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venusluvrr · 3 years

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The Psychological Horror Manhwa “Killing Stalking” is not a Romance, but an Emotional Series Depicting the Codependent Relationship Between Two Ill Individuals

Content Warning!!: contains mentions of sexual abuse (rape) and mental illness.

Killing Stalking is an immensely twisted webcomic series, mainly popular within the Yaoi community for its boy on boy focused plotline. The story follows characters Yoon Bum (Bum), a shy, scrawny young man with a haunting past filled with abuse, and Oh Sangwoo (Sangwoo), a younger man who also has a quite damaging upbringing but masks it perfectly with his vibrant, extroverted personality. After being saved from a rape attempt during his time serving in the military, Bum develops a crush on his saviour, Sangwoo, from which an unhealthy obsession starts to arise and he eventually finds himself locating and breaking into the man’s home one day when he’s out. When he does, he discovers a terribly injured woman being held captive in his basement, and with further evidence, soon comes to the realization that his crush is actually a serial killer -- hence the name “Killing Stalking,” as Sangwoo kills and Bum stalks. For a very specific reason though, Sangwoo decides not to kill the man that had been stalking him, and instead holds him hostage in his custody. From here, the story goes into exceeding depth of the abnormal, toxic, and manipulative relationship the two form during their time spent together. By just the mere description of it, it’s a bit concerning to know that a large portion of readers still support Sangwoo and Bum’s relationship. In other words, they believe they truly loved each other and that the story was not only horror fiction but a romance as well. One could easily come to this conclusion by basing their relationship on the few parts within the novel where they showed affection towards each other -- for example when Bum allows Sangwoo to hug him to sleep when he suffered through the night, or my personal favourite, when Sangwoo buys Bum a stuffed frog keychain after finding out that he had an affinity for such creatures. But we cannot simply dismiss the underlying factors of their relationship because of some cute things they did that made our heart melt -- Sangwoo still abused Bum at his leisure which makes those moments quite meaningless in the sense of it all. What Sangwoo and Yoonbum shared can’t be classified as “love,” because even with their peculiar bond and endearing moments, the psychological damage they both endured played a bigger part in the way they perceived each other.

Many toxic relationships start out lovely and glamorous until the couple have become comfortable enough to start revealing some bad habits, but in Sangwoo and Bum’s case, they were already off to a bad start, as the reason they remained with each other was solely for reasons pertaining to their poor mental health.

At the time Sangwoo saved Bum in the military, Bum still suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) -- a disorder he inferrably developed due to the fact that he grew up being constantly physically and sexually abused by the people around him. People with this illness may easily develop an infatuation for a person who shows them even the least bit of care; It can reach the point where they begin to idolize them and see them almost as a perfect human being -- which is exactly how Bum viewed Sangwoo after he helped him to escape a rape attempt. The likely specific term for what Sangwoo was to Bum is a Favourite Person (FP). To an individual suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, their FP is everything -- their self-worth, identity and emotional dependency all rely on this one person, making them the center of their lives. In contrast to this sincere fondness, the only reason Sangwoo kept Bum alive was because of the man’s resemblance to his late mother -- the one person in his life who he truly loved. While his father was abusive and negligent, his mother tried her best to care for her son even while her own mental stability wasn’t so great either. Even though it was implied that he was responsible for the murder of both his mother and father in high school -- getting away with it scotch-free because of how perfectly executed his plan was -- he still shared a special bond with the woman, allowing her existence follow and continue to torutue him mentally as he grew older. When he saw Yoonbum, he felt as if she had been somewhat resurrected, or at least he could pretend so by dressing him up in his mother’s clothes and making him cook and do the chores; He also played the husband role by abusing and assaulting Bum just as his father did to his mother -- mostly just out of his own nature. Sangwoo had his own issues, “mommy issues,” and he initially needed to keep Bum alive so he could fulfill his own longing desires. Knowing the man’s character though, things wouldn’t end there and instead headed down a very gruesome and frightful path.

The very reasons that the two were drawn to each other we’re even more evident the longer they lived under the same roof. While Yoonbum continued to recall the perfect image he had of Sangwoo in his head, Sangwoo continued to manipulate the man in order to satisfy his own needs. A healthy relationship cannot be based on deceit, because one person will end up victimized instead of loved.

Oh Sangwoo is a sadistic sociopath with a history of kidnapping, abusing, raping and torturing innocent people, and because of his illness, he shows feels and shows no remorse for his actions and even proceeds to kill off his victims as they pleaded in objection. What some people don’t understand is that when Sangwoo met Bum, the only reason he treated him differently was not because he thought of him as special, but because he had a personal agenda that included making Bum think that was the truth and that he was indeed the favoured victim among many. It’s no surprise with the man’s manipulative personality that he would enjoy planting a lie in Bum’s head to make him stay and continue to do as he says, and this is confirmed whenever he returned back to his old destructive habits even after showing the man acts of affection. Yes, Sangwoo spared Bum’s life, clothed him and fed him, but as their bond grew, his narcissistic attitude was still more apparent than ever.

Upon meeting Bum for the first time, Sangwoo didn’t hesitate to aggressively break his ankles to prevent his mobility, he left the man within the dark confinement of his basement for a certain period of time before letting him out only after he had gained his trust. He made him sit in a chair to wash dishes and make dinner because he could no longer stand. Sangwoo also constantly dragged Bum down with derogatory words and statements every chance he could get, this included calling him a “retard,” and referring to him as a “disgusting” and “filthy” human being. As confirmed by the author, Sangwoo is also heterosexual, which is further proved by the homophobic remarks he made towards a significantly older man who was sexually attracted to him while murdering him with Bum’s aid. This fact alone is another one that should justify a strong point that demonstrates the true hostility of their relationship -- Yoonbum never gave his consent to have sex with Sangwoo, nor did he allow it to happen because “he wanted it.” He specifically used phrases such as, “No,” “Stop,” and “It hurts,” implying that sometimes there was no mutual agreement when they had sex and Sangwoo had actually raped him several times.

People with Borderline Personality Disorder have been reported to have difficulties seeing the faults in their partner -- this explains why Bum still held on to him. He chose to stay when he had the chance to escape, and with tears rolling down his face from excruciating pain he still told Sangwoo he loved him. In a scene where Bum is left alone with the police as they investigate the suspicions they have surrounding him, he questions them saying, “Could you kiss somebody like me? Could you love somebody like me?” As he believes nobody but Sangwoo could answer yes to those two questions, convinced that Sangwoo really does have feelings for him. It’s saddening to know that the poor man had successfully been lured into a trap, and because of his mental health it would be much harder for him to realize it.

To the readers that think, “Sangwoo and Yoonbum needed each other,” -- You’re not completely wrong. They did need each other in the way that they found somewhat of a saneness from each other’s presence, each using one another to each other’s benefit. But being together at the same time built on their insanity, as the presence of Sangwoo’s mother seemed to grow even more prevalent with Bum, who resembled her, also in the picture, and Yoonbum growing so unhealthily attached to Sangwoo that he constantly feared of abandonment and turned the sociopath into the only source of his happiness. They needed each other, but not for the right reasons. They were attached to each other, but there was no love, otherwise it would reflect throughout the story. One of the most debate-worthy scenes that challenge this fact is when Sangwoo is reported by an old lady in the hospital, the one that had ended his life, that he was calling out Bum’s name throughout the night as he lay in his deathbed. Those were his final words, and Yoonbum’s final word was also Sangwoo’s name before he was very well implied to have been hit by a car while he chased an illusion of the man he “loved.” Even I almost felt that this was solid proof that even through the tough and terrible of their relationship, deep inside, the two really were in love but could not express it in the right way due to their mental health issues -- after all, what someone makes of their final moments before death is much more meaningful than most of what they've done in their life entirely. But I came to realize that the only way I could support this relationship would be if they had met in an alternate universe where they did not suffer from such dreadful childhood trauma that made them into the hurting individual they had become before meeting each other. As difficult as it is for me to picture the two with different partners, it would be best if the two had not met at all as they only fed into the severity of their conditions.

#killing stalking #sangwoo #yoonbum #yaoi #horror #manhwa

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cerastes · 4 years

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I don’t think we give Amiya enough credit for the nerves of steel she has to have in order to not only lead an altruistic pharmaceutics-slash-PMC-slash-humanitarian-aid corporation in a world as bleak as Terra, but to also have the staff Rhodes Island has in her payroll. Not to diminish her own status as a freak of nature (this term, understand, is used as a compliment for the purposes of this post), but she has some absolute legends and freaks of nature in her payroll, all with their quirks and idiosyncrasies, and she’s the respected boss.

She walks into a room with Actual Legends like Hellagur, Skadi and Schwarz, gives them a nice cordial greeting along with her instructions for the day, and then walks into the next room over where all the Superfreaks like Lappland, Specter and Ifrit are chilling, and you bet your soft toosh she gives them the same TED Talk-style cordial once-over, now, chop-chop, good luck, get that bread, girls.

It’s very likely that the first person to call in anyone’s mind in order to handle a situation with an Operator is Doctor; Ifrit eating her homework? Specter talking about how some things just were always meant to be cut? Yeah, Doc can handle that. Kal’tsit probably can also handle that (most of the time by throwing Doc in there, but she’s shown she can be assed and that she cares), but when neither of them are readily available and you see the tiniest CEO down the aisle? Yeah you can count on her.

Ifrit stops eating her homework and actually does it because you know Amiya is not only not afraid of incineration via punk Sarkaz, she also knows the formulas Ifrit has to be using, so she helps her out. Amiya asks Specter to show her what’s that she’s doing, and Specter gives her a beautifully arranged paper cutout figure of a school of fish she made with scissors and concentration, Amiya asks her if she still wants to cut more, Specter says yes, Amiya tells her there’s a lot of onions that need some slicing and dicing for tonight’s dinner, Specter immediately goes on her way, and now Matterhorn and Gummy have an impromptu assistant, all without being afraid of getting of being on the receiving end of a Specter episode.

We see a lot of Amiya in the context of Basically Doctor’s Daughter, which is fair, the game does indeed present her in such a manner, and since we see the world of Terra through Doctor’s eyes, we see a lot of Amiya in the context of “interacting with Doctor”, but she’s not a Babby Daughter when dealing with others, and I think this side of her is equally important and charming: She handles negotiations with Ch’en and Wei, she doles out orders to Blaze and Jessica’s team, she handles herself in a professional manner.

And that’s wonderful. This duality of Personal Life Versus Professional Life is very charming, it feels very personable, very fulfilling. Arknights could’ve handled Amiya completely differently, they really could’ve just made her Mascot Cute Girl CEO that the game would remind you, at all times, is a cute little girl, they really could’ve made endless bits or running gags about her being A Child and thus everyone treating her as A Child, even though she is the head honcho, and you know people would’ve been okay with this low hanging fruit, especially since they could just give her a *Serious Moment* at one important plot point around Chapter 5 or 6 where she acts as a respected, competent leader suddenly and everyone would’ve remarked on it like “Wow! Amiya is serious!” and you know people would’ve eaten that up and celebrated that hype moment. It’s what’s come to be expected from mobile games. I’m not even trying to be too mocking of it all; I know I would’ve accepted such a development, if nothing else because it could be worse than something mediocre like that.

But that’s not how Arknights decided to handle Amiya, and I’m very thankful, no, they have not, for one second, shied away from the fact that Amiya leads. The Yeti Squadron even lampshades how she looks older than she really is by virtue of her mature demeanor and vocabulary (albeit this particular instance signals to it as something tragic, which is also delicious). She’s not Haha Funny Little Girl With Leadership That The Narrative Keeps Reminding You Of By Belittling Her (But Then She Has A Baller Moment!), Amiya leads. Amiya is entirely composed of baller moments when not alone with Doc, constantly remaining in character as “Leader of Rhodes Island”, and I respect and like that very, very much. I enjoy Amiya immensely. Blaze and Ace casually joke and quip around with her habitually in their dialogue and follow her orders, Nearl clearly has a lot of respect for her, Blacksteel and Penguin Logistics Operators show appreciation for her, she’s never this Kingpin-like boss or “Miss Amiya”, just “Amiya”, who they know is very humane and pleasant, but also her baskets sorted. Amiya leads.

She’s just simply such a joy to have in the narrative as a key character.

#arknights #amiya

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scripttorture · 4 years

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Hey! My character is made into an experiment by the government due to him having a supernatural ability. The one who handed him over was his partner, who has been a part of that organization all along. He is usually a very confident person, powerful and extroverted. I'm not sure how his mental state is supposed to change? I don't feel like the whole loosing their will to live and becoming incredibly depressed thing would fit him as a person. How could I still show that the torture effects him?

There isn’t a sure fire answer to how any one person will change when they’re tortured. We know the possible symptoms, but most people won’t experience every possible symptom and we don’t have a way to predict who gets what.

There’s a post that talks about the possible symptoms over here.

Here’s the thing though: there is a lot of variety in survivors, in the symptoms they get and the way they personally express those symptoms. Some people do become suicidal. Some people do become depressed. And some people do lose their faith in humanity.

But there is not one universal survivor experience.

This means that there’s a big range in realistic responses. It also means that as a writer you actually have a lot of options. You should be picking 3-5 symptoms from the list of possible options, but the list has 14 things on it and some of those things can manifest in multiple ways.

I think that, since we can’t predict symptoms, the best thing you can do as a writer is pick symptoms based on what you feel fits your character and story best.

Depression and suicidal thoughts don’t do that, so let’s have a look at some of the others.

Memory problems are incredibly common in real survivors and are almost never portrayed accurately in fiction. You can read about the four basic types here.

I’d really encourage you to use one of these if you feel it fits your story. They create a lot of interesting narrative challenges for the character and they can make for really good emotional/introspective moments. If for instance you want to explore self-doubt giving the character memories he later finds out are inaccurate could feed into that, leading to him questioning whether he ‘really’ was betrayed.

General forgetfulness (ie low level difficulty forming memories) can give the character a lasting disadvantage in everyday life, creating a much more traditional injury-recovery arc as he tries to find adaptions to this new normal.

Intrusive memories, when handled well, can help create a deeper connection between the reader and the character. Because it lets you create situations where the character’s mood flips in an instant, the other characters don’t understand why but the readers do.

Memory loss can be trickier, mostly because it’s rarely handled well in fiction. It doesn’t effect older memories, such as childhood memories, the person’s name etc. It almost never effects memories of torture itself. But it does effect other aspects of the time they’re held, the period prior to capture and sometimes a few weeks after release. It’s a distressing and disorientating experience and it’s a good pick if there’s any sort of investigation or prosecution.

Because memory problems (especially memory loss and inaccurate memories) are a big part of why torture trials are really hard to conduct. Having the character find that he doesn’t actually remember the crucial details and watching the process of people trying and failing to help him, that can be a really powerful addition. It’s also a good way to form a rift between him and his friends without depression or having him lose faith in others. It gives a reason for any distance between them, even if it’s an emotional rather then logical reason.

Read through the masterpost and really think about whether any of these memory problems could fit your story.

Narratively speaking memory problems don’t link the character’s personality but they do have a strong impact on plots and sub-plots. Memory loss, inaccurate memories and intrusive memories will all effect the character’s emotional arc and sense of self. They can also throw up barriers for the character.

He might be missing a couple of crucial details about his life before he was snatched. He might have some key details about how and where he was snatched wrong. Think about how those sorts of problems could feed into your plot, because they can add interesting conflicts and challenges.

Chronic pain is also incredibly common in torture survivors and it often doesn’t have a single cause. Back, muscular and joint pain are particularly common.

It can lead to a character seeming angry, unapproachable, anti-social or like they have a hair-trigger temper. It can also make it seem as though they have really bad mood swings or a short temper.

This can lead to interesting character moments as non-survivors struggle to empathise with an ‘asshole’ while the survivor is struggling to express the fact they’re in physical pain. It can also lead in to discussions of disability and the way we treat invisible disabilities in society.

It can also often be improved by, again, life style adjustments and sometime medication.

If you wanted to use addiction as a symptom then chronic pain is a common reason behind addiction in survivors. Essentially they start taking more and more powerful pain medications in order to try and feel ‘normal’.

Chronic pain doesn’t always lead to addiction though. Making good, consistent life style adjustments (using a mobility aid, being able to sit instead of having to stand for long periods and so on) can help keep pain at manageable levels allowing a healthy relationship with pain medication.

Insomnia is another really common symptom in survivors. This basically means the character is always at least slightly sleep deprived. Which has knock on effects on absolutely every part of a person’s life.

You can read about the effects of sleep deprivation here.

I’d suggest thinking carefully about what you need the character to do before using this one. It might sound counter intuitive but a character with disabling chronic pain is probably more capable of the occasional bout of superheroics then a chronically sleep deprived character is.

Insomnia caused by mental illness is also notoriously difficult to treat. Medication for the mental health problems survivors tend to have makes it harder to sleep and reduces the quality of sleep. Medication to ‘make’ people sleep often decreases the quality of sleep, when it works. It does not work for everyone.

Essentially don’t treat insomnia as an ‘easy’ option with less impact on the character. It impacts every part of a person’s life, making them more likely to get sick, slower to react, more emotionally volatile and less able to learn/remember everything.

There are so many things that insomnia effects that- well I find it easiest to think of it as a permanent lowering of ability across all categories. This does not mean that a character automatically becomes incapable of things; it means they are worse at them then they were before.

If they were already really good at something then other people might not notice the difference. But the character himself will. Which can have a knock on effect on self esteem.

Any of the things I’ve mentioned can result in social isolation. Because survivors can come across as aggressive, volatile and inconsiderate which can lead to people… avoiding them. Especially when other characters don’t have a good understanding of mental illness or experience dealing with trauma survivors. (Having said that, remember that a pretty significant proportion of the population experiences mental health problems at some point in their life. Think about how likely experience vs ignorance is, rather then assuming one or the other.)

Isolation exacerbates pre-existing mental health problems.

And any combination of the above symptoms make up the frame work of any long term personality change. For instance you describe this character as confident and capable: if he gets multiple forms of memory problems does that impact his confidence in certain areas? And if it does how does he cope with that? It could be by expressing his self-doubt but it could also be by taking a more passive role within a group, letting others take the lead instead of stepping in.

I have an old ask over here that goes through how I pick symptoms for a character and how I vary them depending on the sort of plot I have in mind.

Wrapping up, I think that we make these symptoms individual when we consider how the symptoms interact and what that means for the character.

Depression does not have to mean someone looks overtly miserable. It can look like nausea, like struggling to eat and sleep, like being quieter in social situations. It can feel like going through life disconnected from the world, not so much the presence of misery as the absence of joy.

You’ve listed these characteristics; confidence, power, extroverted and survivors can hold on to all those things. As always the central point is nuance. Because that confidence probably won’t be completely unshaken anymore, that extroversion might not be effortless anymore, his relationship with that power could change.

The character might have developed a lot of self doubt and, though it’s a struggle, continue to make firm ‘confident’ decisions because he feels that’s important either to himself or to everyone else. It could be a way of him showing that he’s still ‘strong’, that he survived, that he can still support the other characters.

The character could still be extroverted and depending on the symptoms you pick socialising might be harder, it could take up more energy. He might be hiding the cost from his friends. Or, another common way it plays out, is that he could just come across as… a lot more inappropriate: making dark ‘jokes’ that non-survivors don’t find funny, having obvious mood swings that make others uncomfortable. You get the idea.

Torture does change people. But those changes are unpredictable and they often don’t look like we expect.

Our fiction often tries to use depression and suicidal ideation as an excuse to turn survivors into passive objects. They are not.

One of the things that stood out to me the more I looked at prominent survivors was anger. Because yes, despair is possible, common even. But so is spite and vitriol and rage. So is determination.

There is more then one way to be powerful. Confidence does not need to be unshakable to be real.

In essence: you are aiming for an understandable change in what is already there, not an excision of the characteristics you’ve already established.

As a final note you might want to take a look at the masterposts I have on medical experiments (which you can find here and also here.) It’s worth deciding whether you want to show unethical but genuine experiments, or torture. You can have a look through the tags on unethical experimentation and pseudo-scientific torture for more information.

I hope that helps. :)

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#writing advice #tw torture #tw medical abuse #writing survivors #writing recovery #tw suicide #effects of torture #torture and memory #chronic pain #insomnia #choosing symptoms #writing symptoms #unethical experimentation #pseudo scientific torture #fantasy ask

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fifteenleads · 3 years

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A YOI x Chrono Trigger AU fic from Ye Olde 2018-ish Era. Go figure.

I can’t even remember what the hell I titled this before. Welp.

Chapter One: “That’s a Nice Band-Aid, Darling.”

They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and that a hero's adventure begins with a cliché-ass wake-up call - something like, "Good morning, Crono!," perhaps. How that even made it on to TV Tropes, Yuuri would never understand. But it is on TV Tropes, and he is in bed reading it.

He's glad his mother doesn't wake him up that way, at least. But then again, he's always up before five a.m. anyway. Sadly, the daily deliveries won't take care of themselves.

Yuuri glances at the time on his tablet. 4:59. Someone will come knocking in three, two, one --

"Yuuri! Get up!" Mari's voice is accompanied by three sharp raps on the door. "Go with dad to the plaza and help him set up!"

This is the part where the hero typically groans at being woken up before grudgingly getting themselves out of bed, but Yuuri Katsuki does not groan. He shouts back that he'll be down in a minute while looking for that darned sock that has gone missing now, of all times. Phichit would surely laugh hard at seeing his best friend hopping frantically on one foot while wearing a poodle-patterned sock. It'll probably go viral on Instagram, too, but that's pretty much a given already. Someone has to part the boy from his gadgets long-term after the Millenial Fair is over.

The minute is up, so Yuuri gives up and gets another sock from the drawer. It is patterned with the face of a silver-haired man surrounded by snowflakes. He has no idea how that found its way into his pile of clothing, but for now, mismatched socks are better than being late.

Yuuri makes his way downstairs and greets his mother, who is busy in the kitchen. Hiroko sends him off with an allowance of fifty kin and packed lunch for him and his father. He ignores Mari's snickering as she musses his hair while glancing at his feet.

The ride to the plaza is pretty short. It is already bustling with people even at such an early hour, all the sellers trying to outdo each other in showing off their wares. Yuuri chuckles as his father joins in the fray, calling out to everyone about the best katsudon in town. Everyone is excited for Hasetsu Kingdom's first Millenial Fair, and with it, the hopes for a thousand years more of peace and prosperity to come.

Toshiya leads the way to their assigned spot, a quaint little corner by the northern area of the square. The tent had already been set up the day before, so all that's left to do is to arrange the food and drinks before the first customers come in. Yuuri passively observes the hustle and bustle around them. Much energy is palpable in the air, and the excited hubbub only grows louder as the sun rises. Some stalls have weapons and armor, others exotic trinkets and accessories. He even spots a merchant selling animals. Phichit would probably want to pick up a new hamster on the way home later.

His eyes wander to the secluded area beyond the main square. Yuuri hoped Phichit's solo exhibit would be a success this time, too. His friend loved tinkering with machines since he was little, and it brought him and his family great fortune as he won scientific contests left and right. His magnum opus, a two-machine teleporter, had impressed the university professors and the panel of judges alike, earning him the highest thesis grade and the first prize for the National Physics Summit.

Yuuri's hand stills when his father calls his name. He had been adding portions of garnish to the newly-cut fried pork cutlets. He instinctively opens his mouth to apologize, but Toshiya immediately pats his back and pushes a one hundred-kin note into his hand. "I'll take care of the stall. You go have fun." He winks at his son mischievously, and Yuuri pushes down the growing blush creeping onto his cheeks.

"Th-Thanks, dad," he mumbles, bowing slightly before making his way to the northernmost part of the square. Phichit would probably be busy right now, but he would never refuse breakfast and morning coffee. It had been their time-honored tradition as college roommates, after all.

Yuuri stops by a mobile café and orders two tall hazelnut lattés and a baguette loaf. He is turning to leave with breakfast in hand when he bumps into the next person in line, spilling hot coffee over his white shirt. The other person, too, recoils in pain, reflexively putting a slender finger into his mouth to nurse it.

"Oh my gosh, I'm so, so sorry!" Yuuri exclaims, setting aside the food and drink and beginning to fuss over the man. He searches his bag for the small bottle of salve he always brings with him, and proceeds to apply a small amount over the man's injured finger, covering it with a band-aid afterwards.

The other man chuckles as he lets Yuuri take care of him. "It's quite all right," he assures airily, waving the bandaged hand with a smile. "I was also too close to you in line, as well." His blue eyes crinkle beautifully as he smiles, and Yuuri fights yet another blush from coloring his face. "I love this band-aid, though!" the man comments. "Where did you get it?"

"F-From the kids' section of the pharmacy," Yuuri admits, embarrassed. He just had to use that one by mistake instead of the flesh-tones ones, did he? Why now, of all times? "The poodle-patterned ones were part of a limited edition series."

"Nice!" the man exclaims in delight, scrutinizing the design closely. "Thank you so much for giving me this one. I love it!" He winks at Yuuri and places a light kiss over his own bandaged finger.

Yuuri wishes the ground would swallow him whole right this instant.

"U-Um, I think I'll get going now," he excuses himself, retrieving the coffee and bread from the counter. "My friend is waiting uphill. I'm so sorry again." Yuuri quickly nods his head and goes on his way, but the other man takes a long stride and ends up beside him, taking the baguette loaf out of his arms.

"It's okay, I'll help you," he offers happily as they ascend the stone steps. "I'm alone today, anyway." The man cradles the food with his left arm and extends his right hand out to Yuuri. "I'm Binktop, by the way. What's your name?"

For an instant, Yuuri is tempted to laugh out loud. The funny name hardly matches the man's regal appearance at all. He must be a foreigner, like the many others who have come to Hasetsu Kingom to join in the festivities. As a citizen of Hasetsu, therefore, he is to show this man the utmost respect and hospitality he deserves, funny names or not.

He shakes Binktop's hand, the cool skin sending small shivers down his spine. "I'm Yuuri. It's nice to meet you, Binktop."

"A pleasure." Binktop returns the handshake with a smile, and they continue going up the stairs. "So, Yuuri, are you also alone here today?"

"Our family actually has a food stall down at the main square, but my dad told me to enjoy myself today," Yuuri explains. "I'm on my way to see my friend, actually. He's an inventor."

Binktop's eyes widen and sparkle in delight, and he accidentally climbs two steps at once. "Wow! He must be really smart!"

"He is," Yuuri nods fondly in agreement. "Phichit has a solo exhibit today. This project won him first place at the National Physics Summit last month."

"That's amazing!" Binktop gushes in admiration, his silver bangs parting to reveal twinkling blue eyes. "I can't wait to meet him!" Yuuri smiles back proudly in response.

They reach the top of the stairs in a minute. The miniature square is cluttered with various machine parts and wires of different lengths and calibers. The two main pods have already been set in their positions, though not yet fully-assembled as Yuuri remembers them. It's definitely like Phichit to cram at the last minute.

The soft whirring noise dies down as the two approach the left pod, and a brown-skinned young man in a bandanna and overalls comes out to greet them. "Yuuri! You're here!"

Yuuri shrugs good-naturedly and hands Phichit the cup of coffee. "I'd love to hug you, but you're covered in oil and soot right now." He smiles widely at his best friend. "Good luck with your exhibit today!"

"Oh my gosh, thank you so much! You don't know how much I need it!" Phichit downs the coffee in an instant, breathing rapidly through his mouth afterwards to cool his tongue. "I heard the prince is coming with the royal delegation to watch my demonstration! I am so nervous!"

This time, Yuuri pats Phichit's shoulder encouragingly, not minding his hand blackening with soot afterwards. "You'll do well, Phichit! You've done this before; you can do it again."

"Good luck, Phichit!" Binktop adds, sending a friendly wink and a thumbs-up of his own. Phichit is surprised at the additional voice, and notices the other man for the first time. His nervous expression immediately changes to one of teasing, instantly directed at his friend. "Yuuri!" he whispers loudly. "Who's the hot guy?!"

"H-He's not - I mean -" Yuuri splutters, coughing into his hand to stop himself. He doesn't even bother hiding his obviously-reddened cheeks anymore; nothing ever escapes Phichit's notice, anyway. Tonight's phone call is going to be a long one.

When Yuuri has composed himself, he turns to Binktop. "Phichit, this is Binktop. I ran into him in the square today. Binktop, this is my friend, Phichit."

"Hi there!" Phichit merrily extends a hand to Binktop. "Phichit Chulanont, at your service!"

"Binktop," he introduces himself, shaking Phichit's hand. "Yuuri here has told me a lot about you."

"Hahaha, good things, I hope!" Phichit laughs, before shooting Yuuri an expectant glare. Yuuri grins back before taking another sip of coffee.

Phichit shows them around the workplace, pointing out the different parts of the invention and which part goes where. His black eyes shine brightly as he rambles in tech jargon while explaining the principle behind the teleporter. Binktop nods excitedly while asking questions, while Yuuri merely watches them interact. Despite his "nerdy glasses," as Phichit had christened them, he is not really into scientific stuff, having taken up a sports major in university.

"Sure thing! I was about to give this thing a test run, anyway." Phichit beckons Yuuri to come over. "Yuuri! Could you kindly step on the left pod? Binktop wants a demonstration."

Yuuri opens his mouth to protest, but knows better than to interrupt his friend when he is in scientist-mode. He may have also wanted to impress Binktop with his bravery, but he doesn't know it yet. Huffing, he finishes the rest of his coffee in one gulp and does as he is told.

Phichit flips the switch, and Yuuri almost loses his footing as he feels himself being sucked away into a vacuum space. Black, wavy lines fill his vision for a moment before everything around him returns to normal. He steps off the right pod and flashes the peace sign at Phichit and Binktop from across the square.

Binktop immediately makes a beeline for Yuuri and embraces him tightly, while Phichit pumps his fist in joy. "Wow, amazing!" he exclaims as he cups Yuuri's face. "You actually teleported!"

"That's how it's supposed to work," Yuuri answers matter-of-factly, but even he has an undeniably huge smile on his face. Phichit's exhibit is surely going to be a massive hit amongst the fair-goers.

"Can I give it a try, too?" Binktop asks Phichit excitedly, still not letting go of Yuuri. "It looks like so much fun!"

"Of course, Binktop!" Phichit laughs, gesturing at the left pod. "Anything for Yuuri's friend!"

Binktop lets out a whoop and disentangles himself from Yuuri. He lightly steps onto the left pod and runs a hand throuh his silver hair. "Watch me, Yuuri!" He sends a playful wink in Yuuri's direction before nodding at Phichit.

"All right, let's do this!" Phichit flips the switch again. Nothing happens at first, so he turns the machine off and on while observing the monitors. Worry begins to creep into his expression as he starts fiddling with the controls, but still, nothing happens.

A gasp from the left pod directs their attention to Binktop, whose pendant is glowing brightly from inside his shirt. It seems to be resonating with the core machine of the teleporter, from which ominous sparks begin to fly out. Phichit shouts at Binktop to get off the pod immediately, but Binktop hears it too late.

A large wormhole, unlike the one Yuuri had seen briefly while he teleported, opens up in the space behind Binktop and appears to be sucking him in. Trying his best to hold his ground, Binktop cries out for help as he extends his hand. In a panic, Yuuri runs up to the left pod and tries to grab him, but his whole body disappears in a flash of light, and the wormhole closes in an instant. Yuuri is left alone on the pod, Binktop's golden pendant in his hand.

Phichit is the first to regain his voice after a few minutes. "What the hell... This wasn't supposed to happen..." Yuuri turns to his friend, who is kneeling by the controllers in shock. Long tracks of tears have washed away the layers of soot on his face.

He runs down to embrace Phichit, who is now trembling in his friend's arms. "Yuuri, I'm so sorry! I really didn't mean for this to happen!"

Yuuri runs his hands over his friend's back, ignoring his own swimming vision and the violent hammering of his own heart in his chest. Now is not the time to deal with an impending anxiety attack - not when Phichit needs his help.

"Phichit. Look at me," he instructs calmly. "Breathe with me."

Together, they go through the motions, inhaling and exhaling deeply in unison. Most of the time, it was Phichit who did this for Yuuri when they were still in college together. It always helped calm Yuuri down after an attack, and Yuuri is more than glad to return the favor now. They cannot afford to be too calm, however - they still have to find out where the hell Binktop went.

Some day this is turning out to be. Yuuri swears never to get up before five a.m. ever again.

Phichit looks up at him and nods determinedly. Yuuri lets go of his friend as he begins to go over his notes. "Either the telepod malfunctioned, or something else did it," he thinks aloud to the clearing at large. "I'm suspecting your friend's pendant had an unusual reaction with the core interface, causing a ripple in the space-time fabric or something."

Yuuri gapes at Phichit incredulously. "You mean, like, time travel?!"

"I don't know yet." Phichit bites his lower lip in deep thought. "That wormhole could have led anywhere. It's too dangerous to try anything at this point."

"We have to bring Binktop back, Phichit! There's no time!"

"I know that!" Phichit snaps, rubbing a blackened hand on his temple at the sudden outburst. "It's not as easy as it seems. We have to find out how to open that wormhole, for starters. There must be something about that pendant."

Yuuri lifts the pendant in his hand against the daylight. It is a small, round, golden medallion with intricate rose patterns bordering its circumference, hanging from a simple chain. The pendant also seems to be pretty old but well-maintained. He briefly wonders where Binktop must have gotten such a valuable trinket and how much it must have cost, but pushes these thoughts out of his mind.

A tiny spark jumps out of the medallion, causing Yuuri to drop the pendant onto the left pod in surprise. Immediately, it causes another reaction, violent gusts of wind forming around them as the wormhole opens once more.

"Well," Phichit laughs brokenly, "that was easy enough!" With a hand shielding his face, he struggles to walk against the wind's direction and tries to pick up the pendant off the ground.

Yuuri has other ideas, however. He uses his stronger body to his advantage and overtakes Phichit in a second, picking up the pendant and wearing it around his neck.

"Yuuri! What are you doing?!" Phichit shouts in alarm. "Get off the pod now!"

To be honest, he has no idea what he is doing, either. His body is already protesting his sudden decision, his heart rate going up, his breathing more rapid, and his hands slippery with sweat. But above all, Yuuri feels that it's the right decision. It's more reckless than heroic, by all means, but nevertheless the right one, just the same.

"I'll bring Binktop back!" he shouts at his friend. "I'll get us back home, I promise!"

Again with the stupid promises, but Phichit seems to finally support his decision. He nods determinedly and hands Yuuri a long, steel wrench. "It's my favorite one! Bring it back safely, okay?"

"Thanks, Phichit! I will." Yuuri waves the wrench nervously as he steps into the closing wormhole.

"Be careful, Yuuri!" Phichit shouts after him. "I'll try to follow you as soon as I figure things out!"

A chuckle escapes Yuuri's lips. It's just like his friend to jump at the call. If anyone is more suited to be the hero of this story, it would definitely be Phichit, and Yuuri, as the dutiful friend, would support him all the way. Funny how things have turned out the other way around this time.

For now, he, Yuuri Katsuki, will be the hero of this story, and he swears on his life to bring Binktop back.

Yuuri raises a thumbs-up to the fading image of his friend, not caring if he doesn't see it. He lets the distortion fill his senses completely until the black nothingness consumes him and claims his consciousness.

#yuri!!! on ice #chrono trigger #alternate universe #fantasy #fanfic

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babyspacebatclone · 3 years

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I am not making any of this up, only altering minor details as necessary that may be too identifiable.

It is long, so for sanity, full dets under the cut.

TL;DR: Whoever’s writing this crap (aka my life) is a hack, and needs to stop relying on the “medical emergency” trope for preventing my job from having a functioning level of staff.

Context: I work at a daycare center in the Midwest of the USA. It is not a chain; however, the owners own multiple centers in the area. Combined we would count as a large business, so of course that’s not how it is on the books (means they can work us longer before overtime, etc).

At the beginning of our story, there were three open centers. AC, the “flagship” center, with a director who is part of the owner’s family. BC North and BC South were purchased next, and, how can I nicely say it…. Half a step up from Ghetto? I am not joking, when I was working at BCN and my mom visited, she said she wanted to pull me out of there. BCN functions, barely; BCS is a few blocks away, and despite the owner’s insistence should never be reopened in my terrified opinion - never has had staff the 5 years it’s been under them, fortunately. CC has been open for 40 years, and purchased by the owners when the previous owner retired three years ago. I work at CC now, and hands down the best place just because we have a functioning director, which enables us to keep functioning staff (half of which were under the previous owner).

At the beginning of the year 2021, none of the three open centers had enough staff. We advertise openings like crazy, but it’s hard underpaid work. So what does my brilliant *cough* owner do?

Buy two buildings in two different nearby cities to convert into new centers. Because he thinks he can get more staff if he’s hunting in new cities??? idk

Not buy two new centers like he’s done previously, with existing enrolled children and staff - two non-daycare buildings to convert.

Note: I talk about “older” and “younger” rooms in this. By licensing, children are in a specific age group based on chronological age, with some overlap to allow for development (e.g. At 16 months, an infant can be a toddler, but you can also delay until 18 months without paperwork). My center has enough physical rooms we further separate infants and preschoolers by development/sanity; toddlers are in one single room. Also, “Lead” teachers are the ones in charge and have extra paperwork; assistant level teachers (like me) can also run a room but are more likely to go crazy if left unsupported (like me). Aides are considered unskilled enough that they can’t be alone with kids, unless there’s a pandemic going on and we’re just trying to have any warm body in a room….

So, that’s the context of this insanity before March 2021, when the lead teacher who was on maternity leave returned to my center and I assumed we could settle down into a stable pattern for a second.

I am a naïve idiot.

First we lose two experienced full-time positions, a preschool lead teacher and the kitchen/support staff, who are both leaving to move closer to their (different) families because personal reasons. Understandable. We have a new teacher-level staff we can have work the younger preschool kids with our returned (excellent) older preschool lead. Our director will just - do the kitchen work until we can find a new kitchen worker…. I guess? 🤷‍♀️ We’re also training staff to work the ancient dishwasher to help…

At this point CC officially implements a “no new children” policy. We will still accept the children we already promised a position before (mostly infants), and older preschool has a lot of kids leaving for kindergarten throughout the summer (as some parents stop day care during their own summer vacations). We can… Manage.

And our best part-time assistant teacher graduates and moves, but ok.

And then our second-best assistant teacher get a job in her field… ok…

And then the pregnant Toddler assistant teacher is put on bedrest for a month we are praying for her…

Ok two new hires, one an Aide but with experience excellent…

. What. No seriously what.

So, the director of AC is - long term sick. I won’t share details. This leaves us with two directors for three centers (Ideally, we would have four; one’s supposed to be Executive Director…). Here, logic is (strangely) applied and BCN is closed down and the children that chose to stay with the owners are moved to AC. Considering they had, I think, three total staff (one for each age group) not counting the Executive Director that had been covering that insanity…..

(We are also under the impression that the owner is stalling construction on those other two centers-to-be, but with our owner who knows….)

Anyway, the three staff will be helping at the other centers - specifically, the Toddler staff will work some days at AC and some days with is at CC, which is awesome because the Toddlers are drop dead insane right now.

Not joking. We have a biter in remission, an older girl with an attitude and her younger sister that had to move up with her when 16 months because the mobile infant room is packed but my young infant room had movers that had to change rooms, there’s a pack of three boys who just egg each other on, the leader of that pack was visiting preschool but started using the N word at relevant children (obviously, we have zero tolerance for that…), and the two youngest just-moved toddlers are screamers (they got better in the mobile room… they’ve regressed…).

And it’s 16 Toddlers (depending on the day) crammed into one area (that can be divided into two play areas, fortunately), at a 7 to 1 staff ratio.

So what happens last week? That Toddler teacher gets sick. Then goes to the hospital. Then, I am not joking wtf, leaves a vague text message to my director about a surgery I can’t even…

I just. What.

The Mobile Infant Room has a casual biter. Like, there is no provocation, this kid (who is giant and all muscle) just crawls up to kids and bites. The other 10 babies in there are generally ok-ish, but I don’t know how they are surviving.

Both preschools are…. Well, better than the Toddler room now that the one child is taking the summer before Kindergarten off praise whatever deity you worship hallelujah. Still have kids that need breaks in the director’s office but not as often.

My room, which is now 6 infants ages 3 to 6 months, is my default the easiest to manage.

And 4 of these 6 babies come in between 7:45 and 8:15 (the other two earlier), all want a bottle between 8:30 and 9:00 (we have two staff and policy is one bottle per staff…) and some of these kids take 20-30 minutes for a bottle (do the math)…..

But by about 10am we’re settled and we generally have them ready to wait for the next round of bottles staggered…

And the projectile spitter-upper is improving! They’re only spitting up about 1.5 oz a day, instead of multiple 2 oz random attacks!! 😊

………. My brain is mush send help.

#tales from the day care #i just #i can’t #what even is this

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astonishinglegends · 3 years

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Ep 200: The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich Part 2

“It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game. He’s flying over me two, three times at a time, at speeds I could not identify.”

– Frederick Valentich - 7:08 pm, somewhere over the Bass Strait in Australia, October 21st, 1978

Description:

When the facts about a paranormal event yield no more answers, investigators and the public alike tend to turn their attention to the experiencer's character to ascertain its authenticity. So what kind of person was Frederick Valentich? A once-lost aircraft accident report from Australia's Department of Transport, which resurfaced in 2012, has shed some light on Valentich's behavior and state of mind leading up to the moment of his disappearance. Through extensive interviews with his family, friends, associates, and the flight personnel he came into contact with, a picture emerges of Valentich's disposition. Although there were some puzzling actions and statements by the young pilot, overall, he appeared to be a dedicated and serious student of aviation. Yet if a paranormal cause of his disappearance is off the table of consideration, then the answer must lie in one of his shortcomings, right? This has led to speculation that Valentich intended to abscond with the aircraft and start a new life, or he planned a mysterious suicide, or that as a UFO enthusiast, he simply mistook stars and planets for a UFO and crashed trying to avoid it. As we delve further into the details and analysis from the official report in part two of our series, we're joined by listener and lifelong Melbourne resident Chris Tyler. Being quite familiar with the case, Chris will lend his own insight into the mystery and illustrate this enchanting Australian backdrop's prevailing attitudes and characteristics.

Location:

Moorabbin Airport, where Frederick Valentich took off from on October 21, 1978, headed for King Island across Bass Strait.

Reference Links:

“Capturing the Light” – The true story of Dorothy Izatt on Amazon Prime

The Frederick Valentich case on the original Unsolved Mysteries, Season 5, Episode 2 on Amazon Prime

“Last Light: the Valentich Mystery” from The History Listen with Kirsti Melville on ABC.net.au

“Disappearance of Frederick Valentich” on Wikipedia

“What Happened to Frederick Valentich? Possibly the scariest UFO case ever” by OzWeatherman on AboveTopSecret.com

“Valentich Case Files Finally Released” by Kandinsky on AboveTopSecret.com

“The Valentich Abduction/Disappearance: 40th Anniversary” by MirageMan on AboveTopSecret.com

“The Abduction of Fred Valentich” from The Unexplained Files on Discovery UK – YouTube clip of Melbourne Flight Advisor Officer Steve Robey describing his radio communication with Valentich

Complete episode on the Valentich disappearance from The Unexplained Files on the Discovery Channel

Cessna 182 “Skylane”

Valentich’s missing aircraft report online, from the National Archives of Australia

Download of Valentich’s missing aircraft report as a PDF

Bass Strait

Moorabbin Airport

“'Truth' was out there after all –An accidental discovery sheds new light on the mysterious disappearance of a pilot in 1978, writes Miles Kemp” from The Advertiser

Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield

Melbourne, Australia

Tasmania

King Island, Tasmania

Visit King’s Island

“Biography of Bette Nesmith Graham, Inventor of Liquid Paper” on ThoughtCo.com

Bette Nesmith Graham on Wikipedia

Australian crayfish

The TCAS or Traffic collision avoidance system

“What C.S. Lewis and Martin Luther Would Say About Our Coronavirus Panic”

Black Death

Second plague pandemic

“Plague was one of history’s deadliest diseases—then we found a cure” on NationalGeographic.com

Suggested Listening:

Check out our good friend Gledders’ paranormal podcast, ANOMALY, where he, his co-host Steve Freestone, and Forrest discuss some of the more weird and wild events of 2020 and more in his latest 2-part series. Click here to subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, the website at anomaly.co.uk, or anywhere excellent podcasts are found.

And then after that, check out Gledders’ “80’s Mix Tape” for the best in 1980s music, Saturdays, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the UK, or stream anytime at Huntingdon Community Radio HCR 104 FM!

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Credits:

Episode 200: The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich Part 2. Produced by Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess; Audio Editing by Sarah Vorhees Wendel. Sound Design by Ryan McCullough; Tess Pfeifle, Producer, and Lead Researcher; Research Support from the astonishing League of Astonishing Researchers, a.k.a. The Astonishing Research Corps, or "A.R.C." for short. Copyright 2021 Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

#199 #Frederick Valentich #Melbourne #Australia #Moorabbin #airport #UFO #Tasmania #Bass Strait #Unsolved Mysteries #King Island #Cessna #pilot #airplane #UAP #200

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collectablecorner · 3 years

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SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity supports the entire Armed Forces family. It is a UK non-profit charity that provides long life support to individuals who are currently serving or have served within the British Armed Forces and their families. This impressive organization has been operating since 1885 and was founded by Major James Gildea. Today SSAFA boasts of 5,000 volunteers to help upwards of people every year and is the UK's oldest national tri-service Armed Forces charity.

Why is Collectable Corner choosing to support SSAFA?

The problem people tend to have when it comes to charitable donations and fundraising is not knowing how much of the donors funds are reaching the desired goal of helping someone in need. While we can't speak for the charities themselves, we (myself and my family) can talk about our experience with SSAFA and why we're confident that the money gets exactly to where it is needed the most.

Brian Cook, a loving husband, father, great grandfather and (my) grandad served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and was a part of the Christmas Island nuclear bomb tests in the 1950's which exposed the soldiers to radiation due to being closer to the bombs than any human should ever be. Today only a handful of the Suicide Squad Veterans are still alive. Almost (if not all) of the soldiers involved died through multiple various cancers and ill health such as chronic arthritis and heart, lung, liver diseases. There is evidence to support the fact that these health conditions can be directly related to what the soldiers were made to do. But not only has it affected the veterans themselves but their families genetics has also caused numerous health problems generation after generation. This will carry on for generations to come also and the UK is one of the only countries involved to not accept these findings and therefore the support for these individuals and families has been lacking. Unfortunately Brian (grandad) was no different, neither is his family.

In January 2018, Brian fell ill and was taken to hospital where within three days of admittance was diagnosed with late stage liver and lung cancer, all that could be done was to make him as comfortable as possible. Over the course of the following four days we prepared for his return home. We gave a sofa away from our living room to make room for the hospital bed due to Brian losing the use of his legs, and we turned a downstairs room into a bathroom. Monday came round and Brian had been in hospital for 7 days, Monday to Monday. He arrived home via hospital transport and we got him settled in as best we could. Grandad always wanted to die at home my grandmother tells me. At 3am tuesday morning, after being home for around 10 hours Brian, my grandmother's husband, my mother's father, and my very special grandad passed away. It was, as anyone who has lost a loved one will know, devastating. It all happened so fast.

During the period between Brian's death and his funeral service SSAFA actually offered us money towards the cost, which we refused based on the fact we would rather it had gone to someone more in need than ourselves, but it stuck with us in our hearts and minds. What we learned is that SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity, gets the money and help to the people who really need it. We didn't expect nor ask for it either. At this period in Collectable Corner didn't exist, what existed was another hobby project that never worked out but a vow was made by myself to use the public platform to raise donations for SSAFA in loving memory of RAF Veteran Brian Cook. Now after a couple of years of hard work, dedication and grind, Collectable Corner, i am elated to tell you is working out and in a position to honour that vow and may he rest in peace.

Who does SSAFA help? And how does it help?

SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity helps people in a variety of ways.

For currently serving personnel and their families provides:

Support in service communities

SSAFA has a network of volunteers on Army, RAF, and Naval bases in the UK and around the world who give local support.

Housing

Housing for wounded, injured, and sick serving personnel and their famiies SSAFA Norton House, Stanford Hall provide home-from-home accommodation for families visiting wounded, injured, sick service or ex-service personnel and outpatients. SSAFA also provides day-to-day management of Fisher House UK at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham (QEHB).

Mentoring for service leavers

SSAFA's mentoring scheme was set up in 2011 and supports those transitioning out of the Forces. SSAFA's volunteer mentors provide support to wounded, injured, and sick leavers through a long-term 'one-to-one' relationship that underpins the transition from the military. SSAFA Mentoring is nationally accredited by the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation.

Adoption for military families

SSAFA is a registered adoption agency dedicated to helping military families through the adoption process.

Additional need and disabilities support

SSAFA provide specialised support to military families with additional needs including their Forces Additional Needs and Disability Forum (FANDF).

Short breaks for children and young people with additional needs from Forces families

SSAFA coordinates holidays and events that focus on offering new experiences and activities for children and young people from services families.

Stepping Stone Homes for women and their children with a service connection

Stepping Stone Homes provides short-term supported accommodation, help, and advice during difficult times. Female spouses and partners of serving or ex-service personnal, along with their dependent children are all eligible to stay there.

Professional health care

SSAFA's professional health care staff provide patient-focussed care to military families worldwide.

Personal support and social work for the RAF

Working alongside the RAF, but outside the Chain of Command, SSAFA staff provide support for RAF personnel and their families worldwide.

Independent Service Custody Visiting

SSAFA provides independent oversight of Army Service Custody facilities.

Support available to veterans and their families:

Housing advice

SSAFA offers practical housing advice and support to Armed Forces veterans and their dependents including guidance around housing benefits and accessing social housing.

Debt advice

SSAFA can help veterans to get advice on dealing with debt when they have fallen behind on their bills or repayments to credit cards and are struggling to get by or at risk of losing their home.

Mobility assistance

SSAFA volunteers seek financial assistance for veterans to help maintain mobility and independence at home. Trained volunteers can help veterans get mobility equipment such as Electronically Powered Vehicles (EPV) or mobility scooters, stair lifts, riser and recliner chairs.

Providing household goods

SSAFA can provide veterans with essential household items, including white and brown goods.

Support for homeless veterans

SSAFA has a range of specialist services to support veterans who are homeless or facing homelessness.

Joining Forces

SSAFA's partnership with Age UK to improve the lives of veterans born before 1950.

Gurkha services

Providing tailored support for Gurkhas and their families who live in the UK.

Glasgow's Helping Heroes

Glasgow's Helping Heroes' is an award-winning service provided by SSAFA in partnership with Glasgow City Council for current and former members of the Armed Forces and their dependants or carers who live, work, or wish to relocate there. It's dedicated team work with national and local governments and third sector providers to resolve clients employment, housing, health, financial and/or social isolation issues.

Forces helpline

SSAFA also offers Forcesline, which is a free and confidential telephone helpline, web chat, and email service that provides support for both current and ex-service men and women from the Armed Forces and their families.

As you can see, SSAFA goes above and beyond to help as many serving and veteran pesonnel and their families as possible who have sacrificed for our country and ensures the aid gets to exactly the places it is needed most. To do this requires a lot of time and money, as you can imagine.

Covid-19 and the SSAFA Emergency Response Fund

Covid-19 has had an impact on everyone regardless of if you are ill. It looks like it will remain a part of our lives for a long time to come, heck, it may be a permanent part of modern life. At SSAFA, calls and requests for help from the vulnerable people, such as the elderly, low income households, and those with serious underlying health conditions. In response to this SSAFA has an Emergency Response Fund. The strain on the organization is obviously high as more people need help with mental health, housing, and financial issues. SSAFA provides this support for the British Armed Forces, serving and veteran personnel, and their families but to do this SSAFA needs to ensure it's staff and volunteers are kept as safe as possible with PPE. Combine the huge rise in help requests and the need to protect SSAFA staff, volunteers and those they help results in a large increase in costs which is why donations are so important and critical to its operations to continue the vital work SSAFA does.

What is Collectable Corner doing to help?

We have purchased over a thousand Royal Air Force (RAF) Dog Tags, Ball Chain Necklaces, Rubber Silencers and Packaging, which we are asking for a donation of £10 per set plus £2.29 for postage of which 100% of the £10 is being donated to SSAFA. Collectable Corner is paying any processing fees and extra postage fees that may incur. Essentially, the Dog Tags are a token of gratitude from us to you for making your donation and helping us to support and help as many people as we can together. In total we have 504 sets of Dog Tags available so that equates to £5,040 in funds to generate. We also have the ability to purchase more should we require them.

How are the donations being made and how often?

We will deposit the donations directly to SSAFA at the end of each month via bank transfer to an account SAFFA has provided to us*.

How will donors know that donations were made?

We understand how important it is to be absolutely transparent with charity work to ensure that everyone knows when and how much is being donated and it is just as important to us at Collectable Corner as to donors and customers. Collectable Corner will of course be publishing monthly updates on our blog and in our newsletter which we urge you to sign up for, along with publishing the donation receipts and sales records minus people's private data such as names and addresses etc. We also have a backend application running on our website which allows visitors to CollectableCorner.shop to view in real time exactly how many sets of dog tags have been claimed.

Share your experiences of SSAFA

Collectable Corner is welcoming you to share your stories with visitors to our website. On each product page is a review section where anyone can make use of by letting others know your story. Maybe it is about how SSAFA has helped you or someone close to you, or maybe you have fundraised and donated in the past. Maybe you are someone who works or have worked with and volunteered for SSAFA who wants to share with us all, or maybe you simply want to say hello.

Thank you...

We, at Collectable Corner, want to thank SSAFA for the amazing work the staff and volunteers have, will and do do. The impact this charity has had on so many lives truly is something to be marvelled at.

Thank you to anyone who helps us to make some real world differences by ordering a set of RAF dog tags with the knowledge that you are donating to a truly awesome cause.

Thank you to all of the past, present and future British Armed Forces personnel who have sacrificed, and do sacrifice everything for our great nation. You make us proud each and every day.

Finally, thank you Brian Cook, my Grandmother's Husband, my Mothers Father, a Great Grandfather, and my Grandad for being such an inspiration, thank you for being the best and only Father i ever had. May you sleep easy and Rest in Peace.

*Please note that the information in this article has been vetted by and in part supplied by SSAFA prior to being released to the public and is accurate at the time of this publication. Collectable Corner has the permission of SSAFA of the logo to be used and they are the copyright owner. SSAFA is a non-profit charity registered in England and Wales (210760), Scotland (SCO38056) and the Republic of Ireland (20202001). Collectable Corner is not in a partnership with nor affiliated by SSAFA, however we are in contact. Anyone who wishes to confirm that SSAFA is aware of Collectable Corner's campaign to raise donations and the methods being used can do so by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]

#ssafa #charity #Collectable Corner #Love

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bonesandblood-sunandmoon · 4 years

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Article from The Atlantic “This Is Not a Normal Mental Health Disaster” (posted July 7th, 2020). Excerpt:

In any case, the full extent of the fallout will not come into focus for some time. Psychological disorders can be slow to develop, and as a result, the Textbook of Disaster Psychiatry, which Morganstein helped write, warns that demand for mental-health care may spike even as a pandemic subsides. “If history is any indicator,” Morganstein says of COVID-19, “we should expect a significant tail of mental-health effects, and those could be extraordinary.” Taylor worries that the virus will cause significant upticks in obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, and germaphobia, not to mention possible neuropsychiatric effects, such as chronic fatigue syndrome.

The coronavirus may also change the way we think about mental health more broadly. Perhaps, Schoch-Spana says, the prevalence of pandemic-related psychological conditions will have a destigmatizing effect. Or perhaps it will further ingrain that stigma: We’re all suffering, so can’t we all just get over it? Perhaps the current crisis will prompt a rethinking of the American mental-health-care system. Or perhaps it will simply decimate it.

Shared in entirety under the cut for those who can’t access it:

This Is Not a Normal Mental Health Disaster by Jacob Stern

If SARS is any lesson, the psychological effects of the novel coronavirus will long outlast the pandemic itself.

The SARS pandemic tore through Hong Kong like a summer thunderstorm. It arrived abruptly, hit hard, and then was gone. Just three months separated the first infection, in March 2003, from the last, in June.

But the suffering did not end when the case count hit zero. Over the next four years, scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong discovered something worrisome. More than 40 percent of SARS survivors had an active psychiatric illness, most commonly PTSD or depression. Some felt frequent psychosomatic pain. Others were obsessive-compulsive. The findings, the researchers said, were “alarming.”

The novel coronavirus’s devastating hopscotch across the United States has long surpassed the three-month mark, and by all indications, it will not end anytime soon. If SARS is any lesson, the secondary health effects will long outlast the pandemic itself.

Already, a third of Americans are feeling severe anxiety, according to Census Bureau data, and nearly a quarter show signs of depression. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that the pandemic had negatively affected the mental health of 56 percent of adults. In April, texts to a federal emergency mental-health line were up 1,000 percent from the year before. The situation is particularly dire for certain vulnerable groups—health-care workers, COVID-19 patients with severe cases, people who have lost loved ones—who face a significant risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. In overburdened intensive-care units, delirious patients are seeing chilling hallucinations. At least two overwhelmed emergency medical workers have taken their own life.

To some extent, this was to be expected. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, substance abuse, child abuse, and domestic violence almost always surge after natural disasters. And the coronavirus is every bit as much a disaster as any wildfire or flood. But it is also something unlike any wildfire or flood. “The sorts of mental-health challenges associated with COVID-19 are not necessarily the same as, say, generic stress management or the interventions from wildfires,” says Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics (published, fortuitously, in October 2019). “It’s very different in important ways.”

Most people are resilient after disasters, and only a small percentage develop chronic conditions. But in a nation of 328 million, small percentages become large numbers when translated into absolute terms. And in a nation where, even under ordinary circumstances, fewer than half of the millions of adults with a mental illness receive treatment, those large numbers are a serious problem. A wave of psychological stress unique in its nature and proportions is bearing down on an already-ramshackle American mental-health-care system, and at the moment, Taylor told me, “I don’t think we’re very well prepared at all.”

Most disasters affect cities or states, occasionally regions. Even after a catastrophic hurricane, for example, normalcy resumes a few hundred miles away. Not so in a pandemic, says Joe Ruzek, a longtime PTSD researcher at Stanford University and Palo Alto University: “In essence, there are no safe zones any more.”

As a result, Ruzek told me, certain key tenets of disaster response no longer hold up. People cannot congregate at a central location to get help. Psychological first-aid workers cannot seek out strangers on street corners. To be sure, telemedicine has its advantages—it eliminates the logistical and financial burdens of transportation, and some people simply find it more comfortable—but it complicates outreach and can pose problems for older people, who have borne the brunt of the coronavirus.

A pandemic, unlike an earthquake or a fire, is invisible, and that makes it all the more anxiety-inducing. “You can’t see it, you can’t taste it, you just don’t know,” says Charles Benight, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who specializes in post-disaster recovery. “You look outside, and it seems fine.”

From spatial uncertainty comes temporal uncertainty. If we can’t know where we are safe, then we can’t know when we are safe. When a wildfire ends, the flames subside and the smoke clears. “You have an event, and then you have the rebuild process that’s really demarcated,” Benight told me. “It’s not like a hurricane goes on for a year.” But pandemics do not respect neat boundaries: They come in waves, ebbing and flowing, blurring crisis into recovery. One month, New York flares up and Arizona is calm. The next, the opposite.

That ambiguity could make it harder for people to be resilient. “It’s sort of like running down a field to score a goal, and every 10 yards they move the goal,” Benight said. “You don’t know what you’re targeting.” In this sense, Ruzek said, someone struggling with the psychological effects of the pandemic is less like a fire survivor than a domestic-violence victim still living with her abuser, or a traumatized soldier still deployed overseas. Mental-health professionals can’t reassure them that the danger has passed, because the danger has not passed. One can understand why, in a May survey by researchers at the University of Chicago, 42 percent of respondents reported feeling hopeless at least one day in the past week.

A good deal of this uncertainty was inevitable. Pandemics, after all, are confusing. But coordinated, cool-headed, honest messaging from government officials and public-health experts would have gone a long way toward allaying undue anxiety. The World Health Organization, for all the good it has done to contain the virus, has repeatedly bungled the communications side of the crisis. Last month, a WHO official claimed that asymptomatic spread of the virus is “very rare”—only to clarify the next day, after a barrage of criticism from outside public-health experts, that “we don’t actually have that answer yet.” In February, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans to prepare for “disruption to everyday life that may be severe,” then, just days later, said, “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives,” then went mostly dark for the next three months. Health experts are not without blame either: Their early advice about masks was “a case study in how not to communicate with the public,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, an information-science professor at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer.

The White House, for its part, has repeatedly contradicted the states, the CDC, and itself. The president has used his platform to spread misinformation. In a moment when public health—which is to say, tens of thousands of lives—depends on national unity and clear messaging, the pandemic has become a new front in the partisan culture wars. Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me that “political and social marginalization can exacerbate the psychological impacts of the pandemic.”

Schoch-Spana has previously written about the 1918 influenza pandemic. Lately, she says, people have been asking her how the coronavirus compares. She is always quick to point out a crucial difference: When the flu emerged in America at the end of a brutal winter, the nation was mobilized for war. Relative unity prevailed, and a spirit of collective self-sacrifice was in the air. At the time, the U.S. was reckoning with its enemies. Now we are reckoning with ourselves.

One thing that is certain about the current pandemic is that we are not doing enough to address its mental-health effects. Usually, says Joshua Morganstein, the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on the Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster, the damage a disaster does to mental health ends up costing more than the damage it does to physical health. Yet of the $2 trillion that Congress allocated for pandemic relief through the CARES Act, roughly one-50th of 1 percent—or $425 million—was earmarked for mental health. In April, more than a dozen mental-health organizations called on Congress to apportion $38.5 billion in emergency funding to protect the nation’s existing treatment infrastructure, plus an additional $10 billion for pandemic response.

Without broad, systematic studies to gauge the scope of the problem, though, it will be hard to determine with any precision either the appropriate amount of funding or where that funding is needed. Taylor told me that “governments are throwing money at this problem at the moment without really knowing how big a problem it will be.”

In addition to studies assessing the scope of the problem, which demographics most need help, and what kind of help they need, Ruzek told me researchers should assess how well intervention efforts are working. Even in ordinary times, he said, we don’t do enough of that. Such studies are especially important now because, until recently, disaster mental-health protocols for pandemics were an afterthought. By necessity, researchers are designing and implementing them all at once.

“Disaster mental-health workers have never been trained in anything about this,” Ruzek said. “They don’t know what to say.”

Even so, the basic principles will be the same. Disaster mental-health specialists often talk about the five core elements of intervention—calming, self-efficacy, connectedness, hope, and a sense of safety—and those apply now as much as ever. At an organizational level, the response will depend on extensive screening, which is to the mental-health side of the pandemic roughly what testing is to the physical-health side. In disaster situations—and especially in this one—the people in need of mental-health support vastly outnumber the people who can supply it. So disaster psychologists train armies of volunteers to provide basic support and identify people at greater risk of developing long-term problems.

“There are certain things that we can still put into place for people based on what we’ve learned about what’s helpful for PTSD and for depression and for anxiety, but we have to adjust it a bit,” says Patricia Watson, a psychologist at the National Center for PTSD. “This is a different dance than the dance that we’ve had for other types of disasters.”

Some states have moved quickly to learn the new steps. In Colorado, Benight is helping to train volunteer resilience coaches to support members of their community and, when necessary, refer them to formal crisis-counseling programs. His team has also worked with volunteers in 31 states, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Colorado’s approach is not the sort of rigorously tested, evidence-based model to which Ruzek said disaster psychologists should aspire. Then again, “we’re sitting here with not a lot of options,” says Matthew Boden, a research scientist in the Veterans Health Administration’s mental-health and suicide-prevention unit. “Something is better than nothing.”

In 2013, reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the SARS pandemic, newspapers in Hong Kong described a city scarred by plague. When COVID-19 arrived there seven years later, they did so again. SARS had traumatized that city, but it had also prepared it. Face masks had become commonplace. People used tissues to press elevator buttons. Public spaces were sanitized and resanitized. In New York City, COVID-19 has killed more than 22,600 people; in Hong Kong, a metropolis of nearly the same size, it has killed seven. The city has learned from its scars.

America, too, will bear the scars of plague. Maybe next time, we will be the ones who have learned.

#coronavirus or covid-19 #mental health

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evolutionsvoid · 4 years

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For a lot of the hybrid species of dryads that have emerged, their origins make sense. With populations growing and mobility getting easier and more prevalent, we are seeing many territories starting to merge. Impassable areas are starting to vanish, and populations that have been isolated for decades are now being visited by the outside world. The chances of seeing Desert Dryads or Marsh Dryads outside of their usual habitat back then was rare, but now it is becoming more commonplace. With such mingling of the different dryad species, it is inevitable that crossbreeding will occur. Relationships can develop anywhere, and love knows no borders or bounds. In the end, two beings who once were oblivious to each other's existence now join together in an unbreakable bond. That is usually how hybridization occurs. In some cases though, you just look at the family tree and wonder "How the heck did that happen?!" One of the hybrids whose lineage brings much confusion is the Mangrove Dryad. They are a hybrid species that is found in warm coastal waters, and whose populations can create living amphibious forests. Compared to other hybrid species, they are also some of the most extreme when it comes to anatomical deviations. Plenty of hybrids share obvious characteristics of their parents, and is usually easy to see the combination that birthed them. In this case, though, Mangrove Dryads have taken on a form that at first seems quite alien compared to their parents. They are quite tall in size, and they also hold quite a bit of mass. Their upper bodies are elongated and stretched out, which hints at one of their parents. Their lower half, however, is where things get really interesting. Instead of having the usual two walking appendages of other dryads, theirs bear more in resemblance to actual tree roots. It is almost the total opposite of what we have! While we have legs that are shaped out of roots, they have roots that are shaped out of legs! Despite its tangled and chaotic appearance, these limbs are indeed legs that the Mangrove Dryad can walk upon. It just so happens that these legs grow in a ridiculous amount and don't restrict themselves to the torso. You can see appendages branching off from other limbs, adding more to this bizarre look. It turns out, this wild growth isn't even restricted to their legs! Upon closer inspection of their arms and shoulders, you can see where a number of branches and arm-like growths have developed. These growths seem much slower and stunted compared to what is occurring downstairs, but it is still a sight to behold! This constant sprouting and growing is believed to be a result of their hybridization, much like how other hybrids possess unique characteristics and features. Speaking of hybrids, I have yet to reveal the parents that result in Mangrove Dryads. Now I am not one to judge relationships or those who partake in certain pleasures, but this is one of those cases where I am baffled about how things came to be. Like, how did these two happen to cross paths, and how did they even pull something like this off? I am not being crude, I am just confused! You see, Mangrove Dryads are a result of a Conifer Dryad and a Kelp Dryad, which is a situation I have yet to fully wrap my head around. If you are wondering how a giant arctic forest dweller and a tropical oceanic swimmer came together to raise a family, then you are in the same boat as the rest of us. I can understand Conifer Dryads migrating to warmer climates, but we are still dealing with a saltwater environment and an aquatic lover. Relationships can indeed happen anywhere and love has no limits, but still! If this was a single incident, I could accept this much easier, but there are entire colonies of these hybrids! Along coastal waters, you can find large populations of Mangrove Dryads dwelling in the swamps and tides. So this pairing had to occur quite a few times for there to be such a healthy number! Sure, they can breed with Kelp Dryads and still result in Mangroves being born, but there are still populations that are miles from one another that had to start from somewhere. It is a mystery to this day on how or when these hybrid colonies were established, and I am not sure if we will ever really figure it out.

Now I think we have spent enough time talking about their conception, so it is time to move onto the usual stuff. Like I mentioned before, Mangrove Dryads inhabit the coastal waters and swamps in places with tropical climates. As a result of two parents from the land and sea, they have wound up being somewhere in the middle. I would say that they are amphibious, but that still doesn't seem like the best term. They don't split their time between land and water, they just have half of their body in the water and the other half out. Well, it is more of a 75% out of water and 25% in. What I am trying to say is that they spend most of their lives standing in shallow saltwater. Their many branching legs allow them to stand comfortably on the muddy bottoms, which holds the rest of their body above the surface. Now most dryads do not tolerate saltwater, as it can be dangerous in large doses. Mangroves, however, are totally fine with it. Thick bark helps prevent the salt from getting in and the water from leaking out. Their many legs also help keep a large portion of their body away from the salty water, where they can also bath in fresh rainwater. Even if they do absorb a bunch of salt, special glands in their bodies absorb it and force it out of their bodies. These glands appear to be located around and under the head cap, mainly where their "hair" is. You can see salt crystals slowly build up on this vegetation, eventually dispersing when the dryad shakes their head or when they do some grooming. I have heard some humans jokingly compare this to dandruff, which isn't the worst comparison I have heard. If you do hang around Mangroves Dryads, be sure to watch out when they do this. This head-shaking technique they use to get rid of the salt buildup is used pretty commonly, so they don't think twice about doing it. If you happen to be near them and have your mouth open when they do this, well, lets just say you better have a full canteen handy. Life in the shallows for them is quite different from what other dryads experience. Due to their large size and location, they do no construct any buildings or structures. Their thick bark and many limbs allow them to weather practically any conditions. Rain is a welcome thing for them, as they can bath in the falling freshwater and hydrate. Storms that blow in can create powerful wind and rough waves, but they can still endure these. Their root-like legs can burrow into the muck and anchor them, making them almost impossible to dislodge. Huddling together as a colony, they intertwine their limbs and pack themselves in tightly to create a formidable living fortress. The saplings will be moved to the center of this mass, where they will hide underneath the adults. The young will be shielded by a wall of wrapped roots, protecting them from the rough weather. While in this state, hardly any storm can affect them, so much so that other life has taken notice. Birds, fish and other small critters will flock to these colonies during rough weather, knowing that it will provide sanctuary. Stories even tell of fishermen being saved by Mangrove Dryads when their boats were swept away in the storm. Studies and observations have also found that these colonies, mixed with the surrounding mangrove trees, can actually create barriers that protect many ecosystems from the brunt of the storm. So while these dryads may appear lax and peaceful, they can be forces of nature when they come together! The everyday life of a Mangrove dryad is a rather simple one. Most of the time they remain nearby others of their kind, socializing and resting in the calm waters. Individuals may go out to gather food, slowly wading through the shallows in search of fish and other snacks. With their many roots and constant exposure to the sun, they get a huge portion of their nutrients by just standing still. When they travel through the surrounding swamps and shallows, it is usually to collect meat, fruits and nuts to supplement their diet. By using nets woven with vines and spears fashioned with old branches, they can hunt fish to bring back to the colony. Edible vegetation is easily picked from the surrounding trees, or dredged up by their many legs. Though they eat most of their food raw, there is one instance where they may actually craft a dish. It is called a "Mud Cake," and it is almost exactly what you think it is. It is marsh mud that has ground up fish parts and seaweed mixed in. The resulting mixture is formed into flat discs, which are then left to bake in the sun. It is mainly made as a treat, and apparently their saplings love it. I myself have tried this dish, and I must say it is an acquired taste. To me it tasted like someone made fish-flavored chalk and then dropped it in the sand. Regardless, the food they collect on these excursions is shared amongst the colony, and most of it goes to the saplings. To ensure their young grow big and strong, they are given hefty portions, as the adults can easily get their nutrients from the surrounding soil. Due to their location on the coasts, these colonies tend to interact with nearby villages and ports. Other dryad settlements near these waters are happy to welcome their fellow sisters, and the two usually work together to hunt and survive. Since saltwater is bad for most land dryads, Mangrove Dryads will aid in fishing and collecting coastal foods. In return, the land dryads will provide terrestrial food and medicine for the colony. Healers who work in these towns will often have monthly checkups arranged with the Mangrove colony, paddling in by boat to see the saplings and deliver medicine. Non-dryad settlements may also find similar help from these colonies, that is if they are willing to work with them. Sometimes human ports and towns may disturb the surrounding area with harmful fishing and practices, and this doesn't please these colonies too much. They care very much for the waters they live in, so such destructive things are not taken well. Since Mangrove Dryads don't move all that fast and aren't really fighters, many don't see any danger in angering them. However, some villages have learned the hard way that Mangrove Dryads can retaliate. When the next big hurricane blows in, they may be surprised to see that the mangrove barrier that protected their town has mysteriously vanished, leaving them exposed to the full force of storm. After the waves and winds tear their settlements to pieces, they may have a newfound respect for the Mangrove Dryads. Chlora Myron Dryad Natural Historian ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This was an old dryad species that got themselves a good reworking and update. My old version was way too bland and I easily forgot they even existed. So I turned them into a hybrid and gave them a better look!

#dryad #plant monster #plant creature #mangrove tree #mangrove #art #drawing

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margaeryrtyrell · 4 years

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Seo tips for websites

Professionals Share the Most Efficient Search Engine Optimization Tips to Drive Website Traffic to Your Web site [Professional Roundup]

If you have a site, the concept is for individuals to visit it. A site s traffic shows just how well a service is doing online. It is likewise a sign of consumer habits, and also will assist you formulate an advertising strategy that will get you a far better position in the internet search engine outcomes. The basic idea of SEO optimization is obtaining extra website traffic to the site. But with 1.24 billion websites on the planet, just how do you guarantee that your web site gets great web traffic? Right here are my top seven Search Engine Optimization ideas that will certainly help drive traffic to your site:

7 SEO Tips to Drive Traffic

Key words: In many searches, at least 50% of people make use of 4 words or more. This indicates that simply keyword phrases are not important. You require long-tail keyword phrases that are specific to the search. When it concerns broad key phrases, there is difficult competitors available which implies that you require to provide something even more to stick out amongst the group. A long-tail keyword is very important to ensure that individuals get specific results of what they are searching for. Top Quality Content: In this affordable world, there are lots of people that write on the very same subject. What should you do various to obtain noted at the top of the search listings? The response is composing great, well-researched content. The material on your website must likewise vary to prevent any kind of inner competitors amongst websites for online search engine listings. You need to arrange your site in manner in which when individuals look for something particular, all associated info is quickly accessible. Also ensure that your material is on a regular basis upgraded as internet search engine frequently check for updates to supply the most effective outcome to its customers. Composing great material can improve up your web traffic and eventually impacts your SEO. Meta Description as well as Title Tags: Title tags are similar to a book title. This is the clickable link that appears on online search engine result pages. If we take Google s instance, a perfect title tag should be much less than 60 characters. A meta description is what appears below the title in internet search engine results. This is what produces the first impression on a user, and believe me, first impressions issue. If you have a great as well as concise meta summary, there s a better opportunity of people visiting your websites and additionally good for SEO. Enhance Pictures: Pictures are what include shade to a websites as well as make it less dull. I can t also think about a websites with pictures. For a far better online search engine listing, make certain that you optimize the pictures by adding descriptions, alt tags, and also titles. Its valuable for your site Search Engine Optimization initiatives. An internet search engine can t recognize an image s web content. It is the text with a picture that aids them rate exactly how appropriate a page is. For this, use initial, ideally sized, top quality pictures. Backlinks: For a search engine, back links are a recommendation of a website. A visitor blog site on another website that connects back to your own will certainly drive web traffic to your internet site. Obtaining a listing in on-line directory sites will additionally drive traffic to your website. The summary of your company in a e-directory will have a web link to your site. Make sure you constantly upgrade your info in these directory sites to produce web traffic and also enhance your Search Engine Optimization position. SSL Certificates: For an online search engine, an SSL accreditation is essential. What an SSL certificate primarily does is it alters your web site s http:// to https:// that makes it extra trustworthy as well as safeguarded. If you want an internet search engine to trust you, a SSL certification is a must. Mobile Kindness: According to Google, there are more mobile searches than on desktop computers in 10 nations consisting of Japan and also the US. In order to take advantage of this growing pattern, your web site requires to be mobile friendly. Obviously, apart from these fundamental SEO suggestions, there are numerous various other ways that SEO can help drive website traffic to your site. Listed below, 91 SEO professionals share their finest SEO suggestions for web traffic generation.

Radomir Basta - 4 Dots

There are lots of points you can do around to accomplish this, yet I ll distinguish a number of foundational actions or seo pointers to take, to start driving more major traffic from online search engine queries. To start with, make your internet site as technically polished as feasible. People in some cases just maximize their web site on the surface, however stop working to dig much deeper as well as minify code, enhance the web server, relocate javascript to the footer, eliminate unneeded tracking scripts no one is making use of and so forth. These tweaks, when built up, will create a significantly far better individual experience in regards to page tons rate, and also this is a straight signal for enhanced internet search engine rankings. After all, your final goal as an internet site owner is to make users feel comfy when browsing through your web pages, and so is Google s. Along with this, I still can t imagine a full SEO project without deploying an appropriate web link building method combined with PR/branding efforts. Publish outstanding and also pertinent resources on your sites, promote them both via social media sites projects and hand-operated outreach initiatives, and also it will work wonders for both the page you are aiming to enhance as well as the site authority in general. Visitor posting is still the very best seo service for boosted brand awareness as well as well-targeted back links. Just focus on websites with a pertinent audience and also you ll be great. Ultimately, producing touchdown web pages for all appropriate subjects with website traffic capacity ought to enhance the web site s keyword reach, and place it for new as well as potentially better converting keyword variations that vary across markets, areas, language and also social obstacles, expert occupancies or topical savviness.

Phil Rozek - Regional Visibility System, LLC

The create terrific web content and make excellent web links recommendations has been covered enough in the meantime, including by me. So my finest piece of less-obvious Search Engine Optimization guidance is: either specialize in a slim specific niche, or start supplying a truly unknown service (or item or widget). The weirder as well as even more specific niche, the far better. If you re the only company, or only regional one, or the very first one, you can grab some very easy rankings, website traffic that contains individuals with a particular as well as prompt requirement, and often even a couple of simple links. Also, some individuals will come for the strange little solution as well as remain for the more-mainstream service( s) you supply?? for which your positions as well as exposure perhaps aren t so great. Go a little off the beaten path.

Eric Siu - Single Grain

There is so much material on SEO available, and it can really feel challenging to start an optimization overhaul. I concentrate on ideas or methods that are effective AND make the very best use resources, including the material you currently have. Right here goes:. Update your existing material?? Existing material already has authority as well as a well established readership. So instead of composing something totally from scratch, discover a blog post already doing well, rejuvenate it with updated info, add visuals, as well as depend on existing signals to make it rate for terms. Improve interaction to enhance positions. Take your existing web content and also make it a lot more readable?? separate any kind of huge blocks of message, splitting material up with headers, bullet points. Concentrate on subjects as opposed to key words?? Google formula updates now allow the online search engine to identify intent as opposed to count solely on the actual key words. So while keyword research study is still very essential, concentrate on what customers are looking for as opposed to different methods to phrase a search query to increase up your SEO. Develop backlinks?? Made backlinks?? via top quality material, outreach and also influencer advertising and marketing?? are still incredibly effective. As well as try to find guest uploading chances on reputable sites. We developed our domain name authority on guest messages from excellent websites like Entrepreneur, Hubspot, Forbes, and also more. While both back links and guest posts will take some manual outreach as well as tenacity, they re big for your brand name acknowledgment and Search Engine Optimization. Reporting and also analytics suggestions?? The numbers put on t lie so measure what s functioning and also what s not as well as always remain to iterate.

Anna Lebedeva - SEMrush

Search Engine Optimization is an ever-changing idea. So to talk about search engine optimization, you really have to see what s going on with Google as well as its formulas. If we utilized to speak about keyword phrases, alt tags, LINK framework and also link-building?? I put on t wish to be deceptive, these things do still issue, a great deal?? material is now getting miraculous significance. Material is king, we ve all heard it. Yet, material made use of to be vital because it was the way to position the best key words, to obtain backlinks and more. Yet, now when Google is all about search intent as well as bringing one of the most appropriate pages before the user, material becomes progressively vital to getting web traffic. Besides, where does traffic come from? From individuals finding your content in much less time than your competitor s content. Which s when you need to enhance for # 1 or absolutely no setting. And also you just arrive if your content satisfies user s intent. That s how it functions. That s really completion factor of all SEO suggestions, techniques and also techniques. So, I d state, rather than utilizing ideas and also plain techniques to maximize for online search engine, try to really get into the individual s head. What does he indicate by typing in fancy dining establishment for Valentine s Day. And also make certain your material addresses his/her needs. Individuals wear t requirement material for the sake of content, or for keyword phrases, or for backlinks, they require it for answers?? any kind of search inquiry is generally a question, even without the question words, so your actual task is to answer that concern. So, the best Search Engine Optimization suggestion is a fundamental content optimization to respond to the inquiries your customers have, and also for that, you truly need to understand your target market as well as prepare for any concerns they require responses for. It s like an excellent old focus team strategy made use of in standard marketing?? prior to developing completion item, big companies purchase customer viewpoints and the needs they require to be covered. Therefore, in addition to mere keyword/backlink research as well as on-site optimization, concentrate on discovering the questions your possible individuals require answers for. At SEMrush, we tried to accept this pattern by presenting rather an one-of-a-kind function for the SEO/content market?? we established a tool that really investigates the most prominent answers for the specific subject you are composing a piece of material on.

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aliciaashowalter · 4 years

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Physiotherapy - A Remedy To Rub Individuals?

To see a beloved one suffer due to stroke is a pitiful experience. The psychological pain, perseverance and also hope that he will become mobile and restore the capability to talk one day are always within us. Physical therapy is carried out to a stroke individual within a couple of days he gets admitted to the medical facility. It has been confirmed that physiotherapy makes it possible for clients conquer their handicaps though it is time consuming. Different programs are associated with the physical treatment. The objective of physiotherapy for individuals that struggle with stroke is to provide stamina as well as maintain the person's arm or legs motile as well as stop the reoccurrence of stroke. To prevent the muscular tissues and also limbs from becoming weak it has to be kept in mind that correct attention is provided and workout methods are maintained. The patients and the care taker are trained in a proper method to make sure that they carry out the workouts properly. A few other strategies that are taught to the treatment taker as well as the person are maintaining all things safe as well as secure, such as maintaining the clients far from ovens and also ovens, removing any barriers from the people' course, ways to cook food, and assisting them with balance. One must be added cautious while leaving a patient that is affected by stroke alone. Physiotherapy is offered patients affected by strokes at health centers or at rehabilitation centers. A lot of individuals who are affected by stroke remain in healthcare facilities for long period or set up a home like atmosphere. Many workouts done by physiotherapists for patients influenced by stroke resemble those taught for those struggle with impairments. Several of the techniques made use of are percussion instruments, massages, sucking, prescription of medications and evaluation. For people that have lung as well as respiratory issues, physio therapists suggest workouts which entail coughing as well as taking deep breaths ... Persons that can handle to base on their very own discover other workouts which might at times or may not involve making use of walking aids. They try to rise from the bed, relocation from a chair to a wheel chair or trying strolling without case. Stroke patients are likewise shown exercises which include stretching, strengthening the muscular tissue, endurance and deep breathing. A lot of techniques are used by physiotherapists for stroke people having talking troubles. Short- term speaking therapy has actually been successful in recovering speaking skills in patients impacted by stroke. Speech therapist works on the language of the stroke patient for 3 hrs on a daily basis for some weeks. The person will be given ample time to try as well as speak as it is recognized that emotions interfere their speech patterns. Physiotherapy which when provided for stroke patients makes up diagnosis, treatment, care, massage therapy, conversation as well as exercise and they lead the client through the path to recovery.

Why Utilize Physiotherapy To Deal With Back Pain

Physiotherapy dates back to the ancient times yet the modern-day technique of this allied medical care began in the 1920s. It is used to address problems like reoccuring pain, musculoskeletal conditions, as well as movement disorders. The healthcare professional who is trained in this area of endeavour is referred to as a physiotherapist or a physiotherapist. Nowadays, the services of physio therapists are commonly looked for by a lot of individuals that suffer from a wide array of ailments. One of the most common of which is back pain. It made use of to be that when an individual has backache, he goes straight to a physician. Presently, he has one more option and that is to engage the aid of a physical therapist. Backaches are available in different kinds depending on the details damaged area. The causes are rather varied varying with those resulting from injuries due to electric motor crash, some conditions or an undesirable lifestyle. It might remain in the kind of lumbar neck and back pain or thoracic pain in the back. Thoracic pain, generally called upper pain in the back or center neck and back pain, is due to a great deal of reasons like degenerative disc diseases. It may likewise happen because a spine special needs. Sometimes, the continuous repetitive motion in the upper body or a joint disorder might result in top back pain. Given that the upper back is far more steady contrasted to the lower back, top neck and back pain are much less common compared to reduced pain in the back. Lumbar neck and back pains or lower pain in the back is a much average incident with a variety of reasons. It may be due to a torn ligament, a herniated disc or slid disc, muscular convulsion or just simple bad position. Even the act of lifting improperly of a hefty box might lead to reduced back pains. Back pains may be short-lived as well as small, where an individual will certainly just really feel a twinge of pain or some tenderness or it can be reoccuring and also disabling. People that are plagued with chronic neck and back pain are far better off starting treatment with an accredited physiotherapist. The relief will be extra lasting for it will target the source and not simply deal with the signs and symptoms. For some, it is an option between physiotherapy as well as surgical treatment with the last having a higher danger variable. In physiotherapy for neck and back pain, a mix of techniques is made use of in the therapy process relying on the factor for such a condition. In case of problems with back discs, only a qualified physiotherapist is supposed to operate in controling back the disc into area. Accredited physiotherapists underwent substantial education and learning and also training to be geared up with skills required to handle injuries such as herniated discs. Surgical treatment for herniated discs is fairly costly and risky. There is a long recovery period additionally where one needs to be maintained stationary. Massage therapy may likewise be utilized to kick back the muscle mass at the back and also to eliminate the pain caused by torn ligaments. Myotheraphy as well as hydrotherapy can be made use of to reduce back pains, not simply briefly but also for a life time. For the sake of maintaining this post short as well as not slowed down in recommendations I don't have every single article on biomechanics as well as pain/injury mentioned in this blog site. With that said off the beaten track here is when biomechanics do and also do not matter ... We know from the clinical literature that specific biomechanical activity variables can be risk aspects and/or mechanisms of particular injuries such as: Filled spine flexion as well as disc injury1 Dynamic knee valgus & ACL tears2, PFPS3, patellar dislocations4 and MCL tears5 Various FOOSH (fall on outstretched hand) injuries such as scaphoid fractures6 and A/C joint separations7 Ankle inversion & eversion sprains8,9. Shoulder (and also hip) abduction & external turning as well as dislocations10,11. Prolonged stances and bone and joint pain12,13. Things you have to bear in mind when looking at biomechanics are ... 1) A great deal of biomechanical variables that individuals cite in their evaluations & professional thinking designs either can not be reliably assessed and/or don't correlate well with discomfort including. Relaxing scapular position14-- 17. Resting back lordosis, cervical lordosis, thoracic kyphosis, as well as sacral angle18-- 25. 2) Injury does not always equal pain. We have great deals of instances in the literature of individuals that have degenerated/bulging discs26, arthritis27, as well as partial potter's wheel cuff tears28 yet they don't have pain. Alternatively many people can additionally have discomfort without injury. 3) We know in the literary works that psychosocial aspects can play a huge function suffering, particularly in chronic pain29,30. 4) The body can adapt to tons as well as stress and anxiety assuming that the stress and anxiety is used and also progressed appropriately based upon the standing & demands of the individual31. 5) The quantity of load/speed during a details activity pattern is essential. A lot of the examples of biomechanical injury mechanisms above put on high speed and/or high lots activities. Clearly you do not have as much "activity kindness" deadlifting 700 lbs as you would certainly flexing over to grab modification. Ask any kind of top degree powerlifter where leading level athletes squat 1000+ pounds and also bench press 500-800+ pounds (depending upon equipped or otherwise) and also they will inform you that there isn't much margin for mistake with technique. 6) Our words can be extra effective than we assume as well as when made use of incorrectly can develop a nocebo result (the opposite of sugar pill impact) 32. When mentoring movements & exercises it's important to make use of favorable training & cueing for workout & activity methods to stop kinesiophobia and also concern avoidance. It's additionally vital to infuse positive ideas in customers concerning their bodies. So as you can see, biomechanical variables are still appropriate to health & physical fitness experts yet they need to be considered because of both real biomechanical proof (not just speculation) and also the biopsychosocial model of pain.

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nikkoliferous · 4 years

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He doesn’t bother explaining why he’s here.

This is early on, late May, a few months into the race, but he is already of the belief that he is doing something extraordinary with his presidential campaign — something that’s never been done before. The trouble is describing it. There’s no word for this in modern politics. It is, he believes, “a new way to communicate with the American people” — though he won’t say this until later, and only when asked. Even now, long after he’s put this work at the center of his campaign — at his events, in ads, on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — he won’t talk about it much. He isn’t sure it’ll work, or if people are “picking up on what we’re trying to do here.” The media, he believes, has always believed, can’t fathom what’s at the heart of this.

So when he arrives at the house, a small mobile home 40 miles outside Montgomery, Alabama, over the Lowndes County line, in one of the poorest places in the country, with five reporters and his own camera crew, he steps through the front door, greets his host, and begins with no clear mention of what he hopes to accomplish here or how it will help him become president.

Pamela Rush, a 49-year-old mother of two, is showing him the problems with her home: the floor tilting visibly to one side, the sheets of plaster peeling off the wall, the broken pipes, the broken cabinetry. He stops in the room where her daughter sleeps. “Do you guys wanna…?” He motions for everyone to come closer. His videographer shuffles forward. On the bedside table, there’s a ventilation machine, the kind used for sleep apnea. A tube of ribbed plastic connects the device to a mask resting on the bedspread, which is patterned cheerily with tiny elephants. Because of mold in the house, Pamela’s daughter needs the device to breathe in her sleep. “How old is she?” the candidate asks. She’s 10. Pamela holds up the mask so he can see up close.

“Show them, not me,” he says, gesturing toward the camera.

She shows the camera the mask.

The visit continues like this. “Show them,” he keeps saying. “Show them.” He speaks only to ask questions, prompting Pamela to “explain” this or that, pointing her to an unseen audience on the other end of his camera lens. It’s like he’s directing his own video — except the video isn’t about him or his campaign or his policy agenda. He is, it seems, somewhere offscreen, an omniscient narrator, felt maybe, but not seen or heard. This is not a public event. There is no crowd. There is no podium, no speech. Mostly, there is silence. The leader of the political revolution — a man who has spent 50 years of his life trying to talk about his ideas — is not saying much at all.

In his first campaign, a third-party bid for US Senate in 1972, he lugged around a 2,000-page, two-volume study by the House Banking and Currency Committee, liberally quoting its findings to the people of Vermont. He spent that year telling anyone who would listen about the fact that a mere 49 banks were trustees of $135 billion and held 768 “interlocking directorships” with 286 of the country’s largest 500 industrial corporations. To him, the phenomenon of interlocking directorships was not arcane or irrelevant to daily life in Vermont. It was an urgent outrage.

In Congress, he developed “the oligarchy speech,” a bleak overview of income inequality in America. The speech became the basis of his public events, his lengthy posts on Facebook, of an entire book — title: The Speech — consisting solely of the transcript of an eight-hour speech he delivered on the floor of the Senate.

And in 2016 — the rallies? The arenas? He had 2,600 in Iowa’s hulking Mid-America Center — largest crowd of the caucus season. He hit every city he could: 5,000 people in Houston, 8,000 in Dallas, 10,000 in Madison, 11,000 in Phoenix, 15,000 in Seattle, 27,500 in Los Angeles, 28,000 in Portland — plus overflow! All those people showing up to hear an hourlong speech they already knew by heart: wages down, median income stalled, one family with more wealth than the bottom 130 million… As he spoke, they’d mouth along to their favorite lines: “Congress does not regulate Wall Street—” “WALL STREET REGULATES CONGRESS,” the crowd would shout back. “Enough is—” “ENOUGH!” they roared. The succession of grim facts — “but let me tell you what is even worse!” he’d say — became a ritual. When a small bird, later identified as a common house finch, once landed on his lectern, an entire stadium full of people cheered wildly, mouths open, their arms raised to the sky, eyes turned upward — not to God, but to the image of the bird and their candidate on the Jumbotron. There was power in the speech. He believed, aides have said, that he was literally changing a generation, person by person, line by line, with every rally.

That was the whole thing — Bernie Sanders, talking.

This is something different.

“Pamela,” he says gently, “why don’t you explain it.”

“And be loud so everyone can hear you…”

Bernie Sanders is sorry for your troubles, but that’s not the reason he’s asking you to talk about them — which he is, everywhere he goes. He wants you to talk about your medical bill — the one you can’t pay. He wants you to talk about losing your house because you got sick. He wants you to talk about the payday loans you took out to keep your kid in school. About the six-figure student debt that’s always on your mind. About living off credit cards, or losing your pension, or working multiple jobs for wages that won’t be enough to support your family.

He would like you to talk about this publicly, in detail, and on camera. He will ask you to do this in front of reporters, or in a room full of strangers at one of his town halls. Of course, the Bernie Digital Team will be there — they are always there — taping your story on camera, or streaming it in real-time to his own mass broadcast system on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. On any given day, he is capable of reaching millions of people.

“Who wants to share their story?” he’ll say. “Don’t be embarrassed. Millions of people are in your boat.”

He has, it turns out, built an entire presidential campaign around an open invitation to speak — to talk plainly about the “reality of life” in this country — to be “loud so everyone can hear.”

His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones. He is less interested in explicitly presenting solutions than naming the problem — that “we have millions of people in the richest country in the history of the world who are struggling every single day,” which is a phrase he repeats daily, almost like an exhortation, as if to grab the American working class by its shoulders. He doesn’t deal in pity or reassurance. Yes, he’ll give hugs — one arm, from the side, other hand still clutching the mic. But mostly he’ll just listen and nod, gaze lowered. Or he’ll shake his head at the crowd, like can you believe this? And then, from the gut, a clipped scoff, like of course you can believe it. That’s the point. He has heard your story before, because it’s all part of the same story: a broken system, driven by profit and greed, built to reinforce the notion that if you’re bright enough, if you work hard enough, then you can travel the path to the middle class. And if you don’t make it there…well, maybe you’re the problem. And who wants to talk about that?

He believes his presidential campaign can, he says, help people “feel less alone.”

He is trying to change the way people interact with private hardship in this country, which is to say, silently and with self-loathing. He is trying, in as literal a sense as you could imagine, to excise “shame” and “guilt” from the American people. These are not words you hear often in politics, but in interviews this year with the candidate, his wife, and his top advisers, they are central to his strategy to win. He is imagining a presidential campaign that brings people out of alienation and into the political process simply by presenting stories where you might recognize some of your own struggles. He is imagining a voter, he says, who thinks, “I thought it was just me who was struggling to put food on the table. I thought I was the only person. I thought it was all my fault. You mean to say there are millions of people?”

He still has his rallies, but “it’s a different campaign, and we do things differently,” he says. “I can give the greatest speech in the history of the world, but it will not have the significance and the impact that the real-life experience of ordinary Americans will have.” At many of his events, the antiseptic macro focus of the “oligarchy speech” — the anonymous actors on Wall Street, the greed of the American corporation, the rigged system — has been replaced by the most intimate details of someone’s life. The outrage in his voice, a booming rasp amplified across three tiers of an NBA-size venue, is softer now. The arena itself has morphed into a digital platform for one voter’s story.

Show them, he says. Show them, not me.

We understand presidential campaigns, in their most basic form, as a conversation between a candidate and the American people. The conversation is happening all the time, in person and online, directly, indirectly, at every possible scale: It’s a handshake, a speech, a television ad, a sponsored post on Facebook. It’s a policy rollout. It’s the signage at a rally, the way an American flag is steamed and hung just so on a stage. Every dollar of every campaign is spent on shaping or beautifying or amplifying some message from the candidate. Bernie’s first presidential bid, in a sense, was the unprocessed, stripped-down version of that conversation: It was the speech. In terms of the mechanics of the thing, as he put it in late 2016, he wasn’t “reinventing the wheel.”

Four years later, he is attempting to run a presidential campaign that facilitates an entirely different conversation — one between people like Pamela and the American people. The stories he collects and broadcasts across the internet aren’t just voter testimonials produced to validate the campaign or its policies — they’re aimed, in Bernie’s mind, at people validating one another.

After 50 years, this is an unlikely place for the political revolution to land. It’s more human. More empathetic. More personal than what you’d expect from a man who’s willingly played along with his persona as a perma-“outsider” and, as he put it in 2015, “grumpy old guy.”

There’s this idea that Bernie Sanders is “a man of the people who doesn’t like people” — just issues. That’s not exactly right, though the precise balance between the two can be difficult to pin down. “Policy, policy, policy,” says his wife, Jane, who is a strategic partner on her husband’s campaign. “Fight, fight, fight — which is true, but he’s also about people.”

He arrived in Vermont in 1968, full of ideas about movement politics, and began his career by raising his hand at a local third-party meeting. He settled in Stannard, a remote town with no paved roads, populated by fewer than 2o0 people, where he learned to live in isolation. But in politics, he also discovered that he liked talking to strangers about the issues of the day. In the ’80s, he hosted his own public broadcast show as mayor of Burlington. In the footage, unearthed by Politico earlier this year, he can be warm and dryly funny. On the campaign trail in Vermont, he liked to take impromptu walks and kept a pair of trunks in the car in case he passed a swimming hole. In Washington, he kept more to himself. Interviewed in 1991, fellow members of Congress described him as a “homeless waif” with a “holier-than-thou” attitude who “alienates” his potential allies, who “screams and hollers,” one said, “but he is all alone.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that Bernie Sanders is not an open book. He will snap at reporters when they ask him to talk about himself or, god forbid, how he’s changed as a person, because what does that have to do with Medicare for All? “You’re asking about me, and I’M not important,” he once said in an interview. “What’s important are the kinds of policies we need to transform this country. OK?” The conversation was over after six minutes. His interior life, to the extent that it is acknowledged among his campaign staff, is a subject only a few people can address with any authority. A simple question on the subject — have you ever seen him cry? — recently reduced senior aides to various forms of lawyer-speak. “I’ve seen him emotionally affected,” one said after a long pause. Another, as if the question had been unclear and possibly even sinister, said only: “What do you mean?” With Jane, he’ll call from the road to talk about his day, but questions like “How did that make you feel?” are not a part of the discussion. “Oooh, no,” she laughs at the suggestion. “Oh no, no. Yeah, no. He doesn’t do that. No. No. Neeevver.”

He can be harsh with staff — short-tempered and demanding and sometimes rude. “Some people say I am very hard to work with. They say I can be a real son of a bitch. They say I can be nasty, I don't know how to get along with people,” Bernie told his press secretary in 1990, according to a memoir by the former staffer. “Well, maybe there's some truth to it.”

His mood is under careful observation. Aides are always noting things like “He’s in a good mood today.” When he is happy, everyone is happy. When he’s not, everyone is quiet, especially in the SUV, where he will ride shotgun with his iPad, a red Vitaminwater at his side, scrolling through tweets from @BernieSanders, maybe only speaking up to dispassionately observe that people must really care about education in this country because a tweet about education is getting a lot of engagement today. Everyone knows which staffers make him feel most at ease — a special currency on the campaign. Small signs of interpersonal comfort — watching an aide make him laugh, watching another gently brush dandruff from his navy blue blazer — can feel like extraordinary acts of intimacy. In 2016, when discussing the campaign at a bar, some staffers got in the habit of referring to him as “Earl” or “the old man,” because at the end of the day, he is 78 years old. And who would have expected this — the most emotionally driven, intimate, borderline touchy-feely campaign of the 2020 election — from “a real son of a bitch”?

Correction.

“I don’t like the word ‘touchy-feely,’” Bernie Sanders says curtly.

Everyone is sensitive about how to describe this. There’s been a lot of “experimentation” with this, one of his advisers will start to explain — before doubling back to say that, actually, “I think ‘experimentation’ is the wrong word.” There’s no precedent for it. Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren often invite you to consider your story through the lens of their own. Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain,” but he never asked people to reorient the way they feel about their own pain.

Bernie says he is trying to “redefine our value system.” Jane talks about breaking down decades of societal muscle memory: “It seems to be the American way,” she says. “That we all think it’s our fault — instead of recognizing there is a system that is making it unfair for them.” They are, as they see it, trying to dismantle the ideal of “rugged individualism,” an entire era of political thought. Ari Rabin-Havt, a top adviser who travels with the candidate every day, puts it more tangibly: The campaign is a “megaphone” for working people, he says. Briahna Joy Gray, his national press secretary, has likened the effect to “catharsis” from nationwide “gaslighting.” On the podcast she hosts for the campaign, she compares her boss to Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting: the therapist who tells Matt Damon, a young man who was abused by his foster parent, “It’s not your fault. Look at me, son. It’s not your fault… no, no, no, it’s not your fault.”

It really started late this spring, around the time he went to Alabama. The campaign YouTube page started pushing out stories like Pamela’s: a family living without clean drinking water in South Carolina; a family with inadequate low-income housing in San Francisco; workers at Walmart. On Twitter, he asked people to reply with stories of “their most absurd” medical bill. He got 50,000 responses in a week. By the fall, he was holding more town halls than rallies. In rooms from Iowa to Nevada, one person would raise their hand to speak, then another, and another, and another. “Don’t be nervous,” he’d tell the crowd. “You really are among friends.” Not every event has been as affecting as the next. On one trip, he visited a woman’s home in Des Moines to document her problems with contaminated well water. His host happened to be a fan and prepared two trays of homemade brownies for the occasion. Bernie, already late for his next event, declined to eat a brownie and left after 15 minutes. But more often than not, he is an attentive and genuine listener. At one event last month, a woman stood to say that people are “embarrassed if they don’t think they make enough money.” Bernie told her this had been “instilled” by “the system.” The campaign posted footage of the exchange on Instagram. As you watch the video, bold capital lettering runs across the top and bottom of the screen like an emergency weather alert: “THE SYSTEM WANTS YOU TO BE ASHAMED.”

“What we are doing,” he says, “is really speaking to the working class of this country in a way I’m not quite sure any candidate has ever done before.”

Eventually, when asked, he comes to describe this as core to his strategy to win.

“Here’s the gamble,” Bernie says. The gamble is there are millions of working people who don’t vote or consider politics to be relevant to their lives. “And it is a gamble to see whether we can bring those people into the political process,” he says. “One way you do it is to say, ‘You see that guy? He’s YOU. You’re workin’ for $12 an hour, you can’t afford health insurance — so is he. Listen to what he has to say. It’s not Bernie Sanders talking, you know? It’s that guy. Join us.”

And yet, on a Tuesday night, in one moment, the full force of the political revolution, all 50 years of it, came grinding so unquestioningly to a halt by one blocked artery. He will spend two and a half days in the hospital — and he will lie there hooked up to their beeping machines, and he will yell at the doctors when they try to ask him stupid questions, and he will quiz them about health care policy and obsess over what all this would cost without insurance — and there will be a crisis over what to say in the press release and when to say it and if it can wait until Jane is able to deliver the news in person to the seven grandkids before they see it on CNN, and there will be reporters stalking him outside the building, and all sorts of people will want to visit — and for days, he will say over and over again, “I can’t believe I had a heart attack… I can’t imagine how I had a heart attack… I can’t imagine…” like this is a fact he simply cannot accept, because he feels fine as soon as they finish the procedure and because he’s always had terrific “endurance”... Never thought it’d be his heart to cause him problems… Ran a 4:37 mile in high school...!

But not once, in all that chaos and frustration, will he consider dropping out.

ii.

Here is what Pamela explains to Bernie Sanders: that her family bought this mobile home in the ’90s for a trumped-up price of $114,000; that she lives on $1,000 a month; that she still owes $15,000 on the house; the house she fears will harm her daughter’s health; the house where her mother caught pneumonia and died; the house where, “when a storm comes,” she says, “we have to stay in the mobile home and just pray.” He learns that Pamela’s sister was arrested because she couldn’t afford to pay for the county garbage service. Another sister was arrested because she couldn’t afford to buy into the sanitation system. He turns to a reporter in the Alabama heat. “Really something, isn’t it?” he says. He is frowning, jowls gathered slightly at the neck, but there is no shock or judgment in his face. It will become a familiar expression over the summer and fall. He is not always an obviously comforting presence, but there is never judgment.

“So this is where the waste goes?”

Everyone is outside now, around back. Sanders wants to see where the waste goes.

He learns that Pamela, like many residents in Lowndes County, is also “straight-piping” her untreated sewage from the bathroom to her yard. She is here with Catherine Flowers, an activist who has worked with Congress on the pernicious tangle of issues facing Lowndes County: criminalized poverty, environmental degradation, inadequate infrastructure.

He peers down at a line of dark, matted grass where, a few paces from his feet, inches from the base of the trailer, sewage flows via exposed PVC pipes into a shallow open-air trench. “Is this uncommon in this part of the world?” he asks, steering the conversation for his unseen audience, and the cameras swing back to Pamela and Catherine.

The sun is beating down. Bernie rolls up his sleeves and starts talking gravely about how this is the richest country in the history of the world... “Today we’re in Lowndes County, Alabama, in an African-American community,” he is saying. “Tomorrow we’ll be in California in a Latino community, or in West Virginia in a white community, and the stories will be the same.” You can see his bald head turning shades of pink and red. Everyone is sweating. Pamela is talking about her mother’s death. It is not an easy conversation. “This is America,” he is saying.

Back in his Washington headquarters, the digital team is waiting for the footage.

In the supercharged world Bernie inhabits, the decision to stay in the race was considered not only reasonable, but obvious. Here, there is no confusion about “what we’re trying to do here.” The candidate moves amid a swirl of people you would classify uncynically as “true believers.” It’s a lot of passion in one place. The stakes always feel high. But the hard and fast question of whether they can win the nomination is, to a certain extent, supplanted by the general sense that the movement is a just and right cause and, therefore, in the end, the cause will prevail, likely in a shocking fashion when no one anticipates it or believes it can be done, à la Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And so they are always on guard against outside forces — people who will doubt them, or underestimate them, or try to actively destroy them.

This is how things go in “a politics of struggle.”

In “a politics of struggle,” as Sanders explains it in a 2015 foreword to his first memoir, setbacks are expected. There will be defeats before there can be the “breakthroughs” few people imagine possible. In a politics of struggle, the goals are “transforming a city, a state, a nation, and maybe the world.” It is already understood that this is “about more than winning an election.”

It’s in this environment that the advent of the heart attack became another motivational “setback.” Ocasio-Cortez decided to endorse. Supporters only hung on tighter. Campaign staffers spoke in grave tones about the “sheer terror” of a world without Bernie. “What is happening right now,” Briahna Joy Gray told her subscribers on the campaign podcast, “is that an old man is carrying the most colossal imaginable weight on his shoulders.” By the time he is back on the trail, the mission of the campaign takes on newly urgent, almost philosophical importance.

He’s in Iowa — a town called Toledo, Tama County, population 2,341 — coaxing people to talk to him about how they feel. “What about health care?” he says at a local civic center, roaming out from behind the podium. “Don’t tell me what I wanna hear! — I want YOU to think about it. Should health care be a human right?” The crowd, not quite warmed up yet, signals a yes. “WHY?” he replies, voice booming. “Who wants to tell me why? Don’t be shy…”

This is his first campaign swing since the heart attack. Five events in 24 hours.

He has to address the age question, of course, so he does. “I've been criticized for being old. I plead guilty. I am old!” he says at his first stop of the trip. Reporters ask him about it. Pundits analyze why it matters. Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and television host, provides his unsolicited opinion that Bernie’s “protoplasm is strong,” a you-know-it-when-you-see-it term in the medical community for physiological sturdiness. Voters also weigh in, as if to offer reassurance. “Seniors rock!” a woman says at a town hall in Marshalltown, Iowa. Moments later, a middle-aged man raises his hand to tell the candidate that, by age 39, he’d had three heart attacks, a stroke, and a triple-bypass surgery — “and it doesn’t have to get in the way of living, all right?” Bernie takes these remarks in stride, smiling back gamely. He is in a good mood. Though you get the distinct impression that he would rather not be discussing the state of his protoplasm, or himself, at all.

During the town hall in Toledo, Jane and a few staffers can hear Bernie speaking through the walls of an adjacent hold room. She and Ari Rabin-Havt, the deputy who was with Bernie in the hospital through the whole ordeal, are sitting at a small table talking about the heart attack like family members who, maybe years later, are finally able to look back at the whole thing and laugh. Except here, it’s been days, not years. Jane is going into her own Bernie impression: “He’s like, ‘I feel fine. I don’t understand… You’ah tellin’ me I had a heart attack?? I don’t — I, I don’t understand.’”

The thing that bothered him so much about it was the relative smallness of it — like this was needlessly, stupidly about him, “and I’M not important,” remember? What did his aging body, in his mind a vessel of little consequence, have anything to do with the reality that “millions of people in the richest country in the history of the world are struggling every single day”? The answer, of course, is everything: This, like any endeavor in electoral politics, hinges on the will and presence and personality of its leader. The political revolution is no less human or fallible.

And there he was, having to ask for a chair during an event in Las Vegas — he rarely sits on stage — because of chest pains. “Ari, can you do me a favor?” he looked around the room for Rabin-Havt. “Where’s Ari? Get me a chair up here for a moment. I’m going to sit down here.” Staffers found their jobs suddenly transformed. They were dealing with the questions of a health crisis: Should they take him to the hospital? And which hospital? The closer one, or the one with the better cardiology center? But this was Bernie. Everyone knows Bernie. There would be a scene. People would ask for selfies in the waiting room. Reporters would hear about it. They did not want that. It was Rabin-Havt, in the end, who approached the front desk at the urgent care center behind the MGM Grand and discretely flashed his boss’s driver’s license — 09/08/1941, SANDERS, BERNARD — so the nurses would usher him into the back quietly and without delay.

“They're like, ‘Look, we're gonna have to put him in the cath lab,’” Rabin-Havt says. Jane, seated to his right, hasn’t even heard this part of the story yet. So they got him in the cath lab. The doctor asked, how much pain are you in on a scale of 1 to 10, which Bernie rebuffed as a useless question. Then they asked him to please remove his wedding ring. “Really?” he growled, removing the ring. Then they asked for his glasses. And that’s where he drew the line. “JESUS CHRIST! I'm not gonna do that,” he said. That night, Rabin-Havt and another staffer took turns wearing the wedding ring so they wouldn’t lose it. “Oh my god,” Rabin-Havt says. “It was the scariest part.”

The next morning, when Jane arrived from Vermont, she found her husband unchanged. He was talking about how someone without insurance maybe wouldn’t have gone to urgent care at all because of how much it would cost. “That’s his brain,” Jane says. She turns to Rabin-Havt. “Did he say anything to you?” “Not during,” Rabin-Havt says. “The next day when he woke up, he was like, ‘What do you think this is going to cost?’”

His room became the center of activity in the hospital. He held policy discussions with the nurses. He asked the doctors about the hospital's finances. That was a relief, Jane says — to see “the same old Bernie.” Back in Washington, the press team kept obsessive watch over the news coverage, demanding corrections from reporters who described the stent procedure as a “surgery.” There was no surgery, they said breathlessly. It was a procedure! “I’m talking to the doctors,” Jane recalls, “and they’re saying ‘procedure,’ not surgery. It was not a surgery.” Rabin-Havt nods: Not a surgery. Once they finally got the diagnosis — “heart attack” — they needed a statement. So they hunkered down in a hospital break room. The doctors (multiple) started dictating to Rabin-Havt, who tapped out notes on his iPhone. Their first draft was a bit medical — too much jargon. One of the physicians, an English major in college, cut in: “No, no, no — we can do this so the press understands.” So then that doctor tinkered. Once they had their finished product, Rabin-Havt emailed it to the doctors and asked for a formal reply affirming the statement as their own. Proof in writing, presumably, in case of conspiracy theories.

“Yeah, it was fun,” Jane says, laughing. “Well, it was — it was not fun.”

You might wonder, reasonably so, why a 78-year-old man would rather be here, back in Iowa, still doing this, likely at some risk to his health, when he could also just drop out, endorse Elizabeth Warren, and spend his days at the family home on Lake Champlain. Maybe this is especially true if you also believe that Bernie Sanders stands no real shot at winning the Democratic nomination and probably knows it — but will take his diehard supporters, his loyal 15%, a big enough chunk to influence the debate and stay relevant, as far as they can carry him. But then, of course, you would be ruining his good mood and missing the point entirely.

“Honestly,” his wife says, seated at the small table, “I think things are getting worse. Things are getting worse.” By which she means wages, costs, bills, just not knowing if you can keep a roof over your head. “And this is an opportunity. I don't know that the opportunity was there in 2016, where it was so widespread in the same way, the feeling among people of, ‘Wait a minute. We deserve better. This is not OK. The system is completely broken.’ There were some people who saw it in 2016, but it has gotten so much worse over the last two or three years.”

“We’re losing ground as a people. And that angers him,” she laughs dryly, and from the other room, you can hear that he does sound angry — angry about how people go bankrupt for getting “CANC-AH,” angry about our crumbling “IN-FER-STRUCHRR,” angry about his colleagues in Congress who say everyone “LOOOOVES” their private health insurance. “THAT TRUE?”

He is yelling, yes, but Bernie Sanders is “happiest and most comfortable in rooms like this,” Rabin-Havt says, gesturing to the event across the hall. “When you put him in a room full of political hacks — like, phonies — that’s not his room. He’s not going to like it.”

Jane nods. “And he’s going to be gruff.”

“He’s going to be gruff,” Rabin-Havt says, “and he’s not going to know how to deal with it. You put him in a room with real people telling their real stories and—”

“And he’s a different person,” Jane says. “If you have politicians and, uh, media personalities just trying to play gotcha politics or talk about the polls or other candidates — and never asking the real questions about what's affecting the people, he has no time. He has no time.”

Jane, like most everyone around her husband, is a true believer. The two grew up in the same area of Brooklyn — 10 blocks apart, where her father worked as a taxi driver — but they wouldn’t meet until 1980 in Burlington. She was a community organizer. He was running for mayor. She had never heard the name “Bernie Sanders” when she helped organize a debate for the candidates at a Unitarian church in town. “Nobody liked the incumbent mayor in the community groups. Being a good Catholic girl, I greeted him and made sure he was all set up. I didn't even talk to Bernie! But everybody was interested in Bernie. And then I sat in the second row, and I listened to him, and so did the entire Unitarian Church,” she pauses, then continues slowly, “and I felt that he embodied everything I believed in. The first time I heard him speak. And I knew I would be working with him from that moment on.”

There is a stunning intensity in the belief — one made very real by the heart attack, one held firmly by his staff, his wife, by the candidate himself — that if Bernie Sanders isn’t going to be telling the American people these stories, then no other candidate will.

“It was a gut check for a lot of people,” Jane says. “Everybody was thinking cerebrally, ‘well, you know, we'll see how it plays out. The polls don’t seem to be doing that well right now. Who knows whether it's gonna be Biden or Elizabeth or Bernie…’” She waves her hand in the air.

“And then when people — I mean, I felt it very strongly from so many people — when people heard that he had a heart attack, it was like, ‘Oh my god.’ And envisioning, OK, without Bernie's voice, oh my god, this would be a totally different race. It would be a totally…” her voice trails off. “People understand that he's the one that can affect real change…”

“This is not a, uh, an intellectual discussion.”

At some point, the sound of Bernie’s voice from the other room drops out.

Jane goes silent. The staffers go silent.

Everything is abruptly quiet, and there is an instant, a half of a split second, when the mind imagines that maybe something’s happened — and then there’s the sound of Bernie Sanders speaking again.

“Somebody was just asking a question,” Jane explains.

“Oh, OK,” Rabin-Havt says.

“OK.”

iii.

The video team is still rolling outside Pamela’s house.

After about 25 minutes, the visit is over. They are all standing in the front yard — Bernie, Pamela, and Catherine. Two campaign vans are idling silently in the driveway. Both women have dealt with politicians before: Catherine has worked on legislation with US senators, including another presidential candidate, Cory Booker, to address rural wastewater problems. Pamela has testified before a congressional forum on poverty convened by Elizabeth Warren.

“Thank you,” Pamela tells her guest.

“I want to thank YOU,” he replies. And suddenly, there are tears. Catherine is hugging him, and then Pamela is hugging him too and crying into his blue button-down shirt — and then they are all hugging together. “We won’t forget you,” he says. “This is just the beginning.”

After they leave the house, he turns to one of the political reporters with him. “Learning something?” he asks.

The visit is still heavy on his mind. There is some light conversation about the trip — and then you see his face turn to a grimace. The reporter asks about Joe Biden. At this particular juncture in the horserace, there is a thirst for conflict between the two candidates.

“One day at a time…” he responds.

The reporter tries again: “Do you think Biden’s message is resonating in the South?”

“We’ll take it one day at a time, I have no idea. Nor does anyone else.”

He is, of course, annoyed. “You have all heard me rant and rave,” he starts telling the group. “I don’t think that the media is the enemy of the people, that it’s fake news. God knows I don’t think that.”

“But I do think we have to do a better job in looking at issues that impact ordinary people.”

“There are millions of people in this country…”

Later in the day, he relays Pamela’s story to the crowd at his town hall. The following month, his campaign releases a two-and-a-half-minute video about the trip, titled “Trapped.” Eventually, it hits 750,000 views.

In the middle of an interview, he bats back a question to ask one of his own.

“Do you know what it’s like to live —”

He is about to say “paycheck to paycheck,” but he stops himself. As he sees it, the media doesn’t know anything about that. Reporters, even the well-meaning ones, he thinks, don’t have a clue. “I mean, I do,” he says. “I grew up in that family.” His father, a paint salesman, worked hard but never made much money. The family lived in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. Both parents died young. As a young politician in Vermont, Sanders had to borrow gas money to campaign. The windshield wipers on his Volkswagen bug didn’t work. He struggled to pay bills. After his swearing-in as mayor of Burlington, he bought his first suit at age 40. He was, in those days, the same voter he’s trying to reach now. His old notebooks, legal pads fished from the archives by a Mother Jones reporter earlier this year, include rambling notes on his inability to do better for himself and his young son. The internal commentary is scathing and unkind. “Not only do I not pay bills every month — ‘What, every month?’ — I am better now than I used to be,” he wrote, “but pretty poor…”

The secret, it turns out, is that in addition to taking this work very seriously, Bernie Sanders also takes it very personally. The secret is that a mostly solitary man — a man who has spent most of his political career on the outskirts, who’s never really fit into someone’s idea of a politician, who’s “cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns” — is now trying to win a presidential campaign, maybe his last, by making people feel less alone.

This is his campaign, his theory of change, though he’s done very little to explain it to a wider audience. “I care less about the coverage, in one sense,” he says. “What I care about is that someone turns on the TV, and there’s someone who works at Walmart, or someone from Disney, or McDonald's. And they say, you know, ‘that’s me.’” He wants those people to do the talking: the people who worry about their electric bill. The people who wonder if they can afford to have another kid. People for whom “the idea of taking vacation” — he scoffs as he says the word — “is not even in their imagination even though they work all the time.” In his mind, he was those people.

He is not among the politicians “whose mommies and daddies told them at the country club that they were born to be president,” as he put it last year. He suspects his parents were Democrats, but he isn’t sure — it’s not something they discussed. So he is not drawn to Washington in the usual ways. Which is not to say that he doesn’t have ego. In 2016, staffers watched him adjust with unexpected ease to his new power and popularity: The guy in the middle seat, coach class, was suddenly flying private and showing up to watch the Golden State Warriors play the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 7. But he does not have what one former president called “that wretched mania, an itching for the White House.” He is driven by a different compulsion.

You get the sense, without exaggeration, that he will keep doing this for the rest of his life. That he would die before he stops. There are some signs, after the heart attack, that this is playing on his mind. “At the end of the day,” he told his supporters in a seven-minute video he recorded after his release from the hospital, “if you’re gonna look at yourself in the mirror, you’re gonna say, ‘Look, I go around once, I have one life to live. What role do I wanna play?’”

But for the most part, his mood is notably light. His return to the campaign trail, ever since the heart attack, aka “heart incident,” as senior aides refer to it in the press, has been a happy, bordering-on-joyous affair. He starts cracking jokes during his speech. He plays basketball. He hosts his staff at his house in Burlington, demonstrating the best way to build a fire in a tiny stove. He announces plans for his own New Year’s Eve party in Iowa with food, drinks, and live music: “Bernie’s Big New Year’s Bash.” Inexplicably, he ends up dancing at a labor solidarity dinner in New Hampshire. “Our revolution includes dancing!” he declares. And then, to the sound of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and The Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” he sways his hips from side to side, grinning, and twirls woman after woman across the banquet hall.

The major papers describe this period as a “renaissance” and “resurgence.” In polls conducted since the heart attack, he has either maintained his position or become even more competitive. He has a shot at Iowa. He looks good in Nevada and California. He remains the only candidate with more donations than Donald Trump. And he has some $1.67 million coming in each month from people who have signed up for automatic recurring donations.

On one afternoon in late October, he travels to Brooklyn to do a few interviews.

The plan is to walk up Henry Street to the Brooklyn Promenade, a pedestrian area overlooking the East River and downtown Manhattan, but he makes a turn onto Kane Street instead — spontaneous! — another indication of his good mood, which an aide quickly notes aloud.

He walks a few blocks, greeting passersby, before ducking into Francesco's Pizzeria & Trattoria, where he orders a slice of pepperoni. His staffers also order pepperoni. “See!” Bernie says. “Can’t think for themselves!” Jane shrugs. “Well, I got cheese,” she says.

The guys behind the counter open the oven and pull out a slice of pepperoni, wet and shimmering in its own hot oil. No one is concerned, apparently, about whether pizza is a wise choice three weeks after a stent procedure. Jane doesn’t blink. His staff doesn’t blink. No one blinks. Bernie takes his plate to a corner table, where he sits for a brief interview, giving polite but clipped answers about his decision to stay in the presidential race after the incident.

In one swift hand motion, as if to dispense with this line of inquiry entirely, he lifts the slice from its white paper plate, folds the crust lengthwise, takes a large bite, and swallows.

“This is my life,” he says.

The statement is, for Bernie, as straightforward and uncomplicated as it sounds. Everyone seems to understand this. Of course he should eat pizza. Of course he is still running for president.

“Well,” Jane says a few days later, “I mean, it would be kind of ridiculous if it didn't affect him in some way.”

“I think the way it affected him was, ‘OK, this… This is my mission in life. This is my purpose. I'm here for a reason.’”

On that long flight from Vermont to Las Vegas, she thought about what she should do when she saw him in the hospital. “If he wasn’t doing well,” she thought, she would put her foot down. She would tell him no. “If he was in danger, I would absolutely say, ‘I’m sorry. You can’t.’”

Jane pauses. “But honestly, I don’t know that he would have listened to me.”

#i totally didn't cry while i was reading this #not even a little bit #bernie 2020 #bernie sanders #2020 us election #2020 democratic primary #political revolution

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