#does better pandemic care than our world in the year 2020 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

appalachiananarchist · 3 years

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1. Vaccine data on preventing disease

I will start this post by summarizing (hopefully as simply as I can) a handful of studies pertaining to how well the vaccines work at preventing disease. I will start by looking at some of the early vaccine studies for the mRNA vaccines (as these are the ones I have researched most heavily). These are older studies done back before vaccine distribution really got big. In fact, I remember doing a journal club meeting on one of these articles sometime late last fall.

The first is one of the Pfizer studies. This one excluded people with compromised immunity which I understand, but angered me greatly when it came out (as a person with compromised immunity). Note that it was designed and funded by Pfizer, though when you look at the protocol and stats it appears well-designed. Like other studies discussed here, infection with COVID-19 used the FDA definition which is a positive test with at least one symptom (which can be basically anything). However, in summary, they found that a 2-dose regimen offered 95% protection against COVID-19 infection per the above definition. (SOURCE)

The second study (on Moderna) was funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the study protocol was designed by Moderna with their assistance. This study also used the FDA definition of COVID-19 as a positive test with a symptom and excluded the immune compromised. However, it found that a vaccination was 94.1% efficacious in preventing COVID-19 infection. (SOURCE)

Now that that part is out of the way I wanted to go over some more real-world data; that is, how are these vaccines actually functioning out there? Are they working on a population level like these studies suggest they ought to? Well...

The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from April through July of 2021 shows that vaccination reduces chances of catching COVID 5 fold. This report was important in examining how the vaccines are responding since the delta variant of COVID-19 has started to surge. (SOURCE)

A study out of California found in July of 2021 that COVID-19 infection rates in unvaccinated people are ~5X higher than in vaccinated people. (SOURCE) They do raise the concerns that more studies are needed on how long immunity lasts and whether it will wane.

Another study examined COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness among health care workers, a group that is heavily exposed to COVID-19. They looked at whether the vaccines would prevent disease (in their study, defined as a positive test with at least one symptom). They specifically looked at the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna). The study found "a single dose...to be 82% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 and 2 doses to be 94% effective." (SOURCE)

And before you say "but those were only symptomatic cases!" here is another study also looking at health care workers. This study spanning December 2020-March 2021 basically tested all of their enrollees for 13 weeks and found that those who received 1 vaccine dose had 80% lower chances of getting COVID, while those with 2 doses had a 90% lower chance of getting COVID. This testing was done regardless of symptom burden. (SOURCE)

There is ongoing data collection on how long immunity lasts with some new reports (warning - following study is not yet peer reviewed) suggests that vaccine efficacy may drop to ~85% after 6 months in preventing disease, but efficacy in preventing severe disease remains very high, at 97%. Still, though, 85% is pretty good. (SOURCE)

So here are just a TEENY TINY number of the many studies coming out regarding the vaccines. I could sit here and list so many more, but then this post would be way too bloated and repetitive because they all say the same thing: the vaccine works. This conclusion is both consistent and reproducible, which when talking about scientific studies, means there is some good research backing it up. And before anyone says anything--YES, you can still catch COVID after getting a vaccine. Nothing works 100% of the time. Just because my car has an air bag and I use seat belts doesn't mean I won't get injured if I crash my car. But based on the available data, it works well in preventing infection in a lot of people, and furthermore, there is one other MAJOR benefit to the vaccine which I will discuss below.

2. Vaccine data on preventing severe disease:

Probably the most important realization that has come out of the past few months is our understanding of how robustly these vaccines effect disease course and severity. I am from eastern KY so one of the big hospital systems in my area is Appalachian Regional Health, which spans 13 facilities. According to their latest stats, they have 213 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Of those, 16 are vaccinated. That means a little over 92% of the COVID patients there sick enough to need hospitalized are unvaccinated. For further reference, another major hospital in the region, Pikeville Medical, today reported that 70 of their 88 hospitalized COVID patients (~80%) are unvaccinated, and 20 their 24 (83%) ICU COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated. Another regional hospital, Kings Daughters, had recently reported that 86.5% of those hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated and 100% of COVID patients in their ICU are unvaccinated. So before I even get to national statistics, you can look at these numbers as already see a trend, and I would hope you can see that these numbers are way too high and too consistent to be coincidence. For sources on these numbers you can visit the ARH, PMC, & KDMC websites or facebook pages where they post their stats (HERE, HERE, and HERE)

Now to post a few studies backing this up:

A recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (we talked about this one earlier) shows that vaccination reduces chances of hospitalization due to COVID-19 by ten fold. (SOURCE) The same report shows that vaccination reduces the risk of death due to COVID-19 by ten fold, as well!

Another recent study that incorporated delta variant data into their research has found that "unvaccinated adults aged ≥18 years are 17 times more likely to be hospitalized compared with vaccinated adults." (SOURCE).

Another study coming out of California, also post-delta surge, showed similar results, with hospitalization rates ~29X higher in unvaccinated people. (SOURCE)

Another study looked at how the vaccine protects adults over age 65, which is going to be a more vulnerable group. It found that adults >65 who received 1 dose of a COVID vaccine saw a 64% reduction in hospitalization if they contracted disease, and those with 2 doses saw a 94% reduction in hospitalization with disease. (SOURCE)

To me, studies like these are really important. What we are seeing over and over again right now is that our health care system is being absolutely flooded by unvaccinated COVID patients who need to be hospitalized. This is stressing the health system in ways it was not built to endure. We do not have enough equipment or staff to manage the volume of patients we are seeing.

Sadly, this does not just affect COVID patients. When a bunch of unvaccinated people get sick and take up ICU beds, that means anyone who gets sick with non-COVID problems, like strokes and heart attacks, also suffer when there aren't beds left for them. For example, your grandmother who developed a bad bacterial pneumonia and is in respiratory distress may die because an unvaccinated COVID-19 patient got there first and took the last vent in the hospital, and there aren’t any ICU beds to transfer her to nearby because the wait lists are all so long because all the ICUs are also filled with unvaccinated COVID patients. I'd argue this is the biggest problem we are facing right now regarding the pandemic even if this problem is invisible to people who don't work in healthcare. Please believe me when I say this: we are drowning, and we are drowning because of unvaccinated COVID patients who are getting severely ill. This is completely unnecessary and avoidable when we are seeing over and over again that vaccination does wonders to prevent you from getting sick enough to need the hospital at all.

Don’t believe me still? I want each of you reading this to visit the webpage for some of your local hospitals. Most of them are posting daily or weekly COVID admission and death statistics. Just take a look at them. Take a look at who is getting admitted and who is dying.

3. Vaccine safety:

Any vaccine, medication, herbal supplement, or what have you that goes into your body carries the risk of an adverse side effect. As a result each of us has to ask ourselves, do the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks? To answer that we need to better understand the risks associated with COVID-19 vaccination, and that means turning back to the data we have available.

According to NYT Vaccine Tracker, there have been 5.73 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide since its release. This generates an abundance of data for us to work with--more than we have for most medications you take every day--in regards to understanding safety profiles of these immunizations. Given that impressive number, we are by no means seeing widespread death or disability popping up due to the vaccine, but let's get more specific. We have seen a couple common possible adverse effects:

Flu-like symptoms: Most common by far is going to be flu-like symptoms or redness/pain at the injection site. This is actually a good side effect because it means that the vaccine is doing what it is meant to do. I won't talk much more about this one because I doubt flu-like symptoms are the reason people are scared of the vaccine. But for most of you, if you have any side effects at all, this will be as bad as it gets. You are more likely to have these symptoms after dose #2.

Anaphylaxis: Anaphylaxis can occur in anyone when you encounter a substance you have a try allergy to. This is going to be a rare side effect (2 to 5 people per million, or 0.00025%), but is also why you are asked to wait 15-30 minutes to be monitored after receiving your vaccine. That way if you show any signs of distress you can be given immediate treatment. Any time you get a vaccine or start a new medicine a severe allergy is a possible reaction, but if you already KNOW that you are highly allergic to something in the vaccine, you should not receive it.

TTP: This is a disorder that causes abnormal clotting or bleeding. It seems to be associated exclusively with the J&J or AstraZeneca adenoviral-vector vaccines based on current data trends. While rare, this is going to be the most serious adverse effect from the immunization. Data suggest the highest risk is for women under 50, but it is still remarkably rare with only 45 confirmed cases of TTP after over 14 million vaccine doses given. This is an incredibly, incredibly low incidence. Of note, however, patients with the actual COVID-19 virus have a SIGNIFICANTLY increased risk of clotting, especially in severe disease. This increased risk may be due to the production of auto-antibodies in response to COVID-19 infection. Summary: your risk of a blood clot is much higher with the actual virus than the vaccine.

Myocarditis/Pericarditis: These are conditions involving inflammation around the heart tissues or heart muscle. There does appear to be an increased rate of myo/pericarditis after vaccination. This is more common in teenaged males who received an mRNA vaccine (such as Moderna or Pfizer). This is also very rare. According to VAERS, 1404 cases of possible myo/pericarditis were reported after vaccination through September of 2021, though only 817 were able to be confirmed. A CDC report from June 2021 estimated about 60 cases of myo/pericarditis may develop per 1 million vaccine series completed (if you are male aged 12-17; otherwise the rate is lower). However, that same report also estimated the prevention of 71 ICU admissions, 2 death, and 215 hospitalizations among that same group per million vaccines given. Again it is a risk-benefit discussion, but here the numbers definitely point to a benefit overall. Vaccine-induced myocarditis and/or pericarditis are generally one-time events with an excellent prognosis, so rarely represent a threat to life. As the authors of the study linked above stated, "The absolute incidence was extremely low, cases were mild, and all patients recovered. Fear of myocarditis or pericarditis should not influence COVID-19 vaccine decisions."

Guillain-Barré Syndrome: This is a disorder of the nervous system that can cause temporary weakness and paralysis. It is commonly seen after immunizations or infections with various pathogens. It has been associated with adenovirus-vector vaccines (J&J, AstraZeneca) at a very low rate (about 0.0008%) with J&J reporting ~100 cases per 12.2 million doses per VAERS data, and 227 cases out of 51.4 million doses given per EU/EEA to the EMA again through June 2021. People with a history of Guillan-barre are more likely to get it again, so your risk is probably slightly higher if you have had issues with this before, so people with this history may want to opt for an mRNA vaccine which has not been associated with this.

4. Addressing Common Concerns

If the vaccine works, why do you feel unsafe if I don't get it? A vaccinated person is more protected from you than if they were not vaccinated, but no vaccine (or medical treatment in general) works 100% of the time, so there is always a risk of spreading disease no matter what. This is true for every single vaccine in history so COVID shots aren't special in this way. The data supports indisputibly that the vaccine reduces the RISK of getting COVID, but does not protect against it perfectly, so people should still use common sense. Also, vaccine works much, much better when everyone gets them, which is why vaccinated people enourage others to get the shot too. Think about it. Most of the studies I linked said the vaccines were in the range of 90-95% effective at preventing disease. If everyone in the room is vaccinated, the chances any of them (with their 90-95% protection) are infected and spreading COVID is going to be lower than a room of unvaccinated people, who have no protection against disease. Think now of yourself as a vaccinated bystander inside each of those rooms. In room 1, there is a low rate of COVID-19 being spread around, so your vaccine-induced immunity is now bolstered by the fact that there is also low spread in the community, making your overall chances of getting sick extremely low. In room 2 there is likely moderate to high spread of COVID-19 virus, meaning that even if you are vaccinated, because your vaccine can never be 100% effective, you sadly still have a chance of getting sick (even if it is lower than it would be if you were not vaccinated). Does that make sense?

If vaccines work, why do I have to wear a mask? Same reason as above. We can get into masks later, but point is, both offer protection against the spread of COVID-19, but neither is 100% surefire perfect immunity. Human bodies just don't work that way, sadly. By using both, you increase your chances of preventing catching or spreading disease more than if you did either one in isolation. Bringing back the car example, a seat belt is good, an air bag is also good, but I'd definitely prefer to get a car that has both a seat belt AND an air bag.

Why is the vaccine not approved for kids? Lacking data on safety and efficacy, as young children were excluded from many of the trials that looked at these vaccines.

We don't have long term safety data. It is unprecedented for an immunization to cause new side effects years later. These shots work by activating your immune system. Any problems they are going to cause will occur surrounding that period of immune activation (meaning, at most a few weeks after you get it). That is why this vaccines typically have any side effects show up within days to weeks of administration. The idea that novel side effects will pop up YEARS later is unlikely. Now, a vaccination may have cause side effect that has long-lasting health implications, such as developing TTP and having a stroke from it, but my point is that will start within weeks of vaccination, not randomly 5 years later after the vaccine has long since left your system. As a result, any side effects from the vaccine are things we will already be seeing right now. The virus, though... I can tell you that scar tissue in lungs doesn't magically vanish, and brain damage from hypoxia doesn't vanish. I can tell you that those who develop a generalized COVID inflammatory response are dealing with symptoms months post-infection. I can tell you that the virus itself is causing irreversible health problems and disability, and we KNOW that right now without waiting another 5 years. And we know that being unvaccinated increases your risk of getting sick enough to have these permanent disabilities. We also don't have time to wait 5-10 years on more data to deal with this problem. Action has to be taken now, or a lot of people won't be alive in 5 years to talk about the long term effects. I wish none of this had ever happened, but it did, and we have to do something or it won't get any better. This is a global pandemic; we have to cooperate with each other to eradicate it.

Vaccines should not be mandated by the state or companies. I don't really disagree. I do not think authority figures should be able to tell any person that they have to put any substance into their body against their will or else face starvation or homelessness, which is a real threat if people get fired over their vaccine status. HOWEVER neither your nor my beliefs on this topic change the fact that the vaccine works and is VITAL to keeping our health system from collapsing, and you really should be choosing to get it on your own based on the available data regardless of what your boss is saying. Please don't refuse to get the vaccine just to "send a message" or take a stand against your boss or whoever, because I promise you they will fire you without a second thought, and the only person you are sending a message to is that little grandma we talked about earlier who needs intubated but can't find a free vent or ICU bed, so dies in the emergency room while unvaccinated people take up all the space in the hospital.

5. In Summary

There are risks associated with COVID-19 vaccination, as with any vaccine or medicine, but they are remarkably, remarkably low. The potential benefits of vaccination are significant, with a decreased risk of infection, hospitalization, and severe disease among those who are vaccinated. This benefit extends to the community as well, in that it means you are less likely to catch (and therefore spread) COVID-19, increase the rate of herd immunity in your area which protects everyone (especially the medically vulnerable), and reduces preventable, unnecessary COVID-19 admissions that are weighing down the health system and clogging up hospital beds. If you look at this purely from a risk-benefit standpoint there is no mathematical reason not to favor getting the vaccine, and I strongly urge everyone who can safely do so to schedule it.

I suppose my take-away statement is this: I am a physician. If you are willing to trust my advice when you show up to the hospital in respiratory distress, trust my advice now in trying to prevent you from getting to that point.

Please.

#covid-19 #pandemic #covid vaccine #covid-19 vaccination #medblr #medical #population health #preventative medicine

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path-of-my-childhood · 3 years

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Musicians On Musicians: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

By: Patrick Doyle for Rolling Stone Date: November 13th 2020

On songwriting secrets, making albums at home, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic.

Taylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.”

Swift showed up without a team, doing her own hair and makeup. In addition to being two of the most famous pop songwriters in the world, Swift and McCartney have spent the past year on similar journeys. McCartney, isolated at home in the U.K., recorded McCartney III. Like his first solo album, in 1970, he played nearly all of the instruments himself, resulting in some of his most wildly ambitious songs in a long time. Swift also took some new chances, writing over email with the National’s Aaron Dessner and recording the raw Folklore, which abandons arena pop entirely in favor of rich character songs. It’s the bestselling album of 2020.

Swift listened to McCartney III as she prepared for today’s conversation; McCartney delved into Folkore. Before the photo shoot, Swift caught up with his daughters Mary (who would be photographing them) and Stella (who designed Swift’s clothes; the two are close friends). “I’ve met Paul a few times, mostly onstage at parties, but we’ll get to that later,” Swift writes. “Soon he walks in with his wife, Nancy. They’re a sunny and playful pair, and I immediately feel like this will be a good day. During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. We walk into his office for a chat, and after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite lyric of his and sign it. He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. That’s around the time when we start talking about music.”

Taylor Swift: I think it’s important to note that if this year had gone the way that we thought it was going to go, you and I would have played Glastonbury this year, and instead, you and I both made albums in isolation.

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

Swift: And I remember thinking it would have been so much fun because the times that I’ve run into you, I correlate with being some of the most fun nights of my life. I was at a party with you, when everybody just started playing music. And it was Dave Grohl playing, and you...

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

Swift: Yes, I was playing his song called “Best of You,” but I was playing it on piano, and he didn’t recognize it until about halfway through. I just remember thinking, “Are you the catalyst for the most fun times ever?” Is it your willingness to get up and play music that makes everyone feel like this is a thing that can happen tonight?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very... Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice... I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: I listened to your new record. And I loved a lot of things about it, but it really did feel like kind of a flex to write, produce, and play every instrument on every track. To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, “I can do all this on my own if I have to.”

McCartney: Well, I don’t think like that, I must admit. I just picked up some of these instruments over the years. We had a piano at home that my dad played, so I picked around on that. I wrote the melody to “When I’m 64” when I was, you know, a teenager.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: When the Beatles went to Hamburg, there were always drum kits knocking around, so when there was a quiet moment, I’d say, “Do you mind if I have a knock around?” So I was able to practice, you know, without practicing. That’s why I play right-handed. Guitar was just the first instrument I got. Guitar turned to bass; it also turned into ukulele, mandolin. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wow,” but it’s really only two or three instruments.

Swift: Well, I think that’s downplaying it a little bit. In my mind, it came with a visual of you being in the country, kind of absorbing the sort of do-it-yourself [quality] that has had to come with the quarantine and this pandemic. I found that I’ve adapted a do-it-yourself mentality to a lot of things in my career that I used to outsource. I’m just wondering what a day of recording in the pandemic looked like for you.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music - I had to do an instrumental for a film thing - so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas... “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

So when lockdown happened, I was in L.A., and we kind of got stuck there. It’s not a terrible place to be stuck. We were there for four months maybe, and during that time, I sent an email to Aaron Dessner and I said, “Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something, even if we’re just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen...”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff - you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: Yeah, and it turned out he had been writing instrumental tracks to keep from absolutely going crazy during the pandemic as well, so he sends me this file of probably 30 instrumentals, and the first one I opened ended up being a song called “Cardigan,” and it really happened rapid-fire like that. He’d send me a track; he’d make new tracks, add to the folder; I would write the entire top line for a song, and he wouldn’t know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where I was going to put the chorus. I had originally thought, “Maybe I’ll make an album in the next year, and put it out in January or something,” but it ended up being done and we put it out in July. And I just thought there are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, “How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?” If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore.

McCartney: And it’s more music for yourself than music that’s got to go do a job. My thing was similar to that: After having done this little bit of film music, I had a lot of stuff that I had been working on, but I’d said, “I’m just going home now,” and it’d be left half-finished. So I just started saying, “Well, what about that? I never finished that.” So we’d pull it out, and we said, “Oh, well, this could be good.” And because it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do some.” So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just really trying to do stuff that I fancy.

I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell you the truth, what I thought was, “I’ll be taking it home tonight, Mary will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone, maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, ‘What did you do today?’ And I’m going to go, ‘Oh,’ and then get my phone and play it for them.” So this became the ritual.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

McCartney: Yeah, well, this was being done in 2020, and I didn’t really think about it. I think everyone expected great things of 2020. “It’s gonna be great! Look at that number! 2020! Auspicious!” Then suddenly Covid hit, and it was like, “That’s gonna be auspicious all right, but maybe for the wrong reasons.” Someone said to me, “Well, you put out McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, and that was 1970, and then you did McCartney II in 1980.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to release this in 2020 just for whatever you call it, the numerology...”

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13... 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find...

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

Swift: Yeah, it’s lucky for me. It’s my birthday. It’s all these weird coincidences of good things that have happened. Now, when I see it places, I look at it as a sign that things are going the way they’re supposed to. They may not be good now, they could be painful now, but things are on a track. I don’t know, I love the numerology.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s...

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Yeah, one of my favorite artists, Bon Iver, he has this thing with the number 22. But I was also wondering: You have always kind of seeked out a band or a communal atmosphere with like, you know, the Beatles and Wings, and then Egypt Station. I thought it was interesting when I realized you had made a record with no one else. I just wondered, did that feel natural?

McCartney: It’s one of the things I’ve done. Like with McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself. So on that album, which I didn’t really expect to do very well, I don’t think it did. But people sort of say, “I like that. It was a very casual album.” It didn’t really have to mean anything. So I’ve done that, the play-everything-myself thing. And then I discovered synths and stuff, and sequencers, so I had a few of those at home. I just thought I’m going to play around with this and record it, so that became McCartney II. But it’s a thing I do. Certain people can do it. Stevie Wonder can do it. Stevie Winwood, I believe, has done it. So there are certain people quite like that.

When you’re working with someone else, you have to worry about their variances. Whereas your own variance, you kind of know it. It’s just something I’ve grown to like. Once you can do it, it becomes a little bit addictive. I actually made some records under the name the Fireman.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us]... We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper...” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

Swift: Yeah, I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you. And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called “This Is What You Came For” that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote “Manic Monday,” they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.

McCartney: Yeah, it also proves you can do something without the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write under the name Bernard Webb.

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

McCartney: As Americans call it, Ber-nard Webb. I did the Fireman thing. I worked with a producer, a guy called Youth, who’s this real cool dude. We got along great. He did a mix for me early on, and we got friendly. I would just go into the studio, and he would say, “Hey, what about this groove?” and he’d just made me have a little groove going. He’d say, “You ought to put some bass on it. Put some drums on it.” I’d just spend the whole day putting stuff on it. And we’d make these tracks, and nobody knew who Fireman was for a while. We must have sold all of 15 copies.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

Swift: I think it’s so cool that you do projects that are just for you. Because I went with my family to see you in concert in 2010 or 2011, and the thing I took away from the show most was that it was the most selfless set list I had ever seen. It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered thinking, “I’ve got to remember that,” that you do that set list for your fans.

McCartney: You do that, do you?

Swift: I do now. I think that learning that lesson from you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want to hear “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” and I’ve played them 300 million times, play them the 300-millionth-and-first time. I think there are times to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they line up.

McCartney: I always remembered going to concerts as a kid, completely before the Beatles, and I really hoped they would play the ones I loved. And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this would be a big deal for me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.

Swift: Yeah, it feels like a bond. It feels like that person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want to give even more back, in terms of applause, in terms of dedication. And I just remembered feeling that bond in the crowd, and thinking, “He’s up there playing these Beatles songs, my dad is crying, my mom is trying to figure out how to work her phone because her hands are shaking so much.” Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special. I love learning lessons and not having to learn them the hard way. Like learning nice lessons I really value.

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks... it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

Swift: That’s the best. I want to hear current things, too, to update me on where the artist is. I was wondering about lyrics, and where you were lyrically when you were making this record. Because when I was making Folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I wrote songs imagining I was, like, a pioneer woman in a forbidden love affair [laughs]. I was completely...

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture - the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school...

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

McCartney: All of them did, yeah. It was important, but it worked pretty well, because when they kind of reached adulthood, they would meet other kids who might have gone to private schools, who were a little less grounded.

And they could be the budding mothers to [kids]. I remember Mary had a friend, Orlando. Not Bloom. She used to really counsel him. And it’s ’cause she’d gone through that. Obviously, they got made fun of, my kids. They’d come in the classroom and somebody would sing, “Na na na na,” you know, one of the songs. And they’d have to handle that. They’d have to front it out.

Swift: Did that give you a lot of anxiety when you had kids, when you felt like all this pressure that’s been put on me is spilling over onto them, that they didn’t sign up for it? Was that hard for you?

McCartney: Yeah, a little bit, but it wasn’t like it is now. You know, we were just living a kind of semi-hippie life, where we withdrew from a lot of stuff. The kids would be doing all the ordinary things, and their school friends would be coming up to the house and having parties, and it was just great. I remember one lovely evening when it was Stella’s birthday, and she brought a bunch of school kids up. And, you know, they’d all ignore me. It happens very quickly. At first they’re like, “Oh, yeah, he’s like a famous guy,” and then it’s like [yawns]. I like that. I go in the other room and suddenly I hear this music going on. And one of the kids, his name was Luke, and he’s doing break dancing.

Swift: Ohhh!

McCartney: He was a really good break dancer, so all the kids are hanging out. That allowed them to be kind of normal with those kids. The other thing is, I don’t live fancy. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an embarrassment, if I’ve got someone coming to visit me, or who I know…

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

McCartney: Who’s got a nice big house, you know. Quincy Jones came to see me and I’m, like, making him a veggie burger or something. I’m doing some cooking. This was after I’d lost Linda, in between there. But the point I’m making is that I’m very consciously thinking, “Oh, God, Quincy’s got to be thinking, ‘What is this guy on? He hasn’t got big things going on. It’s not a fancy house at all. And we’re eating in the kitchen! He’s not even got the dining room going,’” you know?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

McCartney: But that’s me. I’m awkward like that. That’s my kind of thing. Maybe I should have, like, a big stately home. Maybe I should get a staff. But I think I couldn’t do that. I’d be so embarrassed. I’d want to walk around dressed as I want to walk around, or naked, if I wanted to.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

Swift: I remember what I wanted to know about, which is lyrics. Like, when you’re in this kind of strange, unparalleled time, and you’re making this record, are lyrics first? Or is it when you get a little melodic idea?

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics - for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and...

Swift: Oh, I know that song - “The Kiss of Venus”?

McCartney: Yeah, “The Kiss of Venus.” And I just thought, “That’s a nice phrase.” So I was actually just taking phrases out of the book, harmonic sounds. And the book is talking about the maths of the universe, and how when things orbit around each other, and if you trace all the patterns, it becomes like a lotus flower.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack - I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use - kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

McCartney: I think a love of words is a great thing, particularly if you’re going to try to write a lyric, and for me, it’s like, “What is this going to say to that person?” I often feel like I’m writing to someone who is not doing so well. So I’m trying to write songs that might help. Not in a goody-goody, crusading kind of way, but just thinking there have been so many times in my life when I’ve heard a song and felt so much better. I think that’s the angle I want, that inspirational thing.

I remember once, a friend of mine from Liverpool, we were teenagers and we were going to a fairground. He was a schoolmate, and we had these jackets that had a little fleck in the material, which was the cool thing at the time.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember - this is what happens with songs - there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair - it was in a place called Sefton Park - and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house - I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: I love that, when people stop me in the street and say, “Oh, I was going through an illness and I listened to a lot of your stuff, and I’m better now and it got me through,” or kids will say, “It got me through exams.” You know, they’re studying, they’re going crazy, but they put your music on. I’m sure it happens with a lot of your fans. It inspires them, you know?

Swift: Yeah, I definitely think about that as a goal. There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way - like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

McCartney: I think a lot of people have found that. I would say to people, “I feel a bit guilty about saying I’m actually enjoying this quarantine thing,” and people go, “Yeah, I know, don’t say it to anyone.” A lot of people are really suffering.

Swift: Because there’s a lot in life that’s arbitrary. Completely and totally arbitrary. And [the quarantine] is really shining a light on that, and also a lot of things we have that we outsource that you can actually do yourself.

McCartney: I love that. This is why I said I live simply. That’s, like, at the core of it. With so many things, something goes wrong and you go, “Oh, I’ll get somebody to fix that.” And then it’s like, “No, let me have a look at it...”

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really - talk about dumpy - little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down - “I’ll have that one” - and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology - it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

The weird thing was, Stella went up to Scotland recently and I said, “Isn’t it there?” and she said, “No.” Anyway, I searched for it. Nobody remembered it. Somebody said, “Well, there’s a pile of wood in the corner of one of the barns, maybe that’s it. Maybe they used it for firewood.” I said, “No, it’s not firewood.” Anyway, we found it, and do you know how joyous that was for me? I was like, “You found my table?!” Somebody might say that’s a bit boring.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

Swift: And I was just thinking, “I really want to spend time with my hands, making something for their children.” So I made this really cool flying-squirrel stuffed animal that I sent to one of my friends. I sent a teddy bear to another one, and I started making these little silk baby blankets with embroidery. It’s gotten pretty fancy. And I’ve been painting a lot.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: It’s a bit of a romantic dream. I agree with you, though, I think you’ve got to have dreams, particularly this year. You’ve got to have something to escape to. When you say “escapism,” it sounds like a dirty word, but this year, it definitely wasn’t. And in the books you’re reading, you’ve gone into that world. That’s, I think, a great thing. Then you come back out. I normally will read a lot before I go to bed. So I’ll come back out, then I’ll go to sleep, so I think it really is nice to have those dreams that can be fantasies or stuff you want to achieve.

Swift: You’re creating characters. This was the first album where I ever created characters, or wrote about the life of a real-life person. There’s a song called “The Last Great American Dynasty” that’s about this real-life heiress who lived just an absolutely chaotic, hectic...

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

Swift: Her name was Rebekah Harkness. And she lived in the house that I ended up buying in Rhode Island. That’s how I learned about her. But she was a woman who was very, very talked about, and everything she did was scandalous. I found a connection in that. But I also was thinking about how you write “Eleanor Rigby” and go into that whole story about what all these people in this town are doing and how their lives intersect, and I hadn’t really done that in a very long time with my music. It had always been so microscope personal.

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: I was, before my luck changed [laughs]. I still write breakup songs. I love a good breakup song. Because somewhere in the world, I always have a friend going through a breakup, and that will make me write one.

McCartney: Yeah, this goes back to this thing of me and John: When you’ve got a formula, break it. I don’t have a formula. It’s the mood I’m in. So I love the idea of writing a character. And, you know, trying to think, “What am I basing this on?” So “Eleanor Rigby” was based on old ladies I knew as a kid. For some reason or other, I got great relationships with a couple of local old ladies. I was thinking the other day, I don’t know how I met them, it wasn’t like they were family. I’d just run into them, and I’d do their shopping for them.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime - because I was born actually in the war - and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios - you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents... it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal - we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves - this crystal attracts them - they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

Swift: One thing I just find so cool about you is that you really do seem to have the joy of it, still, just no matter what. You seem to have the purest sense of joy of playing an instrument and making music, and that’s just the best, I think.

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

McCartney: I must tell you a story I told Mary the other day, which is just one of my favorite little sort of Beatles stories. We were in a terrible, big blizzard, going from London to Liverpool, which we always did. We’d be working in London and then drive back in the van, just the four of us with our roadie, who would be driving. And this was a blizzard. You couldn’t see the road. At one point, it slid off and it went down an embankment. So it was “Ahhh,” a bunch of yelling. We ended up at the bottom. It didn’t flip, luckily, but so there we are, and then it’s like, “Oh, how are we going to get back up? We’re in a van. It’s snowing, and there’s no way.” We’re all standing around in a little circle, and thinking, “What are we going to do?” And one of us said, “Well, something will happen.” And I thought that was just the greatest. I love that, that’s a philosophy.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: And it did. We sort of went up the bank, we thumbed a lift, we got the lorry driver to take us, and Mal, our roadie, sorted the van and everything. So that was kind of our career. And I suppose that’s like how I ended up being a musician and a songwriter: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

#this just might be the longest post I have ever posted #I have so much work so I'll read and edit later #taylor swift #paul mccartney #Rolling Stone magazine #interview #folklore era

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creatingnikki · 3 years

Text

What 2020 has taught me

1. Those things that seem like content for sci fi or pure fiction are actually things that can happen. To the entire world. Like a pandemic. And to you. Like a seizure.

2. Everyone is sad. Everyone is struggling. In different ways and in different measures. Makes no one special. But you still get to feel sad for yourself and be compassionate towards others. But it's also okay to draw boundaries because you're everyone too. Remember, not special? You're sad and trying to deal with it too.

3. Every job you have will not add value to your life. It will not teach you new things or give you people you'll want to stay in touch with. Sometimes some jobs will only be a season of your life. Even if the season lasts for over a year. It's okay.

4. You know how you thought picking a college and picking a major and picking your first job and picking a specific industry were all the career decisions you had to make? Yeah, no. It's never a one time thing. You could have a job as a marketing strategist for two years and then want nothing to do with it. And then you'll have to make another decision and work towards it. So I'd like to call it moves. It's like chess. You always have to make a move. And it always has to be strategic, yes. But the truth is in your 20s it probably won't. Even if you try. And as long as you're trying, you'll be fine.

5. You may have different sorts of friends like the one you only talk to about kdrama with or the one you met when you went book shopping alone and the friendship is all about books really. That's normal. But irrespective of why and how you became friends with them, if you consider them a friend then there has to be this basic sense of care, respect and empathy for each other. I don't care what people want to say. If you're faced with the worst trauma of your life, the least your friends can do is check up on you regularly. On text. And if they don't even do that then guess what? They aren't friends. They are acquaintances. Social media and quick promises make everyone seem like your friend. But they are not. They are just nice people who will be nice to you for specific periods and then wander away like you are a speck of dust floating in their journey.

6. You speak a lot and write and you express yourself and you’re emotionally mature but oh my god. You still hold in so much. You’ve known that at a subconscious level and over the last year people - experts - have told you that. You have also realized that you make your pain and sadness about pettier things because dealing with them, admitting about them, sharing that with your friends, is easier. You do that so that you don’t have to deal with the real stuff. Because it’s so damn painful. And you don’t know how to do it. Yet. Acknowledging is the first step anyway right? I know you’re confused about how exactly to let go of all this pain and sadness and feel lighter, and you know that talking to people really isn’t the solution, but I also know you’re smart enough to figure it out.

7. Talking about being smart...you know you’re different than others. Better. Special. Smarter. None of these are the right words. And you never voiced this out until this year because you knew it would make you come across as narcissistic. Some would say it’s because you’re an INFJ. But my mother once said that this may be the first time we are consciously living life but our souls are old and so our instinct and the things we know but can’t explain are because this isn’t the first time for our souls. The connections we feel with certain people, the reason we are so different from our siblings who grew up in the exact same environment with the exact same opportunities, our sense of right and wrong...it’s all because our souls learn and grow with each time and that’s why we are who we are. I think that’s probably how I can explain what I have always felt. That I am living in a different universe than everybody but I have to pretend to be in this one and dumb my emotions and thoughts down. Maybe that’s because my soul has lived through thousands of years while most around me are living their 100th life. Or maybe I’m just narcissistic, who knows?

8. You shift between talking in first person and second person but that’s because that’s how you think in your head and talk to yourself and live your life. You ask yourself things and you accuse yourself of things and you apologize to yourself and you comfort yourself. I think that seeps into your writing and the changing of the voices.

9. You always genuinely thought that you’d not be afraid of dying. And then what happened this October proved you shockingly wrong. I know it’s not so much being afraid of dying but the unbearable pain of knowing what that would mean to your family. So you have to be more prudent and less reckless with your life and the choices you make.

10. Regret is not something that plagued you but this year the realisation and pain of giving away your favourite books from your own personal collection to people you care about as a show of affection and them turning out to be ass holes or losers has hit you so hard. So, yes. No more of that shit. I really fucking want my copy of The Perks Of Being A Wallflower back. UGH. With the childhood picture of me inside it!

11. Sleeping at 5 am in the morning stops being fun or romanticised when you realise just how much harm it does to your body and mind. Literally every single disease and disorder can be traced back to a shitty fucking sleep schedule. It’s not just the hours you sleep but also the quality of sleep and the time you sleep at. So yes sleeping for 8 hours is healthy but not if that 8 hours is from 5 am to 12 pm. ‘Not a morning person’ is just another construct of capitalism and you don’t realise how many industries profit from having you believe that and staying up late or all night. Entertainment. Food. Alcohol. Pharma. Biologically and naturally you are a bloody morning person. And you don’t need 3 cups of coffee to begin your day or your phone notifications to get you to open your eyes and brain to wake up.

12. Sometimes you really have to stop taking people so seriously. I know the idea of treating people as casual friends or entertainment makes you want to fight that concept but you know what? Some people like Pineapple are ever only going to be good for that. No matter how much they ‘grow and change’. So keep them in the background for whenever you want some entertainment or drama. But please don’t clear up your busy schedule to meet them or send them gifts on their birthday.

13. If you don’t have the fruit juice or green juice within half an hour of making it then you are losing out on its most optimum health benefits. Or when you remove the white stringy stuff from oranges. That’s where all the actual nutrients are.

14. I am privileged and so are most of the people I interact with. The global pandemic has been hell for a lot of people around the world. Health wise. Financially. Losing people they care about. But I was blessed enough to be safe at home and have a job that I could smoothly do from home and not have a pay cut or 4-hour long Zoom meetings. So honestly when my friends tell me 2020 has been bad I have to stop and ask them why? Yes, the crippling uncertainty and anxiety is not something that can be undermined. But most people I know had very great positive life-changing milestones this year like moving away to another country for college or taking their first solo trip or getting married. So I have to ask them. Because I am not going to agree that everybody’s 2020 and pandemic narrative is the same.

15. Money gets spent really quickly. When I left my job earlier this year because of personal issues, I thought I had enough savings to last me a year. Full disclosure - I mean to last my personal expenses because I live with my parents. But it didn’t even last me 3 months. And so to use money wisely and buy things that provide utility than instant gratification is something to follow. Also buying one pair of really expensive but quality shoes is better than buying 5 pairs of affordable but low quality shoes that will have a very short life and force you to buy more. I know that higher price doesn’t always mean better quality but sometimes it does. And as an adult now I want to do the whole quality > quantity thing even with things and not just people.

16. Everyone in their 20s went through a crisis of what they should do with their lives and their careers and it’s not unique to the 21st century and the challenges of today. Whether it was Vincent Van Gogh in the 19th century or Sylvia Plath in the 20th, every single person, as brilliant as them went through the torture of making these decisions and living with their consequences. You may think I picked wrong examples for they both killed themselves but you know what? They were the people who really want to live more than anyone. They knew what life meant. And maybe if mental health help was more accessible back then their lives would be longer and more peaceful.

17. Telling people everything is overrated. You don’t have to talk about every single thing that’s on your mind or that’s going on in your life. The good and the bad and the mediocre. You have to be mindful about how much of yourself you’re giving away.

18. Re-watch Suits when people at work feel intimidating because the confidence + negotiation tactics that they show can actually work irl cos at the end of the day no matter in what position you’re dealing with people who have emotions and fears and insecurities and desires. You understand how to leverage that nobody can get the better of you.

19. You belong to yourself. No matter how much you love someone or how much they have done for you or how much you owe them - you belong to yourself. You can’t live your life for someone else. Everyone belongs to themselves first. No relationship, no promise, no circumstance should make you feel like you have to give up your life and make it all about them. If and when the time comes to die for them, go ahead. Take a bullet. Donate that kidney. Write them in your will. But live your life for yourself. And let them live theirs.

20. Twenty three was a challenging year. When it started you claimed the age 23 sounds boring and insignificant. Guess it proved you wrong. It hurt so much now. But that only means you’ll look back on it later and see how it added so much wisdom and resilience to your being. It doesn’t mean that it makes all the bad things that happened to you okay. Or that you should be grateful to them. Fuck no. It means that you should be kinder to yourself because at the end of the day, your mind and body find it in themselves to deal with whatever is thrown their way. They have your back. It’s time you learn to sit straight.

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sgt-paul · 3 years

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MUSICIANS ON MUSICIANS: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

❝ During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. ❞

interview below the cut:

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very … Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice.… I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music — I had to do an instrumental for a film thing — so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas… “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff — you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13 … 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find…

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s…

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us].… We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper…” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

McCartney: You do that, do you?

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks … it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school .…

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

Swift: Ohhh!

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics — for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and.…

Swift: Oh, I know that song — “The Kiss of Venus”?

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack — I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use — kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember — this is what happens with songs — there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair — it was in a place called Sefton Park — and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house — I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way — like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really — talk about dumpy — little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down — “I’ll have that one” — and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology — it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime — because I was born actually in the war — and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios — you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents … it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal — we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves — this crystal attracts them — they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

#paul mccartney #old paul #taylor swift #*m #💖#grandpaul #silver stubble #(aahh king)#(I LOVE HIM SO MUCH F*CK OFF EVERYONE)#(the thumbs lads. its always about the thumbs)

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funkymbtifiction · 3 years

Text

intuition

Hi! I am going to postulate a few “facts” before getting to the question

Life is messy and ever changing, butterfly effect and all. It is reasonable to think someone couldn’t predict everything. <- this is correct.

Yes we know Obama [ENFJ, yes?] mentioned the possibility of a global pandemic on his Obama care speech. But before Corona virus appeared somewhere in the news at the end of 2019 no one, or almost, was expecting to face a global pandemic in 2020. Not even high Ni. <- many others of various types hypothesized that a global pandemic was inevitable due to wide travel and no restrictions + historic pandemics, they just didn’t expect it to hit in 2020.

Adaptation is key to live in our inhospitable world. Even on the microscale. When another car bumps into yours your entire day could change. <- accurate, and most people adjust just fine

One can’t survive living only in one’s head. No one can be immune to the outside world. Functions don’t exist in a vacuum. <- also true

From what I understood Ni entails a unique vision you have for your life that comes from within. This summons the image of a 6 year old that decides its life trajectory and looking back at 36 did exactly what was planned. But, this concept seems impossible. You could decide on being a ballerina and discover you hate it, then need to adapt, change [Se]. Or money problems could arise. Life isn’t predictable and you need to be open to opportunities. How can someone see only one path? Judgment value, logical consistency and memory or sensory impressions I can understand being me X external world, makes sense to me. But what does it mean to work inwardly versus objectively regarding intuition? Are Ni’s immune to other’s point of view? If yes, how do they manage to do it?

NJs are constantly searching for what draws them in a specific direction. They don’t stay on one trajectory their entire life, but rather look for what instinct can tell them about people, places, scenarios, things. Make this idea smaller, in order to better understand it in the shorter term. An INJ needs to write a paper for class, so they visualize exactly what they want, figure it all out in their head ahead of time (the major points and beats they want to hit, their opening and closing line, and the paragraph structure) and then write it down exactly as they envisioned it. It’s conceptual, ergo “my playground.”

A Ne user, by contrast, would open up a word document and start writing, then change their idea in the process as they see a better one; they start out writing a paper about N and it becomes about Z, because they go with the flow, and they don’t internally construct the paper’s direction ahead of time, in their mind. They are interacting with the words as they happen. With a Ni, it all happens in the mind long before anyone on the outside sees the results. A Ni plans a novel for years before writing it. Or plans what they want for their birthday before they set out to make it happen. Or thinks about someone’s behavior for a while, not consulting anyone about it, until they decide what seems “most likely” the reason for it. It’s all “me,” “inside my head,” not “ideas are out there, floating on a train and waiting to be found.” Ideas come from my subconscious, myself.

They appear “immune” to other people’s ideas because whatever ideas others (Ne’s) generate on the fly, the Ni has already thought about, conjured up inside their head, examined them from various angles to see if they fit, and discarded them. Their mind naturally focuses on finding the “most likely outcome.” So it discards what seems irrelevant, off-topic, or unlikely to focus on “one answer.”

How can their intuition be accurate if it doesn’t involve the world? How can it be accurate if it doesn’t consider the changes in the environment? How is it possible to reconcile all of life and its ever-changing nature in a convergent direction? I don’t get it. Can you help, please? Where is my logic failing here? Could you please explore NiSe X NeSi a bit more? Thank you for your time.

It’s accurate because they focus on patterns and elimination to find the most likely outcome, based on what information the environment provides (or what they know about a topic). They typically mull over things for a LOOONG time before offering their opinion if it’s on a mass scale, but their answers can be quick in areas of expertise (eg: “I study mental illnesses, so I instantly recognize the signs / diagnose people based on what I hear about them” -- leaping to an assumption, but it’s rooted in psychology).

The problem INJs run into in particular is having too narrow of parameters and trying to cram the world into it, rather than considering alternatives. They sometimes twist the facts to fit what’s in their head, instead of being adaptable (inferior Se). Most of the time, however, they just make “educated guesses” and wait to see if things go in that direction and prove them right or wrong.

#question #infj #intj #entj #enfj

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alittlextrathatway · 3 years

Note

Penelope/Colin: “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t leave.”

YAY SOMETHING BESIDES BRETTSEY. (Not that I don’t love them.) I’ve never written Polin before! I’m excited to play! 🙌🏻 Thank you!

How about a modern AU for this one? Just cause.

******

It all started because of the pandemic.

He’d been perfectly happy traveling. It’s not like he had anything else to occupy his time. He wasn’t particularly talented and he didn’t have any hobbies or interests. Aside from eating but he doubted his mother would approve of him becoming one of those professional hot dog eaters and he didn’t care enough for the piddly portions of fine dining to become a food critic.

The only thing that truly distracts him from his lack of drive or ambition is traveling — learning about the world and it’s many cultures.

He has journal after journal full of his discoveries and experiences. Travel is really his only love.

Which is why he’d stopped and started his studies so many times. He took a year between high school and college to backpack through Europe. Then another year after freshman year to “study abroad”, not that he actually studied. Which is why his mother forced him to come back and finish his third year stateside. After that, he’d set off traveling again. Every year he found another excuse not to come home for any longer than a month or two, allowing him to put off his final year.

It’s not as if he’s getting a degree in anything useful. He’s an English major. And it’s not as if his career isn’t already decided for him. Upon graduation he’ll be given an office at Bridgerton Family Publishing. Doing what? Well, no one knows. Not even him.

So, what’s the rush?

He’d still be gone abroad right now if not for COVID forcing him to return home. God, he hates 2020. What a waste of a year. He came home too late for the spring 2020 term so he’s spent the last several months going absolutely crazy.

He’s a man of the world who is not being allowed to go out and see it. He can’t imagine anything more cruel.

Actually, no, he takes that back. There’s one thing:

Using the time he’s forced to stay in Mayfair to discover he’s completely and stupidly in love with his little sister’s best friend.

The friend who overheard him, last time he was home for any considerable length of time, declaring to his brothers that he would never be interested in her.

Because, of course, Colin Bridgerton is a colossal jackass who doesn’t know a good thing when it’s been staring him in the face his entire life.

There’s laughter coming from the direction of the foyer. Very distinctive laughing. One high and tinkling like a pretty little bell and the other deeper and hoarser. The alto to the other’s soprano. The alto in this case is his younger sister, Eloise, and the soprano is Penelope.

The woman he should have noticed long before now.

He gets up from where he’s lounging on the sofa, mournfully watching the Travel Channel, and takes his plate full of sandwiches with him.

He finds them giggling and applying lipstick in the mirror by the front door. They look dressed to go out. Eloise in her slick tailored pant suit and intricately adorned lace top, in monochromatic lavender. And Penelope in…

Holy shit, what is that?

Apparently, it’s the instrument of his imminent death if the erratic beating of his heart is any indication. He’s going to have some sort of attack and go into cardiac arrest right here in the foyer of his childhood home.

It’s a tight forest green dress that has an off the shoulder neckline. It hugs her curves so perfectly that he thinks someone must have sewn it onto her. It shows the perfect amount of skin along her neck and shoulders, giving just a tiny glimpse of cleavage.

And she’s had a haircut since she was here yesterday. Her ginger locks now rest against her cheeks in a wavy stylish bob. She was beautiful before. He was never blind to that as some other people around Pen have proven to be, but now...

She’s absolutely stunning.

So stunning that other people will surely see what he sees. And he’s grateful for that, truly. She deserves to be seen as she is — brilliant and beautiful — but that means he’s about to have competition while trying to win her over. And he is not grateful for that.

He’s been trying to be more forward with her when they’re alone but that doesn’t happen often and he’s not sure Penelope takes him very seriously. (No one does.) She seems to always be in disbelief when he flirts with her.

“Where are you two off to?” He asks, leaning against the wall opposite the mirror.

“Double date,” Eloise says, fluffing her hair in the mirror. “Pen arranged it. She met someone extremely gorgeous at the library today.”

Penelope blushes and grins demurely. “It’s the magic of a fresh cut,” she says motioning to her new hair. “He was there with his friend and we were all scrambling for resources for our bibliographies together and he asked if I wanted to get dinner and I asked if Eloise could come. No big deal.”

“It doesn’t look as if it’s not a big deal,” Colin observes, his gaze sweeping over Penelope from head to toe.

“His father owns that new super exclusive restaurant Kate’s been begging Anthony to take her too. You know, La Table Gourmande?” Eloise explains.

“The one that told Anthony the next available reservation was in two months? That restaurant?” Colin asks, trying not to scowl.

Really, there was no need for this guy to show off. He seems a bit full of himself.

“That’s the one,” Penelope replies with a nod. “He says he can get us the Chef’s table tonight. I’ve never done anything like that before. It sounds exciting. Might be the closest I ever get to authentic French cuisine. For a while anyway.”

Okay, so now he feels like a heel for wanting to keep her from going out. He knows he’s lucky his family is so well off. It allows him to travel. Penelope’s family, while not destitute, has spent most of their surplus funds putting three daughters, soon to be a fourth, through school. In fact, if not for a distant rich aunt who died they wouldn’t even have been able to afford that.

Any money Penelope used to travel would have to be her own, and he isn’t sure how much of that she has.

“Pen,” Eloise calls, interrupting Colin’s thoughts. “Have you seen my clutch? Did I bring it down?”

“I don’t see it anywhere,” Penelope says with a shake of her head. “Did you leave it on your dresser?”

Eloise groans in irritation, turning toward the main staircase of their massive house. “I guess I did. I’ll be right back.”

Finally, they’re alone. Colin clears his throat and sets the plate of sandwiches he’d been snacking on down on the hall table. He crosses the space until he’s standing mere inches away from her.

“Don’t go out tonight. I can take you somewhere else. Somewhere better,” Colin suggests.

“Better?” Penelope asks skeptically.

He nods. “I have a friend who opened a restaurant here that I met while I was in Nice. It’s smaller than that La Table Gourmand monstrosity and not quite considered fine dining but it’s real. It’s better. It’ll be closer to actually being in France than anything in that obnoxious place.”

“I don’t see why I can’t go with Marcus tonight and then you some other time,” she tells him, lifting one perfect brow and pursing her lips.

“This guy sounds like a prick,” Colin says with a scoff. “Bragging about his father’s connections on the first date? That’s not a good sign, Pen. Trust me, I know these things. I’m a guy.”

“Maybe,” she says with a shrug, a small knowing grin on her lips. “But I think I should decide that for myself. Don’t you?”

That grin…

She knows exactly what he’s trying to do.

She’s being difficult on purpose.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t leave,” she challenges him, continuing to grin smugly.

Well, if that’s the game she wants to play then so be it.

“Why waste a night figuring out what I already know when you could just let me take you out instead for what, we both know, would be a better time?” Colin asks, caressing the length of Penelope’s arm with a light tender touch.

She sucks in a breath at the contact, but doesn’t show any weakness in her expression. “Yes, but going out with Marcus would be a date that might actually lead to something. What would be the purpose of ditching a real date for you instead?”

“Oh, you want it to lead to something?” He asks, a smirk growing on his face as he backs her up toward the wall.

“Y—yes,” she stammers, her grin slipping as nerves shine in her eyes.

Her back hits the wall and he brings one hand to her cheek, cupping her face and trailing his thumb along her cheekbone.

He leans down, nearly closing the distance between them but stops just short of kissing her. “Come out with me, Pen, and you can choose where it leads. I’ll give you whatever future I have, even if I have no idea what it is. You set the terms, you call the shots.”

Her eyes widen and her cheeks flush but she instinctively leans into his hand. Call him a cocky bastard, but that’s the moment he knows he’s won. The moment he knows she’ll choose him.

“I set the terms?” She asks, biting her bottom lip while she stares at his.

He nods, waiting for the moment she leans up and kisses him.

“Well, then you know what I think?” She asks, rhetorically while she rests a hand on his chest.

“Tell me,” he pleads.

She smiles wickedly and pushes him away by one step. “I think you could do with some healthy competition.”

She sidesteps him and saunters off to the front door, leaving him gaping at her like a fool.

Like a besotted, astonished, completely smitten fool.

Eloise reappears, patting Colin’s shoulder as she follows after Penelope. “Tell mom we’ll be back late.”

They leave, the door shuts, and all he can think is…

Well played, Penelope Featherington.

But the Bridgertons are famously competitive and this game is only just beginning. He’ll win her over yet.

Wait and see.

#bridgerton #colin bridgerton #penelope featherington #polin #fanfiction #my fic #angellwings writes #fanfiction prompt game #ask prompt #long post #SORRY THIS IS LONG FOR A TUMBLR PROMPT 😬#new ship for me so be gentle 🙏🏻

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potteresque-ire · 3 years

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hello, ily metas! thank you for taking the time for them. i hope you dont mind an ask with two follow up questions to your metas i'm curious about: 1) has mxtx rly been sentenced? i have seen others also share this news but other fans have quickly dismissed and gotten pissed at these reports for being fake news that are bad for mxtx, and as fearmongering. 2) for those who want to support yizhan but not the ccp, do you have advice how to navigate fan support and interaction with their media?

Hello! I apologise for the late reply! You’ve brought up some interesting points, so please forgive me for responding with an essay.

First, about MXTX — This is a follow-up to this post.

Unfortunately, this is all we got—all everyone has got about MXTX’s current situation: on 2020/11/10, she was sentenced in Hangzhou Shang Cheng District’s People’s Court (杭州市上城區人民法院). No details were given on her verdict, due to “人民法院認為不宜在互聯網公布的其它情形” (“The People’s Court decided it inappropriate to announce further details on the internet”). Here’s a link with the screenshot that showed all the information released about the case that day.

There are enough copies of similar screenshots to this one online, with the differences dependent on where the publisher pulled the information from the same website: 中國裁判文書網, an online archive of verdicts run by China Supreme People’s Court. There’re few reasons, therefore, to believe the information on the screenshot was fake. The link I used was Sina’s Financial News, which I believe is trustworthy enough for China’s standard.

It is also important to note, of course, that two scenarios may still render this screenshot irrelevant. 1) The verdict, which was not mentioned in the screenshot, was “not guilty” and 2) the name listed in the case, 袁依楣, was not MXTX at all.

Few have seemed to suspect 2) to be a possibility. Her real name might have been prior knowledge among some fans, or the combination of her surname and city of residence. 1) has been the where the concern / debate is.

I included China’s rate of conviction in the original post for this reason: acquittal is exceedingly rare (<0.1%) for the arrested in China. This short article discussed some reasons.

So, is it possible that MXTX is now a free woman? Yes. Is it likely? Not at all.

Still, since the probability that MXTX is imprisoned isn’t 100%, is spreading this news smearing her name? Fear-mongering?

I can only answer for myself, Anon, but my answer is no for both questions, which is why I’ve felt comfortable posting about her case. MXTX’s alleged “crimes” are things we already knew she did, or common practices among Chinese IP writers. We know she penned MDZS and other BL works; we know MDZS, in particular, has an 18+ element. She was said to have sold merch based on her works, but that wasn’t unusual at all for writers in Jinjiang, where she published her writing. Even those who don’t like her have seemed to agree that it was her writing that got her into trouble, not some other crimes she could’ve committed.

IMO, a guilty verdict doesn’t tell us as much about her as it does about the judicial system, the business practices of her country. It’s worth re-mentioning that media giants such as Tencent are closely tied to the government; Tencent’s WeChat, for example, is part of China’s Great Firewall and is used for surveillance, for censorship and removal of political dissidents. What MXTX’s case hints at is this: the government has (very likely) convicted her, while its close allies are continuing to use her works—works that got her into legal trouble in the first place—to make money. Some fans of MXTX have questioned if the courts have censored the details of the case to save the embarrassment of the rich and powerful, calling what has happened to MXTX 人血饅頭 (“human blood steamed buns”), an idiom used to describe the act of profiting out of someone elses’ life.

As for fear-mongering, here are my thoughts ~ it would’ve been fear-mongering if the public has access to the facts, and not years after they happen. Specifically, it would’ve been fear-mongering to leak the rumours of MXTX’s sentencing, when the judicial system is transparent and the case details will soon be published for all to see. Why? Because “fear” comes from the unknown, and “-monger” is the unnecessary promotion, stirring-up of this fear.

To promote, stir up anything, one needs a reference level. The reference level in this scenario is this: what is the level of fear if the facts about MXTX’s (and other BL writers’) situation are known? Of course, this knowledge doesn’t make MXTX’s experience any easier or more just; it doesn’t cause her less fear. However, she isn’t the target audience of this likely-to-be-true rumour. The target audience is the public and in particular, those who consume and/or generate BL material online.

What is the level of fear among this population if the facts about MXTX’s (and other BL writers’) situation are known? It’s the (relative) comfort in knowing the government’s stance on what they do: how the administration feels about BL, 18+ BL, and their distribution methods. The comfort comes from having the right information to decide how to act accordingly. For example, if I’m a BL writer based in China and I know the court has found MXTX guilty of bypassing publishing houses but not of writing M/M romance, then I’ll know to not produce paper versions of my writing, but I can keep writing.

This reference level of fear is unavailable here, however, since the government has decided to withhold all details about the case. Without this reference level, fear-mongering becomes a ... difficult to define concept.

Are these likely-to-be-true rumours agents of fear, or are they hints on how to survive in a country that lacks transparency?

Continuing with the example of I being a Chinese BL writer, since I cannot expect to hear more facts about MXTX, this rumour is all I’ve got in choosing what to do with my hobby, in deciding whether it is safe to continue. As I’m aware that a rumour isn’t a fact, I first research on the rumour’s likelihood of truth (similar to what I’ve done for MXTX’s case), and cross my fingers that I don’t get it wrong.

By doing so, I’m turning these rumours into my survival guide.

Is it risky? Yes. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. But this is the way of life for people who live under secretive, authoritarian governments—the authoritarian element making it impossible to demand more facts. It may take people outside such regimes some time to get used to—to the lifestyle, and to the idea that, in a place where news is often synonymous with propaganda, rumours are breadcrumbs of truth that should be sieved through with equal care as one would sieve through the news. Heeding, considering the probable truth of what the authority has deemed to be fear-mongering rumours can be a matter of literal life and death.

Take...COVID. (I apologize for bringing up this unpleasant topic!)

I shall link to an article about the early spread of COVID in Wuhan here and ask: were Dr. Li Wenliang and the seven other doctors fear-mongering? Wuhanese chose to believe in the government, but at what cost to them? What would the world be like today if they took the early COVID rumours as true and masked up like Hong Kongers—Hong Kongers who weren’t any smarter or better, but had simply learned their painful lessons from the 2003 SARS epidemic?

(Why hadn’t the Wuhanese learned? Because the government has long changed the narrative of SARS, taught their people that the illness originated in Hong Kong.)

(How can one learn from past mistakes if one pretends those mistakes never existed?)

You must be wondering, Anon, why I’m talking about COVID when your next question is about YiZhan. The death of Dr Li Wenliang on February 7th, 2020, sparked a demand for freedom of speech rarely seen in internet-age China. Its fury, its ferocity forced the government to change its stance on Dr Li, again an unusual move. Since January 2020, Weibo had been censoring COVID news and opinion pieces that shedded a negative light to the central government; after the death of Dr Li, the censorship apparatus stepped up, making way for the propaganda machine to kick in later and change the narrative of the pandemic.

Here are some questions without definite answers, but may be food for thought for YiZhan fans:

1) While the Chinese government’s censorship apparatus (including Weibo) might have silenced the voices of dissent, of mourning on the surface, was it more likely to pacify, or fuel the anger of netizens, many of whom had lost loved ones, many of whom were still under quarantine?

2) Less than three weeks after the death of Dr Li, a group of fans demanded even *more* censorship from the government—the closing of an internet website that had been seen as a relatively free space to express oneself. How would these netizens react, even though they knew little about these fans or their idol?

(It was, in the context of the massive silencing of COVID discussions in China, that I learned about the ban of AO3. There had been rumours that the government would censor more websites on 2020/03/01. When I read about AO3′s ban on 2/27, my thoughts were 1) Hmm. This came two days early. 2) AO3? Really?)

(I wouldn’t watch The Untamed or know who Gg was until several months later.)

Now, Anon, this is a good time to get to your CCP (Chinese Communist Party) question.

The very short answer is no. There’s no way to support YiZhan without, to a certain level, supporting the CCP. As mentioned above, the media companies are all part of China’s surveillance system. Weibo is where freedom of speech is curbed. Our two boys have been part of the propaganda machine; the BBC article linked above had a tiny picture of Gg on it, as he was a performer in the Hero in Harm’s Way (最美逆行者), a “real-life based” drama on COVID. DD just did a show glorying the Chinese police force (and here’s a video of the same force welding doors to lock in COVID-stricken residents).

Nonetheless, here’s my first advice: please do not beat yourself up for supporting YiZhan!

Gg and Dd are people who live within the system, inside the Great Firewall. They understand the world the way their government has taught them to—not only in school, but also in the news and media. Like most youths in every country, they’re patriotic—and to expect them to be otherwise, especially because of information they don’t have, is both unrealistic and unfair. Even if they do know about certain things impermissible within the Firewall, in China (as in many Communists countries), openly expressing / performing one’s proper political leanings (ie. loyalty towards CCP) is among the most important pre-requisites for any job. This has been especially true for c-ent in recent years .

They, like most of their countrymen, are doing what they have to do.

In this case, it comes to us, our decisions on how to interact with their works. How should we deal with them, their propaganda elements?

The answer, of course, varies from person to person. Personally, I’ve chosen the approaches of “immunisation” and “restriction”. By “immunisation”, I mean learning about as much historical and sociopolitical facts from non-CCP sponsored sources; this is understandably difficult for someone who doesn’t already have some familiarity with the culture and politics of the region, and/or cannot read the language.

Restriction means limiting my consumption of media produced by China. I avoid shows (dramas, documentaries, variety etc) featuring topics that are likely to contain heavy propaganda, such as the military, the police, Hong Kong/Macao/Taiwan, and of course, anything pertaining to the CCP, from its rise to its governance of the country.

In general, I’m wary of all information presented about the post-monarchy years (post 1911), even though CCP wouldn’t begin its reign until after WWII (1949). Why so early? 1) Because CCP was formed in 1921 and so its glorification requires a change of narrative since then; 2) because the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT), which governed China between 1912 and 1949 (the so-called Republican Era 民國), would end up exiling to and setting up a new government in Taiwan.

How much propaganda should one expect in shows depicting the country post-1911? The current TV and webdrama directives (previously discussed in this post) offer some hints. Here are my translations of the relevant items:

D7) Dramas about the Republican era: Glorification of the Republican Era, the Beiyang Government, and Warlord Era requires strict control.

D10) Crime drama: crime drama is the focus of content auditing. The Ministry of Public Security (Pie note: in charge of law enforcement, ie, police) will be involved in the audit. The process of crime solving cannot be exposed; criminal psychology and motivations can however be depicted in detail. Undercover police cannot use drugs or kill, or damage the image of the police force. Criminals must be punished by law.

D12) Dramas featuring realistic topics: realistic topics must adhere to the correct world view, philosophy of life and moral values. They cannot place too strong an emphasis on social conflicts, must showcase the beautiful lives of the commoners. Regular folks should display larger-than-life sentiments and aspirations; they can pursue wealth, but must use proper means to do so; they cannot damage the public image of specific employment types, groups and social organisations. Do not preach negative or decadent world view, philosophy of life and moral values. Do not exaggerate, amplify social issues; do not over showcase, display the darker sides of society; do not preach affluence, avoid things that have no basis in real life.

D16) Dramas featuring the Revolution (Pie note: CCP’s coming to power): 2019 is the publicity period of the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Although the “Three Importances” (important revolution, important people, important events) are still encouraged, the National Radio and Television Administration requires all departments, at all levels, to strengthen the control of content and the overall management of the industry, and focus on the auditing of content pertaining to the Sino-Japanese war and espionage dramas.

These directives (as those translated in the other post) are as vague as they are restrictive, and to err on the side of caution, production companies tend to “overachieve” to avoid going against headwinds at the censorship board. This means their products have a tendency to malign the Republican Era (D7). It means they will likely twist history in trying to depict the CCP as faultless heroes (D16). It means they'll probably present a utopian-like society and call it reality-based (D12), a society in which the good guys share the same values as the CCP and always win (D10).

Yes, my “restriction” means I skipped Hero in Harm’s Way. It means I’ve never listened to Gg’s version of 我和我的祖國 despite my absolute adoration of his voice. It means I just missed Dd’s performance in the law enforcement celebration event. It means I don’t plan on watching Being A Hero and Ace Troops.

So here’s where I’ve drawn the line, Anon, but it doesn’t mean that’s what anyone should do. Only you alone can decide where your own comfort zone is. I write these metas in the hopes that it can offer a … gateway for those who’d like to understand, with a more telescopic lens, Gg and Dd’s country—a country that holds a particularly strong hold over its citizens’ fate including, yes, their romantic fate. It’s not my wish to impose my opinions on anyone.

If I have other hopes… It’s this. Please, as long as it’s safe for you to talk, do not self-censor—especially about facts, especially on sites like Tumblr or Twitter that have long been banned by the Chinese government. I don’t mean one should go about and confront those who insist on a different version of reality. To undo opinions rooted in years of education, IMO, the process has to be voluntary, and the information is already at the fingertips of those who’re surfing these sites and wish to learn more. More importantly, open discussions of these topics may be risky for those who still have close ties to China, and keeping them safe should always be the top priority.

What I mean is simply this ~ please do not feel obliged to agree with every perspective presented in YiZhan’s work just because you support the leads. Please do not feel you must remain silent about the CCP—its good, bad and ugly—just because your favourite stars happen to come from the country it’s ruling. And please remember: “Chinese”, as a term, has always included people who live outside CCP’s control, many of whom still fully embrace the culture, traditions and values of Historical China, a 5000-years long string of dynasties with shifting borders, ethnic makeup and customs. The Untamed is a mainland Chinese production, yes, but its genre, its manner of presenting certain traditions, wouldn’t have been developed, or flourished, without the diaspora. The CCP has only been the ruling party of one country, the People’s Republic of China, for 71 years, and as a party with foreign (soviet) roots and a record of destroying the pillar of the country’s tradition, Confucianism, it doesn’t own a monopolistic say on how every Chinese should think and act—no matter how much it insists it does—or how everyone should think and speak about China and its people.

It isn’t qualified.

#Anonymous #pie metas #pie answers #BJYX #yizhan

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