i love how sometimes i’m typing and my brain goes “DO THE GERMAN WORD” and I must tell it to calm down because we are speaking English right now and must NOT do the German word

Question for people who use they/them pronouns: the normal conjugation is “they are”; does this rule follow when one does not use the pronoun but rather the person’s name?

For example: 1) “Alex are not home, they are out with friends.” vs. 2) “Alex is not home, they are out with friends.”

Everything I know about English tells me nr. 2 is correct but the gendered languages I know keep nagging me that I could be wrong.

Cap de nosaltres és iliure fins que tothom ho sigui

None of us are free until everyone is

[America], your sovereign,

Is prisoner to the foe; his state usurp’d,

His realm a slaughter-house, his subjects slain,

His statutes cancell’d and his treasure spent;

And yonder is the wolf that makes this spoil.

You fight in justice: then, in God’s name, lords,

Be valiant and give signal to the fight.

—Henry VI, Part III (V.4)

Fic can be read HERE.

Alternate Universe (No Powers). Completed. Rated: T. Word Count: 758

Pairings: Kageyama Ritsu/Suzuki Shou

Trigger Warnings: None

“Mall kiosk sales person/poor fuck they’re trying to sell to to lovers. Shou sells his dad’s shitty, expensive hand cream. Ritsu studies in the coffee shop in the same mall and is accosted by some asshole trying to sell hand cream”

« [The problem with psychiatry] is not just its almost exclusive use of a vocabulary of symptoms, deficits, disorders and vulnerabilities, or sanitized ways of describing life experiences; it is the absence of crucial concepts like inequality, power, subordination. It is also the extensive use of the passive voice which keeps damaging agents invisible, saying for example, ‘women with low social support are vulnerable to depression’ rather than something like, ‘women who live with oppressive men are made miserable’. 

I would argue that these linguistic devices are so powerful that it will be almost impossible to challenge [them] and make context more central, without entirely abandoning medical language, including the term ‘mental health’, because using this language is the quickest and most effective way of suggesting a pathological or deficient individual. At the very least, using this language means that extra work has to be done to reinstate social context and meaning which never sit easily with talk of illness, symptoms or disorders. […]

The bizarre logic [of psychiatric language] may be more apparent if we draw an analogy [between abuse victims diagnosed with psychosis] and another common trauma, bereavement. Contrast the following two causal explanations:

1. She was badly abused – and we now think that is what led to her psychosis and in fact made it worse.
2. Her husband died – and we now think that is what led to her grief, and in fact made it worse. 

It would be even odder, to pursue the analogy, to argue that some people are biologically vulnerable to, are genetically predisposed to develop grief, and to attempt to find its ‘real’, biological cause, the death of a partner being merely the ‘trigger’. This logic also leads to confusion about whether a person’s reactions are the ‘symptoms’ of a ‘disorder’, and therefore in need of ‘treatment’, or normal and rational responses and beliefs which are an inevitable part of coming to terms with a very painful experience. 

Compare the following: 

1. Negative beliefs about self, world and others (such as ‘I am vulnerable’ and ‘Other people are not to be trusted’) have been shown to be associated with the development of psychotic experiences. 
2. Negative beliefs about self, world and others (such as ‘I am lonely’ and ‘My husband is never coming back’) have been shown to be associated with the development of grief. 

The main point is that there is the abuse, and there are the responses to the abuse. There is nothing else, no additional ‘psychosis’ that needs explaining. […] We might note in passing that the apparent assumption [behind statement 1.] is that people are trustworthy and individuals are not vulnerable, which shows a remarkable degree of optimism in the face of the evidence of widespread abuse. Maybe the task of the therapist is not to try and change these ‘dysfunctional beliefs’, but to help abused clients come to terms with the truth that is expressed in them, even if it is not the whole truth. »

— Demedicalizing Misery, ed. Joanna Moncrieff

To you I lift up my eyes
who are enthroned in heaven –
Who are enthroned in heaven –
As the eyes of servants
Are on the hands of their masters.
As the eyes of a maid
Are on the hands of her mistress,
So are our eyes on the LORD, our God,
Till he have pity on us. 
As the eyes of servants
Are on the hands of their masters.
As the eyes of a maid
Are on the hands of her mistress,
So are our eyes on the LORD, our God,
Till he have pity on us. 

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God for the promise of life in Christ Jesus,
to Timothy, my dear child: grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
I am grateful to God, whom I worship with a clear conscience as my ancestors did, as I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day.
For this reason, I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that you have through the imposition of my hands.
For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.
So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord, nor of me, a prisoner for his sake; but bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.
He saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began,
but now made manifest through the appearance of our savior Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,
for which I was appointed preacher and apostle and teacher.
On this account I am suffering these things; but I am not ashamed, for I know him in whom I have believed and am confident that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day.

Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and put this question to him,
saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, ‘If someone’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.’
Now there were seven brothers. The first married a woman and died, leaving no descendants.
So the second married her and died, leaving no descendants, and the third likewise.
And the seven left no descendants. Last of all the woman also died.
At the resurrection (when they arise) whose wife will she be? For all seven had been married to her.”
Jesus said to them, “Are you not misled because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God?
When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are like the angels in heaven.
As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, 'I am the God of Abraham, (the) God of Isaac, and (the) God of Jacob’?
He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”

Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.” St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it”, for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: “Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened his hand” (St. Thomas Aquinas). (…)

The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of his goodness, for which the world was created. God made us “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph 1:5-6), for “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God” (St. Irenaeus). The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last become "all in all” (1Cor 15:28), thus simultaneously assuring his own glory and our beatitude" (Vatican II).

Suns out buns out for the book worms

They sealed the walls with bricks and spikes. They locked the doors with chains and planks, but the sky had always so bright above his head; the wretched herald of fire. The boy whose skin was marred with spells tighter than chains golden with flames, than ropes silver with coals, than hymns amber with lies.

Kaine Rella Laskaris didn’t fear. He harnessed hell and heaven, he had nothing left to be afraid of. Death has long gone cold, War giggled as she bowed down. What kind of a losing battle would you willing to wager against a boy so raw with virtues, so fearless against the world? What kind of a losing battle would you willing to wager against a boy with wings of an angel and crowns of, not even one, but two demons?

He, too, was Sanctuary’s prized possession.

That was why they let him roamed along the garden when the sun was high up, when his sister was in his sight. They dangled treasures upon his grasp so when the time went by, he would learn to not bare his teeth, his claws. He would learn that his actions bled, and it wouldn’t be his blood.

What they didn’t know, however, Kaine always took detour away from eyes and ears, four steps behind the spiked walls and nailed gates. Kaine always took detour to met a boy who crouched down by flowerbeds, gulping down lilies, roses, daisies and dahlias until his teeth turned claret, until he wheezed petals and coughed thorns.

Crunch.

He came with many names, Kaine had heard. He was Enoch, he was Abel. Sometimes he was Castiel, and other times, he would be Ramiel. The crows called him Unbeloved, they would caw his name when the church’s bell tolled; Aindras, they said. Aindras, you wretched boy, what did you do until they sowed veins to wake the hounds? Kaine had heard he had two brothers, and the last one was almost of Kaine’s age, if not younger, if not dying, if not dragged away screaming; the second one was often thrown to the mounds set aflame with coals and stones, the third one was often thrown to the hellhounds howling for bones.

And he, himself, Kaine had heard, was often thrown to blades, to the swords, to a cage strung by threads above a water and pyre. The eldest one held Pride, and thus they made him throne built from thorns, from pain, so sure he wouldn’t lift a finger because they held his brothers by neck. He was pathetic, the voice that wasn’t Kaine’s said, what kind of pride did you take from being tied?

Crunch.

But Kaine wasn’t that cruel. He was wrath, yes. He was greed, and that was why he bit every flesh that dared to go near his skin. He thought, there was something that made Aindras behaved so pathetic, so frightened. Every time Kaine saw him, he would scarf asphodels, gobbling carnations, he would devour daffodils and dandelions, he would crunch even the branches, the roots and leaves. He would keep going until he spoke, with a voice hoarse of choirs and hymns, a voice of someone who had long gone cold, long gone dead.

“Are you afraid for me?”

Crunch.

Kaine gazed at him, blinking. Not afraid of him, he said, but for him. Was Kaine afraid for him, for Aindras Canterbury, for the cherished vessel of Sanctuary? Was Kaine afraid for him, for the boy whose eyes gleamed skies, glinted gold? For the boy with silver and platinum threaded in his hair? For the coward who would only plead when they dragged his brothers with ropes and chains and shackles blue with spells? For the quiet soul who would bring the end of the world?

Kaine didn’t answer.

Aindras smiled, as if the lack of words was the answer he was searching for. He looked up, his eyes were pale underneath the sun; no longer blue, no longer gold, merely muddled sapphire of decaying forget-me-nots. “Well, then, stay in pain.”

It was a remark unlike a little boy. He spoke as if he was older, wiser, stronger than any other. He spoke as if he didn’t plead when fathers dragged his brother to the hellhounds, as if he didn’t beg when fathers hailed his brother to the ashes. He spoke as if he was so much more than a sinner.

Crunch.

There was a moment of silence before Kaine finally could breathe again. His limbs were heavy, his steps were slow, laden. Were you afraid for him, or were you afraid of him? The voice that wasn’t his mused soft beneath Kaine’s thought, rippling, grazing alike nails upon wooden chime. Was there anything worth to fear from Aindras Canterbury, cherished vessel of Sanctuary? Was there anything worth to fear from a silver boy marred with petals and bloodroots? Was there anything worth to fear from a soul who bought so much joy to those wretched fathers?

“If I die, will you mourn for me?”

Aindras returned his gaze to the flowerbeds, reaching for another flower. Kaine followed the way his hands moved, the way his wrists marred with chains, with flame, with desperation as he held his brothers close. Kaine followed the way their arms resembled each other; the way wounds snaked around pale skin, the way veins churned blue, purple, green.

“But you won’t die.”

Aindras brought a handful of roses to his lips, mouth open, blood dribbled down. He didn’t stop. He would keep going. Over, over, over, and over. Again, again, again, and again, and over again.

“I am already dying.”

Crunch.