#it's also kind of comforting to see that published PhDs are putting out studies (and getting said studies published) that are...not great... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chenziee · 4 years

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[Read on my AO3 (link in blog description) or by copypasting link below, or under the cut]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26932909

Fandom: Shingeki no Kyojin Ship: Jean/Armin Rating: General audiences Words: 2643 Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Airports, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Minor Levi/Eren Yeager, jean is smitten, Because of course he is, Tinder, but not really, jean is a very responsible working adult, armin is a very responsible PhD student, you can interpret those words however you want, hanji is not a responsible lab boss, don't be like hanji in a lab

Summary: Getting stuck at the airport for hours because of the weather was the last thing Jean wanted today, but it was what he got and honestly, if it meant he could chat with this cute guy who swept a hard 'no' on Jean's Tinder for longer, he wouldn't say no to a few more hours.

Based on a twitter post which I don’t know how to dig up.

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This is a birthday gift for the sweetest, most precious @roxi4 <3 I’ve said this a lot of times but I love you so much and I wish I could personally beat 2021 into submission so that it’s the best goddamn year of your life for you. But, sadly, I’m not a god yet so I gotta settle for writing fics for now.

Also yes, I am posting here like two weeks late because I’m lazy I’m sorry.

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Jean glared at the departure board, wishing he could set it on fire just like that. He understood things like this happened; he could see the heavy rain and wind outside—and people called this spring? Jean demanded a refund—so really, it could have been much worse, but a three hour delay for his three hours and thirty-five goddamned minutes flight was absolutely ridiculous and only slightly rage inducing.

He sighed in frustration and, grabbing his suitcase, he turned away to head to the closest coffee shop. He needed a damn coffee. Preferably spiked or with 8 shots of espresso, he’d decide in the line.

This was seriously so stupid. He had spent an entire week on this business trip and he was tired and the only thing he wanted was getting home to his cat and passing the hell out. At least the Melbourne airport was decent enough and he could safely be bored out of his mind with as much coffee as he needed without worrying he’d catch tetanus like he was at a certain American airport a few years ago. He would take his comfort where he could at this point.

Finally, he managed to order his coffee with only two extra espresso shots—he didn’t want to seem like that much of a psycho but the barista didn't even blink at his order and Jean had to wonder what weird shit the people at a busy airport had to deal with—and headed to the corner of the departure hall that seemed the quietest. There were only a few people loitering around there, all looking just as exhausted as Jean felt. Seemed like Jean would fit right in with their collective coma.

Making his way to one of the empty seats, Jean had to weave his way through the maze of suitcases until one of them caught his attention. Or, more specifically, the book laying carefully bookmarked and discarded on it. Who in their right mind read what looked like an entire fucking encyclopaedia full of words Jean probably couldn't even pronounce while waiting on their plane? No wonder the owner put it aside eventually.

Jean inadvertently looked up at the person sitting next to the suitcase and he did a double take. He had expected some old fart, the type that just screamed of a dreadfully boring college professor who preferred his test tubes or calculations to his students—or people in general, really—not this… tiny, adorable, small animal type of guy who, from his profile, looked around Jean’s age or even younger.

He took in the young man’s small frame, the short, blond hair, and the way he sat cross legged on the hard, uncomfortable airport chair and Jean couldn’t get over how cute the sight was. He was really glad the other man was so engrossed in his phone because even Jean could tell he was staring .

And then something else caught Jean’s eye.

Was that Tinder on his phone? Was that… Jean’s ancient Tinder he was looking at?

Jean felt heat coming up to his face. He hadn’t used the stupid app in years, probably since like... his second year of college. He didn’t even know why he didn’t delete his profile but now he was glad he didn’t because it would be really nice to know if he should even bother trying to strike up conversation here.

With bated breath, Jean waited for the verdict. He watched as if in slow motion as the blond’s thumb moved to touch the screen and swiped—

Left.

Of course it was left.

Unable to stop himself, an awkward laugh forced its way past his lips and he heard himself say, “Hard no for him?”

Even the way he jumped at Jean’s words was cute. And when wide, impossibly blue eyes met his own, Jean felt his stomach drop. Damn, this left swipe really hurt. Jean really had a talent for getting his heart broken before he even had the chance to try. First Mikasa, now this. Did someone up there have something against him?

A few silent, painfully awkward seconds of the two of them just staring at each other passed, until the blond opened his mouth to speak, “If it makes you feel any better, your profile pic really doesn’t do you any favours.”

Jean groaned. Of course. He knew he shouldn’t have let Eren choose his picture, the absolute asshole. He couldn’t believe he still called this guy a friend. Getting roomed with him at the dorm in college was seriously the worst thing to happen in his life.

“Thanks, I guess,” Jean said lamely, sheepishly scratching at the back of his head. Could this get any more awkward?

The other guy laughed then, and it was the sweetest laugh Jean had ever heard. “You’re welcome,” he said, smirning at Jean as he held out his hand. “I’m Armin. Jean, right?”

Jean shook Armin’s hand, almost asking where he had learned his name but managing to stop himself at the last second. They literally just talked about Jean’s embarrassing Tinder profile for God’s sake.

“Nice to meet you,” he said instead, hoping that was a better way to go about it than making a bigger idiot out of himself.

Thankfully, it seemed like it was, as Armin gestured to the empty seat next to him and Jean gratefully took it, making himself as comfortable as he could in the stupid airport chair. Seriously, why were airport chairs always so uncomfortable? People were sitting on these for hours at a time every day, one would think someone would make sure their asses were not hurting. Although, now that he thought about it, cushioned chairs probably wouldn’t last very long—or stay reasonably sanitary, for that matter. It was probably a good thing his ass hurt already.

Jean took his first, long-overdue sip of his coffee before he gestured towards Armin’s suitcase. “Interesting book you’ve got there. Wanted a bit of light reading?”

Armin paused, looking at Jean as if he was trying to figure him out. “Please tell me that was an intentional Harry Potter reference,” he said after a moment. Oh, Jean was so happy he had caught that.

“Maybe,” he only replied, hiding his smirk behind his coffee cup.

Huffing in amusement, Armin glanced at his terrifying looking book instead. “Just trying to do some research for my final thesis. But I have to admit some people really can’t write in an interesting way even when talking about interesting topics.”

“Hear, hear,” Jean muttered. “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to publish books, especially if they then make people study from those.” He still remembered the pain from school. He particularly enjoyed the teachers who required the students read their own God-awful books. It was always a guarantee for the most boring read of the year.

“I know!” Armin cried, gesturing around in frustration and Jean couldn’t help but smile at the sight. “I can’t wait to finish my Ph.D. so I that can not read the things I don’t want to.”

Jean chuckled at his enthusiasm. He really had to love his field of study to get this passionate about shitty books. “What are you studying?” he asked curiously.

“Marine biology,” Armin beamed, making Jean gulp.

Ocean. Fish. Corals. That was about as much as his humble business management brain knew about marine biology. Couldn’t really impress with that, could he? “And you’re doing a PhD. in that?”

Armin nodded. “Yeah. Actually, I’m just coming back home from giving a guest lecture at the university."

"Melbourne university?" Jean asked, raising a brow. He kind of hoped he was wrong and he wasn't just casually chatting with some up and coming scientist celebrity.

"Yeah," Arming confirmed and blushed slightly.

"Damn, that's impressive," Jean admitted, though now he was positive that if Armin started talking science to him, he wouldn't understand a word.

Armin's eyes dropped as he looked away, obviously embarrassed by the praise, then he shrugged and quietly replied, "Not really. This stuff is really easy when you have good teachers."

Jean shook his head. "Nah, if you don't have it in you, it doesn't matter how good a teacher is. You can kiss any degree goodbye then, never mind giving lectures."

He heard Armin huff in amusement and goddamn it, it gave him butterflies. He was so fucked.

"Thank you," the blond said, smiling at Jean brightly before he continued. "How about you? Where to?"

Jean sighed wearily, sagging in his seat as he remembered his exhaustion. "Also home. On my way back from an absolutely stupid business trip."

"Why stupid?" Armin asked as he turned around in his seat to face Jean properly.

Jean mirrored him immediately, hooking one arm behind the backrest as he leaned on the chair sideways. He really enjoyed talking to this random, sweet stranger and he was really glad it seemed to be mutual. He was going to hate saying goodbye.

Suddenly, he wouldn't have minded if his flight got delayed a few more hours.

"Just, you know, people," Jean muttered in distaste. "One would think only customers can be complete idiots. Turns out coworkers can sometimes be even worse."

Armin laughed at his words, nodding along enthusiastically. "God I know. Sometimes I want to kill the doctor leading my lab. Hanji’s a genius but there is so much energy and she can be so stupid. She almost blows up or floods the lab at least once a week."

"I'm sorry, that must be so hard to deal with—" Jean cringed in sympathy at the mere idea of it— "Reminds me of my team. I love them but once in a while, I just want to fire them all when they start organizing paper boat races in the bathroom. Paper boats made from paperwork they don't want to do, by the way."

"Ouch." Armin sounded solemn but Jean could hear the hidden laughter and he just knew he found Sasha and Connie's stupid ideas hilarious. Which… Jean could admit they were, just not when he was the one who then had to explain the mess and unfinished work to his boss.

“Stop laughing,” Jean hissed, though with no real venom in his voice.

“I’m not!” Armin defended himself, but then burst out laughing when Jean glared at him so he quickly corrected himself, “Okay, yeah, I am. Sorry.”

He didn’t sound sorry at all and Jean sighed. “Everyone always finds my suffering funny.”

Armin let him grumble to himself for a bit, the two of them sitting in relative silence for a moment and… it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was actually relaxing and Jean really didn’t want this to end. “So hey—” He paused, glancing at Armin carefully, almost afraid to ask— “when is your flight?”

“Hopefully, in like two and a half hours. Got delayed almost as long as the flight itself.”

Jean almost said it was the same for him but he stopped. Could it be…? “You’re not flying to Auckland, are you?”

Armin visibly startled, blinking at Jean with eyes full of surprise. “Yes, actually,” he said slowly and Jean couldn’t believe it. He had thought he would never see this this cute, fun person ever again but—

“Me, too,” he said quietly and the two of them continued staring at each other in shock for a few moments more until they both burst out laughing.

Incredible. They were both flying to the same place and they would be within reach of each other and maybe there was a point in actually pursuing this. “So, uhm, wanna grab a coffee?” Jean asked awkwardly, pointing in the general direction of the food court.

And only when Armin looked pointedly at his pointing hand, did Jean realize he was still holding his over-caffeinated coffee cup. He really hoped his face wasn’t as on fire as it felt.

Armin only chuckled, thankfully not commenting on Jean’s blunder, and rather suggesting, “How about some actual food instead?”

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By the time they got off the plane in Auckland, Jean was on cloud nine as he gently squeezed Armin’s hand in his. Jean was still not sure this was real; they had spent the entire time at the airport and during their flight chatting—not that they had miraculously had seats next to each other like in the movies, but Jean did bribe an older lady with wine to switch seats with him—and it was the best damn flight delay he could have asked for.

It felt so natural and easy being with Armin, he couldn’t wait to get to know him more during their date tomorrow, and hopefully many more after. Because Jean would be lying if he said he wasn’t completely gone for this charming, adorable genius already.

As they walked through the exit into the arrival hall together, Armin immediately waved at his friend who was picking him up. Jean had offered to give him a ride since he had his car parked at the airport but Armin had said this friend of his would be worried if he just suddenly cancelled and—

Oh hell no.

Jean stared at the tall, young man with long hair tied up in a messy bun who was walking towards them, watching as his wide smile froze when their eyes met. Of fucking course. Jean just couldn’t have any nice things in life, could he?

“Unhand my best friend, Horse Face,” Eren growled and Jean took a deep breath in an effort to calm down.

It didn’t work. “Unhand my boss, then,” he shot back, throwing a pointed stare at where Eren had his arm wrapped around the short, grumpy man who just so happened to be both Jean’s boss and his ex-roommate’s boyfriend. Levi was already sighing and rolling his eyes at them and Jean really hoped this wouldn’t affect his bonus this quarter.

But Eren started it.

“You have no say in that,” Eren hissed, visibly bristling as his hold on Levi only tightened.

“Oh, so you admit it’s unreasonable?” Jean asked, his voice dripping in sarcasm.

Jean could hear Armin gasp as he finally realized what was going on. Obviously, he also didn’t expect this to happen and Jean was glad he wasn’t the only one. Although, really, how did it not occur to Jean that Armin was that Armin? It wasn’t exactly a common name around Auckland…

Just as Eren was getting ready to snap back at him, both Levi and Armin sighed before Levi intervened, “Shut the hell up, both of you. Have this fight when I’m not around for it or I’m talking Armin and leaving your asses here.”

“I second this movement,” Armin said firmly tugging at Jean’s hand for good measure.

Both Eren and Jean closed their mouths then, both knowing full well that was not an empty threat coming from the short grump. Not that Jean wouldn’t get back by himself but he would be stuck with driving Eren, too, without anyone there to mediate, and that would be a disaster.

They glared at each other silently for a second, until Eren hissed at him, “Usual bar, tonight. We’re having a talk.”

“I’ll be there, I need a fucking drink after this,” Jean muttered back, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

Giving Armin a kiss on the cheek, Jean quickly retreated out of Eren’s glare’s range and towards his car so that he could get some fucking sleep before he would go out and get drunk while Eren threatened him with violence for apparently seducing his best friend, or whatever Eren would take out of this… situation. How did shit like this even happen in real life? He seriously wondered what he did in his past life to get karma like this.

At least Armin was worth it.

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popscenery · 4 years

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Passion Pit, »Take a Walk«

by Jessica Doyle

In the summer of 2010, when I took a leave of absence from my PhD program, my dissertation was a helpless non-thing without a subject. In December 2018, I officially got my PhD, because my dissertation was done: written, revised, defended, revised again, approved, copied, formatted, distributed, carefully archived, accepted as an actual work of scholarship. It is arguably my most important professional accomplishment of the decade, and also arguably entirely inconsequential. The claim that 90 percent of academic papers go uncited is mostly untrue, but it is true for my dissertation, and I have the gaping void of a Google Scholar search return to prove it.

Trust me: as bitter and self-deprecating post-graduate students might be about their research (see previous paragraph), none of us start out planning to write something inconsequential. Certainly the subject of my dissertation was not inconsequential at all. “Take a Walk” is not my favorite song of the past decade, but it is the song that kept reminding me that the topic was worth writing about.

My dissertation examined what makes starting and maintaining a business easier or harder for Latino entrepreneurs in different American cities. Take Miami as an example, where 47% of all businesses are Latino-owned. That’s much higher than the national average (12 percent) and higher than the percentage in other cities with large Latino populations: New York, Los Angeles, Houston. So what’s so special about Miami? Is it because the Cuban population that arrived in the 1960s were often landowners or merchants fleeing Castro, and made wealth-building a priority in their new city? Is it the geographic proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean? Is starting a business in Miami easier than elsewhere? Is it something about Miami’s economy in general, or Florida’s? Finally (and more to the point), if policy-makers in another city wanted to put in policies that would help local Latino entrepreneurs flourish, what would Miami’s example offer as guidance?

To make a 295-page story short: it is much easier to turn immigrants into successful business owners if they come to the country with business experience and/or capital already at hand; and if the local immigrant population doesn’t start with those advantages, then policy-makers should focus on providing business education and access to financing, especially the latter. Latino immigrants in the United States who want to start businesses are more likely than native-born white entrepreneurs to use their own cash (which takes a while to accumulate), credit cards (which charge higher interest rates than do bank loans), or loans from family or friends (which means that loved ones, rather than banks with larger cushions, bear the risks). I’d say read the whole dissertation, but in all frankness you’d be better off checking out the research being published by the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, including this report. (It’s more concise and their data is more robust than mine was.)

This all assumes, of course, that you want to encourage Latinos, or other immigrants, or anyone at all, to start their own business. A lot of us--including me; including Michael Angelakos, the artist behind Passion Pit--have immigrant entrepreneurs in our family lineage. In interviews to promote the album Gossamer, Angelakos described “Take a Walk,” the lead single, as about different members of his family. The first verse’s portrait is a classic rags-to-riches, grateful-to-be-in-America immigrant story: I love this country dearly / I can feel the ladder clearly. But in the second verse, the story shifts to a new narrator, and so does the tone: I watch my little children / Play some board game in the kitchen / And I sit and pray they never feel my strife. The final narrator is eventually undone...

I think I borrowed just too much We had taxes, we had bills We had a lifestyle to front

...yet still insists on his participation in the American dream:

Tomorrow you'll cook dinner For the neighbors and their kids We can rip apart those socialists And all their damn taxes You see, I am no criminal I'm down on both bad knees I'm just too much a coward To admit when I'm in need

Apparently at one point a Fox News reporter failed to hear the irony, and asked Angelakos if the song was anti-socialist. But Angelakos told MTV News, “It's about very specific family members, the male hierarchy, and how the men in my family have always dealt with money.... All these men were very conservative; socially very liberal but for some reason, they all came here for capitalism, and they all ended up kind of being prey to capitalism.” He told a different interviewer, “These are all true stories; this is my grandfather and so on.”

Angelakos’s ambivalence is understandable. (Several of the pieces that greeted “Take a Walk” identified it as a direct reponse to the 2008 financial crisis, an interpretation he rejected.) The idea that anyone can come to the United States, start a business, and work their way to financial security and political freedom is an old one--the history of immigrants employing at higher rates than native-born Americans goes as far back as the Census Bureau has been keeping track of such things. But even for the successful it has its costs. The narrators of “Take a Walk” are estranged from their families, anxious about their ability to keep wealth. The theme of risk runs through the song. No one worries about getting fired; they have market investments, business partners, endless complaints about taxes (as one might if one has to pay both ends of the Social Security and Medicare taxes single-handedly.) The risk allows the narrators to make comfortable lives for themselves and their family, and yet Angelakos isn’t convinced, looking back, that they were better off.

Historically, if you were running for any sort of higher political office in the United States and were from a major party, you made sure to say nice things about small businesses and entrepreneurship, especially the immigrant kind. To some degree this is still true: Elizabeth Warren’s campaign platform includes a Small Business Equity Fund that would give grants to minority entrepreneurs. That said, I’m not sure the current dominant political energy on either the American left or right favors small businesses, who tend to hate tariffs. If you read the Green New Deal resolution, though it calls for a more equitable distribution of available financing to such smaller-scale lenders as community banks and credit unions, a lot of what it wants it can only get at a certain scale. It’s easier for a larger company to retool its supply chains to lower environmental costs than it is for ten small businesses to do the same. It’s easier for a firm with a thousand employees to absorb the cost of any one employee needing a higher wage to make rent, or a longer maternity leave, or extended absences due to illness, than it is for a firm with five.

And Music Tumblr in particular can be forgiven for not thinking highly of entrepreneurship. Most creative people--artists, musicians, writers--end up as entrepreneurs simply because decent-paying employment in those fields has never been easy to find. (In 2017, Angelakos spoke of dealing with venture capitalists and deciding to run his mental-health-focused initiative, Wishart, as a combination of for-profit and non-profit.) But no loan officer with a nickel’s worth of sense would approve a loan to enter a market so saturated that marginal revenue is typically zero or close enough, or where thousands if not millions of people seem thoroughly committed to proving themselves, in Samuel Johnson’s eyes, blockheads. Upon hearing, “You can do what you love, but the market won’t reward you,” a lot of people will reply, “To hell with markets, then.”

It all comes down to how you feel about risk. For a long time the dominant American thinking was that higher risk was the price entrepreneurs paid to have the chance to succeed on their own terms. (There’s an ongoing debate in the immigrant-entrepreneurship academic literature about whether any one particular group of entrepreneurs is “pushed” into entrepreneurship--as in, they only start businesses as the best of a bad set of money-making options--or “pulled,” starting businesses because they want to.) More recently has emerged the critique that not all experiences of risk are created equal, and that in championing immigrant or minority entrepreneurship we offload risk onto those people with smaller financial or even emotional cushions. The heightened experience of risk, and its attendant anxiety and feeling of constant scarcity, may be what Angelakos meant when he described his relatives as “kind of being prey to capitalism.”

I personally agree with that critique, and would throw in that the general perception of Latino immigrants as not-entrepreneurial denies them a road to acceptance (or bourgeois respectability, if you prefer) that their Swedish, German, Jewish, Italian, and more recently Korean predecessors have been able to walk. That was why I wanted to write about Latino entrepreneurship in the first place, and why I ended up writing about North Carolina’s Latino Community Credit Union and associated initiatives as a promising case study. But I would caution against crossing the line from wanting to reduce risk for vulnerable minorities to regarding asking them to bear any kind of risk as imperialist and offensive. Risk can’t be eliminated altogether, and there are costs to scaling risk to higher levels of human activity and trying to diffuse it. A small business committed to a bad idea does a lot less damage than a government policy committed to a bad idea, even if the latter is more equitable in the range and number of people it effects.

Writing a dissertation is a humbling process. I’ve never written and recorded a song, but I imagine that process humbles too. (When “Take a Walk” came out Angelakos was not shy about disliking it, though he seems to have grown fonder of it as time goes on: “I like that it’s so uncharacteristic of me,” he said in 2017.) You work and work and work, all the while knowing you have no control over how your audience will hear your message, or if there will even be an audience. You can never be sure that you read enough, or chose the right method of analysis, or treated your subjects with sufficient respect. You’ll never know if you’re actually on the side of the angels. If the “angels” are metaphorical--if you don’t actually believe in a god, or God, whose love is greater than your human tendency to error and self-deception and treachery--then the risk is even higher. And yet, without that risk, how would you ever be able to say anything worth saying?

#songs of the decade #passion pit #longreads #music writing

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chriscanwell · 5 years

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New Post has been published on Develop Attraction

New Post has been published on https://www.developattraction.com/messaging-less/

Girlfriend Messaging Less and Losing Interest – Easy Fix!

If you notice a girl messaging you less and becoming less responsive, this article will show you the best way to fix this problem. It’s an easy fix, but you need to stick to the gameplay laid out below.

But first…. I answer an email from a reader who’s girlfriend is becoming less responsive and has stopped sending sweet messages.

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Hi Chris,

I have been dating a girl for 5 months. The fist month she seemed like totally in love she would call and text me every single day. I would get these amazing affirmations in the morning and we would see each other almost every day or at least talk on the phone every day.

This is common in the beginning of a relationship. Everything starts out passionate and exciting. You’re both love bombing each other with messages and phone calls. And neither of you can do anything wrong because it’s still fresh. She is still getting to know you so you’re a mystery and a challenge. However, over the course of a couple of weeks, you start becoming too available and too used to her messages. The moment the day comes when she decides to change her routine or stop messaging you as much, you panic. I must have seen hundreds of guys follow this same pattern.

As time went on she told me that she had some things to work through and wanted to take the relationship slow. She stopped reaching out every day and I would get a phone call once a week to schedule a time for us to hang out. I stopped getting the every day text messages back in around March.

Because you were no longer a mystery. You were no longer exciting. You were a known commodity. You had become predictable and boring in your routine. So, she starts to lose interest and slowly pulls away from you. In response, you most likely tried to chase her and win her over with more messages.

She told me that I am her first serious boyfriend. We are both 33 years old, and I have had seven ex girlfriends in the past. I have always been the nice guy in the relationship and the one to move things along emotionally.

This goes against nature. A man should never be relationship focused and he should let the woman move the relationship along at her own pace. You don’t want her to feel like you are the one acting like a woman in the relationship, seeking commitment from her. This would be a big mistake. You can get away with it with women you aren’t that attracted to because you can’t mess things up with them. But when you’re dealing with a girl that you have high attraction for you can’t make these kinds of mistakes because you will naturally be more emotional and prone to neediness.

We haven’t said the words “I love you” yet and the fact that she isn’t where I want us to be makes me really sad and needy.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t care if you’re sad or needy. She just cares about your behavior. Women are emotional creatures and if she senses that you are needy or weak she will pull away from you. Women simply respond to their own emotions and how you make her feel. If you make her feel good and behave in a way that is confident and masculine, she will find you attractive and want to spend more time with you.

I have spent most of this relationship in a state of frustration when we aren’t together or when I don’t hear from her. She is a Phd Student and doing her thesis right now. During her spring break, I was less available, and got off the phone with her and only used the phone to schedule the next date. When she came over she couldn’t get enough of me and seemed like she was madly in love with me. This how I want her to be with me.

You’re too relationship focused, that’s why you’re getting upset. She’s busy, she’s got to teach and she’s also studying as well, so you don’t want to add to her stress by letting your emotions get in the way. If you want to maintain that sizzling level of attraction with her, you have to pull back and allow her to reach out to you when she’s ready. Even if it takes a week or two of no contact, it’s better if she is the one who is always reaching out to you. That way she will sense, subconsciously, that she wants you more than you want her. This will make you appear more valuable and attractive in her eyes.

I have told her how I felt about her and how sometimes when she isn’t emotionally available it seems like she doesn’t care about me and that it hurts that I used to get texts in the morning and now I hardly hear from her.

She’s going to think you’re really pathetic when you express this sentiment to her. You tell her this and she wonders why you’re so relationship focused and emotional. That’s not how men are supposed to behave. I know in this day and age of emotional vulnerability and a “tell her how you feel and she’ll love you for it” culture, it’s tempting to express your feelings to her and get her to open up. But in reality, the opposite will happen. She will lose attraction for you and become less available.

She has a big test to take on Wednesday. This past weekend we spent 3 full days together with me and her family.

It’s too much time together dude. You’re being way too available, way too emotional, and way too relationship focused here. She’s going to get bored of your presence and availability (both physical and emotional).

I tried kissing her on Monday and she gave me her cheek and when we were holding hands she pulled back. We hung out all day on Sunday. She told me that she will let me know about hanging out on Wednesday after her test. She pulls away then comes back, but this is the longest she has pulled away for. Should I wait for her to initiate? I haven’t heard a text or a phone call since Monday it’s been 3 full days and I’m freaking out and want to chase her. What should I do to make her fall in love with me? Please Help?

Ray

Make Her Chase You

Getting her to fall in love with you and chase you is easy. However, you do need to follow a set of steps to make her feel more attracted to you. You can’t break down during this process and allow your emotions to get the better of you. That means, no chasing, no message her first, and taking a step back to mirror her emotions. The first thing you need to do is to stop messaging her and wait for her to message you first. Three days is nothing. It’s nothing to worry about. It’s nothing to panic about. And it’s actually a good thing.

Remember, attraction grows in space. Every day that goes by where you don’t talk to her, she will begin to wonder about you and think about you more.

She will miss you more, and she will start to feel more anxious about you, craving your presence and feeling the need to draw closer to you again.

You have to get comfortable with a girl pulling away for up to 10 days without feeling the need to panic or worry about her. You have to have the confidence to know that she will be back.

In case you haven’t seen this process actually work because you’ve never tried it before. I can tell you from my vast experience with this situation that it works every time. She will be in touch.

She’s Less Responsive, Mirror Her

You need to also rebuild your masculine frame. What I mean by this is that you have lost yourself and become relationship focused. Men aren’t supposed to be relationship focused. They are supposed to be mission focused. You’re supposed to be focused on your purpose in life. Your purpose might be work, it might be a hobby, business, health and fitness, studying, education… whatever it is, you need to put the focus on that instead of her.

The moment you get lost to a woman is the moment you lose her. She knows this and she can sense you getting emotional over her.

Now she won’t know why she’s getting turned off by your behavior, but she will suddenly get that dreaded feeling where she says, “I don’t know what happened, you’re a nice guy, but I’m just not feeling it anymore.”

If you want to avoid this scenario, you need to let her reach out to you and initiate contact with you.

Once she initiates contact with you, don’t be passive aggressive. Respond to her and let her know it’s great to hear from her and it would be great to see her.

If she says she can’t make it or she’s busy, simply go no contact again and wait for her to reach out to you.

If she agrees to see you, set a date and that’s it––no need to send anymore messages.

If at any time she gets upset and tries to call you out for not speaking to her or asks what happened, simply respond by telling her that you’ve been busy but it’s great to hear from her.

It’s not about playing games here. It’a about shifting your focus back onto yourself and your mission, and taking the focus off her.

If you do this, you won’t lose her and that old attraction will come back again. If you let her bring up commitment and move the relationship forward, it won’t be long before she is head over heals in love with you.

Your job as a man is to enjoy your time together, push for intimacy, and let her come to you when she’s ready.

If you follow these principles to the T, you will have 100% success with this girl and get her back with interest.

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lululawrence · 6 years

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Annual Writing Self-Evaluation

All answers should be about works published in 2017.

I was tagged by @allwaswell16 and @londonfoginacup and @flamboyantommo and I feel like maybe someone else…so here I am lol also this got hella long, so i’m gonna put most of this under a cut.

1. List of works published this year:

listen. believe it or not i published 40 fics this year. 40. in 2017. SO i’m gonna just…list them in chronological order, k? k. (this is why this is gonna have to have a read more)

1. Easy, Breezy, Beautiful 2. Bloody Mary 3. I Don’t Know What To Believe 4. The Day is Up and Calling 5. Bend Me, Shape Me with @a-writerwrites and @dimpled-halo 6. I Found a Love 7. That’s Not My Name 8. Be a Daymaker 9. Love Me Like You Do 10. What Happens Next 11. Validation 12. Cake, Phone, Harry 13. Same White Shirt 14. Now That It’s Over 15. A Word We’ve Only Heard 16. No Chance At All 17. (Make You Want To) Scream 18. Nothing Please Me More Than You 19. Let Me Make It Better 20. My Cup of Tea

21. (And Things Will Be) Hard at Times 22. Mistaken Identity with like the entire group chat 23. Wait for the End to Change 24. If It’s Meant To Be (It’ll Be, It’ll Be) 25. You Can Read Me Anything 26. (This Could Be Forever) Right Now 27. Will Love Be There 28. With You In Your Dreams 29. Couldn’t See Past Me, Till I Saw You 30. All I Want Is To Be Free 31. One Taste And He Want It 32. Better Walk That (Pap) Walk, Baby with @suddenclarityharry 33. Love So Soft 34. Got This Feeling In Our Souls 35. We’re Both Stubborn (Two Hearts in One Home) 36. Before I Knew That I Had Begun 37. A Real Work of Art 38. You Can’t Blame Me For Tryin’ 39. Christmas at the Holly Lodge 40. You’ve Got My Heart

Okay, and now I’m exhausted. You still with me? Bless you.

2. Work you are most proud of (and why):

@someonethatsfunny actually asked me a few months ago what work I’m most proud of, and I truly don’t know. I’m super proud of (Make You Want To) Scream, because bodyswap is hella hard to write, fam, and I DID IT. I’m proud of my reverse bang, All I Want Is To Be Free, because it was the first time I’d ever really teamed up with an artist like that. I wrote my first historical AU, my first ABO, my first cowrites, my first…A LOT of things, and all of them stretched me so incredibly so I’m not really sure which one I’m most proud of.

3. Work you are least proud of (and why):

I dunno. I have some that I’ve forgotten I wrote this year, but I am still proud of it because have you ever published 40 fics in a year? Just the fact I was able to do that has me patting myself on the back, so yeah. There are some I don’t like as much, but I’m damn proud for what I was able to publish this year.

4. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

They walked past a street performer, Louis completely focused on the church. Rather than walking to the entrance though, Harry first guided Louis towards another corner.

“This part here? It’s completely black like this because it’s the only part of the building that remained standing after the bombing. They were able to salvage it and recreate it as best they could to look like the original.”

Louis leaned in closer to Harry, as if he needed to physically feel him there with him.

“The Hofkirche and the Kreuzkirche are both incredible in their own way, and according to most, none of these churches can even begin to inspire you or impress you in the way that other cathedrals, like the Cologne Cathedral, do, but the Frauenkirche?” Harry paused here as he tried to pull his thoughts together. “I feel like she’s the perfect symbol of Dresden. Of people in general. So often we find ourselves having to rebuild and start from scratch when plans we had hoped and planned on fall through, but even if we are only left with some stones and the corner of the building, we can be strong again.”

Louis was no longer looking at the church but was looking at Harry.

“Well shit, Haz. Is that what you said when you did your episode on Dresden?”

Harry rubbed his hand nervously through his hair before wrapping his arm around Louis’ shoulders. Harry couldn’t help pulling Louis even closer than he already was, and Louis didn’t resist. He moved his Döner to his right hand and wrapped his arm around Harry’s waist.

“No.” Harry swallowed roughly before placing a soft kiss in Louis’ hair. “No, that’s the special version only you get.”

Louis tilted his head back, his blue eyes studying Harry intently. “I like that I get the special version,” he whispered.

From If It’s Meant To Be (It’ll Be, It’ll Be)

5. Share or describe a favorite comment you received:

Oh gosh. I love so many different comments and there were some this year that truly brought me to tears, but some of my favorites were on Validation. It floors me still that people took what I wrote in a fic and started to actually put it into play in their lives. Something that I wrote inspired them to change how they approached some situations and that just…wow. Incredible.

6. A time when writing was really, really hard:

Honestly, most of this year writing was my therapy. It was how I coped with everything life was throwing at me, but the hardest time for me writing wise was this month. I wasn’t feeling inspired, I was having a crazy hard time even carving out ten minutes to write, and I was exhausted all the time. Even with that, though, I was able to write two fics, so I’m proud of myself for pushing through. Especially since I now have five million ideas of things to write again haha

7. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

Oof. Uhm…like everything? For real. So many times I was writing and things happened that I didn’t anticipate or plan for and it turned out better than I ever imagined.

8. How did you grow as a writer this year:

SO MANY WAYS. My big goal for writing this year was to write more, and HOLY MOTHER DID I WRITE MORE. In talking with @briannamarguerite, she mentioned once that writing is a muscle and it can be strengthened when you use it more, and through this year I absolutely agree. I started the year off with a challenge I did with a group of people who became incredible friends (shout out to wordplay peeps @a-writerwrites, @taggiecb, @becomeawendybird, @afirethatcannotdie, @dinosaursmate, @phd-mama, @londonfoginacup, and @allwaswell16!) to write a fic a week, all using the same one word prompt, and that kind of set up the average I ended up keeping through the rest of the year of publishing a fic about every week and a half. I also branched out on tropes I had never written before, tried co-writing, different structures for fics, etc. I feel like this year was a huge one for trying new things and going out of my comfort zone, so I’m actually really incredibly proud of myself for all the ways I feel like I grew this year.

9. How do you hope to grow next year:

I want to focus on the quality I’m putting out. I worked on quantity and telling myself I could do it, so now I want to focus a little more on editing myself really well. Being really happy with not just the story I’m putting out, but the way it’s written. I also am finally publishing a fic I’ve been working on, off and on, since 2015 next year, and that’s the longest fic I’ve written to date, so lots of ways for me to try to stretch myself still!

10. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

Oh holy mother. @silentlarryshipper as a massive support for keeping me going at the beginning of the year for sure! I couldn’t have done this without her. All the wordplay peeps I mentioned above as well. @becomeawendybird, @gettingaphdinlarry, and @briannamarguerite for being the best, most brutal and thorough betas ever, I love all you guys SO DAMN MUCH! And without a doubt every last one of the ladies not already mentioned who were more than willing to yell encouragement at me, even when I was being ridiculous: @freetheankles, @dinosaursmate, @haloeverlasting, @indiaalphawhiskey, @dimpled-halo, @a-writerwrites, @suddenclarityharry, @londonfoginacup!

11. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year:

Oh yes. My love story to Dresden has all my true feelings for the city, some of the ridiculous scenes from the mpregs i wrote are personal stories of my own, a lot of locations are from my own life, etc.

12. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers:

Don’t give up and find yourself a support crew! Having multiple writing support group chats was one of the best things to come out of this entire year for me. The other people you surround yourself with can make the biggest difference as to whether a project gets finished or not.

13. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year:

oh yes! currently i have a to write or to publish list of:

wibbly wobbly, timey wimey fic (which might be my big bang after all)

a couple birthday fics to come

Marcel exchange fic

ABO exchange fic

a flicker album fic

a fic based off of Charlie Puth’s song attention

so we’ll see how that all turns out. lol

14. Tag three writers/artists whose answers you’d like to read.

if you were tagged in this and haven’t done it already, please consider yourself tagged now! (or if you’re reading this and haven’t been tagged and want to, please tag me and say I told you to do it! I want to read your answers!!) OH and I would also love to hear from @justalittlelouislove :D

#mine #writing stuff #about me #this was so long #i'm sorry #but I LOVE THIS TOO #so there's that #fic stuff

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ezatluba · 4 years

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Jul 1, 2020

CBD For Dogs? New Research Backs Canine Cannabis Use For Osteoarthritis

Emily Earlenbaugh

Is your dog suffering from canine osteoarthritis? A new study suggests that CBD may help dogs with this painful arthritic condition.

Canine osteoarthritis is an inflammatory condition marked by pain, stiffness, and loss of mobility. And it can leave dogs lethargic, irritable and reluctant to play, run or jump. Unfortunately, the condition is all too common in dogs. Researchersestimate that it affects at least 20% of all dogs older than 1 year old, with higher risk for older dogs.

The recent study, published in the journal PAIN, looked at whether different doses and formulations of CBD might help dogs suffering from osteoarthritis - and the results suggested that it could.

Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine worked in collaboration with the CBD brand Medterra on the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. The 4 week study included 20 large dogs diagnosed with osteoarthritis who were randomly assigned to receive either a placebo or one of three different CBD options. The dogs were evaluated before and after the regimen by both veterinarians and their owners on factors related to their mobility and pain. Details about the amount of CBD each dog was taking was kept from the owners and veterinarians so that it wouldn’t influence their evaluations.

While the placebo group and the low CBD group showed no improvement, by the end of the one month period, the group of dogs who took higher doses of CBD or used CBD in a liposomal formulation saw significant improvement in their mobility and quality of life.

“I openly admit that I was surprised at how quickly we saw such large results” says Matthew Halpert PhD, Faculty with the Department of Pathology and Immunology at Baylor College of Medicine and Senior Scientific Advisor for Medterra. “I would not have expected to see too much of anything in just one month.”

Halpert, who designed the experiment, explains that in the placebo and lower dose groups, the owners reported their dogs to be “just as miserable as before” and veterinarians didn’t see any improvement in the dog’s mobility. But in the two higher dose groups “almost every dog saw significant improvement in their conditions, in regards to reduced pain and increased ability to move around. And the dogs seemed happier and were able to do more.”

Even two weeks after the dogs stopped taking the CBD, those in the higher dose groups were still showing improvement. “This would tell us that the CBD was in fact addressing the underlying inflammatory issues” Halpert explains. “It wasn't just masking the pain”

These results add additional scientific backing to the emerging market of CBD for pets. There is currently a wide variety of products geared towards dogs and other pets. According to the Brightfield Group, a consumer research group focused on the cannabis space, the US Pet CBD market expanded by more than 10 times its 2018 size in 2019, producing $321 million in sales. In 2020 it is projected to reach $563 million in sales.

The research also lends support to reports of success with CBD from dog owners, such as Zoe Lilly, who lives in Oxfordshire England with her 7 and a half year old dog Zeus - a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Zoe says she noticed Zeus getting a little stiff on one leg, so she decided to try out CBD. She says “It’s made his movement more fluid and he can play pretty well.” Zoe hasn’t noticed any negative side effects in Zeus since starting, but she does report noticing that it helps relax him before vet visits.

While there has been previous research suggesting CBD can help with canine osteoarthritis, this study looked at both traditional CBD and CBD in a liposomal formulation, a method used to make it easier to absorb CBD, which isn’t very bioavailable on it’s own. “It's kind of like a Trojan horse, or a water balloon” explains Halpert. “We put the CBD inside of that and the liposome itself, the balloon itself, is actually very bioavailable.”

When ingested, liposomes are said to be more easily absorbed into the bloodstream of both humans and dogs, making it easier to absorb CBD. In this experiment, dogs taking a daily dose of 20mg’s of liposomal CBD did significantly better than those who took 20mg’s of traditional CBD, adding some evidence to the theory.

Still, other experts disagree. Stephen Cital, a veterinary anesthesia & pain management specialist points out this study didn’t test the CBD levels in the blood after dogs ingested these two CBD options. They just looked at the outcomes in the dogs’ behavior. He’s not convinced liposomes make a difference.

“I have never seen an added benefit to liposomal encapsulation with these molecules” he explains “I think in theory makes a lot of sense, but we haven't seen the data to support that at this point.”

Cannabis or hemp derived CBD products may help dogs with osteoarthritis - according to new research.

Still, Cital supports the use of CBD for dogs with osteoarthritis and has even had his own success story, using CBD to treat his own 11 year old mixed breed dog, who was having shaking in his back legs and a hard time getting up the stairs.

“Within three days I noticed that his back leg stopped shaking.” Cital reports, recalling how his elderly dog was more able to walk up the stairs and play. Cital says he has seen many dogs in his practice see similar improvement with CBD. “You just see the life brought back into them... and [you] get a few more quality years out of them comfortably.”

Other veterinarians with experience using CBD in dogs also reported seeing positive results using the drug for canine osteoarthritis.

Gary Richter, a veterinarian in Oakland, CA says he’s “certainly seen quite a number of dogs that are on either CBD or some other preparation of cannabis for the treatment of osteoarthritis and many of those dogs do very, very well.”

While none of the dogs in the recent study saw negative side effects, Richter says he’s seen some dogs have minor side effects from the drug. “The one side effect that is sometimes seen is an elevation in one of the liver values, the alkaline phosphatase” he explains. Still he says that the elevation “does not appear to cause any real world issue, in the sense that it doesn't make the dog sick. And it is reversible if you stop giving the CBD.”

Gastrointestinal problems like diarrhea or vomiting also occasionally occur for some dogs, but Richter and Cital say it is unclear if this is related to the CBD or the oils and other compounds in CBD products.

Elizabeth Mironchik-Frankenberg, a veterinarian and founder of Veterinary Cannabis Consultants, also adds that “CBD can interfere with the metabolism of other drugs, so this needs to be taken into consideration.”

Richter, Cital, Mironchik-Frankenberg and Halpert all urged pet owners to talk to their veterinarian before starting a CBD regimen and to make sure you use high quality CBD products. “There are a lot of products out there and not everything is made properly, not everything is labeled accurately, not everything has in the bottle, what it says on the label” explains Richter. Cital suggests only using brands that can show lab tested results with their products to ensure dosing information is accurate and the product is free from contaminants.

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pluienoir · 4 years

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Pluie/Noir Interscapes 02 “Interior Design”

Sound Mixed and Compiled by Rubi Visual Interpretation by David Surman

Soundcloud Link: https://soundcloud.com/pluie-noir/pluienoirinterscapes02

Welcome to the new Pluie/Noir podcast series, Interscapes. 8 years after our debut we decided to press the reboot button and return to our roots. With a new format and back to a regular monthly schedule, Pluie/Noir Interscapes will feature audio collages, mixes, live interviews and live recordings from P/N artists, friends, and other collectives we admire.

Because less is more, instead of the usual triptych format, this series will feature one single visual interpretation of the music by a graphic artist. The artwork will be available to purchase in poster format on our rebooted Bandcamp page very soon, with cassettes or CD-r of the mixes as a bonus.

World events have taken the series out of its planned monthly schedule, but priority was on the safety and functional structure of the private lives of everyone involved in the project during these unprecedented times.

For Interscapes 02 we welcome Rubi, a versatile german artist based in Myanmar, with a visual interpretation by english painter David Surman,

— Interview: Rubi

Hi Christina, welcome to the P/N Interscapes series. How have you been?

Hi there, and thank you so much for having me on your wonderful series! <3 I’m good, I’m enjoying what I can from the comfort of my own home together with my little kitty, currently working online and otherwise painting and reading a lot or watching movies!

Why did you move to Southeast Asia? Was it mere chance or a long-term goal?

A little bit of both, but I’d say it was intentional :) I moved here initially only for a short-term gig of three months early 2017 which I found really quite randomly but was very intrigued by. And honestly, I just liked it so much that I felt like I needed to come back and spend more time! I moved back to Yangon, Myanmar in August 2018 and have been here since, and I deeply love it – there’s a different energy in the air in Southeast Asia, people are kind and positive everywhere around you and there is still so much space on an economic and artistic level that it’s a very fulfilling place to be!

Your endeavours seem pretty vast. What did you study, what do you do for a living, and how do you entangle it with music?

Ha, I’m an economist and data scientist during the day. I’ve always been listening to and surrounding myself with music, but actually got deeper into DJing when I started my PhD in Barcelona in 2013 – I just felt like at the end of a long, mentally draining day I needed to use a very different part of my brain to really relax and let go, and getting creative with the music perfectly hit the spot. I’m currently teaching at a Liberal Arts and Sciences Institute here in Myanmar, which has the goal of bringing quality education to students from different walks of life, particularly those from ethnic minorities and less privileged backgrounds.

I finally got to combine my two worlds by teaching a class in music psychology this term, where we are exploring the role of music in everyone’s life from early childhood, how it is used as a social identifier and its connection to politics and conflict. My students are in their early 20s, and I’ve put them on the guestlist for several of the club nights I’ve organized here and they think it’s the coolest thing ever to see their professor behind the decks haha!

How is the audio-visual arts scene in Myanmar and the surrounding Nations? Are you helping activate it somehow and what are you working on nowadays?

I’d say the scene particularly in this part of Asia is at an early stage compared to Europe, but driven by a lot of passion and daring, forward-thinking people. In most of the major cities, you’ll find a beautiful venue and a small dedicated crew of people behind it - some of my favourite places I’ve played at in the area are Savage and Observatory in Vietnam, the Resonant crew at B1 in Taipei and Club Kowloon in Hong Kong. Also, the early-stage vibe brings the liberating attitude that as a DJ it’s really just about making people dance, and there’s no ego yet about the tracks you play or how you achieve this – if you can manage a dance floor, you get a stamp of approval.

Myanmar I’d say is the youngest scene by yet another margin, particularly because of its very recent coming-out of a military dictatorship. There’s a small number of local DJs and very few venues that dare to program (non-EDM) electronic music, and I was lucky to get a residency in my favourite club in town within the first month of arriving! I started my Out Of Sight events here, a monthly series which gained a very regular following and is the only one with international bookings in the whole country. Upon coming here, I didn’t really think I’d get to start another series of my own, especially inviting over so many DJ friends to come to visit and also contribute and explore the country while they’re here. Honestly, part of my joy in doing this has purely been getting inspired myself by seeing people play, bringing together a community of friends to dance through the night and just have a really great time.

It’s been a very gratifying journey, not least because it received appreciation from people in town – many of the local DJs became loyal followers and very excited to see artists from different countries play here in Yangon. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had Adam Collins here, Exos (twice!), TC80, Avos & Moses Mawila, Max Davis and many more. So yes, I feel like I’ve made a small contribution to the scene in one particular place – and honestly, there is still so much space here for people doing things that it’s very fun and easy to create something impactful!

Tell us more about "Interior Design": How, why, when?

I’ve recorded this podcast at home in Yangon, on a chill midweek evening when I felt a little spark of inspiration. I honestly take forever to record podcasts, as you already know from me submitting this so late :) I get deeply into overthinking mode and since I don’t publish many mixes I want them to have a specific theme and vision behind instead of just putting tracks together – which usually ends up with me procrastinating for months until it finally clicks and I know exactly what I want to do. There are quite a few tempo changes inside as I tried to create an arch from very slow ambient tracks to something I’d play in the middle of a night and then back down again. But somehow all of the tracks I put feel deeply me and representative of the style I like, so I identify with it.

The name was a last-minute hunch, but seemed fitting with the current phase of everyone spending time inside their homes and through this discovering maybe not just their furniture but also the building blocks of their inside world :)

And music-making? Is it something you want to explore?

I’ve actually gotten into playing acoustic music here with friends in recent months, and that’s been a really fun journey! I have a bunch of instruments at my home, and hosting small jam sessions has been one of my favourite pastimes. All of them are much more talented and experienced than me but have graciously taken me in so I’m constantly learning a lot.

On the electronic music side, I feel most compelled by making more experimental and ambient things as it feels like there is a larger range of freedom for exploration. I’ve been sampling some of the sounds in my surroundings for a while as the hustle and bustle here sounds so different from what I’m used to in Europe, so we’ll see what comes out of it!

Short, medium and long term goals?

Honestly, I’m a pretty chill person, so my overall goal in life is just to spend my time in an interesting and creative way, surround myself with people I love and somehow leave a positive trace with what I do. If I manage to keep combining all of these things I’ll consider myself a lucky and successful human!

— Interview: David Surman

Hi David, such a pleasure to have you at P/N. How are you, all things considered?

Thank you for asking, I’m very good right now. The pandemic has shifted my reality in all sorts of unexpected ways. I had coronavirus after taking a trip to Madrid, then New York. I came back to London and got sick immediately. I’m so glad to have fully recovered. I’m enjoying the empty London.

Have you lived abroad and explored different artistic fields apart from painting, or has it always been about England and canvases?

I was introduced to painting when I was a teenager by an artist Rob Fairley who my dad knew. I had always drawn a lot, but I didn’t consider being a painter until much later. I actually trained to be an animation film director, which seems so ridiculous to me now. I thought of it as a pragmatic choice -- the kind of profession which is somewhere between a reliable job and artistic freedom. Little did I know that hand-drawn animation would all but disappear.

I absolutely loved good quality animation, films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the Studio Ghibli films. I wanted to make them, and I also wanted to disappear into them. I started seriously painting again in my early 30s after a decade of working in animation and videogames in the UK and Australia. The timing has been perfect for me, as I started to paint really when I was ready. Australia changed my work, it made me think about colour and light and scale. I made films and animations and games there with my partner Ian Gouldstone before we came back to the UK and I started to paint full time around 2013.

I'd discovered your work through Sound Of Vast's "5th Anniversary Series". It featured a series of paintings from your "Paintings for the Cat Dimension" exhibition/installation. What was it about?

That was such a wonderful collaboration, and the team at Sound of Vast are brilliant. My exhibition was a series of 12 paintings of the same cat motif, a mother with two kittens, interpreted in 12 different ways. I wanted to make a statement on what it means to paint in the post-internet era, without giving in to the impulse to simply paint or reproduce imagery directly from online culture. So I created a cat motif in response to the prevalence of cats online from the beginning. The real statement though was the stylistic shifting around. I wanted to say “we are playing with identity all the time, why should an artist be an authentic singular identity?” I wanted to show that an artist can wear many masks, and they’re all authentic in representing artistic action.

Do you consider the internet, social media and contemporary sub-cultures the biggest influences of your work?

I don’t believe you get to choose your influences so much in art. By the time you’re 8 years old or so, your plastic little brain has been shaped by certain formative things. For me, there are two fascinations, first the natural world, which nourishes the animal side of me. The second is the artificial human world of images, electronic media, videogames, movies, art.

As much as I would like to be integrated into nature like a romantic dreamer I firmly believe humans are stuck outside of nature, so we have to make a new nature for ourselves to comfort and distract ourselves. This is art, and it takes many shapes, from youtube to painting to music. I see all these things as fundamentally the same, art is doing something with love. I see a lot of love in internet cultural activity and so it influences me. Though I have no idea how visible all this is in the work.

Your work isn't shy of colour or texture. Is this rooted in your fascination for animation?

When you learn to animate you become totally dedicated to line. It’s through moving lines that things come to life. Drawing is emphasised more than painting, and so colour and surface are less emphasised. When I came back to painting I really savoured the ability to subtly control the colour of the image and also the final quality of the paint. I go for strong colour because of various factors. You’re certainly right about animation being an influence, I think the colours of well-made cel painted animations are astounding. Particularly in good quality anime feature films of the 80s and 90s.

My approach is also calculated, I am interested in having an impact followed by a slowly shifting understanding, and you need to push colour to achieve that. Also as I have gotten older and become more and more conscious of art history I feel a sort of obligation to have courage with colour and put out my ideas in a clear way.

Do you listen to music while painting? Does music have an impact on you while you paint?

I absolutely listen to music when I paint, and I am totally repetitive in my choices. I listen to David Bowie’s discography on repeat, and Kate Bush too. If I need to go to a particular mindset I will listen to Bach, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Glass. Bowie and Bush are just always there, timeless, every aspect of it is totally known and listening to them while painting just greases everything along nicely. I would like to be a curious listener and search for different music, but I think I’ve become extremely focused on the experiences of the eye, and perhaps not so much the other senses.

"Raucous Bird" is your visual interpretation of Rubi's podcast. Why did you choose this particular work?

Listening to Rubi’s work I was thinking a lot about the space of music, and the way we lose a sense of direction. It becomes spatial, but there isn’t necessarily a top or bottom. This is very different from visual art, which relies a lot on a structure of top, bottom, and so on. It made me think of the paintings of cockatoos I’ve made, who I saw often in Australia, playing fun games in the trees. They appear weightless and live to enjoy the space and their own free bodily movement. For me, the music creates a wonderful association with this memory.

Short, medium and long term goals?

To make exciting paintings that have an impact, and to bring the work to new places. That’s the priority for me at any given time. Thanks so much for asking such great questions.

— Links:

https://soundcloud.com/itsmerubi https://www.davidsurman.com

W: https://pluienoir.tumblr.com M: info (at) pluienoir.com

#david surman #rubi #pluienoirinterscapes

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Hans Holzer at 100: America's First TV Ghost Hunter Still Haunts Paranormal Community

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It's time to examine the career and legacy of paranormal pioneer Hans Holzer.

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Born in Vienna on January 26, 1920, Hans Holzer was like many children, fascinated by the ghost and fairy stories he heard in his youth. But those tales, told by his Uncle Henry, which he retold at school to the disapproval of adults, stayed with Holzer. Ghosts became his life’s work as one of the world’s most famous figures in the paranormal field.

Before his death in 2009, at age 89, Holzer authored nearly 140 books on the paranormal, extraterrestrial life, witchcraft, and more, beginning with 1963’s Ghost Hunter. During a career that famously involved the “Amityville Horror” house case in 1977, Holzer also taught parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology, and both appeared on, and consulted for, Leonard Nimoy’s late 1970s show In Search Of… And interestingly, actor Dan Aykroyd claimed an obsession with Holzer, which inspired him to write Ghostbusters.

The paranormal subgenre of reality television exploded around 2005 – a trend that continues today with numerous series on networks such as Travel Channel, and A&E, and which has expanded online. Four decades prior, Hans Holzer was one of America’s first famous ghost hunters, preceding Ed and Lorraine Warren.

“He was the king of all paranormal media,” says Dave Schrader, lead investigator of Travel Channel’s unscripted series The Holzer Files, which re-examines Holzer’s cases, and host of the popular paranormal radio show Beyond The Darkness. “He was like the Howard Stern of his time, and was on TV, wrote for movies, and wrote books.”

“He became our first multi-media spokesperson for the paranormal,” says Jeff Belanger, author of more than a dozen books on the paranormal, co-host/producer of New England Legends podcast, and longtime writer/researcher on Travel’s Ghost Adventures. “He had the personality for it; he had the storytelling ability, and he was putting himself out there at a time when no one else was.”

“He was one of the very few here in the States to have been able to publish most of his findings into digestible books,” says daughter Alexandra Holzer, who authored the 2008 book Growing Up Haunted. “He also could write fiction, poetry, sheet music and compose; he wrote, produced and directed some of his own projects, and even recorded two songs on a ‘45 record entitled ‘Ghost Hunter’ (of course).”

His status exploring “the other side” (a phrase he claimed to have coined, and did help popularize) was an impressive development considering he left Austria—and his studies of archaeology and history at the University of Vienna—with his family in 1938 before the annexation of the country into Nazi Germany. Re-settling in New York City, he continued studies at Columbia University, eventually earned a master’s degree in comparative religion, and a PhD in parapsychology from the (rather dubious) London College of Applied Science. In his personal life, Holzer married the Countess Catherine Buxhoeveden in 1962, and had two daughters, Alexandra and Nadine Widener, before the marriage ended.

Holzer’s work impacted the paranormal field in significant ways. Most notably, the way he spoke about it was thoughtful and scholarly. He eschewed words such as “supernatural” because it suggested phenomena was outside of scientific definition. Rather than using “belief”—which he called the “uncritical acceptance of something you can’t prove”—he said he focused on evidence.

read more: The Holzer Files Season 2 Confirmed

His approach was almost journalistic, yet sympathetic; Holzer viewed ghosts (and their spiritual cousins, “stay behinds”) as “a fellow human being in trouble.” He felt strongly that tragedies would ensnare unfortunate souls, and trap them between the spirit world and this one, “unable to proceed due to the inability to free themselves from emotional turmoil.”

Belanger says he understood the power of storytelling in trying to connect his audience with the hauntings.

“He combined some aspects of journalism, but at the end of the day was definitely about trying to capture the story, which is kind of really what all of us are trying to do … there's obviously varying objectivity when it comes to every single case, but at the end of the day he tried to capture a haunt as objectively as he could to take you, the reader, listener, viewer into it so you can form your own opinions.”

Holzer developed a unique take on how the other side was structured as well, detailing a bureaucratic process that involves a queue, and checking in with an afterlife clerk for another shot on Earth. In 2005, he told Belanger’s Ghostvillage that people would be free of disease after life, but otherwise, things looked pretty similar to this realm with houses, trees – just “maybe a little nicer.”

Holzer’s books and media appearances helped bring ghosthunting into people’s homes. Less than a year after his first book was published, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in January 1964. By 1965, it was The Merv Griffin Show and the Today show in 1967. He would continue to make television appearances throughout the rest of his life.

“We're all standing on his shoulders to some degree,” says Belanger with regards to Holzer bringing paranormal investigation to television.

“There were only a few names of people that were out there really consistently looking into this, and his was arguably the biggest when I was growing up, so I think that he sort of set the tone for what paranormal investigation is supposed to look like for my generation.”

Belanger adds Holzer understood the media, and used it as a way to further discussion.

“He’d say ‘Okay, laugh at it if you will, say there's no such thing as ghosts, but here’s something I found’, and that cracked the door to get other people talking about it, and that door has just been cracked more and more ever since the 1960s thanks in large part to him -- now, we've got all these tv shows that have really blown that door wide open.”

For his part, Schrader – who dedicated his book The Other Side: A Teen's Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal to the researcher — remembered the “slow indoctrination” of Holzer into his life.

“Growing up, my mom and aunt were avid readers, and they really had a wide fascination with the paranormal, and there were always books laying around by Hans Holzer at one of their houses.

But Schrader says Holzer also “made it okay to talk about these experiences.”

“He didn't treat people with disrespect, he didn't roll his eyes at people; he went, heard their stories, and did what he could to help the spirits.”

“He cared about the cases and the people no matter what,” says Belanger. “That's the business he was in: having people welcome him into their homes to talk about something deeply personal, deeply profound, and he captured those stories.”

read more: How The Turning Updates a 100-Year-Old Horror Story

Alexandra echoes this sentiment when speaking of the way her father dressed when in the field, which she says has inspired other investigators to wear a fedora-style hat, buttoned shirt, and jacket.

“He was dressed comfortably but always with something of taste and décor; he felt it set the tone of respect and care in dealing with so many.”

That care and respect may have been influenced by his first visual paranormal experience, which took place after he moved to New York City. He described seeing the ghost of his mother in a white nightgown, pushing his head back upon a pillow to prevent him from getting one of the migraines that plagued him.

“I said, ‘Oh, hello, Mama,’ and she disappeared,” Holzer told Belanger.

Holzer also led tours, and highlighted the geographic sprawl of ghost stories with books such as The Great British Ghost Hunt, The Lively Ghosts of Ireland, Haunted Hollywood, The Ghosts of Dixie, Ghosts of New England, and Hans Holzer’s Travel Guide to Haunted Houses, among others.

Paranormal researcher Peter Underwood, a contemporary who wrote Holzer’s obituary for The Guardian, said his colleague told him, "There are thousands of houses, if not hundreds of thousands, all over the world where stay-behinds, and ghosts, and memories that won't fade, keep sharing the apartments with flesh-and-blood occupants ..."

And that meant an endless supply of material for investigations and books. Impressively, during a time before reality TV ghost hunting shows populated the landscape, Holzer’s writing, lectures, and appearances provided a living for his family. But Holzer was remarkably progressive.

While the predominant methods seen in paranormal television today are influenced by Judeo-Christian theologies, Holzer viewed traditional organized religions as profit-making corporations. He was something of an elder statesman in Wiccan communities and other pagan traditions, and prominently contributed to the mainstream education of such philosophies via books The Truth About Witchcraft, and Inside Witchcraft. He ascribed to reincarnation and was convinced he had previously lived during the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands. And though demons and demonic possession became fashionable, he didn’t buy into devils, monsters, or other supernatural beings.

And rather notably for the time in which he lived, he was a vegan.

“We used to go out to eat but back then finding a vegan restaurant was quite the challenge,” says Alexandra. “You don’t want to go to a place with him without enough choices; it could get ugly!”

Although the modern paranormal investigative community has become known for a plethora of gadgets, meters, ghost boxes, and so on, Holzer preferred looking to the past for his work. During field research, he utilized a “trance medium” where a spirit would use a medium’s mind to convey messages. Trance mediums were popular during the Spiritualism era of the late 19th century. Along with a pen and paper, camera, and audio recorder, this was enough for Holzer.

“He was never keen on technology,” says Schrader. “He always believed the basics.”

Paranormal researcher, and “Weird Lectures” speaker John E.L. Tenney recalls a time in the 1990s Holzer saw his equipment he planned to take on an investigation.

read more: Conjuring Family Reunited for Kindred Spirits Ghost Hunt

“He asked me, ‘What are you going to do with all that stuff? I said, ‘Maybe find a ghost?’” says Tenney. “He laughed, and said, ‘Someday you’ll throw all that stuff away, and you’ll allow yourself to have an experience.’”

“He was right.”

Holzer also possessed a level-headed approach to investigations, not appearing to be easily shaken. Indeed, he said he had never been frightened on a case.

According to Schrader: “When he's hearing some of the most chilling things from the spirit world, he always remained even keel, even-tempered, and tried to control the conversation and to bring some peace to the spirits—instead of winding them up or making things worse, he was always the calming influence.”

Holzer remains associated with well-known cases such as the Whaley House in San Diego—which he decided was the most haunted home in America—and the Barnstable House in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But the Dutch Colonial house in Amityville, New York, became the location for his most famous, and likely most controversial, case.

Following the 1974 murder of six that occurred in the structure on Ocean Avenue, the Lutz family moved in in 1975, and only stayed 28 days before they left, claiming they were tormented by evil entities. This became the basis for Jay Anson’s 1977 book The Amityville Horror: A True Story, which was then adapted into a film. Holzer investigated the home that same year with medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers. Johnson-Meyers claimed she channeled the spirit of a Shinnecock Native American chief who revealed the home was built on a sacred burial ground (despite the Amityville Historical Society noting it was the Montauk tribe who would have been on that land).

Holzer’s investigation, as well as photos he took from the scene, became part of the Amityville lore, and he wrote multiple books about the case—Murder in Amityville, Amityville Horror, Amityville II: The Possession, The Amityville Curse and The Secret of Amityville—two of which became the basis for movie sequels.

As for Hans Holzer at 100, Dave Schrader says he believes the investigator would now embrace technology.

“Now you've got real engineers, real scientists that are putting effort into creating tools and equipment that will test the theories,” he says. “He might have been reluctant to move into it, but I think he would have begun grasping some of this as well and utilizing the technology because I think he would see that it might be even less fallible than a medium.”

Meanwhile, Alexandra believes her father would be back in Europe, tackling the subject matter of UFOs, writing, and composing more music. She says he grew weary of reported hauntings, and would say, “There’s more to life than a ghost who refuses to move on! There are other worlds and beings here and out there!”

Alexandra adds that, on her father’s birthday on January 26th, her family will reminisce of the moments they shared, and she will make his favorite cold salad, “a Russian recipe from my mother’s mother, Rosine Buxhoeveden, who was very close to father.”

“And in the wee hours of that morning, after the coffee is brewed, I’ll toast to him while all are still asleep as coffee was his go-to choice of beverage brewing in our home at all hours of the day and night.”

And though Holzer passed away 11 years ago, Belanger did ask him about his centennial, and what he might be doing on his 100th birthday.

“Looking forward to my 101st,” he told the author. “I do what I’m meant to do. A man who takes himself too seriously, others won’t take seriously, so I’m very careful about that. I want to be factual and to be useful – and I try to help anybody who wants help.”

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justforbooks · 7 years

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On Not Knowing (Modern) Greek

By Johanna Hanink

Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Not Knowing Greek” was published in 1925, the same year as Mrs Dalloway. The title gestures not to Woolf’s (nor to anyone’s) ignorance of Ancient Greek syntax, morphology and vocabulary, but to the impossibility of knowing today “how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted.” The essay is nevertheless an encomium of ancient Greek thought and literature, and, ironically, a testament to Woolf’s own fine command of the ancient language.

I think of it sometimes when I reflect on two frustrations I have about “not knowing” Modern Greek: a version of Greek in which you can, in fact, hear words, laugh on cue, and watch actors act. The first is with myself, because I wish I knew the language better. The second is with the field of Classics, for not institutionally valuing—and for even dismissing—any aspiring classicist’s efforts to learn it. After all, the thinking goes, those hours would be better spent on Homer and Thucydides (or even “German for Reading”: leave it to us to kill off a living language).

Classicists like equally to brag and complain that they have to learn a lot of languages. Most American PhD programs require exams in Ancient Greek, Latin, German, and either French or Italian: if you know either French or Italian, the thinking goes, you can fake your way through the other.

These languages are the tools of the trade, but they are also metonyms for the philological traditions that we are expected to put on a convincing show of knowing—with, say, the occasional name-check of Wilamowitz. Once you decide to get serious about the field, you learn to take these traditions for granted as the most inherently valuable. The history of European classical scholarship is entangled with the esteem that Greek and Latin have enjoyed in countries where German, French, Italian, or English is spoken. Many scholars who identify with the European classical tradition assume that any scholarship worth reading, or at least citing, will be in one of those four languages.

On the one hand, the modern language requirements of Classics PhD programs should really start to reflect that interesting and important things have been said and are being said about Greco-Roman antiquity in countless languages other than English, German, French, and Italian (why not accept Turkish or Arabic or Chinese—isn’t, after all, scholarship really just a form of “reception”?). On the other, the absence of Modern Greek from the list of discipline-approved languages is itself curious, and stranger still if you consider how classicists love to spend time, and to talk about spending time, in Greece.

Like fourteen European countries and two other former British colonies (Canada and Australia), the United States has a home base for its archeologists and classicists in Athens, at the American School of Classical Studies. It should go without saying that plenty of scholarship has been and continues to be written in Greek; Greek universities often have enormous Classics departments. There is simply more information in Greek about Greek archeological sites, both at the sites and in print. And for better or for worse Greek antiquity is more urgently present in national conversations (and at bookstores and on social media) in Greece than anywhere else.

So why does Modern Greek still not have a seat at the classicists’ table? This is, bluntly put, largely because our discipline continues to take a colonialist view of, among other things, Greece, Greeks, and (Modern) Greek. Historians and anthropologists who work on Greece have been much more willing than classicists to acknowledge the country’s legacy of metaphorical colonization: not by the Ottomans, but by the early European antiquaries and travelers who planted their flags in the ruins of Greek antiquity.

At a time when European powers were scrambling to expand their empires, the travelers’ influential approach to the Ottoman-held “Classical Lands” was, as historian K.E. Fleming points out, “representative of a different form of colonialism, in which the history and ideology, rather than territory, of another country” is “claimed, invaded, and annexed.” Viewed through the lens of the present, the people who undertook this more “symbolic” colonization of Greece look a great deal like early versions of classicists.

Thanks to their proprietary attitude toward antiquity, they largely discounted local knowledge and described local people as apathetic to the ancient past whose ruins they seemed to live so blithely among (see here for evidence to the contrary). This kind of thinking was in turn used to justify, among other things, the removal of antiquities from Greece to countries where, supposedly, they would be better appreciated and cared for. All of this makes for a very long and complex story—one in which Greeks were hardly passive participants.

One of the story’s many legacies is that classicists trained in the “Western” classical tradition tend to disregard Modern Greek as a scholarly language, while Greeks who want to participate in the tradition—to have their voices and ideas heard abroad— earn degrees in other countries and publish their research in English, German, or French. Granting Modern Greek a more valued place in the professional conversation would be a positive step for a field that, on the point of colonialism, has a lot to answer for.

Beyond the political argument—and on the more personal, spiritual level that Woolf evokes in her own essay—the struggle to learn Modern Greek can bring a special kind of joy to those of us who first came to the language in its ancient form. That joy is the main reason I recommend that classicists spend at least a little time on Modern Greek, and ignore the gnawing voice that will say it’s a waste of time.

In a recent blog post (“What does the Latin actually say?”), Mary Beard makes an important point: for a lot of people it is hard for people to learn dead languages because we learn them passively. “It is both the plus and the minus of Latin,” she writes, “that we never have to ask for a pizza, or the way to the swimming pool, in it.”

My own learning style is certainly more “verbal” than “logical.” I like to talk, so I make much slower progress at learning dead languages passively than at learning living languages actively (my German is bad, but I could think of no greater waste of my own time than a “German for Reading” class). Modern Greek, of course, is not Ancient Greek: the linguistic politics here are particularly delicate and complex for historical reasons. The pronunciation can be a psychological barrier, and the language has changed since antiquity: classicists are often especially surprised to learn that infinitives have long since passed out of use. Greek also brims with borrowings from Turkish, Albanian, Italian, French, English…. But so what? Classicists’ own modern language requirements count Italian and French as substitutes for each other.

There’s no denying that having to decline Greek nouns when I order a pizza, or manipulate Greek verbs when I ask the way to the swimming pool, has brought even the ancient language to life for me. After years of studying Modern Greek, I have a far better recall for vocabulary, handle on verb forms, and instinctive sense for accentuation. The time I have dedicated to Modern Greek is some of the best I have spent as a classicist, since it has given me a sounder, more internalized sense of the ancient language (a better Sprachgefühl, as a more responsible classicist might say).

It’s fun, too, to learn how meanings of words have changed over time. For years ὁφόρος was, in my mind, the tribute paid to Athens by its Delian League allies. Now the word just means “tax” (inasmuch as tax ever “just” means tax). Being αγαθός nowadays is not usually such a good thing. A στήλη can be a “column” in a newspaper (or on Eidolon). In chapter 4 of thePoetics, Aristotle observes just how much pleasure people take in learning and inferring: in looking at an image of someone and recognizing, “Oh, that’s him” (οὗτοςἐκεῖνος, 1448b).

Making connections between two things—hearing a new word and realizing you already know it, just differently—sends a spark of joy through the brain. And anyway there is something to be said for a language that allows you to describe a tall, fit guy as a kouros in everyday conversation.

The twists and turns of Greek linguistic history also mean you can play specifically with avoiding Ancient Greek. Oftentimes there is a choice between describing something with a “high-register” word with ancient roots or a “low-register” vernacular or foreign word. Liver, for example, is συκώτι (derived, like Italian fegato and French foie, from a word for “fig”), but when the matter is a disease of the liver the more classicist-friendly ήπαρ is common. Speaking of liver, who would you buy it from: the κρεοπώλης or the χασάπης? The one features in beginning Ancient Greek textbooks; the other comes from Turkish. A Greek professor of Latin once told me that he revels in speaking English precisely because it offers similar opportunities to play with the nuance of register: between Anglo-Saxon, French and Latinate diction (to use a classic example, does Elizabeth II strike you as queenly, royal, or regal?).

The Facebook page Ancient Memes exploits the space between these levels by captioning “high-register” artworks with dialogue in very modern, “low-register” Greek. Reading things like Ancient Memes, or my few copies of “Aristophanes in Comics,” has introduced new playfulness into my approach to Ancient Greek. And play, of course, is one of ways we learn best.

So what is still keeping many classicists (again, leaving the more political argument aside) from seizing the real practical benefits that Modern Greek has to offer: the opportunity to spend time in Greece more comfortably, the chance to collaborate with Greek colleagues more substantively, the opportunity to bolster our grasp of the language and its extremely longue durée, and to procrastinate by laughing at Ancient Memes?

When I posed a version of the question to a professor in Thessaloniki, he had a good answer. Classicists, he suggested, are easily embarrassed and afraid to make mistakes. Making mistakes is crucial for language acquisition, and sometimes the mistakes will be horribly embarrassing ones (I have, in polite conversation, said τσιμπούκι when I meant τσιμπούρι). Once, after I paid for books at a bookstore in Greece, I overheard the woman who had just rung me out ask a colleague with genuine bewilderment: “What does she want with an Ancient Greek book if she can’t even speak Greek?” In a field that already demands so much posturing, so much pretense of knowing Greek and Latin, risking mistakes and “not knowing” means risking a lot of your ego.

But it’s worth it. Learning Modern Greek, at least to the extent that I have managed to learn it, has made both my life and my relationship with my work all the richer. I haven’t even mentioned the unique pleasure that modern Greek literature offers the classicist. That sheer enjoyment aside, few people have been more influential in shaping modern views of Greek antiquity than George Seferis, or have problematized the periodization of Greek poetry more than Constantine Cavafy (translated into English most recently by critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn). I first came to Modern Greek after reading Seferis’ essay “Delphi” (Greek here), but since then have actually come to prefer paddling around in Greek literature’s less classical waters.

Nevertheless, since I’m teaching ancient Greek mythology again this semester, the text I’m most excited about right now is Auguste Corteau’s Νεοελληνική Μυθολογία. It is a parodic re-imagining of ancient Greek myths: on one page, Erebus makes a move on his sister Nyx: “Hush you idiot,” she replies, “Mom’ll hear and call Social Services.” Later, Kronos appears on the beach and informs his father he’s come to play paddle ball. “But I don’t see any balls,” says Ouranos. “Nor will you ever again,” says Kronos.

Now, with the prospect of a long plane ride ahead of me, I’m looking forward to having a few quiet hours with the book—no matter how much of it I manage to understand, or how often I know when I ought to laugh.

Johanna Hanink is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University, US.

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nc222358 · 4 years

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Research into selected reading (Moving)

This is essentially just a copy and paste dump of things I found useful / interesting. I’m not 100% sure that I’ll continue on with the Moving reading after doing a bit more research into the Covid reading.

Marni Amsellem, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Smart Health Psychology, says that even though moving can be exciting, exciting things are often fraught with stress.Anytime we’re facing change, that is inherently stressful," she says.

When you're going through a life change, it's a disruption that causes uncertainty, and uncertainty causes anxiety and stress. - makes me think how poorly humans adapt and deal with change.

"Your morning routine will change, even if it's just that you normally wake up with the sun shining in your bedroom and now you don't."

Anytime something happens to mess with your routine, whether a train gets stalled on your way to work, or your usual coffee place runs out of almond milk, it's annoying and stressful because you have to go out of your way to accommodate any changes that interruption causes. Moving is essentially the same thing, but magnified.

And while you're at it, give yourself a chance to say goodbye to the old place. Closure, whether you are moving away from good or bad emotions it is important

"Transitions are inherently stressful, but we do grow through change," Dr. Amsellem says. "If we never challenged ourselves in any way and never did anything different, we [wouldn't] grow."

https://www.bustle.com/p/moving-is-one-of-the-most-stressful-life-events-a-new-study-says-but-here-are-7-ways-to-make-it-suck-less-11832166

British energy company E.ON conducted a survey of 2,000 people, and six out of 10 people cited moving as the most stressful life event with divorce or a break up coming in second.

Filming yourself taking things apart (electronics or furniture) so you can easily put them back together.

NYTimes

The underlying psychological issues involved in real estate decisions are of great interest to therapists and psychologists, because housing and moving are filled with symbolism, the hope for new beginnings, crushing disappointments, loss, anxiety and fear.

“It’s a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it — they mainly talk about the packing and the external part of moving.”

There’s nothing worse than having no control of your own situation.”

“If you say you are trapped,” said Linda Sapadin, a Long Island psychologist and a motivational speaker, “that’s like the trapping of an animal. It’s a pretty shocking visualization. It’s better to say, ‘I can’t move right now,’ and ask what can you do to make your environment safer, more pleasant. Adding the two words ‘right now’ is a tremendous liberator psychologically.”

Mr. Harper said that he had cut back on chasing novel spaces, finding the “newness” he had been seeking in his work rather than apartment hunting. This is that idea of trying to fill a void with something else. Could this be flipped around? What kind of things could comfort people when moving? What routines are NOT changed when moving and can provide the link between the old and the new?

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/realestate/28cov.html

https://www.getbellhops.com/blog/moving-stress/

Ask also why other places you lived felt like home. In doing so, you will identify aspects of your life that are most important to you and can intentionally pursue these areas in your new home.

Whenever possible try to reorient yourself to think of your move as a new chapter opening rather than an old one closing.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2010/06/moving-well-being

https://www.purewow.com/wellness/psychological-effects-of-moving

who have lived in many different places growing up have an increased risk of suicide, substance abuse and even early death.

In a 2016 paper published in the journal Personal Relationships, psychologists concluded that people who move more frequently tend to view both their stuff and their connections to other people as more disposable. Why? Probably because they’ve become accustomed to disposing of them.

According to Oberlin psychology professor Nancy Darling, Ph.D., in, a 2010 study published in the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, frequent moves are tough on kids and disrupt important friendships, but these effects are most problematic for kids who are introverted and those whose personalities tend toward anxiety and inflexibility. “Specifically, adults who moved frequently as kids have fewer high-quality relationships and tend to score lower on well-being and life satisfaction,” she told

“They’re not the flashiest compliments, but they’re grounded ones,” Romm writes. “They’re based in facts. They’re steadying. And for someone awash in a sea of nerves, it’s a relief to have something to grab on to.” Fact based compliments help anxious people see something

‘Real’ to grab onto.

Don’t be so quick to walk away from water cooler conversation or ignore the chatty Cathy in line at the coffee shop. “Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being,” short term interactions are healthy because they are low risk and act as a wee confidence boost throughout the day.

“frustration tolerance”

Whether moving away from a place we associate with good emotions, or bad emotions, we must accept our final look at home and move on to start a new chapter of life. Without closure we experience FOMO and emptiness. Without closure we are uncertain and scared of new adventures, because we don’t know how to feel about our previous ones. Moving is often a means to a fresh start, but without closure, that fresh start is tainted by the mold of anxiety and uncertainty.

#47

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barbosaasouza · 4 years

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PN interviews Fiery Squirrel, developer of Cosmic Defenders

We were lucky enough to (virtually) sit down with Henry Fernández, Game Developer and Founder of Fiery Squirrel. We asked Henry all about his game development background and the upcoming Nintendo Switch title, Cosmic Defenders.

Fiery Squirrel is a one-man team. Can you tell our readers about your history with gaming and what inspired you to form this company?

I have been playing video games since the NES, but I never thought working in the game industry was an option because there weren’t many game companies in Venezuela. So I studied computer engineering, specializing in computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and video game development. That’s when I realized that being a game developer was what I truly wanted to do. After making some prototypes and demos at game jams as well as in my free time, I decided to work on my first commercial project in 2012, Fluff Eaters.

Fiery Squirrel was created in 2014 as a medium to develop and share the games I create with the world. It started with me not knowing a lot about the industry and just wanting to make cool games for people to enjoy. I would not say that I know a lot now, but I’ve definitely learned a lot on the way and I keep doing it.

Through Fiery Squirrel, I try to create innovative games with a combination of simplicity and energy, forged in a traditional way with elements from the modern world. As I envision this company, I would like it to become an experienced crafter, dedicated to impact players’ worlds in a meaningful way through simple and enthusiastic games.

Your base moved from Venezuela to Japan, how did that come about? Do you find it inspirational being an independent game developer in such a tech-heavy country?

I came to Japan in 2009 as an exchange student for one year when I was in college. The experience was great, so I decided to pursue my PhD here as well. In 2014, I participated in a program from the Japanese Ministry of Education to get a scholarship and study my master’s degree in Japan, and I was lucky to get it. From that point forward, I’ve been studying and working in videogames as much as I can.

Yes, it is amazing to have the opportunity to be working on this in a country like Japan. As you probably would imagine, the Japanese culture is very different from mine, customs, way of thinking, point of view, etc. These elements contribute strongly with how I design and create videogames.

In addition, the way Japanese people live, in general, is really “comfortable” I would say. Not only coming from a third world country, for me it’s fascinating that everything just works, but the Japanese people have this concept called “Omotenashi” which really takes hospitality to a different level. Feeling this comfort really helps to focus on the creative process and try to make the best out of it.

Finally, I would say that Japan is an amazing country, with an interesting culture, including their history, elements such as samurai, anime, games, etc. make it very inspirational when working in a creative media like this.

How did the idea for Cosmic Defenders originate?

The mechanics and concept were designed using the theme of cooperation, which is a message I wanted to send to the world: highlighting how important it is to cooperate with others to live in peace. The main reason for this was that at that time, and still today, Venezuela was going through a lot of difficult things, and I wanted people to realize that we and everyone else in the world needed to support each other. That’s also why some mechanics in the game, not only encourage, but force players to cooperate to clear some levels by destroying enemies together.

And how long has the game been in development?

The development of Cosmic Defenders started back in September 2017. Before that, there was a game jam (Ludum Dare) in 2017, which was where the game idea was born. So, the whole development time was around 2 years and 5 months (plus the game jam days).

Why did you choose to develop your game on the Nintendo Switch, and how have you found working on that platform?

This is the first time that I’ve made a game for a console, so there are a lot of new things I’ve experienced and learned in the process when working on the Nintendo Switch.

First of all, I would like to say that before making the game I already knew that I wanted it on the Switch because I thought it was the perfect fit for it. Not only does the game have a bunch of elements from the old school NES era, but easily being able to play with friends or family anytime made it a very good option for Cosmic Defenders.

About working on the Switch, Nintendo has made it really nice to work with the platform. For developers, there is plenty of documentation on the Nintendo website and they made things simple for us to access and work with features such as the Joy-Cons.

I would also like to mention that I’m using Unity3D for the creation of this game and it has been very helpful when implementing things. For that, I think that both the Unity team and the Nintendo team have been working really closely to develop a nice tool for us, developers, to bring our creations to the platform with the minimum difficulties as possible.

How has it been working with Natsume? Can you tell us a little about this arrangement?

Natsume understands that one of the most difficult aspects for us, as independent developers, is to get the necessary exposure to reach the audience we want to reach. As a way to compliment that part of the process, Natsume thought it would be great to support Indies with their experience and audience, to help us get our games to a larger audience and, at the same time, to be able to present new experiences to their audience with the games we are making.

In my case, there are different parts of the whole creation process that Cosmic Defenders and Fiery Squirrel have benefited from. It has been really helpful to have Natsume’s feedback about ideas related to the game during the process of creation, specifically game design, art, and sound. In addition, as I mentioned before that one difficult aspect of this kind of game was QA and testing, Natsume has also helped enormously with this part, debugging the game and helping improve its quality. Finally, of course, I think that thanks to their marketing experience and amazing audience, hopefully more people will know about the game and have a chance to enjoy it.

When should fans expect to see Cosmic Defenders be released on the Nintendo Switch?

Cosmic Defenders will release in April.

What’s next for Fiery Squirrel?

For now, I am putting all my energy on Cosmic Defenders, and do my best to have the best possible release for the game. In addition, I would like to share that it’s in my plans to have more content for Cosmic Defenders after its release. Natsume and I haven’t discussed anything about this yet, but I would love to include some features that I feel would bring more joy to players and let them enjoy interesting elements of the game.

In the future, I would love to keep working on other ideas that I have on my list, but nothing is decided yet.

Do you have any advice for developers trying to break into the indie scene?

For me it’s difficult to give good advice because I’m also learning a lot from this industry. I don’t have a lot of experience, however, I would say that if you are passionate about it, there is no reason for not doing it. Even if you do not 100% dedicate yourself to making games independently, there is always satisfaction about working on your own ideas, and you can do so in many different ways. Try to learn as much as you can from other developers, go to events, watch YouTube videos, try to make as many projects as you can, and try to fail early so you can learn from mistakes, and, most importantly, have fun when making games! We are all here for that!

Thanks for your time, we really appreciate it!

The post PN interviews Fiery Squirrel, developer of Cosmic Defenders appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

PN interviews Fiery Squirrel, developer of Cosmic Defenders published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

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easiestwaytoloseweight · 5 years

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8 Tiny Kitchen Tweaks for Big Weight Loss Results

Your new secret weight loss weapon: Reorganizing your kitchen. You may think that keeping snacks out of sight is a “duh” tip, but there have actually been well-done research studies proving that it really works. Here are a few other scientifically vetted housekeeping suggestions that may also help you peel off the pounds: 1. Clear the clutter. A messy kitchen can make you feel stressed and out of control and encourage you to eat more, according to a study published this year in the journal Environment and Behavior. In fact, the women in the study, who were exposed to a neat kitchen and one strewn with mail, newspapers and dirty dishes, ate twice as many cookies in the messy kitchen as in the tidy one.

2. Hide the snacks. If you have to have unhealthy snacks in the house, make sure you need to use a stepstool (and maybe a map) to find them. Studies from the Food & Brand Lab at Cornell University have found that when they’re out of sight, they’re also out of mind. Also, they point out, when you have to pass yummies a lot you’re constantly making the same decision—eat it or not—and you’re likely to eventually wear yourself down and succumb to temptation. Forget those cute little glass containers. Store goodies in opaque containers and use aluminum foil, not plastic wrap, for fattening leftovers in the fridge. (Cornell researchers have found that the average kitchen has four or five snack cupboards and recommended isolating treats to just one.)

5 Things You Learned as a Child That Cause Weight Gain as an Adult

3. Put the good stuff where you can see and grab it. Don’t get rid of those little glass containers or the plastic wrap. They’re perfect for the healthy food you want to eat. Likewise, it’s okay to have a few things on the counter, like a fruit bowl maybe, filled with grapes on the vine that you’ve snipped into easy-to-eat portions. Other research at Cornell—recounted in the book Slim by Design by the head of the lab, Brian Wansink, PhD—found that having healthy food where you can see and reach it makes you eat more of it. And the sweet spot? The middle shelf in the fridge. That’s where to keep your celery, carrots, apples, oranges and other healthy fare, not in the produce bin.

4. Consider buying little red plates. A study published this year in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research found that downsizing your plates by 30 percent also downsizes the amount you eat by 30 percent, in part by cutting back the amount you serve yourself. Why red? Cornell research found that plate color also tends to affect how much you serve yourself, particularly if the plate and the food are highly contrasted. Portions of white food, like pasta and rice, look much larger on a darker plate, the researchers say. You’ll eat less of darker foods on lighter plates too. Mix and match?

5. Ditch the stools and chairs in the kitchen. Or, at least, make your kitchen less comfortable as a hangout. The more time you spend in the kitchen, says other Cornell research, the more you’re going to eat.

How to Fool-Proof Your Fridge for Weight Loss

6. Serve from the stove, not the table. You’re less likely to overeat if you have to walk to the kitchen for seconds, rather than just reach for the bowl or platter on the table, say the Cornell researchers.

7. Invest in healthy kitchen utensils. Have you tried “zoodles” yet? Those are the “noodles” made by using a special device to spiralize zucchini. For as little as $30, you can get a spiralizing device that turns out piles of noodle-like veggies—all kinds—that you can use in place of pasta. Consider a collapsible metal vegetable steamer that not only lets you steam veggies, but other healthy foods like tofu or homemade spring rolls made with shredded veggies. And take the guesswork out of portion sizes by keeping a counter-top food scale. You can find one that’s only about six-by-two inches so it won’t add to a cluttered look.

8. Keep an aromatherapy diffuser in the kitchen or dining room. Studies have found that just sniffing the scent of fruits such as apples, bananas and grapefruit can help you eat less. A 2012 Dutch study in the journal, Flavour, also suggested that strong aromas—things like onions, garlic and chiles—may encourage you to take smaller bites.

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tedpavlic · 5 years

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Early Career Academics: Tips for Preparing for your Interview Visit

This post goes out to early career academics about to interview for positions. Preparing for your interview is very different than preparing for just another seminar visit. Moreover, the observable difference between a well-prepared candidate and one who sees the interview as just another invited seminar visit is HUGE. Do yourself a favor and ask faculty you know how to prepare. Most faculty, even junior faculty, have served on at least one search committee and will have a lot of good perspectives from sitting on the other side of the interview process. This post gives a few tips that I've picked up after sitting on search committees. Your mileage may vary, and you should definitely ask around. But this is what I notice...

Given that your audience will be with everyone you meet that day as well as everyone who sees your presentation (which may be video taped and viewed in a tiny screen, which is something you might want to consider when crafting it), you should survey several people to see what sticks out for them about good and bad candidates. Ultimately, people make up their minds very quickly based on relatively small things. The search committee might have combed through your CV, and certainly some who submit feedback to the search committee about your visit will have as well, but many will make their decision during your talk (or multiple talks, in the case of some departments) and/or in the few minutes they have had to talk to you during a half-hour meeting or over a meal. So get a good idea of what "many people" might like. So below I've put some good general tips from my perspective. Again, your mileage may vary.

FIRST, THE NON-TALK-RELATED TIPS (see next section for talk related)

It's not all about the job talk. I've given job talk tips below, and the job talk is extremely important -- one of the most important talks you'll give. However, there is a lot of the day(s) that won't be the job talk, and you need to be prepared for all of the interactions you'll have. So I put the non-job talk tips first.

DO YOUR (VIRTUAL) RECONNAISSANCE IN ADVANCE! When you find out you are going to be interviewing, you may not know who exactly you will meet that day. Even when you're given the schedule, there may be last-minute additions. So if you can, do your best to memorize who all of the faculty are and know roughly what they do (up to a 2-sentence description). You may not know who the search committee is, but you should use whatever clues have been made available in the communication thus far to be able to spot them in a crowd so that you know they're coming. You never want to be in the position where you have to ask someone what they do. You want to make it seem like you are genuinely interested in their research and can ask intelligent questions about it. You also want to try to anticipate what they find valuable and adjust your answers to questions to be complementary to these perspectives.

Try to understand how the school is structured and where your position would fit in that structure. Try to understand what resources are available. Be able to tell someone what specific things attract you to that school or that program. Make it look like you've been waiting for this particular position to open and jumped on the opportunity as opposed to just interviewing at any random school.

Be very courteous and approachable and never dismissive. Be comfortable. Do your best to be relaxed and conversational while also internally keeping up a little bit of a guard. You don't want to be too quiet, but you want to be more professional than you usually are on an average visit. You aren't required to answer certain classes of personal questions (whether you have a spouse, kids, plans for these things, etc.), and so you can divert if they happen to come up casually, or you can try to use them if you think they would be an advantage. But don't give up too much information about things that could make it difficult for you to accept a position. Those tricky details can come out during negotiation.

Keep in mind that you want faculty to want to work with you. You want them to be excited about collaborating with you.

Keep in mind that you will also be evaluated based on whether there is too much overlap with existing faculty. Do your best to emphasize the new things you can bring (without accidentally pointing out weaknesses in other faculty or the program as a whole).

You may be given 30 minutes alone with graduate students. Prepare for this time by having a set of questions that you can ask them (in case they don't have much to ask you). You have already studied up on all of their advisers, and so you should be prepared for the different research directions they have and can maybe anticipate some of their answers. But let them speak. You want them to see you as another faculty member that they would want around as a resource. Their advisers may ask them how they felt about the interaction.

JOB TALK TIPS:

And here are the general comments about job talks. See the previous section about non-job-talk related tips (in short: DO YOUR RECONNAISSANCE and BE COURTEOUS)...

Practice your job talk before hand so that your timing is flawless and you are clearly confident with the material. And get your timing and talk density right so that you END WITH TIME FOR QUESTIONS. Ten minutes is sufficient. But don't leave more than 15 minutes. But if you leave less than ten minutes, people will not be impressed (and may even be annoyed).

Make sure your job talk tells a consistent narrative that gives everyone in the audience an idea of what your research vision is and how your career up to this point has successfully implemented that vision. This may not be true a priori, but you need to find a way to tell your story to make it seem true. People don't want to see a random collection of research. They want to use the talk to get to know you, what you've done, what you will likely do in the next 3–5 years, and be impressed with both the current body of work and the potential. With that in mind, you don't have to present everything if some things don't contribute to the broad overall narrative. If you still have some work you're proud of that you don't think fits a narrative, you can include it briefly as a kind of "Other things that I am interested in" near the end to show you have breadth. But don't hop back and forth between disconnected projects. People will forget what you're all about and get frustrated by the lack of consistency.

If your work has been published or presented at major conferences, call out these venues in your presentation as you go through them. You want people to be convinced that other people care about your work. Don't hit them over the head with giant bibs, but maybe include a small parenthetical ref at the bottom of slides here and there and then say things like, "In work I presented at .... last year," or, "In work that came out in ... a few months ago..."

If you have more work than just your PhD work, be sure to show it somewhere. People like to get a sample of what you'll do as an independent researcher. Sometimes just the PhD work doesn't quite capture that.

Include at least a few slides on future directions. You don't want people wondering what you'll do next. Pointing out where you have already received funding is a good thing, and it's definitely good to identify where you'll go next for funding (agencies or even particular programs). Some sort of flowchart showing how your research vision can be divided into specific threads that meet the objectives of these different agencies is great as it is more convincing that your vision can be operationalized for the next 3–5 years.

Figure out if you are in a discipline (or even a school) that cares so much about education that a significant portion of your job talk should be associated with your classroom innovations and perspectives.

When you get to the end of your talk and are taking questions, try to maximize for the quantity of questions. Don't dwell on one particular answer, and don't give one question too much time. Do your best to respectfully acknowledge the value of the question you were given, but try to table long discussions for "off line" discussion. This is the only time some faculty will have to interact with you, and you don't want to frustrate some who have questions by being too thorough with someone else's question. It also looks much better if you answer 3 questions than spending a long time on 1. So find a way to pivot quickly to another question if your first question is starting to take too long and prevent you from getting to others.

The Dean/Head of School/Director may be in the audience. They may have a question. Take that question first as they may have to leave earlier than everyone else, and they also have an outsized role in hiring decisions.

Make sure you go to a bunch of job talks before your own job talk to see the diversity and try to guess which ones are good and bad job talks. Usually (but not always) more senior people give better job talks because they already have a good idea of what is good and bad because they've done it more and been a part of the decision-making process themselves. Contrast these more senior researchers with junior researchers who are definitely giving their first job talk. You'll notice consistent differences in the structure of the talk. I would say a good structure is something like...

Here's my vision

Here's a few projects that fit well together that show that vision

Here is where that vision takes me in the future and who will pay for it

Oh, by the way, here are other things I do too, but I don't have time to go into in detail

Here are my perspectives on education (depending on the school/discipline, you may not have this section at all or it may be half of your talk)

Here are 10–15 minutes I've made available for questions

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thecoroutfitters · 5 years

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maryanntorreson · 3 years

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Humans are made to be touched — so what happens when we aren’t?

Nadine Redlich

Our bodies are designed to respond to touch, and not just to sense the environment around us.

We actually have a network of dedicated nerve fibers in our skin that detect and emotionally respond to the touch of another person — affirming our relationships, our social connections and even our sense of self.

So, what happens when we don’t receive that?

This was one of the first questions that neuroscientist Helena Wasling PhD considered when social distancing restrictions were introduced to curb the spread of COVID-19. Based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, she has studied these nerves — known as C tactile or CT afferents — and their importance to our emotions for over a decade.

“What struck me very early on, in the first week of being told that we were restricted from touch, was that people no longer knew how to behave,” she says.

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a tactile person, touch is — or was — embedded in the social structure of our lives. From meeting a new colleague and evaluating their handshake to giving a friend a long hug when we haven’t seen them in a while, it is one of the fundamental ways we have all learned to relate to one another. “To take it away is a very big intervention,” says Wasling.

New York based psychologist Guy Winch PhD agrees; “Touch is something we associate with emotional closeness, and we associate the absence of it with emotional distance. We may not fully appreciate it, but in pre-pandemic life there were literally dozens of small moments of touch throughout the day.”

This is significant not just in the landscape of our minds, but that of our bodies. Being emotionally and socially responsive to touch is so biologically fundamental to us that CT afferents are present over almost every inch of our skin, absent only from the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet.

These nerves are, Wasling explains in her TEDxGöteborg talk, particularly attuned to three things: a light touch, gently moving, and around 32 degrees Celsius (89F). Which just happens to be human skin temperature. So they are programmed to be most responsive to a gentle caress from another person.

Rather than simply telling our brains that this touch has happened — this is the role of other receptors in the skin that help the primary somatosensory cortex to processes physical sensations — CT afferents instead send signals to the insular cortex. “This is a deeper part of the cortex that deals more with your emotional equilibrium,” explains Wasling. “So you will get kind of a vague sensation. In the best of cases, it will be: ‘That was nice. I’m accepted. I feel safer now. Someone is counting on me.’ CT afferents also have pathways to parts of the brain that deal with who you are socially.”

For people who have now been living without that connection for a long time, it can be incredibly difficult, says Winch. “I have friends and patients that I work with who have not been touched in a year. At all. Not a handshake. And they are really suffering for it. There’s something that feels very distancing and cold about not having any kind of option for an embrace, and that can leave long lasting scars.”

Hugs, the form of touch we probably all miss the most, are particularly important and emotionally nourishing, says Winch. “When someone’s crying and we hold them, we’re doing it to comfort, but what it allows them to do is cry more. People usually will hold it together until somebody puts an arm around them, and then they’ll break down because that hug represents security and safety, and because of the closeness we feel when we know and trust that person.”

Moreover, the benefits of touch that we are missing out on are not just emotional and social but also physical; it can reduce pain and stress, as well as giving us a general feeling of wellbeing. These are the areas, says Wasling, where we may be able to support ourselves when we need to go for prolonged periods without social touch.

Here are some of the ways that we can ease the difficulty of living without this closeness — both for ourselves, and the people in our lives:

Take a shower or have a warm bath.

Although it doesn’t elicit quite the same physiological response as interpersonal touch, Wasling says the slow movement of the water on your skin is likely to generate a CT afferent response. Having a warm bath also relaxes your muscles, which can help to alleviate tension.

Cuddle a pet, or ask to walk someone else’s.

“Just being close to a furry animal has been shown to lower your stress, reduce your heart rate and your blood pressure,” says Wasling. You also have a social relationship with your pet — they rely on you and need you to show up for them.

There’s been a noted increase in people adopting pets during the pandemic, and at least one study has identified the potential therapeutic benefits of human-animal relationships when we are denied our normal level of human social interaction.

If you are able to see anyone in person, be wholly present — even if you can’t touch.

When we remove touch from our social interactions, we should consider what else we can emphasize instead. “Maybe we could be better at looking each other in the eyes, if we do have physical meetings,” suggests Wasling. “We can make sure that we see each other, because touching a person is a way of saying that ‘I see you, I acknowledge your existence.’”

Don’t be afraid to have deeper, more meaningful conversations where you really listen — especially if you know someone might be isolated or lonely. While these interactions don’t activate the same touch-based neural pathways, they still stimulate our social sense of belonging and intimacy, says Winch.

Don’t just “check in” on people who are alone — connect with them meaningfully.

It feels like everyone from our employers to the Twittersphere to US vice president Kamala Harris is reminding us to check in on our single friends. But are we going the right way about it?

“When we say ‘check in’ that’s like a checkbox. Tick; done,” says Winch. But that really isn’t enough. While the boredom and frustration of lockdowns are similar experiences for everyone, being isolated from the regular physical closeness of friends and family is uniquely difficult for people who are alone; the elderly, those who live by themselves, and those who are in high risk categories and cannot chance even one hug.

“If you just check in, that’s not going to be sufficient. You should be talking for at least 15 – 20 minutes for that to be a meaningful conversation. You have to really connect,” says Winch. If you’re both feeling Zoom fatigue, try each taking a walk while you talk on the phone.

If friends have described feeling ghostly or unreal, do your best to appreciate that the absence of touch has been a significant emotional loss for them during this time. One that you may never fully understand. Try not to say “I know how you feel,” if you are not in the same position.

“You know that when you touch things, they’re real to you,” says Wasling. “One of the reasons why I think touch is so important is that it makes you convinced you have a place in the social world of other people.”

As we look towards a vaccinated future, it is difficult to know right now how the pandemic will change our social attitudes towards touch in the long term. Will we still shake hands? Hug colleagues? A UK study conducted from January to March 2020, mostly before lockdown measures were introduced, found that 54 percent of people already felt they had too little touch in their lives. So we may well want this aspect of our lives to return as soon as possible.

But one facet that worries Winch is how the pandemic has actually reshaped our relationship with touch; “We took the thing that represents something so close, intimate and important, and now it represents something that’s actually dangerous and you should avoid. Even if we don’t fully register it, we are going to feel surges of anxiety at the idea of getting a hug. It’s going to take a while to bring us down from the danger alert of touch.”

Watch Helena Wasling’s TEDxGöteborg Talk here:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary Halton is Assistant Ideas Editor at TED, and a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Humans are made to be touched — so what happens when we aren’t? published first on https://premiumedusite.tumblr.com/rss

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sarafinamagazine · 6 years

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Genna Gardini is a writer and teacher. She is the author of Matric Rage, which was published in 2014 by uHlanga Press. In 2012, she was awarded the DALRO New Coin Poetry prize and was chosen as one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans for 2013. She is also the co-founder of Horses’ Heads Productions and has had several of her plays produced at the National Arts Festival including WinterSweet and Scrape, both of which went on to win Standard Bank Ovation Awards. In addition, she also works as the poetry editor of Prufrock Magazine, a journal in which her own work has featured.

Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in the arts?

I don’t know that it was necessarily a person. My parents are wonderful but I suppose are quite “normal”…whatever that means. My dad is an accountant and my mom was an administrator. She started working from home and she took care of me when I was a kid. So the arts are not a world that they are necessarily steeped in. I guess I came out quite precocious. I don’t really know why. I always wanted to be a performer and I always wanted to write. I was always doing both. When I was about nine or ten, I wrote fan fiction about myself: It was about me going to New York and becoming the understudy for Annie. But then, in the story, the lead actor became ill so I took over and took the town by storm. I was fairly narcissistic, I guess, which hopefully I am not now.

I read in an interview where you said that you wrote your first collection when you were six or seven years old?

The Shnozzcumber. I think I had been reading a lot of Roald Dahl poems at the time because they were pretty much a complete knock off of his work. There was a character called Nurse Betty who I had made up. It was before the Renée Zellweger movie that was called Nurse Betty as well. In this poem, I wrote something like, “Nurse Betty is a violent thing, upon her finger sits a ring.” but I had spelt upon as ‘apone’. I don’t know where I got that image from. My mom watched a lot of soap operas, like a lot of The Bold and the Beautiful, so maybe it was a character who I had seen in one of those?

Photo credit: Chris de Beer

You seemed to have this natural inclination towards writing but then also wanted to pursue a career as a performer and went to the University currently known as Rhodes. What was your time like there?

It was actually quite a difficult time for me. I was struggling with various things that made it difficult. But I’m really glad that I was there during that time because I met the people who I work with still to this day and the people who are my dearest friends. The greatest thing is to find your community. I found people that I wanted to work with and who really changed my life in a lot of ways. I was also taught by amazing people. Janet Buckland was a really important teacher for me and one of the first people to be interested in the work that I wanted to create and encouraging of it. Alex Sutherland was also my teacher there and Andrew Buckland and Reza de Wet as well. She was teaching at the time that I was there and was such an important presence to meet and to be taught by. To hear about her work and then also to see her work as well was incredibly important. A very important three years of my life but also tumultuous in its own way.

How do you feel that training has lent itself to the work that you do now?

I decided not to pursue performing because I realised that what I wanted to be a part of was less the magic of performance but more the moments before anyone sees anything. The secret of performance and the community that is created there, that to me was so much more interesting. I was writing my own stuff and, in third year, started to put on my own work. Suddenly to see my words and my ideas animated in front of me with real people saying them was quite revelatory. I became more interested in that. I was always writing. That was something that felt natural to me and performance felt like a pathway into creating work. I think that I’m always going to be interested in live performance. It’s always the base of what I want to do with writing because I think that writing should be performed in some way. I think that when you write something, you need to hear what it sounds like to see if it works. If you don’t hear the rhythm of it then it’s dead. It’s flat. I teach within a drama department because the world of drama and the world of theatre is one that I feel very at home in. Even if that is not necessarily the work that I am producing all of the time, it definitely is a space that I feel very comfortable in.

Photo credit: Chris de Beer

I watched Performance Scale, the piece that you did with Amy Louise Wilson and I thought it was incredible to hear your words through an actress’ portrayal. What was it like creating that piece with her?

That was a project for the ICA. I knew that I wanted to make a larger work about diagnosis and I had written this poem which was about my diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. I asked Gary Hartley who is in the company Horses’ Heads Productions with me and also one of my besties, if he would direct it and I asked Amy if she would be in it. It was really important to me that it be performed, shot and made by people who had some relationship to MS. And obviously they have a relationship to it because I’m their friend and they love me. It’s something that has affected my life but it’s also affected theirs. That was really important to me because I was starting to research what would eventually become part of my PhD project, looking at people telling their own story of sickness through performance. With MS, when people who do not have it tell stories about those who do, often specifically women, it’s mostly stories of inspiration or stories where we are a great burden to others. So either we burden people or we inspire them and, in many of these stories, we die at the end and our death is this great lesson to everyone else. This is not my experience of illness. I’m at home, I’m watching Buffy, I’m eating pizza. I don’t think that I am a great inspiration to anybody. These are not the stories that I had experienced so I thought that it was quite important for this project to be an opportunity to tell stories about MS and to tell them through the perspective of people who actually have it or people who are affected by it. Not in terms of MS being this horrific burden on them, necessarily, but in a real and complex way. That is why I asked Gary and Amy to work on it with me because they are creatives who I really trust, respect and admire. I’ve worked with Amy repeatedly and I love and respect her so much. I think she is an extraordinary actor. We sat down with the text and spoke about it, which I really like doing, tried to figure out what the different parts of it meant, what the secrets were that were embedded into it, to give her an understanding that she could take into the performance. What I thought was really interesting about how she performed the poem, is that it is so different to the way that I would read it because, of course, it means something different for her. I think it’s emotional for her in a different way and for me, when I read it, I find the situation sometimes funny and ridiculous and all of that goes into it. Obviously that is not her experience of it at all and to see that made manifest in the video was quite interesting. This is also something that I am trying to explore now in my studies but we’ll see how that goes.

I’m curious about your writing process. Are you someone who has to force yourself into a routine of writing everyday or do you write when inspiration strikes?

No, it’s a routine. It has to be a routine. I think it was quite different for me when I was younger but certainly, as I’ve become older, it has to be a routine. I teach, I am studying as well and I am trying to write my own work at the same time. I have to have a certain amount of hours that I set aside to do each thing and then there is also the admin, the work that comes with having a chronic illness as well which is something that is a part of my life and something that I need to allocate time to. Luckily, I am in a position right now where my health is not necessarily something that takes whatever time it wants from me. But that could change and it it is the case for many people who have chronic illness. I try to stick to my schedule as best I can. I don’t know how good I am at it but I have to force myself into doing it or I just won’t get anything done.

Photo credit: Chris de Beer

Do you work on one thing at a time or do you have multiple pieces of work in development at once?

Generally, I have to have a couple of things going on but not of the same magnitude. I have to have a poem or something that I am figuring out, that is percolating in me, and then, at the same time, I have to have another kind of work happening. I need to know that, “Ok, I’ve got to do this for my work as a lecturer or I’ve got to do this for my studies as well or I’ve got to do admin.” I think that I need to have quite a lot going on but at the same time, I also need to zone in and focus. It does not work out all the time, quite rarely actually but I guess this is my ideal of how I would work. I’m not always successful at it, though.

I think it’s safe to say that you are incredibly young and have accomplished so much in terms of the work that you have produced…

I don’t know about either of those things. I’m turning 32 this year and my great panic and joy around it is that I’m going to be the age that Lorelai Gilmore was at the beginning of Gilmore Girls. When I started watching that show, I was 16, the age that Rory, her daughter, was. Now I’m going to be the age that Lorelai was. Lorelai had a child, was a manager of an Inn, had a fianc�� who packed a town full of flowers for her at 32. I do not have quite a few of those things.

But she didn’t have a book published! I think you’ve one-upped her in terms of that.

Thank you. I think that’s probably the only thing.

Photo credit: Chris de Beer

What was the journey around having Matric Rage published? I was also wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit about the independent publishing game.

There were a collection of poems I had been writing from when I was around 18 to when Nick Mulgrew asked me if I would be interested in publishing it. I had wanted to make something out of them for ages and had sent them off in various iterations but at those times they weren’t ready to be a collection yet. By the time Nick asked me if I was interested, I think that it was a point where I was ready to try to make something out of the work. Also, Nick is somebody that I trusted and thought was a good person to work with and he has become someone who I’ve worked with repeatedly since. That was the time when he was starting uHlanga. The first three books that he would publish were by me, Thabo [Jijana] and himself. It was really exciting to be in the first flush of what uHlanga would become, of this publishing company that I think has really changed the face of poetry and publishing poetry in South Africa. I think that we came from a tradition of South African poets who were published often being older white men, although of course Modjaji press, which is so fantastic, was putting work out specifically by women. I think uHlanga really exploded old, confining ideas about publishing poetry and challenged it in an important way.

Your first collection was met with such a positive response. Did you suddenly feel pressured after having that work published?

That is not how it felt. It was exciting to have it published and exciting for it to be in the world, but it also felt like work. Which is not to say that people’s positive responses aren’t important because of course they are. I’m human and like anyone else I like affirmation, it’s great. That can’t be the point though. It can’t be because if that becomes the point then the work is all about that and then the work is empty. But I don’t know how to really answer that question. I do think that if you realize you have kind of a platform, no matter how small, you should think about what you are going to do with that platform and how you can use that in some way to be helpful in this world which is already such a bad world. With Nick, he used his platform to create this publishing company that is doing such amazing work. I am so admiring of it and I think that is a good template for how to be in this world as a creative.

Photo credit: Chris de Beer

How do you ensure that you stay true to your voice in terms of the work that you create?

I guess it’s been different at different points in my life. I can only really speak about this point and how I’m thinking about what I am making now. I want to make work that is in some way relevant to what is happening in the world now, but specifically what my experience of the world is. The work that I am doing now is very much about looking at illness, looking at autobiographical performances around illness and a reclamation of stories about people’s personal experiences of illness. This is because, like I was saying, I think those stories are so often told as inspiration porn. It’s certainly not my experience and, I’d imagine, not the experience of all of the complex, interesting people who I know who have chronic illness, who are disabled. I am interested in telling my stories but also facilitating people telling their stories. That is the thing about teaching, as well. How can you facilitate space where a person feels they can tell their story?.

What advice would you have for young women who are thinking about embarking on a writing career?

I never know how to answer this. I am never sure. I guess, to trust the fact that it’s alright for you to be telling your story if it is not hurting anyone who didn’t hurt you in the first place, if you know what I mean. We often don’t trust that we have the space to be able to do that. Like I said, I am terrible at answering this question. I am not sure except to say, if you want to write and you want to be making that work and it is not harming people, then why not? Why not try?

What was the best piece of advice you received during your career?

It’s not advice that I received personally but the quote, “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” I think it’s Doris Lessing. That always stuck with me because so often it just feels like there is no time to be able to do something. That is something that I carry with me all the time because if I don’t do it now then I probably wont do it, so I should just do it now. I tell this story quite a lot but when I was doing [my] undergrad, Reza de Wet was taking us for a practical class in drama and she let all of us start walking across the stage in front of her. Then we would walk in front of her by ourselves. She watched us and said where she felt the power centers in our bodies were. I felt very weird and awkward about doing it, but I did it and afterwards she told me that I had two power centers: one that was in my groin and one that was in my throat, and what was in my throat was blocking me being able to say things that I needed to say. I was so scandalised when she said that. My groin?! I felt very shy but it really was some of the best advice I have ever received, unplugging whatever was there and feeling like I should say the things that were in me and that had to be said.

I’d love to hear more about your involvement with Prufrock.

We are busy finalising the new issue which is really exciting. I had some poems published in that magazine before and then they asked me later to come on board as the poetry editor. That was something that I was beginning to be really interested in, editing poetry, and I’ve worked for uHlanga as well as an editor. So, I began to work at Prufrock and it’s been such a fantastic opportunity. It’s a great space for people to begin to try sending out work and see that work published. It’s questioning the idea of what a literary journal is and trying to make something that is younger, more inclusive in terms of languages being published in those spaces, and allowing more voices to be anthologised.

Who are some South African women in the arts that inspire you?

I had really good teachers. Specifically, Gay Morris [and] Sara Matchett at UCT, who were the first teachers to really encouraged me in terms of scholarship and challenged me in a lot of ways as both a young person in academia and as a human being, as well. I am so admiring of people like Nadia Davids, Buhle Ngaba and Koleka Putuma who are theatre-makers but are writing work in other mediums as well. Nadia is someone who I really admire as an academic, as well. Amy Louise Wilson, who I’ve spoken about, is such an important talent and also such a strong, feminist voice and not afraid to say what she thinks. I would be remiss if I didn’t add that it’s really important for us to be celebrating women and it’s also important to remember gender non-conforming folks who are so incredibly talented. It’s vital for us to be mentioning them within feminist spaces [and] within queer spaces as well.

You can follow Genna via Twitter or Instagram.

To purchase a copy of Matric Rage, please click here.

Special thanks to Chris de Beer and Genna Gardini.

All photos were taken by Chris de Beer on February 8th 2018.

Sarafina Magazine and Chris de Beer maintain copyrights over all images. For usage or inquiries, please contact us.

We chat with @gennagardini about her career, publishing #MatricRage with @uHlangaPress, editing @prufrockmag and turning the same age as Lorelai Gilmore. Photos: @chrs_debeer Genna Gardini is a writer and teacher. She is the author of Matric Rage, which was published in 2014 by…

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