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thumbgarden · 3 years

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7 Tips on How to Grow Strong & Healthy Seedlings

Successful cultivation of healthy seedlings requires correct agricultural techniques. If the work is carried out qualitatively and meets the requirements of sowing technology and care, then seedling raising is not a difficult process, and the planting material is planted in an absolutely healthy and permanent place. However, there are cases when healthy, friendly seedlings begin to wilt, and after 1-3 days, the seedlings die completely. The cause may be non-infectious plant damage related to violation of agronomic requirements of cultivation conditions (insufficient light, low temperature, high humidity, over-fertilization, etc.), so that weak seedlings affected by soil infection in the form of fungal and bacterial diseases blackleg, rot and other forms. This article is devoted to how to avoid seedling diseases caused by cultivation errors and how to overcome blackleg and other infections.

SIMPLE RULES FOR RAISING HEALTHY SEEDLINGS Most of the agrotechnical measures are preventive, but if these simple measures are not followed, it won't be easy to raise healthy seedlings.

1. Sterilize seedling soil mixtures Disinfection of soil and soil mixture should be carried out as a mandatory agronomic measure when raising seedlings in containers, pots, boxes, and other vessels. If you do not have time to sterilize the soil mixture in advance, you can do so before planting using one of the recommended methods or your own original method. Pour the prepared soil into boiling water and dissolve manganese (1-2% solution) in the water. Stir and dry the spilled soil for 2-3 days. Repeat the procedure after 3 days with a solution of soda water. Dissolve 100 g of baking soda per 2.5 Gal (10 liters) of water. At each reception, the soil is dried and agitated. 2 weeks before sowing, treat the soil mixture with a biological agent according to the recommendations: Universal Organic Biofungicide. The soil can be treated with a Bordeaux mixture (1% solution) or copper sulfate (0.5% solution) before sowing. The concentration of the solution should be low so as not to burn the young roots during germination. After all disinfection procedures, dry the soil mixture, fill the container with warm water heated to 75°F (24°C), and sow the seeds in moist soil.

Be found. Seedlings grown in peat pots and plastic boxes were virtually free of blackleg disease.

2. Maintaining a neutral soil environment Acidic soil conditions are favorable for the development of soil fungal infections. Therefore, it is necessary to test the acidity of the soil (with litmus paper) before sowing. The best is considered to be pH = 6.0-6.5. Lime, dolomite powder, and wood ash are used to neutralize the soil. A neutral environment is very important for seedlings. As soil acidity increases, some nutrients become unavailable to the plants. Some gardeners treat the soil under seedlings with dry ash and add sand to maintain a neutral response of the soil while drying it out with excess moisture.

3. Maintaining the density of seedlings and sprouts In large greenhouses, it is necessary to sow seeds at the recommended rate and not to overestimate the density of plants. Seedlings that are too dense can be broken up by pulling out weaker plants: do not pull out, but pull out weaker shoots at the soil level. Thickened seedlings create their own moist microclimate and provoke the growth of disease-causing fungi. When cutting seedlings, leave a distance of 0.6-0.8inch (1.5-2 cm) between seedlings, which will ensure good ventilation and sufficient light for each seedling. When sowing seedlings into individual containers, it is best to sow 2 seeds per plant, and after germination, pull out the weak plants (you can also pull them up).

4. Observe the air and soil temperature regime As a rule, crops grown through seedlings are heat-loving. Therefore, the necessary levels of air and soil temperatures need to be strictly maintained. Seed germination begins with air temperatures within 60-64°F (16-18°C), but the most aggressive sprouts emerge when air temperatures rise to 77-86°F (25-30°C), depending on the culture. Immediately after mass germination, the air temperature must drop to 60-64°F (16-18°C) so that seedlings do not elongate. In this mode, seedlings rapidly form root systems. Therefore, the optimum regime for seedlings of most vegetable crops is 68-77°F (20-25°C) during the day and 60-64°F (16-18°C) at night. Soil temperature is no less important for seedlings. Too much cold, as well as too much heat, can lead to the suppression of seedlings. The optimum condition is 64-71°F (18-22°C). It is especially important to maintain this soil temperature regime during the harvesting process. A drop in temperature below 60 °F (16 °C) will result in deterioration of nutrient and water reception by the plant and reduced energy for seedling roots.

5. Irrigation regime and air humidity observations The soil under the seedlings should be kept moderately moist. Sprouts should be watered in the morning with water heated to 68°F (20°C) no more than 1-2 times per week, but better after the soil surface has dried. Water the seedlings along the edges of the container when growing at home or along the furrow in the greenhouse. Water the seedlings during the first 6-10 days so that the water does not get on the plants. Frequent and heavy watering can deteriorate the air regime of the soil and the activity of the root system. In addition, high humidity of soil and air promotes the rapid development of fungal diseases, and seedlings may die. Therefore, after watering, strongly moistened soil should be dried with dry sand (which is better) or watered through trays instead. You can use finely ground topsoil peat or dry humus to cover the watered soil. The optimum humidity level in the room should be kept at 70-75%. Ventilate the room to reduce humidity, but do not air it out.

6. Without extra light, you cannot get quality seedlings If the conditions at home allow it and you do not need many seedlings, then place the container on a windowsill where the daylight shines. Sometimes, however, additional lighting is needed regardless of the number of seedlings planted, especially when sowing seeds in January-February. For seedlings, a minimum of 12-14 hours of light per day is recommended, but in early spring and winter, plants receive up to 50% of the required light. At low light intensities, plants will shrivel, elongate and bend toward the light source. Therefore, lights are installed in family rooms and greenhouses to provide seedlings with the necessary level and intensity of light, but not with hot lights, but special - cold light. Usually, the heavy light nursery is carried out from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Many gardeners use daylight from plant lights or fluorescent lamps. Now, most greenhouse gardeners are switching to LED lights. They emit a red and blue spectrum that improves seedling development, give off little heat, and are very energy efficient.

7. Don't over-fertilize seedlings Buy ready-made soil mixes for home seedlings that do not require additional fertilizers, especially nitrogen. If the soil mixture is self-cooking, the plants will have to be fertilized. Although with a properly prepared soil mixture, you can do without fertilizer, especially since crops, seedlings have a very short germination period (27-35 days). Normally growing plants have green leaves and strong stems that do not need nutrients. Excessive nitrogen nutrition is very painful for young seedlings. It causes the elongation of plants and their accommodation. Stems become thin and light, internodes elongate, and leaves - a painful dark green shade. The general weakening of the plants helps to accelerate the infection of the crop. To avoid over-fertilization, it is not necessary to fertilize seedlings before harvesting. Within 7-15 days after picking, foliar application of "nitro phosphate and potassium-based high-efficiency complex fertilizer," ash infusion, and the addition of growth promoters and others. If the nitrogen content of seedlings is too high, you can spend a lot of water and immediately drain the trays of water and cover the soil with dry sand in layers not exceeding 0.8inch (2 cm). Small sawdust or grain bran, or finely chopped straw can be placed on the soil surface. Soil microorganisms will begin to break down the fiber and use the excess nitrogen in the soil for this purpose. To improve the nutrient balance during this period, you can spray the plants with Solgar (Chelated Iron).

MEASURES TO CONTROL SEEDLING DISEASES Agrochemical measures are the quickest and most reliable way to protect seedlings from diseases. Among these diseases, fungal and bacterial infections are the most pernicious ones. Particularly dangerous for young seedlings is blackleg. The degree of damage from this disease is very high - up to epizootic. Within 2-3 days, the plant roots are affected by the growing fungus, and the seedlings die. That is why it is so important to observe all agrotechnical requirements of seedlings.

1. What contributes to the development of black legs on seedlings? Despite all preparations for planting seedlings, some typical soil fungal spores, called sclerotia, remain alive and dormant. They accumulate on soil, plant residues, seeds, and wooden greenhouse props. The accumulated infection, under the right conditions, begins to multiply vigorously. The fungus proliferates in the soil. Plants are infected at the roots, and the infection manifests itself as wilting and lodging of seedlings. The spots of individual diseased plants merge into one continuous field within a short period of time. If seedlings are not treated immediately, they will die completely. In order to protect the plants adequately, agricultural techniques and agrochemical works should be carried out simultaneously.

2. Distinctive features of blackleg disease If all agrotechnical requirements are complied with, but seedlings are lodged in separate, rapidly increasing centers, this means that the seedlings or already young ones are already sick. In the case of black stem disease, the stem turns black at the roots, and a black cross can be clearly seen. The disease is caused by several types of soil fungi: some fungi affect the seedlings during the first days of their development. Diseased seedlings during this period turn black, harden, and rot in the areas where the fungus sprouts inside the plant (roots, root neck, lower part of the seedling). Other categories of fungi affect mature seedlings ready for planting. It manifests itself as thinning and darkening (to black) of the root neck and drying of the lesioned part. The plants do not die, but planted in the ground for a long time, they become sick and formless healthy products (especially crops with affected cabbage heads).

3. What should I do if my seedlings get the blackleg disease? The first days of germination are usually not watered to avoid provoking lodging. If the development of the disease cannot be prevented, the diseased plant should be removed and burned. The part of the soil where the diseased plant is located should also be removed, and the area should be treated with an ash soak. Usually, such a solution is prepared in advance so that no valuable time is lost. Dissolve 2 cups of wood ash in 0.25-0.5 Gal (1-2 liters) of boiling water. Influence for 6-7 hours. Filter and dilute in 2.3-2.5 Gal (9-10 liters) of warm water. Spray plants and soil with this solution, approximately 0.25 Gal/11 sq. ft. At home, you will need to arrange the tray with the seedlings in one place before spraying. After 5-7 days after 100% germination, treat with a fine dispersion spray with a solution of humic acid, which can significantly improve the plant's immunity while having a negative effect on pests. The solution is prepared at the rate of 1 capful per 2.5 Gal (10 l) of warm water. Other immune preparations can also be used. Today, experts offer a huge list of chemical and biochemical agents that help protect seedlings from various diseases, including blackleg disease. With independently cultured seedlings, the use of biological agents is much safer for the family's health. They effectively kill soil fungi and fungal diseases on plants and are absolutely harmless to humans and pets. Biological fungicides prepared according to the instructions can be systematically sprayed on plants and soil during the entire period of seedling cultivation, which will fully protect them not only from blackleg but also from rots, powdery mildew, phylloxera, pearl fungus, and other diseases. According to the recommendations for spraying and application to the soil - Trichodermin, etc.

An effective way to combat blackleg is loosening and starting the soil. Loosening of the crust will increase the access of oxygen to the roots and eliminate the process of decay. Within 2-3 days of mass germination, gently soak and water the sprouts using troughs and trenches. Seedlings should be kept dry during this period. Before picking the plants, as a precaution, treat the soil mixture with colloidal sulfur at a rate of 5 grams per 11 square feet. Kemira fertilizer can be added to the soil mixture in very small doses and mixed thoroughly. The available form and availability of micronutrients in the fertilizer will help the plants adapt to their new environment more quickly after harvesting. Some gardeners add preparations of "fungal biological preparations for the prevention and treatment of plants" to the soil mixture and mix it well before picking the seedlings to prevent blackleg disease. Plants treated with this soil treatment do not actually get the blackleg disease. Copper-containing preparations inhibit not only fungal but also viral infections. Therefore, it is recommended to apply them to protect mature seedlings from blackleg disease before planting in permanent locations. Before planting, the above-mentioned preparations are introduced into the well as a solution of phytosporin, Trichodermin. If not prepared, then each hole was watered with a 1% solution of manganese the day before transplanting, before planting the seedlings. Thus, observing all the requirements of agricultural engineering for seedling cultivation, it is possible to obtain healthy planting material. Would you please share tips and proven methods for healthy seedlings in the comments of this article?

#ThumbGarden #GardeningTips #Howtogrow #Strong #Healthy #Seedlings #Sprouting #Germination #Seeds #Bordeauxmixture #Tips #Organics #Evergreens #Garden #Diseases #Fertilize #Soils #Watering #Plantcare #Care #Inspired

Author: Ms.Geneva Link: https://www.thumbgarden.com/strong-healthy-seedlings/ Source: ThumbGarden The copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization, and for non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, May 7, 2021

60 years since 1st American in space: Tourists lining up (AP) Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight—a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.

The U.S. birthrate is falling; other countries have faced the same problem (Washington Post) With the U.S. birthrate declining for the sixth year in a row and undergoing its largest drop in nearly 50 years, according to provisional data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is facing a dilemma with which many wealthy nations in Europe and Asia have long grappled. Instead of trying to ramp up immigration, some governments have tried subsidizing fertility treatments, offering free day care and generous parental leave, and paying thousands of dollars in cash grants to parents. But there’s little evidence that these policies have been effective on a large scale. South Korea, for instance, spent roughly $120 billion between 2005 and 2018 to incentivize having children, but its birthrate continued to fall. Singapore began offering new child-care subsidies, more-generous maternity leave policies and grants for new parents that today amount to $7,330 per baby. But those interventions didn’t reverse the trend: Singapore currently has the world’s third-lowest fertility rate. And Japan, Russia, Estonia and other nations have similar problems.

Protest road blockades halt Colombian coffee exports, federation says (Reuters) Road blockades connected to anti-government protests in Colombia, which marked their eighth day on Wednesday, have halted shipments of top agricultural export coffee, the head of the grower’s federation said. The protests, originally called in opposition to a now-canceled tax reform plan, are now demanding the government take action to tackle poverty, police violence and inequalities in the health and education systems. Twenty-four people, mostly demonstrators, have died. “We are stopped completely, exports are stopped, there is no movement of coffee to ports nor internally,” federation head Roberto Velez said in a phone interview.

20 dead in Rio de Janeiro shootout (Reuters) At least 20 people, including a police officer, died on Thursday in a shootout during a police operation against drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarezinho shanty town, O Globo newspaper reported on its website. Two passengers on a metro train were also wounded in the shooting in the northern Rio neighborhood, the newspaper said.

Gunboats and blockade threats as U.K., France clash over fishing (NBC News) The U.K. and France were engaged in a naval standoff on Thursday as a long-simmering dispute over post-Brexit fishing rights escalated in the English Channel. France deployed two maritime patrol boats to the waters off the British Channel island of Jersey, its navy said, after the British Navy dispatched two of its own vessels to the area late Wednesday. The dueling moves came as a flotilla of French fishing trawlers sailed to the Jersey port of St. Helier to protest over fishing rights. The French government has suggested it could cut power supplies to the island if its fishermen are not granted full access to U.K. fishing waters under post-Brexit trading terms. Clément Beaune, the French secretary of state for European affairs, told AFP on Thursday that Paris will “not be intimidated” by the British. On the other side of the Channel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged his "unwavering support" for the island after he spoke with Jersey officials about the prospect of a French blockade. Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands with a population of 108,000, is geographically closer to France than Britain. It sits just 14 miles off the French coast and receives most of its electricity from France via undersea cables.

Ukraine wants aid, NATO support from Blinken’s visit (AP) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv Thursday, telling him that he was there to “reaffirm strongly” Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.” Blinken also assured Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba that the U.S. was committed “to work with you and continue to strengthen your own democracy, building institutions, advancing your reforms against corruption.” By visiting so early in his tenure, before any trip to Russia, Blinken is signaling that Ukraine is a high foreign-policy priority for President Joe Biden’s administration. But what he can, or will, deliver in the meeting later with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is unclear.

India hits another grim record as it scrambles for oxygen supply (AP) Infections in India hit another grim daily record on Thursday as demand for medical oxygen jumped seven-fold and the government denied reports that it was slow in distributing life-saving supplies from abroad. The number of new confirmed cases breached 400,000 for the second time since the devastating surge began last month. The 412,262 cases pushed India’s tally to more than 21 million. The Health Ministry also reported 3,980 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 230,168. Experts believe both figures are an undercount. Eleven COVID-19 patients died as the pressure in the oxygen line dropped suddenly in a government medical college hospital in Chengalpet town in southern India on Wednesday night, possibly because of a faulty valve, The Times of India newspaper reported. Hospital authorities said they had repaired the pipeline last week, but the consumption of oxygen doubled since then, the daily said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid gains chance to form government, oust Netanyahu (Washington Post) Yair Lapid, a former news anchor and leader of Israel’s centrist opposition, was picked to negotiate a new governing coalition Wednesday, opening the possibility of Israel getting its first government not led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in more than a decade. President Reuven Rivlin tapped Lapid to make the next attempt to form a government one day after Netanyahu failed to assemble a parliamentary majority after 28 days of effort. Under Israel’s system, Lapid also has four weeks to craft a power-sharing plan. If he falls short, the president could open to the process to any member of the Knesset or call for Israel’s fifth election since the spring of 2019. Lapid will face a stiff challenge in trying to find common ground among the range of anti-Netanyahu parties elected in March. As a bloc, they would control enough seats to secure a majority. But ideologically, they range from the far right to the far left of Israel’s political spectrum. They also include Israeli Arab parties that traditionally play no part in supporting governing coalitions but that may be needed this time.

Instagram fuels rise in black-market sales of maids into Persian Gulf servitude (Washington Post) The advent of Instagram in recent years has helped create an international black market for migrant workers, in particular women recruited in Africa and Asia who are sold into servitude as maids in Persian Gulf countries. Unlicensed agents have exploited the social media platform to place these women into jobs that often lack documentation or assurances of proper pay and working conditions. Several women who were marketed via Instagram described being treated essentially as captives and forced to work grueling hours for far less money than they had been promised. “They advertise us on social media, then the employer picks. Then we are delivered to their house. We are not told anything about the employers. You’re just told to take your stuff, and a driver takes you there,” said Vivian, 24, from Kenya. Domestic servants sold on the platform described encountering threats, exploitation and abuse. The agencies which marketed them, meanwhile, made thousands of dollars. In response to a request for comment last month, an Instagram spokesperson asked for the list of accounts identified by The Post so company officials could investigate. Instagram has since deleted these accounts.

Nonuplets: Woman From Mali Gives Birth To 9 Babies (NPR) A Malian woman has given birth to nine babies, in what could become a world record. Halima Cissé had been expecting to have seven newborns: ultrasound sessions had failed to spot two of her babies. "The newborns (five girls and four boys) and the mother are all doing well," Mali's health minister, Dr. Fanta Siby, said in an announcement about the births. Professor Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the private Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Cissé gave birth, said the babies were born at 30 weeks. The newborns weighed between 500 grams and 1 kilogram (about 1.1 to 2.2 pounds), he told journalists. The clinic has deployed a team of around 30 staff members to aid the mother's delivery and care for her nine children.

Nigeria reels from nationwide wave of deadly violence (The Guardian) Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari has come under mounting pressure from critics and allies alike as the country reels from multiple security crises that have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks. An alarming wave of violence has left millions in Africa’s most populous country in uproar at the collapse in security. Attacks by jihadist groups in the north-east have been compounded by a sharp rise in abductions targeting civilians in schools and at interstate links across Nigeria. Mass killings by bandit groups in rural towns, a reported rise in armed robberies in urban areas and increasingly daring attacks on security forces by pro-Biafran militants in the south-east have also all risen. In April alone, almost 600 civilians were killed across the country and at least 406 abducted by armed groups, according to analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations. The violence has left much of the country on edge and Buhari facing the fiercest criticism since he took office.

#headlines #news

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a-woman-apart · 4 years

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Separating the Boys from the Men

Yes, that title is click bait, and if you keep reading, you’ve been warned. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest, and it’s going to involve defending masculinity, femininity, and our right to BEHAVE LIKE CHILDREN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES because in many ways, we already do.

Let’s get straight to the point. As Millennials, regardless of our age, financial status, or level of “success” (air quotes 100% intentional) we have been accused of being lazy, entitled, and way too enthusiastic about avocado toast. At the same time, we have been described as having enough power to decimate the napkin industry, the diamond industry, and the concept of traditional marriage. We have been accused of a collective “Peter Pan” syndrome, because we “refuse” to cut off papa’s apron strings and get off the proverbial mama’s teats.

Wonderful to know.

Let’s unpack the “lazy” bit. Supposedly, this is tied to the fact that we have access to higher education, we [often, not always] have parents who financially support or house us well into adulthood.

So now, my question is, Gen X (the entitled ones, ironically) and Salty Boomers, YOU DIDN’T?

What do you call that “inheritance” you received? What do you call that education your parents paid for that was less than 1/3 what we have to pay? For Boomers, how do you explain the lavish weddings, cheap [and apparently nuke proof] home appliances, and “nights out on the town” that you were able to afford by working at whatever passed for a McDonald’s back in the day? Working on a farm, at a grocery store, or in retail used to ACTUALLY provide a livable wage; for us, those are a “side hustle” and we still have to get a “big boy job” that usually requires an education that can put us over $100,000 in debt by age 30.

Hate to say it, but if you hadn’t made most of your income “during the War” or in the absolute economic boom that followed it, you wouldn’t survive 24 hours in our shoes before having an emotional collapse.

Despite the disastrous living conditions of the U.S. in the 21st Century, not much has changed in how men define their level of “manliness.”

Financial gains (stocks, bonds, portfolio, bank account)

Bro “gains” (a.k.a. “gym gains”, how “Gaston” they are, including whether they want to go for the Adonis, Apollo, or Brawny boi look, or just how far they can throw something or how “boyish” they look if strength isn’t an option and they suffer from femme-levels of body dysmorphia)

Body count (since we’re in a time of peace and not literally war, this is LITERALLY a modern term describing how many people you’ve slept with, and I have never heard an adult man, regardless of sexual orientation, who isn’t a little concerned about putting those notches in the bed post, and if not that, VERY concerned about his bedroom performance: it’s quality vs. quantity)

Kill death Ratio (I know this is a video game term now, but did you know that before video games, men in England used to regularly get on horseback, get a bunch of hounds together, and chase down tiny foxes and rabbits? FOR FUN?!?!? Did you know, that before modern sports ((including Esports)), men used to just fight to the death, regularly, even if an official war wasn’t going on? It was known as “dueling”, and in less socially developed societies, men still behave like this. So the next time you complain about “male rage” and how heartless it is to make live chickens fight, note that even though we’ve quelled male anger and hostility on some level, you will NEVER be able to take away man’s urge to destroy. Boys and men will always like knocking things over, building things from the rubble, and ruling shit. It’s what they do-- and we women can and do, too, but we have a LOT more risk-aversion and self-preservation, which is a blessing and a curse for our species-- but we just need to make sure humanity as a whole stays...chill)

So what, say ye, has changed about how WOMEN define themselves now vs. in the past. I would say that very little has changed, but the level of internalized misogyny, insecurity, and good-old fashioned denial has SKYROCKETED.

Let’s look at some terms of how the majority of women value themselves.

Financial Security (few women will admit to “wanting to be rich”, because that sounds kind of “Trump”, but plenty will talk about having minimum income requirements for their partner(s), wanting to retire at a young age so they can “travel the world”, wanting to eliminate their debts, etc. It’s different language but essentially it translates to: I want to work so hard or marry into so much wealth that I never want to worry about money after age 35. #Hustle)

Looks (it doesn’t matter if you want a Kardashian butt, you’re in the body positivity movement, or you just want to “dress like a bawse” women are just as obsessed with clothes, image, and body weight/shape/size as they ever were, it is just that now that we’ve “slain the patriarchy” we have more fashion options than ever before, because “boy clothes” are just as “in” as femme ones)

Ability to attract a partner (some women, like me, “chase”, but thanks to biology, most women, regardless of sexual orientation, seem to enjoy being pursued more than being Artemis-style hunters. This is evidenced by the fact that when the feminist owner of Bumble changed the rules of the dating website to where women had to start conversations with men rather than vice versa ((a move that had ostensibly zero effect on lesbian matching)) 72% of women that she later surveyed stated that they liked it better when men were approaching them rather than the other way around. I am sure Bumble’s female CEO was shook ((as was I)), especially because she made the change to empower women, and apparently 72% of women didn’t want the power because it meant they now had the power to face rejection, and it made them uncomfortable. Big yikes. So much for #EndPatriarchy and #ChivalryisDead ?)

Playing house (this is probably going to get me some unfollows, but I’ll take my chances. Women, regardless of sexual orientation, often seem to be REALLY into having babies or just “playing house.” There’s also men like this, too, “Family men” as they’re aptly called, men in love with fatherhood ((or just being called “daddy”, and that will never not be weird)). So many women who never want to pop out a baby describe being taken by an OVERWHELMING urge to fuck during their “fertile window” ((or is that just me?)) and seeing every baby alive as the cutest human being ever once we pass the tender age of 25. The biological clock is REAL, and I learned the hard way that being bisexual and having immense fear of pregnancy and childbirth didn’t spare me from the awful truth of my biology.

I really don’t want to keep making references to modern video games, but they seem to serve the dual purpose of being deeply satisfying and helping us to quell “problematic” urges, including that one to dominate and destroy the world. For a lot of women gamers, though, our choices ((on a broad scale, every #girlgamer is different)) deviate from men’s in some interesting ways.

#1: We still love The Sims Franchise way more than guys do

Not only do we love it, but while a lot of men (again, #notallmen) tend to build elaborate neighborhoods to extensively mod and destroy them in terrifying ways, I still see women gamers taking obscene amounts of time to design homes, raise happy little families, and cause TERRIFYING blood feuds by having Sims marry Sims from rival families ((I guess we’re more Shakespeare than we thought, eh ladies?))

#2: We make up most of mobile gaming

Most male gamers think mobile games “aren’t real” and I tend to agree, but a mobile game is invaluable for when I, a woman, have time to kill between the 3 jobs I hypothetically have and I and don’t want to whip out something like a Nintendo 2DS that is both unwieldly and attracts the eyes of every impoverished, thieving human being in a .5 mile radius. #RiskAversion. These games are often low-quality, mindless, and insanely easy, but that is WHY WE LIKE THEM. Our entire life is a job. #Hustle

#3 We also love farming sims and RPGs

While we-- and most male Millennials-- beg god to not have to birth calves, milk cows, or labor in the tomato fields under the hot sun, most of us have no objection to having our virtual avatars perform the same back-breaking tasks to the tune of cheerful chiptune music. Also, even though men definitely enjoy them, too, I have never met a woman gamer who didn’t enjoy a nice RPG; why do you think we’re such avid readers of fantasy/romance YA?

We want to be transported to a different world, and if you won’t take us there, we’re happy to go there virtually ((because we probably can’t afford travel; we’re still millennials)).

Ability to murder people who threaten our young or our partner(s) (Okay this one is a bit more complicated, but I’m just going to tell you a bit about female animals. DON’T MESS WITH THEIR BABIES IF YOU WANT TO LIVE. Human females, are, in that regard, just as savage, if not more so, than our male counterparts.

I’ve never heard of any woman ((outside of prison, maybe)) who killed another woman for “looking at her weird” or saying “your mama” too many times. I’ve heard plenty of women threaten literal murder because another woman ((or man, we’re #progressive)) came too close to her romantic/sexual partner, or another human being threatened harm on our kids or our “squad.”

I don’t know where the meme truly originated from, but “Don’t talk to me or my son ever again” is SUCH a Mom thing to say. So much misandry is wrapped up in the idea that men are predators, and that is true, but not in the excessively sexually deviant ways you think ((that’s only sometimes true)). They just like hunting things, including people, but if you give them a toy to play with ((I MEAN ACTUAL TOY OMG)) they seem alright. Let them go play with their cars, Xbox, [insert whatever] or something. They’re men, okay, they’re easily distracted/impressed/occupied.

Women, on the other hand, have seemed to be having an EXTREME amount of trouble curbing that baby-making urge, or the Excessive Nurturing Urge, that one that makes you ask your grown husband if he’s remembered to pack lunch for work or if he remembered to pack money for his playdate with his bros, because he’s gonna need money at Six Flags and you aren’t going to bring it to him because he should’ve remembered, you reminded him 30093390 times.

THAT’S NOT HIS FAULT. HE HAS MANAGED BY SOME MIRACLE TO STAY ALIVE FOR 33 YEARS. THAT’S YOU, SWEETIE. STOP BEING SUCH A MOM. GO BE A NURSE, DOCTOR, OR SOCIAL WORKER OR SOMETHING OMG.

In summary...

What separates the “men from the boys” or the “women from the girls” isn’t the era that we were born in to, our economic status, or whether we’ve been able to “conquer” our biology. That’s definitely not possible yet, chiefly because transhumanism involves a lengthy, ethics-guided process, and even if we all turn into cyborgs, the goal is to become BETTER humans, not LESS humane. Societal advancements have done more in terms of making us healthier, less destructive citizens of planet earth than raw technology ever can and ever will. Rapid technological advancement, when not combined with respect for morality, ethical standards of living for humans and all other life forms, almost always leads to human slavery, widespread abuse of animals, sex trafficking, and environmental destruction, because the “rules of supply and demand”, when not governed by strong international trade laws, dictate that consumers should be supplied with whatever they demand, because the suppliers can profit, and their right to profit should be defended at any cost.

So, in summary, I believe that “adulting” involves giving up on entitlement. What separates a truly childish human being-- regardless of their actual age-- from someone who is, in essence, “adulting” is experience, and how much those experiences serve to broaden that person’s perspective. It is an extremely childish, self-centered view, to think that you “deserve” anything for being “a good person” or, in the case of many a “woman child” or “man child” in media and in real life, just being “not so bad.”

Grown-ups are able and willing to do something that is known as “delaying gratification” which is the simple ability to delay a temporary pleasure for a long-term gain. Grown-ups are also able to perform true “cost-benefit analyses” to determine if a course of action, business deal, or even relationship is worth their time and effort. Finally, grown-ups are able and willing and able to make an informed choice and stick to it; in essence, we don’t try to “have our cake and eat it too” we understand that once we’ve eaten that cake, the cake is gone, but we also realize that if we are willing to work hard and make sacrifices, we can earn the ingredients to make ourselves another cake to eat, even if we might need a lot of help from other adults in getting those ingredients (we call this teamwork and cooperation).

Children, on the other hand (in literal and metaphorical terms), are very impatient. They get angry when things don’t go their way, and instead of taking the steps needed to improve their situation, they storm off and return home. It doesn’t matter if their home is with their parents, with their 3 roommates, or with their husband or wife, these people throw tantrums, refuse to communicate/cooperate, and stew in their displeasure until someone feels sorry for them and fixes their problem for them. They lack the ability to work through daily life problems and refuse to take any responsibility for how their actions or inaction contributed to their dilemma.

There is one difference with an actual human child or teen, though, is that they have an excuse. Their brains are still developing, and they haven’t had the chance to live through these situations yet; these are new challenges to them. Even if they do have a “bad attitude”, with help from peers and patients, principled adult mentors and teachers, these cantankerous kids can grow into well-adjusted, able adults. The high levels of neuroplasticity in their brains actually make it so that it is easier for them to accept large amounts of sensory data and to learn from processing and practicing using it.

An “adult child” is someone who, more often than not, has been coddled instead of challenged. These people have often faced no significant hardships in life. There is a reason why, even after we have recognized the immense downsides of authoritarian parenting and have demonstrated psychological harms of corporal punishment for kids, we still call “bad kids” and “irresponsible adults” spoiled.

Authoritarianism produces rigid, scared people who often struggle with critical thinking and self-esteem or end up being authoritarian parents themselves, but that last one is actually one of the less likely options. Children of authoritarian parents often develop Borderline Personality Disorder or become defiant against authority (shocker). Overly permissive or overly neglectful parenting, though, are parental styles most associated with producing narcissists, who often become authoritarian parents, because when their kids challenge them, they completely lack the patience or emotional capacity to deal with it and resort to “because I said so”, stonewalling and/or physical abuse as forms of “character-building.”

The reason why overly permissive parents spoil their kids is because kids actually do need discipline and guidance, and so these kinds of parents produce kids who are outwardly capable and confident but completely lack any of the life skills to justify it, and when they ask their parents for advice they are just met with a bunch of hippie mumbo jumbo or told to just avoid the conflict rather than resolve it. These kids grow into adults who are still sad little kids inside, because they never grew up, but now they’re sad little kids who are articulate and well-spoken and now can-- and often have no choice-- but to con their way through adult life because they’ve maxed out Charisma and they have almost no points in Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Dexterity.

The only parenting style worse than Authoritarian and Neglectful/Permissive is Mixed, in which a child grows up in a COMPLETELY unpredictable environment where the rules of the game change from day to day, and parents either give their children no attention at all, or they practically lock them up and throw away the key. Being raised like this is associated with the worse outcomes for the child throughout life.

So, why am I now talking about parenting styles? Because, for all that we love to trash Boomers and large swaths of Gen X on this page, we can’t forget where they came from, so we cannot allow them to forget WHO THEY MADE. It isn’t an accident that even though we live in the times of incredible economic hardship, WE are the generation (and Gen Z, to some extent) that got hooked on reality TV, video games, and social media in incredibly unhealthy ways. A lot of us 30+ millennials are growing out of it, and a lot of us have realized that it is an invaluable (and damn near unavoidable) way of marketing our products and talents. We’re often self-employed because that’s our only option in most cases.

The issue with Gen Z (who, while we called “Zoomers” now just all themselves “Doomers” and I think we should be a bit concerned about that) is that unlike us, they have no memory of “Before the Internet.” We remember dial up, we remember before that when you played outside untl the sun went down. They don’t have the privilege of being linked to that history.

Now, we have to be the Bigger Person. It’s our time to be Grown-Ups. Gen Z feels really fucking lost right now, and hearing us whine about our parents probably makes them pretty pissed off, when some of us older millennials are the parents, aunts/uncles, and older siblings to Gen Z kids. Even if we can’t be mentors, we have to lead by example, because we have a responsibility to these kids. A lot of them aren’t stupid, they see exactly what’s happening and they feel incredibly hopeless about it. Greta Thunberg is still 16 years old. She shouldn’t be out there doing that; I mean seriously, climate change is accelerating, but it isn’t even as bad as Al Gore said, it’s still reversible, but the fact that SHE FELT SHE HAD TO makes us shitty people. ALL OF US.

So you know, we all need to stop being hypocrites. We need to stop being entitled. We need to stop thinking this is about us. It isn’t. Not even close. We’re not important, even if our videos go viral or if we’re swimming in cash next to hot models by a huge swimming pool. America’s fucked up. I hate to sound Republican, but it’s because of our values. We suck at valuing what’s important, and if we don’t change that soon, it’s really going to suck to live in America.

It already does.

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destieltropecollection · 5 years

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Destiel Trope Collection 2019 Day 1: Alpha/Beta/Omega AU

Failing Is What You're Good At | @camerahead12 Rating: Explicit Word Count: 14498 Main Tags and Warnings: Heavy angst, physical/emotional absue, minor character death mentioned, true mates, scent bonding, Summary: All Dean ever wished for was to see the ocean. It was an ever present, constant hum inside that beckoned him to the blue waters. He knew, deep down, he would probably never make it to the other side of the states. Life hasn't handed him a lot of passes, but still he was doing alright. Living, surviving, and beating the odds was what he was good at. Everything thrown at him made him that much stronger. And with that strength he felt sure he could take on anything. Maybe one day his reward would be to see that ocean. Maybe one day he'd follow the hum deep inside and find home.

Oddly Shaped Empty | @jemariel Rating: Explicit Word Count: 65726 Main Tags and Warnings: Dean/Cas, past Dean/others, beta!Dean, alpha!Cas, roommates, mating cycles/in heat, scent marking, mating bites, gender dysphoria, domestic fluff Summary: Dean grew up thinking -- knowing -- he'd be an alpha. Until he failed to present. As a beta, he has no mating cycle, no noticeable pheromones, none of the physical markers that are so important in a world of alphas and omegas. He's out of place. How is he supposed to navigate his relationships and find love when he doesn't fit into the neatly-defined boxes he's used to? By the time he meets his new roommate, Castiel, he's more or less given up on finding a mate. He wears his secondary gender like a chip on his shoulder. But you never know what the future holds, who will come into your life, and how they might change it forever..... Queer themes, finding identity, reconciling the past, and a whole lot of smut.

The Samhain Trials | @jemariel Rating: Explicit Word Count: 8068 Main Tags and Warnings: a/b/o, omega!Dean, alpha!Cas, historical/fantasy setting, soulmates, soulmate-identifying marks, Summary: On Samhain night, the veil is thin, not only between the spirit world and our own, but between humankind and their inner natures. Every year, the hunt is run. Alphas and omegas brave the woods in search of glory and passion. Every year, Dean Winchester comes out alone. The soulbrand on his neck means that he has a True Mate, and what should be a blessing has only been a curse. He hopes, and he waits, and this year his soulbrand has been itching as if it were newly risen. It's nearly sundown.

"What The Fuck Is A/B/O?!" | @spinnerjen�� Rating: Explicit Word Count: 25264 Main Tags and Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Summary: A witch unleashes the A/B/O virus... and it changes everything.

This Alpha's Army | @crowley-loves-usuk Rating: Explicit Word Count: 34800 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamic, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Attempted Sexual Assault, Alpha!Dean, Omega!Cas, Mating, Omega Rights, Strong Omega, Alternate Universe: Military, mpreg, smut, fluff Summary: Lieutenant Castiel Novak is an Omega who has always dreamed of following in his Alpha brother's footsteps by joining a combat unit in the military. Never mind that Omegas aren't allowed into combat. He has worked his entire career for this moment, but it all might come crashing down when he meets his new commanding officer, Captain Dean Winchester. When Cas is sent in for Alpha training as the first Omega in history to do so, he finds himself falling hard for his trainer.

Heaven Scent | @crowley-loves-usuk Rating: Explicit Word Count: 23580 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha!Cas, Omega!Dean, brief Dean/Arthur Ketch (not explicit), Mating Cycles/In Heat, Accidental Mating, Scent Marking, Nesting, John Winchester being an asshole, minor Ketch/Davis (not explicit), minor Sabriel (explicit) Summary: When Dean Winchester presents as an Omega, his parents arrange a marriage to Arthur Ketch. Dean hates Arthur and spends his days dreaming of marrying a mate that he loves. When his mother finally forces him to begin planning his upcoming wedding, Dean never expects that the wedding planner would be the Alpha of his dreams...

The Worst Blind Date | @andromachewritesstuff Rating: Explicit Word Count: 6449 Main Tags and Warnings: From AO3: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha Castiel/Omega Dean Winchester, Top Castiel, Bottom Dean Winchester, Knotting, Referenced Mpreg, Explicit Sexual Content, Past Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester Summary: “Dean, please, c’mon!” “I said no, Charlie.” “Please? For me?” “So, what, you’re setting me up with this guy for you? Gee, thanks, Charles. That definitely makes me want to say yes.” When Charlie tries to set up Dean with Castiel Novak, Charlie won't take "no" for an answer. So, Dean decides to make the whole thing the worst blind date in history. Except, maybe this wasn't the worst idea after all? And maybe Dean realizes a little too late?

More than Enough | @andromachewritesstuff Rating: Explicit Word Count: 7463 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha Castiel/Omega Dean Winchester, Infertility, Fertility Issues, fertility treatments, Mpreg, Past Miscarriages, discussion of miscarriage, Pregnancy, Medical Examinations and Procedures, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, non-graphic childbirth, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Bottom Dean Winchester, Top Castiel, Explicit sexual content, Trying To Conceive, Dean Winchester Has Self-Esteem Issues, Depression, Established Relationship Summary: Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak were happily-mated, successful thirty-somethings. They owned their own home, had good jobs, and a few years ago decided they were ready to start a family. Three years later, they're still struggling. They're also still in love, and still hopeful that this time, maybe, it will work.

Christmas Treats and Angel Heats | @malmuses Rating: Explicit Word Count: 19966 Main Tags and Warnings: A/B/O, Canon Divergent, Alpha Dean, Omega Cas, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Wing Kink Summary: Angels don't have a sex, or gender, nevermind a secondary gender—right? At least, that's what the Winchesters have been led to believe. It's Christmas, and Dean misses his angel friend. He's been AWOL for days, and the Winchesters are worried. When Cas returns to the bunker on Christmas Eve, very clearly in heat, a few of their assumptions are going to have to change. Oh, and Dean is going to have to hide his feelings for Cas in the face of the news that the angel is an unmated omega, who desperately needs their help.

Fresh Horses | @navajolovesdestiel Rating: Explicit Word Count: 11606 Main Tags and Warnings: Alternate Universe, Omega Dean, Alpha Castiel/Omega Dean Winchester, Mpreg, Miscarriage, Knotting, Light BDSM, Daddy Kink Summary: When Dean gets caught sneaking into the Angels' Den, Castiel Novak's BDSM club, Cas takes a special interest in the kid.

demo day | @reallyelegantsharkfish Rating: Explicit Word Count: 15904 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, trans alpha, Alpha Castiel, Omega Dean, Reality TV ,Contractor Dean Winchester, Designer Castiel, Mutual Pining, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mating Bites, Fixer Upper AU, Nesting, Scent Marking, Mates , HGTV Summary: “Guess what today is?” Dean says, grinning into the camera. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Cas rolling his eyes with a smile touching his mouth. Dean unbuttons the top few buttons of his plaid shirt and pulls it apart, Superman style, to show the words DEMO DAY printed across the t-shirt on his chest. “Demo day!”

Forever's As Far As I'll Go | @roobear68 Rating: Explicit Word Count: 9789 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, true mates, newly human Castiel, Castiel in the bunker, knotting, mating bites Summary: When Cas arrives at the bunker after being thrown from heaven, Charlie was the only one there. The boys are on a vamp-nest hunt in Vermont...28 hours away. Cas had just presented as an omega. And he wants Dean.

Delicious, Delirious | @suckerfordeansfreckles Rating: Explicit Word Count: 1923 Main Tags and Warnings: alpha/beta/omega dynamics, alpha!Cas/omega!Dean, true mates, pure smut Summary: "God, I’ve been waiting for this for weeks,“ Dean murmurs when he breaks away from Cas’ lips to take some deep breaths. "Yeah, me too,“ Cas says against his neck as he peppers kisses to it. "You are so beautiful, you smell so goddamn perfect. Why did I ever think waiting to do this would be a good idea?“ "Shit, I don‘t know.“ (Or: Dean met his true mate Cas three weeks ago, they decided to wait before jumping into bed, they are crazy desperate for each other, and finally give in to the tension)

No Righteous Path | @jupiterjames Rating: Explicit Word Count: 111944 Main Tags and Warnings: alpha Dean, Omega Castiel, Professor!Castiel, Handyman!Dean, late life falling in love, low-angst AU, religious! Castiel, Mating, Bonding, alcohol use Summary: On his 40th birthday, Dean Winchester suddenly begins to worry that he may have lost his chance for a real mate. He's been so focused on his business as a 24-hour roofing and repairman, that he's never taken the time to date properly, or even make any lasting friendships outside of his family. Beginning in their late 30's, alphas and omegas start to lose their mating and bonding hormones, making it more difficult - and often impossible - to mate or bond with anyone past a certain age. But as a modern Alpha, Dean would be content with a companion, at least. Blood bonds aren't the be-all, end-all. However, after a late night emergency roofing repair call from Castiel Novak, Omega, Dean starts to hope. Yearn. The only hangup is that Castiel admits to being as old-fashioned as the books he teaches. Nervous to go against his religious upbringing by being with someone who he can't bond properly, as alphas and omegas are intended to do. But he can't deny his attraction to Dean, and despite his sensibilities, he thinks that, just maybe, he can change for the man he's falling in love with.

Just Here For A Good Night | @saltnhalo Rating: Explicit Word Count: 6646 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha Cas, Omega Cas, frat boy Cas, PWP, Dom/sub undertones Summary: In which Dean is looking to get laid at an Alpha Phi Alpha party, and sets his sights on Castiel, who's just trying to make sure that nothing bad happens on his watch.

What The Rain Brings | @saltnhalo

Rating: Explicit Word Count: 6043 Main Tags and Warnings: Omega Dean, alpha Cas, college AU, true mates Summary: In which Castiel's new roommate—supposed to be an alpha, under the guidelines of the college dorms—turns out to be a) late, and b) a beautiful, sarcastic, drenched omega.

What Are the Odds? (WIP) | @imbiowaresbitch

Rating: Explicit Word Count: 68616 Main Tags and Warnings:mpreg, homophobia, violence, referenced rape, underage pregnancy (not Cas or Dean) Summary: Alpha Cas picks up Omega Dean at a bar, and they quickly realize they're True Mates. Life quickly gets interesting.

In This Life | @lemonsorbae Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 1250 Main Tags and Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha Castiel/Omega Dean Winchester, Mpreg, Fluff and Angst Summary: Dean and Cas are anxious about becoming new parents.

The Scent | @angelneedshunter Rating: Teen & Up Word Count: 1120 Main Tags and Warnings: Kidnapping Summary: Dean has been searching for Cas for months when he finally catches a scent.

Omega sense and Alpha sensibility | @msarahv Rating: Mature Word Count: 27483 Main Tags and Warnings: Alternate Universe - Regency, Omega Castiel, Alpha Dean Winchester, Alpha Sam Winchester, Omega Gabriel, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: After his father's passing, Castiel is destitute. He meets Dean Winchester, a delicate, sensitive Alpha and falls for him. But what can he do when he has no money or beauty to offer?

For Every Alpha an Omega | @thursdays-fallen-angel Rating: Explicit Word Count: 123674 Main Tags and Warnings: Canon Divergent, alpha!Cas, omega!Dean Summary: Things never go according to plan. Not when Castiel visits a strip club and finds his other half in Dean, who is definitely not the omega mate an alpha would typically expect to have. Not when Dean launches a search for his missing father, which starts with a paradigm-shifting trip to Palo Alto. And most definitely not when they face off against a demon army with a leader they are powerless against.

In My Heart's Territory | @cas-lost-grace Rating: Explicit Word Count: 14476 Main Tags and Warnings: Pack Dynamics, Mating Cycles/In Heat, True Mates, Enemies to Lovers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Porn with Feelings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Alpha Castiel/Omega Dean, Mating Bond, Mating Bites, Top Castiel, Bottom Dean Summary: There’s a packless individual in Cas’ territory. When he sets out to find them he expects a fight. What he doesn't expect is to find an omega who will change his life.

#destiel #destielfanficnet #destielfanfic #destiel trope collection #tropes #writersofdestiel #deancasfanficnet #Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics #2019

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stevie-baby · 5 years

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@satans-helper thank you for tagging me love! This week has been rough, I have had a shit day looking for jobs, but now I’ve got a beer and I’m answering this because self care or whatever. Leggo!

1. What is your middle name?

Marlene

2. How old are you?

3. When is your birthday?

August 20th

4. What is your zodiac sign?

Leo sun; Capricorn rising; Taurus moon

5. What is your favourite colour?

Orange

6. What’s your lucky number?

8 or 20

7. Do you have any pets?

not any more :( but growing up I had a corgi mix named Lulu. She was dope. Fun lil origin story about her: my mom missed the majority of my first birthday becuase she had to stay late at work becuase her coworker’s dog was having puppies and had to leave early. My mom was like “Angela if I’m gonna be late for my kids birthday celebration can I at least get first pick of the puppies?” So when the puppies were finally able to go to different homes, my mom sat little one year old me in their pen to let me pick the one we’d take home. Something drew me to the runt of the litter (maybe it was the fact that she didn’t straight up attack me like her brothers and sisters) and she lived a happy 16 and a half years with us.

8. Where are you from?

Southern California

9. How tall are you?

5'6

10. What shoe size are you?

Womens 11 but I usually wear a mens 9.5 because I have wide feet

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Like 7 pairs (none of which are cowboy boots or gogo boots which is a travesty)

12. What was your last dream about?

I don’t remember but I know it wasn’t anything malicious, so that’s good.

13. What talents do you have?

I play instruments and I sing. I also do art occasionally.

14. Are you psychic in any way?

I wouldn’t say psychic but I am pretty in tune with the universe. But I do also have dreams that have to do with fertility that are like super heavy with symbolism and are oddly prophetic. I call them my egg dreams. If y’all wanna hear about them I make a post about them or something.

15. Favourite song?

At the moment it is When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin

16. Favourite movie?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

Honestly? Honestly??? Sam Kiszka. I’ve always been into bassists and lanky boys with long dark hair, so he’s perfect. Also, I love his personality. He’s just magnetic and Joy is a lucky gal :)

18. Do you want children?

Not really. I’m 19, barely an adult, so kids aren’t in my plans right now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever be in my plans. But if I do decide I want children one day, I would want to have more than one because I am an only child and I wouldn’t want that for my kid. It gets lonely and I will never know or understand the bond that siblings have. Also I’d want adopt and foster some kids.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

Nope unless you count a chapel in Vegas as a church wedding.

20. Are you religious?

Not religious, never grew up practising anything, but I’m spiritual.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

Ooof I was always in and out of the hospital. I was always sick or getting injured.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Not yet

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

Quite a few. The most memorable experiences were pouring champagne for Drake Bell when I worked at the country club and when Jack Barakat from All Time Low and Ashley Purdy from Back Veil Brides were hitting on my mom,

24. Baths or showers?

Baths are really therapeutic but I feel bad because I’m not conserving water :(

25. What color socks are you wearing?

I’m barefoot babey ;) I’m starting to feel this beer

26. Have you ever been famous?

Nope

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

Maybe, but probably not

┈┈┈┈┈◦•✩•◦┈┈┈┈┈

Documenting that I’m now on my second Modelo, just so y’all know.

┈┈┈┈┈◦•✩•◦┈┈┈┈┈

28. What type of music do you like?

All types honestly. I stray more toward rock though.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

Let me tell you the story. So yes, I have skinny dipped. I was very not sober that night, much like tonight, and I was at a sleepover at my friend’s house on the lake. So all of us drunk 16 year olds were like “FUCK YEAH” and skinny dipped on the coldest night in February. It was transcendent. Later that night I gave myself a stck n poke tattoo :)

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

3 of em. One under my head, one between my knees, and one to hug

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

on my side, spoonin a pillow

32. How big is your house?

Big enough :)

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

coffee and OCCASIONALLY a plain eggo waffle

34. Have you ever fired a gun?

yup. took a gun safety class.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

yeah

36. Favourite clean word?

apothecary

37. Favorite swear word?

fuck (issa classic)

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

74 hours. I was tweaking HARD and crying my fucking eyes out

39. Do you have any scars?

Yup

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

this would be a good time for someone to confess their love for me 👀

41. Are you a good liar?

I’m fantastic at lying

42. Are you a good judge of character?

I’d like to think so

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

a lot of em

44. Do you have a strong accent?

I was back in California for 4 and a half months, so my valley girl accent came back and stronger than ever.

45. What is your favourite accent?

Australian or Midwestern

46. What is your personality type?

old man in a teenage girl’s body

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

One of my formal dresses that was like $120

48. Can you curl your tongue?

yee

49. Are you an innie or an outie?

innie

50. Left or right-handed?

I’m ambidextrous

51. Are you scared of spiders?

not particularly

52. Favourite food?

Bean and cheese burrito or carne asada fries

53. Favourite foreign food?

Mexican food, but Chinese food is also near and dear to me (they’re kinda not foreign to me because I’m Chinese and Mexican

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

I’m messy in an organized way.

55. Most used phrase?

“Fuckin siiiiiiick, dude” and yes I sound like Nick Colletti when I say it. No, I’m not doing an impression, I’m just from SoCal and sound like a skater dude

56. Most used word?

fuck

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

About an hour or so

58. Do you have much of an ego?

I’m a Leo and I fit the description

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

Lick

60. Do you talk to yourself?

Uh yeah who doesn’t????

61. Do you sing to yourself?

Always

62. Are you a good singer?

I’m not bad ;) I’m just a bit out of practice

63. Biggest Fear?

failure i guess i dunno

64. Are you a gossip?

I was going to say no but I can’t lie. I don’t spread shit, but I’ll listen to some tea.

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

Mid 90s was pretty intense. I dunno that’s the only one coming to mind at the momento

66. Do you like long or short hair?

depends on my mood

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

I’m just gonna say no.

68. Favourite school subject?

History or science! Loved em

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

Major introvert

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

Hell naw. I can’t even watch underwater scenes in movies because I get anxious and I feel like I’m drowning

71. What makes you nervous?

Love/being loved

72. Are you scared of the dark?

Lil bit

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

yup and I do it politely so people can learn from it because I’m not a fuckin dick and I want people to thrive

74. Are you ticklish?

Yes

75. Have you ever started a rumour?

Not that I’m aware of

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

I was on student council does thaf countt??? I got put in charge of prom 2 years in a row because the peoplw that were put in charge fucked up and dropped the ball.

77. Have you ever drank underage?

Currently am. Not the first time nor will it be the last.

78. Have you ever done drugs?

Yeah, yeah I have.

79. Who was your first real crush?

This kid in first grade who had moved here from Russia. We were sat next to each other because our names both started with Z. He was fucking rad. i helped him study for his citizenship test and taught me phrases in Russian.

80. How many piercings do you have?

seis. five in my ears and one in my nostril

81. Can you roll your R’s?

Yup yup yup. I speak Spanish so its kinda essential

82. How fast can you type?

Fast enough

83. How fast can you run?

I’m asthmatic and have bad feet/knees/hips/spine, ya know what my bones are fucked upp let’s justgo with that

84. What colour is your hair?

Dark brown, almost black.

85. What color is your eyes?

Brown

86. What are you allergic to?

Cats :( and pollen and shit like that

87. Do you keep a journal?

yeah imean i forget about it sometimes but its nice to vent or reminisce

88. What do your parents do?

They both work in the automotivw industry at separate companies on separate sides of the country

89. Do you like your age?

Nope. I’m at a weird transitional phase of being an adult but also still a kid but I don’t relate to most teenagers and I also can’t legally drink here in the states. Issa bummer ya know???.

90. What makes you angry?

We don’t have time for this and i ont have the mental capacity for iteither

91. Do you like your own name?

Fuck no. My name is Zoeie, acomplicated variant of Zoe. Its dumb and I misspell t a lot becauseI’m a whole dumbass and I remember in like fifth grade there was four other gorls wiyh the same name and we all spelled it differentlu (oooo I’m buzzed) Also, dann the man wagner’s dog is named Zoeie and I’m like coolcoolcooltighttighttight I have the same name as his dog thats fuckin siiiiick dude sarcassssssm it bums me out and i dunno why (I’d rather go by Zee or Z on here but if you want to call me Zoeie that’s fine, I’m ccool with it, I just think its dumb because of the spelling its actually not that bad of a name i’m just buzzed and salty)

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

I don’t really wantt kids but if I were ever to have gremlins I’d say Stephanie Renee (Stephanie after Stevie Nicks and we’d use Stevie as her nickname; Renee is my mom’s middle name) for a hypothetical daughter and Harrison James (Harrison after the fucking superior Beatle; James after Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. Basically just after guitar gods) for a hypothetical son. But I’m assuming there’d be another person involved in making that decision in that situation soooo

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

I am but a wee child, I don;’t want chilren. Also why the fuck would I want something specific??? you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. Love your children or some shit like that.

94. What are you strengths?

I can get up in the morning and I thinf that;s real swell of me

95. What are your weaknesses?

I’m a fucking perffectionist anand I get in myown head a lot

96. How did you get your name?

I was nameless for the first day of my life and this was the first name my parents agreed on. Its spelled real fuckin dumb though. And my middle name was my grandma’s middle name.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

Naw but they were royal guards wayyy back in the Ming dynasty.

98. Do you have any scars?

am i tripppin large wit no luggage or did i answer this arleady???? the answer is yeah

99. Colour of your bedspread?

Navy

100. Colour of your room?

its cream we’re renting this place booooo

I don’t thinkk I’mma tag anyone because my braindoen’;t want to work ahora mismo and I can’t think of who to tag but I LOVE y’all even if idon;t talk to you I love you and appeciate you thank you if you read this :,)

#drunk zee #tag game #learn a something about me #whendid i become a fuckin lightweight?]#it was that four motnhs of sobriety i tell ya

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mayuris-posts · 2 years

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Congratulations as, you have crossed the 1st milestone, rather a last step of the IVF Cycle is the healthy eggs which are ready to be fused or fertilized with the most fortunate & competent chosen sperm, in the laboratory. This place under the able guidance of Embryologists & infrastructure in place is geared up to see the most beautiful event of creating an embryo. Let’s understand first, a few terms often used, that is, zygotes & embryos. The word Zygote is derived from the Greek word ‘zygotes’ which means yoked. Zygotes are nothing but fertilized eggs. The word Embryo is derived from the Latin word, embryum, which means, the thing that grows. The multiplication of the zygote results in the formation of the embryo. Zygotes are single-cell structures while embryos are multicellular. In natural processes, when the embryo is formed within the body, so the body is well adjusted to accept the zygote, and offer food, nutrition &shelter, so embryos are formed & get implanted in the womb. This seemingly simple process is high precision driven under laboratory conditions. In the laboratory, right from air flowing in, Petri plates along with media where the embryo will be formed & observed for its development. This entire process needs to be monitored while creating exact conditions as it for the human body. 24-30 hrs, this Between 24 and 30 hours after fertilization, (Day 1) the embryo gets divided into 2 cells. By Day 2 the embryo is 4 cells and by the third day, the embryo is a 6-8 celled structure. Until this point, all the cells are identical and so, any single cell can be removed with minimal risk to the embryo, and if the need arises, can be screened for genetic diseases in a process known as pre-implantation genetic screening/diagnosis (PGS or PGD).

Before this stage, the development of an embryo is driven by maternal genes from oocytes. Around 8 cell embryo, now, the development is governed by genes of the embryo itself. This is still the 3rd day. On the 4th day, the embryo cells are now fused, within 16-32 cell structures. This structure is now called a morula, which is fast developing stage. On day 5 of the embryo, the cells are specialized and carry out necessary functioning. The outer surface of the morula is the placenta in making & fluid secretions turning into the amniotic fluid. An embryo has a unique requirement for growth & survival. As fertilisation happens in fallopian tubes, where there is less oxygen & glucose as compared to the endometrial cavity. As the entire process is happening in the laboratory on the Petri plates, earlier simple media often failed to provide optimal growth so, the embryo could not survive into the next stage. A lot of research is been done in culture media, so the embryo develops healthily and can survive implantation. Now, the real challenge of additional 48 hrs (day 3 to 5), while, not-so-competent embryos will not survive this stage & leaving only the best to be selected for transfer. There are a few instances, where some women will not have any embryo left for transfer despite appearing good on day 3. It is very easy to say, such embryos which did not survive, eventually could not achieve pregnancy, even though transferred on day 3. Such embryos are chromosomally abnormal. Competent embryologists study pronuclear morphology, dividing speed of cells & their structure on day 3 & can certainly understand, which embryos are likely to survive until day 5. The real challenge is to achieve singleton pregnancy by competent embryo & avoid multiple pregnancies. The more advanced embryo grading and rate of the development stage, the better the chances of implantation in the uterine lining.

What to note on Embryo Transfer Day 1. on the day of ET, be calm, stress-free It’s a relatively simple & painless procedure of 3o min. 2. Ultrasound-guided Embryo Transfer ensure the best implantation of the embryos. 3. The day of ET requires no Anesthesia or sedation. 4. You can have a light delight meal before your Embryo transfer. 5. Transfer is done with a full bladder, so drink plenty of water. 6. Avoid makeup or perfume as embryos are sensitive to such objects. 7. After ET, please empty your bladder and rest for 15-20 mins. 8. Avoid hot baths, swimming or any intense activity for a minimum of 2 weeks. 9. Avoid having sex, long or bumpy trips right after embryo transfer. Because the embryo takes first 72 hours to implant itself.

We at pearl women’s hosp & Yash IVF, recommend day 5embryo transfer to almost all of the patients with a few exceptions if any. 1. Pearl women’s hosp &Yash IVF, have excellent IVF labs upgraded with the latest guidelines 2. In-house embryologist and team are the key assets for 24*7 services 3. Latest infrastructure & upgradation ensure embryo development 4. We offer maximum singleton healthy pregnancy to most of our happy couples 5. Day 5 Embryo transfer many centres do, we ensure happy pregnancy. 6. Committed to excellence in practice & compassion for all.

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whiskynottea · 5 years

Photo

An Interruption in the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40

AO3

@theministerskat, as always, thank you for the beta, love! ❤️

Chapter 41. An Emergency

Stars sparkling against a black sky, a crescent moon rising on the horizon. Jamie’s breaths in sync with mine. His heartbeat steady under the palm of my hand. Everything was perfect.

Well, almost everything. The chill of a Scottish summer night was not ideal. As time passed, it started creeping into my body, making me shiver, even though I had glued my body against Jamie’s.

“Are ye cold, Sassenach?” he murmured in a hushed tone that made me think he was on the verge of sleep.

“Mmm,” I replied in similar style, trying to shimmy closer to him.

Jamie rose on an elbow, his eyes searching the ground around us. We had heard voices from the path some time before, and we had both sighed in relief for the perfect timing when we saw a group of four or maybe five bachelor students sitting on the grass at a distance from us.

Five minutes earlier, and they would certainly have heard our moans.

Jamie groped for his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. “Come here,” he said, and I snuggled beside him once more, much warmer now. He took a deep breath and placed a kiss on top of my curls. “I dinna want this night to end.”

“Me neither,” I whispered, breathing in his musky scent mingled with the spices of his cologne.

Time didn’t consider our requests though. As the moon moved above our heads, the wheels in my brain started turning again.

And my thoughts ran wild.

I thought about the prom, seeing him in a kilt for the first time, his silly jealousness during dinner and the way he held me tight when I told him that he was everything I needed. Our synchronized moves as we danced, and his husky voice when he told me to steal away together. How we ended up making love under the stars.

How amazing that was. And how different, to feel nothing between him and me, having sex without a condom.

Having sex without contraception.

When was my last period?

What if I was late for my next one?

What would happen if I hadn’t ovulated when I thought I had?

How I could be so stupid and risk everything for one night’s worth of a good time.

Eventually, unable to contain my thoughts and feelings within, I sat up with a loud sigh, hiding my face in my hands.

“Sassenach?” Jamie let out a confused mumble. I felt him sitting up, his arm instantaneously coming around my shoulders. “Mo chridhe?” he prompted again, seeing that he had gotten no response with his first attempt.

“We’re so stupid,” I murmured, my voice muffled.

“What?”

I ran my nails against my scalp, not knowing what to do with myself. I was angry. Angry for the absurdity of not having a place we could go, for my stress during the exams that might have changed my cycle, for not always having a condom in my purse. Angry at him, but most of all, I was angry at myself. Angry at my recklessness.

Damn. How did I do this?

“Claire.” His voice was authoritative now, and he turned my face towards him with two fingers on my chin, searching my eyes for the reason of my distress.

How can he be so ignorant?

“What?” I asked, and heard my voice shaking as I did so.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do I need to explain everything?” I huffed, exasperated, and heard him snort.

“Yes, ye do. Apparently, I’m not smart enough to figure what the hell got into ye.”

“We had sex without protection,” I finally explained, talking sharply with my arms open, if I was acting at an ancient tragedy.

“Oh,” he whispered, running a hand through his hair. His brow furrowed, and I saw him biting his bottom lip, hard. “I thought ye said twas safe.”

Oh, well done, James Fraser. Let’s say this is all my fault. It’s easier that way, I suppose.

I said nothing, and after a few short breaths I pulled away from him.

“Claire,” he said again. “I ken it wasn’t the wisest thing to do – ”

“Most probably the stupidest.” I set my jaw, looking into the distance, trying to calm down.

“Aye, most probably. But ye said tis not your fertile days, and I didn’t come – ”

“You know what people are called who use that type of birth control? Parents!” I said, mocking him with distaste in my voice.

Jamie let out a loud sigh and turned his body away, mimicking my posture to avoid looking at me. We sat like that for a while, the boisterous thoughts in our heads swallowing the city’s noise. I could feel his body rigid, his breaths as strained as mine.

I was rubbing my face with my hands – makeup be damned – when I felt the back of his index finger timidly trailing a path on my arm.

“Babe,” he pleaded, and my heart clenched in response. “Can we talk about it? Can we deal with this together?”

I turned to look at him, grateful for the darkness because my tears threatened to get the better of me.

“I’m terrified.” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could think of something better to say.

“I ken. D’ye want to come here?” He opened his arms wide, and smiled shyly, waiting for me.

I nodded and moved into his open arms. The warmth that enveloped my body had nothing to do with the chill on Calton Hill. It was coming the from inside, from the conviction that whatever was to come for us, we would be together. From Jamie’s unending belief in me. In us.

“What do you want us to do? What are our options?” he asked, his voice quiet.

“Apart from always having condoms with us,” I started, and he made one of his throaty sounds in response. “Apart from that, there is only one thing I can think of.”

“Which is?” he asked, and I felt him frowning. “Christ lass, do I need to ask for every little thing before you decide to honor me with yer thoughts?”

I laughed at that and turned to place a soft kiss on his neck. “The morning after pill.” I felt his frown getting deeper. “Emergency contraception,” I added, trying to make him understand.

“Do we have to wait until tomorrow morning?” he asked, making me laugh again.

How can he do this? I was feeling desperate just a few minutes ago.

“No, you oaf! I think the sooner I take it, the better. Let me google it.”

I snatched my phone from my purse, ignored Jenny’s and Joe’s texts and searched for more information about the pill.

“It can be taken up to seventy-two hours after sex,” I murmured, “But yes. It’s more effective the sooner it’s taken. We have to go to a local pharmacy. And it’s free,” I finished and turned to look at Jamie.

“Do ye want to go tomorrow morning? We can go together.”

“Jamie…” I looked at him under my eyelashes. “Can’t we just go now?”

Jamie smiled and pulled me to him. “Aye, of course we can go now. There is a 24-hour pharmacy close to the medical center,” he said, kissing my forehead with a reverence and a sense of protection that would make my knees wobble if I wasn’t sitting already.

He stood up, and offered his hand to help me up too. I wore his jacket and we walked down the hill, his arm around my shoulders, mine on his waist.

“Jamie,” I said while we were still enfolded in the hill’s quietness, before the city’s lights fell on us. “I’m sorry?”

“Was that a question?” he chuckled, and I pinched him for teasing me.

“I freaked out,” I said with a pout. “Before.”

“Aye, I ken. I would freak out too, if ye hadna gone ballistic yerself.”

“Ballistic?” I asked, incredulous, and pinched his side again in revenge.

“Yer always my crazy curly wig,” he said, and pulled me closer for a kiss. “No matter how hard ye try to conceal it under a stylish bun.”

“Why, thank you,” I laughed. “Bun-istic. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Mmhm,” he smiled, and we walked towards New Town, to find the pharmacy and the security that our future would be as we planned.

It took us about fifteen minutes to arrive at the pharmacy. The lady behind the counter gave us the pill and glanced at our clothes with a knowing smile. We ignored her slightly raised eyebrow, nodded repeatedly our assent when she told us be careful next time, and left, as fast as we could. Five minutes later, I swallowed the tiny pill and gave Jamie a broad grin.

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. He was the one that kept us sane, and I owed him that.

“I told ye I’ll always take care of ye. Especially when I’m the one to create yer problems.” He shrugged in the most charming way and I laughed. I kissed him then, softly at first, showing him that I was grateful to have him, and then harder, releasing all the tension I held inside.

“Claire,” he said, and increased the distance between us so he could look at me.. “I ken for now this is out of the question, but eventually… Ye do want bairns, don’t ye?”

I smiled and set both my hands on his kilted arse, pulling him closer again. “I think I do. I’ve never seriously considered it, but I do want to have a family. Eventually.”

Jamie mirrored my grin and took my lips in his.

“Hey,” I said when we broke our kiss. “What makes you think I’ll have that family with you?” I challenged him, raising one eyebrow.

“Oh, dinna fash. I’ll take care of that myself.”

“Mmm, will you, now?”

“Now and forever,” he smiled slyly and kissed me again. A promise, for the future we could only imagine.

I almost got lost in his scent, in his kiss, in the way his body heated mine, making his jacket unnecessary.

“For now, though,” I said, and resisted his lips that tried to hush me again. I was determined to make my point. “We need to always have condoms with us,” I continued, pursing my lips in thought. “In my purse and in your wallet. Just to make sure.”

“Aye,” Jamie chuckled. “Maybe bury some on Calton Hill, too. Just in case.”

“I’m not kidding! I’m not going through all this again!”

“Aye, mo chridhe. We’ll have condoms, always,” he agreed, but I felt that he had more to say. “But, Claire…” he started, then trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head, pretending it didn’t matter, but he didn’t meet my eyes.

“What?” I insisted.

“Ye didna feel it?” he asked, somehow shy. Seeing my questioning look, he continued. “Twasna different for ye, without the condom?” he asked, running his fingers through is hair.

“Oh, that.” I smiled, remembering that this was one of the first things I thought on Calton Hill. “Yes, it was. Different. Better.”

“Aye,” he beamed. “Much better. The way I felt ye… Christ,” he shook his head again, this time smiling, his bottom lip captured between his teeth to restrain himself from sharing more.

“So, when we’ll have a place of our own,” I said cheekily, “I’ll get on the pill. Or have an IUD.”

“IU what?” he asked, perplexed.

“It’s a tiny device that gets into the uterus and prevents the sperm from reaching the egg. Lasts for five to ten years,” I winked at him and chuckled, seeing his wide, surprised eyes. “Impressed, are you?”

“Oh aye, I am.” He licked his lips, thinking. “Maybe we can decide on one of these sooner? Even before Oxford?”

“Impatient, are you?” I laughed, but he cut me short with a kiss.

“I am,” he said, in his most serious voice.

“Okay, then. Which one do you prefer?” I asked, seeing him frown in thought.

“Which one is the best for ye? Will they harm ye?” he asked, his face suddenly clouded.

I kept silent, thinking. “Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, I suppose,” I said at last. “The pill has hormones; the IUD can be either copper or hormonal.”

“I have no idea what ye’re talking about, Sassenach.” I felt his fingers drumming on my back and I hardly hid my smile.

“I’m thinking the copper IUD would be better. I’d rather not take hormones. Plus, it’s fitted once, and we’re done. The pill on the other hand, has to be taken every single day.”

“It surely won’t hurt you? It’s going to be in yer body for five or ten years?” Jamie’s excitement for replacing condoms with other types of birth control was slowly turning to concern and worry.

“It’s safe, Jamie,” I whispered reassuringly and pulled his head towards me, until his forehead touched mine.

“We can ask a doctor. To be sure,” he whispered.

“I’ll call to arrange an appointment.”

“And if in the meantime we decide differently?” he asked. “Ten years is a long time.”

“I can get it removed,” I said, feeling my heart melting at the thought that Jamie already imagined having a family with me. “But we have time.”

“Aye,” he said, cupping my face and kissing my forehead, my cheekbones, my nose. “All the time in the world.”

He kissed my lips then, and I kissed him back, picturing the two of us, growing old together.

Chapter 42

#thermodynamics #The first law of thermodynamics #high school au #jamie x claire #outlander fanfic #outlander fanfiction

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crimethinc · 5 years

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The Movement as Battleground: Fighting for the Soul of the Yellow Vest Movement

In response to Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to increase the tax on fuel for “ecological” reasons, France has experienced several weeks of unrest associated with the yellow vest movement. This grassroots uprising illustrates how the contradictions of modern centrism—such as the false dichotomy between addressing climate change and considering the needs of the poor—can create social movements that offer fertile ground for populists and nationalists. At the same time, the increasing involvement of anarchists and other autonomous rebels in the unrest raises important questions. If far-right groups can hijack movements, as they did in Ukraine and Brazil, can anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians redirect them, as well?

“The yellow vests will triumph”—but what will triumph with them?

Yesterday, the Macron government offered its first concession, delaying the fuel tax for six months. At the same time, protests and police violence around France continue unabated; another day of action has been called for this Saturday, with the authorities promising a massive crackdown in response. The involvement of truck drivers and high school students signals that the story has not yet reached its climax. The model has already spread to Belgium and there are demonstrations called in Germany and Spain. As seems usual these days, no one on any side of the conflict seems to have any strategy in mind except to continue escalating.

But who will benefit from this escalation? Will it radicalize ordinary people, equipping them to defend their livelihoods against neoliberal austerity measures by means of direct action? Will it offer the police state a new justification for further repressive laws and measures? Will it bring a far-right nationalist government into power in place of the government of Macron?

Likewise, if this internally contradictory movement spreads to other parts of Europe, what aspects of it will spread? Will it supplant nationalist populism with economic populism, preparing the way for a revolt against capitalism? Will it serve as a vehicle for the far right to create a surge of grassroots nationalism, opening a new era of fascist street violence? Will it continue to be a battleground on which nationalists, anarchists, and others vie to determine what form the opposition to centrists like Macron will take in the coming years?

Let’s get some perspective on the situation.

In the United States, in less reactionary times, the Occupy movement saw some of the same conflicts emerge: legalistic liberals, leftist pacifists, insurrectionist anarchists, far-right crypto-fascists, and unaffiliated angry poor people all converged in the space of the movement and fought to determine its character. At first, it was unclear whether Occupy would be most useful to middle-class democrats, right-wing conspiracy theorists, or the genuinely poor and desperate; in fact, during that time, some of the same pessimism circulated about Occupy that we have heard from a few anarchists about the yellow vest movement. However, after a few weeks, anarchists and other militant opponents of capitalism and white supremacy seized the initiative, especially in Occupy Oakland, focusing the movement on confronting the root causes of poverty in capitalism and ensuring that many of the people who were radicalized during Occupy adopted emancipatory rather than reactionary politics.

We saw the opposite process play out in Ukraine two years later, when fascists gained the initiative via the very same approach anarchists had used in Occupy Oakland—taking the front lines in clashes with the police and forcing their political adversaries out of organizing spaces.

Today, the far right has made considerable gains since 2014, and conflicts around the world are playing out at a much fiercer pitch than they were in the days of Occupy. France has a long history of movements for liberation, including many powerful struggles over the past decade and a half. Hopefully, these have created powerful networks that will not let nationalists take the lead in determining what social movements in France will look like.

But even if we understand the movement itself as a battleground, that only poses further questions. What is the best way to fight to determine the character of a movement? How do we engage in this struggle in a way that doesn’t weaken the movement in a way that offers the advantage to the police? How do we remain focused on connecting with other ordinary participants in the movement, rather than getting mired in a private grudge match with fascists?

The fog of war.

In order to explore these questions in greater detail, we present the following update from France. This report picks up where our previous analysis left off, in the aftermath of the yellow vest demonstration of November 24.

The Aftermath of November 24

A week ago, total confusion reigned about the yellow vest movement—and within it. The self-proclaimed “leaderless,” “spontaneous,” and “apolitical” movement against the increase of taxes on gas had reached its first impasse. How could the movement remain unified when people from across the entire political spectrum were participating with completely contradictory views about how to address the government, what sort of tactics to employ, and what narratives to rally around? At the same time, how could the movement resist the attempts from political opportunists and party leaders to coopt it, while continuing to push ? The yellow vest movement was fracturing over these issues.

The yellow vest movement is a battleground for the entire political spectrum.

The day after the Parisian demonstration on Saturday, November 24 that saw the avenue of the Champs Elysées transformed into a battlefield between demonstrators and police, part of the movement voted to elect eight official spokespersons. In doing so, they hoped to reintroduce some good old-fashioned hierarchy and centralization into the movement, so as to establish dialogue with the government.

Once again, with these elections, it was not easy to maintain the appearance that the yellow vest movement was “apolitical.” Two of the newly elected spokespersons had connections with the far-right:

Thomas Mirallès ran for the Front National (now Rassemblement National) in the 2014 municipal elections. To defend himself, he describes this political experience as “a youthful mistake” and emphasizes that since that election, he “has never campaigned again.”

On social media, Eric Drouet has shared videos against migrants and expressed arguments used by the xenophobic far right. Knowing that this could tarnish his new “respectable” image as a spokesperson of the movement, he deleted all his Facebook publications up to November 18.

However, these elections were rejected by another part of the movement that refused to fall into the traps of representation and negotiation. Some yellow vesters explicitly reject the concept of representation: rather than having a spokesperson, the idea is that every participant should speak for himself or herself. Moreover, after the intense confrontations that took place during the November 24 demonstration in Paris, several local organizers decided to distance themselves from the movement.

The conflict within the movement didn’t stop some determined yellow vesters from calling for another day of action on Saturday, December 1, in order to increase the pressure on the government to rescind the tax—or simply to destabilize the government itself. The tone was set!

State power, destabilized.

The Government Tries Dialogue

It is clear now that the French government was not expecting the demonstrators’ rage to escalate, producing hours of rioting in Paris. When another call appeared to demonstrate in Paris the following weekend, the government realized that they were losing the control of the situation. This is why, after weeks of expressing contempt towards the yellow vest movement, members of the government changed their strategy in hopes of pacifying the situation. In this regard, the decision to elect official spokespersons for the movement was a strategic mistake, in that it facilitated the government’s efforts to establish a “dialogue” in which politicians would dictate terms to representatives who would then dictate them to participants.

On Tuesday, November 27, President Macron made a public speech in order to present the creation of the Haut Conseil pour le Climat (the High Council for Climate), the purpose of which is to “provide an independent perspective on the Government’s climate policy.” During his speech, President Macron changed his strategy by directly addressing some of the demands and concerns of the yellow vesters, presenting himself as a pedagogue willing to listen to what people have to say. This political masquerade failed; many members of the yellow vest movement rejected the so-called “helping hand” offered by the president and criticized his hypocrisy, as Macron had categorically refused to meet some yellow vesters just that morning.

Later that day, at the request of President Macron, the Minister of Ecological Transition, François de Rugy, received the leading figures of the movement. This meeting was supposed to establish some kind of dialogue between the government and the movement in order to find an exit from the situation. However, after two hours, the deadlock remained. Unconvinced by their exchange with the minister, the two spokespersons reaffirmed their intention to demonstrate on Saturday, December 1.

Understanding that the situation was escalating as more and more yellow vesters rejected the idea of dialogue and committed to gathering in the streets, the government tried one more time to re-establish dialogue. On November 30, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe invited the eight spokespersons of the movement to a meeting. This meeting was a failure, too: in the end, only one spokesperson out of eight met with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Ecological Transition. A second spokesperson, Jason Herbert, left the meeting shortly after it began.

Yellow for all.

A Fertile Ground for Populists

That same week, the self-proclaimed “legalist” and “official” part of the movement, including the elected leaders and spokespersons for the yellow vests, presented traditional media outlets with 42 demands. Looking at this list, it is easy to see the confusion within the movement, but also to identify some of the political influences that its protagonists share.

The list includes demands from every position on the political spectrum. There are social demands such as increasing minimum wage, fighting homelessness, and increasing financial assistance to handicapped people. But there are also reactionary demands, including deporting immigrants who haven’t received the right to asylum, blocking migration, developing a policy of assimilation for those who want to live in France, increasing the presidential term from 5 to 7 years, and providing more funding to the Justice department, the police forces, and the army.

Alongside these demands, we saw the now “classic” opposition to the increase of taxes on gas, as well as some ecological, protectionist, and nationalist arguments. The “legalist” or “official” part of the movement was playing a dangerous game in giving populists from the left to the far right reason to support the movement, if not enabling them to coopt it completely.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the leftist populist party France Insoumise, publicly denies that his party has engaged in any efforts to coopt the movement; in reality, the populist leader, who is obsessed with the idea of a coming “citizens’ revolution,” is hoping that the anger in the streets will weaken Macron’s government. This is purely opportunistic, as the leftist populist party aims to increase its ranks by attracting “angry” voters in the 2019 European elections.

On the other side of the political spectrum, emboldened by the wave of far-right victories in the US, Italy, and Brazil, nationalists know that this movement of collective anger represents a great opportunity for them to gain power and confirm their status as a “real political alternative” to the current government. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, leader of Debout La France, has been supporting the movement from the beginning, and some yellow vesters are members of his political party—Frank Buhler, for example, whose video became viral online.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, believes that the yellow vest movement represents what she’s been describing for years as “the France of the people left behind.” The nationalist party believes that [yellow vesters] “look like our voters. Unhappy and unlucky people because they are usually invisible, and who have a strong contempt for politicians.” This explains why the Rassemblement National has been extremely cautious in terms of strategy. They fear that if they attempt to coopt the movement too obviously, they could turn the demonstrators against them. They decided instead to offer verbal support to the demonstrations without their leaders marching in the streets alongside protestors. They have concentrated on communicating and defending some of the “42 demands” in corporate media outlets. Marion Maréchal Le Pen, niece of Marine Le Pen, said that she was present at the Champs Elysées on November 24 and described herself as “an ardent moral support for the yellow vesters’ suffering,” claiming to have “a lot of empathy for them.”

December 1 in Paris.

Preparing for the Unknown

Frustrated at having failed to neutralize the movement through dialogue, and fearing that, for the second week in a row, images of chaos in the streets of Paris would dominate the airwaves, the government decided to take every possible measure to maintain its precious republican order during the demonstrations of Saturday, December 1.

To secure the capital city, prevent or contain confrontations, and deal with the infiltration of radicals and “extremist elements,” the government arranged 5000 anti-riot police (Gendarmes and CRS) for the day. Their mission was to control all the access routes to the Champs Elysées, the meeting location of the demonstration. To ensure that no dangerous objects or possible projectiles would be brought inside the demonstration, the authorities filtered the access points, searching every single person who wanted to enter the perimeter. These controls were to be in effect from 6 am on Saturday, December 1 until 2 am on Sunday, December 2.

In order to protect the most important buildings, symbols, and organs of power, the authorities designated restricted areas where freedom of movement would be limited. All access to the Elysée (the Presidential palace), the Place Beauvau (the Ministry of the Interior), the Hôtel Matignon (the Prime Minister’s office), or the National Assembly was sealed off completely for the day.

Another reason the government took all those safety measures was that the yellow vests were not the only group demonstrating that day in Paris. At 10 am, railway workers were supposed to gather near the Saint Lazare train station to defend their status; they planned to join the yellow vesters after their action. At 12 pm, other trade unions were gathering for a traditional annual march against unemployment and precariousness. At 1 pm, several collectives of Parisian suburbs and antifascists decided to gather at Saint Lazare to join the yellow vest movement.

In short, on the eve of the December 1 national day of action, all the elements were combining to make for a truly explosive mixture in the streets of Paris.

All cops are bastards; all cars are barricades.

The Fuse Is Lit…

Due to the dramatic scope of what happened on December 1, we cannot provide an exhaustive list of all the actions and confrontations that took place in the streets of Paris that day. This is only an incomplete overview of the course of events. Also, in reference to the images and stories presented herein, it bears saying that some of the protagonists may be members of the far right.

Early in the morning, the first demonstrators began to converge on the Champs Elysées. Police were already deployed and on the alert; all yellow vesters were searched before entering the perimeter of the demonstration. The trap set up by the government was in effect. During the first few hours of the day, police arrested several individuals on accusations of possessing weapons and projectiles.

This map depicts the zones that were declared forbidden or restricted.

This map depicts the part of Paris where the clashes took place. In blue, the restricted area controlled by police forces; in yellow, the areas where yellow vesters circulated; in red, the major confrontation zones, including the route taken by some anarchist comrades in their report.

Surprisingly, the safety plan set up by authorities protected the avenue of the Champs Elysées, but not the Place de l’Etoile—the large traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe. Proposed by Napoléon I in 1806, the Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated in 1836 by Louis Philippe, then King of France, who dedicated the monument to the armies of the Revolution and the Empire. In 1921, the French government buried the Unknown Soldier of World War I beneath it. The flame of remembrance is revived everyday and official military commemorations take place annually in front of the flame. The monument is a symbol of French glory.

Aware that the Arc de Triomphe was not under police control, and knowing that, to access the Champs Elysées, they would have to submit to a search and have their identities checked, demonstrators began to gather around the monument, just outside the police perimeter. At 8 am, about a hundred yellow vesters were already on site, while the official beginning of the demonstration was due at 2 pm. Shortly after, around 9 am, the first confrontations began when yellow vesters tried to force their way through a checkpoint to enter the Champs Elysées. Police responded immediately with tear gas, which only escaladed the clashes.

From this vantage point, it is not easy to confirm precisely who initiated the first confrontations or who took part. As during the previous week, the confrontations included everyone from neo-Nazis and other fascists to anarchists, anti-capitalists. and anti-fascists, not to forget angry yellow vesters from many other different backgrounds and political tendencies.

As is becoming usual with the yellow vest movement, the situation was quite confusing. Some protestors gathered around the Unknown Soldier’s flame as if they were paying tribute to war, nationalism, and imperialism. Others started singing the Marseillaise—the French national anthem. Meanwhile, the more determined protestors were throwing cobblestones at police forces, erecting barricades in the neighboring streets, and setting cars on fire.

Soon, the entire traffic circle was enveloped in tear gas. The situation continued to escalate. Every time the police line got too close, rioters welcomed them with a shower of cobblestones and other projectiles. In the meantime, the first tags appeared on the Arc de Triomphe; this imperial symbol was finally profaned! Sadly, although some of the tags were clearly inscribed by anarchist and anti-statist comrades, others were written by fascists.

The Arc de Triomphe.

French taxes at work.

The presence of organized fascist groups during the clashes around the Place de l’Etoile during the morning of December 1 is undeniable. Several mainstream media outlets covering the yellow vest movement mentioned their presence among the yellow vest movement. In one article, the journalist says: “Several police vehicles had to leave the Place des Ternes hastily after being attacked by tens of individuals wearing visible far-right symbols.” In another article, the author reports the presence of monarchists, traditionalist Catholic groups, and nationalist and fascist groups, such as the GUD (Groupe Union Défense), a far-right student union—backing up these claims with photographs.

In their personal report about the yellow vest demonstration, anarchist comrades also mention the presence of the far right near the Place de l’Etoile:

“When we arrived at the Place de l’Etoile around 12 pm, it had been already a huge chaos for almost three hours. According to some comrades we met on site, the confrontations had been extremely violent underneath the 8Arc de Triomphe* during the morning. It seems that a lot of people had been injured. It was also in this sector that radical far-right groups were most present during the day. The GUD was there. We saw a good amount of walls covered by Celtic crosses. The far right in its “legalist” tendency also appeared to be well represented among the demonstrators. It seemed to us, and according to several other testimonies as well, that these fascist tendencies stayed present all day long around the Place de l’Etoile. Nevertheless, it was difficult to really quantify them.”

The Arc de Triomphe was the focal point of confrontations throughout the morning. Police repeatedly tried to repel protestors from the historical monument, but not without difficulties, as evidenced by this scene in which a group of demonstrators charged an anti-riot police unit that was trying to protect the edifice. During the charge, one policeman was isolated from his unit and beaten up by yellow vesters.

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Clashes at the Arc de Triomphe.

This event illustrated once more the confusion and disagreement within the movement. While some yellow vesters were attacking the police officer, others helped him to escape from his attackers, so he could rejoin his unit. Later, another yellow vester even returned an anti-riot shield to the police after demonstrators had seized it.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the French capital, other people in yellow vests gathered in the district of Bastille and walked along the large street of Rivoli, passing in front of the main City Hall of Paris, with the objective of entering the Champs Elysées from the opposite side—via the Place de la Concorde.

The museum under the Arc de Triomphe.

…Now It’s Time to Explode

The following section draws on this narrative published by anarchists, complemented by information from corporate media and other sources.

Around 1 pm, while the Arc de Triomphe was still surrounded by massive clouds of tear gas, a group of comrades decided to change their strategy and create a new dynamic by starting a wildcat demonstration and leaving the stalemate around the traffic circle behind them. Rapidly, a procession of 800 individuals left the square and entered the streets of wealthy Parisian districts. The crowd was quite heterogeneous, but the atmosphere seemed friendly.

On the Hoche avenue, the wildcat demonstration ran into a large procession of railway workers who were heading towards the Saint Lazare train station in order to join the afternoon call made by suburban and anti-fascist collectives. Without thinking twice, the two processions united and continued to march towards the meeting point. This development shifted the horizon of possibility for the rest of the day.

When all the processions converged in the luxurious Opéra district, thousands of individuals were marching through the streets. Over a century ago, during the Belle Epoque era, anarchists such as Emile Henry demonstrated the concept of propaganda of the deed in this neighborhood by attacking the rich and their symbols in their own luxurious district. Here, in contrast to the ambience around the Arc de Triomphe, the atmosphere was comfortable. Within this large procession, there were anarchists, anti-fascists, queer radicals, collectives against police violence, railway workers, garden variety yellow vesters, some people we might describe as rioters without adjectives, and many others, including the simply curious. For the first time, it really seemed that some kind of anti-capitalist and anti-fascist force could gain a foothold within the troubled waters of the yellow vest movement.

Heading south, the large procession finally arrived at Rue de Rivoli—a large street that connects Bastille to the Place de la Concorde, the highly restricted area near the Presidential palace. At this point, part of the crowd decided to go east and continue marching towards the City Hall of Paris—where they were welcomed by police forces with tear gas. The rest of the procession, about 1500 individuals, were determined to go the opposite way and force their way through the police checkpoint near Place de la Concorde.

When they approached the square, numerous police trucks and a water cannon blocked their way. Uninterrupted and intense confrontations followed between radicals and police forces. Barricades appeared on different fronts, projectiles were thrown at police, while a rain of tear gas canisters fell on protestors and the water canon attacked them at full blast. Eventually, however, the water canon seemed to have some technical issues. Some demonstrators seized this opportunity to set a car on fire for use as an additional barricade.

A barricade.

Further away, near Saint Augustin, about 3000 individuals had been gathering at a major intersection since 3 pm, building numerous barricades in the area to block traffic. People were joyously expressing their desire to overthrow President Macron. The fences of a nearby construction site were used to erect new barricades, while others were set on fire. A little further away, police forces were already blocking the streets. At this point, mounted police also appeared. Not thinking twice, protestors began breaking up the asphalt and throwing projectiles at the police. For over an hour, a confrontation continued at this intersection. This shows how determined people were that afternoon. In the meantime, a nearby bank was thoroughly damaged, while other demonstrators flipped a truck over. Law enforcement finally cleared the area of protestors with a massive tear gas attack.

Christmas comes early to Paris.

Several different parts of Paris were completely chaotic. Three cars were burning on the fancy Haussmann Boulevard, named for the reactionary urban planner who attempted to make Paris insurrection-proof after the revolution of 1848. Several streets further, an empty police car was destroyed, looted, and set aflame. A crowd of radicals arrived at Place Vendome, well known for its luxurious jewelry stores, the Ministry of Justice, and the infamous column that the Communards once destroyed. Plastic Christmas trees found in the nearby streets were piled up as barricades and set on fire.

While a thick cloud of smoke enveloped the Opera district, the anti-capitalists decided to move towards the Bourse, the historical stock market building—another symbol of capitalism and state power. Granted, since 1998, no more financial transactions are made inside this building. Nevertheless, several windows were smashed, the front doors were opened, and fireworks made their way inside the hall. Then the rioting crowd left the area, attacking another police car in a neighboring street on the way. They used urban furniture and construction equipment to block traffic, destroyed the front windows of several banks, and disappeared into the early night.

One day, all that money will just be burning garbage.

The evening of December 1.

The emergence of some kind of anti-capitalist and anti-fascist bloc was an important development within the yellow vest movement. Likely drawing on years of experience in demonstrations such as the May Day and Loi Travail protests, the bloc took advantage of the general confusion to carry out multiple actions throughout Paris with clear objectives and intentions.

In addition to the clashes with police, there were also several confrontations with fascists. Members of the GUD were seen on a barricade with a Celtic cross flag. In another instance, protesters recognized Yvan Bennedetti—a well-known Nazi and former president of the ultranationalist Oeuvre Française, which disbanded after the killing of antifascist Clément Méric in 2013. He was effectively forced out of the area, if not out of the movement as a whole.

On Saturday, December 1, an insurrectional wind blew through the streets of Paris. Many thousands of people unleashed their rage against symbols of power: police were constantly harassed; banks and insurance agencies were systematically destroyed; numerous stores were looted, some even set on fire; cars and urban furniture were used to build barricades; several private mansions were vandalized and set on fire; historic monuments and republican symbols were occupied or attacked, including the Bourse and the Arc de Triomphe. Demonstrators succeeded in entering, looting, and destroying the museum located beneath the historical monument.

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Scenes from December 1.

In view of such determination, the government and police forces were completely overwhelmed. There are several explanations for this. The first reason is the wide range of people taking part into the riots. It was not just anarchists and anti-capitalist radicals attacking police forces, but also a great number of other angry people in yellow vests including far-right activists and other rioters. Secondly, the protests continued to change and develop throughout the day, assuming unpredictable new forms. Finally, the extreme mobility, diffuse organization, and determination of the protestors made them a match for the officers, who were pinned down by their task of defending predefined areas. Indeed, as most police forces were assigned to positions around the restricted areas or busy dealing with confrontations near the Champs Elysées, they couldn’t respond to the developments in other districts of Paris. Nevertheless, on several occasions, members of the BAC (Anti-Criminality Brigade) were seen in the streets haphazardly shooting rubber bullets at every demonstrator in view.

Many officials and media agree that Paris hasn’t experienced such riots since 1968. To this assessment, we must add the following figures.

Altogether, 412 individuals were arrested and 378 of them were put in custody.

It is difficult to tell how much ammunition the police used; numbers vary widely between sources. However, it appears that they deployed about 8000 tear gas grenades, 1000 sting-ball grenades, 339 GLI-F4 stun grenades, 1200 rubber bullets, and 140,000 liters of water during the confrontations.

In the end, during the Parisian demonstration alone, 133 individuals were injured, while the authorities counted 112 cars, 130 pieces of urban furniture of one kind of another, and six buildings set on fire for a total of 249 fires.

The total amount of property destruction could reach 4 million euros.

The clashes around the Arc de Triomphe continued well into the night.

The police unloading even more ammunition.

Some of the consequences.

If you want us to spend more on gas, you may spend more on cars.

Fire Spreads on the Wind

Paris was not the only place in France were yellow vesters expressed their anger with actions. In various cities, protestors gathered for this third nationwide day of action; some of them were as determined as those who took the streets in Paris.

In Nantes, the first actions took place at the airport, where demonstrators succeeded in entering the tarmac. In the afternoon, about a thousand yellow vesters gathered in the streets of Nantes. The demonstration didn’t last very long; as soon as protestors tried to enter to the shopping district, police deployed massive quantities of tear gas to disperse the march.

In Toulouse, intense confrontations took place between yellow vesters and law enforcement. In Narbonne, yellow vesters set fire to a toll collection point. In Bordeaux, clashes erupted between police and protesters when the crowd of yellow vesters arrived at City Hall and tried to enter by force.

In Tours, a demonstration drew about 1300 individuals. Shortly after the beginning of the march, participants began smashing shop windows, and confrontations with police escalated. One yellow vester lost his hand as a consequence of a grenade thrown by police.

In Marseille, the confrontations began at the end of the day. Protestors burned trash containers, smashed several shop windows, looted stores, set a fire in front of the city halls of the 1st and 7th districts, and finally set a police car on fire in front of the Canebière police station. It appears that 21 individuals were arrested after these actions. An 80 year old women was killed when a tear gas grenade hit her in her face as she was closing her shutters.

Finally, about 3000 individuals gathered at Puy-en-Velay. Yellow vesters entered the courtyard of the local Prefecture with tires and refused to leave. Some of them set fire to the tires. Police forces tried to disperse the crowd by using tear gas, but this only increased the anger of the demonstrators. Numerous confrontations followed. The prefect himself tried to discuss with the protestors in order to bring back order but without any success. In the end, dissatisfied with the situation, yellow vesters burned down the Prefecture.

A day of chaos.

The Aftermath

The day after the demonstrations, the government knew that it had reached an impasse of its own. President Macron was on a trip to Buenos Aires for the G20; as soon as he heard about the situation in Paris, he returned to France immediately to deal with this major political crisis.

On Sunday, December 2, President Macron met with some of the policemen and firemen who had been in the streets the previous day. He also made a small tour of the damages caused by hours of insurrectional confrontations before heading back to the Elysée palace for an emergency meeting with all of the government. The President asked his ministers to cancel all their business trips for the next two days.

President Macron did not make any official declaration after the meeting. Nevertheless, he personally asked the Prime Minister Edouard Philippe to see all the political leaders of the different parties the next day, as well as the spokespersons of the yellow vest movement.

In the meantime, the left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon requested that every political group in the National Assembly opposed to the government should make a vote of no confidence to denounce the “catastrophic management of the yellow vest issue.” At the same time, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen demanded the dissolution of the National Assembly. Once more, it is not difficult to see who wants to take advantage of the situation.

On Saturday night, the Minister of the Interior said that he was willing to consider all possibilities to ensure republican peace and order in France, even re-imposing the state of emergency to deal with the yellow vest movement. This is gratuitous: in the new antiterrorist law adopted on October 31, 2017, many of the elements that constituted the exceptional aspect of the state of emergency are now fully integrated into ordinary French common law—for example, the creation of restricted zones during events.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, December 2, yellow vesters determined to push their movement further were already planning a fourth round with the government, calling for another national day of action on Saturday, December 8. It happens that on the same day, the global climate march will take place in Paris. For the occasion, radicals have made a call for an offensive contingent. We will see whether it is possible for these two movements to establish a connection.

On Tuesday, December 4, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said that the government had decided to suspend gas tax increases for the following six months. In addition, the government is also suspending new tougher rules on vehicle checks for the same amount of time, and committing not to increase electricity fares until May 2019. In addition, the Prime Minister announced that a debate about taxes and public expenses at a national scale would take place between December 15, 2018 and March 1, 2019. In making these concessions, the government aims to show that it is open to dialogue with yellow vesters.

Nevertheless, it seems that part of the yellow vesters are not willing to give up the fight. The spokespersons of the yellow vest movement rejected the invitation from the Prime Minister to find a way out to the current situation; several local yellow vests groups are calling to continue their actions.

So far, the government’s announcement does not seem to have had much effect upon the ranks of the yellow vest movement. Since the beginning of the movement on November 17, the number of demonstrators has dropped as the intensity of conflict has escalated. Yet even if some yellow vesters have dropped out due to the increasingly confrontational strategy, the last day of action showed that some demonstrators are determined to continue forward.

We still have an unknown horizon before us—and so many dawns yet to break.

Revolutionary optimism.

Some Reflections

As we hoped, an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist front has emerged within the yellow vest movement. In Paris on December 1, this created a convergence point and catalyst for people who do not identify with nationalist narratives. Hopefully, this will help to spread a discourse that identifies the structural causes of Macron’s programs, rather than framing them as the “betrayals” of a politician who should simply be replaced with a more nationalistic populist.

In only three weeks, the yellow vest movement has gone from blocking traffic to demolishing the wealthy districts of Paris. This illustrates the efficacy of direct action, horizontality, and the refusal to negotiate. In the era of globalized capitalism, any movement that is to face down the neoliberal assault on the living standards of ordinary people will be forced to radicalize rapidly in this manner, and to resist all attempts to control, represent, or placate it.

As many anarchists have emphasized before, effective resistance to capitalism requires the participation of a wide range of people, not just those who share a common ideological framework. This means that a movement must spread beyond the control of any one group or position. Indeed, we can understand the yellow vest movement as a widespread popular appropriation of the confrontational tactics that anarchists and other rebels have been employing in France for years—for example, in the protests against the Loi Travail and on May Day.

Yet the widespread appropriation of confrontational tactics is not necessarily a step towards a better world unless people also absorb the values and visions that accompany them. The rise of Trump and grassroots nationalism in the US has been marked at every step by the far-right appropriation of left and anarchist rhetoric and tactics, which they have used to advance their own agenda.

What happens inside a movement against the reigning government is just as important as what happens in the conflicts between that movement and the police. This is why we have emphasized the importance of fighting on two fronts—against Macron’s police and likewise against the fascists who hope to impose their own authoritarian agenda.

United colors of resistance?

There’s No Such Thing as an Apolitical Movement

From the outset, the yellow vest movement has claimed to be an “apolitical” space open to all. This has offered fertile ground for populists and nationalists to promote their ideas. In most cases, they have not been the ones taking action in the streets, but they have often set the discourse online. Fascist groups have gained visibility, too, even if their number seems comparatively modest; they are better organized now than they were at the beginning of the movement. We must not abandon the streets and the movement to the far right.

No social movement is a monolith; each is a heterogeneous space of perpetual change and tension. It is foolish to deem movements worthy or unworthy, standing in judgment like the Pope and relinquishing the ones that do not meet our standards to the influence of our adversaries. Instead, we can aim to intervene in movements in ways that enable the liberating currents within them to gain momentum and become distinct from the reactionary currents. The challenge is to offer other participants models for how to solve their immediate problems and to connect those with emancipatory visions of long-term change—and to do all this without creating tools or momentum that fascists, authoritarian leftists, or other opportunists can capitalize on.

We need to think more about the relationship between street battles and the battle of ideas. Historically, anarchists have often assumed that those who are willing to take the most risks will be better positioned to determine the character and goals of a movement. On the ground, this is often true—for example, if you escalate conflict with the police, it can force centrists and legalists to withdraw. But we should also remember all the times that rebels from oppressed groups have been the ones to take the most risks and suffer the most repression, only to see authoritarians take advantage of our sacrifices to consolidate their power. This is a very old story, from the French revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870 and the Italian Risorgimento to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

We should bear all these lessons in mind when we weigh whether the best way to gain leverage within a movement is to be the ones who take the most risks within it. How can we make sure that our adversaries within the movement cannot force us to take the majority of the casualties while they simply—take power?

A decade ago, in less complicated times, some anarchists and autonomists imagined that, rather than being connected by a common set of values and aspirations, people in revolt could be connected simply by behaving ungovernably in relation to the prevailing authorities. It is still possible to find examples of this “anti-ideological” attitude in France today, despite all the evidence that at least a few of those who wear the yellow vest are simply fighting to enthrone other authorities who will be just as dangerous if they come to power. It would not be the first time that rebellious street violence brought a new oppressive government into office.

Yes, the order that reigns must be undermined by any means necessary. The same goes for the proponents of rival ruling orders. Driving Yvan Bennedetti out of a demonstration is just as important as defending it against the police.

At the same time, it must be clear to all the newly mobilized and politicized participants in these movements that we are not simply robots acting according to a pre-programmed ideological framework, but that we genuinely hope to connect with them, exchange ideas and influences with them, and work together to create solutions to our mutual problems. Our opposition to authoritarians is not a tenet of a religion, but a hard-won lesson about what it takes to create spaces of freedom and possibility.

In this regard, the moments of dialogue between strangers that take place in the street are just as important as the courageous acts by which people hold police at bay and force out fascists. Let’s not be naïve, let’s not disavow our opinions or abandon our convictions, but let’s remain open to the possibility that we could become stronger and more vibrantly alive by working with others we have not yet met, who share our problems but not our reference points.

The Long Game

Sooner or later, this moment of crisis will pass—either the leaders will cut a deal with the state and the police will succeed in isolating those who refuse to cooperate, or Macron’s government will fall and be replaced by another that promises to solve the problems that drove people into the street.

And what then? Will the far right be able to claim that they were the ones who scored the victory against Macron? Most of the aforementioned 42 demands are compatible with both leftist and far-right populist programs; it would not be surprising to see the movement split in two and be coopted by the two populist parties. Since the riots last weekend, both populist leaders have been galvanized by the demand to oust President Macron and his government. It is entirely possible that a far-right government will come to power after Macron. What should we be doing right now to prepare for that situation, to make sure that people will continue to come together in the streets against them?

As we fight—in France, in Belgium, and everywhere else that neoliberal governments are forcing austerity measures on us—let’s be thinking about how to come out of each fight more connected, more experienced, and with a sharper way of identifying the questions before us. Good luck to each of you, dear friends.

Further Reading: Comparing the Yellow Vests with Ukraine and Italy

Gilets Jaunes et Extrême Droite: Les Leçons de Maïdan

Les Gilets Jaunes à la lumière de l’expérience italienne

Uncertain futures.

40 notes · View notes

xtruss · 3 years

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‘I Feel A Bit Rusty’: Has Covid Killed Our Sex Lives?

The end of lockdown was supposed to herald an explosion of pent-up desire and a bonkbuster of a summer. But it’s been way more complicated than that

— By Zoe Williams | Saturday, 25 September 2021 | The Guardian USA

In lockdown only 1 in 30 women and 1 in 10 men had a new partner. Photography by Antonio Olmos for the Guardian; styling by Andie Redman

This year was meant to be a replay of the roaring 20s, your hot girl or boy summer. We’d be hedonistic, bacchanalian and, above all, getting laid. All the pent-up energy of lockdowns, the only time it has ever been illegal for people from different households to have sex, would explode in one helluva bonkbuster summer. But has it panned out that way? Or has Covid ruined our sex lives?

Have We Really Stopped Having Sex?

Every decade since 1990, the UK has carried out a detailed National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal). In 2020-21 it was replaced by the smaller Natsal-Covid study, which painted a complicated picture: of those in cohabiting relationships, 78% saw a change in their sex life, usually for the worse. One in 10 reported sexual difficulties that started or worsened in lockdown. Even though 63% reported some sexual activity, 75% of those who did were in a cohabiting relationship. Times have inevitably been even leaner for couples who weren’t living together. As for people who weren’t in a relationship, the lockdown months were a catastrophe: only one in 30 women and one in 10 men had a new sexual partner.

A rise in sexual activity can often be detected by a rise in STI rates, but these are hard to judge at present. Anecdotally, professionals have reported a jump. Will Nutland of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who is co-founder of the not-for-profit Love Tank, which researches health inequalities, says: “All my clinical colleagues have noted STIs rising. There’s been a big increase in syphilis, particularly among straight women.” But the general feeling is that Covid-driven lack of STI services means these are mostly stored-up cases from 2020. In summary: just as summer failed to materialise, so did the love.

Does Long Covid Kill Your Mojo?

Short answer, probably. Robyn, 37, caught the virus last December, felt better in January, then found her symptoms coming back. “The main thing is dreadful fatigue and brain fog. I forgot my housemate’s name. I technically could go on a date, but I’ve barely enough energy to walk to the corner shop, let alone have sex.” And anyway, she adds: “I’ve got absolutely nothing to say for myself. My interests are napping and having baths. I’ve got no sparkling personality. Oh, and since December, I’ve had no sex drive at all.”

But Eleanor Draeger, a sexual health and HIV doctor, counsels against too much extrapolation. “People with all sorts of physical disabilities have sex, and long Covid is a physical disability. They may not be having hanging-from-the-chandelier sex, but they can still have sex.” However, she agrees that if low libido is a symptom, it will be pretty decisive.

How Does Fear of Catching Covid Affect Our Sex Lives?

It’s not unreasonable to try to avoid catching Covid. Rose, 27, lives in Edinburgh and works in responsible investment, so uses the phrase “risk budget” more than most of us. But she says “I don’t want to waste that budget on spending time with anyone other than my friends.” She doesn’t want to try getting off with friends: “You’d ruin a friendship at a time when it’s so hard to make new ones?”

People aren’t necessarily scared of Covid; they’ve just forgotten how to be close Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

Has Social Distancing Atrophied Desire For Intimacy?

There’s a subtle but gigantic mental barrier to cross in going from two metres to zero millimetres apart. “People are not necessarily scared of Covid,” says Nutland. “They’ve just forgotten how to be close.” This doesn’t always have a sexual dimension – many people describe anxieties about everyday proximity and crowded spaces. “We’ve lost those social and sexual skills,” he adds, “though they’ll come back with a bit of time.”

Have Lockdowns Shaken Our Body Confidence?

Nearly half of us – 48% – put on weight in lockdown, and 29% said they drank more. But that interacted with more nebulous feelings of pessimism and low self-esteem that come with too much time indoors. Jenny Keane, a sex educator who was running an online orgasm workshop when the pandemic broke out, says feedback she was getting “centred on low libido, lack of desire and low self-esteem, which are in a vicious circle.” So she tailored a course on “body confidence and sexual self-care”.

Not everyone sank into despair about their bodies. Anya, 38, is frustrated by the fact that she is in decent shape but there’s no one to appreciate it. “I wouldn’t get on Love Island, but I want someone to bear witness to the fact that I’m reasonably attractive and look good naked.”

Have We Become Obsessed with Hygiene?

Sanitised sex is a contradiction in terms. It isn’t reasonable or possible to be intimate with someone while maintaining germ barriers. After 18 months of trying to keep ourselves physically separate, it is quite hard to stop seeing closeness as a threat. Draeger has seen this play out vividly in her clinical work, to the point where an STI diagnosis that wouldn’t normally have caused a huge amount of angst has had a hugely damaging effect. “People have told me having an STI felt really stressful in the context of Covid,” she says. “They just felt that everything was unclean.”

Phil Samba, 31, a researcher and campaigner who helps black gay men in particular access HIV and STI testing, says: “Suddenly the message was ‘Just wank.’ That really irritated me. That didn’t work during the HIV/Aids pandemic, and it wasn’t going to work now.” But it was still “very triggering” for people who lived through the HIV epidemic. Samba says: “People were dying of a mystery virus spread through interaction, and it put people back into that 1980s fear.”

Are We All Just Happier Staying at Home Now?

Alan, 50,

says: “I’ve got so used to pottering about my flat that I think, ‘Yeah, that’s my life now.’” Greg, 45, divorced with two children, ended a relationship at the start of lockdown partly because his kids, 10 and 12, were not happy about it. “Now I can’t even go to work without the dog going up the wall. Everybody’s got used to this cocooned, slightly selfish world. I’d struggle to bring anybody else into my life. I was supposed to be having a date tonight, but I don’t really fancy it. I feel a bit rusty.”

Where is Everyone?

Dating apps, brutal at the best of times, are a bit quiet. Anya says: “When the pandemic started, I was 36. Now I’m 38. Part of me does worry that men are looking for women whose fertility isn’t going to be an issue.” And where do you meet people, if you’ve had enough of app dating? After-work drinks, bars and festivals have all either disappeared or are operating under new limits that squash flirting opportunities.

Are Cohabiting Couples Really Having it the Best?

The problems in a cohabiting relationship are different, Keane says. “A woman might be a mother in the morning, a worker in the day, a mother again when she comes home, and a partner when the children go to bed.” In lockdown, we lost those boundaries and became everything in one room.

Then there is stress, which can send you in one of two, really unhelpful, directions: “Either we become activated, so the kind of sex you want then is generally fast and easy,” says Keane. “Or we become disconnected, and have that sense of being further away from the person you’re in the room with.”

Even Before the Pandemic, Were We Having Much Sex?

In the US, research from 2018 found a distinct downward trend: millennials were having less sex than boomers did at their age, and Zoomers were having less than millennials. This doesn’t appear to be the whole story in the UK, unless we’re just slower to notice. Here, under-35s are drinking less and taking fewer drugs, but according to the most recent Natsal (2010-2012), they were having more of everything sex-wise: partners, experiments, encounters. Certainly, they are not very reliable narrators – one 21-year-old I spoke to had sex with two different people between agreeing to be interviewed and the actual interview, and that was a window of 24 hours. So I had to drop her, but I don’t think she minded.

Why Haven’t We Gone Back to Normal Now?

The lifting of lockdown doesn’t mean intimacy returns. A lot of the practical barriers to sex, such as a house full of children – or, worse, adult children – and everyone working from home, are still up. Tom, 37, is in an open relationship with his same-sex partner of 20 years. “We’re intimate but we’re not really sexual,” he says. They both used to travel a lot for work, and had sex with other people when the other was out of the house. Since Covid, that’s harder. “It’s a bit awkward saying: ‘I’m just off out to get laid.’ Where we’re out of practice is the tacit understanding: “Oh, you had a shower and went out for two hours.’ It feels as if I’m doing something dishonest.”

Sex is about connection, and the pandemic has been about disconnection – physical and emotional: at some time or another, we’ve all been in fight-or-flight mode, which is about as disconnected as life gets. Keane believes there is a way back, if we understand better how our state of being affects our interest in sex. “Whatever the problem, everybody’s question is always: ‘Am I broken?’ When so many of us carry shame about bodily functions and confusion about sex, good quality, sex-positive education is key. You can change your entire relationship with yourself just by changing the understanding of your body. My answer is always the same. ‘No, you are not broken.’”

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livingcorner · 3 years

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Asparagus

Planting, Growing, and Harvesting Asparagus

You're reading: Asparagus

Asparagus is one of the first plants that greets us in springtime! It’s a perennial, which means that once it gets established, the tender spears will return year after year. In addition, its ferny foliage makes an excellent ornamental. Here’s how to grow asparagus—from planting through harvest!

About Asparagus

Asparagus can be grown in most temperate regions, but grows more robustly in cooler areas with long winters. The edible part of the asparagus plant is the young stem shoot, which emerges as soil temperatures rise above 50°F (10°C) in spring.

The most important thing to know about asparagus is that you really should not harvest it during the first couple of seasons. These plants need to be allowed to get established before you can harvest sustainably. The patience is well worth it, though, as asparagus beds can be productive for 15, 20, sometimes up to 30 years.

Because asparagus stays productive for so long, it’s important to plant the best variety available for your area. (See recommended varieties below.)

If you are starting asparagus for the first time, we would plant 5 to 10 asparagus plants per person (15 to 30 feet of row).

Read more: How To Build A Rooftop Garden – Step By Step Guide | Gardening Tips

How Long Does It Take to Grow Asparagus?

As said above, newly-planted asparagus plants may take 2 to 3 years to truly get started and produce, so patience is needed! After they’re established, however, asparagus can be productive for decades.

In addition, asparagus plants are fairly fast producers, sending up new spears every few days for a few weeks in the spring. The plant produces ½ pound of spears per foot of row in spring and early summer, so we think it’s definitely worth the wait.

Planting

When to Plant Asparagus

Plant asparagus crowns in the early spring, as soon as the soil can be worked. Many gardeners plant at about the same time as potatoes go in the ground.

Asparagus is usually grown from 1-year-old plants called “crowns,” but it can also be grown from seed. Starting with asparagus crowns, however, eliminates the year of tedious weeding that comes with starting from seed, and will speed up production overall.

A few varieties, such as open-pollinated ‘Purple Passion’ and hybrid ‘Sweet Purple’, can be grown from seed. Start seeds indoors in spring and set out the seedlings when they are 12 to 14 weeks old, just after your last spring frost.

Soak seeds in water for up to 24 hours before sowing.

Sow seeds in moistened peat or seed-starting soil in flats or peat cups.

Once plants reach 12 inches in height, harden them off outdoors for a week.

After the last spring frost, transplant the young plants to a temporary garden bed. Once they mature in the fall, identify the berry-less male asparagus plants and transplant them to your permanent planting site, removing the less-productive female plants.

Choosing and Preparing a Planting Site

Given that asparagus is a perennial plant that comes back year after year in the same spot, it’s important to select a proper planting site where it will thrive.

Choose a site that gets full sun.

Place the asparagus bed toward the edge of your garden, where it will not be disturbed by the activity of planting and re-planting other areas.

Ensure the bed will drain well and not pool water. Asparagus does not like to have its roots get too wet. If you do not have a site with good drainage available, consider growing asparagus in raised beds instead. Learn how to make a raised garden bed here.

Asparagus thrives in neutral to slightly acidic soil (pH of about 6.5).

Eliminate all weeds from the planting site, digging it over and working in a 2- to 4-inch layer of compost, aged manure, or soil mix. (Learn more about soil amendments and preparing soil for planting.)

The soil should be loosened to 12 to 15 inches in depth to allow the asparagus crowns to root properly and not be disrupted by rocks or other obstacles.

How to Plant Asparagus

Plant crowns deeply to protect them from the cultivation needed for annual weed control.

Dig a trench of about 12 to 18 inches wide and 6 to 8 inches deep. If digging more than one trench, space the trenches at least 3 feet apart.

Soak the crowns briefly in lukewarm water before planting.

Make a 2-inch-high ridge of soil along the center of the trench and place the asparagus crowns on top of the mound, spreading their roots out evenly.

Within the trench, space asparagus crowns 12 to 18 inches apart (measured from root tip to root tip).

Once you get to this point, you can follow one of two planting methods: the traditional “little-by-little” method or the easier “all-at-once” method.

“Little-by-Little” Method:

Once the trenches are dug and the crowns are set out:

Cover the crowns with compost and topsoil, burying the crowns 2 inches deep. Water in.

As the season progresses and spears grow to be 2 to 3 inches tall, add 2 more inches of soil to the trench, being careful not to bury the spears completely.

Once the spears again grow through the layer of soil, add an additional 2-inch layer of soil. Repeat this process until the trench has been filled to ground level. Depending on how deep you dug your trench, you may need to add soil 1 to 2 more times throughout the season.

After you’ve filled the trench completely, mound the soil slightly to prevent water from pooling around the emerging spears.

“All-at-Once” Method:

Some gardeners simply fill in the trench with soil and compost all at once. While it’s thought that the traditional method results in stronger plants overall, gardeners don’t typically have any issues result from the “all-at-once” method, either. As long as the soil is fairly loose, the spears won’t have a problem pushing through to the surface.

Learn how to plant and grow an asparagus bed in our video:

youtube

Care

Caring for Asparagus

When the trench is filled, we would recommend adding a 4- to 6-inch layer of mulch.

The biggest issue with asparagus is managing weeds during the first two years. Asparagus should not have its roots disturbed, so you’ll need to gently hand-pull weeds, taking care not to disturb asparagus’ roots. Weeds will become less of an issue as the plants fill in. Mulch around the plant with compost or grass clippings to help retain soil moisture and reduce weed growth.

During the first 2 years after planting, asparagus plants need 1 to 2 inches of water per square foot per week. If you are not receiving adequate rainfall, you will likely need to water. Use drip irrigation if possible.

Asparagus thrive on a steady supply of plant food. Consider an organic fertilizer during the growing season. Follow instructions on the label of whatever product you use.

Before Harvesting

Do not harvest the spears in the first or second year (the plant needs time to grow out its root system), but cut down dead foliage in late fall and side-dress with compost.

During the second year, side-dress with compost in spring and early fall and cut down dead ferns in late fall. Keep the bed thickly mulched.

During the third year, the bed should be in full production, so you can start to harvest asparagus sparingly throughout the season.

Transplanting Asparagus

If you must move asparagus, transplant the crowns in early spring when they are dormant or in late fall before the first fall frost (after foliage is cut back). Dig and lift crowns with a garden fork, being very careful not to disturb the roots. Divide the clump into two or more pieces. Water transplants. Do not harvest heavily in the following year.

Read more: How to build an Underground Room: Complete Guide for 2021

Pests/Diseases

One of the biggest concerns in the asparagus bed is simply weeds. Hand pulling should be done on a regular basis in spring and early summer. Cultivate lightly to avoid damaging emerging asparagus spears. The application of four to 4 to 6 inches of straw in summer also is effective in controlling weeds.

Asparagus Pests and Diseases

Pest/Disease Type Symptoms Control/Prevention Asparagus beetles Insect Spears turn brown and bend in a hook shape; defoliation; damaged fruit/seeds Remove beetles by hand; dispose of plant matter in the fall where eggs could be housed Cutworms Insect Wilting; stems of young spears severed (“cut”) just above soil line Watch for cutworms and remove by hand; clear away weeds and other plant matter. Find more cutworm prevention tips here. Fusarium Crown Rot Fungus Yellow, stunted, wilted ferns; reddish-brown spots on lower stems, crowns, or roots; rotting spears Destroy infected plants; avoid planting new asparagus nearby infected site for 5+ years; choose resistant varieties; disinfect tools to prevent spread; avoid overharvesting Asparagus Rust Fungus Pale green spots on emerging spears become yellow/orange with concentric rings; reddish-brown blisters appear in summer, releasing rust-colored spores that turn black; brown ferns; defoliation; reduced vigor Rust requires moisture to spread; avoid getting excess water on spears or ferns. Destroy infected plant matter; choose resistant varieties; ensure good air circulation; avoid planting new asparagus nearby

Asparagus is considered a deer-resistant plant, though a hungry deer will eat almost anything.

Harvest/Storage

How to Harvest Asparagus

Do not harvest during the first couple seasons (see information above).

If you have young plants, the season may last 2 to 3 weeks. However, established plants produce longer—up to 8 weeks.

Check your plant every other day for harvest-ready spears. Spears grow quickly and may become too woody before you know it! Once an asparagus spear starts to open and have foliage, it’s too tough for eating.

Harvest spears when they reach 8 to 10 inches in height and between ½ and ¾ inch thick. (Bear in mind that younger, thinner spears will be more tender, so harvest according to your own taste.)

To harvest asparagus, simply cut the spears with a sharp knife or scissors at ground level.

Stop harvesting spears when the diameter of the spears decreases to the size of a pencil.

After harvest, fertilize your asparagus in early summer. You can top-dress with a balanced organic fertilizer, or scatter another inch of rich, weed-free compost over the decomposing mulch.

Do NOT cut down the remaining ferns in summer or you will ruin your asparagus bed. Allow the ferns to grow and mature; this replenishes the nutrients for next year’s spear production. Always leave at least two or three spears on the plant through the growing season.

Only cut back asparagus ferns AFTER the foliage has died back and turned brown or yellow. This is usually in early winter after several hard freezes. Cut the ferns back to the ground.

Fertilize the bed with a 1-inch layer of rich, weed-free compost or manure topped with 3 inches of straw, rotted sawdust or another weed-free mulch. Clean spears will push up through the mulch in spring.

Asparagus comes in few different colors: purple, white, and green! Photo credit: Picture Partners/Shutterstock

How to Store Asparagus

Asparagus does not keep for very long after it’s picked, so be sure to eat it within two or three days from harvest.

Brush off any visible dirt or give the spears a light washing with cold water before storing. It’s very important to dry washed spears thoroughly; moisture can lead to mold.

To store, bundle the spears together, wrap the stem ends of the spears in a moist paper towel, and place the bundle in a plastic bag. Store in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator.

If you have enough space in your fridge, you can also store asparagus by placing the spears in a cup of water. Keep about an inch of clean water in the cup.

Recommended Varieties

Asparagus plants are either male or female. Female plants produce berries; males plants do not expend energy on berries so they can be up to three times more productive than female plants. For this reason, growing male asparagus plants is often preferred.

Gardeners in Zones 4 to 6 have a wider selection of varieties, including ‘Jersey Giant’, ‘Jersey King’, and ‘Jersey Knight’. Older varieties ‘Mary Washington’ and ‘Martha Washington’ may produce female plants, which are not as productive as the males.

In colder climates, ‘Guelph Millennium’ and other varieties that emerge late often escape damage from spring freezes.

In warmer climates, early, heat-tolerant varieties such as ‘Apollo’ and ‘UC-157’ produce well before the weather turns hot.

White asparagus is not a variety, but simply asparagus grown in the absence of sunlight to prevent chlorophyll from developing. White asparagus is slightly sweeter, but has less fiber than green asparagus.

Purple asparagus is bred to be purple in color, but turns green when it is cooked. Purple varieties tend to have thicker spears, but fewer of them.

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newstfionline · 5 years

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I Took ‘Adulting Classes’ for Millennials

Andrew Zaleski, CityLab, Oct 29, 2018

On the eve of my wife’s 30th birthday--a milestone I, too, will soon hit--she posed a troubling question: Are we adults yet?

We certainly feel that way: We hold our own jobs, pay our own rent, cover our own bills, drive our own cars. Our credit is in order. But we don’t yet own a house and have no children--two markers commonly associated with fully-fledged adulthood (and two markers that both our sets of parents had reached well before they turned 30). And there are other gaps in our maturity: I don’t buy napkins or know how to golf; up until last year, I didn’t know how to change the oil in my car’s engine. Thankfully, last year we managed to throw a dinner party, our first, without burning the pork roast.

A vague anxiety over these known-unknowns is something of a generational hallmark. A Monday-morning scroll through the social media feed of the average 20-something might turn up a handful of friends sharing memes of dogs--looking bewildered, exasperated, or both--unironically captioned with something like: “Don’t make me adult today.”

Yes, Millennials have killed yet another thing. In this case, it’s something so fundamental that it may have seemed unkillable, but apparently isn’t: knowing how to be an adult.

Younger people need not look far on the internet to find popular condemnation from card-carrying grown-ups about our many shortcomings. We are, we are often told, simpering, self-indulgent, immune-to-difficulty know-nothings, overgrown toddlers who commute on children’s toys and demand cucumber water in our workplaces. But in our own social circles, such constructive criticism can be harder to find. Young urbanites tend to pack themselves into specific neighborhoods, cities, and living situations that have relatively fewer older residents. In such communities, knowledge on how to Seamless a meal to the doorstep is a dime a dozen, but first-hand experience in snaking a drain, cooking a meal for four, or operating a manual transmission comes at more of a premium. (To say nothing of the fact that a third of Americans between 18 and 34 are living with their parents.)

Luckily, the rough road to adulthood can be paved with adulting classes. The Adulting Collective, a startup venture out of Portland, Maine, made a big splash about two years ago after national news outlets reported on its in-person events. In its short lifespan, the Collective has offered up lessons, either guided or via online video, in such varied life skills as bike safety, holiday gift-giving for the cash-strapped, putting together a monthly budget, opening a bottle of wine without a corkscrew, and assembling a weekly nutritional plan. Their target audience: “emerging adults,” the massive 93-million-strong demographic group composed of people in their 20s and early 30s.

There are similarly structured programs across the country. At the Brooklyn Brainery, for example, you can take classes on how to run a good meeting or what Seinfeld teaches us about love. Take an online course with the Society of Grownups, sponsored by the insurance company Mass Mutual, and topics will include budgeting and how to deal with student-loan debt.

The sheer banality of many of these courses is their salient quality. They’re teaching stuff that people neither look forward to nor seem to enjoy, but implicitly recognize as part of being a grown-up: paying bills, setting a budget, calling the car insurance company, looking after your health. The joyless, quotidian chores of post-adolescence.

“Adulting is something nobody prepares you for, but you know it when it happens. It’s the unglorified part of being on your own,” says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, assistant director of the writing and communication program at Georgia Tech who taught a class on adulting in the 21st century in 2016.

In a bygone era, the ordinariness traditionally associated with growing the hell up was something few noticed--in the first half of the 20th century, 20-somethings were too busy trying not to die of the Spanish Flu or fighting Hitler to worry too much about what life skills they were failing to develop. That has now been replaced by public displays of what it means to be a self-sufficient human being, Fitzsimmons says. At the intersection of these two competing truths is the cottage industry of adulting, one nurtured by Instagram hashtags and built around how-to classes for hapless Millennials.

Born in 1989, I am a card-carrying member of the oft-derided demographic. How hapless am I? To find out, I signed up for the two action challenges the Adulting Collective offered last fall: one on nutrition and another focused on monthly budgeting. Via email, I received instructions for each of these week-long courses, which had me tackling a new skill or task each day.

When I hit 30, I intend to complete emerging adulthood fully equipped for whatever comes next.

First lesson: Hydrate! Never would I have thought the amount of water I consumed would be a point of instruction. But it turns out that young adults are notoriously poor judges of this particular basic biological need. The crash course in nutrition from the Adulting Collective that arrived in my inbox last fall was titled “Detox Before You Retox,” and it heavily emphasized hangover avoidance. Billed as a way to prepare yourself “before the next happy hour,” the instructions contained multiple steps broken down over five days. Step one: Get your basics in order, like eating your veggies, exercising, and drinking more water.

So one evening I stood in the harsh glow of my kitchen’s overhead fluorescent lighting--pitcher at the ready, glass on the countertop--applying myself to my first adulting lesson. On my smartphone I made a quick calculation: my weight, divided by 2.2, multiplied by my age, divided by 28.3, divided once more by eight. The answer: eight. More precisely, I needed to drink 7.56 cups of water to hit my proper daily intake.

This was only one of the big takeaways I received. I also learned that a morning drink of lemon water and cayenne pepper mixed with said water can help boost my metabolism, apparently. Like the unnecessarily complex hydration formula above, some of this material had the effect of making a heretofore uncomplicated thing more daunting. It was months later it finally dawned on me that a simple Google search could yield a far simpler answer for the number of glasses of water I ought to drink every day.

How did it come to this? Did previous generations have so much trouble mastering the basics?

“In an ideal world, we would all be followed around by this combination of our grandmother and Merlin who would lovingly teach us how to do each and every thing in the world,” says Kelly Williams Brown, author of the 2013 book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 535 Easy(ish) Steps. “In the absence of that, it can be nice to have resources.”

Brown’s book seems to be largely responsible for the meteoric rise of the gerund form of the word (which was short-listed by Oxford Dictionaries as the word of the year in 2016). A revised edition of Adulting was published in March. The adulting industry itself is newer. Rachel Weinstein co-founded the Adulting School (now Collective) with Katie Brunelle in fall 2016. (Brunelle has since left the business.)

A professional therapist, Weinstein would sometimes encounter younger clients who spoke about the idiosyncrasies of grown-up life with a feeling of self-conscious shame. Being overwhelmed about how to manage money or clean out their kitchen pantry were things they felt they had to hide. “I just saw a lot of my clients struggle with life, trying to be competent in skills that we’re not necessarily taught. People had this sense of internal embarrassment,” she says.

To Weinstein, this seemed like a golden business opportunity. As a group, 26-year-olds are the single biggest age cohort in the U.S., followed by people who are 25, 27, and 24. Yet unlike previous generations, the young people of today are slower to reach the milestones usually associated with adulthood: living independently, forming their own households, having children, and getting married. “Today’s young people,” as the U.S. Census Bureau reported last year, “look different from prior generations in almost every regard.”

Tempting as it might be to identify the price of avocados as the culprit in this stunted generational progress, there may be other reasons to explain the shift. A research report released in the spring by Freddie Mac cited weak wage growth and the rapid rise of both housing costs and average expenditures as some of the principal reasons. “A popular meme, ‘adulting is hard,’ provides a humorous take on the challenges faced by young adults,” the authors wrote. “Like a lot of good comedy, the phrase has a tinge of cruelty.”

The typical adulting student is someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid told to get good grades.

Geography plays a role, too: Millennials tend to choose to live in the centers of high-cost cities, and their earning power hasn’t kept pace with housing costs. Since 2000, the median home price in the U.S. has risen by a quarter, from $210,000 to $270,000, while the per capita real income for young adults has risen by only 1 percent during that same period. Throw those myriad factors together, and you have some of the explanation for why 20-somethings are renting for longer periods of time than they once did, as well as why marriage and fertility rates have dropped. Appropriately, Freddie Mac’s report was titled, “Why Is Adulting Getting Harder?”

But if you go further back, delaying the markers of adulthood does have historical precedent, says Holly Swyers, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. She recently completed a project examining adulthood in America from the Civil War to the present day. For much of the period Swyers studied, many Americans over 18 followed roughly the same trajectory as modern Millennials do: They spent their 20s figuring out life and establishing themselves financially. The script didn’t flip until the 1950s and 1960s, when the markers that defined crossing over into the world of adulthood came to mean marrying and having children.

“Marrying when you’re 20, having kids by 21, and being established is a little bit freakish in American history,” she says.

So if those Americans of yore managed to (eventually) attain maturity without the aid of online courses, why can’t Millennials?

Maybe we really are uniquely ignorant. That’s the thesis that GOP senator and Gen Xer Ben Sasse presents in his book The Vanishing American Adult. He writes that younger Americans have willfully embraced “perpetual adolescence.” Some of this is our fault, evidently: staring at our smartphones for hours on end has obliterated our attention spans. Yet Sasse also places blame at the feet of his own generation for its “reluctance to expose young people to the demands of real work.”

Weinstein, however, offers another explanation. She attributes the acute modern need for additional grow-up instruction to class and demographics. Her typical adulting student is probably someone whose childhood was tech-dependent and activity-rich, the sort of high-achiever kid who was repeatedly told to bring home good grades in order to get into a good college. “Whatever folks are really being pressured for college prep, they’re just not getting as much time and exposure at home hanging out with their family, learning how to unclog the kitchen sink, or hang a picture on the wall,” she says.

Lots of those over-scheduled and test-prepped teens of the aughts also missed out on erstwhile educational staples like home economics and shop classes, where high-school kids once learned how to darn a sock or hold a hammer; many schools began mothballing these mandatory courses in the 1990s. As a result, legions of American high-school graduates are being unleashed on the world without any basic skills. Some higher-education institutions, such as New Jersey’s Drew University, have stepped in to offer “Adulting 101” classes in things like beginner car care for their undergraduates.

The Adulting Collective doesn’t rely solely on Weinstein’s expertise for its courses, although it appears that designing an adulting curriculum is just as much of a challenge as growing up. Right now, the website contains some short posts and links to videos explaining a few skills, which is a deviation from the original idea to enlist instructors to offer online lessons. According to Weinstein, the new plan heading into 2019 is to build out a membership program that involves action challenges similar to the nutrition course I took part in. “One of the things I’ve learned as a therapist is a lot of times a little bit of accountability to somebody helps us achieve goals and get tasks done,” she says.

To Swyers, what’s extraordinary in Adulting Ed isn’t the curriculum itself, which is a pretty standard mix of self-improvement and personal finance tips. It’s the notion of branding such lessons under the “adulting” rubric. After all, classes geared toward grown-ups and their skills are all over the place. Visit any big-box hardware store and chances are there’s some sort of hands-on workshop taking place, for example. “If somebody is willing to be taught, for instance, basic kitchen skills--which people pay for all the time--they don’t call it an ‘adulting collective.’ They call it a cooking class,” Swyers says.

The difference, says Weinstein, is that the way younger adults are expected to grow older and assume our place in the world has dramatically changed: “I don’t think it’s a ‘hapless Millennial’ kind of thing at all. I just think there are things that are harder about the world today.”

Case in point: The spiraling costs of higher education. Those emerging adults are entering the workforce with massive student loans to pay off; no wonder some days all they can manage to do is Instagram bewildered-dog memes. “I have clients graduating from school with over $100,000 dollars worth of debt,” she says. “When you’re paying a mortgage’s worth of school debt every month, you’re probably going to need a little help stashing some money away in an emergency fund.”

Indeed, the most useful takeaways from my own brush with the adulting industry involved money management. Last fall’s challenge on budgeting included a chart for itemizing monthly breakdowns of expenses: so many dollars toward utilities, housing, food, clothing, and so on. After six months of following the chart I completed during the challenge, I managed to save up a sizable emergency fund of eight months’ worth of expenses--not bad for a freelance writer who graduated college with $250 to his name, and well worth the $5 I paid for the course itself.

The class was theirs. But the experience was all mine. And with my savings in order, I was freed up to stash excess cash in an additional account my wife and I hold to save for a future home down payment. With a house on the horizon, we’ve recently turned our attention to the prospect of having children sooner rather than later.

#adulting #adulting classes

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roeniusfitness-blog · 6 years

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The importance of sleep and how it affects you

Sleep. Sleep is something that most people enjoy and look forward to, but yet, don’t get very much of, especially if you’re a college student like myself or are a matured adult. Sleep is a critical part of everyone’s life, and about one-third of a person’s life is spent sleeping, provided you are getting the adequate amount of sleep. According to the American Sleep Association, 50 to 70 million U.S. adults experience symptoms of a sleep disorder. About 30 percent of the population will experience insomnia at some point in their lives, and about 10 percent of adults will deal with chronic insomnia. Therefore, if you find yourself struggling to get sleep, you’re not alone. Sleep plays a crucial role in every single person's health and well being, but yet sleep is the one thing that most people, especially Americans, are willing to compromise even more than food and money. Most people have probably heard from some successful entrepreneur, business owner, doctor, lawyer, [you name it], that achieving success takes hard work, which may require many long hour days and sleepless nights. While it may be true that achieving success takes hard work, one should actually avoid sleepless nights if they want to achieve their full potential, be successful, and be healthy. Instead, people should place a high priority on getting a full night of sleep. According to sleepassocation.org, it is estimated that 35.3% of adults get less than 7 hours of sleep during a typical 24-hour day, which is hurting their overall health. Sleep is undoubtedly one of the most crucial and essential requirements for the human body to function properly. Sleep plays a vital role in the health and well being of the human body both physically and mentally. Not only does sleep help humans maintain their physical and mental health, sleep can actually save you from many serious diseases and illnesses. Sleep also plays a vital role in your ability to achieve your fitness goals. Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist, professor at UC Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, states that sleep is “probably the greatest performance enhancing drug that most people are probably neglecting in sport, especially in terms of physical performance, skill learning, memory, and recuperative benefits.” Without the proper amount of sleep each night, one will suffer consequences to their body that will drastically lower the quality of their life. The following is how sleep affects our bodies physically and mentally, and how it relates to fitness.

How lack of sleep affects your physical performance:

Trying to accomplish your everyday tasks while also trying to get into shape is a tough thing to do on it own, but factoring in inadequate amounts of sleep to that equation makes it even harder of a task for anybody to accomplish. Sleep plays an integral part in one’s ability to get in shape. A study done by a Matthew Walker shows why and how sleep affects one’s ability to perform in any athletic environment. Walker states: “In terms of motor skill performance [the movements’ related to large muscles such as legs, arms, etc. that are critical for athletic performance], lack of sleep drastically worsens your peak muscle strength, peak vertical jump height, peak running speed, build up of lactic acid, and decreases the ability of your lungs to expire carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen.” All of these factors play a crucial role in your body’s ability to lose weight and get fit; thereby, slowing your body’s ability to achieve your desired results. The fast production of lactic acid causes more muscle fatigue and post-exercise muscle soreness, thus making it harder to complete workouts consistently. Also, when you’re sore and tired, you may find yourself making more excuses as to why you shouldn’t go to the gym and eating unhealthy foods, which will make your workouts and your progress limited. Not being able to perform every day at peak performance with any exercise limits your body’s ability to get the most out of your workouts, and when you add in not being able to get the needed amount of oxygen, you’re going to drastically lower your ability to perform at a high level during your workouts. Walker states that “practice does not make perfect, practice with a night of sleep makes perfect because you are 20-30% better in your skilled performance compared to where you were at the end of your workout session the day before.” This amount of skilled performance could drastically lengthen or shorten the time it takes for you to start seeing results. Sleep is so important that if someone gets 6 or fewer hours of sleep during one night of sleep, your time to physical exhaustion will drop by up to 30%. So for example, say you are preparing for a marathon and are able to run 20 miles before noticing physical exhaustion. You can spend all your time training to run that marathon and be in great condition, but if you get 6 or fewer hours of sleep the night before the marathon race, you will likely be more noticeably physically exhausted by mile 14 compared to mile 20. Not only will sleep limit your ability to perform but if you are getting inadequate amounts of sleep, you are much more prone to injury. Walker found that in the difference of 9 hours versus 5 hours of sleep, there is a 60% increase in the probability of injury risk throughout a season of any sport. Lack of sleep affects all of us with negative side effects, but it affects each gender differently. When males experience lack of sleep, their testosterone is lowered to the level of someone ten years older than them. When females experience inadequate amounts of sleep, their fertility-related hormones are negatively affected.

How sleep affects your mental performance

Have you ever noticed that the less sleep you get the crankier you are throughout the day, and the more sleep you get the happier you are? This testament of crankiness versus happiness in itself is proof of the importance of sleep in our lives. According to a study from UCLA, sleep deprivation disrupts brain cells and their ability to communicate. While sleeping, your body’s cells are being reenergized, waste from your brain is being cleared out, and your memory and ability to learn are being supported. How many times have you been suffering from headache and then you slept for some time and wake up feeling 100% better? This is the effect that a sound sleep session has on your mind as well as body. Sleep is also essential for learning. A person needs adequate amounts of sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button. Sleep “future proofs” the facts in the brain. Without sleep the memory circuits in the brain become waterlogged and essentially makes it extremely hard to absorb the information. A study was conducted on a number of healthy adults who were placed into two groups. One group was a sleep-deprived group, and the other group got the adequate amount of sleep. The next day, they were placed in an MRI scanner and were presented the task of trying to learn a whole list of new facts that they have never seen before. The MRI results showed that the sleep-deprived group had a 40% deficit in the brains ability to make new memories without sleep. This is difference between getting a 100% on an exam versus failing the exam, which brings me to the importance of sleep and education. In today’s academic world, students are becoming accustomed to getting no sleep so that they can study for exams or do homework. The U.S. National Institute of Health found that about 70% of college students are attaining insufficient sleep. This inadequate amount of sleep is then reflected during their day. As a student myself, I want to emphasize the importance of sleep to any student who thinks that staying up late for an exam is going to better their likelihood of passing. Inadequate amounts of sleep are also related to many diseases as well. If someone get less than 6 hours of sleep per night on average, they are 200% more like to get some type of cancer, inadequate sleep produces more beta-amyloid which is a protein that is a precursor to Alzheimer’s, and lack of sleep can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Although all of these facts may be scary, there are ways to prevent inadequate amounts of sleep.

What you can do to make sure you are getting enough sleep

The best practices to avoid inadequate sleep: 1. Avoid Caffeine/energy drinks caffeine after 2 pm 2. Go to bed at the same time, and wake up at the same time. 3. Surround yourself with darkness before bed, and limit screen time to allow for melatonin hormone to build up. 4. Make your room colder to around 65-67 degree because your brain actually needs to cool down before sleeping 5. Avoid Alcohol. Alcohol is a sedative, which deprives of getting naturalistic sleep. 6. Avoid naps in the evening as it releases some of the sleepiness that is built up during the day. If you find yourself wanting to take a nap, the first question you need to ask yourself is “why do I need a nap?” Naps should not be taken in the afternoon as it releases some of the sleepiness that is built up throughout the day. Sleep is not like a debt where you can pay it off by sleeping extra long on the weekend.

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