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Filed under: Uncategorized
I have recently started a new job as a Research Associate in Social Science in the School of Population Health and Environmental Sciences at King's College London. In the role I am encountering, reading and working on new literature and research projects. Currently I am reading about big data and learning health systems in health care; epigenetics and ancestry markers; personalised medicine; and patient and citizen engagement in health care research. At the moment I am in a state of learning and absorbing the ideas across these fascinating cutting edge topics affecting the present and future of public health care and social science. My intellectual life for the past 3-4 years has been preoccupied with grief and bereavement, inhabiting spaces of death and dying studies or the sociology of the emotions. This new role is taking me into new areas and making me feel like a novice all over again. (though watch this space for *fingers crossed* a future book on my PhD research on grief, bereavement and recovery). As I continue to digest these new ideas I hope to share some of them here, drawing connections with previous work and trying to develop some central lines of enquiry in this rather fluid postdoctoral phase.
I'm still getting my head around what the postdoctoral phase is and how best to use it, and I hope to share some of those reflections here too. My role allows for a fair amount of flexibility which is at once wonderful but then somewhat pressurising (a pressure imposed on my self) as I feel weighted with making the most of this precious opportunity. It's a strange feeling. From my experience in academia you're either in or you're out; either you're desperately scrabbling for the job, a published paper, acquiring some CV enhancing responsibility in order to 'get in' or else you arrive and suddenly the previously closed doors swing open. On the one hand my arrival feels mysterious or unwarranted (imposter syndrome returns) and on the other I recognise its the culmination of years of hard work, low pay and many failed attempts.
A lot of change has occurred in the past six years or so since starting this blog. I have been in and out and in and out of academia. That was the background story. At the forefront was a thinking through of ideas about living otherwise, a life worth living; about resistance, attachment to the wrong things, and loss. How this blog will evolve now with the new fields I am exploring I am not sure, but the spaces that are opening up right now seem hopeful, and exciting.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The last time I wrote on this blog was over a year and a half ago. I had written about not having a story. I had become increasingly fatigued over the proliferation of stories, and specifically the use of stories as a means of liberation. In effect that was my last story for a while too and this blog – and by extension me – had become consumed by silence, or at least I had run out of stories to tell.
More accurately I had become consumed by the bigger story of my PhD and in telling that story I had no time for any others. But also in the process of telling one story, all other stories become relevant and related in some way. It as though the more your story expands and becomes all encompassing the more one-pointed your focus becomes and you end up seeing and listening to very little that is new. That is the persuasive power of narrative.
Now in post-doctoral life I am revising that same story again and again in slightly different formats so that hopefully one day I can start thinking about new stories again.
My feeling then – and now – was that stories were not enough. Telling one's account is not in itself liberating. A story shouldn't be used in place of lasting social change. Giving someone a 'voice' can be lazy quick fix remedy to avoid shifting social structures, changing laws and bringing justice. Giving everyone a platform might be the beginning of equality but it certainly is not the end of it. I felt that stories were pointless when what we should be really thinking about is building spaces people can inhabit without hate or prejudice.
In a way that was the sociologist in me responding to arguments that had forgotten the emotional is always social, and political. The personal account is not more true than other knowledge because it is emotional. Truth is not measured in tears. We remain trapped in a different version of the same story if, for example, we view the personal experience of an illness as more significant than the clinical diagnosis and description of what is happening in a body. The point is: both matter.
Anyhow I had been reconsidering the importance of stories as I have been wondering about the role of sociology in the contemporary world. As I dip in and out of various social media it's a question that is apparent if not explicitly posed. I decided that the role of sociology was to tell better stories. To provide a narrative to events. To put events, ideas and people into context. Inevitably this might be a long and complex story. How to tell stories of the present to an audience accustomed to 140 characters?
Personal stories are often assumed as true. But it seems nowadays any story that is published in black and white can be assumed as truth. The response to "fake news" signals that popular culture has yet to even reach the postmodern phase, as all social constructionist know that it is not about 'truth' being 'fake' but rather truth is always a social construct.
For Foucault things don't just exist 'out there' but emerge as identifiable objects through various social structures – including language. The task is to examine how things come to be seen as truth; to critically engage with all claims to truth. In other words, we need to all do our homework.
This becomes increasingly hard when wading through partisan news agendas. Journalists I am sure wouldn't be keen on referring to themselves as 'story tellers', even as the news is fed to us in 'news stories'. Journalism has to believe in an objective truth and fight to convey that as best as possible. But media often presents a point of view, and too little diversity in points of view and we start to accept opinion as truth.
Often in academia we bend over backwards to ensure our work is untainted by bias and opinion. We engage in reflexivity, acknowledge our sources, cite references, and undergo peer review. Perhaps because of our rigour we are better placed to provide better stories. In which case the whole structure of academic publishing needs to change dramatically.
Not having a story can mean you get consumed in the dominant narrative, whether you like it or not. Like not voting, the choice is made for you. The problem with dominant narratives is that the story expands and becomes all encompassing. It becomes harder to listen and see and critique. Depending on the vision the narrative provides we might join and work towards that, or reject it and argue that its not working. In such a climate of destructive narratives, an alternative vision is needed, which could begin with telling sociological stories. But there has to be the offer of a future. Foucault never made any claims on how society should be run, but he did provide the gift of critiquing repressive structures. Once that repression is visible, the question remains: what makes a life worth living?
Filed under: Academe, Recovery, Resistance | Tags: emogeo, Lauren Berlant, stories
Everyone wants to tell their story. What use is a story? Who is telling the story and why should we listen?
These are some thoughts I am left with following the Emotional Geographies conference last week. Stories were everywhere: the telling, the encouragement to tell, the strategies to extract them.
What's my story, I think. Do I need a story?
Through my research I have learnt that telling one's personal story is the key to recovery. Telling a story is healing and restorative. Its empowering, enlightening, liberating. Telling stories is the answer to everything it seems.
It isn't social change we need or meaningful work or better health care or a living wage, we just need to construct our story and then we will be free.
Telling stories is about finding the truth. Stories are true if you tell them. That's your truth, it can't be denied. But sometimes some stories are deemed less true than others. What are the parameters on truth? How does truth get revealed, concealed and distorted in the telling of stories?
At the conference emotional stories were the most truthful. Two of the keynote speakers told personal stories of illness. They were accounts narrated emotively, they wanted to tell us about their feelings. The personal was awarded more status than scientific or medical knowledge. This was 'writing against the grain'.
At the conference and in my research I have been struck by the question as to whether stories can ever be non-conventional. In a culture where stories proliferate, and lives are lived via the online advertising reels of Facebook and Instagram, and public displays of emotions are sensationalised (and induced) in 'Britain's got Baking on Ice'; there's an overcrowding of stories and confessions and tears. There's so many stories but less connection to them.
To really go against the grain it might be better to say nothing at all. How would it feel to not have a story?
Stories cannot avoid being conventional because they rely on an assumption of truth. It has to appear true to whoever is listening. Stories interpret events so that they have meaning and stories demand an ending of some form.
Imagine if these dimensions of telling a story were not adhered to. People diagnosed with psychosis are often accused of telling false stories. Their accounts do not align with dominant assumed truths that structure society. The interpretation might not make sense either. The story might not end. It might be circular.
These are not considered stories; this is stuckness. People who are grieving might tell stories about how their dead husband speaks to them. They might take this to mean that their spouse is still here. They might tell this same story for 17 years.
Stuckness is just a stopping place on the way to finding a story. But without a story you are undoubtedly stuck. And 'wrong' stories might take you to the wrong places.
Stories might be told as though they are definitive and final: the memoir is the exemplar – this is my one true story of me. Of course this is not accurate, a memoir is not truth but an edited identity, like an instagram photo, capturing one reality and omitting a whole load of others.
Stories are always in flux. Or rather individuals, people, are always in flux. Telling a story gives respite from the flux – and it might feel like catharsis. Constructing a story might be a way of containing the unbearable. Sometimes though there just isn't a story to capture a feeling or an event. And perhaps the feeling or event doesn't need containing. Perhaps not having a story is a way to think about the inadequacy of storytelling and to think of, not better stories, but better realities that will allow space for flourishing. Stories can become a quick-fix remedy when what is needed is not a podium, but lasting spaces in which to inhabit; where meaning can be found in the liminal and a life worth living can be discovered in the suspension of conclusions that is not nothingness.
Filed under: Grief, PhD chat, Subjectivities, Yoga | Tags: ashtanga, fieldwork, habitus, India, passing, performativity, positioning
Sometimes my fear of losing overrides my ability to listen. This is a lesson I should have learnt already. As I undertake the mind-numbing labour that is interview transcription, I note how as I went from one interview to the next my contribution became less and less. When my input appears it is more measured, concise, to the point.
I've always felt how I express myself is at odds with what I mean. This is no doubt true. And I am no doubt not alone in this. One always speaks as the stereotype of the person they think they are. Delving into the stories people tell about themselves and their losses, I've been struck by how we rarely say things in concrete terms. We're always skirting, dancing in vagueness – like, sort of, kind of, thing. It's as though words, language, is constantly failing us. Or else we're scared that in the act of capturing we enact violence to the 'thing' (experiential, sensory realm) itself. And yet we understand each other, make sense of each other through these mumbles, incoherences, gestures. We talk in codes, metaphors, sounds, utterances, signs and silences – those most important silences. How we ever manage to find a space to commune and feel known by another amazes me. I often would walk away from an interview encounter carrying one impression but in the process of typing speech into words on a blank page it impresses upon me in a totally different way. Sometimes when I hear myself ask the questions that occurred to me at the time, I cannot even recognise my own thought process. The stories we tell through language are already not our own, but then they become mine as listener and researcher and in turn they become owned by the page or screen. It feels as though something seeps away in each step of this process, that messy something that's better to edit out.
So too must we be transparent with ourselves about how we go about understanding. First of all – there is no neutral place. We're always giving something, even in silence – perhaps especially so. Spending time in the mysore practice room taught me this. As well as the theorists before that. India has taught me this too, aggressively so at times. And again my adopted Indian family before that. I think spending a lot of time being the only white face in a room/house/temple full of brown bodies, all speaking in a language once foreign to me is an experience instructive as all the post-colonial theory I can get my hands on. Because what happens is you stop seeing difference. I started to understand a different language through listening alone. When, after some time becoming part of, I got mistaken for Indian, I don't think it had anything to do with not seeing my white skin – that much was obvious – but a reaction to the way I had consciously and unconsciously developed a disposition, a bodily disposition that went beyond appropriate clothing or eating with the right hand. This wasn't merely a performance – it was as though 'India' had tapped into something vital in me – but the process through which I on occasion managed to 'pass' is still elusive to me.
In the research encounter my identity became more performative as I had not yet cultivated an academic demeanour I could rely on. I was concerned people would not take me seriously but on reflection the only person who struggled to take me seriously was me. Becoming serious would mean becoming present. And never being neutral can feel like a heavy burden to bear. More so when its due to things you can't control like being female or feeling complicit in the neo-colonial benevolence of the new empire.
Down the other end of the Skype line in another time zone my PhD supervisors tell me once again "You need to clarify your position. It's still not clear where you stand."
Most of the time I view myself as an outsider in the academic world, in the ashtanga world, in rooms of white middle-class people. When positioned as the one with power whether that's when I'm using academic discourse to get people to talk to me or paying for chai and chocolate cake at the Green Hotel in Mysore with 1000rs note, it disturbs me and I seek to displace myself. And sometimes power displaces me. I've been thinking perhaps that's part of what going on with sexual harassment in India. My body symbolises power but it can still be violated by your body. I can always become silenced (again).
Knowing from where we speak is the most important lesson for the critical researcher. I'd say its pretty important for a yoga practitioner too. And I will have to establish my position for my thesis as much as I loathe fixity. My supervisors tell me too that the position I will take is only a performance. But I wonder if there's more to be said about why I understand emotionally and you understand logically and if we can describe this without resorting to gender roles.
Positioning oneself is all about becoming part of a structure that is recognised. The habitus cannot exist without the field (Bourdieu). That's why the entrance fee is through learning the language (and that's not just about words). We reach our limit in structures that reject us on things that either we cannot or choose not to change. Its here we fall back into the space between the idea of ourselves that finds room to move through performing and passing and what stands still, caught up against weighty structures. That's why I always start with stuckness. Why don't people recover from loss? What happens when you're deemed as failing to capture the dream of the 'good life'? Why can't they/we speak? Trauma is often considered to be a result of not having a story. But the voices in the stuckness have always been speaking clearly its just that the world is poorly equipped to translate. What if we all developed the capacity to listen to each other even in the midst of prejudice. Might then we find relief in the stuckness and find space for flourishing to exist in and alongside the messiness.
Filed under: PhD chat | Tags: death, fieldwork, grief, interviews, loneliness, PhD, positioning, research, vulnerability
I'm finally reaching the end of a challenging year. This second year of the PhD I have spent planning and carrying out fieldwork. I have travelled miles around the country, I have met a host of different faces who shared with me their stories. Stories about how it feels to lose the person you love, stories of how to recover and how to fail, stories about how to help and support flourishing. I've encountered great generosity, I have encountered disinterest and rejection, I've been blessed with luck and chance and been challenged by obstacles and blockages.
If I could do it all over again I would do it differently. I procrastinated away months due to fear: fear I wasn't ready, fears over my ability, fear I wouldn't find the data I needed. I faced many ethics committees and bureaucratic hoops to jump through. I learnt research was a lot about unanswered emails and phonecalls and fruitless journeys into forms and admin. I learnt a lot of people really don't care about your little project or they just don't get it.
If I could do it over again I would do it differently. But I've realised I couldn't have learnt the lessons any other way. And I've got so angry at it all. Angry at the process you have to go through. Angry at the loneliness – angry at the loneliness most of all. I accept now that the isolation and loneliness is an inextricable part of the PhD process, but its not an easy acceptance. Because its preposterous really. And many people will not understand what I'm trying to say. And there lies the seed of the loneliness: no-one can understand what it feels like to be me in this research.
I have written in the past about researching your own life and the crises and freedoms it can bring. It was a hideously painful article to write, but more painful was the research experience from which the article was borne. The PhD experience has been different after clearing those cobwebs, but still the research encounter has left me feeling heavy and burdensome. I left interviews feeling much heavier than I began. I would go home and curl up in my bed with a fuzzy mind. I started to feel tired before the interview would begin as though in anticipation of the burden I would be carrying home later. It was such a long journey to access and find participants by the time it came to meet and speak to them, I was already exhausted.
The burden though was not something given to me by the participants – sometimes it was – but it was me too taking something from them. I was over-identifying, putting myself in their shoes. What if that happened to me? What if I lost the person I love most? How would I live? Being able to feel is what allows me to enter the world of my participants. This is essential to capture their story. And yet in the process of entering, becoming immersed, it is easy to lose oneself and boundaries as a researcher. I couldn't tell where my stuff ended and where their stuff began. I was reliving my past through them and I was imagining a future that hasn't happened through their telling of their past.
But when it became too much about me I was no longer listening to their story. Empathy is a delicate balance of which there are no clear guidelines. It was an ongoing negotiation that only became easier when I became more confident in my capacity as a researcher. Even if that confidence was a performance, the maintenance of composure provided a boundary through which I could control what I let in and what I didn't. It was a filter of sorts, a necessary one because it protected me from taking it too personally, and it protected my participants from me distorting their stories.
People always want to know why you are doing the research you are, what are your motives, what is your reasoning. I am still searching for the right answer to that question. I haven't quite measured my distance from my research object, I don't know how I stand in relation to it. Sure its personal. But its also pragmatic. Its contradictory and conflicting. There's no easy way to describe that relation.
Undertaking the fieldwork for this research has put me in a vulnerable position professionally, mentally and emotionally. Professionally it pushed me into situations I wasn't at all comfortable and so I avoided and avoided and nearly gave up. It pushed me to very unpleasant places that I can't look back and simply say I am glad about because it helped me grow. I think there may have been nicer routes to learn the same things. At times I have wondered why I was inflicting such a situation on myself for so little return. I can't blame it all on any one thing. It was everything all together, and having no control over emotions that would make me come undone again and again. I made no sense to those around me a lot of the time.
I couldn't have learnt the lessons any other way. It had to be messy and heartbreaking. I had to feel isolated from the person I love the most because it was a journey I had to take alone. And it feels sad, but in that sadness is a purpose. Just as in the stories people so generously allowed me to listen to, the sadness has a purpose. The purpose is in writing a story that hasn't been told. And its a story that can't be told from outside. So whether it pains me or not, its a story that has to be told from the vantage point of the liminal space of the researcher. And that's okay because in the space of liminality all types of things can happen. There's possibility and alternatives in the liminal space even if there's no certainty and stability. That's how things happen: just close your eyes and take a leap. But if you can, I ask, keep holding my hand as I venture down the rabbit hole.
Filed under: Mental health, Recovery, Uncategorized | Tags: good life, recover college, recovery
Talk presented at recent seminar at the Faculty of Health and Social Care at The Open University.
Recovery has become popularised in mental health care as a means of empowering service users to construct their own identity and meaning of recovery. Recovery is a term often used indiscriminately but what does it mean to recover? The strength of recovery apparently lies in its ability to mean different things to different people allowing people to construct their own version of a meaningful life. However I will argue in this presentation that the shift in emphasis to the individual in the rhetoric of recovery has meant that recovery becomes the responsibility of the individual. As recovery becomes an individual obligation or requirement, the promise of recovery rather than freeing people to construct their own meaning serves to reaffirm existing norms on how to function and manage mental distress in order to obtain the good life.
Recovery, as I am sure many of you are aware, has become increasingly popular in mental health care services. Services now describe themselves as 'recovery-focused' and 'recovery orientated', Recovery colleges that provide a variety of courses for service users are being set up across the country. An increasing academic interest in recovery in mental health care has lead to the creation of a number of seminars and conferences and research networks, and is what has brought us all here today.
In my own PhD research I am exploring how recovery from grief is understood and experienced. My interest in recovery has led me to learn about the uses of recovery more broadly in mental health care and also to speak with several current and ex-mental health service users each with differing views on recovery.
So what does recovery actually mean? In brief the use of recovery appears to have emerged from the psychiatric survivors movement, where recovery referred to the right to live with mental distress rather than see it as something to overcome.
However many definitions of recovery have been proposed with no universal agreement on what recovery should look like. This is in part because recovery was intended to be self-defined.
Most descriptions tend to focus on building hope, creating a new identity, having a meaningful life, and taking control over one's life.
South London and Maudsley's (SLAM) Recovery College prospectus defines recovery as:
Recovery is about people with mental health difficulties having the same opportunities in life as everyone else. It is about a personal journey towards a meaningful and satisfying life. It is about hope, control and opportunity. It is about living as well as possible.
Another example taken from a report entitled 'Making recovery a reality' published in 2008 by the Sainsbury centre for mental health describes:
(Recovery) can only be resolved if the person can discover – or rediscover – their sense of personal control ('agency') and gain a belief in the future (hope). Without hope they cannot begin to build their lives.
However since recovery's incorporation into mainstream mental health care a number of more specific models such as the 'recovery star' have been developed which predefine the parameters of recovery.
The Recovery star includes the following dimensions:
- Managing mental health
- Physical health and self care
- Living skills
- Social networks
- Work
- Relationships
- Addictive behaviour
- Responsibilities
- Identity & self-esteem
- Trust and hope
There is also the new 'Wheel of well-being' which contains 6 elements: body, mind, planet, place, people, spirit. And another model called the Tree of life, all of which are taught at the recovery colleges.
The point I wish to highlight here is in these models recovery is given outcomes and priorities that are not set by the service user themselves but by the NHS trust delivering the service.
I would argue these priorities are reliant on an assumed understanding of what constitutes a good life and living well. The recovery colleges for instance deliver courses on how to stop smoking, how to eat better, and how to get a job. In these models of recovery there is an implicit judgement over how one should successfully live out their personal lives.
As one participant I interviewed in my research commented, in the recovery model it is as though you need to recover from being yourself. Daily activities such as taking a shower, or walking outside, and eating a balanced diet become 'self-care activities' rather than just living.
By establishing markers of recovery such as the recovery star it becomes possible for the relevant medical authority to make a judgement on whether or not someone is recovered.
People then become responsible for adhering to prescribed ways of governing their lives, but the medical authority still remains in tact – as psychiatrists become recovery experts and mental health care becomes 'recovery orientated' and 'recovery focused'.
A contradiction then arises as recovery is described as a unique individual journey to self-control and autonomy over one's life yet it is taught and learnt via a set of experts and in adherence to a set of predefined criteria.
As SLAM'S recovery college prospectus states:
"The workshops and courses we run aim to provide the tools… to help you become an expert in your own recovery."
And whilst recovery is claimed to be a co-production, if someone fails to reach recovery the blame is squarely on the individual.
Again from the SLAM Recovery college prospectus:
"Treatment and support from mental health professionals can be helpful but every person with mental health problems can become an expert in their own self-management. Whatever challenges you face, recovery involves finding the personal resourcefulness and resilience to take back control over your life and what happens to you."
If something bad might happen then, something that might not fit within the recovery model, the blame will then fall on the individual because in this understanding recovery is always possible, no matter how serious the person's difficulties you just need to find your inner 'resourcefulness'.
This is the promise of recovery: you can get better according to pre-existing normative ideas of what a satisfying good life is, because the only thing that needs changing is you and how you currently live your life and we (being the relevant medical authority) are here to tell you how to do that.
This obligation to recover thus becomes a way to abdicate responsibility for mental distress elsewhere, that is to the person experiencing the distress themselves.
It is for this reason amongst others that the recovery model has come under criticism from service users and others working within mental health care. Recovery is seen as a way to cut back on services, to eradicate long-term care, where referring people to recovery colleges is a way to discharge them quicker.
For an increasing number of people then, recovery is a shiny gloss on an unchanged system that remains unequal in practice and which shifts responsibility to live a certain way on the service user.
A group of people have formed on Facebook to express their disapproval at the way recovery has been appropriated in a group they have called 'Recovery in the bin'. The members of this group contend that 'recovery' has been colonised and used to discipline and control people with mental distress and argue for a 'Social Model of Madness', placing mental health within the context of the wider class struggle.
Some of the group have claimed the title of "UnRecovered" to replace "Recovered", to express their rejection of what they see as a neoliberal intrusion on the word 'recovery' that has been redefined, and taken over by marketisation, an capitalist values.
To recover from mental illness, to adhere to the model of recovery, involves a considerable amount of work on behalf of the service user. To recover involves a range of activities such as attending recovery colleges, completing recovery plans, taking medication, getting a job, sustaining good relationships with others, eating well, not smoking, creating a new identity, being mindful and taking walks in nature.
People using mental health services are increasingly finding themselves obligated to undertake this sort of 'recovery-work' in the promise of becoming well.
Yet the promise of recovery possesses a cruel contradiction in that the highly prized ability to become autonomous and have self-control to manage one's life is only possible through submitting to experts who help people navigate their way through to recovery.
The service user is taught how and what to desire all in the name of self-fulfilment and individual freedom.
And because recovery is always possible it can only be the individual's failure of will or resilience if they are seen to relapse or fail to recover in the terms that have been proposed.
Filed under: Grief, Mental health, Recovery, Resistance | Tags: diagnosis, freud, normalcy, posthuman, recovery, sovereignty
Paper presented at Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane, University of Sheffield, July 2014.
I've always been interested in people who don't do as they're told. They excite me, intellectually and personally. In my PhD research I am interested in those that are seen to have failed to recover from their grief following bereavement.
The failure to recover from grief is defined in contemporary society by bereavement theories and increasingly by psychiatric diagnostic categories that place a time limit on the appropriate length of mourning as well as delineating what behaviours and emotions are normal and acceptable in grief and those which are not.
In grief and bereavement research there was much controversy over the publication of the Fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) last year that saw the omittance of the bereavement exclusion in the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, which was included in previous editions of the DSM. What this means is that someone who is bereaved could potentially be diagnosed with depression as little as two weeks after bereavement. Further the DSM-5 also included the diagnosis of 'Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder' for further consideration in the next edition of the manual. 'Prolonged grief disorder' has also been proposed for the revised version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
There are overlaps and inconsistencies in each diagnostic category, but the push toward what has been seen as a medicalising of grief relies upon claims that there are a number of people (research varies from 7-20%) who have 'complications' or fail to recover from grief. These complications are described as a 'derailing' of 'normal' grief or a 'delay' in integrating loss. The markers of someone failing to grieve properly are overwhelming time specific – people should be moving toward healing in a few months, struggling 6 months on is classified as complicated. The diagnosis are also structured – in vague psychiatric terms – in accordance with the degree to which behaviour is deemed inappropriate or out of line with the dominant cultural and social norms in which the bereaved person is situated.
As a commonplace and yet problematic event, grief marks the line between normal (does not require medicalising) and abnormal (intervention is necessary to ease suffering) emotional behaviour.
The search for the pathological in grief also presumes a normative mode of grieving yet this is never made explicit, or been proven. The normal way of grieving is instead defined by the ways in which the line between abnormal and normal grief is drawn. My focus has been then to uncover who draws the line, who has the power to draw the line, with what claims and with whose interests at stake.
Those that do not recover within these paradigms risk being read as resistant, problematic and in need of psychiatric treatment. The failure to recover is often seen as a failure of the individual rather than the individual being a victim of the ever-expanding field of psychiatric diagnosis. For example in the current era of the DSM-5 and the future world of the ICD-11 the bereaved person might be considered mentally ill but in the era of past editions of the DSM or before psychiatry began to make claims on grief, bereavement and grief were experiences situated within the normal side of the line.
The developments in grief treatment can be seen as a reflection of broader changes in mental health services and psychiatry. The Recovery Model is the current popular model of providing mental health services that has been met with much enthusiasm and success.
The recovery model encourages people to find their own individual path to life without mental illness.
Recovery Colleges have been set up to provide courses for people with mental health difficulties on recovery and how to recover from mental illness. These colleges also run courses on ways to well-being, how to find work and how to manage one's diet.
Recovery began as a radical movement to reclaim power back to the patient from the psychiatrists, but in being co-opted by the mainstream the vision has become a conventional one that places emphasis on the individual and their responsibility to change. The recovery model relies upon an idea of the ideal person as being a functional citizen, someone who gives back to society, someone who has the capacity to make the right choices.
However many patients and service users have now turned their back on the recovery model due to what they feel is a lack of acknowledgement of the social factors that contribute, create and maintain mental difficulties. When recovery is 'always possible' failing to recover can only ever be the fault of the individual. Critics have also argued how the recovery model is still one very much dependent on the deficit model – where people with mental illness are in some way deficient and require fixing. The recovery model was adopted in order to remedy this; an attempt to allow people to uncover their own unique individual journey to recovery, to the good life. But the journey to recovery is filled with yet more normative fantasies.
The obligation to recover is one of the obligations we encounter when the human is considered to be a sovereign subject. Experiences such as grief can work to unsettle our sense of sovereignty, problematising what it means to be able to choose, how capacity is defined, revealing instead a self that may be incoherent, ambivalent, not in control of themselves. I will talk about how and why grief has the power to make us come undone, but first a note on sovereignty.
Sovereignty, in a truncated form, is about having the power over one's life and having the ability or capacity to decide how you live your life. Sovereignty is mostly used in political and legal terms when discussing the sovereignty of the head of state where sovereignty is understood as having the power over life and death – that is to permit life and to take it away. There is much debate in political philosophy over the uses of sovereignty, but here I am picking up the concept in a similar way to Lauren Berlant but in a perhaps somewhat more crude fashion and placing it in an individual context to refer to a way of being which has capacity to make decisions, is consistent, intentional, and has coherent explanations for actions.
In many ways I am also talking largely about capacity – and the capacity to make choices and decisions for oneself (to be autonomous) is arguably the paradigmatic feature of what it means to be human in a contemporary neo-liberal society.
After all it is often when sovereignty is taken away that we feel injustice is taking place. It also reveals the rights we assume to have by virtue of being human (which may or not be supported in law). As I work within the field of death and dying I have been exploring the ways this sense of sovereignty is interrupted and destabilised through the act of death. Sovereignty is not necessarily something we have simply by virtue of being human but something that is granted or taken away.
It also serves to pathologize those that deviate from these expectations.
As Berlant describes:
Without attending to the varieties of constraint and unconsciousness that condition ordinary activity, we persist in an attachment to a fantasy that in the truly lived life emotions are always heightened and expressed in modes of effective agency that ought justly to be and are ultimately consequential or performatively sovereign. In this habit of representing the intentional subject, a manifest lack of self-cultivating attention can easily become recast as irresponsibility, shallowness, resistance, refusal, or incapacity; and habit itself can begin to look overmeaningful, such that addiction, reaction formation, conventional gesture cluster, or just being different can be read as heroic placeholders for resistance to something; affirmation of something, or a world-transformative desire. – Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p.99.
When the intentional, positive active subject is considered to be the truest enactment of being human, emotions such as grief – which may leave the subject irresponsible, unemployed, and ambivalent – are devalued and are seen as negative, unproductive, something to be recovered from.
The over-psychologisation in grief theory has meant normal grief tends to involve integrating the loss, claiming that in order to recover, the relationship with the deceased has to be reconfigured in some way, either as a process of detachment or reinstating and/or continuing bonds in order to accept the loss.
Sigmund Freud in 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917) is often attributed as the first thinker to promote the idea of the need to detach from the deceased, and that 'hanging on' to the deceased is pathological and an obstruction to healthy mourning. The melancholic figure persists as an example of what happens when people fail to mourn successfully, when they are unable to let go of the deceased. This at least has been the way in which Freud's ideas have been interpreted by later theorists.
The melancholic is one who is never sure what he or she has lost. That is to say, what has been lost remains unconscious to the melancholic, they do not know what they are missing. The melancholic knows whom they have lost but not what is lost in him/her. The melancholic does not know what they have lost in themselves because the melancholic incorporates the lost person into his/her 'ego', so that he/she never fully experiences the loss, since the loved one, even in absence, becomes merged with the self. What this suggests therefore is that people who are seen to be 'stuck' in grief do so perhaps unknowingly because they are not fully conscious of how they are still tied to what they have lost. This is because the lost person has been incorporated into, in Freud's terms, the ego. In other words the deceased person still makes up a large part of how the grieving person understands their sense of self.
To understand how someone could get stuck unable to face the 'reality' of their loss requires a refiguring of how the self is understood and how the sense of self is composed. It is to look upon identity as not something that is shaped and constructed autonomously, but composed in relation to others. Grief theories which describe continuing bonds or building biographies of the deceased attempt to explain how and why people talk about keeping the deceased inside themselves. However these theories often do not elaborate further on how grief and loss become an instance that reveals the one who has been lost already existed inside the subject. To say that the deceased person already existed inside the subject is to point towards the fact that people are shaped by one another, often perhaps ambivalently, in ways that do not presume two atomized autonomous individuals making an attachment, but rather a more intimate and intricate interface of being entwined into one another's lives and sense of self. But the ways in which people are bound to one another is often not known until an event such as loss or the risk of loss that allows the recognition of how the sense of self is invested in another person. Grief therefore destabilizes the 'I' of autonomous thinking through a process of coming undone, being confounded by loss, in which the self, and not only the one who has died goes missing.
Certain types of attachments act to impede the ability to move on, even if they provide a sense of self, a sense of place in the world. The bereaved person is then suspended in the space of liminality, for to let go and leave the object of desire is to leave the anchor for optimism, and yet staying with this fantasy produces unhappiness. This sense of ambivalent attachment is captured by Lauren Berlant's concept of 'cruel optimism' which describes how any form of attachment can become cruel when they become obstacles to flourishing. Berlant's example is instructive for grieving for whilst recovery is constructed on the understanding that detaching from the lost object leads to successful mourning, the lost object is the very anchor that sustains hope.
This ambivalence also reveals a more complex view of agency, where the bereaved may desire and not desire to become attached to something that makes them lose control, a desire and lack of desire to become sovereign. Discourses that promote recovery often assume autonomy, choice and agency are desirable traits that everyone should wish to achieve and vulnerability is weakness and undesirable. What the sustaining of cruel attachments suggests on the contrary is that people often wish to not be sovereign, (and proposes further that sovereignty can never be anything but a fallacy) by violating their attachment to intentionality and give themselves over to something larger than themselves.
Melancholia and the refusal to recover or let go of attachments to the dead can not only be read as a sign of pathology but might be understood as an active choice to not be sovereign. This presents a contradictory twist – the right of choice we have over our lives can also be used to reject those choices. But there is also something more subtle taking place, it is about injecting the unconscious into the intentionality of the subject. It is suggesting that certain affective experiences such as grief can reveal to us we often do not know to what we are tied and why, the one who refuses to recover might not be aware of the ways they are attached to something that is actually becoming an obstacle to their ability to live a life.
To tell someone to lose the object of their desire and face up to the reality of their loss – the reality that is apparently evident to everyone but them – is to neglect to see how certain fantasies that people invest in provide a sense of belonging all of their own.
What if we do not presuppose the sovereign subject? How do we account for the self?
Should not the whole theory of the subject be reformulated, seeing that knowledge, rather than opening onto the truth of the world, is deeply rooted in the "errors" of life? – Michel Foucault
Borrowing from Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant I have been working with a description of grief as an instance which can make a person 'come undone'. This is a coming undone of a self that was already not the sovereign person they took themselves to be. What this means is not that grief or loss merely breaks people down before they put themselves back together again (a recovery narrative that relies upon the self as normally integrated) but rather an instance that reveals the relational nature of their sense of self; the capacity to affect and be affected.
Injecting some incoherence, ambivalence, resistance into the subject then, the interest lies less in how people come undone – if we alternatively assume the subject is always somewhat prone to incoherence – but rather how do they hold themselves together, and what form this holding together takes and why. Or to take a Deleuzian line: how do we hang together when we are multiple?
The task remains for me to discover the discourses that mould the form of the grieving person into an identifiable recovering/recovered/not recovered subject. That is to say what are the discourses, structures, norms that may impinge, limit, obstruct the capacity for flourishing or for becoming otherwise.
There's a labour to remaining within the bounds of normal, of which some feel more acutely than others. And yet there's also a comfort to passing as normal because it means staying under the radar. Expecting or demanding a level of sovereignty over one's life can serve a protective or liberating purpose but it can also enforce an unworkable and limited vision of what it means to be human. I'm not so sure about whether we need throw out the concept of the human and become post-human and I know too little to make a biological claim on things that are indisputably human. Rather I make the modest proposal that it is not the vision of the human that needs transforming but the world we inhabit so that is capacious enough to hold all the multiple ways of being human.


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Every generation gets its own workplace cliches.
For our grandparents and parents, it was "run it up the flagpole" or "behind the eight ball" or "think outside the box." In the last few years, an entire new lexicon of hackneyed phrases has invaded the business world.
They all began as something fresh and, possibly, had some value at one time, but they were adapted and copied and spread around until they became so ubiquitous as to be meaningless.
So, I asked business leaders and entrepreneurs for the ones that make them cringe the most and got more than 100 great examples. Here are 15 of the worst offenders.
1. Thought leader
"I don't know any high-level person anywhere who isn't described as a thought leader. Just having thoughts doesn't make you a thought leader."
—Amanda Ponzar, chief marketing officer at Community Health Charities
2. Hustle
"People use this term to talk about their stepped-up game or their freelance work (side hustle). Why can't they just say that?"
—Jeffrey Soto, managing content editor, Katie Wagner Social Media
3. Come to Jesus
"'We need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with him.' Really? It's that intense?"
—Chris White, CEO of Shinesty
4. Tribes
"I get it. Seth Godin's got this book called 'Tribes.' And all of his books are amazing. But now, like any word that turns into jargon, it's started to lose its meaning."
—Rachel Jordan, founder of 929 Marketing
5. Take it offline
"It means, 'Let's talk about this after.' I think people should just say that!"
—RaShea Drake, B2B Analyst, Verizon Business
6. Disrupt
"I'm from Africa, and every now and then you get a tech website reporting on how a new startup is 'disrupting' a particular industry in Africa. Funny thing is, most of these companies just want to keep raising rounds until their companies are no more."
—Daniel Bamigboye, Firebrick Digital
7. Rock star
"Using 'rock star' to describe a tech professional drives me crazy. Are sunglasses mandatory? Do they throw their PC through the window before signing autographs?"
—Richard Howe, UX Designer, Colour Rich
8. Ninja
"'He/she is a rock star-ninja (fill in the blank).' I don't want to hire rock stars. They are egotistical and spoiled. As far as ninjas, I am not looking for silent employees. I want great communicators."
—Sarah Johnson, public relations specialist, Fit Small Business
9. Out of pocket
"People use it to mean the person is unavailable or difficult to reach. But it doesn't mean that. It's about expenses you have to pay yourself."
—Gary Romano, president and CEO, Civitas Strategies
10. Low-hanging fruit
"I personally hate this term. It undervalues the effort behind a task and makes whoever is working on it not give their best. Every job deserves your best effort."
—Jay Labelle, owner of The Cover Guy
11. Swim lane
"I personally dislike the concept of the 'swim lane.' It's reductive, and undermines a sense of shared responsibility within the organization. Nothing interesting would ever happen if everyone just stuck to their lanes."
—Erin Fisher, Dotted Line Communications
12. Best in class
"The marketing phrase that companies use that drives me the most crazy is best in class. As soon as I hear it, I assume the exact opposite."
—Leslie Osman, vice president of marketing and communication at Park Bank
13. Girl Boss
"I love that fellow females are excited about their power in the workplace, but enough with the #GirlBoss already — we don't hear men going around saying they're a Boy Boss now, do we?"
—Amanda Duff, founder, Duff PR
14. Regroup
"'Let's regroup'; nobody wants to deal with this right now, so let's delay the pain and hope it goes away."
—Brooke Niemiec, chief marketing officer, Elicit
15. Change agent
"I certainly don't mind people using this expression when they're talking about Martin Luther King Jr., but when it's consistently applied to eighth-tier talents who once gave a TED Talk, it's annoying."
—Shlomo Z. Bregman, founder, Bregman Success

subset: commoncrawl


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The UK Special Project is Rocky Mountain's take on a simple but effective UK trail bike. The trail scene is growing by the minute and the network expanding rapidly, so it's good to see companies branch out and cater for people on tighter budgets. The big question is though, can this limited edition rig cut it out in the hills?
Based around Rocky's North Shore hardtail frame, the Reaper, the UK Special Project uses Rocky Mountain's custom 6061 double-butted aluminium tubing. The hydroformed top tube and down tube are joined with one sleek weld before being attached to the head tube, creating loads of strength in one of the most stress-prone zones.
The rear triangle uses ultra-stiff box-section tubing to ensure as little flex as possible, and the compact frame design gives plenty of standover height and manoeuvrability.
With a mix of Shimano Deore and SLX taking care of transmission and braking duties, it's fair to say you're in safe, reliable hands. The Rock Shox Recon XC delivers 120mm (4.7in) of travel, with rebound and preload adjustment on tap. The bar and stem combo from RaceFace are well built, and offer their usual high standards, with stem length options ranging from 60 to 90mm.
The SDG Bel Air I-Beam saddle is super comfy and many bums will sing its praises after hours sat on it, churning out the miles.
The 22.5in top tube matched with the 70mm stem produced a comfortable cockpit, enabling good weight distribution to combat the ever-changing trail. It's roomy enough to be climbed up some of the ugliest slopes, but compact enough that it can get up to speed and hammer the descents without a problem.
The Recon fork's 120mm (4.7in) of trail-friendly travel is supple enough to keep the wheel gripping on the loose, flat turns commonly found at many trail centres, and handled the bigger hits well. We would prefer to see a through-axle fork on such a capable frame to give that extra bit of steering precision on choppier terrain, though.
Our pre-production model's head angle measured in at 69°, but Silverfish have confirmed the production version will be 68°. This means improved stability on the descents, yet still snappy and sprightly on flatter, more technical singletrack.
The Maxxis High Roller tyres may not be the fastest-rolling, but they cope with a multitude of conditions extremely well, and proved their worth on the rougher terrain we tested the bike on. When the speed picks up, the 660mm RaceFace bars can get a little twitchy, but that's easily solved with wider bars.
At 13.15kg (29lb), it's no featherweight race machine, but that's not the point here. This bike is all about grin factor and versatility – and it delivers the goods in both areas.


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Landlord, Tenant, Leased Premises, Rent, Lease contract/Lease agreement, Shell & core premises, HVAC/Heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, Suspended ceiling, Telephone box/ telephone booth/cocoon
Headline rent – Basic rent with no discounts or incentives
Effective rent – Basic rent decreased by discounts and incentives
Incentives – Bonuses offered by the Landlord (rent-free periods, fit-out contributions, any other financial contribution)
Rent free period – Period when the Tenant does not pay rent, only service charges
Fit-out contribution – Landlords´ contribution to the building of partitions and any other interior equipment in the leased premises
Workplace strategy – Study of how the interior working space is being used
Headcount – Number of employees
Heads of terms (HoT) – Written agreement on the key commercial lease terms
Viewing – Visit of the premises which are of interest
Space plan – Proposal for the best use of the leased premises – E.g. open space , closed offices, meeting rooms, kitchens, reception and archives etc.
Service charges – Charges for services and energy added to the rent
Add-on factor – Coefficient defining the portion of shared common areas (such as reception, lobby, corridors) that the Tenant pays in his lease.
Gross lettable/rentable area – Total rentable area including the portion of shared common areas.
Net lettable/rentable area – The rentable area without any shared common areas.
Fit out – Partitions and other fittings of the leased space
Fan-coil – Cooling and/or heating unit
Reinstatement – Renovation of the rented space before the lease termination
Lease term – Lease period
Break – Tenant´s right to terminate its lease earlier than the standard leased contract is signed for. A break option is typically after three years in the case of five year lease contracts.
Expansion – Enlargement of the leased premises
Contraction – Reduction of the leased premises
Extension – Prolongation of the lease contract
Holdover – A short-term prolongation of the lease contract
RfP/Request for proposal – Tenant´s request for official written offer provided by the Landlord
RfR/Right of first refusal – Tenant´s right to be offered freed-up space before others
Sublease – Tenant offering part of its / whole leased premises for further lease
Parking ratio – Proportion of parking spaces per office space (for example 1/40 means 1 parking lot for 40 m2 of office space)
Raised floor – Raised floor for cabling
Floor box – Box situated in the raised floor used for electrical, data and telephone cabling connectivity.
Open plan – Working space without partitions
Indexation – Rental increases according to inflation, usually on an annual basis
Commencement date – Start of the rent period
Handover date – Date of the return of the leased premises to the Landlord


text:
I am a full-time single parent, of two of the best little girls a person
could ever wish upon themself.
If I ever thought my life had meaning or value, before these two
came into it, I was sorely mistaken, I can assure you. I spent alot of
my first years as a parent, wondering and worrying that I would not,
or could not be a good father and that I would fail this precious pair
I had brought into being. Well, against all odds, and a small amount
of my own disbelief, it seems that I have actually become one.
What was my life's greatest success - that of being a good daddy in
the eyes of my two wonderful, respectful and beautiful girls.
I love these two more than anyone that does not have a child can
imagine, and in thier eyes, I see respect and love - for me, and
everything that surrounds them.
If you have no child, the greatest piece of enlightenment that I can
pass on to you then, is that you re-evaluate everything you think you
now know - everything. For all that you could now concieve, of life,
responsibility and love, are just shallow preconceptions of the true
depths you will encounter, the first moment you "connect" with your
own child. I wish you luck and resilience once you are upon this path.
This one's from Kyrie's "Barbie"
Birthday Party.
I was told today that this year "Daddy,
I'm having a "Unicorn Birthday Party" -
on our Porch"...
Well I guess that that, settles that...!!
This year the girl's decorated their first tree
(without alot of panic and parental "aid")
and much to everyone's surprise, they did a
really good job.
Ok smartie pants.... explain this to me.
"If Barbie is so darn popular, then why do I have to buy her friends ?"


text:
Learning to live with nature's wrath
According to natures wrath it is cross the strict security and enter the venue of the climate summit in Paris, you halls and meeting rooms that leads to a broad array of passage arrive at. The passage 'Champs-Elysees', the world famous avenue in the center of Paris by the French hosts are baptized.
NGOs, CARE International, one of the world decarbonizes passage that will make a legally binding global deal to seal the UN climate summit have gathered here for the Representatives of over 150 countries Kutty had to duck away the small end of the century for natures wrath.
A higher effective campaign of natures wrath, "Care solution ducking" is called. Adapting to climate change is awakens us to the new rules that is based on natures wrath; I care ducks, hens, in contrast to adapt to climate change, flood waters rising around their homes flourish, just because poultry rearing ducks on the location of the business Bangladeshi families have been supported to start for natures wrath. Families, thus, adapt to climate change, to improve their lives by poultry-rearing ducks with an opportunity to make more money.
Climate summit talks entered the second week on behalf of natures wrath, this unfortunate state of technology, the world community's annual performance Wordy diplomatic solution while ducking and legally binding targets to focus more on two-decade old singing tunes that is becoming apparent transfer, finance and pointing fingers of climate change is not helping to stop the attack of natures wrath.
Rich and poor countries are no indication of similarity in approach.
In 55 page discussion document with the meeting starting November 30 for the final negotiations for the French presidency for 43 pages, after a week of negotiations, low and was handed. Document so far to interact with all the key issues, "draft outcome Paris' title in regards of natures wrath or climate changes.
The financial commitment by the developed countries, technology transfer, capacity building, developing countries east -2 020 goals, loss and damage compensation, and includes legally binding targets after 2015. All of these have begun still that high-level talks, the position is left field, which means "fields" are deal in sight without negotiations continue, the increased frequency and intensity of climate change impacts of natures wrath around the world continues. Sometimes they appear to be giving a warning to the highest level.
Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) United Nations Office for the past two decades for natures wrath, from 90 percent of the approximately 6,500 major disasters recorded floods, storms, heat waves, droughts and other weather-related events that were due said last month. India, with 288 such disasters, and more than countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, have been most affected by the world's top five countries.
In 1995 the first natures wrath or climate change conference (COP-1) since, nearly 600,000 lives have been lost and 4.1 billion people have been affected, homeless or as a result of weather-related disasters in need of emergency aid left have given. The resulting economic losses are close to $ 2 trillion. Swiss Re, a major insurance company, only a small part of that is insurance in developing countries, says.
Living with disasters and adapt to torment the annual UN climate negotiations in meetings on the same issue new model side by side with the old standards has become.
As for future generations, they also 'Duck' solution is learned. In Bangladesh, a new generation, with new criteria of entrepreneurship, global climate negotiations to the old way, thanks have arrived.


text:
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text:
Setting up a website was a lot easier the last time I did this. I think Wordpress is much more user friendly. I plan to sit down with someone more knowledgeable soon to set this site up like I would like. Until then, patience please, to the few of you who may have come to see what I'm up to.
The adventures have been continuing, and I am back logging quite a few stories that I will put up as soon as I can figure out Squarespace. For this post, I will give a brief update on my work for Permagora Productions.
Since 2016 began, I've been going around to events and gatherings in Southern Oregon, with a focus on local community, permaculture, agorism, and people whose lives reflect a potential solution to so many problems humanity faces. As much as possible, I try to combine my journalism with my children's world-school education, so they come along on many of my excursions.
Below is a list of some of the events that I've covered, which will all explored at greater length in time, with write ups, pictures, and eventually even videos in some cases. (It will take a bit of time before I'm ready to produce videos, though I'm gathering plenty of raw footage now that I hope to later make into videos on different topics.)
- Anarchapulco - Anarchist conference in Acapulco
- Garden work days at Bill' and at Gateway Gardens
- Geo-engineering presentation - Ashland
- Circle of Children Nature Immersion Camp - Triangle Lake
- Oregon Medical Marijuana Program public hearing, regarding new changes to the laws that made lots of people very angry
- Pesticides and Pollinators event - Ashland
- Seed Growers Exchange - Ashland
- Victorian Fashion Show - Central Point
- Bee City Ashland recognition at City Hall
- May 20th - Anniversary Celebration for victories against big ag and GMO in Jackson County
- Wolf Creek Easter Parade
- Indigo Ray's Iris Party - Colestin Valley
- Homestead files - documenting our work on the land where we currently live
- Human and Freedom Show - Jackson Wellsprings
And that's not all that's been happening! As much as we can we've been exploring the natural areas around here, going on outdoor adventures and hikes. May was a really busy month with planting all of our gardens, and much of June we spent in Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, on another adventure. We had a great visit out to Freedom Ranch, the homestead project of Adam Kokesh and Macey Tomlin. I met some really great folks out there, and I was so encouraged to see freedom minded people working together voluntarily towards the cause of building self reliance and escaping the trap of the matrix.
So look for stories on all of these things, along with some other updates that will surely come. Thanks for patience, and thanks for tuning in to Permagora as it begins to unfold.


text:
10 Lessons I've Learned About Marriage From Divorce
Unfortunately, I know a thing or two about divorce. My parents divorced when I was in my twenties, and my first marriage ended in divorce after 13 years. Even my closest friends all have parents who are divorced.
So when my marriage ended, I thought that having a successful marriage wasn't in the cards for me. But as luck would have it, I ended up meeting and marrying a man who is not just an amazing person, but a top-notch husband. My second marriage has been my version of Happily Ever After.
What I've learned from my experiences of divorce and remarriage, and from observing other couples, is that every couple has the ability to have a successful marriage. Marital success has nothing to do with education, economics or social status. In fact, if ever there was an even playing field, it is in this area.
Having a successful marriage is all about the choices we make every minute of every day. Marriages fail when spouses make poor choices as to how they are going to treat each other. It isn't more complicated than that. So here are some of my insights about marriage (some learned the hard way) and how you can make good choices and have your own happily ever after...


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While it seems the game industry is just overflowing with products for the 3 and up crowd there really aren't very many for toddlers. So when I saw Hello Sunshine! at Toy Fair I was delighted to see that ThinkFun was creating more games for this age group and of course Sunshine is irresistibly cute!
ThinkFun sent over a copy of Hello Sunshine for me to check out. It's meant for the 18mos+ crowd and playing the game is pretty easy. You pick one of the printed cards which shows a hiding place for Sunshine and shows the wording, like "Under a chair." Then you hide Sunshine accordingly and work with your child to find the cuddly little plush sun.
It's a pretty simple concept and it actually reminds me of the exercises we would do in Spanish class during middle school (you know, back when kids didn't come out of the womb speaking multiple languages) while learning basic vocabulary. So I can see how that would easily translate to a learning experience for a baby learning concepts like on top of, inside of, under, etc.
What I love about this game:
-It's simple, and doesn't really have "rules" since kids this age are too young for game rules.
-You can play for as long or short as your child's attention span will allow
-Kids love the cuddly plush sun (I know because I had to pry it from my 4 year old's death grip to be able to get some photos of it)
-The illustrated cards are easy to follow and cute
-It takes a simple concept and turns it into a teachable lesson to grow your baby's vocabulary. I think it would make a great ESL toy as well.
-Older siblings can also play - challenge them to read the words on the cards to bring the game to their level.
-The cards store easily in a little hidden pouch on the bottom the plush sun. Nothing is more frustrating than games that don't have a way to store all the pieces!
So you could try to use a homemade version of something like this, but then you'd also need to make your own illustrated cards with words and pictures and quite frankly for the time it takes to do that, I'd rather outsource the work and pick up this cute little cuddly version!
Know a little one who would love Hello Sunshine! I think it makes a really cute 1st or 2nd birthday gift or a great present from a visiting grandparent. You can check out Hello Sunshine! right here


text:
Are you a fan of Breaking Bad?
I've seen a bunch of episodes and I liked them. I haven't watched every episode from the beginning.
Previous question
Now that I think about it your song "Painfully Obvious" reminds me of the guy I' currently fancy. What is the song actually about?Lauren Fairweather responded on 02/25/2014 Next question
How and when did you start playing guitar? Do you have any tips for a beginner? ^_^Lauren Fairweather responded on 02/27/2014
1000 characters remaining


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Jesus Christ is our light and life.
When we follow Jesus, we grow stronger and become more like Him.
We should remember Him and follow Him like sunflowers follow the sun across the sky.
Following His light and example will bring us joy, happiness, and peace, even if things around us are hard.