#see what they need is more human friends because even a middling scam artist like tracey could run laps around angels and demons

[sunderwight]

aziraphale and crowley are so bad at convincing anyone that they don't know where gabriel is

it's funny because even when crowley actually didn't know what was going on he still somehow gave off vibes as though he did

and it's not just that the vibes! strategically they suck at it!

at any point they could have actually let the angels or demons search the bookshop top to tip, with "Jim" standing there waving and offering snacks the entire time, and they would have actually not found anything and been forced to look elsewhere

but it never occurs to them to actually do that because THEY know that they know where gabriel is, so they just panic and fixate on keeping all the angels and demons away as much as possible, which makes it really obvious that they know something they're not sharing with the class

how are you both so bad at this?!

[resinatingbeauty]

A 'Witch Shop' Owner's Plea Before Casting That Love Spell

I don't personally offer many spell kits, mojo bags, etc. In my shop and avoid selling my 'Craft', as in, I don't advertise or list spell casting among my offerings, though I have had a couple of customers specifically ask if I could perform a spell I offered as a kit on their behalf for whatever reason. This is because I personally believe that the journey is just as important as the destination in witchcraft and many of the spell kits / spells I do offer are designed in such a way to soothe, relax, release, and heal throughout the process. Honestly, in addition, I really don't want the responsibility associated with performing magick on someone else's behalf for many reasons. The strength of my intent is not going to be as strong as yours, for example. Even if I effectively channel your energy, creating that personal connection between the beneficiary and the intent or purpose of the spell work is incredibly difficult at a distance. I'm always wary of other shops advertising this type of service- the sad truth of the matter is our little niche has been permeated by scammers, con artists, and frauds looking to take advantage of anyone looking for a solution to whatever it is that has them at this low point in life. I will tell you, more often than not it's love spells that the customer is after, and they are apt to find many options on Etsy, the platform I primarily do business on, and beyond.

I distinctly think of one potential customer who had contacted me one night obviously very upset. My heart went out to her immediately - I could just tell by what she was saying and how quickly she responded to me that she was in a state of panic and extreme emotional distress. She isn't the only one, but she stands out from the others as her desire to win back her ex lover was so strong it was evident that she would do anything and (potentially) pay anything for a chance to get things back to the way they were in her love life.

I am a human being. I have been given this amazing opportunity to pursue my passion to share my creations and spiritual / metaphysical knowledge with the world through my work. I understood a long time ago that this also meant I had a responsibility to do my best to help those in need and never knowingly harm, much like a doctor commuting to the Hippocratic oath. This may make me a flat out horrible business woman, but I would rather not sell someone on something I don't believe is going to help their situation. In fact, love spells usually make things worse. I'll get to that momentarily.

"Is there a spell to make her see what she has done wrong and to make her love and want me again?"

I allowed this customer to explain to me the situation and took the time to hear her out after telling her that I'm sure that she could find something like that elsewhere and someone else willing to sell her a spell kit or cast that spell, but I urged her to take a deep breath and talk to me before she did something that she would regret.

Thankfully, she spent the next hour or so explaining her situation and elaborating on everything that has happened in her relationship. It was one of those on again / off again things that so many of us get trapped in. Understandable, considering once you establish that strong bond of love, whether one sided or not, it's incredibly hard to cut that cord and move on especially if you're so emotionally invested (and maybe even financially invested) in this other individual who has had your heart for so long you can't imagine giving it to anyone else.

This PSA goes out to the broken hearted of all walks, as this is a universal experience for anyone who has been in love. There may not be someone to stop you from pursuing what you think will fix everything as I did for her, but I'm hoping if you read this, you'll think twice about acquiring and performing love spells or any magick in hopes that it will provide a quick fix to any situation.

•Beware the Opportunistic Con / Scam

Our field is flooded with scammers, con artists, and frauds that exclusively cater to those in this sweet girl's position and anyone who is vulnerable due to emotional distress or panic. Whether you need a love spell like she did to win back her ex or a quick fix to get more money in the bank or what have you, beware those that have used spiritual advisory and witchcraft as a means to peddle you their high priced garbaged. This is a tough one, as you may have a hard time deciphering what is 'legit' and what isn't, but there are some signs and facts you can look for when browsing these shops / websites.

-They promise / guarantee results within a specific or unrealistic time frame

Magick takes time to manifest and the true story is that nobody has a 100% satisfaction guaranteed spell book. More often than not, when spells come to fruition, it often isn't quite the way you would expect it to, either. Anyone promising a quick fix to anything is most likely just trying to take advantage of you when you are vulnerable and you better believe there will be no money back guarantee if said garbage doesn't work for you. OR, they like to do one of these:

-"Oh, your situation is worse than I thought. You're going to need this and this, with a huge $$$$ price tag."

This starts a never ending cycle of you pouring money into this scammer who will make you believe that it is necessary to do so. That maybe if you did throw them an extra $500 for their thingamajig that you will get what you want. This is only the beginning, as when THAT doesn't do it for you the way you would like, they will claim some other interference, maybe you're cursed or under psychic attack, and need something else even more expensive and elaborate to take care of that before you can even get to what you went to them for in the first place. Anytime someone proposes this type of thing, stop while you're ahead and don't provide them with a guaranteed cash flow that you aren't benefitting from at all. Also, be wary of ANY seller who makes outrageous claims- overnight changes, curing cancer, etc. Are unrealistic expectations.

•Understand What You Truly Need

Maybe it's time to consider an alternative path. The customer I spoke about DID ultimately purchase a tarot spread, which I was much more inclined to do for her than some love spell to win back this girl who has repeatedly broken her heart over the past few years and obviously got a kick out of it, the way she told it, as it was ALWAYS her doing the breaking up and blocking, starting all the drama. I told her I would much rather give her a spell to find her twin flame / soul mate than to win this person back who has perpetually been hurting her and taking advantage of her kindness.

Sometimes it's time to cut the cord before more damage is done. I understand it isn't easy to move on from someone you have loved and cultivated a relationship with over a long period of time, regardless of the negative energy that has invaded the relationship, we DO tend to focus on the positives, which leaves us a bit biased and blind to what we could have and deserve to have.

Take a moment if you are in a relationship situation like this, are beginning to question your current relationship, or are considering taking the next step in any relationship. Sit down with a pen and paper. On one side of the paper, write down all the things you love about that person. All the ways you think they have been the light in your life (be honest and give credit where credit is due!). Now on the other side, list the negatives or cons in your relationship. If one list is noticeably longer than the other, depending on which side it is, it may be time to consider breaking it off, giving things another shot, or taking things to the next level. Ask yourself;

-Do they support me in what I do, even if they don't understand or necessarily agree with it? (So long as it is something healthy -obviously if they're supportive of a bad habit or detrimental behavior, this is more like enabling and not a good thing)

-Do they have my best interests at heart more often than not?

-Do they show that they care? Even in the smallest of ways?

-Could I call them my "best friend?" Am I honest with them?

-Are they honest with me?

-Do they lift me up more than they put me down?

-Do you want the same things in life / have similar priorities?

-Is our relationship valuable to them the same way it is to me?

•LOVE SPELLS NEVER WORK THE WAY YOU WANT

This is the cold hard truth about love spells. Forget the warnings in movies and books, as it is hard to believe them or even take them as a legitimate warning when you haven't had the displeasure of experiencing what a love spell can do for yourself. I have, so you don't have to. This is MY story:

Of course love spells are very appealing when you're a young and naive teenager. I had a strong crush on this guy I had low key been stalking since middle school. I don't know why I liked him so much. Part of it I'm sure was the way he looked (hey, I'm being totally honest!) And how he came across to me. We had absolutely no interaction with each other outside of passing each other in the hallway. He had no idea who I was.

I had just borrowed a copy of Silver Ravenwolf's 'Teen Witch' (which is honestly a fantastic book for teens and young adults just starting to delve into Wiccan practices, which she follows exclusively) from a friend of mine and thought I would try the super simple love spell in the book figuring I had nothing to lose. All it consisted of was focusing on the subject, your intentions, writing their name on a piece of paper, folding it up and placing it under your pillow. I would sleep on that paper for months. I was in middle school just about to go into my freshman year of high school when I performed the spell and would forget about it up until the day it worked, a few months into my freshman year of highschool, when my crush was in the graduating class of that year- literally my last chance to make an impression.

I had gone to a local band's concert that was performing at the school's auditorium one day after classes and was just about to leave when my crush randomly approached me and started talking to me. It was like the whole world just stopped right there. I couldn't believe it. The thought of that spell crossed my mind briefly as we exchanged phone numbers.

Over time and getting to know him, he admittedly wasn't exactly my type. He was still someone whose friendship I valued, but not someone I could really put any effort into dating. About the time I realized this, his personality took a complete 180° turn for the worst. He was stalking me. Blowing up my cell phone (which was a prepaid piece of junk at that time I really couldn't talk on for more than a minute without paying a fortune), so much so one evening when I was at Jukido Jujitsu practice that I came home to something like 32 missed calls and 17 voicemails from him, each one showing gradual frustration and anger. This scared me. I knew I had to confront him about it and break this off before it got worse.

I caught him in a populated area of the school the next day before homeroom- more like he came up to me out of nowhere like he knew I would be passing through that part of the school that day- and I confronted him about the calls,attempting to gently explain to him that I wasn't interested in a relationship and I would like to continue being friends. He blew up at me and threw me against the brick wall of the school, trying to kiss and touch me in front of every single person that walked by. I wish I was making this up.

Thankfully a teacher came and pulled him off. Nothing much else was done. I did my best to avoid him and cut him out of my life entirely from that point on.

I don't know if it was the love spell or if this would have occurred anyways. All I knew was that what had been originally a very sweet, big hearted guy that was soft spoken with low self esteem became a monster in a matter of weeks. The take away from this and what I have personally seen with other's experiences with love spells is that they tend to bring out the worst characteristics of the person they are cast on and you have to be really careful what you are actually asking for when thinking about 'desire' and 'passion.' This intent can quickly lead to stalking, obsession, and not in a good way. Another customer of mine who originally came to me for my Forgiveness Spell Kit and had the desired results also, unbeknownst to me, had someone else perform a love and desire spell in addition to it. The guy that she was reverted into an obsessed jerk who decided to spread rumors about her on social media and beyond, blocked her on all platforms, and would get her friends involved in his quest to make her life miserable. Her story reflects and embodies so many I have heard over the years from others who have dabbled in such spells. When they work, it's just never quite what you had in mind.

So if you came to this blog post in search of a love spell for your personal situation or came across it when you have maybe considered one in the past or know someone who has, please take a deep breath, consider your options, and don't do anything that you may regret down the line. Remember that you are deserving of all the love, respect, support, and happiness one could give another. Do not settle on someone who offers you less and expects more, no matter how much you have invested in them, no matter how many years you have spent with them, as they do not appreciate you for the amazing person you are. I can promise you, however, given some time to heal, you WILL find someone who does.

-Samantha

(Owner /Chaos Witch/Designer)

Blursedbaubles.etsy.com

[couldbeasong]

1-60 for the ask meme

Ope sorry I did not see this until today. I think I know the one? If it’s not the one you meant just lmk lol

1. Selfie?

You can have this picrew but I wish to be unperceived.

2. What would you name your future kids?

For female names I like: Harmony, Slyvia, Edelweiss, Bethany, and Opal

For male names I like: Uriah, Aiden, Kai, Levi, and Luke

3. Do you miss anyone?

My grandpa and Midnight (old dog)

4. What are you looking forward to?

Going on vacation in a few weeks, the end of the semester, and seeing @calligraphywitch tomorrow

5. Is there anyone who can always make you smile?

@calligraphywitch and my other girlfriend. They’re hilarious lmao

6. Is it hard for you to get over someone?

Romantically? Not really. You kinda gotta just accept it and move on. In the past, always being like: this will never work because of reason xyz helps.

Friendship wise? Absolutely. It depends a lot on the emotional investment I put into the relationship, but I find myself still missing people I haven’t talked to since High School or Middle School.

7. What was your life like last year?

It was weird being a freshman in college and trying to survive. I had a lot of family problems going on along with one of my best friends from High School being on her death bed for a while. A bit of a crisis of faith as well. But we survived, God willing! I miss pre-pandemic times tho

8. Have you ever cried because you were so annoyed?

Ask my brother. I’m sure there’s been an instance.

9. Who did you last see in person?

My grandma across the room from me!

10. Are you good at hiding your feelings?

I hide them so well I can’t even find them!

I like to pretend they aren’t there and repress them a lot but idk if I’m good at hiding them from others per say.

11. Are you listening to music right now?

I’m in a zoom meeting for class, so I guess my professor's voice?

12. What is something you want right now?

Freedom

13. How do you feel right now?

Kinda tired, kinda nauseous, kinda bored. Idk I probably need to drink some water.

14. When was the last time someone of the opposite sex hugged you?

Uhhhh idk about a week ago? My last hug was probably a week ago too XD

15. Personality description

I like to think I’m funny

16. Have you ever wanted to tell someone something but you didn’t?

I work in customer service- everyday (:

17. Opinion on insecurities.

Everyone is insecure about something. It’s kinda fascinating how even though all of humanity is exactly the same (in terms of our struggles and insecurities, we don’t vary) we still judge others for having them. Confidence is seen as a virtue and the most attainable goal. Society profits off of your insecurities tho so be aware of what they are and don’t let yourself be scammed.

18. Do you miss how things were a year ago?

Certain aspects perhaps. But 2019 is gone. It performed and then it left. It can’t hurt us or help us anymore. There’s little use in dwelling on that and wishing for 2020 to be 2019.

19. Have you ever been to New York?

No, but I swear Ima go one day and see a show on Broadway.

20. What is your favorite song at the moment?

I have like three I’m cycling between rn

When You’re Home from In the Heights

Wake Up by Jenny Owen Youngs

Together by For King and Country

21. Age and birthday?

Old enough to know better and October

22. Description of crush.

He’s super great and super intelligent, not to mention super in love with God. Frankly, he deserves better than me. I gotta lot of self-improvement that needs to happen, but we’ll see what happens XD

23. Fear(s)

Heights, drowning, spiders, super dark streets and rooms, not being good enough

24. Height

5′5″ respectfully

25. Role model

It’s changed through the various stages of my life. Rn tho a few of my Christian online friends

26. Idol(s)

I mean I stan Brian David Gilbert, but I don’t idolize him lol

27. Things I hate

Cheesecake, sickly sweet stuff, when someone grabs the receipt out of the printer even though it’s way more effort for them to do so than for me just to hand it to them and it throws me off of my rhythm, fudge

28. I’ll love you if…

You exist (and even not then because fictional characters just hit different lol)

29. Favorite film(s)

Tangled, Ella Enchanted, Enchanted, Howls Moving Castle, Princess, and the Pauper

30. Favorite tv show(s)

Brooklynn 99, Parks and Recreation, Ouran High School Host Club, My Hero Academia, and Bojack Horseman (I’m going through a phase with it rn lol)

31. 3 random facts

Blue is my favorite color, I own almost nothing in blue, people are better at identifying members of their own race better than members of other races.

32. Are your friends mainly girls or guys?

Girls- they’re easier to talk to and approach. Tho I stan and love my guy friends. They are kings.

33. Something you want to learn

Everything? Idk I have an insatiable desire to learn and it switches. Consistently, I want to learn how to make my own clothes, play either piano, guitar, or violin, and detail cars.

34. Most embarrassing moment

Uggg I’m not talking about it and neither is @calligraphywitch

35. Favorite subject

I really enjoyed Statistics as much as I have hated it. My all-time favorite class I have ever taken tho was AP US Literature

36. 3 dreams you want to fulfill?

Graduate grad school, get married, travel overseas

37. Favorite actor/actress

uhhh probably Chris Pratt or anyone who was on Parks and Recreation. Tho Broadway actors, I love Christian Borle

38. Favorite comedian(s)

John Mulaney

39. Favorite sport(s)

I miss playing softball and volleyball so prolly those

40. Favorite memory

There are too many to count. But usually, involve good conversations under the stars after 2 AM.

41. Relationship status

Have a picrew of my sister and me. Keep scrolling and mind ya business (jk ily anon)

42. Favorite book(s)

The Bible lol but fictional book wise, I will always love the Warrior Cats series. Red Queen was pretty lit. The Hourglass Door gave me a love for time travel aus lol. And Library Wars is near and dear to my heart.

43. Favorite song ever

You can’t ask me thisssss

Idk Hope is what we crave by For King and Country

44. Age you get mistaken for

24-30 it depends on the context

45. How you found out about your idol

@calligraphywitch

46. What my last text message says

No xD not disney

47. Turn-ons

When you have a musical playing and the end of one song is the start of another so they bleed into each other. CHILLS or when a line of poetry just expresses how someone feels. OR when different parts harmonize just right

48. Turn-offs

When my computer deletes my homework right before it’s done

49. Where I want to be right now

In a little cabin in the woods

50. Favorite picture of your idol

51. Starsign

Scorpio

52. Something I’m talented at

Reading peoples emotions

53. 5 things that make me happy

Music, Friends, Deep Conversations, Hugs, and God

54. Something that's worrying me at the moment

So much to do so much to see

55. Tumblr friends

Friends and mutuals include:

@calligraphywitch @an-assortment-of-forks @repentance-brings-healing @synthetic-blanket-hairs @loneallegiance @boywiththewand @knightof-cups @a-lil-strawberry @linkedwolf @indygo @obnoxioushair

There’s plenty more than that and I love you all ^^

56. Favorite food(s)

Tacos, Crab Ragoons, Salty Foods, RICE

57. Favorite animal(s)

Wolves and cats

58. Description of my best friend

Artistic, beautiful, supportive, hardworking. She is hilarious and an amazing person. There’s so much to the many reasons I love her I just can’t do it in words

59. Why I joined tumblr

Back in the 7th grade, my friends all had one and helped set me up with one. And that’s that.

60. Ask me anything you want

You want nothing ig lol if you want to submit one I can answer it still

[ivyhanlon-blog]

Is that ELIZABETH OLSEN walking down Old Town Front Street? Nah, IVY HANLON  just looks like their identical twin! The THIRTY YEAR OLD AQUARIUS has been a NATIVE for THIRTY YEARS. On their good days, IVY is ARTISTIC AND ACCEPTING, but if you catch them on a bad day, they may be HYPERVIGILANT AND FLIPPANT. Keep your eyes on this MUSICAL BUDTENDER/DRUGDEALER. Wonder what they’ve been up to lately in Sunnymead!

PINTEREST [ x ]

CHARACTER INFLUENCES: Meredith Grey ( Grey’s Anatomy ), Phoebe Buffay ( FRIENDS ), Liv Moore ( iZombie ), Fiona Gallagher ( Shameless ), Marissa Cooper ( The OC ), Lorelai Gilmore ( Gilmore Girls )

Ivy grew up privileged and lucky, besides the fact that she was white, she was also upper middle class. Her father is an architect, her mother a pediatrician running a relatively successful practice with the other pediatricians/family doctors in Sunnymead. She grew up going into Mammoth & other ski resorts closer to Sunnymead , having a ski pass and premium benefits. Her parents loved each other, she had a few younger siblings who came after her – they all wanted for nothing. Everything they wanted, they got. While this would’ve made some people bratty and even stuck up, Ivy was always so appreciative and in awe of it all. She was born with a wonder for the world, a curiosity for it and a love for the nature she grew up in. It was no surprise when she got into the arts.

At first it was all painting, dancing, and ice skating but the minute she got her hands on a piano – it was her calling. Ivy first love was the piano and the music of Chopin ( Tchaikovsky came next ), she quickly practiced, practiced and practiced. Their large home in the mountains was filled with Ivy’s mistakes & music. She was getting good, it was easy to see, and even easier to nurture. Her father especially sat with her, helping her work out the kinks in her technique or tips to get through a piece that was particularly difficult. He always cheered her on. They had dreams of Julliard, they had dreams that Ivy was more than determined to fufill.

In Highschool, she was known as an artsy kid, outgoing and fun, a little out there sometimes. Ivy came out to her school and parents as bisexual and growing up in a progressive household, she was accepted. Ivy refused to be ashamed of who she was and what she loved, she loved and loved and gave and gave. Friends who didn’t have money would be paid for, people who didn’t have lift passes or couldn’t afford meals, would always be fed and taken care of. Ivy still had that laser focus for school and for her music, because all that mattered after it was Julliard. Was becoming a pianist. Was doing what she loved and learning how to do it better.

( illness tw ) Her mother started getting sick when she was 16. At first, it was little things, like her memory fading, her sleeping in – something she never did, especially on weekdays when she had work. Then came the pain, hours she would hear her mother sob, she would sit at the foot of her parents bed. Sleep next to her but not cuddle her out of the fear of her mother causing her mother more pain. Ivy missed her second round of Julliard auditions in New York to be by her mother while she screamed, as doctors struggled to find what was wrong with her. As her mother couldn’t work, they drained through their savings looking for treatments and trying them, her father missed work being there for her mother, as well losing income.

They assured her, she could still go to school. She could still go to music school. While Ivy got into several prestigious music schools, including the Berklee College of Music and the Jacobs School of Music at the University of Indiana – she decided to stay in state. Even though her ambition was great, even though her music was everything – her family was always more important. She had to make sure her siblings were taken care of and pick up the slack her father seemed to be letting go. Still, her parents, her father, assured her it was just a rough patch. That they’d get her treatment, that they’d land on their feet okay. That money wouldn’t be an issue, that they’d take care of each other.

( gender dysphoria mention ) Ivy believed it, why wouldn’t she? Her family had been there for each other for the past two years, it had been more than hard, but they had made it. Off to college she went. College was an amazing time for her, while she wished to be at one of the better music schools, again Ivy was happy with what she had. It was in college she learned more about herself, her gender, how it all came together and clicked. While Ivy had always had body image issues, they never were the same as her friends who were girls talked about – at least not all of them. Nonbinary, femme, the words rolled off her tongue and felt right, and she fit in the definitions as well much better than she ever had when she had labeled herself a woman. Ivy started to shape the sort of person she was, and it felt amazing, she felt that maybe it was a blessing in disguise not going to music school as maybe she wouldn’t have found what she did in San Francisco At the same time, she always wondered what if. Still, being at school was wonderful, around other trans & non-binary people, around people who knew more than her & could educate her out of her bubble. The world felt infinite, she didn’t feel as tied to California & Sunnymead anymore, and thought maybe when her mother got better, when they found proper treatment for her – she could reapply to music school and go then.

It’s why when her father left her mother, sick & disabled, during her junior year of college that Ivy’s world fell apart. Everything she knew about her family – gone. Ivy went into action immediately, letting her anger & sadness be turned into fuel. Ivy adapted to her circumstances, taking on the role of caretaker for her mother and her siblings.  It was by the grace of generous friends, selling their beautiful home, and Ivy taking a job as a pianist at Snowfall, dropping out of college, that they weren’t left homeless and hungry. She didn’t give herself time to grieve, she didn’t give herself time to cry. Ivy learned about her mothers condition, learned about CRPS, learned her mothers medical history back and front. Learned how to deal with insurance companies. Learned how to go to parent teacher conferences and go to her sibling’s  IEP meetings. Ivy got guardianship of her underage siblings just to help her mother out, who had become bedridden due to the pain.

Deep down, Ivy was crestfallen, angry, in disbelief, angry again. How could her father do this? Just leave? Her may have sent child support, but there was no contact. He left them ALL. All because her mother’s illness became too much for him. As the bills started to pile up as the family wasn’t as good at downsizing as they needed to be ( Ivy included, sometimes ) and Ivy didn’t have the heart to tell them half of the time, she got another job as a Budtender in the best ( and only ) Dispensary in Sunnymead. The job was perfect for a variety of reasons – despite the good pay and tips, it would allow her access to cannabis that helped ease her mothers pain at a discounted price. Before the interview she had prepared, thoroughly, everything depended on it and when she got in she almost cried. It was then, at 22, her love for cannabis wasn’t just recreational but a true appreciation. She watched as her job helped get her mom medication that seemed to be the only thing that actually eased some of the consuming pain. That was everything.

Her mother always pushed her to continue pursuing piano, and while they had sold almost everything else valuable to rake in money for the family – the one thing Ivy kept for herself was her piano. The beautiful black Steinway they could barely fit into their now single family home, Ivy will play for her mother to lull her to sleep when she asks. Her relationship with the piano is complicated now as it sometimes reminds her of her father, but she wants nothing more to reclaim it for herself. Ivy immerses herself in other arts as well, oil painting being one of her favorite mediums when she can get her hands on it.

( drugs tw ) Something Ivy did to generate more income as her siblings need money for college is drug deal. While Ivy has a kind, generous heart, she does what she has to do and tries to scam richer families & people passing through from out of town, by selling them weed at an extremely high price. She scams them, shamelessly, and sometimes also sells LSD, Adderall, and/or cocaine.  If her work knew she was doing this, she’d get fired, but at this point Ivy needs to do it as her work hours sometimes still don’t pay all of the bills. 

Ivy may come off as childish, sometimes too impulsive or even wild, but truly she picks and chooses her moments to be this way. They’re limited and while she can be a kindred soul, Ivy in other elements away from people her age is a completely different person. At least, it’s a different facet of her personality. She’s still generous, she’s still kind, but she’s also rather blunt but private about her own issues. She’ll be honest about some things, but other things, she keeps to herself. Ivy comes off rather composed though excited about life, intrigued about the people around, and she is because reality hits her way too often. Seeming carefree and having a very hippie like mentality about some things as well as being vocal about her support for cannabis, gender expression & sexuality but Ivy doesn’t let herself lose herself completely in anything like she used to. She missed her old life, nostalgia often being an emotion that keeps her up at night, because she misses being able to actually breathe and take in everything around her without worrying about the next thing that’ll happen. A human who wants to desperately live in the moment, like she used to, who constantly feels anchored to Sunnymead. It’s a feeling that she’s trying to come to terms with because she knows she’ll have to endure it until her mother has either passed away or gotten a proper caretaker. Some days she still feels like wasted potential and on those days, she does anything she can to distract from her own mind. The question of what if is always hanging on her tongue, but she does her best to just find beauty & comfort in the now. In her surroundings and the people around her.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

 Ride or die best friends!!!! THey’ve been best friends they’re whole lives and they’re basically family at this point!!

Coworkers!!!!

Hookups/Friends with Benefits

Other LGBTQ people in town wanna link up for a JAM SESH Or just smoke Sesh!!

Other musicians!!

Enemies since Day one. They see each other and it’s ON SIGHT they’re ready to RUMBLE

People she sells drugs to!!

People who know her family/knew her dad 

Hiking / roadtripping buddies

Ivy’s always down to babysit so she could babysit your characters kids or cousins or something!!

EXES!!! 

someone give me a brotp THANKS idc what it is 

[dfhvn]

Deafheaven Grammy Nomination Interview // Billboard

Full article via Billboard Famous major-label acts like Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica and Slipknot have long dominated the best metal performance category at the Grammy Awards. But this year the field is more in tune with the underground: Four of the five nominated acts are signed to independent labels, including first-time nominee Deafheaven (ANTI-). The San Francisco band, which formed in 2010, earned a nod for its Ordinary Corrupt Human Love track "Honeycomb," an 11-minute primer on its experimental sound.

Back in December, how did you find out you were nominated?

George Clarke (vocals): I was on a flight to New York and had a layover in North Carolina that was only about an hour long. When I landed, I turned my phone back on and had a text from a friend: it was a screenshot of the nominees, saying congratulations. I could hardly believe it. I called Kerry immediately.

Kerry McCoy (guitar): I was in Paris with a friend at lunch. I was texting George about random stuff and then he called me. He knew I was in Paris so he knew it was like, 25 cents a minute -- not cheap. I thought it was an emergency. So I answered and he asked me if we got nominated for a Grammy. I was like, what? No, it can’t be! I didn’t have Internet out there so I couldn’t verify it until we got back to the apartment. It was surreal but really awesome.

I'm sure you weren't really expecting it, but was the chance of a nomination on your minds at all?

Clarke: Not really... I think we were all still on a high from how fun the touring had been and how the album was received. For us, that's really enough.

I will say that given who's been nominated the last few years -- Baroness, Code Orange, Mastodon -- it did seem like someone at the Grammys was paying more attention, which thought was very cool. I thought our category needed to be shaken up the past few years, and it has been. I’m happy to be included in a new wave of attention to younger, heavier artists.

How did "Honeycomb" come together?

McCoy: It was one of the first songs we wrote as a band after I had gotten sober [in late 2017]. I had this burst of creativity. I was listening to a ton of Pulp, Oasis, and Dinosaur Jr, stuff like that at the time. That big, Oasis-like middle section was the first thing we had come together. I took rough sketches up to Oakland and the whole song came together within a couple days. [Guitarist] Shiv [Mehra] had a bunch of leads he threw on there immediately. Chris [Johnson] added the great bass and [drummer] Dan [Tracy] was doing his stuff. It sounds easy -- not technically easy -- but easy in the way music feels when it's written by people who enjoy it.

Clarke: It exemplifies the celebratory feeling we had with this record.

The Grammys don't typically recognize music like Deafheaven's; why do you think they're coming around now?

Clarke: I don't have an answer to that... In our community, there are a lot of hardworking people who sacrifice a ton to release records like this, to stay on the road. Perhaps together we’ve drummed up enough attention for these major outlets to recognize. We just try to make meaningful music and work hard.

It felt like Deafheaven helped lead a lot of non-metal people and publications to open up to metal, especially around your 2013 sophomore album, Sunbather.

Clarke: If we played a part in being a gateway for major outlets to cover [artists] of our caliber, that's really positive.

You mentioned Baroness -- they were nominated in 2017 and Deafheaven is about to go on tour with them. Did they impart any Grammys wisdom?

Clarke: When I was in New York I had dinner with a couple of those guys who live out in Brooklyn. It was fun. They gave me a rundown of how it was, the overall weirdness of it all, how funny certain aspects are. We’re essentially foreign to this whole world, so they way they described it was just to enjoy the experience. To fill those weird shoes. They seemed to have a lot of fun and I think we will, too.

What are you going to do that day? Are you going to walk the red carpet?

Clarke: Honestly, we have no idea how it works, but from what we’ve been told thus far, yes. We’ll be doing the red carpet. We're taking our moms. From my understanding, it’s the whole thing. We’ll be dressing up and being fancy for a night.

McCoy: My mom is talking about having her friends style her and everything… She’s pumped.

Did you notice that four of the five metal nominees -- Between the Buried and Me, High on Fire, Underoath and Deafheaven -- come from independent labels?

Clarke: We did! That's something I wanted to speak on, too. These are groups of musicians who have been working, grinding for an extremely long time, some of which we’ve had the pleasure of touring and playing with before. It’s really cool that whoever is running this Grammy committee is giving these artists recognition.

McCoy: Of all the bands that are nominated, we’ve been along for the shortest amount of time. And we’ve been around for nine years!

Why do you think it takes metal bands so long to get noticed?

Clarke: Metal is not typically the most commercial genre. It hasn’t been for a while. And that’s okay. Metal is gonna be fine on its own. It has an extremely dedicated, built-in community. It has extremely dedicated musicians. And it’s never gonna go away. It's really cool to be recognized, but I don't think metal relies on the Grammys' attention. And I think the Grammys know that, too.

McCoy: It’s not something that everybody listens to. I’m sure the people at the Grammys are just as much regular people as my mom is. And my mom doesn’t really listen to metal except for us [Laughs].

You mentioned 2018 nominees Code Orange; what are some other younger metal bands you'd like to see the Grammys recognize?

Clarke: I’d love to see Inter Arma or Power Trip.

Aside from the Grammys, what are you most excited for this year?

Clarke: Just getting out in general. We're a band that thrives on touring and thrives on seeing fans all over the world.

McCoy: Even though we've done it so many times, we can't get enough of it: figuring out set lists, hanging with friends, seeing what the health food stores in random parts of the country are like.

Does a band like Deafheaven earn most of its livelihood from touring?

Clarke: For a band like us, yes. Touring and merchandising are our bread and butter. We see income from little things here and there, but touring is where we make our money.

Things worked out really well for you in that respect.

McCoy: We always used to say it felt like a scam because we used to spend money to tour. And now we get paid to do it. We keep wondering what the catch is!

Are you thinking about your next release or working on new music?

Clarke: Not heavily but it's always being talked about. The thing about our band is we're all very good friends, so we talk all the time. Kerry and I are always sharing little ideas of where we might want to go. Or little riffs here and there. Shiv is the same way. So on that level it's kind of a constant thing, but no, as far as right now we haven't sat down and planned anything.

The whole [Grammys] thing is weird for us, but we're enjoying it. It's a great way to start the year.

[castielusive]

Ray’s Miscellaneous Rec List

Several of these are unique, and a lot of my favorites are on here because of that. Assume all fics are rated explicit unless stated otherwise. WIPs are marked, but few and far between. Updates regularly.

Title: Asunder by rageprufrock

Word count: 23,817

Summary:  Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew 19:6)

Sam gets married, Dean gets a wake up call. Easy top 3.

UPDATE: Pod fic version. It’s so good. (x).

Title: Carry On by TamrynEradani

Word count: 148087

Summary: When Sam gets into Stanford, Dean needs a bigger paycheck than Bobby’s garage can give him. Luckily, he knows a guy.

Edit: The author took this one down, but she’s said she’s fine with people reading it if they have the pdf. Hit me up if you want it.

Edit 2: Podfic version: x

Title: The Breath of All Things by KismetJeska

Rating: T

Word count: 65,404

Summary: Dean Winchester was twenty-six years old when a car accident killed his father and left him paralyzed from the waist down. A year and a half later, Dean is in a wheelchair and lives in a care home in Kansas, where he spends his days waiting to die. It’s only when Castiel Novak starts volunteering at the care home that Dean starts to wonder if a changed life always equals a ruined one.

Easily number three in my favorites.

Title: Drop Anchor by almaasi

Word count: 42,124

Summary: AU. A sailor and an enemy pirate are marooned on an island together, and while awaiting rescue they accidentally achieve domestic bliss.

Or:

Dean Winchester is lieutenant of the Royal Trading Ship Echelon. On a pleasantly sunny but particularly catastrophic day, he is marooned on an island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only one man for company. That man is Castiel, captain of the black-sailed Leviathan: a pirate, no less. Given the circumstances under which they are stranded, rescue seems unlikely, and it could be aeons before a ship even comes by. The two of them may as well make the most of their own private island, personal differences be damned.

This is lovely.

Title: In the Weeds by Nanoochka

Word count: 40,265

Summary:

“Dean knew, from the minute he laid eyes on Chef Castiel MacCarthy, the day would come that he would have to kidnap the man and dump the body in the darkest, dirtiest crack den in Ireland. Given that this was Dublin city, it wouldn’t be hard to find.”

Title: make you whole by casfallsinlove

Word count: 4,531

Summary: In which there is a funeral, mixed-up feelings, quiet motel rooms, and a long journey home.

Title: 300 Things by cautionzombies

Word count: ~76,500

Summary: Dean’s life at twenty-four makes him feel like he’s forty–he works two jobs to help pay bills for his house and put his genius little brother through private school, and has spent six years (on and off, let’s be honest) working on his mechanical engineering degree at KU. With so much of his life devoted to his family, Dean has little time in his schedule for class and no time for social interaction. Then, while getting his classes together for the fall, he finds himself in a do-or-die situation: He must take his last literature class now, his spring already filled with those left for his major…except that none of the English classes will fit his schedule. This is how Dean grovels and begs Dr. Castiel Milton to make a special arrangement for him, and Dr. Milton does.

Easy top 5. Ashton’s art is what got me to read this one in the first place, and I didn’t notice it linked anywhere in the fic, so I’m sticking one here quickly.  [x]

Update: Tenoko1 did an audio fic and I am completely enamored with it. [x]

Title: Significant by holyhael

Word count: 4,547

Summary: Dean Smith’s and Castiel’s unconventional morning after.

This is? Amazing?

Title: There’s No Going Back by Catchclaw

Word count: 2983

Summary: Some of the things you find on vacation are hard to bring home.

Dean Smith/ Endverse!Cas is quickly becoming my favorite thing ever.

Title: put your hands on my waist by mcpadalackles

Word count: 2,182

Summary: “Dean is sitting at the window seat in their dark bedroom, the one that opens onto the fire escape. He must be cold. He’s wearing nothing but boxers, miles and miles of lovely bare skin exposed to the cool breeze drifting in. If he is, he doesn’t seem to care.”

Short but sweet. One of my top 10.

Title: Bicker by followyourenergy

Word count: 7947

Summary: Sam Winchester is nervous.  He’s taking his girlfriend of eight months, Jess, to meet his brother, Dean, and his brother’s best friend and roommate, Castiel.  Sam loves his brother and loves Cas, but it seems like all the longtime friends do is bicker and he hates it.   Sure enough, from the moment they arrive Dean and Cas are at it.  Sam thinks he knows what’s best for the two of them, but Sam ends up learning a few things about love and relationships that he never expected.

[NEW] Title: Smells Like Queer Spirit by ChasingRabbits

Word count: 8,364

Summary: It's been ten years since Sam Winchester has seen his brother. However, just as he's come to terms with the likelihood that he will never see Dean again, fate (and the internet) intervene and Sam is finally able to track him down.

What he finds throws him for a monstrous, brain-scrambling loop.

A series with a lot of variety. Not every piece is my favorite, but this one and the last two are great.

[NEW] Title: Mr. & Mr. Smith by amarillogrande

Word count: 26,550

Summary: Dean and Castiel Winchester are a normal married couple, living a normal life in a normal suburb, working normal jobs—both as secret deadly assassins. When they find each other as targets, their quest to kill each other leads them to learn a lot more about each other than they ever did in five (or six) years of marriage.

Canonverse and (mostly) canon divergent:

[NEW] Title: A Little Company by VioletHaze

Word count: 48,585

Summary: After Cas became human, he and Dean finally stopped dancing around what existed between them. The vulnerability of the newly-fallen angel scared the hell out of Dean, scared him enough to decide that he was ready to stop pretending and make some serious changes.

Now, five years later, they'd retired from hunting to live a "normal" life in Sioux Falls complete with a house and a brand-new adopted baby daughter.  Against all odds, Dean had found that the civilian life he'd always scoffed at nearly overwhelmed him with joy. 

But Dean knew better than to bask in it; the world was a dangerous place and a happiness like that depended on him safeguarding his little piece of it.

[NEW] Title: Hunting for Faith by  perunamuusa and riseofthefallenone

Word count: 270,952

Summary: It starts a few days earlier.

Castiel first notices it in the middle of the night when the dreams of fire and screams have kept him awake. He’s kneeling before the altar, praying, when the glass in the windows start to shake, the very air vibrating around him. Castiel is on his feet and reaching for the gun tucked into the back of his pants as the shutters over the windows start to rattle.

Title: Bring up the Deep by beenghosting

Word count: 22,679

Summary: They went back and forth on whether or not to make the drive until Sam found an article in the town’s local paper dated a week earlier about a lobster fisherman who swore a monster sank his boat.

Case fic!

Title: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by amarillogrande

Word count: 22,237

Summary: Heaven is white.

Well. Isn’t that fucking stereotypical

Dean isn’t really sure how he got here. Or even why he’s here. And hell, for all the times the Winchesters have died, he thinks he ought to know the drill by now. But what he doesn’t know is when most folks go, they find something different.

There’s a system God put in place. That when you’re gone (for good) there’s a couple things you gotta do first.

There are five people waiting for you.They are the five people you meet in heaven.

Best canonverse fic I have ever read.

Title: Faith Healer by punkascas

Word count: 75,087

Summary: Dean hates faith healers. Scam artists and power-hungry dicks, all of them. But with Sam nearing the end of his rope and desperate for a way to keep their father’s last words from being true, Dean has no choice but to turn to the enigmatic and irascible Castiel, more tattooed junkie than spiritual leader, in hopes of finding a way to cure Sam. Yet Castiel hides dangerous secrets, and Dean soon learns they have more to worry about than just Yellow Eyes and Sam’s growing demonic abilities. War is coming. Canon divergent after 2.10.

Title: Dean (and Cas’) Top 13 Zepp Traxx by pantheon_of_discord

Word count: 82,450

Summary: Dean eases Baby down the frontage road, trying not to look in the rearview mirror as his home gets smaller and smaller behind him.

He’s done this a hundred times. He’s driven down this road in the soft morning light, heading out to some little town in some distant corner of the country. This is a job like any other.

“It’s not like we’re never coming back,” Cas says from the passenger seat.

Dean and Cas and the open road, to the tune of Led Zeppelin. A post-series story in thirteen parts.

Title: where the weeds take root by beenghosting

Word Count: 16,450 (so far)

Summary: “Are you happy? Y’know. Just—being here,” Dean says, gesturing to the yard with his beer bottle. “Being with—I mean, you used to fight in celestial wars and—and save the world. Now you’re growing vegetables and talking about chickens.”

Title: new testament [just more of the same ‘verse] by outpastthemoat

Word Count: 46,880

Summary: No heaven. No hell.  Just Dean and Cas and the status quo.

[mabel-but-slytherin]

Ghost of Adam - A Superphantom Crossover (1/1)

Cross-posted on ffn and ao3 with author’s notes.

Despite what tabloid rumors and his vast fortune may lead the average person to believe, Vlad Masters did not have an army of servants to care for his vast mansion.

Yes, living in a large, empty home all by himself could feel lonely, but that was why Vlad filled the endless foyers and sitting rooms with memorabilia of the things he could not have. Anything else would just make him feel emptier. The job of cleaning the vast corners and high chandeliers was much more easily handled by a few weak spirits he employed, though he knew the feudalistic nature of the Ghost Zone too well to keep no more than the few families he would need. Despite what Daniel and his improper friends insinuated, the half-ghost businessman had no desire to take over the world, merely obtain the power necessary to finally have what he wants. Except what he needed to keep up appearances, Vlad Masters did not indulge in things that would bring company.

A normal human may complain that the situation left the Wisconsin estate feeling rather dead. Should that happen, Vlad could all too easily see himself flashing some fangs and the 'scary eyes' and remarking that the sentiments didn't bother him in the slightest.

Right now, however, the only complaint Vlad had with his housekeeping was that they were absolutely useless in entertaining callers who came to the door, given the whole visibly dead thing. It was late on a Thursday night, almost early Friday morning, and Vlad had been contented to spend the rest of the evening upgrading the latest Fenton ray his spies stole for him as well as tinker with a number of his own original designs when the unmistakable sound of the doorbell broke his concentration. Gritting his teeth, Vlad tried to ignore it and return to his soldering when the sound echoed more persistently.

The billionaire was certainly not expecting visitors.

With a mutter of 'oh fiddlesticks' the businessman peeled off his ectoplasm-resistant gloves, shrugged into his suit jacket and tie (it better be someone important at this hour) and stomped his way downstairs.

The ringing had gone quiet after its third chime while Vlad was still in the lab, and the man angrily plotted the ways he would get back at whoever disturbed him if they ran away before he had a chance to face them. That was one benefit of living in the middle of nowhere: even if they were in a car it'd be easy to invisibly chase them and pinpoint exactly who it dared play Ding Dong Ditch.

There was in fact a person at the door when Vlad slammed it open with a scowl, although not at all what he was expecting. She was young, in her early twenties, with long brown hair and a plain face that had an innocent, natural beauty. The look was emphasized by her modest white dress, but quickly fell apart at the small amounts of dirt on the fabric and what appeared to be a sizeable bloodstain on the middle of her side. Looking down her feet were barefoot, caked in enough dirt to show that she had been walking for a while that way, but not enough to make it seem she went out of her way to dirty herself.

She had an almost serene smile on her face, but Vlad had met enough sharks to see the hunger behind it.

"Hi." Her smile grew slightly wider as her gaze finished taking in his appearance in turn and the billionaire knew she was trying to appear slightly bashful, despite her inner confidence drowning out any attempt at subterfuge. "Can I come in?"

"I'm sorry miss, I don't get involved in this kind of thing." Vlad all but spat, getting ready to slam the door in her face. Some of the details were unexpected, but Vlad had dealt with exactly this type of scam before, had even used it on a few competitors. Send a pretty, lonely girl to someone rich and famous's house at night and see if you get any good blackmail material out of it. Especially for a man living alone almost any outcome could be scandalous: at best you get an affair, at worst you get him coldly shunning her to the streets or taking her in for unsupervised 'alone time.'

Vlad already had a reputation for being cold and ruthless, whoever would set this up would be disappointed by the lack of a headline they found themselves with.

Her hand reached out and easily caught the door, despite the heavy wood being at the fastest point of its momentum. "I'm not wanting to do anything like that." She murmured, her face looking slightly disappointed by his rejection but still holding that mockingly serene smile, as if she was always on the inside of a joke with the world.

"I just wanted to get to meet you face to face. I've heard so much about you and couldn't help my curiosity." Her fingers trailed along the wood grain of the ornate door in a way that was not helping expel Vlad's preconception, and he mentally pinched his nose at the thought of either a crazed seductive fan or a very determined blackmailer.

"It's such a pleasure to finally put a face to the legends…" She pursed her lips and somehow managed to whisper the last word in his ear from more than two feet away. "Plasmius."

Vlad's blood ran cold. Perhaps she did have a secret in with the world.

"Wh-who are you? How do you know that name? Did Daniel put you up to this?" The last question came out just to hide the twinge of fear creeping in on the billionaire. While he and Daniel may have their fights and games, the boy should know that there were boundaries. If he told a stranger about this as a sick joke he'd…

"No, I don't mean to hurt you at all, Vladimir." She kept her voice to the same soft even tone Vlad once mislabeled as seductive, leaning in closer to him with all of the common signals but none of the intentions. Her finger trailed down along his tie and pulled it out of his suit jacket, yet she never tried to touch his skin. "I promise you I just came here to meet you, and maybe to have a little chat."

Vlad swallowed, promising himself it was just nerves, and let his voice harden. "You never told me your name."

The girl leaned her head back to meet his eye and let that knowing grin spread all the way across her face, as if she held the answers to the universe. "I'm Eve."

Knowing who she was, Vlad wouldn't be surprised if she did.

Even though she got her children to let her out of Purgatory in order to start a war, Eve would be lying if she said she wasn't trying to have a little fun during her time on Earth. There were, however, very few things Eve cared about other than her children, and like any good mother her sole focus was entirely on what would keep them safe. For that reason alone she had little desire to leave Purgatory before Crowley started torturing her firstborns, and few motivations to stick around when she was done.

It was rare that she ever focused on something other than her children, so when Eve had heard of a creature that fascinated her as much as her own monsters from within the realm of Purgatory she was for once disappointed at her imprisonment. Once she starting planning an escape she promised herself she'd find time to visit when she was Earth-side.

Ghosts always called out slightly to Eve, in-so-far as they were twisted versions of the human soul that could prey on and kill the species they once were. They were far nobler than demons, who rotted in Hell and their own militaristic hierarchy, and Eve respected their individuality and the soul that Hell beat out. Eve valued the immortal soul as more than just a power supply, and considered it the core of her offspring, to be protected just as their bodies were. There were no classes of monsters beyond the distinction of her firstborns, and Eve only made her monsters an army because she needed them. Her battle plans were merely to turn all of humanity and starve Hell rather than put her children in harm's way.

Unlike demons ghosts lived (died? As a resident of an afterlife herself Eve was in no position to judge) largely in solitude and were ruled by emotions and lost souls. The Mother of All in Eve had long yearned to adopt them into the fold of her family, but Death and God were persistent that those who refused a Reaper be left alone in punishment and insisted that she already had her own supply of souls.

As the one primordial beast who still believed in balance, and was safe and immortal because of it, she wouldn't fight against the status quo unless encroached upon first.

But the man in front of her… was amazing.

Human and ghost, Dead and lingering but with a soul that had yet to be committed to a final destination. He had never met a reaper or ignored their advice, had never died and been brought back as another creature. He wasn't cursed into a haunt by Death's taboo.

He got his powers through an accident. And he had turned.

Eve liked to think that that made him fair game.

And while she had spent the past couple weeks flitting from town to town, hitchhiking her way and greeting her children and turning every human she met in hopes of working out the kinks in the perfect monster for her plans, Eve couldn't help but dream up a more impossible design. It would be impractical for the entire human race, a change hard to force and noticeable to the victim, but not a single human had discovered the current halfas' secret and that was a level of discretion that she admired.

The ectoplasm she could sense pulsing through veins of the man before her was a paint Eve had never had access to before, and the artist in her longed to reach her fingers out and smear it across his canvas.

She could make him such a precious child, her heart swelled at just the thought of it, and she just knew he would learn to appreciate every gift she gave him.

He had been so alone. An Alpha without a Mother, coming into himself on his own and convinced that his beautiful gift was a disease. Abandoned by the pair who made him, rejected by the woman he loved after she changed his life, spurned by his only descendant: Eve had to push herself back from reaching out to him and keeping the man by her side forever. He would be the perfect general, his resources and technology helping her spread her newest creation even further, his experience with supernatural experimentation maybe even able to help smooth out chinks in her beta testing.

But she held herself back. Vlad Plasmius was an Alpha in his own right. And she had too much love for creation, be it hers or the God she was modeled after or anyone else's to mar such a stunning original.

Even if she was tempted to make improvements, she wasn't the little girl vessel she appeared to the world, and she could control herself. But she still yearned.

"I can help you." Eve voiced as she followed Plasmius into his sitting room, unafraid to do a small twirl to take in the grandeur of the place as if she really was her virgin vessel before sitting on a purple and gold armchair. There was a love seat nearby that remained empty, and Eve had to bite her lip at the thought that that's where they'd sit if she turned him.

She just had to keep remembering that he was already turned, despite not being one of hers.

Vlad walked briskly out of the room and returned with a teapot, his eyes still glancing her over with caution clear in his gaze. He was confused and unsure, and clearly not expecting her behavior after what he had heard of someone so feared. But he still stood strong, with the intimidating aura of a man (with just a little more leaking through) who fought and cheated his way to the top, and would do whatever it took to hold his position.

Eve couldn't help herself from being relaxed in his home. His wealth didn't make her nervous; it made her proud.

"I didn't think that ghosts fell under the category of monsters you look after." The man only responded after he poured her tea and sat down, using the distraction of his own full cup to avoid eye contact. His gaze met her only seconds later, however. He was far too used to intimidation games to spend long being afraid.

"I already said I don't want to harm you. I don't have anything against anyone except Crowley." Eve saw Vlad's face curl slightly in disgust at the name and let her smile become more genuine. She tilted her head at his piercing gaze and pressed the irony of the situation. "Is that alright? I thought you two did business."

Vlad stiffened, either from fear of her mentioning his friendship with her mortal enemy or the fact that the Mother of All was slightly teasing. "Crowley's deals are profitable from time to time and we each admire the other's resources, but neither of us are a fan of competition. Crowley throughout his reign has had a habit of sticking Hell's fingers where they simply don't belong, and he isn't opposed to backstab a friend if he thinks they might one day have the strength to become an enemy."

"I suppose you could put it that way." Eve kept sipping her tea. She came here to meet the soul behind Vlad Plasmius, she needed him to make the first move.

And within less than a minute of waiting he did, leaning forward in impatience as she calmly sipped her drink. "That doesn't explain why you personally came looking for me. My businesses are involved in very little outside of human and ghosts and I know for certain none of our arrangements involve what he is doing to your monsters. You have no reason to come after me."

Eve couldn't help the burst of anger at his phrasing, "What Crowley is doing is torturing my children and I am going to do everything I can to hunt him down and kill him!"

She forced herself to lean back and take another sip of her tea, recognizing the faint brew of a rare plant that had the property to temporarily calm souls. She had no soul, at least in mortal terms, so it wasn't like it would have an effect, but the thought was cute. However looking up at the man trying to hide his primordial fear of her Eve figured perhaps the brew was intended for himself.

"I won't apologize, but don't worry. My visit here is completely separate." Eve took another sip of her tea. "I wouldn't lie to you. Like I said I wanted to meet you."

Vlad's eyes narrowed "Why?"

Eve didn't look down or away as most would. Instead she turned her gaze right back into his red ones. "Because I look after firstborns."

He paled. "I'm not your monster. I'm-"

"-Not a human, not a ghost. You're the first of your kind." Eve cut Vlad off, her voice laced with an almost seductively reverent understanding, made all the deadlier in its sincerity. "The oldest, the strongest, you've had so much time alone to master your own powers and it's made you incredible." Eve leaned forward and in her eyes Vlad saw the hunger of an all-powerful creature faced with the one thing she was denied.

A passing thought wondered if this was what Daniel saw when he looked at him.

"Any decent mother will always recognize her children, but a good mother can pick out and feel for an orphan child as well." She pulled his empty teacup out of his lax fingers with a soft grip, still never touching his hands. "You've come so far on your own, and made yourself into such a beautiful creature that I don't need to make you mine to care for what I see."

Eve cleared away the dishes to the side table where a servant would've waited had Vlad employed any as she continued. "You know a war is coming, but I'm not asking you to fight. You've already done too much on your own for a mother to ask that. Just let me help you get what you want in the aftermath." Coming back Eve settled herself on the love seat she noted earlier at a closer angle to her present target.

Taking in his expression for the first time now that she returned, Eve could make out the surprise at her words, followed quickly by suspicion at the unexpected gift. Of course he would be. He was a businessman: he wasn't used to anything coming that easily. Especially not when he was expecting to be threatened or coerced by something stronger. Both the man and the monster knew from experience that that never ended well.

It only made Eve want to care for him even more.

"Why are you offering me anything? Why do you care about what I've been through?"

Eve smiled. "You remind me of my children, and I give gifts to anyone who does. Gifts I'm not sure you would accept," she let a small frown settle on her lips. "Not to mention it would be a shame to change another firstborn. Just because you're not mine doesn't mean you deserve to die. Or to be alone."

"What are you proposing?" Vlad's glare still cut like ice, as if he was the other one who held her interest. The billionaire didn't seem any more convinced by her sentiments.

"My monsters have already started building an army, and soon they'll start moving even faster. I'll turn the entire human population if I have to, until Crowley lets my children go or runs out of souls to keep his operations running." Her hand reached out to his sleeve, caressing in a way that wouldn't change him. "I didn't want to hurt you by involving those you love without asking, so I made a stop along the way. That, and I wanted to meet you to make sure you were someone I wanted to work with."

He pulled his hand back. "What are your terms?"

Eve sighed, running that hand back through her hair. "Don't tell Crowley of my plans and I'll let your family live. Your real family. We both know that ones who turned you and your own kind run deeper than blood." She could see that moment that she finally caught Plasmius's interest.

"Tell me where he is, or at least prove to me you looked," she met the halfa's eyes to show that she'd know if he lied, "and I'll bring them back to you. My gift."

Eve smiled her most maternal smile and Vlad stared, his posture helplessly losing its formality for a moment to wonder. "But you'll-"

Knowing they were going down a dangerous path Eve cut him off before they reached the technicalities. "They won't be minions. I said I'll let them live and I'll keep them safe. They're your family, and if you'll let me…" Eve leaned all the way out of the love seat, pushing herself onto the armrest so she could lean a breath away from his ear. For the dozenth time she swallowed the temptation to turn the man before her.

"If you let me, by extension they'll be my family too."

Vlad pushed himself until he was sinking in the high-backed chair, panic at her advance driving out all previous lines of questioning like Eve planned. "I'm not one of your monsters, and I don't want to be."

Eve let her face fall and backed away as she let him pretend he had his victory. "You may not be my monster, but you will always be a firstborn, and all firstborns are my most precious children. Just accepting that makes us family enough."

With that she danced out of the chair, loving the way her virgin vessel let her smile serenely at the world and care with all the human's heart as she gave it to those who no longer had them. "I am so glad to finally get to meet you, but I need to keep moving before my children get jealous. I hope you'll enjoy my gift when I next see you."

She wanted to smirk at the way Vlad was torn between a snarl and a polite smile. He was just as fun to play with as to care for. "I think you seem to already know perfectly well what I'd like."

She smiled back to him. "I just want to help you." And she did. She was just glad to clear up that she could do so in a way that helped herself.

Without needing Vlad to show her the way Eve started towards the front door, her bare feet echoing across the marble as she thought of how this would fit in with her plans.

She'd be sure to be in Amity Park when her army got to turning it. She'd either let one of her more violent children kill Jack Fenton or she'd bring him to Plasmius as a peace offering to sooth his anger. Maybe she'd even let Maddie or Jasmine Fenton remain human if that'd calm him even more. There was little harm in leaving one or two human souls remaining for Crowley to potentially prey on, that was far too little to keep his war machine running. In fact, she was planning on offering a similar deal to the Winchesters in exchange for their help.

She'd need to win Vlad's favor back after all, with what she planned to do the crown jewel of his desires. As much as the mother in her yearned for the ghostly orphan who gave her the hope of experimenting with ectoplasm, nothing would allow her to put another creature before her children.

She promised him none of them would be minions. She didn't say they wouldn't be monsters.

Because if Vlad Plasmius was the hope of new species, the masterpiece of fate and circumstance she had to refrain from experimenting on, Danny Phantom was the prodigy she couldn't wait to take under her wing and recreate in her style. He was already strong, and had a title among the ghosts she once wished she could turn, but still he was human. A human turned monster due to the interference of another of his species, with enough of a blast to cause instant transformation and avoid the pesky dance with death she could smell in Vlad's past. Even if Vlad hadn't intended Danny to become a halfa when he sabotaged the Ghost Portal blueprints in an attempt on Jack's life, neither he nor Eve were disappointed in the result.

The calling card of a monster versus a new brand of spirit was the ability for an existing to infect a human to become like them. Ghosts had never done that before, and more than anything that technicality gave Eve all the leeway she needed if ever confronted by the wrath of Death or God.

Vlad had given her with so many gifts and unique abilities that Eve couldn't help but thank him in person, even if she had to hold off on giving him her favorite gift in return. Still, once she turned his family he would be family in turn, and Eve giggled at the perfect end to this incredible anomaly.

It was disappointing she could never own Vlad because he was an Alpha, and Alphas were off-limits. But there's no hierarchy beyond firstborns either in monsters or ghosts, meaning everything else is fair game. So while she loathed the limits on what she could do she could still tie him closer with everything he desired, giving and taking and twisting his soul as much as if he were truly her Alpha.

And Eve couldn't wait for the chance to make the world's second halfa an Alpha in his own right.

[sanguisfulgur]

✩ - Exactly What You Hate

The Ultimate Relationship Tag Send ‘✩’ for the following:

Disagreements:

Who is more likely to raise their voice? CiceroWho threatens to leave but never actually does? TheoWho actually keeps their word and leaves? CiceroWho trashes the house? TheoDo either of them get physical? Both of them.How often do they argue/disagree? Well all couples bicker but serious arguments happen rarely, they just get NASTY when they do. Who is the first to apologise? Shockingly Theo. 

Sex:

Who is on top? Theo usually.Who is on the bottom? Well obviously Cicero. Who has the strangest desires? They’re both old af vampires I don’t think anything is weird to them now. Any kinks? How long do you have because the list is long as hell. Who’s dominant in bed? Both but definitely moreso THEO. Is head ever in the equation? Always.If so, who is better at performing it? They both probably think they are lol. Ever had sex in public? YES Who moans the most? CiceroWho leaves the most marks? They never last long but Theo.Who screams the loudest? CiceroWho is the more experienced of the two? Again, they’re both old as hell vampires.Do they ‘fuck’ or ‘make love’? Both.Rough or soft? RoughHow long do they usually last? Long enough that a human would’ve probably died from exhaustion. Is protection used? No, it’s not needed. Does it ever get boring? Nope. Where is the strangest place they’d have sex? I don’t even want to think about where these two have done the nasty. Because where HAVEN’T they done it. 

Family:

Do your muses plan on having children/or have children? It hasn’t come up yet.If so, how many children do your muses want/have? Ditto.Who is the favorite parent? Think it would depend on the kid in question.Who is the authoritative parent? Theo. Who is more likely to allow the children to have a day off school? Cicero.Who lets the children indulge in sweets and junk food when the other isn’t around? Cicero.Who turns up to extra curricular activities to support their children? Both.Who goes to parent teacher interviews? BothWho changes the diapers? I imagine this usually comes down to a coin toss.Who gets up in the middle of the night to feed the baby? They take turnsWho spends the most time with the children? Both of them would try to spend equal time with them. Who packs their lunch boxes? TheoWho gives their children ‘the talk’? BothWho cleans up after the kids? Both, but most likely Theo because Cicero weasels his way out of it. Who worries the most? Considering the past loss of a child, surprisingly Theo. Who are the children more likely to learn their first swear word from? Cicero. 

Affection:

Who likes to cuddle? Both.Who is the little spoon? Cicero.Who gets naughty in the most inappropriate of places? BOTH OF THEM. Who struggles to keep their hands to themself?  Again, both of them. How long can they cuddle until one becomes uncomfortable? Probably depends on the day, the temperature, the grip the other has ect. Who gives the most kisses? CiceroWhat is their favourite non-sexual activity? Oh man I’m going to say cooking together (or going out to dinner) or Theo playing piano whilst Cicero gets to listen. Where is their favourite place to cuddle? In bed. Who is more likely to playfully grope the other?  THEO. How often do they get time to themselves? Pretty often I’d say?

Sleeping:

Who snores? Not often, but Theo. If both do, who snores the loudest? See above.Do they share a bed or sleep separately? Share.If they sleep together, do they cozy up together or lay far apart? here is much cuddling happening which they will deny. Who talks in their sleep? CiceroWhat do they wear to bed? Underwear or nothing. Are either of your muses insomniacs? No.Can sleeping pills be found by the bedside? Probably not?Do they wrap their limbs around each other or just lay side by side? They’re tangled dumbs. Who wakes up with bed hair? Both of them. Who wakes up first? Cicero, but Theo wakes up pretty soon after. Who prepares breakfast in bed for the other? Theo does or Cicero. What is their favourite sleeping position? Probably spooning. Who hogs the sheets? CICERODo they set an alarm each night? No, their poor vampire ears. Can a television be found in their bedroom? I… honestly don’t know. Maybe at Theo’s place? Who has nightmares? BOTH. Who has ridiculous dreams? Cicero probably.Who sprawls out and takes up most of the bed? Theo omg. Who makes the bed? Theo.What time is bed time? Probably soon after they’re both up. Any routines/rituals before bed? Cicero takes off his ‘face’ (as in makeup), Theo tends to read a little and I’ll state the obvious: they fuck. Often. Who’s the grumpiest when they wake up? Cicero purely based on how he fusses over his appearance in the morning. 

Work:

Who is the busiest? TheoWho rakes in the highest income? It probably changes each month. Are any of your muses unemployed? No but they’re not exactly ‘employed’ either. Who takes the most sick days? Neither of them have employers so. Who is more likely to turn up late to work? Same as above. Who sucks up to their boss? Neither. What are their jobs? Theo… ahem… specialises in blackmail and bribery. Cicero is a little computer scam artist. Who stresses the most? Theo.Do your muses enjoy or despise their careers/occupations? Definitely enjoy.Are your muses financially stable? Yup. 

Home:

Who does the washing? Both.Who takes out the trash? TheoWho does the ironing? Both. Who does the cooking? Both.Who is more likely to burn the house down just trying? NeitherWho is messier? They’re both neat but probably Cicero by a smidge. Who leaves the toilet roll empty?Who leaves their dirty clothes on the floor? Unless they’re about to screw, neither. Who forgets to flush the toilet? Neither.Who is the prankster around the house? Cicero probably omg. Who loses the car keys when it comes time to go somewhere? TheoWho mows the lawn? TheoWho answers the telephone? CiceroWho does the vacuuming? TheoWho does the groceries? BothWho takes the longest to shower? CiceroWho spends the most time in the bathroom? Cicero

Miscellaneous:

Is money a problem? Nope.How many cars do they own? Not sure, I know Theo owns several.Do they own their home or do they rent? Own.Do they live near the coast or deep in the countryside? I’d say closer to the coast. Do they live in the city or in the country? City.Do they enjoy their surroundings? Absolutely. What’s their song? Flesh by Simon Curtis tbh. What do they do when they’re away from each other? A lot of things like??? Their jobs, read, interact with other people, shop, do whatever they want/have to do y’know??Where did they first meet? I’m… terrible and can’t actually remember I need to read their first threads again. How did they first meet? It was not pleasant because ROMAN and GERMANIAN. Who spends the most money when out shopping? CiceroWho’s more likely to flash their assets? CICEROWho finds it amusing when the other trips over? omg they both probably do.Any mental issues? A TRUCKLOAD. Who’s terrified of bugs? Neither?Who kills the spiders around the house? Neither, the spiders are left in peace or shooed outside. Their favourite place? Honestly probably some high-end restaurant or the theatreWho pays the bills? Sometimes they slit but usually Theo spoils Cicero. Do they have any fears for their future? Probably a lot, they both have a lot of issues. Who’s more likely to surprise the other with a fancy dinner? Theo is. Who uses up all of the hot water? Cicero. Who’s the tallest? TheoWho’s more likely to just randomly hop into the shower with the other? Theo, not that Cicero minds. Who wanders around in their underwear? Cicero because he has pretty lingerie that must be shown of. Who sings the loudest when singing along to the radio? Cicero??What do they tease each other about? EVERYTHING. Who is more likely to cringe at the other’s fashion sense at times? Neither because they both have the most excellent tastes in their opinions. Do they have mutual friends? Probably by now. Who crushed first? Well it started as hate sex but, Theo was the first one to acknowledge and admit it was becoming something more. Any alcohol or substance related problems? No, they both like a drink but it’s not easy to get them drunk. Annbbd I wouldn’t be surprised i they’d both dabbled in hardcore drugs in the past. Who is more likely to stumble home, drunk, at 3am? NeitherWho swears the most? Cicero, Theo surprisingly doesn’t swear often. 

[iamwhelmed]

Not Rika, Right?

Okay, so this is actually a one-shot I promised my friend that I’d do a few months back, but I haven’t gotten around to it until now. She’s such a great beta reader and I’d be hard pressed to find somebody who knows writing like she does! <3 Thanks, girl!

My first MM fanfic. I haven’t completed anybody’s route but Yoosung’s best one, so please keep that in mind as you read! >~< This is an alternate good end to his route, one where he and Seven don’t confront Unknown and Yoosung doesn’t nearly lose a damn eye! How that works? I have no idea. That’s just what’s going on here.

Summary: "The room fell silent, again. It was funny how three words she’d said so often to him, something she thought she’d understood before, could be breaking her the way she always worried it’d been breaking him. He was too quiet for her, too quiet and his hands were too tense and he wasn’t moving." Alternate Good End to Yoosung’s route. MC meets the guests at the big event, but some old attendees spark the idea in MC’s mind that maybe, just maybe, she could never fill Rika’s shoes, and trying will only bring disappointment to everyone around her. Maybe leaving the RFA before that happens would be the best idea...

It’s here on AO3!

They’d all said the same thing to her; it was in a different way each time, other words—same drift. She supposed she shouldn’t have been too surprised, right? After all, it was what she’d been repeating to Yoosung for the better part of a week.

She wasn’t Rika.

She said it before, a million times, because she wanted what any self-respecting human being would want: to be loved not for the old life Yoosung had been so convinced she was offering, but the new life she really was.

But now she was standing in the middle of a ballroom filled to the walls with strangers who carried pockets heavy with cash, and they were all looking at her the way she felt the entire rest of the organization had been—a newcomer, a rookie coordinator, a stranger who’d stumbled into one of the most stressful jobs she’d ever had.

Above all else, they looked at her like a replacement for Rika; Yoosung looked at her like a replacement for Rika.

“You weren’t what I was expecting” said one guest. “How fortunate they found someone to do such important work” said another. Her stomach had swelled with butterflies, and she might have smiled had the guest she’d been speaking to not added: “Her eyes were much larger than yours are, dear. They were always filled with such hope…”

The interaction left a bitter taste on her mouth, inching somewhere between the back of her tongue and the tip of it, dried because her mouth had been left hanging open, searching for a response that never came to mind. She stood tall, with her hands folded in her lap, still as the ice sculpture Jumin had all but demanded at one point. People moved around her, faces with names she couldn’t place, voices of the other RFA members floating somewhere in the distance. Her head fell low, fingers clenching and unclenching, twisting around in her dress and hiking it up unintentionally.

She was not Rika. She couldn’t fill that void in the hearts of her friends, or even the man she loved: she was useless. A total stranger, waltzing in and taking over a loved, respected woman’s work? She’d been fooling herself. Everyone had been so kind, she must have gotten wrapped up in it all, tricked herself into thinking she could ever come close to holding a place in their hearts the way Rika had. She’d heard stories about the kindness Rika showed, the compassion and the willpower and the drive to be somebody amazing—all under the impression that she wasn’t already.

But she’d captured the affections—the love, the friendship, the loyalty—of everyone around her; Rika truly had been one of a kind.

The stranger that’d imprudently taken her place was not.

There were things she knew she could have done better, things that she knew Rika might have handled with no problem. She’d driven some of the RFA’s older guests to brush the party off, stick their noses in the air and run for the other direction. Rika could have convinced them to come, she was sure. Rika was beautiful and strong and smart and dedicated and she just couldn’t—she could never—measure up to her.

Truly, that was why she’d continued telling Yoosung she and Rika were different. Some part of her, deeper than she’d ever dared to dig, knew she’d only disappoint him. She’d eventually disappoint all of them. They’d all come to realize the newest member of RFA was a cheap knockoff version of the woman they’d all admired, and she’d have to hear it for real—see it for real.

“It’s been nice talking to you,” she could almost see Yoosung’s tiny avatar popping across her smartphone’s screen. “It’s just that, I think I got ahead of myself. You aren’t really… what I thought you’d be.”

Jumin and Jaehee might agree, Jaehee softer than he’d inevitably be about it. “She certainly is different, isn’t she?”

“She did good work, but I doubt she can keep it up the way Rika did.”

Zen and Seven might try to jump in and say something to stick up for her, but the truth would be, certainly, that behind all of those words, they’d agree.

V wouldn’t have much to say on the matter, probably—if he responded at all.

She grinded her teeth. No, she was being petty. She knew they all had their own struggles; V was no different. Rika probably wouldn’t have sunk so low. Rika would have worked harder to become better and rise to the place she wanted to be. She wanted to do that, too—she just knew, no matter how hard she worked, she could never be her. Jaehee would see it, Zen would see it, Seven would see it, Jumin and V would see it…

Yoosung would, too, and he’d realize he was never really in love with her.

The red carpet beneath her feet grew darker; tads of red darkened like small pelts of rain, falling along the soft floor. She was crying, salty tears running down the top bones of her cheeks, along the bridge of her nose, and falling away because she didn’t want anyone to notice her wiping at them.

“The last party was much classier…”

“I did hear this was put together in a week…”

“How irresponsible…”

It was getting harder to breath.

She was a scam artist, a con—a fraud.

Her shoulders began shaking under the weight of every crushing realization, every painful way she could imagine being kicked from the organization she’d truly, honestly come to love. What was she to do? It was going to come, no matter what. She’d mess up something big, something Rika certainly would have gotten right, and then the world that’d started to surround her would come crashing down in fiery, lung-choking masses. She couldn’t take that. She couldn’t deal with seeing Yoosung’s face light up her phone less and less, hear the passion in his voice begin dwindling as he realized just how far below Rika she was.

She couldn’t do this… She couldn’t do this!

She took the side exit out, the tall metal door that was supposed to be for emergencies but she’d find her way home from there.

She reached inside of her purse, missing her phone again and again because her hand wouldn’t stop trembling.

  “I can’t find her!” Yoosung was beginning to panic—he knew it, and Jaehee certainly knew it. She didn’t look much better than he did, he thought. Her glasses had to be readjusted every few seconds, and the tie around her neck, usually so elegant and neat, was loosened around her throat. She sighed and turned to meet Jumin, who was approaching from the hallway, hands folded behind his back.

“Please tell me you found her.”

Jumin exhaled and hung his head. “I’m afraid not. Has there been any word from Seven?”

“He and Zen haven’t checked back in yet, but I’m sure they will soon.”

Yoosung swallowed hard, reaching for his phone, which had been stuck haphazardly in his back pocket as he’d rushed to get to the event. Where could she have gone? She’d worked harder than anybody to make RFA’s first event in years something unbelievable; he just couldn’t understand! He opened their shared app as quickly as he could, hoping maybe, just maybe, there’d be a message there from her, telling him she was just picking up last-minute preparations for some reason, or maybe taking care of some troublesome drunken guest—anything. He needed anything, just something so he knew she was all right!

When her avatar (not quite as pretty as the real thing, he’d noted when he first saw her welcoming the guests) popped up on his screen, Yoosung felt the anxiety in his chest release, leaving only the butterflies that floated around, growing in numbers with every conversation they shared. The smile that came, the one he knew he’d furtively reserved for her, began to inch across his face. “Ah, she was online a little while ago. I’ll see what she said.”

Jaehee heaved a breath, leaning on the backs of her heeled shoes. “What a relief! With all of the commotion recently, I was worried something might have happened to her.”

“Seven did say he took care of it…”

Yoosung had tuned them out. All that mattered was seeing her again, because he hadn’t gotten the chance to kiss her just yet and it would have been a horrible end to the day if he didn’t get to. He’d been looking forward to meeting her for days, but every hour that’d past felt like years and decades and centuries. Chatting with her was good enough to tide him over, but his arms were starting to feel heavier and heavier, and his heart carried a similar sentiment. Words were nice, but touch was what he’d desired. Yoosung opened up the chat, eager eyes falling along the last messages and scrolling down to the bottom.

Sorry.

His heart stopped cold.

  She’d thrown as much as she could into her purse—things she’d purchased for her stay in Rika’s apartment. She cringed; the guilt continued piling on, growing worse and worse the more she thought about every little thing she’d done wrong. Who was she to take the apartment? Who was she to take Rika’s job and walk into her shoes like her life was hers now? She wasn’t Rika—she really, really wasn’t Rika.

She choked on her tears, wiping at them furiously because she needed to be able to see, dammit!

Her purse wasn’t very big, certainly not big enough to fit everything she wanted to. She just couldn’t bring herself to take one of the suitcases she’d seen lying around in Rika’s closet. Sure, she wanted memories of her time as a member of the RFA, but she didn’t plan on stealing anything else to keep them. She’d taken enough. She kept telling herself she should have been eager to leave, kept telling herself that she was the only living thing in a dead space, and she was breathing in stale air and she shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

She glanced at her phone, buzzing away on her—Rika’s—bed. It’d been going for the better part of fifteen minutes, avatars of all the people she’d grown to love so much lighting up her screen, some messages in all caps and others calmer. She supposed her message had been cryptic. She figured she’d send another one before she walked out the apartment doors for the last time, just to let everyone know she’d be fine and that they should carry on without her. Part of her wanted to see Yoosung again, just one last time, but she didn’t know if he’d already seen the messages or if she’d be able to explain why her face and hands were slick and wet. She paused as she reached over to grab her phone, pausing as the notifications seemed to roll to a halt. Rubbing at her eyes with her other hand, she pressed the home button and entered her password.

She should have just ignored that Unknown user. She should have just left it alone and undownloaded the app and let the rest of the day pass because she was in more pain because of that bastard than she had been in a very long time.

The most recent message was from Seven, simple lowercased text beneath paragraphs of bold, massive letters from Zen. Jaehee and Jumin and V were mixed somewhere in there, but the walls of text were instinctively distracting.

open the door

Someone knocked, and she bit down on both of her lips to keep the squeal she felt coming quiet. Her phone flipped in the air, and she only very nearly dropped it, bottoms of her palms catching the edges just before it fell. The knocking came again, more furious and urgent. She turned around slowly, eyeing the door up and down as if she could see the person behind it. Her phone buzzed for a second time, and it was still Seven and still the same message but the box was bordered by light red strokes.

Cautiously, walking on the tips of her toes as though she could pretend there wasn’t a person in the brightly-lit apartment, she pressed one hand to the knob and turned.

Yoosung was standing on the other side, hunched over with his hands at his knees, gasping and wheezing and choking. He winced at her shoes, covered in dirt and a little torn because she’d ran all the way home, then let his gaze trail along her body until he met her face.

He grimaced, eyes swelling at the edges.

She wasn’t expecting him to spring into her, sending her backwards on her shuddering feet until she was balanced enough to keep the both of them from toppling to the floor. His arms wrapped firmly—steadfastly—around her, and she all but felt the squeeze of his hands demand that she not move. He was freezing to the touch, skin burning against her own, sending shivers down her neck to her toes. She froze.

“Don’t do it! Don’t you dare leave me, too!”

“Yoosung-!”

“No! You can’t! I won’t let you! I’ll stay right here by your side! I won’t let anybody hurt you—even you!”

It occurred to her, then, what her one-worded apology might have looked like to somebody like Yoosung, what he might have thought and what the others might have thought; she felt tears pricking the corners of her eyes again.

“I- I wasn’t going to…! I was-!” She whimpered and placed both hands at his shoulders, trying to muster the strength to push him away even when she knew it wasn’t coming. “I'm just… leaving the RFA.”

Yoosung paused, trembling body tensing. She wasn’t sure what that meant.

“You-?” His voice hitched. She swallowed and stood straighter, clenching her jaw; she wasn’t sure if she was trying to be brave or tough, but she was trying nevertheless. “What?” Yoosung pulled away, hands at her arms, pressing her, eyes wide and wild and bursting in a frenzy. “Why would you do that? The party was a huge success!” He went to say more, but he must have seen the scrunch of her nose and the downward tilt of her chin because he fell silent, eyes softening the longer they stared at each other. He took a step closer. “I know you were in a lot of danger the last few days… I know it was scary.” His hands loosened at her arms, hold like a lock coming unlatched, thumbs rubbing the skin there as though he’d hurt her—he hadn’t. “But Seven is keeping an eye on you—and I am, too! Please, have faith in me to protect you!”

“That’s not it…”

“Then what is it? Please, tell me!”

“I’m not Rika!”

The room fell silent, again. It was funny how three words she’d said so often to him, something she thought she’d understood before, could be breaking her the way she always worried it’d been breaking him. He was too quiet for her, too quiet and his hands were too tense and he wasn’t moving. Her heart dropped from her chest again, sinking to the bottom of her stomach and sitting there like a heavy bag of sand. She let her eyes fall; she couldn’t look at him, not now.

“I know that... I know you’re not Rika. What I have with you—it’s completely different.”

She shook her head and let it fall against his chest, sniveling and shuddering. He wrapped his arms around her again, hands once freezing now warm against her bare back. He enveloped her like a fresh blanket, heat washing over her shoulders, soft and gentle like a kind hand; he was kind, she knew, to deal with her like this. “I can’t compare to her. Everything I’ve heard about her is so amazing,” she choked and squeezed her nails into the skin of her hands, fists tight enough she was sure she’d see red when the muscles relaxed. Yoosung stayed silent still, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing anymore. “I know I’m not her; I never could be. I’m just going to disappoint everyone—I’m going to disappoint you. I couldn’t take it,” she choked and clenched her fists tighter, feeling the tips of her nails beginning to break skin. “I couldn’t take it if Yoosung started to hate me…”

“Hate you? No! There’s no way!” He pulled her back again, hands sliding down the length of her arms to fall over hers, his fingers grazing the skin all the way gently, softly. He was handling her like a fragile doll, and she supposed she might have been at the moment. She wouldn’t look at him; he couldn’t see her face when it was wet and red and puffy. “We all know you’re not Rika! That doesn’t mean you’re any less important to us! It’s because of you we could throw another party!”

“She sounds like such a kind person…”

“You are, too! You put up with me confusing the two of you, right? You still loved me, didn’t you? You never once gave up on me!”

“But I’m not her…”

“And we don’t care! Everybody was so worried about you when we got your message! We’re lucky Seven found you over the surveillance cameras! I don’t know what I would have done if you- if you and Rika had-!” He stopped short, and she could hear his words latch in his throat.

She blinked and pulled one of her hands from his, wiping at her eyes because, honestly, her makeup was already smudged enough; she couldn’t make it much worse. “I know,” she hiccupped. “I know Rika’s death hurt all of you.”

“So why would you put us through that again?” She met his eyes then, and his purple hues weren’t even blinking. They were passionate and focused and the only time they moved was to take small glances at the rest of her face. Her lips fell open and closed again each time she tried to say something, but every word she could think of stuck like gum at the roof of her mouth. Yoosung’s eyes sharpened. “If you know how losing Rika made us feel, if you know what it did to me, why would you leave us, too?”

“I- I don’t know! I just thought…”

“You just thought we wouldn’t care? That we’d let you go? There’s no way! You’re a member of the RFA, now! You’re a part of our family! What kind of family would we be if we just let you leave us?”

He pulled her into his arms again, burying his head in the crook of her neck, arms snaking around her and squeezing her tightly, firmly, as though she’d slip from his clenched hands if he even began to let go. Her fingers twitched to reach up and touch the back of his neck, play with his hair and let her head fall against his, but she settled for laying her palms at his chest. They squeezed the vest he was wearing, and his fingers tangled into the back of her dress. Her eyes weren’t burning anymore. Though her tears hadn’t stopped entirely, they’d slowed to the occasional drip. “Yoosung, thank you…”

Their phones chirped—the signature messenger sound ringing on the bed and from Yoosung’s back pocket. They both jumped and pulled away, though she noted his chest was still set against her own. “I- um, sorry, I’ll just-!” He pulled his cell out and opened the app, eyes skimming the long list of messages the rest of the RFA had sent in panic. She watched his face, let her gaze follow the twitch of his adorable nose and the red of his cheeks, only vaguely wondering if her face was just as rosy.

Yoosung’s eyes widened. “Eh?” She watched as his face alternated between several different shades of the crimson that’d been there before. His head snapped around, looking from one wall to the next, barring his teeth and grunting with every turn he made.

Slowly, she reached out and took Yoosung’s phone from his hands, attempting to scroll down before she read anything else. Seven’s last message had been bumped up a slot, sitting right above the most recent text: WOW! Yoosung has become such a man!

It took her a moment of pause, she tilted her head, and then remembered—the surveillance cameras.

“Wha-? Seven!”

“This is an invasion of my privacy, you jerk!”

The tell-tale sound of Seven’s heart-eyed emoji resounded from their phones.

[djatoon]

Fantastic article. A must-Read for all parents and/or teachers.

“1. To be a parent is to be compromised. You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.

Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.

Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.

Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.

Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.

When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.

At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other toddlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on the wait list.

Places at the preschool were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.

New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized society, individual achievement should be the basis for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristocracy, those rewards must be earned again by each new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.

In his new book, The Meritocracy Trap, the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.

On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.

2.

not long after he drew the picture of the moon, our son was interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term, and the teachers were wearing brightly colored hope pendants that they had crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan display (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?) and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s monitored group play was successful. He was accepted.

The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on, the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play.

Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them.

We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. As tuition passed $50,000, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.

But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is social justice. I’d rather use the word democracy, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”

The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

Public schools are a public good. Our city’s are among the most racially and economically segregated in America. The gaps in proficiency that separate white and Asian from black and Latino students in math and English are immense and growing. Some advocates argue that creating more integrated schools would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious in America is to know that schools of concentrated poverty are likely to doom the children who attend them. This knowledge is what made our decision both political and fraught.

From October 2017: Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.

Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough. Friends had pulled their kids out after second or third grade, so when we took the tour we insisted, against the wishes of the school guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too. Students were wandering around the rooms without focus, the air was heavy with listlessness, there seemed to be little learning going on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.

One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conversation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becoming the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.

That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools. We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took a few kids from out of district, only to find that there was a baby boom on and the seats had already been claimed by zoned families. At one new school that had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a slot if one had been offered.

Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts. This school was economically and racially mixed by design, with demographics that came close to matching the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students). And the school appeared to be a happy place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—“child centered”—based on learning through experience. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going on. Hallways were covered with well-written compositions. Part of the playground was devoted to a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.

The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.

I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with P.S.

A few parents at the private school reacted as if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meritocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when we heard that sixth graders at the private school were writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched our son and his friends sweat through competitive public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools until we felt better.

Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He never looked back.

Illustration of a hand holding a pencil

Paul Spella

3.

the public school was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.

I had barely encountered an American public school since leaving high school. That was in the late 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stellar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of parents except that they pay their taxes and send their children to school, and everyone I knew went to the local public schools. Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture. Because many of the families were poor, our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fundraising goal of $100,000, and some years the principal had to send out a message warning parents that science or art was about to be cut. Not many blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these schools were called “private publics.” Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000. This enormous gap was just one way inequality pursued us into the public-school system.

We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week, I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fundraiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a much larger community, and so there was an appeal for money when a fire drove a family from a different school out of its house, and a food drive after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready to do just about anything to get involved. When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)

The private school we’d left behind had let parents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled audiences at performances. But our son’s kindergarten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white), a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When his class of 28 students was studying the New York shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.

That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.

4.

parents have one layer of skin too few. They’ve lost an epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases to absorb them.

In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanitation truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to suggest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops, and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings. If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.

The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a backyard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.

At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in joining the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an African boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true: He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irritants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition. The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend a 9-year-old who was reading Animal Farm, but he brushed me off. He would do this his own way.

The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught various strategies for multiplication and division, but the times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum. “Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.

Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son of a better education. We got antsy with the endless craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But our son learned well only when a subject interested him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.

And then things began to change.

5.

around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum—one in math, one in English. In the winter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school about the upcoming tests. They all carried the message that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Yourself!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child will take the tests is YOUR decision.”

During the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, statewide tests were used to improve low-performing schools by measuring students’ abilities, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties (“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These standardized tests could determine the fate of teachers and schools. Some schools began devoting months of class time to preparing students for the tests.

The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.

The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”

Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.

We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—no one should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.

We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.

One day I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school.

Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.

I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.

A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my wife and I asked what our son would miss during test days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Students whose parents declined to opt out would get no preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.

If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests—then, I thought, our son should take them.

The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?” I told her that our son would take the tests.

She was the person to whom I’d once written a letter about the ideal match between our values and the school’s, the letter that may have helped get our son off the wait list. Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-out movement—it didn’t exist. Less than four years later, it was the only truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d betrayed her.

Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone. She described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.

Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither triumphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of Central Africa.

Illustration of the American flag with gold stars scattered on top

Paul Spella

6.

the battleground of the new progressivism is identity. That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of exploration and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music,” The New York Times Magazine declared in 2017, in the introduction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”

The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race. Our son and his friends, whose classroom study included slavery and civil rights, hardly ever discussed the subject of race with one another. The school already lived what it taught.

The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.

Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.

The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.

When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out movement than the bathroom issue, explained her financial constraints and urged the formation of a parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral.

in politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

7.

in 2016 two obsessions claimed our family—Hamilton and the presidential campaign. We listened and sang along to the Hamilton soundtrack every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its brilliant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this latest version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every time he died she wept.

Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes history

Hamilton and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted them to believe that America was better than Trump, and Hamilton kept that belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”

The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right. Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go to the bus stop.

The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on Hamilton. When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their newborn children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic. It was a long time before we listened to Hamilton again.

A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversation about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III, the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been abolished—and they seemed reassured.

Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.

Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt helpless to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said we have power too, and at the march she sang the one protest song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days afterward she marched around the house shouting, “Show me what democracy looks like!”

Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.

We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried. We just wanted them to have their childhood without bearing the entire weight of the world, including the new president we had allowed into office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?

I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from Hamilton.

Read: Civics education helps create young voters and activists

The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a comeback in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.

“If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

Illustration of a school desk with gold stars overlaid on top

Paul Spella

8.

students in new york city public schools have to apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the students based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of 10-year-olds to the breaking point.

“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”

We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.

The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If there’s a relation between the systems, I came to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.

On the day acceptance letters arrived at our school, some students wept. One of them was Marcus, who had been matched with a middle school that he didn’t want to attend. His mother went in to talk to an administrator about an appeal. The administrator asked her why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle school that shared a building with our school, that followed the same progressive approach as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and despair. She had no desire for him to go to the middle school upstairs.

Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools. Last September he came home from the first day of school and told us that something was wrong. His classmates didn’t look like the kids in his elementary school. We found a pie chart that broke his new school down by race, and it left him stunned. Two-thirds of the students were white or Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino. Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.

His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools. Our district, where there are enough white families for integration to be meaningful, was chosen as a test case. Last year a committee of teachers, parents, and activists in the district announced a proposal: Remove the meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of equality. The proposal would get rid of competitive admissions for middle school—grades, tests, attendance, behavior—which largely accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new school. In the new system, students would still rank their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to produce middle schools that reflect the demography of our district, giving disadvantaged students a priority for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s middle schools would be racially and economically integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slogan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.

I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class. Under the new system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her to a charter school. No doubt many other families will leave the public-school system. But I had seen our son flourish by going to an elementary school that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy separate out and demoralize children based on their work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for children’s fates to be decided by an institution that was supposed to serve the public good.

Read: Poor kids who believe in meritocracy suffer

I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American & World History.”

“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially & socioeconomically mixed classrooms.” How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?

We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.

The Department of Education didn’t seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.

Late in the summer of 2018, a public meeting was called in our district to discuss the integration plan. It was the height of vacation season, but several hundred parents, including me, showed up. Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.

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De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

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Pisces Sun Pisces Moon: A Sunny Personality

Emotional but strong-willed, the Pisces Sun Pisces Moon personality balances the dreamy nature of this sign with a hidden resilience and desire to succeed.

People with both their Sun and their Moon in Pisces are good at feeling what others are going through from an emotional point of view. They can also grasp their surroundings very well.

Because they are emotional themselves, they could easily make a living from the arts. It’s amazing to watch them putting images, feeling and thoughts together in the most sensitive way.

Pisces Sun Pisces Moon combination in a nutshell:

Positives: Intuitive, engaging and practical;

Negatives: Confusing, possessive and victimizing;

Perfect partner: Someone who can dedicate to them body and soul;

Advice: You need to overcome your tendency to read too much into certain situations.

Moon Pisces are considered the psychics of the zodiac. It’s difficult for them to determine which are their feelings and which ones are of others’, not to mention they can get the sense crowds can transmit and inspire.

These double Neptune-ruled natives need to be very careful whom they pick as their friends, companions and lovers.

When they don’t get along with someone, they become even more emotional and sensitive than they usually are. Not to mention that it is very hard to get them out of their thinking patterns when they get stuck to an idea.

Personality traits

The natives of the Sun and Moon in Pisces combination are intuitive and can understand what other people can’t. Their environment will have to be inspiring and very appealing.

Their mysterious air will make them even more attractive to others, it’s like they’re not from this world.

You will never see them mean, deceitful or not well-intended. On contrary, they have an innocence and a self-awareness that makes them vulnerable in front of those who are only looking to scam them.

Their intuition is the main way through which they defend themselves. If they wouldn’t have it, they would be victims of this cruel society. It’s like they have a guardian angel that tells them who to avoid and when to be more attentive.

It’s normal for them to be interested in the unseen rather than in what’s real. Very imaginative, Pisces Sun Pisces Moon can sometimes find it difficult to make a difference between what’s reality and what’s fantasy.

They are sympathetic and prefer to evaluate themselves a situation rather than let others to do it. Some may think of them as self-centered, but it won’t be true, perhaps they are only a bit insecure.

They struggle to have as many possessions as possible because they want comfort. Charming and fine artists, they will manage to convince others to put their ideas into practice. Especially since they aren’t the most focused and practical people. Because they are sensitive, they will prefer to fantasize when life will become too harsh.

It’s normal to surprise them drifting away in the middle of a conversation. It’s like they are going into a trance and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

The man in this astrological combination will want a steady income, the woman will probably look into marrying someone rich. But both of them will have to fight their urge of withdrawing and isolating themselves.

It’s true the world today is too harsh and focused on making money and they are sometimes too timid for it. However, they have their intuition to guide them.

Everything about creativity makes them tick. But when it comes to determination and consistency, they are not the best. They are more about visuals and immortalizing beauty.

Their sense of humor may not always be in tune with the trends in society. But they know the human behavior very well, so their jokes will probably stick. While they will laugh when others are being funny, they will most of the time seem spaced out.

Many will not understand them when they are like this. But these Pisces need to dream, or reality will simply overwhelm them. The fact that they grow dependent of others is unavoidable.

Moon Pisces individuals are smooth and lovable and they care about those around them very much. And when it comes to meeting new people, they immediately make them their friends. But if they won’t learn how to no longer absorb others’ feelings so easily, they will end up not knowing what’s in their own heart.

However, the fact that they can feel what they haven’t experienced can help them be amazing actors. If they are too shy for this job, they could try becoming writers or painters.

Pisces Sun Pisces Moon people feel more energized when they are thinking an ideal world is possible. When they feel a deep connection between people or people and other creatures, between concepts and things, they start experiencing the true force of our existence.

It’s in their nature to go beyond the normal and the mundane, beyond everything that’s material. If they want to be happy, Pisces Sun Pisces Moon individuals need to be spiritual and connected to different planes of reality.

But this means they will always be confused, deceived and not sure about their own identity or limits. They will not know where things begin and end when it comes to their own person. They will refuse reality and create one of their own in order to feel comfortable.

A love out of this world

Sun Pisces simply don’t know how to be of this world. But the fact that they are transcendental makes them more emotional, imaginative and even romantic. Their partner will be showered in gifts and all kind of attentions.

But for this to happen, things have to be easygoing and for them to not feel tied down. If their partner is too restrictive, Pisces Sun Pisces Moon natives prefer to leave.

They can either break up or be present in the relationship only with their body and not with their mind. And it’s strange to be with someone who isn’t involved all body and soul.

Moon Pisces are absolute dreamers. They need to bring magic in everything they are doing, from their relationship to everyday activities. It’s absolutely necessary their partner understands their need to withdraw in a world of fantasy when they are feeling too stressed and overwhelmed.

In people with this Moon, intuition and strong instincts are combined greatly, making them very sensitive to what their partner is going through emotionally. That’s why it’s important everything surrounding them is peaceful and serene.

It doesn’t matter what their lover’s Sun sign is, he or she needs to understand and accept that Moon Pisces are the most empathetic people of the entire zodiac and this comes with great benefits but also a great responsibility.

The Pisces Sun Pisces Moon man

The man with the Sun in Pisces and the Moon in Pisces is dualistic and too complex for others to understand him easily. He thinks deeply and sometimes feels like the world is a place too weird for him.

That’s why he withdraws in his own fantasy and people can no longer reach him. But many will open easily to him because he’s kind and likes to listen. While he’s very well on his own due to his great intuition, he still wants to develop close relationships and to have a social life as active as possible.

Most of the time, the Pisces Sun Pisces Moon man is flexible, curious and someone whom others can trust completely. His Moon makes him open to any kind of suggestions and oddities.

Many would see this as a weakness because he never seems bothered by what others ask of him. But it’s more of an attitude and a philosophy based on being careless and as free as possible.

As long as no one is bothered or hurt, the Moon Pisces man will let things happen on their own. A lot of his friends will think this is something unusual, but for him it would only be normal.

Because he pays attention to others more than he pays to himself, he will have great friendships that will last a lifetime. When it comes to his job, he won’t mind working hard and paying attention to every little detail.

His mind is sharp, responsive and fast. The fact that he relies so much on what his gut is telling him makes this guy a mystic in the eyes of others. Filtering information through his emotions and being very creative, he can see deeper into things. He will always be motivated and a great thinker. He would do an amazing job as an artist of any kind.

The Pisces Sun Pisces Moon woman

When a lady has both her Sun and her Moon in Pisces, in her natal chart, she’s the same as her male counterpart: dualistic and difficult. She tends to also be analytical of her own emotions and ideas.

No one can stop her from contemplating all the time. She may be so lost in her own dreams that the world seems a strange and too colorful place.

This girl tends to isolate and not allow others to reach her anymore. On the other hand, she’s smooth and friendly, but only with those she considers friends.

Independent and self-reliant, the Pisces Sun Pisces Moon woman still craves the warmth of a relationship. Sociable, trustworthy and fun, she will have many friends with whom she will often go out.

The Moon in Pisces means she’s empathetic and can absorb what others are feeling just like a sponge absorbs water. This lady has a strongly developed intuition. Not to mention she can see beyond the materialistic existence. Many astrologers say that she has something like a sixth sense that helps her deal with problems and people she finds difficult.

But those who are insensitive and not polite can deeply hurt her. She has a chaotic behavior from time to time, yet she would never say something wrong to anyone. If she’s to be coupled with a cold partner who can’t keep his word, she will immediately leave because she’s looking for someone sensitive, like her.

As soon as she has found someone appropriate, you can trust she will commit and be loyal as her responsibilities and duties are very important to her.

Believing in herself and what her gut is telling her, the woman with both the Sun and the Moon in Pisces is intelligent and perceptive. As a matter of fact, these are two of her most important qualities. She’s a thinker who will always analyze things in depth.

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6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

A celebrity public service announcement seems like a fine idea in theory. People love having a popular, attractive person tell them what to do — that’s how God-Emperors are made. So how can you screw that up? Well, let us count the ways …

6

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

“Captain” Lou Albano had the honor of being both a professional wrestler and Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which to children is about as impressive as being a crimefighting dog who can magically summon ice cream. So it’s not surprising that Albano was seen as a great choice for an anti-drug PSA aimed at kids. It is surprising that they filmed the whole shebang in a closet while Albano looked like he was wasted on a whatever he was telling kids to stay away from.

Albano crams a lot of words into 19 seconds, and while it’s mostly standard PSA stuff (“Don’t be afraid to say no,” “People who want you to take drugs aren’t really your friends,” “You’ll probably stop giving a crap about what Mario says when you go to college and some cutie invites you to smoke weed with them,” etc.), there’s a last-second twist. Albano warns that if you do drugs, “you’ll go to hell before you die,” while fading into a corner of a screen and whispering the word “please” in a way that would really mess with your head if you were tripping.

Always remember, kids: According to a professional athlete who played a hero whose power comes from magical mushrooms, drugs have no benefit whatsoever and will send you to a nightmarish plane of brimstone and fire.

5

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Teenagers, generally speaking, are the demographic that most need education on sexual safety, both because they’re lacking in life experience and because they’re getting laid way more often than we are. So if you had to make a hip safe sex PSA in the mid-2000s, what celebrities would you work with? The stars of a teen drama? Maybe the cast of a reality show? How about the heroes of their dad’s favorite gritty police drama, The Wire?

Luckily, a whole chunk of The Wire‘s cast is here to prestige people into practicing safe sex. Unfortunately, this PSA is less of a coherent call to action than a laudanum-induced fever dream. There are no statistics or stern lectures — merely the dying hallucinations of a ’80s music video director made surreality.

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

The whole thing comes across like aliens have kidnapped humans and are trying to make a soothing simulated reality for them based only on the trivia that we like sex, award-winning television, and outdated music. Clarke Peters looks like he’s about to teach us either Tae Bo or how to use your orgasm to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

4

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

“You all know me as an action hero,” is how Jackie Chan walks into this PSA. But he wants to introduce us to another action hero: Mr. Condom, who sounds like the stuffed bear of a Victorian British child — something to keep in mind the next time you use one.

Mr. Condom and Jackie clearly have a strong and respectful master-student relationship, and Chan explains how this strong warrior prevents STDs. Meanwhile, an energetic Mr. Condom shows off his fighting moves. Because if there’s one thing you want a good condom to be, it’s flexible enough to move around wildly on its own.

Mr. Condom then launches himself into the air, spins around, and stretches himself out, in case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when a condom has its own orgasm, before reminding us to use him when you have sex. Chan then wraps up the PSA by telling us that while he can fight visible enemies, even he needs Mr. Condom’s help in keeping HIV at bay, which can definitely be a risk when you cheat on your wife. Then Jackie and Mr. Condom embrace, and Jackie definitely doesn’t die a little inside before they punch the camera.

3

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

If you make the wrong decision while driving, you can end a person’s life. Someone’s loved one could be snuffed out in an instant due to your carelessness. But apparently some people require a more “What’s in it for me?” incentive than that, so Evander Holyfield made a PSA about how he’ll beat the shit out of aggressive drivers.

Scene: A car pulls into traffic and cuts off another driver, who then angrily honks and forces the car over. The man gets out of his truck and reveals himself to be a redneck stereotype whose string of profanity makes it clear that he intends to beat the fuck stuffing out of his new nemesis. But then, surprise twist! The man he wants to murder is Evander Holyfield! Now who’s about to die?

The moral clearly ought to be “Avoid road rage. You never know who you might run into. But counterpoint: If you can clearly see it’s some soccer mom or a grandpa, feel free to go full King Immortan Joe on their asses.” If the only way you can think of to appeal to violent maniacs is to remind them they’ll sometimes cross paths with a professional fighter, you haven’t made a PSA against road rage, but one in favor of keeping a gun in the glove compartment.

2

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

No, they’re arresting Mel Gibson. And while it was prescient for Gibson to portray himself as being in trouble with the law, here he’s being hauled in for the simple dystopian crime of owning vitamins. “Guys, guys! It’s only vitamins!” he protests. But what he doesn’t know is that the government wants to make vitamins illegal. This video is here to warn good American citizens that their supplements are under attack. Now, you probably don’t know anyone who has been dogpiled by a SWAT team for cracking open a bottle of Flintstone’s, but in the chilling, stupid reality of Mel Gibson’s world, the answer is “It’s already happening.”

As shown in this obviously based-on-real-events footage, the fascist pig cops are unimpressed when Gibson explains to them he was only taking Vitamin C, “like in oranges.” He’ll have plenty of time to adjust his mindset during his four-month stay at a Dietary Supplement Reeducation Camp. But that future doesn’t have to be ours, the cards say, if we just call our senators.

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on, this “PSA” was funded by the Nutritional Health Alliance, a lobby group formed by the supplement industry to prevent the government from looking into what a huge scam supplements are.

Specifically, in early ’90s, the FDA wanted to crack down on supplements that made completely unsubstantiated health claims on their packaging and in ads, because if there’s one thing the Man loves to do, it’s pushing around honest, hard-working Americans by forcing them to stop buying dangerous products that hospitalize tens of thousands and might accidentally kill people. It’s unclear if Gibson actually believed in the supplement industry or was letting them supplement his income, but luckily, Gibbers was unable to terrify Americans with his vision of a vitamin-hating police state. The FDA’s new regulations went through, and Gibson found himself on the wrong side of history — a position he’s since become intimately familiar with.

1

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

It’s no secret that America is a politically divided country. And who better to bridge that bitter gap than Kid Rock and Sean Penn, two of the most beloved and kind artists in the world. Between Kid’s political savvy and Penn’s famous calmness, only these two could ever unite Americans across the political spectrum — mostly by making all of them ask “Wait … what the fuck?”

This nearly 11-minute (no, seriously) public service Sundance entry is called “Americans,” and it features one of America’s favorite (alleged) spousal abusers sitting down with one of America’s least-favorite aural abusers for a conversation that absolutely no one asked for.

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Mitt Romney (this was made in 2012) is giving a speech on TV. Penn asks for the channel to be changed, but the justifiably scared female bartender ignores him, just in time for Romney to introduce his special musical guest. It’s Kid Rock, and for a moment, we are all Sean Penn:

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

But Mr. Rock, who also seems drunk, plops himself down next to Penn and starts complaining about “Obummer’s” tax policies, like a totally relatable middle American. The two start sniping at each other like YouTube commenters — Penn quotes Goebbels, while Kid Rock says “Fuckin’ suck it, commie.” They both take turns delivering incoherent tirades, although Penn seems to be winning the debate. After all, it’s hard to take Kid Rock seriously when he’s dressed like he’s on his way to play the Country Bear Jamboree.

They nearly come to blows, in a fight we could only hope they somehow both lose, until a random sassy bar patron tells them to shut up and appreciate everything America has to offer. Her passionate speech about what American citizenship means to her is somewhat undercut by the fact that she finishes by calling them “fucking pussies,” but never mind that –there’s some breaking news on the bar TV that inexplicably isn’t just on ESPN. 26 marines have been killed in Afghanistan! Cue sad music and Kid Rock failing to act!

Thankfully, those soldiers didn’t die in vain. Rock and Penn are inspired by their sacrifice to toast “to freedom” and apologize to each other — while babbling over everyone else’s respectful moment of silence. Naturally, the next step is a wacky montage! The first thing Kid Rock does is sell his car and buy a Prius, as any relatable conservative American who wants to learn more about his liberal friends could totally afford to do at the drop of a hideous hat.

Next, we get a shot of an environmental protest, Kid Rock urinating in the background, and Penn catching his urine in a bucket because … Kid Rock’s dehydrated lizard juice still counts as potable water? No time to reflect, because it’s time for Penn to trade places! Kid Rock teaches him to drink a beer instead of a girly cocktail! As the day is winding down, Penn takes Rock to a gay wedding, which, according to this movie, involves one of the men wearing a wedding dress! Are we seeing this wedding through Rock’s Republican eyes?

They then buy each other T-shirts and exchange them on the beach! Kid Rock and Sean Penn are totally about to fuck! After the pair leaves the beach to go bone down, the message of this inspirational tale appears onscreen for the benefit of the slower viewers: We’re all Americans, whether we love PETA, own guns, or are a sassy black woman. Those are the only three kinds of Americans. You too can put aside your cavalcade of liberal and conservative stereotypes and stop yelling crude insults at each other long enough to bond over some dead marines and go car shopping. Because in the end, aren’t we all just South Park jokes without the irony? Fuck yeah, Sean Penn and Kid Rock. Fuck yeah.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Also check out The 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time and 7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 6 PSAs Way More F#!@ed Up Than Any Drug Addict, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we’ll follow you everywhere.

If we’ve ever made you laugh or think, we now have a way where you can thank and support us!

Make a contribution

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182980603822

[samanthasroberts]

6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

A celebrity public service announcement seems like a fine idea in theory. People love having a popular, attractive person tell them what to do — that’s how God-Emperors are made. So how can you screw that up? Well, let us count the ways …

6

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

“Captain” Lou Albano had the honor of being both a professional wrestler and Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which to children is about as impressive as being a crimefighting dog who can magically summon ice cream. So it’s not surprising that Albano was seen as a great choice for an anti-drug PSA aimed at kids. It is surprising that they filmed the whole shebang in a closet while Albano looked like he was wasted on a whatever he was telling kids to stay away from.

Albano crams a lot of words into 19 seconds, and while it’s mostly standard PSA stuff (“Don’t be afraid to say no,” “People who want you to take drugs aren’t really your friends,” “You’ll probably stop giving a crap about what Mario says when you go to college and some cutie invites you to smoke weed with them,” etc.), there’s a last-second twist. Albano warns that if you do drugs, “you’ll go to hell before you die,” while fading into a corner of a screen and whispering the word “please” in a way that would really mess with your head if you were tripping.

Always remember, kids: According to a professional athlete who played a hero whose power comes from magical mushrooms, drugs have no benefit whatsoever and will send you to a nightmarish plane of brimstone and fire.

5

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Teenagers, generally speaking, are the demographic that most need education on sexual safety, both because they’re lacking in life experience and because they’re getting laid way more often than we are. So if you had to make a hip safe sex PSA in the mid-2000s, what celebrities would you work with? The stars of a teen drama? Maybe the cast of a reality show? How about the heroes of their dad’s favorite gritty police drama, The Wire?

Luckily, a whole chunk of The Wire‘s cast is here to prestige people into practicing safe sex. Unfortunately, this PSA is less of a coherent call to action than a laudanum-induced fever dream. There are no statistics or stern lectures — merely the dying hallucinations of a ’80s music video director made surreality.

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

The whole thing comes across like aliens have kidnapped humans and are trying to make a soothing simulated reality for them based only on the trivia that we like sex, award-winning television, and outdated music. Clarke Peters looks like he’s about to teach us either Tae Bo or how to use your orgasm to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

4

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

“You all know me as an action hero,” is how Jackie Chan walks into this PSA. But he wants to introduce us to another action hero: Mr. Condom, who sounds like the stuffed bear of a Victorian British child — something to keep in mind the next time you use one.

Mr. Condom and Jackie clearly have a strong and respectful master-student relationship, and Chan explains how this strong warrior prevents STDs. Meanwhile, an energetic Mr. Condom shows off his fighting moves. Because if there’s one thing you want a good condom to be, it’s flexible enough to move around wildly on its own.

Mr. Condom then launches himself into the air, spins around, and stretches himself out, in case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when a condom has its own orgasm, before reminding us to use him when you have sex. Chan then wraps up the PSA by telling us that while he can fight visible enemies, even he needs Mr. Condom’s help in keeping HIV at bay, which can definitely be a risk when you cheat on your wife. Then Jackie and Mr. Condom embrace, and Jackie definitely doesn’t die a little inside before they punch the camera.

3

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

If you make the wrong decision while driving, you can end a person’s life. Someone’s loved one could be snuffed out in an instant due to your carelessness. But apparently some people require a more “What’s in it for me?” incentive than that, so Evander Holyfield made a PSA about how he’ll beat the shit out of aggressive drivers.

Scene: A car pulls into traffic and cuts off another driver, who then angrily honks and forces the car over. The man gets out of his truck and reveals himself to be a redneck stereotype whose string of profanity makes it clear that he intends to beat the fuck stuffing out of his new nemesis. But then, surprise twist! The man he wants to murder is Evander Holyfield! Now who’s about to die?

The moral clearly ought to be “Avoid road rage. You never know who you might run into. But counterpoint: If you can clearly see it’s some soccer mom or a grandpa, feel free to go full King Immortan Joe on their asses.” If the only way you can think of to appeal to violent maniacs is to remind them they’ll sometimes cross paths with a professional fighter, you haven’t made a PSA against road rage, but one in favor of keeping a gun in the glove compartment.

2

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

No, they’re arresting Mel Gibson. And while it was prescient for Gibson to portray himself as being in trouble with the law, here he’s being hauled in for the simple dystopian crime of owning vitamins. “Guys, guys! It’s only vitamins!” he protests. But what he doesn’t know is that the government wants to make vitamins illegal. This video is here to warn good American citizens that their supplements are under attack. Now, you probably don’t know anyone who has been dogpiled by a SWAT team for cracking open a bottle of Flintstone’s, but in the chilling, stupid reality of Mel Gibson’s world, the answer is “It’s already happening.”

As shown in this obviously based-on-real-events footage, the fascist pig cops are unimpressed when Gibson explains to them he was only taking Vitamin C, “like in oranges.” He’ll have plenty of time to adjust his mindset during his four-month stay at a Dietary Supplement Reeducation Camp. But that future doesn’t have to be ours, the cards say, if we just call our senators.

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on, this “PSA” was funded by the Nutritional Health Alliance, a lobby group formed by the supplement industry to prevent the government from looking into what a huge scam supplements are.

Specifically, in early ’90s, the FDA wanted to crack down on supplements that made completely unsubstantiated health claims on their packaging and in ads, because if there’s one thing the Man loves to do, it’s pushing around honest, hard-working Americans by forcing them to stop buying dangerous products that hospitalize tens of thousands and might accidentally kill people. It’s unclear if Gibson actually believed in the supplement industry or was letting them supplement his income, but luckily, Gibbers was unable to terrify Americans with his vision of a vitamin-hating police state. The FDA’s new regulations went through, and Gibson found himself on the wrong side of history — a position he’s since become intimately familiar with.

1

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

It’s no secret that America is a politically divided country. And who better to bridge that bitter gap than Kid Rock and Sean Penn, two of the most beloved and kind artists in the world. Between Kid’s political savvy and Penn’s famous calmness, only these two could ever unite Americans across the political spectrum — mostly by making all of them ask “Wait … what the fuck?”

This nearly 11-minute (no, seriously) public service Sundance entry is called “Americans,” and it features one of America’s favorite (alleged) spousal abusers sitting down with one of America’s least-favorite aural abusers for a conversation that absolutely no one asked for.

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Mitt Romney (this was made in 2012) is giving a speech on TV. Penn asks for the channel to be changed, but the justifiably scared female bartender ignores him, just in time for Romney to introduce his special musical guest. It’s Kid Rock, and for a moment, we are all Sean Penn:

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

But Mr. Rock, who also seems drunk, plops himself down next to Penn and starts complaining about “Obummer’s” tax policies, like a totally relatable middle American. The two start sniping at each other like YouTube commenters — Penn quotes Goebbels, while Kid Rock says “Fuckin’ suck it, commie.” They both take turns delivering incoherent tirades, although Penn seems to be winning the debate. After all, it’s hard to take Kid Rock seriously when he’s dressed like he’s on his way to play the Country Bear Jamboree.

They nearly come to blows, in a fight we could only hope they somehow both lose, until a random sassy bar patron tells them to shut up and appreciate everything America has to offer. Her passionate speech about what American citizenship means to her is somewhat undercut by the fact that she finishes by calling them “fucking pussies,” but never mind that –there’s some breaking news on the bar TV that inexplicably isn’t just on ESPN. 26 marines have been killed in Afghanistan! Cue sad music and Kid Rock failing to act!

Thankfully, those soldiers didn’t die in vain. Rock and Penn are inspired by their sacrifice to toast “to freedom” and apologize to each other — while babbling over everyone else’s respectful moment of silence. Naturally, the next step is a wacky montage! The first thing Kid Rock does is sell his car and buy a Prius, as any relatable conservative American who wants to learn more about his liberal friends could totally afford to do at the drop of a hideous hat.

Next, we get a shot of an environmental protest, Kid Rock urinating in the background, and Penn catching his urine in a bucket because … Kid Rock’s dehydrated lizard juice still counts as potable water? No time to reflect, because it’s time for Penn to trade places! Kid Rock teaches him to drink a beer instead of a girly cocktail! As the day is winding down, Penn takes Rock to a gay wedding, which, according to this movie, involves one of the men wearing a wedding dress! Are we seeing this wedding through Rock’s Republican eyes?

They then buy each other T-shirts and exchange them on the beach! Kid Rock and Sean Penn are totally about to fuck! After the pair leaves the beach to go bone down, the message of this inspirational tale appears onscreen for the benefit of the slower viewers: We’re all Americans, whether we love PETA, own guns, or are a sassy black woman. Those are the only three kinds of Americans. You too can put aside your cavalcade of liberal and conservative stereotypes and stop yelling crude insults at each other long enough to bond over some dead marines and go car shopping. Because in the end, aren’t we all just South Park jokes without the irony? Fuck yeah, Sean Penn and Kid Rock. Fuck yeah.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Also check out The 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time and 7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 6 PSAs Way More F#!@ed Up Than Any Drug Addict, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we’ll follow you everywhere.

If we’ve ever made you laugh or think, we now have a way where you can thank and support us!

Make a contribution

Source: http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

[allofbeercom]

6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

A celebrity public service announcement seems like a fine idea in theory. People love having a popular, attractive person tell them what to do — that’s how God-Emperors are made. So how can you screw that up? Well, let us count the ways …

6

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

“Captain” Lou Albano had the honor of being both a professional wrestler and Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which to children is about as impressive as being a crimefighting dog who can magically summon ice cream. So it’s not surprising that Albano was seen as a great choice for an anti-drug PSA aimed at kids. It is surprising that they filmed the whole shebang in a closet while Albano looked like he was wasted on a whatever he was telling kids to stay away from.

Albano crams a lot of words into 19 seconds, and while it’s mostly standard PSA stuff (“Don’t be afraid to say no,” “People who want you to take drugs aren’t really your friends,” “You’ll probably stop giving a crap about what Mario says when you go to college and some cutie invites you to smoke weed with them,” etc.), there’s a last-second twist. Albano warns that if you do drugs, “you’ll go to hell before you die,” while fading into a corner of a screen and whispering the word “please” in a way that would really mess with your head if you were tripping.

Always remember, kids: According to a professional athlete who played a hero whose power comes from magical mushrooms, drugs have no benefit whatsoever and will send you to a nightmarish plane of brimstone and fire.

5

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Teenagers, generally speaking, are the demographic that most need education on sexual safety, both because they’re lacking in life experience and because they’re getting laid way more often than we are. So if you had to make a hip safe sex PSA in the mid-2000s, what celebrities would you work with? The stars of a teen drama? Maybe the cast of a reality show? How about the heroes of their dad’s favorite gritty police drama, The Wire?

Luckily, a whole chunk of The Wire‘s cast is here to prestige people into practicing safe sex. Unfortunately, this PSA is less of a coherent call to action than a laudanum-induced fever dream. There are no statistics or stern lectures — merely the dying hallucinations of a ’80s music video director made surreality.

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

The whole thing comes across like aliens have kidnapped humans and are trying to make a soothing simulated reality for them based only on the trivia that we like sex, award-winning television, and outdated music. Clarke Peters looks like he’s about to teach us either Tae Bo or how to use your orgasm to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

4

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

“You all know me as an action hero,” is how Jackie Chan walks into this PSA. But he wants to introduce us to another action hero: Mr. Condom, who sounds like the stuffed bear of a Victorian British child — something to keep in mind the next time you use one.

Mr. Condom and Jackie clearly have a strong and respectful master-student relationship, and Chan explains how this strong warrior prevents STDs. Meanwhile, an energetic Mr. Condom shows off his fighting moves. Because if there’s one thing you want a good condom to be, it’s flexible enough to move around wildly on its own.

Mr. Condom then launches himself into the air, spins around, and stretches himself out, in case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when a condom has its own orgasm, before reminding us to use him when you have sex. Chan then wraps up the PSA by telling us that while he can fight visible enemies, even he needs Mr. Condom’s help in keeping HIV at bay, which can definitely be a risk when you cheat on your wife. Then Jackie and Mr. Condom embrace, and Jackie definitely doesn’t die a little inside before they punch the camera.

3

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

If you make the wrong decision while driving, you can end a person’s life. Someone’s loved one could be snuffed out in an instant due to your carelessness. But apparently some people require a more “What’s in it for me?” incentive than that, so Evander Holyfield made a PSA about how he’ll beat the shit out of aggressive drivers.

Scene: A car pulls into traffic and cuts off another driver, who then angrily honks and forces the car over. The man gets out of his truck and reveals himself to be a redneck stereotype whose string of profanity makes it clear that he intends to beat the fuck stuffing out of his new nemesis. But then, surprise twist! The man he wants to murder is Evander Holyfield! Now who’s about to die?

The moral clearly ought to be “Avoid road rage. You never know who you might run into. But counterpoint: If you can clearly see it’s some soccer mom or a grandpa, feel free to go full King Immortan Joe on their asses.” If the only way you can think of to appeal to violent maniacs is to remind them they’ll sometimes cross paths with a professional fighter, you haven’t made a PSA against road rage, but one in favor of keeping a gun in the glove compartment.

2

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

No, they’re arresting Mel Gibson. And while it was prescient for Gibson to portray himself as being in trouble with the law, here he’s being hauled in for the simple dystopian crime of owning vitamins. “Guys, guys! It’s only vitamins!” he protests. But what he doesn’t know is that the government wants to make vitamins illegal. This video is here to warn good American citizens that their supplements are under attack. Now, you probably don’t know anyone who has been dogpiled by a SWAT team for cracking open a bottle of Flintstone’s, but in the chilling, stupid reality of Mel Gibson’s world, the answer is “It’s already happening.”

As shown in this obviously based-on-real-events footage, the fascist pig cops are unimpressed when Gibson explains to them he was only taking Vitamin C, “like in oranges.” He’ll have plenty of time to adjust his mindset during his four-month stay at a Dietary Supplement Reeducation Camp. But that future doesn’t have to be ours, the cards say, if we just call our senators.

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on, this “PSA” was funded by the Nutritional Health Alliance, a lobby group formed by the supplement industry to prevent the government from looking into what a huge scam supplements are.

Specifically, in early ’90s, the FDA wanted to crack down on supplements that made completely unsubstantiated health claims on their packaging and in ads, because if there’s one thing the Man loves to do, it’s pushing around honest, hard-working Americans by forcing them to stop buying dangerous products that hospitalize tens of thousands and might accidentally kill people. It’s unclear if Gibson actually believed in the supplement industry or was letting them supplement his income, but luckily, Gibbers was unable to terrify Americans with his vision of a vitamin-hating police state. The FDA’s new regulations went through, and Gibson found himself on the wrong side of history — a position he’s since become intimately familiar with.

1

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

It’s no secret that America is a politically divided country. And who better to bridge that bitter gap than Kid Rock and Sean Penn, two of the most beloved and kind artists in the world. Between Kid’s political savvy and Penn’s famous calmness, only these two could ever unite Americans across the political spectrum — mostly by making all of them ask “Wait … what the fuck?”

This nearly 11-minute (no, seriously) public service Sundance entry is called “Americans,” and it features one of America’s favorite (alleged) spousal abusers sitting down with one of America’s least-favorite aural abusers for a conversation that absolutely no one asked for.

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Mitt Romney (this was made in 2012) is giving a speech on TV. Penn asks for the channel to be changed, but the justifiably scared female bartender ignores him, just in time for Romney to introduce his special musical guest. It’s Kid Rock, and for a moment, we are all Sean Penn:

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

But Mr. Rock, who also seems drunk, plops himself down next to Penn and starts complaining about “Obummer’s” tax policies, like a totally relatable middle American. The two start sniping at each other like YouTube commenters — Penn quotes Goebbels, while Kid Rock says “Fuckin’ suck it, commie.” They both take turns delivering incoherent tirades, although Penn seems to be winning the debate. After all, it’s hard to take Kid Rock seriously when he’s dressed like he’s on his way to play the Country Bear Jamboree.

They nearly come to blows, in a fight we could only hope they somehow both lose, until a random sassy bar patron tells them to shut up and appreciate everything America has to offer. Her passionate speech about what American citizenship means to her is somewhat undercut by the fact that she finishes by calling them “fucking pussies,” but never mind that –there’s some breaking news on the bar TV that inexplicably isn’t just on ESPN. 26 marines have been killed in Afghanistan! Cue sad music and Kid Rock failing to act!

Thankfully, those soldiers didn’t die in vain. Rock and Penn are inspired by their sacrifice to toast “to freedom” and apologize to each other — while babbling over everyone else’s respectful moment of silence. Naturally, the next step is a wacky montage! The first thing Kid Rock does is sell his car and buy a Prius, as any relatable conservative American who wants to learn more about his liberal friends could totally afford to do at the drop of a hideous hat.

Next, we get a shot of an environmental protest, Kid Rock urinating in the background, and Penn catching his urine in a bucket because … Kid Rock’s dehydrated lizard juice still counts as potable water? No time to reflect, because it’s time for Penn to trade places! Kid Rock teaches him to drink a beer instead of a girly cocktail! As the day is winding down, Penn takes Rock to a gay wedding, which, according to this movie, involves one of the men wearing a wedding dress! Are we seeing this wedding through Rock’s Republican eyes?

They then buy each other T-shirts and exchange them on the beach! Kid Rock and Sean Penn are totally about to fuck! After the pair leaves the beach to go bone down, the message of this inspirational tale appears onscreen for the benefit of the slower viewers: We’re all Americans, whether we love PETA, own guns, or are a sassy black woman. Those are the only three kinds of Americans. You too can put aside your cavalcade of liberal and conservative stereotypes and stop yelling crude insults at each other long enough to bond over some dead marines and go car shopping. Because in the end, aren’t we all just South Park jokes without the irony? Fuck yeah, Sean Penn and Kid Rock. Fuck yeah.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

[pauldeckerus]

Photographing the Fake Holy Men of Varanasi, India

“Where should we go?” Melissa, my girlfriend, was trying to narrow down what seemed like a mountain of possibilities-places that were worthy of exploration. After a month of repeating that same question a million times, we finally settled on India.

Why? Throughout my 8-year career, I have seen such an overwhelming amount of photography. I have studied the greats in both photojournalism and commercial portraiture. Out of the millions of photographs, many of the ones I remember most vividly were from India. Every time I listened to top photographers speak, it seems like they all mentioned the same thing: how incredible and unexplainably magical India is.

Eventually, it was these comments and the related work that I love so much, that drove me to insist we go there.

Our goal was to stay in as few places as possible and go deep, instead of trying to see everything. We wanted to find a story, but didn’t want to go there with expectations and decided to figure out what that story would be once we arrived.

India is a massive place, and picking just a few locations was difficult, but one we settled on was Varanasi because of the many incredible portraits and accompanying stories about Sadhus: religious people who renounce worldly possessions and embark on a spiritual journey with the goal of reaching ‘moksha’, or spiritual liberation.

We booked our flights and accommodations and prepared for our trip.

I had always been excited to see the Ganges, or ‘Mother Ganga’ as it’s affectionately called by many followers of the Hindu religion. You see, the Ganges River is not just seen as a river, but as a holy and sacred entity. From where it rises in the Western Himalayas to its end-1,600 miles away at the Bay of Bengal-it is worshipped. Despite this, the river is highly polluted and the level of fecal coliform (E. Coli from human waste) is over 100 times the official government limit around Varanasi. Imagine my surprise when we arrived in the middle of the night and peered out our bedside window at a man bathing in it. As we realized the next day, this is extremely common.

The streets of Varanasi were packed with both animals and humans. What smelled like a mix of diarrhea and bleach permeated the air as heavily as the ashes of the dead. Varanasi, formerly Benares, is over 4,000 years old, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. Much like the Ganges that it sits upon, it is sacred. The most sacred city in Hinduism and Jainism, in fact.

Hindus believe that to die there is to break the cycle of life and death, or to reach ‘Moksha’.

As a result, Hindus will travel from around the world to Varanasi as they (or their loved ones) age or fall ill. When the person dies, a family member will purchase wood that is placed along the Rivers edge. The body is placed on top of this wood pile and burned in the open. This is happening 24/7, 365. To walk along these ghats is to accept the ashes of the dead falling upon you.

Some things are harder to get used to than others.

From a visual perspective, the city was incredible. People toiling and working and laughing and smiling and swimming. It was all so striking. The character in people’s countenance was apparent everywhere we went.

Throughout my 8 years as a photographer, I’ve photographed a variety of content. As I matured in my work, I focused my efforts on environmental portraiture and knew I wanted to reflect the strength of my skill in this area within my portfolio. After seeing so many great photos of Sadhus taken by artists that I respect, I wanted to create some strong photos of these holy men. This was a large motivation for going to India.

I began wandering the ghats. There were many Sadhus.

After an hour or so of scouting, I approached a Sadhu who I thought had a particularly strong look. I sat down and had a good conversation with the man. Eventually, I asked if he would allow me to photograph him.

“500 rupees!” he demanded.

I was a bit shocked. As I mentioned at the start of this blog post, Sadhus relinquish all worldly possessions-including and especially money- in pursuit of spiritual liberation.

I explained to the man that I was there as a photojournalist and that to pay anyone or accept payment for a photo would compromise the integrity of my work and would, therefore, be unethical. I simply wanted to honor and document his culture. He made a motion with his hand, shooing me away. I happily obliged as an austere Sadhu would have never asked for money.

No problem. There were many more Sadhus in the area.

I approached one, then another, and another. They all demanded payment to take a photo of them. I can understand some Sadhus-like in any religion-not being as devout as others, however, I would not expect every Sadhu I approached to disregard one of the core tenants of their faith.

That night, we went back to our hotel confused and frustrated. I asked the gentleman at the front desk whom I had befriended over the previous days, “What am I missing?”

“Those are fake Sadhus. They are not real. They dress in a Sadhu’s clothing and grow dreaded hair in an attempt to fool foreigners into giving them money for photos. All of the real Sadhus are up in the mountains, and tend to avoid people.”

Suddenly it was starting to make a bit more sense.

There are many great photographs of Sadhus that have been taken over the years. I pulled out my phone and showed my new friend a few photos of these Sadhus. I asked if he knew where I could find REAL Sadhus like the ones I was showing him.

“Most of the men in these photos are not Sadhus. These are the same homeless men dressing up and fooling tourists that you saw today. I can take you and show you tomorrow.”

“Wait, so you’re saying many of these Sadhus aren’t legitimate?”

“Yes.”

Oh. No big deal. Didn’t travel from the opposite side of the planet to find real Sadhus or anything…

…I couldn’t believe it.

I can see how what happened to me might have also happened to other photographers.

You think you are coming for one thing and discover it’s not what you thought. You realize you came around the world, spent your time, money and resources only to realize you are looking for a ghost. So you just take what you have, photograph the “fake” Sadhus and Aghori and continue to perpetuate the false narrative so that you can still come out with a ‘win’ and appear more legitimate. More ‘Nat Geo’ if you will. I just can’t do that.

The next morning, Melissa and I went out for some breakfast. On our way there, we were passing the ghats where they burn the bodies. A man stopped us and asked us to wait out of respect for a ceremony that was taking place. Despite being frustrated from the night before, we waited. and waited. and waited. While doing so, the man started to discuss the ceremony and tell us everything we already knew about what was going on. Eventually, my hunger got the best of me and I told him that we were just going to go up and around the entire ghat in order to not disturb anyone.

“1000 rupees!” he demanded. He actually expected us to pay him because he spoke to us for 10 minutes.

Unbelievable. Even the funerals weren’t off limits. At that moment, I felt like Varanasi was like a Disney theme park-all the characters dressed up imitating something it once was — a well-oiled machine, with its only legitimate truth being to extract money and scam people. Had he no shame? What kind of person is willing to stand on the backs of dead bodies in order to try to guilt and obligate someone into paying them money?

“Not happening.”

After eating our usual crepe filled with Nutella, we discussed our next move. It was then that we realized that we hadn’t lost our story, but gained one. We decided to spend the rest of the trip photographing these “fake” Sadhus to show just how legitimate they can appear. Knowing we wanted to write this story, we needed to show you examples of the Sadhus standing along the River asking for money in exchange for posing for a photo. Their attire and appearance is representative of how they looked when we found them:

Finally, it was time for us to journey back to Brooklyn. The gentlemen we made friends with at the hotel insisted on carrying our luggage a quarter mile back to our taxi. I admired their hospitality and hard-working attitude. This seemed to be a theme across all of the hotel workers and restauranteurs in India. I was happy to end our trip with this sentiment in mind.

45 hours after our plane took off from Varanasi, after many delays, a Kuwait police officer being more blatantly sexist than I’d ever seen in my life, and awesome airport lounges (thanks Chase Sapphire Reserve), we were back in Brooklyn. The whole flight back, thoughts kept racing through my head;

What does it mean to be a “real” anything?

How can we know ones true beliefs? Often, we struggle with answering this question for ourselves.

How closely do we need to follow our faith to be considered legitimate?

How much responsibility do we have as photographers, journalists, and travelers?

Does the tourist or naive photographer and the ‘fake” Sadhu deserve one another? Are they both not giving the same level of effort and depth towards their journey and commitments?

We want to go learn and empathize with another culture. We want to tell their story, and give a voice and platform to people who might not already have one. But we also want to be recognized and appreciated for providing that insight, doing something many aren’t willing to do. To find the truth. To find something real. Maybe that’s truly what we’re searching for. Something 100% authentic and pure. Maybe that’s the most important question of all;

How far do we have to go to find something real?

How much do our own expectations play into our idea of what that is?

If finally confronted with it, could we accept the truth even if it didn’t fit into our expectations?

This blur between legitimacy isn’t only present in India. There are monks in a Buddhist temple that are constantly over-charging for entry. Tribes in Ethiopia that set up near major roads and dress in more dramatic make-up than is typical of their village located a few miles away-all to gain more money from tourists. Young members of the Jewish faith going to Israel for ‘Birthright’, a program created to deepen their understanding of Jewish heritage, only to party in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Sexual abuse being perpetrated by Catholic priests.

There are a lot of important stories that need to be told, but this line of thought drives deep into human nature and truth itself. Something more timeless that goes beyond what we want to be and asks who we actually are. A string that I feel is worth tugging on, despite the wormhole that might ensue. So with that, I’m beginning a new series that will be titled, “Only God Knows.”

Now that I’ve had a couple months to reflect on our trip to India, I realize how much I’ve grown from it. It was so dirty, yet beautiful. Everything seemed fake but was so real. Humbling and rewarding.

There were many parts of the trip that I didn’t enjoy, but in a way, it was everything I wanted it to be.

You can’t really define India or put it in a box, and trying to understand why I want to go back again is enough to drive me crazy…

But hey, I guess I’m just drawn to the irony in India.

About the author: Gavin Doran is a Brooklyn-based photographer best known for his cinematic portraiture and dynamic lifestyle imagery. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his work on his website or by following him on Facebook and Instagram. A longer version of this post was also published here.

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2019/02/01/irony-in-india-photographing-the-fake-holy-men-of-varanasi/

[sailorrrvenus]

Photographing the Fake Holy Men of Varanasi, India

“Where should we go?” Melissa, my girlfriend, was trying to narrow down what seemed like a mountain of possibilities-places that were worthy of exploration. After a month of repeating that same question a million times, we finally settled on India.

Why? Throughout my 8-year career, I have seen such an overwhelming amount of photography. I have studied the greats in both photojournalism and commercial portraiture. Out of the millions of photographs, many of the ones I remember most vividly were from India. Every time I listened to top photographers speak, it seems like they all mentioned the same thing: how incredible and unexplainably magical India is.

Eventually, it was these comments and the related work that I love so much, that drove me to insist we go there.

Our goal was to stay in as few places as possible and go deep, instead of trying to see everything. We wanted to find a story, but didn’t want to go there with expectations and decided to figure out what that story would be once we arrived.

India is a massive place, and picking just a few locations was difficult, but one we settled on was Varanasi because of the many incredible portraits and accompanying stories about Sadhus: religious people who renounce worldly possessions and embark on a spiritual journey with the goal of reaching ‘moksha’, or spiritual liberation.

We booked our flights and accommodations and prepared for our trip.

I had always been excited to see the Ganges, or ‘Mother Ganga’ as it’s affectionately called by many followers of the Hindu religion. You see, the Ganges River is not just seen as a river, but as a holy and sacred entity. From where it rises in the Western Himalayas to its end-1,600 miles away at the Bay of Bengal-it is worshipped. Despite this, the river is highly polluted and the level of fecal coliform (E. Coli from human waste) is over 100 times the official government limit around Varanasi. Imagine my surprise when we arrived in the middle of the night and peered out our bedside window at a man bathing in it. As we realized the next day, this is extremely common.

The streets of Varanasi were packed with both animals and humans. What smelled like a mix of diarrhea and bleach permeated the air as heavily as the ashes of the dead. Varanasi, formerly Benares, is over 4,000 years old, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. Much like the Ganges that it sits upon, it is sacred. The most sacred city in Hinduism and Jainism, in fact.

Hindus believe that to die there is to break the cycle of life and death, or to reach ‘Moksha’.

As a result, Hindus will travel from around the world to Varanasi as they (or their loved ones) age or fall ill. When the person dies, a family member will purchase wood that is placed along the Rivers edge. The body is placed on top of this wood pile and burned in the open. This is happening 24/7, 365. To walk along these ghats is to accept the ashes of the dead falling upon you.

Some things are harder to get used to than others.

From a visual perspective, the city was incredible. People toiling and working and laughing and smiling and swimming. It was all so striking. The character in people’s countenance was apparent everywhere we went.

Throughout my 8 years as a photographer, I’ve photographed a variety of content. As I matured in my work, I focused my efforts on environmental portraiture and knew I wanted to reflect the strength of my skill in this area within my portfolio. After seeing so many great photos of Sadhus taken by artists that I respect, I wanted to create some strong photos of these holy men. This was a large motivation for going to India.

I began wandering the ghats. There were many Sadhus.

After an hour or so of scouting, I approached a Sadhu who I thought had a particularly strong look. I sat down and had a good conversation with the man. Eventually, I asked if he would allow me to photograph him.

“500 rupees!” he demanded.

I was a bit shocked. As I mentioned at the start of this blog post, Sadhus relinquish all worldly possessions-including and especially money- in pursuit of spiritual liberation.

I explained to the man that I was there as a photojournalist and that to pay anyone or accept payment for a photo would compromise the integrity of my work and would, therefore, be unethical. I simply wanted to honor and document his culture. He made a motion with his hand, shooing me away. I happily obliged as an austere Sadhu would have never asked for money.

No problem. There were many more Sadhus in the area.

I approached one, then another, and another. They all demanded payment to take a photo of them. I can understand some Sadhus-like in any religion-not being as devout as others, however, I would not expect every Sadhu I approached to disregard one of the core tenants of their faith.

That night, we went back to our hotel confused and frustrated. I asked the gentleman at the front desk whom I had befriended over the previous days, “What am I missing?”

“Those are fake Sadhus. They are not real. They dress in a Sadhu’s clothing and grow dreaded hair in an attempt to fool foreigners into giving them money for photos. All of the real Sadhus are up in the mountains, and tend to avoid people.”

Suddenly it was starting to make a bit more sense.

There are many great photographs of Sadhus that have been taken over the years. I pulled out my phone and showed my new friend a few photos of these Sadhus. I asked if he knew where I could find REAL Sadhus like the ones I was showing him.

“Most of the men in these photos are not Sadhus. These are the same homeless men dressing up and fooling tourists that you saw today. I can take you and show you tomorrow.”

“Wait, so you’re saying many of these Sadhus aren’t legitimate?”

“Yes.”

Oh. No big deal. Didn’t travel from the opposite side of the planet to find real Sadhus or anything…

…I couldn’t believe it.

I can see how what happened to me might have also happened to other photographers.

You think you are coming for one thing and discover it’s not what you thought. You realize you came around the world, spent your time, money and resources only to realize you are looking for a ghost. So you just take what you have, photograph the “fake” Sadhus and Aghori and continue to perpetuate the false narrative so that you can still come out with a ‘win’ and appear more legitimate. More ‘Nat Geo’ if you will. I just can’t do that.

The next morning, Melissa and I went out for some breakfast. On our way there, we were passing the ghats where they burn the bodies. A man stopped us and asked us to wait out of respect for a ceremony that was taking place. Despite being frustrated from the night before, we waited. and waited. and waited. While doing so, the man started to discuss the ceremony and tell us everything we already knew about what was going on. Eventually, my hunger got the best of me and I told him that we were just going to go up and around the entire ghat in order to not disturb anyone.

“1000 rupees!” he demanded. He actually expected us to pay him because he spoke to us for 10 minutes.

Unbelievable. Even the funerals weren’t off limits. At that moment, I felt like Varanasi was like a Disney theme park-all the characters dressed up imitating something it once was — a well-oiled machine, with its only legitimate truth being to extract money and scam people. Had he no shame? What kind of person is willing to stand on the backs of dead bodies in order to try to guilt and obligate someone into paying them money?

“Not happening.”

After eating our usual crepe filled with Nutella, we discussed our next move. It was then that we realized that we hadn’t lost our story, but gained one. We decided to spend the rest of the trip photographing these “fake” Sadhus to show just how legitimate they can appear. Knowing we wanted to write this story, we needed to show you examples of the Sadhus standing along the River asking for money in exchange for posing for a photo. Their attire and appearance is representative of how they looked when we found them:

Finally, it was time for us to journey back to Brooklyn. The gentlemen we made friends with at the hotel insisted on carrying our luggage a quarter mile back to our taxi. I admired their hospitality and hard-working attitude. This seemed to be a theme across all of the hotel workers and restauranteurs in India. I was happy to end our trip with this sentiment in mind.

45 hours after our plane took off from Varanasi, after many delays, a Kuwait police officer being more blatantly sexist than I’d ever seen in my life, and awesome airport lounges (thanks Chase Sapphire Reserve), we were back in Brooklyn. The whole flight back, thoughts kept racing through my head;

What does it mean to be a “real” anything?

How can we know ones true beliefs? Often, we struggle with answering this question for ourselves.

How closely do we need to follow our faith to be considered legitimate?

How much responsibility do we have as photographers, journalists, and travelers?

Does the tourist or naive photographer and the ‘fake” Sadhu deserve one another? Are they both not giving the same level of effort and depth towards their journey and commitments?

We want to go learn and empathize with another culture. We want to tell their story, and give a voice and platform to people who might not already have one. But we also want to be recognized and appreciated for providing that insight, doing something many aren’t willing to do. To find the truth. To find something real. Maybe that’s truly what we’re searching for. Something 100% authentic and pure. Maybe that’s the most important question of all;

How far do we have to go to find something real?

How much do our own expectations play into our idea of what that is?

If finally confronted with it, could we accept the truth even if it didn’t fit into our expectations?

This blur between legitimacy isn’t only present in India. There are monks in a Buddhist temple that are constantly over-charging for entry. Tribes in Ethiopia that set up near major roads and dress in more dramatic make-up than is typical of their village located a few miles away-all to gain more money from tourists. Young members of the Jewish faith going to Israel for ‘Birthright’, a program created to deepen their understanding of Jewish heritage, only to party in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Sexual abuse being perpetrated by Catholic priests.

There are a lot of important stories that need to be told, but this line of thought drives deep into human nature and truth itself. Something more timeless that goes beyond what we want to be and asks who we actually are. A string that I feel is worth tugging on, despite the wormhole that might ensue. So with that, I’m beginning a new series that will be titled, “Only God Knows.”

Now that I’ve had a couple months to reflect on our trip to India, I realize how much I’ve grown from it. It was so dirty, yet beautiful. Everything seemed fake but was so real. Humbling and rewarding.

There were many parts of the trip that I didn’t enjoy, but in a way, it was everything I wanted it to be.

You can’t really define India or put it in a box, and trying to understand why I want to go back again is enough to drive me crazy…

But hey, I guess I’m just drawn to the irony in India.

About the author: Gavin Doran is a Brooklyn-based photographer best known for his cinematic portraiture and dynamic lifestyle imagery. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. You can find more of his work on his website or by following him on Facebook and Instagram. A longer version of this post was also published here.

source https://petapixel.com/2019/02/01/irony-in-india-photographing-the-fake-holy-men-of-varanasi/