Cycling Couple Quotes

So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.

Getting better at relationships does not mean learning how to get the other person to do or be what you want them to be. In couples therapy, you can work on your relationship together. But you can also work on your relationships by understanding your own individual needs and patterns and the cycles you tend to get stuck in.

Rincewind sighed. “Look,” he said. “No self-respecting High Priest is going to go through all the business with the trumpets and the processions and the banners and everything, and then shove his knife into a daffodil and a couple of plums. You’ve got to face it, all this stuff about golden boughs and the cycles of nature and stuff just boils down to sex and violence, usually at the same time.

The more we live as 'free individuals' . . . the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities--we have to be impelled or disturbed into freedom. . . . This paradox thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes 'permissive' liberal society. Since permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on subjects' freedom: they have to appear as (and be sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become 'entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel . . . we are constantly bombarded by imposed 'free choices'; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals--since the more we act freely the more we become enslaved by the system--we need to be 'awakened' from this 'dogmatic slumber' of fake freedom.

Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.

Lyre: Ash, my friend, you have a lot to learn about women. Ash: Why force it out of her if she doesn’t want to talk about it? Lyre: Because women like to stew about sh*t that could otherwise be sorted in no time. If you’d just talked to her a couple of cycles ago, she wouldn’t have had this time to get worked up about it. Then, you could have focused on getting her worked up in other ways.

The goal of attunement is not simply continual meshing, with an utter entrainment of every thought and feeling; it also includes giving each other space to be alone as needed. This cycle of connectedness strikes a balance between the individual’s needs and the couple’s. As one family therapist put it, “The more a couple can be apart, the more they can be together.

I thought for sure she was the one. I felt it in my bones. Now all I feel is remorse, because it wasn’t until ten seconds ago that I realized I’ve already moved on to another cycle. I’ve moved on to Willow.

Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so many issues, and with such anger. Again, it may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization. This

Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games.

After a couple of years of monitoring the news, I’ve learned that the same stories repeat in a cycle, with just the names and places changed. At first I thought that the news broadcasters were literally reusing old reporting to save money, but I gradually came to the conclusion that humans find it comforting to watch the same news over and over again.

I’ve met a couple real cowboys in my life, and I’ve seen an awful lot of fellas who like to dress the part without any real need. Drugstore cowboys we used to call them. The real ones tend to be a lot less flash and sparkle, and tend to carry themselves with a lot more humility. I suppose the real work that cowboyin’ involves helps a fella grow accustomed to the taste of humble pie.

It was a Black-Art bookstore on Seventh Avenue dedicated to the writing of black people of all times and from all places. It was in the same category of black witchcraft, black jazz and Black Nationalism. It was run by a well-known black couple with some black people helping out and aside from selling books by black people to black people it served as a kind of headquarters for all the black nationalist movements in Harlem.      There were books everywhere. The main store, entered from Seventh Avenue, had books lining both walls, books back to back in chest-high stalls down the center of the floor. The only place there weren't any books was the ceiling.      "If I had read all these books I wouldn't be a cop," Coffin Ed said.      "Just as well, just as well," Grave Digger said enigmatically.

The news cycle never let me breathe anymore. 9/11 happened last fall, two weeks into my freshman year, and a couple of weeks later two dudes attacked me while I was walking home from school and the worst part—the worst part—was that it took me days to shake off the denial; it took me days to fathom the why. I kept hoping the explanation would turn out to be more complex, that there’d turn out to be more than pure, blind hatred to motivate their actions. I wanted there to be some other reason why two strangers would follow me home, some other reason why they’d yank my scarf off my head and try to choke me with it. I didn’t understand how anyone could be so violently angry with me for something I hadn’t done, so much so that they’d feel justified in assaulting me in broad daylight as I walked down the street. I didn’t want to understand it. But there it was.

I figure there are a couple of reasons why Kamusari villagers are so easygoing. One is that most of them are involved in forestry, where you have to think in cycles of a century; the other is that there’s no place to hang out at night, so when it gets dark everybody just hits the hay. “Running around won’t make the trees grow faster. Get plenty of rest, eat hearty, and tomorrow take what comes”: that seems to be the prevailing philosophy

An organism arises when the loop of circulating energy somehow closes on itself to give a regenerating, reproducing life cycle within which energy is mobilised, remaining stored as it is mobilised. The energy goes into complex cascades of coupled cyclic processes within the system before it is allowed to dissipate to the outside. These cascades of cycles span the entire gamut of space-times from slow to fast, from local to global, that all together, make up the life cycle.

This theme is found throughout literature — the conflict between our desire to escape the world of other human beings and our desire to dwell within it. Couples the world over experience this conflict. It’s easy to be compassionate and generous when you don’t have to compromise. It’s relatively simple to live peacefully when you’re not regularly challenged by a person who sometimes inconveniences you with her decisions, embarrasses you with her choices, and drives you crazy with her “otherness.” It’s interesting to notice how many of the people we identify as the greatest spiritual teachers are single (and childless as well)!

Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, -- in moments when they are not neurotically dependent -- but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon. The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode -- and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

Couples counseling has long been banned from the list of acceptable treatments for domestic violence . . . "an inappropriate intervention that further endangers the woman." Schechter explained: 'It encourages the abuser to blame the victim by examining her "role" in his problem. By seeing the couple together, the therapist erroneously suggests that the partner, too, is responsible for the abuser's behavior. Many women have been beaten brutally following couples counseling sessions in which they disclosed violence or coercion. The abuser alone must take responsibility for the assaults and understand that family reunification is not his treatment goal; the goal is to stop the violence.

I've met people who say they don't want relationships; but it's not the relationships that they don't want: it is the mundane dynamic that is named the "relationship", which they despise. The struggle for control; the humdrum motions recycled by a billion other couples; the low rhythm that seems to cycle, repeating its monotonous hymn through the myriad crowds. They want to find someone and feel every vein in their body connect to that person, they want to fly with someone, they want what's natural; they want a partner. It's a partner they want. Not a "relationship"; but a partner. A whole other person who wants to stay with their own whole person. They want something meant for them, or nothing at all.

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to “cycle through” different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson’s. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing “chemistry” turn out not to be jokes at all.

They were told that couples facing infertility should grieve the loss of biological children, the hopes raised and disappointed cycle after cycle, before they moved forward with adoption. For them, though, spending years or even months in mourning didn’t feel right. The miscarriage had been devastating, but they had already resigned themselves to the fact that biological children might not be in their future. If adoption was God’s plan for them, she said, she didn’t mind missing out on the experiences of pregnancy and birth. She joked, when she was ready to joke about it, that if someone else did all that work instead, it would be okay with her. They both just wanted a baby. If they were lucky enough to be able to adopt, they would never dwell on things they had been denied.

But those constant interruptions strain the brain further and make a hash of our time. For every interruption, Jonathan Spira writes, it takes ten to twenty times the amount of the interruption time to return to the previous task: It can take five minutes after a mere thirty-second interruption to get back on track. Fully one-third of every worker’s day, he reports, is taken up by these endless cycles of unnecessary interruptions. Even Fortune 500 CEOs, with the ultimate power to predict and control their own time, are not immune. One study found they averaged only twenty-eight uninterrupted, productive minutes a day.24 “This overwhelm is not any one thing,” Huda Akil told me. “It’s not just technology. It’s not just two-career couples. It’s a thousand little stabs. You put that together and it’s like being constantly slightly jet-lagged.

No—uh—no, I’m good.” I hold up a sleeve of crackers. “You were right, Paige isn’t feeling well. I thought I’d get her something to eat.” Lame lame lame lame. She’s going to see right through this whole cracker ploy for what it is. Attempts to settle her pregnant daughter’s stomach. Mrs. Nichols lets out an audible sigh as her brow puckers in sympathy. “Poor thing. Those cramps have always been such a nightmare. For that reason alone, I wish she’d remained on the Pill.” For the second time in as many days, everything stops. My breathing. My heart. And I’m pretty sure the couple seconds it takes for her words to register and their meaning to sink in, time grinds to a halt too. Paige’s mother chokes back a laugh as she takes in my expression. “Oh dear, weren’t you supposed to know that I knew my daughter was on the Pill? Or is it me talking about a woman’s cycle that embarrassed you?” she asks, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. I

Girlfriend!" Blue repeated, and he felt a disconnected thrill to hear her say the word. "How about friend-friend?" "I thought we were friend-friends." "Are we? Friends talk. You go walking to the Pentagon and I find out from Gansey! Your dad's a jerk and I find out from Gansey! Noah knows everything. Ronan knows everything." "They don't know everything. They know what they were there for. Gansey knows because he was there." "Yeah, and why wasn't I?" "Why would you be?" "Because you'd invited me," Blue said. The world tilted. He blinked; it straightened. "But there wasn't any reason for you to be there." "Right, sure. Because there's no girls in politics! I have no interest. Voting? What? I forgot my apron. I think I ought to be in the kitchen right now, actually. My rolling pin -" "I didn't know that you -" "That's my point! Did it even occur to you?" It had not. "You wouldn't have gone someplace without Gansey, though," Blue snapped. "You two make a grand couple! Kiss him!" Adam cocked his head witheringly. "Well, I don't want to be just someone to kiss. I want to be a real friend, too. Not just someone who's fun to have around because - because I have breasts!

When we ingest a drug or a drink, our system instantly floods with an absurd amount of dopamine — from two to ten times the natural amount — causing an intense uprush of pleasure and focus, essentially shortcutting the brain’s natural reward system. That feels really, really good. Then a couple of things happen. The hippocampus — the part of the brain responsible for creating memories — lays down “tracks” or “records” of this rapid sense of satisfaction. So essentially the brain remembers: I can cut straight to the good feelings with this simple little thing. Next, the amygdala, which is responsible for emotions and survival instincts, creates a conditioned response to the stimulus (for me, it’s alcohol; for you, it’s whatever your “thing” is), and as a result, the brain produces less dopamine or even in severe cases eliminates dopamine receptors in an effort to maintain balance, causing the activity that once used to be the fast track to pleasure to become less and less pleasurable over time. Now, repeat this cycle a few thousand times, and the brain’s reward and learning functions change significantly. The actual pleasure associated with the behavior subsides, yet the memory of the desired effect and the need to re-create it (the wanting) persists. The normal machinery of motivation no longer functions rationally. “You were literally out of your mind,” she said.

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.

Of course, it is painful when your partner verbally attacks you. Recognize that by responding in kind, you are almost guaranteeing more volleys in your direction, the negative cycle will continue, and you will find no peace.

Honeymoon, a term we are all familiar with, is a specific reference to mead. The term comes from an old English tradition that dates from the Middles Ages. Mead was drunk in great quantities at weddings, and after the ceremony nuptial couples were given a month's supply of mead--sufficient for one full cycle of the moon.

long tradition of seeking coded messages in the Bible, or the Torah. Even Sir Isaac Newton had believed that such a code existed, but in fact, Jewish priests and Bible scholars from the more distant past had a tradition of seeking interpretation of their world in the holy books. There were even a couple of words to describe the results; exegesis and eisegesis, meaning, respectively, insightful and false interpretations.

At first, the American war effort faced financial difficulties. In 1842, the government, in an effort to protect growing American industries and, as Southerners would say, to force them to buy eastern goods, set a high tariff on imports. While the tariff was successful in stifling foreign competition, it also drastically reduced government revenues and put severe limitations on the extension of international credit to American entrepreneurs. Coupled with currency inflation and a slowing of the business cycle, the United States Treasury was hard put to finance a war. At the beginning of hostilities, the treasury held only a small surplus of $7 million. When Polk recommended that the Congress place additional taxes on coffee and tea, the House of Representatives indignantly refused. Polk, however, was able to have passed a new bill lowering tariffs, and by the beginning of 1847 revenues began to increase. The Congress also voted to issue $10 million in new Treasury notes and bonds. Technical

answered the phone; it was, in fact, the Times—the Los Angeles one. Jackie took the call, and by the time I could get unhooked from my homicidal seat belt and turned around to look, there was nothing to see except the usual mad, gleaming pack of angry, overpowered vehicles. I scanned in all directions a couple of times, but I saw no cycles, and I heard no more popping backfire sounds. So I shrugged it off before we were even halfway to work, and thought no more about motorcycles.

Medical science seemed to be a couple shakes away from beating the old adage that there were only two things unavoidable in life…death and taxes. Sorilla figured that the government wanted more taxes, which was why the medics were so close to beating death.

He felt the one experience sharpened the other. He said one feels one has earned a beer after cycling for a couple of hours and then the continued cycling afterwards gives one the satisfying feeling that one is working it off and will soon need another. In this way one can achieve a comfortable rhythm of exercise and relaxation getting neither fitter nor fatter.

We had been looking at some land adjoining the zoo and decided to purchase it in order to expand. There was a small house on the new property, nothing too grand, just a modest home built of brick, with three bedrooms and one bathroom. We liked the seclusion of the place most of all. The builder had tucked it in behind a macadamia orchard, but it was still right next door to the zoo. We could be part of the zoo yet apart from it at the same time. Perfect. “Make this house exactly the way you want it,” Steve told me. “This is going to be our home.” He dedicated himself to getting us moved in. I knew this would be our last stop. We wouldn’t be moving again. We laid new carpet and linoleum and installed reverse-cycle air-conditioning and heat. Ah, the luxury of having a climate-controlled house. I installed stained-glass windows in the bathroom with wildlife-themed panes, featuring a jabiru, a crocodile, and a big goanna. We also used wildlife tiles throughout, of dingoes, whales, and kangaroos. We made the house our own. We worked on the exterior grounds as well. Steve transplanted palm trees from his parents’ place on the Queensland coast and erected fences for privacy. He designed a circular driveway. As he laid the concrete, he put his own footprints and handprints in the wet cement. Then he ran into the house to fetch Bindi and me. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s all do it.” We grabbed Sui, too, and put her paw prints in, and then did Bindi, who was just eight months old. It took a couple of tries, but we got her handprints and her footprints as well, and then my own. We stood back and admired the time capsule we had created. That afternoon the rains came. The Sunshine Coast is usually bright and dry, but when it rains, the heavens open. We worried about all the concrete we had worked on getting pitted and ruined. “Get something,” Steve shouted, scrambling to gather up his tools. I ran into the house. I couldn’t find a plastic drop cloth quickly enough, so I grabbed one of my best sheets off the bed. As I watched the linen turn muddy and gray in the rain, I consoled myself. In the future I won’t care that I ruined the sheet, I thought. I’ll just be thankful that I preserved our footprints and handprints. “It’s our cave,” Steve said of our new home. We never entertained. The zoo was our social place. Living so close by, we could have easily gotten overwhelmed, so we made it a practice never to have people over. It wasn’t unfriendliness, it was simple self-preservation. Our brick residence was for our family: Steve and me, Bindi, Sui, and Shasta.

MYTH-1: Handmade items are costly! The items are modest yet the commitment of the craftsmen behind the items we offer is costly The vast majority of the cycles engaged with making the item are finished by the creator – the plan, however, the choice of the materials, the working out of how to cause the materials to go together, gathering the item, capturing the item, advertising the item, planning the bundling, and posting, conveying, or action selling. In spite of this, the items that the fasten organization offers you are truly sensible. Haven't viewed our list? here you go! (click here) Have you ever discovered such wonderful hand-made items at such modest rates?? I GUESS NOT! MYTH-2: HAND-MADE PRODUCTS ARE NOT STYLISH On the off chance that you believe that way, I have an inquiry for you – did your grandmother convey such a shopping pack when went out to get for food supplies or did she have such telephone and individual embellishment sacks? Certainly not. The crafted works are not, at this point unfashionable or old-fashioned. Actually, they are intended for pioneers. Simply being an aspect of the pattern and following it has neither rhyme nor reason. Be the person who sets it MYTH-3: HANDMADE GOODS ARE OF POOR QUALITY I can't envision how individuals have such misguided judgment. The machine-made merchandise is to some degree bargained with quality. In any case, with regards to hand made items, they are taken well consideration of by the craftsmen as referenced above, there is no trade-off with the quality. They are made of cotton and jute which are solid and strong. They are lightweight and simple to deal with. MYTH-4: THEY ARE SAME OLD PATTERNS You can't quit lecturing about the handcrafted items which are extremely extraordinary as it will never be equivalent to some other the explanation being that they are delivered by the hands of a craftsman and not a machine. The sack so made is a result of devotion, love, energy, and the enthusiasm to serve the client. Individuals love block prints due to the strong and straightforward plans that can be made, yet that effortlessness finds a way to accomplish. The strategy is brilliant for pictures with only a couple of tones and fewer subtleties however can be hard to use for pictures with bunches of little content, or extremely fine subtleties that will, in general, sever the square with such a large number of employments. One of the benefits of square printing is that it very well may be done on a surface of practically any size and surface. I print on texture, paper, canvas, wood, and different materials, and you don't need to stress over fitting it through a printer or a press. MYTH-5: HANDMADE PRODUCTS ARE NOT LONG LASTING Recollect the last cowhide sack you had? Which lost its covering not long after getting wet in a downpour or subsequent to utilizing it for 3-4 times. That is not the situation with hand-made cotton packs. They are launderable which makes it look clean with each utilization. No problem with the upkeep.

The front ramp is gradually lowered, in slow electronic increments. A couple of dozen backpackers stand, inside the lower deck’s muted light, like an army of extraterrestrials. Paros is refilling with English, German, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Australian, and South African tourists. The town remains in motion. Some come. Some go. The cycle appears endless. The entire world appears to wash up on Paros.

But the greatest, the most belauded, and the most dazzling of all the heroes of that heroic age was undoubtedly Cuchullain, of whose life and wondrous deeds, real and imaginary, hundreds of stories still exist.[13] No cycle of Irish story with the one possible exception of the Finian cycle (whose time is a couple of centuries later) can at all compare with the wondrously rich, and extensive, Cuchullain cycle. And in the legendary literature of the whole world, by few other cycles is it surpassed. Cuchullain was a foster-son of King Conor.

Eton, for all its virtues, seriously lacked girls. (Well, apart from the kitchen girls who we camped out on the roof waiting for night after night.) But beyond that, and the occasional foxy daughter of a teacher, it was a desert. (Talking of foxy daughters, I did desperately fancy the beautiful Lela, who was the daughter of the clarinet teacher. But she ended up marrying one of my best friends from Eton, Tom Amies--and everyone was very envious. Great couple. Anyway, we digress.) As I said, apart from that…it was a desert. All of us wrote to random girls whom we vaguely knew or had maybe met once, but if we were honest, it was all in never-never land. I did meet one quite nice girl who I discovered went to school relatively nearby to Eton. (Well, about thirty miles nearby, that is.) I borrowed a friend’s very old, single-geared, rusty bicycle and headed off one Sunday afternoon to meet this girl. It took me hours and hours to find the school, and the bike became steadily more and more of an epic to ride, not only in terms of steering but also just to pedal, as the rust cogs creaked and ground. But finally I reached the school gates, pouring with sweat. It was a convent school, I found out, run entirely by nuns. Well, at least they should be quite mild-natured and easy to give the slip to, I thought. That was my first mistake. I met the girl as prearranged, and we wandered off down a pretty, country path through the local woods. I was just summoning up the courage to make a move when I heard this whistle, followed by this shriek, from somewhere behind us. I turned to see a nun with an Alsatian, running toward us, shouting. The young girl gave me a look of terror and pleaded with me to run for my life--which I duly did. I managed to escape and had another monster cycle ride back to school, thinking: Flipping Nora, this girl business is proving harder work than I first imagined. But I persevered.

Venting how you feel may make you look like a fool. And you may get in a cycle of pushing your loved ones away from you. No one wants to be around someone who bursts out with anger. If you’re quick to vent, you miss important information that your emotions have for you. You steamroll right into another gear. Instead, what you need to do is downshift and listen for the real meaning underneath the anger. You may have never heard of emotions as giving you key information. But they’re there, trying to get your attention.

Sheba has often told me that she thinks there's a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. The rhythm varies from couple to couple, she says. For some couples, the see-saw of affections takes place over a week. For others, the cycle is lunar. But all couples sense this about their life together - the way in which their interest in one another builds up and recedes. The happiest couples are the ones whose cycles interact in such a way that when one of them is feeling jaded, the other is ardent, and there is never a vacuum.

health benefits of sleep come from the REM cycle, which do not happen throughout an eight-hour slumber. It only occurs a couple of hours each night; the rest of the time the body lies in inefficient unconsciousness. If one can learn to fall into REM sleep, then they can save many hours in the process. Humans theoretically do not need eight hours of sleep for any biological regeneration

Like most people, Mishima has a couple of favorite feeds, sources that she’s found to be fast and reliable, although she’s probably both pickier and a better judge of “reliable” than most people.

Endometriosis Endometriosis is a painful condition in which bits of the endometrium (uterine lining) grow outside your uterus. These are called endometriosis lesions. Chocolate cysts The most common site for endometriosis lesions is the ovaries. This growth is referred to as an endometrioma or chocolate cyst. Endometriosis lesions also grow on Fallopian tubes, pelvic ligaments, and on the outside of your uterus, bowel, and bladder. Actually, they can grow anywhere—even inside your nose. Endometriosis lesions are sensitive to estrogen, so they swell and bleed with every menstrual cycle. Eventually, this causes pain, scar tissue, and heavy periods with large clots. Endometriosis can also impair fertility. What Causes Endometriosis? How does endometrial tissue ends up outside the uterus? There are a couple of theories. One theory is that menstrual fluid enters the pelvis via retrograde flow through the Fallopian tubes. This is not likely to be the correct explanation because retrograde flow occurs in most women, yet only a few women develop endometriosis. A second theory is that the endometrial tissue is laid down before birth—during your own fetal development. The tissue then lies dormant until it is activated by your hormones at puberty. Whatever the original source of the endometriosis lesions, your immune system is a big part of the problem. Your immune system produces inflammatory cytokines and autoantibodies that inflame endometriosis lesions and promote their growth. Without that inflammation, you are unlikely to suffer the condition of endometriosis (although you may still have dormant endometriosis lesions in your pelvis). Researchers have come to view endometriosis not as a hormonal condition, but as an autoimmune disease.

The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner (so helpful for couples in that “I’m screaming and he’s/she’s shutting down” cycle) and her new book, Why Won’t You Apologize?

The therapist attunes to, empathetically reflects, and clarifies cycles of affect regulation (e.g., numbing flips into rage which dissolves into shame and hiding) and cycles of interactions with others (as I hide, you harangue me and I shut you out more, triggering an increase in your aggression, and so on). The focus here is on how clients are, in the present, actively and most often without awareness, constructing inner emotional and interpersonal interactional realities into

There is increasing evidence that modern economies are driven less by the traditional and quite short-term ‘business cycle’ that most economists have focused their attention on (typically a couple of years) and more by a longer-term ‘credit’ or ‘financial’ cycle (between 16 and 18 years) that is mainly driven by land and property values.

Most of the Science Crapp was still packed in the crates, barrels, bundles, and bales in which it had been carted hither. Each of these containers was an impediment to the casual investigator. Daniel spied a crate, not far below the rafters, with its lid slightly askew. The only thing atop it was a glass bell jar covering a dessicated owl. Daniel set the bird to one side, drew out the crate, and pulled off the lid. It was the old Archbishop of York’s beetle collection, lovingly packed in straw. This, and the owl, told all. It was as he had feared. Birds and bugs, top to bottom, front to back. All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they’d been given to the Royal Society by important people. They’d been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt.

Dr John Nash Ott had reported improved health that an outdoor lifestyle can bring in his books. He believed it could cure prolonged illness. I had a similar experience. I had achieved what had been impossible during the previous decade, a return to the weight I was in my thirties. I had far more energy and far less days of chronic fatigue. I was mentally alert and suffered far less forgetfulness and confusion. I slept better on a two stage sleep cycle that Dr John Nash Ott had reported as an effect of the outdoor lifestyle. I would go to bed earlier, typically a couple of hours after sunset and wake up around 1-2 AM before falling asleep again until morning twilight. My body had automatically aligned with the twilight times. It was common in the morning to be awake in bed listening to the morning chorus of the birds and the “Cock-a-doodle-do!” of the roosters.

From fear, partners often say, think, and do things that harm the relationship, like defending, criticizing, or avoiding. Many couples have a way to talk through the inevitable disruptions that arise, but when the interactions repeat without resolution, monstrous negative cycles can develop that are difficult to reverse without help.

figure there are a couple of reasons why Kamusari villagers are so easygoing. One is that most of them are involved in forestry, where you have to think in cycles of a century;

In the precapitalist world, patriarchy allowed all men to completely rule women in their families, to decide their fate, to shape their destiny. Men could freely batter women with no fear of punishment. They could decide whom their daughters were to marry, whether they would read or write, etc. Many of these powers were lost to men with the development of the capitalist nation-state in the United States. This loss of power did not correspond with decreased emphasis on the ideology of male supremacy. However, the idea of the patriarch as worker, providing for and protecting his family, was transformed as his labor primarily benefited the capitalist state. Men not only no longer had complete authority and control over women; they no longer had control over their own lives. They were controlled by the economic needs of capitalism. As workers, most men in our culture (like working women) are controlled, dominated. Unlike working women, working men are fed daily a fantasy diet of male supremacy and power. In actuality, they have very little power and they know it. Yet they do not rebel against the economic order nor make revolution. They are socialized by ruling powers to accept their dehumanization and exploitation in the public world of work and they are taught to expect that the private world, the world of home and intimate relationships, will restore to them their sense of power which they equate with masculinity. They are taught that they will be able to rule in the home, to control and dominate, that this is the big pay-off for their acceptance of an exploitative economic social order. By condoning and perpetuating male domination of women to prevent rebellion on the job, ruling male capitalists ensure that male violence will be expressed in the home and not in the work force. The entry of women into the work force, which also serves the interests of capitalism, has taken even more control over women away from men. Therefore men rely more on the use of violence to establish and maintain a sex role hierarchy in which they are in a dominant position. At one time, their dominance was determined by the fact that they were the sole wage earners. Their need to dominate women (socially constructed by the ideology of male supremacy) coupled with suppressed aggression towards employers who "rule" over them make the domestic environment the center of explosive tensions that lead to violence. Women are the targets because there is no fear that men will suffer or be severely punished if they hurt women, especially wives and lovers. They would be punished if they violently attacked employers, police officers. Black women and men have always called attention to a "cycle of violence" that begins with psychological abuse in the public world wherein the male worker may be subjected to control by a boss or authority figure that is humiliating and degrading. Since he depends on the work situation for material survival, he does not strike out or oppose the employer who would punish him by taking his job or imprisoning him. He suppresses this violence and releases it in what I call a "control" situation, a situation where he has no need to fear retaliation, wherein he does not have to suffer as a consequence of acting violently. The home is usually this control situation and the target for his abuse is usually female. Though his own expression of violence against women stems in part from the emotional pain he feels, the pain is released and projected onto the female. When the pain disappears he feels relief, even pleasure. His pain is gone even though it was not confronted or resolved in a healthy way. As the psychology of masculinity in sexist societies teaches men that to acknowledge and express pain negates masculinity and is a symbolic castration, causing pain rather than expressing it restores men's sense of completeness, of wholeness, of masculinity.

I know the adolescent phenomenon of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video doesn't belong exclusively to lesbians, but I'm talking about the collective energy of this experience. Lesbians are the energy of staring wistfully out of a rainy car window and pretending you're in an Avril Lavigne music video, personified. And that's because yearning is an inherent part of the queer female experience. And I'm not talking about, like, the 2018 awards cycle, when Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga essentially performed yearning to sell their movie. I'm also not talking about Sally Rooney's Normal People, which is about a heterosexual couple who, for reasons unbeknownst, cannot be together because one plays football and the other one... reads books? Straight people, someone needs to tell you this once and for all. You are allowed to be together. You have always been allowed to be together. Romeo and Juliet is essentially hetero fanfic about what it's like to be gay. Your parents hate each other-who cares! For people who experience same-sex attraction, sometimes yearning is all we have. For me, yearning used to be everything-so much so that it damaged the relationships in my adult life. But before I had yearning, I existed in the Thirst Vacuum-a space that was so dark, so desolate, I couldn't yearn for anyone at all.

This, and the owl, told all. It was as he had feared. Birds and bugs, top to bottom, front to back. All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they’d been given to the Royal Society by important people. They’d been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt.

couple. They tilled the land, sowed the seeds, harvested the crop, and also did some odd jobs to sustain themselves. Their only drawback was that they were both daydreamers. They sometimes even missed on work opportunities due to this habit of theirs. Once, after finishing a cycle of sowing and harvesting, they both sat for five days chatting and making big plans. Their talk revolved around unreal things or exaggerated fantasies! Once as they sat down to talk, Chandrakant brought up the topic of wanting to become rich through the milk business. He said he wanted to buy a cow. He told Supriya, “If we plan properly and save money from our daily wages, we will be able to buy a cow.

The Danger Zone! Parked cars hide not only entering vehicles, but also people who walk out to get to the driver’s side. And the door of a parked vehicle can open up to 4 feet into the lane. If you ride just beyond the reach of the door, you are still at risk of being startled and swerving if it opens suddenly. The Danger Zone: 1) Strike zone. 2) Startle zone. 3) Unusable road width. Sure, many people—even some bicycling “experts”—will tell you, “Always keep as far to the right as possible,” and, “Look out for opening car doors.” But at speeds above walking, you can’t react in time to avoid a car door. And you can’t see inside many cars to know whether a person is inside. If a door opens in front of you, you will hit the door unless you swerve out into the street—maybe into the path of a passing car. So to avoid being struck or startled, the end of your handlebar should be 5 feet or more from parked cars. Hold your line. Don’t weave in and out between parked cars. Don’t weave in and out between parked cars. If you weave into the parking lane, a parked car will hide you from drivers approaching from behind. Then you have to pop back into the path of overtaking traffic when you reach the next parked car. Put yourself in the place of a driver a couple of hundred feet behind you. Are you constantly visible and predictable? Motorists don’t mind slowing down for a predictable, visible bicyclist nearly as much as they mind a bicyclist who swerves out in front of them.

Your high arousal also fuels negative and judgmental thinking, which further fuels negative emotional arousal—a vicious cycle.

The word resentment expresses what happens if the cycle goes uninterrupted. It means, literally, “to feel again”: resentment clings to the past, relives it over and over, picks each fresh scab so that the wound never heals. This pattern doubtless began with the very first couple on earth. “Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their nine hundred years,” wrote Martin Luther. “Eve would say, ‘You ate the apple,’ and Adam would retort, ‘You gave it to me.

No more escape attempts. No more being deliberately rude or irritating. No more kicking people in the groin,” Raegel adds. I nod. “No more drugging me and absolutely no dragging me around or locking me up.” My hands have made their way onto my hips and we’re negotiating like an angry couple. “I can’t promise not to knee someone in the groin. He had it coming.

The widespread occurrence of the Kuramoto model raises the question of why this particular mathematical structure should be so common. To be honest, it probably isn’t all that common. I have focused on it because it is the only case of spontaneous synchrony we understand well. On theoretical grounds, one can show that it arises only whenever four specific conditions are met, and is not expected otherwise. First, the system in question must be built from an enormous number of components, each of which is a self-sustained oscillator. That is already a strong constraint. The individual elements must have extremely simple dynamics: pure rhythmicity along a standard cycle, without chaos or turbulence or anything complicated, just repetitive motion. Second, the oscillators must be weakly coupled, in the sense that the state of each oscillator can be characterized by its phase alone. If the coupling is strong enough to distort any oscillator’s amplitude significantly, the Kuramoto model will not apply. The third condition is the most restrictive: Each oscillator must be coupled equally strongly to all the others. Very few systems in nature are literally like that. Oscillators normally interact most strongly with their neighbors in space, or with a collection of virtual neighbors defined by a network of mutual influence. Finally, the oscillators must be nearly identical, and the amount of dispersion in their properties should be comparable to the weakness of their coupling.

Nicky was watching their reactions uneasily, clearly wishing they would take this a little more seriously. “A couple of decades ago,” she said, “some of our orbiting gamma ray observatories began picking up incredibly powerful bursts. Long story short, it became obvious that these were coming not down from deep space but up from below—from the earth. So powerful that they maxed out the sensors, so we couldn’t even tell how massive they actually were. Turned out they were coming from thunderclouds. The conditions in those storm towers down there are impossibly strange. Free electrons get accelerated upward and get kicked up into a hyperenergetic state, massively relativistic, and at some point they bang into atoms in the tops of the storm towers with such energy that they produce gamma rays which in turn produce positrons—antimatter. The positrons have opposite charges, so they get accelerated downward. The cycle repeats, up and down, and at some point you get a burst of gamma rays that is seriously dangerous—you could get a lifetime’s worth of hard radiation exposure in a flash.” She paused for a moment, then stared directly at me with a crazy half smile. “The earth,” she said, “is an alien world.

have a growth spurt and require additional feedings. This may last from one to three days.   For a breastfed baby, feeding could be as often as every two hours (possibly extending through the night) for one to three days.   For a formula-fed infant, parents will notice that their baby appears hungry after consuming the normally-prepared number of ounces; or he is showing signs of hunger sooner than the next scheduled feeding. There are a couple of options to consider:   Add 1-2 ounces to his bottle at each feeding, allowing baby to take as much as he wants. If baby was taking 2½ oz. per feeding, make a full 4 oz. bottle and allow him to eat until full; or   Offer the extra feeding as Baby shows signs of hunger. When the growth spurt is over Baby will return to his normal feed-wake-sleep routine. However, on the day following a growth spurt most babies take longer than normal naps.   By week three, alertness should be increasing at feeding times. Between weeks three and four, your baby’s waketime will begin to emerge as a separate activity apart from eating. His schedule should look something like this: feeding, burping and diaper change takes about 30+ minutes. A little bit of waketime adds another 20+ minutes. Naptime is 1½ to 2 hours.   Not all feed-wake-sleep cycles during the day will be exactly the same length of time. That is why a range of times is provided and not fixed times.   If breastfeeding, do not allow your baby to go longer than 3 hours between feedings during the first three weeks. The feed-sleep cycle should not exceed 3 to 3½ hours during the first three weeks. At night, do not allow your newborn to go more than 4 hours between feedings. (Normal feeding times usually fall between 2½ to 3 hours.)

New racial minorities now constitute a fresh and welcome presence in the suburbs and slow-growing rural areas as well as in big cities. They are a much-needed tonic for a labor force that would otherwise be starting to shrink. Furthermore, they will serve as a necessary conduit to other nations in today's increasingly globalized economy. The political clout of racial minorities, both new and old, was demonstrated in the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, and diversity within the electorate continues to increase more rapidly than most political strategists could have anticipated only a couple of election cycles ago.

Life is not a matter of choices! Life is handed to you, a couple of cards that have cycled through the grimy hands of hundreds of players before you. There are no aces hidden up your sleeve. There is no shortcut to success and happiness. Sleight of hand will only earn you a bloody nose and a thrashing in the alley outback. So instead, you play the few good cards you have and do what you can with the bad, and you play fair. There is no choice.

Compared to other emotions (joy, sadness, anger), there is a lot of physical evidence that love is actually a concept closer to hormone activity than emotion. Biologically, love is a powerful neurotic condition. Desire to love is accompanied by sexual desire, but it is similar to hunger and thirst for hormonal reasons. When you fall in love, the brain releases several chemicals: pheromone, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, and so on. Just by hugging a loved one or simply looking at a photograph of a boyfriend, the hormone oxytocin is released in the body and acts as an analgesic for headaches. What is interesting is that if you break up, the symptoms you experience are similar to the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts. In some cases, withdrawal from the demonstration may release a chemical that weakens the heart in the body. Biochemically, phenylethylamine , which secretes in the brain's limbic system, acts as a stimulant, a kind of natural amphetamine. The phrase love is a drug is no longer a metaphor but an explanatory note in this scene. But it takes 2 seconds to look at the opponent and take the so-called saying at first sight. In just two seconds, phenylethylamine is secreted and becomes full, stimulating the brain, making the opponent look barefaced. If you can make your opponent secrete phenylethylamine, this is the birth of XXX, a grossly outbreak of creatures. However, the secretion of phenylethylamine has a shelf life and generally does not exceed 2 years. [10] After that period, I will get back to my mind. From this time on, love has passed through the stages of chemistry and sociology. But a new fact has been announced. It is said that there are quite a couple who secrete this phenylethylamine throughout life. (...) In this case, however, it is not the same as the whole life, but the period when it is secreted like other normal couples, and the time when the secretion is diminished repeatedly. However, the cycle of this pattern is similar to the two people, so it is a good fit for a lifetime. If you think about it a little differently, you will come back bump bang for a while and then fall back to each other. On the contrary, the broken couples still have one secretion, and the other side breaks into the resting period, and the secretion side considers that the other's love has cooled, Perhaps the main pattern that a man and a woman make and break is confessing - fellowship - Confession feels that the opponent is obsessed with the pattern of departure - separation, It may be that the action of the opponent, who started the pause more quickly and began to climax at the apex of the secretion at that point, is regarded as an obsession. However, it is difficult to justify the feeling of love as a simple hormonal change. It is not possible to reveal what kind of change is happening in any situation, even if it is revealed that what kind of hormone change occurs when feeling love, and it is impossible to tell. Just as you do not secrete phenylethylamine, which is one of the most common types of phenylethylamine you encounter on the roadside, you can not say that this research has 'revealed the principles of love' and 'why you fall in love'. The latter is influenced by individual values, experience and situation, first impressions, and the conditions of the opponent.

Couples who thrive are likely to possess two strong skills: they can see and accept their differences and, paradoxically, because of this ability, they can be generous and collaborate on a happy coexistence.

In the great scheme of things, we were nothing more than two people who had passed each other while walking through their lives. Couples broke up every day, and we were not special in that regard either. You cried yourself to sleep then woke up and went to work. When you repeated the cycle enough times, one day you woke up and suddenly it didn’t matter all that much. New people walked alongside you and eventually, you forgot the ones you left behind.

For the two of us to merely exist as a couple, we don’t have to be open or vulnerable with our partner. But if we want to share a genuine, vibrant emotional connection, we do have to let down our guard and show up as the person we truly are.

Gronager broke down the times when the burglars’ coins were manually moved out of the wallets that held the stolen Mt. Gox funds, plotting the money movements across a twenty-four-hour cycle. All of them seemed to fall from morning to night in a certain time zone, one that lay a couple of hours east of Greenwich mean time and nowhere near the waking hours of the average person in Japan, where Mark Karpelès lived.

The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green. Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi. I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky. "All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?" He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.