#like-minded or experiencing individuals in a pseudo-communal setting

[casegreys]

Surrealism warped reality

Automatic writing, the manifestation of this process, superseded the novel as Surrealism’s chosen textual format. Through ‘psychic automatism’ the Surrealists created an alternative means of experiencing reality. Rather than create purely objective representations, the Surrealists, as ardent disciples of Freudian psychoanalysis, favored inner experience and the unconscious. Freud’s theories of the unconscious underpinned Surrealism’s emphasis on the creative possibilities of chance, desire and dream. Surrealist ideas were influenced by the rising popularity of psychoanalysis in the 1920s and 1930s and informed by the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Surrealism found international success in the 1930s, survived the Second World War and expired in the 1960s. Other key visual artists associated with the movement include Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, who never officially joined but exerted influence on Surrealism and adopted surrealist principles in their own work. Members of the movement during this period included prominent visual artists such as Max Ernst, André Masson, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, with others joining the movement, such as Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Méret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy and Alberto Giacometti in the mid-1920s, as Surrealism gained more attention. These findings were discussed and documented in the pseudo-scientific periodical La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29). In the same year, writers and artists including Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, set up the ‘Bureau of Surrealist Research’, an office space in a central Paris location where they aimed to record the forms and expressions of the subconscious mind. The principle aims of the manifesto were to define Surrealism, declare its members and communicate its methods and intentions. In 1924, Breton formally enunciated the intentions of Surrealism in the Manifeste du surréalisme ( Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924). Originating as a literary movement in Paris, Surrealism was initially defined in relation to its literary precursors in the early periodical Littérature (1919–24), set up by artists and writers including André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. Breton famously said that ‘beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’, and this revolutionary spirit helped to reenergize fields that had largely reached a state of decadence. Furthermore, because of their interest in non-rational states of being, Surrealists idealized those who lived outside the bounds of traditional society. This produced techniques like the exquisite corpse, in which individuals took turns drawing figures or writing lines while simultaneously obscuring preceding sections of text or the image. Surrealists also emphasized collaboration and chance occurrence. Using automatism, artists and writers worked in a trance-like state without interruption or later revision as a means of producing unfiltered art. They developed techniques to suppress their rational intellect and tap into unconstrained consciousness. Surrealists dedicated themselves to collapsing the barrier between the dreaming and waking worlds. Surrealism instead drew upon Sigmund Freud’s belief that a primal, non-rational Id lurked beneath our rational intellect and idealized the creative potential of the subconscious However, Dada held that all ideals were inherently absurd and substituted nothing for the norms it ridiculed. Dadaism and Surrealism both created work that mocked and insulted bourgeois aesthetic, moral and social norms. The movement was an offshoot of Dada, which emerged in Zurich in 1916. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become deadened by habit, cliché and scientific rationality. Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924.

[bigskydreaming]

TFW you realize you relate more to a fave character than you ever actually consciously realized, lmao. 

So I was just having a remote therapy session, and we were focusing on just some mental pain management techniques since my stupid metabolism makes most pain meds largely useless and my head has been waging all out warfare on me for the past week and a half, lololol. And we were delving into one of my personal fave rants, which is the fact that so many people - including vaunted medical professionals - just fundamentally don’t seem to get that having a high pain tolerance does not mean you don’t like, FEEL pain unless its really a lot or intense. Its just that you’re hard-wired/trained/geared via stuff like an abusive childhood, lol, to not SHOW or DISPLAY any visible or audible pain cues unless the pain reaches a certain high threshold where its impossible to hold them back.

But particularly over the past four or five years, with my ongoing medical shit, its super obnoxious trying to get your doctors to display a sense of urgency about your condition because they’re just fundamentally not grasping the degree of chronic pain you’re dealing with every day, since, y’know....I can literally be sitting there in the doctor’s chair and conversationally talking about the fact that no, I definitely am currently feeling like, an eight or nine out of ten on the pain scale, please don’t be confused by the fact that I’m literally LOLing as I describe this to you rather than gasping and moaning in a more obvious indication of it. 

Its like, I’m not TRYING to undersell it or anything, its just, when you grow up since the time you’re like five or six years old, knowing damn well that the only appropriate response to someone asking ‘oh am I hurting you’ that won’t earn you MORE pain is a completely casual or cavalier sounding ‘nope, I’m fine, all good here, no problems.’......like, at a certain point in your development, that becomes pretty hard-wired in, like, you can’t shake it just because you consciously WANT to. (Though it is one of the things I’m trying to unlearn and ‘rewire’ in therapy now, via EMDR techniques aimed at like, literally reprogramming my nervous system and how I react to various stimuli. Its.....slow progress, lmao, but I mean there is some progress so its all good).

But point being, when you’re a physically abused kid and your physical abuser doesn’t want to believe or accept that they’re hurting you, and so they tended to just get angrier and MORE dangerous if they thought you were indicating or even just ‘implying’ that they were in fact hurting you.....you get pretty damn good at not showing even the slightest hint of pain or distress unless its literally a level you’ve never experienced before and thus have no practical experience in hiding or distracting yourself from.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t FEEL every bit of it. It doesn’t mean you’ve found a magical off-switch that means you can just mind-over-body yourself from acknowledging or being aware that you are in fact in a shit ton of pain. You just.....have learned the importance of masking it, and found ways to do that by necessity.

Except, even much later in life when you are in a safe place or more control of your situations or surroundings, there’s no easy way to just....stop putting that mask on by default, the second you’re experiencing any type of pain. And so even when dealing with medical professionals, too many of them just don’t GET that their vaunted ‘tell me how much pain you’re in from one to ten’ scale isn’t really the be-all and end-all of pain measurement, because its subjective and arbitrary as HELLLLLLLLL.....and one of the defining parameters for what that pain scale looks like and feels like for YOU, is....your personal history with pain and how you’re ‘comfortable’ displaying evidence of it. (And I know there’s a ton of people and even groups of people who can relate to this for entirely different reasons, I just can only speak to my own of course). 

But its definitely frustrating and invalidating as hell to be in more pain than many people ever experience in their lives, and TRYING to convey that as openly and honestly as you can.....and literally being able to SEE the doubt and dismissal in doctors’ eyes, because all they’re seeing is the visual cues you’re putting out there and which they equate to ‘can’t possibly be in THAT much pain, not if he’s acting this casual about it’.....

And so the frustrating irony is that you end up dismissed as like, a pain ‘lightweight’ who is complaining about an apparent degree of pain that’s barely anything in their ‘professional’ estimation. And thus they’re disinclined to take your requests for heavier or more effective pain medication seriously, or not impressed by your attempts to imbue a greater sense of urgency in their approach to your treatment plan or procedures, etc......when in reality, the only reason you’re showing those cues of not being in that much pain is because you’re MORE used to and familiar with even extremely high degrees of pain than anything a lot of them are accustomed to.

Its invalidating as hell, being treated as though you have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “I am actually in a shit ton of active, ongoing pain, hey thanks, can we maybe do something about this,” when actually, the disconnect comes from you having MORE experience with MORE pain than some of them can even fathom. You just....also have more experience with reasons not to SHOW that pain, if its at all avoidable to any degree whatsoever.

THAT’S what high pain tolerance actually means, and the sheer volume of medical professionals who just flat out don’t get this, or worse, just don’t care or are too proud to reassess their viewpoints on this matter if that carries the implication they don’t actually know as much as they think they do......god, it grates.

(Once, when I was around twenty-three or twenty-four I think, I got caught up in the periphery of a bar fight that resulted in me getting a shard of glass embedded in the back of my forearm. Still have a pretty sizable scar from it. And it absolutely hurt like fuck, but I was conscious as paramedics arrived on scene and when going to the hospital to have it removed and stitched up, and like......kinda cracking jokes about it the whole time because I was uncomfortable as hell and didn’t really know what else to do or how to react, y’know? I mean, I had a few inches of glasses jutting out from the top of my forearm, lol, what the hell are you supposed to do or say about that? There’s not really a protocol, lmao. Problem was, they took one look at me sitting there with this spear of glass sticking out of my arm and making dumb jokes about it like it was no big deal......and they decided this meant I was in shock and kept trying to treat me accordingly. And it was just like.....useless, because lol no I wasn’t in shock, I had none of the physical symptoms of being in shock and benefited from none of their assumptions that I was.....I was just a dude with a shard of glass in his arm that hurt like fuck and I really wanted it out as soon as possible, and I was in full awareness of what had happened and everything I was feeling, I just didn’t know how to convey this in a way that they would believe, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say or do other than laugh about how fucking surreal the whole situation was.)

Anyway, so circling back to the point, or as much of one as I ever have, so today I was just learning and practicing various mental pain management/coping techniques with my therapist and discussing my issues with doctors and the High Pain Tolerance Quandary. Basically like, I would really truly like to know or learn how to display the ‘expected’ physical and visual/audio cues for being a person who is experiencing a ‘4′ on the pain scale, versus a person who is experiencing a ‘7′ or a ‘10′.....so they can stop fucking treating me like I’m only at a 4 when I’m actually at an 8 or 9, just because I look and sound like a person who really is only at a 4 no matter what they actually CLAIM to be feeling.

Course, easier said than done.

But yeah, so as she was coaching me through various techniques and surveying what I was doing with my body and facial expressions and cues, etc, she pointed out something that I had literally never noticed about myself before, even though once she DID point it out I could recognize that its something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, well back before I was ten and no doubt stemming from smack dab in the midst of the worst of my childhood abuse.

So, y’know on Teen Wolf, how Scott and Liam and various others are at times shown digging their claws into their palms and drawing blood to ground themselves with the pain? (And ironically, how I was just talking the other week about photo doubling for a similar such scene with gashes in the character’s palms, lmfao). Well, obviously I don’t have claws, and part of why I’d never really paid much attention to when I was doing it is because even my therapist wasn’t comfortable classifying it as a kind of self-harm or anywhere near punitive enough to carry that kind of weight or associations.....

But like, I’ve always kept my fingernails fairly trimmed but not completely. Like, just enough of an edge to them that at times, particularly when I’m in physical pain or distress already, I’ll just like....dig my fingernails into the pad of other fingertips, and use that little familiar spike of pain to not ground myself but rather distract myself from whatever else I was feeling. Like, she wasn’t comfortable calling it a self-punitive technique because as we got into it, it was clear I was never doing it to CAUSE myself pain....rather, its something I only do when I’m already in pain, usually far more pain than anything that brings up.....but by deliberately doing that and creating a focal awareness around it, even just a largely subconscious one......I’ve apparently long been using that to hook my attention up to a very specific, very manageable sensation/focal point of pain that lets me and my ADHD brain relegate whatever other pain I’m feeling (even if its much much worse) to the back of my mind for at least a little while, as I distract myself by focusing on this more obvious and consciously directed bit of lesser pain. 

And a big part of why I probably never noticed I was doing this, we eventually concluded, is because as a kid I probably came up with it as a kind of survival technique specifically BECAUSE it was something I could do to distract myself/manage my pain covertly, without drawing my abuser’s attention to what I was doing either. And by extension, without the fact that I was doing it at all 'betraying’ that I was in pain or trying to manage or cope with painful sensations in the first place. A lot of other pain management techniques, like even just deep, deliberate breaths, tend to be a lot more obvious and noticeable, and thus would have been counter-productive for my specific purposes. No matter how much they helped me manage whatever physical pain I was feeling, they would have at the same time inevitably drawn attention to the fact that I was trying to do that at all in the first place....and thus only invite more pain. 

Merely digging my fingernails into my fingertip pads, not enough to draw blood or make me cry out or anything like that, but rather just to distract myself and deliberately focus me on a source of pain I could deal with and more easily handle, as well as being ‘low in intensity’ enough that focusing on it didn’t bring any other obvious visual or audio pain cues to the forefront.....that I could do without anyone noticing. And thus this is likely why it came to be my go-to move whenever I was in any kind of pain at all, as just a quick and easy way to wrap my head around my physical sensations and shift focus to something more easily dealt with or managed (even if it didn’t actually dismiss or get rid of whatever other pain I’m feeling entirely). And just the low-key nature of it in general likely being a big part of why it became such an unconscious instinct for me until now, something that barely even registered in my conscious mind as I built up/hard-wired instinctive responses that incorporated it without me having to consciously direct myself to do that.

I mean, its still obviously not an ideal response, especially when I’m long past being stuck in any kind of external situations or need to fall back on that and the covert nature of it. So now its another of those things to just be aware of and work on rewiring on an instinctive level, making it a priority for me to focus on consciously using more helpful and positive methods of pain management.

But it was just interesting to me to have it pointed out as something I’ve been doing all this time, let alone being as unaware of doing it as I’ve apparently been. And its not hard to draw obvious parallels to when characters in media I consume do similar things even if for not quite the same reasons or in quite the same ways. So now I’m just kinda contemplating that and wondering how much even just some degree of unconscious awareness that I do that might have made me more alert to when characters or other people do similar things. Made me more attuned to noticing or even fixating on moments when they do things like that, that I related to even on an entirely subconscious level.

*Shrugs* Anyway, that’s all, like, literally not going anywhere with this, was just unwinding and felt like mapping my way through that all contemplatively, because oh no, inexplicable strangeness, therapy puts me in particularly contemplative headspaces, whodathunkit, lmfao. *Shrugs* Just struck me as particularly interesting, so felt like sharing for anyone else who can relate/see similar parallels themselves.

Or just chalk it up to random anecdotal wtf-ery from your friendly (err, mostly. okay sometimes. FINE ideally, let’s go with that) neighborhood over-sharer. 

[shadowfromthestarlight]

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news  companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that  long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to  understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts  they want to emphasize.

It’s why  Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over  the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of  potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this  audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led  discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the  manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to  be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the  animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon  calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The  Migrant Caravan? Fox slices  off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the  border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters  by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White  House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most  obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the  financial incentives encourage it.

Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox  wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its  supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without  a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of  pseudo-respectability Fox  had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers  started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for  Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the  ads to Trump’s voters for four years.

In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (“Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay  Lohan, Inmate Says” is one from years ago that stuck in my mind), Fox’s business model has  long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with  a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America’s decline. It  villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists —  anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of  Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox’s  narrative.

The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to  the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in  Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the  problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after  bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places  like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous  contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a  population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in  favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over  and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything  else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest  exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.

Trump  began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom,  and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in  caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made  conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed  from Fox,  which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling  audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors.  Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy  was closer, making the hate more real.

I came  into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of  reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at  the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials  that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for  sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim  Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing  the work of Hunter Thompson:

Thompson  had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the  crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press  secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and  meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their  wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from  reading his pieces.

What Rolling Stone did in  giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the  system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a  sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases  end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull  “objective” format.

The  problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of  politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite  direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.

If you  work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all  November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If  you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even  suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense  of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of  success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the  eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.  

We need  a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those  financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages       groupthink and requires at  least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

operating on a distribution model that as  much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s  desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.

The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.

Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their  constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they  don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension  the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making  pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter.  Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity  to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out  access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and  conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes  shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a  failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

Matt Taibbi is one of the only people I subscribe to. He’s one of the few journalists I like because I actually believe he’s genuine.

[freeqthamighty]

Woman Witnesses Police Brutality and is Arrested for Her Intervention | #JusticeForRodneka #BlackLivesMatter

IMMEDIATE ACTION STEPS:

LIKE the #JusticeForRodneka page for updates. READ and SHARE Rodneka’s story (use #JusticeForRodneka) or share this article to your networks.

DONATE and SHARE THE DONATION LINK with your networks — www.gofundme.com/rodneka

SHOW UP WEARING WHITE for Rodneka at 9AM at 2700 Tulane Ave, Section H on January 12th, 2018 for her trial date. Check the Facebook page for date changes.

Imagine you’re driving home from work. Expecting an uneventful ride, you’re surprised to see the blinding glare of police lights in front of you. As your eyes adjust to the scene, other things start coming into view.

A baby blanket.

The “slick and shine” of a baby’s head.

A woman who is holding the baby. A police officer who is choking and pulling the hair of the woman holding the baby.

Imagine your basic human decency kicking in, forcing you to intervene. You stop your car in the middle of the street and run over to them, thoughts racing of the potential fate of both woman and baby. You get ahold of the child and hand the child off to a bystander who had asked for them.

“Be human!” you hear yourself calling out repeatedly to the police officer as he stares blankly at you. “Be human!” you hear yourself calling repeatedly as a crowd forms and watches this officer, still with a “debilitating hold” on the woman.

Imagine the woman the police officer is choking exclaims she doesn’t know why this is happening to her, only for the officer to body slam her onto the ground. The crowd yells at her to “stop resisting” and you, having watched the entire episode, beg them to see her humanity, her natural reaction to being choked with a baby in her arms by saying, “she is not resisting”!

Imagine the woman is now face down on the ground, the officer on her back, with his arm around her neck. “You’re choking her!” you scream, only to be met with an amused look from the officer who shouts back, “look, I’m not choking her”. Never mind the small amount of foam discharging from her throat, drops of it seen coming out of the sides of her mouth.

Imagine you’ve tried once, twice, three times now to record the officer. You are less than five feet away from him and the woman he is assaulting. Your full attention is on her safety, even at the expense of your own. Before you notice, other officers, who you thought were on the way to help the woman, tackle you off your feet.

Within seconds, you no longer have to theoretically relate to the woman.

Now, your own Black woman body is against the concrete, handcuffs clamped around your wrists. As you’re dragged to the police car, you plead with a stranger to go to your job — not five minutes away — and tell a friend to come get your car. The stranger refuses to get involved.

You are arrested. You spend the next two nights in jail, not eating for 20 hours. You are unable to access your medical routine for 48 hours and your bail is set at $2500. Imagine for the next few months, you are faced with a series of financially and emotionally stressful court dates on top of the stress and trauma caused by the initial assault by the officer(s).

If you #TrustBlackWomen, then you don’t have to imagine any of this story. This is the reality for New Orleanian Rodneka S. On April 23rd, 2017, Rodneka experienced this ordeal on her way from work (read it in her own words and SHARE on Facebook here).

And she is not alone.

Her case highlights the continued mistreatment and abuse of Black people by law enforcement agents and the ways the system continues to punish and criminalize Black people after they’ve had their rights and bodies violated by agents of the state.

In the United States, when it is the word of a police officer against that of a civilian, the officer’s account is usually taken as truth (this is why, initially, people were so excited about body cameras on police officers). This happens despite the multiple times we’ve seen officers find cover hiding behind the “blue wall of silence”, and the times we’ve seen officers manipulate the law to criminalize others in order to avoid accountability for their crimes.

In 2015, Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma City Police Department patrol officer, was convicted of multiple counts of rap­­e, sexual battery and other charges. Holtzclaw had systematically and strategically targeted and violated 13 low-income Black women while on duty. Through gross misuse of power and an even grosser understanding of society’s inability to #TrustBlackWomen, Officer Holtzclaw was able to sexually abuse these women. As the prosecutor on the case, Lori McConnell, stated, “He didn’t choose CEOs or soccer moms; he chose women he could count on not telling what he was doing…He counted on the fact no one would believe them and no one would care.”

These same intersections of race, gender and believability in the United States collide in an exhaustingly familiar way in Rodneka’s case, where she is charged with battery of a police officer and resisting arrest for stopping to help someone else that fateful night.

The charges against Rodneka are equally telling. Somehow, we are expected to believe that this Black woman who was minding her own business coming home from work leapt out of her car unprovoked to assault a police officer.

The story sounds ridiculous to me, but then again, I do not subscribe to notions of Black people’s criminality or violent nature as many still do in the United States and around the world. It is this same narrative of Blackness as violent and uncontrollable (and in need of being controlled) that allowed Officer Darren Wilson to shoot Mike Brown in cold blood, then say he feared for his life. After all, according to Wilson, Brown looked “like a demon”,and had reached into Wilson’s car without reason, punching him in the face, initiating the need to protect himself through lethal violence.

Rodneka joins the list of Black people charged with resisting arrest when making calls for their basic humanity to be considered during arrest. According to her story, Rodneka was close to the officer, but did not initiate contact.

PHOTO CAPTION: #JusticeForRodneka Court Support Team. You can support her directly by donating at www.gofundme.com/rodneka

Yet, when other officers arrived on the scene, she was immediately tackled and arrested. Her call to be treated like a human being was twisted into assault against others, which is too often the case when people who are intimidated by the police assert their rights. This portion of her story reminded me of Earldreka White, a Black woman who was pulled over for a traffic stop then violently arrested and charged with resisting arrest, not for any alleged traffic crime she had committed. In this country, the very existence of Black people is criminalized. The Earldreka’s and Rodneka’s of the world don’t have to do anything in order to be eligible for arrest. It is especially telling in cases in which resisting arrest is the only charge issued.

On January 12th, 2018, Rodneka faces her next court date. This means we have just over a month to rally our communities behind this young woman. Rodneka’s ask is simple — treat her with the human dignity the police officers didn’t accord her. Believe her story. Share her story. And, if you can, show up and let her know she doesn’t have to be the sole author in this story of struggle.

The Movement for Black Lives Matter began when Trayvon Martin was killed. It has since been reduced by mainstream media to the lethal police violence faced by mostly young Black men. However, the Movement for Black Lives has a much more expansive definition of state violence that includes cases like Rodneka’s. In order for #BlackLivesMatter to actually be realized, our lives have to matter while we’re still alive. #BlackLivesMatter is not just a call to mourn our deaths when we’ve been unjustly and often brutally killed — it is a demand for our right to live full lives without fear of violence by individuals or the state from the moment we are born.

Rodneka has one more desperate plea specific to the New Orleans community — if you were filming or simply present the night of the incident on April 27th, 2017, PLEASE REACH OUT to the #JusticeForRodneka campaign at RodnekaStands@gmail.com or through the Facebook page.

Rodneka had this to say about her experiences since that night: “This whole situation has impacted my life greatly in every aspect. The greatest is psychologically as it has shattered my pseudo reality that I am free in 2017. I am certainly not free of harm by law enforcement and I have been exposed to the system that allow this to be. It has also however confirmed to me that there is a community of ppl in my city of New Orleans who look like me that love, work for, and sacrifice for the ppl like me contrary to popular belief. We are not desensitized and we stand for each other and that’s the world I live in. The only thing I regret is that I have not obtained a dash cam to record the events of April 23rd. I wish the lil Sistah believed that she was worth the help. Sometimes I wish I’d never had to witness what I saw but there’s no fixing a problem that is not acknowledged. I think it’s important that we all understand that in the stride to be sane or mentally functional, humans sometimes have to believe notions that aren’t true. Both victims and beneficiaries of abuse. It keeps us functional but it also keeps us prey to the problems we refuse to see before us. The problem now is what happened to me has happened to others and can happen to you. Let’s work on fixing the problem. It’s not so hard when we work together.”

Standing up for or against injustice is often difficult, thankless work. Despite this, Rodneka did her part, alone, on the night of April 23rd, 2017. As a community, let’s make sure she doesn’t have to face her­ next steps alone.

IMMEDIATE ACTION STEPS:

READ and SHARE Rodneka’s story with #JusticeForRodneka or share this article to your networks. LIKE the #JusticeForRodneka page for updates

DONATE and SHARE THE DONATION LINK with your networks — www.gofundme.com/rodneka

SHOW UP WEARING WHITE for Rodneka at 9AM at 2700 Tulane Ave, Section H on January 12th, 2018 for her trial date. Check the Facebook page for date changes.

[howdytherepardner]

take, cut, spread, done.

there are a few things that do not matter, and then there are the bagels offered on school nights in the dining hall of whitman. community hall, rumored to be both named after the "ebay community" and tall as hell due to no money for a second floor, is often host to a few scholarly groups spread throughout the whole space. i always feel a little bit bad entering, any entrance has massive doors that slam shut and likely serve as a mild disturbance not only to my general passive gait but to the conversations, focus of other in the space. a community hall indeed, though there have been a few late nights where i've been there entirely alone. my first Dean's Date stands out in memory, where between 3:20 and 4 am i took a study break to sing a bit of Simon and Garfunkel. but back to breakfast. i don't remember when i was made first aware of it, perhaps a recommendation from an rca or a discovery after an event in the hall that night, but much like murray dodge cafe or computer clusters, the pseudo-continental breakfast spread is a necessary aspect of my understanding of how this campus exists. whether it be terrible coffee, fruit, or foam bowls of cap'n crunch, the offerings on the counter provided a kind of disoriented comfort, giving you some sense of standing in a necessarily transitory space. but the offerings of bagels, made somewhat fresh in the morning now stale at the day's end, and peanut butter, a local/organic chunky variety, facilitated the most familiar, filling experience for me on those late nights. my go-to after a later wake-up before high school was an untoasted lander's and jif, which was more than satisfactory, but this ~fancy~ upgrade to an assonine thing could be symbolic of many things. bagel, spread peanut butter, a crack of salt and pepper if you're feeling fancy. same formula, different ingredients. ~ medium fine grind, 30 grams coffee, 500 grams near-boiling water. wet the filter with hot water before the grind goes in, then blooming with 70 grams of water, aggressively swirling before letting sit for 30 seconds. aggressive pour to close to the top of the v60, then slow the rate to the same pace at which coffee drains into the decanter. after reaching 500 grams of water, stop, let it drop a little bit before lightly swirling once, then again after the water drips lower with a bit more force. let drip until it ends. discard filter and grounds. if feeling fancy, pour coffee between decanter and a large container to cool a bit quicker if you're impatient. swirl decanter before pouring your drink. sip first, then down it. often, this has been the extent of my breakfast, which my stomach certainly files its own concerns about, dear reader. i recently reconsidered the peanut butter bagel, what used to be a late night snack, a journey to the dining hall with my roommates amid school work, to put it back in the breakfast rotation; an investment i make the night prior when picking up to sustain a tolerable existence the next day. two days i have a nine am lecture, and the prospect of a hot coffee and a bagel less than 3 feet from my room has been quite the pull factor in getting me to class (albeit, an average of 3 minutes late). i am flung this point; perhaps if a theme of this writing is the attempt to process my pandemic experiences, then it occurs to me that this was my most consistent morning breakfast: - being sent home meant a return to landers and a new use of the Mr. Coffee once reserved primarily for visiting relatives whose caffeine needs were supplemented by things other than diet coke - first fall arrangements meant bagels less frequently, but still peanut butter toast and a decently sized pot of melitta. - campus spring was mason jar tea-like improv and first venturings v60 and, whenever i was up early enough for breakfast (more than occasionally) but didn't feel like scrambled tofu, pre-packaged bagel and not-one-but-two individual peanut butter packets. recipe becomes routine, routine becomes ritual, ritual becomes recipe. ~ "10-20-40" is the third track off of Rina Sawayama's debut

extended play, Rina, released on 27 October 2017. Written by Sawayama and produced by Clarence Clarity, the lyrics offer an insight into Sawayama's experiences with depression and taking SSRIs, delivered through car-related metaphors.

... In an interview with Hannah J Davies for The Guardian in January 2018, Sawayama explained: "The metaphor is about teetering on the edge, but also the romance of driving, and the romance of taking Citalopram or being depressed in the media, when actually it's so mundane. It's a daily chore." (x) ~ being that my room is 3 feet from a kitchen, my room is generally subject to the various sensations that emerge from that space, though seldom emerging from my own efforts. despite my independent status and residence in a spelman room, i rarely use the stove top and have not once taken advantage of the oven. always indulging in the smell of food, i do also sometimes allow myself to be treated to the generous leftovers of my roommates' endeavors. overall, though, my plan for meals (not to be confused with the official designation of 'Meal Plan') has been entirely inconsistent. it will be leftovers one dinner, the tail-end of a happenstance free food event the next, Two Extra Meals, dinner with a work shift, Nassau St. fare, and who knows what else. i am wondering on what it means to be in an eating club. the start of this year has seen even starker lines of experiential division; where guest meal policies have normally allowed people to take options with relative ease, both university dining and club policies started as very exclusive to people beyond their plans, meaning that your meals are at a single institution, and that's it! the option exists, of course, to eat elsewhere, but this requires expenditures in addition to the 9-10k that you (by extension of your parents) dropped on the club, and it seems like the calculus of each meal not consumed would loom. the arrangement seems so suffocating! there are aspects of these particular institutions that i think are questionable (beyond just bicker, mind you), but i think i'm also coming to terms with the fact that a large part of my disdain for these institutions comes from the fact that it is just... not my preferred experience. what to me is thinking of cost-per-meal and the constriction of the same people is to others a more secure place, a sense of stability when other aspects of their social alignments and experiences shift. i have never felt particular excited to get a meal within the Great and Mighty Brunch Mansions, but people do. frequently whether i would feel differently if my context was such that i (by extension of my family) could securely afford such an experience, and what social development prior to that would imply, but for now i think i am tired of worrying about things beyond myself and my control. after all, ain't i the hypocrite in saying this but joining a co-op? besides a lower price tag and greater labor invested into the experience, it is structurally comparable from an organizational standpoint ( 1. clubs composed of students 2. where they [could] source most of their meals and 3. eat with other students). but it is the cultural distinctions of these arrangements that matters most. i don't think i'm experienced enough with either arrangement at present to discuss those distinctions with confidence yet, and i trust that anyone with enough familiarity to recognize what i am referring has their own understanding of it developed, in any case. nothing original to contribute yet, though i feel motivated to get ahead for the classes whose (self)placement in these institutions looms.

~ so that's it, i believe. i am supposed to have a routine right now, and in practice i do in the minds of others; i go to my scheduled classes, i attend these meetings, i hang out with others. not a uniform schedule, but a consistent set of behaviors that makes me, to others as a social entity, a ritualistic person. in the place between body and mind, i feel the grand variance of my own perception, as colored by my emotional state (to put it melodramatically). the narrative of my life to me is a pathway, and the presence of my life to others is a point of checking in. my routine is only fueled by a desire/need/compulsion to continue changing, and it is only when those changes alter my social routine that those beyond myself can note it. i suspect that someday, perhaps even tomorrow, i will disagree with that, but i feel confident in saying this: i will never get tired of a peanut butter bagel, even as the seasonings change.

[gloverdominic92]

Premature Ejaculation Pills Hindi Portentous Useful Ideas

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[typologycentral]

[Fi] Bloody Fi purge! Your inferior cousin needs some dominant and auxiliary guidance.

To preface: I love you XNFPs and unbeknownst to me, always have. For one, it's been edifying and validating to see some of my all-time favorite humans (writers, musicians, actors, thinkers, etc...) being typed as XNFP. Even before learning about typology and gaining a deeper understanding of Jungian cognitive functions, I was actively working on (what I now know to be) Fi development because a lack of it had reaped much unnecessary hardship onto my life. Therefore, I think that conscientious journey led me to people that embodied their Fi with vigor and authenticity and helped me get in touch with my own, for which I am eternally grateful. And now on to the issue at hand (this is a long read but I'm trying to give relatively detailed information that might help you to help me): For a little under a decade, since high school, I've had an on and off, pseudo-platonic, quasi-romantic, eternal soulmate, occasional f-buddy relationship with this ebullient, effervescent, deeply insightful, dreamy eyed, pixie warrior priestess (INFP) that, in my relatively short life, has always stood a mile apart from the "Gone Girl/Cersei Lannister/Elle Driver/Cookie Lyon/Harley Quinn/Akasha, Queen of the Damned" fare I've usually attracted [strike]...and been equally attracted to[/strike]. Our first interaction was a classroom debate turned bloodstained duel to the death over the ethics of eating animals (I swear on the atom, this is not a utilization of an NFP stereotype lol). Something clicked (energy + angst + lust + social isolation + troubled pasts), and from there, this happened > I'd never before intimately known someone who had the chasm of incongruously layered emotionality she possessed--ostensibly she experienced feelings in a plethora of shades from eggshell, hunter green, and cobalt blue to neon yellow and not only that, could verbalize them as such. Meanwhile, I only had ready access to basic black, white, red (all degrees of rage), grey, and at my best, a metallic gold. Though wholly confounding, maddening and taxing to me, I had never felt more woke and unchained and set free. It was intoxicating to experience a wider array, a more diverse palette of feelings. I obviously never reached her depths, patterns and colors, but even experiencing a trifle more than I was previously accustomed to felt like a massive, tectonic plate moving, internal shift. She saw me shed an actual, solitary tear once under extreme duress but in better times, just by staring into my eyes and smiling on a whim she could easily make me mist up with soul purifying relief, which was a gargantuan, almost incomprehensible feat for lesser mortals and I truly honestly never before felt so connected to someone on a level that was nigh impossible to articulate in a rational way. And particularly when she was sad and grieving (probably because of me), which often left me feeling inadequate because I was too emotionally dumb and powerless to effectively help--which, in and of itself, beset me with very real, very potent, personal "trigger" landmines. Especially back then, I neither spoke of nor experienced emotions with great affect. I understood them cognitively and intellectually, but to actually engage them with my "heart" felt like a blind man wading neck-deep in cement. My take on our biggest, most immediate problem aside from all the other reasons this union was likely to fail? We just spoke completely different cognitive "languages (Ni vs Si? Dom Fi vs Inferior Fi? Dom Te vs. Inferior Te?)" that always created endless communication gaffs, roadblocks and nuclear disasters. For example: Pixie: "Did I see you at Starbucks earlier today with Cersei f%#king Lannister when you were supposed to be at a study group?" Me: "That was the study group." Pixie: *heart imploding with the force of a billion suns* "Why didn't you tell me that?" Me: *blistering dispassion with a hint of exasperated bemusement* "Look, our past relationship is just that, in the past. You have nothing to feel insecure about. It was harmless, only work. You know I love you." Pixie: "That's not what I asked you! Stop lying and trying to hide and sugarcoat things! You know I hate that brother f%#king bitch! Why didn't you tell me you were going to see her? Me: *voice box shredding like the Hulk's Capri pants* "Because that was fucking irrelevant. She was put in a group with me! Her strategy to double-cross Dany and Jon will fall to shit, for Christ sakes. Are you happy now? You always focus on the wrong thing!" She always wanted to know the exact details behind what actually happened in a very direct, matter of fact way (perhaps to refine the many possibilities she generated for why I would withhold supposedly important information from her), whereas I always instinctively and immediately went to why I did something or the "why" concerning the underlying problem, because the "why," the deeper meaning (should and theoretically, in my mind) supersedes anything else, and especially when problem solving and coming up with a viable solution imo. Ultimately, it just didn't work. Idiotically yet idealistically, we wouldn't let that stop us. We broke up and got back together a few times before deciding that we were better off as this nebulous, ill defined glob of corrupted love and unresolved daddy/mommy abandonment issues that maybe one day might actually not fall apart at the seams just as it's getting good again. The whole idea and its subsequent execution was dysfunctional, unhealthy, ridiculous and plain ol stupid, but I gather this was us trying to be intense, brooding and deep. Dunno exactly. We'd go on to see other people and sometimes, in between relationships, link up again. Usually we couldn't reach a year and a half before we wound up back in the other's arms/bed. Moving on. She experienced a tragedy (by her standards) about 3 years ago while I was literally on the opposite side of the planet and whereas I would've normally come flying to her aid with an S on my chest, I made the conscious choice not to. Already enduring my ascent to power (lol) being stifled because of my brokedown Fi usage as it pertains to my burgeoning career, I resented yet another unwieldy force (Pixie) possessing that type of influence over me as well; I defiantly chose self-interest above anyone or anything else (like I'm instinctively wont to do, right or wrong, good or bad). She kept trying to reach me to the point of flooding all of our communication channels with emotional spam (from childish antics to vile, unforgivable diatribes). After a while, I felt bad, decided to reach out to her but was ignored for 2.5 years straight. That had never happened before--it broke our unspoken rule, which devastated me more than I realized. I grieved (rather poorly by over-utilizing Se), but eventually tucked it away, moved on and focused on work. I figured we were never meant to be anyway but that I would still love her (from afar) and wish her the best regardless. Lo and behold, she called me last night out of nowhere, drunkenly seeping concentrated pain, spewing regret, betrayal, rejection, abandonment, hatred and then love for me. She says, through tears, that she's still in love with me and wants to know if there's any chance for an "us." I felt terrible and thoroughly confused. I tried to listen and be supportive (my Te is completely inept at properly addressing/handling others' intense feelings)--I just don't naturally "speak" emotions in an unforced, compassionate, empathetic, organic manner. I'm better than I used to be but I was blindsided, taken aback and don't think I did much good. Honestly, I don't need or want this in my life right now; I'm so engrossed in my work and achieving my goals and going by what she was saying over the phone, she's still stuck in past patterns of dysfunction. I don't want that anymore. But I truly do care for her and want her to be well and happy--just not with me and not right now, at least. I hate that she is suffering but I don't know what, if anything, I should/could do to remedy this. And now, finally, here are my questions to you smart, capable, helpful people*/**: 1. When you are expressing your feelings (whether "good" or "bad"), what is the best way to respond to this that will make you feel heard, understood and validated? 2. When overcome with negative feelings that seem too powerful and unrelenting, how do you self-soothe (using safe + legal methods)? 3. Is there anyway I can speak my truth and tell her honestly where I'm at and what I want at this point in my life without further hurting her? Should I do it regardless or is it better to wait for when she's more stable? 4. Tangent, now that I have you > How do you know what you value? (Is that a stupid question? lol) I think I know what I value ("money-power-respect," knowledge, meaning/substance, fairness, justice, individuality) but it can be hard to finesse on the spot (when asked) and not come off as crude and unrefined. Do you spend a lot of time going over in your mind what is meaningful and significant to you, or do you just know somehow? (like how I seemingly "know" and intuit stuff via introverted intuition) To those who made it all the way to the end, thank you. I would really really really really appreciate some help. I have very few people in my life I trust to give me strong emotions related advice and none of them are XNFPs. Their emotions are just as trash and poorly developed as mine are. lol *Obviously, there are a multitude of ways that people respond to these things that exclude type but I'm looking for any and all variations, particularly from XNFPs and anyone else who can provide insight. **And I will shamelessly bump this thread until I obtain the breadth of insight I seek. :shrug: https://www.typologycentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93755&goto=newpost&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[adlerianfrog-blog]

A Family in Crisis

June 2017 Family Systems Studies 

This is a graduate studies self-reflection presentation in partial fulfillment for Masters of Fine Art in Psychology with an emphasis in family systems and Marriage and Family Therapist licensure.

This was the life I started with.

Family System Genogram Reflection

Section One

Index Person (IP) is a 45-year-old, twice divorced mixed race male. IP is a decorated combat veteran. IP served with the US Navy from 1991-2010. IP has **six combat deployments as a Navy SEAL, his final combat deployment was OEF-1 in Afghanistan (Dec 2001-July 2002). (**Every deployment a Navy SEAL makes is a combat deployment)

At the time of this writing, IP is presently attending graduate school. IP states he is of mixed ethnic descent. IP does not know his actual birth date. He stated that in an early childhood recollection, he asked his mother when his birthday was and she said, “When would you like your birthday to be?” IP states “I said”, “Today!” and per him, his mother smiled and said, “Voila! Today is your birthday!” IP states that “Finding my birth certificate was impossible.” IP states, “The state of Georgia issued me a replacement based on the information the state of Kentucky provided, which was provided to them by me or the child protective services social worker.”

Per the Index Person this typified his style of life and movement. He stated that this was “Circularity defined; I found out on October 6th, 1975/6/7 that my birthday was, October 6th and per my birth certificate, I was born in 1971 on Oct. 6th.”  IP experienced abandonment by biological father, a forced cut off, pseudo abandonment from mother due to court system involvement. Client states “I do not know my biological father or his family system.” And that “I know very little about my family of origin.” Client states he is cut off from adopted family as well. Client has three children from first marriage to T.W. (46). Daughter (16), Son (13), Son (11). Client’s children have lived on the east coast with their mother and her second husband since moving away four years ago. IP’s kids visit during 2 ½ month summer breaks and holiday breaks if budget supports travel expenses.

Attachment Prefracture

IP states he was born in 1971 in Tifton, GA. IP states “I lived on the streets; homeless; for the first six years of my life.” Index Person states from birth until approx. 1977 “I didn’t know that my life experience was any different than anyone else. We spent a lot of time on the road. Hitchhiking, sleeping under cars. Stealing food to survive.”

IP states, “As I think back to my earliest childhood recollections I remember being adored. I remember my mother singing to me and how her eyes would light up with delight as I would sing along with and eventually to her.” IP describes his family of origin She was educated at Julliard in New York City. Per IP, the name of his mother is Mary Elizabeth Catron. IP states that he has two half-brothers. D.G. (62, Married, 2 daughters), R.G. (58,Married, 1 daughter). Mary Catron (deceased 1987) is the daughter of Mr. James Catron (deceased), a minister and Family Medicine Dr. who died at the age of 56 of congestive heart failure and Alberta Catron (deceased), an English school teacher died at the age of 92.

Mrs. Catron had a brother, Jimmy (deceased), who was disabled with cerebral palsey from a breached delivery at birth.  Client states “I absolutely know that I was loved very much by my mother.” And that “While she absolutely loved me, took care of me as best she could, per the social norms of the day, my mother was not a good mother.” Client presents tearful demeanor with deep sadness emerging. Client states “She had difficulty in finding and keeping work; Providing a stable home environment proved to be the hardest thing for my mother to do; Ultimately that ended up as the reason that her rights as my only known parent were forever stripped 41 years ago.

Attachment Fracture

From the age of 6 until 9 Index Person states he was a “ward of the state.” He “quickly transitioned from unstable living situation with my mother to a more stable environment, a solidly middle class lifestyle awaited me.” Per IP “In 1977 the efforts that were made to help children like me were more than likely personality driven and community values oriented.” He further states that, “the decision was made to strip my mother of her parental rights because of our living situation.” Client states “the relationship was broken with my mother; My one and only caregiver.”

Per Mr. Surmont, “The relationships that I did have were remarkable in that I came out ‘pretty much unscathed’. I wasn’t damaged by not having enough clothes or toys or even a place to call home. The damage was the termination of my relationship with my mother. The forced “cut-off” has had a psychic effect on my that has and will continue to ripple and echoes across generations of lives. That’s been the source of damage for affecting me into my present-day life.”  

The literature speaks to the importance of validation and empathy when working with trauma survivors. “We must appreciate the adaptive & resilient strategies developed by families who are not part of privileged groups in our society.” (McGoldrick, 2016)

Per Mr. Surmont, “I’m continuing to deepen my own understandings and meanings into the importance, value and worth of intact relationships. My attitude is that relationships are critical to survival. Cut-off relationships make it difficult to survive be free and live well. At 45 years of age, I reflect that the decision that day to cut-off my relationship with my mother, my only known parent, “baked in” a certain set of beliefs. I’m sorting out what that means to me, my world and my future. Part of me believes that it has served me incredibly well. Someplace deeper I feel a deep hurt and am leaning in to understand it and how best to learn from it.”

Attachment Instability

The early part of Mr. Surmont’s life involved instability from the perspective of environment and basic physical needs. Mr. Surmont believes that his emotional and developmental needs were met very well and his basic physical needs were minimally met. The abrupt cut off from his mother of his family of origin caused a culminating trauma that as of the date of cut-off “all experiences before were bad.” Mr. Surmont has experienced a pattern of extremes of insufficient care as well as social neglect, rearing under unusual settings that severely limit the child’s ability to develop. Per the Index Person, “the court viewed my mother as broken and damaged. They sent the message to me that my experiences with her were averse to my health and well-being. “Adverse Childhood Experiences; i.e., nonaccepting childhood environments can be lifelong burdens.”

Client was removed from his mother’s care. Became a ward of the state. Six foster homes in 3 years. Approx. Ages 6 – 9.

1976 Smith’s: (Western Kentucky) Mormon family. Working farm family. IP: Loved this family”. 9 children. IP was the 10th. inherited 99-acre farm in Utah. Couldn’t get permission to take me from state. said goodbye; moved away; IP moved on.

1977 Hall’s: (Mercer County Kentucky) Auto Mechanic. Stay at home mom. 4 children. IP was the 5th. IP asked to leave due to CSA. IP moved on.

1978 Dibble’s: (Barbourville, KY) College Professor. Homemaker. No children. IP was the 1st and only. IP was caught smoking. IP was told “IP wasn’t good enough to be their son.” IP moved on.

1978 Barnett’s: (Corbin, KY) Small Business Owner’s. 2 boys. IP “Loved this family.” The Mackey family asked if IP could live with them they were thinking of adopting. The Barnett’s said ok. IP moved on.

1978-1979 Mackey’s: (Corbin, KY) Owner and Provider of Family Optometry practice. 4 Children. IP “Loved this family” too. They decided to adopt him. The Surmont family asked Mackey’s to allow them to consider adopting IP. Surmont family promised to “stay home” and work with IP. Initially very happy with the Surmont family. IP said thank you to the Mackey’s, IP kept in touch with Mackey’s throughout his life. But IP moved on.

1980 Surmont’s: (Corbin, KY) Both Parents worked in their family owned and operated business. 3 Daughters. They adopted IP. Eventually IP moved on from the Surmont's as well.

Per Mr. Surmont, “Family "alliance patterns" may pose an additional, separate, unseen and potentially difficult set of obstacles impacting, impairing or even interfering with an adopted child’s ability to successfully integrate and attach within the family system that selected the child for integration into the family in the first place; this experience rife with mixed messages; possibly described as an "outsiders effect" does shape views of self, world and future; it may not be obvious in situ that these individuals may be encountering burdens such as additional unseen or unknown horizontal anxieties; as well as additional vertical anxieties inevitably transmitted throughout the family system.

What most people miss is this child must contend with two family systems - not one. And the biological family system the child is coming from maybe dying or going extinct - a true death in my mind. The life and developmental stage of the adopted child is a factor; children adopted beyond age of 5 have life experiences that must be honored by the adopting family to develop, incorporate and hold to produce existential meanings for the child to age appropriately integrate and hold BOTH old and new family system membership narratives.

If the integrating family does not encourage and foster this type of acceptance and inclusion into the family alliance the child must incorporate resilient survival strategies or avoid altogether which fundamentally compromises the child’s sense of self by having to choose the integrating family system over the birth family system all in the context of family integration; ultimately and predictably causing additional burdens to simply survive and be seen by others as equal; The child (in this case me) is left with unseen burdens and with no understanding with which to cope.”

Failure to Attach

In 1981 IP was adopted by the Surmont family. S.S. (66) and B.S. (66), small business owners and parents to three daughters, S.P(45, Divorced, 1 daughter), S.J. (43, Married, 1 daughter, 1 son), B.W. (41, Married, 1 daughter). Mr. Surmont describes a series of experiences and ultimately the experience of his failure to be integrated into his adopted family alliance system.  

IP states that his “late childhood and early adulthood. Not that much time with the Surmont’s but important period of my life developmentally. IP states he “learned lessons primarily through observation.”  IP describes “never feeling welcome.” And that he “always felt like an outsider or an intruder.”

Per Mr. Surmont, the Surmont family’s interactions gave him insights into the world of family that he had never experienced before. He states that he “so much wanted to be accepted and included.”

Client also ran away from home at the age of 13.

Client describes that there has been little to no connection to them or with them from the beginning; client states “They did their best to keep up appearances.” Per IP, “Looking back on things now, the Surmont family didn’t have a good chance to successfully integrate me into their family system.” He describes feelings of helplessness and that “we were both set up to fail.” And that “Family Courts favor those with families.” is a truth he learned the “hard way”.

Per client, “because of his own personal experiences, he developed his own set of strategies.” “We must appreciate the adaptive & resilient strategies developed by families who are not part of privileged groups in our society.” (McGoldrick, 2016)

Client states that his “private logic had accepted that attachment stability and environmental stability were relative terms for me and mutually exclusive.” Client demonstrates dichotomistc either/or thinking informs that client has experienced severe attachment instability.  

Client believes the Surmont Family made the best efforts they could. He states, “They didn’t know what to do.” Client finds himself wondering “what do I owe them?” Client states “At least they gave me the ability to “Hide in plain sight” as a member of a family as far as someone might ascertain with a cursory look.” Client continues to process blame or defending those adverse or traumatic relationship experiences. Client admits to experiencing new confrontational insights as he examines his genogram.  

Client states, “I felt like I was on the trajectory for family alliance integration.” Mr. Surmont describes an event that happened when he was 10 years old, about six months after he was adopted, about a year into being with the family. IP states “everything changed after reporting an intimate touching incident I accidentally observed between two children one of the children of my new family sister and a neighborhood child who was one year older.” Per Mr. Surmont, “This report was not received well.” IP states that “The interfamily political winds of my intended integration into the Family were no more.” He believed that his role in the adopted family had shifted from “Oldest son, only son, carrier of family surname, big brother) soon after this incident, IP believes he became the adopting family’s “scapegoat”. Per IP, he “tried hard to enjoy and appreciate my childhood.”

Client is very appreciative of the environmental stability the adopting family provided. For client, “Things never quite felt right.”

Per Mr. Surmont, he worked very hard to push this sense of unease away. He tried to convince himself that he had no other past than that of his adopted family’s history. Client tried to convince himself that his family of origin history didn’t exist, was damaged, broken and not worth remembering.

Over time the superficial relationship with his adopted family system began to deteriorate and eventually die. IP states he “recently decided to allow it to die the death it deserves.”

Client shared what he called an encouraging mantra for him to repeat during his mindfulness practice. Mr. Surmont wrote the following phrase expressing his feelings of being unburdened by guilt and shame of his adopting family that contributed to many of his coping skills as well as other difficulties that exist as a facet of his life experiences.

“The cool healing waters of ancestry are finding me; rebinding me; flowing through me; Rising in me from the ashes of many deaths; My unbound identity binds unto its own lifespring, taking flight.”

- John Surmont, July 2017

References

McGoldrick, M. (2008). Genograms: Assessment and intervention. New York: Pearson.

McGoldrick, M., Preto, N. G., & Carter, B. (2016). Expanding Family Lifecycle, Individual,

Family, and Social Perspectives (5th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Surmont, J. S. (2017). Book Report: Hillbilly Elegy. Unpublished manuscript, The Chicago

School of Professional Psychology, MFA Clinical Psychology, MFT Specialization. J. D. (2016). Hillbilly elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis. New York: Harper.

[curtis-experience-blog]

Experience article #1

Before we begin --

Something among the many nothings I often think of is how a good number of advances in that or the other thing come about after such and such has long left the living. Is this true? I have no idea, and I don't have the ambition to find out if it's true. There are plenty of fun things to recite to ourselves, and as a result of propaganda, bias, and/or censorship, etc., we end up with various levels of comprehension, ignorance, and acceptance. I think how I want. Folks that want to do the same should go about that choice. You take all that stuff you're subjected to and figure out how it makes sense to you. Can I make sense of 2+2 and find an answer to the equation? Yes, on a good day. That concept is fairly certain, at least, for most things that I care to comprehend or show interest in. I'd like to underline: I don't go out of my way to spread misinformation. There are things like fact and opinion, and that's fantastic. The latter: funnily interpreted. Conversely, facts tend to stay the same. Then that's the purpose of the scientific method and all those learned people that seek the "Truth": to go and prove, whether out of curiosity or demand, that this, that, or the other thing make that thing do this thing, and the other things represented there do another thing, etc.

This paper's tone is heavily influenced by the writings of alchemists. This is gold before its purity has been restored; one half of natural gold. This is a passionate attempt to explain what exists without the means and devices and circumstances to extract any more of the Truth from within. So, there validity of happenings may be scrutinized. That is something that is unavoidable; however, a person who has lost their arm knows that their arm is no longer attached to their body. A portait of a blind person is drawn. A person inspecting it might not conclude they cannot see. Similarly, most organisms on this planet eat because they feel hunger. Parallels of these kinds present themselves everywhere. Specifically of the focus of this paper: it is something felt, not seen, and like hunger, there is no device to measure its sensation.*

All we can do is make use of the ~70 years we spend here. While the intent is to bring attention to a phenomenon that exists in nature, I can fully appreciate Their decision to ignore or dispel what is described below. There surely will be ramifications and much frustration felt in many groups when/if technology advances (if need be). On the bright side, there is no one out there that forces you to remember this stuff yet. I'm talking to you, Music Professors/Learned Professionals. Of course, there is always the reality that nothing spectacular happens from here on out. Either way, I'm not holding my breath. This thing can just sit here collecting dust, if that's the way it goes. What matters to me is that I took the time to write this out. Folks can take it or leave it as it is. Just know that Curtis experienced, documented, and offered his mentation on the matter. Need a name? Let's call it "pseudo-vocal science" for now.

Understanding the Full Potential of the Voice

   Understanding the full potential of the voice takes years to uncover. In this paper it will be attempted to both bring awareness to one's own voice and describe the complex, yet, simple theory of voice strength. Everything here is taken for granted as there are no research, documented experiences, or data available - period - to argue the finer points. Take what is written here as the understandings drawn from the shell of an idea from one person; no more, no less. There will be included some ideas for voice exercises to play with, though, the main focus herein is to contemplate a mysterious phenomenon that resides in each of our very bodies.

   It's called the Theory of Voice Strength. Each individual is born with their own unique voice, and additionally, there is an inherited strength-- voice strength (or voice energy) as well. It's uncertain whether the vocal chords themselves are the reason for the uniqueness of the sound of a person's voice or if it is result of the composition of their voice energy. It may very well be a combination of the two. It isn't too often you hear two voices that sound the same like those from younger twins, for instance. Previous generations typically have stronger voices because it was a necessity to have a strong voice to be heard across greater distances. In today's modern age, there are many reasons why humans don't require strong voices any longer, save for various industrial settings; a person is immersed in a noisy environment, and a fisherman comes to mind too. Instead of relying on our voices like the rest of the animal kingdom does, we have many technological devices to make our communications require much less effort, taking away any burden on our voices.

   Evolution is the observable change in organisms [usually] over long periods of time. As far as the observable change in human voices' power is concerned, it is more than apparent if one listens to older recordings. Now, maybe it isn't fair, but the disparity of voice strength between humans and those of animals in the "wild" is unmistakable. Without firsthand experience, it is hard to assert all tribes people surely have much stronger voices than your average city-going citizen. When there is not a necessity for biology to be loud, it simply stops putting in the effort. How else does one explain why change occurs in organisms than by surmising one thing or another was needed due to conditions in its environment; one thing or another was not needed because of the toll and demand on its parents' bodies versus quick, reliable maturation. Humans are quickly losing their voices!

   It is understood that our vocal folds grow as we age, thus, changing the deepness of its timbre. Voice strength is no different. From the time we are born to the time we are without life, the growth of this energy is constantly building from the force exerted on it: the desire or striving to be heard. Something that each one of us is familiar with is the wanting to sound "better." In what calibre this behavior manifests is purely a personalized matter. Parents, teachers, peers, those hard at hearing, coworkers-- "They need to hear," or "I want to be heard by," might ring true. These are the basic thoughts, at least, that drive our voices to extend out; and evolution has designed a tested and true device to do just that. Like the heart that which forever cycles the blood in our bodies, voice energy is always moving and compounding on itself by demand. In fact, sleep time may be the only time when it is not. It can only be speculated as to how the energy of the voice behaves during an unconscious period. Perhaps it does indeed accelerate, encouraged to do so from the nature of the dreams we have. So, then from this natural growth to what all this looks like.

The first three images are of (from left to right):The essentially spherical nature of voice energy and two images depicting one of the more common patterns that voice energy makes.

The two pairs of images on the far right are of (from top to bottom): Force exerted outward from below the jaw and the corresponding place an airy sensation is felt in the larynx to its right, leading to a great increase of voice energy, and its opposite counterpart, leading to a great decrease in voice energy.

   You are not seeing anything, really. The energy of the voice is obviously not seen but felt. It can be thought of as a large orb around the throat area in its entirety. When put into motion by force, the effects of its energy rotating or growing may be perceived in a limited way. "Waves of growth" is what the behavior of the patterns of the voice energy is called. Above there is illustrated a single fragment of a single piece of a common pattern that voice energy adheres to. It is impossible to record how complex the waves of growth are, and it will likely not ever be possible to properly document how they begin. The most anyone can do is feel them when and how they are felt. Plainly speaking, waves of growth are only perceivable when significant force is placed on the energy of the voice. This 'force' is not to be mistaken as yelling. Rather, it is usually, though not limited to, being felt from the intentional use of voice for a sustained period. One such way is to try to create a moderately high pitch and hold the note very firmly. A sort of pressure in the chest may present amidst any number of other sensations, and even noticeable aftereffects on the whole sound of the user's voice is possible. Examples are enhanced vocal fry, changes to resonance, more difficulty or ease to project the voice out. In any case, expect change when subjecting the voice to strenuous activity. Singers are probably the most aware of the changes in their voice because of certain waves of growth that directly affect the accessibility of their "established" vocal range. It should be noted: When any trait in quality of voice appears during or after any exercising, it is solely the fault of the waves of growth and the state that they've reached.

   There is perhaps some truth to 'warming' up the vocal folds; however, states of the voice are things that are ever present and immensely affect one's performance. Make note of how it is impossible to maintain the way your voice sounds at the time you wake up. That is a state. It is surmised that when one comes out of unconsciousness, they are subjected to a state vocal energy settles to. The sound your voice makes at this time is as if it were completely relaxed before transforming, readying itself for use. There are times when vocal fry is harsher or more easily accessed. That is a state. Just the same: after one has exercised or has spoken loudly for a time. These are all states that the voice goes through. It is continually added onto and built and transformed since the very materialization of his/her vocal folds.** It is both necessary and can be very frustrating, especially for a singer, for the states of the voice can only be manipulated so much. Remember: the states of this energy are formed inside the whole "orb" of a person's voice energy. The bigger the orb, the more densely packed the waves of growth are, leading to much longerlasting states. Vocal exercises are proven to work because the force transforms the state into one that is more appropriate for pitch ascent and descent. Beyond this, it is ignorant of wants because it is a natural construct - built to last, and not particularly for the purpose of maintaining a wide vocal range indefinitely. Once the overall orb of voice energy has been sufficiently packed so densely by the waves of growth, its state must change. For music appreciators, this happening is most often witnessed in the recordings of groups where the lead singer makes use of a gradually decreasing vocal range over the span of their career.

   In the illustration above there is reference to airy sensations felt in the larynx region when a technique is used to force voice energy to accelerate its growth. The sensation itself is airy, though, it is also so condensed to feel sharp as it rises up. It is not pain. It, also, is not felt in the actual tissue of the larynx but to the left or to its right. To explain this behavior, one may need to fully comprehend the true shapes of the waves of growth in their most rudimentary stages. Until technology has developed to the point where it can measure voice strength and more, we can only guess at the hidden equation that makes it all work. Keep in mind: the one technique known to experience this for one's self comes with significant weight. While it is possible to very quickly "grow" the voice, the potential to weaken it is apparent too. All that can be told of this technique will be available in the following section of this paper.

   We've now explored all the new relevant information for the theory of voice strength. Complete technological reliance may not cause biology to do away completely with our voices. The voice, in all probability, will likely merely become the next appendix; worst case scenario. Surely, when the people of human civilization find more confidence in their voices through understanding and the knowledge that this golden age can bring, they will make even the animal kingdom envious. From then on, expect voices as strong and stronger than the vehicles they operate. This is one prospective future mankind has. Although there is so much to learn, the fundamentals of communication is inspired by, first, discovery, and then change.

Technique and some theory

   So, basically, the theory behind why this works is that as with the states talked about earlier, a particular state is required from the energy of the voice to allow it to "skip." There is no way to actually know how strong one's voice must be before this technique is possible to perform. All I know is that it took about seven years of singing before the question of what might be possible came to mind. I specify how long it was because it is known that a certain voice strength is needed. Whether it was possible at an earlier time is completely up in the air; though, I am skeptical to believe I could have done it much sooner, given the way my voice had begun to behave in months preceding success. So, yes, there are a couple prerequisites. Among the words I use as terminology, "critical mass" seems to work well with labeling the moment when rapidly accelerating the growth of the voice can be done.

   To go about readying your voice you'll need to practice glottal stops while making an uh. I recommend listening to music, uttering to the beat or however it works well for you. Do this for upwards of two hours. Though I have no evidence to support the claim, I do believe it does take some time for the state to come about. You think about how long it takes to "warm up" in vocal exercises to advance the energy so much. An hour may be the minimal time invested. All that is up in the air. Keep in mind: the purpose of these grunts, if you will, isn't to do them haphazardly. You must be trying to make each uniform and the same in every way. You must pay close attention to how it feels when you're doing this too. If they feel different from one to the next, I suspect that is an indicator that the voice isn't strong enough. Furthermore, the purpose of the glottal stops is to have a place to focus on and compare. My vocal experimentation had been going on for about a month with the grunting. Additionally, I found it very helpful to hear the singing of my favourite singers as I was doing this. It served as the catalyst for my epiphany: to try to push the sound of the glottal stop out. It was from hearing the "impact," for lack of a better word, during their singing that made me wonder if the answer was so simple. It was, honestly, the next day after the thought came to mind that I tried to do this and succeeded. It pretty well just feels like your voice skips out from your mouth, along with the sharp, airy type feeling rising up the right side of the larynx.

   I want to go over how I think you avoid weakening your voice too. Essentially, you just talk (and/or sing) like normal. Don't let the waves of growth or abrupt change of states make you think you need to change anything in the focus of your speech. I found they really confused me when I was feeling them. For instance, there seemed to be a sort of sweet spot that you reach just a little ways up to during the technique. Of course, I'm not talking about pitch. That led me to try to speak that way; to try to achieve that same spot during regular speech. The best advice I can give is: don't do that. Talk regularly and save the change in focus for when you're out exercising, if you do this at all.

   You know, I'll admit, I do have the worry that there will be those that are successful, and then succumb to weakening their voices. Whether it's on purpose or accident, it really doesn't matter. The bottom line is: the effects are permanent; or they'd may as well be seen that way. The rapid development of voice energy you experienced while you were in the womb is not possible once you're out and about. You can expect to never be able to recover the power you once had. So, don't fool around. This technique is basically like taking nature in your hands and modifying it at will. It's not something to take lightly.

Q & A

Q: I've been yelling like you said and nothing is happening. What am I doing wrong?

A: There is no yelling involved in any of this. People have been yelling with all their hearts for centuries. Don't expect anything miraculous to happen doing that.

Q: What does all this mean?

A: This paper explains why some people are naturally louder than others (not just loud personalities), why many people that try to sing, can't, and by extension, why voices change the way they do as we age.

Q: Can anyone do this?

A: I don't know. Probably.

Q: Are you sure you're not just the only person in the world with this ability to make your voice louder?

A: While that's a cute thought, I do have the suspicion that someone somewhere has accidentally done it.

Q: Why are you posting this on Tumblr instead of to a peer-review what'cha-ma-call-it place?

A: Because this is part of my thoughts and experience program. Besides, would you take a submission like this completely unscientific, completely lacking data and evidence with bad grammar paper as anything more than some crazy shenanigans?

A: Please don't answer a question with another question.

Q: Is this meant to be serious?

A: Yes. It was my intent to write out what I've come to understand (as rationally as possible) after experiencing what I have with voice experimentation.

Q: How does this affect me?

A: Think about it like driving a car. You don't know how the car works, but it drives around just the same. ut if you want to be able to understand how the car works, you'll read about it.

Q: Do you believe in ghosts?

A: Kind of, I guess. I don't really care. If they exist, then that's good for them.

Q: What are your thoughts on measuring voice strength?

A: I have a couple ideas. My first idea was using burps, as ridiculous as that sounds. The issue being that no burp is the same as another. Not to mention you can push a burp out with the abdomen. The second idea is vocalizing while inhaling. There's only so much anyone can do to force air in and vocalize at the same time, so it's fairly sure to give okay results. The disparity in voice strengths might be noticeable for someone hearing for it. Under these circumstances it is unmistakable.

Q: If this picks up and lots of singers begin to take advantage of this, what do you think would happen?

A: Well, that would be up to them. There might be those that want to have voices stronger than a jet engine. Others might be satisfied with just not needing a mic any more. I can't help but wonder what it feels like to have a voice (as modest as it sounds) as strong as an elephant or other large animal. I'm sure it feels unreal, especially when the strength of a regular voice feels pretty cool by itself.

*There may be a device to measure the sensation of hunger

** Probably

9.9 experience out of 10 experience points.

[mentalisttraceur]

Dead end? Part 2

One of the problems is that I am genuinely weary of externally exploring any of my recent mental developments. Not because I think they’re in any way wrong or bad, but because the more I develop as a mind (and by develop I don’t necessarily mean a constant improvement trend from an ethical value judgment perspective), the more everything I find myself wanting to discuss and over feels like it’s just alien to most people that have opportunity to talk to. But I also don’t know that there’s any meaningful progress to be made on those ideas.

Like, I want to discuss if combinations of memes can be be runaway-destructive. As in, can we introduce a set of memes into a human mind such that they gradually induce in the mind a mental disorder of some sort? Sure this could be theoretically proven one way or another, maybe, but in my lifetime? I don’t know.

I want to explore the idea of whether or not two people, or a tribe of people, or a city or nation or any other assemblage of people actually hosts an emergent “sum” mind - and i don’t mean in some new-agey telepathic collective unconscious sense or in some neoTumbliberal cultural identity sense, I mean actual meaningful how-do-minds-work contemplation. What distinguishes a network of neurons firing neutransmitters vs a perfect simulation of those neurotransmitter firings in a hypothetical computer, vs a large set of humans moving around, passing complex information between each other? If you slowed down time and zoomed in on the workings of one human brain without knowing what you’re looking at, you’d see neurotransmitters being flung from one neuron to another, and conclude what? Given how human intuition works, you certainly wouldn’t think “this assemblage of large complex structures is experiencing something“. But like, how far can we really get with this idea, right now, as limited humans? The closest thing I’ve been able to come up with to a cogent working hypothesis is that minds that experience things are more likely to manifest in systems where there is selective pressure requiring minds. So like, two people just meeting together an talking cannot meaningfully be said to “give rise to” a mind, but a business entity which has to actually make self-aware decisions about it’s environment? I think at least a subset of those can genuinely be said to actually be having experiences on a level completely different from, but equally as valid as, our individual human experience.

Meanwhile, the prevailing tumblr discourse still hasn’t gotten its shit together about whether all human minds are deserving of some universal base level of compassion and good-will as a starting point, and I’m here trying to figure out if an ant hill collectively has a mental experience, or if a human is really one mind, three minds (one for each hemisphere, since we know they can operate scary-independently when severed, and an overlapping overlay mind of the two), or something else more complicated. People still have to be reminded that “corporations aren’t people” (and yes, they are not people, they are a large collective of people, with the exponential compounded complexity of that many people combined) - yet I’m here trying to contemplate if a drug cartel as an amalgam has a mind and is an “organism” of a new/different kind our brains were never evolved to comprehend, the way our body has a mind and is an organism of a kind that our individual cells never evolved to comprehend.

I want to figure out how to maximize communicating with both a person’s conscious and subconscious mind at the same time, by maximizing conscious usage of body language and the like, but the average person can’t distinguish between an attempt to genuinely directly convey sincere ideas through consciously crafted body language vs. being a manipulative shit, because god forbid you put conscious thought into choosing your mannerisms, then suddenly it’s not just not genuine, but it’s somehow less good.

I want to help people develop the kind of introspection and cognitive behavior retraining talents that I seem to have gotten, but frankly, the languages I know lack the words to meaningfully describe things like how I am able to disengage from pain under some circumstances, or how to even begin to introspect deeper than you currently can, let alone how to recognize how your conscious thoughts can interplay with your emotions and how to adjust how you think to set changes in how you emotionally react to things in motion, and how to follow that through to completion to do things like change or remove cognitive reactions you don’t like. Of course, I’d also love to explore what the fundamental limits of these skills are: How much cognitive behavior retraining can skilled practitioners really achieve in general? Does it vary profoundly by person, or is it basically the same across the board? Am I just more integrated as a conscious mind with my cognition than other people are, due to a genetic fluke? Or did I just practice the skillset naturally from an early age?

I want linguistic constructs to talk about cognition and “choices” without every one of those statements implicitly reinforcing the delusion of free-will, which I find to be at best a useful shorthand, but generally to be just a profoundly nonsensical and frankly detrimental-to-ethical-growth concept.

I want to explore ideas like how memes and genes interplay to reinforce their propagation, and how social/political/etc currents (and any emergent minds/”organisms” made up of collectives of humans) interplay with that as well, but most people don’t even have enough of a grasp on evolution to intuitively grok it on a physical gene/organism level, let alone generalize it across pretty much every problem domain where duplication and propagation are factors.

I can’t even mention Gandhi as an example of specifically extremist pacifism without a bunch of morons jumping down my throat acting like his dubious positions on other matters somehow change the fact that he was a pacifist and thus an example of pacifism, like as if that somehow can make sense to any thinking mind.

And I can’t say most of the above without most people shutting down and assuming like I’m being an arrogant/pretentious/pseudo-intellectual/whatever, because taking two seconds to consider that maybe I’m just genuinely trying to think shit through is apparently too hard for many people.

Honestly, I would even appreciate straight up being slapped and told I’m thinking down completely idiotic paths, but I need that to come from someone who’s actually seemingly in a position to evaluate what I’m saying, rather than from people who clearly didn’t even take the time to understand the concepts in question.

How am I supposed to propagate the ideas I’m having nowadays to any meaningfully large demographic of people within my lifetime, let alone find satisfying answers to most of this?

[ramblefishworld]

Blender Mechanics and The Constitution of the Nervous

I don’t know if this is a good way to explain it, but I wake up each morning suddenly, with the sensation a blender is whirring on the low setting in my mind. Almost every night, after hours of pseudo sleep that includes foot thumping, random flailing, and irresistible desires to itch or remove and replace my socks—I wake up having gotten around 3 hours of sleep with this grinding, whirring sensation of mental work and social confusion about the day that lies ahead, and turns my thoughts into mush.  

This grinding, whirring, crunching sensation is autism--cajoling me into a day of navigating crunching social anxiety, sensory challenges, and organizational struggles. At times, the experience of anxiety is the result of the sensation of my mind grabbing and dealing with way too many details at the same time like specks of static electricity, so that things literally start looking alike.  I can’t keep certain details out.  At other times, the anxiety relates to total confusion about people and what they are experiencing or desiring from me, how to handle situations, communicate needs, or address conflict, and many other things.  The result is that my mind is in this constant state of clutter and moving around the details— breaking up and chewing up the information with this sort of metallic feeling of urgency, which according to my Physician’s Assistant, translates to occasional blood pressure surges to 170.  

This blender phenomena In my opinion is at the crux of autism experience:  the functional anxiety I’m riddled with is physically painful, socially confusing, and totally related to the experience I have with practical living, such as having a hard time keeping up with finances, dates, assignments, and making decisions that make sense. The issue is that the world is organized in a way that doesn’t make sense to me, either practically or socially—while the world is organized by things I just don’t get (socializing and relationships and getting along), that keep me awake and wondering and asking myself what to do—the world that makes sense to me is quiet, colorful, organized, compulsive, internal, repetitive, weird, complex, confusing, and solitary.  

I tend to be an extremely forgetful person, on a monthly basis losing things like my phone or glasses. People don’t understand the nuance that It’s not that I make those kinds of mistakes because I’m anxious and get all bewildered and befuddled.  I’m anxious because I make intellectual mistakes, because I have these experiences of memory and functional challenge, of facial recognition and organization, of processing information and of understanding conversations or their implications.

I was actually happy recently when someone recognized what happens to me during a conversation. Chuck and I were out to dinner with a couple, and about halfway through the night the guy looks perplexed and asks:  “You’re not understanding about half of what I’m saying, are you?”  He was absolutely right.  I follow conversations piece meal, with the utmost effort, using my intuition and piecing things together, and very often misunderstanding the gist of conversations completely in terms of what they were about or what was important about what was said, or whether that person wants something of me.  It’s not that I’m not hearing, but that I am not understanding what people are saying.  The words literally sound like spaghetti and I am unable to differentiate one word from another, and I will go away having no idea of what we just talked about.

There is no way to describe the effect of this syndrome on a person’s anxiety level, because life essentially becomes a conflagration of misunderstandings, in which I think I have followed what you’ve said, but chances are I’ve missed the main point of the conversation because the words themselves do not make sense to me. And even when a person understands my condition, all my relationships still comprise of this element of misunderstanding, because I just can’t figure out what people are trying to get across with their words, body language, or the entire gyst of our interactions.

There are so many other social and sensory realities to autism, which can’t be addressed by changing or medicating us, but by changing the way systems are organized and their flexibility for dealing with differences in how we navigate the world and process our environments.  Without education, it may be hard for individuals to understand why an autistic person may have trouble approaching people, may have strange behaviors or tics, or may have unusual ways of pursuing interests or unusual ways of experiencing the world.  But with tolerance and social acceptance, and with adaptations for the particular way we do things and allowing us to be ourselves, I keep hoping the anxiety can be at least partially assuaged, because it takes just so much energy to process and address social anxiety.

With all this said, it came to me  that the adrenelline rushes blender on low sensation I experience multiple times per day and night may be a part of my constitution, and I may have to deal with the discomfort of it—

on the other side of that nervous energy, though,  is creativity, alive and electric— The truth is I’ve spent  hours days and decades channeling my most valuable energies into worrying about social things, even as an adult—, how I should respond to criticism, whether I’m dressed right, how to interpret a glance, who to cc, who to call, who to text, when to enter a room or a doorway or office, or ask a question or interject a thought.   I can channel my energies into so much more if I can basically get my mind rid of this kind of negative social self feedback, which create mazes for me, spiraling and vast.

I think whether autistic people are or are not doing ok depends in large part on how well we adapt and integrate so that the experience of difference is not alienating and anxiety compelling but invigorating, so that that whirring, metallic gut feeling of fear I have in the morning propels creative work rather than self evaluative angst, based on prior experiences of marginalization.  If creativity is the end goal—whether the objective is a painting or a code review—and society can buy into that then I guess it could be a different paradigm for how to deal with anxiety.  

[suzanneshannon]

The Many Ways to Include CSS in JavaScript Applications

Welcome to an incredibly controversial topic in the land of front-end development! I’m sure that a majority of you reading this have encountered your fair share of #hotdrama surrounding how CSS should be handled within a JavaScript application.

I want to preface this post with a disclaimer: There is no hard and fast rule that establishes one method of handling CSS in a React, or Vue, or Angular application as superior. Every project is different, and every method has its merits! That may seem ambiguous, but what I do know is that the development community we exist in is full of people who are continuously seeking new information, and looking to push the web forward in meaningful ways.

Preconceived notions about this topic aside, let’s take a look at the fascinating world of CSS architecture!

Let us count the ways

Simply Googling "How to add CSS to [insert framework here]" yields a flurry of strongly held beliefs and opinions about how styles should be applied to a project. To try to help cut through some of the noise, let’s examine a few of the more commonly utilized methods at a high level, along with their purpose.

Option 1: A dang ol’ stylesheet

We’ll start off with what is a familiar approach: a dang ol’ stylesheet. We absolutely are able to <link> to an external stylesheet within our application and call it a day.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">

We can write normal CSS that we’re used to and move on with our lives. Nothing wrong with that at all, but as an application gets larger, and more complex, it becomes harder and harder to maintain a single stylesheet. Parsing thousands of lines of CSS that are responsible for styling your entire application becomes a pain for any developer working on the project. The cascade is also a beautiful thing, but it also becomes tough to manage in the sense that some styles you — or other devs on the project — write will introduce regressions into other parts of the application. We’ve experienced these issues before, and things like Sass (and PostCSS more recently) have been introduced to help us handle these issues

We could continue down this path and utilize the awesome power of PostCSS to write very modular CSS partials that are strung together via @import rules. This requires a little bit of work within a webpack config to be properly set up, but something you can handle for sure!

No matter what compiler you decide to use (or not use) at the end of the day, you’ll be serving one CSS file that houses all of the styles for your application via a <link> tag in the header. Depending on the complexity of that application, this file has the potential to get pretty bloated, hard to load asynchronously, and render-blocking for the rest of your application. (Sure, render-blocking isn’t always a bad thing, but for all intents and purposes, we’ll generalize a bit here and avoid render blocking scripts and styles wherever we can.)

That’s not to say that this method doesn’t have its merits. For a small application, or an application built by a team with less of a focus on the front end, a single stylesheet may be a good call. It provides clear separation between business logic and application styles, and because it’s not generated by our application, is fully within our control to ensure exactly what we write is exactly what is output. Additionally, a single CSS file is fairly easy for the browser to cache, so that returning users don’t have to re-download the entire file on their next visit.

But let’s say that we’re looking for a bit more of a robust CSS architecture that allows us to leverage the power of tooling. Something to help us manage an application that requires a bit more of a nuanced approach. Enter CSS Modules.

Option 2: CSS Modules

One fairly large problem within a single stylesheet is the risk of regression. Writing CSS that utilizes a fairly non-specific selector could end up altering another component in a completely different area of your application. This is where an approach called "scoped styles" comes in handy.

Scoped styles allow us to programmatically generate class names specific to a component. Thus scoping those styles to that specific component, ensuring that their class names will be unique. This leads to auto-generated class names like header__2lexd. The bit at the end is a hashed selector that is unique, so even if you had another component named header, you could apply a header class to it, and our scoped styles would generate a new hashed suffix like so: header__15qy_.

CSS Modules offer ways, depending on implementation, to control the generated class name, but I’ll leave that up to the CSS Modules documentation to cover that.

Once all is said and done, we are still generating a single CSS file that is delivered to the browser via a <link> tag in the header. This comes with the same potential drawbacks (render blocking, file size bloat, etc.) and some of the benefits (caching, mostly) that we covered above. But this method, because of its purpose of scoping styles, comes with another caveat: the removal of the global scope — at least initially.

Imagine you want to employ the use of a .screen-reader-text global class that can be applied to any component within your application. If using CSS Modules, you’d have to reach for the :global pseudo selector that explicitly defines the CSS within it as something that is allowed to be globally accessed by other components in the app. As long as you import the stylesheet that includes your :global declaration block into your component’s stylesheet, you’ll have the use of that global selector. Not a huge drawback, but something that takes getting used to.

Here’s an example of the :global pseudo selector in action:

// typography.css :global { .aligncenter { text-align: center; } .alignright { text-align: right; } .alignleft { text-align: left; } }

You may run the risk of dropping a whole bunch of global selectors for typography, forms, and just general elements that most sites have into one single :global selector. Luckily, through the magic of things like PostCSS Nested or Sass, you can import partials directly into the selector to make things a bit more clean:

// main.scss :global { @import "typography"; @import "forms"; }

This way, you can write your partials without the :global selector, and just import them directly into your main stylesheet.

Another bit that takes some getting used to is how class names are referenced within DOM nodes. I’ll let the individual docs for Vue, React, and Angular speak for themselves there. I’ll also leave you with a little example of what those class references look like utilized within a React component:

// ./css/Button.css .btn { background-color: blanchedalmond; font-size: 1.4rem; padding: 1rem 2rem; text-transform: uppercase; transition: background-color ease 300ms, border-color ease 300ms; &:hover { background-color: #000; color: #fff; } } // ./Button.js import styles from "./css/Button.css"; const Button = () => ( <button className={styles.btn}> Click me! </button> ); export default Button;

The CSS Modules method, again, has some great use cases. For applications looking to take advantage of scoped styles while maintaining the performance benefits of a static, but compiled stylesheet, then CSS Modules may be the right fit for you!

It’s worth noting here as well that CSS Modules can be combined with your favorite flavor of CSS preprocessing. Sass, Less, PostCSS, etc. are all able to be integrated into the build process utilizing CSS Modules.

But let’s say your application could benefit from being included within your JavaScript. Perhaps gaining access to the various states of your components, and reacting based off of the changing state, would be beneficial as well. Let’s say you want to easily incorporate critical CSS into your application as well! Enter CSS-in-JS.

Option 3: CSS-in-JS

CSS-in-JS is a fairly broad topic. There are several packages that work to make writing CSS-in-JS as painless as possible. Frameworks like JSS, Emotion, and Styled Components are just a few of the many packages that comprise this topic.

As a broad strokes explanation for most of these frameworks, CSS-in-JS is largely operates the same way. You write CSS associated with your individual component and your build process compiles the application. When this happens, most CSS-in-JS frameworks will output the associated CSS of only the components that are rendered on the page at any given time. CSS-in-JS frameworks do this by outputting that CSS within a <style> tag in the <head> of your application. This gives you a critical CSS loading strategy out of the box! Additionally, much like CSS Modules, the styles are scoped, and the class names are hashed.

As you navigate around your application, the components that are unmounted will have their styles removed from the <head> and your incoming components that are mounted will have their styles appended in their place. This provides opportunity for performance benefits on your application. It removes an HTTP request, it is not render blocking, and it ensures that your users are only downloading what they need to view the page at any given time.

Another interesting opportunity CSS-in-JS provides is the ability to reference various component states and functions in order to render different CSS. This could be as simple as replicating a class toggle based on some state change, or be as complex as something like theming.

Because CSS-in-JS is a fairly #hotdrama topic, I realized that there are a lot of different ways that folks are trying to go about this. Now, I share the feelings of many other people who hold CSS in high regard, especially when it comes to leveraging JavaScript to write CSS. My initial reactions to this approach were fairly negative. I did not like the idea of cross-contaminating the two. But I wanted to keep an open mind. Let’s look at some of the features that we as front-end-focused developers would need in order to even consider this approach.

If we’re writing CSS-in-JS we have to write real CSS. Several packages offer ways to write template-literal CSS, but require you to camel-case your properties — i.e. padding-left becomes paddingLeft. That’s not something I’m personally willing to sacrifice.

Some CSS-in-JS solutions require you to write your styles inline on the element you’re attempting to style. The syntax for that, especially within complex components, starts to get very hectic, and again is not something I’m willing to sacrifice.

The use of CSS-in-JS has to provide me with powerful tools that are otherwise super difficult to accomplish with CSS Modules or a dang ol’ stylesheet.

We have to be able to leverage forward-thinking CSS like nesting and variables. We also have to be able to incorporate things like Autoprefixer, and other add-ons to enhance the developer experience.

It’s a lot to ask of a framework, but for those of us who have spent most of our lives studying and implementing solutions around a language that we love, we have to make sure that we’re able to continue writing that same language as best we can.

Here’s a quick peek at what a React component using Styled Components could look like:

// ./Button.js import styled from 'styled-components'; const StyledButton= styled.button` background-color: blanchedalmond; font-size: 1.4rem; padding: 1rem 2rem; text-transform: uppercase; transition: background-color ease 300ms, border-color ease 300ms; &:hover { background-color: #000; color: #fff; } `; const Button = () => ( <StyledButton> Click Me! </StyledButton> ); export default Button;

We also need to address the potential downsides of a CSS-in-JS solution — and definitely not as an attempt to spark more drama. With a method like this, it’s incredibly easy for us to fall into a trap that leads us to a bloated JavaScript file with potentially hundreds of lines of CSS — and that all comes before the developer will even see any of the component’s methods or its HTML structure. We can, however, look at this as an opportunity to very closely examine how and why we are building components the way they are. In thinking a bit more deeply about this, we can potentially use it to our advantage and write leaner code, with more reusable components.

Additionally, this method absolutely blurs the line between business logic and application styles. However, with a well-documented and well-thought architecture, other developers on the project can be eased into this idea without feeling overwhelmed.

TL;DR

There are several ways to handle the beast that is CSS architecture on any project and do so while using any framework. The fact that we, as developers, have so many choices is both super exciting, and incredibly overwhelming. However, the overarching theme that I think continues to get lost in super short social media conversations that we end up having, is that each solution has its own merits, and its own inefficiencies. It’s all about how we carefully and thoughtfully implement a system that makes our future selves, and/or other developers who may touch the code, thank us for taking the time to establish that structure.

The post The Many Ways to Include CSS in JavaScript Applications appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

The Many Ways to Include CSS in JavaScript Applications published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[tonimartz]

Welcome to an incredibly controversial topic in the land of front-end development! I’m sure that a majority of you reading this have encountered your fair share of #hotdrama surrounding how CSS should be handled within a JavaScript application. I want to preface this post with a disclaimer: There is no hard and fast rule that establishes one method of handling CSS in a React, or Vue, or Angular application as superior. Every project is different, and every method has its merits! That may seem ambiguous, but what I do know is that the development community we exist in is full of people who are continuously seeking new information, and looking to push the web forward in meaningful ways. Preconceived notions about this topic aside, let’s take a look at the fascinating world of CSS architecture! Let us count the ways Simply Googling "How to add CSS to [insert framework here]" yields a flurry of strongly held beliefs and opinions about how styles should be applied to a project. To try to help cut through some of the noise, let’s examine a few of the more commonly utilized methods at a high level, along with their purpose. Option 1: A dang ol’ stylesheet We’ll start off with what is a familiar approach: a dang ol’ stylesheet. We absolutely are able to to an external stylesheet within our application and call it a day. We can write normal CSS that we’re used to and move on with our lives. Nothing wrong with that at all, but as an application gets larger, and more complex, it becomes harder and harder to maintain a single stylesheet. Parsing thousands of lines of CSS that are responsible for styling your entire application becomes a pain for any developer working on the project. The cascade is also a beautiful thing, but it also becomes tough to manage in the sense that some styles you — or other devs on the project — write will introduce regressions into other parts of the application. We’ve experienced these issues before, and things like Sass (and PostCSS more recently) have been introduced to help us handle these issues We could continue down this path and utilize the awesome power of PostCSS to write very modular CSS partials that are strung together via @import rules. This requires a little bit of work within a webpack config to be properly set up, but something you can handle for sure! No matter what compiler you decide to use (or not use) at the end of the day, you’ll be serving one CSS file that houses all of the styles for your application via a tag in the header. Depending on the complexity of that application, this file has the potential to get pretty bloated, hard to load asynchronously, and render-blocking for the rest of your application. (Sure, render-blocking isn’t always a bad thing, but for all intents and purposes, we’ll generalize a bit here and avoid render blocking scripts and styles wherever we can.) That’s not to say that this method doesn’t have its merits. For a small application, or an application built by a team with less of a focus on the front end, a single stylesheet may be a good call. It provides clear separation between business logic and application styles, and because it’s not generated by our application, is fully within our control to ensure exactly what we write is exactly what is output. Additionally, a single CSS file is fairly easy for the browser to cache, so that returning users don’t have to re-download the entire file on their next visit. But let’s say that we’re looking for a bit more of a robust CSS architecture that allows us to leverage the power of tooling. Something to help us manage an application that requires a bit more of a nuanced approach. Enter CSS Modules. Option 2: CSS Modules One fairly large problem within a single stylesheet is the risk of regression. Writing CSS that utilizes a fairly non-specific selector could end up altering another component in a completely different area of your application. This is where an approach called "scoped styles" comes in handy. Scoped styles allow us to programmatically generate class names specific to a component. Thus scoping those styles to that specific component, ensuring that their class names will be unique. This leads to auto-generated class names like header__2lexd. The bit at the end is a hashed selector that is unique, so even if you had another component named header, you could apply a header class to it, and our scoped styles would generate a new hashed suffix like so: header__15qy_. CSS Modules offer ways, depending on implementation, to control the generated class name, but I’ll leave that up to the CSS Modules documentation to cover that. Once all is said and done, we are still generating a single CSS file that is delivered to the browser via a tag in the header. This comes with the same potential drawbacks (render blocking, file size bloat, etc.) and some of the benefits (caching, mostly) that we covered above. But this method, because of its purpose of scoping styles, comes with another caveat: the removal of the global scope — at least initially. Imagine you want to employ the use of a .screen-reader-text global class that can be applied to any component within your application. If using CSS Modules, you’d have to reach for the :global pseudo selector that explicitly defines the CSS within it as something that is allowed to be globally accessed by other components in the app. As long as you import the stylesheet that includes your :global declaration block into your component’s stylesheet, you’ll have the use of that global selector. Not a huge drawback, but something that takes getting used to. Here’s an example of the :global pseudo selector in action: // typography.css :global { .aligncenter { text-align: center; } .alignright { text-align: right; } .alignleft { text-align: left; } } You may run the risk of dropping a whole bunch of global selectors for typography, forms, and just general elements that most sites have into one single :global selector. Luckily, through the magic of things like PostCSS Nested or Sass, you can import partials directly into the selector to make things a bit more clean: // main.scss :global { @import "typography"; @import "forms"; } This way, you can write your partials without the :global selector, and just import them directly into your main stylesheet. Another bit that takes some getting used to is how class names are referenced within DOM nodes. I’ll let the individual docs for Vue, React, and Angular speak for themselves there. I’ll also leave you with a little example of what those class references look like utilized within a React component: // ./css/Button.css .btn { background-color: blanchedalmond; font-size: 1.4rem; padding: 1rem 2rem; text-transform: uppercase; transition: background-color ease 300ms, border-color ease 300ms; &:hover { background-color: #000; color: #fff; } } // ./Button.js import styles from "./css/Button.css"; const Button = () => ( Click me! ); export default Button; The CSS Modules method, again, has some great use cases. For applications looking to take advantage of scoped styles while maintaining the performance benefits of a static, but compiled stylesheet, then CSS Modules may be the right fit for you! It’s worth noting here as well that CSS Modules can be combined with your favorite flavor of CSS preprocessing. Sass, Less, PostCSS, etc. are all able to be integrated into the build process utilizing CSS Modules. But let’s say your application could benefit from being included within your JavaScript. Perhaps gaining access to the various states of your components, and reacting based off of the changing state, would be beneficial as well. Let’s say you want to easily incorporate critical CSS into your application as well! Enter CSS-in-JS. Option 3: CSS-in-JS CSS-in-JS is a fairly broad topic. There are several packages that work to make writing CSS-in-JS as painless as possible. Frameworks like JSS, Emotion, and Styled Components are just a few of the many packages that comprise this topic. As a broad strokes explanation for most of these frameworks, CSS-in-JS is largely operates the same way. You write CSS associated with your individual component and your build process compiles the application. When this happens, most CSS-in-JS frameworks will output the associated CSS of only the components that are rendered on the page at any given time. CSS-in-JS frameworks do this by outputting that CSS within a tag in the of your application. This gives you a critical CSS loading strategy out of the box! Additionally, much like CSS Modules, the styles are scoped, and the class names are hashed. As you navigate around your application, the components that are unmounted will have their styles removed from the and your incoming components that are mounted will have their styles appended in their place. This provides opportunity for performance benefits on your application. It removes an HTTP request, it is not render blocking, and it ensures that your users are only downloading what they need to view the page at any given time. Another interesting opportunity CSS-in-JS provides is the ability to reference various component states and functions in order to render different CSS. This could be as simple as replicating a class toggle based on some state change, or be as complex as something like theming. Because CSS-in-JS is a fairly #hotdrama topic, I realized that there are a lot of different ways that folks are trying to go about this. Now, I share the feelings of many other people who hold CSS in high regard, especially when it comes to leveraging JavaScript to write CSS. My initial reactions to this approach were fairly negative. I did not like the idea of cross-contaminating the two. But I wanted to keep an open mind. Let’s look at some of the features that we as front-end-focused developers would need in order to even consider this approach. If we’re writing CSS-in-JS we have to write real CSS. Several packages offer ways to write template-literal CSS, but require you to camel-case your properties — i.e. padding-left becomes paddingLeft. That’s not something I’m personally willing to sacrifice. Some CSS-in-JS solutions require you to write your styles inline on the element you’re attempting to style. The syntax for that, especially within complex components, starts to get very hectic, and again is not something I’m willing to sacrifice. The use of CSS-in-JS has to provide me with powerful tools that are otherwise super difficult to accomplish with CSS Modules or a dang ol’ stylesheet. We have to be able to leverage forward-thinking CSS like nesting and variables. We also have to be able to incorporate things like Autoprefixer, and other add-ons to enhance the developer experience. It’s a lot to ask of a framework, but for those of us who have spent most of our lives studying and implementing solutions around a language that we love, we have to make sure that we’re able to continue writing that same language as best we can. Here’s a quick peek at what a React component using Styled Components could look like: // ./Button.js import styled from 'styled-components'; const StyledButton= styled.button` background-color: blanchedalmond; font-size: 1.4rem; padding: 1rem 2rem; text-transform: uppercase; transition: background-color ease 300ms, border-color ease 300ms; &:hover { background-color: #000; color: #fff; } `; const Button = () => ( Click Me! ); export default Button; We also need to address the potential downsides of a CSS-in-JS solution — and definitely not as an attempt to spark more drama. With a method like this, it’s incredibly easy for us to fall into a trap that leads us to a bloated JavaScript file with potentially hundreds of lines of CSS — and that all comes before the developer will even see any of the component’s methods or its HTML structure. We can, however, look at this as an opportunity to very closely examine how and why we are building components the way they are. In thinking a bit more deeply about this, we can potentially use it to our advantage and write leaner code, with more reusable components. Additionally, this method absolutely blurs the line between business logic and application styles. However, with a well-documented and well-thought architecture, other developers on the project can be eased into this idea without feeling overwhelmed. TL;DR There are several ways to handle the beast that is CSS architecture on any project and do so while using any framework. The fact that we, as developers, have so many choices is both super exciting, and incredibly overwhelming. However, the overarching theme that I think continues to get lost in super short social media conversations that we end up having, is that each solution has its own merits, and its own inefficiencies. It’s all about how we carefully and thoughtfully implement a system that makes our future selves, and/or other developers who may touch the code, thank us for taking the time to establish that structure. The post The Many Ways to Include CSS in JavaScript Applications appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

https://css-tricks.com/the-many-ways-to-include-css-in-javascript-applications/

[kiddiemom-blog]

Parenting Without Your Village

They say it takes a town to raise a child. And once you end up being a moms and dad, the fact of that statement typically becomes right away clear. What if you do not have family neighboring to assist out? What if you merely do not have a village?The other night

as I strolled the pet, I was appreciating the abundance of colorful tulips and emerging tree buds announcing the arrival of spring when I encountered an elderly gentleman pacing up and down the pathway. As he approached, I saw that he had an infant swaddled to his chest in a wrap, its legs and arms hanging in an unwinded stupor. We decided to walk together quickly and I found out that he and his other half were visiting their kid and daughter-in-law from Michigan for two weeks to assist with the newest member of the family."We never used these things, but they are so simple,"the happy grandpa described in regard to the wrap. He went on to joke,"We have to battle my daughter-in-law's moms and dads to have time with the babies considering that they live here."As I listened to him savor grandparent bliss, I experienced a pang of yearning-- with a twinge of

envy. My hubby's entire family lives in Poland and with moms and dads who have health disabilities (in addition to a fear of flying), this leaves Skype as the only medium that connects our daughter to"Babcia," or" grandma" in Polish.A current bachelor in New york city City, my father undoubtedly enjoys our children but his involvement is very little due to a hectic social calendar, as he enjoys his newfound pseudo-retirement. When I was pregnant with my child, we beinged in the healthcare facility waiting room the day prior to my C-section, submitting paperwork. I keep in mind observing the many member of the family, laden with balloons, stuffed animals, and other presents, waiting for the arrival of their child. Grandfathers laughing loudly while posing for selfies and three women, probably aunties, talking rapidly while exuding a palpable, confident energy prior to an unexpected silence and anticipatory gasp each time the adjoining door to the maternity ward swung opened.My spouse and I enjoyed silently, each familiar with what the other was thinking however not wanting to put words to it. My heart sank, recognizing there would be no household to invite my child who would be showing up in the midst of Hurricane Joaquin. No proud, beaming grandparents or uncles, aunts, and cousins.My earliest and happiest memories include my grandparents, specifically after I lost my mother at the age of five. Summers were divided between family on the West Coast and my doting grandparents in northern Virginia, who would bring us kids

on mini historical adventures to Colonial Williamsburg, DC, and Philadelphia.My granny in California, who is turning 90 in October, entertained us with stories about fairy shoes that allowed her to fly, while my Granny June and Papa in Nevada would bring me over to my cousin's home for unlimited hours of playing in the swimming pool and camping out on the trampoline. My grandma in Virginia completed all my back to school shopping and assisted move me into my freshman year dormitory on a sweltering August day in 2002; things that would have been neglected by my dad.To this day, my grandmother in Nevada, likewise turning 90 this year, and I talk on the phone regularly. Most recently, I texted her about how to clean up among my child's dolls. She right away responded with a long description detailing how to clean it properly while maintaining the stability of the fabric. That kind of suggestions and wisdom never ever grows old.Because my grandparents played such pivotal and developmental roles in my life, it distresses me picturing my children not taking pleasure in those comparable relationships. The longing is possibly magnified understanding that the grief of losing my mom resurfaces in the kind of the missing out on relationship with my kids, her grandchildren.As the years go on, my partner and I have grown more familiar with the obstacles of parenting without family around, mainly due to the fact that it's all we've ever known. When our buddies have the ability to take a kid-free trip, or perhaps head out to dinner without taking on the logistical(not to point out pricey)challenges of arranging child care, I am truly happy for them but still privately long for that type of support.Yes, we have an incredible network of friends who are tremendously encouraging (and who braved the cyclone to invite our child into the world), however no matter what, it's still not the same. In the words of a good friend whose moms and dads died, you are never ever anyone else's number one top priority. You're constantly a remote 3rd or 4th if you're fortunate since, by nature, one's own kids and household will always precede. In a society pressed for time and relatively taken in with work, nobody has the luxury of

free, unscheduled time to simply provide unreservedly outside of their own home. Understandably, these valuable resources are reserved for our own families.For a while, we had good friends in our community with whom we shared a childcare barter system of sorts. I 'd go to their house one evening while my partner remained house so they could go out for a date night and vice-versa. That worked well till one of their moms retired and moved down to Richmond. Now, they no longer require to take part in the exchange. Running late at work? No issue, granny can do a preschool pick up. Want a kid-free weekend? Grandmother to the rescue with cookies and adventures aplenty!Recently, a colleague was complaining that her mother-in-law constantly dresses the kids in

matching attire when she babysits, a gesture she finds annoying. It was difficult to sympathize and yet, I've needed to review the times I have actually vented and perhaps been insensitive to other individuals's circumstances. Griping about my kids when someone has actually privately battled with infertility for years or making statements about feeling exhausted when a new mom recently returned to work as a single parent.I also remind myself that my spouse and I are beyond fortunate; particularly that we can manage quality child care during the week and have flexible work schedules. In fact, every few months, we'll both settle on a day off and set up a"date day." Not only are crowds non-existent at noon on a random Tuesday, we also aren't trying to stay awake through supper while psychologically keeping an eye on the time to prevent overextending the babysitter.Sometimes, I advise myself that, similar to anything in life, the turf isn't always greener. There are plenty of individuals whose parents are physically close-by however due to particular scenarios, such as still working complete time or various social concerns, are unable to offer help. I likewise know of couples our age, in their 30's, who are supporting their parents as they withstand chemotherapy for cancer, MS, ALS, or a myriad of other incapacitating health impairments.You merely can not live wishing your life might be different. The finest solution, in my opinion, is to express appreciation for all the gifts you've been given. I am so grateful for all the individuals who have actually actioned in as a surrogate household-- from my friend's family to our preferred

community sitter who periodically takes the kids, complimentary of charge, to a seasonal event like pumpkin picking.These reprieves are wonderful for us. Understanding there are people who wish to hang around with the kids without monetary gain feels joyous; it's affirmation that they love them even if. And for that, I am beyond fortunate, for these are the individuals who have actually become my village.The post Parenting Without Your Village appeared first on Richmond Mother.

[goldstonefinancialgroup-blog]

All About bots

By Anthony Pellegrino | Goldstone Financial Group

Even if you aren’t familiar with bots, you’ve likely come into contact with many of these forms of artificial intelligence, or AI. Bots are applications that perform automated tasks such as setting alarms, relaying weather forecasts or conducting online search for travel deals. Many smart phones come equipped with personal-service bots, such as the iPhone’s Siri.1

AI is ramping up in a number of ways that affect consumers’ lives — even when we don’t realize it. For example, Amazon uses AI for automated shopping suggestions and Bank of America utilizes online customer service chatbots.2

There are many areas in which a bot can either deploy specific instructions or assess historical data and make recommendations. However, there are still areas in our lives that can benefit from being handled by human interaction, such as financial decisions. We believe it’s important to work with a trusted and experienced financial professional who can offer guidance tailored to your circumstances.

For example, there’s more to buying an insurance contract than just knowing your age and expected lifespan. Many factors — such as leaving money to your loved ones, retirement income needs and goals for the future — come into play. If you are looking for some human interaction to help you assess your retirement income needs, give us a call.

As for bots, there’s a lot of chatter online and in the news about their misuse in how they spread misinformation and influence the way people think and consequently act. For example, the social media website Twitter is reported to have a preponderance of bots used as fake accounts to generate acrimony among users. According to one report, bot accounts make up 9 to 15 percent of all Twitter users. The company deletes these accounts once they are identified and has increased measures to prevent bots from signing up to the tune of around 50,000 new bot accounts a day.3

Over at Facebook, they are combating the bot-manipulated spread of fake news by using their own automated systems. Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with using AI to combat AI. For example, in the days leading up to the Fourth of July, the newspaper in a small Texas town posted a series of passages from the U.S. Declaration of Independence on its Facebook page.4

One post that cited potentially offensive-sounding language (“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”) was identified as hate speech and thereby removed by Facebook bots. Eventually the mistake was rectified with an apology from Facebook.5

An interesting twist in the bot phenomenon is some companies want their users to believe they’ve developed the latest bot technology, but in reality, they’ve determined it’s cheaper to hire humans to do the work rather than invest in AI capabilities. In effect, they’ve hired humans to imitate bot technology instead of the other way around. For example, a couple of startup firms that feature calendar-scheduling services actually employ humans to pretend to be chatbots for this mind-numbing task. Some of the workers were so bored by the task they reported looking forward to being replaced by actual bots.6

Content prepared by Kara Stefan Communications.

1 Sarah Mitroff. CNET. May 5, 2016. “What is a bot? Here’s everything you need to know.” https://www.cnet.com/how-to/what-is-a-bot/. Accessed July 8, 2018.

2 Ben Dickson. TheNextWeb.com. July 5, 2018. “7 surprising companies where you can work on cutting-edge AI technology.”https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/07/05/companies-work-ai-technology/. Accessed July 8, 2018.

3 Maya Kosoff. Vanity Fair. June 27, 2018. “Can Twitter Purge Its Bots Without Killing Its Bottom Line?”https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/can-jack-dorsey-twitter-purge-bots-without-killing-bottom-line. Accessed July 8, 2018.

4 Simon Sharwood. The Register. July 5, 2018. “US Declaration of Independence labeled hate speech by Facebook bots.”https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/05/us_declaration_of_independence_labeled_hate_speech_by_facebook_bots/. Accessed July 8, 2018.

5 Ibid.

6 Olivia Solon. The Guardian. July 6, 2018. “The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work.”https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies. Accessed July 8, 2018.

We are an independent firm helping individuals create retirement strategies using a variety of insurance products to custom suit their needs and objectives. This material is intended to provide general information to help you understand basic retirement income strategies and should not be construed as financial advice.

The information contained in this material is believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed; it is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions. If you are unable to access any of the news articles and sources through the links provided in this text, please contact us to request a copy of the desired reference.

544941B

[pappydada]

Whispers to Alice

Whispers to Alice (a work in progress) by Joshua Kaplan

Beginning

--

Keb's Journal, Sept 7, 2022 3:13AM

"It...(i say 'It' rather than 'they' because i don't have the knowledge of where One may end and the Next begin, if beginning and end are even applicable to It/Them)... so It, is like us in that It exists, and moves and reacts, irritable and motivated.  At these very basic points, these requisites that we've assigned to Life, do the similarities between us and It become hazy.  Does It reproduce? Does It feed and shed waste? and if not, how is it compelled to continue existing?  We don't know, hence the confusion regarding beginning and end.

Beginning and ending are temporal concepts, and this entity's relationship with and to Time/Space is as yet undefined. Both reproduction and sustenance might well be unnecessary.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and is also dutifully non-supportive of the unnecessary, so perhaps what constitutes beginning and ending to this/these Being(s) is as different as pudding is to electricity.

Piper suggested that It's beginnings might be traced to the heart of a super massive star, like Andromeda, whose pressure at it's core is so great that electrons become liquid and protons shed their charge, but..."

--

Research Operations Center, Hoboken New Jersey Sept 6, 2022 7:45AM

"...Who knows what other shit is going on inside one of those massive stellar kilns." Dr. Piper Souza, the team's Chemist said.  "I'd look there for Its origin and for more of Them, if there are more."

"Maybe It exists independent of time, like Wheeler's theory that the universe consists of only a single electron that cycles forward and backward through time..." Dr. Henry Kenkeith, Applied Physics, offered, trying to wrap his mind around the concept of a non-material life form.   "..Like weaving a blanket through the boson field."

"I thought that was Feynman's Positron work." quipped Dr. Olsana Marisen, Biologist and Director of Applied Sciences, who was listening intently, contrary to the apparent and compelling distraction of her favorite pseudo-scientific periodical, the Farmer's Almanac.  "I read that paper when i was 17.  I remember because it was right before i got my scholarship to Penn."

"A glorious day, that."  Piper added wistfully, resting her chin on her cupped hands.  "I remember mine like a lost young love, though not Penn, Columbia."

"You guys are gonna make me cry, gettin' all mushy and sentimental like this."  Bond Timmick, Director of IT and team Engineer/Geek emoted greatly, wiping theatrical tears from his tragically masked face.

The room, once thick with the weight of conjecture, lightened with the music of laughter.

"John Wheeler presented the 'single electron' idea to Feynman in a phone call in 1940; or so the story goes."  Keb Snydaar, team Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist said distractedly, staring at the torn and tormented collection of text, diagrams, and doodles in front of him.

Henry Kenkeith grinned widely at Olsana, who replied by promptly sticking out her tongue at him.

"Wheeler, Feynman, Hanna, Barbera...who gives a shit."  Keb said impatiently.  He was working on three hours of sleep and the amphetamines certainly didn't help his mood.  "What we need to know is the 'How?'.  How does this...entity...exist at all?  Is it really intelligent or does it become sentient using it's host's intelligence?  Is it one entity or a collection of individual beings joined by a community mind?   Or maybe how we measure intelligence and sentience is inapplicable with It.  How does it move where it wants to go?  Does it even know where it wants to go?..."

"Easy there Man o'War.  Better take a breath now and again or you might pass out."  Bond wisecracked, creating more laughter.  "What I want to know is how did we get involved with this craziness to begin with?"

"It all started with a woman named Alice."

--

Keb's apartment, Hillside New Jersey Aug 24, 2022 9:42PM

"I met a girl."  Keb said to the man seated opposite him at the breakfast table, staring absently at the illustration on his half empty coffee cup.

"That's great, Keb! Coincidentally, my ass cheeks just grew wings.  Now I can fly around and dispense skittles to the world...HAHA!"

Silence.

"Wait...Really?" Umber M. James was startled but continued chuckling.  "I thought you were joking."

"Am I really that backward?" Keb said sullenly back, not knowing how to explain what was troubling him without bearing the full brunt of Umber's ruthless and predatory ribbing.

"Nah, I'm just busting your balls.  She cute?"    

"She's...beautiful." He replied, hesitating momentarily from the involuntary clamping of his abdomen as he pictured her.

"Wow."  Umber sensed in his old friend a tension that seemed out of place, even for Keb, who was one of the most internally tightly wrapped people he had ever known.  "You're not telling me something, Keb."

"She talks to trees, among other things."  Keb said with resignation, still looking at the picture on his mug of the grizzled cowboy lamenting the waste of his money on everything except women and beer.

He didn't drink alcohol, and hadn't so much as held a woman's hand in the 5 years since he learned of his ex-lover's need for romantic diversification.  It was his father's mug.

Umber stared vacantly back, as much from surprise as for comedic affect.

"Okay, so she's a bit off." Umber said after a moment.  "...As long as the trees don't talk back, I guess."

Keb stared at his friend expectantly.

"Wait...They don't talk back, do they?"  Umber's eye's widened in surprise.

"Yes, actually they do."

"Seriously? Is she mentally ill you think?"  Umber asked with sincere concern. "'Cause that's a rough ride. Be advised; If you're considering some kind of emotional investment you should take a little time and see how deep that rabbit hole goes."

"First of all, i didn't say a thing about any relationship, or emotional investment, and I'm not saying that she talks to trees and they talk back in her head." Keb said sharply.  "I'm saying she talks to trees...and they talk back.  I've witnessed it myself."

Silence.

"When was the last time you got more than 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep?" Umber said, finally, only half joking.  "Seriously Keb, how many days? Two? Three?"  

"I'm not psychotic, 'Berz, nor is she."  Keb said flatly, using the nickname he had given his old chum long ago.  "Though I may be a bit addled at all the implications of what she showed me."

"Answer the question then." Umber prodded.  "How long since you've slept? at all, even."

"Been about 40 hours i guess. plus minus."  Keb relented, becoming irritated at the innuendo that his claims were due to insomnia induced hallucination.  Keb was no stranger to hallucination, through chemistry and deprivation both, and this was no such thing.

"See?" Umber said, smugly satisfied at his impromptu diagnosis. "Go smoke a bone, get some shut-eye, and look at the whole thing tomorrow with a fresh set of brain cells."

"You've reached a conclusion with no data," Keb pointed out, then added unnecessarily,  "Spoken like a true student of politics."

Umber James was by far the staunchest and most thoroughly immersed pundits of government and political chaos that Keb knew, or had ever known.  He was Editor-in-chief of a semi-respected liberal periodical called, "The Drop" and ceremoniously attended every meeting that required minutes to be taken and an American flag to be present; at every level of City, State and Federal Government that he could logistically justify.  Keb had for years urged him to "put his ass in a seat that mattered, rather than just pushing moist air with forceful rhetoric," but Umber always laughed it off, stating proudly that, "Not only DID I inhale, but will continue to do so for as long as I see fit, so fuck you and your vote if you don't like it."  They discussed the consideration of having t-shirts made.

"Okay, Keb. I'll play devil's advocate." Umber relented.  "I can understand the whole 'talkin to trees' thing.  Lots of hippy, barefoot, patchouli oil people talk to things; trees, crystals, stale popcorn...but rarely do you meet someone that hears them talk back.  What makes you think that this girl is really hearing anything?"

Keb stared Umber in the eye and stifled an impulse to berate his friend of many years for dismissing Alice so easily. Turning his attention back to his coffee mug, Keb then began his internally prepared monologue on what he mentally referenced as 'the walk in the woods.'  Contrary to normal routine, Keb had not yet documented this interaction with Alice.  Each time he began, something in his mind 'switched on.'  What he attempted to review as a slide show of memory became a cascade of living moments; Alice's eyes flashing brilliance and insight, the way she flowed through the green, as if the flora knew she was there and moved to touch her and allow her passage, both.  It was as if Keb was an alien entity in the woods, and Alice was the wood herself.

Keb knew with complete certainty that what he had experienced was devoid of trickery or manipulation, and was compelled by the thought that Einstein, Faraday, Maxwell, and Newton must never themselves have been witness to such sorcery, else our collective understanding of the mechanics of the physical world might be far different than what we have come to accept today.  

"We were walking in the woods..." Keb began, seeing the images in his mind as he was related them,  again seeing the sunlight beam through the natural canopy of oak onto her golden hair, tied back in a wide braid, and capturing her profile in the stark contrasts of sun and shadow, and for a moment he was again in those woods, and again held breathless by her shy radiance.  

"Yeah?...And?... You still with me there stud?"  Umber said, noticing his friend drift momentarily.

"...Hmm?  Oh, sorry..."  Keb said, and continued.  "Alice had been explaining how she was able to communicate with the Earth, that she could hear voices in the breeze as it touches the leaves..."

"Okay, wait," Umber interrupted.  "start from the beginning.  i want to hear the whole thing.  Were you holding hands?  Did you guys just have sex in the bushes?"

Umber was fond of stories, and fancied himself a potent weaver of lore, so it was no surprise to Keb that he wanted the whole story, nor was he taken aback at the provocative embellishment.

"We weren't on a date, so no, we weren't holding hands nor had we been physically intimate in any fashion." Keb said, fully aware that Umber was lightly prodding him just for fun, but wanted to respond anyway.  "We were on our way to perform a simple experiment, or i should say, i was.  she didn't require any evidence to satisfy what she already knew."

"But she played along?"  Umber lilted.  "she's a sport.  probably great in the...tree house?  HAHA!  sorry. go on."

"She had her own reasons for accompanying me and submitting herself to the study."

"...And they were?"

"She said she wasn't ready to tell me yet." Keb said, deflated at the recollection, feeling some level of failure at not having a simple answer to an important question.  "but she said she would later."

"Oh yeah!"  Umber shouted.  "If that's not a troll for a second date i don't know what is!"

***

Alice; The Dream

--

She loved the dream.

It wasn't the same each time, but everything about it was in almost every way.

In the beginning of the dream, she is always in a meadow, kneeling.  sometimes over a dandelion, usually; sometimes a cluster of clover, and sometimes even, a little frog that looked like it was made of water.

The first of the dreams was the best, when she met her Aua, Ga.  She was 4 years old, and remembers it as if happened yesterday.

--

she hears a giggle, far away...too far really to be heard, a detail she'll remember when she gets older, but now, it is just different.

She looks up, toward the laughter, and it is so bright that she has to shield her eyes with her flattened hand.  In the distance, over a rolling hill of a thousand different shades of green and brown she thinks she sees another child in motion.  It looks like it's running in circles around a tree, but the figure is blurry, though the tree is clear.  As her eyes begin to adjust to the brilliant sunlight, the image becomes clearer.  It IS a child, naked, with long orange hair past it's buttocks, and it is dancing and skipping, spinning and laughing, so happy and free.

for a moment she is envious of the dancing child, then realizes that she can run and dance too...so she does.  she runs and runs, feeling the wind and her own motion toss her hair and it makes her neck tingle.  she watches her bare feet grasp the moist green with each stride, and she tries to quicken her pace...faster, she has to go even faster...like a bird flying, skimming over the ocean, over the trees.

then, suddenly she is airborne, her legs lifting beneath her as her body slowly arches forward in a graceful dive...she sees bright blue flashing past her, and green and billowing sunlight...and then the flash of white as her face impacts the ground, churning up bits of dirt and wet grass with her chin.  

"Ohhhh...."

Alice isn't sure what happened.  she was running so fast that she started to fly, like a bird, then fell, but she isn't sure if it hurt.  It should hurt.  "...And what was that sound?"  she thinks.  "Did i make that sound?"

"Ohhhhaaaahhhh...."

She hears it again.   this time she's pretty sure that it didn't come out of her.

she blinks once into the sweet smelling grass and dirt, and turns over.

"Owwww...?"

Kneeling over her, looking down into her face is another little girl, maybe even the same age as Alice, with blazing red hair so long that it was draping across Alice's face, neck and shoulders, and she looked like she was about to cry.

"No ow."  Alice said to her, momentarily distracted by this little girl's own distress and immediately understanding her question.  Had the little girl even moved her mouth, though?  Alice was confused.

The little girl with the long hair brushed her mantle of rust and pumpkin out of Alice's face and abruptly thrust her own face to where their noses were almost touching, and gazed deeply into Alice's gray-green eyes with eye's like a sea of molten gold, her brow furrowed.

In those eyes Alice saw...everything.

The little girl's frown suddenly became a beaming smile.  Alice couldn't even see her mouth since she was so close, but her eyes told the whole story.  This was her sister, Alice knew now.  Her very own best friend to play with and run and dance and giggle and be free.  and all she had to do was dream.

Alice wants to be that happy in real life, and to dance and skip and laugh, but it is hard to be happy.  That's why the dream is so good, because Alice is really happy there, always.  She is never hungry, and her beautiful friend is always there to hug her and put flowers in her hair and show her new things in the meadow.  She is never alone there, and she never wants to be.  She always wants to be alone in real life, because people hurt her.  They don't always mean to, but it is the same hurt either way.  In the meadow of her dream, Alice is safe.

Alice stares at her sister, not really thinking anything but taking all of her in;  Her bright red hair and milk pale skin, her golden eyes that swirled and glowed and reflected everything good and nice in the world, her joyous smile and the way she folded her feet under her as she kneeled.  Alice hadn't noticed it before, but she thought she could see tiny little sparkles of silver flashing all around the little girl's body, and when she smiled there were lots more sparkles.

Alice knew this little girl was special, and more, that she loved Alice.  she knew this just from looking into those glorious, gleaming eyes.  There were no words to convey this, nor were any necessary.  it was communicated like a song of emotion playing through her soul in waves.  and Alice knew that she loved her back, just as much.

The two girls sat looking at each other for only a moment, until Alice was swept up by a gust of wind with flaming red hair, both of her hands held in the other's, and together ran just as fast as they could.  past the mighty and potent tree that the pale, golden girl had been in orbit around, and over the little swaying hill through a patch of purple and blue flowers, and to a little brook, where they both squatted side by side and watched tadpoles skitter to and fro just beneath the surface.

"What's your name?"  Alice asked, as she turned her attention from the play of life in the creek to the golden eyed girl.

The other turned to Alice and looked confused.

"My name's Alice, after my grammy.  She makes really good toast."

The little girl tilted her head to the side, and slowly seemed to realize what Alice wanted to know.

"Aaaaoooowwwwaaaaaa..."  She said, and gestured with her arms, sweeping outward and looking from side to side.

Alice heard her clearly, and even though the little girl was only inches from her, her voice sounded distant...funny...and Alice was, for the second time, unsure if she saw her mouth move when she spoke.

"Your name is Awwa?  That's a pretty name."

The little girl frowned slightly and shook her head from side to side, and said again, with the same sweeping arm movement, "Aaaaooowwwaaaaa..."

Then she put her hands to her chest and said, "Ga."  and she beamed at Alice and grabbed a handful of water and splashed it on Alice's hands, then stood up and ran back toward the big tree, giggling and looking playfully over her shoulder at Alice as she ran.  Alice immediately stood up and ran to catch her mischievous friend.

--

With each subsequent dream Alice had of the little girl in the meadow, her friend and sister changed slightly.  her voice became less drawn out, clearer and easier to understand, and her mouth slowly began to sync with her speech.  Alice had been correct to note that the little girl's mouth did not move as she spoke in the beginning; she would open it as if attempting to emulate how Alice looked when she talked, but it was easy to see that the sounds Alice was hearing were not being created by the little girl's mouth.

Alice came to realize that the little girl spoke with her heart, not her mouth, if such a thing were possible.  She also now knew that the little girl's name was Ga, and that Aua was whatever Ga was, but in everything in the meadow, even the light.

As Alice grew older, so too did her dream friend, and the dreams became less and less frequent.  This troubled Alice greatly at first, but it quickly became apparent that Ga was with her even when she was awake, and the older they both got, the better the communication between them became when Alice wasn't asleep and dreaming.

Ga had told her once to never tell anyone about them, about their friendship and sisterhood.  She said people wouldn't understand, but that someday Alice would meet people that would make everyone understand.

"How will i know, Ga?"  She asked as they both lay together in the meadow and together manipulated low flying cumulous clouds.

"The little frog will lead you, my love."  Ga said.  "Together we'll be, so no worries.  i like your horse cloud..."

***

Keb's Journal Aug 21, 2022 12:02AM

I am a scientist.  a professional nerd.  this is part of my problem, this conundrum. What i witnessed today was nothing short of fantastic and i have no basis to substantiate or explain it.  Add to that this absurd, internal sounding of my emotions...It is among the most substantial impulses i have ever felt, this motivation to help Alice.  I have tried to convince myself that my passion and interest is founded only in professional purpose and a need to know, but I'd be a fool or a liar to deny that it is on a far more personal level than what any psychological profile or equation can rationalize.

This amazing woman, so unique and sensitive to the world around her, has perhaps opened a door between accepted universal mechanics and something else...I don't know what to call it...Psychic phenomena? Magic? How else should i reference it?  Without a grounded theory and some semblance of a mathematical argument it certainly looks like sorcery, but then again, so would an internal combustion engine look to a primitive.  Really, i think a coffee maker, or even a glow stick would accomplish same, probably, though with far less noise.

---

Keb's apartment, Hillside New Jersey Aug 24, 2022 9:57PM

Keb had great admiration and respect for his old friend Umber, who everyone close called 'Berz.   He was smart, funny and could be trusted with most anything, with the simple exception of your girlfriend.  Berz was among the most proficient practitioners in the art of wooing that Keb knew, and had always attributed his success with the women folk to confidence.  "it's all in the self-image, my friend."  he'd say.  "if you like you, they'll like you, too."

Keb argued that it was easy for his friend to be confident when local legend spoke in hushed tones of the storied endowment of one Umber M. James, nicknamed by his many followers; The Gourd. Keb had no such farmer's market appeal, and other than some level of envy, and minor annoyance at his flirting with his dates when they were younger, he had never been bothered by Umber's predilection toward carnal behavior or his conquests.  however, Keb maintained that it was difficult to nurture a serious conversation when every utterance was fodder for his factory of innuendo and blue commentary.

"There was never a first date, so i doubt in totality that she was leading me with her conversation."  Keb explained unnecessarily.  "Can i just tell this story without your input?"

"HAHA!"  Umber laughed.  "Sure. still, i can hear it in your voice.  You like her. What's her name, by the way?"

"Alice. her name's Alice."  Keb said hesitantly, his mind filling with imminent Lewis Carroll parallels.

"That's kind of a coincidence. i just mentioned the rabbit hole thing."  Umber said, as expected, but he wasn't laughing.

"True enough."

"Is she blond?  Blue dress?  and how old is she?  if you tell me she's 15 I'm gonna have to kick your ass."

"she is.  Blond, i mean...Unless you're crudely referring to her intellectual capacity, in which case, no, she is decidedly un-blond.  Ah, i get it.  Another 'Through the Looking Glass' comment. "  Keb continued.  "and no, she's not 15.  she's in her mid 20s, i believe."

"Okay, so here's Alice, all beautiful and smart and blond and crazy, spending her time talking fragrant oils and decorating to the local flora and fauna,"  Umber quipped.  "...and here's you, lab rat and scribbler of Newtonian hieroglyphics who never leaves his house except to go to the lab.  How did you two hook up? First guess is it's lab related."

So Keb told his story of meeting Alice, from the beginning.  He remembered it so vividly, it seems like it must have happened a thousand times.

"I was at the lab eating my lunch and reading an old copy of Analog that Kenkeith gave me, a reprinted Simak story,"  Keb orated, as if reading a script. '...and i remember being excited about it.  Simak wove tales of future intrigue before quantum theory and atomic application, and he influenced some of the greatest science fiction contributors in the world; Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell, really everybody.  i love the old pulp writers and their stories..."

"Keb, is that actually pertinent?"  Umber interrupted.  "I don't really care about your comic collection.  I wanna hear about the girl."

"Not comic, pulp."  Keb corrected, and continued.  "I was actually somewhat annoyed when i heard the knock on the lunchroom door.  no one else was there so i would have to either stop reading, get up, answer the door, and politely tell this intruder that the person or persons they hoped to locate were nowhere on these premises; or be a prick and ignore them.  i opted to be less prick and more annoyed, so I got up and answered the door.

"when i opened the door, i saw this young woman, dressed all in black, with her hand thrust out, and I just stared at her.  i felt like i was in stasis."  

"In stasis?  Why?"  Umber asked, incredulous.  "Holy crap, she's a woman, not a werewolf.  I will never understand your fear of women."

"Why?  I don't really know."  Keb lied.  "She just said 'hi' and i froze."  

Keb continued with his story, careful not to give away too much in the telling.  He indicated that Alice was clearly anxious, and even so kept smiling and never once betrayed her desire to flee.

Research Operations Center Hoboken New Jersey Aug 12, 2022 11:23AM

"I'm Alice.  Alice Leganno.  I have an interview here at 11:30 with Dr. Marisen?"

Keb had stared at her standard offering of formal greeting, and in the distant fog of his awareness heard an echo of reality which told him to shake her hand, and as he slowly did, careful not to squeeze too hard, he heard it.  

the voice.  an auditory hallucination.  a symptom of schizophrenia.

it wasn't so much a sound as it was an awareness, Keb told himself, not wanting to accept the possibility of mental illness.  He compared it to knowing from the breeze and smell of the air that it's going to rain.  

"Dr...Mari..."  Keb fumbled, the message in his mind ringing, and tried to get a grip on the here and now.  "Okay, you're here to see Olsa.  I'll show you to her office."

Keb guided Alice with whatever level of faux detachment he could muster, including a smile to replace what she must have compared with Novocain mouth, and arrived at Dr. Marisen's office, tapping lightly before cracking the door and peeking in.

"Your 11:30 is here, Olsa." He said, mind whirling.

"Perfect!" Olsana shouted enthusiastically, her arms in the air.  "Don't just stand there gawking, show her in, goofy!"

Dr. Olsana Marisen was nothing if not passionate.  Everything she did she did with flair and high energy.  She laughed loud, loved hard, and lived life thoroughly.  she was one of Keb's favorite people and he considered himself lucky to be able to work with her.  But even her volume and force could not push from his mind what he had heard and felt just moments before, though it felt like he had been feeling it forever.

"you can go in, Alice."  Keb said, looking into her gray, green, and golden eyes that moved like wood smoke.  "don't let her knock you over with her bluster."

"Thank you, Keb."  She smiled and made her way into Marisen's office, and closed the door behind her.

As he walked back to the lunchroom, Keb had completely forgotten about the fantasy pulp, the brine and soy lunch, and pretty much everything else.  all he could wrap his mind around were those words that he had heard, or felt, or hallucinated so strongly as he had taken Alice's hand in greeting...

"She is here for me."  

It was only after he sat down at his desk and leafed through several pages of his journal did he realize that he had never told her his name.

--

Keb's Apartment Hillside New Jersey Aug 24, 2022 10:23PM

"Okay, so you hear this voice say 'she is here for me'..." Umber said, wide eyed. "And you think... what?  that she's your soul mate or some such?  Dude, that is some corny shit."

"I don't know what to think, frankly."  Keb said sullenly.  "Hearing voices is a symptom of schizophrenia.  That seems more likely, maybe from sleep deprivation."

"Or maybe you're just fucking nuts."  Umber stated flatly.  "Doesn't make you a bad person."

"Well, we've both known for a long time that I'm nuts, but that's REALLY nuts."  Keb said.  "There is the unrelated detail of her knowing my name.  That's been puzzling me."

"Fact that this Alice chick knew your name can be explained any of a dozen ways; name tag, placard on desk, simple previous inquiry..."

"I figured as much, " Keb interrupted.  "So i asked her about it later, after Olsa introduced us formally."

"What'd she say?  That she's been stalking you for your man parts?"

"Yup. And that i should poison your next meal with a live culture of dysentery."

Umber laughed, though Keb was only half joking.

"So what happens next?  Olsa invites you in for a quick menage and friendly hand of canasta or what?"  Umber joked.

"I just went back to the lab and sat there with my head in my hands."  Keb said, not remembering those next moments or days very clearly.  "minutes, hours, days later...I don't know, I wasn't thinking clearly, I heard Olsa's door open and them exchange niceties as Alice left, but I didn't see her again for several days.  I went in to talk to Olsa to see how the job interview went, or that's what I thought at the time..."

***

Alice; (cont.)

The meadow was as ever, warm deep green and moist brown, with flashes of reds and purples, streaks of yellows and orange dotting the expanse.  Today though was overcast, not the distant wash of blue that normally greeted Alice.  Today, the sky was layers of wandering cool grays, with drapes of sunlight peeling through, illuminating clusters of mist and rain which embraced the dream place within the little girl's sleeping mind.

Together on the little hill swell by the big tree, little Alice, now 8, had questions for the old woman with the flowing silver hair lying next to her, both their face's glowing moisture as they looked to the sky.

"Ga?"  Alice said quietly, breaking a long silence.

"Yes, my love?"

"Are you God?"

"I don't know.  What is God?" The old woman asked sincerely after a moment, turning her head toward her friend/sister/daughter.

"You don't know what God is?"  Alice said incredulously.  "That's crazy!  God is the guy that made the universe n animals n stuff."

"Hmm...well then, first, I'm not a guy, and second, i help the universe n animals n stuff but i didn't make the universe n animals n stuff,  so i don't think I'm the God."

"But you talk to everything and can make stuff happen and even bugs listen to you, an you change from a little girl to a old lady, like now...and your name even sounds like God...Ga---Aaadd...see?"

Ga appeared to Alice sometimes as the bouncing ball of energy with flaming red hair past her buttocks, and other times as the old woman, whose sparkling silver hair seemed to reach throughout the entire meadow, weaving and wending itself into the ground like roots made of water. Now, because little Alice needed her friend-mother, not her friend-sister, this was how Ga appeared.  Alice was not aware yet that it was all her own need that called on Ga in her different forms, at least that was the now.  As Alice grew and learned, Ga would begin to move to other needs through Alice, those of the world...this was as much due to Alice's own desire to heal a sick world as it was Ga's task to care for that which she called her other home; Earth.

"Ga is short for Gaia, my love, not Gaaaaaddd."  Ga made a funny face as she imitated her friend-daughter, which made Alice giggle.

"Gaia?  Really?  That's so pretty!  Why didn't you tell me before? Meany."  Alice mock frowned and crossed her arms dramatically.

"You gave me that name yourself little flower, when you were a someone else.  I thought you already knew."

"When i was a someone else?"  Alice questioned intently, as she sat up and leaned on her elbow.  "I don't get it."

"You have been a someone else many many times, my love."  Ga explained.  "When your body can't hold you anymore you dance with me into another.  It is the saddest most beautiful dance."

To Ga, everything was a dance;  Life, experience, motion...everything.  Aua were comprised of light and moved by using the photo-force to attach to passing photons, so they were in a state of constant motion, redirection and speed that no human mind might comprehend.  It was truly the grandest of dances.

The dance of a complex soul reincarnating to another was not only joined by the Auan symbiote, it was engineered by it.

"Wow.  why is it sad though?"  Alice asked, imagining herself, her real self, flying through the air holding Ga's hand as they swirled and laughed into another body, like hurtling down a water-slide into a pristine pool of transparent blue.

"...Because I have to say goodbye to a you..."  Ga said, almost inaudibly, as she closed her eyes to allow the salty pools to drain down her cheeks with the misty rain.

Though little Alice was 8 years old in Earth years, to Gaia, her human host had just been reborn, and she remembered every detail of her previous incarnation and the love she had lost when she died.  It had been a glorious dance.

"Are you crying, Ga?"  Alice had never seen her friend-sister-mother ever cry before.  She had never even seen her sad.  "Now I'm sad, too.  you don't have to cry, Ga, I'm right here."

Alice wrapped her arms around Ga's midsection and rested her head on her chest.

"I see you, My Love."  Ga put her hand to Alice's droplet pocked golden hair and ran a finger through it.  "I cry joy and sadness.  my joy is a new you and a new dance, my sadness is the goodbye and our old dance.  So you see, it's both.  all things in the dance are both sadness and joy."

"All things?"  Alice asked, propping her head up with her chin on Ga's midsection and looking into her gleaming, golden eyes.

"All."

"I love to dance."  Alice rested her head back on it's side and closed her eyes.

"I know you do, my love, and yours is my greatest joy."

***

Keb knew Olsana as well as anyone he had ever worked with.  They were not the closest friends, but neither were they distant associates.   They had met years before as students at a physics seminar and had impressed each other with their common politics, intellect, and humor, but their strongest bond was that they both wanted to save the world.  Keb through physics and mathematics, and Olsana as a healer, ultimately.  She was a medical doctor and a tenured biology professor, as well as being a published author, and occasionally even a guest on some major market morning talk shows which required intelligent remittance of the science of healing.   Her daily toils now included pursuing her passions as the division head of the Hoboken facility of Research Operations Center, or ROC.  

It was Olsana who was responsible for Keb's employment at ROC.  There had been an opening in the lab for a number cruncher, and though Keb wasn't the big boss' first choice, Olsana had convinced him by showing the CEO, Edge Silver, a paper Keb wrote called 'Applied Temporal Mechanics and the Resolution of Irrational Numbers.'  The work itself hadn't been given much credit in general academic circles but there was something to it that was different, Olsana thought, something magic.  She felt strongly enough about it that she was willing to put her reputation on the line.  Additionally, she felt sorry for Keb.

--

Research Operations Center Newark, New Jersey April 3, 2004 3:26PM

"I know he's an oddball, Edgar..."  Olsana urged

"Edge, please.  My mother calls me Edgar."  Her boss reminded her, looking at his notes on Keb Snydaar.  "and Oddball is a nice way of saying he's mentally ill.  He has been remitted to institutions twice.  I'm assuming you are aware of this."

Olsana got up from her seat and stood over Dr. Silver's sterile brushed steel platform he used as a desk and leaned toward him, so as to add impact to her next carefully chosen words.

"He's a fucking genius."

Once Edgar George Silverman, now Edge Silver, Chief Executive/Operations Officer of Research Operations Center, liked smart people very much.  To he, all people were tools, and the best tools were usually worth the extra cost.

"Okay, Dr. Marisen, i will have Ms. Silverman call him in for an interview..."

"You mean your daughter?"  Olsana relaxed her posture at the agreeable resolution.

"Yes, my daughter, my secretary, now please go away before you decide to chastise me for nepotism."

Dr. Silver pressed a button on his intercom.

"Ms. Silverman?"

"Yes Daddy?"

Dr. Silver sighed and closed his eyes in slight exasperation.

"Ms. Silverman, please call Dr. Snydaar in for an interview.  Dr. Marisen will give you the number as she's leaving.  Now."  Edge Silver glared at Olsana Marisen as his subordinate prepared herself to leave.  She was smiling.

--

Research Operations Center Hoboken, New Jersey Aug 12, 2022 12:47PM

The walk back to Dr. Marisen's office wasn't a long one, but today it seemed like a journey.  Keb waited 15 minutes after hearing Alice leave before getting up from his chair to make way to question his friend and colleague about the meeting between the two.  He didn't want to appear anxious, and also didn't know what would he say to Olsana to mask his true motivation.  "Should I admit to having auditory hallucinations?"  He thought.  "Maybe that some spiritual messenger is speaking to me about this young girl?  she'll tell me to go home and sleep for 3 days and not come back until i wasn't seeing floating mandalas in my peripheral vision."  Olsana and Keb had discussed his pattern of deprivation on more than a few occasions, She having a similar difficulty in her own personal life; that being insomnia.  

The light tapping on Olsana Marisen's door echoed in Keb's head, and for a moment he forgot that it was he that was knocking.  

"Come in, damn it!"  The long time occupant of the largest office in the facility screamed through the closed, smoked glass door, loud enough to make everyone in the outer areas and adjoining small lab freeze.

"Is the volume really necessary, Olsa?"  Keb said, slightly annoyed, placing his index finger in his ear as he opened her door.

"I yelled three times for you to come in, deaf goofball."  Olsana said loudly, with some level of exasperation.  "Each time louder than the last, while you stood there like a zombie.  I swear, i think you're drooling."  

Keb stared at Olsana distantly.

"What is wrong with you today, Keb?  You really seem out of it all of a sudden."  Olsana said, concern replacing her edge of frustration.  "Are you coming down with something?  If so, you need to go home before you get us all sick."

"No. Not sick."  He said in the doorway.  

Upon entering Keb sat down on the large antique chair, as always, that Olsana Marisen kept toward the side of her voluminous desk. Her workspace was decorated with a menagerie of distractions; there was what appeared to be an entire set of miniature cartoon sculptures holding placards touting the strengths of her gender, which was one of her many rallying calls, and there were little plastic goats of every shape, size, and construction standing sentry on staggered piles of paper, texts and notebooks, as if they were part of a mountainous diorama.

However, the most telling and potent aspect of Olsana Marisen's immediate periphery were the pictures of men.  They were everywhere.  Small pictures, large pictures, black men, brown men, white men, golden men,; the only common denominator that any observer might notice was that they were all either naked or half-naked.  Keb mostly just ignored the pictures, having grown inured to Olsana's wanton and overt display's of man worship, and only occasionally commented on any new material that she had decided to add to her shrine.

"Aren't you concerned with sexual harassment issues?" He had asked her once, years ago.

"Should i be?  does any of this stuff really offend you?"  She had said, with serious demeanor.  "Doesn't seem to bother anyone else or I'd take it down. Just say the word and I'll pack up my fella's, though i suspect that you're just a little jealous of mister January...Officer abs.  ooooh yummy!"

"No, it doesn't bother me a bit,"  Keb had chuckled.  "But i can't help thinking that you're opening yourself up to some misery somewhere along the line."

"I appreciate your concern, Dr. Prudenchaste, but i hide all my guys whenever an outsider enters my lair."  she had said happily, and that had ended the conversation then and forever more.  To know and love Olsana was to know and accept that part of her.

Sitting in the cozy, ornately quilted chair, Keb lost himself in it's soft embrace, it's well-worn cushions and comforting smell of musty, decades old upholstery.   Breathing deeply the reminder of times past at family reunions, Keb realized that he was again in the midst of a silent reverie, which to many he indulged in too frequently, and remembered suddenly why he came in to see Olsana.

"I didn't know you were looking for help."  Keb said nonchalantly, looking at his nail-bitten fingers.  He had decided that an indirect tact would be the path of least humiliation.

"I'm not."  Olsana said.  "If you're talking about the young lady that just left, Alice, she was referred to me by a friend."

"Medical consult?"  Keb asked, now sympathetically concerned with the welfare of a woman he didn't even know.

"In a way....wait a sec."  Olsana said, grinning widely, and she slapped her palm to the desk top, making several little goats tumble from their paper perches.  "You like her.  Dirty old man."

Keb just stared at Olsana, not even able to muster the energy necessary to show indignation.

"That's okay, Keb.  happens to the best of us."  She said, smiling at her friend and colleague.

"Implying that I am not among the best of us?"  He said, weakly, thinking his best defense here would have to be a change of direction.

"You know what i mean, goofy.  Don't try to change the subject."

One of Keb's great frustrations in life was a general disability to hide his feelings, a natural weakness exacerbated by an annoying and substantial mood disorder.  "You wear your heart on your sleeve."  His father would tell him, trying to coach his difficult son through times of upheaval.  "People see right through you.  It's a good thing you have a conscience or we'd all be in trouble."

"Yea, she's pretty." Keb said reluctantly, knowing the hopelessness of trying to maintain any subterfuge with someone who knew him well.

"Right."  Olsana smirked.  "She's a Viking Princess! And don't even try to tell me your jaw didn't hit the floor when you saw her.  You can't fool me.  But anyway, too bad for you, she has a boyfriend."

This didn't surprise Keb but he still could not suppress the sudden sinking feeling, like a ball of ice in his gut.

"What's her story?"  he said, attempting to move quickly past the quick-sand of his emotions.

"Well, funny you should take an interest, because i was going to ask you to come in on this one, anyway."  Olsana said, becoming suddenly serious.

Keb instinctively leaned forward, as Dr. Marisen's voice always dropped several decibels when she was on task, though the soft cushions of the chair didn't make it easy for him.

"Ok..."  Keb said reflexively, as Olsana leaned back in her own custom, ergonomic chair, which looked not unlike a pilot's ejector seat in a modern jet fighter, pressed her finger tips together and shared with him the story of the girl she had offhandedly referred to as their very own Viking Princess, named Alice.

Keb listened intently while Olsana went over the details of Alice's visit; how she had been through a revolving door of councilors, analysts, and psychiatrists, to try and cope with what Olsana referred to as AHSD, or Acute Hyper-Sensitivity Disorder.  He had never heard of it before, but Olsana didn't seem to see it as just another pigeon-holing psychiatric device to further partition gifted people away from the rest of the world, so who was he to doubt the diagnosis.

Eventually, and fortunately for Alice, she met a Psychiatrist named Dr. Shane Michaelson, a brilliant individual who placed patient care and treatment above all else.  Dr. Michaelson was a professional associate of Dr. Marisen, as they frequented parallel academic circles, social and professional, and he had Olsana's utmost respect. The good doctor relayed to Olsana that it had taken him several sessions (a dozen or so, in fact) with Alice to get her to feel comfortable, but they together had managed to navigate her trust issues and were able to proceed toward treatment.

***

Offices of Dr. Shane Michaelson Philadelphia, PA. July 3, 2022 2:12PM

Dr. Michaelson had listened to Alice talk about her childhood and schooling, adolescence and her difficult passage to womanhood, and finally to the present, whereas she revealed to him, at least as much as she wanted him to know, her true reason for seeking help.  Though she had endured a childhood and life which presented any of a host of valid reasons for her anxiety and depression; various abuses, abandonment et al. she noted with assurance, however, the primary source was external...a feeling of impending doom that was going beyond distraction, and it had nothing to do with her own troubled upbringing.  

She also revealed to Dr. Michaelson, as opportunity dictated, that one special secret she had been keeping since the age of 4.  The promise to Ga.

"Don't tell anyone about our bond, My Love."  Ga had asked her, trapping Alice in their innocent bond.  However, Ga had also given her a key to this prison, as all secrets were prisons to Alice.  

"How will I know, Ga?"  

"The little frog will lead you, My Love."

Dr. Michaelson had a tiny crystal frog on his desk.  It was the first thing Alice noticed about his office and ultimately why she allowed herself to open up to him.

When Alice revealed to the doctor the truth, that she felt that the world was talking to her, and that it had always talked to her; through Gaia, and messages in the sound of wind passing through trees, in the presence and behavior of animals or their sign, even in the weather.

"I know what you're thinking."  Alice said to Dr. Michaelson during this, another of their extended sessions.  "That I'm suffering some form of delusion.  Maybe you think I'm bipolar or even schizophrenic, i don't know."

"I didn't say that."  He said, staring at her intently while chewing the end of his pencil.

"What else would you think?  If our positions were reversed that's for sure what i would be thinking."  She said, smiling slightly.  "That bitch has bats in her belfry!  But that's okay.  You can think whatever you please, i don't mind."

Alice then went on to detail to Dr. Michaelson why she felt as she did, referencing specifics of her dreams, the meadow, Gaia and associations in her real life; signs and events and how she had interpreted, acted, and interacted as a result.

On this day that she outlined these things to him, these closely guarded intimacies and personal skeletons, Dr. Michaelson became a different man.  Not because of what Alice had said to him, but because of what she would show him.  Shane Michaelson had been practicing psychiatric medicine for 7 years.  Before that he spent 4 years as an ER Surgeon, and before that, 9 years a resident of Jacob Kurtzberg Memorial Hospital.  In the 20 years he had been immersed in these various aspects of his profession, he had seen and heard just about everything.  or so he thought.

"I know you don't believe me."  Alice said, looking out the window at a crow sitting proudly atop a sparsely populated tree.

"About what?"  the Doctor had said, feigning ignorance.  "I believe everything you tell me."

"You believe that the Earth speaks to me?"  Alice dared him, with eyebrow cocked.

"Well...I believe that you are earnest in your belief."  Dr Michaelson offered diplomatically.  "But, do I believe that what you are experiencing is actually the Earth talking to you? That might take some convincing."

"Okay.  May I open the window?"  Alice asked politely, getting up from the good doctor's tasteful patient couch.

"You're not going to jump because of what i just said, are you?"  he said.  "We're on the first floor."

"No, Doctor." Alice laughed.  "I wouldn't be so selfish as to negatively affect your future livelihood.  Besides, who you do you see more interesting than me, hmm?"

Dr. Michaelson laughed as Alice gracefully moved to the window, and taking a moment to familiarize herself with the locking mechanism, proceeded to release the window from it's brass constraint and lifted the bottom pane, which revealed a light screen on the other side.  Fortunately, it was not permanently secured to the outer window and could be opened in the same manner.  Were it not for this simple detail, she might have been unable to change the doctors stance on her metaphysical sensitivities, and he might have remained as he was; a brilliant, accomplished and ultimately unenlightened man.  

Alice would change the last of these forever.

She hated to show off, it made her feel uncomfortable and vain.  However, some instances required a little something extra; some showmanship.  This was one of those cases.

After opening the Doctor's window and it's adjacent screen, Alice moved to the couch and sat down again, smoothing her long, flowing skirt under her so as to not let it bunch and wrinkle.  She then looked at Dr. Michaelson, smiled softly, placed her hands together on her lap and closed her eyes.

The Doctor said nothing.  He knew her well enough to see that she was preparing to communicate something to him, maybe something distressing, and that these periodic silences were her small retreats to regroup and steady herself.

The brief vacuum of silence lasted only a moment, as a large crow, not coincidentally the one that Alice had been watching a moment earlier, accompanied by a gust of wind from it's large, iridescent ebony wings, flew in the open window and, scattering mail and unmoored post-it notes, landed on Dr. Michaelson's desk.

The bird took a step forward, stared Dr. Michaelson in his eye, cocked it's head sideways, and abruptly took the small crystal sculpture of the little frog in its beak.  The frog had been gifted to Dr. Michaelson by his staff, 4 birthdays past.  he loved it.

The aggressive avian then took a side step back, ruffled it's feathers, and flew out the open window, crystal frog in beak, past a smiling young girl who was watching a silent and jaw agape Dr. Shane Michaelson.

The room was motionless for several seconds.

"Okay... that was crazy."  The Doctor said, finally recovering his senses.  "I...I loved that frog.  Am I to believe that you did that somehow?"

"Well, if I answer 'yes," Alice said thoughtfully,  "...then you would have to either take me at my word, and accept that the Earth Mother, Gaia and I really do communicate, or consider the possibility that i own a trained crow and set this up somehow.  I'm guessing that that's exactly what's going through your head right now."

Alice had impressed Dr. Michaelson many times; with her intelligence, passion for learning, humanity, and humor.  Occasionally she even intimidated him, something few people could accomplish, with only the force of her spirit and goodness.  This was another of those times, whereas she seemed to be looking right at his brain through the eye sockets of his skull.

"Or I suppose you would have to include the possibility of coincidence."  Dr Michaelson said, though he didn't believe that for a second.

"Would you like it back?"  Alice asked, coyly.

"You mean the frog?  um...yes."  He returned cautiously.

Alice again slowly shut her eyes, softly inhaled slow and deep, and placed her hands together on her lap.  and she smiled.

In a second rush of wind and disarray of unmoored papers being jostled about, the crow returned, and also for the second time, landed on Dr. Michaelson's desk.

The crow looked at the tall, dark man sitting at the desk, blinked to clear it's glowing onyx eyes, and dropped a medium sized pine-cone to rest precisely where the crystal frog had been.  It then ruffled indignantly, took two steps in a semi-circle to face Alice, cawed loudly, and flew off through the open window; perhaps to go look at it's new frog sculpture.

Alice laughed harder than Dr. Shane Michaelson had seen before, and maybe even more than the doctor thought her capable of.

"Nice pine cone."  she said, chuckling.

"Where's my frog?"  He said boyishly, staring at the pine cone and fully in a haze of confusion. This was not a state of mind in which Shane Michaelson was often found.

"I asked him nicely to return it, but i guess he likes it and doesn't want to give it back."  Alice smiled and sighed.  "However, in crow-land apparently, that is a mighty fine pine cone and a fair trade."

That was all the convincing Dr. Michaelson had needed.

The two occupants of the comfortable and very civilized office sat in silence, both listening to their own inner voices.

They jointly determined that day that there would be no standard treatment, drugs, or really anything within the normal confines of accepted Western medicine that might help Alice with her unsettling feelings of the dark and imminent.  Dr. Michaelson was now compelled to accept the possibility that these feelings of Alice's might be more than could be explained through existing prejudices. Terms like 'prophesy' and 'oracle' danced mockingly in his head, pointing fingers at his smug self-assurance and cynicism.

"I need to make a call."  He said, quickly deciding his plan of action.

He would need tests; MRi, CT, maybe even a nuclear WBC scan.  Also, extensive monitoring and cataloging of Alice's abilities would have to be scheduled.  There was only one place that he knew of that had both the resources and the 'out-of-the-box' thinking necessary to take on this project.

Dr. Michaelson picked up the handset of his desk phone, cycled through a list of numerical entries on the small LED display of the base unit and dialed.

"Hello, Olsa? It's Shane.  We need to talk."

<a name=10212017>***</a>

Research Operations Center Hoboken, New Jersey Aug 12, 2022 1:28PM

Olsana waited to gauge Keb's reaction to what she had told him.  She wasn't sure if she believed it herself, having to suspend her disbelief due to the source of the information, and she was unsure how her colleague might react.

Dr. Shane Michaelson was not one to be taken lightly, surely, and Keb was aware of the psychiatrist's reputation but had no personal knowledge of him whatsoever.

"What do you think?"  Olsana urged, watching him intently.

"The Crow, The Crystal Frog, and The Pinecone."  Keb said absently, staring at his fingers.  "Sounds like CS Lewis.  I think Michaelson is ingesting psilocybin."

"He was serious as a heart attack on the phone, Keb."  Olsana continued.  "He wouldn't call me if he thought this was a normal circumstance.  He knows the kind of work we do here."

"What does he think we can do?"  Keb wondered out loud.  "Sounds like a job for spiritualists, not a think tank."

"Do you think i would just accept what anyone tells me without clarifying the feasibility and dynamics in my own mind?"  Olsana chastised.  "There is no one on the planet whose psychological evaluation I value more than Shane's, and he says there is more to this...to her...than meets the eye.  This is as much about the source of the information as the information itself."

"C'mon, Olsa... you really think she talks to trees?  hmm..."  Keb said, then moments after remembered that he had heard something too, when they first met.  Might they be related?  Keb's mind began to crunch commonalities and possibilities.

"I think that you should talk to Alice.  Devise some simple test so you can see for yourself if her condition warrants our particular mojo."  Olsana smiled.  "If you'd rather I can get someone else to pick this up."

Keb couldn't help but smile himself, knowing Olsana was teasing him with her takeaway.

"I'll do it, of course."  Keb agreed.

"Of course.  I'll have Tammy set up a meeting for you and Alice to get acquainted."  Olsana smiled back, referring to Tammy Silverman, Edge's daughter and company secretary.  "Just let me know when you have some free time and an idea of how you'll test her."

"I already know how to proceed.  It won't be difficult to gauge her claims of tree talking."  Keb said, having devised a simple test in his mind moments after the problem presented itself.  "And Time?  Well, that I have plenty of."

--

Keb's Apartment Hillside, New Jersey Aug 19, 2022 7:18AM

On the day of their first scheduled meeting, Keb woke up an hour early, unable to keep his eyes closed.  He only slept 3 hours the night before but still felt energized.  Today he would see Alice again.  He was nervous, certainly, but also intrigued at the prospect of delving into her situation.

"She's a tree talker."  He mused to his reflection while shaving, and let his mind run wild at the applications.  

If she communicates with trees, he thought, then trees must have some level of intelligence, and if so, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that all plant life had intelligence as well.  He then considered the symbiotic relationship between plant and animal organisms, and perhaps the commonality there, or a level of communication that had never been considered before.  Keb Snydaar was not a biologist.  His academic strengths were purely mathematical and related to basic atomic structure.  Living organisms were chemical and chemistry was not his forte.  Chemistry was sloppy and inexact, he thought.  Fickle.

Normally Keb didn't give much thought to his attire, as long as he was comfortable, but today he wanted to make a good impression.  he picked out his best form fitting jeans, the worn Levi 501s, and a button down shirt that he had ironed the evening before.  he considered wearing a necktie even, but reconsidered, as he thought it might seem a bit much.  They were going to go for a walk in the woods, and business casual in woods would just make him stand out as an uncomfortable and detached individual.  He laughed to himself that the truth hurts, that he was the poster child for uncomfortable and detached, but advertising it was even more socially inept than being so.

He looked himself up and down in the door length mirror of his cluttered room, and satisfied that he would not be the subject of disapproving stares, made his way toward whatever fate, destiny and dumb luck might make present in his path.  Before making contact with the doorknob he patted his pockets to ensure he had migrated his entire walking inventory to these pants and ran through his mental checklist of needed accessories; notebook, writing implement...coffee??

How had he forgotten coffee?  He would have to stop somewhere and buy some.

"idiot idiot idiot"  Keb chastised himself out loud for this simple oversight.  Now he would have to deal with this anomaly; stopping somewhere for coffee, and all the associated little anxieties that would accompany it.  

He ran through the event in his mind, anticipating the extra traffic in the turn lane he would encounter, the uncomfortable tapering of distance between himself and another patron going in the front door, the imminent choice he would have to make between a fresh pot of medium brew, or a slightly burnt and older pot of dark brew, the eye contact and connection with the store clerk...

He had to forcefully stop himself by shaking his head, or he might stay frozen like this for minutes...and sometimes those minutes turned to hours.  He pictured Alice as he had first seen her, extending her hand to him and smiling, then he took a deep breath and made his out.

***

Alice's Apartment. Maplewood, New Jersey Aug 19, 2022 7:45AM

"Wake up, My Love."  

Alice smiled as she heard those familiar words, somewhere between the last dream and now...

"Today we have important things to do."

"Okay, I'm up Ga..."  She said lazily, adoring the warmth of her comforter and familiar smells of morning, then stretching her arms outward and yawning.

"What's a Ga?"  

Alice started, but only internally, the sole betrayal her eyes sudden opening and full awareness.  She immediately took stock of her surroundings.  The white and volume of her own bedding, the smell of lavender and cinnamon in the air, the musk and warmth of male body and the contour of the person next to her.  She was home.

"Mornin' sleepy dreamer."  The figure beside her said, and leaned toward her face and mouth.

"Mornin' yourself handsome."  Alice replied, turning her head away from his advance.  "Breath..."

"I brushed my teeth a few minutes ago."

"Not yours, mine."  Alice propped her upper half to sitting and eyed her bedmate approvingly.  "Do I smell coffee?"

"You do.  I'll go get you some."  Her companion leapt athletically to his feet and eager to show off his kind deference and barista skill both, scurried off to his immediate task.

"He's such a good boy," Alice thought to herself.  "I think I'll keep him."

Alice decided to take advantage of these minutes and closed her eyes to melt into the meadow, but only for a moment.

"Good morning, My Love."

Gaia was waiting for Alice, kneeling beside her as she opened her eyes.  She was her middle self, though more young than old; her hair was almost entirely bright amber, with a single streak of silver running it's entirety into the ground.  She was stroking Alice's golden hair and humming softly.

"Was that you who woke me up?"  Alice asked immediately.

"Well, i can't take all the credit, now can I?"  

"Did you speak to me from here? or..."  Alice asked, needing some clarification on what had transpired as she woke.  Never before had she confused a person, any person, with Ga.  She wasn't sure who she had heard first, Ga or...

"...Sully.  I spoke to you with his voice."  Ga admitted, referring to Alice's love, Sully Robertson.  

"I didn't even know you could do that."  Alice said nervously.  "It's kind of creepy."

"I'm sorry My Love.  I do not dance with the thought of speaking with another's voice.  I only spoke for a moment and was gone."

"I understand Ga.  I haven't forgotten."  Alice said, softly.  "The Dak Aua is coming..."

"...and we have work to do."  Both Ga and Alice said simultaneously.

<a name="10262017">--</a>

Research Operations Center Hoboken, New Jersey Aug 19, 2022 9:28AM

The air was thick with moisture, having rained earlier in the morning, and there were still small pools scattered about and roof edges and trees still slowly dripped.  The drive to work had been slow, and with the extra stop for coffee already weighing on Keb's mind he would on any other day have already reached his personal tolerance for delay.  Today, however, he took it all in stride, his mind racing in several directions at once.  How would she look?  He thought.  "Will she be upset with me for trying to debunk her mythos?  Will she like my jeans?  What if she's a fraud?  What if she's not a fraud?..."

The last of these questions weighed heaviest on his mind.  Alice had already seemingly convinced two highly intelligent professionals of her ... odd ... sensitivities.  What would he do if...? this was always the toughest question, with everything.  So many possibilities, so many wildcards, so many outcomes.  Too many to fully digest, he thought.  Baby steps.

As Keb pulled into his parking spot, the one incorrectly marked for Dr. Snyder, he saw Alice get out of her car and walk towards the front entrance.  He could've gotten out immediately and gotten her attention with a friendly 'Good Morning!' but he opted for the path of least anxiety, as had become his instinct.  He needed some moments to prepare to say hello; he couldn't just approach her in the parking lot.  could he?  So he just sat and watched.

He watched as she motivated herself forward, noting that her elbows stuck out when she moved at a brisk pace, and her wide braid bouncing between her shoulder blades as she walked.  He wondered if it bothered her, the persistent pattern of contact.  She wore loose fitting sweat pants and a wind breaker over a simple printed white t-shirt.  Keb thought she looked like someone going on a gambling junket to Mississippi.

He watched as she stopped by a tree and looked up, and waved hello to a small bird.  He half expected to see it land on her finger and accompany Alice in a song.

Having satisfied her need to interact with her new friend, the sparrow, Alice made her way into the modest looking glass and concrete facility, and seeing this, Keb proceeded to exit his car and walked along the elegantly landscaped path into the building.  As he passed the small birch tree where Alice had her brief commune, he heard a single staccato *chirp, and looking up, saw Alice's friend.

"Hello bird."  Keb said, noticing a small black and orange spot on it's left side.  

*chirp*  The bird repeated itself, staring at Keb from the safety of it's elevated perch.

"Really?  She said that about me?"  Keb played.  "Wow, she must think I'm pretty awesome, huh?"

The sparrow ruffled it's feathers and turned away.

"Guess not."  Keb mock frowned.  "But there's always hope, right bird?  What's that?  I need to accomplish something with my life?  Then maybe she'll come around?  Well, you do make a valid point... Hmm, I'll have to think on your words of clarity..."

"Oh, he's just impatient.  Sparrows are the most impatient of all birds, I think.  Well, maybe seagulls.  But sparrows are definitely up there."

Keb jumped sideways as he heard Alice speak as if she had miraculously appeared beside him.  It was fortunate for him that today he  insured his coffee lid was securely capped.

"I'm sorry for startling you."  Alice chuckled.  "I just got here myself.  I forgot something in my car."

"S'ok."  Keb wondered how she had moved so quietly, and how much she had heard.  Would she know he was talking about her?  

"How are you this morning?"  He tested.

"Stressed!"  Alice said immediately.  "Holy shit, I can't believe how people drive around here!  I saw half a dozen near misses on the turnpike this morning.  I'm amazed that anyone here in New Jersey manages to get where they're going alive."

Keb laughed at Alice's irritated and somewhat profane commentary.  It was unexpected.  He imagined her to be a 'one with the universe' type of individual, one that let things roll off her back.  Apparently, like Keb himself, she suffered to some extent the same irritation at the general lack of compassion and empathy one see's on a daily basis in these United States, especially when driving.

"Where I'm from, people may be a bit crazy too, but they at least have some semblance of regard for other motorists."

"Well, I'm glad we both made it safely, regardless."  Keb said, wanting to go inside and prepare for their appointment with the wood.

"I know, right?  I'll meet you inside, i just need to grab something from my car."

"Okay."  Keb said, walking.  "I just have to check in with Dr. Marisen and let her know I'm here."

*chirp*

"The bird says to 'say hi' for him."  Alice said, seriously.

"Really?"  Keb said, stopping suddenly and looking back at her.

"No."  Alice grinned, showing her perfect teeth.  "Gotcha!"

Alice laughed cheerily as she strutted back to her car, elbows out.  

Keb stared at her as she walked, his mind on her femininity, contour, and grace.  He stopped himself before his thoughts naturally migrated to sexuality.  That wouldn't be fair to her or to Research Ops.  Keb already understood how his emotional state might negatively affect this or any other academic process; were he to add to that the constant pressure of intimate appetites, well...chances are that Alice would leave prematurely and Keb would be the cause, an undesirable outcome.

He shook his head slightly, as much from habit as to clear unwanted thoughts, and walked through the nondescript entrance to Research Operations Center, Hoboken.

The facility was alive with motion and the sounds and smells of industry and had been for several hours.  There were technicians scurrying to and fro with burdens of tools, and expedience, administrative personnel carrying coffee and conversation, deliverymen with clip-boards and looks of impatience, and construction workers laboring against gravity and restraint.  It was a busy day, but every day was a busy day here at Research Ops.  Private sector folks didn't have the luxury of living on their own clock, as Universities and Government facilities often did.  Money only appeared with expectation, not charity, and expectation only appeared with potential, progress, and results.  That was what mattered to Edge Silver, and he would not tolerate anything but 'asses and elbows' in motion.

"Good morning Olsa."  Keb said earnestly to his friend, colleague, and supervisor, who was sitting in a resin chair at one of the utility tables in the foyer, drinking coffee and reviewing a progress report.

"Well, good morning to you, sunshine!  Big day today!"  She replied enthusiastically.  "You ready?"

"As ready as ever, I suppose."

"You don't sound very enthusiastic.  Something bothering you?"

"Not really.  Just same shit as ever, I guess."  Keb said.  "Wondering where this stuff with Alice will lead, is all.  I mean, if Alice is what we think she may be, then the world is a different place to what we've all been taught.  Everything changes.  And if she's not..."

"...then Alice is mentally ill, or a fraud."  Olsana said seriously, completing Keb's thought.

"...and Occam's Razor suggests that the likelihood is the latter of those scenarios,"  He continued.  "...and that makes me sad."

"Would make us all sad.  Waste of time, and resources.  Speak of the devil!"  Olsana said abruptly, as much a greeting as a warning to Keb that Alice was in earshot.  "Good morning sunshine!"

"Good morning to you!"  Alice said as she walked into the foyer, matching Olsana's positivity and cheer.  "I'm all set to go talk to trees for you."

Olsana laughed.  Keb just stared, unsure if Alice was joking or not.

"Here, I packed some stuff for you guys that I'm pretty sure Keb overlooked."  Olsana retrieved a small grocery sack made of canvas from under the table.  "Water, first aid kit, Swiss army knife, insect repellent, snacks..."

"This is an experiment, Olsana, not a picnic..."  Keb said, immediately sorry that he did.

"What's wrong with a little picnic?"  Alice quickly joined, rescuing Keb from his own impulsive negativity.  "All work and no play makes Keb a dull boy."

"That's what I'm sayin'!"  Olsana bellowed.  "Now you two skedaddle, and don't come back 'til the sandwiches are eaten.  Here Alice, you drive.  I already signed out a company ride for you two.  The Beast!"

Olsana handed Alice a ring of car keys with a large ROC fob on it.

"Okay..."  Alice said reluctantly, looking at Keb to gauge his reaction, who had an unreadable expression, other than his normal look of seeming to be in pain.  "The Beast?"

"Keb hates to drive."  Olsana explained for him.  "Besides, I don't think he can handle the sheer force of 'The Beast'... Girl Power!"

Olsana raised her fist in the air, and there were several echoes of her sentiment to be heard throughout the immediate environment, including  applause and vocal support.  In her realm, and this facility was indeed her realm, Olsana fostered not only a place of safety for female workers, but a place of power.

"I'm not so sure I can handle The Beast, either."  Alice remarked, looking again to gauge Keb's reaction.

Keb rolled his eyes.

"The Beast is a two seat electric car.  The engine was converted from a power screwdriver, i think."  Keb said.

"So, The Beast is an herbivore then?"  Alice joked, making both Olsana and Keb laugh.  Taking the laughter as a cue, Olsana bid the two good luck and sent them on their way.

As they walked together quietly out of the building, Alice's mind was distracted by the thought of comfort she got when she made Keb laugh.  And maybe she felt something else, something more than just comfort?  She would have to ask Ga, she thought.

The drive to Hacklebarney State Park, which took approximately 45 minutes, gave Keb and Alice a little time to get personally acquainted.  They spoke about their hometowns and schooling, and Research Operations Center, Edge Silver, and Olsana, and learned that they had several common passions.  They both loved coffee, music, and art, but more importantly, they found that they genuinely liked each other.  Alice was surprised to learn that Keb had a sense of humor, and had made her laugh several times on the ride.  Keb was compelled by Alice's intelligence, the way she phrased things, her rational insights and morality.

"Do you want some insect repellent?  Still wet outside from the rain.  Gonna be skeeters."  Keb offered, as he searched through the canvas bag of supplies.

"No thank you.  I don't use pesticides."

"Ever?"  Keb asked, surprised.  "What if you get ants or roaches in your house?"

"I don't."  Alice said.  "I keep a clean house, thank you very much."

Though Alice spoke truthfully, it wasn't merely her attention to orderliness and cleanliness that kept pests at bay, it was Gaia.

Gaia's constituent particles, Auton's they would soon be dubbed, at varying levels of concentration were in every living thing on Earth; every insect, every bird, every plant.  She, and others like her, was the connection between all things organic.  She was why a mass of hundreds and thousands of Starlings flew together as if of a single mind, and why massive schools of Herring danced as if all to the same music.  They were as one, through Gaia.

Gaia did not actively or consciously control all living organisms, but she was present, nudging here and prodding there.  She could control her own parts, her autons, as precisely as a human could manipulate their own fingers, massing them together to focus light energy and heat at nano tolerances, delicately arranging them to manipulate the color dance, and even using them to capture and vector clusters of electrons.  Control was not part of her dance, though.  On an evolutionary scale she was more sculptor or potter, than a maker or packager of clay, but the ability to control was viable and potent, if largely ignored.

"...and the skeeters?"  Keb prodded.

"I'm not sure if I've ever been bitten by a mosquito, frankly."  Alice said, thoughtfully.  "Or by any bug, come to think of it."

"Bee sting?"

"Nope."

"Fire ant?"

"Nope."

Keb stared at Alice for far longer than he normally would have felt comfortable with.  He was scanning her for her emotional state, looking for any signs that she was at any level full of shit.  He didn't see any.  All her could read on her was sincerity and... good.  He searched internally for a better word.  Good was subjective, he knew, and could be sourced from many of a thousand places, the most common including upbringing, personal tragedy, and current economic perspective, all malleable and externally coerced.  But as he stared, he wondered if maybe he was wrong, if maybe there was a quantifiable, consistent and polar quality called 'good,' and Alice was that.

"You think I'm full of shit."  Alice stated flatly, eyes remaining focused on the surrounding traffic that loomed over the small automobile that whined it's frustration at maximum occupancy and minimum thrust.

"I believe you, though what you're telling me is naturally anomalous, unless you live in a bubble."

"But you believe me."  She repeated, turning her attention to look in Keb's eyes.

Keb saw in her eyes everything he had thought previously, but more and unexpectedly he saw her need for him to believe her.  It displayed a vulnerability he had not seen in her before, a very real softness.  He saw her hurt and got just a tiny taste of her damage, and he loved her for it.

"She is here for me."  He remembers.

His mind drifted to that moment he touched her.  Sometimes, when he mentally floated and let the delusion ride unfettered he believed it meant she would love him.  However, even when within the easy embrace of fantasy his brain wouldn't allow for simple, easy answers.  Maybe the message was not focused on him, he thought, but on her.  maybe it was she who needed help and he would necessarily provide it.  

Someone of mystic experience had long ago told him that there were two types of greatness; the glory of kings and the poetry of king makers.  According to his tarot profile and the pseudo-calculus of numerology, he was to be the latter of these, only.  A fun detail he liked to remind himself of from time to time.  

"I'm glad you believe me Keb."  Alice said, turning her attention back to the road and breaking him free of his passenger-induced hypnosis.  

"OH YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!!"  She yelled suddenly, hitting the brakes to avoid a collision with an aggressive motorist in a pickup truck who had decided that small electric cars were unworthy of consideration and a place on the common roadway.

"Fucking pricks in pickup trucks, I tell you."  Alice continued railing, shaking her head.  "I wonder if a person that buys a pickup is already an asshole or if the vehicle itself makes them a dick."

"Well, I imagine that the power of the pickup's V8 catalyzes an aggressiveness that is already present in the driver," Keb said thoughtfully, "And that this is exacerbated by the driver's relative elevation."

Alice turned to Keb and stared.

"You said fuck.  twice."  He added quietly, staring off to the right, smiling.

Keb expected her to laugh but instead was dismayed that she became apologetic.

"I'm sorry if my cussing bothers you..."  She began

"PUH-leese!"  Keb interrupted.  "I was kidding.  You can scream obscenities at the moon all day if you need to, I don't mind.  I read a study that indicated people that use profanity regularly are significantly more likely to display loyalty and compassion in their everyday lives."

"Fuckin' ay."  Alice smiled.  "Hey, there's a sign for the park.  We made it in one piece.  Yay!"

--

Hacklebarney State Park Morris County, New Jersey Aug 19, 2022 10:43AM

As Alice pulled into the park driveway they mutually decided that a spot with a charging station situated close to a bathroom would be best for all purposes, and found a suitable location quickly.  It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week so there were many open spots, for parking and all other park related activities.  This pleased both of them, as another of their common preferences was to avoid crowds of people whenever possible.  For Alice, this meant quiet, which was her sanctum.  For Keb, it meant a slight reprieve from heightened anxiety, which increased as his elbow space lessened.

As they got out of the small car Alice stared at the line of trees that wrapped around their location interrupted by several small paths, wooden handrails and small utility sheds.  She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, then smiled and put her arms out as if greeting the world, which she was.

"Hello My Love!"  She said to the sky and surrounding life, then wrapped her arms around her shoulders in a self-embrace.

Keb watched silently and noted that the breeze changed as she spoke, creating music in the tree line, and several movements came into his peripheral vision.  Where moments before he saw only a sparsely populated public park, now he noted the erratic path of butterflies, swallowtails, he remembered, and dragonflies, dozens of them, hovering and darting looking for mosquitos to torment and devour.  and Birds, chirping and creating havoc in the branches.  Had they been making that much noise before?  He wasn't sure but it seemed that the ambient noise increased noticeably in relation to their being there.  Or, Keb corrected himself, to Alice being there.

He chastised himself for not thinking of audio concerns regarding the experiment.  Stupid arrogant idiot, he kicked himself, realizing that he did not take this experiment seriously enough, even though he had convinced himself otherwise.

"I should've brought a recorder and a condenser mic."  Keb said out loud, completing his internal dialog.

"Maybe next time."  Alice chirped, her mood clearly elevated at her surroundings, even though she was in a fine mood already.

"Isn't it glorious!"  Alice spread her arms out, as if to showcase the horizon to him.  "Keb, I would like to formally introduce you to Mama."

"Hello Mama."  Keb said, smiling, though he didn't know who he was smiling at.

<a name=10272017>--</a>

Alice leaned into the car and retrieved her carry bag, a cotton tie-dyed sack with brightly colored patches of flowers and peace signs sewn on, shouldered it, and smiled brightly.

"I'm ready."  She chimed, as she reached into her bag and pulled out an old Konica single lens reflex camera and set the strap around her neck.  "Lead on McDuff."

"What's the camera for?"  Keb asked innocently.

Alice stared blankly at him, blinking once.

"It's for taking pictures."  She said after a moment, her tone matching her look of mild condescension.  

Keb laughed so suddenly that he snorted, breaking Alice's facade of mock disbelief, and she laughed too.  Keb didn't notice but when she laughed, the entire landscaped reacted, growing slightly brighter, greener.

"C'mon Keb, let's go this way."  Alice decided to take the lead, waving him to follow.  She could feel Keb's anxiety, and it was her natural way to address discomfort in others, she didn't consciously think about it.  She would be the lantern carrier.

Alice had been diagnosed by the esteemed Dr. Michaelson as 'suffering' Acute Hyper-Sensitivity Disorder.  Upon reading this in her ROC report, Keb equated this to being a clinical quantification for an individual that had empathy.  That was what Western medicine had deemed as a detriment.  To he, the absurdity of this was almost comical.

Keb had reflected for long hours on the behavior of humanity; what makes us different from non-sentient life forms, and the simplest answer that he could arrive at was empathy and compassion.  These were the qualities least present in the behavior of all forms we consider non-sentient.  Life itself doesn't give a shit one way or another, he thought.  We make the choice to alter the currents and tides of life and give form to hope and self-evolution, and only those who Feel can willfully provide this to others.  

A person that cannot sense the suffering and need of another is not a vital organism.  It is sole and parasitic by nature.  One that can feel the suffering and need of another, yet chooses to ignore that need, or worse, manipulate it to add to their own mass, displays simple animal behavior and is flaccid in their ability to alter the flow to support and grow the system.

Only the one that can sense the need of another, and make the choice to address this need without the machination of adding to their own mass may be defined as sentient.  Sentience is not truly about being self-aware, he thought...it is about being out-of-self aware.

Keb didn't know it, but the very thing he defined as the sole common property of higher intelligence, empathy, was the very reason Gaia had been drawn to Alice.  Her great empathy, this diagnosed sensitivity disorder, was the most beautiful dance Gaia had ever seen.  The way  Alice's nervous system lit up with electrical activity in response to the dance of other living organisms was, to Ga, an oasis of organic sensation.  When Ga merged with Alice it was like she was born herself into Alice's consciousness and it's wonder.

"I think you make a better McDuff, anyway."  Keb said absently, adjusting his own burden on his shoulder and following dutifully, surveying his immediate path for obstacles.

"You sayin' I'm Butch?"  Alice teased.

"Sayin' you kick ass."

"I wish."  Alice laughed.  She had in the past been made to feel powerless at the hands of certain people, and still experienced some level of frustration at what she perceived of as a lack of physical potency.  She sometimes had to remind herself that her potency, her own magic, was very real and very unique.

As they walked, Alice leading by a few paces, she told Keb the story of Ga.  It was an intimate sharing for her, a vulnerability displayed, but she was in the woods now, among the trees, her Temple, and she recognized him now as a kind, gentle soul.  Damaged, certainly, she thought, but still she felt safe here with him.  A person's damage gives them defining texture and contour, and to she, there was little art in those with no damage.

"What do you think Gaia is, physically?"  Keb asked, making notes as they walked.

"Light."

"What makes you say that?"

"I can feel her in the sunlight.  When her rays touch me it feels like when you're in a room with someone you love.  You're not touching them, just sitting together, but you know they're there."

"Do you feel her in artificial light?"

"Yes and no.  Not really the same, like she's only partly there, physically."  Alice said, touching leaves as she walked by them as if they were her children's hands.  "But she's always there mentally.  Though now that i think of it, she's more vital, more animated in sunlight."

Keb wrote furiously as she spoke, and cursed as his pen raked dry across the notepad.  

"Aw crap!"  He spat.  "I hate pens that don't work!"

"Careful with throwing that word around."  Alice chastised.  "Don't waste such potent energy on something so trivial.  There are a great many things one may disdain, but hatred? Well, that's a self-applied pollution that befouls the entire body."

"Shakespeare?"

"HA! Alicespeare."  Alice giggled.  "But thank you.  Maybe I should write a play."

"What would you write about?"  Keb asked, genuinely interested.

"Hmmm..."  She thought.  "I think I'd write about finding yourself, about each person following their true path, whatever that is.  and computers."

"Computers?"

"I love computers. What can I say, deep down I'm a geek."  Alice shrugged acceptance.

"Really?  That's neat."  Keb complimented.

"Why, 'cause I'm a girl?"

"No, because your passion seems to be in art and music.  Loving tech is an entirely different animal."

"Yeah, I'm a bit hippy, and a bit metal too."  Alice admitted thoughtfully, somewhat pleased with her self-definition.

--

As they walked Keb began to notice small movements around Alice, though each time he trained his focus on the source he could see nothing that might have moved.  He wondered if he was having sleep deprivation hallucinations; little sparks and flutters in his peripheral vision, though he felt fine.  He was suddenly glad that Alice had taken point as he was able to survey her interaction with, and affect on the green, which would have been otherwise impossible had he been in front.

The more he watched and focused on her movements and the contour of her surroundings, he began to see what had triggered his motion sense; micro movements of the plant life around her.  At first he thought it was tactile, that Alice had touched the branch or frond to cause it to move, but he never saw the actual contact.  Just ahead Keb spied a tall thick tuft of saw grass which was bordering their path.  Alice would have to walk right past it, he thought.  Keb trained his sight on the grassy mass and as Alice glided past, he saw the movement; saw each frond move slightly toward her and follow her as she made her way past it.  He again cursed himself, a long habit of his, for his lack of foresight.

"I'm so fucking stupid.  I should've brought a high-speed camera.  We could see these motor responses in great detail in super slomo."

"Motor responses?"  Alice asked over her left shoulder.

"The plants are moving with you as you walk past."  Keb replied.  "I wasn't sure at first; thought it might be the wind or you touching them, or me seeing things, but now I'm certain."

"I was wondering when you would notice."  Alice smiled, as she raised her arms out to her sides and gracefully spun in a pirouette.

"Truthfully, I think I've seen enough to warrant the next phase."

Alice stopped, and frowning, turned to face her walking companion.

"Already?  Don't you want to see me 'talk to the trees?'"  Alice made air quotes.  "I thought that was the whole point."

"The point of this excursion was to find justification for a full investigation into your abilities, and I've already seen something I'd never thought possible; a plant interacting with a specific human being."  Keb said, feeling somewhat numb at this first revelation of new science.

"I don't have any abilities, not really."  Alice said matter of factly.  "It's Gaia.  She makes the plants move, not me."

"I disagree.  Olsana told me about your meeting with Michaelson."  Keb explained.  "I didn't know what to think about it...until now.  If you have the ability to communicate a need to Gaia, as Olsana indicated you did with the crow summoning, and she then addresses that need through some physical manipulation of mass or energy, as in providing a conduit between yourself and the crow, then you're incorrect.  You not only have abilities, but if you are the only one who has this bond with Gaia, you may be the single most potent person on the planet."

"Oh, pish."  Alice said dismissively, waving her hand at him.  Her nature would not allow her to fully accept what she knew deep down in her heart to be true, that she was a Goddess, or at the very least, an Angel.

"I'm not exaggerating even a bit."  Keb said.  "Frankly, I may actually be in some subtle form of shock, because this is some mind blowing shit, and my mind is a blank.  This is all new."

"Well, it's not new to me,"  Alice smiled warmly,  "...And certainly not to Ga.  Besides, we haven't even had lunch.  Olsa said not to come back until the sandwiches were eaten."

"True enough. However, all food gets eaten, regardless."  Keb dead-panned.  "She didn't say we had to be the ones that ate it."

"I don't think she was referring to ants or bacteria.  We are finding a place to sit and eat, mister."  Alice commanded, hands on her hips.  "I'm not driving back with you until you eat and don't have that look on your face like someone's poking you with needles."

"Do I really look like that?"

"HOT needles."

"Well, at least they're sterile."  Keb attempted a weak smile, and though his feelings were a bit hurt, he didn't disagree a bit.

"C'mon."  Alice said, no longer willing to waste energy negotiating.  "Follow me."

She didn't wait for a reply, and spinning on her heel, elbows out, made her way to a dry looking spot she had eyed minutes earlier; or maybe something told her to choose it.  She wasn't sure.

Alice found the clearing that spoke to her, and knowing Keb had followed (without any indication, verbal or otherwise), she spun again and pointed to the ground at her immediate left.

"Here."  Alice said with a maternal glare, which Keb didn't consider challenging for even a moment.

He immediately rustled through the supply bag and produced a red and white plaid tablecloth, which he draped across the general section of grass she had pointed to.

"How lovely, and so rustic."  Alice said happily.  "Olsa thinks of everything."

"Well, she didn't think of a ground cover large enough for the two of us to sit on."  Keb said, scratching his chin.  "This will, however, create a plane separating the food from the ants, so no complaints."

"She probably imagined us eating at a picnic table."  Alice offered.

"We can do that if you like."

"Actually, I prefer the ground, if you don't mind."  Alice returned, remembering all the times she had said that exact phrase in her life, in response to several different topics; transportation, sleeping arrangements, et al.

As a small child she often opted to sneak outside and sleep on the grass. This particular eccentricity especially enraged her mother, who was already a volatile that required little spark to ignite.  Alice now, as an adult, sometimes had to resist the urge to lay out on the grass at night, simply because it wasn't safe for any young woman to be outside alone.

"Nope, don't mind a bit."  Keb agreed.

Keb continued to root through the large canvas sack, finally producing paper plates, plastic flatware, napkins, plastic utility containers which held cold potato and slaw salads, and two sandwiches of unknown quantity.  He handed the materials to a sitting Alice, who placed them carefully in their proper configuration.

Order was a high priority to Alice.  She painstakingly manipulated any space she would be forced to inhabit for any length of time, whether it was the place setting at a diner or her own office and living space.  Everything had it's place and usefulness, and if it didn't meet both criteria, it was gone.

Unsatisfied that he had found all that he would need at this lunching, Keb continued to scan the contents while lowering himself to sitting, and did not see the stick he would sit on.  It was small enough to be missed, yet large enough and contoured to provide a nice goose.

"Careful."  Alice said, seeing the unfolding milieu before her.

Keb looked quickly beneath him as he sat, and seeing the obstruction, attempted to catch himself by shifting his left leg. This however, did not produce the expected results.  As he unknowingly planted his left foot on a still moist leaf, his leg skated out from under him and Keb flew backward and landed flat on his back, creating a moderate 'thud'.

"Oh my!"  Alice exclaimed.  "Are you okay?"

Keb laid still for a moment and stared at the sky, performing a brief internal inventory for physical damage.

"Yeah."  He said, still staring skyward.  "Least I didn't sit on that stick.  Thank you for not laughing."

"I'm really sor..."  Alice began to apologize, feeling somewhat responsible for Keb's immediate posture, but couldn't contain herself.

"HAHAHAHA..."  Alice began laughing.  "I'm sorry, but that was really funny...HAHAHA..."

"I didn't drop the bag."  Keb said innocently, smiling stupidly to the sky.  This made Alice laugh even harder.

Alice continued laughing, tears streaming down her face, while Keb propped himself to sitting.  He watched her and saw that she laughed with her whole face, with joy and release.  He didn't know it yet, but Keb would think back on this scene often in the years to come, concluding it to be the moment he fell in love with her.

When she finally gained some control, a difficult proposition when the giggles set in, she again apologized for what she considered an  immature display, made worse because it was at someone else's expense.

"I read an interesting little piece that made a correlation between comedy and tragedy, stating essentially that all things are tragedy; Comedy is simply someone else's."  Keb commented, while unwrapping a sandwich.

"If that's so, then all things are comedy too.  Just depends on your perspective."

"Unless the tragedy is universal."  Keb said, making a face at his untoward discovery of beets on his sandwich.  "If it happens to all of us, who's left to laugh at it?"

Suddenly Alice's expression changed.  Her sparkling golden rimmed green eyes averted to the ground and her brows furrowed, her smile becoming a grimace as she chewed on her lower lip.  Keb noticed immediately.

"What's wrong?  Did I say something?"  He said, plucking blood red disks from his lunch, worried that he had caused her some issue.

"No.  Well, yeah, you said many something's, but it's not you."

"Okay, I'm listening."  Keb prodded, eyeing the red stains on his bread with disdain.  "And wondering who puts beets on a sandwich?"

"I'm not ready to talk about this yet.  I'm sorry."  Alice said, wrapping her arms around her knees as she sat.  

"Beets are okay."  She forced a smile.

Keb didn't understand exactly what had happened but he was fairly certain that he had catalyzed it with his commentary on comedy and tragedy.  Did she shut down at the memory of some personal trauma or is it more?  He wondered.

"I'm here to listen.  About the beet thing, I mean."  Keb smiled.

He wanted to tell her that she could trust him, but stopped himself, knowing what flaccid commentary that would be to someone that didn't know him.  

Anyone can offer trust, he thought, and they often do, yet fall far from grace when the event horizon is reached.  A contract of trust is manifest in silence.  It is anonymous and unheralded by nature, and it is rare.  He could not ask for her trust, he might only earn it. And that he would do by silently honoring her.

--

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