#nor do lots of parents actually explain connections between content of the book and the irl versions a child sees

[nozomijoestar]

Typical to see as I read some assigned essays for school that people in the U. S. have always been fucking stupid by and large about treating their children with any respect to the point it actually hurt their literacy skills

[emmys-grimoire]

Lesson 52 analysis + 53 predictions

Turning this into a routine thing now! They’re fun to write and they’re popular (moreso than my actual commentary posts lmao).

Y’all like my ramblings.

Things guessed correctly from prior lesson

The House of Lamentation was an illusion produced by the fairies

The arc culminated in the completion of the Trial of Patience (star received via Simeon)

The illusion did a number on Simeon's feelings as well due to his fondness for Lucifer and the brothers

They shoved Mammon and Luke off to the side and plopped them back in only after the Satan/Simeon arc was complete. There was no arc for Luke. To be fair, though, they did get more content than I expected even so.

Things guessed wrong

The banshee didn't show up at all. It was a red herring.

There was no significance to the geranium found in the mysterious book

Our adventure also completed the Trial of Generosity. (I incorrectly attributed this to Diavolo, who actually gave us the Star of Gratitude)

Still ???

Whether or not there is some kind of transfer of memories/experiences going on between the brothers' past selves and present selves due to our meddling in time. We've confirmed that past angel Beelzebub has turned into a glutton in between the time we last saw him and now, but we haven't confirmed if it *is* our meddling that has induced that. Currently, no change has manifested in the present brothers, nor has the timeline of events seemed to have significantly changed.

Whether or not present Lucifer becoming more "angelic" in season 2, in lieu of past angel Lucifer's growing doubt, will be a significant plot point. The parallels are getting stronger, though. (This is elaborated on further down)

It feels like 50/50? I’ll probably keep a list like this going for future analysis/prediction posts just so I can keep track of how right/mistaken I am throughout the playthrough. Might help me make less mistakes in my analysis!

As a general rule I try not to meander too far off into symbolism or out-of-game lore because what I write begins to sound like this:

And this is an otome game that is light on writing and plot. Nine times out of ten, it’s not going to be that deep. So I work with the details given and the plot points shown and try to draw connections within the framework of the story, in an attempt to try to deduce where the devs are taking the plot. Unfortunately for me, the devs like red herrings, and red herrings are designed to mislead you. With me, they are quite successful! I’d like to get better at spotting them.

The book was consequential -- it’s used to imprison Satan later -- but that’s the end of it’s meaning. Maybe the Bible verse had something to do with it, too -- those were some weird ass numbers to just throw in the title -- but maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. 

But enough of that, onwards! We have a lot of points to go over that may be interesting to note, right or not.

Satan the Memory Thief

Back in 50-B we learn that it was Michael who taught the brothers the stories behind the human world constellations. 

When we’re tossed back in time-dreamland (?) again, it is Satan who takes the opportunity to teach the brothers the human world constellations. The room had just been remodeled: Michael hasn’t had the opportunity to give them tours yet. Lucifer mosied into the room so he and the brothers can get the first glimpse.

Sooo if in a future lesson we ask them about where they learned the constellations in the present timeline and they say “oh a guy named Sully, who suspiciously looked just like Satan, taught us!” then we know our meddling is having significant consequences.

It IS worth noting that unlike the prior dream sequence, Satan and Simeon remember what they just went through. This particular time-dream could very well just be an illusion meant to give Satan/Simeon some kind of emotional resolution and nothing else. This is kind of why I hate that they’re bring time travel back into the story: it makes stuff like this confusing and borderline inconsistent. Some sequences may have effects and others may not. 

The chat between Lucifer and Simeon could also be consequential.

“Do you *really* mean that?”

There is a parallel at play here!

After you wake up after dozing off, you go off to find Lucifer and Simeon conversing in a forest clearing, evidently unaware that you’re eavesdropping on them. Simeon says although he knows it is just an illusion, that he was glad to see angel Lucy once more. Angel Lucy is predictably confused, and reassures Simeon that they’ll remain like this forever.

Simeon, of course, knows better. He tells Lucifer that he knows he’s been meeting with Diavolo and he’s having doubts about his place in the Celestial Realm -- and if things really will remain the same. Lucy is caught off guard, and starts to explain with some clear hesitation... and of course we pass out before we could hear his answer.

There’s creepy loud heartbeats when it fades out. Normally I associate them with tense, pivotal decisions -- but it could also just be related to us waking up and returning to reality.

If Simeon ends up being wrong -- and there will be real world consequences to this conversation -- they could be very significant consequences. We’re not sure if the conversation continues for a bit longer after we pass out, but Simeon already woke up before we come to.

Obviously the brothers still fell (they’re still demons in the present), but I wouldn’t underestimate the potential of a butterfly effect changing the circumstances of the Great Celestial War. I kind of hope they don’t do that, though, because they haven’t even begun to explain the present details of that event. We know only the broad strokes. Suddenly changing them to make the resolution between the demons and angels more smooth will feel really forced.

And that parallel I mentioned: Diavolo expresses similar worries and doubt in Lucifer’s conviction in season 2.

I have no doubt Lucifer actually means what he says to Diavolo, unlike his dialogue with Simeon, but Diavolo is aware of just how far Lucifer will go for the sake of his family -- and he’s probably #2 on the priority list, when push comes to shove. Lucifer forsaking the Celestial Realm for Lilith was the thing that brought him to Diavolo in the first place.

Of course, this lesson has Simeon suggesting that Diavolo’s influence on Lucifer was significant prior to all that unfolding, and it may have eventually happened regardless. It was only a matter of when, not how.

Still, Lucifer be writing checks he may not be able to cash. We also get this foreboding warning from Barbatos in Season 2:

As I’ve said before, the inevitable conflict the story was hinting to at this point doesn’t happen in Season 2. Lucifer isn’t forced to make a choice like this. The Night Dagger didn’t demand it.

I’ve also expressed my belief that Season 2 and Season 3 were likely written back-to-back due to the small window of time between their releases, so I believe details overlooked in Season 2 may suddenly become more relevant in Season 3.

It’s worth remembering Diavolo’s growing feelings for MC -- and Lucifer’s inner conflict about it -- were hinted at early in Season 2, as well. It doesn’t really get going until the conclusion of Season 2, leading into Season 3.

Do I have any clue of what this is actually leading up to? Not at all! If it mirrors Season 2′s format, though, it’ll suddenly come to a head in the last 3-5 lessons. I remember feeling equally clueless then, and Season 2 had a lot more foreshadowing...

... a lot of which actually didn’t pan out! But it might now. 

Guardian Angels

Another smaller, but interesting detail. Guardian Angels are indeed a thing.

I think they’re gonna become a thing soon. The devs very sneakily changed a small detail in Season 2, suggesting they might have realized that it may interfere with their plans for later seasons. 

Old version.

New version.

I’m thinking they may have decided giving Michael guardianship of an entire swath of the population was cheating, and they may be individualizing the role of Guardian Angels.

Which leads me to who I think Michael’s chosen human squeeze is:

My man has been scoping him out long before we came around.

It makes sense, too. We know Michael gave his Ring of Wisdom to Solomon, which seems to have kickstarted his career as a demon-pacting sorcerer (though he clearly was a sorcerer before this).

This is a very powerful item, described as the Ring of Light’s counterpart, that would be very useful for a high-ranking angel to possess. I don’t think Michael would fork it over to just anyone, particularly when we remember how he felt compelled to interrogate us via dream hi-jack before the Ring of Light fully came into our possession.

Solomon also makes Michael angst in a way a well-meaning but misbehaving child would make their parent angst:

Solomon also really doesn’t seem to regard Michael like some distant, all-powerful alien being who could smite him out of existence.

Contrast this with how he responds when he’s forced to hang out with Diavolo for a day (he gets more comfortable, but he initially wants to punt the responsibility back to Lucifer ASAP).

And he knows a surprising amount of small details about the guy:

I think Solomon is a significant part of Michael’s long-term plans, but he may not even be fully aware of how. Or he is, and they’re in some kind of mutually beneficial agreement -- possibly related to cross-realm peace -- that we simply haven’t been made aware of yet.

Personally, I think Simeon should be made MC’s ‘official’ Guardian Angel if they’re gonna be a thing with official mechanics behind them. I know Michael is supposed to be the Big Cheese and ridiculously hot, so it may make sense to have him linked to the MC of an otome game because they’re super special too, but Michael may already have Solomon. He shouldn’t get to hog everything. It’s not like assigning Simeon to do job would really inconvenience him, either: MC is Solomon’s apprentice. He can easily work with the arrangement.

Luke may feel left out but he’s a kid so...

Seven Brothers Constellation

We learn there’s a constellation representing the brothers in the Celestial Realm. Everyone there knows the legend, but Luke doesn’t know what the three stars ‘watching over them’ represent. 

He, Mammon, and Satan begin to theorize and Satan suggests they may represent the three realms. The other two like the idea, and Mammon insists the ‘human’ star represents MC. 

He’s probably right, but I’m willing to take it a step further: it represents MC, Diavolo, and Michael. The three “guardians” of their respective realms, and the brothers. Season 3 has been repeatedly beating us over the head with how much Michael still cares for the brothers and his relevance to their upbringing, and likely their future.

It bears repeating: Diavolo and Michael are aiming towards the same goal, though their visions of what peace and harmony looks like may be very different.

Solomon could also qualify as a self-appointed guardian, but I think he lacks the connection to the brothers MC obviously has.

Still, he has the same resolve, and he’s not leaving the story any time soon.

Predictions

I sniff out even the smallest Michael details because he’s clearly the key to whatever is gonna blow up.

This might give us some insight on how the initial dealings with him may unfold:

It’s hard to deduce just what this actually means. Either Michael tends to overthink things that just aren’t that deep (can empathize) and that in itself leads to needless complications, or he’s apt to misread situations and as a result gives poor advice. Or a combination of both.

My initial read on him makes me think that he thinks the best of humans/angels but the worst of demons. He is very, very complimentary towards MC as soon as they start answering his questions.

Am I now? Really?

It could just be the game making characters butter up the MC to make the game more enjoyable for the player of a self-insert character, but dude we just met.

When you tell him you did what you did out of love for Lucifer:

That’s a very telling pause/ellipsis. It’s like his brain momentarily short-circuits and he needs to regain his composure before he continues, and he still doesn’t sound entirely sure of what you just said lol

He also just outright admits he initially thought you must be wicked just because the brothers liked you, and this is a guy who is still fond of them himself. I think he’s having a very hard time with it.

So the inevitable bumps in the roads ahead with him will likely be a result of this, and/or his dad being an asshole. Neither he or Diavolo are actually in charge of the realms they’re overseeing -- they’re both de facto leaders -- so maybe the parents will suddenly barge in and try to knock over their sand castles for whatever reason. It is kind of weird that the exchange program has been agreed to in the first place, particularly on the Celestial Realm’s part.

Regardless, I have no clue what the next arc will be. I know we still have three trials left, but they could combine two again to leave more room for the actual storyline to progress. The climax is going to be the last trial of our sorcerer’s exam, or something happening afterwards. Not sure which one I’m willing to bet on yet: I remember Simeon’s play and the silly Blood Moon contest in Season 2 were what kept use preoccupied for Season 2 until SUDDENLY LUCIFER GETS AMNESIA AND THE WORLD IS IN DANGER AND WE HAVE TO STAB HIM TO SAVE EVERYONE. But they did heavily foreshadow that in the very beginning lol. They just didn’t fill in the blanks until much later.

I wonder what the trial of chastity is gonna be like and how hard we’ll actually fail and the game will need to overcompensate for that

[sneakerdoodle]

I was going to release this as a long video essay but devices and software had conspired against me and eventually drained my patience, so here it is in the written form. My magnum opus. My 15 pages long analysis of the three Infinity Train seasons currently out. 

1. Introduction

So for starters, I watched Infinity Train way too late, only a few weeks before the release of Book 3. And it immediately gave me MANY many thoughts, head full... Needless to say, when the first 5 episodes of Book 3 were released I was HYPED. So hyped that, being on a vacation out in the countryside, with better connection only availble upon climbing a nearby hill, I made some. sacrifices. To get there after dark, when everyone else was sound asleep.

[id: two screenshots of separate discord messages by someone with a handle “fern”, one reading “ also i decided to not risk bothering people/dogs by opening the gate, so i jumped the swamp instead, except i didn’t actually cover it, my foot got stuck, i barely saved my shoe, and i need to do that again to get back bc i am locked out”, another reading “well” with a photo of a person’s legs covered in black dirst from feet to knees. end id]

And by the rules of friendly bullying, I am now destined to have that night haunt me forever. Naturally.

[id:discord chat search results for the word ”swamp” (38 results found), cropped so that a part of one message is readable, saying “... KNOW it was the SWAMP that embraced ME, not the other way around”, another (by someone with a handle “Fleur” saying “you already DID embrace a swamp”. end id]

[id: a message from the same person saying “he asks ‘how was your swamp’”. end id]

[id: a message from the same person saying “big words coming from mx. soggy feet” with an angry red overlay. end id]

And, well. The first two Books had left me with a sense of assuredness, the underlying motif of them appearing empowering and infinitely comforting, and I was excited to get another supporting pillar in season 3. Another story to turn to in time of need to remind me that I have the power to make my life a better one, that it is never too late to make something of where I am. And, well, it's not that Book 3 didn't continue the topic of personal choice and growth, but the story it told added... let's say, more weight to the idea of personal development. 

That is perhaps only natural: narratives need to grow, to develop, to take the themes explored in them further, deeper with every coil of the spiral. And a more, grave, exploration of them will only bring them closer to life. But in the aftermath of Book 3 I had to deal with a certain sense of powerlessness, not being able to fit it into a neat system, put it on a shelf in a shiny frame of witty analysis and call it a day. But, quite ironically, I believe that this exact feeling of unending change and death of comfort is the exact thing the show wants us to get comfortable with. And that's what I want to talk about here. Infinity Train's core narrative of an individual versus the wrold, individual versus change. The very concept of personhood, the relationship between the person and their environment and the way to approach it that is shown as perhaps the most productive. 

I’ll start with my Many Thoughts on the first two books to explain what I thought was the underlying message of both of them.

2. Book 1: The Perennial Child and the Unproducitve Protagonist Complex

Book 1 establishes the core elements of the narrative wonderfully, the writing is smooth, effortless, beautiful and takes you on a wonderul, deeply impactful and bittersweet emotional ride. We have Tulip, The Perennial Child herself, who has to renegotiate her relationship with the world, with life, change, and other people's power to bring said change. Tulip is also to learn true connection and make peace with its price.

The narrower narrative of a story centered around a divorce is a perfect gateway into a broader one, so let's explore the specifics of the foremer first. Tulip's mindset is the mindset of a child from a dysfunctional family. The notion of blame is very strong in her perception of the world. On one hand, she sufferes from a misplaced sense of responsibility for the way things are, as she admits in her conversation with One One. That is the most natural for someone who grew up in an unstable environment, with parents whose relationship was not harmonic and healthy.  A child caught in the middle of adults' anger and argumments internalizes that anger and those arguments as something having to do with them. And that's what we see Tulip go through, with her having to listen to her parents fight because of her needs. 

[id: a screenshot from Infinity Train Book 1 showing younger Tulip, a read-headed girl, sitting between her two parents upset as her father is telling something to her mother angrily. end id]

Tulip also has to step in as a caregiver to a suffering adult, tucking her dad in at night; the dialogue emphasizes that their usual roles are being reversed in that situation. Growing up in the middle of constant conflicts, having to provide care and comfort and stability to someone who was supposed to take care of her, had naturally resulted in a  deeply ingrained painful perception that Tulip is the one responsible for her environment, is the one to blame when it is “broken”, and is the one who should step up and fix it, make it right.

Then, on the other hand, there is the notion of blame Tulip puts on others, specifically her parents. Here, we see the same mindset but reversed: Tulip feels caught in the middle of their divorce and demands that they make it right, make it work, for her sake. She needs her family, she needs stability, she needs her parents to work out their schedules, she needs to get to the game design camp. And she is prone to seeing her parents as people who are cruelly destroying her life and her family for no apparent reason. 

I am not calling her entitled, of course; ideally, stability is exactly what parents need to provide their children with. That is their mission. And when they fail, it is more than natural for children to feel hurt and betrayed. In a way, they are. Tulip's agony over her parents' divorce is never mocked nor undermined in the show, either; it is shown with the deepest compassion. So this is not so much about calling her feeligns invalid, but about looking for ways to redefine the situation in a way that would help Tulip heal. The way out of her  agony seems to be to abandon the mindset that puts her at the center of her family life – and at the center of the world, in general. Things are not that simple; people have reasons for behaving the way that they do outside of how it affects her; and avoiding and rejecting that truth hurts her, first and foremost. Feeling like the center of the universe isn't so much selfish or arrogant or toxic; it's just painful, and Tulip needs to step out of it, for her own sake.

[id: screenshot from Infinity Train Book 1 showing the two adults from before, Tulip’s parents, with exaggerated demonic features, surrounded by flames. end id]

An important thing to discuss is that the notion of “blame” can only exist if there is indeed something wrong with the world. Let's go back to Tulip's defining conversation with One One, in which she gets to say some incredibly important words: “It's not your fault the car is this way.There isn't a fault, it just is.”. “No fault” can mean “no one to blame” as much as “there is actually nothing wrong with the world”. The words “It just is” carry this simple and raw reality check that forces us to accept the way things are, with no emotional withdrawal or avoidance of it. 

The world simply is the way it is, and even if the way it is hurts us, it doesn't mean that what hurts us is wrong. 

I would like to suggest that the Unfinished Car itself, the residents of which continue adapting to their unconventional reality and genuinely thriving in it through acceptance and flexibility, are here to emphasize that. We may not like the way things are, but that doesn't mean we should go looking for someone to blame and force to “fix” them, be out ourselves and others. We shouldn't ferociously attack what hurts us with wrenches, kicking and screaming and tyring to get it to Work Already. Sometimes the only thing we can do is to accept the reality of it, let go, and see what we ourselves can do to feel happy and content in the present circumstances.

Making peace with the way the world is, renouncing responsibility for it outside of her personal decisions, is exactly what Tulip gets to learn on the train. Being half-abducted by it during a time when Amelia has taken over and no one is there to give a nice welcoming message with specific instructions, Tulip is deeply distraught by the mysteries surrounding her, and infinitely frustrated by her seeming inability to 'logic' her way through the challenges. She boards the train as a girl whose main need is to create a semblance of control over her environment, through understanding it. 

[id: two shots of Tulip’s sketchbook where she is tryng to figure out train’s puzzles. end id]

She is at the center of the universe, she is responsible for the way things are, and it is up to her to figure them out.

That is a lone, individualistic journey of a single person who only wants to deal with their own life, their own problems, and Tulip does not welcome any companions at the beginnig of it. It makes sense for her to seek solitude: she feels overwhelmingly responsible for her own little personal world, just how unbearable would it be to let it merge with other people's lives, for her to suddenly be at fault when those she cares about are hurt? Not to mention that new people are new unknowns, new factors that can make her life harder, more confusing and painful. For a person stuck in her desperate desire for control, it makes a lot of sense to prefer to deal with her problems on her own and expect others to do the same.

Meeting One One, who is the first to care, and Atticus, who is there to dispense his pearls of wisdom about the resources we find in each other, the value of friendship and its ultimate worth in the face of responsibility and risk of loss that comes with it, is what helps Tulip find comfort and humility in her relationship with others. She is simply one of the many people influencing each other's lives; she is not at the center, not at fault for the pain that comes to others, even if they were hurt through their association with her; it was their chocie to lend her a hand or a paw, and they had the right to make that choice.

Similar humility of being just one of the many is found in Tulip's relationship with the world at large, too, shown through her relationship with the train. First, she is frustrated and impatient, trying to figure out the most rational logical way to proceed in her attempts to control what happens to her next. Then, as she finds joy and connection, things become easier, she finds a rhythm that works for her, as seen at the start of “The Ball Pit Car”. And then soon after that, in swoops Amelia, ready to wreck havoc and quench Tulip's progress by trying to kill one of her friends and turning the other into a monster, and pinning it all on her. 

Losing Atticus is far too big of a blow, and so Tulip gives up her lessons and falls into fatalism, feeling like she has no control over her fate, like she will never be allowed to make it off the train.

But the core component of Tulip's character is her ability to “bounce back”. She loses her progress quite tangibly, with the number going up – and yet reverses that development rapidly, when she gives it all another try and subsequently learns the truth about Amelia. Finding out that the current self-appointed conductor who has been terrorizing cars and threatening Tulip and her friends is just a person, Tulip asks a very important quesiton: “What's stopping me from doing what she did?”. She stops interpreting her surroundings as alien, hostile and created to act against her, in weird incomprehensible ways that seem to be mocking her attempts to find a shred of logic to them. Instead, she takes full control of her own actions and starts using her environment to her own benefits, much like Amelia did. But Tulip takes it a step further and approaches it in a healthier fashion. Where Amelia is desperately trying to make the world do her bidding, Tulip states a simple objecitve: help her friend, - and looks at her options.

Tulip steps into her power when she realizes her choices and actions matter and have full weight. That restores her faith into being able to help Atticus. She cannot control her surroundings fully, she cannot control how other people behave, and trying to make herself responsible for it is unfair to herself and others and hurts everyone. She can, however, make her own choices and use her own skills to strive to perserve what is important to her.

Once again, that mindset is directily opposed to Amelia's. In Book 1, Amelia is stuck in the constant attempts to recreate her life, to change the world around her, to bend her environment to her will instead of growing internally, accepting the change and adapting to it, taking responsibility for her own feelings and not for what surrounds her. The key motivation in the prison she has created for herself is grief. Unwilling to let go of the world she once shared with someone she loved, not wanting to accept the passing of something that was incredibly important to her, Amelia stagnates, rejects the thought of progress, of healing, of moving on. To start to get over such a loss is to create distance between yourself and what you are mourning. When you move on, you leave it futher and furher behind with each step. And so Amelia decides to stay exactly where she is: in the depth of soul-shattering suffering. Symbolically, she never even leaves the pod she was delivered to the train in, stays at the very beginning of her recovery journey, turns her pain into her armor until forcefully broken out of it by Tulip. 

The two characters are perfect for each other as counterforces; even more so, the very environment that Amelia has created, the one that frustrates Tulip with all the unanswered questions and mysteries, is the exact one that would motivate this girl to grow. This is something to keep in mind when approaching Infinity Train's narrative: Amelia is a perfect antognist to Tulip, and it is through encountering her that Tulip grows. Amelia's mistakes result in Tulip's progress.

A key moment in the two characters' confrontation is Amelia's offer to give Tulip a car of her own, where her and her family can be pitcture-perfect and happy in the exact way Tulip wants them to be. By that point in the narrative Tulip has already had to face the truth of her family situation, the reality of it, it not being anyone's fault nor her parents' whim, sad things simply just happening for reasons outside of anyone's control. And with Amelia's offer, she has to come painfully close to the truth that she has just started making peace with once again. She has to really internalize the fact that her real parents were not happy together, and wouldn't be happy in this simulated reality; and if they were, they would not truly be the people she knows. 

Tulip acknowledges the painful and beautiful truth of life: if you want to be surrounded by real people you can love, people that can love you, you need to give them the freedom to live their lives, freedom to hurt you, to walk away, to change the life you share, to have their own personal feelings that might be different from the ones you wish they had. They need to have freedom to make choices. It is scary, and it hurts, but that is the only way to have something real. While Amelia is obsessed with molding her environment in the image of her perfect life, and failing miserably, Tulip realizes that to reunite with her parents she needs to accept that, as long as they are in her life, things can change between them; and that is okay. That is the only way love can exist. With the risk of loss and pain, not any less worth it for that.

At the end of her journey, Tulip has learned the nature and price of connection, and her place in the complicated, irrational, incomprehensible world. She gets to accept that things don't need a reason for happening, that there is not always someone to blame and demand reparations from. She gets to accept that she is just one person -  but that realization gives her so much personal power. As just one person, she is free from the weight of the world she used to carry on her shoulders; as just one person, she has the full scope of her personal skills and power to protect herself and those she loves, to change with the world and adapt to it, once she starts treating it as a friend and engaging with it on its own terms. At the end of her arc, she truly gets to say that she is ready for everything: she learns a whole new way to approach life that makes handling change much less painful.

She is a protagonist that gives up the protagonist complex, telling her she is the central point of the larger narrative. And through that, she finds peace and flexibility.

What is fascinating is that the narrative itself then supports that idea by removing Tulip from the center of the show. In the next book we follow the arc of Lake, my beautiful perfect child. And with it being centered around the idea of Lake's personhood and them transcending the role of a denizen, that decision could not have been any more metatextually perfect.

3. Book 2: Cracked Reflection and the Relationship between Personhood and Connection

In the first season, Lake is a side character that appears for just one episode, contributes to the protagonist's journey and is then gone. But as the story shifts and focuses on them, we see their struggle as they try to break out of the role of a 'supporting character' and prove their completion and worth outside of their contribution to someone else's story. Their intial place in the narrative and their initial position within their own story echo each other beautifully, and this is the exact kind of writing excellency that has me absolutely hooked. Thank you Infinity Train.

Quite interestingly, the idea of personhood is explored in relation to the theme of connection. Lake shares their journey with Jesse, and the two character arcs mirror each other, dealing with the relationship between personal freedom and external bonds. 

Lake and Jesse operate under the same false pretense that to connect to people means to be what they want you to be, that in order to have friends you have to sacrifice who you are, what you want. They approach this false predicament from the opposite ends: Lake by avoiding any connection altogether and Jesse by readily caving in to peer pressure, adult pressure, just... general imposion of everyone else's expectations, because he suffers from the compulsive need to be liked and accepted. Lake refuses to fit in and is left to deal with their horrifying situation alone, Jesse hurts himself and those he loves in order to fit in.

It's very interesting how the narrative connects reflectiveness to connection. 'Empathy Goes', the song about friendship that Jesse sings, starts with lines “When I look at you, I see me” – words that take on a quite literal uncomfortable meaning for Lake. 

[id: a screenshot from Infinity Train Book 2 of a small girl looking at her reflection in a reflective child (Lake)’s head, Lake unamused. end id]

Then the thematic core of season 2 – Lake's conversation with the dying Sieve, in which the latter torments them – introduces the thought that, by befriending Jesse and helping him grow, Lake became what he needed them to be; became his reflection.

That is, of course, not true. The idea that Lake had simply fulfilled the role of a denizen is disproven by the fact that they are the protagonist of Book 2 that goes through the same journey as Tulip, meeting the exact people and creatures and foes that influence and challenge them in the most important ways. At the end of the day, their victory was not changing their external circumstances but their internal approach to them.

As this awesome person has pointed out, that to get off the train, Lake had to embrace their reflectiveness. However heartbreaking was their enraged plea to have their personhood recognized, they never really did change One One's mind. In his perception, they remained a denizen, “so good at helping”. 

The truth is, however, is that yes, Lake has helped Jesse - by being themselves unapologetically, by not fitting in, by showing him that that is an option, and in that life, you can still be loved and cared about – because Jesse without doubt cares about Lake very deeply. 

But Jesse has helped Lake, too, has changed them – by giving them connection and recognition, by showing them they can be accepted and loved without the need to change who they are, without the need to tailor themselves to another person and 'mirror' them. At the end, the two get one escape for two people – because their journey was a shared one, because their paths cannot be separated, because they have influenced each other equally.

 And much like Amelia was the perfect person to challenge Tulip, One One with his inability to think outside of the algorythm and acknowledge Lake's personhood, was perfect for challenging them and putting them into a situation where they had no other choice but to accept, acknowledge and appreciate the connections they have made, and the fact that those connections define them - partially.

Reflectiveness represents bonds, letting other people into your  life, letting them influence you, teach you something, ask something from you – and, fascinatingly, that seems to be a part of what defines us, gives us personhood. Are we just what we do for other people? No, obviously not. Are we simply what separates us from others, what makes us unique, who we are completely on our own, with no regard to what unites us with other people, what they bring into our lives and what we bring into theirs? The answer Infinity Train provides appears to be no, once again. 

Lake names themselves – finds a true, real name that they identify with, when they embrace their reflective nature and see themselves in a body of water that, yes, lets the world in, reflects it, while also undoubtedly having a life and depth of its own. Personhood, real, full human experience seems to be the subtle dance of individualism and connection, both what defines us as separate from others and what tethers us to them.

I mentioned how Lake's journey being similar to Tulip's is a part of what validates their personhood. That's one of those fascinating things in Infinity Train's writing: how the intial split of the cast into the passenger and supporting denizen characters appears almost like commentary on the protagonist complex, with Tulip actually having to internalize the idea that the world and her life are not centered solely around her, are not all about her happiness and growth, that some things happen just because they do, not because they have something to do with her. 

Then, opening with a lead that needs to outgrow the protagonist complex, the show moves on to that character's narrative foil and shows them grow into the central point of the narrative, fighting to have the world recognize them as the main character of their separate, independent story. And to us viewers there is no doubt that Lake is a person of their own and has full rights to personal protagonism – they  are the one we are watching, whose struggle is  the focus of the Book, they are who we sympathise with in the story. 

This wonderful meta decision really drills in the idea that every single character we only ever catch a glimpse of is the main hero of their own journey, and has a full life and full personhood outside of the role they play in the story we watch unravel. At the same time, as per the rules of narrating, we only see the people and events that serve the current protagonist's growth. Through that, and through being an antalogy that unravels by latching onto a secondary character time after time, book after book, exploring their own journeys and inner worlds, Infinity Train creates a breathtaking polycentric model of reality, in which every single person is the main character on their own path, with people around them contributing something of value to that path – and the main character contributing something to theirs, becoming in turn a secondary supporting character in someone else's story. 

Tulip and Atticus are a wonderful example of that: embarking (hehe) on the same journey for different reasons, helping each other, accepting the responsibility that comes with being each other's friends and companions, welcoming the pain that comes with connection and at the end aiding each other in their quests. And Jesse and Lake are much the same. 

The idea of companionship being the escape is only directly introduced in Book 2, but it had already sprouted in Book 1. The themes of connection, renegotiating one's relationship with the seemingly hostile world, and coming to terms with everyone's place in it as one of the many, but having endless personal power over our own narrative, are constantly and continuously present in the show, with the differnet smaller plots and character arcs beautifully overlapping.

___________________________________________________________

Analyzing all of this in the past, I felt incredibly secure and confident in the seeming underlying lesson. That there is no reason to fight the world at large, the things that are outside of your or someone else's control.  And that doesn't mean “not standing up to those who are hurting others”, as shown in Tulip's confrontation with Amelia, Jesse's confrontation with the Apex. It means that some things, like where you have come from, what the relationships of people around you are, and who you have lost, cannot be changed, and our subconscious attempts to fight them only hurt us in the end. 

The idea of our boundless ability to find resources in ourselves and people around us, learn from people that surround us, accept their help and offer them ours, find love once we accept the change love brings; the idea that we always have the ability to thrive in our current circumstances, once we accept that we ourselves are getting in our own way, out of the unwillingness to let go of something we hold dear; the idea that we can always, always bounce back, that it is never too late for any of us, and that true companionship will always be there to give us escape... 

The idea of the world as our friend, with its own will and wishes, something that is not to be controlled and bruteforce- reasoned  through, but something to engage with... 

These all gave me strength, held me up, and gave me a new paradigm that allowed me to look at the reality from a place of comfort and assuredness. The paradigm of the complicated web of life where everything is in its place, where our shortcomings create valuable lessons for someone else, where our choices, even if they hurt us and others, create lessons, as established by Sieve,  have their place in the big picture, like what we see with Amelia's mitakes and Tulip's progress. 

Then, the idea that in that big picture, you are exactly where you need to be, always, because you always have the only thing you need to grow and recover and thrive – you have yourself and the people around you. How infinitely comforting this is, how solid.

And then Book 3 has arrived. And holy shit y’all.

4. Book 3: Cult of the Conductor and Trust vs Control

And once again, this season has not necessarily disproven all of the aforementioned stuff, just... put a lot more emphasis on the reality of pain people have to endure. In this book we had to witness simultaneously a recovery – within Grace's arc, - a descend – within Simon's, - and an actual, raw trauma, that Hazel had to suffer through on screen. We had to watch Simon murder Hazel's caregiver and repeatedly make her feel unsafe, and Grace withdraw herself and leave Hazel alone because of her ungoing identity crisis. We have to come uncomfortably close to the reality of the pain that shapes people, and with how horribly we all can hurt each other. That pain is no longer obscured by the passage of time, it's not something in the character's past. And that is... very rattling.

But, once again, the constant running themes and motifs remain. Once again, the show tackles the idea of change, of connection and the relationship between the individual and the world. 

Regarding the latter, what we see with the Apex is the protagonist complex projected on a group. The Apex myth simultaneously places them at the top of the world – hence the name – and makes them the poor victims of the evil False Conductor that of course seeks to destroy them and targets them specifically. Grace and Simon developed the idea of themselves and their group as the sole people for whom the train exists, as well as the chosen deliberate targets of the entity that had taken over their environment, instead of accepting that maybe the world does not revolve around them!

Upon meeting Amelia they learn that they are not chosen, that they are not on the train because the outside world did not recognize their value, that there was never someone at the top who had their best needs in mind, and that the entity that calls the shots now does not actually know anything about them besides the fact that they exist.

The theme of connection makes a comeback hand in hand with the motif of empathy, with the book opening with Jesse's song 'Empathy Goes'. And that's what's being explored in Grace's and Simon's respective arcs with relation to denizens: their ability to show compassion and recognize someone else's personhood.

The narrative is multi-layered here. On one hand, what is being explored is a group mentality, a cult mentality that paints the outside world as simultaneously inferior and hostile, and we can see Grace and Simon accidentally inventing some pretty mean propaganda techniques. Whew, those kids. But then on the other, the idea of denizens as projections, 'nulls', incapable of actual feeling, only pretending to be real people... this brings to mind such complicated and staggering concepts as philosophical zombies or the idea of the world as something that is simply a projection of your, you currently reading thinking person, brain, where nothing is real except for your own consciousness. And since it is simply impossible to possess others and make sure they are indeed living breathing feeling creatures and not just NPCs in one wild, wild dream, empathy becomes a fascinating choice. What we're left with is 1) believing that other people do in fact feel what they say they do, 2) treating them with respect just in case or because being mean feels bad, or, 3) you know, deciding that we're on top of the world, and are the Apex predator, and everything exists for us, and we can do whatever we want with people around us.

It's interesting to see this mindset as a group mentality, but it makes sense, too; with the Apex we get to watch what happens when a group only recognizes the personhood of those that are a part of it. The thing is, there is no actual empathy within that group, either; we see that once Grace stops fitting into it as smoothly. To the Apex, she becomes a 'void', a nothing, something hollow, devoid of status and power and therefore rights and feelings that need to be respected. Simon's approach is “whatever I do not like is not real”, so by proxy, the new version of Grace is nothing, and should be erased.

This lack of empathy can be tracked deeper and deeper down to Simon as the extremely tyrannical leader, his refusal to recognize the personhood of anyone who does not agree with him. It is natural for us all to act as if what we believe is correct; otherwise, why would we believe it? But Simon takes it to the extremes, refusing to even for a second consider an alternative point of view, and ends up locked in a mindset in which he is the only person entitled to the ability to see the truth, and everyone else somehow is inferior and incomplete. That's the protagonist complex, that's the experience of a person who considers themselves at the center of the world. Why would he out of all people be the keeper of truth? He simply does not ask himself that, because he does not stop to think about the existence of others, or their experiences.

However, it wouldn't be correct to say that Simon is completely devoid of empathy. It's just that his version of it is extremely self-centered and unable to discern between his personal situation and someone else's reality. As my awesome friend @buttercup-bug​ has pointed out, the relationship between Grace and Hazel and Simon and Hazel is built on extending that limited, conditional empathy. As they have noted, the golden and silver masks at the start of the season that are performing the song 'Empathy Goes' represent the two of them, the golden one directly intersecting with the one Grace wears, and in general gold and silver matching their color schemes. 

The position of the masks matches their position on the stage, as well: they are the two leading figures in the big messed-up play that is the Apex, removed from reality, avoiding it, living in their own little world. They perform that reality in different ways, Grace leading with smiles and emotions/emotional manipulation, Simon being more uptight and serious. 

[id: two shots from Infinity Train Book 3, showinng first a scene with halves of two theatrical masks, a sorrowful and a laughing one, surrounded by undefined actor creatures; then Simon and Grace, two young people, Simon white and blonde, Grace black, with shortr dredlocs, wearing a golden masks, holding hands with each other and two other kids in a curtain call manner, with fire raging behind them. end id]

Now, returning to the empathy motif: as it was pointed out to me, the two extend their empathy to Hazel in their own ways, representing their relationship with the inner child. Grace relates to Hazel as a lonely young girl seeking connection with other children, and engages with her in a fun, upbeat way, making it so they enjoy each other's company and spend time together like friends do. That helps her get closer to Hazel, get genuinely attached and through that let Hazel influence her worldview a bit, and be there for Hazel through harder, less fun things as well, till.. a certain point.

Simon, on the other hand, sees himself in Hazel as someone stranded on the train and under the care of a denizen, and automatically perceives Tuba as a threat. And he expresses his empathy in a direct, serious, violent way, by doing what he thinks needs doing: by getting rid of  Tuba without making time for smiles and fun times. 

Grace is the leader, she engages with people emotionally, making them feel needed and special and through that keeping the group together. Simon is the general who leads the army in what he perceives as the Apex's attempt to protect themselves. His approach does not leave much space for bodning. And it makes sense for him as someone much more focused on safety to have his understanding of denizens as dangerous run deeper, be more at the forefront, in his focus. He’s the one calculating the “danger levels” of encountered denizens. And of course the incident with The Cat makes it much more personal. I think it's fair to assume that both Grace and Simon must've had some unfortunate run-ins with the inhabitants of the train, with Grace being initially so set in her belief that denizens are dangerous because they are unpredictable, and you never know what they will do next. Though the only time we actually see her endangered is by the steward that Amelia had reprogrammed. Either way, the two had started off feeling endangered by the unpredictable and unreliable creatures surrounding them, and probably, in their attempts to find a reason to trust each other and feel safer around each other in a dangerous and confusing world, decided that passengers must be inherently good, denizens must be inherently bad.

There is, however, no actual trust in that, none at all between them. 

I'd say that “trust”' is the core motif of season 3. Infinity Train tends to adopt an aphorism that keeps reappearing throughout a season, pronounced by different characters or in different contexts, highlighting the thematic movement and change and the development of the theme within the plot. In Book 1, it was the collocation “bounce back”, as the core of Tulip's character. In Book 2, we had “You can't spell 'escape' without 'companionship'”. In Book 3, our boy Roy introduced the phrase “Teamwork starts with two people trusting each other”. Simon's horrifying rendition of it emphasized the idea that not everyone counts as a person, so not everyone is deserving of trust. You can only rely on those who fit your narrow criteria of one. 

However, even when Grace and Simon were on the same side of the barricades they've built with their own hands, they could never actually trust each other. Their bond and their care for each other were extremely conditional, hinging on the ultra specific image of a passenger, and influenced by the power hierarchy they had created. 

We see that Grace is reluctant to trust Simon or the Apex with the changes happening to her, with her number going down, because she didn't want them to think “less of her”. Her personal  issues, her fear of loneliness and abandonment and the idea that she needs to be something specific, someone who is always strong and right for people to stick around her, have certainly played into that. Grace is so used to comforting herself through saying the world is mean to her because she is special; she wears her “special” status as a mask, she has the highest number, she is “so good at the train”, and that's what keeps others around her in this reality, keeps them needing her. But it's not actually about her as a person. But it is also just the system the two have established. Numbers are power; one's number going down is their failure. 

The amount of trust only diminishes as the plot progresses, with Grace's perspective shifting but her not being able to trust Simon with those thoughts and feelings – quite understandably, since he remained adamant about his beliefs till the very end. Grace could never truly trust Simon outside of the invented value system they've been existing within for many years. And that is reflective of her constant inner struggle, not being able to trust anyone with her self, without any myth explaining why she is awesome and irreplacable. Hazel was the first person who spent time around Grace while also falling out of the equation, not being influenced by the Apex propaganda, and that is why their bond was so life-changing to Grace – aside from the aforementioned grounds for empathy.

Now, was Simon ever able to truly trust Grace? I think he desperately needed to, and facing the fact that Grace has in some ways betrayed that trust by keepings things from him was one of the things that played into him going off the rails. (...That pun was not intended. ) 

As it was pointed out many times by many viewers, Simon seems to know quite a lot about funerals, which means that he probably had to attend one as a kid. Then, his relationship with The Cat seems to be a metaphor for neglectful parenting due to an addiction. The Cat is a collector, her treasures seeming to be extremely important to her. The voice in which Simon says the words “She is collecting again” hints on a long, ongoing problem. Then in the memory of his meeting with Grace, we see that The Cat had actually probably endangered him on one of her car crawls. Overall, Simon's childhood seems to had been an extremely unstable one, with nothing and no one he could truly rely on, with parental figures either dying or neglecting him. It is similar to Tulip's struggle, but most likely running even deeper.

We see Simon continuously leaning on Grace, which at times causes her frustration: she snaps and asks bitterly if she always has to tell him what to do. When Grace starts behaving weirdly, starts changing, acting in a way that Simon can't understand and is not used to, he probably feels endangered, like his life is growing incomprehensible and unstable once again, like things are slipping through his fingers and out of his control. 

But at the end of the day, not one of them was truly relying on the other. Grace never trusted Simon to just stick around because he liked her, she needed the upper hand, the leading position, the idea of being “very good at the train”, and the system in which they should stick together as the passengers threatened by the dangerous environment and “the false conductor”. Simon never truly trusted Grace as we should trust those we love: with the freedom for them to grow and change and still remain someone we can feel safe and happy around. Instead of taking that leap of faith and relying on her to do right by him, he was in fact leaning on the system they've created, clinging to it desperately to the very end. People may change, but the system will stay the same, as long as he doesn't reconsider his worldview, and he had decided to never abandon it, whatever happens.

The lack of trust is warranted by their treatment of each other. How could Simon rely on Grace if she had never shown him her true self? How could Grace trust Simon with her genuine self if he needed her to be something very specific and unchanging? Their bond, while being something that helped them through the lonely existence in a weird, dangerous place, was in fact incredibly, tragically toxic. That is not something that people acknowledge easily. These two held onto their semblance of friendship for dear life, but that only worsened their respective problems, made them less and less capable of actual genuine friendships.

Both of their characters are very complex and convincing, and before I speak directly of some less pleasant parts of them  I want to establish that I love Grace and am so very proud of her, and glad to see that a Black woman character did not remain an antagonist and got explored deeply and compassionately. And that while I was absolutely enraged by Simon's actions throughout the season, I can also appreciate the depth and complexity of the show's writing in his arc, and the tragedy of it, and I do feel for him quite deeply. 

It is also worth mentioning that, even tho they are on the older end of 'kids', they are both kids still, with their formative years spent in unfortunate, unhelpful environments, and the age of growth and self-discovery happening in an actual cult, even tho it is one they had locked themselves into.

So now, to what can be perceieved as the darker parts of their characters. A unifying element of both Grace's and Simon's characters are their desire for control. Both scared of what life would be without it, they bend over backwards to make people behave in the way they need them to. 

Grace does that through emotional manipulation, she directs her entire demeanor into making people see her as the most knowledgable and powerful, someone they need. She makes them want to be a part of the gang, telling them that it makes them special and brave, as well as making them belive that the outside world means them harm, which is... a classic cult tactic. She hides the truth from them when the truth threatens her position and bonds with them. In the culmination of her personal growth, she admits the reason behind it: she did everything in her power to not be left alone. She tried to control the way other people see the world, and through that control how they see her, thinking that that will make them want to stick around. But her manipulation was what kept her from creating genuine connections, so after she first fell out of her own equation and then pushed Hazel away in the last desperate attempt to fit back into it, there was no one left around her. She made people need her cult, not her person. She never let them know the real her that would make them want to stay. The truth is that people change constantly, and we can't eternally push ourselves to live up to a specific expectation, so any attempt to keep people around with anything else than our genuine self are simply doomed.

Simon does not have the same talent for manipulation that Grace does, despite his attempts to use her own techniques on her when trapping her in her memories. 

[id: screenshot from Book 3 showing Grace looking at Simon, who’s sitting next to her with a grave expression on his face. end id]

Lacking subtlty, he seeks to control the world around him through brute force. We see him repeatedly grabbing Grace in an unsettling, scary, invasive and violent manner. He is unable to influence her mentality like she influences the mentality of other people. He can't act subtly, through emotion and manipulation. And his desperation to control the world and force it to work in ways that suit him get externalized through physical aggression. 

That does not excuse him, nor does his desperation warrant sympathy, but the idea of his shows of power being actually signs of powerlessness seems... captivating, reassuring somehow. People who lash out at us do so because they don't actually get to control how we feel, and never can. They can influence and wound us deeply, but they can never actually fully control us, they don’t get to rewrite us.

...Buuut back to the character analysis. Much like Grace who at the start was holding the position of “whatever doesn’t pleases or entertains me gets wheeled” (perhaps a reflection of her “never needed them anyway” attitude seen in how she feels about her failed attempts at friendship), Simon also denies everything that doesn't suit him, not just the value of it but the reality of it, too. Despite all reason, he refuses to believe that he had been living a lie for the last uhh number of years. If something isn't working the way he wants it to, if someone is behaving in a way he doesn't like, he deems them broken and wrong. As Grace points out, her memories are only a true and reliable source to him as long as he likes them, and once he doesn't, they must be lies. 

Simon is the very embodiment of stagnation, complete lack of flexibility – out of his compulsive need to control the world, to have it remain the same and stable, after the turbulences of his childhood. He is very, very much like Tulip – but he is not given a chance to 'bounce back'. Amelia, another example of deep stagnation and refusal to accept the changes in the world, is allowed that decades after boarding the train. She might never leave it, but she can still make an effort, she can still grow, bit by bit. Simon never makes it to the point where he is ready to accept the reality and start making peace with it.

I assume that for the biggest part of the show he is simply constantly triggered. He spends time with Grace, like they used to, before the Apex – but they met and started travelling together right after The Cat had abandoned him. Then they encounter a child who has no one but a supposedly unreliable denizen taking care of her – another thing to remind Simon of his own neglect. Then they straight up bump into The Cat, and Simon learns that her addicition is still active, that nothing has changed, that what happened to him wasn't enough for his parental figure to reconsider her ways. Then things start changing, Grace starts behaving differently, abandones the 'passenger-denizen' binary and makes him feel more alone and directionless than he probably has been in years. 

But after he traps her in her tape and returns to the Apex, there is at least a couple of month for him to get out of the spiral and reconsier. All Of That. and yet he doesn't. At this point his actions are not solely motivated by the very unstable state he was in – which is not to say that he wouldn't need to take responsibility for them either way. But a certain amount of time and distance from it all could have been used for reflection, and yet Simon stays firmly in his position of clinging to the system and revelling in the ultimate control he had found by becoming a leader. He creates a myth of Grace as someone who is worthless because she is unfit to be a leader. He paints himself as more reliable and powerful through the firmness of his beliefs. With him, you can always know what the rules are going to be, how to be the best. Perhaps, in his twisted horrifying perception, he was giving the Apex kids the stability he'd never had.

Going back to the question of why Simon was not given the opportunity to bounce back... Obviously, a core element of his character is his refusal to change in any form, and that’s on him. But with making peace with change being a big theme in the show from season 1, with Amelia doing the same for decades and eventually getting to a place where she had finally accepted it... This is a heavy and fascinating narrative decision.

It's good to consider that Amelia never actually succeeded at controlling the world in the way that she needed. Among all the characters, her grief was the most hopeless, most desperate: she tried to reverse time, she tried to bring someone back to life. Unlike her, Simon achieved some at least perceived control that he had been striving for. The danger of his character is that he executed his power over actual physical people, and he felt like he could actually decide what their life was going to be, what his life was going to be. He never got to lose it all, like Grace did. He never got to face just how hollow his illusion of control was. So in some ways within his arc him not getting redemption makes sense. 

But what does it mean for the show at large, for the underlying message? It feels inconsistent with the Infinity Train's narrative to just make Simon out to be a cautionary tale of what happens to those who deny change, or a foil to Grace who did ended up accepting it; we've already established that in the show's polycentric system, every character is more than just a part of someone else's journey, has full existence and autonomy outside of that.

Once again quoting my wonderful smart friend @buttercup-bug​, I want to refer to the end of season 3 in which Grace tells the ex-Apex kids that it is not fair for her to decide for them what their place on the train is, who they are, what life is to them; and in the same way, the unconcluded story of this book can be open to interpretations, with every one of us getting to choose what to take out of the simple reality of it. Simon's story simply happened. We can take whatever lesson we need from it. 

But before we part our ways and each one decides what to think of the bone-chilling end of his arc, I want to point a couple more things out.

5. The Train as a Metaphor for Life

Something that has really fascinated me about the show's narrative ever since my marathon of the first two seasons is the concept of the train. One One seems so very sure the train inspires growth, and yet, as we have learned in season 3, he, the Conductor himself, does not actually know much about the passengers' life aboard it except their numbers. There is no established system, there is no assigning of the denizens, there is no rulebook for them, they are not aware of the specific problems of the passengers they meet. Passengers can actually die on the train, which is wild if the goal of it is to make them grow and flourish. We are so used to thinking that to heal, one needs a perfectly supportive, comfortable and safe environment, and yet the train is challenging, dangerous, unpredictable.

I think the idea here, with characters time after time having to come to terms with life being confusing, ever-changing, often painful and entirely outside of our control, is that the train is not necessarily there to soothe the wounds but to raise the stakes, challenging people in such a way that their choices and their actions and approach to the reality have much more serious consequences. Tulip learns to accept help and help others in situations that actually threaten her and her loved ones, while what she would risk in the past when shutting herself off was just upsetting some friends and family and, you know, being fundamentally alone. Jesse went from letting others bully his brother to balancing on the edge of selling Lake out, which would end their entire existence. Grace went from being a child who creates fights and eggs others on to do something stupid to being an actual teenage cult leader. The train raises the stakes exponentially, and that makes everyone on board reconsider the real price of their actions.

Aside from that and giving specific directions for growth through numbers, though, it doesn't really... do anything. It functions the way life functions: things just happen, people just behave in ways that make sense for them, and everyone has full autonomy. At the same time, we see characters encounter the exact companions that make them grow, the exact enemies that challenge them in the most important ways. To once again quote Fleur @buttercup-bug​ a.k.a. the established sponsor of all of the behind-the-scenes Infinity Train discussions, the train is both ambigious and very meta, and “acts both as a narrative arc machine in a storytelling sense and as a lesson provider in a life sense, which bridges the gap between story and reality in a really personal way”. 

That is a wonderful way to put something that captivated me upon my first watch. The train is a metaphor for life. It is contrasted against the metaphor for death or non-existence: the  lifeless wasteland through which it is constantly moving, the wasteland populated by soul-sucking parasites also symbolical of nothing other than death. The train is life that is always moving, never the same, outside of our control, bigger than us, not obeying our wishes no matter how hard we try, challenging, populated by other people that have their free will, which often hurts us. And yet, the train is a provider of companions, which are to be our escape. And they are not crafted or tailored to us, nor are we crafted for them - and yet as our paths intersect, we impact each other, and we learn from each other in incredibly meaningful ways.

When thinking about this, I've landed on two possibilities. Either the Engine or the Train – something separate from One One – is a great and omnipotent mind capabe of foreseeing how things would unravel to everyone's utmost benefit, placing the correct people at the correct places, weaving an incredibly complex web of connections in which we always meet the companions we are supposed to meet ot exchange lessons with... or it doesn't need to be at all. And I think I like the latter much more. 

The train doesn't need to be that, because, as I've already proposed earlier, ourselves and the people around us, whoever they are, are all we ever need. Wherever you are right now, wherever the Universe has put you, you are supposed to be there, not because it has some grand plan and knows something that you don't, but because no matter your circumstances, you already have what you need for growth. You have yourself and you have other people and their stories, and the connection they can offer you. (Hazel, who is perhaps the most mature character we meet – which is tragic considering how many dysfunctional adults she has to be around – seeks to connect with everyone around her who is not outwardly dangerous, no matter how little in common they seem to have. And eventually something is found, some strand of connection, creating empathy.) People around you always have something to offer. You yourself always have something to offer.

I would hold onto that idea, as well as the idea of “bouncing back”, of it never being too late to get better. And I felt a bit off-balance when Simon was not given a chance to do that. But in a way, shifitng the story from fated encounters that kickstart someone's progress, like the one between Tulip and Amelia, Lake and Jesse, gives even more weight to this concept, by putting our personal decision to change into focus. 

It's not all about meeting this one specific person who will show you the error of your ways; even more so, sometimes people who have a lot in common and mirror each other hold each other back instead of helping each other grow. Sometimes one of them changing only pushes the other further down when they refuse to accept that. And at the end, it is all up to us. 

Getting a little bit existential here, but we are fundamentally the only ones who define our lone separate experience, and we are always on our own and solely repsonsible for ourselves. Connection is always there to support us, to teach us something, and playing a role in someone's life is what makes us real and vice versa, and at the same time we are all masters of our own destiny. We do not bear responsibility for other people's actions, and they do not bear responsibility for ours. Some environments are more suited for our growth, some less, but at the end of the day the choice to take whatever opportunities we have is up to us. 

Which means that we don't have to sit around waiting for the Logical Point in our character arcs to achieve a breakthrough. The world is always there for us to engage with, to hear what it has to say. The question is, are we ready to accept it? To see it for what it is? With time it will grow louder, ignoring the truth we're avoiding will become harder, but the choice to listen is always ours. We can do it sooner rather than later. Or we can do it... never, refuse the reality, refuse change and the nature of life. Because we are the ones responsible. We can't blame the world for not delivering the needed lessons sooner in life, because even if it did, nothing would stop us from ignoring them. We can't feel entitled to endless lessons and endless comfort from people around us. We should take care of ourselves. 

Which means that, wherever we are, at any point of our lives, we can always grow if we listen, if we open ourselves up to the truth. And the truth is that  life is incredibly, undescribably complicated. It stretches across so many different individual experiences, and it does not prioritize a single one of them. We are a part of such a vast web of events and connections, and it is foolish to consider that the world is the way it is just to spite you or hurt you, or that it should change, stop and start spinning in the opposite direction just to ease your pain. 

Things happen that no one is to blame for. There is no fault in the way the world is. Nothing is broken. Life goes on, endlessly, life changes, people change, people leave, people hurt us. That is okay. We can always change ourselves, we can be flexible and open and alive, we can extend our hand to the world and work together with it in true companionship.

Life is the way it is, wild and uncontrollable, and you cannot escape it, you cannot escape change, as long as you are alive. But you can make peace with that. Through acceptance, love and connection.

Gohms, creatures dwelling in the desert that symbolizes non-existence, parasites that symbolize death, are what awaits those who choose to get off the train. Those who try to escape the endless movement and challenges of life. You cannot truly stagnate, you cannot stop moving, you cannot stop things form changing, as long as you exist. As Simon attempts to control the world, still it, for the very last time, that is what happens to him. He stops existing. By refusing change, he refuses life itself. And loses it. And maybe it's not about him never getting to arrive at a point that would tip him over and change him. Maybe it's about his choice to not take all the opportunities that were presented to him before. Maybe he could've done something very different, whether that would have changed his fate or not, with whatever time he had left.

[storyunrelated]

NaNo 2020 - Conclusions

So I didn’t finish this year. Whatever. Any time I have quote-unquote ‘finished’ it’s been a steaming pile of shit anyway, so did I really lose anything? Did I? Really?

No, the answer is no.

But did I learn anything?

No, the answer is no. Again.

What ideas bloomed this month though? Ideas that might charitably described as having sprung from NaNo in some way, shape or form? 

Everywhere Be Dragons

The original idea that I abandoned. Schlock, standard sci-fi. Lasers and shit. A retired man and his electronic friend who is presently in the robotic body of a bird go off to try and find out who injured his nephew. Turns out its some guy from some podunk evil space empire with a sword that can some summon chrome space dragons that can fly through space or some shit. Whatever. Garbage garbage garbage

Here’s a bit. The first lines, in fact:

Alarmingly naked, David Bellamy strode up to the largest of his windows and flung back the curtains to let what he hoped was the glorious sunshine of another sedate, mellow day flow in and bathe his more personal regions. 

Being a man of leisure now he had the time available to do this sort of thing.

Awful. 

Anyway, next.

And now for something completely different

Some admin schlub who works for a nebulous evil organisation ala SPECTRE is tasked with sourcing twenty-five red, plastic wallets by next week. It should be easy. It is not easy.

This was a very threadbare idea based on something I actually had to do, leading rather naturally to the thought “Wouldn’t this mind-numbing task be funnier if it was happening in an evil organisation?”. High-concept stuff.

Here’s a bit:

“Why am I doing this? This isn’t anything to do with me?”

“It’s nothing to do with me, either, but they passed it to me and I’m passing it to you. I’m higher up than you so now it has something to do with you. It is, in fact, now your problem.”

“What happened to Bill anyway?”

“Dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah, him and a bunch of others. Whole chunk of procurement, in fact. Super agents, last month.”

“What had procurement ever done to them?”

“I don’t think they were aiming for there specifically, they just got in the way. Think they were trying to hit the weather control department - they’re underneath them.”

“Oh yeah, yeah. Poor bastards.”

“Yes, well, now you’re here to carry on their fine work. Next week. Red. Sort it out.”

“But-”

“You’re a resourceful man, I’m sure you can manage.”

That’s literally all I did before I got bored.

Next!

Bad Wizards

I was reading about The Sword of Truth and I was reading about how Confessors worked in The Sword of Truth and it was this super-weird combination of an absolutely terrifying sounding power being the implications of which were ignored in a super-weird way.

Basically a whole class of women can ENSLAVED ANYONE THEY TOUCH FOREVER and this ability isn’t something they use it’s something they have to concentrate NOT TO USE and the purpose of this class of women is to...

...basically go around and brainwash/murder anyone they deem isn’t being honest and good. Oh, and they decide who’s honest and good. And there’s no question that they’re honest and good.

Oh and there’s no men with this power. Why? Because any male infants born with this power are murdered by their brainwashed loveslaves ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS.

Very odd. Very very odd. But easy fodder for villains, so I just thought “What about people being charged with coming up with ways of trying to fix this or go against it?”.

Then I did a bit where two guys are visiting a dead guy in a dead city. I don’t know why.

Much to his displeasure Percival was once again accompanying First to the city of Erhart, home to the court of Baldric the Everliving. Percival did not like the court of Baldric the Everliving. He didn’t much like Erhart, either.

He did not like the silence, the utter and complete silence. He did not like that, despite all of the citizens having died, there were no bodies anywhere, nor even a hint of violence or struggle to mark their passing. 

(Not that heaps of corpses would have made him feel better, obviously, but knowing that they had died it was eerie not seeing so much as an upset teacup to indicate that this might have been the case. It just didn’t seem fair to them, somehow. Like they’d passed on without a fuss, without so much as a whimper.) 

He did not like the way the empty windows seemed to stare at him. He did not like the way the streets were so dusty. A dirty street he might have been able to understand, but to have such a layer of dust, lying as thick as snow, untouched by the elements, undisturbed by any living footfall other than their own periodic visits - it just made him uncomfortable.

Everything about Erhart made him uncomfortable, frankly, from the mere thought of it, up through the physical reality of it all the way to the ruler of it, who he was going to have to go and talk to. Again. Nothing about this day was good for Percival.

BORING! NEXT!

Worse wizards

Uh, another idea, less related to anything else I was reading - I think? - but more, uh, what if there was a horrific ruling class of magical people who were for all intents and purposes utterly untouchable. 

Can kill you soon as look as you, mess around with your brain and your body just for kicks, come back from death easy as anything and only get more powerful as the years go on. One of them has a huge tower held up solely by their willpower, whatever. They’re a horrible, immovable fixed point in society.

Then one day mechanisms and techniques start showing up that can kill them and ignore their powers. Just out of nowhere. And these methods are super-simple to do and also start to spread.

What happens?

Lame lame lame lame lame.

“Did all of you miss what I told you at the start? The nature of what was used to kill Dennis?”

Blank looks. They had listened, but they had promptly forgot. It hadn’t seemed important.

That it was important and that this should have been obvious had passed them by. John gritted his teeth and straightened up, reaching around to a nearby trolley and - carefully - picked up a kidney-shaped dish resting on it and bringing it around so they could all see its contents. In the dish rattled several small, dark, sharp bits of what sounded to be metal. These the wizards peered at.

“He was killed by something that not only ignored his magical protections and ignored them completely, might I add, but which also then drained his body of even the merest trace of magic and severed whatever connection there might have been between his mortal shell here and anything beyond the material. Did you listen that time? Would you like me to say it again? Would you like me to go slower?”

More blank looks, though some were starting to get less blank. Some were getting confused. Some were getting worried. They’d actually paid attention this time.

What was I THINKING?!

Indulgence

This was me just doing a re-write of one of my secret, shameful pieces of fanfiction, with the fanfiction elements removed. Because why not?

[REDACTED]

Nope, not even a little bit.

Stupid! Next!

N/A

Some random thing in first person about following some rambling lady across some bridges and getting some weird book I don’t fucking know.

Where did all this water come from, anyway? And where did it go? I could see the vast lakes below us, of course, stretching off as they did towards wherever these caverns terminated, but did those lakes drain anywhere? The flow of water from above never ceased, and yet the levels below never rose. What maintained this equilibrium? Or was the scale involved simply so great that no change could ever or would ever be observed?

I do wonder why I wonder about these things sometimes. The answers to these questions wouldn’t benefit me in any way. 

Yet still I wonder.

Who ccaaaaaarrreeeessss? Next!

Delicious Godmeat

A long, long time ago in some faraway land in another universe or whatever there was some vague, vaguely benevolent overgod. They had of children and they looked after all the normal people and blah blah all was well.

One day those children decided to devour their parent and split up their power between them, so they could care out their own little demenses and rule things the way they thought they should. So that happened.

However, the biggest, juicest bit of godly meat went missing somehow, much to their chagrin. They looked and looked but they never found it. Because it fell through time and space in a way that’ll never be explained, and ended up here. And now, by accident, some random young lady touched it.

Whoops! You’ve got a chunk of a dead god stuck inside you now! Better go free the land of those rapaciously evil children, absorb their power and try to bring some goodness back to this land! Whatever that means! Figure it out! You’re basically a demigod now!

Have fun battling the alien feelings of a dead deity and an ever-increasing level of godlike power! 

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to make a choice knowing that whatever choice it is you end up making it is going to make a lot of people very, very upset with you.”

“Can I just do nothing?”

“Sadly, no. Someone in your position chooses not to decide, that’s still making a choice.”

“Gah! I can’t win!”

CONCLUSIONS

Awful. Awful awful awful awful. They’re all awful. They’re all terribly. Sweet Jesus what a waste of time, every last one of these is a stinking, rancid turd now fouling my Google Docs with their stench. Awful awful awful.

Know what’s missing in all of these? Well, lots of things, but you know what crucial element hobbles each and every one of them from right out of the gate?

No fucking characters! Just a half-baked idea shoved out and left to die in the sun! No-one involved I give even the merest whiff of a shit about! Not a one! And no situation I care about either! None of these do anything for me! They leave me cold! And everyone in them leaves me colder! Frozen!

A setting isn’t worth shit if you’ve got no-one to do anything with it! Settings just sit there, inert, characters make it happen! Characters make the story! AND YOU’VE GOT NO CHARACTERS YOU WORTHLESS SHITHEAD! YOU’VE GOT NOTHING! JUST THE SAME WORDY BASTARDS OVER AND OVER AGAIN! JUST A THOUSAND COPIES OF YOU! I HATE ME! THAT’S USELESS!

I’m dead inside now!

Well, deader than I was before!

Awful! Awful awful! Eurgh!

Oh well! Same time next year!

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

BFCD Reviews by Nesha: Summertime on Netflix

This is what I’m gonna do... I’ll be doing more structured reviews later and most likely liveblogging suggested stuff and tagging with “Nesha Watches (Insert Title) for all liveblog posts. For this first review, I won’t be as structured, because I didn’t really plan on reviewing, so this is basically all of my comments to friends @chenoahchantel and @daintyurbanprincess that were made whilst I was watching this show suggested to me by @rbaifzau 

It didn’t take me long to be annoyed with the white boy in this show. It doesn’t take much anyways, but one episode in and I’m over him already. This dude saw her at a party, she got pushed into the pool accidentally, he gave her a dry shirt, and two minutes later tried to kiss her… TF..  

Girl, this bout to be IGNANT...

Chile... She was like, "What are you doing?" And he looked surprised. Like whet. And in episode 2 after having seen her thrice and spoken to her once, he telling his best friend, "I'm pretty sure I like her a lot." I HATE stuff like this. Why did I tell old girl I'd watch this and discuss it with her? 😭

But she like him, so like??? 😭

And her daddy, who we haven't seen yet is presumably a rolling stone. Only one negro in this town and the nigga gotta be probably running around on his wife? 🙄 I'm like, OH, so the one Black man in the show gotta be a rolling stone? And even though his wife is also highly irresponsible as a parent, she's sort of made out to be the victim of his dreams. They never portray Black mothers doing things on their own as victims. That woman was messing up left and right and it's all on her husband not being there, when that's only part of the problem.

Also, if she IS the only present parent and made the decision to do that, she should be doing it instead of leaning on Summer all of the time. 

And she got a close friend that have an obvious crush on her but she seems oblivious. I hate dis

This dude reminds me of Max Theriot. He always looked musty to me. 🤣🤣🤣 He look like him breaf stank. Him and Jack Griffo were working on something where they play soldiers and I absolutely said, "He still look like he stank" when I saw him on Instagram…

This is basically the same mold of dude and it looks moldy and should be tossed out. None for me, thanks.

But, there are moments in this show that's really cracking me up. 🤣🤣🤣 It's like, I feel like I should enjoy it for the messiness of it, but the main characters can be infuriating.

She called him an asshole and he said, "You don't even know me." No duh dipshit. She ain't know you when you tried to kiss her neither. NOR when you was talmbout you like her. 

This girl kissing her friend!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. She's gonna hurt this boy! My Gwad. He finna be discombobulated. 😭😭😭 He all happy today and she don't even see him like that. Lordt.

He walked up and she look uncomfortable AF. Her younger sister is like, "You're being weird." 🤣🤣🤣 Even SHE hip to something. He on the beach talmbout "It's hot today, don't you think?" And took his shirt off. 😭😭😭😭😭😭

I like Summer's friends and feel bad for them because she really didn't treat them kindly. She used Edo whenever she was upset by Ale and then she just completely ditched Sofie on her birthday and didn't even text her or anything. Just had her waiting on her and didn't even apologize. Like, I love that she gets a chance to be human, but being an asshole to the people who you're supposed to be friends with is such an upsetting trope to me.

And the connection between her and Ale is so weird. He comes across as super predatory in the beginning and I don't understand why she liked him in the first place, but also whenever he does something by mistake, she is so angry at him, even though she's been just as inconsiderate when it comes to her friends.

NOW... HE HARASSING HER AT HER JOB. 

WOTTICE DIS HUNNY??? 

Talmbout if she got a boyfriend he'll "take care of him" 😖 After she told him to leave and he said he'd wait for her outside, she asked her coworker, "What do you do to let a guy know you like him back?"

NOW, she went outside and he's there, but her friend showed up to surprise her after work. 🤣 Whoever made this HATES me

He stole a book out her locker and left a card with his phone number. How is this the start of a romance???

OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. FRIEND IS TALKING ABOUT THE KISS...He said it was perfect........

Chile... And she don't even wanna tell their other best friend. Bruh. He said, "What we have doesn't need to be discussed." Summy PLEASE tell this young man...HE TRIED TO KISS HER AGAIN AND SHE SAID, "We just talked about last night's mistake" 😭😭😭

And she done hurt my friend this way, but she worried about Maxface because his mama can't reach him on the phone??? Girl.. go.. girl...

The gag is that she got mad at Ale because she saw him talking to his ex and she had to cover for him at work, but you've now ACTUALLY put your best friend in a bad space. And he ran into her mom and little sister and looked so uncomfortable but kept it short and sweet. These are people he loves. Idk. I feel bad for him and also like she kind of a hypocrite.

That was what REALLY bothered me. I don't expect her to be perfect, by all means. Black girls should be allowed their imperfections and their mistakes, but the fact that she knows what it's like to have the people you love be so absent and that she would treat her friends this way because of one guy who she's only known for a couple of months was disappointing for her character. She could have been written imperfectly without this glaring problem that I don't believe a real person in her position would actually have. 

I think in real life, the girl who raises her sister and basically has to lift her mother up all the time would overextend herself to her friends, but instead, she just leaves them in her dust as soon as she gets some dick. 😭

He is now hanging out with her little sister. 😭😭😭She goes to school with them but she looks tiny. I'm cringing at everything.

BRUH. Like... I can't tell if they're trying to or not, but I wouldn't be surprised because he's cool with the sister too, but they've been friends a while, so I didn't think much of it until Summer hurt him.I thought she liked him earlier, so idk if he is noticing her or I just EXPECT it. 

OAN, this man realized his son had a motorcycle accident on purpose and got mad instead of concerned

At one point, they say he's been riding bikes for 20 years, and whenever his father is mad that he had his accident on purpose (which I'll come back to) he says that he's never made a mistake like that, not even was he was 4, so Ale is AT LEAST 24 and she JUST turned 18. Which is WILD to me, even though at 18 I dated someone who was 23 (he was possessive and abusive, so I have a real suspicion of age gaps). 

But, aside from that - she gets mad at him any time she sees him with his ex when It is perfectly fine to speak with your ex and whenever she did see them together, it was always innocent and she didn't give him a chance to explain.

But then, when he does something questionable, like whenever he tried to kiss her the first day they met, or whenever he came to her job to ask her out and she told him to leave but he said he was going to wait outside (toxic AF and presumptuous) she is fine with those things.

Now, back to Ale's accident. I really felt so bad for him whenever we discover he did this on purpose, because his father is mad, when they should be concerned. His mother says, "You could have died" and he agrees...

How did they not notice that meant that this young man was so disappointed with his life as a biker that he was literally suicidal? They just grazed past it and whenever he vanished on them, there wasn't a huge call to find him,even though he'd just admitted to purposefully filling a possibly fatal mistake.

I'm prepared for nothing but disappointment. ALL these people outta there. Ale's best friend is in love with his ex. 😭 IT'S SUMMER'S 18TH BIRTHDAY. MYNIGGA She really stood her other best friend up to go get some dick on a little ass boat

The little sister shot her shot! 😭😭😭 He told her she's like his little sister and she burnt off mad denna muffugga

This child drunk, walking down the street in the middle of the night without her glasses...

OMG AS I WAS TYPING THAT SHE GOT HIT BY A DAMN CAR

I was really upset by these things coming to light, and also whenever Blue gets hit by a car, because all of the reviews that I've seen on this site have been that it's a cute love story with likable characters, but nobody mentions the problematic content, the dark portions of the story that can be triggering - like suicide and alcohol incidents and literally seeing a young Black girl be hit and run by a car??? 

I wasn't prepared for that shit in a "cute love story." I think that this story is less cute and more dark than people have made it out to be, and that's one of my problems with it. It isn't marketed as a dramatic coming of age story. It's marketed as a romantic comedy, when it is more serious than that and has a lot of issues that should be considered.

The lesbian best friend is in love with her too??????????????????? I. Hate. This.

My favorite person in this whole thing is the lesbian in the background, Irene. And also Dario.

I was entertained a lot of the times. Just heavily confused because I couldn't figure out what the tone was supposed to be. 😁

In conclusion - it's maybe a dark comedy, not a cute comedy, IS a coming of age about a young Black girl who is kind of an asshole, but Black girls should be free to be assholes too. White dudes do it all the time and are valued characters. The dude is weird AF for chasing around this 17 year old girl and he's in his 20s. Idk if that's normal in Italy. It's nasty to me. Their beginning is young people foolishness and there's not much that we see their relationship built upon, but that happens, yanno. You young, tired and silly and some pushy dude makes his move whenever he see you. Slap some discount sex in a dinghy on it and you have this show. I don't recommend it, but a lot of folk loved it, so I guess it did what it meant to do.

[hopewritcs]

dancing in the kitchen. finale.

pairing: romantic steve x reader, familial dustin x reader

word count: 1.5

summary: without giving too much away: the reader is Hope Henderson, Dustin’s older cousin who’s staying in town, due to some family issues. takes place soon after s2.

note: from the bottom of my heart, thank you to all of you who have read this.  those of you who have been there from the beginning and those of you who only just recently found the story.  it’s been a great journey and i’m lucky to have had your support.  

other chapters: masterlist

ditc tag list: @stevieboyharrington, ,@thekidsofneibolt, @labgeek, @tyedyedstars,@samisimportant, @madhatterweasley, @pity-mee, @l4life, @restlessmelodrama@darkuserboxes,@princessnancy,@hipsmcgee, @wtf-richarddd @honey-your-bee-puns-sting@whataloadofmalarkey @queenlalybug @im-a-stranger-thing@bilesxbilinskixlahey @ravenclawnerdfromnarnia @trashyemonerd , @theslayingavenger, @addictwithaheavydirtycheetah, @patat-boi  (if you wanna be added to the tag list, let me know!!)

SIX MONTHS LATER ( LATE JUNE )

School was over for the summer.  Everyone was doing their own thing, the mall having opened up not too long before the school days finished.  Steve had gotten a job at the ice cream parlor Scoops Ahoy! and Y/N had gotten a job at the movies.  Dustin was particularly excited about that, claiming that Y/N could get him in to see any of the new films playing over the summer for free.  She’d rolled her eyes at the suggestion, but didn’t actually say no.  She did get a discount on tickets, and he was her favorite ( only ) cousin.  

It was one of Y/N’s days off when she was sitting watching a video she’d rented on the couch, Tews perched in her lap purring contently as Y/N pet the cat.  She had no plans until later in the day when Steve was going to take her to dinner.  So she was surprised when the phone rang, but got up to answer it.  

“Henderson residence!  This is Y/N speaking.”  

“Y/N, darling!  It’s your mother.”  

As if Y/N couldn’t recognize the voice to begin with.  It had been months since she’d gotten to Hawkins and her parents had jetted off to Europe on yet another save their marriage escapade.  The only communication she’d gotten was two or three postcards from different Italian cities.  She didn’t mind, though.  She preferred to be staying with Claudia and Dustin.  Her parents did believe all those awful rumors about her anyway, whereas ever since she got to Hawkins neither Claudia nor Dustin pushed to know her reason for coming to Indiana.  Though, Y/N was sure that Claudia had gotten the skewed story from her mother.  

“Darling, are you there?  The telephone connection is rather poor at the airport, I’m afraid.  Y/N?”  

Y/N shook her head, clearing her thoughts.  “Sorry, mom.  I was just thinking.  Are you back in New York?”  

“We just landed not too long ago, but your father’s having trouble getting us a car.”  Her mother’s voice was filled with disdain.  Which is always the tone either of her parents took when speaking about the other, at least in private.  “How’s small town life?”

“It’s pretty good, actually.  I’ve been doing a lot, I even got a job for the summer until school starts back up.”

“Are you staying?  Sweetheart, did we discuss our daughter staying with Claudia for another year?”  She could tell her mother attempted to pull the phone away from her ear so Y/N couldn’t hear it anymore.  

“Another year?  I think my sister would be alright with that if we asked.  I mean, we’ll send money and the rest of Y/N’s things.”  

“But she can be so troublesome!  I’m sure something’s happened since we’ve been away.”  

“Dear, you’re overthinking this.  Let me speak to Y/N.”  There’s a scoff from her mother, and she could picture the roll of her eyes but the sounds of shuffling objects must mean that her father got the phone.  “Pumpkin, are you still there?”

“Yup.  How was Italy?”  

“Excellent.  We’ll get the film developed and send you some pictures, I got you some souvenirs I’m sure you’ll love too.”  

“Could you stay on topic for once!”  She heard her mother hiss in the background, more than likely hovering behind her father’s shoulder as he spoke into the phone.  

“Yes, apologies.”  He paused, probably holding back a sigh, before speaking again.  “Pumpkin, are you certain you’d like to stay in Hawkins?  I’ll have to speak to Claud about it either way.”  

“I do.  It feels like home, daddy.”  Y/N explained.  She’d never felt more at home, more welcomed, more herself than when she spent time in Hawkins.  And now that she’d been there for months and was making progress with her own friends and had Steve too, she didn’t want to leave.  

“Alright.  Leave a note for your aunt to call me back and I’ll discuss it with her.  I just want you to be happy, Y/N.”  

“I’m writing the note now.  Thanks.  This really means everything to me.”  Y/N scribbled down a note on the pad by the phone before tearing it off and moving to put it with one of the magnets onto the fridge door.  

“Be sure to keep in touch, okay?  I want to hear all about this summer job next time we call.”  

“Of course, dad.  I love you.”  

“Love you too, pumpkin.”  

A few days later, Y/N was getting things set up at home for Dustin’s return from his camp.  Claudia had offered for her to go along to pick him up from the camp, but Y/N declined, opting to get things set up at home.  Dustin’s friends had all called her on the walkie talkie in Dustin’s room the night before to ask if they could come over to surprise him.  And, of course, she said yes.  

She was getting a couple of snacks ready to put on the living room table as she overheard the kids conversation.  El would use Dustin’s robotic toys to draw his attention to bring him out into the living room for the surprise.  They talked about it freely because Y/N knew about her powers now.  

It had come two months earlier back in April on one particularly rainy day.  Steve was dropping Y/N back at home and he refused to come in when asked, “They’re going to want me to stay the night too.”  He had groaned, to which Y/N laughed and kissed her boyfriend goodnight before coming back in the house.  Though she hadn’t been able to find the kids at first, she heard their voices coming from upstairs in Dustin’s room.  The moment that she saw them sitting there on the floor surrounded with a couple of objects floating in the air, she was cut off with his door slamming in her face before she could say anything.  

They had to tell her after that, Y/N was too confused and had definitely seen what she knew she saw.  But she was sworn to secrecy.  All they told her was that El ( Eleven, or Jane now, according to the birth certificate that Hopper had gotten for her ) had been an experiment as a baby and came out with telekinetic powers.  Of course, Y/N thought it was crazy.  And then El had demonstrated the power for her specifically to understand.  

Since then, the kids almost felt like Y/N was more included.  The way she’d reacted to Eleven’s powers wasn’t what they had expected.  They may have expected a bit more of a reaction, but all Y/N had needed was a simple explanation of the powers, a quick show of what they had meant, and then she was quick to believe what it was.  

Not that they thought anything was going to happen again, the gate was closed, but if something did happen, they would figure that Y/N could help them too.  

Then, a couple of days later, Y/N was at the mall having finished her own work for the day at Scoops Ahoy! sitting in the break room with Steve, chatting about nothing in particular, when Dustin had shown up, Y/N had was glad that she’d timed her lunch break accordingly and watched as Steve jumped up from his seat in the back to go and greet her cousin.  She followed behind, opening the window and leaning out to watch the exchange with a smile on her face.  She even giggled as she watched Robin roll her eyes and look at Steve.  

“How many children are you friends with?”  she asked, before turning back to look at Y/N.  “How many kids does this guy know?”

“Technically, this ones my cousin.  Hey Dusty!”  she called with a slight wave from where she stood in the break room and Dustin turned to her shining his bright smile in her direction.  

“Don’t these children have parents of their own or is it you two?”  Robin asked quietly as she leaned back to look at her.  

Y/N stood over with Robin who was cleaning as Steve prepped Dustin his own ice cream boat.  He’d offered to have Y/N sit with them, but she’d kissed his cheek and told him to catch up with her cousin.  They’d had a similar conversation the night before, her and Dustin.  She wondered how Steve would feel about the whole Suzie situation.  Y/N was positive Dustin was telling the truth, simply because she knew her cousin and wanted to believe the best thing for him.  She’d been having a side conversation with Robin, whom she’d grown to consider a friend after spending a lot of her free time ( and lunch breaks ) down at Scoops with Steve.  

When the line at Scoops got busy again, Y/N escaped into the back room.  She wasn’t technically supposed to walk back their freely, or even at all, but no one had stopped her.  

Somehow, she wasn’t exactly surprised when Steve and Dustin came bursting through the door, Dustin sitting down at the table and pulling out a recording and a book.  She grabbed the book quickly and looked between the two of them, “Russian to English translations?  What are you two idiots doing now?”  

[mateotorrezjr]

permanent record → mary h.k. choi

i was lucky enough to receive an arc of this at yallwest, the thoughts expressed in the following discussion though are completely mine.

before we get into specifics, this was one of my most anticipated reads. if i’m being honest i’m still looking forward to september when i can get my hands on a finished copy of this. i also went into this book pretty blind. after finishing emergency contact earlier this year i was pretty confident that i’d want to pick up anything other stories mary h.k. choi decided to write and spoiler, i’m just as content after having finished this as i was after having finished choi’s debut.

i also want to say that i am almost certainly biased in favor of enjoying the way in which choi tells stories, and while there are aspects i’ll discuss in a more negative light toward the end of this discussion on the whole even the aspects that some readers might take issue with, they weren’t as big a deal with me. i also don’t believe that it’s not my place as a person who talks about books to do so in an objective way or to discuss this book as though it exists in a vacuum. as i discuss my thoughts here they are inherently subjective and i can only talk about the book in the way that i experienced it through a singular lens. hopefully, i’ll be able to articulate my thoughts to clearly convey that lens and how my lens and my experiences and what i got out of the book can assist someone else assessing whether this content could be for them.

i don’t really feel it’s my place to discuss pablo being korean + pakistani or the son of a not so strict muslim, nor is it my place to talk about how leanna’s being mexican is handled in the book. i don’t think anything in terms of their diverse heritage is written in any kind of problematic way, i think that both identities and the respective characters relationship with that identity is something that was explored in a really thoughtful way in the novel. with pablo, in particular, i felt that there were several moments where choi would callback to very specific feelings that he had where pablo would have these introspective reflective moments that were really a joy to read. i think that there were a number of lines in the book that dealt with the topic of identity and racism that really made me pause and chew on that thought for a moment. i really appreciated getting to have that sort of relationship with the text, specifically on that topic. i don’t think that the goal of any of these moments or scenes was characters moving to accept the intersection of their identities, rather than simply acknowledging how those intersections have impacted them as people and formed all aspects of their personality. i feel like the way i described and interpreted those moments makes it sound technical or detached, but it really resonated with me on a very fundamental level. the moments carried with them an honesty that i found to be really refreshing. because as i said they weren’t so much written as the characters struggling with what it meant to be x identity and more understanding how said identity has shaped them as people and continues to impact their lives. honestly not sure if that made anything more clear there, but i just really liked that aspect of the book.

i guess i want to start this discussion off with pablo rind, that just seems the most logical place to root this. i was initially surprised that the entire narrative was told from his perspective. or at least i was surprised after having skimmed the summary. i don’t think that the narrative falters because we only get pab’s perspective it was just something i wasn’t expecting. that said, being in pablo’s head was easily my favorite thing about this book. much like i’ve already talked about his introspective thoughts on his identity, i was in love with how pablo saw the world and thought about it. i don’t know if i would say that i agree with all of pablo’s observations, i would say that i was thoroughly entertained by them. while pablo is technically younger than i am, i felt that pablo was easily someone i could know. his friend group to a lesser extent also felt like people i could know. i appreciated the fact that pablo had a complicated relationship with his parents and family, but they were still an integral part of the book. if i’m being honest i’m really happy that this seems to be a trend with choi’s work so far. there’s even a sequence toward the last third of the book that involves pablo that is sort of a homecoming, it’s not really the correct phrasing but the best i can do while still remaining vague enough to not spoil anything that i thought was really fantastic. there’s something about the way choi juxtaposes his initial joy in this homecoming as his first instinctive thought against the realization that the childhood expectations he had were sort of silly that resonated with me on a very real level. it felt very grounded in a reality that allowed the reader to really connect with pablo in that moment.

i think that a lot of what i loved about pablo in particular, and again something that was a surprise, was how little the romance plays into this contemporary. i don’t mean to imply that the romance isn’t, i think that pablo allows this romance to be the thing that distracts him from everything else. almost in an “if i can keep this thing then the fact that all the other shit in my life that’s currently falling apart will work out” kind of way, that while anxiety-inducing in a way that i’ve never experienced before; was also just something that again grounded the novel. i’m very lucky in that i don’t have a crushing amount of student loan debt from my decision to drop out after one semester, so i couldn’t relate to that aspect of his journey, at least on a personal level, i was able to empathize with it. i think that a lot of the financial binds that pablo finds himself in are not only very real but provided something i don’t think gets a lot of page time in contemporary novels with this. the struggle with paying for college is something that a lot of american’s at least have to struggle with, and including that in the realistic way i thought was really a nice thing to do. even if only because when pablo was explaining the situation that landed him in the financial situation he was in gave me the big short vibes [ a film that has nothing to do with twenty-somethings falling in love, but their way of explaining complicated concepts relating to the lead up to the great recession was easily some of the best cinema ever made ] and i was already a sucker for pablo’s thoughts and when random bits of foundational material can be incorporated into the narrative in an organic way that was at least entertaining af to this human.

more than anything though the fact that pablo wasn’t really sure what it was that he wanted to do with his life was by far the most relatable. while i couldn’t relate to the full pressure of being financially in debt to the extent he was, can’t relate to bill collectors hounding me, but the sense of “i have plan” without actually moving forward was the biggest mood™. there was something anxiety-inducing about continuously reading about pablo continuously ignoring those particular responsibilities, but i think that was really a credit to choi’s writing. i was genuinely concerned about pablo. just as i was about his family when around halfway through the book there’s an emergency. obviously, not all of the characters were given an equitable amount of page time, but i felt that the page time we got with them was spent crafting believable and easily relatable.

i guess this is the part of the discussion where i guess we can turn to things that i didn’t quite vibe with. i’ll be honest, i don’t expect this portion to be any less ramble-y than the first half of this was, but i also am still unsure if these are actual flaws of the novel. i’ll do my best to remain spoiler free and i’ll do my best to explain the context of the lens through which i experienced this, and i fully accept the fact that i might not have interpreted this as was intended, but i don’t think that i’ve reached too far in terms of me not appreciating these aspects.

first, and what i think is the briefest conversation is some of the interactions between pablo and his friend group was just odd. maybe i’m more like pab’s mom [ the scene where he talks about her being the least sentimental person really struck a chord with me ], but there were moments that i thought really should have been called out. to be fair they were, and again, pablo’s position in life is different than my own circumstances and so expecting him to react to wyn’s obama birther comment in a way that i would have is unfair to all parties. the part that really left me speechless though had more to do with the cultural insensitivity of his friend getting his first big break on a law and order type procedural focused more on federal agents in nyc where he’d be playing a terrorist character with a generic middle eastern sounding name that fairly rubbed pablo the wrong way. this notion that pablo was somehow being a shitty friend for not being happy for this break or even that pablo had sorta ghosted the friend group to spend time with leanna at this point in time was wild to me. sure the girlfriend stuff is pretty valid, but the idea that a person should be happy that their friend is going to go on national television and play a stereotype about my culture, that seems to be outside the realm of what i would consider being actual friend behavior. the scene later with them making up and mending bridges and moving past that was nice because again we got to have a moment with pablo being introspective and his friend did raise a lot of valid points to all of the things going on in pablo’s life that he wasn’t dealing with. all of that i thought was really well handled. again, it’s hard for me to really label it a flaw, especially given i feel like it could have been written with the intent for the reader to stand with pab in that particular instance, but i remember just having a really getting rubbed the wrong way by the part of the conversation that dealt with this friend playing the terrorist on the racist television show.

now we get to the hard part of this discussion, the part of the book that honestly made me the most conflicted. the romance between our two leads. seeing as i didn’t talk at length about the stuff i liked about that particular aspect at length before i will do so now. i was a big fan of their initial meeting. as far as meet-cutes go this was solid, and i was really on board with their dynamic from the jump. i will say though that i’m a sucker for any dynamic where both parties are clever, i’m a sucker for a snappy one-liner when two characters teeter on the edge of being mean to each other i’m destined to fall for them. i think that’s sort of the appeal in a contemporary with romance elements, you want those conversations where both parties are on the top of their game, where there isn’t that missing beat or that thing you wish you could take back. the dialogue is just heightened enough to where you can believe that people would say these things but still at a level where it can come off as aspirational. if that at all makes any sense.

i even thought that the duo was opposite enough to make it work. sure the famous entity going matched with someone who leads a more ordinary person isn’t the most unique idea under the sun, but even then i think that the setup worked well enough. there were still aspects, particularly the interim between the first and second bodega visits that could tug on a reader’s suspension of disbelief, but i don’t think that it’s anything that ruins the novel. again, we’re operating in a heightened space that is still trying to come across as realistic, and a minor tug isn’t going to be the thing that makes me lose it. i’d need a few more instances and thankfully none popped up.

i want to revisit the part of the discussion where i talked about this being told solely from pablo’s perspective. i didn’t really start to think this was an issue until the end of the novel where i felt things started to come together almost too neatly? i started to get this sense that it was almost like through his time with leanna that pablo was able to see the things in his life that he wasn’t doing, the steps he should be taking to better himself. i’m hesitant to really call leanna a plot device because i do think that it’s always been clear that the two of them weren’t exactly the best of matches for one another. again, i think that there were a lot of moments in the novel where pablo was allowed to have introspective moments and it was established that he was the type of person that allowed himself to be distracted or chased after thing for the chase and that relationship with leanna could easily be one of those instances, so discussing it in this way is hard for me to do. taken as a whole i don’t think that the novel is poorly written, especially in regards to their relationship. i don’t really think that there were any moments where leanna outwardly tried to change pab or show him how his life could be better, which is part of why i stop short of calling her a plot device. i do think on some level even before the final third of the book pab knew and understood what the endgame would be. i actually liked what the endgame happened to be. i’m a big fan of the trend in contemporaries not to give in to the expected ending, or at least the ending that would break the internal logic of the book. i think it’d be easy to call the ending a disappointment, but i appreciated that the ending like so much else int he narrative was honest in a raw way that allowed the reader to connect to it.

before i transition into my closing thoughts, i do want to say that there is a part in the book, the final third where there is a discussion of actions that i thought were just grossly manipulative of leanna as a minor. i wasn’t expecting it, i don’t think that it detracts from the narrative in any way. i just think that i think that it implies a more complex dynamic between leanna and a side character that i know i would have appreciated having explored with leanna’s perspective. that also wasn’t the story that choi wanted to tell, and i think that it’s always a sign of a good story when there are threads that you want to keep pulling, so it’s not a knock in this case i guess. if it wasn’t clear by this point that i have a lot of contradictory thoughts, particularly in what are the “weaker” points of the novel, then i don’t know what to say to you. just know that there’s about a paragraph of text in the last third of the book that could be considered grooming behavior. around the middle-ish, just before the third act, there’s a conversation centering around assault / unwanted touching. again, it’s nothing graphic, it’s two pages of a conversation, but it is there. i think both instances were well handled and well written. just know.

at the end of the day, this is one of my favorite books i’ve ever read, period. i have never felt more connected to the main character than i did reading pablo. i was constantly torn between wanting to read the book as slowly as possible as to savor every moment i’d get to spend with pablo for the first time and reading through the novel as quickly as possible to continue the experience i was having. this book constantly had me pausing to chew on a sentence, whether it was because of the construction or the content, and i’ve honestly never felt this engaged while reading something. choi crafted something in these 400+ pages that were truly magical and one of a kind. i will forever be jealous of those that get to come to this story for the first time and is a book that i know i will return to time and time again. not only to check back in on pab but because of the narrative; while discussing issues that are relevant today, are also issues that i think are timeless and welcome a revisit. someday things might fall into place for me the way that they did for pablo, i’ll have to work on that. until then though i’m grateful to have had this experience at this point in my life. i hope that all future readers of this are able to enjoy this book at least a fraction of the amount that i did if not more so.

[exxar1]

Chapter 13: Ambassador Kosh, The Smoking Caterpillar, And Six Months Saved

3/16/2021

            One of my favorite sci-fi shows from the 1990s is Babylon-5. It takes place on a space station in neutral territory between various warring alien and human empires in the mid twenty-third century. One of the alien characters, Ambassador Kosh, is fond of asking those around him, “Who are you?” Kosh is a Vorlon, a mysterious, cryptic species who’s true physical nature is hidden from others by an elaborate encounter suit. No one has ever been to their homeworld, and the Vorlons rarely interact with other species around them, so when one asks “Who are you?”, it’s a significant question that implies a need for an honest, significant, soul-searching answer.

           That is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot these past few months. This week is the six month anniversary of my salvation. Looking back, it feels like I’ve crossed a gulf wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon. September 17th seems like almost a lifetime ago. And yet, it also feels like it was just yesterday. So much has changed in my life, and yet so much is still the same.

           The other day I was looking back over my previous log entries from this new journey. The one from October 10th leaped out at me as I reread it:

            “I just recently realized how much we change throughout our adult lives as we get older. Those passions and desires and things that interest us and consume our time when we’re in our twenties are not necessarily the same passions, desires, and things that we care about in our forties, or our fifties, or our sixties. We as people are not just flesh and blood. We are conscious, thinking, emotional, intellectual human beings, and the parts of us that make us who we are are those passions, desires, interests, and things that we care about. It’s what makes me me.

             Some of those qualities can be defined as hobbies or interests, the things that I do in my spare time or what I’m passionate about in life. The fact that I have always been a science fiction fan, for example, or my writing. Other qualities can be emotional, or intellectual, or parts of me that aren’t necessarily physical. The fact that I’m gay, for example; or that I love to read, or that I’m an introvert, or that I once used to be an Atheist.

           In other words, those things that make up who we are as an individual human being, that define us to the world and to other people around us, are not always constant or unchanging. And that’s what I had never realized until now. I have always been happy living my life on my own, by my own terms, and I found peace in being alone. I have never felt the need to have that “special someone” in my life, but now, for reasons I cannot explain, I’m no longer content with that. I think this is why so many people at this point in their mid-lives have a crisis. They buy a new car or get divorced or change careers. Perhaps my loneliness is nothing more than a mid-life crisis?”

           At the time, I was attributing all my recent angst and internal unrest to aging, but now I recognize this for what it really was – and still is: sanctification. (or maybe it’s a little of both.) 2 Corinthians 5:17, one of the first verses that I had memorized long, long ago in Sunday school, says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It’s one thing to know about a process, but quite another thing entirely to actually experience that process firsthand.

           Who am I?

           My name is Neal Timothy Jones, I was born on June 4, 1978, I currently weigh 205 lbs., stand at a glorious height of 5’5”, have blue eyes, brown hair – which I’m very slowly but surely losing (more than in the back than the front, I’d say), and a goatee that is now more silver than brown. My favorite color is blue. I’m a brother, a son and an uncle, but not a father or a husband. I was born and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, and I’m an introvert. I’m often shy, quiet, used to have a hard time speaking up for myself and was afraid to be myself for fear of ridicule and shame. I’m a sci-fi fan (Star Trek in particular) and an avid Super Mario Brothers player. (If that was an Olympic sport I would hold a gold medal for most games conquered and exceptional fire flower skill.) I also read a lot, and, lately, I have a very hard time shutting off my brain. I’m always overthinking, overanalyzing, and overly critical of both myself and those around me.

           My favorite food is Italian, especially pizza and pasta (hence the 205 pounds), and I despise coconut. I mean, like really, really hate it. Whoever decided that shredded coconut should be a topping on desserts should be strung up by their apron strings and crucified in their kitchen. Coconut – especially shredded coconut – has absolutely no taste for one, and for two, it has all the texture of grass. It’s vile and disgusting.

           I have type 2 diabetes, and I’m a good twenty-five pounds overweight. I’ve always hated exercise. Yes, I enjoyed running around the playground and being outdoors in general when I was a kid, but I hated organized sports. I suffered one year of soccer in 7th grade because my parents insisted I needed to get out and do something besides always being alone under a tree with a book in between classes. (I think they were worried about my anti-social behavior far more than they actually let on.) That one year led to a life long revulsion of sports in general. Seriously, I don’t get it. Running up and down a field, chasing a ball or trying to make a goal – *yawn*. So overrated.

           Also, for that matter, is competition. I’m probably the least competitive person anyone knows. I really couldn’t care less whether or not my coworkers beat me in upsells and product promotions. I don’t give a damn if my friends or family make more money than I do. I have no desire to rise the corporate ladder and be king of my local branch. I don’t really care what my house looks like on the outside compared to my neighbors. Nor do I give a rat’s ass if my car is the nicest one in the neighborhood. (And, frankly, given the neighborhood I currently live in, I most definitely do not want a super nice car that would attract nearby thieves.) I really do just march to the beat of my own drum, and if you’d like join me, great! If not, oh well. You do your own thing, and you be you. I’m not going to care one way or the other.

           Who am I?

           I’m gay. Or, rather, I was. Or maybe I still am. I honestly don’t know. And that’s been my problem lately. Clear back in September, right after I was saved, I was sure of two things: one, that I was saved and new child of God, and two, that I was gay. In just six months, though, I’m not so sure of that latter one anymore.

           It’s funny how we sometimes take one thing in our lives – our marriage, our job, our sexuality, or maybe that one hobby or spare time interest – and we build our whole self-identity around that. For me, it was being gay. That was who I was, and I centered my entire self-identity around that one thing as soon as I left high school. After I left the Army, after returning home to Twin Falls and enrolling at the College of Southern Idaho, I immediately joined the Gay-Straight Alliance on campus. I spoke up for gay rights, and I even helped organize a petition for a gay float in the local Western Days parade. (I honestly can’t remember if we ever really accomplished that or not. I do remember the city council not being very happy with our little request.)

           I watched pretty much anything on TV that had gay stories and/or main characters. Shows like Will & Grace, Queer As Folk, and Six Feet Under were my favorites.  Same for the movies. Hollywood was my religion, the local cineplex my church. Celebrities like Ellen Degeneres were my idols, and I did my best to follow their wisdom and lifestyles. Throughout college and my early adult life afterwards, whenever I introduced myself to new friends and co-workers, I was quick to let them know I was gay. I was proud of that, and anyone who disagreed with that or tried to tell me I was wrong for living that way would quickly get shut down by my new, independent spirit and debating skills. I bought t-shirts with slogans like “I don’t even think straight” or which just had the symbol of the rainbow flag on the front.

           Everything else was secondary, and when my life moved online to social media, I made sure to put my sexual orientation front and center on all my bios. I connected even more to the greater national gay community by joining Facebook pages that promoted gay rights, and I followed many gay activists and celebrities on Twitter and Instagram. In recent years, especially after moving to Las Vegas, I did quiet down a little with the in-your-face attitude, due more to aging than anything else. It was no longer that important than every single new friend or co-worker know right away that I was gay. Instead of announcing it with the first handshake, I let the subject come up organically in regular conversation. I also purchased Apple watch bands made in rainbow colors or plastic bracelets of the same design to wear as a silent testimony of my proud lifestyle.

           Who am I?

           One of my favorite scenes in Disney’s Alice In Wonderland is the one where Alice is confronted by the smoking caterpillar. He repeatedly demands of the young, lost and confused heroine, “Who. Are. You?” (Each word is punctuated by a perfectly shaped ring of cartoon smoke.)

           In recent weeks and months, there have been days when I have stood in front of the mirror above my bathroom sink, looking at my reflection with puzzlement and curiosity, asking that very same question. Some days, I have felt like a true warrior of God, leaping from bed, excited to rush into the world and live the truth of Christ. Other days, I have felt small and weak, and conflicted, and wondering why I have kept giving in to the old lust of the flesh and breaking my vow of celibacy. (Yes, even just giving in to old desires and lusts in the mind’s eye are a sin in the presence of God. It doesn’t necessarily have to go as far as an actual, physical act with another man.)

           One evening, about three weeks ago, as I got ready for bed, I was reflecting on my day. It was one of those mediocre days, not too bad, but not really exciting or exceptional either. I was feeling a little down and discouraged, but I couldn’t say exactly why. I sat on the edge of my bed, lost in thought, and tracing absently with my right index finger the outline of the tattooed cross on my left bicep. Since the tattoo was barely a week old, most of it was still one large scab, and I had been fighting the recent urge to pick at it. I glanced down and saw the plastic rainbow bracelet on my right wrist, right next to the other bracelet with white stars and a blue strip on a black background.

           As if by some spiritual instinct, I reached out with my left hand and pulled that rainbow bracelet off. I held it up, examining it for a few moments, and then I opened the drawer of my nightstand. I tossed the bracelet inside and shut the drawer. I sat for a minute or two, thinking about what I had just done, and then I got up and marched across the hall into my office. I opened the bottom left drawer of my desk and rifled through the several dozen Apple watch bands that have accumulated there over the last few years. I pulled out all the ones that were rainbow striped or rainbow colored. I threw them in the trash. I also threw away the bag of rainbow bracelets (they had been 20 for $5 on Amazon). I turned out the light and shut the office door.

           I went to bed that night feeling more at peace than when I had first asked Jesus into my heart just a few months before.

           The next day, during my lunch break at Walmart, I went through all my social media accounts and removed the word ‘gay’ from my bios, as well as any emoji symbols such as the rainbow flag. That, too, felt right. I was now just ‘Christian’, not ‘gay Christian.’

           I’m still honestly not sure what this means. Part of me has felt utterly terrified, as if I’m erasing more than just part of who I’ve been for all my adult life. The one thing that was the core of my self-identity has been essentially wiped away, as if God was one of the workers in the amusement park of Westworld, another of my favorite shows. In that not-so-distant future setting, the human-like androids are often re-programmed by the park’s engineers to change their personalities or even their entire character to match whatever new story is going to be enacted for the park’s biological visitors and tourists. Ever since my salvation, I have often felt that God is reprogramming me in the same way, erasing parts of the old sinful self and rewriting new software, giving me a new core identity. Right now, that process of sanctification has only just begun, and, hence, there are days when I don’t quite know what to call myself. Yes, I’m a Christian. Yes, I am a child of God. But I feel like there should be more than just that. I feel like the loss of my old identity means that that I also have nowhere to belong; there is currently no new community in which I can plug myself in order to have the same sense of friendship and comradery that I once had with my fellow gays.

           And yes, I know what you’re already saying to your phone or computer screen as you read this: “Neal,” you say, “just being a child of God is enough. Just calling yourself a Christian is enough. That is the new community that you now belong to.”

           Yeah, I know. But, at the same time, I still feel incomplete. Don’t ask me why. I feel like those Lego sets I used to play with as a kid. My favorites were the spaceships, especially the really big ones that came with about two hundred individual pieces. I liked those the best because I had the choice of either building the ship pictured on the front of the box, or I could assemble a different ship entirely using the same pieces but fitting them together in different ways. I feel like God is doing that with me right now. He’s completely disassembled me from the inside out, and his Spirit is slowly and gradually reassembling me into something totally new.

           Part of me wishes He would just hurry the hell up and get to the finished product already! Why is He taking so long?? But the other part of me – the part that I am slowly coming to recognizing as the voice of the Holy Spirit is gently, firmly reminding me that this process can take a lifetime; that I need to learn to be patient and wait upon the Lord.

           Who am I?

           I am ALL of those things that I listed above – yes, even the homosexual. God hasn’t changed that completely. But that particular Lego piece is now on the worktable with all the others. And I no longer feel a need to advertise to anyone and everyone that I am still gay. For now, I am just ‘Christian.’ And I’m looking for a church family where I can truly belong.

           I recently finished reading a book that dealt with this exact topic. The author is Greg Coles, someone I’ve mentioned before in these posts. The book is titled No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation. There are many, many lovely and beautiful passages in the book where Greg gives his own testimony of finding his place in his particular part of the world and his church community after coming out as a gay Christian in 2017. But there are two passages, specifically, that I found most inspirational in my own journey of trying to find the church family in which God wants to place me. I’ve already posted them on my social media, but I’m going to quote them again here.

           The first is from Chapter 5: Hide and Seek:

            “But God—the real God—has only ever been interested in loving us, in redeeming us, in transforming us. He has no interest in an army of clones, a horde of wax figures and cardboard cutouts sent to approach him in bold unanimity while his heterogeneous flesh-and-blood children crouch in the shadows.

Those of us who love Jesus are indeed called to find our paramount identity in him. Every other identity is placed in submission to Christ, upturned and radically reordered by the logic of the kingdom of God. But our particularities are not erased in the process. We are not recycled paper, blended into a pulp and recast as a blank sheet. We are a painted canvas in the hands of a master restorer, painstakingly cleansed and healed and remade until we finally become the irreplicable artwork we were always intended to be.”

           That ‘irreplicable artwork’ is what I cannot wait to see! That’s what I’m eagerly waiting for – that finished masterpiece. But I also know from the testimonies of my parents and Pastor Mark, as well as ones that I’ve read online from other Christian authors, is that there is a real possibility that I might never see that completely finished work; that God, in His infinite wisdom and grace, is never entirely finished with us. And that’s okay too. That’s what I need to recognize and reconcile with right now. The old saying really is sometimes true: it’s the journey that matters more than the destination. But, along the way, God does not want me to just melt into His crowd, to be one more clone in the Christian army. Instead, as Greg points out, God wants each of us to stand out, to share our unique gifts and talents with the body of Christ and with the world around us. We need to shine for Him, and we can’t do that if we just hide away, afraid to be more than just another smiling face in the crowd.

The other passage, the one that brought me to tears, was the final paragraphs of the book:

             “I am my Beloved’s. He is mine. We belong in one another, with one another, to one another. We always will. We’re not going anywhere.

             I’m not the only one making these vows with heaven, to be sure. A symphony of voices joins mine in the air. The song includes married folks as well as celibates like me, straight and gay and everything else. Our choir represents every race, every language, every nation.

             But despite the grandeur of the choir, Christ still hears and responds to each individual voice. He isn’t content to declare his affection for us in form letters and megaphone announcements. He whispers to us one by one, into your ear and mine, exchanging promises of love. As long as these promises remain true—as long as our fragile memories can hold them—home will never be further than a whisper in our ears, never further than an ink drop beneath our skin. We are loved. And because we are loved, we belong.”

           I have re-read that passage so many times over the last couple weeks, savoring it like piece of gold, a treasure of beauty and real wisdom. Greg’s completely right. Not only does God want us, just as we are, no matter how broken, how lost, or how sinful, but He also wants for us to belong in Him, and Him alone. This small piece of wisdom seems at once so simple and yet so complex. I have had to remind myself almost every day, especially those days when I’m feeling lonely, or a little lost, or discouraged because the church that I had hoped was going to be my new home didn’t work out after all, that I am first and foremost a child of God. I belong only – and solely – in Him. I need to understand that that is all that matters right now. The rest will come in time. Perhaps once I have understood and fully absorbed this first and important truth, then God will begin providing unto me the rest of his desired blessings and, especially, belonging within a new church family.

           As a result of these blog posts, I have had the immense blessing and pleasure of reconnecting with old friends who had once taught and reared me when I was that stubborn, contrary, rebellious kid who gave out more sass and disrespect than a Las Vegas drag queen in a nightclub. One of those friends shared a quote by Leonard Ravenhill with me a few days ago that immediately touched my heart. I printed it off and taped it to the bottom frame of one of my computer monitors in my home office.

“Great eagles fly alone; great lions hunt alone; great souls walk alone – alone with God!”

             The friend who shared this helped me to see that same truth that Greg pointed out in that second passage that I quoted above. It’s okay for me to stand apart from the crowd – Christian or otherwise. It’s okay for me to continue marching on my own. The only difference between my old life and this new, blessed one is that God is now marching beside me. He has changed the beat of my drum, and He has “…begun a good work” in me, as Paul says Philippians 1:6, and that work will not be completed until “…the day of Jesus Christ.” But, if I’m honest, I will say that, on most days, I don’t feel like the lion or the eagle. Not just yet. I feel more like a church mouse from a Beatrix Potter tale, crouching in the shadow of my Lord and Savior, and letting Him do His thing on my behalf.

               One of my other favorite quotes that has had a special significance to me these last few months is by Socrates. He once stated, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I think God would agree, and the best form of self examination should always start with the following question:

                Who am I?

[daresplaining]

MCU Danny Rand Week: Day 5

A Favorite Episode

Iron Fist Season 1, Episode 10: “Black Tiger Steals Heart”

    Another challenging category because we have so many favorites, but this is one of the most pivotal and powerfully-executed episodes of Iron Fist. It introduces some major characters, reinvents an antagonist that, up until this point, had not been handled all that well in this universe (”Handled”. Hah! Sorry...), and does a beautiful job of cranking up the pain of the show’s already brutal emotional rollercoaster. And as an added bonus... it contains not one, but two Iron Fists.   

    Danny is in a downward spiral moving into the end of Episode 9. His already chaotic life is shattering around him, he is getting closer and closer to the root of his repressed trauma, and Colleen has nearly been killed by the Hand. Thus, the beginning of Episode 10 comes as an emotional respite-- both for Danny and Colleen, and also for the viewer. The bright, gentle color palette of the first chunk of the episode reinforces the calm that comes with the idea that for the moment, our heroes are getting a well-earned break. 

    We are also given a little more of Colleen’s backstory, in that she is bringing Danny “home”. While her past remained largely undeveloped in this first season, we learn enough to know that she owes a lot to this safe haven, which both tells us about her and gives us an extra reason to trust in the safety of the place. The astute viewer might wonder about why everyone-- including Colleen-- is wearing various combinations of black and red (the same colors as the Hand ninjas’ uniforms in Daredevil!), but the overall good vibe of these early scenes serves to keep any suspicion in the background.

    It’s a small detail, but Danny learning to recharge his chi is one of our favorite scenes in the whole show. It’s great to see him this content, and it’s a beautiful bit of acting and cinematography-- as well as a vital bonding moment between Danny and our new pal Bakuto.

    Bakuto was one of the major triumphs of Iron Fist and The Defenders, and we will miss him. He existed briefly in the comics, as a young, volatile Hand leader who clashed with Matt in the Daredevil arc leading up to “Shadowland”. He was around for a few issues before being killed. The Bakuto developed in Iron Fist is a far more interesting (and, personality-wise, completely different) version of the character. His soft-spoken, friendly, insanely charismatic nature makes him instantly trustworthy. We are also compelled to take Colleen at her word. This is someone she loves-- clearly, he’s a good person. We also love the fact that Bakuto’s physical appearance, mannerisms, and even speech patterns are very similar to Danny’s-- another subconscious suggestion that we should trust this guy. 

    This comment stuck out to us as important the first time we watched the show, and now, with what we learned about Bakuto’s K’un-Lun connections in The Defenders, it makes perfect sense. It’s a great detail for Danny to pick up on... a little thread tying the Hand to K’un-Lun. 

    This also explains how Bakuto is able to offer Danny exactly what he longs for-- further Iron Fist training. Having left K’un-Lun prematurely (and been lied to a bit while he was there, as we learn in The Defenders) he is still a weak Iron Fist. Bakuto offers to fix this. He offers Danny information, and fulfillment, and purpose, and... this:    

    While his identity is left a mystery, and the Iron Fist legacy is not explored this season beyond being mentioned, the costume makes clear that this is the MCU version of Orson Randall, the Iron Fist who directly preceded Danny in the comics. How awesome is that? We don’t know if this Orson suffered/is suffering the same chaotic life as his comics counterpart, but we would kill to see more of him. As it stands, not only is this a glorious scene for all the comics fans in the audience, it’s also a powerful moment for Danny, who has never seen another Iron Fist before and is nearly brought to tears.               

    While Bakuto’s suspicious knowledge of Iron Fist techniques and general obsession with Immortal Weapons makes a bit more sense in light of what we learned in The Defenders, we still can’t resist speculating about the missing Book of the Iron Fist plot point from the comics, and the other stuff in Bakuto’s safe...

    What are you hiding in there, buddy?       

    After offering Danny everything he has been searching for, the cracks at the edges of paradise begin to come through. Bakuto spies on Danny’s phone call with Harold, and is then confronted by Colleen. This interaction proves that Danny is being kept in the dark, and Colleen’s discomfort suggests that maybe, in fact, Bakuto doesn’t have Danny’s best interests at heart.

    Danny, meanwhile, runs into Darryl in another of our favorite scenes in the show. Darryl (who was originally in Luke Cage, for anyone who missed that connection) is a great character-- similar to Hope Schlottman and Cole Miller in his status as an innocent kid dragged into a horrible situation. He is instantly sympathetic, and his little sparring match with Danny in this scene is delightful.  

    Danny gives him the benefit of the doubt, too, because he’s Danny. And he executes some perfect defensive fighting. It’s a really fun interaction, included to add maximum pain to their less-than-fun interaction at the end of the episode.

    Danny sneaks into the containment building and spends a few significant seconds staring at a mystery person in a bed. Who is this? Is it Orson? This is one of the biggest mysteries of Season 1 for us and we hope to see it resolved in Season 2.

    Danny and Gao have a fascinating relationship. While she is as irreverent as she come-- that’s part of her charm, in fact-- she exhibits a compelling degree of respect for Danny, and helps him on a number of occasions. But of course, she is also extremely manipulative and may be behaving in this way in order to serve her own needs. It is impossible to read Gao’s motivations, but in this episode, with the Bakuto situation becoming uncertain, she is particularly suspect-- and neither Danny nor the viewer can be sure what side she’s actually on. Bakuto insists she is lying, but we now have a reason to not trust what he has to say.     

    And most importantly, she is the one to reveal to Danny that the compound is Hand-run, a revelation which both saves Danny and screws with Bakuto’s plans. Until this point, we had very little sense of the Hand’s recruitment process. In Daredevil we saw them kidnapping children to harvest their blood, and were shown crowds of identity-less ninjas, but had no indication of what appeal the organization might have for its members. This is what makes this reveal so effective-- the fact that Bakuto’s faction is so different from anything we’ve seen before. For the first time, it becomes clear why people-- good people, even-- might be drawn into the Hand. This adds depth and realism to a group that previously in the Netflix-verse had been two-dimensional, and makes them extra sinister and creepy. 

    This is followed by Danny’s fight with Colleen, which confirms the worst. He’d thought he was safe. Now he is learning that the one person he really trusts isn’t even who she said she was. The pain of this fight is made extra powerful when placed alongside the perfect lightness and tranquility of their relationship early in the episode.  

    This fight does several things (in addition to hurting the viewer). First, it benefits from dramatic irony. To the viewer, Colleen seems to be the voice of reason because we have seen what Danny has not: that she felt bad about lying, wanted to tell him the truth, but was prevented from doing so. We have also just been shown how dangerous it is to believe appearances, and we trust Colleen’s testimony of her time with the Hand, and her long-held devotion to Bakuto’s faction, enough to assume that maybe she is right. But at the same time, we understand Danny’s horror on an emotional level. This is not the first time he has been stabbed in the back by someone he thought he could trust, and it is hitting at the core of his pain: his parents, who-- he believes at this point-- were murdered by the Hand. The worst kind of fight is the one where both sides have a point, and neither is able to budge. 

    It also explores a theme set up earlier in the episode, in which Danny tells Bakuto that most people are only interested in using him, as the Iron Fist, for their own purposes. As we later learn, one of those people is... Bakuto. During the fight, Colleen directly addresses this theme, solidifying the fact that she isn’t trying to manipulate him in this way and that she cares about him as a person. Danny is too upset to acknowledge the significance of this statement, but the viewer is informed enough to recognize its importance.   

    With this, night falls and the tone of the episode shifts. Instead of the bright, colorful, inviting color palette of the daytime scenes, we are plunged into sinister low lighting, mirroring the shattering of the Hand compound’s happy illusion and the bleakness of Danny’s situation.   

    He is isolated, unable to trust anyone around him, and his discovery of Bakuto’s surveillance room-- bringing with it a hint of just how much the Hand have been meddling in his life-- is just one more psychological punch in the face. 

    This is the point at which Davos shows up. We wrote a post about him the other day, but it’s always worth reiterating how great his introduction is in this episode. Danny has lost one friend and gained another, and their side-by-side tag-team is one of the greatest fights in a great fight-filled show. 

    But even this can’t save Danny from having a bit more of his world ripped away. The horror and confusion resulting from the emotional switch-backs inflicted upon him this episode disrupt his chi and prevent him from using the Iron Fist. He has now lost one of his closest friends and his future as the Iron Fist all in one go. Any hope he might have possessed when first arriving at the compound has been destroyed, and he is left with nothing.      

    To add even more pain, Colleen has not stopped trusting Danny, and is caught between two sides, both of whom she cares about. She risks her life to help Danny, turning on her family. The least she can do is help him and Davos escape to prevent both parties from killing each other, but this is a decision that impacts her arc for the rest of the show. At the very least, Danny sees that she has helped her before being dragged out the door.   

    We are then left with another little plot thread that we’d hoped would return in The Defenders, but didn’t. Having been forced to fight Danny for real, and getting seriously injured by Davos in the process, Darryl is now perfectly set up to enter a new stage of his own story. While it has not yet been carried out on-screen, the idea of Darryl further devoting himself to the Hand and becoming an enemy to Colleen and Danny is painful enough for the moment.  

    Having started the episode on an emotional high, Danny ends it at his lowest possible point. He has lost everything he had on Earth, and is faced with the shame of returning to K’un-Lun as a failed Iron Fist. Everything he’d hoped to achieve has been destroyed. 

    And on top of that, just to make everything that much worse, he’s bleeding out.  

    A great end to a great episode. We didn’t even touch on the excellent Meachum plot-points explored in “Black Tiger Steals Heart”, but Danny’s trauma is compelling enough on its own. 

[obsessivesarcasticgayliving]

Sisters’ Night

They hadn’t had a sisters’ night in quite a long while.  At least that’s what it felt like. It was understandable, reasonable. A lot had happened over the past few months. Alex was abducted, tortured, almost killed. Kara largely blamed herself for those experiences. Kara had to fight her cousin, an incredibly painful fight she might add. They both put their lives on the line and in the others’ hands while resisting the historically tyrannical reign and potential enslavement and/or genocide of the Daxamites.  Knowing she was responsible for releasing lead into the atmosphere sending their invaders back to space including the person she thought was the love of her life (she didn’t know how wrong she was until she drunkenly made out with Lena Luther one night) was hard for Kara to handle. She became reclusive for a while. When she wasn’t working at CatCo she was flying through the skies protecting those who needed Supergirl. When she wasn’t partaking in either of those activities, she was at home in the dark crying. Trying with all her might to dig her way out of her slump. On the off chance she did go out, (she may have super strength but her sister had red sun lamps and puppy eyes that were almost as strong as Kara’s) she got drunk.  One of these nights resulted in the aforementioned drunken make out session between a Luther and a Super.

So no, a sister’s night, a night with no other people, no friends or girlfriends, has not happened in a long time. So when Alex showed up outside her door with drinks for both of them and enough food to feed an army of a small country on the way, Kara didn’t have the heart, nor desire, to send her sister away.

Kara bowed low, swinging her arm out in front of her signaling Alex to enter. She tilted her eyes up making eye contact quickly with her sister, the person who has been in her corner longer than any other person, now officially longer than she had lived on Krypton. She smiled a smiled that reached her eyes, a rare occurrence these days.  Alex simply smiled back, knowing all too well the darkness living in her sister.

Alex set the drinks on the coffee table, fell back onto the couch limbs flying in all directions and a grunt escaping her mouth.  “We’ve broken mom’s rule you know. We aren’t supposed to go more than two weeks without spending time together “bonding.” She’d be extremely disappointed if she knew. I figured I’d save us both from a premium mom lecture when she visits next week. Whatya say, Kar? Food and movies or food and something else?” Alex finishes watching Kara with calculating eyes trying to deduce what Kara was in the mood for.

Kara moved toward her bedroom without saying a word. She emerged with three boxes stacked on top of each other. “Food and talking-reminiscing really. I’ve been going through our old photo books from when I first arrived on earth.”

“That could be fun, deal” Alex reached for a book sticking out slightly from the first box. She opened the cover and was met with the last picture taken of her family, all four of them. “This was a good day. It was the last happy day we had for a while.”

“I remember. It was one of the first days it felt like we were actually family.” Kara smiled sadly, “it was the last picture we had taken with the four of us.” Alex just nodded her head patting the spot next to her telling Kara to sit. They made it through one and a half photo books before the food arrived. Pizza and potstickers covered the island in the kitchen and the coffee table in the living room. Together, the sisters ate through all four boxes of pizza and four containers of potstickers, all the while flipping through book after book, telling story after story, laughing so hard they ended up crying. At some point, they slipped off the couch onto the floor.  

They each had a book in their laps, each holding different parts of their combined past, each seeing the same memories from different points, remembering them in slightly different ways. Alex stopped flipping through the book in favor of watching her sister. She looked on in amazement, studying the amazing women sitting in front of her. Kara was truly one of the strongest women she knew. She lost her family-her planet-when she was 13. She had to fit in, belittle herself, ensure that she didn’t stand out for so long. She was lost her family and her planet again when she was attacked by the black mercy and yet again when Mon-el was forced to choose between leaving Earth’s atmosphere and dying. Although Alex was never a fan of the Daxamite. She hated him in fact, hated the way he treated Kara, disrespected her. She thought he was border line (and that was lenient) abusive but he was one of the closest things to home for Kara. Especially after Astra died. Alex knew she had Clark but he didn’t know Krypton as a memory he knew about it from stories. So even though Alex was glad that he was gone, glad that he could no longer hurt and abuse her sister, she realizes that Kara is once again missing that connection to her home.

Alex is brought out of her reverie but Kara’s laugh and insistence that she look at a certain picture. Alex leaned forward and instantly burst into laughter. The picture in question showed both Kara and Alex standing in the kitchen both covered in milkshake laughing hard. It was taken not long after Jeramiah’s “death” Kara is reaching forward her index finger scraping milk shake from Alex’s face moments after the photo was taken Kara’s finger was in her mouth.

“Oh my god!” Alex exclaimed.

“Remember this, it’s from our first official sisters’ night.”

“I do, Dad was presumed dead not too long before this.”

“We didn’t even know this picture was taken until Christmas.  Eliza was working late, remember, she told us that we had to spend the night hanging out doing sister things.”

“Oh yeah, I also remember resenting having to do it. I just wanted to stay in my room, stay away from people. I was so depressed because of dad.”

“I know, Eliza told me that we had to do everything we could to support you. She was really worried about you. She told me that because she was working late so often I needed to find a way to make you lean on me.”

“She told me that I needed to make sure you were ok because dad was the third parent you’d lost and that we were all you had left. With her working late so much, she said it was my responsibility to be there for you.”

They stared at each other mouths agape. “She totally played us!” they gasped at the same time.  They started laughing again.  They laughed so hard they ended up rolling on the floor.  When they both calmed down enough, it was 3 am, after all, they were lying head to head feet extended in opposite directions. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was heavy breathing as breath was caught and after shock laughs escaped tired bodies.

“Do you think she knew back then?” Kara whispers, tilting her head toward Alex.

“Knew what?”

“That we would continue “sisters’ nights even well into our twenties’?”

“I think she hoped that we would.  Hell, she probably knew. But I think she also knew that we needed to figure it out for ourselves. I mean some of our adolescent sisters’ nights involved us sitting silently in the same room until we were allowed to go to bed.”

It was quiet again as both Kara and Alex thought back through their combined and individual pasts.

“Hey Alex, I’m really glad Eliza made us have sisters’ nights growing up. I’m happy that we kept having them even after we moved out. I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for you.  You’re the best sister a person could have.”

“I’m glad too Kara.  And I’m pretty sure the title of best sister a person could have belongs to you. But just for the record, if it weren’t for you, I’m not sure where I’d be either. I love you, sis.”

“Love you too Alex.”

Kara stood up reaching a hand out to Alex to help her up.  “I’m sorry I’ve been distant lately.  It’s just…I felt like- I don’t know- I guess I feel like I’ve lost my planet all over again.  Looking back I see that my relationship with Mon-el wasn’t healthy in the least.  I think I knew that when we were together even, at least subconsciously. But I could talk to him about Krypton and he knew. I didn’t have to explain everything to him.  It was nice talking in my native language with someone who remembers what it was like to live there.”

Opening her arms, Alex held Kara close to her squeezing as tightly as she could. “I know Kar. And I wish I could make your pain go away. I wish I could bring Astra or someone back.  And even though it hurts, you’ve still got me and all of our friends which include but is not limited to Lena Luther.” Kara pulled back staring at Alex with raised eyebrows. “What you’re the one that made out with her in the middle of Dollywood, not me. What’s going on with that anyway or are interested in James still?  Or do you want to swear off relationships right now?  I don’t care either way I just want you to be happy of course!” Alex finishes with a smirk.

Kara doesn’t give Alex the satisfaction of an answer. Instead, she grabs Alex’s hand and gently drags her to the bed.  She’s tired and all she wants right now is to fall asleep in her big sister’s arms, safe and content.                        

[np254]

No, it’s not a click bait. I quit social media and am in rehab.

Let me explain:

What

I deactivated my Instagram account.

I deleted the Facebook app on my phone. I cannot completely deactivate my account, because I am administrating a page (hence the responsibilities). I only access FB from my phone in case of emergencies. Everyday, I check my notifications once or twice from my laptop.

I logged out of Tumblr on my phone and deleted the app. Visits reduced to 2-3 times a week.

The only social-networking app I am still using on a daily basis is Messenger, which is more like a messaging app.

When

From October 13th. Undecided end date.

Why

1. My clean history with social media

I have been socially active all my life and been using my social accounts very consciously for years. Ever since my childhood, my parents have taught me about the importance of moderation when it comes to social media. Even though I have had 2 emails (not one, but two!) for 11 years (and I am 20), my parents have given me guidance on managing these from the very beginning. It was the same with Facebook (which I’ve also been having for about 10 years) – during the first few years, I never went online without parental controls. And for that I was thankful.

Even when I gained full control of my socials, which was about 7 years ago, everything was still going well. Although I have a lot of friends in school and from my social activities, social networks have always been there for its initial purpose – to help me stay in touch with people.

Even when I took charge of my social media accounts, I still used them with caution and consideration. On Facebook, I only connect with people whom I have actually met in real life or whom I have heard about/talked to or with whom I have many mutual friends. My Instagram account has been private from the beginning and I have my own “rules” when accepting new followers. It explains why my social circle is not massive but the interaction rate is remarkable.

At once I could confidently state: “I am a Digital Native, I know my way around social networks”.

2. The addiction

In the beginning it was very subtle. The addiction.

The addiction is young. It started since I went to Germany to study abroad 2 years ago. At the time, I wouldn’t say that it was an addiction. However, it was definitely slight overuse. As I started my “adult life” on my own in a country far away from home, away from any kind of supervision whatsoever, I allowed myself to do whatever I want as long as it’s justifiable.

Somehow I felt the need to update my life online constantly, mainly because: – of the distance. Being so far from each other, I wanted to keep my family informed about my new life – of the time-zone difference. Being online constantly helped me stay informed about family and friends at home. – Germany is beautiful, I had a good life and I wanted to brag about it So I ended up being online a lot. Luckily, I had a group of five girlfriends and we spent a lot of time together cooking, chatting, baking and studying, so I was distracted from my phone and laptop.

After the first year, I moved to Hamburg. Around this time, I started my hobby with analog photography and this blog. I also started my course at the HAW. Here we learned about the importance of our online presence – whether it is necessary and what are the risks. I decided that an online presence is inevitably necessary, since I am a hobby photographer and later on want to work in the media.

I think I did a good job maintaining my online image. I am on every social networks and my profile on each network is carefully though-over and well-drafted. They coexist in harmony with the same username and together they portray different aspects of my personality exactly how I want them to.

It would be nice if I stopped there. But I didn’t.

I craved validation, but my craving was the worst type – I didn’t actually need validation, I just wanted to put myself and my life online, and for that I would feel satisfied enough. The thought that everyone knew how great/not great my life was fed my ego. In my head, I told myself that I am doing a great job sharing with people the often unnoticed moments in life (very noble, I know). Of course, I was ecstatic when someone responded, but that was not the main point.

Now, I will include another factor that played a role. But I also want to disclaim that I do not intend to put all the blame on it. It was only unfortunate that among many other reasons, a long-distance relationship also contributed to the growth of my addiction. Along with my own craving for validation, I had another justified reason to post about every little thing in my life.

From there, everything went downhill. I was online all the time, and I mean the literal  meaning of the phrase. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. The first thing I do every morning was checking my phone for messages from the night, notifications on every social networks, emails, Facebook newsfeed and Instagram feed. This ritual took at least 30 minutes every morning, often an hour. If I didn’t do this, I could not wake up. You can say that my brain delved into new notifications to wake myself up.

Then, during the course of the day, I was online constantly, even when there was nothing more to check. Social networks are programmed to be addictive, to this I agree. Even when I had something to do (e.g. am in a lecture), I would still occasionally pull out my phone, completely unawared, and aimlessly scroll through the feeds. When I had read everything, I would turn to the “Discover” tab, which both Facebook and Instagram have. The vicious cycle went on and on.

Besides from checking the feeds, I also posted content. I trust my taste and my aesthetics, so I invested a lot of time in choosing and editing the photos that I post. A little while ago, I reached the peak of my addiction, where I spent excessive time on content for my Instagram story. I would edit the photos in 1-2 apps then design the layout with beautiful text description in another app. Just to post to a virtual story that will only last for 24 hours. When I was bored, I would write quotes. To have nice hand-writing by smearing your finger on the touch screen is not the most efficient thing to do. I wrote and rewrote until the quotes looked decent and met my aesthetic standards. All that too, served the Instagram story that is only visible for 24 hours.

I agree that there are people who have to do this for the sake of their career. They could be professionals who do this for a living. Considering that I am neither a professional nor  earn any cents from my social accounts, I was wasting so much time for nothing.

A few examples of my “creations” for my Instagram story:

Each of these took about 30 minutes.

The bad thing about the situation was that, I didn’t actually posted a lot on Facebook and Instagram. I only checked the feeds too frequently. Therefore, my addiction went unnoticed for a long time, since nobody, even myself, ever addressed my overuse.

It came to the point where I could not part with my phone or my laptop anymore. I would switch between my phone and laptop. Either one of them was always on, sometimes both. I would even check my phone while my laptop was booting or loading something. From time to time, I found myself in distress because I could never finish the book that I found interesting, or invest time in self-improvement as I did a year ago. Despite my distress, I never succeeded in cutting down my online time to spend time on other things. I just couldn’t.

3. The breakpoint

A month ago, something that happened had shaken me awake and rewired my way of thinking. My apologies for not explaining what this “something” was, for it is a personal matter.

I realised that I would waste my entire future if I didn’t make a change. I felt my mental capabilities deteriorated. I saw that I was not missing out on the virtual world, rather the actual world.

I did not want to live my life anymore, and I was the one who caused it all. 

I have thought about seeking help, but I figured, maybe I could still cure myself, as long as there is a strong self-discipline. With this mindset, I started out on my personal rehab. It is still happening. If it goes wrong, here you can read in black and white, i promise that I will seek professional help.

How’s it been? What have I learned?

It has been difficult, of course.

Like every other addiction, the cravings are unbearable. It’s especially hard when I check my socials in the morning or before I go to bed. If I lose control, I can scroll on forever.

The most noticeable thing are random moments. Sometimes when I find something funny, or an interesting thought passes my mind, I feel a very strong urge to post something onto my Instagram story. Other times, I would open the “Social Networking” app folder on my phone, where I have remembered the positions of every app, and tapped intuitively, only to choose the wrong one (because I deleted some).

From this experience, I learn that the nice moments in life should be enjoyed in person. Even when there is no friend around to share with. I learn to find joy in them. Getting used to not instantaneously share everything online is hard, often times I find myself reaching for my phone, then put it away, then look around to find a familiar face, then look up to the sky and smile to myself. As if there is a sacred secret between me and an unknown Significant Power.

Solitude and happiness may seem like they will never go together, but happiness is actually in its purest form when you can share it with yourself and the universe. The happiness you feel is a whole, and you feel it with your entire heart and attention. Most often, we try to share our happiness, forgetting that it should be felt by us first, before it can be shared with others. Otherwise, the happiness would lose its purpose: to fulfil one’s soul.

Another thing I’ve learned, is that I do not need to prove my emotions.  Honestly, people do not give much attention to what they see online, because the flow of information is endless, so they jump from this to that, quickly forgetting what they have seen. No one has noticed that I stopped using Instagram, even though I had been posting actively. As my account is deactivated, you can’t find me or tag me. From this I learn that life is not a stage and you don’t need an audience. Nobody will judge you if you are not happy, and the fact that you are happy and you show it does not do anything for anyone else, if they don’t truly care about you.

And people who care will go out of their way to make sure that you are fine. Even if you do not post anything on social networks, they will try to reach you. Such a short and simple message like “Hey, how are you doing? Haven’t heard from you in a while.” can light up my day brighter than 50 likes on a pic on Instagram.

Do I feel FOMO?

“Fear of missing out” has become a chronic disease. Funnily, I felt like I have always been having FOMO ever since I started using social media. No matter how often I check my feeds, I would still miss out on something.

To me, it doesn’t make any significance when I stop using social media in comparison to when I still used them in terms of FOMO. It’s not like I have stopped informing myself about the world. Quite the opposite, I read the newspaper regularly to know what is going on in real life.

The only problem that I currently still can’t solve is that I do not know what my friends abroad are doing. I have very good friends from school, with whom I do not talk very often but like to keep up with them via their social media accounts. Now that I am going completely sans Instagram, I don’t have a clue how they are doing, and simply hitting them up via Messenger just to ask if they are fine seems awkward and weird.

So far, this is my experience from one week with massively restricted social media usage.  The struggle and the journey continue…

Deep down I wish that something good will come out of this.

I quit social media

[musicsig]

Louder .cn Interview  March 07, 2011

Louder.cn Articles SIG: Sad Mirror March 07, 2011 SIG: By Chacha, sad mirror  SIG and I often meet each other, either in my house or in a bar. He sometimes comes to listen to music, smoking one by one like a chimney, but seldom speaks. Until now I can’t say that I know him. He and his music are fascinated by the halo, like a pedestrian gradually diving into the thick fog, swaying the flashlight in his hand. Before and after, I can only see the hazy beam I don't know where he is. SIG is about to release an album in April this year. I called him to talk about it. He said calmly: It’s time to pick it! I originally planned to write a large description of SIG and his music, but later found this idea ridiculous and terrifying. I don’t want to give you any preconceived impressions, so maybe you can get closer and look more closely at his music world. CHA: What kind of city is Shanghai to you? SIG: The rule in Shanghai is money. Everyone is active under this rule. The name "Magic City" is appropriate. It makes you hard to get close but you don't want to go. CHA: What do you think is pulling you? SIG: I think it is desire. In this city, I can obviously feel that my desires start to expand, and the activities start to be intense, and gradually I can't control it. CHA: How has such a city changed you? SIG: Basically, my heart changes every day, and my appearance changes with it. There is a vortex here, there will be a feeling of lost. That is, you will forget who you are. CHA: What kind of state do you think you should keep in to be your satisfied state? SIG: A sense of security, unaffected by external and internal desires, remain sensitive and calm at the same time. At first, it was in a good state for half a year, and then slowly entered the vortex, it will become more and more chaotic, and then it will be better in half a year. CHA: So which mental state is more likely to inspire your creative inspiration? SIG: I think the best state of making music should be a calm state. I wouldn’t feel lonely without anger, unhappy or even without desire. It’s the state that came naturally. This is the best for me. This album was made in this state. My music composition always tells me something before I can perceive it. But now, when I make this music, I can't understand it at all, and maybe it will be slowly understood after a few years. So I can't say whether he is good or bad, only an experiment. CHA: What about your upcoming album under the PAUSE MUSIC label? SIG: This record is called "Sad Mirror" and will be released in April this year, but it was completed in 2006-2008. It was the third year after I left the band and started writing my own music. This period I have already started New directions and ways of creating music. Starting from the blank, start with one tone or two tones, or make a drum first, and then add a tone, like building a house, some random unexpected reactions occur, which is my happiest, and then press your own technology It is enough to control the completion. When I finished a work, I didn't actually know what I was going to express. I would listen to it and modify it repeatedly. Slowly, when those pictures appeared, I would give it a name. When I gave them a sequence, it was already 3 years later, and this is how the album basically came out. CHA: This album "Sad Mirror" basically contains some of your previous works, so what does this album mean to you? SIG: It's a summary for me, because I think I'm a little better now, and I might go to the next stage. So this should be a summary of a stage, and I might return to this type in the future. All current works belong to the experimental stage. Here I thank my parents for their support, they gave me money I can buy a lot of time to complete this record, thank them. When I was in junior high school, I heard some foreign tapes. At that time, it was a style called rap or RAP. I was fascinated. At that time, I had such an idea. If I could improve this kind of music and turn it into my own style of music How cool it should be. But the overall environment made me not to do it right away, so I left it there. Until later, I started to form a band to play music and quit the band to make music by myself. I have some unclear pictures in my mind that I want to describe, but I don’t know what it is. I tried to describe this music to my friends. My friends gave me some The record says: Listen to this: DJ Krush. At first I thought this person didn't seem to make music. Until one day, on a quiet night, I heard some sounds that I had never heard. At that moment, some clues in my brain seemed to be connected in an instant. Suddenly I felt the world turned upside down, and my ears seemed to be open. Recalling those ideas when I was a kid, I think it’s still not too late to try it out. At that time, I was at home, started to make music, eat, make music, went out for a walk in the early morning, then made music, and then went to bed. During that time, it was very calm, and naturally there was no desire to torture people. Time is still. Like heaven.  CHA: Can you explain why the album title is called "SAD MIRROR"? What is it related to? SIG: Chinese means a mirror in sadness. I see some sadness in the mirror, or the mirror itself is sad. The name is instantly obtained. I can't give any explanation. I just think it is beautiful. I like that. You have me, I have your feelings. Most song titles in the album are similar combinations of four words. The earliest idea was to want a poetic feeling. From the earliest start of making music to the making of this music, it has changed a lot to myself, and it has completely changed. This music is something I have never thought of before, and there may be some clues before, But after listening to a lot of music, I suddenly had some connections, and all the clues were suddenly connected. For me, there will be an earth-shaking, black and white upside down change. The entire album should be like a suspenseful movie about myself, family, We are educated and humane. CHA: What kind of self do you see in front of "sad mirror"? SIG: What I saw should be a victim, a person who sacrificed himself. Many internal conflicts lead to someone who looks sad outside. I want to take out the contents and show it to others. I hope that I am the mirror. CHA: This album sounds completely different from your new music. The previous music was affected by many krush and shadow. Which musicians influenced your new music? Whose music do you listen to now? Which musicians have a qualitative influence on your creation? SIG: When I was five years old, I watched a Chinese movie about break dance. It was performed by gold panning. I really like that kind of dance and rhythm. It always gives me a feeling that the rhythm should be internal. Let your Every cell is active, beating according to its own specific law, but it should not be at a constant speed, something that is not clear, but I always think that is the root. A lot of music influenced me to make this kind of thing clear gradually. The enlightenment was Krush. Later on, it was Babatunde Olatunji called Circle of Drum. There were also some dubstep artists, burial, and coordinates9. Pinch, Detroit techno, deep house, old hip hop and some people who have only heard but don't know the name, and their music has what I want. There are also many good djs around me. I will listen to them and play music, and I will learn something. I am always more sensitive in this regard. Basically, the qualitative change is from making music and then pursuing the sense of picture in music to the recent attempts to draw directly with sound. CHA: In China, there is neither sales nor attention to the release of albums. In this case, what kind of people are you doing to release this album? Or what kind of people would you like to listen to your album? SIG: For myself, I will have some moments of loss or melancholy, a fall that you cannot control, as if attracted to a certain black hole, you will come to the labyrinth in your heart, you will feel confused and Helpless, but usually at this time, some of the books you have read, or the movies you have seen, or the concerts you have heard appear, they seem to have been waiting in the dark, they will tell you with a smile, go here, Do not be afraid. I think they are great. I want this too. I also hope to meet the audience in the dark through music. At first I didn't think about who would listen, but one day, my mother came and asked me if I made the song in her mp3? Very nice. I remembered that I used her mp3. So I especially hope to fill those generation gaps or gaps. I hope to listen to your parents, but also hope that parents listen to their children. I hope that parents can understand that children are instincts. Every child is different and will have something good at. Parents should protect these things. CHA: Music should be entertaining, cultivating the public? Or is it aimed at the heart and facing the self? SIG: To me, music is like a way out of my soul, and I am faced with your own gods, or yourself, subconscious, and the like that you don’t know. Music is not a joy for me. It is a way for me to resolve my internal conflicts. Like writing a diary, I have to write something every day to record some of my unspeakable feelings. I feel that the world of music enters from the top, and then goes deeper and wider, and it looks like a pyramid. Many music focuses on the conflict between physical and reality, I prefer to focus on the conflict between self and non-self. However, I personally feel that all people have some common feelings at a certain level. Some music reaches this level and people should like it. Although I don’t know why I like it, I think this is good music. Can't say entertainment or edification, because everyone has this feeling, and everyone can't tell. Since you make your own things when you make music, do things that no one can make anymore.  CHA: Do you think you are the kind of person who has a serious internal struggle? Is this a kind of torture? SIG: Every day, it should be considered a kind of torture. But without such conflicts and struggles I might not make music. CHA: Have you ever experienced a very dark period in life? If so, how does it feel? SIG: Yes, twice. The first one or two months, the second two or three months. To use ordinary words to describe it is "collapse". Basically, during that time, I woke up from a nightmare every day, I woke up from a terrible dream, and then you wanted to go to a place, but you don’t know where that place is. You will go out no matter what time is 4:5 or what time, put on some clothes, and keep walking. You can’t see anything around. In that case, you can only go home and make music. There is no other way. Think of many messy things. If you want to bask in the sun, the sunlight is also very good, but you can’t sit there and you want to go to a place. Then I went home and made a concert and slowly forgot about it. When I went to bed, I lost sleep and sweated all over, and then repeated this. But slowly it was better again. CHA: Did you ever think you would get better during that time? Or think you might be crazy. SIG: I didn't think it would get better. I thought it was crazy, it was terrible. After the first time, I feel that I have experienced it once, and the second time I should have immunity or experience to solve this problem, but when the second crash comes, the darkness is already beyond imagination. Too. At that time, I was already conquered. In this darkness, I can no longer tell the difference. CHA: What kind of people are you in contact with now? How do they affect you? SIG: Now I have few friends. I came to Shanghai just to experience the feeling of loneliness by myself, a kind of loneliness. There used to be a lot of friends who would make trouble, but now I feel a little tired. It's a test of yourself. Most of them are friends who talk about music, and some friends, they basically will not take the initiative to find me, when I have time, I go back to find them, at this point I am more selfish, but when I go to find them, they Still smiling, as if playing together yesterday, they gave me a sense of security. CHA: What is the next plan? SIG: To accumulate and make some new music, the progress may be slow. If you do some singles, you will not release this album form, and you may release two or two songs. CHA: Through what channels can you buy your album and follow your trends? SIG: It may be sold on Taobao. I will tell you when it is set up. In addition, on Douban, soundcloud can also hear my music. SIG "Sad Mirror" album debut: April 8 at The Shelter Start at 10pm

[isabellelambert1975]

The best blogging tips of the year….

What are your best blogging tips of the year? I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.

Britmums is a blogging collective. Although it’s mainly for parenting bloggers, it has some great resources and a fab BML (BritMumsLive) conference every year. I find that most of the advice given by panellists is appropriate to all lifestyle blogs. Currently Britmums have a linky running where you can share your post on the best blogging tips of the year.

If you’re wondering what a ‘linky’ is, it’s a series of linked posts, usually on a single topic, from lots of different blogs. You can submit your own post, and it’s a way of promoting your blog to people who wouldn’t normally see it. And it’s a way of finding interesting posts, you yourself wouldn’t otherwise see.

 Blogging is ‘back’

2017 was the year that blogging ‘came back’ in a big way. A few years ago, people said that ‘blogging was dead’ because people were moving to Instagram, Pinterest and more.

As indeed, they did. But all the social media channels do suddenly change the rules. Instagrammers and Pinners suddenly noticed that they’d lost a big chunk of their audience, apparently overnight, due to an ‘algorithm change’. It’s Instagram or Pinterest’s platform. Their territory, their rules.

But your blog (if you own the domain name and pay for hosting) is your very own. No-one can take you down unless you break the law. If you have a free blog, it belongs to the company that hosts it, such as WordPress, Wix or Blogger (Google) but they don’t seem to change the rules in quite the same way that Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and others do. If you’ve got X hundred people on your mailing list, they are your readers. It’s between you and them.

Get to grips with Google Analytics

If you have a website or a blog, you need to find out what works and what doesn’t with Google Analytics.

I was in the bottom division in Maths at school. The Maths teacher told me that if there was a division below that, I would have been there. In those days it was called Maths O level and I struggled to pass it. I am not being cute about this. Now that we have established that I am neither numerically literate nor young – if I can understand Google Analytics, anyone can.

Google runs free online Google Analytics courses. But if the sight of any sum in double figures throws you into a panic, then invest in some personal tuition (not from your son/nephew etc). Find a professional who is Google Certified.

I had a one-to-one session of Google Analytics from Mark Jennings at Stormchasers Digital in Rochester. I also won a place at one of their all-day workshops, when I was a finalist in the Kent Creative Live awards, which they sponsor.

Mark explains things very clearly (he needs to, with me). And actually, it’s fascinating. One of the best blogging tips he gave me was to highlight my links in a stronger contrast colour. This immediately increased the number of people reading more than one post.

What does Google Analytics do?

Google Analytics shows you how many readers visited your pages, so I can see that the Middlesized Garden has had just over half a million page views since this time last year.

It also shows where they came from -most Middlesized Garden readers come from search engines or are subscribers, but I get nearly 20,000 page views a year from Pinterest. But only 64 views a year from Instagram! Do I up my Instagram game or spend less time on it?

Analytics can also show you where readers go after they’ve read one post. This is interesting because some posts are successful and people go on to read more posts. Others may be equally popular but don’t seem to inspire readers to go any further.

Analytics tell you how long your pages take to load, what other interests your readers have (homes, interiors, travel, food in my case) and more.

If you’re already using Google Analytics but don’t know where to go after seeing how many people have read your blog this week, go to Behaviour/Site Content/Content Drilldown to find your posts listed in order of popularity. My favourite page.

Stormchasers Digital’s one day courses are £395. They are running some shorter, affordable introductory workshops in 2018, and they have an online video course for £20 a month.

Interact with other bloggers

This is another trend that has ‘come back.’ When blogging started, part of the excitement was the interaction between bloggers. Bloggers quoted each other, commented on each other’s posts and recommended lists of other blogs to follow. It was part of getting your own blog noticed.

Then, as blogging became a business, bloggers started to be more competitive. Why, after all, should you mention and link to another blog? Won’t your readers just go off and read that blog instead? Won’t it be like when your best friend dropped you in Year 8, and became Maisie’s best friend instead?

Well, Google likes to see you link out to other sites, if they’re good, reputable ones. It calculates that it makes you more useful to people.

Then there’s karma. The more you give, the more you get. Bloggers that share on social media are more likely to get shared back.

And when you’re not yourself writing a post, you’ve still got something to offer your social media followers. I actively look for other bloggers’ posts and tweets that I think Middlesized Garden readers would enjoy – and I find interesting things to read in the process. Win, win. (I think most garden blogger interaction is probably on Twitter rather than as comments on blogs…what do you think?)

And there’s being stronger together. Many bloggers are approached by PR companies for reviews or collaborations. What or when should we charge? How should we disclose our fees? And what about when someone steals your posts and puts them up on their own blog? It is all so much easier when bloggers share information or act together when necessary.

At the Fiskars’ Make a Terrarium Day with James Wong. Everyone was doing Instagram stories….

Also, you can learn a lot from other bloggers. That doesn’t mean copying them, it means picking up ideas and doing them in your own way. For example, at the Monty Don book launch, we were all taking photographs of the canapes, then Instagramming them. One clever blogger (sorry, can’t remember who, excellent cocktails) Instagrammed us all photographing the canapes. Nice twist – I’ll try to remember to take  more ‘behind the scenes’ pix, too in future.

And when I noticed that the other bloggers at a Fiskars’ lunch were all doing Instagram stories, I tried it too. I’m not very good at it, though, so follow Hannah Bullivant’s Instagram   or Julia Rebaudo on Stylonylon to see it done well.

Canapes at the Ham Yard Hotel for the Monty Don Down to Earth book launch. But the Instagram shot of us all photographing the canapes was much more fun!

Above all, it’s enormous fun to talk to people who do the things you do, and who understand the frustrations you may have.

Do joined-up social media thinking

Connect your social media channels and your blog in a joined-up way. Because we’re all so busy, that means working out a formula so that you don’t forget anything. It helps enormously if your blog name is also your Twitter name, the name of your Facebook Page, your Pinterest Page and so on. It should all lead back to your blog, and your blog should connect out to your social media wherever possible.

So every post gets a Pin (made with Canva.com). I also now include a YouTube video, where relevant. I’ll tweet the post several times, and put it on the Middlesized Garden Facebook Page once. I don’t personally find Instagram gets me a lot of readers, but I know other garden bloggers do. For successful Instagrammers, look at the Anxious Gardener, Higgledygarden,  Mr Plant Geek

I looked at lots of other blogs to see how they were positioning their Pins. Some bloggers were putting a Pin near the beginning of the post, with the words ‘No time to read now? Pin for later.’

This seemed like good advice, but a bit distracting. I imagined everyone pinning for later and never reading the post. Then I spotted that Catherine from Growing Family puts her ‘Pin for later’ at the end of the post, which seemed to make much more sense.  So I do that now, although I call it ‘Pin for reference’ as that’s how I think of Pins. Thank you, Catherine.

Best blogging tips – always enter awards

If you’re not in it, you can’t win it. Don’t wait for the perfect post or the magic number of readers. Just do it. The fact is that most people who enter awards don’t win, however wonderful they or their blogs are. Never enter an award with any expectation of winning. But, suddenly, you’ll find yourself short-listed when you least expect it.

From right: Garden Journalist of the Year 2017 finalists: Nick Bailey (winner), Annie Green-Armytage, me, Stephanie Mahon (Property Trade Press finalist) and Barbara Segall

This year, I was a finalist in the Property Press Awards Garden Journalist of the Year. As the other finalists were Monty Don, Joe Swift, Caroline Donald, Nick Bailey, Veronica Peerless, Annie Green Armytage and Barbara Segall, I didn’t expect to win, but it was huge fun to be short-listed alongside such names. Nick Bailey won it, and we all had another glass of champagne.

I did win one award this year, though, The Kent Creative Live Award for publishing, which I co-won with Faversham Life, a beautiful online magazine about Faversham.

And I’m nominated for UK Blog Awards 2018, so if you could bear to vote for me, I’d be extremely grateful. It’s in the Lifestyle section, which is usually dominated by homes and interiors blogs, so it would be great to see gardening get something. You could vote for Agents of Field, too, who are also nominated. Let’s get two gardening blogs up there! I’m tired of gardening playing second fiddle to homes/interiors/fashion.

Practice video…

All the pundits say that video is going to get bigger and bigger. Like many people, I’ve never been comfortable with seeing myself in photos or on screen, so initially I thought this would stop me vlogging (video blogging).

However, as with everything, it’s just a matter of practice. I’ve been working on the Middlesized Garden’s YouTube channel this year. Video definitely does offer an extra dimension to blogging. And the only way to get over feeling self-conscious in photos and video is try, try and try again. YouTube have lots of excellent video-making advice available free on YouTube Creator Academy.

And when I went to Britmums BML17, there was an excellent session given by YouTube experts. One of their best blogging tips was to do a video ‘challenge’, such as Vlogmas. Vlogmas means uploading a video every day in December, or until Christmas. I’m doing Vlogmas this year, and it’s very time-consuming. But it’s also exciting, and I’m learning so much. The videos are far from perfect, but that’s the whole point. See below for the latest one!

Vlogmas 8 – turn your photos into Christmas cards…

So what are your best blogging tips from the year? Let me know, either in the comments below or on Twitter or Facebook.

Pin for reference:

   The post The best blogging tips of the year…. appeared first on The Middle-Sized Garden.

from The Middle-Sized Garden http://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/best-blogging-tips-year/

[jansegers]

Simple English Word List

SIMPLE1540 : a simple English wikipedia word list based on the XML export of all articles related to the nine major groups: Everyday life, Geography, History, Knowledge, Language, Literature, People, Religion, and Science and retaining all word forms appearing 7 times or more in this corpus. The total number of words in this corpus is well over the 100.000 words. a A.D. ability able about above absence abstinence abstract academic academy accent accept access accord account across act action active activity actual actually ad add addition adherent adjective adult advance advice affect after again against age agnostic agnosticism ago agree agreement agriculture air alcohol all allow ally almost alone along alphabet also although always amateur amendment among amount an analysis ancient and angel animal annals anonymous another answer anthropomorphism any anyone anything aphasia appear apple apply approach archaeology architecture area argue argument around arrange art article artificial artist ask aspect associate association astronomy at atheism atheist atomic attack attempt attribute audience author authority available average avoid award away B.C. baby back background backpack bad bah balance band baptism base basic basis battle BCE be bear beautiful beauty because become bed bee before begin behavior behind being belief believe believing belong below best better between beyond bias biblical bibliography big billion biological biology birth bit black blind blood blue body book born both bottom boundary box boy brain branch bring brown buffalo build building bull burn business but by c. ca. calendar call can cancer canon capital caption car carbon card carry case cassette cat category cathedral catholic cause cell center central century cerebral certain change chapel chapter character chemical chemistry child china China choice choir choose chronicle church circumcise circumcision cite citizen city civil civilian civilization claim clan class classical cleanup clear clergy click climate close closer clothes clothing coast coauthor code codex cognitive col cold collection college colonization colony color column com come commentary commission common commonly communicate communication communion communist community companion company compare competition complete complex compose composer computer concept conception concern condition confuse confusion congregational connect connection conquer conquest consciousness consider consistent constitution construct construction contain contemporary content context continent continue contrary control convention conversation conversion convert cook cooking copy core correct could council country course court cover covered create creation credit crime critical criticism crop cross crust cultural culture current currently daily damage dark data date day dead death debt decadence decadent decide declaration decline deconstruction deep define definition deity demonstrate denomination department depth describe description design detail determinism developed development device devil diagnosis dialect dictionary die difference different difficult difficulty diphthong dipstick direct directly dirt disagree disambiguation disbelief discipline discover discovery discussion disease disorder distance distinct distinction distinguish distribution divide divine do doctor doctrine document dog don't door down Dr. dream drink drown druid due during dynasty each earlier early earth easier easily easy eat economic economics economy ed edge edit edition editor education effect eight either electric electricity electronic element elevation else emperor empire encyclopedia end energy engine engineering enlightenment enough enter entertainment environment environmental epic episode equal era error especially establish etc. etymology even event eventually ever every everyday everyone everything evidence evil evolution evolve exact exactly example except exchange exist existence expansion experience experiment expert explain explanation express expression external extinct face fact failure fair faith fall false family famous far fast father feature feel feeling female feudal few fiction field fight figure file find finding fire first fish fit five fix flow folk follow food for force foreign foreskin form formal former fortune fought foundation founded four fourth frame framework free freedom frequently friend from front fruit full function functional further future gas general generally generation genre geographer geographic geographical geography geology geometry germ get give glass global go god gold golden good government grammar great greatly green ground group grow growth guide guillotine hair half hall hand handbook handicap handle happen happens happiness happy hard have he head heading health hear heat heaven help hemisphere her here heritage hero high highly him himself his historian historical historiography history hold holy home homo hope hot hour house how however human hundred hunter hypothesis hysteresis I ice icon idea identify identity if illiteracy illiterate illusory image importance important impossible improve in inc. incense include increase indeed independence independent indigenous individual industrial industry influence information inquiry inside instead institute institution instrument instrumentation intellectual intelligence interlinear internal international internet interpretation into introduce introduction invent invention involve iron island issue it IT itself job join journal journalism judge just keep key kill kind king kingdom know knowledge la LA label lack lake lamp land landlocked landscape language large last late later law lead leader leap learn learned least leave legacy legal legend let letter level lexeme library life light lightning like likely limited line linguistic linguistics link liquid list literacy literary literature little liturgy live local location logic logical long longer look lord lore lose lot love low lower mac machine magazine magic magnetic magnum mail main mainly major make male mammal man mankind manuscript many map march March mark market mass material mathematical mathematics matter may May me mean meaning meant measure measurement meat median medical medicine medieval mediterranean medium meet member memory men mental mention mercury message metal method mid middle might migrate migration military millennium million mind minister minute misconception miss model modern modernism modernist moment money monologue monophthong month monument moon moral morality more morning most mostly mother mount mountain mouth move movement much museum music musical musicians must my myth mythology name narrative nation national nationality native natural naturalism naturally nature near nearly necessarily necessary need negative neither neologism network neurogenesis neuron neuroscience never new news newspaper next night nine no non none nor normal normally not note nothing noun novel now nuclear number object objective objectivity observation observe occupation occur ocean octane of off offer office official officially often oil old older on once one online only open opera opposite or oral orbit order org organization organize origin original originally orthography orthology other others our out outer outside over own oxygen p. pack pagan page paint palace paper paradigm parent parish park part participant particular particularly party pas pass past pasta pattern pay peace peer penguin penis people per percent percentage perception performance perhaps period peroxide persecution person personal personality perspective persuasion pet phenomenon philosopher philosophical philosophy phoneme phonetic phonetics photo phrase physic physical picture piece pilgrimage place plan planet plant plat plate play please poem poems poet poetry point pole police policy political politics polytheism polytheistic popular population position positive possession possible possibly post power powerful pp. practical practice praise pray prayer precise predict prediction prehistory present preserve press prevent priest primary principle print printing private probably problem process produce product production professional program project pronounce pronunciation proof property prophet propose prose proselytism protection protein provide province psychological psychology public publication publish publisher publishing punishment pure purpose put pyramid quantum question quickly quite quote race racial rack radiation radio rain range rate rather read reader real realism reality really reason receive recent recently reclamation recognize record recreation red ref refer reference referred reform reformation regard region reign rejection relate relation relationship relatively relativity reliable relic religion religious remain remember remove renaissance replace report republic request require research researcher resource respect response result resurrection retrieve return revelation revert review revision revival revolution rhetoric rich right rise ritual river rock role room royal rule ruled ruler run rural sacred sacrifice safe saga sage saint salad same sample satellite saw say schizophrenia scholar school science scientific scientist scope sea search second secondary section secular see seek seem selection self sense sent sentence separate sequence series service set seven several sexual shall shaman shape share she short should show shrine side sign significant silence similar simple simply since single situation six size skill skin slavery sleep slightly slow small smell smith snake so social society sociology soft soil solar soldier solid soliloquy some someone something sometimes song soon sortable sound source space speak speaker special specie specific speech speed spell spirit spiritual spirituality split sport spread square st. stage stain standard star start state statement station statistic statistical statue status stick still stone stop story strange strap strong structure struggle stub student study stutter style subject successful such sugar suggest sun sung sunlight superior superiority supernatural support suppose supreme sure surface survey surveyor sushi sustainability sustainable sweat symbol symbolic system table take talk tam tan task teach teacher teaching technique technology tectonics teeth tell temperature template temple ten term terminology territory tertiary test testament text textual than thank that the their theism them themselves then theology theoretical theory therapy there therefore thesaurus these they thick thing think third this those though thought thousand three through throughout thumb thus ticket tight time title to today together toilet tolerance toleration tongue too tool top topic total towards tower trade tradition traditional train translation transport travel treat treatment tree trench trial tribe tried trig true truth try turn twentieth twenty two type typical typically ultimate ultraviolet under understand understood union unit united universal universe university unknown unsortable until up upon upper urban urbanization usage use useful usually valley value van vandalism various vassal vegetable verb verbal verse version very video view violence virgin visit vitamin vocabulary voice vol. volume vowel vs. wale wall want war warm warmer wash waste water wave way we weak wealth wear weather web website weight well what when where whether which while white who whole whom whose why wide widely wild wilderness will window wisdom wise witch witchcraft with within without witness woman word work worker world worship would write writer writing wrong yam year yellow you young your

China, March and May made this list because china, march and may are on it and I didn't want to decide in favor of the common noun or the proper noun; all other proper nouns have been omitted (even the ten other months that met the criterium of appearing more then 6 times). #SimpleWikipedia #SimpleEnglish #wordlist #English #words #level1540 #Inli #nimi #selo1540