#is because immigrants come from cultures where sharing a room is normal

[awkward-teabag]

So tired of everything being derailed by racists.

Want to talk about jobs? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about the state of housing? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about post-secondary education? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about healthcare? Blame immigrants.

Want to talk about the state of the economy in general? Blame immigrants.

And it's never about the systems in place that lead to immigration or the how companies exploit young workers from elsewhere in the world (by taking advantage of their inexperience, their lack of support network, taking their money, and so on), it's all about how those dastardly non-whites are trying to screw honest Canadians out of everything by taking advantage of us, and they're personally going after you.

You can be talking about something and even be open to talking about the complex issue that is immigration but it immediately gets taken over by THEY TOOK OUR JERBS! assholes.

It's at the point where as soon as immigrants/immigration comes up, I peace out unless I know the person and can expect them to have a point beyond bigotry and fascism.

Because it's never about our systems, decade(s) of neglect, neoliberalism or conservatism, or anything like that, it's about how selfish, rich, and anti-white brown kids are and things would be perfectly fine if not for them.

[time-to-write-and-suffer]

Let’s talk about #swedengate

Hi.

I’m here to give my two cents about the current meme going around about Swedish families not feeding their guests, particularly children who come over to play with their kids.

My initial reaction to this meme was “Wow, out of all the things to roast Sweden for, the Americans picked the thing that’s untrue? Guess they’re just happy that the world isn’t making fun of them for a change.” But then I gave it some thought, and actual Swedes, that I actually know and can confirm are Swedish, said that the memes are true, while others said they were bullshit, including my own initial reaction. So then I thought back to my childhood, and realized that hey, there’s some nuance here. But it’s more complicated than “Swedes are evil and racist and classist and don’t give people food because they hate intimacy and love and joy” and “Swedes are wonderful and perfect and super generous and actually Americans stfu you don’t even take your shoes off inside.”

This is about Culture TM.

So what are my credentials? Well, I don’t have any. I took some basic sociology and ethnicity and culture classes and now I pretend I know things. However, I have something more important than that: 1) I’ve lived in Sweden for two thirds of my life 2) I’m a zillennial so my experiences are probably still relevant and 3) I’m an immigrant from a working class family. My perception of Swedish customs is not colored by patriotism, and I can compare them to the culture of my birth country.

Feel free to ask for clarifications and details and such, but be civil. Svenskar är välkomna att dela med sig av sina erfarenheter, men bara om du är normal, okej?

So here are my, I think fairly unbiased but informed, thoughts.

First of all: yes, Swedish families will feed the kids who come over. However:

Sometimes they won’t :)

A common experience for me was that the parents would ask if I would join, then ask for dietary restrictions and potentially whether what they were making was okay. Sometimes they’d adjust the food accordingly. Back when I was still Muslim, I remember the parents of my then-bestie got visibly upset when I said I’d be going home instead of eating with them, because they’d made chicken instead of pork for my sake. Now, I was always shy and socially anxious, but this was partly informed by the Swedish culture surrounding food and particularly family dinners. I’ll get there, though.

While many of my experiences coming over to friends’ houses included having dinner with the family, I do remember many a time where I've had to wait alone in their room for my friend to be done eating with their family. This is, to an outsider (especially one with different cultural upbringings) very strange and seems maybe draconian in some way. I want to figure out why that is, because to me, it’s awkward but pretty normal.

It should be noted that I was never forced to sit alone and starve, nor that parents will just lock children who aren’t their own in a room to contain them while they gorge themselves on meatballs and surströmming, but rather that this was the result of many different factors.

From what I’ve seen, it could be no-food is more common among city folks than country bumpkins. I grew up in smaller towns, because that’s where immigrants get punted due to the expensive living in the cities, and people there were pretty willing to feed you.

I could also argue that the household’s class has an influence on whether you get fed or not. I remember that I never once shared a meal with my one Swedish friend who was lower-class (she lived in an apartment like the immigrant kids in the town, versus all the other Swedes who had their own houses in the suburbs). I also never once ate at very wealthy kids’ houses, either. So lower class people won’t feed you because they can’t afford it, while upper class people won’t feed you because they’re assholes. This leaves that middle-class families tend to be the most likely ones to feed you, which is my own experience. This is anecdotal and heavily misremembered evidence, but still interesting to think about.

To me, the two things that determine whether you get fed are the family’s own attitude and how well you know them. A lot of families will just assume you’re staying to eat, and won’t even ask or have the kids ask you, because they’re just like that. They’re peppy, they’re friendly, they’re fun. Sometimes they’ll ask about dietary restrictions and might even make you something separate if it turns out you can’t eat what they have.

But the second factor is the main one I want to talk about. You see, Swedes are socially awkward. Or at least, they’re deeply uncomfortable with strangers. They avoid eye contact on public transport, they don’t strike up conversations with random people, and they stand 10 feet away from each other on the bus stop. So when people from other cultures say sharing food is a sort of social bonding exercise, a type of intimacy, is it really a surprise that Swedes are hesitant to participate?

Those families that will feed you? More often than not, the parents will ask you, or ask their children to ask you, whether you’ll stay for food. And due to how Sweden tells you to be polite and unassuming, it’s generally seen as more polite to decline. Some parents will try to convince you, but a some won’t. So if you’re not going home to eat and want to resume playtime later, you’re waiting.

And you, raised in a different culture, might think, “Wow, this is messed up! How do you put that responsibility on children? Just feed them!” But the question isn’t really about that. A Swedish parent isn’t thinking “Am I morally obligated, as an adult, to feed every child that shows up on my doorstep?” They’re thinking: “What if they can’t eat this? What if they don’t like it? I’m not gonna assume they’ll want to eat what I made, that’s rude! What if I make them uncomfortable by making them eat? What if they’re too shy to refuse and eat something they shouldn’t? What if they ate already and simply don’t want to? What if they want to eat with their family at home instead of with us?” Assuming that the child 1) can eat what you made 2) wants to eat what you made 3) wants to share this meal with you, would be rude. It’s easier to ask, and if they say no, you respect that decision. You treat that child as an individual making their own decisions, not as a nebulous little creature you must feed simply because you’re the one making the food.

I’m not arguing pro or con, I’m explaining the mindset.

There’s also another, final layer to this smörgåstårta How do we define a meal? How do we share food, what’s for everyone and what’s for the family only?

You see, Swedish families have a focus on family dinner. Kids get down and eat together with their parents. It’s the norm. It’s the time to share what’s happened and gossip about people they know. Based on the reactions I’ve seen, this isn’t the case in other places. Dinner isn’t something reserved for the family, but something to be shared with others. That’s fine. But it’s different. So when strangers come by, it’s awkward for the average Swede. So they ask, “Are you eating here? Are you sharing this with us?” And you, a small Swedish child, just as aware of the intimacy of the moment because you do this very thing at home, do the quick assessment of whether it’s rude to intrude, whether you’re close enough to this family to say yes, whether you’re comfortable sharing this with them instead of with your own family at home, and come to a conclusion, “No, thank you.” But you’re not gonna leave just because they’re eating, that would be weird! And you want to keep playing later. So you wait.

EDIT: I forgot another small factor that others have pointed out, and it’s that whether you join people for dinner also depends on how long you’re staying. Like if you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house, then it’s obvious you’ll get fed. One family that I was very close with as a kid even let me join in on movie nights, sitting on the couch with blankets and eating snacks together. It was very good and chill, but that’s a level up over just joining them for dinner. High level play, not recommended for beginners.

You know what’s the most common way that Swedish family will feed kids that aren’t their own? They’ll make the food and then set it on the kitchen counter and shout “Food’s ready!” And then you and your friend go downstairs, put food on your plates, and haul it back to their room. That’s the most consistent way you get fed as a kid in a Swedish house. When the expectation isn’t “join us for dinner,” it’s a lot more casual and, seemingly, inviting. It also bypasses the need to ask whether the kid will be joining or not: they can simply take the food if they want to or not if they don’t. But it doesn’t have the same vibe to a lot of Americans, because it doesn’t happen around a big jolly table. But the big jolly table is for family only. Are you close enough to this family yet? Are the parents cheery enough to make it inviting? Can you eat what they’re offering? Do you want to? Do you have a dinner waiting at home in just an hour and it’s food you really like versus the food you don’t like here?

It’s about politeness, really. It’s polite of the parent to ask, and it’s polite of the child to decline. That might be fucked up to an outsider, and many an essay can be written about this, I’m sure, but in the end, it’s not really malicious. It’s just culture and socialization.

In Russia, it’s expected to bring something when you visit someone. If you’re gonna eat there, you bring something to eat as well. Swedes just fucking hate that. Well not really, but they don’t get it, and it makes them uncomfortable. I know because I’ve delivered many a weird gift my mom sent me with to many a baffled and embarrassed Swedish parent who didn’t know how to react. It’s just not done that way here. So it’s not always about being a cheapskate or a snob, nor is it about racism or classism. (For the record, any Swedish family who’s racist enough not to offer a kid food just because they’re a PoC is already racist enough to not let that kid into their house in the first place, which I feel is pretty obvious but idk people are dumb I guess.)

There’s a lot of layers to this. And it comes down to not being evil or racist or hating fun and joy and the spiritual purity of food sharing or whatever the fuck. Sure, there are assholes who tell you to leave before dinner or won’t feed you ever, but they’re the exception, not the rule. It’s mostly about how fucking awkward Swedes are and how even adults can’t usually handle it in a normal way.

That’s not to say that Sweden and Swedes aren’t racist, they very much are. Think of Sweden less as a socialist utopia and more of a wannabe America. It’s a capitalist state slowly being turned further and further right by the neo-Nazis in its government. It has a deeply troubled history with eugenics, genocide, and general racism, and is currently a very segregated society both in terms of class and ethnicity. It pretends to be all about personal freedoms and progress while anyone darker than a vanilla wafer is, generally, fucked. It’s like a white gay’s utopia, but only the type of white gay who’s the target audience of all those rainbow profile pics the corporations switch to in June.

What I’m trying to say is that the food thing has a lot of different layers, not all of which relate to and include the darker parts of Sweden’s past and existence.

If you do want to make fun of something food-related in Sweden that’s actually mildly racist and problematic, go ahead and laugh about how the most popular foods in Sweden that many Swedes consider to be “Swedish food staples” are actually imported and refined by immigrants. That includes tacos, kebab, pizza, etc. Traditional Swedish food is, in general, pretty garbage. Just some of the whitest, saltiest meat you can put on the world’s hardest piece of flat stone some might call bread. And there’s inexplicable jam everywhere. Will defend IKEA’s meatballs with my life though.

So um anyway. That’s that on that, I guess! And again, none of this is scientific or backed up by anything. These are just my thoughts and experiences. Hope it helps y’all decide whether this meme is funny or not <3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

K-Zombies

When you and your friends put your fingers on the ouija board planchette and it starts moving around, there's a chance your friends are just yanking your chain - but just as possible is that your friends are experiencing the ideomotor response.

That's when your unconscious mind directs your muscles without your conscious knowledge. The movement of the planchette doesn't tell you what's going on in the spirit world, but it does tell you something about the internal weather of your friend's psyche, fears and hopes.

Our narratives are social-scale planchettes, directed by mass ideomotor response. When a fake news story takes hold, it reveals a true fact: namely, the shared, internal models of how the world really works.

Fake news is an oracle, in other words.

https://locusmag.com/2019/07/cory-doctorow-fake-news-is-an-oracle/

There's no spirit-realm directing planchettes. Supernatural phenomena are nonsense, in all their guises. Mediums are fraudsters or deluded - and so are soothsayers who claim to be able to predict the future. That goes for fortune-tellers and futurists alike.

A shocking number of self-described "rational" science fiction writers share the delusional view that they can predict the future. These pulp Nostradamii point to "predictions" of sf that have "come true" and claim to have an inside line on the world of tomorrow.

Sf *has* an important relationship to the future, though! It can be a planchette: all the futures imagined by all the sf writers are a kind of mutation-space, and the fitness factor that determines whether a story thrives or sinks is whether it captures public imagination.

Sf writers and readers are a means for society to reflect back, amplify and examine our unarticulated hopes and fears about our *present* technology. Sf doesn't predict the future, but sf readers and writers do an excellent job of predicting the present.

And since the present is the standing wave where the past is being transformed into the future, knowing about the present can be a source of insights into what's coming - and not just because sf reveals what's going on in the present, but also because it influences it.

People who are captured by imaginative, futuristic parables about the problems and possibilities of technology acquire a set of intuition-pumps for coping with the future when it arrives, reflexive views and actions about what the future demands of us.

Gene Rodenberry didn't predict the Motorola flip-phone. Rather, when a generation of Motorola designers and engineers were asked to make a mobile communications device their minds immediately flew to the Star Trek communicators they grew up with.

Thinking of fantastic fiction as measurement device and influence machine is a productive way to pick apart the meaning of literary trends.

As I wrote in my intro to the bicentennial re-release of FRANKENSTEIN, the rise and fall of Shelley's book tracks to the rise and fall of fears related to the book's various themes:

https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1974387

So what are we to make of K-zombies? Korean pop culture is experiencing a golden age of zombie movies, games, comics and other media.  

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-23/zombies-are-everywhere-south-korea-fears

Zombies have a lot of different themes, of course, and some are easy to map to the current situation: the fear of contagion and the need to distance yourself from loved ones who have become infected. The parallels to covid hardly need explaining.

But the K-zombie phenomenon predates the pandemic, and zombie stories aren't merely contagion stories - they're often stories about the lurking bestiality of nearly everyone around us.

That's behind stories like The Walking Dead, about the propensity of all our "normal" friends and neighbors to transform into an insensate, rampaging mob. These zombie stories are a throwback to the "cozy catastrophes" of John Wyndham and co:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#wyndhamesque

These are stories of racial and class anxiety, of xenophobia and the literal othering of someone who *seems* to be just like you but is actually a secret monster. Again, on a divided peninsula, it's not hard to see how stories of lurking otherness would catch hold.

Zombie stories are also stories about the fragility of social cohesion: stories about how we're never "all in this together" and how, when the chips are down, it'll be "the war of all against all." That, too, feels very zeitgeisty given recent South Korean politics.

South Korea has an ugly, authoritarian past that is at odds with its founding myth as the "good Korea," the "democratic Korea." But the post-war reconstruction of the country by the US elevated an elite to a position of near-total authority and impunity.

They abused this power in ghastly ways, running forced-labor camps for poor people and people with disabilities, with rampant physical and sexual abuse. Families who lost their loved ones were traumatized to learn that they'd ended up in the camps.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160423131643/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

These forced-labor camps (which continue in a slightly modified form to this day) supplied slaves to chaebols, the conglomerates that represent the country on a world stage. Unsurprisingly, the leadership of these companies is also grossly corrupt:

https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2052871/samsung-chief-jailed-for-2-5-years-over-corruption-scandal

Korea is also riven by messianic cults, and the leaders of these cults have close ties to the Korean political class, an incredibly politically destabilizing fact that has caused recent Korean governments to collapse:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37971085

South Korea, in other words, isn't just haunted by the spectre of aggression from the north - but also by the possibility of internal rupture. It has a huge, authoritarian secret police force that has been caught secretly meddling in electoral politics.

Far from reining in this spookocracy, the South Korean political class has tried to hand them even MORE powers, with LESS oversight. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Korean opposition's filibuster to stop the worst of these.

(Seo Ki-Ho, a politician with the affectionate nickname "Milhouse" for his resemblance to the Simpsons character read the Korean edition of my novel LITTLE BROTHER into the record during the filibuster!)

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/26/south-korean-lawmakers-stage-filibuster-to-protest-anti-terror-bill-read-from-little-brother/

This othering is also sharply illustrated in the country's culture of misogynistic voyeurism, which goes beyond "upskirt" videos and includes a roaring trade in videos captured with hidden cameras in toilets, changing rooms and hotel rooms.

It's hard to overstate the reach of this practice, and its political salience: it has provoked a vast mass-movement of women and allies demanding an end to the practice and a reckoning with institutional sexism:

https://www.khaosodenglish.com/culture/net/2020/10/21/voyeurs-are-selling-photos-of-women-at-the-protest-online/

Zombies aren't ever just about contagion - they're also always an expression of a deep anxiety that your neighbors aren't what they seem, that in a pinch, they'll turn on you, and not just because they've been infected, but also to protect themselves and their comfort.

US zombie booms always have an element of this: 1950s (reds under the bed); 1980s (red menace redux); 2000s (immigration "crisis"), etc. It'd be amazing if the only thing driving K-zombies' popularity was the pandemic, or even less plausibly, a mere aesthetic coincidence.

[shyrose57]

Brothers anon and ah, its just me than. Links on tumblr break half the time for me sorry bout that!

1: Mostly how it looks in the actual episode but with some changes. Its gaint, even has multiple floors, most rooms have a glass dome roof with iron railings (3-4) lining the bottom of the glass. The hallway typically have windows leading up to the roof, but the roof and both floor are a mix of materials like iron, copper, wood, and even gold. The most complex room is the Council room, which has a a higher roof than the rest, with mostly wood railings that go all the way up and lead to a circle at the top. The Council is the group that leads Mizu, they have 1 leader of every Idol to represent the different opinions of the citizens, with 1 special member that doesnt belong to any Idol, and is instead used to represent the opinions of people who either haven't chosen a idol yet, got kicked out of a idol following, and just to give a unbiased opinion most of the time. They do make most decisions, mostly those relating to topics like construction, farming, money distribution, where people can live, etc. And they also mostly agree on most subjects and don't agure, but they do have massive disagreements on topics and problems like Representation in other Cities/Kingdoms, trading, visitors and immigrants, and sometimes supply missions. 

3: Situations like taking care of his siblings (I have decided Benjamin shall have siblings) and friends, and he was also put under extreme stress as a kid in school and family life, but unlike Ranbob, he managed to successfully communicate his struggle and find coping mechanisms. Also when he went off to live by himself for a bit, he was under sudden extreme situations where he had to make split second decision. So he just learned from everything thats happened to him over time. 

8: Levi exists purely to make Watson and others go insane. People claimed it was made up because they claimed most events as unrealistic (like Doomsday, Techno escaping a death trial, Pandoras Vault (they believed it impossible for something to be inescapable)). Plus the fact it seemed cruel such young people where faced with such trauma that no sane person would let it happen, and the fact most historical important items couldn't be found, people claiming that they where made up (also cause if the land was that exposed to such devastation, it would've collapsed on itself). No to both of those, by this point their to far away from Dream for him to have a direct meaningful affect on the group, and while the residents of Kelalen know it was Dreams sword, the group does not know. Nope! Mizu came about years after Kelalen was forgotten about and shamed. And Mizu was only made because of the growing number of believers in the SMP history was causing disruptions in both the political sense and educational sense, so it was made to separate the "outcasts". Though Mizu eventually grew as big as most cities, and greatly civilized and advanced, though they where still often "forgotten" about and basically seperate from the Kingdom that set them up and became their own place (though not officially). 

They do have a friendship! Its not super close but their definitely friends. Ranbob is definitely a worrier, he heard that two of his friends almost died he immediately goes to them and fuses over them. And when their recovering he doesnt leave their side, infact Benjamin has to drag him away from the two just to get him to eat. And he refuses to sleep unless he's like directly on top of them. Yeah, Cletus challenges Grievous to a parkour challenge over a Delta Basalt, and he happily accepts. They end up giving everyone a heart attack after Cletus slips and almost falls onto a magma block. Jackie plays in soul sand and dumps a handful down Rans shirt, Watson teaches Charles and Isaac how to make gold from gold nuggets and more Piglin culture. When Cletus is cleared to be ok and Jackie stops getting soul sand in areas he didn't even know existed. They all sit in a circle and decide what they should try first, with Ran and Watson watching carefully and preventing them from drinking anything that they recognized as harmful. But other than that they just let the others do whatever. 

10: Because he couldn't use it, when Dream was a full human he used to be able to access his powers at his own will. But after his spirit got linked to his mask his power greatly reduced. To the point he relies on others for his powers, more specifically, he needs them to be exposed to him for a certain amount of time (like 2 weeks) until he can use their own essence/spirit to help his powers. When the group of people came after Ranbob left, they stayed for a long time, especially after they took the mask with them. Dream got the power back. Cause it is a "I worked to hard to give this up." Type situation. Ranbob was his first victim and the first person he had control over in decades, he considers Ranbob the puppet he was meant to have and refuses to let him go. Everyone is the nat to him, but specifically Ran. Cause Ran was the only person who survived the murders, so Dream sees him as a kill that was taken from him that he needs to fix. Everyone else to him is nothing more than an annoyance, and he's more than happy to use them as nothing more than a stepping stone to kill once he's done with them. 

13: Ran is stronger than everyone else, Jackie is faster than everyone else, and Watson is more acrobatic than everyone else. Sorry can you reword "Is Jackie considered stronger than them aside from shared tactics, or is it the other way around?"? I dont completely understand sorry. Kind of, I'll say. There can only be 3 ranking members, but it can also be 2 Corporals and 1 Sergeant. 

14: They where caught off guard, but also knew something must be going on due to the fishermen staying closer to Ranbob than normal. He never got too far, as he isnt very fast and Charles and both Isaac tend to be fast enough to get him. If the episode is really bad bringing him back can lead into physical fights but it rarely gets into that, as it seems like Ranbob really doesn't want to fight them most of the time, and holds himself back.

Well, I hope it’s working for you now, cause that sounds less than ideal, honestly.

1: Well, Mizu sounds gorgeous, quite frankly. As for the council having a member of no idol, what about that? People can get kicked out from an idol group? Why? Do some just never choose an idol? Also, how’s the housing situation there? Are there like, apartments on one of the floors, or something? Why does the council not really agree on outside affairs?

3: Not gonna lie, I’m rather curious. What kind of life did Benjamin lead to be under such heavy stress? Does he relate to Ranbob because of this? And what was he doing when he lived on his own to need to make fast-paced decisions? Also, siblings! What’re his siblings like?

8: He sounds like it.

And hm. There are several things I’ve taken from this. 

Do totems no longer exist, if they don’t believe Techno could have survived, or did that particular piece of the story just get left out over time?

Has Pandora’s vault fallen? And why would people find it unbelievable? If it’s the future, shouldn’t they have even more advanced technology than that? Or is it simply the lack of evidence that leads them to disagreeing about it’s existence? 

They don’t believe people would have been so cruel to the younger ones? Oof, um. Well, at least that says something about the future, I guess. 

Mizu sounds like it has an interesting history in it’s self. How do Ran and Ranbob feel about being in a world that basically shunned the people of what would eventually become their home? Do they ever have issues when people find out they originate from Mizu, or worship an idol? From how you put it, it seems like that wasn’t really looked upon well, since they shunted the people who did it to Mizu.

Friendships for the win! Maybe not close, but it sounds like an interesting dynamic. Charles honestly seems pretty mild, and as you said, shy, so putting him with Mr.Random And Chaotic certainly sounds like something. How did these two become friends?

And honestly, it sounds like everyone had a lot of unique experiences in the Nether. It also sounds like Ran and Ranbob were probably an inch from a heart-attack the entire time, considering the shenanigans ongoing. It sounds kind of cute that Ranbob was only sleeping when he was close to them though, and it gives me the image of a giant fluffy cat, so win-win there.

10: Interesting. Was Ranbob not enough to fully return that power to him when the Fishermen first came and took him? Or did Dream just not think they’d get that far and not react in time, when he still had that power from his puppet?

And, uh, wow. Dream was certainly off his rocker before, but that’s definitely cemented now. Is anyone aware he thinks of Ranbob in such a way? Does Ranbob know? How are everyone’s feelings on that-besides y’know, ‘gonna murder Mr.Mask Man’. How does everyone feel about being considered as ‘nats’?

13: Huh. And yeah, I confused myself rereading that. Basically, is Jackie considered stronger than those two? You said they were mostly on par, because of the shared tactics, so when it comes to cutting those shared tactics out of the picture, does Jackie come out on top?

14: So the gang could tell? If I may ask, what were the tells that gave Ranbob away?

[snapextherapy]

please let me have filipino magicians at hogwarts

the little 11 year olds being taken by their parents to a magical tattoo artist in the Philippines, getting a circlet tattooed on each wrist and ankle, that will grow as their magical knowledge progresses

they get asked on the train by little white wizards where they're from, who don't know where the Philippines are,

give me the filipino magicians (and MAGICIANS because pre-hispanic Philippines didn't have gendered words) who, when asked what race they are, hesitant to say asian, because they don't "look asian" and instead will say pacific islander, or Hispanic sometimes (if their family immigrated from Spain in the last few generations)

who, when they get off the train, and called to the stool have their names pronounced wrong by the teacher

the filipino boys asking if they can wear a barong instead of the normal collared shirt, because it makes them feel at home

the filipino witches go up to their dormitories and their roommates make jokes about how "the room smells asian"

who when asked what their parents do, people will assume that they are maids or nurses, and their fathers work construction

filipino magicians who go down to eat breakfast in the Great hall, and wonder where the dried fish and rice are

when they ask about it, they get weird looks "why would we have rice at breakfast?"

give me filipino magicians who grew up in ethnic neighborhoods, and didn't know that some cultures DIDN'T eat rice everyday

filipino magicians writing to their parents to send actual food, because "ive been here for a month and its all british foods, mama! there's no rice"

a week later, the family philipine eagle-owl comes back with a grocery bag containing last week's leftovers in 3 year old plastic takeaway containers from the Japanese restaurant down the street

a filipino magician who's patronus is a tigmamanukan bird, and is proud of it

filipino magicians who don't go out in the sun, for fear of being darker than they already are, because the titas will know come summer, and they'll recommend the Newest Whitening Cream

half-white filipino magicians who dont fit in with either group at hogwarts, and end up forming their own clique

white-passing filipinos who "in the Philippines would be upheld because the color of your skin" but feel different from their darker cousins and siblings

filipino magicians who get their names anglicized, get called by nicknames, and who have to frequently correct teachers on their pronunciation

filipino magicians who never learned filipino, becauss their parents didn't want them to feel like an outsider

filipino magicians, who because of that, feel out of place whenever they go to a tita's house, and all of their cousins are speaking tagalog to each other

filipino magicians at hogwarts who use random filipino words in their sentences. they don't know the language well, but their lola likes to teach them some words

filipino magicians, who have parents that won't talk of their life back in the Philippines, and there's so much heritage they'll never know

filipino magicians who are still catholic, who are Muslim, and who are pagan

filipino magicians who's accent come back in the summers, when all the family visits, but leaves when its time to go back to hogwarts

filipino magicians who still have a heavy accent, having to spend extra time on their pronunciation of spells

filipino magicians who are embarrassed that their lola and lolo still live with them

filipino magicians feeling lost in a sea of white faces and small noses

filipino magicians banding together, and sharing their history

filipino magicians growing into their own skin, and being confident of their color, history, and culture

filipino magicians who will wear short sleeves whenever they can, to show off the tattoos that are still steadily creaking up their arms

filipino magicians at hogwarts embracing their identities

filipino magicians, dude

[thatfunkyopossum]

The 4400 AU

In short: Time Travel Shenanigans AU where Katsuki Bakugou is a first generation Japanese American immigrant who was born in 1936 and got sent to the future in 1952. Eijirou Kirishima is a gay american punk from new york living through the AIDs epidemic, born in 1970 and sent to the future in 1986. More information below the cut!  

♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

Please Reblog & consider following! Buy me a Coffee? https://ko-fi.com/O5O36YKF

Do you know The 4400? Its a show where, over the last 50 years, there have been 4,400 specific disappearances. In the modern day, a ball of light is on a collision course with earth. Before it crashes it slows down, then in a bright flash it deposits all 4,400 of those people. Not one of them has aged a day since their initial disappearance. By all accounts, they were just at the spot and time of their disappearance mere moments ago, even though many occurred decades previously. They’re held for 6 weeks by the government before its determined that they and their families have the right for them to be freed, on the condition that they return for weekly check-ins. Interestingly, after their reappearance, the 4400 begin to display supernatural abilities.... 

My friend @albino-pony suggested this au! Its one I’ve gotten really into even though I’ve only ever seen the first episode of the show. I’m not entirely sure how to format this so its interesting, but I figure that if you clicked on the readmore and you’re still reading, then you’re ok with some info dumps. So here’s these boys individual timelines. TW For era typical homophobia and racism. 

Katsuki

          Mitsuki was born in 1914 in Japan’s Aomori prefecture. She was born with albinism, giving her blonde hair and blue eyes. In 1928 Mitsuki immigrated with her family to the United States at age 14, where they were processed at Angel Island, and moved into San Francisco shortly thereafter. She, her parents, and older brother all got jobs as soon as they could. In 1932, amidst the Great Depression, she met Masaru Bakugou and married him in the spring of 1934.

In 1936 Masaru and Mitsuki had their first child, a boy who inherited her albinism, and named him Katsuki. They do their best to provide for him, but it's the Great Depression and they're immigrants who only speak English so well. They scrape by, providing for their boy as best they can. They normally leave their son in the care of an Inko Midoriya, a fellow Japanese immigrant who is being supported by her fairly successful husband. 

 Then in 1939, things are stabilizing again. Life is getting easier. They still work themselves to the bone but they don't go to bed starving so their growing son can have his best chance. In 1940 life is pretty good. Katsuki's four years old. Mitsuki has a job as a seamstress, and Masaru has an office job. Life is looking up. 

December 7th of 1941, Pearl Harbor is bombed. Americans die. Masaru and Mitsuki are scared about the possibilities of war and what it could mean for their little one. But they decide to do their part and work as hard as they can for their new home, because they're Americans, and they love this country and the hope it holds for their son. 

February 1942, the Bakugous are detained and put in a Japanese Internment camp in southern California, where they spend the next three years. Katsuki is five years old when they’re forced out of their home, and he remembers the train ride. He remembers his father holding him as they walked. He remembers the cold. He remembers the three coldest winters he ever felt, and he remembers the burning blazing heat of the three hottest summers he ever endured. He remembers the scorching desert of Manzanar. He remembers the stuffy air of the tight quarters. He remembers. 

September 1945, The Bakugous finally leave Manzanar. They’re among the last to go. They go home to San Francisco and try to move on. Katsuki is nine years old. His parents are disturbed at how bad anti-japanese sentiment has gotten in the time they were at Manzanar.  Mitsuki finds an old magazine in a waiting room with an article on how to tell Japanese people from Chinese. Masaru is spat on and called various racial slurs. They're terrified for their son, and do their best to shield him from it. When Inko Midoriya’s husband is killed only a few blocks away because he was Japanese and his murderer talked about how his brother was killed in action by them, Mitsuki doesn't let her son play outside anymore.

December 1945, Mitsuki realizes she’s pregnant again.

September 19th, 1946, Tsubaki Bakugou is born.

February 27th, 1947, Tsubaki Bakugou dies of whooping cough at four months old, her family lacking access to the vaccine. Katsuki is eleven years old, and is the one to find her body after his mother asked him to check on her. 

June 1947, Mitsuki pays closer attention to her remaining child, terrified of losing him too. She gets worried. Mitsuki starts to notice how fond he is of his friends, and how little he seems to care about girls.

1948,  She starts to worry about the way he looks at other boys and the movie stars of his favorite pictures. She asks him one night if he likes boys better than girls, and when he says yes she cries and tells him that he has to learn to like girls, and that liking boys is bad and he can't do it anymore.  She doesn't let him go to the cinema anymore, and doesn't let him go out at all with his friends unless Izuku is there with him, because she knows Izuku will tell his mom if anything weird happens, and that Inko will tell her. She doesn't tell Masaru.

1949, When Katsuki is 13, Mitsuki and Inko talk, and they end up sending both of their sons to military school. Inko hopes it will help her son to stand up for himself, and Mitsuki hopes it will teach Katsuki discipline and order. It helps Izuku. It tames Katsuki's attitude toward adults, but his treatment of the other kids only gets worse. The only thing he learns there is how to pretend.

1952,  Katsuki is 16, he's visiting home. He fights with his mother. They call each other all manner of horrible things. He tells her he never wants to see her again. She tells him thats fine, and to go. Katsuki goes for a walk to clear his head.

He never comes home.

Eijirou

Eijirou is born on October 16th, 1970 in upstate new york. His timeline is shorter than Katsuki’s because I dont know as much about 70s/80s culture in new york that would have affected a young japanese american man, so theres only a few really important events in his life that I know for sure of.

July 28, 1982 - Eijirou is 11 years old and sees Queen live on their Hot Space Tour in NYC, and it blows his fucking mind. It instills in him a love of music, and whenever he needs to psych himself up for something he listens to those songs and remembers that energy. 

1984 - He comes out as gay to his parents and is kicked out. He takes a bus to the city and ends up being embraced and taken care of by some members of the punk scene and NYC gay communities. 

1985 - The man who took care of Eijirou, Taishiro Toyomitsu, better known by his stage name Fatgum, dies of HIV related complications. 

1986 - On his way back to the shitty apartment he shares with his bandmates from a concert they were a part of, Eijirou stops to pee in an alley way or something, and disappears in a flash of light. 

When the 4400 appear back on earth in the modern day, many experience small physical changes. For example, Eijirou and Katsuki have red eyes, and Izuku’s hair is slightly green. Todoroki’s hair is half white, and half red. 

People Who Reappeared in the 4400 and When/Where

Touya Todoroki - 1923 - Japan

Tenya Iida - 1924 - Great Britain (London)

Shoto Todoroki - 1930 - Japan

Yagi Toshinori - 1946 - America

Katsuki Bakugou - 1952 - America (San Francisco, California)

Izuku Midoriya - 1952 - America (San Francisco, California)

Fumikage Tokoyami - 1961 - America (West Virginia) 

Hawks (whats your real fucking name u shit) - 1961 - America (West Virginia)

Yuga Aoyama - 1968 - France 

Tooru Hagakure - 1970 - New Zealand 

Denki Kaminari - 1977 - America

Ochako Uraraka - 1985 - United Kingdom

Eijirou Kirishima - 1986 - America (New York, New York) 

Momo Yaoyarozu - 1989 - West Germany (Berlin) 

Shota Aizawa - 1992 - Japan (Tokyo)

Ashido Mina - 1996 - Japan

Hanta Sero - 2000 - China (Yunnan Province) 

Kyouka Jiro - 2005 - America 

Tsuyu Asui - Literally like a week before they reappeared - America

More will be added as they’re decided on!

[dokidoki-tae]

Sorry if this is to political, but how would La Squadra deal with a s/o in the United States. Like a long distance relationship. Trump has rubbed me the wrong way. I just want to call Formaggio to bitch about this vile man. Like this stale Cheeto of a man doesn't understand that people immigrating is normal.

Politics is fine. I follow politics quite a bit because it affects my way of life, my family and friends, my community, and other disenfranchised communities, so I see it as my responsibility to pay attention to politics. But I’m actually pretty curious about the views they would hold if they existed in real life. They probably experience Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership (Italy has a president though? How does that work?). But Italy seems to have it’s own “complicated” relationship with immigrants and people of color too :/

This would be easier if I understood Italian politics though haha Italians give me your opinion on American and how it compares to your elected officials

Risotto: He doesn’t know (or care) much about American culture, but he wonders if you are around or experiences the amount of violence against minorities as he hears about on the news. What chances do you have in getting shot, he might wonder. He calls you to make sure you are alright whenever an incident happens. He’s never followed another country’s news, but here he is. He’s no stranger to what happens with the rise of fascism. His beloved country was a victim of it and he worries that you will directly experience it, and it does worry him. He tells you ways you can take precautions to be safe. It will probably stress you out more, but he has to teach you to watch out for yourself because he’s not there.

Prosciutto: He hates the long distance because he can’t check up on your mental, emotional, and psychological health regularly. He has to settle with calling you when he wakes up (the end of your day) and calls when you wake up (the end of his day). He always asks how things went. He wants you to use him to let out your frustration. He hates how stressed you get because of the state of your country. He understands since Italy has had its fair share of idiot leaders who he regularly complains about to the others. Eventually, he’ll ask if you’re willing to move to Italy to escape the toxic environment. He wants to be able to comfort you and be able to actually protect you.

Pesci: Doesn’t follow politics even in his own country, so he doesn’t understand how you’re feeling. In his mind, politicians lie, tell people what they want to hear, and are not good people. So you shouldn’t be surprised by it, right? It’s something he’s heard many people say before and what he learned through history. If you send him clips though, even he’s stumped when hears Trump speak. At first, he thought the translator was bad at his job, but no that’s how the man talks. He feels sorry for you for having to deal with that. He’s there to lend an ear because he doesn’t know what else he can offer to comfort you. He does always tell you to be careful though just in case you run into a bigot.

Formaggio: He doesn’t pay attention to politics either, and he bases all his judgment of what’s going on in your country based on your rants. He listens to you open up your heart to him about your anger and frustrations and fears. He never suspected this kind of thing was going on because he’s run into American tourist, and they always seem pretty happy and unconcerned. If you were to tell him he’s similar to, say, Mussolini, he’s going to understand immediately and might open himself up to rant. He’s another one to suggest to you to come to Italy because their food is better anyway. Italy also has its share of bigots but Formaggio promises to beat the shit out of them if they say anything to you.

Illuso: If he comes across American news, he finds it quite entertaining because it’s just so outlandish and ridiculous to him. He’ll make fun of your country’s politics and how ludicrous things are over there. You’ll have to be vulnerable to get sympathy from him because he doesn’t quite grasp the severity of human rights being stripped away from your or your loved ones. If you tell him that, he’ll become more serious and hear you out. He won’t make jokes at your expense especially if you’re genuinely concerned and scared about the things happening in your country. He too will offer to open up his room for you to live with him. 

Melone: IMMA be real with you. Melone doesn’t seem to have the highest regards when it comes to women, BUT I don’t think he approves of your president's vulgarity. Melone has lived through Silvio Berlusconi leadership to know where your country might head. He will give warnings about the dangers of that sort of man being elected again. Overall, he won’t care too much about what happens to your country; he’s only concerned about you and will do what he can to take your mind off the things happening in your country. 

Ghiaccio: Doesn’t really pay attention to American news, but when he somehow comes across it, he’s going to call you and scream, “WHY CAN’T YOUR DAMN PRESIDENT FORM A SINGLE FUCKING SENTENCE.” And you’ll be able to hear him punching something. It might be enough to get you to laugh, but he’s genuinely distraught about how this man got elected. He stereotypes Americans as being stupid (gee thanks) and your president is pretty much confirming his beliefs (but you’re enough to remind him that isn’t true). Don’t tell him about the electoral college.

[ertrunkenerwassergeist]

Dreams of Our Past - Chapter 27

*flails around* The chapter is done! It’s the second longest so far and the second half was fighting me until the end. But I prevailed! Here’s the Link to AO3.

In which Gladio invites Ignis to dinner and he finds a dearly missed person because of Iris.

Featuring: Ignis' brand of awkwardness, the starscourge, the tempers of Gladio and Hiemi, Noctis being so very close to a mental breakdown and Somnus and Bahamut being dicks through history

Warning: vomiting, mentioned child murder

Gladio IV

8.5.755 ME

Insomnia, Ghetto

Kingdom of Lucis

The days since their meeting at the Black Saffron had been nerve wrecking and uneventful. It grated on him like nothing else. He had thought, after they had all finally decided – more or less, he was aware enough to admit – on a course of action, things would start to move again. They hadn't. And Gladio didn't like it. At all.

He stood near the door to the pitiful office of Camp No. 5 and watched the people mingling about. More specifically was he watching Prompto, who sat grinning like a loon on a camping bed, a laptop in his lap and... did something while a group of people watched over his shoulder. Gladio really hoped the blond didn't play some kind of game. He was supposed to search through the pictures he had taken over the last few days and upload them on a dummy account by the end of the day.

Here was to hoping the whole crazy plan was going to work. It was a shame Pelna wasn't here right now, but he had finally found the time to talk to his contacts, and had gone to get the ball rolling on that whole facial recognition thing.

It wasn't that things weren't being done, really, it was just that they were moving along so slowly.

Gladio felt like he was treading on the spot, not moving forward no matter how much he wished to. It was frustrating beyond belief.

Before he realized what he was doing, he had fished his phone out of he pocket and weighted it in his hand. It couldn't hurt to call Ignis, making sure the man didn't overwork himself like he was prone to do. Maybe he had managed to find something that would help Gladio figure out what he could be doing in this stinking mess. Not that is was very likely, but a man could hope.

The phone rang once, twice, then a click sounded and a cultured voice drifted through the speaker: “Good morning Gladio. Was there something you needed?”

“Barely morning anymore, Ignis”, the older snorted.

A non-committal hum could be heard. The former advisor could be very peculiar about his greetings. A voice sounded in the background on Ignis' side. It was decidedly feminine, even if Gladio couldn't make out any words.

“Oh no, it's perfectly alright, Miss Aster. I am talking to a friend. Thank you for your wonderful help”, Ignis said.

Gladio couldn't help the grin blooming on his face. “Should I call you later, lover boy?”

Ignis gave an undignified snort. “I am at work, Gladio”, he said, stressing the word work like that was the important part. “Miss Aster is a secretary within the Ministry for Civic Affairs and Immigration. I met her yesterday, when I was looking into how far along they are with evaluating the houses in the Immigration District for damages. Apparently there seems to be a filing issue of some sort. Miss Aster has been looking into it since it came to her attention. She says it goes against her pride to have messy paperwork.”

“Tampering?” Gladio couldn't help but ask.

“Very likely.”

“Damn.”

“Whoever did it was very careful. The papers are listed as filed, they obviously went over all the right desks, but they aren't where they should be. I have never seen this amount of misfiling in my entire life.” Ignis' obvious indignation would be funny, if the situation wasn't so serious. “Mrs. Custodela cannot help us with this. She has her hands already full trying to keep abreast with the camps she is looking over. After this, would you please call Camp 7 for me? Mrs. Custodela has found a plumber who is free and can take a look at their showers.”

Something in the pipes in the showers of Camp 7 had broken and now the water there had turned a muddy brown. It couldn't be very healthy.

“That's good. I'll do that. Anything else?”

“Make sure to note down who is using the vehicles you got provided with, and where they drove and how long it took to get there. Certain people have been making noise about rationing petrol. Records of the use of the vans you have at your disposal would go a long way to work against this”, said Ignis after a few moments of consideration.

Gladio jerked in disbelief. “Rationing petrol? That's bullshit! The oil production in Leide is still under Insomnian control.”

“I know, Gladio. Believe me, I know.”

“Fuck, this whole situation is a stinking mess”, he complained and carded a hand through his hair.

I need a shower, he thought with a grimace. Ignis didn't answer. He didn't need to. Somewhere in the hall a baby started to cry, followed shortly by a second. Gladio sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. He needed to get out of here. At least for an evening. Breath some air that didn't smell of exhaust fumes or like too many sweaty people cramped into a place too small.

“How... how is Iris doing?” Ignis sounded like he wasn't sure at all, if he should even ask.

“She's not doing worse for now”, he choked out, his stomach plummeting like it was suddenly filled with lead.

“Gladio. I am- I'm so sorry.”

That sentence sounded heavy. Full of hidden meanings and implications and Gladio didn't want to hear any of it.

“Don't you dare talk like she's dead already! Because she's still very much alive”, he snapped.

A tightly controlled intake of breath sounded over the speaker. Gladio couldn't muster the will to feel bad about it. Iris wasn't dead and she wouldn't die. He was her older brother and he would protect her, damn it!She was barely fourteen, for Bahamut's sake.

“You are right, Gladio. I apologize”, Ignis said after a maybe too long pause.

“It's alright”, he sighed and deflated.

No, it wasn't alright, not at all. But Ignis was a friend – or had been a friend once – and he didn't deserve this. Pitioss, Iris didn't deserve this most of all. Why ever were the Gods punishing her like that? It had to stop.

He cleared his throat and asked awkwardly: “I'm going back home for the night to spend some time with her. Do you want to come over for dinner? Iris would love to see you again.”

“If you are sure.”

Ignis sounded so high-strung that Gladio just knew he was feeling as awkward as he himself was.

“Don't worry. I wouldn't ask, if I wasn't.”

“Then I will gladly come. Which time would be most convenient?”

“We normally eat around six since Iris gets tired early”, Gladio shrugged.

Ignis hummed in thought. “Five thirty then.”

“Fine by me”, he answered after mentally running through his to-do list again. “Just... be gentle with her, alright?”

“Of course, Gladio”, agreed Ignis. “I need to go back to work.”

“Ah, yes. Yes, of course. I'll see you later.”

“Until later.”

The call disconnected. Gladio listened to the silence of his phone for a few seconds before he sighed and lowered it from his ear to stare at it. Social graces and impulse control. He needed to work on his temper more. But for now he had a few calls to make. First Camp 7 about that plumber and then Jared to tell him that he and Ignis would be there for dinner. He had been trying to come every evening since the earthquake happened, but he hadn't always managed it.

On his first call he managed to reach Libertus who sounded just as grouchy as he had expected the man to be. Gladio had to bite the inside of his cheek as to not snap back. Instead he managed to make his way through the conversation with all the grace of a garula in a china store. Luckily Libertus didn't seem to notice. Something about two feuding Clans in one room, he had heard Crowe and Pelna say.

His second call went a bit better. He could practically hear the retainer smile as he announced his and Ignis' presence for dinner.

Now he could go outside and see how far along Tredd and Crowe were with checking over the newest delivery. Then there would be another round of phone calls between Centres 4 through 8 to see who was lacking what and to pool their resources. After lunch he would write out new timetables for those who had volunteered for various duties around here. And he would need to find someone who had experience with the whole giving birth thing, since one of the women here looked just about ready to pop.

Dinner could have been definitely worse. It had been decidedly awkward, but between Ignis practically doting on Iris within the first few minutes of his arrival and Jared's efforts to keep the conversation flowing, it had been a very pleasant meal. Everything had been fine, Iris had been laughing and moving around more than she had in weeks and Ignis had been sharing recipes with Jared.

He should have known that this wasn't going to last. Nothing good had for a long time now.

The screaming woke Gladio in the middle of the night. It took his sleep addled brain long precious seconds to realize that they were coming from his sister's room. He practically leapt out of bed and ran into her room that thankfully was right next to his. Light spilled into the dark room and for a moment his sister's shadow seemed to froth and seethe, but Gladio ignored it in search of any attackers that he could painfully eviscerate.

No one was there. No one but Iris and him.

Her screaming stopped once she saw him.

“Gladdy”, she whimpered and reached out towards him.

The sleeves of her pyjama slid back and exposed dark splotched on her skin that hadn't been there during dinner. A thin line of blood trickled down from the corner of her mouth. It was black.

“Iris!” he cried and lunged towards her, cradling her small form carefully against his muscled chest.

“Gladdy, it hurts. It hurts so much.”

She grasped weakly at his arms, sobbing. Then she went limp, her breath coming in nothing but weak bursts that ghosted over the naked skin above his collar bone.

“No”, he breathed. Desperation roared in his chest like a wild beast and stole his breath. “No, no, no, no, no.”

What should he do? No doctor or hospital they had visited since she had first gotten sick, had been able to help. There was no one here that could help her.

Oh, by the Gods, she was going to die.

The realization hit him like a slap in the face. His little sister would die before morning came, because there was no one in this damned city that...

Gladio's breath stuttered in his chest when he remembered what the innkeeper of the Black Saffron had said about his son and the woman that had come by during the meeting, when he remembered what that prostitute had told him last week.

Without stopping to consider what a colossally stupid idea this was – he could not afford to think about it, not now when his little sister was dying – he wrapped her blanket tightly around her frail body and lifted her up in his arms. She was so light he barely noticed her weight.

Why was it getting so much worse? Why now, of all times? She had been fine! Or at last not worse than the last time he had taken her to a doctor.

He didn't even stop to get dressed in something other than his sleeping trousers or to put on some shoes, and instead ran right out of the door, into the dark streets of Insomnia. In the privacy of her bed, the prostitute had described to him how he could get to this Healer, if he ever needed to.

Sweat ran down his face and back the further he ran, his breath burned in his lungs, but he didn't dare to stop. He didn't dare to do so as he ran past buildings the earthquake had destroyed, deeper and deeper into the city, through neighbourhoods that were getting more and more run down.

Iris began to shiver, despite the warm summer night. Gladio only tightened his grip and hastened his steps.

Despite the growing lack of functioning street lamps, he could see the great, broken pillar. It rose out of the shadows like a great, stony needle as he hurried past it and then turned left into a narrow alleyway. It didn't take long to reach the other side. It was nearly pitch black now. Only a few weakly glowing lanterns showed him the way, forcing him to slow down, lest he stumble and fall. He found the staircase Viti had talked about through sheer luck. There weren't any handrails, so he had to be extra careful. He did not dare hurry since some of the metal stairs creaked ominously.

Follow the lights, Viti had said, and so he started to run again towards the nearest light he could see. It was a single lantern glowing like a lonely star at the first house on the right. It hung from the ceiling in a room that was entirely open on one side and illuminated a group of chairs, metal drawers and a long table. In a corner there was a part of the wall that looked like it could possibly be a door. He just about kicked it in.

“Hello! I need help!” he bellowed into the darkness of the house, honestly not caring who he might wake.

Not a second later hasty footsteps sounded to his left. It was a teenager, his skin paler than he had ever seen a human being be, with big blue eyes so light they looked white near the pupil. In his hand he carried a lantern, its light cast a cheerful glow on everything it touched.

The teenagers eyes grew even larger when he saw the bundle in Gladio's arms, then his eyes dropped to his feet and back up again.

“My sister needs help”, Gladio repeated, pleading.

That seemed to do the trick, as the teenager gestured towards a staircase with a hasty “Follow me!” and practically leapt up the stairs.

“Healer! Healer wake up! There's an emergency. Quick!”

Gladio followed the teen down the hallway to his right until they came to the last door. Behind it was a small room with a rickety bed, a bedside table, a stool and a chest of drawers. Another lantern, it had been hanging from a hook next to the door, was lit and the teenager motioned for Gladio to lay his sister on the bed before he vanished down the hallway again, calling for Healer.

Now here, where he could finally focus on something other than running, running, running, he noticed he was trembling like a leaf in the wind. His heart beat like a fast paced drum and his breath shuddered with each intake of air.

His gaze settled on Iris. Her skin was a pasty, unhealthy white and the dark splotches had spread up her neck and onto her cheeks. Each laboured breath sounded wet and rattled within her chest. Carefully, as to not hurt her any further, he settled her down on the lumpy mattress of the bed. The frame gave a high pitched sound as her weight was added.

From outside the room he could hear doors opening and closing, sleepy voices were asking questions and hasty steps were making their way towards them. A young man appeared in the doorway. He had clearly just woken up, his startling violet eyes squinting against the light of the lantern and his long black hair a mess that hung in his face.

When the man – he couldn't be older than 20 – saw him he froze. His eyes grew large in surprise and fear, his mouth opened and closed like he was a fish on land. Gladio glowered. If he had only come to stare, he was going to beat him within an inch of his life.

“Help her!” he bellowed.

The man jerked. His gaze fell on Iris and all expression vanished from his face. One moment he stood by the door and the next he was next to the bed, leaning over his sister and looking intently at her gaunt face.

“Casto, get me a bucket and take the bedsheets for winter out of the closet. Go to Hiemi and tell her I need some of her purging tea, and bring me a bowl of hot water and a washrag”, he said with an air that made it clear he was used to be listened to and obeyed.

Not bothering to turn around and see if the teenager was listening – which he did; he ran out of the room like the Infernian himself was after him – the young man started to gently unwrap the blanket. She had grown even paler and the black splotches covered large parts of her visible skin.

Gladio would love to ask who this guy even was and what he was doing as he released a hissing breath and started cussing quite creatively, but his voice refused to work. Each new gulp of air took more effort than the last and slowly he began to realize that everything hurt. From his muscles to his feet. Especially his feet. They felt like two big, raw lumps of meat that did nothing but hurt. He ignored it as best as he could for now.

A thin hand with long, elegant fingers was lain on Iris' forehead, golden-violet sparks danced across the digits and over her skin.

Wait, this was the famous Healer?

“For how long has she been sick?”

Gladio's tired mind barely registered the question. “What?” he managed to utter after his second attempt at articulating.

“How long, Gladio”, Healer barked.

How...? That wasn't important right now.

“Nearly two months”, he managed to say around the lump in his throat.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit. By all the sulphurous fires of Ifrit's den. By all rights, she should be dead by now.”

That made Gladio's tired brain pay attention again. “Excuse me?”

Healer shook his head and reached for the bucket a huffing and puffing Casto held out towards him, bedsheets under his other arm.

“No time for that.”

He gently sat her upright, her weight lying awkwardly in his arms, and sent a wave of softly glowing magic through her. The golden and violet light washed over her like water. Without warning her upper body jerked forward and she vomited her dinner mixed with black blood into the bucket. It stank sickeningly.

Iris took big, heaving breaths, occasionally dispelling mouthfuls of junky black sludge. After nothing new came up, Healer set the bucket down beside the bed. He didn't seem to care for the splatters that had hit the naked skin of his arms and torso. They slowly turned into wispy smoke and then vanished entirely. Her eyes fluttered feverishly without seeming to notice her surroundings.

“Yeah, that's it. Everything's alright now. In and out, in and out. Yah're doing great, Iris. Everything's gonna be alright.”

While Healer was gently coaxing his barely lucid sister into regaining her breath and Casto put a garish monstrosity of a pillow beneath her head, Gladio leaned against the wall to ease the pain in his feet and to regain some kind of equilibrium. Because this Healer knew his sister's name. Gladio knew he hadn't told him and he had known his name, too, without needing an introduction. Just who was he?

“Tata?”

All eyes turned towards the door. There stood a girl. She looked to be around seven with wild, sleep mussed red hair and honey coloured eyes that gleamed golden. She looked drowsily at them and yawned.

“Solaris? What're yah doing out of bed?” asked Healer without taking his glowing hand from Iris' forehead even once.

“It's loud”, the girl complained.

Gladio's gaze wandered from one to the other and he wondered.

Healer nodded. “Ah know, little sun, but Iris needs mah help for now. If yah can't sleep anymore, could yah go down and ask yahr mati for a big glass of water? Casto, could yah look after Astra, please? Ah don't wanna've him running 'round alone and in the dark.”

Both nodded and left the room, the girl taking the teenager's hand. Gladio stared after them. He had heard this accent before, he knew he had. If he could just place where. He felt like he was missing some very crucial things right about now. Sleep. What he needed now was sleep and for Iris to not die.

His gaze settled back on her. A flittering net of golden-violet magic covered her from head to toe. It looked more like mist than a tangible thread. How was such a thing possible? Only the royal family should be the one harbouring powerful magic in this city, even the whole continent. And now here was this Healer, whose magic prickled against his skin like a Lucis Caelum's did. It would probably be more upsetting, if he was fully awake.

“What does she have?” he asked instead of all the other questions burning on his tongue.

Healer blinked at him, as if he had forgotten that Gladio was also in the room. He made a passable impression of a bowstring drawn tight. In an obvious nervous tick, Healer tugged at his hair and wet his lips.

“She's scourge sick”, he said at last, his voice barely more than a quiet whisper.

“Scourge sick”, Gladio repeated tonelessly. “You mean the black plague, curse of the Gods, the starscourge? That kind of scourge sick?”

“Yes”, came the careful confirmation.

Gladio felt his fingers flex like they wanted to hit something, if he had just a bit more energy left. “That's a load of chocobo shit”, he rasped. “The starscourge does not reach within the Wall. Everybody knows that.”

Near glowing, violet eyes shot him a deadpan stare that felt achingly familiar. He suppressed a shudder creeping up his spine. Damn, those eyes were eerie.

“Two months ago yah said? Has she been anywhere near the old crypts at tha' time?”

The broken shield opened his mouth to instinctively deny the question, but he hesitated. “I... I don't know”, he admitted at last. He tried to remember, but his head started to feel like it was packed in wool.

“Doesn't matter anymore. It's good that yah came now, but yah were cuttin' it very close. She wouldn't 'a' made it through the night. Ah can barely believe tha' she made it this long.”

With a shuddering breath Gladio leaned more of his weight against the wall. The rough plaster dug uncomfortably into his shoulders.

Steps sounded from the hallway and shortly thereafter the girl was back, two cups in her hands. One was steaming and emanated a strong smell that made him wrinkle his nose. She gave the one with the foul smelling liquid Healer, the other one she cradled between her hands.

“Thank yah, little sun”, the young man smiled. “Now, yah remember what ah taught yah? Reach for the power resting in yahr bones. No more than a spark. Take it and guide it, it knows what it's got tah do.”

The girl's face scrunched up in concentration, in a way Gladio had seen a hundred times before, in the way Noctis had looked when he had wanted something to go exactly right. What Gladio hadn't seen before was the reddish glow of her hands.

“Not so much, little sun”, corrected Healer gently.

Solaris' brow furrowed even more and after a few seconds the glow dimmed until there was only the barest sheen of it left. It seeped into the cup and the liquid it contained, until it glowed, too.

“Very good”, praised the young man and Solaris beamed. “Would yah be a dear and give it tah Gladio over there?”

“Yes, tata”s she said dutifully and held the cup out to him, standing as far away as she could manage while doing so. She was clearly skittish around strangers.

“No, thank you”, he said while looking at the glowing cup in healthy scepticism. As long as he had no idea what it was he wouldn't drink it. He swallowed, and that made his parched throat just more noticeable.

Healer clucked his tongue in disapproval. “It's jus' water with a bit of healin' magic. Sit down and drink tha'. Yah look like yahr abou' tah keel over. 'Specially with yahr feet.”

Gladio made a face, but in the end he took the cup from the girl. The liquid in it looked like plain water hit by sunlight during noon. It was kind of fascinating, he had to admit. The little girl scampered off towards the bucket and glanced into it, curiosity clear on her face. She clamped her hands over her nose and mouth with a disgusted sound. Gladio frowned. A child as young as her shouldn't see these kind of things. Healer seemed to be of a similar mindset.

“Solaris, would yah please go and get Ardyn? And after tha' ah need yah tah do somethin' very important. Can yah do tha' for me?” Healer looked at her with serious eyes. The girl nodded, face solemn. “Yah need tah go tah the other patients and tell them tha' everything's alrigh'. They don't need tah worry.”

“Ah will, tata”, she said and carefully stepped closer to give Healer a kiss on the cheek before she left the room.

“What happens now?” asked Gladio and took a tiny sip of the mystery water, as he had dubbed it in his mind.

At once he could feel some of his exhaustion leave and the soreness of his muscles easing off just a bit. He blinked in surprise. This was a bit like the potions he knew, just far more gentle in the way the soothed things. Potions and ethers made by Lucis Caelum magic were always accompanied by an unpleasant burn.

Healer answered while he carefully, drop by drop, made Iris drink that foul smelling tea. “Now ah'll start tah heal her. The scourge has been burrowed in her body for too long for me tah heal it all at once, but ah can do it. Yah needn't worry.”

“You can really heal her? How long will it take? There is supposed to be only one person who is able to heal the starscourge, and I kind of doubt that you are the Oracle in disguise.”

The deeply buried seeds of hope started to grow into a warm feeling pooling in his stomach. Or maybe that was just the mystery water.

“Yeah, but like ah said, it'll take me some time. A week at least. Ah don't just need tah rid her of the scourge, but also repair the damage it caused and tha's the truly tricky part.”

Gladio became light headed in relief. If he hadn't been sitting on the floor already, he would certainly do so now. But he couldn't help but wonder how it was even possible. The Fleurets had been blessed by the Astrals with the power to cleanse the scourge from its victims. There were no others.

“My, my, nephew. You have all of the clinic in a right tizzy.”

A man stood in the doorway with wild reddish hair that had an odd violet sheen and golden eyes. He leaned on a cane the same way King Regis did, and Gladio didn't know why, but he found that quite disturbing. Despite the stuffy and hot air he wore a long pair of trousers and a high collared tunic with sleeves that fell down over his wrists.

“She is scourge sick”, the man stated. His eyes bore a strange glint that Gladio didn't like.

Healer nodded. “Yes”, he affirmed and motioned towards the bucket sitting at the end of the bed. “Could yah get rid of tha'? Ah made her drink some of Hiemi's purging tea, so she'll need tha' bucket 'gain soon.”

“Of course, dear nephew. But if you don't mind, I would like to see how you handle this one. It's the first time I see you treat someone afflicted with starscourge, after all. Not to worry, I'll keep myself well out of the way.”

Healer's answering shrug clearly said suit yourself.

Gladio watched as the man – who was most likely this Ardyn the little girl had gone to fetch – gathered the bucket, keeping a straight face at the sickening smell, and retreated back towards the door.

“I'm ready”, the man announced with a grin.

Healer huffed, but he turned his full attention back to Iris who now looked like she had gone back to sleep. He gently rested his free hand on her stomach, right over her navel, the other still being on her forehead, and closed his eyes, his brows furrowed in obvious concentration. For a moment there was absolute silence. Then the glittering net over his sister's body retreated, leaving the room strangely dim. Not a moment later however, Healer's whole body started to glow in a golden light. It looked like a sun was trapped under his skin.

The black lines on his skin, that Gladio had thought were tattoos, started to crack open and released a burning violet light. It looked utterly otherworldly. Suddenly Gladio could believe every story Viti had told him about Healer. That he was a fallen star or an Astral, forgotten by humanity and time. There was so much power. It made his skin prickle and the fine hairs on his arms stand on end. And it seemed like Healer himself could barely contain it, he looked like his human shell was going to shatter at any moment.

Magic pulsed in time of an invisible heart, lapping over Iris and through the air like it was water breaking on a shore. The light seeped into Iris' skin, concentrating where the black splotches marred her, and with each new wave that washed over her they grew a tiny bit smaller. A fine black mist rose and dissipated within seconds.

Gladio couldn't do anything other than stare at the spectacle in front of him, even as it made his eyes burn to look directly into the pulsing light. He didn't even look away when he heard a violent hiss from where the red haired man was watching.

An especially large wave made the air shudder, caressed his skin like the softest silk and eased the pain in his bloody feet. There were quite a few cuts and a broken toe nail. He hadn't even felt it as he had been running to get his sister the help she needed. He couldn't help the sigh of relief that escaped him. The magic teased over him like a long lost friend. It made something in him that had been sleeping for a long time, suddenly sit up and pay attention. He knew the feeling of this magic, had felt it quite often when Noctis had been made to practice his elemancy, even if he had never been connected to it like a proper Shield should be...

He jerked upwards. By now the magic had turned into a bright supernova with the young man and his sister at its centre. It couldn't be.

“Noctis”, he breathed, stunned.

He stood there, frozen and having no idea what he should do. This couldn't be possible. He had searched for his prince high and low and the Crownsguard and the Kingsglaive both had searched outside of Insomnia. If Noctis was still in the city and not dead they should have heard something by now. Shouldn't they?

On the other hand there clearly were people down here. Gladio hadn't even known that this place existed, and it was part of his job to know about the city's layout. It would also explain how Healer had magic. But why hadn't he recognized him then? He knew what the prince looked like! Then again, Healer had long hair and what he had thought were tattoos covering a large part of his body, including his face. And even if it turned out that Healer wasn't Noctis – which became more and more likely the longer he thought about it – this was a place he could potentially be, because no one had ever thought to look.

Had Noctis hidden here this whole time?

Why?

As if he had been heard, Healer opened his eyes. Even in the bright light of the magic they glowed like a pair of newborn stars. Gladio had to look away. White spots danced in front of his eyes. A high pitched whine sounded from where the door was located.

Slowly, oh so slowly, the pulsing light became weaker, the pressure of powerful magic in the air grew lighter. With each new wave it retreated further and further, like the changing of the tides until it was mostly gone.

The black splotches on Iris' skin had turned into mere shadows beneath skin still pale from sickness. There was a bit of colour in her cheeks now.

Healer's hands retreated and the last of the glow died, leaving the room in a strange half light until Gladio's eyes had adjusted again. Only the black lines on Healer's skin still gave off a dim iridescence, and Gladio swore there was a new one slashing across his cheek close to the nose. It made the impression that the man's humanity was nothing but a thin veil that could be ripped away to show what really lay beneath at any time. And wasn't that disconcerting?

Reluctantly, like he needed to remind himself how to move his limbs, he stood up and carelessly let the blanket Gladio had carried Iris in, fall to the floor, before taking up the one the teenager had brought in and spread it over Iris' still sleeping form. His breath came in quick bursts and he was covered in sweat like he had just completed a taxing workout. With a quiet groan he stood up straight. Finally the shimmer beneath his skin was completely gone.

“Fuck. Ah think ah overdid it”, he mumbled barely loud enough for Gladio to hear.

“You can say that again, my dear nephew. Please warn an old man the next time you want to set off the magical equivalent to a Nifasi firebomb. It would be much appreciated. You can never be sure of the consequences otherwise”, stated the red haired man before Gladio could even think to open his mouth.

There was a caution in Healer's gaze as he nodded, that set Gladio's teeth on edge and made him want to punch something. Or someone. Preferably the guy who used a cane exactly the same way his King did but moved like a was an actor playing out a drama.

“Now, go downstairs to your wife, eat something and drink some of her truly amazing tea. You look like someone who dearly needs a break and some extra energy. I dare say, it's too early already to go back to sleep again. I will look after the girl for the time being. Do not worry, I have some experience in looking after the scourge sick and know what I'm doing”, he continued as if he hadn't seen Gladio's glower.

Which he clearly had.

Healer – who was quite possibly Noctis and Gladio wasn't really sure if he wanted him to be or not – just rolled his eyes, but he took a step towards the door before he stopped and turned towards him, a guarded look on his face.

“Come”, he mumbled. “We need tah talk, and best do it now.”

Gladio didn't say anything as he followed Healer through the still mostly dark house. To be honest, he had no idea what to say. For all the questions tumbling through his mind in a never ending whirlwind since he had first seen the young man.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to rage.

He wanted to shake the answers out of the man leading him down dark stairs.

But he didn't. If this whole mess had taught him one thing, it was that raging at it all didn't help a thing. So he swallowed the anger hissing in his mind down and sat in the chair in the warmly lit kitchen he had been indicated to.

The kitchen was a large room that was clearly well lived in and cared for with a loving hand, if cluttered to a point where there was nearly no free space left. Despite the warm summer night there was a new fire burning in the hearth that was old enough to belong in a museum. It made the air near uncomfortable hot.

Most of the kitchen appliances looked like they belonged into the 5th century ME at least. Well, there was an electric tea kettle and a few other bibs and bobs that clearly belonged into the modern age of electricity. How could anybody live like that?

As he examined the kitchen he noticed the woman standing at the counter. She wasn't very tall with a thin face and very pale skin that contrasted heavily with her long black hair. Her big eyes were of a green that reminded him of shadowy forests outside Insomnia. The long and thin tunic she wore was of a russet colour and looked more like a nightgown to his eyes.

He knew her. It was the woman that he had met at the Black Saffron the day before yesterday. Well, three days ago by now, he supposed. What was her name again? Hiemi? Wait, so the little girl had been...

She came over towards the table with a tray in her hands upon which were three cups and a large pot that wouldn't be out of place in one of the historical romances he liked to read sometimes. Now that she stood next to Healer, who had been awkwardly hovering next to an empty chair, Gladio could see that she was a few centimetres taller than him. The woman gave Healer a chiding glance that lost its bite with the fondly exasperated tilt of her smile.

“Yah overdid it”, she stated.

“Ah know”, he murmured and gave her a chaste kiss on the mouth. “Ah'm sorry.”

“No, yah're not. Now sit down and introduce me so tha' we can have this talk b'fore we've gotta go t' work.”

And Healer did just that.

He gave her hip a gentle squeeze and sat down on the chair across from Gladio while the woman served the tea and then sat down herself. There were a few beats of awkward silence before Healer cleared his throat and introduced the woman next to him.

“Gladio, may ah introduce to yah Hiemi, Dame of this household and mah wife. Hiemi, this's Gladio.” He hesitated, as if he wasn't quite sure how to continue.

Before he could make up his mind about it, Gladio interrupted him: “What in the name of Pitioss' cursed depths were you thinking, Noctis?!”

The young man flinched, his fingers dug into the wooed tabletop until his knuckles turned white and his mouth fell open with no sound escaping him.

In the warm light of the kitchen it had become very clear to Gladio that this Healer was in fact Noctis, despite all the changes. The facial structure practically screamed Lucis Caelum. There was also the magic – magic he had never seen or heard of before – and the fact that he knew his and Iris' name.

“Where the fuck have you been? Do you know how worried your father was? Still is, to this day? Do you know how the nobles are hounding him to produce another heir? He keeps refusing out of love for you and the late Queen and you sit here, healthy and alive, and play house! The King still hopes that you're alive and well, that you're coming home one day. Do you know what your actions did to Ignis? To Iris? To me? Do you-”

By the end he had been nearly screaming, ready to lunge across the table and beat some sense into his prince. If he even deserved that title anymore. But suddenly he was frozen in place. The words tumbling out of his mouth, halted on his tongue and his muscles refused to move. It was like time around him had been halted but everywhere else it moved forward like it always did. He couldn't even blink as he looked at the two people across from him.

Noctis had grown even paler than he already was, hunching his shoulders and shrinking into himself. Hiemi, the woman he had introduced as his wife – and wasn't that a whole other can of worms – was another story. Her eyes were blazing in fury as she rose from her chair, one arm held out in his direction. Around her wrist and along her forearm danced smoky grey chains. Sparks of green and yellow jumped between the individual links.

“Don't yah dare.” She hissed, her face contorted into a sneer. “Don't yah think he knows tha'? Mah husband knows the consequences of his actions quite well, knave Gladiolus. Yah bet there's a damn good reason for it, do yah understand me?”

“Hiemi”, Noctis said in a tone that was barely more than a whisper. At once her attention was on him. “Let him go, please. It's fine.”

“It damn well isn't, and yah know it! Shield or not, friend or not, he can't jus' walk in here and treat yah like this. Healer. Noctis. It's not yahr fault. Yah couldn't 've done anything different. Not with Him watching.”

Gladio listened with growing concern. What was she talking about? Who was this Him? The way he said it he couldn't be a nice guy. Noctis made a keening noise so full of old hurt and fear and guilt that Galdio would have recoiled, if he were able. The prince pressed his face into her abdomen, his hands grasped at the cloth of her tunic and his shoulders shook as if he was crying. She didn't say anything but carded her hands through his long, tangled hair with a tender expression on her face. Gladio dearly wanted to look away, shaken to his core at the scene before him.

“Ssshhhh”, made Hiemi and continued to pet Noctis' hair until he pulled away.

The prince's eyes were thankfully dry and he didn't look quite as much as an anak caught in the headlights anymore. His wife pressed his cup of tea into his hands and he took a sip. And then another, the action calming him down further.

“Now”, she said, her tone brooking no argument, “we're all going tah sit down and talk like the adults we all are. Am ah clear?”

Here she looked sternly at Gladio who still couldn't move. He wished he could point that out to her.

“Mah life, yah need tah take off the spell first”, Noctis reminded her with an amused twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Due to her pale skin, the redness in her cheeks was very noticeable as she cancelled whatever she had done with one last warning look towards him. The chains around her forearm vanished. He carefully flexed his fingers and shifted his weight, to see if everything was back in working order, but he wisely kept his mouth shut and waited for either of the two to speak first. Their short exchange had made it clear that there was more going on than he had thought – than anyone had thought – and he wanted to know what it was.

It was Noctis who started the conversation again.

“Tha' night in tha' alleyway ah was scared shitless, Gladio, and it wasn't because of tha' old drunk with the broken bottle.”

“What in the name of Bahamut's blades happened to you?” asked Gladio and watched uncomprehending, as both of them flinched slightly.

“Please, don't say His name. Down here, He can't see me”, Noctis pleaded.

“What do you mean, down here He can't see you? Wait, the He you were referring to is-?”

Gladio swallowed down the name Bahamut, but the other two knew exactly who he meant. They nodded in unison.

“But why?”

He didn't understand this at all.

“The Bladed One's still one of the Six, one of the Astrals, but His standing, from what ah understand of what Healer told me, is more tha' of the Infernian up there”, answered Hiemi and motioned towards the ceiling.

Ignis would love this.

The sudden thought made Gladio realize that he needed to get the advisor in on this. Gladio himself was in over his head. But that was for later. Now...

“So Ba- the Bladed One is some kind of traitor, a malevolent deity? What does that have to do with why you're hiding in this dump?”

Both of them bristled at his words and Hiemi opened her mouth, clearly prepared to argue, but Noctis' hand on her shoulder held her back. She leaned backwards, still glaring at Gladio like he had insulted her personally.

“It's got everything tah do with it”, said Noctis. “Do yah know the stories of the Lucis Caelums tha' had a magic different from wha' was expected of them?”

Gladio hesitated. He tried to think of the old stories Noctis had liked to read in the archives, when he had been allowed down there, but none came to mind. It was strange, since this was the main reason he had started to like reading historical romance. Try as he might, he couldn't remember a single of those stories the young prince had liked to ramble about on occasion.

“I... cannot say I do, no”, he admitted, feeling strangely ashamed of it.

Noctis just sighed. “Tha's alrigh'. They've always ended violently, with the death of the Lucis Caelum in question, and more often than not with innocent bystanders dead. There're records of Kings killing their own children tah minimize the inevitable damage they'd cause if left tah live. Dad told me the last one left to live died when he collapsed a house on top of him, also killing the people within the building and most of the bystanders. Ah managed tah find records from the Founder's time, where King Somnus decreed in the Bladed One's name tha' every child not of black magic was Bad Faith.”

Gladio gave a quiet curse. He remembered now, the sordid stories Noctis had told and had given him a sour taste in his mouth every single time. The prince seemed to have noticed his discomfort at his retellings and had stopped them after some time. It hadn't stopped him from going into the archives, however.

All of a sudden he had a very bad feeling about this.

“Please tell me you aren't one of those cases, Noctis”, he all but begged, already knowing the answer to this.

Ruefully, the prince in hiding shook his head. “If he finds me it's only a question of time before something happens. Do yah understand? Ah can't go Up because for some reason we can't figure out, He can't find me here. As long as ah'm here nothing'll happen.”

“And what of the rest of Lucis? Should it fall into chaos, conquered by Nifelheim, because you were too much of a coward?”

Noctis pressed his lips into a thin line in displeasure. “And what would you have me do, Gladio? Wait for the dragon to kill me? I've wanted to just march up to the Citadel so many times, I've lost count. You have no idea how much it hurt to stay away from all of you.”

In his ire he was starting to lose that damn accent that had been starting to grate on Gladio.

“Stop!” thundered Hiemi before the argument could escalate any further, her presence backed up by the feeling of powerful magic. “We've been talking abou' contacting His Royal Majesty for some time now. 'Specially in the last few days. The children've been excited ever since they heard we've been considering it. Healer, ah think it's abou' time we finally did it.”

“I... yes”, he relented after a few moments of silence. “It's abou' time.”

[theopentable]

No hate, no hate

PENTECOST 18

MARK 7:24-37

If we examine this story there are so many factors that add up to making Jesus and this woman outsiders to each other.

Tyre was an important commercial and political centre as the leading city of Phoenicia. The region included not only the city but also the farmlands and villages located near the border of Galilee that were crucial in terms of feeding the population of the city.

Tyre itself was largely a Gentile population but in the borderlands the area was ethnically mixed – Jew, Gentile, all immersed in an often-uncomfortable collision of ethnic, religious and cultural difference, and all of it heightened by economic tension between the city dwellers and the residents of the villages.

What happened was that the poorer farming communities would be captive to the needs and desires of the wealthier city dwellers. When there was times of poor harvests and food was scarce the poorer farming communities would go hungry at the expense of those in the urban settings who had more resources.

And so we likely have this setting where Jesus is among fellow Jews in the borderlands, where tensions are high, where people feel marginalised, defensive, and vulnerable to exploitation in a context of chronic scarcity – a seedbed for hostility, bitterness and strained relationships.

And then this woman, seemingly from this elite urban classes, comes to Jesus in a desperate state.

And in many ways, she herself is an outsider - in conventional Mediterranean “honour culture” it would have been inconceivable for an unknown, unrelated woman to approach a man in the privacy of his residence—much less a Gentile soliciting favour from a Jew.

So we have all kinds of factors that make both Jesus and this woman outsiders to each other – ethnicity and culture, gender, religion, economic realities, a sense that one people have been exploited by the other….

It’s a dramatic set-up that leaves us expecting that there’s no way of overcoming the distance, the otherness.

It’s impossible to imagine that good would come from this situation.

The whole scene is immersed in difficulty – a world seemingly lacking in grace and mercy, where people are in survival mode.

The text seems to ask, what happens when we’ve become outsiders to each other?

Can there be any healing here?

What happens when our lives are defined by otherness, by distance?

And what might bring us together?

How can we learn to live without enemies?

How can our hostility become hospitality?

How can we rewrite history?

In what way might we need to learn a new way of being?

One of the big challenges in this text for me is that we might imagine that Jesus would be on the front foot showing us the way forward here because when Jesus is involved, God’s heart is engaged.

But then something deeply troubling seems to take place.

Jesus is harsh and refuses to offer healing to someone in a situation of vulnerability.

This is a striking story because the hero or the protagonist doesn’t seem to be Jesus. There’s no story like it!

Jesus calls the woman a dog.

Now there are many thoughts people have offered about this passage –

maybe Jesus said this with a playful look, maybe he gave a wink.

Or maybe he says those words through sad, compassionate eyes naming the normal barriers and dynamics at play in typical relationships between a Jewish man and a Gentile woman – almost as if to say, “I know how this conversation is supposed to go for outsiders like us, let’s name it so we can subvert the way things normally go so we can then pave a new way that is more human.”

These are certainly possibilities.

But is it also possible that Jesus spoke out of his cultural perspective, that perhaps he defaulted to an instinctive reaction to this outsider who may have even brought oppression to his people?

Is that what we’re dealing with here in Jesus’ harsh response, the anger of the rural Jewish poor and the pain of the marginalised?

Is this a reaction to the exploitative economic realities that crush Jewish families and their children?

In reality the text itself doesn’t tidy the matter up, we’re left with questions hanging – surprising questions that we might struggle with.

As I’ve sat with this episode over the years I can’t say I’ve come to a conclusive answer.

But I want to suggest, as the episode unfolds, perhaps we have two heroic examples of what it looks like to overcome distance and otherness in a way that brings good out of almost impossible circumstances, examples that might offer hope for all of us.

First, the woman.

We have to say, at least on the surface way the text is presented to us, that the initial sustaining energy for this relationship originates in the woman.

She comes to Jesus with great courage and desperation.

She is labelled harshly but perseveres despite insult so that her daughter might be healed.

We could talk about the sacred mother-daughter love that she demonstrates, the kind of love that ignores all kinds of barriers and endures all things to make sure that her loved ones may flourish and have the best shot at life.

That’s a powerful form of love. It’s a beautiful kind of love.

It’s the passionate, sacrificial and protective love of a parent. If we all lived from that place we would embrace a rich way of being in the world.

But I think there’s something even deeper than a parent’s love for their child at work in the text, something even more profound about this woman that creates the healing possibilities that this episode encapsulates.

And I think that quality is worthiness.

She hangs in there. The voices that reduce and dismiss and condemn come at her like waves rushing in but she does not allow them to pull her under for good.

She seems to know who she is. She knows that she is worthy.

And she knows that Jesus can heal her.

Somehow she holds onto a greater vision that hatred and division.

She had every right to destroy Jesus in her heart, to put up the walls and shatter the possibilities for relationship between outsiders.

But she doesn’t. And in the process she models for all of us how to avoid being trapped by another’s characterisation as enemy. 

Sharon Ringe writes,

‘Her tactic is the verbal form of the strategy in martial arts of meeting the opponent’s attack by using its own force against the perpetrator. Instead of confronting the insult, she turns the offensive label of contempt to a character in a domestic scene so familiar and so obvious that the logic cannot be refuted: children are always dropping food, and pets gobble it up almost before it hits the ground. Likewise, she and her daughter will get what they need from the bits and pieces that fall from the table on which Jesus’ ‘food’ is intentionally served. Her witty ‘words’ turn his rejection into assent to her request’ (Ringe, A Gentile Woman, Revisited, p.90-91).

The woman’s presence is entirely disarming and non-defensive.

She refuses to repeat the cycles of hostility and suspicion that reflect the shared history of their people.

Perhaps she understands on some level Jesus’ reaction and accepts his pain on some level, absorbing and deflecting the hurt that comes her way in the process.

Let’s be honest. Few things in life are harder to do than this.

The most instinctive and natural thing for all of us to do when we are hurt or insulted is to armour up, to default to a place where we will no longer show any hint of vulnerability to those who might hurt us.

It’s unnatural under these circumstances to show grace.

But the problem is that it only creates a kind of prison for ourselves. No healing can come from that place. It only creates bitterness, hostility and anger in us.

And unless we can find something life-giving to do with our anger and our hurt it destroys us. It saps us of energy and steals our joy.

So how do we do stop that from happening?

How do we disarm our own ego-defences that are endlessly determined to protect, prove, and when necessary, attack?

How do we avoid getting stuck in the endless cycles of bitterness?

I believe the only way we can do this is if we can hold firm to our worthiness, the deepest part of who we are as human beings that is not defined by how we are treated by others.

We can live from our bruises but we are better off living from our unbreakable worthiness that is grounded in God’s profound love for us.

That’s the ultimately truth of who we are. You have infinite dignity of worth. Nothing and no-one can take that from you. 

The first and last word about you is that you are loved, you are loved, you are loved.

And then the extension of that is that so is everyone else – even those who have just hurt us!

They are still God’s beloved. They are our brothers and sisters. We are bound together and when we hurt another we also hurt ourselves.

Love is who we are and love is our destiny. Not hate. Never hate.

Author and spiritual director Alexander Shaia tells a story about how when he was seven years old, racists burned his grandmother’s house to the ground.

The Shaia family had emigrated in the 1950s from Lebanon to Birmingham, Alabama and were Maronite Catholics.

At that time, Birmingham was less than one-half of one percent Catholic, and Maronites were a tiny, obscure minority even among those Catholics.

They were outsiders in a very real sense - a minority of a minority within an immigrant minority in a city that was, in those days, not kind to minorities.

He says,

“They waited until nightfall so they could slip through the shadows. Then they scoured her house, dug in her closets, opened her wooden chest, stripped the mantels of her beloved mementos, and put everything into a big pile in the living room. All the Catholic artifacts, statues, and family pictures from her tiny home were added to the stack. Placing the crucifixes atop the heap, they poured on kerosene, lit matches, and fled.

Fire engulfed the structure in minutes. Summoned from my bed, I rushed to her house with my family and watched the conflagration, despairing, certain that my grandmother was inside, perishing in agony. We all called her “Sitto,” which is Arabic for grandmother, and she was especially beloved to me. Since she walked with a cane, I was sure there was no way she could have escaped the terrible fire. However, hours later she appeared, having fortuitously been taken to church by a friend that evening. Her restoration to us was joyful, but I will never, ever forget the smell of the charred wood, nor my fear, nor the palpable experience of hate that surrounded me that night. Indelibly imprinted on my seven-year-old heart was the clear understanding that being “outside” meant the risk of pain and terror, and perhaps even the loss of life itself.”

Alexander Shaia goes on to talk about how the family met for their regular Sunday dinner five days after the fire:

“We always met on Sundays at Sitto’s house—everyone: parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole extended crowd—and usually we sat around the big, old mahogany table, which was covered for the occasion with embroidered linen and china. My recollection isn’t clear whose house we went to that week, but I do remember that the tables were planks on sawhorses, the chairs were folding metal, and the tablecloths were paper.

The grown-ups sat in the middle, the kids around the edges. Sitto, as always, was at the head of the makeshift main table, and when the room hushed, she led us in saying grace. Afterward, there was silence, and then her eyes, clear and direct above the glasses perched midway down her nose, slowly moved to meet the eyes of every person in the room—even ours, the children. We all waited patiently in the silence. Finally she spoke. Her voice was soft, and she said only two words, though she repeated them until she was sure we understood and accepted them: “No hate. No hate.…” And I felt the burden lift from the heart of my family.”

Sitto and the Syro-Phoenician woman both embody the kind of grounding that transforms hate and anger into a healing force for good.

In our little household we try and let this same spirit shape our lives and our relationships. We’ve got a family motto that we come back to all the time, especially if in our interactions we’ve somehow forgotten to live it out.

We say to each other, “remember, no hate, no hurt, no harm. Always love, always love, always love.”

Because we do make mistakes. And it’s brave and hard coming back to that place of love. But we are beloved and love is our destiny.

Which brings me to the way I think Jesus is heroic in this episode.

I used to really struggle with the possibility that Jesus might make a mistake and treat someone with a lack of compassion, that he might have these reactive judgments that somehow missed the full picture of who another is.

And while there are obviously different ways to read this text I’ve come to warm to it over time.

Maybe there’s even something here that can deepen our appreciation and understanding of what love and compassion looks like.

What I want to propose here is that what if love, even here in Jesus’ experience, isn’t so much about always getting it right every time, or finding it easy, but is best displayed in our willingness and capacity to say “I got it wrong, I’m sorry. Let’s make it right. Let’s start again.”

I don’t know about you but that’s a love I can really relate to. Because I have these reactions that rise up within me all the time, that feel right and appropriate. Only they don’t always come with the right spirit. Sometimes they dismiss or reduce others. Often I get it wrong.

But in preference to rumbling with my judgments I rationalise them, justify them, build a strong case around them.

Because then I don’t have to change. Then I get to maintain the high-moral ground. I get to remain guarded.

And I might walk away feeling like I am right and that my cause was a noble one but perhaps all I really did was hurt or dismiss someone when instead it might have been an occasion where some kind of healing could have happened between us.

And if it wasn’t some kind of healing or flourishing for them, perhaps it would have been for me. Maybe some healing or freedom from my own pride, or lack of compassion, or whatever else.

One of the things I’ve been learning is that Jesus comes to us with great tenderness and grace but usually that grace comes in an uncomfortable form –

in the form of otherness, in the form of an outsider that maybe we might have already made up our mind about, or maybe in the form of someone who has hurt us.

Whichever the case, Jesus may come to us in a form that is hard for us to love – at least from each of our own unique experience. Those that are hard to love for me will be different for you and different for others again.

I think those occasions are Christ coming to us, saying “can you receive me?”

If you can you will be drawn into a larger kind of life, a bigger kind of love which is good for us and good for the world.

But usually we struggle to receive Christ in his most uncomfortable forms for some time.

But grace keeps coming, keeps offering us discomfort, keeps offering us opportunities to enter in this one wild life that is before us, perhaps even within us.

And I think that presence comes with words saying, 

“No hate, no hurt, no harm. Always love, always love, always love.”

COMMISSIONING AND BENEDICTION

Let us go and bear witness

to the healing power of Jesus Christ.

May we be a people defined by Christ’s affectionate love,

May God give us strength to choose reconciliation, courage to choose a higher love,

And way we, by the Spirit’s power, embrace even those who might hurt or dismiss us so that a greater good might come.

Go in peace. Amen.

[phantom-le6]

Episode Reviews - Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 (3 of 6)

Carrying on with our series of reviews for episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, here’s a third instalment of episodes from the show’s fifth season.

Episode 11: Hero Worship

Plot (as given by me):

The Enterprise is sent to locate a research ship called the Vico and locates the vessel adrift just outside the Black Cluster, the region the Vico had been assigned to explore. The ship is heavily damaged, and Commander Riker leads Lt. Commanders Data and La Forge on an away mission to recover all logs from the ship’s computer. Having previously detected no life signs from the Enterprise, the away team is surprised when they find a young boy named Timothy is still alive aboard the Vico, albeit trapped by debris.

 As the debris and hull plating around the room where Timothy is trapped blocks transport, Data surmises that through his android strength, he can lift the debris to free the boy.  However, this would cause imminent structural collapse, so Riker and La Forge beam back first, giving Data the time and freedom to move the debris and get Timothy to the corridor.  The pair are beamed directly to sick bay, where Timothy claims the ship was attacked. Some initial evidence seems to support this, as the gravitational wave-fronts inside the Black Cluster would hamper sensor effectiveness, and the damage is consistent with disruptor-style weaponry and Breen combat tactics.

 However, La Forge notes the evidence is inconsistent with Timothy’s story about the ship being boarded, and Counsellor Troi suggests the boy could be repressing the true events due to trauma; as he processes what happens, he may volunteer the truth of his own accord.  Troi asks Data to help, as Timothy seems to have bonded with his rescuer. Data agrees, and when Timothy learns Data is incapable of feeling emotion, he begins to pretend he is also an android, emulating Data’s mannerisms and pretending to have no emotions either.  Troi explains to Captain Picard that Timothy will only assume the android persona until he feels emotionally strong enough to do without it, and that they should encourage it to help the boy along. Picard orders Data to help Timothy “be the best android he can possibly be.”

 As Data helps Timothy, the Enterprise enters the Black Cluster to investigate further what happened to the Vico. Sensor reflections and a refraction effect when the ship’s phasers are fired quickly reveals that the Vico could not have been attacked as Timothy described. The boy is brought to the Captain’s Ready Room, where he claims he’d caused the ship’s destruction by accidentally hitting a control panel. Picard, Data and Troi all explain that the control consoles on all starships are designed to require a user code before the controls can do anything. Because of this, Timothy could not have accidentally affected anything on the Vico, and as such the truth of what happened to that ship is still unexplained.

 The discussion is interrupted by the increasing gravitational waves, which are growing in intensity and battering the Enterprise. Timothy’s recollections of what happened on the Vico give Data an idea, and he swiftly determines the cause and solution of the problem. Data urges Picard to lower the shields, and Picard obeys, which causes the growing gravitational wavefronts to dissipate. Apparently, Timothy’s recollections enabled Data to theorise that both the Vico and the Enterprise experienced a harmonic amplification effect; the more power that each ship put into their shields, the worse the gravitational wavefronts became, resulting in the Vico’s destruction.  The Enterprise leaves the Black Cluster, and Timothy remains friends with Data even after abandoning his android persona.

Review:

For me, this episode is a very good episode, but it’s also very mis-titled.  When the boy Data rescues begins emulating him, that’s not an ‘oh wow, this guy is so cool, I want to be just like him’ reaction.  If it was, then the episode title would make sense.  What he’s actually doing is thinking ‘ok, I feel bad because my parents are dead and I think it’s my fault, so I’ll pretend to be this emotionless robotic being so I can avoid that pain.’  That’s not hero worship, that’s a form of demand avoidance, albeit in this case avoiding dealing the emotions of a traumatic event rather than an activity of some kind.  It’s an interesting idea to explore, don’t get me wrong, but I think the episode needed a title that was a bit more on-target; something like “trauma” or “mistaken guilt” would have worked better.  It’s also interesting to see Data be emulated rather than doing the emulating for once, while at the same time Troi gets a chance to do really well as ship’s counsellor and co-own this episode with Data.

 Timothy’s mistaken belief that he is responsible for what happens to his ship is also a great example of a fallacy of reasoning that was the title of an early episode of later drama series The West Wing. That flawed reasoning is post hoc, ergo proctor hoc, or translated to English, after it, therefore because of it. The reasoning assumes that if one event occurs after another event, it was cause by that preceding event. However, this reasoning is highly flawed, often because the true cause is often harder to find and overlooked. In this case, Timothy assumes that because his hand hit a control panel just before his ship was destroyed, he was responsible, but had he been more well-versed in starship operations, he would have known his actions couldn’t possibly have been responsible.

 It’s a method of reasoning politicians will often trick members of the public into using when those politicians have screwed something up and don’t want to take the blame.  Too much money going out in benefits?  Blame immigrants rather than the uber-wealthy who fail to cough up their fair share of tax money through loopholes in tax law.  Too much crime?  Blame addicts despite the fact that a) politicians cut spending on police forces, b) they also cut funds to education that could help steer young people away from gang and drug culture, and c) addiction is a medical issue and our NHS is also being targeted by cut-happy politicians.  As with the case of Timothy in this episode, such real-world examples of this kind of reasoning are counter-productive; only when you bother to look at the actual cause of a problem instead of the assumed cause and find an actual solution is the problem solved.  Too bad that in real-life, no one in charge of solving problems actually wants to do so.  For me, this episode gets 9 out of 10; with a better title, I’d have given it full marks.

Episode 12: Violations

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise conveys a delegation of Ullians to Calder IV. Tarmin, their leader, explains that Ullians are telepathic historians who conduct their research by retrieving long forgotten memories, and demonstrating this on volunteers by helping Keiko O'Brien recall a lost childhood memory, and revealing Dr Crusher is thinking about her first kiss. Tarmin continues to explain their abilities that require years of training, and his son Jev, also part of the delegation, has not yet reached his potential. Jev is upset at this implication and leaves. Counsellor Troi follows and talks to him, pointing out that her own mother is also quite overbearing. After finding a common bond, Troi leaves for her quarters. While there, she recalls a romantic interlude with Commander Riker, but as the memory gets more intense, Riker begins to assault Deanna, ignoring Deanna's screams of "No!". Suddenly, Riker is replaced by Jev. Troi screams out in pain and collapses, later to be found in a coma.

 Riker speaks to Jev as the last person seen talking to Troi, and asks if he would submit to medical tests to make sure the Ullians do not carry any harmful toxins or pathogens. Jev agrees, but later Riker suffers from a similar flashback and also collapses. Dr Crusher's tests reveal nothing, but her scans of Troi and Riker show an electropathic activity typical of a rare neurological disorder, Iresine Syndrome. However, the doctor rules this out as the disorder would produce a low histamine count, and the counts for Troi and Riker are normal. Captain Picard asks the Ullians if they would allow for further scanning, which Tarmin agrees to. None of the Ullians, nor any of their volunteers during the demonstration, show this disorder. Later, Dr Crusher succumbs to a similar flashback, and Picard asks Lt. Commanders Data and La Forge to continue the investigation. Following Dr Crusher's research, Geordi looks to other cases of Iresine Syndrome in Federation records, eventually discovering two that occurred on Hurada III while a Ullian delegation was present. Picard requests the Ullians to confine themselves to quarters until they resolve the issue.

 Troi wakes from her coma, and when news of this arrives to Jev, he requests to help probe Troi's mind to find out what happened. Picard allows it, and with Jev's help, Troi recounts the memory, ending with the replacement of Riker by Tarmin. Jev asserts that for his people, forcefully inserting oneself into a memory is a crime, and contacts his homeworld to let them know of Tarmin's crime. As they near their destination, Jev comes to say goodbye to Troi, apologizing for his father. When Troi offers sympathy, Jev engages another mind probe, causing the same memory to occur for Troi. Just then, security personnel arrive and take Jev into custody; Data and La Forge had discovered two additional instances of unexplained comas on Nel III, and that Tarmin was on his home planet at that time. As the Enterprise sets course for the Ullian homeworld, Tarmin is cleared, and Riker and Dr Crusher recover from their comas.

Review:

This is a much better stab at tackling the issue of rape than I’ve seen many shows do, and it certainly helps the show redeem the insensitivity with which the same issue is handled back in the second season opening episode “The Child”.  Granted, it’s all done psychically rather than physically, and one could perhaps argue that this makes the episode very strictly metaphoric, but I disagree.  Granted, in the real world telepathy does not exist, but through the application of various tools of mental manipulation in unethical manners, it could well be possible to trick victims into situations where they are subject to mental abuse that could be the psychological equivalent of rape.

 It’s also great to see that this episode acknowledges the act of rape for what it is, namely a form of violence.  Because rape is sometimes also known as sexual assault, many are given the misconception that rape is still somehow a sexual act.  It’s not; sex is about mutual pleasure, either for its own sake or as an expression of romantic love.  Rape is about violence, about the misapplication of a need for control/domination through the victimisation of others.  In addition, Riker’s taken down by this psychic rape analogue along with Troi and Crusher, which highlights that it’s not just women who can be rape victims, while at the same time still keeping women as the majority of the victims in line with the reality of the issue.

 The only real issue I have with the episode is that we as an audience know who the rapist is right from the teaser at the earliest, and from the first attack at the latest.  The look on Jev’s face just before the opening title sequence roles betrays the rapist lurking within, and his face shows up in every single memory invasion.  As a result, it’s hard to buy into Jev’s claim that his father is supposed to be the psychic rapist; the earlier scenes where Tarmin is being outwardly pushy aren’t enough for me to buy that alternate explanation, and the reveal is too soon within the run-time to be the solution.  Overall, I give this episode 8 out of 10.

Episode 13: The Masterpiece Society

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise has been assigned to the Moab sector to track a stellar core fragment from a disintegrated Neutron star. They find the fragment is due to pass near Moab IV, threatening a human colony on the planet. On contacting the colony to arrange for evacuation, its leader Aaron Conor refuses, though allows an away team down to discuss the matter. Conor explains that the colony was formed 200 years prior to create a perfect society using genetic engineering and selective breeding, and he and the other leaders feel that evacuation would destroy the perfect order they have achieved. They discuss other alternatives and Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge is introduced to Hannah Bates, the colony’s lead scientist in theoretical physics. Bates proposes using a multi-phase tractor beam, powered by the Enterprise's warp core, to push the fragment from its path, which La Forge agrees would be a possible solution. After some deliberation, Bates is allowed to leave the colony to the Enterprise to oversee the process. Meanwhile, Deanna Troi and Conor start to develop a romantic attraction as they try to convince the other leaders that evacuation is the best option.

 Aboard the Enterprise, Bates' solution is found to be effective, but the equipment required is damaged too quickly to be used. La Forge recognizes her solution could be augmented with similar technology that enables his VISOR to operate, allowing the equipment to last long enough to manipulate the fragment safely away from Moab IV. La Forge comments that this solution wouldn't be possible in the current colony's manner of perfection as “imperfections” like blindness would have been outright eliminated. As they continue simulations, they find that the solution is not perfect, but La Forge suggests that they reinforce the colony's shielding during the fragment's passing, allowing the colony to survive the fragment's passage. Conor initially refuses as this would require more Enterprise personnel to transport to the colony, and he fears cultural contamination, but relents when Troi convinces him this is the only solution. The Enterprise is able to push the fragment far enough that the colony appears to be safe.

 As the other Enterprise crew return to the ship, La Forge and Bates check on the status of the colony shielding. Bates reports there are microfractures that will soon fail, and recommends full evacuation. La Forge, having not seen these on his VISOR, recognizes that Bates falsified the readings, as she wishes to leave with the Enterprise, recognizing that the colony has languished behind the technological improvements of the Federation. Admitting her lie, she requests asylum aboard the Enterprise. Several other colonists express their desire to leave. Troi brings Captain Picard to the colony to discuss the matter with Conor. Though Picard recognizes that the colony's society will be altered by agreeing to asylum, he cannot refuse this request as a fundamental right of human free will. Conor reluctantly agrees, and allows Bates and 22 other colonists to leave with the ship. As they leave orbit, Picard comments how this affair is a clear example of the necessity of the Prime Directive; the intervention of the Federation to save the colonists may have, in the end, proved just as dangerous to the colony as any core fragment could ever have been.

Review:

This is a good episode not only for exploring the issue of genetic engineering and Eugenics, but also for pointing out how fundamentally stupid the latter concept is.  One of the many things I remember from my science lessons in school were the words of Charles Darwin, that the strength of nature is in its diversity. The whole reason why Earth has such a variety of life, and why humans are in turn so diverse in and of ourselves, is to enable it to survive.  Wipe out a certain type of life form from the planet, and it wreaks havoc on all the other life.  Wipe out a given racial type from within humanity or any other species, take its number and its genetic diversity too low, and you risk the loss of certain antibodies, or even a lack of sufficient genetic diversity, either of which can result in endangerment or extinction.

 This is seen in the colony featured in this episode; the people and their environment have been made to depend on each other by design in a similar way to how life on Earth is inter-connected and inter-dependent.  Remove enough pieces from the design and the whole thing gets ruined.  In addition, it’s clear from how Benbeck behaves in general and how Bates initially treats Geordi that genetic engineering hasn’t ‘improved’ the people at all.  They’ve each just been pre-programmed to be good at one thing, and in the process, they’ve become anti-disability bigots.  If that’s what genetic engineering would do to humanity, I for one would want any scientist even theorising such changes to be shot, hung, electrocuted or otherwise executed.  As much as the idea of being to work what you’ll do with your life from an early age and then do it brilliantly has a slight appeal, I’d sooner keep hold of an aimless and often incompetent humanity than trade away any hope of humanity getting better at accepting those who aren’t regularly abled.

 Geordi’s line to Hannah is perfect in this regard; when she claims it was the wish of those who founded the colony that no one there should have to ‘suffer’ a life with disability, Geordi retorts “who gave them the right to decide whether or not I might have something to contribute?” This is exactly how everyone who is differently abled must feel at some time or another dealing with the regularly abled world, especially when they start talking about ‘curing’ us, like we’re some kind of disease.  We’re not a disease, we’re people, and being differently abled gives us unique perspectives that add to humanity’s potential and advancement, as Geordi proves when the technology of his visor ends up being what solves the whole problem. Just goes to show that the only people who ever truly blind are those who fail to see value in those of us who are different.

 The one thing spoiling the episode for me is Picard showing regret at mucking up the colony through their interference. While that does gain some plus-points in that it speaks to the idea that humanity needs to leave nature well enough alone more often than not, we’re talking about a colony of anti-disability bigots.  Far as I’m concerned, the Enterprise should muck it up one way or another, and since they didn’t leave well enough alone on the stellar core fragment, dragging these genetically engineered throwbacks out of their moronic ignorance serves just as well. Overall, I give this episode 8 out of 10.

Episode 14: Conundrum

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

After being scanned by an unknown alien spaceship, the Enterprise crew discover that their memories, along with those of the ship's computer, have been partially erased. Although they retain their practical knowledge and skills, none of the crew can remember who their crewmates are, and have forgotten their own identities. Mysteriously, during the scan, an additional crewmember, in an officer's uniform and with the rank of commander, has joined the group on the bridge.

 The bridge crew attempts to gain control of the situation, and Worf, wearing his baldric, assumes because he is decorated that he is the captain of the ship, and assumes command. Data, with the memory files identifying who he is unavailable, and based on where he was when the scan happened, assumes the job of bartender in Ten Forward.

 After considerable time, the ship's computer memory is finally reached, and La Forge brings up the manifest of the senior staff members. Among the bridge crew is listed the mysterious new member who is identified as Commander Kieran MacDuff, the executive officer. The computer also reveals what is apparently the Enterprise's mission: According to the orders, the Enterprise is part of a fleet of vessels fighting a decades-old war with the Lysians. Their current assignment is to destroy the Lysian central command headquarters, which they are to do while maintaining communications silence. Worf apologises to Picard for taking over but is assured he and the rest of the crew were simply doing their best.

 In the meantime, Ensign Ro concludes that she and Commander Riker are likely romantically connected, and pursues this relationship. The two had been bickering about rank and proper procedure prior to the memory loss. Meanwhile Deanna Troi also realizes she has feelings for the commander and finds evidence which supports their past relationship.

 Doctor Crusher works to restore the memories of the crew, a process complicated when it's found that the medical records for the crew have been destroyed. She tries an experimental procedure on MacDuff, who apparently reacts poorly to the treatments, but later smiles when Crusher turns away.

 Continuing toward the target, the Enterprise encounters a Lysian ship, which is easily destroyed. Picard becomes concerned with how mismatched the firepower of the Enterprise is compared to her supposed enemies. Picard complains to MacDuff that he feels as though he has been given a weapon, taken into a room and told to shoot a stranger. Ultimately, when faced with the Lysian central command, drastically incapable of fighting them off and with 15,311 people on board, Picard calls off the mission, stating that he does not fire on defenceless people. Angered by this action, MacDuff attempts to take control of the Enterprise throwing Lt Worf across the bridge when Worf attempts to restrain him. Riker then fires a phaser at MacDuff, revealing that MacDuff is some manner of alien. MacDuff struggles to activate the ship's weapons, but Riker and Worf defeat him by simultaneously firing their phasers at him causing him to collapse.

 D. Crusher is able to restore memories to the crew. The alien is identified as a Satarran, who are at war with the Lysians so they plotted to hijack the Enterprise and tilt the war in their favor.

 Riker remains uneasy when he encounters Troi and Ro in the Ten Forward bar. Troi claims his actions resulted from subconscious desires and curtly informs him that "if you're still confused tomorrow, you know where my office is."

Review:

Compared to “Future Imperfect” and “Clues”, this episode is a better use of the concept of amnesia to throw our characters a curve ball because it’s using it more extensively.  “Future Imperfect” didn’t really use amnesia per se; it was just an excuse to explain why Riker couldn’t remember an ideal-ish future that was actually a holodeck program of sorts.  Likewise, “Clues” only erased memories covering a very short space of time. In this episode, who the characters are gets shoved right out the mental airlock, and it’s fun to see how they try and work their way back to themselves.  The change in the Ro-Riker relationship that creates a love triangle between the two of them and Troi is probably the most amusing concept out of the lot, albeit a predictable use of the whole ‘sexual attraction disguised as antagonism’ cliché if you go by the pre-amnesia relationship between Riker and Ro.

 The biggest problem is the addition of the alien who claims to be Commander MacDuff; just by his presence alone combined with the amnesia, you know the two will be linked, and the solution is given away pretty much the moment the fake mission gets revealed.  There’s no climax or suspense, and most of the characters return to who they should be despite a lack of memories too quickly.  As a result, the more interesting use of amnesia is undermined by this less-than-brilliant execution.  For me, the episode only racks up an end score of 7 out of 10.

Episode 15: Power Play

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The Enterprise approaches Mab-Bu VI, a moon covered in electromagnetic storms, from where it has detected a distress call. Lt. Commander Data discovers that the distress call is standard for Daedalus-class starships, which went out of service 172 years ago. He then finds that the USS Essex, a Daedalus-class ship, was lost in the region over 200 years ago. After concluding that visiting a ghost ship with an away team in such hazardous conditions is a waste of resources, Captain Picard decides to move on and report the whereabouts of the once-missing ship. However, Counsellor Troi indicates that she feels a living presence on the surface. Data announces that electromagnetic interference prevent the use of the transporter to the moon; Picard authorizes a shuttlecraft mission, manned by Commander Riker, Data, and Troi.

 As the shuttlecraft travels towards the moon's surface, the crew loses control, and makes a crash landing. By the time the shuttle lands, all communication with the Enterprise has been cut off by electromagnetic interference. Riker has a broken arm due to the crash landing and the three crew members emerge from the shuttlecraft to learn about their surroundings. They observe the front of a massive electrical storm. A tricorder scan indicates EM bursts across the entire spectrum.

 Back on the Enterprise, the crew discuss rescuing the crew of the shuttle. Ro Laren uses the descent angle of the shuttlecraft to approximate the landing site. Transporter chief Miles O'Brien proposes that he should transport to the surface and use a pattern-enhancing device to allow a reliable transport of the away team. Lt. Commander La Forge cautions Picard that O'Brien's chance of surviving the transport is about fifty-fifty. O'Brien acknowledges the risk and Picard grants permission. O'Brien safely transports to Mab-Bu VI and prepares the transport procedure. While doing this, the crew is struck by what appear to be bolts of electricity, incapacitating all four members. Three light sources enter the bodies of Data, Troi, and O'Brien, and Riker awakens to finish the pattern buffers. All four are then safely transported back to the Enterprise.

 When they awaken, Data, Troi, and O'Brien insist that the Enterprise conduct a survey of the southern polar region of the moon. The rest of the crew refuse. The three then stage a violent uprising and take command of the ship. They use hostages as leverage to force Picard to change course. Dr Crusher determines that Riker was not affected because the pain from his broken arm repelled whatever force possessed the others. Troi, the leader of the mutineers, then reveals that she is the captain of the Essex. She claims that their spirits were trapped in the electromagnetic fields of the moon and if the Enterprise transports their bones back to Earth, they can be set free. However, Picard is sceptical of her claim because of their violent actions.

 La Forge, Crusher, and Ro devise a plan to separate the possessive entities from the crew members' bodies by inducing pain, then containing them by flooding the area with a particle field. However, the plan fails when Data suddenly moves out of the attack area. After Data threatens to kill everyone in the room, Picard agrees to comply with their demands. He tells Riker to let Data, Troi, and O'Brien move safely to one of the cargo bays. Picard, Worf, and Keiko O'Brien accompany them as hostages. After they arrive, Picard challenges Troi about her claim to be captain of the Essex and she reveals that the moon is a penal colony. O'Brien uses the transporter to beam hundreds of other prisoner entities into the cargo bay. These prisoners are to take over additional crew members' bodies so they can commandeer the Enterprise and return to their home planet.

 The bridge crew activates the particle field, which sequesters the other prisoners. They then prepare to blow the cargo bay hatch, which would kill the six crew members in addition to all the prisoners. Picard, Worf, and Keiko each declare that they are willing to die, which forces the three prisoners to relinquish their hosts. Worf beams all prisoners back to the moon. Data apologizes to Worf for the way he acted when possessed by a prisoner, adding that Worf must have exercised extreme self-control to not fight back. O’Brien is joyfully reunited with his wife and baby daughter.

Review:

This episode stands out for being ‘that one where Marina Sirtis did her own stunt and broke her coccyx’, as well as being perhaps an early prototype for the ‘make O’Brien suffer’ episodes of DS9 fame. Him revealing that he’d have killed the entity possessing him if he could, taken in context with how much O’Brien hates the Cardassians for forcing him to kill when he had to fight in the Federation-Cardassian war, shows this couldn’t have been an easy experience for the character.  However, aside from that, it’s another example of ‘actors playing their characters weird for weirdness’ sake, and again the solution is given away early.  The weird energy going into Data, Troi and O’Brien practically screams possession by an alien consciousness, Data’s actions afterwards telegraph the mutiny ahead of time, and if the behaviour of the possessing entities didn’t scream desperate escaping prisoners, I don’t know what does. For me, this episode is only worth 5 out of 10.

[theotherpages]

From Final Orbit (The Other Pages Press):

Chapter 1: All Stories Begin at Home

         I am writing this story because my daughter Izidora asked me to write it. It is not mine alone, for reasons I will explain. I will tell what I think is important, as best I can. I will not tell you everything, for reasons I will not explain. I will say only that some parts of the story are not mine to tell. Trust is important to me. Faith is important to me. Love is important to me. And most specifically, the people I consider family are important to me. More than anything. Material things, by and large, are not. Let me begin with my family.

          My parents, despite being first-generation Vietnamese immigrants to Brazil, had a fondness for all things Italian, and named me Mario, after Mario Andretti, the most famous race car driver of the 20th Century CE. My older sister was named Sofia, after Sophia Loren, the most beautiful actress. They liked that Sofia also means wisdom, because in our culture, education has always been highly valued. Mario technically means hammer, so I think maybe their expectations for me may have been a little less ambitious.

          In all other things (or almost all) they immersed themselves in their adopted country. They became devout Catholics, they spoke only Portuguese in the home, they became naturalized citizens, and they studied futbol with a seriousness that verged on comedy. When they were naturalized, my father changed his first name to Milton, and my mother changed hers to Beatrice. Sofia and I came later. Our family name is spelled Ng, which we have always pronounced the same way it is spelled, “en-gee,” and though it is a very common Vietnamese name, my parents kept it as the one unbreakable tie to their past lives and to their ancestors.

          They never talked much about their own parents, or their younger lives in Vietnam, or why they migrated to Brazil. In honesty, I never thought to ask. Our family always seemed whole and complete as it was, with the four of us.         

          Our home was a medium-sized flat in Favela Paraisópolis in São Paulo. I say medium-sized, but that is in favela terms. Anywhere else it would have been quite small. It was stacked vertically - the kitchen was at street level, my parents' bedroom and storage closet above that, Sofia and I shared a tiny room above that, the tiny WC was at our level, and then there was a small open space on the rooftop where my mother raised spices and peppers, and we hung our laundry. There was a raised rack supporting the solar panels that heated the water beside a storage tank, and my father had planted a climbing vine in a pot next to it. The shady space created beneath the vine’s green leaves and flowers was our refuge, Sofia and I, from the grime and the noise of the narrow streets below.  

         I liked the rooftop because I could look up and watch the clouds, and look out at the city skyline at night. I remember once when there was a massive power outage across all of São Paulo, and Sofia and I were dazzled by all of the stars in the night sky that were normally hidden by the glow of city lights. “Where did they come from?” I asked in fascination.

          “They are always there, Mario,” my mother answered. “Like the sun and the moon, but they are so far away that their light is tiny to us. They have been there forever.” Maybe it was then I first started thinking about being an astronaut. I cannot say for certain, but it might have been then.

The eBook version is still on sale on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08R2FW42K/

[mindtraptotravel]

Everything You Need to Know and Do in Sydney

HISTORY OF SYDNEY

This influx of men and women directed for a number of the very first cities and after cities in Sydney. Whilst the age of golden rushes went and came, the evolution of suburbs and also improved transport additionally surfaced. The building of railways and tramways from the century helped this accelerated improvement. Through the twentieth century, Sydney had people of more than one million men and women.

Located across the Sydney Harbor,'' Sydney is popularly Called the harbor Metropolis' where residents and travelers May Enjoy such arenas like the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge. A former sponsor of this Summer Olympics,'' Sydney is undoubtedly developing a vacation destination for those travelers of now as time goes on.

This lets Sydney become the perfect destination for many travelers who desire an awareness of development and history in addition to amazing weather and also neighboring pursuits. Sydney is significantly more than the usual secondary hot-spot; it truly is at which time has demonstrated that whatever may be accomplished with endurance and work.

Since their national funding of New South Wales (http://www.visitnsw.com.au) at Australia, Sydney is unquestionably high in history any traveler might love to find them. Launched in 1788 if Briton Arthur Phillip maintained Australia for England, Sydney has become one among many very renowned towns in the Earth, boasting four thousand people to its populace.

A number of those languages additionally have different dialects for assorted tribes and clans. All these languages have been gone today, however, stone carvings continue to be to share with the tales of all these prehistoric folks.

This Caused the British infantry settlement as based by Arthur Phillip. A couple of decades after in 1789, a celiac illness disperse across the territory, murdering the native inhabitants --most genuinely believe that this has been due to smallpox.

Together with all the 2nd largest immigrant population of almost any bigger world, Sydney is an intriguing mixture of expression and culture. In reality, 1 percentage of the populace will function as migrants of a few terms. This generates an alternative sense from the metropolis --just one of sharing and acceptance, as opposed to segregation.

The native Australians (http://www.dreamtime.net.au) after roamed the lands of Sydney along with the neighboring regions for around half a thousand decades ago And if the numbers dwindled ahead of the coming of Arthur Phillipsthey inhabited the location and left their domiciles at the area.

From 1820, there weren't many aborigines still left and also the time scale of culture commenced: both the instruction and Christianization of those natives. With all the direction of Governor Macquarie, the metropolis of Sydney started to have an even more coordinated sort. Roadways and wharves had been assembled and also nearby development proved to be quickly. Persons began coming from Britain and Ireland so as to discover a brand new life.

LIFESTYLE OF SYDNEY

Together with all the Sir Stamford merely a couple of moments walk away from a few prominent Sydney town center sights, visitors can readily and immediately enjoy this sort of region of attention whilst the Royal Botanic Gardens. Positioned on thirty hectares (nearly ninety acres) of native and native possessions, the Gardens give you the right spot to relaxing lunchtime wander between a complete day's family members excursion. Other intimate landscapes incorporate the famous Sydney Opera House plus also a huge variety of retailers over the Harbor, itself.

Eventually, for the Ease of an apartment Together with the luxury of the five-star resort, contemplate that the Quay Grand Suites Sydney situated on the eastern coast of this Round Quay. Whilst the title says, no"rooms," only self-appointed suites which have a couple of bedrooms, a spacious family space plus a superbly equipped bath with laundry, spa room, plus an in-wall connoisseur kitchen area. Balconies offering breathtaking views of Sydney Harbor encourage guests in which to stay to get a silent night observing the Harbor pursuits in the coziness of the owner's suite, or else they may possibly opt to flake outside in Jordon's, Sydney's leading fish restaurant, readily reachable by either ferry along with mono-rail.

Sydney Harbor additionally includes lots of outdoor tasks for additional adventuresome traffic: sailing, panoramic flights, jet boating, and climbing the Harbor bridge. Panoramic views of this Harbor may be obtained from your Stamford Plaza Double Bay lodge -- maybe not the very expensive resort in the city, but unquestionably a lavish, five-star adventure. Located only 10 minutes in your Sydney's Central Business District, the Plaza Dual Bay gives small business guests a small business center, seminar centers, and also much more shuttle solutions, however, do not let this fool you. Just about every space has it has minibar, Juliet terrace or balcony, icebox, and also much more data interface links to simply help guarantee equally satisfaction and convenience, along with also the total adventure is just improved with all the luxury appointments involving 18th century Louis XV and Georgian antiques in most shared locations.

Therefore for the visit to Sydney, proceed however you like! The town provides a few of their absolute most lavish and sumptuous lodging on the Earth, positioned in only about every single area you may possibly want or would like to see -- in your Central Business District into Harbor perspectives into the historical city-center -- and also an abundance of things to do to relish each of these as well. The traditional luxurious of that overall public is similar to an exclusive pub setting, and also every one of the one hundred and five guest rooms or suites offers visitors with a tasteful escape from busy sightseeing rounds or company experiences. Accommodations alternatives that range from this Superior metropolis Room into the govt Harbor Suite combination using pleasant, thoughtful services along with a large selection of comforts -- atmosphere conditioned rooms, private restrooms and laundry centers, on-site eating places and pubs, together with a small business centre and seminar centers -- to offer the best within contemporary sophistication and contemporary usefulness.

The Dual Bay located area of this Plaza is just one of Sydney's most prestigious districts, introducing friends with a large variety of stores and boutiques comprising a number of their planet's most renowned name brand traces of items and outfits. Dining can be actually a fantasy, as the lodge boasts it has classy dining space and did we say nevertheless the Stamford Plaza has just one of Australia's biggest private artwork collections? If guests elect to flake outside, a wide range of top excellent places to eat are right within just the Dual Bay spot, which ranges from high-brow bars to full-sized five-star dining places.

CHEAP HOTEL OF SYNDEY

On the opposite side, in the event that you should be on the lookout for enjoyment following your dinner or dinner, take a look at the Fox Studios or your Australian Centre for images. Thrilling sporting excursions and events could be obtained in the Sydney Cricket Ground along with also the Aussie Stadium, also Paddington's 2 cinemas frequently offer you independent or foreign movies.

Yet another Fair spot to Remain in the Core of Sydney is your Leisure Inn Barclay Resort. With airconditioned family and standard rooms, the Leisure Inn Barclay was noticed by most people since they have just one of those friendliest Managers round.

Because of hosting the 2000 Summer Olympics, Sydney is now famous worldwide among its absolute most exquisite and pleasant cities on earth together with it has Sydney Opera House about the sanctuary, it has an amazing shore, and also the countless fantastic areas to remain. Possibly you have finally reserve time to get the fantasy vacation while in the earliest town in Australia, or perhaps you own a marketing firm journey scheduled to the recently formed firm, along with your very first stop will be the well-known capital of New South Wales. No Matter the Main Reason for the trip, in case you are staying in Sydney over a shoestring budget, then you also could find more details regarding the following Premium Quality, less Costlier, Pricier resort and motel Alternatives Available via http://www.hotelssydney.com

No matter whether you are enthusiastic about researching the nightlife of Oxford road, the pleasure outlets in Paddington, or else you also require quick accessibility into this Central Business District, Sydney provides a vast array of funds motels to match almost any budget range!

Additionally in easy strolling space will be Sydney's famous Oxford Street, household to specialization classic, vogue, publication, and gift outlets, like the Paddington marketplace Bazaar on Saturdays, together with stalls offering gourmet meals, hand made gift and cosmetic things, stylish garments, indigenous plants, and blossoms, and much far more. If you should be anti-gay, then you may like to steer clear. However, also for journeys to outlying locations, bear in your mind the Museum railroad station is just one hundred meters (roughly 300 ft ) off!

One other city center hotel that has only a brief walk out of your great Paddington and Oxford road areas could be your Crest lodge plus a"budget" resort with quite large customer evaluations. Offering airconditioned normal rooms, in addition to people using a perspective of charming Sydney Harbor, the Crest resort gives laundry services, spa, pool, and many massages. 1 customer categorized the resort as"affordability," also it is suitable spot is just one among its most significant worth -- near into the well-known restaurants and shops, but in addition directly close to the Kings Cross rail station.

Additionally within strolling distance to Oxford Street's renowned bars, eateries, and nightlife, and the Leisure Inn Barclay even now presents comfortable accessibility to buses, trains, and taxis -- fact that the bus stop is located right beyond the door. A number of the dining establishments inside your community are cultural you need to comprise black, Italian, Vietnamese, and lots of Meditteranean restaurants. In the event you would like to learn exactly what the sailors like, you'll locate a few of these preferred bars close to the home space of Paddington, only off Oxford, and also East of Paddington city is just one among the greatest regions to start looking for daylight cafes and bar eateries.

If this shoestring finances of yours are now becoming frayed, look in the Y in the Park, the YWCA's innercity lodge. With alternatives that range from storytelling fashion to luxury, studio, and company rooms, and also only concerning the most effective deals available, Y in the Park provides relaxation, comfort, and value.

Merely a 20-minute stroll into Oxford Avenue, the Acacia Lodge Provides the two En-suite rooms and Those Who Have shared amenities over Looking Moore Park using its own Moore Park Greens and also Effortless Accessibility into the Sydney Showground along with Fox Studios, in Addition to Aussie Stadium and the Sydney Cricket Grounds.

Produced by Portuguese architect Francis Greenway, the Barracks construction was the most important home for male convicts from New South Wales before it shut from 1848.

TRAVEL TO SYDNEY

Harbor Hopping along with Ferry Frolicking

Sydney conveys the biggest natural refuge on earth and will be offering divinely scenic sunset views out of any one of those 70 sanctuary shores at the metropolitan area region. The very optimal/optimally method to find that the sanctuary is by simply taking a ferry out of fundamental Sydney into the Taronga Zoo, at which koala, platypus and roughly 3,000 additional endangered or species that are rare like prime oceanfront real estate. Even the Royal Botanical Garden in fundamental Sydney can also be quite notable, including the maintained web page of this colony's very first searchable vegetable patch. On the southwest, Bondi Beach has been Sydney's sandy beachfront getaway, whole with gelato distributors, amazing bars and also a general atmosphere of comfort.

The glowing jack metropolis of Sydney has arrived away from the modest colonial start after the British came in the 18th century. City course goes together with suburban way of life, which makes a lot more than a chance to finding outdoors and research enjoy just Australians discover just how. Top-notch dining table, a large selection of species that are endangered, and also the signature Opera residence contrary to the gorgeous background of Port Jackson make it tough to suppose Sydney is scarcely 200 decades old.

After Captain James Cook's British Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788, '' he attracted together with him a million convicts from Britain to set a penal settlement,'' that turned into the tiniest colony in The Rocks which could descend right into Sydney. As of the moment, aboriginal men and women had occupied the region for more than 30,000 decades and so were mostly murdered off or hauled to the Blue Mountains. The nearby area remains filled with rock that people can view now; travelers can additionally partake from the developing popularity and celebration of culture that is indigenous. Along with this predominantly Anglo-Celtic populace, the 20thcentury attracted Sydney a brand new tide of legislation from Croatia, Lebanon, both Argentina, and Turkey to call a tiny percentage and now the town turned into a cosmopolitan and culinary foundation of this planet maybe perhaps not to be overlooked!

In various ways,'' Sydney could be your soul and heart of Oceania. An actual melting pot of civilizations, ecology, and foundations, Sydney may be the funding of Australia in most facet nevertheless name. Uncover this interesting portion of this southern quadrant in the delights and paintings of Sydney, an amazingly various, older and contemporary metropolis.

You will find more ways to relish town proper once you go to Sydney, for example, a few of those funniest performances in the Opera residence patio throughout the summertime months. The mythical Harbour Bridge, also called the coat hanger' amid sailors, can be definitely an experience on the planet. 

Climb the staircase of this south-west pylon to get an unthinkable opinion of this sanctuary or cover somewhat added in funds and spend a few hrs actually scaling the bridge by way of an avowed business. For more earthbound the Museum of Modern Art can be actually a matter of attraction, though merely for its excellent art-deco construction in that it resides, and also the memorial houses a remarkable selection of 18th and 19th-century functions. Adhering to a very long evening of harbors, beaches, artwork, and entertainment, King's Cross is only an ideal mix of hip underground and class subculture to get a nice dinner, chi-chi cocktail or round groove.

[samesamemy]

South Korea & UK

Gabriel Augusto Marques Pitcher and Sehee Sarah Bark

Sarah is South Korean and Gabriel is from UK, but his mom is Brazilian and dad is half Italian. 

Sarah: The first time we’ve bumped into each other was many years ago in Penang, when I was doing artist residency and Gabriel was living there. Sadly, we’ve only met for a couple of days during that period of time, since Gabriel have had to fly back to UK. By the time he was back in Penang, my residency was already over and I was home in South Korea. 

Gabriel: When I first met her, before we’ve event have had a conversation, I already knew that she’s going to be a significant person in my life. It’s just one of those feelings, that everyone is talking about, but you never sort of fully believe in. But here it was, first hand experience. So even we didn’t spend much time in Penang, one day I spontaneously bought my tickets to Soul and went to see her (of course my excuse was - I am just going to see South Korea). Even nothing romantic have happened between us during my week in Soul, we have had a really good time and kept in touch after. 

Sarah: We did keep in touched and tried to meet couple of times after that, but always something interrupted. There was my show in Korea that he promised to come, but didn’t. Another time I remember I was having an exhibition in Europe and Gabriel promised to be there for opening of the show. It made me so happy, even though I could just have shipped my works to the gallery and stayed home, I decided to fly there myself with hope to see Gabriel. Little did I know that he will end up being in New York during that time. So you can say that I was already losing my hope, but then magic happened and we ended up meeting in Penang couple of months later! That’s when spark turned into flame! Funny enough I wanted to play it cool, so I told Gabriel, that I am coming to Penang to finish my art project. : )

Cultural misunderstandings and fun expeirences

Gabriel: By being a foreigner in South Korea I break a lot of behaviour rules that I don’t know about. What seems “normal” to me, might be “no go” for Korean people. Most of those situations involve how I behave around older people. Like that one time during graduation dinner in Sarah’s university, I pat her professor on the shoulder. Apparently people in South Korea don’t do that to the people who are older than yourself. For me it it was just a friendly gesture of apprechiation. Or another situation during the same dinner, professor poured me a drink and I poured one back to him, saying “no no, you share with me too!”. Apparently it a big no too! 

Sarah: When I am in Gabriel’s house in UK, I call his dad “dad”, not by his name - Edy. Reason being, in Korean culture we do have a special word for “father in law” which doesn’t exist in english translation, so I just call him “dad”. Edy, Gabriel’s dad, finds it amusing and strange, because he’s not used to being called dad by not his own children. 

Gabriel: I guess being in relationship with someone from another continent always comes to a challenge, especially when they are visiting Europe. Before we were married, Sarah came to visit me in London and immigration stopped her just because in her immigration form occupation section, she wrote “freelancer”. Border control took her to an interrogation room and were questioning the purpose of her visit as a “freelancer”, I guess they’ve suspected that she came here to find job. To make matters worse, my phone’s battery died, I didn’t have power bank and immigration officers couldn’t reach me in order to confirm the purpose of her visit. I was waiting for hours at the arrival gate without knowing where she was or what happened to her. The thing that saved us was a sketch book of the stage design that officer found in Sarah’s luggage. It made them realise that she has a full time job back in South Korea.  

Food

Every time we back in Penang our number one choice of food is tandoori chicken : )

[junker-town]

A common goal

Sean Archibong, reVision FC

How young refugees find belonging and opportunity through soccer.

Warshan Hussin is a new kid in Baltimore. He’s a native Iraqi by way of Syria. He’s lonely. And he really hates the kid speaking English.

He is sitting in his seventh-grade class, unable to say a word. Nothing. His family arrived in 2007 through a refugee resettlement program, almost four years after leaving Iraq.

He’s looking around the room, hoping he can find some way to communicate. Maybe someone speaks his language. Maybe English actually isn’t hard at all and he can pick it up in the next 30 minutes. Maybe he’s a language prodigy. Maybe the other kids are just as behind as he is in learning his new country’s primary language. He is in Moravia after all, one of Baltimore’s most diverse neighborhoods. There are kids at his school from all over the world.

Nope. Plenty of his classmates speak English just fine. Especially this one kid. Like many kids at the school, he’s a refugee, but he’s communicating effortlessly with everyone, including the teacher. Yet another refugee who seems light years ahead, Hussin thinks.

Hussin’s experience isn’t unique. Isolation and culture shock are normal for kids coming to a new country — heck, they’re normal for kids moving across town. But in addition to the new kid awkwardness, refugees also face the challenge of overcoming language and financial barriers.

There is no easy way to immigrate to a new country, but finding common interests with others when you feel like you’re an island goes a long way. Fortunately, for a large percentage of refugee children who enter the United States each year, they share a game.

Shortly after his first day in school, Hussin went to a meeting of the Baltimore chapter of Soccer Without Borders. It happened to be the organization’s first-ever meeting, making it one of the few things that had been in the city for less time than him.

But Hussin didn’t know that. He just knew that someone had brought a few soccer balls to a field in Moravia. It seemed like a good time. Until he realized that kid, the one speaking circles around him in class, was there too.

“Shit.” he thought. “Not this kid again.”

Soccer Without Borders began in Oakland in 2006. Former Lehigh University soccer player Ben Gucciardi founded the organization after writing his master’s thesis on sports as a vehicle for social change. SWB began as a small, well-received day camp in Oakland that hosted soccer, dancing and nutrition education. It now serves four American cities and more than 1,900 participants. The Oakland chapter alone works with more than 400 refugees from 38 different countries that speak 23 separate languages. Participants in the organization boast a 95 percent high school graduation rate, compared to the Oakland average of 60 percent.

Balazs Gardi, via Soccer Without Borders - Oakland

Soccer Without Borders founder Ben Gucciardi, left, with an athlete.

“In the communities where our kids are, there’s just not a lot of support. A lot of our kids don’t have their full families here. A lot of them have undergone some really intense situations,” Gucciardi said. “So just having that space where there’s somebody that takes care of them … I underestimated the power of that alone.”

With the help of community partners like Albany-Berkeley Soccer Club, SWB has given refugee kids that space. The organization develops English language skills through games and lessons, requires students to meet classroom performance standards before they can compete on the field, and helps facilitate post-secondary education.

Gucciardi once found out a promising student and player within SWB hadn’t taken the SAT. He helped the player sign up, drove the student to and from the testing center, then called a coach from a local university. The player got a good test score and a scouting session. A scholarship followed.

“The kids are super bright. They’re super talented. And if there’s somebody who’s kind of advocating for them the same way that I had advocates for me, then they can access these other opportunities,” Gucciardi said.

Kids like Yohannes Harish have made the most of those opportunities.

Harish is 25 now, but he came to Oakland as a 14-year-old by way of Kenya and Eritrea. His mother had left for the United States when he was five, and they spent 11 years apart before reuniting in Oakland. Harish’s transition to the United States was a challenge, but soccer helped him face it head on.

When you first come, it just feels like you’re on your own. And then when you see that there are people going through the same thing. It just makes you feel better.” - Yohannes Harish

After joining Soccer Without Borders, Harish picked up English quickly. He became captain of the team and class salutatorian at Oakland International High School. He found a spot on the team at nearby Division II Holy Names University and was named captain there, too.

“It kind of felt lonely [when I moved to the U.S.] because I couldn’t speak the language, didn’t know the culture as much and didn’t have many friends,” Harish says. “When you first come, it just feels like you’re on your own. And then when you see that there are people going through the same thing. It just makes you feel better and that you just need to keep working and keep pushing.”

Now Harish plays for the Oakland Roots, a first-year National Premier Soccer League team in the city he calls his home away from home. He wears No. 91 in honor of the year of Eritrean independence.

The kid from Hussin’s class, the outgoing one who appeared at the same Soccer Without Borders meeting, is named Glory. He came to Maryland as a Congolese refugee at about the same time as Hussin.

The day after Hussin’s first practice with SWB, Glory recognized Hussin in class. He also saw Hussin hadn’t organized his new binder yet.

“He took my stuff and put it in there, and to me, that stood out because I know he remembered me from practice. I know I remembered him,” Hussin said.

That simple gesture brought them closer together. After hours of school, soccer practice and English lessons, the pair became best friends.

“We had a really good friendship because, basically, I learned English speaking to Glory because I wasn’t afraid of talking to him,” Hussin said. “I didn’t know how to talk, but he wouldn’t make fun of me because he was in the same boat.”

Sean Archibong, reVision FC

Soccer Without Borders uses the game as its primary link to the refugee populations it serves; others use the game as one among many tools.

In and around Atlanta, New American Pathways helps resettle, stabilize and improve the lives of Georgia refugees through a number of initiatives, including an after-school program for elementary and middle school-aged kids.

“We have a student survey that the kids fill out at the end of the year,” NAP’s Middle School Coordinator Caitlin Barrow said. “When we asked them, ‘What’s your favorite part of the program?’ A lot of them are coming for the soccer and happened to get the literacy or the academic help. They know they have to complete that part of the program before they can go outside.”

New American Pathways’ after-school programming encompasses nearly 175 students at three Atlanta-adjacent Dekalb County schools. That service is vital to the area’s growing refugee population. Georgia annually welcomes 2,500 to 3,000 newly-arrived refugees, according to the Coalition of Refugee Service Agencies. And within DeKalb County, refugees make up three percent of the student body.

Every weekday, the three schools provide participating students a snack, a lesson, homework help and, of course, soccer.

The sport has permeated almost every aspect of afterschool programs. For example, teachers show yellow cards as a warning to misbehaving students, and red cards when the warnings have ended. Even when it involves discipline, the shared language of soccer helps students and teachers build trusting relationships.

“I remember when I first started and I played soccer with the kids. I instantly gained respect, maybe some street cred that comes from the idea that ‘she kinda knows what she’s talking about,’” elementary program coordinator Caroline Miller said. “To me, it went hand in hand. It was the thought that, ‘Oh they think their teachers are cool and they respect me and they want to listen to me because I’m also helping them with their soccer skills.’”

The instructors at New American Pathways say after-school soccer helps break up cliques, and develop skills that go far beyond the classroom. On top of that, the kids also play some damn good soccer.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Barrow said. “Last year they put the middle school students against other rec teams and it was just like not fair to the other teams. The other kids are so disheartened by the end.”

Whether it’s English skills or building empathy through soccer. These things are essential for success in our very complicated interconnected society.” — Winston Persaud, New American Pathways

Some teachers have been forced to relinquish their names. Winston Persaud used to go by ”Mr. Persaud” when he was the lead teacher with the middle school program in 2018. Now he is known to his students as “Coach.”

Persaud has amassed a substantial collection of international jerseys over the years as a former high school player and long-time soccer fan, enough to wear a different one to class every day. So that’s what he did.

The jerseys led to conversations with his young refugee pupils, and those conversations led to relationships. That ultimately led to Persaud becoming a pro-bono coach during daily pickup games, but that was fine by him. It’s all in the name of giving students a strong educational foundation.

“A lot of these kids they’ve had interrupted schooling. A lot of them carry trauma. Combining something with academic support and athletic participation is huge,” Persaud said. “It’s a program of social education. Whether it’s English skills or building empathy through soccer. These things are essential for success in our very complicated interconnected society.”

Soccer doesn’t have to be solely an educational tool, however. Often, it is a much needed release: a space to feel belonging, and a space to cry.

In Houston, there’s been some crying.

At least for a few kids. By itself, that’s an accomplishment. It’s hard to get teenagers to cry in front of each other, even those who aren’t from one of Houston’s toughest areas.

But the larger accomplishment is how the kids have come together in the first place.

Fifteen kids, each an ocean away from their first homes, have been brought into the space that will become their locker room. They’ve been sat down. And they’ve been told they’ve made a soccer team. Not that they’ve gone through a tryout process, been evaluated and selected, but that their Sunday pickup group has become an actual, honest-to-goodness, team.

At first, there wasn’t even soccer. ReVision is an organization dedicated to creating positive outcomes for Houston’s most at-risk kids.

It operates out of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in the southwest part of the city, which is densely populated with resettled immigrants. The vacant lot in the back of the church gave the organization an easy way to reach its neighbors.

A soccer ball plus empty space equals a gathering.

“I decided to just stand out on the field on Sunday afternoons after church and invite high school age kids to come and play pickup games,” reVision CEO Charles Rotramel said. “We thought it was a good way to introduce us to kids and introduce kids to our new field and just see what happened.”

Here’s what happened: Kids showed up, all refugees, and they were very good with a ball at their feet.

They kept showing up Sunday after Sunday, more and more kids. They made difficult moves look easy. Rotramel, a soccer coach since 2007, gave them pointers on tactics and technique. Eventually, the talent outgrew the confines of the makeshift pitch. Rotramel believed the kids were ready for bigger challenges.

He invited a friend, a high-ranking member of Houston Dynamo’s youth academy, to come to the field one Sunday afternoon. Just to watch. Just to make sure Rotramel wasn’t imagining things.

The game started. About a minute passed.

“Charles,” the friend said. “These kids are amazing.”

The next day, Rotramel called the players into their future locker room. They were the first members of reVision FC.

The team began playing in the South Texas Youth Soccer Association’s U-19 level in April 2017. Positive results didn’t come quickly. It spent the entire summer losing. But eventually, talent and passion turned into wins. The team got better. Exponentially better. The next year, despite a massive disadvantage in funding and resources, reVision FC won the state championship in Texas’ second-highest level of club competition.

The group’s effort earned them much more than a trophy. Afterwards, six reVision FC players signed to play at State Fair Community College in Sedalia, Missouri.

Via Warshan Hussin

Warshan Hussin, far right, coaching for Soccer Without Borders.

Stories from organizations like reVision FC, New American Pathways and Soccer Without Borders show refugees that there’s a direct path to building a future in the United States. They are reminders of how much a game can empower people. Take Hussin, for example.

The kid who felt lost in school not only learned English, but went on to become captain of his SWB and high school team. He graduated from Digital Harbor High School in 2015 with honors and moved on to play collegiate soccer at Stevenson University in Baltimore.

“I think, most importantly, it gave us a safe place and especially getting placed in Baltimore,” Hussin said. “I think especially as a kid at that 14, 15, 16 age, we’re all just growing right now when we just want to explore everything. Coming here in a free country when you can do whatever you want, drugs, gangs, all that stuff, it’s literally right there in front of you as a kid. I think it kept a lot of us away from that stuff to do something that we love.”

Hussin is now finishing up his degree and coaching one of Soccer Without Borders’ many teams. He says it’s a blessing to be able to use soccer to mentor kids facing the same challenges he did not long ago.

“It’s like stress relief, you know?” Hussin said. “Just putting that smile on these kids’ faces. It’s basically telling them that four or five years ago, I was just where you guys are right now. It’s going to be OK. I made it. A lot of people made it. You’re going to learn English. It’s going to get better. It’s going to get a lot better.”

[tahneeglll299]

Ask Me Anything: 10 Answers to Your Questions About www.gtadownload.org/

Game description GTA 4

Rockstar's vivid story of Niko Bellic, the immigrant with convictions strong sufficient to help explode him from the crumbling bases of Liberty City's earth of organized offense, is at once out on PC. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games shipped this past April, with this one you'll get a few modifications and additions those who waited are sure to understand. Despite what's been put in, if you've already joined in the unit versions it's hard to commend picking this up, even though it now includes space for approximately 32 persons now it is multiplayer games and a robust, easy to use replay editor for reputation and making clips from your in-game actions.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise rocketed to pile popularity after Grand Theft Auto III's freedom with the ground laws were decided for a different kind of game. Since then we've seen slight modifications and squeezes to the center formula with Vice City and San Andreas, and GTA 4 represents another move forward. This is a game to strips down many the much more zany problem from games past. You won't be making any remote control helicopter vision or lowrider matching problems here. Rather, the emphasis is located in realism, a more mature awareness, and cause GTA into the present day.

Leave by buying with your cousin Roman, a small time operator flat to get exaggeration, you'll move your way upward in criminal rings until you find what you want. Unlike GTA makeup in the previous, though, Niko isn't trying to establish himself because some sort of badass for the ages, transported to tip the city no matter what. He's searching for a little, next the objective he undertakes are really the only way for him to find this. He may perform a number of ruthless bill (which you, by the way, instruct him to help), although there are places in the story where you can reduce the hand down the lead to or create a selection while to the way things proceed. Despite the kind of senselessly violent tendencies many may see with GTA characters, Niko is the exception in many respects, since he has a language through which he works.

The sport infrastructure may be been more suitable, though there's still room to improve. If Niko fails a mission, a message request to retry it pops up the moment you respawn, and once you die you don't waste the full system. Moving across the gargantuan metropolis is made easier by hailing cabs to lead you to waypoints upon the map. Stealing a car with send yourself is always an option, as is the more immersive element of actually riding in the cab's backseat the whole time, looking out the windows in the passing lights. For anyone who's short on time otherwise would prefer to give up the chance perils of handling across a GTA world, the cabs are certainly welcome.

Still, you'll be doing quite a bit of mission restarts, and that usually means repeating big chunks of the problem. Many missions break down into a great original travel segment, some kind of escalation experience, a struggle, also a great escape. Moving through the on-foot shooting sequences, a real frustration with the clunky control structures of games past, has been be much better with the inclusion of a case technique also, as with many PC versions, mouse and piano defense for meaning and shooting. Coming from last cover that feasible to blind fire, rapidly pop dated to help unload a few photos, or walk cover to help cover, a system that doesn't always do perfectly but is a certain step up for the series. That possible to use a gamepad as well, that controls vehicles better than a mouse and keyboard. You can actually change freely between the control devices. Managing the two input methods depending whether you're direct or aim is beautiful awkward, but this good that Rockstar figure the idea during without forcing you to fiddle with a control input menu toggle. And if you have to choose one, it's much better to shoot from a moving car with the mouse and keyboard.

Some of the mission structures can be really impressive also drive very well within the framework of the narrative's government, but unfortunately the franchise's hearing with slip nature hasn't disappeared. You could be fix a mission perfectly until you accidentally engage a cop car, inadvertently develop an article critical on the mission, or misinterpret a new set of path that will want precise timing upon a mission's phase change, and this kicks you claim again out there to try again. Some can infer that as part of the problem, but the idea a setup that's become a little familiar at this point and continued existence will likely frustrate series veterans.

The strength of report and quality along with the amazingly detailed world are certainly about to create great thoughts with whoever dives into that side of Liberty City, but GTA has always been about moments. Remember that time people turned away from the stunt start and arrived on the pedestrian after slamming through the light job with the authorities chopper crashing on the ground from the family, putting off a run of explosions rocketing through the stalled traffic? With the COMPUTER version you'll be able to actually prevent that type of thing manipulating the replay feature. Hitting F2 will but a portion of gameplay roughly 30 seconds long near your own hard sink and make it designed for worked with the integrated replay editor. This collection of tools will enable anyone decrease in filters, join together clips, add text, attach music, adjust camera angles and more so you can recreate your favorite scenes but you see fit. Mean a cord of photos of people firing on traffic jams through a good episode chopper? Remember going to F2 every time you're popular that circumstances with joining them all together should happen no problem, cause people the possibility to prevent and savor those quirky, seemingly impossible-to-repeat seconds that turn up in GTA's unpredictable world.

If you buy something in this situation, IGN might pick up a share with the auction. For added, learn more.

To choose the Grand Theft Auto PC Download editor mode Niko utilizes the cellphone, which play like a sort of heart for many activities. This appears in to play in the course of missions for bill meanings also gossip with the game's vibrant, well-realized NPC population as well as act as a tool built to allow players to live Niko's life as if it become a real one. NPCs can arrange to consult, for example, with no purpose other than increase your impression of the character. You can go on dates, control a game of rush or collection, and manage relationships much like you might outside of Rockstar's world. Many of these diversions prove to be fairly tedious after a while, but they're entirely possible so you can just go them alone if you prefer.

Outside of that there's plenty to get in Liberty City, a stunningly realized virtual report of New York City caked with all the dust, don, and cuts you'd presume to realize while moving behind an authentic street. There you can engage in the assignment, sure, but also immerse yourself in activities strictly frivolous, from going to Internet looks and pressing through fictional junk email to meeting ago in a dimly lit residence with absorbing the accumulation of curriculum and ads to, in normal Rockstar style, wryly torpedo common culture.

The lines staple radio is very much intact in GTA IV. When set against the net and group phones it seems like a bit more of a good anachronism, but it still offers the playoffs fantastic soundtrack then a cavalcade of fake talk lists with cynical advertising. Perhaps in GTA Against, the character will ultimately acquire the iPod.

PC gamers will get more flexibility when it comes to music selection, as Rockstar has involved Independence FM with this type. Since you're bound to have tired of finding out on Dragon Brain and Pisswasser eventually, you can weight popular composition files into a game list to act as that post is beaten to, snap you a better ability to learn anything you like must people plan to go on one of the adrenaline fueled cross-city cop chases GTA is famous for.

Then there's the online play, a significant addition for the string with a portion of the game that's been increased with a better player control in the PC variety with superior search functionality. Read through Niko's cell phone you'll find a broad range of selections for play, through races to deathmatches to a number of team-based games with more specific rule sets. The real sketch from the online portion here is to engage in 32 person chaos across the area of the capital in open mode, but the structured inside here for persons looking for something other organized. It would hold survived pleasant to view a little extra cooperative modes rather than those already offered in the system versions, but the multiplayer remains a strong element of this outcome for the freedom it offers those who venture online.

Online or away there's no doubt you'll be impressed with some of GTA IV's visuals. It's not so much the character models, but the sheer selection in the city's sections, from the glitz of Liberty City's "Times Adjust" to the dirt slathered in the industrial areas, Rockstar has turned out one of the most authentic, believable settings ever noticed in competition. But with the PC version, you're going to need a very good organization to notice in all the splendor for a decent framerate, as still about the system (Core 2 Quad 2.40 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 768 MB GeForce 8800 GTX with Vista 32) we lived having performance problems even after toning down a few of the situations, and some of the cause (the shadows in particular) didn't appear so angry as posed during important resolutions.

The severe is employed even better. Stellar voice acting throughout a absolutely unbelievable sum of sharply written dialogue presents and illuminates GTA IV's thrilling story. As you're getting together the starting sequence of a mission another time you'll generally be healed to an completely different, cohesive dialogue thread between the passengers on the auto and then grasp the pieces toward that Rockstar has worked to stop this earth with strain and personality. But this also carved in every situation, from the small piece of pedestrians to the normal horns, train track screams, and universal mechanical fuzz that suffuses large town to Rockstar's managed to capture so perfectly here, also contributes heavily to Liberty City's authenticity.

Verdict

If you've so far neglected to record Grand Theft Auto IV's stunning modern capital of Liberty City, by all means get this game. The GTA formula has been polished and retooled in this kind being more convenient, more realistic, and ultimately more mature, however it yet gets placed with brambles taken over by games past. As far as settle a virtual time goes, direct the public circle, night time, travel conventions and explosive attacks of digital dynamo Niko Bellic becomes just one that'll stay in your planning for times ahead. The LAPTOP version comes with a few added features, such as online filters for obtaining matches, the ability to save clips and alter them all together, added video and organize options, and also a better player capacity in some of the multiplayer modes. Though you'll need a high-powered approach to truly understanding the PROCESSOR version's enhanced visuals, Liberty City is a surprise to behold.

[drcolumbosnotepad]

Being Mortal | When Breath Becomes Air | How We Die

The Fighting Temeraire  -  J.M.W. Turner 

Introduction  

Prelude III: Mortality – Santiago Wu

 At the break of dawn begins a new day,

Now I am one with the world,

To be part of something greater, I pray.

All of us part of the same mystery unfurled.

 Time past and time future,

Everything that came before,

To everything that follows.

All my love to long ago,

And my hopes for days to come.

Heart selfless, soul mindful.

Live, laugh, love —this  the meaning of life?

My candle burns at both ends.

All the places I’ll never see,

All the people I’ll never know.

This might be how it ends.

 Memento Mori - Remember that you have to die. 

Vanitas – Philippe de Champaigne

Death is inextricably entwined with life, hidden in the shadows patiently waiting to take us on the day we take our last breath.  Reading the accounts of dying men and women is truly humbling, whether it be in their twilight years or prematurely - death comes for all of us. All their stories and memories of human life and emotion: all the joy, love, laughter, tragedy, sorrow and regret willing us all to live more fulfilling, meaningful lives. 

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die – Michel de Montaigne

 I think you always know the moment when you finish a book whilst digesting the last words and the text as a whole, its impact and importance in your personal life. The books I am writing about all discuss mortality – a taboo topic normally hushed about and swept underneath carpets. To read and understand the writings of these books in such a raw and honest fashion was a welcome albeit overwhelming change in gear. These books have had a massive impact personally and have formed an epoch in my life and attitudes to life and death. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi and How We Die by Sherwin Nuland are books which have the rare privilege of being read more than once, truly understood, annotated to grasp every fragment of detail of wisdom shared in their pages. The authors are doctors (American surgeons, all sons of immigrants). These men had the privilege and the burden of looking after and treating people with fatal illness in their daily practice. Their accounts are beautifully written, one from the perspective of a doctor looking after patients in their end of life and the other written as a patient facing his own death and one written in his twilight years recounting his medical practice and patients and sickness and death. I have heavily quoted all three books because I believe they offer profound wisdom which is literally life-affirming, in fact I have written this for myself as much as my reader in order to truly understand the essence of the lessons of what these three books and their themes can teach us.

I was first introduced to Atul Gawande from the 2014 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 which were a series of four excellently given speeches on life, death and medicine. His deep research on medicine for the dying draws upon many different threads with a surgical precision. His striving to be better and to constantly improve is remarkable and sets a paragon of medical practice. I was humbled by his admissions and failures and his striving to be a better surgeon. The lectures provided a grounding to my burgeoning clinical experience and taught me to never take anything for granted – never to be complacent of my abilities because to have another human being’s life in your hands is a huge privilege which some say is playing god with a small ‘g’. He understands the fine line between offering false hope and deciding when to cut your losses which is never a clear choice. I immediately related to Paul Kalanithi’s love of literature. It is rare in medicine to meet someone who loves literature so much – stories of humanity, emotions ranging from highest peak to lowest ebb… I can tell this deep affection directly influenced his writing and indeed his medicine and approach to life. What made him unique was his relentless quest to search for life’s meaning. With his juggling of both art and science, I immediately remembered my own decision for choosing to enter medicine. Art reflects the universe whilst science explains it. Medicine married the two together. Though in modern medicine, science is king – like Paul Kalanithi, I have a strong affection for my first love of literature which I’ve come to realise expresses and sometimes even explains the universe in better ways than science can. Sherwin Nuland’s ground-breaking book How We Die has been mentioned in circles of medical humanities and referenced by Atul Gawande as the quintessential book on the medical viewpoint of death and mortality. It is easy to see why this book, though nearly thirty years old is still as relevant as ever today. The art of medicine has been revolutionised and become more efficient by multiple progressions and innovations in science and technology but at its heart remains the doctor-patient relationship which Sherwin Nuland writes about in a philosophical and humane way. He marries both medical science and the stories of his patients which from a medical point of view was an utter joy to read. Funny how things have changed since 1994 when Sherwin Nuland wrote his book and also how much they remain the same – sobering to know how despite our scientific and technological advances in medicine, our attitude towards death and dying patients is still primitive and myopic. In How We Die, Sherwin Nuland details the most common causes of death in the developed countries: cardiovascular disease, old age, stroke, infection, murder, HIV/AIDS, cancer in individual chapters with case studies based on his own patients or his family members.

The theme of death and mortality explored in these books led me to think a lot about them especially in my early medical career. When I first started this blog, I wrote of great figures in human history that have sadly left us and their medical conditions. From a great fighter to an entrepreneur to a musician, all were unique human beings with different qualities but what united all of them – and also us, is death. Death is something that is often misconstrued in our modern lives, whether we euphemise, sugar-coat or indeed fear it. The old saying of De mortuis nil nisi bonum or ‘Do not speak ill of the dead’ and Requiescat in pace or ‘Rest in Peace’ pervades our lives even today. We feel sadness when great figures die because of the finality of death – there is no return, we will never know what would have come next. We are reminded of our own lives and within our limited time we too are able to achieve something great. Of course, it is foolish to be able to condense every reference and understand them completely, that will take more than a lifetime to study, a Sisyphean task – death and ars moriendi (the art of dying) being perhaps the biggest and most universal theme of human life across all cultures. There are still works by Heidegger, Nietzsche, the Bible, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I Ching, the Mahabharata, the Vedas, the Quran, countless poets, novelists, philosophers, scientists etc. that I haven't been able to read in this time, this of course is a study over generations upon generations who still are uncertain about the question of death. I cannot answer these questions death poses, there are mountains upon mountains I will need to ascend in order to catch the slightest glimpse of an understanding. I myself cannot even expect to offer the slightest bit of eloquence of my own voice – I elect instead to let great men and women do that for me for may I learn from them and one day pass on this knowledge. After spending the past year contemplating on death and mortality and reading around the topics from great accounts by humanity, I am certain that what this teaches us is the appreciation of life now in the present. None of us knows when we will die, only we know for certain that we will die. In our cycles of time, this is our time on Earth, our time to live. How we come to peace with death and our mortality is focus of these books I have mentioned and the lessons we can all learn from them.

As I child, I had devoured the Roald Dahl books like any other kid in school I loved his dark wit and unpatronizing creativity in his novels where they provided the first forays into my love for books and imagination. One thing always struck me in his books that I never truly understood until my youth, was his motto that preceded each and every one of his novels. I had a much loved, battered double copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory & Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator which I had read several times over. The motto that perplexed me well throughout my childhood was:

My candle burns at both ends it will not last the night. But oh my foes and ah my friends, it gives a lovely light!

How apt of Roald Dahl! Even in children's novels he never hid death from them – didn't the twits shrink away into nothingness and didn't James' parents get squashed by a rhinoceros? It's a beautiful motto, the transience and beauty of life condensed into four lines. When I look back over my life, over petty arguments, being let down and hurt by others, showing loved ones my worst side – I am deeply humbled. Life is short, I don't want it to be marred by acrimony and bitterness and regret. Those are the things that don't matter, the bitter pill you stow away at the back of the mind to learn a cruel lesson from and yet cringe at who you could be and hopefully were. There isn't room for such sourness, when you read the accounts of the dying – there is often the bittersweet feeling of regret and missed opportunity as seen in Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

Here we must focus on the important things – the old sayings of ‘letting the little things go’, and ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ are true. Do we hold a grudge to everybody who has wronged us? If that’s the case then we’d only hold a grudge to everybody because as Bob Marley said “The truth is everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones suffering for.” Life is too short for all of the pettiness and trivialities. Forgive and love, it’s the best antidote to bitterness and the best steps to self-love for through only loving ourselves can we love others.

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same way?

That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die - Michel de Montaigne

The Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh 

Medicine and death

The Doctor – Sir Luke Fildes

“To me, the subject will be more pathetic than any, terrible perhaps, but yet more beautiful.”

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be.

             We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

             The field of palliative care emerged over recent decades to bring this kind of thinking to the care of dying patients. And the specialty is advancing, bringing the same approach to other seriously ill patients, whether dying or not. This is cause for encouragement. But it is not cause for celebration. That will be warranted only when all clinicians apply such thinking to every person they touch. No separate specialty required.

             If to be human is to be limited, then the role of caring professions and institutions – from surgeons to nursing homes – ought to be aiding people in their struggle with those limits. Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

             I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I’d have as a doctor – and, really, as a human being – would come from helping others deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can. But it’s proved true, whether with a patient like Jewel Douglass, a friend like Peg Bachelder, or someone I loved as much as my father.

Being Mortal – Atul Gawande p259-260

 Having the medical perspective of death is something strangely inhuman. The first death with everyone is upsetting and everyone reacts in their own way. Yet witnessing death on a daily occurrence begins to offset this shock to the system, becoming a routine to which medical professional need to learn how to cope with death. Doctors and nurses in A&E departments don’t stop with each death, rather they move onto the next pressing case to attempt to succeed where they failed before. Paramedics share dark humour about death and gore in order to deal with what they see every day. Porters transporting the recently deceased to the morgue don’t cry over the tragedy. Pathologists inspecting the corpses of patients to determine a cause of death don’t become overwhelmed with grief. This desensitisation to death is a double-edged sword, it allows us to function when it should overwhelm us with grief yet does it detach us from our common human empathy, forgetting or indeed denying to ourselves what it feels like? Indeed, I remember my first deaths I saw as medical student, I have always been too guarded and perhaps too detached to cry but the spectre of death haunted me where I felt its presence after seeing a failed cardiac arrest or whilst on an ambulance shift seeing an old man surrounded by his family slowly stop breathing until there were no more breaths. Often, I have reminisced and dreamt about these experiences, I still remember them freshly and yet I still do not know my own thoughts and feelings on them.

As Atul Gawande shows in the second chapter aptly named Things Fall Apart – named after the Chinua Achebe novel which consequently was named after a line in the W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;’ When we look at death as a cross sectional timeline we tend to map it in certain ways.

The first is the classic model of how we perceive our lives and death. The classic timeline of good health until old age – when health begins to deteriorate until death.

Advances in medical practice have allowed for previous fatal chronic diseases to be treated and hence the ebbing and flowing of improvements and exacerbations in health until senescence takes place. As each second becomes a minute, as each minute becomes an hour, as each hour becomes a day, as each day becomes a month, as each month becomes a year, as each year becomes a decade, we are all ageing with time. Senescence is defined as biological ageing – the gradual deterioration of function. If disease does not take us, then old age surely will.

 The third graph Atul Gawande shares with us is the graph of old age, so often medicalised given the plethora of diseases that occur in one’s twilight years. Old age and dying is the primary subject matter of his book where our medical fiddling of patching over the punctures of disease becoming a long, slow fade towards death. How then can we prepare for the inevitable? With every new wrinkle and grey hair, we know we are inching towards old age. With the 150,000 people who die on earth each day, two-thirds are due to old age. In essence, it is a miracle that medical progress has taken us this far, as proposed by Abdul Omran an epidemiologist, quoted by Dr Jonathan Reiner in Dick Cheney’s book Heart, there are three progressive stages of population longevity in the USA: age of pestilence and famine, age of receding pandemics, the age of degenerative and man-made diseases. In our modern age, instead of infectious diseases being the predominant source of mortality in developed countries with the dawn of scientific breakthroughs such as vaccinations and nutritional improvements, this modern post-industrial age presents itself with ischaemic heart disease as the number one most common fatal disease – our new sedentary, calorific lives alongside the meddling of tobacco companies have surely contributed to this. Indeed, as Montaigne wrote in the late sixteenth century. “To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest kind of dying”. During Montaigne’s time the average life expectancy was nothing to the years we clock up in our modern times with the average age of death now in the UK as 81.60 years.

DNAR stands for Do Not Attempt Resuscitation, it is a form filled out that I have seen in hospitals for patients who are approaching the end of their life or if they are about to have a high risk procedure. The number of times I have seen the form filled out is countless and seeing it from the doctor's perspective as a medical necessity but seeing it from the, often, elderly patient's perspective you note a sign of resignation, fear and sadness. For these patients, they are forced to confront with what might be the end. Patients who are dying will often grieve over their borrowed time left.

 The desensitisation of the significance of death from being in the medical field is an odd feeling. When something becomes routine, we become normalised to it. Countless times I have seen doctors and nurses, sign away the paperwork and send the patient to the morgue. My first time seeing someone die was indeed difficult – a cardiac arrest but there’s now a commonplace lack of novelty around death I have often wondered if I was losing my humanity.

                 I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, unclear it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self-important trivia, getting right there, to truly life-and-death decisions and struggles… surely a kind of transcendence would be found there?

               But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to afloat, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide.

When Breath Becomes Air P80-2

 This level of detachment I see from colleagues is understandable when we realise the alternative is to open ourselves up to our patients’ pain where we share their grief and predicament. The sheer heat of emotions we experience will also cloud our judgement that we may not be able to serve others who need our care in the best possible way. I remember a session on being taught ‘breaking bad news’ to patients where one horror story came from the doctor breaking down in front his patient and was in turn comforted by the very person he was meant to comfort. The abode to be cruel to be kind is commonplace in medicine, administering a vaccination to a young child, inserting needles to take blood from patients, using scalpels to open the flesh in surgery. There’s a lot of pain in medicine and being swamped and desensitised to it, to an outsider looking in, may see us as cold or inhuman. Indeed, I believed that too as a young medical student but now I realise, it’s just the only human response we can have.

 But it is so very difficult to tell your patient that there is nothing more that can be done, that there is no hope left, that it is time to die. And then there is always the fear that you might be wrong, that maybe the patient is right to hope against hope, to hope for a miracle, and maybe you should operate one more time. It can become a sort of folie à deux, where both doctor and patient cannot bear reality.

…

I have learned over the years that when ‘breaking bad news’ as it is called, it is probably best to speak as little as possible. These conversations, by their very nature, are slow and painful and I must overcome my urge to talk and talk to fill the sad silence.

…

I drove away in a turmoil of confused emotions. I quickly became stuck in the rush-hour traffic, and furiously cursed the cars and their drivers as though it was their fault that this good and noble man should die and leave his wife a widow and his young children fatherless. I shouted and cried and stupidly hit the steering wheel with my fists. And I felt shame, not at my failure to save his life – his treatment had been as good as it could be – but at my loss of professional detachment and what felt like the vulgarity of my distress compared to his composure and his family’s suffering, to which I could only bear impotent witness.

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh P151-3

It is a horrible feeling, that somebody’s life is ruined and is at its near end, but we still have patients to treat, our own lives to lead and life goes on…That is the burden of our professional detachment. It’s a delicate fine line to balance upon, I do not suspect that doctors signing DNAR forms find it easy – whether they empathise with the patient’s resignation or whether they are starkly reminded of their own mortality. It is never easy, but the only way is to keep moving forward.

In the medical field, we have the enormous privilege of being with our patients in their lives from cradle to grave – at their strongest but also at their weakest, where the fear of their lives are in our hands. We are bound by a sacred confidentiality to protect our patients and our duty upheld by the four pillars of ethics: respect for autonomy, benevolence, non-maleficence and justice.

Sometimes it is forgotten the fear of what patients go through whether it be a simple medication, routine operation, or terminal diagnosis. The Kübler-Ross model is an oversimplified form of the stages of grief that patients will go through when faced with a terminal diagnosis though not necessarily in this order:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Acceptance

Although oversimplified, the stages give an indication and ballpark figure to gauge what emotions patients are feeling during this difficult time. This is a difficult time for all involved, one of the most if not the most testing time in our lives. This is because we are confronted the cruel finality of death. There won’t be another story following this, this is it – the final chapter. Atul Gawande interviews various medical professionals working in the field of palliative care – the specialty of terminal end of life care. Both Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi mention how doctors can bombard patients with information in order to provide informed consent – as both authors say “Doctor informative”, yet both realise the limitations of this approach where the anxiety of patients can be exacerbated by flooding of information when they still do not know how to compute the diagnosis just given.

             The options overwhelmed her. They all sounded terrifying. She didn’t know what to do. I realized with shame, that I’d reverted back to being Dr Informative – here are the facts and figures; what do you want to do? So I stepped back and asked the questions I’d asked my father: What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not?

             Not everyone is able to answer such questions, but she did. She said she wanted to be without pain, nausea, or vomiting. She wanted to eat. Most of all, she wanted to get back on her feet. Her biggest fear was that she wouldn’t be able to live life again and enjoy it – that she wouldn’t be able to return home and be with the people she loved.

             As for what trade-offs she was willing to make, what sacrifices she was willing to endure now for the possibility of more time later, “Not a lot,” she said. Her perspective on time was shifting, focusing her on the present and those closest to her. She told me uppermost in her mind was a wedding that weekend that she was desperate not to miss. “Arthur’s brother is marrying my best friend,” she said. She’d set them up on their first date. Now the wedding was just two days away, on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. “It’s the best thing,” she said. Her husband was going to be the ring bearer. She was supposed to be a bridesmaid. She was willing to do anything to be there, she said.

             The direction suddenly became clear. Chemotherapy had only a slim chance of improving her current situation and it came at substantial cost to the time she had now. An operation would never let her get to the wedding, either. So we made a plan to see if we could get her there. We’d have her come back afterward to decide on the next steps.

Being Mortal P234-5

 In medicine, the aim is to minimise mortality. We aim to stay up to date with research and novel techniques in order to gain a more positive outcome for all of our patients through the use of scientific data. The Kaplan-Meier curve is an estimator of survival from lifetime data. It is used in medical research, it is used to measure the fraction of patients living for a certain amount of time after treatment. In both Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air, the Kaplan-Meier curve was referenced citing both its usefulness but also, its limitations. The Kaplan-Meier curve is purely an estimator and the trends it gives are too general for individual cases. For instance, who's to say that our patients will not fall in the unlucky few that the trend ignores? As seen in Paul Kalanithi's account:

 The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired – life – was not wat I was confident about – death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean, “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbably but still plausible outcome – a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average?

When Breath Becomes Air P133-4

Kaplan-Meier Curve example

Patients when faced with their terminal diagnosis usually do not want to discuss statistics and outcome data. The flawed approach of medical practice is often being in a medical echo chamber where we are within a bubble without yet realising there are patients who do not understand with what exactly they are going through. Most patients haven’t gone through medical training and are not well versed in medical jargon, the bombardment of information can flood the senses and alienate them.

Both Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air allude to a future of medicine that is more patient value driven. Of time becoming short and death imminent, what are your values? If you had a bucket-list - what would you place in your top 10, and which ones would you resign away and yet be okay if you didn’t get to complete them? Atul Gawande alludes to Daniel Kahneman’s fantastic book Thinking Fast and Slow which I cannot recommend highly enough. Here he refers to what is termed the Peak-End Rule where upon asking patients to recount an event whose memory has become blurred with time, what is remembered follows this rule. The ‘peak’ or the most memorable part of the event – i.e. a incredibly touching moment, a beautiful goal scored, a worst painful moment of a procedure, and the ‘End’ where we remember the concluding moments of the event. For example, during the 2002 World Cup qualifiers – I remember vividly David Beckham scoring the equalising goal against Greece to send England into the finals. The game had its moments but was a poor performance from the England team. Greece were leading England 2-1 into the 93rd minute and it looked like England were out of the World Cup. Then England were awarded a free kick, and what happened next was history. Even as a seven-year-old, my memories of watching that rather drab football match were elevated considerably in literally the dying seconds of David Beckham scoring that free kick. Atul Gawande notes the story we write ourselves – the narrative of our life. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. We distinguish our experiencing self – which is absorbed in the moment with the remembering self – recognising the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. As we know from all stories, endings matter. And no more so than the ending of our lives.

In Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation, it is proposed there is a hierarchy of needs with basic needs for physiological survival, and safety at the bottom, above this is the need for love and belonging, and above this is the desire for growth – attaining personal goals, mastering knowledge and skills, recognition and reward for our achievements. At the crest of the pyramid of this hierarchy of needs is what Maslow terms ‘self-actualization’ – self-fulfilment through pursuit of moral ideals and creativity for their own sake. This is all good and well when we believe we are invincible – everybody wants to live forever but once faced with death – what then becomes important to you?

 How we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have. When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you “the world is your oyster,” “the sky is the limit,” and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification – to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow’s pyramid – achievement, creativity, and other attributes of “self-actualization.” But as your horizons contract – when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain – your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

Being Mortal p97

 We need to discuss what is important to a patient who is dying with the utmost importance, we know what one wants at twenty will be drastically different to what one wants at sixty. Similarly, what one wants now may be completely different to six months down the line, all of this even more important now that time is running out and its finite sands trickling away.

 Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany.

 ...

“I wish things were different.”

“If time becomes short, what is most important to you?”

Being Mortal P182

 We so often deprive the elderly of choice with regimented medication schedules and restriction of even going outside the house for fear of them falling of injuring themselves. Even in this age of patient-centred care, what hasn’t been realised is what the patient wants. It is this failure in health to recognise that the sick and aged have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.

 Wants are fickle. And everyone has what philosophers call “second-order desires” – desires about our desires. We may wish, for instance to be less impulsive, more healthy, less controlled by primitive desires like fear or hunger, more faithful to larger goals. Doctors who listen to only the momentary, first-order desires may not be serving their patients’ real wishes, after all. We often appreciate clinicians who push us when we make shortsighted choices, such as skipping our medications or not getting enough exercise. And often adjust to changes we initially fear. At some point, therefore it becomes not only right but also necessary for a doctor to deliberate with people on their larger goals, to even challenge them to rethink ill-considered priorities and beliefs.

Being Mortal p202

It is this independence and autonomy that gives a patient their dignity – their freedom and their choice to do how they wish. I think everyone wishes to be treated with respect and have their own freedom in their end of years, it is only human to do so. All it takes is basic human empathy to realise how we treat our elderly patients and elderly family members and friends and understand the golden rule in religion: Treat others how you want to be treated.

 Medicine, now no less than then, is the art of nurturing the sick to a state of health and recognizing when it is impossible to do so. Should that be the case, ways must be found to de-medicalize the final weeks or days, to nurture the dying and those who love them, and by this means to nurture ourselves. The real truth of healing lies in the nurture.

How We Die P288

 All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.

             This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life – to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness and old age make the struggle hard enough. The professionals and institutions we turn to should not make it worse. But we have last entered an era in which an increasing number of them believe their job is not to confine people’s choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

Being Mortal p140-141

The Dance of Death

Unity of death

Michel de Montaigne, a figure so renowned he earned his place in history as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reputable Men thought deeply about death and mortality amongst other topics and emphasises this point with profound eloquence. His Essay “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” is a serene meditation of death and life that expresses the contemplation of death far more eloquently than I could ever do it justice.

—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.

That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die – Michel de Montaigne

Each of us is facing the same fate; all of us united in the face of death. To death, none of us knows how to react really. Yet we know it's there hanging before us, like Cicero's account of the Sword of Damocles. Nothing in life is ever guaranteed. Our memories of the past and our hope for the future. To our love to long ago and our love for days to come.

I began to realise that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

When Breath Becomes Air P132

Across all cultures from the Mexican tradition of Dia de Muertos (All Souls Day) and Hallowe’en – a contraction of All Hallows’ Evening, Chinese tradition of the Ghost Festival (盂蘭節), Pitri Paksha (पितृ पक्ष) or fortnight of the ancestors, the Japanese term mono no aware (物の哀れ) or the pathos of things. The veneration of the dead where descendants pay their respects to their ancestors is shared across all cultures, no matter the difference in our tongues.

We all strive to understand the mystery of death, where do we go after we die? Will this love survive of us? Was my life a life well spent? These questions are universal and unanswerable. The only thing we know for certain is the only time we have is in the present.

The fear in life is to live a life unspent. Regret is the cruellest wound, like in T.S. Eliot’s narrator in The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, the stings of missed opportunities and paralysing neuroticism tinges the poem with the bitterness of living a life like his.

“We bones, lying here bare, await yours.” in Capela dos Ossos

 Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur,

mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur,

omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur.

Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.

 Life is short, it will end; Death comes quickly and respects no one, It destroys everything and has no mercy. To death we are hastening let us refrain from sinning.

 Ad Mortem Festinamus from the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat

 There is our fear and loathing against death – like Beethoven shaking his fist at the thunderstorm on his deathbed, or Dylan Thomas’ plea to his dying father. How many of us have been deprived of our future and dreams by lives cut short. Life is never fair when the good may suffer and the evil may revel. We’re all victim to death’s blind snatching of us.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do not go gentle into that good night 

- Dylan Thomas

The final monologue of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot notes the cruelty of ephemeral life and a resounding cry against death and old age in his final lines in the play:

POZZO:

(suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. (He jerks the rope.) On! Exeunt Pozzo and Lucky. Vladimir follows them to the edge of the stage, looks after them. The noise of falling, reinforced by mimic of Vladimir, announces that they are down again. Silence. Vladimir goes towards Estragon, contemplates him a moment, then shakes him awake.

Waiting For Godot – Act 2 – Samuel Beckett

Such in life, what we make of it is how we live. We cannot be overwhelmed by life's brevity, from the Buddhist concept of anicca (impermanence) there is still meaning to be found in life with our families and friends and our fellow human beings. Do resign ourselves to the disillusionment with the disregard of the cosmos like Meursault in Albert Camus’ L’Etranger? We can be all too paralysed with a myopic view upon death where we creep ever deeper into the rabbit-hole of existential crisis, unable to see the wood for the trees. Being inevitable, countless philosophers and wise thinkers have argued our fear of death is pointless. There is a fine line one treads between accepting death resignedly and passively overwhelmed by the indifference of the universe or fearing death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxw-zXRqOs

And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life’s span?

Luke 12:25

Yet death is scary, it’s terrifying in fact. It’s the finality of death that makes it so powerful and why it has been feared by our ancestors generations and generations before us. Being aware of our death makes us fearful of how we wish to live, what we wish to achieve, the opportunities we see hanging before us – the most powerful impulse in our life. We cannot escape it through fear because death is the one thing we cannot run away from. Though fear remains, it isn’t the fear of the mystery of death rather the fear of what we may not be able to do, achieve, live in our limited time on Earth.

Such is the importance of the philosophy of how we decide to live our lives, whether it is through religion, philosophy, family, community etc. we need to find meaning in our lives because our days are numbered and we need to make them count.

As Matt Haig argues in his beautiful book Reasons Not To Die “We can just use it in life. For instance, I find that being grimly aware of mortality can make me steadfastly determined to enjoy life where life can be enjoyed. It makes me value precious moments with my children, and with the woman I love. It adds intensity in bad ways, but also good ways.”

Reasons Not To Die – Matt Haig

 No matter how brief our lives are, we can still find beauty in its brevity like mayflies rising and falling where we can choose to make it a life well spent. I think all of us face this existential question at some point in our lives where we feel the sands of time trickling away or facing abject boredom as Heidegger describes facing anxiety over your life’s meaning: “Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference.” It is this boredom when we feel the fear of a conditional life never spent. Boredom I feel is the directionless passivity of allowing yourself to be swept up by the tides and waves of time. That’s why it’s so important to have a purpose, values in life that can steer yourself to a destination where you want to reach. Carpe Diem as the old saying goes, “I am not throwing away my shot!,”

 So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

Psalm 90:12

 “The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man…Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose” 

Jacques Monod

  Ageing and growing old

People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms.

Being Mortal p249

I’ve spoken to elderly patients in the hospital who are simply waiting, waiting to be seen, waiting for treatment, hopefully waiting for the family and friends that never visit. I’ve found myself guiltily detaching myself from the history taking after an hour and a half which I’ve allowed to go on for so long (the history is expected to be taken in less than 10 minutes) because I simply know that they have no one else to speak to, and I may be the only comfort they have in a place that’s too busy for them. It’s a pitiable state and I tried not to realise myself in their situation too much because I very much fear that – the loneliness of existence, your children not even bothering to pay a visit and the doctors and nurses too busy for you, may be me one day. I remember when I was volunteering at an elderly care home on every Sunday afternoon during my teenage years, this being the same care home my Grandmother went to during her twilight years, I always remembered the staff being especially friendly whenever we visited Granny and in volunteering there I hoped I could give something back to their support they gave her. Stepping into the care home, after a few months of volunteering a strange realisation dawned on me. I had never seen any of the residents’ relatives. Of course, this might be down to chance on a Sunday afternoon window where I may have missed them but the look on the residents’ faces betrayed that. They were always ecstatic (which admittedly unnerved me a little initially) whenever I came always eager to share their stories with me. Some weeks they would forget who I was briefly then the slow recognition of who I was as I handed over their tea. I saw the cruelty of dementia threatening to deprive them of their memories and realised then why they wanted to pass on their stories so eagerly so that they may never be forgotten. I met wonderful people there including one Joan Regan who struck me as a woman who was very beautiful in her prime. Joan recounted stories of her youth and her singing career with joy as I listened eagerly. Then one day after locking my bike and getting ready to serve the tea and biscuits, I realised that there was one person missing from the round. Joan wasn’t there. I heard from one of the nurses that she had passed away earlier in the week. The surprising snatching of life at death’s hands came once again, the void Joan left in that room was never filled again.

The specialty of geriatrics is the care for elderly patients i.e. all patients over the age of 65 and gerontology which is the study of the ageing process itself. The care for the elderly is in itself its own specialty given the increased complexity of the decreased physiological reserve the elderly have which in turn presents with increased complications with problems and disease. Many of these elderly patients are on polypharmacy – on a number of different drugs, many of which are to treat the side effects of a certain toxic effect of another, as Paracelsus said: Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift, allein die Dosis macht dass ein Ding kein Gift ist. All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison. The drugs which treat are also poisonous and hence strict monitoring of the medication is needed for fear of pushing a patient’s condition into a worse state by iatrogenic problems – problems caused by medical interference.

How we monitor the care for the elderly is measuring their activities of daily living (ADLs), a group of eight markers of basic physical independence: toileting, eating, bathing, grooming, get out of bed, get out of a chair, walking. After often a prolonged stay in hospital, the worst thing to do would be to discharge a patient unable to perform these ADLs independently and hence cause themselves further harm. A study by the University of Minnesota found elderly patients under the care of a geriatrics team were a quarter less likely to become disabled and half as likely to develop depression. This is remarkable, and it is clear why, geriatric teams have set out especially to treat the needs of the elderly and the problems of ageing which other specialties overrun with political and economic burdens on their health systems may overlook.

…In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible.

This is the consequence of society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals – from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families’ hands to coping with poverty among the elderly – but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves anymore.

Being Mortal p76-77

The values we see in young children and values which have been handed down over the years: filial piety, mutual respect, treating your neighbour as if you wish to be treated yourself, kindness, gratitude etc. These values are old and they count for something important for they teach us how to live meaningfully. The Japanese have the terms Hanami (flower viewing) where the cherry blossoms start to bloom and Momijigari (leaf peeping) in which the flowers of summer turn into a deep autumnal maple red. There’s a dignity and great beauty in entering the autumn of our years. Such are the seasons of time, we rise, and we fall for the new generation to take its place.

In our ageing population, where in the UK over 10 million are aged 65 or over, these values have never been more important. The elderly population face the trials and tribulations of old age which is a slow frustrating taunt where you slowly become more and more aware of your limitations of your failing body. The circle of life where you are dependent as a child, growing into an independent adult at our zenith, only to become reluctantly dependent in old age. As our grandparents and parents enter their autumnal years, it is key that we are always there for them. Though they may walk a little slower, stoop in their posture, their hearing and eyesight slowly diminish, they are still our heads of our family – the wise voices from the past who have learnt from experience and mistakes as they learnt from their forefathers passing on valuable advice for us in our generation now so that we may pass it on to our future generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkoDUFNRqpw&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop

The fear is being in the predicament of those poor, elderly patients I have seen in hospital all alone. I cannot help but feel an indignant anger towards their children, how they have failed in their duties as children. And how we have failed as a society that we allow the old to die scared and lonely? Have we become a less compassionate world? I see the arrogance of the young, a contempt for the old and sick by princelings and little princesses spoiled into becoming narcissists who only care for their own needs? When we evaluate how we treat our elders in society and family, our lack of empathy and the lack of dignity we give them is appalling in many cases. The medicalisation of ageing where we sedate them with drugs and try to quiet down their ‘delirium’ whilst worst of abandoning them to isolation whereby we blame their limitations on them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww8CH62FZB0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFc19I3flJM

The elderly still have a lot to offer us, they are not castaways who no longer have any use in society – that is false. We are entering tumultuous, fearful times ahead in our world, we need their patient guiding hands to show us the way who have gone through difficult times themselves. In our age of nuclear families, we have slowly cut off from our parents and grandparents in the extended family model. This deprives us of an extended kinship that grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, family friends that can provide vital support to the family. No man is an island after all. Young men and women will speak with their grandparents and know that one day the same fate of ageing awaits them, a humbleness to forces greater than all of us and that we all want the same thing – a meaningful life well spent.

When we take photos, record in a diary, compile an album, we are trying to save the moment, whether it be a child’s first steps, a wedding, a graduation, these are the accumulation of memories that may fondly remembered for future days. Nostalgia and poignancy colour our past days so that we can affirm to ourselves that our days were not in vain.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Meditation XVII – Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die - John Donne

Time and Life

What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die – Michel de Montaigne

 Did we lament the fact we weren’t alive during the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Enlightenment, or Woodstock? Do we lament that will not be alive when the futuristic flying automobiles and hoverboards of Back to the Future II will finally be available? It is a fool’s errand to do so. How lucky we are to be living in our times, over the course of history this is our time to live and breathe – how wonderful it is to feel this gratitude of being alive now? As in Lin Manuel Miranda’s smash hit Hamilton, in the song The Schuyler Sisters – there are words that leave their mark on this gratitude of the present tense. “Look around. Look around. At how lucky we are to be alive right now!”

You were dead for billions of years before you were born, and it didn't bother you one bit. You will be dead for billions more. Your life is an aberration. Enjoy it.

- Mark Twain

 “The race of men is like the race of leaves. As one generation flourishes, another decays.”

- Homer

 “There is a ripeness of time for death, regarding others as well as ourselves, when it is reasonable we should drop off, and make room for another growth. When we have lived our generation out, we should not wish to encroach on another.”

-Thomas Jefferson

 Old men must die; or the world would grow moldy, would only breed the past again.

- Tennyson

 It is through the eyes of youth that everything is constantly being seen anew and rediscovered with the advantage of knowing what has gone before; it is youth that is not mired in the old ways of approaching the challenges of this imperfect world. Each new generation yearns to prove itself – and, in proving itself, to accomplish great things for humanity. Among living creatures, to die and leave the stage is the way of nature – old age is the preparation for departure, the gradual easing out of life that makes its ending more palatable not only for the elderly but for those also they leave the world in trust.

How We Die P87

  “Give place to others, as others have given place to you.”

- Michel de Montaigne 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=yRJBuNwQwzc

How lucky we are to be alive, and what a privilege it is to pass it on. No one can live forever, we should not lament that fact but rather seize life and live it – carpe diem before our time ends.

Everyone hopes to die peacefully and painlessly – I remember even as children we asked each other the question what would be the best type of death? And as morbid eight-year olds that we were, we all agreed to die in one’s sleep would be the ideal departure from this earth. So then with the increasing life expectancy and improved medical care from the dawn of the miracle of modern day medicine, our lives have become more stable as a result and the chance infection or illness to snatch away our lives is now much less common. This presents with a new set of challenges that Atul Gawande talks about namely the notion of how we die. This view has been romanticised and dramatized that our own expectations of the nature of our deaths has become something of a myth.  Death presents itself as one of the factors beyond our otherwise controllable lives and this places a much larger emphasis on ars moriendi – the art of dying.

Sherwin Nuland suggests:

“Death with dignity” is our society’s expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often finality of life’s last splutterings.

                  But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps, spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.

How We Die P10

 The patient dies alone among strangers: well-meaning, empathetic, determinedly committed to sustaining his life – but strangers nonetheless. There is no dignity here. By the time these medical Samaritans have ceased their strenuous struggles, the room is strewn with the debris of the lost campaign, more so even than was McCarty’s on that long-ago evening of his death. In the center of the devastation lies a corpse, and it has lost all interest for those, who moments earlier, were straining to be the deliverers of the man whose spirit occupied it.

How We Die P41

 When we begin to focus on death, there is an ethical slippery slope of the myth of the good death. In certain societies such as in Holland and Switzerland who have legalised assisted dying there is the worry is that this normalise euthanasia and medicalises old age – where we’re left with a dystopian Logan’s Run scenario. There is no clear answer like any other ethical question, Sir Stephen Hawking himself who said “Where there is life, there is hope” has also said “To keep someone alive against their wishes is the ultimate indignity,” and has spoken out in support of assisted dying. There is no clear answer. In the UK, euthanasia is illegal – but there are so many levels of this question it is impossible to have a complete blanket law for everyone because all cases are not the same.

Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.

Being Mortal p245

 Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well

Being Mortal p245

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV6fDJi_6ns 

When afflicted by disease and ageing, dying becomes less in line with dignity. We lose control and may forget who we are, we become incontinent, forgetful, weak, short of breath and in pain. Sherwin Nuland argues dignity in death is very rare, there’s the view we’ll be stoic and transcend our circumstances but within the destructive effects of disease this becomes near impossible.

Though the hour of death itself is commonly tranquil and often preceded by blissful unawareness, the serenity is usually bought at a fearful price – and the price is the process by which we reach that point. There are some who manage to achieve moment of nobility in which they somehow transcend the indignities being visited on them, and these moments are to be cherished. But such intervals do not lessen the distress over which they briefly triumph. Life is dappled with period of pain, and for some of us is suffused with it. In the course of ordinary living, the pain is mitigated by periods of peace and times of joy. In dying, however, there is only the affliction. Its brief respites and ebbs are known always to be fleeting and soon succeeded by a recurrence of the travail. The peace, and sometimes the joy, that may come occurs with the release. In this sense, there is often a serenity – sometimes even a dignity – in the act of death, but rarely in the process of dying.

                  And so, if the classic image of dying with dignity must be modified or even discarded, what is to be salvaged of our hope for the final memories we leave to those who love us? The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi is ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

How We Die P268

  Themes of death and mortality place life in perspective. Everything that is good is appreciated anew and all the bad and negativities don’t leave their impact that they used to. Not sweating the small stuff and letting the little things go comes from seeing the big picture. When we’re confronted with our mortality, we realise time is limited and that comes with getting the house in order, making sure what we leave behind will be better than before and our loved ones will be okay when we’re gone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTvTLGkWYMU  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuGwJs6NLw4

It’s the lesson of life to always be humble. The measure of a person is not how much they know but their confession of how much they do not know. Being humble is the key to constantly improving and striving to make things better for the future. Arrogance and pride can lead to a wave of egocentric complacency which blinds them to the crash that awaits them. By admitting our limitations to greater forces, admitting our own positions as mere mortals can we then realise the folly of playing god. Like the woman in Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, karma is a cruel punishment for the proud.

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 No one knows when their time will be cut short. In When Breath Becomes Air and Mortality by Christopher Hitchens. Both men were afflicted with the emperor of all maladies: cancer. The age-old question of why death comes prematurely denying one of a peaceful death – Why me? The answer: Why not?

In Jean-Dominique Bauby’s poetic and moving account The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, where he is afflicted with locked-in-syndrome – due to a brainstem lesion leaving him unable to move or talk, imprisoning him in his own body. It is something that I can imagine that would be like a living hell. He communicated through blinks to write his memoir and not a word was wasted. It is a beautiful book filled with pastime memories, regret and the daily routine of his new life. Life isn’t fair especially for these men, but their message they leave, is never to take anything for granted for human life is fragile and nothing is guaranteed, and your fortunes may change in an instant.

This examination of mortality has been since the times of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor) a hugely influential book that showcased his own thoughts and philosophy of medicine that elevated the profession to an art.

…this is indeed not to feare death, but yet to bee afraid of life. It is a brave act ofvalour to contemne death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live, and herein Religion hath taught us a noble example: For all the valiant acts of Curtius, Scevola or Codrus, do not parallel or match that one of Job; and sure there is no torture to the rack of a disease, nor any Poynyards in death it selfe like those in the way or prologue unto it. Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum nihil curo, I would not die, but care not to be dead. Were I of Cæsars Religion I should be of his desires, and wish rather to goe off at one blow, then to be sawed in peeces by the grating torture of a disease. Men that looke no further than their outsides thinke health an appertinance unto life, and quarrell with their constitutions for being sick; but I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that Fabrick hangs, doe wonder that we are not alwayes so; and considering the thousand dores that lead to death doe thanke my God that we can die but once…

Religio Medici Section 43– Thomas Browne

In modern medicine, we have lost the fundamentals of what it is to treat the sick. We have forgotten what it means to have the privilege to speak with and treat our patients. Sometimes have to look back to remember how to realise the future. The age-old duty-bound Hippocratic oath of medicine and its interpolation of Primum non nocere – first do no harm, embedded in a sacred duty for our patients which is at the very centre of medical practice.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/hippocratic-oath-today.html

In modern malpractice, the fellow humanity of our patients is often forgotten and eroded away to meet the target of cold political drives. The NHS (National Health Service) remains a remnant of the post-WWII desire by Aneurin Bevan to establish a brave new world – a better future for all of humanity to never face the horrors inflicted again. Free healthcare to the point of care where healthcare is a right not just a privilege for the few. I am proud of being part of the NHS and yet fearful for its future. What foundation of this wonderful system laid out in The Citadel by AJ Cronin and the fight against corruption before the NHS. I was gifted this wonderful novel by my Argentine school tutor who always was there to support me through quite a tumultuous time during my schooldays. I am very grateful for all his support and how teachers like himself are so rare nowadays, it is fitting he left me such an inspirational book to carry me forward. Seeing the NHS in crisis by political machinations makes us all realise what a special thing we have and something we should all fight for.

This anxiety and disillusionment I can see with my own eyes the day to day dismantling of what was a sacred institution and to witness the very best of humanity. In medicine, the litigation and blame culture has demanded nothing less than perfect in a beautifully imperfect human service during this consumerist age where the customer is always right because they are ‘entitled’ to the service and profit is always prioritised over people. Atul Gawande and Sherwin Nuland note this in America where Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul and an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. When I first enrolled in medical school, I was full of giddy excitement which was soon replaced with shock then anger then disillusionment. Many of the medical students I have encountered have been difficult to say the least, of course there are countless that are lovely, beautiful, amazing human beings, yet I cannot help but feel the new age of medicine is recruiting technocrats and vastly intelligent, bright individuals yet lack basic human empathy and humility. Some of the arrogance I have witnessed has been disgusting, the blatant disrespect to others, the objectification of a patient as a mere lump of flesh by others has left me seething and wondering how and indeed why these people choose to become doctors? Unfortunately, this is something I think will only continue, the admission process can only be measured in certain ways – examination scores, grades, yet what is not and cannot be measured is the human behind the paper. The very same predicament is happening with the health system, overrun with middle men and managers who clock and measure every shred of data in order to assess performance. As Sherwin Nuland wrote in his coda to How We Die in 2010 shortly before he died:

Much of the reconfiguration of health care has been hijacked by economic needs.

…

In this New medicine, everything must be measurable. It must come in the form of a datum, to be commingled with other data in order to make the entire group of facts susceptible to quantification and analysis. Empathy, autonomy, caring, and simple unhurried kindness are not measurable and so become swept away as encumbrances to quantifiable efficiency. The individual patient, along with the complexities of his medical and human problems, is rendered invisible and inaudible by being hidden under the collective weight of some researcher’s or bureaucrat ’s protocol. Nowhere is this suffocation more effective than in stifling the care, counsel, and decision-making of those who are dying.

How We Die P279

I see some of my peers and the immense pressure they’re under – whether it be familial or institutional and often give them the ‘benefit of the doubt’ but finding myself under the same pressures I, in a lapse of my own better judgement when I forget who I’m speaking to could be my family member or a close friend, a fellow human being, and instead as mere tools to fulfil checkbox ticks proving my ‘competencies’. Whenever patients wanted to talk more about something but finding myself more preoccupied with looming examinations and hence not giving them the time I should have, or being frustrated a patient executing their right to not be seen and examined after having countless other medical students and doctors looking at their pathology. I am deeply ashamed of myself that I myself have fallen into this trap of forgetting the humanity of medicine – becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor.

At the end, we and those who surround us cannot allow ourselves to fall victim to the imposed conditions of regimented men and women who would have us die under the unnatural conditions of a medical, economic, and bureaucratic order in which humanity and love have no place.

How We Die P282

 There was no likelihood of guidance, or even understanding, from Harvey’s doctors, who had by then shown themselves to be untouchably aloof and self-absorbed. They seemed too distanced from the truth of their own emotions to have any sense of ours. As I watched them strutting importantly from room to room on their cursory rounds, I would find myself feeling almost grateful for the tragedies in my life that had helped me be unlike them.

How We Die P226

 The doctor said that so-and-so indicated that there was so-and-so inside the patient, but if the investigation of so and-so did not confirm this, then he must assume that and that. If he assumed that and that, then…and so on. To Ivan Ilych only one question was important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question. From his point of view it was not the one under consideration, the real question was to decide between a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis… From the doctor’s summing up Ivan Ilych concluded that things were bad, but that for the doctor, and perhaps for everybody else, it was a matter of indifference, though for him it was bad. And this conclusion struck him painfully, arousing in him a great feeling of pity for himself and of bitterness towards the doctor’s indifference to a matter of such importance…He said nothing of this, but rose, placed the doctor’s fee on the table, and remarked with a sigh: “We sick people probably often put inappropriate questions. But tell me, in general, is this complaint dangerous, or not?…” The doctor looked at him sternly over his spectacles with one eye, as if to say: “Prisoner, if you will not keep to the questions put to you, I shall be obliged to have you removed from the court.” “I have already told you what I consider necessary and proper. The analysis may show something more.”

The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Chapter 4

 We offer patients hope in medicine, whenever they are anxious, scared or pessimistic. There is always the possibility things can improve and get better. “Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps the chief happiness which this world affords,” - Samuel Johnson. We must never allow our patients and loved ones lose hope – that we learn early on especially when dealing with patients who are dying. However, when we talk about death with a loved one or a close friend or a patient, and when knowing the condition is terminal, by offering white lies and false hope – we are doing them a disservice. But when there is nothing else to be done, instead of another investigation or procedure that will certainly prove to have the same result – the preparation and openness to talk about death is needed. Death after all is an event, we all must experience it at some point sooner or later. By not being open with our patients and loved ones, we are doing them a disservice – depriving them of their last wishes, their legacies they want to leave behind and the comfort of their loved ones when they go. It is this abandonment that Ivan Ilyich so feels when he is lied to from his doctor and his family about his fatal condition, being kept in the dark and helpless with no one to understand or help. Sherwin Nuland talks about one of his patients who is dying and the preparation of one last Christmas that meant everything to him. The last time to see family and close friends and tie off loose ends, and share that last moment of joy. Medicine with its goals, is not just to prolong life but also about so much more. Doesn’t everyone deserve this frank and open discussion, our preparations for death allow us to live a more fulfilling life to get everything we wanted done, complete our bucket-lists and set our priorities straight.

What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and the only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result. He however knew that do what they would nothing would come of it, only still more agonizing suffering and death. This deception tortured him — their not wishing to admit what they all knew and what he knew, but wanting to lie to him concerning his terrible condition, and wishing and forcing him to participate in that lie.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Chapter 7

 Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death – it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage in death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patient. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

When Breath Becomes Air P114-5

 Death is in an old man’s door, he appears and tells him so, and death is at a young man’s back, and says nothing; age is a sickness, and youth is an ambush;

Meditation VII - The physician desires to have others joined with him – John Donne

 You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!”

Psalm 90:3

 Josiah Royce, a Harvard philosopher wrote a book The Philosophy of Loyalty which tries to answer what is it that we need in order to feel that life is worthwhile? Simply existing and eating, sleeping and in comfort seems to be empty and meaningless. Royce believed that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves – to him, an intrinsic human need.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t mortality is a horror. But if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.” In more recent times, psychologists have used the term “transcendence” for a version of this idea. Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential.

Being Mortal p127

To find meaning and a cause in your life is the question that countless philosophers and wise sages have asked since the dawn of time. What is the meaning of life?

To die takes courage. Ernest Hemingway described courage as grace under pressure and I think that’s not too far off. Atul Gawande mentions Plato’s Laches where Socrates asks ‘What is courage?’ Atul Gawande then writes how he derived the definition: courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. He goes further where he mentions two types of courage required in aging and sickness. 1) the courage to confront the reality of mortality – the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. 2) the courage to act on the truth we find. He ends by posing One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most – A truth to live a good life itself. Such with my own experience, much of life is a choice. During the 2 weeks of the London 2012 Olympic Games, I remember my time during the Olympics could either be spent indoors or outside visiting the various events organised during that fortnight during a rather uncertain time for me personally. It was my choice to either experience the atmosphere of the games or rather mope inside. This is a truth that is shared with much of life, life is what you make of it – and no one can take that away from you.

Conclusion

Tempus fugit – time flies

Ultima forsan – perhaps the last [hour]

When I remember my first encounters with death, I was only a young child, but their impact left a clear mark on me. There are always things I wish I did more of and said, I am regretful that I was too immature to understand how precious time was then and took things for granted as a result especially if it was someone who loved me as much as my Granny. She was a truly remarkable woman who the more I learn about the more I am humbled of her ability to overcome hardships and struggle. Her story is for my Dad to tell, to whom she passed on her best qualities and is the best person to pass on her story. The family friends we lost too soon who were amongst the kindest and best people we ever knew. Their stories are also for my Dad to tell who knew them through loyal friendships and unselfish kindness.

The lessons learnt from all of this is to never be complacent with time and death, love each other and appreciate the goodness and kindness in life, all the other negativities are just minor trivialities that have no impact in the bigger picture. To always be humble, to always be kind to each other and to yourself and to be patient with others. To count your blessings and have the courage to deal with life’s trials and the striving to make your life and the lives around you better and to be the master of your own destiny to fulfil God’s work. To be thankful of our opportunities we have been given and to make the most of them. All of this sounds like a cliche but in the face of death, this means everything. And one thing we can be certain of, is that we will die. What we make of life is how we live it. These final extracts voice the beauty of life and the pathos of farewell in the most beautiful and touching ways. I hope these words will resonate with you as they have done with me and hope that they will inspire you all to live your lives to the fullest and most meaningful so that by the time we are at death’s door we will share the same serene gratitude for our lives and hope for the future.

 Yet I was still intensely moved and grateful to have gotten to do my part. For one, my father would had wanted, and my mother and my sister did, too. Moreover, although I didn’t feel my dad was anywhere in that cup and a half of gray, powdery ash, I felt that we’d connected him to something far bigger than ourselves, in this place where people had been performing these rituals for so long.

             When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance: never to accept limitation that stood in my way. As an adult watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn’t simply be wished away. When to shift from pushing against limits to making the best of them is not often readily apparent. But it is clear that there are times when the cost of pushing exceeds its value. Helping my father through the struggle to define that moment was simultaneously among the most painful and privileged experiences of my life.

             Part of the way my father handled the limits he faced was by looking at them without illusion. Though his circumstances sometimes got him down, he never pretended they were better than they were. He always understood that life is short and one’s place in the world is small. But he also saw himself as a link in the chain of history. Floating on that swollen river, I could not help sensing the hands of the many generations connected across time. In bringing us there, my father had helped us see that he was part of a story going back thousands of years – and so were we.

             We were lucky to get to hear him tell us his wishes and say his good-byes. In having a chance to do so, he let us know he was at peace. That let us be at peace, too.

             After spreading my father’s ashes, we floated silently for a while, letting the current take us. As the sun burned away the mist, it began warming our bones. Then we gave a signal to the boatman, and he picked up his oars. We headed back to the shore.

Being Mortal P262-3

  Everybody succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

               Yet one thing cannot be robbed of her futurity: our daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters – but what would they say? I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all past.

               That message is simple:

               When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s day with sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior days, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

When Breath Becomes Air P198-199

 I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live our the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favourite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning he was mortally ill at age sixty-five, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

…

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity, and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too for some fun (and even some silliness as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment – I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people – even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last ten years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate – the genetic and neural fate – of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have love and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

My Own Life – Oliver Sacks

Further Reading:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04bsgqn - Reith Lectures 2014

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/being-mortal/ 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying 

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/opinion/sunday/how-long-have-i-got-left.html?mcubz=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

Gratitude - Oliver Sacks

Do No Harm - Henry Marsh

Reasons to Stay Alive - Matt Haig

Mortality - Christopher Hitchens

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions – John Donne

The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot

In Memoriam: Poems of Bereavement introduced by Carol Ann Duffy 

Essays, That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die - Michel de Montaigne

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&t=1s

Virgil – Georgics

How We Die – Sherwin Nuland

The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

The Citadel – A.J. Cronin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV6fDJi_6ns House speech on dignity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjQwedC1WzI

https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/18-close-encounters-of-the-cancer-kind

https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/17-death-and-its-concept

https://philosophynow.org/issues/27/Death_Faith_and_Existentialism

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/reports-of-my-death Clive James

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/15/clive-james-interview-done-lot-since-my-death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capela_dos_Ossos

http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/718/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_(Rousseau_painting)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825232/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone#Stanley_meeting

http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/key-issues-for-the-new-parliament/value-for-money-in-public-services/the-ageing-population/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veneration_of_the_dead

Josiah Royce – The Philosophy of Loyalty

https://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxw-zXRqOs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dgn97v3q28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhxJ1EzKUoM

http://www.lifehacker.co.uk/2017/09/09/what-it-feels-like-to-die

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

https://archive.org/stream/philosophyloyal00roycuoft/philosophyloyal00roycuoft_djvu.txt

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3349959?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laches.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjmDHiSTm8

https://archive.org/details/IkiruToLive

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/letter/letter.html

Calvary

Momijigari

Day of the Dead

Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

Tibetan Book of the Dead

War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

To Calvary (Gagulta) – site of Jesus’ crucifixion, Place of the skull