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gilly-psycho-journal · 3 years

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This might be a wise place to remind you that the opinions expressed in these blogs are not necessarily representative of WCC and they are not given on behalf of the organisation.

Without further ado here is David Gill’s wonderfully erudite and entertaining responses. Please enjoy!

LD: Why and when did you decide to become a counsellor? DG: After I left Afghanistan and closed the door on my life as a social documentary filmmaker and photographer, I realised that I was still looking to find a way to continue to engage with humanity. To listen and to learn from people. I was looking for a fresh challenge. Three years ago, I had a germ of an idea about wanting to be a therapist. If you’d asked me to give you an answer as to why I wanted to do this, it would probably be much different to the answer I’d give you right now and probably different in another three years. I suppose like everything it depends on who is asking and what I think they want to hear.

Having spent three years in the academic system, I still hold the opinion, despite the over-medicalisation of therapy, that this vocation has room for creative individuals and free thinkers. This optimism is based on delving into the lives of its originators such as Rogers, Freud, Klein, Adler and Ellis and it’s more weird and wonderful leftfield luminaries such as Jung and RD Laing. One thing that struck me about all of these people and what kept me going was that every single one of them at some point was regarded as frauds, charlatans, quacks, counter-culture renegades or just plain bonkers. To a man (and the odd woman) they were all rule-breakers, all of them questioned and challenged the status quo in their desire to unlock the secrets of the human psyche.

LD: What did you do before you became a counsellor? DG: My last quantum leap was a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, living and working in Afghanistan for seven years.

LD: Why and when did you decide to join the team at WCC? DG: I joined WCC back in February 2019. I found the whole atmosphere warm and extremely welcoming, and without sounding too affected – it has ‘soul’. It’s also very diverse in both practitioners, and it’s client base which is what I am looking for in my private practice. They were also the first people to say ‘yes.’

LD: Is there a certain model of counselling you use in your work? Can you explain in less than 10 words what it means? DG: Integrative Approach – ‘Promiscuous and flirtatious around the psychodynamic, relational and humanistic theory.’ = 10 words – I did it!

LD: How have you adapted to doing your counselling work during the lockdown? DG: Novelist Tom Holt summed it up for me, ‘Human beings can get used to virtually anything, given plenty of time and no choice in the matter whatsoever.’ I accepted the inevitability of going online with a certain grim foreboding. Within weeks I realised that I was spending a third of the session looking at myself. I Googled it and found out it was normal. Then I discovered how to mute my face. Concealment was a revelation. Now there’s a paradox!

LD: Do you feel as though the lockdown has increased peoples’ need for counselling and therapy? DG: The media has been reporting a lot of research highlighting the negative impact on people’s mental health and finding it difficult to cope with the emotional challenges of isolation. Personally, I thought lockdown was enlightening at first, aside from the grim death toll I found exhilaration in its novelty. No traffic, low pollution, endless sunny days. ‘All in it together’ and all that malarkey.

The current lockdown is very different, and I can sense a collective anxiety building amongst all my clients. It is impacting everyone in a myriad of ways, but now I feel as though we are all yearning for things to return to normal. Although as James Hillman said in, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse, ‘In a world like ours, where what’s considered normal is a sickly compromise between how much boredom you can stomach and how much denial you can defend, new thoughts and explorations are often couched in terms of psychosis’. So maybe it is an opportunity for people to look at new meanings and new beginnings instead of looking back. It could be the jolt some of us require.

LD: What would you say to someone who is thinking about receiving therapy or counselling? DG: Be careful, as Carl Jung said, ‘Be aware of unearned wisdom.’ Searching for the truth is not the same as what’s desirable. My god that sounds enough to scare the pants off anyone. Honestly, it’s great. How about Socrates? ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ No, that also sounds quite intimidating. Ok… just do it you’ll never look back. Oh no! That’s the whole point. What about; Be as truthful as possible with your therapist and ask questions. Get stuck in and do the work. It will reward you.

LD: What do you find most rewarding about being a counsellor? DG: The trust that clients place in me and the utter privilege I feel from receiving that trust. James Andreoni claimed the ‘glow of giving makes acts of generosity ultimately selfish.’ In sum; Helping people is a win-win.

LD: What do you find most challenging about being a counsellor? DG: The trust that clients place in me and the utter terror I feel from receiving that trust. Which is good right? Terror broadens the mind. When you’re scared, the stress response induces an adrenaline rush and floods your brain and body with oxygen, increasing your stamina.

LD: What advice do you have for people who are thinking about becoming a counsellor or therapist? DG: Take the red pill. It represents an uncertain future. Living the “truth of reality” is harsher and more difficult than you could imagine. But as Morpheus says in The Matrix, “if you take the blue pill…the story ends.” If you haven’t seen the Matrix, then that won’t make any sense. But maybe this is a trick question because as counsellors we are not meant to give advice. So perhaps I should adopt the Oscar Wilde approach on this one, ‘I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.’

LD: What’s your favourite technique to keep happy and healthy at home during the lockdown? DG: Cooking hearty soups and getting stuck into a Cold War Steve jigsaw puzzle. Twitter @Coldwar_Steve

LD: How do you start your day? DG: Tragically, like most people, these days, going to the loo and staring at my iPhone.

LD: Which 3 people would be on your guest-list for your dream dinner party? DG: RD Laing, Dorothy Parker and Keith Moon. Although I might be too terrified to attend.

LD: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year? DG: I’m a Joke, and So Are You – Reflections on Humour and Humanity by Robin Ince & Stewart Lee.

LD: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? DG: Not sure it is solid advice but more of a statement from Maya Angelou, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ She sounds a bit harsh and judgey, but I get the point. But I think the best advice I have read is that therapists should read more stories, more great literature, more Greek myths. Case studies, diagnosis, theories are great, but a lot of the time we are dealing in fiction. Freud said, ‘It’s how you remember, not what actually happened.’ That’s what clients do. They tell us stories that they have told themselves, and we should be always aware of that.

LD: What’s the most adventurous thing you’ve done in life? DG: Besides embarking on a career in therapy, I suppose it must be going to live in a so-called ‘war-zone’ and eating meat-based Kandahar street food in the blazing summer.

LD: When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? DG: In the Navy, but my mates told me that it was a bit ‘gay’. Please don’t blame me. It was Yorkshire in the 1970s in and literally, everything you didn’t like or understand was pejoratively called ‘gay’.

LD: What thing are you most excited to do once the lockdown has finished, and it’s safe to travel again? DG: Travelling on the Central Line in rush hour and licking shop windows outside Harrods.

LD: What are you irrationally scared of? DG: I am scared of faking it and making it. Freud called it ‘success neurosis’, but the great poet Phillip Larkin, said, ‘Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.’ So I try not to be scared of living.

LD: What 3 things would you bring to a desert island? DG: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I have never managed to read it (the paperback is over 1100 pages) but apparently, it echoes a timeless conundrum: the propensity for humans to distract themselves, often mindlessly, from boredom and the trauma of life. If that doesn’t work the complete audio works of Alan Watts and Screamadelica by Primal Scream and maybe something to play them on if that’s not too greedy.

LD: What does 2021 hold for you? DG: Hopefully spending less time staring into a screen and shouting, ‘Can you hear me?’ However, I must end on another quotation since this interview is drowning in them. ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.’ Woody Allen.

David Gill [email protected] www.gillypsychotherapy.com

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lilnasxvevo · 6 years

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I wrote an essay once when it was really late and I was really frustrated

I am not going to send it to my literary journal and I did not even hand it in for the class I wrote it for (the next essay I wrote was passable enough to submit) but I think it is kind of funny so I am going to share it with you

Zoom Zoom

Draft number four of this FUCKING essay because I can’t FUCKING write. I just through out the last three because they sucked and excuse my language but I’m so frustrated at myself and I typed the wrong homophone in the last sentence and I went back and changed it but then I changed it back so you understand where I’m at right now because I NEVER!! MAKE!! SPELLING MISTAKES!! I was on the editorial staff of my high school newspaper for two years and that shit was flawless! I was editor in chief and that shit was free of god damn error! I do not make! Spelling mistakes!

I’m so frustrated because part of me just wants to write about a motherfucking TV show and the rest of me is like, “No, Thomas, that’s so fucking stupid, write about something that’s serious, something people can take seriously, something people can respect, but NOT something boring” and I’m like OK!! WELL!! THAT’S A TALL ORDER YOU’VE GIVEN YOURSELF TOMMY BOY!!

I’ve been trying to copy the style of the essays we’ve been reading in the last three drafts I just started and abandoned. I wrote…lets see…(I will be keeping all future grammar and spelling errors that I make) over 1300 words that way so far today. Fuck it!! I am going to be writing like ME and what I write like is a protagonist from a really sub-par young adult novel. I read a lot of those! But I was already like that before I read all those books. Actually most of the ones I read are pretty great. Holly Black, David Levithan, uh those Girl, 15, Charming but Insane books I forget who writes them but if I look it up I have to stop my timer and that is just not happening—check em out, they’re great. Oh, Eoin Colfer, too. I have his autograph! I actually also have David’s.

I made a list of all the things I could write this essay about. I didn’t want to write about being queer again because I don’t want you people to pigeonhole me. There’s like 50 items on that list. I’ll spare you. The list sucks. I texted my best friend “What should I write this essay about” and she said “Roman Catholicism” and I was like “Maybe” and she was like “Vampires” and I was like “LMFAO you will never believe what I wrote last time spoiler it was vampires.”

I have ADHD. Sometimes this surprises people! Sometimes it does not! Usually it doesn’t surprise other people who have ADHD because we go based on our lived experiences instead of stereotypes unlike SOME people. I was diagnosed when I was 17 which is super super late but they literally, and you can look this up, base most criteria off of the symptoms of little white cisgender boys, who are usually hyperactive, and I was inattentive type. My third grade teacher used to slap my desk with a ruler when I spaced out. She never brought up my attention issues to anyone else. I hated her. I still hate her. Curse you, Cathy Sellers!!

I have chilled out on the caps lock because maybe that was kind of a gimmick. Ok. Well. The ADHD. I actually don’t remember why I brought up ADHD, which is classic ADHD. Oh. I think it was to say that maybe you will be surprised that the inside of my head is this giant mess. Not to be all “welcome to my twisted mind” or that edgy shit. Maybe I’m trying to make an embarrassing essay on purpose. The point is some people think I’m very composed and stuff and the inside of my head has never once been composed. Well, maybe a few times. I miss standardized testing because they don’t really matter and they were fun to focus on and it was fun to fill the bubbles in and they made me feel smart. I am smart. I promise I’m smart. Sometimes people think I’m dumb because I’m a trans man which I don’t understand but I promise I’m smart.

I just slapped my face to try to get myself to wake up a little bit. I am wiped. That cold that’s been going around is kicking my ass, though not as bad as it’s kicking the ass of other students in this class who I have maybe potentially had to drive to the pharmacy this week.

I am so obsessed with this show on BBC America right now called Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. In ADHD circles this is sometimes called a hyperfixation—it’s kind of like the special interests autistic people have, surprise surprise ADHD and autism are both developmental disorders and they have a lot in common. Dirk Gently is all I can think about. It’s a really great show and I loved it last season because it has the actor Samuel Barnett as the lead actor and I swore my fealty to him in like 2014 and then he got a lead on a TV show which is crazy because he never gets big roles like that so I was like NICE!!! Yeah, so last season was sci-fi, and the show is really great and it has this big diverse cast and all the characters are really interesting and the show never leans on stereotype instead of fleshing out a character as a unique person and there were electric crossbows last season that were designed by that Adam Savage dude from Mythbusters. So but this season, THIS SEASON, is SO good because apparently the show is planning on “switching genres” every season but with the same main cast so now they’ve been running around trying to find each other after everyone got separated at the end of last season (spoiler) and now they’re all in Montana and instead of sci-fi it’s FANTASY which is my FAVORITE. There’s another dimension that’s this great high-fantasy nation called Wendimoor and there’s a door between the valley of Inglenook and this one town in Montana for reasons that I refuse to explain, just watch the show. Ok and in Inglenook, there’s—it’s kind of sketchy how it works but there’s this guy named Panto Trost who has pink hair (his whole family has pink hair and it’s unclear if it’s genetic or if they dye it as a tribal marker or something, and when I first saw it I was like, HOLY SHIT, WHY DID I NEVER THINK OF THAT), and he’s the prince of Inglenook, and there’s this guy named Silas Dengdamor, who’s some kind of minor prince in Inglenook somehow, and THEY. ARE. A GAY INTERRACIAL HIGH FANTASY COUPLE. THEY ARE IN LOVE.

And the guy who plays Silas, Lee Majdoub, he’s really active on Twitter and Tumblr, which is crazy because almost no one is active on Tumblr under their real name and it’s mostly just depressed young adults like me, but Lee fields questions about the show all the time and talks about how it was an honor to play a gay prince and he has so much love for Silas and he put so much work into this character which you can tell because he has an answer ready for everything. Has he ridden that train we saw? Is he gay or bi or what? What are his hobbies? If he lived in our world what would his favorite movie be? His five favorite songs? Does he agree with his family’s stance on the feud? (Oh my god I forgot to MENTION that the Trosts and the Dengdamors are TWO FAMILIES AT WAR, which makes Silas and Panto basically gay Romeo and Juliet, but hopefully they won’t die but Dirk Gently is a “don’t get attached” kind of show.)

And did I mention he’s respectful??? My favorite answer he’s ever given is when someone asked him what it was like to kiss Chris Russell (the other actor), which is a question every fucking presumed-straight actor gets when they play a gay role, and since there is a 4 inch height difference between them, Lee answered something like, “It was a little weird because Chris is very tall, so I felt a little like Natalie Portman in Thor. Natalie Portman and I both have dark hair so we’re practically twins.” Also he is very handsome. It is important that Lee Majdoub is very handsome. Okay, it’s important to me.

Wow, glad I got that off my chest. It’s kind of all I ever want to talk about. Two weeks ago, before I could do my actual writing assignment for the day, I had to freewrite about Kevin Spacey for like AN HOUR. What I wrote ended up being kind of unusable for this class thus far, I just haven’t been pleased enough with the way it handled a very sensitive topic to hand it in, but it was about Kevin Spacey and Jeffrey Dahmer and OUT magazine and news media and Anthony Rapp and me.

I wanted to write about a historical figure for this paper but all the ones I could think of that I have a strong connection to were gay. While I was typing that sentence, I thought of Dorothy Parker. Well, shit. Another day, then.

This paper is what we call a RISK!!! pleasedontfailme

Here are some excerpts from the other three papers I tried to write today:

· Sometimes I sing and dance in front of them. Sometimes I scream. One time, I stood on a desk.

· The last time I told her I was proud of her I could only do it because she had consumed an obscene amount of wine and called me to talk about one of Shakespeare’s history plays

· I am afraid that I am a husk a husk a HUSK a husK a husk a husk a husk of Corn-ell because

I promise these essays were not good. These were the only good parts. I wanted to include them because I wanted you to understand that I covered a lot of fucking ground before settling on whatever the fuck this is. I am sorry if you feel you would rather be reading one of those other essays, but I did not want to write them.

I just scrolled back up to the top because I remembered abruptly that this essay doesn’t have a name. It’s called Zoom Zoom now. When my sister is bored while she drives, she says, “Zoom zoom! We’re zooming!” She is 24 and has a master’s degree. This particular catchphrase of hers always comes to mind when I try to describe how my brain works—childish, too fast, bored. Her boyfriend says “Brroom brroom” when he drives. I think he picked it up from her. He calls me Thomathy. Because Thomas can be Tom for short and Tom is like Tim and Tim is short for Timothy. Get it? He says “Thomathy” sounds like a disease. I think he likes me anyway. Even though one time during a heated game of Monopoly I told him I would eat chips at his funeral.

I have three cats. One is ten years old, the other two are one. I have a rabbit. He’s a jerk. That’s all you need to know about me. Oh, I’m from Wisconsin. My favorite color is orange.

Yeah so thanks for coming to my TED talk. Please buy a t-shirt on my way out, they’re $20. I know TED talks don’t usually have t-shirts but I want your money. Yes. Now scram.

Are they gone?

Jesus, I’m so fucking tired.

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pmscenarios · 7 years

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Notification - Sender unknown

I was sitting in the sofa, half-way watching the latest Jimquisition on the big screen, while checking up on the newest twitter controversy with my recently bought Lenovo Yoga 720 (got it half-price on the black Friday sale) when a notification popped up in the bottom right corner:

*plop*

I didn't murder anyone today

Heh, that's a pretty weird message to get out-of-context. I absentmindedly wondered who'd start a conversation with such an unique statement.

*plop*

gonna try harder next week

Okeey.. That was definitely a bit off. Which one of my friends could be messaging me about this, and why? Are they commenting on a video game? I moused down to open Discord when I realised it wasn't there.

Not that it wasn't open, there was no icon. I hadn't installed Discord on this pc yet.

So where was the messages coming from? I opened windows' action center, but the sidebar only displayed one sentence -

"no new notifications".

Maybe it's Skype? I didn't activate my Skype account, and I haven't used it in years, but it is a part of my windows id, and I had to log in when I set-up the Lenovo after all. I quickly opened the settings menu and uninstalled Skype. Can't stand that program anyway.

I didn't get any more notifications after that, so I assumed it had just been some random Skype spam. By the next week I'd almost forgotten it happened, only documented by my twitter feed - jokingly theorising I'd mistakenly intercepted a message from a serial killer.

Supergreatfriend was maneuvering in and out of some very selective elevators on the latest wild goose chase in Shenmue 2 when it popped up again.

killed my first one today, human

The same unknown sender, another ominous text. My nerves were instantly flaring, my hairs standing on end. This shouldn't be happening, I uninstalled Skype. I checked the Discord icon on my task bar, downloaded and installed during the last week. It was inactive. I started the app up to check, but there was no new notifications. I quickly clicked through my direct messages and then scrolled through the servers I followed. Nothing.

*plop*

he got up but I knocked him down with a rock

No. It has to be coming from somewhere. It must! I switched back to Chrome and quickly closed the Youtube tab. Maybe it had been a comment notification from that? Or maybe Twitter? Tumblr? I hastily closed every tab, and then Chrome for good measure. There was no more options. No more twisted, unknown messages.

*plop*

the fall didn't do it, but the spike did

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! It's not stopping, this is so freaky. I opened the start menu as fast as I could - shut down, shut down now!

Slamming the lid closed, I flung the netbook next to me in the sofa. Something had to be wrong with the win 10 install.

I should do a factory reset.

It's been 2 weeks since then. My twitter followers' suggestions ranged from a prank, faulty software, and just my own paranoia, to mistaken identity, refurbished pc still receiving spy messages or a malicious hack. I haven't really wanted to think about it. My Discord buddies suggested I report it to Microsoft, or maybe even the police, but what would I say? "I got these mysterious messages on my new laptop, without them having a sender or a connected program. No, I can't show them to you, they only appeared as live notifications."? They'll think I'm crazy.

I'm starting to think they would have a point. I've been really paranoid lately - seeing shadows were there are none - this weekend I was even convinced someone had broken into my apartment while I'd been out, just because I spent a few minutes searching for the new box of Nescafé medium roast capsules. Finding it, of all places, in the cup cupboard. I hadn't had a cup since. Heh. I shake my head at my own insanity. I really need a vacation.

*plop*

The small sound makes me almost jump out of my skin. The tell-tale soft sound of a windows notification, but it can't be! The Lenovo has been off since that day, secluded to a corner of the living room.

I glare at it there it sits, perched on the corner of the side table. The power button shining brightly, taunting me.

*plop*

Maybe if I just ignore it? Let it sit there on the side-table, plopping to itself until it runs out of power?

The coffee withdrawal is probably exhasperating my mental state.

I decide to make myself a cup of coffee and sit down with an episode of the Film Reroll. I'd found this podcast a few months back and was currently listening my way through their Wizard of Oz playthrough.

My Dolce Gusto coffee machine humms lowdly, slowly filling my cup with some medium roast black goodness. After about a minute, I pick up the freshly-made, piping hot cup of coffee and a nearby teaspoon, put in a few spoons of dairy-free creamer and a packet of sweetener, before stirring everything while heading for the couch.

I settle down in the sofa with my trusty Audio-Technica headphones and my old Sony Xperia tablet - which had ended up being used longer than planned with the recent events.

*plop*

The Lenovo was still asking for attention in the corner, but I block it out of my mind and focus my attention on the Podbean app, quickly starting up ep. 3.

As the group starts bantering about Gillikins and Gilligan's Island, I slowly start breathing normally again. I hadn't even realised I'd been holding my breath.

I give my cup a quick blow before sipping the newly-made coffee.

Sinking deep into the sofa I close my eyes and let the players transport me to their wonderous, weird world of Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy knows mind control and the Scarecrow does more to sabotage the group than help. *Du-du!* The Xperia notification sound deafens the podcast for a few seconds and shocks my eyes open. On the top of the screen is a new message:

I killed 5 yesterday, they cried a lot

I stare at the notification, not really taking in the words. It's like my whole world has frozen, time starting up as a crawl when the notification slowly withdraws. The podcast has just become meaningless noise, nothing reaching past my ears.

*du-du!*

I left the table for a minute and they tried to escape, so I caught the room on fire

This can't be real, this is a joke, a hoax from one of my twitter followers, or discord friends! I desperately run through all the options in my head, looking for an answer, any answer. The messages hadn't appeared on the tablet, only on the pc.

"You don't know that". A tiny little voice in the back of my mind whispered. "The tablet was in the bedroom while you were using your new computer, you saw the messages on the device you were using at that moment."

I desperately grab for the Len, the pc, to confirm to myself that it's a trick, that someone is messing with me, that it's not the same mystery messages I was getting before.

Pulling it open I place it on the sofa next to me and unlock it with my finger. I don't want to think about why it's on or how it's been able to keep a charge for over 2 weeks, I just need to check. To makre sure there's nothing there.

"no new notifications"

With a sharp breath of relief I feel like my terror recedes a bit. There's nothing there. Probably just someone remembering my recent freak-out and deciding to mess with me a bit. I take off the headphones and place them and the tablet on the table, before taking another sip of coffee.

"Heh!" I almost spook myself with my own snort, I'm really too paranoid. Somebody is probably sitting on the other side of the world congratluating themself for their little joke. I will have to thank them for the scare later.

*plop*

The tiny notification sound from the pc next to me is so loud I almost drop the cup, and I can see at the edge of my eye the tablet screen has also lit up with a new message.

fire and poison

"No.." My voice is barely a wisper and I can feel the tears welling up in my eyes. Why? Why is it there? There was nothing, no notifications, no.. i"that's what it said earlier too, when you checked after the first messages. There was never anything there."i/ I looked over at the tablet. windows might not keep the notices, but the tablet definately does! android doesn't hide thems until you clear them. I yank the tablet to me, causing the headphones to tumble onto the floor with a thud. Quickly swiping up, I pull down the notifications.

There's nothing there. No messages, no social media updates, nothing.

Gripping the tablet in my hands, my fear starts changing into rage. Fuck this whole thing, fuck this goddamn slimeball who's probably sitting behind a screen in a lowly lit place laughing to himself over his latest prank driving another completely insane.

Sending more and more bullshit messages.

What's the last one? "Fire and poison"? That doesn't even make any sense, it's just words..

"Yeah!" I shout out. "It's just fucking words on a, a screen! Whoever you are think you so clever for freaking me out like this, but I'm not scared anymore. You can't hurt me. You could never hurt me!

You, you're just, just words!

I can feel the stress letting go of my body, my mucles relaxing. The tablet slips out of my hands and falls on the headphones and floor.

"How do you feel now, huh?" I smirk, every word I speak into the empty room making my body go limp.

*plop*

I can barely turn my head to look at the pc beside me.

i am soo sleepy

Did Did it No, it cant be. I try to reach out and grab the thing beside me, but my arms arent listening to me.

Its just a coinc A co By chance. Friends. It never talked about things like that before. Just about.. Killing.

*plop*

I'd drink some coffee but I am immune

"ee-mmn-e?" My lips cant form my words. What a strange word to choos to talk cofeee. I get not effect from cofffee anymore, but immune? "- and poison" - it pop up in head like a bliking mesaage. Pull head around and stare half-had coffee. It not be+

try - stand, but body heavy. just sit. Help

helo

her;[

trlkhdtmknlmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

after she found the corpse and the maggots got her

#doodlesatbreakfast #short story #horror #creepy story #thanks WafflesRtheBest for the creepy messages #I guess it's a creepypasta?#Was sort of the style I was emulating #tech tales #cw: swearing #tw: dead people #tw: violence #tw: death #tw: murder #jimquisition #supergreatfriend #"theFilmReroll #tw: burning #tw: killing

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networkingdefinition · 5 years

Text

Birthday Quotes

Official Website: Birthday Quotes

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• A birthday is just another day where you go to work and people give you love. Age is just a state of mind, and you are as old as you think you are. You have to count your blessings and be happy. – Abhishek Bachchan • A birthday:-and now a day that rose With much of hope, with meaning rife- A thoughtful day from dawn to close: The middle day of human life. – Jean Ingelow • A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age. – Robert Frost • A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday. – Erma Bombeck • All I want for my birthday is another birthday. – Ian Dury • All I watch is the Food Network. I took a cheese making class a few weeks ago, and I told my family and friends to only get me kitchen stuff on my birthday. I’m into every kind of cookbook and anything by Anthony Bourdain. I’d love to own a restaurant if I could find the right chef. – Jesse McCartney • All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much. – George Harrison • And for the city’s birthday, we will host events in every neighborhood of the city, inviting all of our residents to share in the celebration of Boston’s great epic – the story of neighbors who support one another where it matters most. • Any time women come together with a collective intention, it’s a powerful thing. Whether it’s sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens. – Phylicia Rashad • At 50, don’t let aging get you down. It’s too hard to get back up. Happy 50th birthday. – H. H. Asquith • At her birthday, my seven-year-old daughter will say that she wants these big cakes and certain expensive toys as presents, and I can’t say no to her. It would just break my heart. But when I was little, for birthdays we just played outside and we were happy if we got any cake. – Goran Ivanisevic • Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. – Christina Rossetti • Because time itself is like a spiral, something special happens on your birthday each year: The same energy that God invested in you at birth is present once again. – Menachem Mendel Schneerson • Believing hear, what you deserve to hear: Your birthday as my own to me is dear… But yours gives most; for mine did only lend Me to the world; yours gave to me a friend. – Martial • Birthdays? yes, in a general way; For the most if not for the best of men: You were born (I suppose) on a certain day: So was I: or perhaps in the night: what then? – James Kenneth Stephen • Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake. – Walter Lord • Every year on your birthday, you get a chance to start new. – Sammy Hagar • Everyday is a birthday; every moment of it is new to us; we are born again, renewed for fresh work and endeavor. – Isaac Watts • Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, “ye cannot enter the kingdom of God.” One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again. – Dorothy L. Sayers • Fly free and happy beyond birthdays and across forever, and we’ll meet now and then when we wish, in the midst of the one celebration that never can end. – Richard Bach • For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier… I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. – Steven Wright • For my birthday this year, my girlfriends – who knew I’d just inherited my dad’s turntable – gave me a carton of albums like “Blue Kentucky Girl,” by Emmylou Harris, and “Off the Wall,” by Michael Jackson. It’s all stuff we grew up with. I mean, you can’t have a music collection without Prince’s “Purple Rain” – it just can’t be done! – Connie Britton • From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye. – William Butler Yeats • Happy birthday greetings and warmest wishes, too May today, tomorrow, everyday Be truly happy for you. – Margaret Brown • I binge when I’m happy. When everything is going really well, every day is like I’m at a birthday party. – Kirstie Alley • I crashed my boyfriend’s birthday when I was 12 years old. He didn’t invite me and so I showed up. – Isla Fisher • I had arranged a birthday party for him and my children, who are all Aquarians. Instead, we got married. I ran out of excuses. It was just us and my children. – Diane von Furstenberg • I love having my birthday at Australia Zoo. – Bindi Irwin • I love photography. My boyfriend’s got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday. – Sarah Sutton • I love the big fresh starts, the clean slates like birthdays and new years, but I also really like the idea that we can get up every morning and start over. – Kristin Armstrong • I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ – Steven Wright • I was fired by ‘America’s Next Top Model’ on my birthday. – Paulina Porizkova • If I have the power to post ‘Happy Birthday’ on someone’s Facebook page and make them feel really good, it feels really good to make other people feel really good. I love it. I’m a huge Facebook and Twitter person. And I love talking to my fans. It’s fun. – Rebecca Mader • If there’s one thing I really want for my birthday, that is for the mining company not to mine my daddy’s reserve. – Bindi Irwin • If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it. – David Horowitz • I’m a summer baby, so I usually have my birthday as a good summer memory. – Sloane Crosley • In 1993 my birthday present was a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. – Annette Funicello • In childhood, we yearn to be grown-ups. In old age, we yearn to be kids. It just seems that all would be wonderful if we didn’t have to celebrate our birthdays in chronological order. – Robert Breault • It does not seem a year Since last we sent to you Our wishes for your special day And all that you would do. And once again we wish you All joyous things and more A day that’s filled with happiness And memories to store. Then when you think in years to come Of Birthdays long ago You may remember fondly How much we love you so. So have a day of pleasure Do things that make you smile For ………….. you are treasured Today and all the while. – Janet Horne • It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me. – Ellen Glasgow • It’s odd the things that people remember. Parents will arrange a birthday party, certain it will stick in your mind forever. You’ll have a nice time, then two years later you’ll be like, ‘There was a pony there? Really? And a clown with one leg?’ – David Sedaris • Mattresses! Beautiful! Let’s go buy a couple of mattresses. Give ’em to people for their birthday. – Lawrence Tierney • May the moments of today become fond memories for tomorrow. Happy Birthday – Rob Jackson • Most of us can remember a time when a birthday – especially if it was one’s own – brightened the world as if a second sun has risen. – Robert – Staughton Lynd • My brother got a .22 for his 12th birthday; I got a .22. He got a hunting knife; I got a hunting knife. – Stephanie Cutter • My first recognition of age setting in was exactly on my 36th birthday. I have no idea why, on this day of all days, I looked in the mirror and realized my face no longer looked young. – Paulina Porizkova • Nicole will come up in conversations where it’s in a part of the conversation. Or we may be somewhere and I would tell some story about their mother and I. You know, we always honor her birthday. – O. J. Simpson • On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles. – Mary Antin • Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time. – Jean Paul • Pleas’d look forward, pleas’d to look behind,And count each birthday with a grateful mind. – Alexander Pope • Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same. – Audrey Hepburn • The best birthdays of all are those that haven’t arrived yet. – Robert Orben • The best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once. – Herbert V. Prochnow • The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity. – Seneca the Younger • The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. – Samuel Johnson • The summer of 2002 at the Wilson birthday party I met Van Dyke again and I made plans to have dinner with him. – Matthew Sweet • The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it’s time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book. – James Rollins • The way I see it, you should live everyday like its your birthday. – Paris Hilton • Then when you think in years to come Of Birthdays long ago You may remember fondly How much we love you so. – Janet Horne • There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents, and only one for birthday presents, you know. – Lewis Carroll • There is still no cure for the common birthday. – John Glenn

• We didn’t have a whole lot of money when I was growing up either. I would always ask for magic books or magic tricks for my birthday or for Christmas and the rest of the year I either had to mow lawns or find part time jobs to help supplement the cost of doing magic. – Lance Burton • Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we’ve grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it’s not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing. – Jerry Seinfeld • We’re sending you best wishes And hope your day goes well And that you’ll find some memories With stories you can tell Of how you had a marvelous time And those around you too With fun and lots of laughter And all this just for you.. Have a Very Happy Birthday – Janet Horne • When I was little I thought, isn’t it nice that everybody celebrates on my birthday? Because it’s July 4th. – Gloria Stuart • When I was young and it was someone’s birthday, I didn’t have the money to buy nice presents so I would take my mom’s camera and make a movie parody for whoever’s birthday it was. When I’d show it them, they’d die laughing. That reaction was a high for me, and I loved that feeling. – David Henrie • With a recent birthday, I’ve been acting now for twenty years. – Thayer David • You’re birthday reminds me of the old Chinese scholar….. Yung No Mo – Dana Rosemary Scallon [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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equitiesstocks · 5 years

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Birthday Quotes

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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Two or three days like the beginning of love […] To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering and anxiety.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

AS JOANNA WALSH’S Break.up opens, the author, who is the meta-narrative’s protagonist, is well into a period of mourning a love that never quite happened. The premise of the “novel in essays” is simple: Joanna and an unnamed, emotionally unavailable man met and, while living in different cities, carried on an intense online romance. They saw each other only a few times In Real Life before he pulled away and she began to obsess over what went wrong. As she’s unraveling the affair, Joanna plans a trip across Europe with the hope that the liminal state of travel will offer room for meditation and recovery.

That isn’t to minimize the relationship. Often, those affairs are the trickiest: the ones that strand us, unable to name what that was, but ultimately leave us changed people. On her multi-city pilgrimage, Walsh is prepared to explore every angle of the romantic action and eventual fallout. And she does so skillfully, weaving the concrete details of her travels and life into an in-depth study of love and connection in the 21st century. Break.up works as well as it does in part because Walsh provides room for the reader to examine these topics alongside her, in turn accomplishing what the best essays do: stir up more questions than answers.

So much of Walsh’s writing is caught up in the emotion of travel, how we deal with back there while we’re temporarily here, and a specialty of hers is exploring grief, or the onset of grief, while on the move. In her 2015 book Hotel, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, Walsh flees her ending marriage by taking a job reviewing hotels for a new travel website. Though she isn’t paid for the pieces, her stays are free, and the time away from everyday life allows Walsh to begin to process the confusion and pain she’s left with following the relationship’s dissolution. Vertigo, published by Dorothy in 2015, reveals a writer grappling with the complexities of marriage, frequently during travel, as she attempts to decide what kind of woman she wants to be while watching a daughter outgrow her childhood talismans and a husband turn into a stranger.

But it’s in Break.up that Walsh fully realizes this aspect of her art. Joanna knowingly throws herself into the pace of travel to be at once busy and quiet, as travel often is. Sketches of scenes play out in her mind. “I wasted my time with you,” her fading lover says. “I didn’t,” Joanna responds. These vignettes often bubble up as Joanna is doing something else (crossing every bridge in Budapest only once, for example), and they cast a foggy specter. Were these words spoken in actual conversation or made later as notes, marred remembrances of a promising involvement turned sour?

How or when these words were spoken really doesn’t matter. The collaging of ghostly memories, conversations real and reimagined, and philosophical investigations of the nature of love allows what could have been a straightforward narrative hinged on a literary trope to become a rambling hybrid essay that urges the reader to dig deeper, too.

Walsh deftly uses these ghosts from the immediate past to examine the long game of life. While in Budapest, Joanna remembers visiting the city with her then-husband when they were first married and both very young. Walsh writes,

And now I’m repeating that stop in time to grasp at who I was that time in Budapest before — so many years ago I might have been a different person in a different city — but it’s something like trying to hold onto a smell, or a color, or the feel of a string of beads passing through my hand. There are no adjectives to describe time’s passage. It can pass slower or faster, like a volume dial can turn louder or quieter, but no more than that: it has no texture, no timbre.

This meditation acknowledging the essential formlessness of time and self centers the novel of essays. As Walsh reminisces about her past marriage, she sees an entirely different version of herself, signaling to the reader that she knows this is just one story in a line of stories and that, unlike travel, life and love aren’t linear, a truth we’d all do well to remember.

Starting at a London train station, Joanna’s trip takes her through France (twice), Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, and the Netherlands, and she’s packed lightly to leave room for intellectual baggage. Prepared to at least attempt to demystify love, she’s brought with her an arsenal of books on the topic: Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and André Breton’s Mad Love and Nadja. Excerpts from these and other titles litter Break.up’s margins.

Her travels are both immediate — sitting in a cafe in Athens, she notes when a young girl comes up to touch her computer — and intellectual — watching a young couple kiss from a park bench in Sofia, she falls into a meditation on the physicality of love, the Soviet statues that once littered the city, and the boredom that inevitably accompanied her romantic entanglement. Walsh writes,

A love story comes only after the end of love, whether it ends one way, or the other, and, until the story’s told, love is a secret, not because it’s illicit, but because it’s so difficult to tell what it is.

Joanna is continuously reminded that, though the story is complete in one sense, allowing her to tell it, an uncertainty remains. Because so much of the affair happened online — through text and email, Twitter and Facebook — the connection is lost only when the wi-fi is down, leaving the relationship perpetually unresolved.

The nature of Walsh’s narrative draws the reader into Joanna’s relentless waiting game. As she enters the cafe in Athens, she’s eager to see if he’s contacted her. By this point, the reader has been told enough about the unnamed man that his silence feels like the healthier outcome, but as Joanna rides the line between obsession and erasure, what she desires becomes less clear. Luckily, spotty wi-fi gives her generous amounts of time to wander, and she takes the reader inside her jumbled, mourning mind as she passes through markets in Sofia, attends readings in Paris, and perches on a rock overlooking the Mediterranean in Nice, cigarette and wine in hand.

Break.up is as much about the loss of emotional liberty in a world that relies more and more on digital connection as it is about the loss of love. Joanna is trapped in a holding pattern — “Come to Prague,” the man writes — and the claustrophobia the online world evokes in her underlines just how difficult disappearing has become. With a few sleuthy moves, anyone can be teased out from the digital dustbin: childhood crushes, lost college friends, a one-night stand, that guy you danced with once at a Halloween party. As a result, a new anxiety has formed around allowing oneself to connect in the first place. In Break.up, Walsh shows the reader the aftermath of an exquisite falling: thinking only of immediate happiness without considering the potential for pain and disappointment, Joanna revealed herself — at least her digital self — to the fullest.

Nearly two-thirds of the way through the book, in an essay/chapter titled “Sofia/Boring,” Joanna briefly loses focus on the man she’s attempting to excise as she immerses herself in the strangeness of Bulgaria’s capital city. The lost love is still referenced, but a shift has happened as Joanna becomes wrapped up in the boredom and stagnation of travel, of what it means to carry oneself from place to place, killing time. She begins to allow herself the room to disengage.

Because of the care Walsh has taken to create both a sound investigation and a narrator strong enough to carry the reader through the book’s experimental structure, Break.up maintains its momentum to the end, even as the novel-in-essays, predictably, meanders — between past and present, obsession and distraction, love and pain. Joanna hits each city on her list, but it’s never the place that matters so much as what she experiences emotionally and mentally (and digitally) at each destination.

As Joanna finally pulls back into London, she and the reader are unsure of what awaits her. She’s returned a person distanced from the pain she felt at the book’s beginning, but the ubiquitous nature of digital contact has left her without closure. Imagining scenarios of how her disembarking could go — who might meet her at the station, what life will look like upon returning home — Walsh, defiant, declines to tie up the story, writing, “I refuse to finish this book. There is no end to love. Now, where were we?”

Melynda Fuller is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, LitHub, A Women’s Thing, and Poets & Writers, among others. She’s a graduate of the New School’s MFA writing program and is currently at work on a collection of essays.

The post Fighting for Emotional Liberty in Joanna Walsh’s “Break.up” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2KqbZqS

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