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theseadagiodays · 4 years

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May 25, 2020

Orchestrators of Attention

Hayati Evreni’s Persistence of Covid

I typically have a very vivid dream life. Whole evenings of movies with characters I’ve never met and settings I’ve never seen. It’s one of the reasons I so love to sleep. Every night, I have an imagined altered reality to look forward to. And most mornings, to keep the stimuli of these vistiations fresh, I regale Geoff with a detailed recollection of these colorful fictions. But last night my reverie was disturbingly similar to my waking life. Zoom calls with real music students that I’ve been teaching. The delivery of our commissioned fence mural, which is actually scheduled for this Wednesday. It’s like so much else during this period, where everything seems to be bleeding into each other. Days to Weeks. Work to Home. And now, even the treasured boundary between my subconscious and conscious life has been compromised.

The fluid nature of perceived time in our current reality is problematic in so many ways. We are animals who’ve found real comfort from the compartmentilization of our lives. Separate spaces for every endeavor, from offices to gyms to libraries. We mark time in dozens of essential ways, with calendars, outfit changes, meal routines, holiday celebrations, happy hours - most all of which have dramatically changed during Covid. This weekend, I read the best explanation for why we find the circular time that has been foisted on us so difficult. Man Booker International Winner, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is part travel-fiction, part-memoir. Each vignette is a musing about the human propensity to wander. Here, she explains why perhaps only those of us truly tied to natural cycles, like growing seasons, can thrive in circumstances like we face today.

Sedentary people prefer the pleasure of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal or destination, rise in percentages. Every moment is unique; no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.

So, given that most people in modern society are far more aligned with the nomad/merchant class, it makes sense that we are sentenced to this inevitable grief once our “Just Do It”, “Follow Your Bliss” plans get derailed off-course. This analysis does not provide any solutions. However, I do think it absolves us of a certain culpability, so that we can stop blaming ourselves for feeling bad or for not handling the new norm as well as we should. Meanwhile, I think it can still be helpful to look for coping mechanisms, and I’ve found some from Jenny Odell, the unintended Queen of Quarantine who I crowned such after the cogent messages from her 2019 book, How To Do Nothing, came to be the perfect precepts for our time.

An avid bird-watcher, walker and observer, Odell is a proponent of slowing down to make space to notice. She calls her book a “field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy.” Her suggestions serve as antidotes to the distracting and fractured nature of attention that the limitless connectivity of our plugged-in lives demands. So, while most of us are still highly connected online, there are so many other ways in which we’ve become uplugged from life as we knew it. And I think she is suggesting that, perhaps, instead of seeing this as disconnection, or as an untethering, we can appreciate the space that this is creating for us to develop subtler forms of attention.

Odell describes herself, and all artists, as “orchestrators of attention”. She sees artists as curators of objects and ideas, re-imagined in ways that allow us to see things differently. I certainly turn to artists and writers to help me do this. And ironically, it is a circular journey of a different sort that brought me to her wisdom in the first place. Lately, I’ve found myself in a strange intellectual fractal. A quest for philosophical nuggets that has me spinning inside a loop of similar thinkers.

I regulary subscribe to BrainPickings, the source of many such nuggets. And that’s where I found Victor Frankl’s Yes to Life quote (from March 28 in this blog) about “the power to choose our response”. That newsletter also quoted Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark), who I checked out further on Krista Tippet’s podcast, On Being. Looking at older episodes of this show, I found an interview with Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized), whose podcast just featured Jenny Odell on May 8th: On Nature, Art, and Burnout in Quarantine. https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/5/8/21252074/jenny-odell-the-ezra-klein-show-how-to-do-nothing-coronavirus-covid-19 This inspired me to purchase her new book, with its page 9 quote of none-other-than Solnit, again, this time from her book, Paradise Built in Hell. Back down the Solnit rabbit hole, I found another Frankl reference in this book, now from Man’s Search for Meaning. And so, the perfect circle was complete.

May 26, 2020

Unproductivity

Labyrinth project by Emily Carr university mentor, Kitty Bland, and student, Mary Rusk - https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/kitty-blandy-and-mary-rusak-find-focus-during-pandemic-with-meditation-pathway

Circular time makes me think of labyrinths. Mandalas of pathways that lead to nowhere, whose hypnotic ellipses draw our single-pointed focus towards the simple act of walking. I have always loved these places of reflection. And I find it erroneous that the term labyrinthian has come to refer to complicated places where we get lost. Because I feel that I actually find myself in such places. The only thing lost is a false sense of destination as the purpose in life.

Odell subscribes to a similar viewpoint in How to Do Nothing. Rather than a plea to escape reality, quit our jobs, or shrug our responsibilities, her book is an invitation to question what we perceive as productive. I think our current reality has many of us doing this. My morning walk has me literally “stopping and smelling the roses” each day, as I’ve seen so many others do during this altered time.

So, while it has encouraged me to see normally overprogrammed-teens watching sunsets and families chilling for endless hours on front lawns, I have also observed a pattern of apology amongst my peers, when they acknowledge having been “less-productive than usual”, during this period. So, I’ve taken to meet this only with permission. This is something I’ve increasingly given myself ever since my excessive drive, as a flutist, left me with a chronic overuse injury that was a wake-up call I’ve only recently been able to truly appreciate.

After this major uninvited “halting” of my career, I became acutely aware of how often people answer “How are you?” with “Busy.” Particularly artists, who have perhaps been undercompensated, underemployed and underappreciated for so long, it feels like being “busy” is a badge of honor that implies their work is in-demand. So, I get it. But still, I have made a point, since this realization, never to answer that question as such. Busy is not an emotion. The truth behind the word - feelings of anxiety, overwhelm and fear - are perhaps too telling to reveal. Because admitting them might mean we have to shift something. They might force us to slow down and stop busying ourselves, which is maybe the scariest thing of all. Because then, we have to face who we truly are when we are not “doing”.

To track my own “doing” during quarantine, I’ve been particularly careful about limiting my screen time. So, I check it weekly. But it was only this week that I finally went to the second page of the iPhone screen time data, where I found a strange categorization of time. It breaks it down into Productive, Creative, Social, Entertainment, Reading and Educational use. However, what they place in each category runs quite counter to what happens to be true for me now. Photos are listed as a Creative pursuit, however many of my hours have been frittered away deleting unnecessary shots (attempts to capture moments that might have been more mindfully spent camera-free). So, this endeavor doesn’t feel that creative to me. Whats App is marked as Social but, of course, it’s now become the arena for some of my most my productive work, since I’m using it as a teaching tool. And Notes is in the Productive category, even though, as a self-admitted list-addict, my worst time-waster is making and remaking these itemized scrolls intended to render me more efficient, when I can’t even imagine how much “productive” time I must have lost just writing them.

So, we all have something to learn from this clever street artist, whose balloon art gives us an important reminder.

May 27, 2020

Covid Art Museum

So far my “efforts” to do nothing more (as ironic as that sounds) have gone swimmingly. I deliberately cancelled one of my Zoom calls this week, two other meetings conveniently got cancelled for me, and I was left with many more hours to spend spontaneously. Some of these involved lying in the grass eating gelato. Others watching passerbys from my front stoop. And one I spent biking the new “slow street” circuit in Vancouver, which has been designated a car-free zone to create more safe, physically-distant space for cyclists and pedestrains to roam. That even our roadways are now on a diet from their usual busyness, seems to me a beautiful metaphor.

Of course, some of this time also involved digital daydreaming, as I prefer to romantically call surfing the web. But using the intentional lens of seeking artistic responses to share on this blog makes even this indulgence feel more guilt-free. So, this week, it landed me on a very cool Instagram page, full of visual reflections about this time (digital illustrations, photographs, sketches, watercolors and more). In fact, it’s where I stumbled upon the balloon art, above, which evolved into my entire week of blog entries. Quite a few pieces reference circular time in some way (above). And a remarkable number of them depict doing nothing (below). Jenny Odell is clearly on to something...

https://www.instagram.com/covidartmuseum/?hl=en

May 28, 2020

Hidden Symphonies

Udo Noll, a Berlin-based media artist and founder of Radio Aporee, a digital global sound map, documented before and during the pandemic

The music of my environment has always captivated me. In fact, I dedicate almost an entire chapter of my novel to birdsong. I love the voice memo feature on my phone, which I use like an auditory camera, as I travel. I’ve learned that this is not a habit many people share. Until recently, that is. Because it seems that suddenly, we are all beginning to listen more. Now, with less traffic, quieter commercial corridors, and other colluding factors, there is left an amazing amplification of the soundscapes which always existed behind the din.

Before Covid, a long tradition of deep listening has been cultivated by various sound artists. American composer, Pauline Oliveros founded the Deep Listening Institute in 1985 (originally called the Pauline Olveros Foundation). Here, she invited musicians to improvise and record, in particularly resonant and reverberant spaces like caves, to inspire extra-sensitive responsiveness.

In the 70’s, Canadian composers, Hildegard Westercamp and Murray Shafer, started the World Soundscape Project (https://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html), which recorded Vancouver’s sonic landscape to illustrate the negative effects of noise pollution, ultimately resulting in more positive guidelines for urban acoustical design.

Acoustic ecologist, Gordon Hempton says that silence is not the absence of sound, but rather the presence of everything. In the short documentary, Sanctuaries of Silence, he offers tools for seeking silence amidst noisy urban life.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUxMdYhipvQ

But his suggestions probably never could have predicted Covid, which has achieved this result with alarming swiftness. British sound artist and field recordist, Stuart Fowkes has been tracking the soundscapes of this disquieting time on his website, Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/

Here, you can click on one of 3,000+ global coordinates and listen to everything from empty flagpoles, and ticking radiators, to kites flying. Anyone is welcome to contribute, using #stayhomesounds. And this is my own addition to the catalogue:

Bullfrogs mating: https://youtu.be/ZoKT-RlDfs8

The New York Times, has tracked the music of the pandemic in another interesting way. Measuring by decibels (below), they compare the soundscape of a normally busy Manhattan street, before and during quarantine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/22/upshot/coronavirus-quiet-city-noise.html

Pre-covid nights sound more like quarantine days, averaging around 64 decibels.

Another bi-product of the pandemic is a trend towards birdwatching. The world’s attention was brought to birding this week, due to an unfortunate racist incident that occurred in New York’s Central Park. Christian Cooper was drawn to the park because of the orioles and yellow warblers he could find there. While birding, he politely asked a woman if she would kindly put her dog on a leash. When she refused, he insited and she proceeded to call the cops. Cooper was armed with little more than binoculars and a camera. But apparently, his crime was being black. The woman was white. Luckily, he caught her ridiculous cry for help (“I’m being threatened by an African-American man.”) on camera. The video immediately went viral and resulted in her being fired from her job. Graciously, he remarked today in the Times, that this punishment did not fit her crime, and while he wants to hold her to account for her racist behavior, he doesn’t believe that “her life needs to be torn apart.”

Whatever her fate, if this time inspires deeper listening for you, let’s hope your soundscape walks are far less eventful than his was.

May 29, 2020

Covid Shuffle

Brooklyn’s usually bustling Fort Greene Park, during the pandemic

From the beginning of social distancing, I have been quite fascinated by the complicated choreography we are collectively participating in. I would give anything to be an eagle, looking down from above, just to witness the maze of interwoven patterns that our sidewalk dances create. And I am not the only person interested in this do-si-do.

If you search “six feet apart” on YouTube, you can’t imagine how many musicians, famous or otherwise, have composed new songs with this exact title (IE. country singer, Luke Combs, teen pop star, Alec Benjamin). It’s just one of many things that illustrate the uncanny global resonance that is happening right now, even while there are still vast differences between the ways people experience this pandemic.

Personally, I’m partial to this rap, written as a PSA for UNC Health, by The Holderness Family, a modern-day Al Yankovich-style parody band comprised of former FOX sportscaster, Penn Holderness with his wife and kids. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjfCeY4D2QI

Deeper into this search, I found another music video, by a different family band in LA, called Haim. These three Grammy-nominated sisters have written the song, I Know Alone to express how quarantine living has felt for them. Meanwhile, they appropriately dance to their lyrics six feet apart.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.vulture.com/amp/2020/04/haim-i-know-alone-video-album-release-date.html

In the dance world, old colleagues of mine, from Flagstaff, Arizona, will host a virtual Festival that starts this Friday, May 29th, featuring original socially-distant choreography from movers all over the Southwest. Fittingly, it’s called the Six Feet Apart Dance Festival.

https://canyonmovementcompany.org/cmc/upcoming-events/

Documenting the Covid shuffle in a very different way, Toronto geographer, Daniel Rotszdain created a “social distancing machine” to demonstrate just how difficult a genuine 6-foot radius is to maintain in public space.

And finally, this hip hop dance compilation, made in 2019, could be the anthem for our times.

MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJskIJGEsd8

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miachanelparker · 4 years

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Title: Baby Carter Update! Involved: Mia Carter and Tyler Carter Posted: Monday, March 23rd, 2020 Subscribers: 1,201 Views: 215 Likes: 10 Dislikes: 6 Video #: 2 Description Box:

I’m back with a update on Baby Carter and some very helpful tips and tricks for getting through your first trimester. I got you girl!

Watch: https://miachanelparker.tumblr.com/post/611602148480942080/title-intro-to-baby-carter-and-mommy-mcvlogs

Instagram: @mrscarter_ Twitter: @mrscarter_ Facebook: Mia Carter Snapchat: @mrscarter_ (new user)

Products Mentioned:

B6 Vitamins: https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Bounty-Supplement-Supports-Metabolism

Smoothie Ingredients:

Banana Peanut Butter Whey Protein Cacao Almond Milk Honey 1/4 cup Greek Yogurt

Boutique Location: Maison Jolie @ 003 Westheimer Rd b, Houston, TX 77027

[ Friday, March 20th, 2020 ]

Mia stood in their guest bedroom as she held up the light camera, flipping the screen up to be able to watch herself properly. “Hey guys, it is” she breathed stopping as she picked her up phone and checked the date “it’s March 20th” she told them “a Friday and it’s 11:20 am” she announced “and we are currently in the new set up my husband designed for me” she said with a giggle. “He just up and surprised me with all of this” she said looking around the room showing them a bit of the behind the scenes of her sit down set up. “I am so very grateful; you guys have no idea” she stressed as she walked out of the room her long hair swinging behind her. “I was shocked too” she added a she moved towards their kitchen “he got everything for it, set it up, he even got me this camera” she said looking at them “which is very light, very clear” she emphasized. “Well what do you guys think?” she asked them “I think it’s pretty freakin’ clear” she told him. “I love it, it’s small and sleek. And it fits right in the majority of my purses, which is a bonus because I can incorporate more vlogs outside of the house now too, without the hassle” she breathed.

Mia grabbed her baby pink and gold glass bottle unscrewing it’s top, she placed it against the fridge door filling it with cold water for her to drink while she worked today. “So, I am going to take you guys in there, show you an overview of it” she told him as she thought about it. “I have pregnancy brain” she said shaking her head a little. “I am going to show you guys the room, oh!” she said as she pulled the bottle away. “I want to give you guys an update on the baby, show you some new products that I think has helped me during my first trimester” she told them “they aren’t too new, but I think they will help some of you other first time mother’s” she said as she moved back towards the room. Mia closed the door behind her and set the camera up making sure she connected it to the large monitor they had now, before she sat down guzzling down the water thirstily.

Mia stopped to catch her breath and she sat the bottle down screwing its top back on it before she grabbed her phone and said “so as of right now I am exactly 10 weeks” she said as she looked at the app that was on her phone. Mia picked up her phone and showed the little imagery from the app “it says I am 10 weeks” she said looking at herself in the monitor. “It tells me baby Carter is 1 inch and weighs 0.25 ounces” she said with a smirk “that’s crazy” she chuckled her other hand resting on her knee. “Baby is the size of a fig” she also added before she lowered the phone closing it and sitting it aside. “I don’t have any cravings right now, but I no longer like the smell of broccoli, which is weird. Because I used to love it but now it’s a major turn off” she told the camera with a headshake.

“So, for a personal update” she said clasping her hands together gently “I will say truthfully my biggest trial during this first trimester has been conquering my morning sickness” she told them. “I am technically 3 months pregnant” she told them “I will be entering my second trimester shortly and I hear about how much easier it gets for women when they do” she chuckled. “So, we will see” she told them, giving the camera a knowing look. “But my husband and I found some awesome stuff that I feel really helped with my morning sickness” she told them. “We had a doctor’s appointment to check in on our pumpkin” she said as she reached down beside herself picking up the items she wanted to discuss. “We had some concerns” she told them “nothing bad” she added before she said “mine were my morning sickness definitely, I wanted to know if my doctor had any recommendations for me considering I had tried several different things. But crackers, ginger-ale, and soup just weren’t cutting it honestly. And my husband’s concern was night sweats…” she said using air quotes. “I wasn’t aware of it myself but that’s a whole thing and I am completely transparent on this channel so, yeah” she said shrugging. “I can say we do live in Texas; it’s starting to warm up a lot here and it’s about 75 degrees at 8 and 9 o’clock at night so” she shrugged once more. “Your girl apparently sweats like a stripper in church at night and before anyone drops below in the comments any fat jokes” she said pausing for a long time her head tilted as she looked at the camera. The edited clip is zoomed in slowly before it snaps back and Mia says “I’m fat, get over it” she said before she moved back to the items.

“For the night sweats, I simply wear less clothing to bed. Drop the temperature at night. My doctor said due to the hormones and increase blood flow etcetera pregnant women sweat and there’s that. Not much you can really do to combat it” she told the lens. “If anything, I tend to keep this bottle” she said raising it into the camera view “filled with water on the nightstand and it stays pretty cold, so it cools me down throughout the night when I drink from it,” she told them. “For the morning sickness however” she told them sitting the bottle down again my doctor suggested vitamin B6, caffeine free herbal teas, resting more, eating less greasy foods, and eating smaller portions” she told them. “My husband ordered a few bottles of the vitamin B6, which I take along with my regular prenatal vitamins. I am not going to speak on these much because collectively I can’t say that the vitamins work phenomenally on their own or if it’s the collection of things that I do, that has helped me. If you get what I mean” she told them showing them the bottle before she sat them down. “But I have noticed a difference, I say a vitamin never hurts, and you should give it a try if it has the potential of helping you. My husband said he ordered them from Amazon” she said giving them a knowing look. “Which isn’t a shocker we are the Amazon freaking family in this complex” she chuckled.

“I bought these herbal teas from our local whole foods” Mia said as she lifts the boxes, holding one of each in hands as she showed them. I have peppermint and ginger flavor. Out of the two I lean towards the peppermint one, but I do enjoy the ginger more during the day honestly” she told them. “I will usually drink the peppermint in the evening or at night” she told them “and the ginger during the day” she sighed. “I try to limit myself, but I could drink 3 cups of peppermint tea a day. I try not to though” she reiterated. “I only sweeten it with raw honey from whole foods” she added “and really I hardly use it in the ginger one” she breathed. “These help soothe my stomach greatly and I would 10/10 recommend trying this method of just hot teas, I don’t feel the brand matters these are Yogi, just steep it as instructed and drink it down” she told them sitting the boxes aside.

“I get as much rest as I can. I am a full-time student, that’s better said than done any day” she told them. “But I am not shy to naps right now honestly. I think I nap after every class or every time I eat” she chuckled. “Especially after…” she said sipping her invisible glass of tea. “Which might I add the morning sickness is like” she breathed weighing things with her hand “neck and neck with the sex* drive. I don’t get it” she said shaking her head “imagine having to throw up during sex*” she said blurting the word in the final cut. “It’s not cute” she said tucking her lips in as she shook her head once more. “Anyhow” she said changing the subject “I did cut back on grease, which wasn’t hard because truthfully I did not eat that bad beforehand. I am addicted to Chickfila and McDonald’s fries, but I didn’t eat much of it during the day considering I do like to cook, and I do cook often” she told them. “Far as portion controls go, I did make them smaller and just added healthier snacks in between. Not to mention” she said having a thought. “I make this amazing smoothie, of which I have become addict to, and I drink that every day now” she told them.

“I will drop the ingredients in the description box. But it mainly has banana, peanut butter, almond milk, ice of course, cacao, a little of my husband’s whey protein” she said measuring on her fingers and she thought to herself before she said “yes I will definitely drop it below because I am drawing a blank, but there’s other stuff I add” she told them. “It is so good” she told them, “so that’s like one of my sweet treats of the day and that will hold me for some time so that cuts down on what I intake in the morning” she breathed. Mia lifted her bottle unscrewed it and began to drink down its contents before she closed it and sat it back down. “I try to cook breakfast every morning, I was raised that it is an important meal of the day and I feel like it kicks starts me having a productive one. So, if I can I try to make us breakfast every morning” she said “today I did not” she snorted chuckling. “I woke up super late, so I had my smoothie” she told them.

“We also got me some bra’s recently, which I really needed. I went up in my sizing” she told them. “I just happened to notice when we were in Paris, I was so uncomfortable in all of the bras that I had at that time” she breathed “so a lot of what I wore I think I just said F it and didn’t wear one because my boobs were just so freaking tender and sore all the time” she told them. “When we got home, I went to a regular department store and got sized. So, I went from a 46 double D to a 46 triple D or E rather” she told them camera before she picked a bra up. “So, with that we ended buying a bunch, it was more so my husband than me” she chuckled. “We went to two separate locations” she told them “retailed they are like 50 plus dollars apiece, I think he bought me like 20 to 40 of them” she said not too sure. “He bought varieties” she told them, “regular bras, sports bras, nursing bras, and so on” she listed. “The boutique we went to was a little ways out but I can say it was worth it, I love the quality of the bras and the feel of them” she nodded. “I will be sure to drop the boutique name and location in the description box as well” she told them as she placed the bra aside.

“I will show you guys some more of the other bras” she told them as she moved to stand up and she grabbed the camera moving into the massive walk-in closet turning the light on. “This is the walk-in closet in our place” she walked over to the middle drawers and opened one showing the other bras “here are the other bras we picked up, I have so plain nude ones and black ones” she said showing them as she flipped through the bras. “And some cute and decorative ones” she said the camera angled at the bra drawer and she combed through the various ones. “So that’s that” Mia said closing the drawer with her hip and she turned back around moving to exit the closet, turning the light back off. Mia moved toward the kitchen, King trotting behind her as she did, and she panned the camera to him “look at who’s following me” she chuckled as she knelt down closer to King. “Hey” she said as she scratched his head playfully “hi baby” she said happily as cooed over him before she stood back up and continued to walk Mia turned the camera to herself and she said to the camera “okay so I am going to take King out for a little quick walk” she said looking down at him “and I am going to feed him, make sure his bowl has water and stuff and then I’ll be back to give you guys and overview of the room” she told them before she placed her hand over the camera.

[ Saturday, March 21st, 2020 ]

“Hey guys!” Mia said cheerfully as she rested in her bed, her hair tied and face freshly washed. “Today is Saturday, March 21st” she said. “I totally ended yesterday’s vlog with me walking King and I had all intentions of coming back, but I got busy and sidetracked with a group project I had to get done” she said rolling her eyes. “So, I had to stroll all the way to the campus and met up with some 3 of my classmates to get the project done completely” she said rubbing her eyes and her forehead. “It took forever, I have always hated group projects and assignments because truthfully” she shrugged “Not everyone has good work ethics. I think I left the campus at about 7 or 8 pm which was crazy to me” she said shaking her head. “But it’s done, there’s no stressing over that anymore. I am happy” she told them as she moved to get up out of the bed and the camera caught a very small glimpse of Tyler’s outline beneath the sheets lying in bed in the background as she moved towards their kitchen “it’s” she breathed softly as she walked towards the stove and she panned the camera to the time “9:30 am” she told them tiredly. “And I am about to make me a smoothie, my husband a protein shake” she breathed setting the camera up on the counter.

“I think I am going to make spinach and cheese eggs, some turkey sausage, and a little fruit” she shrugged. “He’s laying down, he’s probably already had some cereal or something” she said scratching her arm idly. “He woke up very earlier today, he’s an artist. So, I can say his creative flow happens either first thing in the morning or late, late at night” she told them.

In this clip of the video, it is speed up as you watch Mia cook around the kitchen in a Ethika pull over camo bra and staple shorts. Never mind the fact that the spandex held Mia in all of the right places as she moved around.

“Okay, so breakfast is served” Mia said as the camera is zoomed in onto their plated meals before she turned the camera to herself and says. “So, we are going to eat, and I’ll be back shortly” she told them, placing her hand over the camera.

“Okay so it’s about 10:45 am” Mia says looking at her phone screen for the time as she held the camera up to her face. “I am going to now show you the overview of the room” she told them as she sat her phone on the cleaned kitchen counter and she walked down the hallway passing a large mirror. “I changed after we ate, I just have on this Pretty Little Thing basic white V-neck and some of their lounge or sports wear pants” she said turning to the side. “My husband likes when I wear these” she said pulling her shirt up a bit as she angled her ass just right “any who” she chuckled before she opened the door to the room. She stood in the door way and said “this is how it’s looking right now, don’t mind those boxes over there in the corner” she pointed out “those are amazon packages I need to open with a few little things I want to try inside them” she said.

“Um, it does look like a lot of equipment and stuff. But it isn’t, we didn’t want to go overboard. This is just a two-bedroom place. We will have to move me out of this space eventually to turn this into a nursery” she told them. “I know some people asked about that on the last video, what we were going to do once the baby did come and we decided on a nursery layout” she breathed. “I think I will move my step up into the living room or maybe we get rid of a dining table” she shrugged. “You guys haven’t seen this, because I haven’t taken you guys in that space, but we have two massive tables with 20 plus chairs at them and honestly” she chuckled “even with both sides of the family together one table is large enough to accompany everyone. So, I may ask my husband can we remove that table or sell it or something. I don’t know” she said moving her hand to her mouth as she thought to herself.

“But this is the set up” Mia said getting back on topic “I have a backdrop; I have the other fabric choices in the closet for right now. I have 2 soft box lights” she said moving around the room now to show each item. “I took the chair and the side tables you saw in the first video out. He bought me a longer table to rest my laptop and stuff on. We got rid of the obvious bed in here. I think he sold that; I am not sure. I came home and it was gone” she told them. “I have a new chair, which I love” she said showing the baby pink chair to them. “Everything in here is pink, gold, and white. Very much cut aesthetically pleasing” she told them. “I have small decorative pieces here and there to add to the look, but again outside of a plant I didn’t add much in here only because I know it has to change anyway. Now we don’t know the sex of the baby, but if it is a girl some of this stuff can double as décor for her, if not. Well like I said it’s moving” she told them as she slowly panned the room “that’s my large monitor” she said as she continued to move past it slowly.

“Checking in” Mia said as she looked to the camera set up on the table near the kitchen. “It is 1 pm in the afternoon. I just made myself some lunch, my husband is gone. He’s out working and stuff” she breathed. “And I made a salmon burger” she told them, “I will have to show you guys my recipe one day. I had that, sweet potatoes fries, and water” she said lifting her bottle for them to see how much of the water in 1-liter bottle was left. Mia panned the camera to the textbooks and her notes “so I am studying now and doing some homework. We will be on Spring break soon, so I am trying to finish strong” she told them. “And I am going to set you guys up to watch my techniques a bit” she said. Mia sat the camera up and she began taking notes, using various colored gel pens and various colored highlighters, she wrote in very neat and legible handwriting as she showed them how her brain worked to process what she was reading and studying. Mia focused on the textbook flipping the page, she didn’t skim she read the book word for word before she scribbled something down quickly each time. She stopped and scrolled her MacBook before she moved back to her textbook and continued to write up her notes. The video then begins to speed up, showing you each hour that passed as she completed her assignments both online and in her notebooks. She moved back and forth before she reached the 4-hour mark and stopped the time-lap.

“Okay, so I managed to type up some work. I started an essay. I finished 4 assignments and I studied for one of my finance classes, I study hard because those kick my ass* the most” she said the word being bleeped out. “Now King is whining by the door, so I am going to take him out and let him get some fresh air. I am going to feed him; give him some water and I’ll check in a little later” Mia said with a smile before she placed her hand over the camera.

[ Sunday, March 22nd, 2020 ]

“What’s up people” Mia said as the camera facing her in a full face of makeup and her hair down her back. “I just got back from church” she said truthfully. “If I can I make sure I get my butt up every Sunday and go to church” she told them. “After I left there, I stopped by the store to get groceries and I am going to tell you guys what I got” she said. “I changed out of my church clothes” she told them, showing herself in a mirror. “I am nice and comfy now. On Sunday’s I try to bathe King, clean the house. House cleaning is definitely on Sunday’s for me, that is when I am the least busy” she told them. “My husband is out; he doesn’t go to church with me” she notified.

She turned the camera towards the bags of groceries, “it seems like a lot, but honestly I needed stuff to make today’s dinner and we needed to buy actual stuff for the house. It had been a while” she told them. “So, I stopped at whole foods” she said setting the camera up angled at the bags.

Mia has everything set up on the counter, and she held the camera that was facing the food for right now. “I sat it all out and I am just going to name each item for you” she told them “I think I am going to make my famous lasagna, which I have not made for my husband yet. So, I am excited to see how he’ll react to it. If he’ll like it or not” she told them. While either pointing or touching each item Mia began to list off across the countertop “there is lasagna noodles, olive oil, ground turkey instead of ground beef simply because I am trying to cut back on greasy and fatty foods like my doctor said” she breathed. “Fresh garlic, oregano, marinara sauce which I got 2 jars of because I like to make my lasagna with at least 4 or 5 layers” she said with a hand gesture, moving it side to side. “Ricotta, no particular brand” she shrugged though they couldn’t see her. “Parmesan, parsley, mozzarella, baby spinach mix, Caesar dressing, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon, organic honey, lemon, oranges, bananas, organic peanut butter, chia seeds, cacao nibs, whey protein mainly for my husband who does workout often” she said inhaling deeply before she said “salmon, avocado, everything but the bagel seasoning. For my avocado toast, y’all have to try it” she said plugging the item in.

“Bagels, whole wheat bread, coconut water, orange juice, naked drinks, garlic bread, regular lemonade and raspberry lemonade. Because my husband loves juice, he’s a juice guy. I have to keep juice in the house for him, I can live off water and tea and be fine. A little OJ here and there, but he loves juice” she said turning the camera back to herself now. “So that gives you guys a little idea of what our cart looks like when we go shopping for groceries” she told them as she moved around the kitchen to begin putting the items up in their rightful places. “I am slowly building up some things that I love to cook with in here, far as seasonings and everything goes. While we were still dating my husband lived in our home and he didn’t do much cooking at all, so it was very minimal things in here, but I have added a lot of the necessities for me to cook with in here” she smirked. “I am in the process of organizing our pantry right here” she showed them. “I have all the containers” she told them as she showed each one “and their labels are already on, I hand wrote them. I didn’t mind doing so” she said easily. “I have a few matching baskets for his chips, granola bars, protein bars, and stuff” she said showing a few things. “All of his cereal is in those containers up there. He loves” she emphasized “cereal so it’s a variety” she said panning over it. Mia closed the door and moved to set the camera back up on the countertop.

“I used to pick up a bottle of 2 of wine each time I shopped to keep our wine cellar full but since I can’t drink, I have just left that be” she said gesturing towards that area of the house with her hand. “So, I am going to put these things up fully, and I will be back when I start to clean the place up. It’s only about 1:30 pm right now and I won’t start cooking until about 5 or 6” she told them. “So, during that time, I clean and all those other things I told you guys before” she said.

“So, this is King” Mia said holding the puppy up to the camera hugging him to her face happily before she pecked his head. “He’s only a month old” she said looking at him as the puppy licked her fingers. “He’s not quite a big boy yet, so I bathe him in the sink for now” she told them. “All the things I use for him” she said as she positioned him in a laying position in her arms “I keep in this baby blue basket, that I have labeled King” she said lifting it with one hand for them to see. “I keep it in the laundry room along with his food and any extra stuff for him, toys, leash, etcetera” she said. “In here I have his small little measuring cup” she said “this is mainly to rinse him off and as quickly as possible before he makes a huge mess�� she showed. “Here’s his brush and comb” she said picking up each item for them to see. “His puppy soap, a small little towel just for him, and an essential oil. It helps maintain a fresh scent and they are not harmful to dogs at all, I use the rose or lemongrass ones” she told them. “Pits don’t have strong odors at all, so it just for the heck of it honestly” she shrugged.

The video begins to speed up showing Mia bathing King gently and rinsing him before she dries him off and brushed his fur, she rubs some oil into him before she picks him up in his towel and cuddles him gently to her chest.

Mia held the camera in her hand, and she rested King in his bed in their room, still wrapped in his little towel before she moved to clean the bathroom up. “So now I am going to clean up” she told them, sitting the camera back down. “I am starting with the bathroom, then I am going to clean our bedroom. I use all organic and very clean products especially because of King. If you are cleaning with Bleach or any other harsh products with a dog, just keep in mind they have sensitive noses people” she said looking at the camera. “I use either Method, Thieves, or Meyers” she listed out for them. “Okay so let’s get this started” Mia said before the video began to speed up once more.

Mia is shown grabbing all the mats and walking out of the room before she returns with a Swiffer and broom. She places those two items aside before she begins to clean the shower and the tub in the shower. She took the stand in their shower out and set it aside before she moved back to clean out the tub first and then moving to clean the entire shower itself. She got on her hands and knees and began to scrub the tile with a brush cleaner, when she was done with each section, she used the bucket she had to pour water against it to clear the tile of its suds. When she was done with that she set everything back into place before she began to clean the sinks and the toilet before she then began to sweep and Swiffer the bathroom floors clean.

Mia is then shown setting the camera up in the room, where she sat King and his bed on their already made up bed. She began to clean up their bedroom putting things in their proper places again before she took, cups and bottles back in their kitchen to be washed. The fast-paced Mia moved to straighten the nightstands up on both their sides before she began to vacuum the rug in their room. Making sure she took King out of the room beforehand did due to his sensitive ears. The plus-sized woman moved around the rug twice before she turned that off and put it away. When Mia returned, she sat King and his bed on the floor in their room again before she cleaned the sitting area up in the room as well.

“I am all done cleaning now” Mia said as she held the camera up “whew” she breathed out as she licked her lips slowly. “I cleaned our room, the bathroom, the living room, and our kitchen” she told them as she stood in the kitchen now, it being the last place that she cleaned. Mia purposefully left out the other areas of the room assuming Tyler wouldn’t want all of their space exposed, though she hadn’t asked him that yet. “After I finished all of the cleaning. I washed my face clean of all that makeup I had on and I bathed” she said pointing to the camera. “Now I am going to start dinner, my husband is finally back home. He’s in the living room right now so I am going to get started…” she told them as she began to take the items she needed out and placed them on the counter. She set the camera up on the counter again before she said “I am going to cook the lasagna and I think I am going to have a side salad and garlic bread” she told them as she moved.

The video begins to speed up and Mia starts to grab the pan she needs for her lasagna before she began to prepare the dish completely. Mia moved step by step making the dish in its now speed up pace.

“Here’s the lasagna all cooked and ready, I have garlic bread here, and I made a salad with that spinach mix” she said to the camera as she pointed to each individual dish. “Babe!” Mia called out loudly for Tyler from the kitchen where she was standing.

Tyler sat in the living room, his feet propped up on the ottoman as he watched the TV closely, following the storyline to a T. As Mia called him, he responded “yeah, babe?” loudly, his eyes not once leaving the TV as he stood up from the couch, without waiting for her response. He slowly began to walk out of the room, stumbling over his two feet a bit as he continued to look at the screen. Once he was at an angle where he really couldn’t see it anymore, he turned his body walking normal, his socked feet sliding against the hardwood.

“Baby come here” Mia called out to him as she grabbed a large spoon and dipped it in the pan for him to try her recipe. The food was still hot, but it wasn’t hot enough to burn his mouth when he ate it. “Come try this baby” she said as she heard him turning to the side as she held the spoon out. She blew the food a little before she said “I want to see if you like my lasagna recipe baby” the camera still rolling, she looked to King resting at her feet in the kitchen before she looked up at him.

Tyler looked at Mia as she spoke and he nodded slowly as he walked closer, leaning in a little, his chest in the camera view unknowingly. He opened his mouth and accepted the spoon full of lasagna. “Mmm,” he hummed out as he chewed it. “That’s real good babe,” he told her as he wrapped her up in his arms, pulling her to his chest, his hands sliding down to her ass, gripping her there, in front of the camera.

As Tyler accepted, she smiled knowingly, you could see her in the camera view but not him which she found amusing. As he tasted the sample and told her it was good, she smiled “you really like it?” Mia asked him.

Tyler held Mia close, cupping her by her ass and he squeezed. “Of course,” he told her as he finished swallowing. “You know everything you cook is damn good,” he complimented her, dropping a kiss on her lips.

The video began to speed up as the two of them spoke and chuckled with each other. Tyler is seen patting her butt, kissing her lips a few times, making his plate and moving out of the camera view with his dinner.

Mia sits and she eats dinner next to Tyler and she licks her lips of the string of cheese that covered it before she said. “I think I am going to try to upload once or twice a week” biting her lip, and she turned to Tyler even though he wasn’t in the screen at and all and ask, “babe what do you think?” curiously.

Tyler leaned forward, his elbows on the counter as he ate. At Mia’s words, Tyler nodded slowly. “I think that’s good, steady content promotes more followers,” he said easily, licking his lips.

Mia chuckled at his response, always the supportive one “you are right” she told him as she leaned over her head on his arm for a moment before she sits back upright forking some more food into her mouth.

“Okay guys, I am going to go cuddle up with the hubby and we are going to watch a movie. A little later I am probably just going to study which you guys saw me do in… yesterday’s vlog” she said with a smile. “So I am going to log out” she said with a smirk a she rested against the kitchen counter “make sure you guys subscribe, like, comment below, and press that little bell button so that you are notified of any future videos from the Carter clan” she said before she placed her hand over the camera again.

#tag: youtube #tag: vlogs #tag: mcvlogs

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quarantineculture · 4 years

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quarantine days 4 and 5

Saturday, March 21, 2020 and Sunday, March 22, 2020

Didn’t update yesterday. You already know why. Zelda, baby!

Anyways, back to your regularly scheduled Quarantine Blogging.

The days are starting to all blur together. It’s hard when I do pretty much the exact same few things every day, just in slightly different order or for varying amounts of time.

RAMBLING ABOUT THINGS I SAW AT THE PARK AND ATTEMPTS TO MAKE UP NAMES FOR LOCAL FLORA AND FAUNA WHOSE NAMES I DO NOT KNOW (with pictures!)

Here’s something funny that I saw/heard yesterday. At the park, there was a family gathered at the edge of the lake, all looking down into something. A little girl, probably 5 or 6, was pointing at a dead fish floating at the surface and saying, “Look at the fish! Can we bring it home?” (I have no idea if she realized it was dead or not, but I am gonna assume yes?) And her sister who’s probably around 9 was like, “Yeah, take it home and we’ll cook it for dinner!” Their parents were trying to be encouraging but not let’s-grab-a-very-dead-fish-out-of-the-pond kind of encouraging.

That fish was probably smaller than the palm of that little girl’s hand. LMAO. You couldn’t feed anyone with that. It was just a funny conversation. Kids are so idealistic.

I wonder what it must be like for kids right now with no school. Do they realize what’s going on? I’m sure they know something is off, but I wonder how excited they are to not have school. Are they going stir crazy yet? I know a lot of college kids are already going stir crazy being stuck at home with their families. It kinda feels like high school again, but we don’t even have school to hang out with people your own age. Also, who came up with the word stir crazy? I feel like I only started hearing it very recently. Maybe because it describes what a lot of people are feeling right now, but I feel like there was a different term that I used before, but I can’t think of it off the top of my head. Restless?

NEVER MIND! I FOUND IT! Thank you, Wikipedia. It’s called cabin fever! That was the word I’m more familiar with. Wikipedia says the therapy for cabin fever/stir-craziness is going outside and direct interaction with nature. Good thing I’ve been doing that every day! Thank God for NYC parks. The one near my house is so big that once you get deep enough in you can’t even really tell you’re still in a city. I mean, you could. But if you look myopically (is that a word?) at just one small area of trees or whatever those grain-like bushy things are called- bushtails? – you could pretend that you’re on a prairie or something and not in New York City.

BUSHTAILS? I know there’s a word for it! Please let me know if you know it.

Yesterday (Saturday) I saw a whopping THIRTY-SEVEN (37) TURTLES! But today I only saw like 6 or 7. It was hard to count exactly because they’re kinda far away and you can’t get too close because of the fence around the whole lake. Today was pretty cold so I guess the turtles stayed inside. Look at this picture. How many turtles does it look like to you? 3? 4? 5? I can’t tell.

It’s blurry because I already had to zoom in a bunch because I was so far away. The struggle is real ☹

Look at these boys above. Don’t they kinda look like they’re playing leap-frog? Hehe.

And here’s a cool bird I saw! Red-breast? I’m just making up common names for things I see around the neighborhood now. If you know what it is please tell me so I don’t make a complete fool of myself. (I think it might be too late.)

REFLECTIONS ON LIFE IN QUARANTINE:

It’s different than the lifestyle I’m used to, but not altogether bad. At school, I’m running around a lot, going to classes, dining halls, hospital job, RA duty, library, meetings, TA-ing, etc. I don’t really spend much time in the dorm at school. (Also because being in my room kinda stressed me out when I was an RA, because I constantly felt like I had to be telling my residents to be quiet, but I wasn’t sure where to draw the line because I thought I might be over-sensitive to noise. It was really difficult.) Since all my friends lived at different parts of campus, I’d usually go over to their place to hang out with them or meet at a dining hall or study somewhere together. But now that we are all practicing ~social distancing~, I get to stay at home and relax all the time. It’s kinda freeing to not have as many obligations and it’s wicked nice to be able to sleep late. But I do have this looming feeling of needing to get work done for my two exams that are coming up, and I really do need to work on my thesis which I am ridiculously, ridiculously behind on.

A lot of people are making memes commenting on how introverts are actually thriving right now in quarantine because that’s how their (our?) lives are usually. Staying home, doing your hobbies, not leaving the house unless absolutely necessary, etc. I remember having this conversation with several of my very introverted friends – they were telling me that during college winter break, they just stay at home and don’t leave the house for days on end. My roommate was like that. I love that girl so much. She said, and I quote, “Why would I go outside when there are so many things I can do inside?” She pointed out – reading comics, watching TV shows, playing with her sister, browsing Instagram… there was a whole list and I’m only really recalling some of them, but you get the point. I appreciate that. I realized that a lot of the hobbies I had in middle school and high school – playing guitar or piano, writing stories, etc., I just stopped doing in college. I thought it was because I was so much busier with schoolwork, which is true, but I think it’s also because all my friends were so much closer to me in college. Like, there’s nothing stopping you from going to your friend’s house to hang out all afternoon and night if you want when you’re in college. Whereas in middle school or high school, you have to make a whole arrangement between you, your friend, your parents, and your friend’s parents to set up a time and date and place and who’s going to drive you there and back if you want to hang out with them outside school.

So I do appreciate this time to work on my hobbies. I’ve been working on a lil crochet chicken project. It took me a long time to get started but I am making slow progress now! I’m excited for how it turns out. Maybe after I go back to my dorm and get the stuffing and other materials from my room I can make more. I miss my friends kind of, but I guess I’ve already become so accustomed to being back at home that I don’t actively want to go back. I guess since it’s still technically spring break it doesn’t feel as real that the semester’s gonna be completely online now.

GRATITUDE LOG:

Caught some nice horses in Legend of Zelda! Cute dogs in the park. Funny little family talking about bringing home a tiny fish. The weird chiffon cake that my sisters made and gave me even though it didn’t have any sugar in it because they somehow forgot to add sugar. Downloaded a drawing app but haven’t used it yet. Made progress on my little crochet chicken project! Texted a bunch of friends that I haven’t talked to in a while. It’s nice to hear from people that you haven’t heard from in so long. Got a FREE Scribd account to read books!! GET ONE Y’ALL you don’t even need a credit card for 30 days!! Get those books for free that you’ve always wanted to read!

QUARANTINE BY THE NUMBERS (Saturday 3/21)

Time outside basement: 1 hour

Screen time on phone: 6 hours 7 min

Toggl-logged studying: 1 hour 34 minutes

Times I fell asleep while studying: probably at least 3

Turtles spotted: 37

Legend of Zelda: approx. 4 hours

Horses in BoTW tamed: 3 or 4 (I think one of them I tamed, then jumped off, then had to re-tame)

New horses registered in BoTW: 1 (the FASTEST horse EVER!!! SO worth it!)

QUARANTINE BY THE NUMBERS (Sunday 3/22)

Time outside basement: approx. 1 hour 15 min?

Screen time on phone: 5 hours 39 min

Legend of Zelda: 0 playing, a lot listening to music

Toggl-logged studying: 2 hours 25 min (a lot was probably sleeping tho)

Toggl-logged blogging time:

Turtles spotted: 6 or 7

Chocolates eaten: 1 (unfortunately)

#quarantine #quarantine blogging #covid-19 #coronavirus

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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COVID-19 Fashion School Grads ‘Pushing the Industry to Go Virtual’ – WWD

https://ift.tt/3g2Mub5

“You are the chosen class,” said Oprah Winfrey. “Building your community is how you change the world,” said LeBron James. “Leave behind the old ways of thinking that divide us,” said former President Obama.

Some of the biggest names on the planet converged for a virtual graduation special over the weekend to celebrate the class of 2020. The message? The coronavirus has been hard on all graduating students — high school and college — who must face a historic level of uncertainty when they were just raring to go into the world.

The quarantined months have been particularly hard on students of such hands-on disciplines as fashion, textile and product design, whose final collections had to be completed on bedroom floors instead of classrooms, and often without supplies, drawing tables, pattern-making equipment or sometimes even sewing machines.

Graduation celebrations were scrapped, and long-awaited debuts into the fashion world, via the graduate runway show, along with them. And as unemployment soars and fashion retail and brand bankruptcies loom, students face a challenging future.

But there are glimmers of hope in leaving behind those old ways of thinking, as Obama called them. In the first part of our class of 2020 series, WWD saluted the next generation of fashion designers and trailblazers at the Rhode Island School of Design, ArtCollege of Design and Savannah College of Art and Design. In part two, we shared the experiences of students at Academy of Art University, Otis College of Art and Design and Kent State University.

In the final part of the series, WWD takes a look at what’s being done differently for graduation, as well as some words of wisdom from students, faculty and administrators, at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the New School’s Parsons School of Design and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, NEW YORK CITY

New graduation plan:

FIT is planning an in-person undergraduate commencement in October at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden and a separate graduate school commencement ceremony. FIT will recognize the class of 2020 with a virtual graduation week celebration that began May 18. Since FIT’s annual “Future of Fashion” runway show was canceled, senior thesis collections will be featured on a web site, which will include a dedicated page for each graduate, representing five areas of specialization. In addition to social media visibility, FIT will produce an exhibition and film in the fall, featuring designs selected by industry experts and faculty (assuming it is safe to do so).

Career counseling:

FIT’s Career Internship Services continues to support graduating students with career preparation and development. In response to COVID-19, FIT recently hosted its first virtual career fair, in addition to offering students ongoing workshops to enhance virtual presentation skills for job interviews. “We’ve also been working with employers to understand their current needs, and continue to share related insights with our graduates so they can pivot as necessary, and communicate solutions during job interviews,” said Troy Richards, dean of the School of Art and Design. “Getting a job is going to require entrepreneurial skills. It might take a bit longer to find a job, but our students are so well prepared to hit the ground running, they will make a place for themselves.…We’ve also offered training in CLO 3-D software so students could translate their designs into digital models, strengthening skills during this time when everyone is speeding up production and cutting costs. Students have benefited significantly from feedback from industry critics, as well, as part of our senior program.”

Student wisdom:

“During this time, we are all encountering circumstances and challenges that we never expected. As I was approaching graduation and the beginning of my career, I was anticipating both an exciting period of growth, as well as an unknown path. It now seems that this path will be even more unpredictable. However, I believe that this unstable time creates an environment for young designers like myself to reimagine the boundaries and possibilities of the fashion industry. There is so much opportunity for exploration and innovation. Despite uncertainty, I look forward to the future, and I believe that my peers and I have the chance to bring new perspectives and vision to the table.”

— Annalisa Ebbink, BFA, fashion design, sportswear

“Every coin has two sides. The uncertainty destroys all my plans for the year, but also creates opportunities. After graduation, although it might be hard to find a job right away, I believe that the fashion industry will actively and positively face the situation. I believe that opportunities for new designers like me will appear. Under the current circumstances, I have had time to slow down, more time to think, to read and to develop skills for both my professional and personal interests. I will continue to pay attention to what is happening and respond accordingly based on the situation. Embracing and accepting the uncertainty, creating more value, will be the first choice for me.”

— Anqi Jiang, BFA, fashion design, knitwear

“This is definitely not the future I thought I would be graduating into, but FIT has provided me with the skills to adapt in this ever-changing world and I am interested to see how the fashion industry changes as we all heal.”

— Elle Klein, BFA, fashion design, sportswear

“When the future seems uncertain, I like to remind myself to breathe and continue moving forward. Every generation has dealt with difficult moments, like this one, but with our creativity and the skills we have learned we will find answers and solutions.”

— Giulia Rao, BFA, fashion design, knitwear

“To be honest, I’m a little frightened to graduate in this unfortunate time. However, I believe that our new generation’s biggest strength is that we are able to achieve a creative solution and find our way to adjust toward a better circumstance. Because of what is happening now, many of us are understanding the importance of sustainability. Personally, I encourage people to buy less and style more, and I hope many people will realize that the world doesn’t need fast fashion and that they don’t need to buy every single item on trend to be stylish and chic. Therefore, I think the current situation will be a push that we needed for many years.”

— Babi Byambatsogt, BFA, fashion design, sportswear “I have the drive to do anything in this world. A virus shut down the world, yet I am still chasing my dreams. Let’s take this time to grow, evolve and love one another.”

— Kenneth Ivey, BFA, fashion design, sportswear

“People have made me feel positive during this global virus, even about facing the future. Everyone has been forced to face the risk of losing their jobs or maybe even people they’ve loved. This year became more difficult and challenging for all students who are preparing to graduate. The only thing that we can do now is keep ourselves and our families safe and remain positive. We are facing a new era that interconnects physical and digital lives. Moreover, everyone is pushing the fashion industry to go virtual. For example, we have seen several brands using AR, 3-D and CGI technology in advertising themselves for the past few seasons. I talked to several friends and they strongly expressed their thoughts about developing new technology. Since we didn’t choose to live in an uncertain world, we must make the choice to make our lives more stable. I deeply encourage people to stay strong, even if the coronavirus makes us all feel like we are suffering and are overwhelmed. We have been forced to leave our comfort zone but all of us are going to face a better world tomorrow.”

— Ka Ho Kam, BFA, fashion design, sportswear “As Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘The best way to predict the future is to create it.’”

— Irene Xiaoyu Zhang, BFA, fashion design, knitwear

Faculty Wisdom:

“Every graduating class at FIT is special, but this year’s class has demonstrated real grit and proven their ability to adapt and overcome even the most challenging obstacles put in their way. I am confident that they will continue to use their immense gifts, creativity and remarkable work ethic to reach their full potential, and I look forward to following their careers. Like so many previous FIT alumni, I am sure they will be successful, and define success on their own terms.”

— Troy Richards, dean, School of Art and Design

“To the 2020 graduates of the fashion design program — you overcame the challenges that this semester presented. Often with limited resources — you designed and created beautiful garments, a testament to your tenacity, ingenuity and future success. Congratulations.”

— Sandra Markus, chair and professor, fashion design

“This is the moment we have to rethink what being a designer is. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but it’s an exciting moment to make something new and different come out of it. You can be the designers of a new age.”

— Tom Scott, assistant professor, fashion design

“See the unusual in the usual, and what feels like a collapse is nothing more than space for new ideas.”

— Amy Sperber, assistant professor, fashion design

“Creativity comes out of restriction. You’ve proven that being innovative, influential and inspired has no boundaries.”

— Nicole Benefield, assistant professor, fashion design

PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN, NEW YORK CITY

New graduation plan:

The Parsons graduation ceremony went virtual on May 13 via Zoom for students and their loved ones across the globe. The hourlong program included remarks from Parsons leadership, program directors, faculty and students. “While circumstances are undoubtedly different this year, a few things remain constant. This includes our students’ unwavering dedication to and passion for their work as well as our commitment to celebrating and showcasing their achievements as widely as possible,” said interim dean Jason Kass. “As is always the case, our graduating students have done amazing work this year that explores new possibilities, terrains and futures for fashion. We are so excited to share this work with the public in the coming weeks and through a digital format that will be as uniquely Parsons as our typical on-site activations.”

Career counseling:

“Parsons understands that our graduates are anxious about their futures in ways that are extraordinary, and we will be working with all students to ensure that they feel prepared and supported as they enter an uncertain job market,” Kass added. “Our School of Fashion program directors continue to work closely with graduating students to help them identify productive ways forward. In some instances, this includes pairing students with industry mentors while in others, it means holding regular Zoom sessions for students to share their anxieties as well as ideas. Now is a time for forward-thinking action and creative problem solving, both of which are at the core of a Parsons education.”

Student wisdom:

“After four years of blood, sweat and tears — managing school while working to support myself, commuting from a different state, and oftentimes crashing at school or at my friend’s place to wake up and repeat the endless grind — I want to be celebrated in the best way possible with my rest of my mates. But because that’s not possible beyond Zoom calls at the moment, I’m just trying to make the best of it through digital platforms. As much as I’m going to miss school, running into people to talk about useless crap, pulling all-nighters with the dress form and celebrating our survival through each semester with the same people that pained through with me, I continue to remind myself that this isn’t the end to my learning, to meeting, connecting and creating.”

— Sayo Watanabe, School of Fashion 2020

“This pandemic situation is a tough time, but it also lets people rethink about lots of aspects of our life, for me it shifts my view on human connection and technology. The situation has also affected how I approach my thesis as well. This graduation doesn’t mean an end, I will definitely keep working on what I believe, and what I care about.”

— Danlin Zhang, School of Fashion 2020

“We were told on the first day to center our process around who we love, what we care about, the community that surrounds us, and above all, to demand excellence of ourselves. This way of thinking will be carried with me throughout the rest of my career and life. I look forward to nothing but excellence from the class of 2020.”

— Katya Ekimian, School of Fashion 2020

Faculty wisdom:

“Creative visualization is a powerful thing. See it, believe it, design it and your idea will manifest as a reality. Your expression must count for something true and the energy that you put into your creative process will be received by those who understand it. You will feel completely fulfilled and empowered by that process and nothing will stop you from achieving your goals.”

— Keanan Duffty, program director, MPS Fashion Management

“Everything needs to start from self. Knowing and understanding what is important to you — what is going to drive the commitment. Being blatantly truthful of your strengths, weaknesses and attributes will be the key to unlocking and owning your unique positioning, beliefs and place in this ever-developing industry.”

— Neil Gilks, program director BFA Fashion Design: Collection and Product

“Embrace the future, class of 2020. As designers, you have the opportunity to design new systems for an industry that is in need of fresh new approaches to collaborative processes. Build on what you have learned through your years at Parsons, identify what is missing, and problem solve by offering innovative solutions. Think globally and reflect on what fashion needs to do better, be it sustainable practices, ethical conduct, community justice or systemic changes. This is a time to rethink, with design, new ways to strengthen the local and global fashion industry alongside refining current media and communication skills.”

— Francesca Sammaritano, director, AAS Fashion Design

“This is going to be a difficult time to enter the job market as a graduating fashion student. There is no point in sugar-coating the truth. However, this crisis will end, and brands will need innovative thinkers that can think beyond old business models and engage consumers in new, more meaningful ways, no matter the format. This is a moment when companies are more likely to take risks, to use this as an opportunity to reset and build new foundations that can ensure a brand’s future success. This means they will be looking for new employees that are ready and willing to work hard and rethink what fashion can be, with more careful consideration of people and planet.”

— Joshua Williams, associate professor, MPS Fashion Management

FASHION INSTITUTE OF DESIGN AND MERCHANDISING, LOS ANGELES, ORANGE COUNTY, SAN DIEGO AND SAN FRANCISCO

New graduation plan:

“We went 100 percent remote and online learning for the spring and summer quarters, and it’s been great,” said Barbara Bundy, vice president, education at FIDM. “The thought process continually changes, because we’re living in this world of uncertainty, but right now it looks like we are doing San Francisco campus graduation in June and Los Angeles in September. What form it will take we don’t know. We usually do L.A. graduation at Staples Center, and with the reopening of large events and venues moved now to California’s reopening stage 4, who knows what will happen? We want to give our students a ceremony if possible. We also had to cancel our debut fashion show. But we were able to squeeze in a photo shoot with our advanced fashion design students before the stay-at-home order, and we are doing weekly Instagram takeovers with some students. We want to do a show, but where, when and how we don’t know.”

Career counseling:

“That’s the big thing, the uncertain job market,” Bundy said. “Students are putting their portfolios together, and the career center is working with them one-on-one to arrange initial interviews that are being done virtually. We are waiting for companies to open up as well….And in the meantime, we’re doing reaching out and saying, ‘Hi; we’re here if you have any needs.’ Our number-one recruiter over the years is Guess; they touch every major and have been dear partners. They sponsor our sustainability classes, and have been generous with scholarships. We’ve also been working with the Black Design Collective. And we’re looking at doing virtual job fairs. We are being creative.”

Student wisdom:

“I think it’s a great time for young designers to be creating. Fashion is going to be different after the pandemic; I don’t know exactly how but I’ll continue to adapt and evolve. I’m using this time to create a new collection and consider it an exciting time for fashion.”

— Scarlett Dyer, advanced fashion design major, FIDM 2020

“I like to keep busy, so while quarantined, I’m just doing as many things to fill my head as possible. Currently, I’m taking this time to make masks, looking into getting my master’s degree and waiting for the job market to open back up.”

— Delaney Poe, advanced fashion design major, FIDM 2020

“I’m grateful to be working remotely as a Global Product Innovation intern at a major skin-care company. While it is not an ideal time to start a career, I’m confident that beauty and related industries will recover. Change is intimidating but as a young person, at the start of a career, it’s also exciting. We have the opportunity to make history.”

— Natalie Noble, beauty marketing and product development major, FIDM 2020

“COVID-19 has definitely changed the way I see the world and future. The opportunity presented now, creating anew, has given me liberty to begin the execution of the beauty brand of my dreams.”

— Roxana Ontiveros, beauty marketing and product development major, FIDM 2020

Faculty wisdom:

“Hang on to your dreams, don’t lose them, and stay positive. The class of 2020 will always be remembered as the class that graduated during the pandemic. As one student said to me jokingly, ‘I have always wanted to be the smartest one in the room, and now that I’m studying at home, I am always the smartest one in the room.’ They might not have some of the same events, but will go down in history with pandemic graduates. I have respect for them, they are working hard on their resumes and portfolios. I know they will get amazing jobs, and they have the skills for tomorrow. They are tech and social media savvy, and ready for what will happen today and in the future.”

— Barbara Bundy, vice president, education, FIDM

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The Spy Who Came Home

By Ben Taub, The New Yorker, May 7, 2018 Issue

Shortly after an evening nap, Patrick Skinner drove to the police station in the Third Precinct in Savannah, Georgia, wearing ill-fitting body armor. It was late December, and bitterly cold, and he figured that the weather would bring fewer shootings than usual but more cases of domestic abuse. “Summertime is the murder time,” he said. He had come to work early to tape together his body camera, because the clasp was broken.

The shift supervisor--a tall corporal with a slight paunch--stood at a lectern. “Good mornin’, mornin’, mornin’,” he said. It was 10:31 p.m. Speaking through a wad of tobacco, he delivered a briefing on criminal activities from earlier in the day, then listed vehicles that had been reported stolen. “Look out for a cooter-colored truck,” he said.

The walls of the briefing room were sparsely decorated. There was a map of each beat within the precinct--an area, more than half the size of Manhattan, that includes Savannah’s most violent neighborhoods--along with a display case of various drug samples and a whiteboard listing police cars that were out of commission. One had overheated, two had been wrecked in accidents, and two others had broken headlights. A sixth car was labelled “unsafe for road.”

“What does ‘unsafe for road’ mean?” a cop asked.

“That’s all our cars,” another said.

Most patrol officers drive old Ford Crown Victorias, several of which are approaching two hundred thousand miles on the odometer--”and those are cop miles, where we’re flooring it at least twice an hour,” Skinner told me. Officers complain about worn tires, dodgy brakes, and holes in the seats where guns and batons have rubbed impressions into the fabric. Many cars run twenty-four hours a day.

Skinner, who is forty-seven, is short and bald, with a trim beard, Arctic-blue eyes, and a magnetic social energy that has the effect of putting people around him at ease. He wears humor and extroversion as a kind of shield; most of his colleagues know almost nothing about his life leading up to the moment they met.

At around 3 a.m., a call came in: a “strange vehicle” was idling in someone’s driveway, in the Summerside neighborhood. The caller gave no address and no description of the car.

Though Skinner had completed his training just two months earlier, he already knew every road in the Third Precinct. On slow nights, he tried to memorize the locations of Savannah’s traffic lights and stop signs, so that he could visualize the quickest route to any call. Darren Bradley, who went through training with Skinner, said, “When they gave us the sheets with police signals and codes”--a list of nearly two hundred radio call signs--”he looked it over once and had it in his head.”

As Skinner approached Summerside, a white Camaro with tinted windows pulled out and came toward him. Cars registered in Georgia don’t have license plates on the front, but, as the Camaro zoomed past, Skinner glanced into his side mirror, memorized the rear-plate number from its backward reflection, and called it in.

Georgia’s law-enforcement-training program does not teach recruits to memorize license plates backward in mirrors. Like many of Skinner’s abilities, that skill was honed in the C.I.A. He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. He shook hands with lawmakers, C.I.A. directors, the King of Jordan, the Emir of Qatar, the Prime Minister of Singapore, and Presidents of Afghanistan and the United States. “I became the Forrest Gump of counterterrorism and law enforcement,” he said, stumbling in and out of the margins of history. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise--the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad--was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ “ Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s hard--and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What does that mean?”

No military force can end terrorism, just as firefighters can’t end fire and cops can’t end crime. But there are ways to build a resilient society. “It can’t be on a government contract that says ‘In six months, show us these results,’” Skinner said. “It has to be ‘I live here. This is my job forever.’” He compared his situation to that of Voltaire’s Candide, who, after enduring a litany of absurd horrors in a society plagued by fanaticism and incompetence, concludes that the only truly worthwhile activity is tending his garden. “Except my garden is the Third Precinct,” Skinner said.

“I’ve never been a senior anything,” Skinner said. “Always a rookie.” In 1991, when he was nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard; he spent two years carrying out search-and-rescue operations, followed by three years working on an icebreaker in the Hudson River.

He met his wife, Theresa, in the Coast Guard, and in 1999 she was assigned to a position at headquarters, in Washington, D.C. Skinner, who had spent the past couple of years working as a waiter and a flight attendant while finishing his college degree, joined the Capitol Police, but his graduation ceremony was interrupted by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Before the debris settled, Skinner had faxed an application to the C.I.A. In the following weeks, the agency received more than a hundred thousand applications; it took months to sift through the pile.

The Capitol Police temporarily assigned Skinner to plainclothes duty in the Senate. On January 29, 2002, he accompanied Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President George W. Bush’s first State of the Union address. They sat together as Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” made up of rogue states “and their terrorist allies,” setting the stage for the invasion of Iraq.

Later that year, Skinner left the Capitol Police and became an air marshal. One day, he got a call from a blocked number. “You applied to work for the government?” the caller asked.

The caller was a recruiter for the C.I.A. “He asked me some rapid-fire questions--’Is the Indus River north or south of Kashmir?’ ‘What was the date of Partition?’ ‘Name five towns in the occupied West Bank’--basically to cross me off his list,” Skinner said. “But I knew all the answers, because I had sat on airplanes for the past six months, doing nothing but reading newspapers and The Economist.”

In the summer of 2003, Skinner joined the C.I.A.’s third post-9/11 class, as a prospective case officer, working under diplomatic cover. He refuses to discuss the training program--the agency doesn’t officially acknowledge its existence--but much of it can be pieced together from memoirs by former spies.

Training begins at the C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, where aspiring case officers develop cover identities to facilitate clandestine work abroad. After a few months, they are sent to the Farm--a sprawling, wooded campus in southeastern Virginia. There, for about nine months, the students inhabit an increasingly complex role-playing scenario, in which the Farm is a fictitious unfriendly country and the instructors serve as teachers, tacticians, sources, border guards, and officers of a hostile intelligence agency. Case officers rarely steal secrets themselves; instead, they recruit well-placed foreigners to pass along information.

Students practice their recruitment skills at fake embassy parties. Each is assigned a target from the host country, and is tasked with carrying out conversations that play to the target’s interests and hobbies; by the end of the evening, students are expected to have elicited their assets’ contact details, which are used to begin a delicate, months-long process of recruitment. The next day, they receive feedback on their approach. They lose points for tells as minor as drinking beer from a bottle; diplomats typically use a glass.

Students are trained in tactical skills that they hope they’ll never need. During the driving course, known as “crash and burn,” they learn how to avoid obstacles at high speeds, how to behave at checkpoints, and how to smash through barricades. They practice navigation and hand-to-hand combat, and spend days hiding in the mud while being hunted by armed instructors. They are taught to jump out of airplanes and to handle explosives, foreign weapons, and the gadgetry of secret communications.

They also spend hundreds of hours outside the campus, skulking through suburban Virginia and Maryland, crafting surveillance-detection routes, on foot and in rental cars. Each student scopes out sites at which to meet with the asset from the embassy party, then devises ninety-minute paths to the locations, through congested areas and isolated roads, with regular stops at gas stations and shops, in order to obscure the real objective, which is to draw a surveillance team into view. Every year, the agency wrecks several rental cars; students spend so much time staring at their mirrors that they sometimes lose sight of what’s in front of them.

The C.I.A.’s fixation on area familiarization has shaped Skinner’s approach to policing. He begins each shift by driving the perimeter of his beat, then working his way inward, sometimes heading the wrong direction down one-way streets to insure that he does not fall into familiar patterns. On slow nights, he parks at the scenes of unsolved robberies that took place weeks earlier and imagines which escape route the thief would have taken, so that next time he can go straight to wherever the thief is headed.

In the Third Precinct, many establishments that stay open past midnight are robbed at gunpoint several times a year. “People thank cops for their service, but they should be thanking McDonald’s workers,” Skinner told me. “They’re way more likely to have a gun in their face than I am.” He added, “The only place that doesn’t really get hit is the late-night liquor store. People are thinking, If this place gets shut down, how will we get in drunken fights?”

One night, Skinner and I arrived at the site of a mystifying car wreck near Candler Hospital, on the southern edge of the precinct. Someone, while driving out of a parking lot, had launched a Ford Taurus more than twenty feet up a grassy knoll and into the hospital’s sign. The front seat was covered in blood, but there was no one around. In the back, Skinner found diapers, an empty bottle of the opiate hydrocodone, an extra set of license plates, and a driver’s license showing a thin white man in his late twenties, with dishevelled brown hair.

Candler Hospital is on a busy highway, surrounded by strip malls and residential streets. Skinner narrowed his search to three likely spots, based on the cold weather and the apparent extent of the driver’s injuries. He drove two blocks to a McDonald’s, and the Walgreens next door, and told employees to look out for “Shaggy, from ‘Scooby-Doo,’ but drunk and bleeding.” Skinner explained, “He’s not embarrassed that he’s a poor driver--he’s running from a D.U.I.” By sobering up before turning himself in, the man could avoid alcohol-related charges.

Skinner’s third hunch was that the man had gone north on Habersham Street--heading back toward town, to be picked up by a friend. At 2:41 a.m., medical personnel at Candler called the police; Shaggy had been picked up, drunk and bleeding, at a gas station on Habersham, and was now in the E.R., shouting expletives and trying to attack the medical staff.

In the summer of 2004, Skinner completed his C.I.A. training and was deployed to Kandahar, an Afghan city near the border with Pakistan, where the agency was operating out of the former home of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban. Kabul had fallen three years earlier, but Al Qaeda’s leadership had found refuge in the mountainous border areas, and Pakistani intelligence was quietly supporting the Taliban. C.I.A. officers, confined to Afghanistan, struggled to recruit assets who could penetrate jihadi networks in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Access was not the C.I.A.’s only obstacle; elsewhere in Afghanistan, the agency was using National Geographic maps from the nineteen-sixties, with names for landmarks and villages that didn’t correspond to those used by the locals.

People in Kandahar often sought Skinner out, hoping to trade secrets for cash. “We were temporary-duty officers, and they knew our rotations,” he told me. “They’d have a story of how, in Quetta”--just across the Pakistani border--”they had seen bin Laden, Zawahiri, Captain Marvel--all these people. And if you just got there you’re, like, ‘Holy [cow], I’m the best case officer in American history!’ And you give them five hundred bucks and write it up for Langley.” By the end of his rotation, Skinner had heard the same discredited stories dozens of times.

Douglas Laux, a case officer from Indiana, had studied Pashto, the language spoken in southern Afghanistan, before deploying to Kandahar, in 2010. When several walk-ins gave him the name of the same Taliban fighter, he asked one of them how everyone had suddenly learned it. “He informed me that the local Afghan radio stations in the area regularly broadcast the names of individuals the U.S. military wanted information about,” Laux writes in his memoir, “Left of Boom,” which was heavily redacted by the C.I.A. The military knew this but had neglected to inform the agency, and walk-ins had been cashing in for years.

Espionage hinges on human relationships. “The best assets I ever ran weren’t in it for money,” Skinner said. “They had this urge to be part of something bigger. It wasn’t patriotism--they just wanted to be part of a high-functioning team.” But most assets could be trusted only in a very narrow context, and locals routinely sought American firepower to back them in personal or tribal disputes. “They might tell you it’s to help their country--they know we love to hear that--when it’s actually revenge,” Skinner said.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. military was trying to defeat the Taliban and install a new government, while the C.I.A. was primarily focused on killing members of Al Qaeda. At times, Special Operations Forces and intelligence officers coördinated on highly effective raids. But tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They f---ing live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

The preferred weapon of the Taliban--and of most insurgencies, worldwide--is the Kalashnikov, a Soviet-developed assault rifle that can penetrate a person’s torso from more than half a mile away. Last year, Bradley McClellan confiscated a Kalashnikov and several pistols from two juvenile pot dealers in Savannah. Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars--a week’s salary.

The prevalence of high-powered weapons in America is creating an arms race between citizens and the authorities. Each year, dozens of cops are shot dead, and officers kill around a thousand members of the public--often after mistaking innocuous objects for weapons or frightened behavior for threats. Meanwhile, peaceful protesters are increasingly confronted with snipers, armored vehicles, and smoke and tear gas. In the past twenty years, more than five billion dollars’ worth of military gear has been transferred from the military to state and local police departments, including night-vision equipment, boats, aircraft, grenade launchers, and bayonets. “If we wanted an mrap”--a military vehicle, designed to protect soldiers from ambushes and mines--”we would just have to submit an application to the federal government,” Skinner told me.

According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out.

At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed--and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs.

“This is how situations go so, so badly--yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”

“The de-escalation calls are so much more draining for me than grabbing people,” he told me. “My head is humming during the call. It’s exactly--and I mean exactly--like the prep work I used to do for the agency, where you’re seeing the interaction unfold in the way that you steer it.” As a case officer, Skinner drew flowcharts, mapping out every direction he thought a conversation might go. Now, he said, “instead of having a week to prepare for the meeting, I have as much time as it takes to drive up to the call.”

Skinner always drives with the windows down: he tries to maximize the number of encounters people have with the police in which they feel neither scrutinized nor under suspicion. “You sometimes hear cops talk about people in the community as ‘civilians,’ but that’s bs,” he said. “We’re not the military. The people we’re policing are our neighbors. This is not semantics--if you say it enough, it becomes a mind-set.”

During several searches and a house raid, I noticed that Skinner was the only officer who kept his gun holstered. One night, at 4 a.m., an alarm was triggered at his mother’s former high school; officers found an open door. Three of them stalked the premises with their pistols drawn. Skinner used his flashlight. He told me that, because they were all looking in different directions, having guns drawn only increased the likelihood that they would accidentally shoot one another.

And then there are the calls where the violence has already taken place: a murder outside a gas station, a gang shoot-out with multiple casualties, a domestic-abuse case in which a man beat his girlfriend unconscious after she told him that he needed to help with the bills. We visited the woman in the hospital, where a nurse stood by as Skinner took a police report. The bones in her face were broken, and the left side was so swollen that it looked as if there were half a grapefruit under her skin. She could hardly speak, except to say “yes,” “no,” and, even more quietly, “I feel like it’s probably my fault” and “I’m pregnant.”

The following night, there was a lull in calls. As we drove through quiet streets, Skinner noted the eerie beauty of Savannah’s twisted oak trees, draped in Spanish moss and cloaked in fog. Then he noted the date, and went silent. It was December 30th--the eighth anniversary of the worst day of his life, the second-deadliest day in C.I.A. history.

After 9/11, the Bush Administration authorized the C.I.A. to use an array of abusive techniques, referred to as “enhanced interrogation,” on suspected Al Qaeda militants. Employees of the agency also kidnapped suspects and took them to third countries, where interrogations were outsourced to foreign intelligence services with abysmal human-rights records. That way, the C.I.A. could claim to have no knowledge of specific allegations of torture.

Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate is America’s closest counterterrorism partner in the Middle East. The U.S. funds and equips its operations, and the C.I.A. shares a counterterrorism center with the G.I.D., on the outskirts of the capital, Amman. According to Human Rights Watch, between 2001 and 2004 the C.I.A. transported at least fourteen terror suspects--often wearing only diapers and blindfolds--to a G.I.D. detention facility, where some of them were tortured until they confessed to crimes.

In 2006, after another deployment in Afghanistan, Skinner was assigned to work at the C.I.A. station in Amman. He was relieved to be moving with his wife to a posting in a peaceful country. The agency’s use of black sites, rendition, and torture had become the subject of intense public scrutiny, and the enhanced-interrogation program, which relied heavily on contractors, had been scrapped. According to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, the torture sessions had extracted no actionable intelligence.

Skinner, like most case officers, got results through “rapport-based elicitation.” “You can build great relationships with some unsavory people,” he said. “In any terrorist group, there’s dysfunction, usually some jealousy. It’s literally a job--they get a salary. So you’re looking for the guy who feels underappreciated.”

In late 2008, the National Security Agency traced a prominent jihadi blogger to a desktop computer in a working-class neighborhood of Amman. The blogger posted grisly footage of American soldiers dying in Iraq, and he interpreted the words of bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as if he had inside knowledge. “The speculation among his most ardent online followers was that he was a Saudi and very likely a senior official within Al Qaeda,” Joby Warrick writes in “The Triple Agent,” his meticulous account of the case. The C.I.A. shared the blogger’s address with the G.I.D., and the case was taken up by one of Skinner’s close associates, a thirty-four-year-old Jordanian captain named Sharif Ali bin Zeid.

The man behind the computer--a young doctor from Jordan named Humam Khalil al-Balawi--seemed like an improbable fanatic. He spent his days treating women and children in a Palestinian refugee camp, and his evenings with his wife and daughters. He was a pious, mild-mannered introvert, with no apparent real-world jihadi connections, yet online he wrote as if he were plotting a suicide attack.

One night in January, 2009, the G.I.D. raided Balawi’s home and brought him in for interrogation. When they released him, three days later, “he was almost unrecognizable,” Warrick writes. “Jittery, sullen, distracted.” In the following weeks, bin Zeid took Balawi out for coffee and expensive meals. He thought that Balawi seemed malleable and weak, and that his online status within jihadi circles could be used in counterterrorism operations. If his help led to the capture or the death of high-level Al Qaeda members, bin Zeid told him, the reward would be staggering: the Americans were offering twenty-five million dollars for information that led them to Zawahiri.

In February, Balawi proposed to bin Zeid that he go to Pakistan’s tribal areas, make contact with members of the Pakistani Taliban, and ask for their help in setting up medical clinics. This cover would allow him to move freely within Taliban territory, and to send bin Zeid intelligence reports.

Bin Zeid brought Balawi’s plan to Skinner, and their agencies discussed it at length. Balawi had jihadi credibility, but he had no training in codes or tradecraft, and the agencies agreed that he would probably be found out and killed. Nevertheless, should the young doctor somehow pass along actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. would have drones ready to strike. In recent years, the agency’s vocabulary had shifted: a “target” was no longer someone to be recruited; it was somebody to be tracked, kidnapped, rendered, or killed.

On March 18th, Balawi left Amman. Two months later, he e-mailed bin Zeid that the Taliban had accepted him, and that he would serve as a personal physician to its leadership. In June, the C.I.A. assigned Skinner to a posting at the American Embassy in Baghdad, and Balawi’s file was transferred to his colleague and friend Darren LaBonte.

In late August, after months of silence, Balawi sent an encrypted video file that showed him in a room with one of bin Laden’s closest associates. Intelligence analysts were stunned. “You have lifted our heads in front of the Americans,” bin Zeid wrote to Balawi. It was the first time that the C.I.A. had ever penetrated Al Qaeda. Soon afterward, Balawi sent bin Zeid an e-mail saying that Zawahiri had sought him out to treat his diabetes. Bin Laden had been in hiding for so long that the C.I.A. believed that Zawahiri and Al Qaeda’s head of finance, Sheikh Saeed al-Masri, were actually running the group. But there had been no confirmed sightings of Zawahiri since 2002. The C.I.A. director, Leon Panetta, briefed President Obama on Balawi’s access, and the agency decided to try to debrief Balawi in person, at the C.I.A. annex at a U.S. base in Khost, Afghanistan.

In early December, LaBonte and bin Zeid left for Khost, where they met with Jennifer Matthews, a twenty-year agency veteran, and eleven other C.I.A. officers and security contractors. LaBonte preferred one-on-one debriefings, often in the back of a moving car, but Matthews and her bosses in Langley had decided to give Balawi a full welcoming committee. Since the meeting would take place a few days after Balawi’s birthday, Matthews instructed the base chef to bake a cake. The base was guarded by Afghan forces, but, fearing that they might report Balawi’s presence to the Taliban, Matthews ordered them to leave their posts.

Before the meeting, LaBonte was exchanging messages with Skinner, in Baghdad. LaBonte was upset with the C.I.A.’s disregard for its usual methods. He had argued with Matthews, and had sent a cable to the Amman station, but was rebuffed. A Jordanian intelligence officer warned the C.I.A. that bin Zeid had become too attached to his asset to make dispassionate assessments, but he, too, was ignored. The President had been told that the meeting was about to happen; no one wanted to hear that it shouldn’t.

As Balawi’s car approached the base, LaBonte told Skinner that he had to go.

The car weaved through three unmanned barriers and approached the C.I.A. annex, where Matthews, LaBonte, and the others were waiting outside with Balawi’s cake. Balawi had some difficulty climbing out of the car. He started limping toward the greeting party, muttering a prayer, and then reached for a detonator attached to his wrist. There was enough time for everyone to understand what was about to happen, but not enough time for anyone to run away.

The explosion killed the driver, bin Zeid, and seven C.I.A. officers and contractors, including LaBonte and Matthews. In martyrdom videos that were released after the attack, Balawi explained that Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives had worked with him to pass along exclusive and accurate information, in order to win the C.I.A.’s trust.

The agency, in its desire to kill Al Qaeda targets, had overlooked a fundamental rule of espionage: that an ideologue can’t be turned, “even if he is offered the sun in one hand and the moon in the other,” as Balawi said in one of the videos. Coercion can work, but it also inspires revenge. Months later, an internal C.I.A. investigation described the attack as the result of “systemic failure” within the agency.

“We were chasing down this irresistible bait--this guy had actual, no-joke access to Zawahiri, the most wanted person on the planet--and we fell for it because his intel was real,” Skinner told me. He added, “Those of us who make it out of these places--we’re not better, we’re luckier.”

In Baghdad, Skinner was mired in politics and violence. It had been six years since the American invasion and subsequent dismantling of the Iraqi Army had led to a full-blown insurgency. Skinner had spent many evenings in Amman drinking Johnnie Walker Black with Iraqi tribal sheikhs, trying to recruit their support. “These guys had fled the war and stolen all the Iraqi money,” he told me. “We would try to develop them as assets for what became ‘the surge.’” In 2007, Bush sent an additional twenty thousand troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency, but, two years later, car bombs were killing hundreds of civilians in Baghdad each month. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, was stacking the security forces with loyalists who carried out sectarian massacres. “We were focussed on Al Qaeda,” Skinner said. “He was focussed on Sunnis.”

In June, 2010, Skinner completed his posting in Iraq. He and Theresa bought a house with a small garden in Savannah, near where he’d grown up. He took an extended leave of absence from the C.I.A., and then resigned. In 2011, he joined the Soufan Group, a private-sector intelligence-analysis firm that employs retired American and British security officials and spies. As the director of special projects, he advised governments and corporations on matters of geopolitics and risk, and offered public analysis in the form of unsigned “intel-briefs,” congressional testimony, and interviews with journalists. In 2014, when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its findings on the C.I.A.’s use of “enhanced interrogation,” Skinner wrote an op-ed for Time, describing torture as an “indefensible tactic” that is designed “to produce false confessions for propaganda purposes.”

That year, isis captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and beheaded aid workers and journalists on camera. As the United States became consumed with fear of the group, Skinner grew uneasy in his role. He fielded phone calls from reporters who seemed more interested in citing a former C.I.A. officer than in what he had to say. “One journalist called me up and said, ‘My deadline is in ten minutes, but isis is bad, right?’” Skinner recalled.

In March, 2016, while visiting his aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he gave a lecture on terrorism at the local World Affairs Council. “We have become the most fragile superpower ever,” he told the audience. While Al Qaeda aims to carry out what its operatives call “spectacular attacks,” he explained, isis obsesses over creating a “spectacular reaction.” As an example, he recounted an incident in Garland, Texas, in which two wannabe jihadis were killed after attempting a raid on a provocative anti-Muslim convention. The men had no coherent affiliation with isis; they merely followed its instructions--which have been widely disseminated by the American media--to post online that they were acting on behalf of the group. “If you strip the word ‘terrorism,’ two idiots drove from Arizona and got shot in a parking lot,” Skinner said. The real threat to American life was the response. “We shut down cities,” he said. “We change our laws. We change our societies.” He went on, “We’re basically doing their work for them.”

“Getting killed by isis in Savannah is like expecting to get hit by a piano falling from an asteroid,” Skinner said. “It’s insane. Day to day, it’s the people who are kicking in doors and stealing cars who are actually making life unbearable.”

Skinner became increasingly consumed by the incongruity between his words and his actions. He felt like a “fraud,” he said. He preached that insurgencies arose out of the failure of local policing, yet he didn’t know a thing about the gangs operating a few blocks away. “We have people that are disappearing into the cracks of society,” he said. And they can be helped only on an individual basis. “Then you have to scale that support to a neighborhood. And then to a city.”

Because local police departments pay poorly, “the people who have been trained to do this work best are never going to be doing it,” Skinner said. According to a study by Brown University, since 2001 the average American taxpayer has contributed more than twenty-three thousand dollars to veterans’ care, homeland security, and military operations in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “I used to spend more money on meals and entertainment for a couple of sources in Amman, each year, than the Savannah Police Department has to spend on cars,” Skinner told me. “And whatever the American people got out of my meals in Amman had way less impact on their lives than what was happening down the block.”

In October, 2016, one of Skinner’s closest friends in the C.I.A. was killed by isis forces in Afghanistan. Skinner was despondent. A few months later, he left the Soufan Group and joined his local police force, taking a pay cut of more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

For the Savannah police, the biggest obstacle in gaining the community’s trust is the city’s history. Savannah is around fifty-five per cent black, and Georgia practiced segregation well into the second half of the twentieth century; after Skinner completed his training, he was startled to find that many interactions he had with older black men began with them reflexively putting up their hands.

One night in late December, at around 3:30 a.m., a few blocks south of Cuyler-Brownsville, a young black man ran into the road and urged Skinner to pull over. He said that he’d been at the home of a girl he “hangs out with,” and either she had stolen his watch or he had misplaced it--he wasn’t sure. He reeked of alcohol, and couldn’t remember the woman’s name or address, but he gestured in the direction of the housing projects a few blocks over. Skinner asked for the man’s name and date of birth, to run a quick check for outstanding warrants. “Anthony,” the man said, before hesitating and adding “Greene” and a date of birth.

Skinner drove around the block. “He definitely just gave me a fake last name,” he told me. “People don’t usually lie about their first name.” Skinner pulled over and typed “Anthony Greene” into a police database on his onboard laptop. No record. Then he tried “Anthony” and the man’s date of birth, and found “Anthony Jackson,” who had been charged with dozens of crimes, including lying to police officers about his identity, and jailed at least thirty times. The photograph on the screen showed the man we had just met. In a corner of the screen, there was a small notification: “Alias: Anthony Greene.” Jackson was on probation, but he didn’t have an outstanding warrant, and, apart from apparently lying to Skinner, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Skinner returned to the corner, and explained to Jackson that he couldn’t find the watch without knowing where the woman lived. Jackson nodded and thanked him. “Listen, buddy, next time don’t give me a fake name, O.K.?” Skinner said.

“I didn’t!” Jackson called out. “I got an I.D.” He stumbled into the road, handed Skinner his driver’s license, and shouted his Social Security number.

If the driver’s license was fake, he’d have to arrest him. But a different database showed that the license was authentic, and that it belonged to Anthony Greene. And yet a search of the Social Security number he had given Skinner led straight back to Anthony Jackson.

“He’s his own legal doppelgänger!” Skinner exclaimed. “He’s two people, but neither of them is wanted--which is insane, because literally everyone in this neighborhood is wanted.” After a few minutes of cross-checking databases, he walked back to the man, returned his license, and apologized.

In the next few days, Skinner kept bringing up the case. “Imagine if he had been belligerent, or there was a warrant out for one of him,” he said. “We had all the time in the world. But, even with these vast databases of information, we came out of that interaction with zero knowledge. Maybe negative knowledge.” He shook his head. “We’ve invaded countries on worse information. But, if the C.I.A. taught me one thing, it is to always be acutely aware of the tremendous amount I don’t know.”

On New Year’s Eve, locals launched fireworks out of abandoned lots, and Cuyler-Brownsville erupted in celebratory gunfire. Shots fired into the sky take about forty-five seconds to hit the ground. Less than ten minutes into 2018, two other officers, parked a few blocks over, fled Cuyler-Brownsville when bullets took out a street lamp overhead. All through the neighborhood, pavements and doorsteps glistened with brass shell casings. We heard hundreds of rounds--from shotguns, pistols of all calibres, a Kalashnikov. At the corner of Fortieth and Florance, there was a scrap of crime-scene tape, from an incident the week before.

At 12:11 a.m., Skinner was dispatched to the site of a burning car. But, before he got there, another call came in, and he was sent to the Live Oak neighborhood to investigate more gunfire. “You can commit felonious aggravated assault with a firearm for fifteen minutes,” Skinner joked. The city has installed a costly but discerning gunfire-detection network, called ShotSpotter, with receptors in high-crime areas; that night, ShotSpotter was so overwhelmed that it was operating on a lag of around five hours.

It often falls to the police to handle what Skinner calls “the social work of last resort.” One night, as the temperature dropped into the twenties, he spotted a person in dark clothing skulking through an empty parking lot, near the site of a recent unsolved robbery. He pulled into the lot, and as he got closer his headlights illuminated an aging black woman with a sunken face, wearing a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket. “You doing O.K.?” Skinner asked.

“I was trying to get to Walgreens,” she said. She looked at the ground and spoke slowly, in subdued, raspy tones. “Everybody mad at me,” she said.

“They’re not too mad at you, are they?” Skinner said.

“They say I’m a troublemaker.”

“You’re not a troublemaker. What’s your first name?”

“Norma Jeane.” She was too cold to make it to the Walgreens, she said, and so Skinner told her to hop in the car. After he closed the windows and turned up the heat, Norma Jeane lit up. “I’m named after Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I’m gonna be a superstar.”

She launched into tales from her past, with characters and events entering and vanishing from her story as spontaneously, it seemed, as they had in her life. As a young child, she said, “I took my brothers with me, and we got baptized” at a church on May Street, just north of Cuyler-Brownsville. “They say, ‘Where are your parents?’ And I said, ‘They’re both alcoholics.’ “ The rest was a chronological blur, a half century of hardship, arguments, scarcity, and violence. As we approached Walgreens, the McDonald’s next door caught her attention.

Skinner asked if she was hungry, and she asked if he would get her some pancakes and sausages, since she hadn’t eaten all day. Skinner pulled into the drive-through. “If I sit down, it hurts,” Norma Jeane said. “Feels like I got polio. That’s why I keep walking. I know how to walk, and I ain’t scared. I never been scared. I been walking these streets since I was five.”

When Norma Jeane mentioned that someone had once given her a calico cat, Skinner asked for its name.

“I didn’t know no better name than Calico,” Norma Jeane said.

“That’s awesome--I have an orange cat named Orangey,” Skinner replied. “He’s so mean, though. I usually just call him Mean Cat.”

“Oh, boy, I love cats! I turn cats into dogs,” Norma Jeane said.

Norma Jeane carried a wooden cane and a black handbag, in which she kept her Bible, an empty pickle jar that she used as a wallet, a cracked cell phone with no battery, a magnifying glass, and an old bottle for Seroquel, an antipsychotic medication used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She said that the pills made her sleepy, so she’d stopped taking them long ago. She also has diabetes, but she couldn’t afford health insurance or treatment. “I haven’t taken insulin in three years,” she said.

Norma Jeane’s food arrived. It cost a little more than six dollars. Skinner paid with a twenty and put the change in Norma Jeane’s pickle jar. “I wish I could have a dill pickle, but I ain’t got my teeth on,” she said. “I love them Hot Mama pickles, sour pickles . . .” She trailed off.

“Where are you gonna spend tonight?” Skinner asked.

“I could go--what time is it?”

“It’s two-forty-one in the morning.”

“I’m trying to think,” she said. “I got to go where it’s clean. You know someplace I can go?” As a warm city in the Deep South, Savannah attracts many homeless people, but its overcrowded shelters had locked their doors around dusk. “I need to go to a Waffle House,” she concluded. “It’s open twenty-four hours. I’ll go in there and play the jukebox.”

Skinner notified the precinct of the plan, and pulled into the Waffle House parking lot, on Abercorn Street. Norma Jeane walked over to a booth in the corner. Then she took off her Santa hat and started messing up her hair, pulling strands so that they’d stick out in all directions. “This way, everybody gonna think I’m crazy,” she said. “No one gonna come up to me, this way. No one gonna hurt me.”

Back in the car, Skinner explained that part of his motivation in helping Norma Jeane was to prevent an emergency call, three hours later, of a homeless woman freezing to death. “Think of all that went wrong in this country for Norma Jeane to be sitting in the car with us,” he said. Although schizophrenia affects a little more than one per cent of Americans, it’s a factor in a high percentage of police calls. A few hours earlier, Skinner had checked on a schizophrenic man who calls the police multiple times each night, reporting paranoid hallucinations; the department can never ignore a call, because he is the legal owner of a .357 Magnum revolver, and officers told me that he once tried to execute an intruder in his front yard. At times, Skinner feels as if the role of a police officer were to pick up the pieces of “something that has broken in every single possible way.”

“A huge amount of what police actually do is support and service and problem-solving,” David M. Kennedy told me. “And part of what’s so inside out is that most of that activity is not recognized.” Police officers are increasingly filling the gaps of a broken state. “They do it essentially on their own, usually without adequate training and preparation, often without the skills they need, and overwhelmingly without the resources and institutional connections that it would take to do those things well.”

Twenty-seven hours after we left Norma Jeane at the Waffle House, another cop radioed in an E.M.S. call. A fifty-nine-year-old homeless woman, dressed in a Santa hat and a leopard-print jacket, was freezing to death.

In February, Skinner began a permanent beat, from 2:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Residents have begun to get used to him. In March, during a foot chase in Cuyler-Brownsville, two women--one of whom he’d put in handcuffs the previous week--started cheering for him from their porches. “Go, Skinner, go!” they shouted, laughing. He’d lost sight of the suspect by then, and asked if a young man had just run past. On a block where the police never get tips, the women helped him narrow the search.

One recent Saturday night, two drunk men sitting in a park waved Skinner over. One of the men was trying to console his friend Kenneth, whose girlfriend had kicked him out and taken away his car keys. Suddenly, Kenneth stood up and reached for Skinner, to embrace him. Skinner hugged back.

A few minutes later, Skinner described the scene to an officer-in-training. She was aghast. At the police academy, cops are trained how to position their bodies when interacting with members of the public--one shoulder forward, gun hip always out of reach.

“I know--I lost tactical advantage,” Skinner told her.

“Yeah!” the trainee said.

Skinner smiled. “I’m not looking for tactical,” he said. “I’m looking for strategic.”

#Patrick Skinner #Savannah GA #CIA to police officer

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