Monitor The Beat Quotes

We were there, together, and in the next room I could hear that monitor beeping. Keeping track of another heart’s beat and giving enduring, solid proof of our own.

Roarke glanced over at the monitor briefly, saw Eve on screen facing a woman who'd tried to make herself her twin. The hair, the eyes. She didn't come close, he thought, then forced himself to look away from the beat of his heart, and work to save her. Roarke tuned it out, all of it. Just the sound of Eve's voice - not the words, just the sound of her voice - was all he let in as he worked to lift the most important lock of his life.

God is in the mountains. Impassive, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the creator from the universe's perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and even in the piety of an atheist's sigh. I don't know; but I feel him in the mountains.

The Thunderhead had no arms to embrace. Even so, it could feel the beat of Greyson’s heart and the precise temperature of his body as if it were right beside him. To lose that would be a cause of immeasurable sorrow. And so night after night, the Thunderhead silently monitored Greyson in every way it could. Because monitoring was the closest it could come to embracing.

I understand that it’s disheartening to pour effort and money into a work of art and find that others do not value it with the same intensity. I’ve been to this rodeo more than a few times, and yes, it’s painful and hard on the soul. It is also the sort of thing that grown-ups do every day. Anyone deluded enough to think they are owed monetary success because they bled for their art is in for some hard, hard knocks and buckets full of tears. There will be many cries of “unfair” and much jealousy and hatred. And to be fair, all authors go through this every time they watch their books ride the waves of bestseller charts and the ego torture chamber known as Goodreads reviews. Even the most well-adjusted of us watch that horrible piece of shit book beat our baby to pieces and gnash our teeth and shout at our monitors demanding to know what brain-donors are shopping on amazon.com these days. But holy Smart Bitch on a cracker, Batman, to write a post about how stupid readers are and worse to actually put it out there on the internet is so beyond the pale there’s a special hell for that kind of idiocy. Let me repeat: authors exist at the pleasure of readers. Without the people who buy and read my books, I am just another dizzy broad writing shit down. Readers aren’t just an author’s audience; they are her lifeblood. --

Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It throbbed forcefully on screen. The image was only a foot away but the heart assumed another context, one of distance and immensity, beating in the blood plum raptures of a galaxy in gormation. What mystery he glimpsed in this functional muscle. He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars. How dwarfed he felt by his own heart.

When the fisherman bait the hooks, through them into the sea and sits looking at horizon, do not think he is doing nothing. He and all his senses are fully tensed. His eyes monitors the line, his ears picks the slightest sound of the rod, his heart beats in harmony with the waves and his mind plans further than you think

One last bit of bad news. We’ve been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time—by definition, if you are turning on the sympathetic nervous system all the time, you’re chronically shutting off the parasympathetic. And this makes it harder to slow things down, even during those rare moments when you’re not feeling stressed about something. How can you diagnose a vagus nerve that’s not doing its part to calm down the cardiovascular system at the end of a stressor? A clinician could put someone through a stressor, say, run the person on a treadmill, and then monitor the speed of recovery afterward. It turns out that there is a subtler but easier way of detecting a problem. Whenever you inhale, you turn on the sympathetic nervous system slightly, minutely speeding up your heart. And when you exhale, the parasympathetic half turns on, activating your vagus nerve in order to slow things down (this is why many forms of meditation are built around extended exhalations). Therefore, the length of time between heartbeats tends to be shorter when you’re inhaling than exhaling. But what if chronic stress has blunted the ability of your parasympathetic nervous system to kick the vagus nerve into action? When you exhale, your heart won’t slow down, won’t increase the time intervals between beats. Cardiologists use sensitive monitors to measure interbeat intervals. Large amounts of variability (that is to say, short interbeat intervals during inhalation, long during exhalation) mean you have strong parasympathetic tone counteracting your sympathetic tone, a good thing. Minimal variability means a parasympathetic component that has trouble putting its foot on the brake. This is the marker of someone who not only turns on the cardiovascular stress-response too often but, by now, has trouble turning it off.

Farrow smiles like he’s already beat me and raced miles ahead. “See, I would’ve never touched your right hand even if you blindfolded me. And I’m a doctor. I know which parts of you are off limits. So technically, if you feel a sharp pain, it’s your fault.” Everything he just said… stirs my cock. My blood rushes downward, and the beep beep of the heart rate monitor suddenly accelerates to beepbeep beepbeep beepbeep. Fuuuck. Farrow laughs hard. “Shut up.” I growl out my frustration and rub my face with my left hand. Alright, new plan. Focus on other shit besides sex.

In the summer, as the heavy moths beat their powdery wings against his window screen, he wrote to her about the island, describing how the berry bushes were laden with fruit, and where the most succulent oysters could be found, and the way the bioluminescence lit the lapping waves and filled the ocean with twinkling planktonic forms that mirrored the stars in the sky. He translated the vast, wild, Pacific Rim ecosystem into poetry and pixels, transmitting them all the way to her small monitor in Manhattan, where she waited, leaning into the screen, eagerly reading each word with her heart in her throat, because by then she was deeply in love.

She went downstairs to the library and wrote two letters. One was to her father, the other to Jess and Ronan. She folded them, stamped the wax seals with her seal ring, and put the writing materials away. She was holding the letters in one hand, the wax firm yet still warm against the skin, when she heard footsteps beating down the marble hall, coming closer. Arin stepped inside the library and shut the door. “You won’t do it,” he said. “You won’t duel him.” The sight of Arin shook her. She wouldn’t be able to think straight if he continued to speak like that, to look at her like that. “You do not give me orders,” Kestrel said. She moved to leave. He blocked her path. “I know about the delivery. He sent you a death-price.” “First my dress, and now this? Arin, one would think you are monitoring everything I send and receive. It is none of your business.” He seized her by the shoulders. “You are so small.” Kestrel knew what he was doing, and hated it, hated him for reminding her of her physical weakness, of the same failure that her father witnessed whenever he watched her fight with Rax. “Let go.” “Make me let you go.” She looked at Arin. Whatever he saw in her eyes loosened his hands. “Kestrel,” he said more quietly, “I have been whipped before. Lashes and death are different things.” “I won’t die.” “Let Irex set my punishment.” “You’re not listening to me.” She would have said more, but realized that his hands still rested on her shoulders. A thumb was pressing gently against her collarbone. Kestrel caught her breath. Arin startled, as if out of sleep, and pulled away. He had no right, Kestrel thought. He had no right to confuse her. Not now, when she needed a clear mind.

The human mind is a product of nature. Resembling other forms of nature, does it follow an ancient code by adhering to universal rules of structure, time, and rhythm? Does the human mind establish through training and education its own pulse, tempo, pace, and lilt? Does reading allow us to witness the rhythm, beat, and intonation of other people’s minds? Does writing allow us to develop, monitor, and train the pulsating pulse of our own surfing mental cadence? Does reading enable us to see the groundswell of our own life refracted through a prism of other people’s storm of words? Does reading depict the upsurge of images and thoughts of a working mind, which casement frames humankind? Does writing spur us to scrutinize the indistinct pictures taken by the viewfinder submerged in our own minds? Does inspired writing draw out of us what composed material binders the structures of our multi-dimensional mind?

Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. —2 Corinthians 5:6–7 (NIV) I was clicking though my usual Monday morning e-mail glut when I noticed in the reflection of the monitor that I’d missed a spot shaving. Now I was beating myself up about being so careless and felt like the Wolfman himself, transmogrifying from human to beast. I recalled that somewhere deep in the recesses of one of my drawers was a razor. A second later I was ransacking my desk in search of it. That’s when Carlos walked in, a gentleman who shows up once a week with his watering can to check on our office foliage. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “Nothing, really,” I muttered. “You are looking awfully hard for nothing,” he said. His watering can gurgled as he attended to one of my philodendrons. “I’m trying to find a razor. I missed a spot shaving this morning.” “Stubble is fashionable on men these days,” he said. “I look like the Wolfman.” “Maybe people will appreciate what a good job you did on the rest of your face.” I turned from my rummaging and shot Carlos a look. He was laughing, his face crinkled up with mirth. All of a sudden I was laughing too. “Don’t take yourself so seriously, Mr. Edward. It’s only Monday. You have the whole week ahead of you!” Then Carlos and his watering can were off to the next office. He was right: A whole week lay ahead—a good week, if I wanted it to be. Lord, it’s me again, Mr. Edward. Thank You for Carlos and beard stubble and gurgling watering cans and thirsty philodendrons and all the other stray blessings You bestow upon this too often insecure soul. —Edward Grinnan Digging Deeper: Ps 118:24; Mt 6:11

Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The media, of course, must walk a fine line covering this story. With more we turn to Steve Carell in the Daily Show news center. Steve? Steve Carell: [standing in front of a bank of TV monitors] Jon, this is in many ways an unprecedented situation for us. [A blue band with white letters—the “crawl,” or “chyron” in TV lingo—scrolls across the screen, at Carell’s waist level] Crawl: MAJORITY LEADER DASCHLE RECEIVES LETTER CONTAINING ANTHRAX. Steve Carell: On the one hand, we must alert the country to the latest events. Crawl: AL QAEDA VOWS NEW ATTACKS. Steve Carell: And on the other hand, we musn’t cause undue alarm. Crawl: FBI WARNS SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN SOMEWHERE SOMETIME. Steve Carell: Scaremongering isn’t the way to go. Crawl: WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS. Steve Carell: So far the media has in fact shown restraint. Crawl: STORMS BATTER NEW ENGLAND—LINK TO TERRORISM STILL UNDETERMINED. Steve Carell: And I must stress this—there is absolutely no need to panic. Crawl: [picking up speed as it moves left to right] CIA: THAT GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU ON THE BUS LOOKS A LITTLE SHIFTY. Steve Carell: Patience, diligence, and above all, responsibility. Crawl: A FRIEND OF THIS GUY I KNOW CONFIRMS HIS GIRLFRIEND TOLD HIM “THEY’RE PLANNING SOMETHING IN A MALL OR SOMETHING.” Steve Carell: Jon, we have a job to do here, but we also need perspective. Crawl: [accelerating] OH, F—! WHAT WAS THAT SOUND? SERIOUSLY, DID YOU HEAR A SOUND? Steve Carell: And in keeping that perspective— Crawl: “THE HORROR, THE HORROR”—KURTZ. POLL: 91% OF AMERICANS “WANT MOMMY.” Steve Carell: Okay, that was—no, no, no, that was unacceptable. Jon, would you excuse me for a minute? [walks out of frame] Crawl: CHICKEN LITTLE: “THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!” OH GOD, OH GOD. [Carell confronts technician typing the crawl, beats him up as screen goes snowy] Jon Stewart: We’re having some technical difficulties with the crawl. Ah, Steve Carell is back! Steve Carell: Sorry about that, Jon. As I was saying, we journalists have to make sure that our worst instincts are curbed in the sake of national interest. Crawl: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE JUST WONDERFUL WITH LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS AND HAPPY FEELINGS FOR EVERYONE. Steve Carell: It’s a unique challenge, but one I think the greatest free press in the world can easily attain. Crawl: BUNNIES ARE CUTE, CUDDLY, AND COMFORTING. Steve Carell: Jon?

Focus intently and beat procrastination.    Use the Pomodoro Technique (remove distractions, focus for 25 minutes, take a break).    Avoid multitasking unless you find yourself needing occasional fresh perspectives.    Create a ready-to-resume plan when an unavoidable interruption comes up.    Set up a distraction-free environment.    Take frequent short breaks. Overcome being stuck.    When stuck, switch your focus away from the problem at hand, or take a break to surface the diffuse mode.    After some time completely away from the problem, return to where you got stuck.    Use the Hard Start Technique for homework or tests.    When starting a report or essay, do not constantly stop to edit what is flowing out. Separate time spent writing from time spent editing. Learn deeply.    Study actively: practice active recall (“retrieval practice”) and elaborating.    Interleave and space out your learning to help build your intuition and speed.    Don’t just focus on the easy stuff; challenge yourself.    Get enough sleep and stay physically active. Maximize working memory.    Break learning material into small chunks and swap fancy terms for easier ones.    Use “to-do” lists to clear your working memory.    Take good notes and review them the same day you took them. Memorize more efficiently.    Use memory tricks to speed up memorization: acronyms, images, and the Memory Palace.    Use metaphors to quickly grasp new concepts. Gain intuition and think quickly.    Internalize (don’t just unthinkingly memorize) procedures for solving key scientific or mathematical problems.    Make up appropriate gestures to help you remember and understand new language vocabulary. Exert self-discipline even when you don’t have any.    Find ways to overcome challenges without having to rely on self-discipline.    Remove temptations, distractions, and obstacles from your surroundings.    Improve your habits.    Plan your goals and identify obstacles and the ideal way to respond to them ahead of time. Motivate yourself.    Remind yourself of all the benefits of completing tasks.    Reward yourself for completing difficult tasks.    Make sure that a task’s level of difficulty matches your skill set.    Set goals—long-term goals, milestone goals, and process goals. Read effectively.    Preview the text before reading it in detail.    Read actively: think about the text, practice active recall, and annotate. Win big on tests.    Learn as much as possible about the test itself and make a preparation plan.    Practice with previous test questions—from old tests, if possible.    During tests: read instructions carefully, keep track of time, and review answers.    Use the Hard Start Technique. Be a pro learner.    Be a metacognitive learner: understand the task, set goals and plan, learn, and monitor and adjust.    Learn from the past: evaluate what went well and where you can improve.

Judd sat alone in the chapel. They’d let him in for a handful of minutes to look down on Christabel’s white, drawn little face. If he’d been able to get to a bar, he could have gone through a fifth of whisky afterward. It was shocking to see her like that. She was hooked up to half a dozen monitoring machines with a needle in her arm feeding her nutrients and apparently a narcotic for pain. There was a tube coming out of her side to drain her chest. Perhaps it was the same tube they’d used to reinflate the lung as well. Not since she was sixteen had she been so badly hurt, and even then it wasn’t this serious. There hadn’t been the risk that she could die from her father’s brutal beating. This was different. She looked fragile and helpless and so alone. Her big dark eyes were closed. There were dark circles under them. When she breathed, he heard the slow rasp of fluid in her chest. Her lips were blue. She looked as if she’d already died. He’d touched her small hand with his big one and remembered the last thing she’d said to him before Clark showed up. Tippy had told her that he’d been disgusted with her, that he hadn’t wanted her hanging on him, running after him with her heart on her sleeve. His eyes had closed with a shudder. If she didn’t make it, her last memory of him would be one of pain and betrayal. It wasn’t true. He wasn’t disgusted. He lay awake nights remembering the passion they’d shared. He missed her. It was like being without an arm or a leg. He’d told her he didn’t want anything permanent. Now the choice might not be his anymore. He might be left alone, as he’d thought he wanted to be when he told her he was getting the divorce. Somewhere he remembered an old adage. Be careful what you want; you might get it. He looked at Christabel’s still body and saw the end of everything he loved.

Oldie took another swing and I sidestepped, my feet carrying me into the kitchen. I brought the eskrima stick overhand and cracked him on the head as I let out a little giggle. I couldn’t help it, really. Day after day it was study, study, study, practice, practice, maybe watch a little TV, wonder why I’m not as good at fighting as Mom, and then one day you wake up and there are two men in the house. And I’m beating them both senseless without giving it my full effort. What does it say about me that I haven’t seen a living human being other than Mom in twelve years and my first instinct is to knock them unconscious? I’d worry more about it, but Mom’s been gone for over a week – coincidence that these guys show up now? Mom comes home every day after work. Set your watch by her: with only an occasional exception, she was home at 5:34. But I haven’t seen her in a week. I thought about leaving, but what if it’s a test? There was an alarm, after all; she could have been monitoring, and then I’d fail the test – and that would be bad. We’ll define “bad” later. After

The Lips I Kissed Butterflies rise from the mouth of the dead like planes over Dulles or O’Hare, masking her unspeakable void in a procession of iridescent blips across the control tower monitor. Can these abandoned doors be the lips I kissed -- lips I once explored like an underground river, a maze reaching to the core of her secret fire? Her heart, Gilgamesh rain upon the Tigris plains, beats no more but sits in buttoned devotion, parent proud to her bountiful yield. The sapped earth, now embalmed, rests until the next sowing of the dead.

The instinctual response today is to sue. This is so ingrained in our culture that our pop media mocked the knee-jerk reaction of litigation decades ago. To call in the sanctioned arbiters of fault and justice is the modern man's immediate response to challenge or a severe offense. No one dares knock down the doors of the offending party and seek immediate justice. That is barbaric. We are a nation of laws forgetting to check the men behind those laws. Men have been domesticated so quickly to shun all instincts and cry barbaric at the thought of beating someone who has wronged them. A child is stomped in school. Out of nowhere and for no reason. Eyewitness accounts from other students support the victim. What were the monitors and teachers on watch doing? The school gives poor excuses for not preventing it or breaking up the assault earlier. Parents are angry and the school-assigned cop even states that the family is making a big deal.

a Cell match for the main event at the pay-per-view. Later in the week on Smackdown, on the Miz TV segment between Ambrose and Cena, the match was revealed to be a No Holds Barred Contract On A Pole Match. On the October 13 episode of Raw, Ambrose and Cena had their match that night instead in which Ambrose won and will face Seth Rollins in a Hell in a Cell match at the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view. At Hell in a Cell, Ambrose lost to Rollins after Bray Wyatt attacked Ambrose at the end of the main event match. The next few weeks saw Ambrose and Wyatt taunting and attacking each other in both backstage and in-ring segments, with Wyatt claiming that he could "fix" Ambrose, leading to a match at Survivor Series. Ambrose lost the match by disqualification after hitting Wyatt with a steel chair and then hit Wyatt through a table in which Wyatt would be buried under tables and chairs as Ambrose stood on a ladder. This would then soon after announce another match between the two in a tables, ladders and chairs match on the TLC pay-perview next month. During the match, a television monitor blew up in Ambrose's face, allowing Wyatt to win the match. Ambrose managed to beat Wyatt in a Boot Camp match yet again was defeated by Wyatt in a "Miracle on 34th Street Fight". The feud concluded when Wyatt beat Ambrose in the first Ambulance match held on Raw. At the Royal Rumble, Ambrose participated in the Royal Rumble match, but was eliminated by Kane and Big Show. On the January 19 episode of Raw, Ambrose defeated Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett. The following weeks, Ambrose demanded a match for Barrett's title, but Barrett declined, leading to Ambrose attacking him, tying his hands around the ring post, and forcing him to sign a contract

Open monitoring (OM) is one form of mindfulness meditation that has been shown through research to help reduce the subjective experience of intrusive thoughts popping into your head.42 OM (also called mindfulness meditation) is a practice in which you simply observe your thoughts nonjudgmentally, acknowledge them, and then (theoretically) let them float by or pass on. Instead of concentrating on something, your attention is open and aware of the thoughts passing through your mind. Rather than reacting to the thought (like you would in the three C’s of tidy thinking), you just observe it and then watch it subside. A study from Yale University suggests that mindfulness meditation can actually deactivate the brain regions that are thought to underlie mind chatter.43 Another study from Harvard indicates that

monitors. “Okay, we’ve got a pulse. Damn, ventricular

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

The cough penetrates my dream with the sandpapered force of a chain-smoking speed freak. It’s Daddy’s pneumonia-laden cough, Mother’s emphysema wheeze. Even without the monitor, I can hear the hacking gasps start. My body’s a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, it’s still possessed of a golden nimbus. That’s the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me—that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness. Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner’s blast across my naked chest. Forgoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife-beater T-shirt. (3:15!)

Since the mid-1990s, the primary tool to reform law enforcement has been the consent decree: a court-enforced agreement requiring a police department to overhaul itself under the supervision of external “monitors.” This legalistic mechanism, authorized by Congress in the wake of the outrage over Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles cops in 1991 and the devastating riots following their acquittal a year later, focuses on reducing uses of force, police shootings, racial profiling, choke holds, and more. The results have been distinctly mixed.

The timid children seem to come into life with a neural circuitry that makes them more reactive to even mild stress, from birth, their hearts beat faster than other infants' in response to strange or novel situations. At twenty-one months, when the reticent toddlers were holding back from playing, heart rate monitors showed that their hearts were racing with anxiety. That easily aroused anxiety seems to underlie their lifelong timidity: they treat any new person or situation as though it were a potential threat. Perhaps as a result, middle-aged women who remember having been especially shy in childhood, when compared with their more outgoing peers, tend to go through life with more fears, worries, and guilt, and to suffer more from stress-related problems such as migraine headaches, irritable bowel, and other stomach problems.

Jeong-dae, who nonchalantly slid the blackboard cleaner into his book bag. ‘What’re you taking that for?’ ‘To give to my sister.’ ‘What’s she going to do with it?’ ‘Well, she keeps talking about it. It’s her main memory of middle school.’ ‘A blackboard cleaner? Must have been a pretty boring time.’ ‘No, it’s just there was a story connected with it. It was April Fool’s Day, and the kids in her class covered the entire blackboard with writing, for a prank - you know, because the teacher would have to spend ages getting it all off before he could start the lesson. But when he came in and saw it he just yelled, “Who’s classroom monitor this week?” - and it was my sister. The rest of the class carried on with the lesson while she stood out in the corridor, dangling the cloth out of the window and beating it with a stick to bash the chalk dust out. It is funnv, though, isn’t it? Two years at middle school, and that’s what she remembers most.

When I was a child and I would listen to my sister's LPs She was a huge fan and she was so in love with him that she wrote him a letter. I enjoyed seeing my sis so happy about Manilow Mania. I wrote some lyrics based on one of his songs, also thinking of those ships that pass in the night in the city where I was born. Can you guess which one? Anyway, my sister was already unconscious at the hospital when I inserted an earplug so that she could hear some of his songs. It was very low, very mild Manilow, when all of a sudden, in the second cord when he sang "I made it through the rain" in a beat a bit higher her heartbeat which was being monitored played faster. I could see that as a sign that she was listening. I stopped the song and I started Singing one of her songs that she had especially made for my birthday when I turned nine yrs old and I never forgot about that. I could see a little smile coming from the left side of her lips. It was the affirmation I needed. That she was and will always be there for me as I so admired her soul to the bones!

Let your students monitor their breathing. If they are huffing and puffing, tell them to pace themselves. This is their workout. If they cannot keep up with the fast beat of the music, suggest they train to the slow beat. This is not a race. There is no finish line. It takes as long as it takes.

MN4, discovered late in 2004 and recently named Apophis, the Greek name for the Egyptian God Apep –the destroyer. At one point, the probability of Apophis striking the Earth on 13 April 2029 was thought to be as high as 1 in 37. Now, to everyone’s relief, those odds have increased to 1 in 8,000. Again, these may sound very long odds, but they are actually only 80 times greater than those offered during summer 2001 for England beating Germany 5–1 at football. A few years ago, scientists came up with an index –known as the Torino Scale –to measure the impact threat, and so far Apophis is the first object to register and sustain a value greater than zero. At present it scores a 1 on the scale –defined as ‘an event meriting careful monitoring’. The object is the focus of considerable attention as efforts continue to better constrain its orbit, and it is perfectly possible –as we find out more –that it could rise to 1 on the Torino Scale, becoming an ‘event meriting concern’. It is very unlikely, however, to go any higher, and let’s hope that many years elapse before we encounter the first category 10 event –defined as ‘a certain collision with global consequences’.

In the study, 12 people were asked to think “appreciation” and another 12 were asked to think “anger.” Meanwhile, scientists monitored their hearts. After performing computer analysis on the heartbeats, the scientists discovered that the hearts of the people thinking “appreciation” had been beating more smoothly and regularly — called “internal coherence” — than the hearts of the people who were thinking “anger.” And this type of coherence has a residual effect on the rest of the body.