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weneverlearn · 6 years

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"Our kids were conceived to that one.”

Chewing the fat with Marshall Crenshaw about his 1983 classic, just reissued on Intervention Records

It’s not often you get one of your all time favorite albums from your dentist.

So I’m in 9th grade, and making back and forths in the parents’ station wagon to the dental school at Case Western Reserve University because my four top front teeth were all agog. (My mom figured it was because I’d fallen down the basement stairs when I was one and landed on my face.) Numerous visits that included poking, prodding, and endless numbing shots into the inside of the top jaw was no way to enter the high school years. But having a hep craw doc helped.

Dr. Sasthma (”It’s like asthma, but with an S” -- funny guy) was his name, and between spit suction and implorations to floss more, we fit in fun music discussions. On the last visit right before the big pulling and twisting procedure, Sasthma sits me down and says, “This one today ain’t gonna be easy, but I’ve got a little prize for you afterwards.” And for the next hour and a half, I sat there with my mouth open (some would say that would not be out of the ordinary), while the doc poked around and made chin-scratching/brow-furrowing decisions, all while my jaw muscles started to atrophy.

Finally, when it was done, he reaches behind the giant dentist chair claw machine thing and pulls out Marshall Crenshaw’s debut album (Warner Bros., 1982). After I had regaled him with how much I liked “Someday, Someway” at the previous visit, he said he tracked down the album for me, though the shrink wrap had been peeled. “Well, I had to give it a listen, and yeah, it’s great!”

L-R: Robert Crenshaw, Marshall Crenshaw, Chris Donato - Photographer unknown

Not only did that little act make me much more tolerant of dentist visits going forward, it gave me one of my favorite albums. Crenshaw’s revived Buddy Holly-meets-nervous with opening pickup lines pop classicism was like a fresh, new toothbrush over all the dreary, dusty, classic rock of my Cleveland radio dial depression, until I took a sharp left into college radio that summer where I first heard Crenshaw, and a lot more. (Thanks WCSB, WRUW, and WUJC!)

It’s hard to imagine today, hearing Crenshaw’s should-couldabeen power pop nuggets, but his clean looks and simple two-minute tunes made him a little too throwback odd for mainstream radio back then. Who knows or cares, as he still piled up an impressive major label canon before furthering into a long-running career of solid albums and consistent touring. The days of figuring out the whys and hows of mainstream radio play now seems about as useful as wondering how to get better reception on your TV.

Crenshaw’s sophomore album, Field Day (Warner Bros., 1983)? Maybe even better, filled with a slightly wider songwriting palette and production to match it. The term “sophomore album” never fit better for me, as it landed right around my sophomore year, and was a perfect companion on my journey into hook-heavy rock’n’roll obsession and mythical, sun-setting summer romance mythology/reality.

So imagine my excitement when I got a press release about an impending reissue of Field Day. Despite it’s initial hefty, if brief, publicity push, Top 40-sniffing hit single (”Whenever You’re on My Mind”), and big time producer (Steve Lillywhite), the record didn’t (say it with me) “sell as much as hoped for.” And though Crenshaw did not fall into the usual “got dropped” holes (three more major label albums followed), Field Day did lag just a bit behind the CD explosion, having fallen out of print, and was never given a proper CD version for a few years.

I only point this out because, goddamn it, it’s a perfect guitar pop record and is one of the best of that fleeting, early-80s moment where bright-eyed corners of the record industry hoped the world might once again embrace melancholy-flecked, otherwise blue-sky singalong songs. ‘Twas that “skinny tie” moment where loads of slacks-sporting Midwesterners parlayed punk’s energy into their pre-teen guitar lessons filled with Beatles covers. And in even that, Crenshaw did not exactly fit -- kind of the front tooth along my otherwise straight top row.

Upstart vinyl reissue label, Intervention Records -- who seem to have a knack for snaring ol’ major label titles from oblivion -- recently released a fine, vinyl-only edition of Field Day, including an extra 12″ EP of remix and live stuff, and different artwork.

I caught up with Crenshaw internet-wise to get his take on the new update of his old classic.

If memory serves, I saw you play "High School" by the MC5 at an outdoor BBQ fest thing in downtown Cleveland in, like, 1985/6. Any memories of that, and did you cover that tune often?

I remember that event in Cleveland, like a fried-chicken festival, right? I remember that we used "The Greasy Chicken,” by Andre Williams as walk-on music that day (and on other days). The MC5 song would've been "Tonight.” I never played "High School,” except with DKT-MC5 in 2004. I played "Tonight" a lot over the years. I grew up in the Detroit area, was a big MC5 fan. "Tonight" was sort of a local hit single, got played on CKLW. A band that I was in played it at an audition for a dance at our high school, and I can still picture a girl sitting in front of me watching me play and sing that song, really enthralled by what we were doing. That girl was Ione. She and I are still together.

You grew up in Detroit, right? When did you move, and what were some early influences from living in Detroit, music and otherwise?

I lived in the Detroit area from birth (1953) until 1977, grew up with Rock and Roll music all around me, fell in love with the music during childhood. Detroit was a big test market for records. There were lots of regional hits, on national and local labels. Two that immediately come to mind are, "When You Walk In the Room" by Jackie DeShannon, and "Mind Over Matter" by Nolan Strong and The Diablos -- both massive Detroit hits, both part of my musical DNA. As far as influences besides music go, I don't know where to start. That could turn into a book.

Though the only book Crenshaw has done so far was this excellent compendium of rock’n’roll movies; also, his musical knowledge goes deep. If you can do so, track down this amazing hillbilly compilation he put together in 1989.

Field Day, in title and cover art, was a reference to high school, I assume. But I remember some reviews saying that that record was a kind of more mature version of you -- bigger production, some more serious themes, etc. So what was your inspiration for the high school nod?

I had nothing whatsoever to do with creating the packaging for that record. When we finished recording, I went on vacation with Ione and Robert to visit Robert's girlfriend at the time. She was working on location outside Prague on the movie Amadeus (which I've still never seen. I should see it, I saw it being made). And when I got back, the album cover had been put together by my then-manager. His father co-owned a big company that published magazines. My manager had worked for that company for a minute, and thought that the presentation of images was something that he knew something about. I hated the album’s front cover, got talked into approving it. OOPS! I don't think Warners was pleased that instead of using their art department, he'd hired an expensive design firm to create such a dodgy end-product. He came up with the title; I do like the title, didn't think of high school when he suggested it. "Having a field day" is just a figure of speech, doesn't refer to high school, necessarily. It just means "having a great time,” and indeed we really had a great time making the album.

It said the art for this reissue is how you originally intended.

I wanted to change the front cover for the reissue, was extremely happy that Intervention Records was into the idea. The only thing that made sense was to use some pre-existing artwork from the time period, namely the front of the picture sleeve for the "Whenever You're On My Mind” 7″.

I just loved Field Day when it came out. I am sure you are more than aware of the "debates" over the production -- which to me made total sense for those songs and that point of your career. What is your take on what you asked of Steve Lillywhite, and how you felt it turned out, back then?

I'm really glad that you like it. I know that the album was "controversial" in the day. I think that all the criticism it got back then was completely lame. When I listened to the first playback of the finished mixes, I had my feet up on the edge of the console; I thought, “This is an album that can kick the world's ass.” We all loved working with Steve. He was the only producer that I talked to going in, my first choice. He said yes right away, and that was that.

I'll assume you were involved in this reissue. What were your thoughts on revisiting it?

I heard about the reissue project after it was already underway, and was just delighted about it. I'd even say that I felt a sense of gratitude that somebody wanted to honor the album, which is what Intervention has done. As a career experience, "Field Day" was an instance where the party-train just ran right into the ditch. I loved the album, didn't get why some people were perplexed by it. I got the test pressing from Intervention and was knocked out. It's just a unique and beautiful Rock and Roll record, if you ask me. And the people at Intervention love it as much as I do.

Your’s truly probably bugging Crenshaw about the MC5 again, post-back alley gig, August, 2012, NYC

Any good stories during the recording of Field Day? In-studio disputes, after-session shenanigans, anything like that?

I don't remember any disputes until after the record was done -- then the shit-storm began. We had nothing but fun while doing it, and there was a festive atmosphere at the sessions. They were all at night, and afterwards we'd go out. I remember going one night to the Roxy Roller Rink disco on the West Side with Steve and a couple of the other guys. This was when hip-hop was first starting to come downtown. When we finally got out of there it was broad daylight. "Monday Morning Rock" was partly inspired by that night...

"Whenever You're on My Mind" was a demo for awhile before it appeared on Field Day, right? How come it didn't make it onto the debut?

I wrote that one before I wrote most of the songs on my first album. When I did the first album I wanted to do all the newer ones first. I'm always most excited about whatever the new thing is. But then, going into "Field Day," I was really glad to have "Whenever" in reserve. And I'm glad that it got recorded when it did, under those circumstances.

The instrumental of "Blues is King" from that era is one of my favorite instrumentals, and just has one of those, maybe accidental, gorgeous, simple demo production vibes. Was that originally an instrumental and you decided to add lyrics later, or what?

I did that instrumental version after I'd written the music; the lyrics didn't happen until a few months later. I do like it as just a piece of instrumental music. And those are Mosrite guitars, which I love the sound of.

Field Day standout, "Our Town" -- when you made Field Day, I believe you'd been living in NYC for awhile. Did you pine to get on a train back to Detroit sometimes? What were the bad and good things about trying to get your music career going in NYC in the very early 1980s?

I never pined to get back to Detroit (although I like visiting there now). That song was written about New York. I'd been on the road for most of a year when I wrote it. I did take a train to Detroit once, from NYC. It was during the last days when Michigan Central Station was still being used by Amtrak. I'd never seen the station during it's heyday, but when I got there it looked not that different than what it looks like now, like an absolute wreck. I still remember the look on my mother's face standing there waiting for me. She looked like she felt ashamed, and like, "You had to take the train and make me go through this, right?" Getting my music career going in NYC in the early '80s was a blast. The scene embraced us right away. It was like dying and going to heaven.

Did you find yourself attracted to the CBGB scene at the time?

Yes, we played CBGB many times. I think we even held an attendance record there for a minute, or maybe I dreamt that. But our last couple shows there were mob scenes. I really had my ears and mind open in all different directions during those years in New York, and I can't overstate how much I loved the NY scene then, with all it's diversity, innovation, etc. I'm still proud to have been part of it. And I'm including NY radio in this declaration. I had lots of great go-to stations like WBLS and WKTU ("urban"), WLIB (Caribbean music), WFMU (free-form), WKCR (Jazz), WNYU, with "The Afternoon Show,” and the "Wavebreaker" countdown on Fridays, WNEW ('cause they played us). On and on...

There were a ton of "skinny tie" power pop bands around in the very early '80s too, many from the Midwest. Did you play with the Shoes, Knack, Romantics, Plimsouls, etc.? Were there ones that stuck out for you? I feel like you weren't roped into that signing frenzy trend though.

I played with The Plimsouls in NY once. I loved them, became friends with Peter [Case] back then. But one of my fears in those days was that anybody might lump us in with that Anglophile “skinny tie” thing. I hated most of it, not all of it. I didn't like The Knack, didn't identify with what they were doing, didn't want anybody to identify us with what they were doing. I feel bad saying so, but I'm answering your question. Again, we came out of the NY club scene which was really diverse and eclectic. I wanted our stuff to reflect that as best I could. Another one of my fears, since we took off so fast in NY, was that somebody might tag us as the "Next Big Thing,” and unfortunately that did happen. I had a real sense of doom when I read all that stuff about my first album in Rolling Stone.

Oh, also, we were never part of any signing frenzy. We got our record deal by packing out every NY club we played at, getting our stuff on "mainstream" FM rock radio when they never played local bands on indie labels. We earned it the way you did back then.

"What Time Is It?" -- how did you decide on that cover? I assume you were a big doo wop fan. Once you got to NYC, did you get to play with or meet any old doo wop favorites?

I don't think that happened, but now I wish that it had. It would've been great to meet Randy and The Rainbows, for instance. "Denise" is one of those records that gets me every time. Or Eugene Pitt of The Jive Five. It's too bad I never met him, even after I covered their tune (actually a Feldman-Goldstein-Gottehrer tune, but anyway).

Can you tell me about the making of the "Whenever You're on My Mind" video? Were you one of those who was suspicious of videos back then?

Hahahahaha! By the time we did that one I was really enthusiastic about videos, wanted us to get on that bandwagon. It seemed like most of my favorite ones were British, so we went over there and found a British director. I'm laughing thinking about it now. We tried.

Finally, where would you rank Field Day in your catalog?

I was really on my game just then. It was some kind of a pinnacle, as far as that moment in my life goes. And it seems to be my most beloved album. People tell me all kinds of things about it, like, "Our kids were conceived to that one.”

youtube

#MarshallCrenshaw #power pop #field day #warner bros #intervention records

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duhragonball · 7 years

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Babbling about Comics

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get back in gear with my plan to read my entire collection of X-Men comics. I had this big plan to do it in 2015, but I only made it about halfway, which put me around Uncanny X-Men #280 (September 1991). That’s about 29 years’ worth of comics, though, so my plan was probably unrealistic.

Ever since I reblogged this, I’ve been thinking about how I used to be big into American comic books, but not so much anymore. One person in that thread jokes about how complicated it is to start reading X-Men and Wolverine, and the thing is, I actually know how to do that, because I spent maybe a week in 2014 obsessively studying the Marvel Chronology Project website to come up with a good reading order. Honestly, it’s kind of fun, but only because I’m a maniac. I can’t see how any normal person would even want to bother untangling that mess. The system was designed for only two kinds of immersion.

1) You bought the comics when they were published, and read them in more or less their intended reading order, because you had no other choice.

2) You’re a maniac like myself, who accumulated all this stuff after the fact and you’re determined to go back and figure out what happened.

Nowadays, it’s a lot easier for a new fan to dig into the past, because so much of Marvel’s back catalog is available in digital format, but it’s still a pretty big paywall when you think about how many X-Men comics they’ve made. And even if you download torrents, you still have to read the whole thing, and who has time for that? Generally, Marvel’s marketing strategy has been to try to make the new stories accessible enough for new readers to follow, while only reprinting the older material that’s important or popular. As a collector and a completist, this always frustrated me, but I think I’ve finally begun to see the wisdom of that approach.

See, the real gateway to a franchise like this is to stick to the greatest hits. For me, that’s Uncanny X-Men #94-167, which spans 1975-1983. Then you jump all the way to Wolverine’s solo book, which started in 1988. The first thirty issues of that are really, really good. I like the stuff that Larry Hama did with Wolverine later, but it’s not for everyone. If you want to read a crossover, I’d recommend “X-Tinction Agenda”, since it provides a decent snapshot of where the X-Books were at in 1990. Now, I’m skipping over a lot of other material from the period, but a lot of it was pretty awful, and the good issues of X-Factor and New Mutants were kind of inessential. The point is that you have to sample the best stuff first, then decide if you care enough about the characters to go dumpster diving through the rest of it. You’ll find some gems, but you have to be willing to put up with some real crap to get at it.

For example, right now, I’m in the middle of 1992, which was sort of a defining period for the X-Men franchise. Chris Claremont had ended a 17-year run as the writer, and they were trying to build everything around superstar penciller Jim Lee. I don’t know what went wrong exactly, but by the end of the year Lee had left to start his own company, and a lot of the X-Men comics from that year have a long list of co-plotters, co-scripters, and guest artists. The flagship title, X-Men v.2, held up reasonably well, but it’s sister Uncanny X-Men suffered from neglect. UXM #281 was supposed to herald this bold new era, but instead it just looks like a tire fire, one that continued to burn until #293 at least. But, those issues are notable because they introduce Lucas Bishop to the franchise.

I never cared much about Bishop, except that he looks pretty cool, and he had a cool voice in the X-Men cartoon. Otherwise, I only knew he was a guy from the future with a gun, just like the dozen other future-guys-with-guns in 90′s comics. But when Bishop was introduced, he hailed from the year 2062, where he’s part of a Judge Dredd-style security force. Bishop revered the X-Men as legends, but once he meets the real deal he quickly finds out they’re not what he expected. Bishop sees himself as a peacekeeper, and he’s honored to join the X-Men, but he keeps finding his violent, hair trigger methods at odds with the X-Men’s rigid protocol.

The thing is, I identify with the guy. I used to write him off as a knock off of Cable, or one of the other loose-cannon hardcases the X-Men keep recruiting, but they actually found a way to make Bishop stand out from the crowd. He loves the X-Men in theory, but he really doesn’t understand what makes them work. Which is sort of like me trying to read all these comics I only know by reputation. A lot of of the things fans praise the X-Men for are vastly overrated or completely misrepresented. The conventional wisdom I always got from the fans was that the X-Men were only great when Claremont wrote them, and then Scott Lobdell took over and Ruined Everything(tm). The reality (from my perspective) is that Claremont ran out of mojo around Year Eight of his 17-year run, and he was running on fumes from ‘83 to ‘91. I’ve seen fans carry a torch over what happened to Madelyne Pryor, but as far as I’m concerned Madelyne Pryor’s introduction was when the Claremont run jumped the shark. Her whole character arc was a no-win scenario and their biggest mistake was in not ending it sooner. I used to think the X-Men comics of the early 90′s were a creative train-wreck, but somehow it managed to generate Bishop, and that gives me hope.

Also, there is something oddly comforting about reading these old comics. Nothing ever really changes with the X-Men. If a character gets killed, they just come back a few years later. If a character quits or turns evil, it’ll get reversed later. The X-Men never really win or lose any battles. They just sort of show up and fight, and then something else happens and they get distracted by that for several issues. Last night I read the issue where Forge gets upset because he’s in love with Storm and he hasn’t even gotten five minutes alone with her to rekindle their feelings from 1988. He awkwardly proposes to her, and she punts, telling him she’ll think about it. In the very next scene they have together, he leave the mansion before she can even give her answer. Forge is convinced that Storm doesn’t really love him, and that she’ll never set aside her X-Men career long enough to make time for a serious relationship. As he slams the door, she mutters “I would have said... yes.” That’s classic X-Men for you. All angst, all turmoil, no resolution. We don’t know if Storm is sincere or not, and Forge won’t even stick around to find out. Is he right about her, or is he just too afraid of rejection? Maybe we’ll see in a later issue, but I bet we don’t. It’s Schrödinger’s ship. Everything sort of hangs in midair.

Now, I might have said that this is why I’ve come to prefer anime lately, because the stories are more decisive. Goku married Chi-Chi and that’s it. Done. There’s no hotshot editor trying to split that up or retcon it to clear the way for a fresh pairing. The real tragedy of Storm is that she’s trapped in Comic Book Time, so she couldn’t have a long term relationship even if she wanted to. If she had married Forge in 1992 they would have inevitably been divorced a short time later, because Marvel likes to rotate romantic partners around every few years. Storm actually married the Black Panther later on, but I’m pretty sure that’s over now. But Goku’s marriage to Chi-Chi is absolute. I like certainty. It helps make the characters feel more genuine, and less like imaginary dolls driven by editorial whims and sales charts.

But, having recently finished Revolutionary Girl Utena, I find the X-Men’s open-endedness kind of soothing. I didn’t get what I wanted from the ending of the Utena TV series. I’m not sure what I wanted, exactly, but what I got wasn’t completely satisfying. I may warm up to it later on, or I’ll watch the movie version and see if that’s more to my liking, but that’s pretty much all I’m going to get. With the X-Men, I’m not particularly invested in the characters, and I have a general knowledge of what happens to them, and that anything that happens to them is mutable and transient. It takes a lot of the punch out of Forge walking out on Storm, but it’s still decent theatre, and I’m not in the mood for dramatic punch right now. Utena was like getting dramatically punched by Star Platinum for five pages. I’d watch one episode and then I’d have to take a break before moving to the next one. Not everything needs to be like that. Sometimes it can be Bishop possibly getting Storm on the rebound, only to discover that she’s not as good in bed as the history books said she was.

Nevertheless, I think this is something the comics industry needs to address. I got fed up with following comics because the new ones are expensive and inconsistently produced, and nothing worthwhile ever happens in them either. They keep relaunching series with new #1′s, or renumbering them every time they get close to a Big Round Number, so it’s probably even harder to keep the reading order straight than it was twenty or thirty years ago. So it’s a lot of the same hassles you get from back issues, except my back issues are already bought and paid for, so I might as well waste my time reading them instead of paying for overpriced new stuff. Their best bet is to introduce new characters, especially female, POC, and LBGT+ characters that are tough to find in the back issue rack, because that’s something novel they can use to draw modern audiences. Because Thor’s dealt with Ragnarok about a dozen times already, and the X-Men haven’t accomplished anything tangible in 30 years, so eventually no one’s going to fall for the same corny “Nothing Will Ever Be the Same!” gimmick.

#disclaimer: i don't know if storm and bishop hook up or not #but the last issue i read sure seems to want me to think they could #but even if they did i know it wouldn't last because she ended up marrying t'challa in 2006 #but i have no idea what she was up to in between so maybe bishop had a shot #and that's what's neat about delving into a long run of comics #to find out if something just didn't happen or if it did and fans just never talk about it

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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J-Novel Club Licenses Slayers, Holmes of Kyoto, and More

Light novel and manga distributor J-Novel Club were on hand today for Anime Expo Lite, the West Coast convention's answer to the current social distancing measures in place. During their industry panel, they rolled out an exciting slate of 13 light novel and manga titles, some of which are available to start right now on their website if you're a JNC member!

Here's the full list of new titles:

The Bloodline

publishing first on J-Novel Club

After the fall of civilization, a hierarchical society was born where blood determines everything. The rich steal both the blood and lifespans of the poor, rejoicing in their now-eternal lives.

Nagi is a commoner fated to die, while Saya is royalty, gifted with eternal youth. When fate brings their unlikely paths together, their innocent love set the gears in motion to tear down the walls of a society built upon tremendous inequality and racial discrimination.

Slayers

Beautiful and brilliant sorcerer girls just can't have nice things, huh? All I wanted to do was swipe a little bit of bandit treasure. Now suddenly I'm being chased around by icky trolls, nasty demons, mean mummies, and brooding golem bad boys. And for what? A tiny little artifact that can bring about the end of the world? Hah! I'll show them there's a reason you don't cross Lina Inverse…

Start reading now

I Love Yuri and I Got Bodyswapped with a Fujoshi! (manga adaptation)

Meet Reiji Yoshida: a yuri otaku that loves yuri more than anything else in the world. All he wants is to enjoy his hobby in peace, but trouble ensues when he crosses paths with Mitsuru Hoshina, a fujoshi who is obsessed with boys’ love. Hijinks ensue, and a vengeful ghost residing in their school’s manga club swaps their bodies!

Polar opposites in both personalities and hobbies clash in this exciting first volume—follow the adventures of their comedic body swap experiences!

Start reading now

My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me!

Awaking to absolute chaos and carnage while on a school trip, Yogiri Takatou discovers that everyone in his class has been transported to another world! He had somehow managed to sleep through the entire ordeal himself, missing out on the Gift — powers bestowed upon the others by a mysterious Sage who appeared to transport them. Even worse, he and another classmate were ruthlessly abandoned by their friends, left as bait to distract a nearby dragon.

Although not terribly bothered by the thought of dying, he reluctantly decides to protect his lone companion. After all, a lowly Level 1000 monster doesn't stand a chance against his secret power to invoke Instant Death with a single thought! If he can stay awake long enough to bother using it, that is…

Start reading now

WATARU!!! The Hot-Blooded Fighting Teen & His Epic Adventures in a Fantasy World After Stopping a Truck with His Bare Hands!!

It's a wonderful day for Wataru Ito, high school student, master martial artist, honorable and humble teenager, and all-around awesome guy. During his daily run to school he happened to get hit by a large truck barreling around a corner.

Not that this is the kind of event that would be the end of the likes of Wataru, of course, but when a truck runs into you, you get sent to another world. That's just the way things are sometimes. Still, Wataru's not about to take this kind of thing lying down! The first thing he sets out to do is find who's the toughest hombre in this land and go up against the greatest challenges this new world has to offer!

Oh, and the greatest fighter in this place also happens to be the Demon Lord who is kidnapping people all across the kingdom in an attempt to wipe out humanity? Even better! Wataru's main interest is in facing a tough battle; saving the world in the process is just icing on the cake!

Start reading now

Record of Wortenia War (manga)

Ryoma Mikoshiba, an ordinary high-schooler adept at martial arts, one day finds himself summoned to another world. The ones who summoned him, the O’ltormea Empire, cite the fact that 'when those summoned kill another living being, they can absorb a fraction of their strength and make it their own' as their reason. But upon learning the empire uses those they summon to strengthen themselves by foul means, Ryoma is consumed by hatred and slays an important member of the O’ltormean court.

Attempting to escape the Empire's borders while keeping his identity a secret, he is accosted by two twin sisters— one golden-haired, the other silver-haired— in a meeting that sets the gears of fate in motion. The curtain rises on a record of the wars of a young supreme ruler in this other world fantasy!

Start reading now

A Lily Blooms in Another World

a J-Novel Heart title

Miyako Florence isn’t sad when her fiancée breaks off their engagement after two years. It’s all according to plan! Whisked to the world of her favorite otome game, Miyako frees herself from a dull noble to pursue her true soulmate: the game’s villainess Fuuka Hamilton. Proud Fuuka only has eyes for their mutual ex-fiancée! Miyako confesses her love to Fuuka and proposes that they run away together.

Fuuka agrees on one condition: Miyako must make her say “I’m happy” in 14 days. With conniving nobles, strange diseases, and magical rituals pulling them apart, can Miyako win the villainess’s heart? A tentative bud blossoms in this twisting romance from the author of Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out, So I Teamed Up With a Mythical Sorceress!

Start reading now

Mapping: The Trash-Tier Skill That Got Me into a Top-Tier Party

Note Athlon was really looking forward to becoming an adventurer with his best friend (and crush) Miya. That is, until he drew Mapping—a rare skill with practically no purpose. In other words, it’s trash. This kicks off a vicious spiral for Note, who plummets further and further into the depths of self-loathing despair when Miya leaves him. He now spends his days drinking away his earnings, wondering how things might have been different if only he’d pulled a better skill...

But little does he know his trash-tier skill is about to score him an invite to a top-tier adventuring party! Note’s now determined to find his way through life—and a dungeon!—in order to make something of himself.

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Mapping: The Trash-Tier Skill That Got Me into a Top-Tier Party (manga adaptation)

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The Sorcerer's Receptionist

a J-Novel Heart title

In a world of everyday magic, Nanalie has always dreamed of becoming a receptionist at the prestigious Sorcerer's Guild. To achieve her goal, she needs to attend a magic school full of princes and the daughters of nobles. Determined to prove that a commoner can be the number one student, she must compete with Rockmann, the son of a duke. When she graduates, she lands her dream job and they go their separate ways.

Nanalie enjoys spending each day alongside her familiar Lala and her kind co-workers, but it seems that fate won’t let her escape her entanglement with Rockmann that easily...

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Black Summoner

Waking up in a strange new place with no memory of his past life, Kelvin learns that he’s bartered away those very memories in exchange for powerful new abilities during his recent transmigration. Heading out into a whole new world as a Summoner — with his first Follower being the very goddess who brought him over! — Kelvin begins his new life as an adventurer, and it isn’t long before he discovers his hidden disposition as a battle junkie.

From the Black Knight of the Ancient Castle of Evil Spirits to the demon within the Hidden Cave of the Sage, he revels in the fight against one formidable foe after another. Join this OP adventurer in an exhilarating and epic saga as he and his allies carve their way into the annals of history!

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Black Summoner (manga)

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Holmes of Kyoto

a J-Novel Heart title

Half a year after moving to Kyoto, high school girl Aoi Mashiro brings her late grandfather’s old scrolls to Kura, an antique store nestled in Kyoto’s Teramachi-Sanjo shopping arcade, for an appraisal. One thing leads to another, and she winds up working there part-time. The manager’s son, Kiyotaka Yagashira—nicknamed the “Holmes of Kyoto”—is uncannily perceptive, and together, they solve strange cases relating to the antiques brought to them by clients.

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>> J-Novel Club Website

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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jesseneufeld · 6 years

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From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

We live in a stress-filled world. Poor quality nutrition, toxic chemicals, xenoestrogens, EMFs, blue-light, deadlines, and traffic have us competing for our health. But on March 20, 2011, life got much more stressful than I could have ever imagined.

That particular day, I found myself in an ICU bed after recently being hit by a series of large vehicles. I recalled crossing a busy street in Traffic Nation, a.k.a. Los Angeles, where I was unexpectedly hit by a Land Rover headed west. The force of the blow threw me into the eastbound lane, where I was then run over by a Toyota Tundra. Needless to say, my world was rocked.

Lying unconscious in the middle of Melrose, paramedics and first responders aided my broken body. Upon impact I had seven broken ribs, a collapsed lung and “the worst compound fracture’ the maxillofacial specialist at the hospital had ever seen…BUT I was still alive. Perspective.

For any person, this would be a traumatic experience, but for a young, 30-year-old working actor and model, my future was suddenly completely unsure. At this time, my physical appearance was a huge part of my livelihood, and quite honestly, I wasn’t certain I would ever look the same.

My body wrecked and my confidence not far behind, I found a silver lining by focusing on what I DID have rather than what I didn’t. Some say true purpose is born from tragedy, and luckily for me, this was the case. As easy as it would have been to give up, my near-fatal accident turned out to be the ultimate blessing in disguise — that experience sparked the fire in my soul’s purpose. I set forward with passion to recover my health and to get back in better shape than I was before the accident. Along the way, I shared everything I had learned about nutrition, natural healing, skincare and how to feel better about the reflection in the mirror with the rest of the world.

All Natural Recovery

My recovery wasn’t easy, physically or mentally. I had pain from head to toe, my jaw wired shut and nubs for front teeth, I felt myself turning into a zombie from the antibiotics, CT scan and monthly x-rays. It was dark. I lost my zest as a human being. I definitely wasn’t my ‘happy-go-lucky’ self, and it is a scary thing to witness yourself changing for the worse as a person. But I didn’t give in to that feeling, I quickly decided I was going to do everything in my power to ‘beat’ this funk that I was in and recover as quick as I could, as best as I could. A walking ball of inflammation, I began researching ingredients for how I was going to accelerate my healing both internally and externally. I met with several Chinese herbalists and developed a morning tonic that would help build my blood, assist in ridding my body of toxins and provide the best nutrition possible while not being able to chew food. It was extremely tough. Deer Placenta, egg yolks, bison liver… You name it, I tried it. I just wanted to get back to the old me!

In addition to this, my face was extremely swollen, covered in abrasions, and I had an unsightly deep scar on the left side of my face from point of impact that really was an eyesore. Social situations were uncomfortable, so I spent most of my time in my little apartment researching. Unhappy with the toxic, paraben-laced products that my doctors were recommending that I use to heal my skin, I began obsessive research into creating my own remedy. My simple understanding of the negative side effects of the medical and conventional led me into an ever-evolving journey of education of ingredient decks. I learned a lot about the physiology of toxic fragrances, artificial colors and other synthetic chemicals.

It turns out, most conventional skin-care products were going to do more harm than good for my skin. Parabens, one of the more common ingredients, is estrogenic and antagonistic to androgen production, meaning they interfere with the endocrine system’s ability to produce and regulate hormones—this physiological mechanism makes them correlated with breast and other cancers. This sort of research only further validated my protest against the recommended creams and further fueled my desire to heal my body, naturally. I understood that the skin pores are vulnerable to everything they are exposed to, so I only use products that are free of any known toxic, carcinogenic, inflammatory substances. I also ensured that every ingredient that touched my skin came with beneficial, therapeutic effects for my skin cells. I deeply felt that my skin would respond best to a blend of nutrient dense organic ingredients, clays, superfood extracts, cold pressed essential oils and butters.

Researching and finding these hidden gem ingredients became my own little creative outlet! I would isolate certain ingredients and note their effect on my skin, I would pay close attention to the activity of the ingredients and the synergy that they created together. What started as a carefully formulated blend of clays sourced from all over the world, quickly turned into a mineral rich, superfood regenerative meal for the skin on my face. Not only did it help reduce the swelling, and completely heal the abrasions on my face, but my complexion was crystal clear and silky soft. I knew I had something special. The same people that saw me in an ICU bed were blown away by what they saw just a few weeks later. Wondering what I did to heal so quickly, I drove all around town with my backpack, wooden spoon and bowl and would mix up a mask for them to try.

Blown away by the feedback, I knew I had something special. The Alitura Clay Mask was born! Next thing you know I’m melting down cacao butter in a cast iron pan in my kitchen, combining it with Manuka Honey, adding Sea Buckthorn Oil and other skin healthy botanical extracts…. And the best part…seeing and feeling results! The concoction made out of that cast iron pan became my Alitura Night Cream. It was great because I really became my own biggest science experiment. The cell turnover process was sped up by staying extremely consistent with a routine of using the Clay Mask which exfoliated dead skin, then following with the cream that I was making to heal, hydrate and deeply nourish the freshly exfoliated skin’s surface. I started to look forward to doing it.

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

Shortly after that, Bulletproof CEO Dave Asprey heard about what I was doing and had me on his top ranked podcast ‘Bulletproof Radio.’ Our podcast got such a response from it that he invested in me and my brand and the rest is history. Four years after launching the business out of a dingy studio apartment in North Hollywood, California, Alitura Naturals now has 20 products and is in 76 countries. Alitura is Latin for ‘feeding and nourishing,’ and we maintain that in our core brand mission and ingredient integrity in every product that we make.

I specifically want to say thank you to Mark Sisson and the extremely kind staff at Primal Blueprint, Primal Kitchen® and Mark’s Daily Apple. The first book that I ever read in the health and wellness space was The Primal Blueprint. From cover to cover, I found myself devouring information in that book and implementing it into my and my family’s lives. That book flat out changed my life, and was the catalyst in leading me towards an enriched quality of life by keeping me on a path towards my ultimate purpose.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Folks, I hope you enjoyed Andy’s story as much as I have. I’m happy to share that Andy’s offering Mark’s Daily Apple folks a generous discount. Check out his product line and use the coupon code “primal” (of course) to receive 20% off anything in the entire store—and enjoy free U.S. shipping, too.

Be sure to catch Andy on this coming Monday’s Primal Blueprint Podcast (10/22/18). Our own Elle Russ chats with Andy about his near death experience, his commitment to full recovery, and the thriving business that came out of his resolve.

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

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watsonrodriquezie · 6 years

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From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

The post From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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fishermariawo · 6 years

Text

From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

The post From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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cristinajourdanqp · 6 years

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From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

The post From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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milenasanchezmk · 6 years

Text

From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

The post From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

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thegloober · 6 years

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From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

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Source: https://bloghyped.com/from-bedridden-to-radiance-how-i-used-a-holistic-lifestyle-to-heal-from-a-near-death-accident/

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cynthiamwashington · 6 years

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From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident

All Natural Recovery

Just 2 1/2 months after a life threatening accident, I was back on the runway, modeling for Macy’s! My first victory in my recovery.

It truly is an honor to contribute on a blog that I have read and been a fan of for years. Thank you!

— Andy Hnilo, CEO & Founder, Alitura Naturals

Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Have an awesome weekend, everyone.

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The post From Bedridden to Radiance: How I Used a Holistic Lifestyle to Heal From a Near-Death Accident appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Article source here:Marks’s Daily Apple

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weightloss18-blog1 · 6 years

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What I’m Loving Lately 119

New Post has been published on https://designweightloss.com/what-im-loving-lately-119/

What I’m Loving Lately 119

Hi, guys! Happy almost Labor Day Weekend to you!

I can’t believe this is our final weekend of summer. It seriously flew by. It was truly the best few months, and I’m sad to see the fun times end, but I am a little excited to get back to a routine. Mal is back-to-school next week, and Quinn “officially” starts PreK. I can’t believe this is Quinn’s last year at Kindercare before he’s in Kindergarten and riding the school bus all by himself. WHERE does the time go, right?

With it being Friday and all, I wanted to share some FAVORITES from the past week. It’s quite the mix of goodies with everything from oysters and popcorn to CBD oil and cozy fall sweaters and hoodies. I hope you guys enjoy this round-up! 🙂

The Raw Bar at Island Creek Oyster Farm on Duxbury Bay – We finally made it, and it was everything I expected and more!

If you’re local and love oysters, you definitely need to visit before the season ends.

FYI: The Raw Bar only serves oysters (and other raw ocean items) and booze, so it might not be enough for dinner, but it’s definitely a pre- or post-dinner spot. It’s also super kid-friendly and located right on the bay, so the views and atmosphere couldn’t be more perfect. I hope we have a chance to visit again soon!

Episode 186 of Fit Womens Weekly Podcast – I had the opportunity to chat with Kindal about unbalanced hormones during and after birth control, how seed cycling may help, and why macro counting works for some but not others.

Brooks Fly-By Hoodie – Obsessed. I first saw this hoodie when I was in Seattle for the Brooks Run Happy Ambassador Trip, and I immediately knew I wanted it in my life. It’s my favorite! It comes in different colors and some of them (white and pink) are on sale right now. It also comes in a 1/2 Zip, which is super cute too! FYI: I’m wearing my favorite TOMS sneakers in the photo below – lovvvvve them!

Ultimate Guide to Reverse Dieting – I’ve been really interested in reading more about the reverse dieting concept. I find it an interesting approach to helping people get out of diet mode in a healthy way, especially if they’ve been restricting calories and working out too much for too long. This is definitely a good read if you are at all curious about how the metabolism can take a hit and be repaired from dieting.

Point Sur allover pointelle crewneck sweater – I’m seriously loving this sweater! It comes in dark green, navy, and light pink too – and J.Crew is having a big sale right now. Use code BIGSALE for 30% off + an extra 10%!

FREE ground beef for LIFE from ButcherBox – If you’ve been thinking about trying ButcherBox, now is the time! This deal is just too amazing to pass up!

Stay-Healthy Travel Hacks From Successful Women – I’m so honored to be included in this piece on Forbes!

Primally Pure Charcoal Deodorant – I get lots of questions about this all-natural deodorant, and I’m still loving it. It’s easily the best I’ve found and worth every cent for keeping me dry and smelling delicious – well, ok, kind of minty, but definitely fresh!

What a Functional Medicine Practitioner Tells His Hashimoto’s Clients to Eat – I know there are quite a few CNC readers with autoimmune diseases and Hashimoto’s is fairly common among women, so just wanted to share this blog post.

The Ultimate Detox System + CBD oil – I have a full post coming out about CBD oil, but I want to give a shout out to the Ultimate Detox System that Kristin from Thrive by Food recommended to me. I recently received my results from the DUTCH test (via Kristin), and it was truly fascinating (IG Live coming soon about it)! My hormones are wacky because my body has issues detoxing. DETOXING! Finally, some answers! Even just ONE single month using the detox system with CBD oil has made all the difference in my hormonal and anxiety issues. More info coming, but just wanted to tell you guys because I’m really excited to finally have some answers and see some results! FINALLY!!!!!

Eating Strawberries Reduces Colon Inflammation, Improves Gut Health in IBD Mouse Model – Interesting study!

Quinn microwave popcorn – We’re loving all kinds of Quinn microwave popcorn right now. It’s organic, not made with any funny ingredients, and sooo delicious! Quinn and I have been loving it for our movie nights!

Question of the Day

Anyone else just love microwave popcorn?

It always brings me back to my childhood – watching movies with my mom and sister – so I love having it with Quinn now on our movie nights!

P.S. Thinking about trying EverlyWell? They’re offering 15-20% off their tests with code SCHOOL until Monday!

Chocolate Milk + Fish Sticks

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latestnews2018-blog · 6 years

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There Were Zero Things Better This Week Than These Grandma Twins

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/there-were-zero-things-better-this-week-than-these-grandma-twins/

There Were Zero Things Better This Week Than These Grandma Twins

Welcome to Good Stuff, HuffPost’s weekly recommendation series devoted to the least bad things on and off the internet.

The best thing I saw this week was this photo of two old women I’m going to assume are twins because they look exactly the same and are wearing matching pink outfits. If I’m wrong, sue me.

Why do I like it? I don’t know. I just do. Maybe it’s been a so-so week, but I can’t think of anything else that has brought me more joy. Look at their outfits! The shirts! The glasses! The hair! Are those called shorts or pants? Who cares! I love them!

My colleague Ashley Feinberg described this photo as “fucked up,” claiming “there’s no way you get to 80 and still keep buying matching outfits with your twin without something being extremely fucked up.” She is wrong. Sometimes two cute twins (presumably) are just two cute twins (presumably).

Do you know these twins? I would like to interview them. Thanks. ― Maxwell Strachan

Jonathan Chait’s BOFA Tweet

Twitter

On July 12, in the year of our Lord 2018, at 10:51 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, persecuted white man Jonathan Chait tweeted three perfect words: “What is BOFA?”

BOFA, as any self-hating internet user knows, is “bofa deez nuts.” It is the “What’s ‘updog’” prank, only vastly stupider and consequently infinitely funnier whenever an unsuspecting target takes the bait. Jonathan Chait took the bait, and the result was more beautiful than any of us could have ever hoped to deserve.

Jonathan Chait, however, deleted his tweet — the tweet in which he asked, “What is BOFA?” — and deprived us of our constitutional right to dunk on Jonathan Chait. Just one more example of illiberal deplatforming from the radical left.

Anyway, congratulations to the remarkably damp Jonathan Chait on giving brief, beautiful life to a perfect tweet. We should all be so lucky. ― Ashley Feinberg

Sweet Soccer Boys Sharing Gentle Hugs

ALEXANDER NEMENOV via Getty Images

This week I wanted to recommend hate-watching (or more like “confused-watching”) Fox’s nightly special “World Cup Tonight,” but my editor made me turn it into a standalone blog.

Instead, I will recommend a more healing aspect of the World Cup spectacle: watching the beautiful boys of soccer comfort and celebrate with each other through emotional embraces. Jezebel’s Sheena Raza Faisal saluted these loving clinches in a very on-point post that features not quite enough images of man hugs ― check the comments for more, especially England manager Gareth Southgate soothing Colombia’s Mateus Uribe after Uribe missed a crucial penalty kick in a shootout against England.

Boy, it sure is dusty in here, etc., etc. ― Claire Fallon

Glynnis MacNicol’s New Book

Illustration: HuffPost/Photo: Simon and Schuster

After hearing Glynnis MacNicol talk about her new memoir, Nobody Tells You This, at the Strand in New York City, I’ve had this one sentence stuck in my head. When asked about the plight of unmarried, childless women and our society’s treatment of them as somehow other or incomplete, MacNicol hit back with a statement that resonates with me still: “We look at women as a problem in need of a solution.”

In her book, MacNicol draws attention to the ways strangers feel they have a right to women’s bodies and lives in service of the ultimate goal, motherhood. The shame around it all, the general lack of freedom or agency, is really frightening. Although I have yet to read Nobody Tells You This, I’m excited to. And I’m ready to recommend it as a refreshing take on what life can be like for women who choose not to do what is expected of them. ― Anna Krakowsky

The Birth Of Kulture

Kulture ❤️❤️anything else woulda been basic 💁🏽‍♀️💁🏽‍♀️💁🏽‍♀️Okrrrrr

— iamcardib (@iamcardib) July 12, 2018

Cardi B had the baby and her name is Kulture with a K. That’s self-explanatory Good Stuff. ― Julia Craven

When June Smacked The Shit Out Of Commander Waterford On “The Handmaid’s Tale”

In a moment when it feels like terrible men are trying to whittle away women’s rights on a near-daily basis, sometimes you just really want to see a lady righteously smack the shit out of a dude who deserves it. Enter the “Handmaid’s Tale” finale!

June (Elisabeth Moss), who has spent two seasons being psychologically tortured, raped and belittled by Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) ― a man who desperately wants to be powerful and desperately wants the approval of women he knows are better than him ― finally stops bottling up her rage and lets him have it, right across the face. I could watch this GIF on repeat for the next two years. ― Emma Gray

England’s Loss

WATCH: Mario Mandzukic scores the game winning goal in extra time to put Croatia in its first ever World Cup Final. #ENGCRO #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/dnRpjSNPHo

— Jurado (@JuradoNYC) July 11, 2018

It’s not coming home. LOL. ― Travis Waldron

The Enya Song In “Eighth Grade”

You know a movie’s good when an Enya song pops up in a pivotal scene. But even without “Orinoco Flow,” Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” would be an indie masterpiece ― one you should definitely, totally, run to the theater to see.

It follows “Most Quiet” superlative winner Kayla (Elsie Fisher) during her last week of eighth grade, as she tries to come to grips with her social anxiety and lackluster lifestyle before high school. Behind her phone, she’s confident, even funny. But in real life, Kayla is quiet, a loner. Burnham allows viewers to study her every move in a tech-obsessed world while contemplating their own adolescent memories. It’s beautiful, raw and utterly sweet. ― Leigh Blickley

Megan Amram’s Emmy-Nominated Web Series

vimeo

Please watch “An Emmy for Megan,” a hilarious and weirdly poetic exercise in doing the bare minimum, while remaining utterly extra. The concept is simple: Writer Megan Amram, best known for her work on “The Good Place” and Twitter, decides she reeeeally wants to win an Emmy Award. (It’s her favorite award!) So at the last minute, she decides to write, direct and star in a short web series about making a short web series to win an Emmy.

The six episodes, under 10 minutes each and created in the week leading up to the submissions deadline, use the constraints of the Emmy requirements like forms of meter and verse. There are tears and tantrums and alcohol-fused meltdowns and even a surprise MUTINY along the short (so short) way.

Amram’s feat is not only hilarious but effective. On Thursday, the series was nominated for two Emmys: Outstanding Actress in a Short-Form Comedy or Drama Series and Outstanding Short-Form Comedy or Drama Series. Don’t sleep on the most inspiring tale of our time. ― Priscilla Frank

A Podcast About A Cult

When I was a kid, my best friend’s name was Robin, which was kind of weird because my mom’s childhood best friend’s name was Robin. The difference between my Robin and my mother’s Robin (aside from their being entirely separate humans) was that the latter ended up in a “Wild Wild Country”-ish cult.

My mom told me the story of her friend’s descent into Cult Town, U.S.A., and the teen girl power rescue mission that boldly extricated her a million times. Everything about it fascinated me. For a while, I actually thought it was a cosmic inevitability that my Robin would end up in a cult from which I’d need to liberate her. Anyway, she didn’t. But “The Gateway” is a good podcast about a cult. ― Katherine Brooks

Road Trip Music

Over the past few years, there’s been renewed interest in the work of John Fahey, the instrumentalist who put American primitive guitar on the map. As the genre has surged in popularity, acolytes and like-minded explorers have come out of the woodwork. Specialty labels have reissued private-press recordings that had long since gone out of print. It seems as though every town had an uncelebrated devotee of these obscure, mystical tunings. Worshipful but questioning, celestial and homespun, primitive guitar uses repetition and drone to access the pleasures and enlightenment of devotional music.

In April, Fahey’s hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland (just outside D.C.), honored the genre he helped create with a multiday festival. Lauding his work, it also shone a light on others who followed a similar path, devoting years to decoding the light and limber picking of Mississippi John Hurt and replicating the primal thump of Reverend Gary Davis. It was only fitting that one of this generation’s best pickers showed up ― Marisa Anderson, a guitarist based in the Pacific Northwest.

Anderson recently released a new album, “Cloud Corner,” which should be her breakthrough. She does something that I think most Fahey followers miss. She captures his melancholy, favoring mood as much as speed and technique. Her songs put you in places and moments. One song off an earlier album, she has said, is a tribute to her favorite swimming hole in Kentucky.

The new record lands on weightier subjects like the Syrian refugee crisis while other tunes process Tuareg-style playing through her fuzzy, electric style. But mostly, the songs ring clear, notes hushed or plucked pure. The album is meant for one of the few modes of escape where we can all still worship in peace: the road trip. ― Jason Cherkis

And Finally, The Women Of Color Who Dominated The Emmy Noms

Noam Galai via Getty Images

Sandra Oh was nominated for her role in “Killing Eve.”

This week in Good Stuff for me was the plethora of amazingly talented women of color who got Emmy nominations for best and supporting actress, including Sandra Oh (the first Asian woman to be nominated for lead actress in a drama), Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Zazie Beetz, Letitia Wright and my queen Thandie Newton. ― Zeba Blay

Get last week’s Good Stuff here.

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years

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The Father-Son Story Of The Two Michael Sams

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-father-son-story-of-the-two-michael-sams/

The Father-Son Story Of The Two Michael Sams

Michael Sam Jr. doesn’t talk to his father, who has been caricatured in the press as an anti-gay man who abandoned his family. But there’s a lot more to the story.

In a yellow-walled room in a Texas nursing home this July, a man in a wheelchair watched a flat-screen TV. He saw Michael Sam Jr. kiss his boyfriend and hug his small team of supporters — agents, coaches, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown. The first out gay player drafted into the National Football League strode to the stage to receive ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award, an honor previously bestowed on Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman, and Nelson Mandela. It was the climax of a star-studded evening in Los Angeles meant to announce Michael Jr.’s arrival as a national icon.

View this image ›

Michael Sam accepts the Arthur Ashe Courage Award onstage during the 2014 ESPY Awards in Los Angeles. Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS

Michael Jr. thanked his agents, his publicist, the couple who welcomed him into their home in high school, supporters from the University of Missouri, and top officials with the St. Louis Rams, the team that had drafted him only two months earlier.

Finally, he gave a brief nod to his roots. “To my mother, a single mother who somehow raised eight kids. I love you dearly.”

Back in his cramped room at the nursing home, Michael Sam Sr. picked up his battered, flip-style phone and found his son’s number. He left a message.

“So that’s what you’re going to do?” he recalled telling his son. “After all I’ve done for you?”

Since Michael Jr. publicly announced he was gay in February — just days after he let his father know by text message — Michael Sr. has been vilified in the press. In the New York Times, Michael Sr. came off as a callous homophobe when he said, “I don’t want my grandkids raised in that kind of environment. … I’m old school. I’m a man-and-a-woman type of guy.” When the ESPN documentary declared that Michael Sr. had “abandoned the family” and left his mother to raise Michael Jr. and his seven siblings on her own, Michael Sr. seemed the archetype of the intolerant and absent black father.

In none of these accounts did Michael Jr. come to his father’s defense. “I’m closer to my friends than I am to my family,” Michael Jr. told the Times.

But the father-son story of Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. is more than a conflict over whether Michael Sr. loved and supported his son. It’s the tale of man who’s been reduced to a caricature but whose actual life was shaped by the loss of child after child, some to death and some to crime. The rift between Michael Sr. and his youngest son started long before Michael Jr. came out and stems in no small part from those family tragedies.

Of course, those losses shaped Michael Jr. too, but he isn’t saying how. Through his agent and publicist, he declined numerous requests for an interview. But it’s not hard to see how, in order to succeed and perhaps just to survive, he might blame his father, fairly or not, for what happened to his family.

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Joel Anderson/BuzzFeed

Michael Sr. spends most of his days at the DeSoto Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, about 15 miles southwest of Dallas. His electric hospital-style bed and almost all of his few belongings — a mini-fridge and a rolling dinner tray, mostly — are crammed into a corner of the room he shares with another patient. He locks his drawers because someone has been stealing his snacks.

He gets around in a wheelchair, having lost his ability to walk almost three years ago. He wears a gold chain around his broad neck, which bears a deep and long surgical scar that runs from the bottom of his hairline to somewhere past the neckline of his white undershirt. It’s not clear he knows exactly what ailment has left him in a wheelchair. “I have a hole in my neck,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna die in this motherfucker. I’m getting out of here.”

At 55, he’s one of the youngest and most vibrant residents at the nursing home. He has a paunch and false teeth, but he still possesses the thickly muscled shoulders and arms of someone nicknamed “Hammer,” a handle he got on the football field and in the streets. His hands still make large fists; kicking ass was a family pastime.

“Maaaannnn, I used to hit hard,” he said. “I taught all my sons to play football.”

He often rolls his wheelchair to a shaded patio, where he goes through Kool cigarettes like some people do cups of coffee. He banters with almost everyone. Especially the women. “Better quit bending that ass over like that,” he tells one of the women staffers, a smile creasing his fleshy face. The woman smiles back. If she or other women staffers are offended by his behavior, they don’t show it. At least a couple jokingly call him their boyfriend.

His phone rings throughout the day, bearing calls from his children or friends named ”Frank Tha Cook” or “Little Leroy.” The conversations usually cover his health, upcoming casino trips to Louisiana, and football, particularly the Cowboys, his favorite team since he was a boy.

One person who doesn’t call is Michael Jr., who kept his distance as he ascended to fame and more recently when he tumbled out of big-time football.

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Michael Sam in 2013 playing for the University of Missouri. Joe Robbins / Getty Images

After Michael Jr. publicly came out in February, even President Obama praised the announcement. On May 10, the St. Louis Rams drafted him, generating more praise. But despite the fact that he had been a star at the University of Missouri, where he became Co-Defensive Player of the Year in the powerful Southeastern Conference, he was chosen late. Only seven players were selected after him. He performed well during training camp and the preseason — but was still cut from the final roster on Aug. 30, touching off a debate about whether homophobia played a role in his release. The Cowboys signed him three days later to their practice squad, then dropped him on Oct. 21. He is now a free agent.

For the nearly two months that Michael Jr. was with the Cowboys, he lived a half hour away from his father. It was the closest they’ve lived to each other in about 15 years. A family friend, Sean Woods, hoped it would finally bring the men together. “Now,” he said, Michael Jr. “has to deal with his daddy.”

Yet the Michaels have exchanged only a few text messages and haven’t spoken a word to each other, a quiet that has now lasted at least several months with no end in sight. Michael Sr. has mostly kept up with the vicissitudes of his son’s career through updates on ESPN and phone calls from friends and family members.

Shortly after Michael Jr. was released from the Cowboys’ practice squad, Michael Sr. sent a text to BuzzFeed News: “Hey they cut Mike.” Asked if he’d heard from his son recently, Michael Sr. texted back that Michael Jr. “wouldn’t say a word to me honer [sic] thy father.”

“It’s like he was looking for an excuse to separate from us,” Michael Sr. said. “Now we’re just letting him have his limelight. We’re tired of begging him to stay in the family.”

On the room’s walls, Michael Sr. has pinned Father’s Day cards, a corkboard with a calendar and pictures of his family, and, over his bed, a lengthy poem about angels. On a special spot on the wall — right over his flat-screen TV — are two pictures of Michael Jr. in his University of Missouri football uniform. Pointing at the pictures, Michael Sr. said he knew from the start that Michael Jr. would be special.

“That boy, he had some big nuts,” Michael Sr. said. “He was big when he was born. That boy had some big-ass balls.”

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Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram / MCT

Wesley Sam, Michael Sr.’s father, was also pretty ballsy. In 1947, he was living in Opelousas, Louisiana, when he heard on the radio about what’s generally considered the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, an explosion at the Monsanto plant near Galveston, Texas. He headed right to the scene, figuring he could get work there.

He loaded cotton at the Galveston wharves for a few months before landing a job at the Monsanto plant. Yes, it had blown up, killing nearly 600 people, but he could make more money there than a black man could expect almost anywhere else.

He married Alberta, a fellow Opelousas native who spoke Creole, little English, and who couldn’t read or write. With their 10 children, they moved into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home at 1732 Thompson St. in La Marque: Wesley and Alberta had a bedroom, the girls had one, and the boys had the room at the back of the house. “I had a white boy type of life at home,” Michael Sr. said. “There wasn’t nothing I couldn’t have wanted and gotten.”

Alberta died at 46 following “a brief illness,” according to her obituary in the La Marque Times. Wesley Sam was a loving man, a capable cook, and obsessive about cleanliness — he would dust off his car every day, his surviving children said. But he wasn’t quite up to the challenge of corralling all of those children. Who could? Instead he set his example through his work ethic, putting in a full day at Monsanto then mowing lawns with his sons in the evening. They’d do 18 yards a day, Wednesday through Sunday.

“My dad was a workaholic before anyone called it that,” Michael Sr. said. “He’d think you were sorry if you didn’t have that work mentality in you.”

Michael Sr.’s siblings went off to college, joined the military, and found middle-class jobs. His sister Geraldine would become La Marque’s first black mayor.

Michael Sr., meanwhile, dropped out of school over the protests of his father but earned a GED. He wasn’t much of a student anyway, and finding work in the area was a cinch for anyone who didn’t mind getting a few smudges on their shirt. He worked in construction, at a chemical plant, and as a crane operator and a forklift operator.

Away from work, Michael Sr. and his brothers drank, chased women, and kept up the family tradition of fisticuffs. “We’d be out in the front yard fighting,” Michael Sr. said, grinning at the memory. “Real fighting. Not no slapboxing.”

One night in 1978, Michael Sr. met a woman named JoAnn Turner at a local nightclub. “She was fine and good-looking,” Michael Sr. said. “And I walked her out.”

Little more than a year later, JoAnn gave birth to a boy they named Russell. A year later, they had daughter Chanel. Julian was born in June 1982. They were young and in love, with three kids and jobs that paid middle-class wages. It didn’t take long for Michael Sr. to settle into life as a family man, or long for it to be destroyed.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Here’s a news brief from the Associated Press on Sept. 23, 1982, with a dateline from Texas City: “The body of Chanel Roshaun Sam was found Monday night in about eight feet of water near a pier on which she had been playing. Her parents and neighbors searched for three hours before finding the body.” The little girl, 2 years old, had apparently drowned.

After several days of grief, and desperate to rescue JoAnn from her despair, Michael Sr. suggested they go to the courthouse. And so, six days after their daughter died, they were married.

“I felt like she needed some support,” Michael Sr. said. “It was the right thing to do, to bring something positive from it.”

It wasn’t enough. JoAnn turned to religion and became a Jehovah’s Witness. Her conversion deepened the fissure in her marriage, because Michael Sr. was raised as a Baptist and felt his wife’s new religion was too restrictive. She insisted the family not celebrate Christmas. “I celebrated it,” he said. “But she didn’t celebrate it with me. I still bought the kids gifts.” (JoAnn didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

Michael Sr. found his solace shooting dice. On Friday and Saturday evenings, he would take his paycheck to a little wooden shack in Texas City and gamble away the family’s money. JoAnn suspected the absences were because of another woman, Michael Sr. said. But a mutual friend of the couple gave her the scoop. In Michael Sr.’s version of the story, the woman told JoAnn that “he ain’t screwing none of us” but was just gambling.

One Friday night, Michael Sr. recalled, he won $700 and left the shack with two friends on an impromptu trip to Boy’s Town in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, an infamous red-light district just across the Texas border. He didn’t bother calling JoAnn to tell her that he was leaving town.

“Weren’t no cell phones back then, and I didn’t stop and spend the 25 cents to call,” he said. When he returned Sunday, “she bitched at my ass. But it was pretty funny. I had a blast.”

The marriage continued to spiral, though Joshua was born in 1984 and Christopher in 1985. Michael Sr. finally filed for divorce in February 1986. A brief attempt at reconciliation resulted in the birth of Michelle in 1987. But the divorce was granted in 1988.

JoAnn was awarded primary parental responsibilities. Michael Sr. would have access to the children two weekends each month, and they divided up the holidays.

Michael Sr. was also ordered to pay JoAnn $250 each month for child support. Within a few months, JoAnn returned to court to complain that Michael Sr. wasn’t meeting his obligation. Thus started a four-year battle over child support. Michael Sr. was charged with contempt of court at least 10 times stemming from his failure to pay, according to court records. Twice he was sent to county jail.

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The District Clerk’s Office of Galveston County

“It was because I was running around and spending money and shooting dice,” Michael Sr. said. JoAnn “needed more money, and I was doing the very minimum. I should’ve been doing more.”

Typical of their on-again, off-again relationship, JoAnn gave birth in 1990 to Michael Jr. — right in the middle of their child support dispute — and the next year to Ashley, the eighth and last child they would have together. “Man, I had some phases with JoAnn,” Michael Sr. said.

In July 1992, JoAnn went to court to sign off on an agreement to release Michael Sr. from county jail and to clarify the terms of the support payments. At that point, according to court documents, Michael Sr. was behind nearly $4,000 in payments.

During the Christmas holidays that year, Michael Sr. said, JoAnn made a surprise visit to his house. “She wore one of those Mormon dresses — she knows that I like dresses,” he said, laughing. This time, he said, she demanded more than a night together.

On May 3, 1993, Michael Sr. and JoAnn went to the county courthouse once again — to get remarried.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Michael Sr. took no small pride in raising sons who were every bit the hell-raiser that he was. People around the neighborhood called him a man’s man. “My dad didn’t take no shit off nobody, and I didn’t take no shit off nobody,” Michael Sr. said. “I wasn’t a bad guy. But I was a ‘I’ll kick your ass’ kind of guy.”

“All of his kids were muscular and some bad dudes,” said Charles Sam, Michael Sr.’s brother.

The toughest of the bunch was also the oldest: Russell. As a freshman, he was pegged as a future football star at La Marque High School. Michael Sr. fondly remembers how Russell would walk around the neighborhood, “always ready to slap a motherfucker.”

But, he said, “I kept telling him to get out of that gang shit.”

Here’s a clipping from the Galveston County Daily News. It reports that on Feb. 27, 1995, Russell was sent home early from La Marque High School for “creating a disturbance.” A school administrator allowed Russell to walk home since his mother couldn’t leave work to pick him up.

Instead of heading straight home, the newspaper said, Russell stopped at a house about a half mile from the school. He was breaking into the back door when the homeowner fired at him three times through a metal door. Russell was clutching a screwdriver when his body was found. No charges were filed against the homeowner (who was also black).

The anger welled up within Michael Sr., who casually knew the man who had killed his son. There weren’t many strangers on that side of town. Michael Sr. got himself a handgun. “I was going to kill him,” Michael Sr. said. “I was going to go over there and end him. But my daddy saved me. He wouldn’t let me go over there.”

His father saved him. But Michael Sr. couldn’t save his own sons.

At 5 feet 4 inches and 125 pounds, second-oldest son Julian had an unusually slight build for a Sam boy. He went by the nickname “Ice Pick.” But he had a left arm that was made for pitching. “That boy could throw,” Michael Sr. said. “He used to strike Russell out all the time. Those were the funnest days.”

But, Michael Sr. said, “he wanted his own money” and begged his father to let him work. Michael Sr. eventually gave in, and Julian took a job with a local cable company.

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The Daily News

Here’s another headline from The Daily News, this one from Oct. 22, 1998: “La Marque mother looks for clues into son’s disappearance.”

Julian was last seen outside La Marque’s high school football stadium, where he had gone to buy tickets to the homecoming game. JoAnn told the newspaper, “What has me afraid is that he had just gotten paid, and had $200 on him.”

“I should just not have let him work,” Michael Sr. told BuzzFeed News. “I should have let him throw that ball. He would’ve been a left-handed pitcher.”

Julian hasn’t been seen since that homecoming game, and 16 years later the police maintain his disappearance is still an open case.

When Michael Jr. was born, his parents were scarred by the drowning of their daughter and were feuding over child support. When he was 5, his oldest brother was gunned down. When he was 8, his second-oldest brother vanished.

His remaining brothers, Josh and Chris, tormented him constantly. “His brothers picked on him,” said Michael Sr., who also grew up as the youngest brother in his family. “I’d have to go in there and tell them to quit that shit and leave him alone.” Michael Jr. told Outsports he was a “punching bag” for his older brothers.

Josh was also showing a precocious ability to find trouble in the streets of La Marque. “No one had reached 18 yet,” Michael Sr. said of his children. “I didn’t think [Josh] was going to reach it either.”

Michael Sr. and JoAnn decided that Hitchcock, a town only four miles away, might do them all some good.

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Population 7,000, Hitchcock was founded in 1873 as a railroad station between Houston and Galveston. Today, it’s a quiet two-stoplight town that sits along a state highway. By most socioeconomic markers — home ownership, median income, residents with college degrees (just 8.2%) — Hitchcock ranks below the Texas average.

The Sams settled into a well-kept rose-colored wood-frame house that sat along the railroad tracks and unkempt ditches on the black side of town. It seemed isolated enough from the troubles that La Marque had visited upon their family, but it wasn’t.

La Marque police reopened the investigation into Julian’s disappearance after getting reports that people had seen him in the area. “We think he left on his own free will and we feel strongly he is alive,” the police chief told the Texas City Sun in October 2000.

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An age-progressed photo of Julian Sam. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children / Via missingkids.com

JoAnn told the Sun that she also believed he was still alive. “He was at that age of rebellion,” she said, suggesting he had run away from home. She told the newspaper that she wanted him to come home or at least call someone in the family to let them know he was OK.

In grief, Michael Sr. had quit his job at the post office. “I had always had a steady job, but I couldn’t handle it no more,” he said. “I felt closed in. Just thinking of it.” He found work as a crane operator but was laid off soon after. He got a job working for a local pipe company and was let go again. Finally, in the fall of 1999, a family friend told him he should consider truck driving. Michael Sr. went to school in Dallas, and four months later was on the road, coming back to Hitchcock when he could, mostly on weekends.

“It was a steady job,” he said, and one that answered a deeper need: “I had to get away. I wanted to get away.”

The marriage crumbled. Michael Sr. and JoAnn remain legally married but haven’t lived as a couple since he moved to Dallas in 2000.

Michael Jr. was 10 when his father started his life on the road. With JoAnn working late hours and taking extra shifts to provide for the children, Michael Jr.’s older brothers had their run of the house — and the streets. “It was bad,” Michael Jr. said in an ESPN documentary about his life. “I’m a kid and I’m seeing some hardcore drugs in my house. My mother didn’t know about it. If I told her anything, my brothers said they would kill me.”

Craig Smith, one of his high school football coaches, saw it for himself. “Sometimes I’d drive over to pick him up and honk the horn and one of his brothers would come out to see if I wanted to buy” drugs, he told a crowd at the school’s annual football reunion dinner in late July.

The criminal records of Michael Jr.’s brothers support these accounts: Josh has been arrested more than 40 times, including four convictions for drug possession, and Chris has tallied nearly 20 arrests.

In April, Chris was sentenced to 30 years in state prison for breaking into a woman’s home, choking her into unconsciousness twice, then using her credit card at a nearby restaurant. Josh was put in the Galveston County Jail in July on a minor offense and was released last month.

“I got caught up in them streets,” Josh admitted during a June interview with BuzzFeed News, a rare evening this year when he wasn’t locked up.

Little of this came as a surprise to family members. Cousins remember being warned to keep their distance. “We knew it wasn’t the ideal upbringing,” said Joseph Sam, a nephew of Michael Sr. “They were always in trouble.”

With his childhood saturated with grief and his older brothers descending into crime, Michael Jr. would have had to be a saint not to look for someone to blame. Conveniently, his father was already blaming himself.

Out on the road, far away from home, Michael Sr. remained tormented by the loss of his boys. Teaching them toughness had backfired; he’d armed them with tools for survival in one world that wouldn’t work in almost any other.

“Life was going to be tough on them,” he said. “Your skin had to be tougher than the others. But I also wanted them to make the right decisions.”

Somewhere in these years, Michael Sr. began to lose the last of his sons — not to death or crime, but to rejection.

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Courtesy of Robert Dohman

On his first day of third grade, in a new town and new school, Michael Jr. was seated next to a chubby, snowy-haired boy. Michael Jr. wasn’t saying much to his new seatmate. The silence went on for so long and got so awkward that eventually the boy spoke up.

“I told the teacher that I didn’t want to sit next to him because he was too quiet,” said Robert Dohman. “He turns around and goes, ‘Hey, blondie boy, I’m not quiet!’ And that’s the way me and Michael get along now.”

Michael Jr. was voted “friendliest” by his sixth-grade classmates and elected homecoming king in eighth grade. His popularity was a testament to his ability to navigate the unspoken color line of a small Southern town; most of his close friends were white.

“My grandma,” said Dohman, “was very old-school and wasn’t into all that racial mixing. But when I had Michael over, he’d always be the first one to come over and give everybody a hug. Even her. He really changed the way my grandmother looked at black people. She would even smile when he came around.”

Michael Sr. said he saw little of the outgoing side of his son, saying he was quiet at home. But coaches and teachers remember him as a precociously self-assured teenager who could start a conversation with anyone. After football games, Michael Jr. was known for going into the bleachers — uniform and pads still on — to introduce himself to parents.

Michael could “talk to a group of 15-year-olds and then set there and talk to a group of 55-year-olds and not feel out of place either,” said Smith, now head football coach at Hitchcock. “I just never had a student that could just go and talk to a group of people. He would make friends all the time.”

Even in what was ostensibly enemy territory. Smith recalled a track meet at Danbury, a nearby town that is 90% white, less than 1% black, and had developed a reputation for being unfriendly to minorities. Except, apparently, Michael Jr.

“I can remember some Danbury parents cheering and rooting for Michael running the 100-meter” dash, Coach Smith said. “You just didn’t see that, if you know anything about Danbury.”

Maybe the biggest benefit of playing sports is that it kept Michael Jr. away from his brothers. The coaches, who also worked as teachers in the district, knew all about Josh and Chris: Their obvious athleticism had never proven to be worth the trouble. But Michael Jr. was charting a path different from the men in his family. Michael Jr. greeted people with hugs, not fists. He was going to be the first to graduate.

“Michael was a good kid,” Michael Sr. said. “He said he didn’t want to be like his brothers.” Left unsaid was that Michael Jr. clearly felt the same about his father.

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Courtesy of Robert Dohman

On fall Friday nights, Michael Sr. said he would find a seat somewhere in Hitchcock’s football stadium, away from the crowd and sometimes with his father, Wesley. After nearly 30 years as a father, he said, he could finally engage in the autumn ritual familiar across Texas.

“I didn’t miss [any] home game his senior year,” Michael Sr. insisted.

There isn’t anyone who can corroborate his perfect attendance. Family and friends say they’re sure he went to some games but don’t know about all of them. The coaches at Hitchcock High can remember seeing or, rather, hearing, Michael Sr. only once in four years: a game in Michael Jr.’s sophomore year.

“I heard this guy yelling at Michael and I turned to Michael and asked him, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’” Smith recalled. “Michael said it was his father. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him.”

Those stadiums can be hubs of activity on Friday nights, and coaches are notoriously focused on the events unfolding well away from the stands. It would be easy to miss someone on game night, right?

“Let me say this in a nice way,” Smith said. “I didn’t know him, and I know a lot of people in town. I can look up in those stands and know who’s there.”

Michael Sr. said he didn’t make it a priority to spend any time with the parents of Michael Jr.’s friends or the alums and other regulars who would show up at school events — most of them white. “I never did know them,” Michael Sr. said. “And I never tried to go out of my way.”

Michael Sr. said he took a job with a trucking company based out of Ada, Oklahoma, so that he could arrive in Hitchcock by the start of kickoff Friday night. He assumed his son appreciated what he considered a significant sacrifice of time and money; coming back to Texas without a load meant he wouldn’t get paid for the drive home.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, when media outlets began saying that he had abandoned his son, that Michael Sr. learned he was being phased out of the story of his son’s childhood. He never thought all those years on the road would mean that he wasn’t there.

“Michael’s family was the city of Hitchcock,” said Dohman, Michael Jr.’s childhood friend.

Told what Dohman said, Michael Sr. looked straight ahead, the anger washing over him. Sitting on that patio at the nursing home, he was, for a few moments, that angry Sam boy ready to fight.

“The city of Hitchcock didn’t buy his goddamn clothes, a roof over his head, or the bed that he slept in,” Michael Sr. said. “The city of Hitchcock can kiss my ass.” He paused. “I should have kept those gas receipts.”

Of course, Michael Sr. never thought he would need them. He also never thought the family of a high school teammate — a white one — would get so much credit.

Once Michael Jr. revealed in February his plans to become the NFL’s first out gay player, the two media outlets with which his publicists coordinated the announcement wrote this:

The New York Times: Sam found a comfortable place off the field as well, in large part because of Ethan Purl, a classmate and the son of Ron Purl, the president of the local branch of Prosperity Bank. Ron’s wife, Candy, made sure their house was part recreation center and part counseling hub for their children and their friends. By Sam’s senior year, he had his own bedroom in the Purls’ house, along with chores like cleaning the pool and carrying the grocery bags. “I look at our house as a kind of safe haven,” said Ron Purl, who keeps a photograph of Sam in his Missouri football uniform in his office. “He is just another son. If he did something wrong, he got yelled at just like the others did.”

ESPN: The relationship started when Candy Purl, Ronnie’s wife, invited Michael to dinner during his freshman year of high school. Ronnie, a man with a personality much bigger than he is, discovered a kid he didn’t recognize and demanded to know, “And who are you?”

“Without skipping a beat, my brother replied, ‘I’m Michael Alan Sam Jr.!,’” said Ethan Purl, Ronnie’s son. “And after that, he never left.”

“That’s a bunch of shit,” Michael Sr. said. Sure, he said, his son went to the Purls’ on weekends, but “Michael lived at home to the day he graduated.”

“He lived with the rest of us,” agreed Michael Jr.’s sister Michelle.

“The Purls only helped [him] in [his] senior year,” his aunt Geraldine said. “If the Purls were really good people, they’d tell Michael that he was wrong. That he should acknowledge his mother and daddy.”

After a brief phone conversation in which he said he didn’t have time to speak, Ethan Purl did not return repeated phone calls. Ronnie Purl declined a number of interview requests. “Without Michael’s approval I will not be able to speak with you,” he said in an email. “Being in banking, I am very aware of privacy issues.”

Michael Sr. said he met the Purls at least once, when he accompanied Michael Jr. on one of his visits over there.

“I just wanted to see where Michael was going, to make sure where he was going was the right environment,” Michael Sr. said.

In fact, Michael Sr. liked that his youngest son had white friends. He was convinced his association with them might mean better grades, a high school diploma, and maybe even college — the chance at success that his other sons never had.

“He wasn’t messing with the black guys trying to sell drugs and doing drugs — I thought that was a good thing,” Michael Sr. said. “As long as he wasn’t doing nothing crazy, wasn’t in no cult, I was all right with it.”

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A yearbook page shows Michael Sam during his high school days in Hitchcock, Texas. Scott Dalton/The New York Times/REDUX

When Michael Jr. was at the University of Missouri, Michael Sr. began noticing some changes in his son, he recalled. There was that road trip from Dallas to Houston with Michael Jr. and one of his college friends, Vito Cammisano, a member of the men’s swim team. What struck Michael Sr. was his son’s taste in music.

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Michael Sam with his boyfriend, Vito Cammisano. Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS)

“He knew all of them white songs,” Michael Sr. said. “He knew country, Taylor Swift, all that stuff. I’m like, What brother knows all of them white songs? That tripped me out.”

On another one of Michael Jr.’s trips home with Vito, Michael Sr. noticed their relationship seemed much closer than a simple friendship. How else to explain Vito coming home for the holidays? Michael Sr. waited until they returned to Missouri to broach his suspicions to his wife. “I told JoAnn, ‘You know, Mike ain’t bring his girlfriend but he brought this dude. That’s kinda funny,’” Michael Sr. said. “But she swore up and down” that he wasn’t gay. “I kept asking Mike was this boy funny? ‘No, Daddy, no. Ain’t nothing wrong with Vito,’ he’d say.”

“He didn’t act gay then either,” Michael Sr. said of Vito.

But during a visit to Missouri for one of Michael Jr.’s games last fall, Michael Sr. became certain about Vito.

“I shook that boy’s hand, and that boy’s hand felt like a woman’s,” Michael Sr. said. “And the boy looked different. I told my brother that that boy right there is gay.”

When they went out for dinner later that night, Michael Jr. showed them a picture of a woman he said he was dating; Michael Jr.’s Instagram account has lots of pictures of him in college posing with young women.

“I still had some suspicions,” Michael Sr. said. But other family members “didn’t wanna believe it. I had intuition about that boy.”

That intuition was finally confirmed this year. On Feb. 4, Michael Sr.’s birthday, he received a text message from his son. “I could tell his PR guy wrote that message because Mike don’t talk like that,” Michael Sr. said. “It was some bullshit. ‘I wanted to inform you that I’m gay.’”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” Michael Sr. remembered texting Michael Jr. in response. “He texted me back, ‘Happy birthday.’ So I went out and got drunk.”

Five months later, in his room at the nursing home watching the red carpet show before his son would receive the Arthur Ashe Award, Michael Sr. grew wildly upset. He started calling and texting family members and friends.

With Vito at his side, Michael Jr. had been asked what was the most difficult part of coming out. He told the interviewer that it was telling his friends. Michael Sr. was incensed.

“If it was so hard to tell his friends, why didn’t he tell us first?” Michael Sr. said. “It was harder for him to tell us.”

And it probably was. One recent afternoon, Michael Sr.’s brother Charles asked if Michael Jr. might go back to women. Michael Sr. responded, “Women don’t really want to mess with you after doing all that gay shit.”

Michael Sr. is never going to be the spokesman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. He’s not thrilled about his son’s sexual orientation. But he also hasn’t disowned his son. He never says his son is going to hell. He doesn’t talk about trying to cure him or make him straight. In his own rough-hewn, coarse way, Michael Sr. has accepted that his son is gay. “I love my son,” he said, “and I don’t care about what he do.”

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Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS

The family rift that the ESPY Awards exposed to a national audience had been there, deep and wide, for a while.

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Will Ebner L.G. Patterson / AP Photo

Seven months earlier, in December 2013, Michael Jr. came to Houston as one of the nominees for the Rotary Lombardi Award, which is awarded to the best college lineman or linebacker. Instead of asking his family to attend as guests, he invited the family of Missouri football teammate Will Ebner.

“We found out Will and I were going to be part of his family representing him,” said Elaine Ebner, mother of Will Ebner. “If someone else had come from his family, I would have wanted them to be center stage. I know my place. Mainly, I just wanted to be whatever he wanted me to be.”

Michael Jr.’s aunt Geraldine managed to score tickets from a friend who was a member of the Rotary Club. She also sat in the area designated for family. “When I got there, [Michael Jr.] was glad to see me. It’s always good to have family there,” she said.

Days later, Michael Jr. graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism. Everyone in the family — except Josh and Chris, who were both in jail — made the 600-mile road trip from Texas to celebrate the first of JoAnn’s and Michael Sr.’s children to graduate from college.

To commemorate the occasion, Michael Jr. posted a picture on Instagram of himself in a cap and gown, a wide smile on his face and an elbow comfortably resting on the mantle of a fireplace. “It’s been a long time coming,” read his caption. He was alone in the photo and made no mention of anyone else being there — in that or any of his other public social media posts from the time.

Later in December, during the week of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas — Michael Jr.’s final college game — Michael Sr. said his son borrowed his car and spent all of his time with Vito and teammates. Michael Sr. also said his son lied to him about the location of the team hotel and then didn’t call him, or return any of his calls, for the rest of the week.

“I had to call him to get him to bring me my car back,” Michael Sr. said. “I kept calling and calling. He didn’t bring the car until the last day, and the game was the next day. He didn’t talk to me or nothing.”

In May, on the weekend of the NFL draft, Michael Jr.’s family was conspicuously absent when TV cameras followed him around at his agent’s home in San Diego. He declined an offer from his father’s family members to attend a draft party they wanted to host in Dallas, his aunt Geraldine and Michael Sr. said. Instead, he spent the weekend in California with Vito, some friends, and his agents.

“If he’s so ashamed of us,” Geraldine remembers one of his sisters telling her, “why doesn’t he just change his name?”

The day the Rams drafted him — when he was so happy that he kissed Vito and smeared his face with celebratory cake — might end up being the pinnacle of Michael Jr.’s NFL career. Now, cut from his second team, he is learning something his father learned long ago: Life can take what you want most.

Since 2000, Outsports noted, every single Defensive Player of the Year from the five major college football conferences made it onto an NFL team — except Michael Sam Jr. And it’s not that he played poorly in preseason. Far from it. He totaled 11 tackles and three sacks, a figure that left him tied for fourth in the league. His bold announcement of his sexuality, which garnered him glamorous accolades, may have also destroyed his football career.

Disappointment and loss are feelings Michael Sr. knows well, of course, so the two Michaels have more in common now than they may have ever had. And yet Michael Jr. doesn’t come to his father — or anyone in his family — for comfort. He keeps his distance.

To Michael Sr., sitting in his wheelchair or taking a drag on one of his Kools, that distance can feel like death. He doesn’t want to lose another son.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/the-two-michael-sams

#Dallas Cowboys #Football #gay #LGBT #St. Louis Rams

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yespoetry · 6 years

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Stay Mad, Make Shit, Get Joy, Work Hard

By E. Kristin Anderson

It’s easier to be mad than to be depressed.

In March I was so goddamned mad that I woke up mad and I went to bed mad and I was mad in my nightmares and everything I saw made me mad and I just kept looking at it because if I was mad I couldn’t feel the things that made me want to jump off an overpass into MOPAC.

I have bipolar disorder. It’s a lot. I also have a rare autoimmune disease which, while currently in remission, has left my mind and body wrecked. The trauma wrecked me. The treatment wrecked me. The disease wrecked me. I’m a 35-year-old woman who lives her life exhausted, anxious, and in pain, but somehow I manage to get up and do things every day.

I get dressed. I put on makeup. I eat meals. I run errands. I care for my animals. And as often as I can, I write.

In March I went to AWP in Tampa. I had a good time (aside from all the goddamned stairs, like, seriously AWP) (also the cockroaches in my hotel room…seriously, Florida?) and while I was there I had this dream about [CENSORED] with Dave Grohl. I tweeted about it. I laughed about it with friends at the conference. But more, I felt something new but vaguely familiar.

Stay with me here. I promise this is moderately relevant.

On my way back from AWP, listening to Foo Fighters records on the iPod kept safe in my bra, I realized that I had omitted my childhood hero in my current writing. I have recently fallen in love with Foo Fighters’ more recent albums and I was rediscovering things from when I was younger that I wanted to write about. But if I was going to do this I wanted to approach it with techniques I hadn’t used before. While I often work with found materials in my poems, it was important to me that—if I indeed was going to write tribute pieces to Foo Fighters—I was going to do it in a way that was worthy of the material I was planning to use—their albums.

Working with song lyrics is tricky. With any found poetry, you need your poems to diverge enough from the original material that it is not recognizable as someone else’s work. With song lyrics, this can be exceptionally difficult from both a craft and a legal perspective. Pop songs tend to be repetitive and easily memorable.

One tactic I’ve used to work with song lyrics is scrambling the words from an entire album and then applying erasure techniques to this new text to create a poem. (My chapbook Fire In the Sky came from this process.) But I didn’t want to repeat that. I have this fear of being thought of as a one-trick poet. I’m always looking for a new path to take within my own writing practices.

So I stayed up late, angry that I couldn’t sleep, of course, trying in the dark to think of a way to do something new with the words of a band I’ve been enamored with since MTV actually played music videos. And for some reason I thought writing crowns of sonnets was a good idea. I hate myself a little.

I set up some rules for myself. I always have rules, maybe because I’m competitive (even with myself) and because I’m neurotic. Constraint has a way of opening creative windows while also forcing accountability. The more I bring this to my writing, the better the drafts that result. For my Foo sonnets, these were my rules:

1. I would write a crown(let) of three sonnets for each Foo Fighters album.

2. This would include the Saint Cecilia EP but no collections/compilations (like Greatest Hits) or live albums.

3. The double album In Your Honor would be split into two albums, because honestly they pretty much are and should have been and I think Dave Grohl even said so but I didn’t Google it to verify let’s just go with this.

4. For each crown I could only use words that were on the corresponding album. So “Feel This Real Forever,” which consists of three linked sonnets from the Foo Fighters album The Colour And The Shape, can only use words that appear on that album.

5. I could repeat words as many times as necessary. For example, if I wanted to use the word “ceiling” three times, but it only appeared on the album once, that was okay.

6. I wouldn’t have to use meter, but I did have to use end rhyme.

7. The end rhyme would be slant rhyme. Like really, obsessively strict slant rhyme.

8. In a crown, the sonnets are linked by line 14 of the preceding poem and line one of the next—the line repeats. Some folks who write sonnets might change a word or two, or change verb tenses. But my rule was to only change punctuation in these linked lines.

9. I would write the third sonnet in each crown first. (This was less of a rule and more of a really good tip from Cathleen Allyn Conway)

10. I would rite three linked Foo sonnets every day for 10 days.

This last rule showed up at the end of day one. Because I was feeling overzealous and obsessive. But it worked:

To prepare, I compiled the lyrics of each album into a Word doc. I removed line breaks and all punctuation except for hyphens and apostrophes, creating a paragraph out of each song. I then ran the doc for each album through the Cut-Up Machine at the Language Is A Virus website, creating a scrambled version of the lyrics. I saved these versions as separate docs creating two docs for the lyrics of each album.

Every day I started by printing out the two docs corresponding with an album. I read through these pages and circled words and phrases I liked or thought would be useful. The scrambled lyrics gave me Dave Grohl’s language out of its original context and the original version let me pick choice phrases that I could use to call back to Foo Fighters songs. As the days went on, I also started making lists of concrete nouns from each album, since songwriting tends to use more abstract language. I needed words that could anchor my poems.

And then I revised. I revised a lot. My first drafts were all hand-written (and occasionally illegible, ugh) and as I was typing up these drafts I revised. I cross-checked the language in my poems with the source text(s). My poems got better. They even got good.

I’m pleased to say that my efforts paid off. I wrote ten mini-crowns of sonnets. I actually really love them and many have been sent off into the slushpile ether.

And I was angry while I wrote. I figured if I could stay angry I could stave off depression. I could put that anger into these poems every day. I knew I could keep myself from feeling dark even when I was writing dark topics by using my anger fuel my creative work.

But what I didn’t expect was finding an absolute joy in this grueling routine. In the weeks since finishing the first drafts, I’ve missed writing these sonnets. I’ve missed the language. I’ve missed the process. I’ve missed the neurotic obsession. My rules—my constraints—continue to set me free in more ways than one.

And while I’m writing some erasures for the month of April, I’m already planning my next manic, fast-drafted project. I have an idea. Some rules. A notebook I’ve selected from my stash. A text from myself at 3 a.m. a week or so ago that just says “research golden shovels.”

I’m looking forward to chasing another poetry high all summer and I am excited to see where my new rules—and my new joy—take me. I’m doing another thing I’ve never done before. I’m going to write tough things and I’m going to have tough rules, but I’m going to have fun with it. And goddamn, I’m going to write a shit ton of poems.

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. A Connecticut College graduate with a B.A. in classics, Kristin has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and Hysteria: Writing the female body (Sable Books, forthcoming). Her writing has been published worldwide in magazines and anthologies and she is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press), and 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and a slush reader at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked the night shift at The New Yorker. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com and tweets at @ek_anderson.

#E. Kristin Anderson #essay #writing prompts

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foursprouthealth-blog · 6 years

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I Spent a Week at a Retreat for Women Who Struggle With Weight and Food—Here’s What the Experience Taught Me

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/health/i-spent-a-week-at-a-retreat-for-women-who-struggle-with-weight-and-foodmdashherersquos-what-the-experience-taught-me/

I Spent a Week at a Retreat for Women Who Struggle With Weight and Food—Here’s What the Experience Taught Me

On a sunny March morning in a small town in Vermont, four women of different shapes, sizes, and ages sit at a square table with bowls of whole-milk Greek yogurt, honey, fruit, nuts, and oatmeal in front of them.

Hailey* appears slightly curled in on herself, her shoulders slumped. The 21-year-old engineering student from California easily the slimmest woman at the table, but has been body-shamed by her family since childhood, she says. “My dad started making me ride the exercise bike every morning before school when I was 6.”

RELATED: 11 Things Nutritionists Eat at the Airport—and 4 They Avoid

Next to her sits a cheerful, smiling 25-year-old, Stephanie. She has a sparkling new engagement ring on her finger and a good job as an accountant. But she’s been binge eating in secret for years, and deep down, she worries that her weight and disordered eating will keep her from “being anything important” in life. Rachel, 47, is a diehard yo-yo dieter who’s tried everything. Last year, after signing up for one popular weight-loss program for the sixth time, the medical professional and mother of three hit a wall: “I said, that’s it, I’m over this! I can’t do this to myself anymore.”

These women and a half-dozen others were having breakfast in the dining room of the country’s first and oldest non-diet retreat for women who struggle with weight or emotional eating: Green Mountain at Fox Run. Unlike weight-loss spas and “fat camps,” there’s no talk of calories or fat-blasting cardio at Green Mountain. There isn’t even a scale. The program takes an anti-diet and weight-neutral approach, based on research showing that mindful eating and movement have major benefits—such as lower blood sugar, better body image, and less depression and anxiety—whether people lose weight or not.

The workshops, workouts, and even the dining room menu focus on building health-supportive habits that help visitors feel good and enjoy life, free from obsessions over weight and food.

RELATED: The Best Healthy Snacks That Satisfy Every Type of Craving

I first visited in 2016 when, after a decade of solid recovery from binge eating disorder, I began struggling with weight gain and emotional overeating again. What I learned was so influential that I decided to go back a few months ago, this time as a reporter for Health. Get ready: The lessons shared here could change the way you think about your body forever.

You didn’t fail at dieting, dieting failed you

“Many of the women who come to us are basically professional dieters—they’ve tried everything and feel like failures,” says Green Mountain executive director and licensed clinical mental health counselor Kari Anderson, DBH. “But the vast majority of people can’t stick to a diet or strict eating style. You may do well for a month or two, but inevitably life happens and you rebound. You may eat terribly and feel awful. Then, when you can’t take that feeling anymore, you gather your resolve and do it all over again,” she explains.

Research suggests that labeling certain foods “bad” or “off limits” creates a sense of scarcity that your brain and body react to in the same way they would if you lacked access to food because of outside factors like poverty, says Anderson. “It’s called ‘food insecurity,’ and it increases your desire for foods you can’t have, and can lead to binge eating or obsessive thoughts.” With a more flexible eating philosophy in which all foods can fit, you’re better able to make empowered, intuitive choices instead of getting stuck in a cycle of feast and famine, says Anderson.

Body comparisons are pointless

So, your best friend does Spin class five times a week and seems to thrive on her paleo food plan. That doesn’t mean you should do that too, says Green Mountain therapist Haica Rosenfeld, PsyD. “Every one of us really does have unique needs, abilities, and genetics. What works for one person isn’t necessarily right or even possible for someone else,” says Rosenfeld.

RELATED: The Best Spring Superfoods to Fuel Your Warm-Weather Workouts

To illustrate her point, Rosenfeld likes to show participants in her class on “Body Neutrality” a cartoon about dogs. In the short film by the Association for Size Diversity and Health, petite and fluffy poodles believe they’re the epitome of health and beauty, and that other dogs should be more like them. But what if you’re a mastiff, or a terrier? A starved, permed mastiff will never be a poodle. “You could be the most fit, flexible mastiff ever, but if you’re trying to be a poodle,” Rosenfeld says—“you’re going to feel like shit!” a participant calls out. Exactly.

This concept of being neutral about your body, as opposed to loving every last thing about it, is freeing for me. Because I’m a self-help author and advocate for size acceptance, I sometimes feel as if I’m never allowed to have negative thoughts about my shape. Now I know that simple neutrality is enough if it allows you to honor, respect, and care for your body as it is.

You will be able to trust your hunger again

If all foods are allowed, won’t we all just stuff ourselves with pizza and ice cream until we die? If you’ve ever craved a salad after an especially indulgent couple of days, you know the answer. Guilt-free access to formerly “off-limits” foods actually decreases your cravings for them, says Green Mountain at Fox Run’s lead dietitian Dana Notte, RD.

RELATED: 10 Frozen Vegetables to Keep on Hand—and Tasty Ways to Use Them

If we tune in, our bodies will send us signals about what and how much food we need. “On my way home from Green Mountain I stopped at the Vermont Country store and ordered a sandwich, broccoli salad, and a slice of pie,” says Mary Beth, 53, a tech professional who has struggled with weight gain and binge eating for decades. “I was eating slowly and mindfully and realized I was full after the salad and half of the sandwich. Later, after dinner, I was mindfully eating the pie for dessert, and after a few bites, I’d had enough. That was a big change for me.”

I had a similar experience recently after eating junky takeout dinners for days in a row: By day four, I couldn’t stand the thought of another French fry or pizza slice. All I wanted was a huge, crisp salad. Luckily, you can get those as takeout, too.

Mindful eating makes food taste really good

Each table in the Green Mountain dining room had a card with a “mindful eating tip” on it. My favorite one said, “If your food is starting to lose its flavor, that may be a sign you’ve had enough.” That lesson, like so many other lessons learned here, is almost revolutionary in its simplicity. Being mindful is just slowing down and limiting distractions while you eat so that you actually notice the food—and catch your body’s cues about whether you’re hungry, full, or even like what you’re eating.

Ready to ditch added sugar? Sign up for our 14-Day Sugar Detox Challenge!

Being quiet can make a big difference, I realized one night during “silent” snack time at Green Mountain. (They discourage chatting during the p.m. snack because so many women have troubles with overeating at night.) The snack plates held two thick squares of delicious Vermont white cheddar; after mindfully eating the first, really tasting the sharpness and feeling the creaminess of the cheese, I realized I didn’t need the second square. I was a little sad about it—the cheese was so good! But I was happy to know that if I stopped to listen, my body would talk.

Others felt the same. “Some foods I thought I really enjoyed, I’m finding out that I don’t so much, like the fries at In-n-Out,” says Hailey. “I ate them by the handful. But when my boyfriend and I went for burgers recently, they were kind of tasteless. I had a few and then put them aside. My boyfriend was like, ‘Who is this person and what have you done with my girlfriend?’”

The scale might hurt more than it helps

Green Mountain used to offer women the option of being weighed the day they arrived and before they left, but they tossed the scales in 2016, says fitness manager Bibiana Sampaio. “We found that even if women had made huge strides, like being able to do exercises they never thought they could, or feeling comfortable in their clothes, or their digestive bloat had disappeared, they would deflate if the number wasn’t what they wanted it to be.”

RELATED: 12 Healthy Eating Hacks Nutritionists Use Every Day

There are three possible outcomes when you step on a scale, says Notte: It says what you want it to say, it says you’ve gained, or it says you’ve lost, but not as much as you expected. “Two out of three of those scenarios kind of suck. There’s a greater chance that any time you step on the scale, it’s not going to tell you what you want to hear,” she says. What happens then, she asks participants in her “Measuring Success Beyond the Scale” workshop? “You feel guilty,” one woman answers.

None of these feelings and reactions is helpful for your health journey, says Notte. Besides, the scale is not as accurate a representation of what’s happening in your body as you may think: Weight changes significantly with hormonal fluctuations, water retention, if you gain lean muscle, or have food in your digestive tract.

Some women do notice changes in their size when they leave Green Mountain—it makes sense that things would shift after a week of mindful, guilt-free eating and plenty of exercise. Hailey told me she had to buy new bras when she got home. She can also easily crank out 30 minutes on the elliptical, when she used to get winded after the first few minutes. She’s holding herself differently, too. “According to quite a few people, I’m standing up so much straighter,” she says. “Apparently when I first got to Green Mountain I was hunched over and looking at the floor.”

RELATED: What Really Happens to Your Body When You Yo-Yo Diet

Stephanie feels more confident after her stay too. “I feel empowered to take care of myself—which seems like the simplest thing, but it’s so not,” she says. She makes sure she has breakfast every day, and brings lunch to work instead of skipping it and subsequently bingeing later.

When nutritionist Thelma Wayler founded Green Mountain at Fox Run in 1973, it was the only program of its kind. Today, her conviction that diets don’t work is a widely accepted mantra—and it’s getting easier to find providers who embrace a size-inclusive, non-diet mindset. To look for weight-neutral, non-diet health help near you, click on “Find an expert” in the “Resource” section on the Association for Size, Diversity, and Health website. Or scan provider sites for phrases like “intuitive eating,” “non-diet,” “weight-neutral,” and “size-inclusive,” says Rebecca Scritchfield, RD, author of the book Body Kindness.

Sunny Sea Gold is a health journalist and author of the book Food: The Good Girl’s Drug. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @sunnyseagold.

*Names have been changed

#Health

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maciaslucymua-blog1 · 7 years

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5 Ways to Stop Obsessing About Him

New Post has been published on http://www.healthgoesfemale.com/5-ways-to-stop-obsessing-about-him/

5 Ways to Stop Obsessing About Him

Obsessive love is powerful – and destructive – because your heart is captivated. When you can’t stop thinking about him, your life is ruled by an impossible relationship. That’s the bad news. But wait – there’s good news! You CAN stop the destructive train wreck of obsessive love, and you can get emotionally and spiritually healthy again. What’s your story? Maybe you can’t be with him because he’s a married man, or maybe he’s emotionally unavailable. Maybe you’re unequally yoked; you’re a Christian and he’s not a believer. Maybe you’re getting divorced after 25 years, and you can’t stop thinking about him because he betrayed you. Or maybe you’re hopelessly in love with a coworker who doesn’t know you’re alive. But really, it doesn’t matter what your exact circumstances are! Obsessive love doesn’t care about the facts…it only wants to be together. I was inspired to write this article by a group of kind, nonjudgmental, loving women who have been supporting each other in the comments section of my article on breaking up with a married man and healing your heart. In fact, they were so supportive that I had to turn off comments on that article! We were approaching 1,300 comments, and it was too much for one blog post.

So, I decided to write an article to help women who are struggling with obsessive love, and who can’t stop thinking about a man. Here’s a recent comment from the married man article: “Only recently have I truly accepted the fact that the man I love isn’t leaving his wife,” says Anon. “I am only getting the crumbs of his love and emotion. I’m not even good enough to call or message even though He says it isn’t fair to me but I can’t imagine me not being in his life. What am I supposed to do? I can’t stop thinking about him and I know I have to let him go, but I can’t. He was my soulmate and I believe that. I can’t even be mad because I started this affair, I knew what I was doing. But love is love. Now, how do I get out of love without feeling the weight and guilt of losing my soulmate? I still want him to call. I still want him to leave her, but I know he won’t.” How to Stop Obsessing About Him These tips are for all women struggling with obsessive love. If you feel like you can’t stop thinking about a man you’re in love with, you will find a least a seed of hope and healing here. 1. Stop saying “I can’t stop thinking about him” The more you tell yourself that you’ll never get over this relationship, the harder it’ll be to heal and move on. You believe what you tell yourself, and your feelings follow your thoughts. So, instead of saying you can’t stop thinking about him, focus your mind on positive ways to move forward. In your private journal or the comments section below, write a replacement for the “can’t stop thinking about him” thought. For example, I’d focus on thoughts of healing, hope, joy, and letting go. I’ve been hurt really badly in past relationships — but I healed and moved on! Those past hurts and breakups helped me see that I can let go of a past relationship and be free and happy again. 2. Get to know your shadows and weaknesses “Your shadow refers to all the things you hide, push away, or run from,” writes Hibbert and Those in Who Am I Without You?: Fifty-Two Ways to Rebuild Self-Esteem After a Breakup. “Your shadow is the things you deny and wish you didn’t see in yourself. The more we run from or deny the shadow, however, the bigger and scarier it becomes. It’s only in exposing shadows to the light that they disappear. As we face our weakness, our darkness, we take the shadow’s power away.” Who Am I Without You? has a great tool for not only seeing and healing your shadow, but for rebuilding your life after a relationship ends. If you’re focused on this obsessive love and you can’t stop thinking about him, then you’re not looking at someone more important: you. Well, actually, Jesus is THE most important person you could ever look at because only He has the power to heal you. For now, though, you need to take your eyes of this man (especially if he’s a married man who is cheating on his wife, who he vowed to love and cherish). Stop giving into to the selfish weak parts of your heart, and start learning why you’re so obsessed with this relationship.

3. Look at yourself through your mom’s or daughter’s eyes Imagine sitting down with your mom or daughter, and telling her all about this relationship. 5 Things You Must Do to Stop Thinking About Him What would it be like to tell her you can’t stop thinking about him? How would it feel to explain the depths of your obsessive love, the length of the dark shadows in your heart? What would she say about this relationship, and how would see see you? If you can’t tell your mom or daughter about this man – or your feelings for him – then this relationship has the power to destroy your life. But it’s not just the relationship that has power — it’s your shadow side and weakness that is giving in! You are allowing feelings of obsessive love to control your life. You are giving in to the idea that you can’t stop thinking about him. You are being weak. But, you don’t have to be weak anymore. 4. Find light, life, power, strength, healing, and freedom Are you humbled and maybe even crushed because you’ve seen your dark side? Good. Perfect! This means you’re ready to be filled with the light, life, power, strength, healing, peace, and joy of freedom. You must hit rock bottom of obsessive love before you can start to heal and rise. You can’t do this alone. You won’t find the power, strength, and healing you need in yourself — for you know how weak you are. You spirit is willing, you want to stop thinking about him, but you can’t because you aren’t God. You are simply a woman in love. And, you won’t find strength you need to overcome the power of obsessive love in the comments section of online articles – even if they’re all about how to stop thinking about someone. Why? Because you’re simply dwelling in the pit of despair. The more you write and talk about what you can’t have and can’t overcome, the stronger those feelings of helplessness get. 5. Renew your mind Stop allowing your emotions to rule your life! You are a grown woman, not a two year old child. You are smart. You are worthy of healthy love and a committed relationship that is filled with respect and honor. You are valuable because God created you in His image, to glorify Him. You are beautiful because God has a mission and purpose for your life. In Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don’t Control You, Joyce Meyer teaches how to live beyond the emotions that can control us. She discusses obsessive love, uncontrollable anger, jealousy, fear, insecurity, loss, and grief. It’s time for you to start focusing on what you want to CREATE in your life, not what you wish you had. Dwell in the land of possibility, hope, and freedom – not the wasteland of obsessive love. Stop saying you can’t stop thinking about him. Start cleaning up the mess and moving on with your life. What say you? I know it’s hard to overcome those powerful feelings of obsessive love. I totally get it; I’ve been there. But, I also know that there comes a time for us to get out of the shadows and start living in the light. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Your comments are welcome below! I’d love to hear from you. I don’t give advice, but you may find that sharing your story will help you heal and move on. Sometimes just getting it all out can be the most healing thing we can do…as long as we don’t dwell in the pit of despair. Take a deep breath. Look up. Feel the light on your face. Receive the love of the spirit. You are alive and well, and you are here for a reason.

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