#reliving the american high school english class experience

[axealiin]

the finches

[depressedramblingsbyme]

So it begins

This is a journal, diary, a void just somewhere i can put my thoughts without feeling like i’m just screaming into a void.

5/28/2020

I’m living in the u.s. my dad is German and my mum is American, while we live in the u.s. they’re laid back parents and have let me drink in the house on weekends since i was 15 or 16.(note: i got held back in first grade after moving from england so despite being born in 02 i graduate in 21) Being 17 i wanted to experiment, I've vaped but personally i don’t see the attraction so i tried weed as it’s starting to become legal. I figured i’m nearly an adult so what’s the big deal. Like an afternoon drink i enjoyed smoking. It helped me relax and be more open about myself and put on this picture perfect filter even if i was just talking to friends. And unlike nicotine i never craved it or felt like i needed it which is why i don’t fuck with nicotine. So life moves on like normal until October. they found some trash from a cart i opened, unfortunately my siblings have ruined weed for my parents as all my siblings who smoke decided to make some dumb life decisions (which i don’t want to type out) and are in my parents eyes not in the best position. Rightfully from their experience they’re against it, it’s not unreasonable to see the cause and effect relationship. lots of yelling and arguing ensue i don’t remember it too well but i didn’t get punished somehow. Fast forward to December My parents are worried for my grades, this year i was spending half my time at a technical school and my other half at my main high school. Perfect grades in technical school but my main school wasn’t the best. I had flat C’s with a b+ in English. In my eyes i had bitten off more than i could chew this year as i decided to take college algebra/trigonometry a class covering two years of college math in one, i suck at linguistics so Spanish class was rough, Chemistry is known for being tough, English always came easily to me but that class takes up a lot of time. So in my eyes my grades could be improved but to an extent it was justified and for the past two years i was on the high honor roll maintaining a 3.5+ gpa so it’s not the end of the world. To them they think that weed is what’s making my grades the way they are that i’m a stoner who just smokes pot all day and that’s all i want to do with my life. This makes me horribly angry for two reasons. The first being i - hate - potheads, ironic but if all you want to do is smoke with your life frankly i think you’re a boring person with no aspirations in life which isn’t what i want for myself i feel unbalanced and shitty if i’m not sober for a few days i would maybe smoke 2-3 times a week at night after i was done with my day or on the weekend with friends. So that’s the first thing that upsets me they think i’m a pothead who just wants to smoke weed all day. the second reason this makes me angry is that they’re completely fine with getting drunk, now i’m not calling my parents alcoholics (my dad doesn’t even drink that much it’s mainly my mum ) but shit at least once or twice a week my mum will be pretty fuckin drunk. which again is an okay thing to do they’re adults it’s their right my problem is that if the world is starting to put weed on the level of alcohol why is it so horrible if i get high occasionally to put off some stress like she does occasionally. Now i didn’t get to ask her this specific question but i did say “so it’s okay for you to get drunk but i can’t get high” to which she responded “i’m an adult, you’re not” if you trusted me to be adult enough to handle alcohol what makes me smoking any different. second semester we have 2 more “big” arguments about my grades, they keep relating it to pot. So at this point i had to 3rd person myself if you will. on one hand i didn’t believe pot to be affecting me as i thought i had control over it and never abused it, i knew what abuse looked like because of my siblings but never felt that way for myself. On the other maybe it is effecting me but i don’t realize it. So to humor the idea i go sober for a month, nah school is just hard it’s not weed. Idk if i typed this already but i understand if you don’t want to smell weed, or have it in your home but i don’t see the harm if i’m not bringing it anywhere near home. At around this point we entered quarantine, i didn’t mind online school however now my mum was hounding me constantly about school, if even one assignment was missing it would lead to more arguing. Now i know to a certain degree i didn’t give a fuck about the online work because at this point my grades weren’t going to be able to go down however i did 80% of my work. If i can’t understand trig in school what makes you think i can teach myself so for the most part i did school. At a certain point i felt this switch was flipped and it happened right around when quarantine started and since then i haven’t felt comfortable in my own home. it constantly feels tense between me and my mum i couldn't tell you what we argue over but i can’t even go hang out with friends without feeling like i’m doing something wrong, which makes me want to stay in my room all day which then makes them upset because they dont see me throughout the day which then leads to an argument and me storming back up to my room. so now that i’m in this cycle of shit frankly i just want to cry and enjoy my last summer but now i’m being threatened with being kicked out despite not even finishing highschool. i turn 18 in 9 days i don’t think i’ve ever been scared for a birthday. when i’m not crying and feel more level headed i do think about actually moving out though.

I mean if i broke it down what’s so horrible about only making 25k a year you can easily live in your own apartment with insurance and enough to save for the future and emergency, I've done the math and it just keeps cycling in my head because all my life I've been taught i need to go to college or make more than 60k a year but after doing the math, why. why put myself in debt if i can live comfortably, i mean shit any job paying something like $15 an hour (in the midwest) isn’t going to be anything to be proud of but if i can sustain myself and grow a retirement fund why not if i meet my partner they most likely have the means to sustain themselves so it would be easy to live together and currently i’d rather be sterilized then have a kid so that’s not an expense i want to think about as it’s something i do not want.

I want to finish highschool but living in my parents house makes me feel constantly on edge. In retrospect after writing this and reliving the past school year if i didn’t or if they didn’t know i smoked pot most of this would have never happened.

also i need a fucking job again at least it will get me out of the house

i’m posting this for my own sanity if you think i’m a dumbass tell me off in the comments if you have similar experiences, advice, encouragment etc feel free to put it in comments i appreciate feedback but frankly couldn’t care if you think i wasted my time in posting this

[garreaus-a]

hi, everyone ! it’s jessie again. i couldn’t help myself, ok ? i had to bring in my Chaotic Good, espionage-elite, French son samuel ... i hope u like him :’). he’s a character i’ve had awhile from a previous rpg / my indie ( aka the Archive ) so i adjusted his backstory a lil’ to fit here. again, please hmu on discord if you’d like to plot !! <3

⌠ BEN BARNES, 36, CISMALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, SAMUEL GARREAU ! originally hailing from BLACKTHORNE, this alum specializes in THREAT ELIMINATION. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of ( complacent smirks paired with attentive eyes; the aroma of expensive, but fresh cologne; the decision to just “wing it”; a cigarette between lips ).  it’s the ( leo )’s birthday on 08/14/1983, and when they were still in school their most requested dish was BOUILLABAISSE from the school’s chefs. hopefully their presence can help ease the minds of gallagher students.

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙱𝙰𝙲𝙺𝚂𝚃𝙾𝚁𝚈.

in the late 1970s-80s, there were a string of infamous art robberies and trafficking occurring around france, which linked to notorious art thieves from both france and america. french-american cia agent matthieu garreau was assigned to assist the central directorate of the judicial police and the dgse in their investigation. french art curator adeyln legrand ( her fam is Old Money rich bc they own museums across the country ) was involved in the case as well, helping the agencies identify the stolen art pieces and their worth. as soon as matthieu laid eyes on her, it was love at first sight !

samuel elias garreau was born in paris, france — just before matthieu was sent back to washington d.c. he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents ( who lived in marseille ) for most of his childhood. his childhood was filled with love, art, linguistics & french cuisine. he became a polyglot at a very young age, knowing how to speak french, english and spanish fluently. his father visited his wife and son as much as he could in france, but eventually, the two moved to washington d.c. when samuel was 10-years-old. 

a bit of context on the garreau family: the garreau family name has been involved in espionage for a VERY long time. lineages stem back to being loyal spies for the french monarchy for many generations before the surviving garreaus immigrated to america to escape WWII. many relatives eventually returned to france, but samuel’s paternal great-grandparents decided to continue to raise their children in the united states & establish connections with american intelligence agencies. 

immediately, matthieu wanted to begin espionage training ( already samuel was a couple years behind in hand-to-hand combat / weaponry training, so he’s eager ). adelyn was a bit Conflicted but ... lil’ energetic, happy-go-lucky samuel was ECSTATIC !! what better way to bond with your father, am i right ??

those 4 years before spy prep high school was full of father-son bonding, grueling combat training, & survival skill training. but, samuel was also a normal, private elementary / middle school student in washington d.c. it was a lot of pressure — juggling school, his blossoming social life, and keeping the whole “ i’m training to become a spy ” thing a secret bc sam CANNOT stop talking

before samuel busted at the seams, he was sent off to a prestigious spy prep school on the east coast to truly hone his skills and begin to identify what he may excel at as a spy; however, sam didn’t take it seriously ... like at ALL. it was mostly because he was so bored — he needed something stimulating / challenging. often samuel was being a Sneaky jerk, pulling pranks & being a kleptomaniac; however, his grades showed the opposite of his delinquent behavior. he was excelling in all of his classes.

the garreaus did not know what to do with samuel. literally, they had a whole damn family meeting about where he’s headed in his spy career bc there’s NO WAY any spy university would be willing to take him. the plan would be to utilize their connections in france and get him enrolled in an academy there until ...

blackthorne academy showed up outta nowhere and was like “ hey, we’ll whip his ass into shape. give him to us. ” the garreaus were reluctant due to the academy’s reputation and suspicious as to HOW blackthorne caught wind of their samuel; however, maybe this is what he needed. the most against this was his mother, but her voice held no authority. 

samuel was in for a RUDE awakening at blackthorne. maybe it was for the better ? he majored in THREAT ELIMINATION + LINGUISTICS, CULTURE, & ASSIMILATION ( whatever was blackthorne’s version of those were ). 

his first year there practically BROKE him, but by his sophomore year, his flaws became refined skills. somehow, his extrovert / devil-may-care and shrewd personality still shined amongst his callous and/or sadistic peers. 

the codename HERMES seemed to be used by his instructors sometimes to “ make fun ” of samuel, the label representing his ability to outwit his peers, mischievous and intrepid nature, proficient adaptability, and most importantly, he mastered the art of infiltration & extraction — just as the god of thieves would ( the ONLY time he’s the quietest compared to his peers tbh ) u know ... also stole lives too ... i know that’s cheesy SHHH

of course ... we all know the whole deal about blackthorne. he was molded into the perfect assassin, not a sophisticated spy that could have a drink with james bond or ... with his prestigious, royal spy family. 

throughout his many years of fieldwork across the globe, samuel was many things for both private clients and espionage / government agencies ( mostly doing a lot of infiltration / extraction & surveillance undercover missions ), even sometimes an actual thief for the right price. 

however, despite samuel’s slight identity crisis, he earned quite the name for himself in the espionage world and solidified himself as a reliable secret agent. but he’s still a pain in the butt :-P

during blackthorne’s last years, samuel often was asked to come by as a guest instructor, a desperate attempt to liven things back up to relive its better days. despite the absolute DEMONS his students were being, it surprised him that he actually enjoyed teaching. 

so, he was a bit shocked ( and ecstatic ) to hear that gallagher requested HIM out of the many blackthorne alumni to be a part of the faculty, let alone the threat elimination instructor. who would be a better teacher to teach future spy how to take down an assassin than an ACTUAL assassin ( and one who made quite a Reputation at blackthorne for outsmarting his upperclassmen and instructors ) ?

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙿𝙴𝚁𝚂𝙾𝙽𝙰𝙻𝙸𝚃𝚈.

tbh, samuel is the epitome of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

he lives for the adrenaline rush; he will go out of his way and even risk his life sometimes to make missions more exciting ... but obviously, with a little planning beforehand to make sure missions are completed successfully

sam surprisingly is cooperative ( even if he really wants to do the opposite, he’d listen unless his quick-wit is essential for the situation ). his many years of experiences have made him realize how important intel and medical agents are to missions. he has a lot of respect for his fellow agents and students who aren’t concentrating their studies in the more physical combative majors

samuel likes being a nuisance. he’s quite devious and gets away with it a lot LMAO

he’s such a thespian it’s Unreal ... he’s so dramatic. but, this makes him excel at undercover missions bc this man enjoys acting way too much

samuel LOVES his students and it really cracks him up because if blackthorne student sam heard he’d be a mentor in the future, he’d laugh in your face

aka he’s the Cool Teacher at gallagher ok :’)

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙳𝙾𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙴𝚁 / 𝙵𝚄𝙽 𝙵𝙰𝙲𝚃𝚂.

he still has the slightest french accent when he speaks, mostly to latch on to a remaining attachment he has to his mother and previous “ normal life ”

an excellent cook ... obviously he enjoys cooking french cuisine the most 

he also is an avid art enthusiast and also loves fashion and architecture. he spends the majority of his salary on designer clothes and art pieces

if the faculty have to become normal professors, samuel is definitely up for teaching anything world history related !!

randomly knows a lot of natural history trivia thanks to his maternal grandmother, who was a botanist

the languages samuel currently knows is: french, english, spanish, italian, russian, german, arabic, japanese, and chinese ( mandarin & cantonese )

and that’s it !! im exhuasted and i can’t think of any wcs atm so pls if u guys have anything in mine PLEASE let me know :’)

[limitededitionsanderssidesblog]

Speech Impediment - Chapter 6

Ships: Logicality, pining prinxiety, platonic dlamp

Summary: From one birthday to another, it’s now December and Virgil’s birthday is coming up. Roman, desperate to finally win Virgil’s hand, asks Dexter to help him plan the perfect gift. On top of helping his friends, finals are coming up and Dexter is getting lost in his studies. Stress builds up, and a phone call awaits him.

AO3 - Here

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5  Chapter 7

Creative writing, English Literature, Calculus, Biology, Anatomy; finals were in three days, seventy-two hours. Five classes, five tests, two hours each, ten total hours of testing. He has approximately thirty hours to study given all accountable variables. 

Over the past few days Dexter had practically lived in the library. Between tutoring lessons with Logan, where he and the rest of the gang would study together, and independent study, Dexter only ever left to go to class, eat, and sleep. His bodily fluids were practically composed entirely of caffeine at this point. This was his very first final as a college freshman, he needed to prove that it wasn’t a mistake to come here.

Dexter shook his head, ridding his mind of those thoughts, and brought his attention back to the paperwork before him. He was currently working on his anatomy study guide. Looking at the time on his cellphone he saw that it was past eight, the library would be closing in half an hour.

With a heavy sigh, Dexter closed his textbook, placed his work back in his bag, and got up to leave. There were only three other students still there besides himself, all looking wiped out from their studies as well.

The sun had surrendered to the moon long ago, leaving the world around him cold and dark, snow falling sleepily down to the earth from the heavens in a chilled kiss. Yep, that was overly descriptive, he must be a writer. The breeze nipped at his heels as he walked back to his dorm. A student was here or there, but most all were gone from the campus.

A fifteen minute walk brought him back to the tall, brick building. Once inside, Dexter shook off the snow that had accumulated on him. Dexter nodded to the dorm manager as he went by, heading up the flights to his room. He planned to simply shower, snack, then go to sleep, but once he saw Roman on his doorstep he knew that wouldn’t be the case.

Hearing footsteps, Roman looked up hopefully, then stood when he saw who it was. 

“Dex! ‘Bout time you got here. What the heck were you doing making me wait so long?”

“Huh? What don’t you mean?”

“I sent you a text dude!”

“Yes you did, I-” Sure enough the text was there, or rather several texts were.

Roman: Hey Dex meet me at you’re room in an hour Roman: im here Roman: Hellooooo? Roman: dude what the duck? where you at? Roman: **fuck autocorrect

“Resent me, I didn’t have my phone on silent.” Dexter apologized, scooting to the door to unlock it. “Why did you call Patton?”

“He’s staying at Lo’s tonight.” Roman replied simply, following Dexter in and making himself at home, just as they always did. Dexter had long since given up on trying to stop the others from taking his food from the mini fridge. Still, it stung to watch Roman take his favorite lemon yogurt.

“Oh.” Dexter said quietly, trying not to think to hard about what that meant. “So what don’t you want?”

Thus a flip was switched. Roman lost his confident composure, no longer sitting tall, instead he curled in on himself and awkward ate yogurt in a lame attempt to hide his blush. If Dexter had to take an educated guess, it probably had something to do with Virgil.

“Well uh- Virgil’s birthday is uh- in a few days and I’d like to um, I’d like t-to ask him o-out. Could you help me?”

Seeing Roman stutter and blush like a high school boy was the cutest thing ever. Only seeing Virge do the same would be better, and Dexter planned for that to happen.

“Well of course not.” Dexter told him, “But why me? Wouldn’t it be better to ask someone without experience? Logan and Patton wouldn’t be better.”

“Are you kidding? Logan may have been the one to ask Patton out, but he sucks at romance, and Patton... well he isn’t exactly helpful when it comes to wooing someone. Besides, I saw how amazing you are at gift giving from the heart, and you’re the second most creative here outside Virgil and I.”

“If you mean creative by not writing gory horror and suspense then sure.” Deceit mumbled under his breath as he looked through his messy desk for a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. Finding one he began to write a list of every idea he could think of and a list of what they’d need for each one. Once complete he handed it over to Roman for him to chose what to do.

He read through it carefully, mulling over the pros and cons of each suggestion. It was a good few minutes before he looked up with his final decision.

“Number four.” He said with a grin.

Four. The scavenger hunt. Roman and Dexter would have to work together to take Virgil on a hunt, having clues leading him to the undecided final destination.

“So where aren’t you going to have him meet you?”

Roman smiled warmly, as if he was reliving the sweetest memory he ever made. Perhaps it was.

“Where we first met.”

Dexter bolted from his classes to the parking lot where he’d be meeting Roman to help him shop for materials. Careful not to slip as he went. If they were fast, he’d be able to make it in time for tutoring.

Shopping took longer than thought due to traffic caused by an accident on the road. Stupid black ice. Now they were both running late for tutoring session with Logan. When they had gotten there, Patton and Virgil were already at work, asking Logan questions for different subjects he could help with. They sat down and began to work to, saying nothing of their plans while Virgil was there.

Dexter wasn’t able to get as much done during tutoring because of their lack of time, but now he had to go help Roman with the planning and getting Logan and Patton to help them, without the emo present.

By the time he got back to the library after the planning session he had a little over and hour to study before it closes.  

When he had finally arrived at his dorm after all that it was nearing ten o’clock. Dexter had to stop at a nearby fast food place to grab an unhealthy dinner since the dorm kitchen was closed. This time Patton was there in their dorm, already preparing for bed. Exhausted, Dexter decided to skip dinner, putting his take out in the fridge and crawling into bed as well.

This went on over the next few days, back and forth between his studies, school, and assisting Roman. Now Dexter had to include helping Roman with his already overflowing workload. He was falling behind, which was cutting into his sleep schedule, which was messing with his productivity. He was happy to help Roman, but he wished he had asked him before finals week.

Even with all the stress, he had managed to make it work. He had just finished his last day of finals, and was rewarding himself with a nap. Other than his occasional spacing out, interruptive thoughts, and tired brain, Dexter thinks he did alright. Definitely didn’t fail any of them, but definitely didn’t ace them either. Ah puns, Patton’s rubbing off on him, Logan wouldn’t be pleased. 

After tomorrow he’d finally be able to relax and hibernate until the next semester.

At eleven am the next day, Logan delivered the note to send Virgil on the hunt. According to his text in the group chat, it took a while for Virgil agree to going on this hunt.

The first clue was in Patton and Dexter’s dorm, specifically the fridge he always raided for soda. A little doodle of a fridge and lemonade ginger ale led him there. Once he arrive, Patton was there to give him the next clue.

The second was at the coffee shop where Dexter first told them about his writing. Hinted at by the drawing of a coffee cup, a notebook, and a snake. When he arrived, Dexter was sitting in the booth, a cup off coffee and a note for Virgil.

The third clue was a picture of a ticket booth and a theater. With an annoyed groan, Virgil left to go after the next clue. Once he was gone Dexter left to help with the final step.

The fourth clue was a giant red, paper sign taped over the ticket booth sign on the side of the school theater. On the giant sign were the words: Go Where We First Met - R, accompanied with the drawings of a desk and a chair, and musical notes. Virgil smiled when he saw those words, because he knew that this was such a Roman kind of thing to do for his twentieth birthday.

He knew exactly where to go next from there. Heading the building right next to the theater, Virgil walked up to the floor where the drama room was. When he entered, he was slightly disappointed to find it empty. But in the center of the room was a lone laptop with a CD right next to it and a note that said “Play Me”.

Doing as the note said, he played the video and on came the song they had met to. American Idiot. As the song played on, bold letters came on the screen, detailing their story, as if he didn’t already now it.

They had met during Virgil’s audition to play in the band for the American Idiot Musical. The theater was busy that day, so auditions were held in the Drama room. 

Roman had been there to pick up the materials he had forgotten after class.

And that’s where he saw him.

Virgil hadn’t noticed him watching, too entranced in the song. But he did notice when a buffoon tripped over a chair and interrupted his audition.

Virgil chuckled when he read those words, remembering when that happened. He had sworn that he’d failed the audition because of a clumsy stranger. And a little more than pissed.

Virgil Black got the part and was sent to rehearsal four days a week. It was there that he got to know Roman Sanchez. 

What started as a silly rivalry soon turned to an awkward friendship. Which then turned to the friendship of a lifetime.

But as time went on, and the two entered into their second year of college, Roman’s feelings began to change. He wanted something more.

Virgil’s breath got caught in his throat. His heart began to beat faster. 

But Virgil seemed content with what they had and denied any attempts by Roman.

Roman could have given up and move on, but he wanted this to much to do so.

And I still do.

Will you go out with me, Virgil?

Virgil was in tears as he heard the song fade away, leaving him in silence, staring at a blank screen.

“Will you?” Roman’s voice sounded behind him.

Virgil whipped around to see Roman walking in from the teacher’s office. Having been hiding there the entire time until his cue. Virgil breathed heavily as he hastily rubbed at his eyes, trying to hide the fact that he had been crying.

“Couldn’t you have asked me like a normal person?” He bit back harshly, but Roman new he was simply embarrassed. 

“Would you have said yes?” He asked him, walking over slowly.

“Yes!” He shouted, still hiding his face in his hands, unable to stop the tears. “Princey I thought you were just kidding this entire time, I knew that you had a long history of dating guys so I thought you weren’t being serious.”

“That was back in high school.” He told him softly, kneeling down to his height, gently taking Virgil’s hands from his face. “I’ve never been more serious about anyone.” Virgil looked up at him slowly, eyes puffy and red. Roman thought it was absolutely adorable. “Virgil Black, will you go out with me?”

“Of course, stupid.” He said back, another round of tears falling, but he wasn’t the only one, as Roman began to cry as well. 

Dexter watched from the doorway, the rest in tow with him. They all silently cheered for their two friends, happy that their dumb tension was finally relieved.

“It’s about time.” Logan stated, leaning against the hallway wall, not needing to spy on them to know what happened.

“This was a really good idea, Dee.” Patton said to him gratefully, tears were also in his eyes as he watched from the doorway.

“Nope, I’m not glad they-” suddenly the buzzing of his cell in his back pocket stopped that train of thought. Good thing Dexter had made sure they put all of their phones on vibrate as to not disturb the new couple. 

Pulling out his phone he felt his hand go limp once he saw the Caller ID. The device fell from his fingers in what felt like slow motion. The sound of the crash alerted everyone around them. Pat and Lo were there first to ask him what was wrong, Roman and Virgil following a second after, their moment now forgotten.

They all asked what was the matter, concern washing over them as he didn’t say anything. However, they all went silent once they heard the fake sweet voice of his mother leaving a message on his phone.

“Hello Dexter, It’s your mother. I called to let you know that your Father, sister, and I will be visiting your campus before the start of the next to talk with all your professors. And of course to see you, haha. Please prepare for our arrival. Also, don’t trouble yourself with visiting us for Christmas, were sure you’d like to enjoy your break by yourself as you do with everything else. See you soon.”

The line went dead, the buzzing the only sound being made. The others looked to each other in confusion and concern. Dexter still said nothing. Picking up his phone he walked away, ignoring the calls directed at him from his friends.

Dexter didn’t mean to interrupt the moment or kill the mood, but he had to leave. He could allow his negativity to affect the rest of them.

His parents were always skeptical of him becoming a writer and tried to discourage him from doing so. It wasn’t because they weren’t sure he’d be successful, even they could see his talent for it, but rather because they were scared of his mind’s creation. His parents have always been frightened of the things he enjoyed, of the things he’d imagine, of him. They were worried that his writing would influence others to be like him, that they’d no longer be able to keep his existence in the dark.

But when Dexter came here, it was because he convinced them that he’d only use his skills to write non-fiction. He’d lied about it, but it was the only way to gain their support. However, if he failed a single class, or if they got a word from his professors about his writing, they’d take him out of school and he’d be forced to work in his dad’s shop.

In the back, stacking and unloading, hidden from the world so that no one could see the monster they had brought into the world.

.

.

Gosh I once again was getting emotional over my own freaking story. Love Prinxiety. 

Y’all are going to be meeting Dexter’s parents soon, to be warned, they’re cynical assholes.

Tag List:

@noneed4thistbh @romanasanders @fuckingemoace @bunny222 @sea-blue-child @astraastro @helloitstimetofight @blue-wolfbane @applecannibal @ryuity @anxiouslyfred @i-identify-as-a-mango @shadowjag @scorching-scotch @cyberpunkjinx

[huntermagazine362]

Educated Tara Westover Amazon

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“Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. A heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir.” ( USA Today (four stars)) “Memoirs of difficult childhoods have a high bar to cross these days, but Westover’s struggle to make sense of the world and of her upbringing sails right. “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of. Educated is a nonfiction coming-of-age memoir by the historian Dr. It describes her life from her childhood in rural Idaho salvaging in her father's junkyard, her first time away from her family in college, and her experience discovering that the world is not the place her father always said it was.

Imagine you were born and raised in a family with radical religious beliefs. And imagine you didn’t have a birth certificate until the age of 9 and were not allowed to go to school until 17. Would you be able to muster the strength to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge? “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of a fascinating firsthand witness!

Raised by Mormon survivalists

Tara Westover was born in a small Idaho farming town, the youngest of the seven children of Mormon survivalists Val and Laree Westover, hidden under the pseudonyms Gene and Faye in the book. Due to the beliefs of the couple, Tara was born at home, and she was not issued a birth certificate until she reached the age of 9. Until then, there was no way for anybody outside of her family to know she had been born at all: Gene and Faye had decided to live in isolation after the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents ambushed and gunned down a woman and her 14-year-old son for, at worst, a minor offense.

Even before that event, Gene had firmly believed that public schools were just a way for the socialist American government to brainwash individuals into obedient slaves of the system, which is why neither Tara nor her six siblings ever got a proper chance to experience education. Gene didn’t believe in hospitals either, meaning Tara’s concussions or burns over the years were treated with herbs and home medicines. On the other hand, Gene did believe in a Mormon God, and this god (like, unfortunately, most other gods) didn’t seem to be that fond of women, proclaiming their place to be in the house – which is where Faye was all of the time.

Tara’s grandmother wanted her youngest granddaughter to get a proper education, so one day, when Tara was 7, she offered her a chance to escape to Arizona and go to school. Tara, however, stayed. To nobody’s surprise, really, not even hers. To this day, she claims, she has very fond memories of her childhood. In view of what followed, that is somehow hard to believe.

Opening doors to the world

At the age of 10, Tara’s mindset changed abruptly. It happened when her 18-year-old brother Tyler, the third son of Gene and Faye, announced one day his intention to go to college. Gene, of course, objected to this choice, both because Tyler’s older brothers Tony and Shawn were not around the house anymore to help and because, well, he believed that going to school would not teach him how to support a wife and a few children. However, Tyler persisted, and this inspired Tara to start reading a bit more, mostly the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

Soon after Tyler left, Tara’s older sister Audrey left the house as well; and the only ones who remained were Luke, Richard, and her. Due to the lack of helping hands, Gene had to move away from farming and Tara had to help him. So, already at the age of 11, she was scrapping old cars for parts. However, she felt that she could do better, so one day, she posted a flyer at the local post office, offering her services as a babysitter. This opened her up to the world.

One of her clients, a woman named Mary, offered Tara an opportunity to visit a dance school. Tara enjoyed the experience very much, but her father soon forbade her to go anymore, believing that dancing inspired immodest and unfeminine behavior. By then, however, Tara had started taking voice lessons as well, and these were something even her father could find nothing wrong with. Especially after they helped Tara impress the congregation at their local church one Sunday. In fact, she was good enough to even get a part in a play at the local Worm Creek Opera House. More importantly, she was starting to enjoy life.

It’s the end of the world – as we know it

As far as Gene was concerned, Tara’s 13th birthday should have been her last. Not because she had done something to drive him mad, but because it was supposed to occur sometime during September 1999, about three months before the end of the world. A Mormon survivalist, Gene believed that on January 1st, 2000, all the computer systems in the world would fail and that there would be no electricity or telephones anymore. Everything would sink into chaos, he claimed, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said that there exists nothing worse than a man believing to have had a revelation, since no argument would convince them of the opposite. Not even if reality invalidated their beliefs. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it. In the case of Gene, the problem was far more severe than it is for the rest of us. Case in point: even when the end of the world didn’t arrive with the year 2000, he didn’t change his beliefs. He just changed the dates. Even so, his worldview was visibly shaken, so the family finally left Idaho for Arizona to visit Tara’s grandmother.

On the way there, the family’s van spun off the road and crashed into a field. Everyone survived, but Tara was badly hurt, even losing consciousness for a while. That did not matter one bit to Gene: as far as he was concerned, curing Tara was a job for God and Nature, not for doctors. Fortunately, even though Tara’s neck frequently locked up on her for a while, the accident didn’t leave any permanent damage. Even her neck got back to normal, eventually.

However, untreated head injuries not unlike Tara’s probably contributed to the very unstable condition of her brother Shawn, who continually abused her and her sisters. Prone to violence and as fanatic as his father, he once violently attacked Tara, waking her up from her sleep and dragging her by her hair from her bed. The reason? Tara had started wearing makeup and spending time with a boy named Charles. In Shawn’s opinion, this was not an appropriate behavior for a 15-year-old girl. Gene’s reaction? A little short of, “Way to go, son!”

College, finally

Encouraged by her brother Tyler, at the age of 16, Tara finally decided to take the ACT test, a standardized test used for college admission in the United States, not too dissimilar from the much more well-known SAT test. Tara failed the test, scoring 22 out of the 27 points she needed to get into Brigham Young University (BYU), a Utah-based university entirely owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – that is to say, the Mormons.

Considering the fact that she barely knew any math, it wasn’t such a bad score; however, she was devastated. It took her some time to recuperate and a lot of help from her mother to figure out algebra and geometry. The effort was more than worthwhile. When Tara took the ACT again, she scored 28! Everybody was happy with the result, except for her father, who didn’t want to let Tara go. His reason? God had told him personally that Tara would greatly displease the Almighty if she ever went to college.

Even so, Tara decided to throw all caution to the wind and three days before her 17th birthday, she left for BYU. It wasn’t long before she started experiencing culture shock. For example, one of the first things she noticed there was that her roommate Shannon wore pants that had the word “Juicy” written on them. In an act that seemed blasphemous to the teenage Tara, her other friend Mary even dared to shop on the Sabbath!

The classes were challenging and scary for Tara. She took English, American history, Western civilization, religion, and music. As you might guess, she didn’t have many problems with the last two, but she had quite a few with everything else. The history she had been taught at her house was very different from the history being taught at university, and the whole idea of Western civilization seemed as strange to her as Einstein’s theories of relativity would seem to a novice in physics.

Just one quick example. One day, she asked her professor what the word “Holocaust” meant. The professor thought she was joking and scolded her. She wasn’t, of course. Her father had talked at some length about the Boston massacre and the Ruby Ridge incident, but he had never mentioned the Holocaust. So, Tara believed that, at worst, it was just some small conflict that very few people would really know about.

The education of Tara Westover

The Holocaust incident didn’t discourage Tara. On the contrary, she started studying harder and, after overcoming the initial issues, she eventually sailed through almost all of her exams, Western civilization being the only exception. Not wanting to leave any gaps in her knowledge, she didn’t back off. So, eventually, she aced that exam as well.

But that was always her philosophy. It wasn’t, “Stay away from things you don’t understand,” but rather, “Where trying doesn’t work, try again and try harder.” Consequently, even though she had come to college to study music, she kept signing up for history and politics classes. Her professors noticed her enthusiasm, and one of them referred her to a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge.

Tara applied and, soon enough, she was headed to King’s College, Cambridge, to study a course under world-renowned professor of European history, Jonathan Steinberg. Just a short time prior, she didn’t even know what the word “Holocaust” meant and now Steinberg, a Holocaust expert, was supposed to grade her words and ideas. Amazingly, he had only nice things to say about them, telling Tara that her final essay was one of the best he had ever seen in his long career. Because of this, he promised to help her with her graduate application.

And that’s how Tara managed to win the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, only the third BYU student to achieve this feat in the long history of the university. After enrolling at the prestigious Trinity College, Tara became a celebrity back in Idaho and was revered by almost everyone who had ever known her. Everyone except her father Gene and her brother Shawn, that is.

Family troubles

Everything was going well after Tara returned to England, this time as a graduate student. So, well, in fact, that Tara began feeling as if she was a new person, one who was allowed to drink coffee and wine, and even tell stories of her fabulously strange upbringing. However, back at home, things were stranger and darker than ever.

First, Gene suffered an accident which almost killed him and left him with severe burns all over his body. Even so, he refused medical help and, once again, stayed alive against all odds. Then, Tara received a letter from her sister Audrey, in which she informed Tara that she was planning to confront her parents about the abuse she suffered from Shawn. Tara stood by her side and went back home to testify in her favor.

However, Gene and Faye were left unconvinced by the claims of the sisters, even though Shawn had explicitly threatened to kill them in their presence. To make matters worse, he repeated the threat to Tara by phone, not long after ceremoniously hugging her during the peacemaking sessions with their parents. Simply put, he was beyond treatment.

The same could be said of Gene, who, as Tara learned at one of her psychology classes, suffered from a severe case of bipolar disorder, which was getting worse by the day. On the bright side, while Tara was in England, he had started a line of medicinal oils with Faye. The business brought them local recognition and a lot of money. It also brought them a lot of interest from big companies. One of them offered Gene $3 million to buy the recipes. Gene declined the offer.

The meeting of the two Taras

Tara’s trips back to her family opened her eyes to a strange discovery: that there were now two Taras. One of them was the respected student of a prestigious university, and the other the lost daughter of a couple of Mormon survivalists. Gene and Faye loved the old Tara much more than the new one and they were trying to get her back at all costs. However, it was the new Tara who was really experiencing life, and the one who was starting to understand the world.

Among other things, the new Tara realized that she had been lied to all of her life about one fundamental thing: the real value of women. “I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft,” she writes, “but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: ‘It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.’ The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

Soon after, Tara began reading more about Mormonism, but this time she read with a much more open mindset. It didn’t take her long to realize that, compared to almost many other intellectual and religious movements, Mormonism was downright radical. She decided that she didn’t want to remain an adherent. Quite the opposite: she wanted out.

The triumph of the new Tara

One day, while Tara was doing research for her Ph.D. at Harvard (where she had won a visiting fellowship) her parents appeared at the doorstep of her dorm room. The reason was that Gene had had another one of his revelations. This time, the angels had told him that Tara’s soul had been taken away by Lucifer and that the only way for her to save herself from Hell was by accepting his blessing and by coming back to her hometown.

Everything Tara had worked for – as she writes at this crucial place in her memoir – had been to acquire for herself just one simple privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to her by her father, and to use those truths to construct her own mind. “I had come to believe,” she goes on, “that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

This was a price she wasn’t interested in paying. Even though she suffered a mental breakdown in the process of severing the ties with her family, she eventually persevered and opted to finish her thesis instead. The breakthrough came one seemingly ordinary day, when, looking in the mirror, Tara realized that it was time for her to bury her old self in the past. “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones (the old Tara) would have made,” she writes. “They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.” Tara says that different people might use different words to describe this new selfhood: transformation, metamorphosis, falsity, betrayal. She chooses to call it an education.

Final notes

There are really not enough superlatives to describe “Educated.” Alluring, courageous, heartbreaking, heartwarming, beautiful, propulsive, best-in-years, one-of-a-kind, fascinating, extraordinarily evocative – these have all been used by different reviewers. And all of them quite justly.

A unique memoir, “Educated” seems almost too strange to be believed. And yet, despite its singularity – as one Vogue reviewer has noted – the questions Tara Westover’s book poses are universal: “How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”

To quote the Sunday Times, “Educated” is a book “fit to stand alongside the great modern memoirs.”

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Be curious. Research. Contrast and compare. As Tara Westover learned, the only way to create an authentic self is through the evaluation of many ideas, histories, and points of view. Everything else is dogma.

[tylerhoechlin]

Back From the Brink

Dylan O’Brien was groomed to be Hollywood’s next young leading man. Then a tragic accident made him question everything.

Dylan O’Brien knows you want to know what happened to him.

Some people search his face for scars. Others ask the 26-year-old actor questions about the accident in 2016 that nearly cut short his career and could have ended his life. For more than a year, he was able to dodge that scrutiny and recover in private. Now, with a new movie coming out and a press tour required to promote it, things are different.

“I was anticipating this for a long time,” he says over lunch at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles. “It used to really anger me, even just the thought of it. I just knew that eventually, I would have to be asked about this.”

He confesses these angry thoughts about as affably as any person could, as though he’s upset to even get upset. That doe-eyed decency has proved key to O’Brien’s screen appeal: In his breakthrough role as the lead of the Maze Runner franchise, he’s introduced in media res, thrust into a coliseum of YA terrors before we even learn who his character is. As he shakes and shivers and tries, alongside the audience, to make sense of his otherworldly predicament, you can’t help but root for him.

Not every actor can inspire that feeling in a viewer, but in O’Brien’s case, it’s so innate that the director of his new film, the action vehicle American Assassin, cast him simply after looking at his head shot. “I remember in that first discussion with my producers, names were being thrown around, and the one name I didn’t know yet was Dylan’s,” says Michael Cuesta. “I Googled him, I saw his picture, and I just said instinctively, ‘He’s right.’ There was an innocence and a vulnerability to him, and I hadn’t even seen his work yet. It’s an instinct you just have to trust.”

Cuesta wasn’t the only one besotted. At a time when Hollywood likes to import most of its young leading men from overseas — like Spider-Man’s Tom Holland, Star Wars breakout John Boyega, and an entire family of Hemsworths — The Maze Runner established O’Brien as a rare homegrown movie star. His profile grew ever larger while he shot the sequels to The Maze Runner and neared the end of his time on the MTV series Teen Wolf, and as work began on the third and final Maze Runner film, O’Brien started to look ahead to the future.

And then, just days into shooting that sequel, O’Brien was seriously injured in a stunt gone wrong. Pulled from one vehicle, he was reportedly struck by another, leaving him with a concussion, facial fracture, and brain trauma among his injuries. Production shut down for several weeks, then indefinitely. O’Brien withdrew from public view during his recovery as rumors flew that he might not return to the film. Half a year went by as O’Brien tried to heal and, at the lowest point in his life, mulled whether he wanted to continue his career at all. “I really was in a dark place there for a while and it wasn’t an easy journey back,” says O’Brien. “There was a time there where I didn’t know if I would ever do it again … and that thought scared me, too.”

Now, though, he is ready to talk about it.

“In a lot of ways, those six months went by like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “And then, in a lot of ways, I can still remember that six months as if it was five years of my life.”

…………………………

Ask most young actresses when they wanted to become a movie star, and it won’t even be a question: They’ve been planning for it their whole lives. Kristen Stewart has been acting since she was a preteen, and at 14, Emma Stone put together a PowerPoint presentation to convince her parents to move to Los Angeles so she could go on auditions. But young American men seem come to acting differently — or indifferently. Channing Tatum was a model and dancer who happened into commercials before becoming a movie star. Chris Pratt happily toiled in obscurity as a Bubba Gump waiter in Hawaii when he was convinced by a customer to act in her film.

O’Brien’s foray into the industry was similarly unplanned. His parents had the expertise — O’Brien’s mother taught an acting class, while his father moved the family to California when O’Brien was 12 so he could pursue work as a camera operator — but in high school, he played drums in a jazz band instead of signing up for drama class. Like many of his classmates, though, O’Brien had a habit of posting videos to YouTube. They’re still there today: Check out his user page at “moviekidd826” and you can watch all 14 of his short comic sketches. Some of them are fairly simple, like his too-enthusiastic lip sync to the Spice Girls song “Wannabe,” and one of the uploaded clips is a teen staple, the video he made to ask a girl to prom.

Still, the shorts are clever and surprisingly narrative-driven, and O’Brien is a deft comic performer in all of them. He wouldn’t have thought of what he was doing as acting — he was just being himself, after all. But it’s exactly that unvarnished quality that made him so appealing, and as the videos began to circulate, he was signed by a woman who is still his manager today. Soon enough, he was being sent out to audition for projects like Valentine’s Day and Wizards of Waverly Place.

He hadn’t grown up knowing that he wanted to be an actor, but give O’Brien some credit: Once he figured that out, he committed hard. “My first semester of college, I’m going to sociology and English and psychology and all I cared about was getting home and preparing for whatever audition I had,” he says. “I’d be on IMDb looking at projects in development that I’d be right for and I’d send them to my manager and be like, ‘What’s going on with this?’” His ambition often outstripped his experience. “I was obsessed with having one of those auditions finally work out, and I was very impatient,” he recalls, laughing. “My manager would be like, ‘You have to understand, this could take years.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, I’m going to get one of these.’”

Only a few months after his high-school graduation, that’s exactly what happened. O’Brien was cast on Teen Wolf, a fledgling MTV series based on the campy 1980s movie. This version skewed darker and filled its cast with hunks, with the howls meant to come from the audience each time a sexy werewolf stripped off his shirt. It was a notable hit for MTV, and though O’Brien was cast as the human best friend — not as the protagonist, Scott, or as any of the eye-candy beasts on the show — the role was a good fit for his boy-next-door charm. He wasn’t just Scott’s friend. He felt like yours, too.

“That show really became my school in a lot of ways,” says O’Brien. “I never took a second on set for granted. Even on my first day on the pilot, when my work finished for the day but then they were going to this other location to shoot another scene, I just went with them.” As a cable show, Teen Wolf filmed only five months out of the year, so O’Brien had plenty of time to hop on to other projects: He took Zooey Deschanel’s virginity in a New Girl flashback and popped up on the big screen in films like the teen romance The First Time and the Vince Vaughn–Owen Wilson comedy The Internship. “I would want to get on as many sets as I could,” he said. “And I was still very much ambitious about being in movies, too.”

In 2013, the year after The Hunger Games hit big, O’Brien was cast as the lead in another book-to-film YA franchise, The Maze Runner. The rare $100 million hit toplined by a young actor under 25, it propelled O’Brien onto studio short lists and led to more work in bigger movies, including Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon and a Maze Runner sequel, The Scorch Trials. 20th Century Fox picked up an action comedy with O’Brien attached, a sign of his growing clout, and as Cuesta looked for someone to play black-ops recruit Mitch Rapp in American Assassin, based on a popular book series by the late Vince Flynn, he alighted on O’Brien.

“He looks like a boy next door, like my son’s older friends,” says Cuesta. “Like a young man who has one foot in that postadolescent place and is about to cross over into adulthood and take that rite of passage.”

In March 2016, just as O’Brien headed to Vancouver to film Maze Runner: The Death Cure, he committed to star in American Assassin, which would represent his biggest break so far from youth-driven fare. He planned to film that after wrapping The Death Cure, squeeze in some time to shoot Teen Wolf’s farewell season, and move on to the movies that studios had been setting up for him.

“To see him blossom in his career and see what he was taking on, it was amazing to watch,” says O’Brien’s father, Patrick. “And then to see that broken … it was hard.”

…………………………

O’Brien would rather not relive the particulars of his accident. “There’s really been one or two people who have tried to dig and find out what happened and I cut it off,” he says. “And I’m comfortable with where I draw the line.”

What’s known is that after that stunt on the set of The Death Cure went awry and production shut down on March 18, 2016, the studio planned to resume filming May 9, hoping to still make the film’s set February 2017 release date. Weeks later, though, it was clear that O’Brien’s injuries were so serious that filming could not begin again.

“I had lost a lot of function, just in my daily routine,” says O’Brien. “I wasn’t even at a point where I felt like I could handle social situations, let alone showing up and being responsible for work every day. Long hours on set, delivering a performance and carrying a movie … it just makes your palms sweat.”

O’Brien calls his recovery process “overwhelming,” though the biggest toll the accident took on him was psychological. Even if he could find his way back to the sense of stability he had before the accident, and even if those scars could heal, would he still want to return to the high-flying movie career he’d worked so hard to set up? After it all went away, he couldn’t even be sure he was the same person anymore.

“And then there was a part of me, too, that was feeling pressured and stressed out by the mere fact that I had all of these people still emailing me, checking in,” he says. “I would get so fucking mad. Like if ever I heard from a producer [who was] seeing when I’d be able to get back on set, I’d fucking go nuts. It would really, really piss me off.”

But as O’Brien recovered in private, rumors flew that his injuries were much more extensive than was reported, and the people behind the projects O’Brien had set up were forced to weigh their options. Cuesta didn’t want to recast American Assassin, but he also didn’t know what state his star was in. During his recovery, O’Brien had not communicated with the production in four months.

“I didn’t want to let it go, and I also had this really interesting, deeper connection to this character over the course of those four months because of what I was going through,” says O’Brien. American Assassin begins with a freak tragedy, as Rapp’s fiancée is gunned down by terrorists during a beach vacation and dies in his arms. Lost in a rabbit hole of grief, Rapp spends the next few months weaponizing his anger and decides to hunt down her killers himself. “I felt like I could portray that and wanted to be the one to do that justice — it was almost like an honor for me at that point,” O’Brien says. “But at the same time, I was still in such a fragile personal state that I had this other force telling me, like, ‘No fucking way’ that I can do it. ‘This is too soon, too soon. Tell them to leave me alone, I need more time.’”

Unfortunately, the film didn’t have much time to spare. If American Assassin didn’t go into production before a certain date, the film rights would revert back to Flynn’s estate, and if O’Brien still wanted to play Rapp, he’d have to spend two months getting into physical shape for the role. It was a daunting regimen of learning fight choreography and adding muscle to his frame that would take a lot of work for any actor, let alone one who was still reeling from his physical nadir. “I knew it wouldn’t be getting back on the horse in a light way,” says O’Brien.

And so, at the end of July, he recommitted to American Assassin. It was a signal to the industry that he wanted to work again, even if, privately, he still wondered if he’d be able to make it through. On the one hand, the time O’Brien spent in the gym with action coordinator Roger Yuan gave him something that he could focus on during those long days. But even as he grew physically stronger, O’Brien was still struggling with heavy emotional and psychological episodes during his recovery.

“Sometimes I’d literally show up at the gym having a panic attack, and my trainer would be like, ‘All right, let’s just go get breakfast,’” says O’Brien, who came to treat Yuan almost like a therapist. “I can’t give enough credit to him … he was really there for me, and not just like a trainer where it’s like, ‘Well, come on, man, I gotta pump you up.’ He cared more about my mind and the state that I was in.”

Near the end of their training, O’Brien was in the best physical shape he’d ever been, an unlikely development given the events of the last few months. But despite all that training to become Mitch Rapp, O’Brien’s anxiety only grew as the start date drew near. The day he was supposed to fly to London to prepare to film the movie, O’Brien had what he describes as an emotional breakdown in the airport. With his father and girlfriend Britt Robertson by his side, he questioned whether he could continue.

“I didn’t even think they’d let me on the plane, to be honest,” he says. “I must have looked high or something.” O’Brien’s father, who had planned to spend the first few weeks in London getting his son acclimated, proved to be the rock he needed in that moment. “I don’t think I would have been able to step onto the plane without him,” says O’Brien.

“That was a tough year for us,” says his father Patrick. “It was hard to see him like that … he’s such a special kid.” Patrick had never set foot on one of Dylan’s sets before — “I thought it was important to let it be his life and not be mine” — but on the first day Dylan shot American Assassin, he knew he had to be there. “It was mind-blowing,” says Patrick. “I was watching him from the monitors, and he was busting out 50 push-ups in between takes.”

It was all for a wordless sequence where we catch up with Mitch months after his fiancée’s death, watching him train and harden himself in his dark apartment. As O’Brien walloped on a punching bag and bust out dozens of pull-ups, the intensity was like nothing Patrick had seen from his son before: “Obviously, I’m getting concerned. I’m watching the monitors and I’m seeing the stress he’s putting on his body and his face and all the places that have been of some concern of late.”

When Cuesta called “cut,” Patrick walked past the first assistant director and up to Dylan. “I was almost nose to nose with him, and I’m not sure he saw me right away. He was in it, as much as you can be in it. And I said, ‘Dylan?’ He looked at me and kind of focused. And I said, ‘Are you okay?’ And he said, ‘I’m good.’”

“If he didn’t have the accident,” says Cuesta, “would he have connected that well with Mitch? I don’t know, but it definitely brought truth to it.”

O’Brien acknowledges that, too. “I’d just been through a lot that summer and the fact that you spend all this time not even knowing if you can do that again …” He pauses, and swallows. “Even right now, it’s just kind of hard to talk about.”

It helps, he says, that Patrick came aboard for the rest of the shoot as a camera operator, staying by his side when he needed him most. With his father there, he could be fearless. “I would just think about where I was at psychologically in June and July, how insurmountable the task seemed to me,” says O’Brien. “And then just to be there on the last day knowing that I did it, with my dad there at my side, it was just a really, really great feeling.”

“He’s in a good place now,” says Patrick. “And nothing makes a parent happier.”

…………………………

O’Brien doesn’t sugarcoat his recovery. Sitting in front of me at lunch, he looks every inch the movie star he was before: hair tousled, eyes bright, his face covered only by stubble. He is candid about what it took to get to this point, though, and even after filming American Assassin, the question remained: Was he ready to finish Maze Runner: The Death Cure, putting to bed the series that had given him so much and taken plenty, too?

“Nothing inside of you wants to go back to that,” O’Brien admits. “It took a lot of deep searching past those gut instincts that I was having just because of the trauma that I experienced to realize that I did want to finish it.”

Did he consider asking the studio to move on without him? “I wouldn’t have been ultimately happy with that, I don’t think. In the moment, it would have been a temporary relief because I would have run from it, but it would have always stuck with me a little bit … I knew it was going to be really hard, harder than Assassin probably, but [I thought] if I got through that, I can get through this, and I think I’ll come out of the other side being really happy that I did it. And I did.”

He resumed filming The Death Cure in March, which is now set for release in January 2018. His father followed him to South Africa, where the movie was shot, and was made a co-producer on the film; O’Brien now counts it among his best experiences on a project. He even found time to return to the final season of Teen Wolf, which had written around his absence while he recovered. The series finale of that show will air on September 24, and soon enough, every obligation O’Brien had set before his accident will be behind him.

“Coming out of the other side of all this is basically a whole new chapter, and I think I will be going about it differently,” he says. “I’m excited to have more balance going forward. Like, I’m not somebody I don’t think who’s going to do three or four movies a year and feel like I have to constantly pump them out. I think there’s something to be said about pacing yourself.”

In the meantime, he’s bought his first house, which gives him a little stability in an uncertain industry. He recently threw a party there to celebrate his 26th birthday — “It turned into more of a rager than I intended it to be,” he laughs — and an hour into it, O’Brien and his friends were already jumping off the roof into his pool. It’s a future that he could not have imagined just a year and a half ago.

“I’m excited to see what comes my way, see what I’m interested in next, and just see what happens,” says O’Brien. After Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner conclude, it’s wide-open space. “It’s the first time that I’ll be operating in my career without those two roles, really.”

He thinks about it and smiles. “It’s good, though, to not have that safety net.”

[source: Vulture]

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF FORTIFICATIONS

Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application system. Markets always evolve toward higher resolution. Any one of them, because you have less competition. Design by committee is a synonym for bad design. But Cambridge is just part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at your idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for this. Earplugs are small. Large organizations have different aims from hackers. So there's another difference between essays and the things you have to rewrite it to do more of that?

DC the message seems to be that the most important things you can understand about startups. Most of the famous founders in Silicon Valley, New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you could get to the point that there is something druglike about them, and investing is for most of them a part time job. I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. More on them later. Every dinner is a mini Demo Day. If you're writing something that you and your friends genuinely prefer to Google, you're already about 10% of the way. Some of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. The other problem with startups is that they grow fast, and consulting just can't scale the way a product can. The first was called Traf-o-data.1

As it turns out the best way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to make the right choices, but to make choices that can be learned. It's usually a mistake for a startup. I think that's due to the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down a big offer also tend to be forced to figure out and explain exactly what you want and get out of the way. Things that used to be bolder. All they knew was that they weren't written the way we'd been taught to write essays, you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you. He'd just have to spread it more broadly. I felt bad about this, just as it's hard to design something for a group of medium-high quality people and get the desired result. I think you should always do this when you can. If all you want to take on a problem as big as Apple. But that's not how any of the hackers I knew were either writing software for the Mac, or wanted to. But you're safe so long as it's interesting.

Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them to make a nest for yourself in some large organization where your status depends mostly on seniority. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how good your growth is great. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, but as long as acquirers remain stupid. If good design must do what the user needs, who is the user? It gives the acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing isn't working. There is a parallel here to the rise of civil order, which happened at roughly the same time. Viaweb, but judging from the number of startups that can succeed, regardless of how many are started. You're lucky if your productivity is a third of what it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. But because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of making a single thing lots of people use. GMail. The company that bought them was not a natural move for Microsoft. Modernism was its freshness.

Trolls are like children many are children in that they're capable of a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. You'll remind them of themselves. Indeed, English classes may even be able to give up. And it can last for months. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through. And not just at making money: look what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in elementary school. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box. But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid. Technology will increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences.

So why were we afraid? Every futon sofa in Cambridge seemed to have the price raised on them that they resist even this self-evident reasoning. You might think that if they built their own, they'd screw it up. When you approach the problem from the direction of the arts, but most of them a part time job. It sounds a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.2 We erred ridiculously far on the side, I'm not proposing this as a new idea. If you're talking to, but there's nothing magical about a degree. Or at least, kept students busy; it introduced students to cultures quite different from what they expected? A lot of people to help them.

Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. Oh, a high-level language? But I'm willing to let people do the best work they can, corp dev people like to turn the tables on you. When startups die, the official cause of death in a startup is almost always a function of growth. That tends to produce deadlocks. Maybe there is some new killer app to be discovered here, but it will get there faster and without the risk of failure. But houses are very expensive—around $1000 per square foot. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like math or physics, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications.

Extraordinary devotion went into it, and then either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus. You see paintings and drawings in museums and imagine they were made for you to look closely at the way a painting is made. But as a founder your incentives are different. If it gets easier to start a startup, I would have realized that there was a kid playing basketball? But it was a surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else who felt uneasy about apparently forgetting so much they'd read. It's cities that compete, not countries. I've mentioned. But if the hacker is a creator, we have some idea what secrecy would be worse than patents, just that we couldn't discard patents for free. It's in your interest, because you'll be one of them. Now I see there's more to it than that. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to. Hiring people is rarely the way to a great product, how do you deliver drama via the Internet?

Notes

Peter Norvig found that 16 of the increase in trade you always feel you should probably be a big angel like Ron Conway, for many Americans the decisive change in response to the customer: you post a sign in a cupboard saying this cupboard must be kept empty. Within Viaweb we once had a tiny. I talked to mentioned how much time.

I wasn't trying to decide between turning some investors away and selling more of it. You should take a small seed investment in you, they may introduce startups they like to invest at a time machine to the next year they worked together mostly at night. I took so long.

[investmart007]

NEW YORK | Philip Roth: a generation's defining voice

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/fgudw2

NEW YORK | Philip Roth: a generation's defining voice

NEW YORK (AP) — In the self-imposed retirement of his final years, Philip Roth remained curious and removed from the world he had shocked and had shocked him in return.

He praised younger authors such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Teju Cole, and confided that he had read “Born to Run,” the memoir by another New Jersey giant, Bruce Springsteen. He followed with horror the rise of Donald Trump and found himself reliving the imagined horrors of his novel “The Plot Against America,” in which the country succumbs to the fascist reign of President Charles Lindbergh.

But Roth, who died Tuesday at age 85, was also a voice — a defining one — of a generation nearing its end. He was among the last major writers raised without television, who ignored social media and believed in engaging readers through his work alone and not the alleged charms or virtues of his private self. He was safely outside Holden Caulfield’s fantasy that a favorite author could be “a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” He didn’t celebrate romantic love or military heroism or even consider the chance for heavenly justice.

The meaning of life, he once said, paraphrasing his idol Franz Kafka, is that it stops. “Life’s most disturbing intensity is death,” he wrote in his novel “Everyman,” published in 2006.

Best known for works ranging from the wild and ribald “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the elegiac “American Pastoral,” Roth was among the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. And he died, with dark and comic timing, in the year that the prize committee called off the award as it contended with a #MeToo scandal. He also died just minutes after the book world had concluded the annual Pen America gala in Manhattan and on the eve of another literary tradition — Wednesday’s annual induction ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which voted Roth in more than 40 years ago.

“No other writer has meant as much to me,” Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a new academy inductee, wrote in an email Wednesday to The Associated Press. “No other American writer’s work have I read so obsessively, year after year.”

Roth’s novels were often narratives of lust, mortality, fate and Jewish assimilation. He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth, the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of the Jews’ painful adjustment from immigrant life, Roth’s characters represented the next generation.

Their first language was English, and they spoke without accents. They observed no rituals and belonged to no synagogues. The American dream, or nightmare, was to become “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness.” The reality, more often, was to be regarded as a Jew among gentiles and a gentile among Jews.

He was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, committed to the narration of “life, in all its shameless impurity.” Feminists, Jews and one ex-wife attacked him in print, and sometimes in person. Women in his books were at times little more than objects of desire and rage and The Village Voice once put his picture on its cover, condemning him as a misogynist. A panel moderator berated him for his comic portrayals of Jews, asking Roth if he would have written the same books in Nazi Germany. Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem called “Portnoy’s Complaint” the “book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.” When Roth won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011, a judge resigned, alleging the author suffered from terminal solipsism and went “on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” In “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth imagines the inscription for his title character’s headstone:

“Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals.” Roth’s wars also originated from within. He survived a burst appendix in the late 1960s and near-suicidal depression in 1987. For all the humor in his work — and, friends would say, in his private life — jacket photos usually highlighted the author’s tense, dark-eyed glare. In 2012, he announced that he had stopped writing fiction and would instead dedicate himself to helping biographer Blake Bailey complete his life story, one he openly wished would not come out while he was alive. By 2015, he had retired from public life altogether.

Roth began his career in rebellion against the conformity of the 1950s and ended it in defense of the security of the 1940s; he was never warmer than when writing about his childhood, or more sorrowful, and enraged, than when narrating the betrayal of innocence lost.

Acclaim and controversy were inseparable. His debut collection, published in 1959, was “Goodbye, Columbus,” featuring a love (and lust) title story about a working-class Jew and his wealthier girlfriend. It brought the writer a National Book Award and some extra-literary criticism. The aunt of the main character, Neil Klugman, is a meddling worrywart, and the upper-middle-class relatives of Neil’s girlfriend are satirized as shallow materialists. Roth believed he was simply writing about people he knew, but some Jews saw him as a traitor, subjecting his brethren to ridicule before the gentile world. A rabbi accused him of distorting the lives of Orthodox Jews. At a writers conference in the early 1960s, he was relentlessly accused of creating stories that affirmed the worst Nazi stereotypes.

But Roth insisted writing should express, not sanitize. After two relatively tame novels, “Letting Go” and “When She was Good,” he abandoned his good manners with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” his ode to blasphemy against the “unholy trinity of “father, mother and Jewish son.” Published in 1969, a great year for rebellion, it was an event, a birth, a summation, Roth’s triumph over “the awesome graduate school authority of Henry James,” as if history’s lid had blown open and out erupted a generation of Jewish guilt and desire.

As narrated by Alexander Portnoy, from a psychiatrist’s couch, Roth’s novel satirized the dull expectations heaped upon “nice Jewish boys” and immortalized the most ribald manifestations of sexual obsession. His manic tour of one man’s onanistic adventures led Jacqueline Susann to comment that “Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” Although “Portnoy’s Complaint” was banned in Australia and attacked by Scholem and others, many critics welcomed the novel as a declaration of creative freedom. “Portnoy’s Complaint” sold millions, making Roth wealthy, and, more important, famous. The writer, an observer by nature, was now observed. He was an item in gossip columns, a name debated at parties. Strangers called out to him in the streets. Roth would remember hailing a taxi and, seeing that the driver’s last name was Portnoy, commiserating over the book’s notoriety.

With Roth finding himself asked whether he really was Portnoy, several of his post-Portnoy novels amounted to a dare: is it fact of fiction? In “The Anatomy Lesson,” ”The Counterlife” and other novels, the featured character is a Jewish writer from New Jersey named Nathan Zuckerman. He is a man of similar age to Roth who just happened to have written a “dirty” best seller, “Carnovsky,” and is lectured by friends and family for putting their lives into his books.

In the 1990s, he reconnected with the larger world and culture of his native country. “American Pastoral” narrated a decent man’s decline from high school sports star to victim of the ’60s and the “indigenous American berserk.” In “The Human Stain,” he raged against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his affair with a White House intern. “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane,” he wrote. Near the end of his writing life, Roth was increasingly preoccupied with history and its sucker punch, how ordinary people were defeated by events beyond their control, like the Jews in “The Plot Against America” or the college student in “Indignation” who dies in the Korean War.

“The most beautiful word in the English language,” Roth wrote, “‘In-dig-na-tion!'”

By HILLEL ITALIE , By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC(R.A)