Transition Words Before Quotes

Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.

I'd forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren't forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.

For to conceive the sum of Joseph’s efforts for master and steward one must add that he had every evening to say good-night to Mont-kaw, and every night in different phrases. For that service he had originally been bought; and Mont-kaw had been too favourably impressed with the first instance to forgo the pleasure in the sequel. He was a poor sleeper, as the pouches under his eyes betrayed. Only hardly did the overburdened brain relax from the occupations of the day and find the good highway to slumber. The kidneys too were bad and helped to make the transit difficult. So that he could well use a few sweet words and mellifluous murmurings at the end of the day. Thus Joseph might never neglect to come before him at night and drop soothing speech in his ears—which, besides everything else, had to be prepared during the day, for it must have comeliness of form.

And then he heard it. A loud crash. The Number 22 bus had pulled away from the stop, and another driver in a car trying to get around to turn had collided into the side of the transit vehicle. Finally, Daryl had the nerve to do what every like-minded criminal in Baltimore knows they must. Run and get on the bus for insurance claims. Get a “suitcase,” as some of the old-timer grifters still called phony neck injuries, marrying the word “suit” as in law with “case” as in court. “Suitcase,” the all-purpose secret word for fraud. Amazingly, his erection still held. It was a little painful going up those first bus steps, but so what, it felt even sexier doing a second scam before he’d completely gotten away with the first one. The lucky few passengers on board were already going into their cries of “whiplash,” holding their necks and moaning out loud. He limped to an empty seat and held his knee as if it had been painfully slammed in the impact. Even the bus driver was faking injuries as he called into his dispatcher to report the accident, exaggerating the speed he had been going to make it sound worse. Daryl knew he was surrounded by fellow swindlers and felt, for the first time, part of a community.

When they come to explain about the two Transits of Venus, and the American Work filling the Years between, “By Heaven, a ‘Sandwich,’” cries Mr. Edgewise. “Take good care, Sirs, that something don’t come along and eat it!” His pleasure at being able to utter a recently minted word, is at once much curtailed by the volatile Chef de Cuisine Armand Allègre, who rushes from the Kitchen screaming. “Sond-weech-uh! Sond-weech-uh!,” gesticulating as well, “To the Sacrament of the Eating, it is ever the grand Insult!” Cries of “Anti-Britannic!” and “Shame, Mounseer!” Mitzi clutches herself. “No Mercy! Oh, he’s so ’cute!” Young Dimdown may be seen working himself up to a level of indignation that will allow him at least to pull out his naked Hanger again, and wave it about a bit. “Where I come from,” he offers, “Lord Sandwich is as much respected for his nobility as admired for his Ingenuity, in creating the great modern Advance in Diet which bears his name, and I would suggest,— without of course wishing to offend,— that it ill behooves some bloody little toad-eating foreigner to speak his name in any but a respectful manner.” “Had I my batterie des couteaux,” replies the Frenchman, with more gallantry than sense, “before that ridiculous little blade is out of his sheath, I can bone you,— like the Veal!

Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial displacement of the word “emigrant” by more positively loaded words. According to David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, “before 1790, Americans thought of themselves as emigrants, not immigrants. The word immigrant was an Americanism probably invented in that year. It had entered common usage by 1820.” Related terms also emerged in the 1810s. “Pioneer in the western sense first appeared in 1817”; “Words such as mover (1810), moving wagons (1817), relocate (1814), even the verb to move in its present migratory sense, date from this period.” This was indeed a “radical transformation . . . a new language of migration.”72 But Fischer and Kelly fail to note that it was not solely American and that settler, not immigrant or pioneer, was its main manifestation. In Britain, settler was used in its current meaning at least as far back as the seventeenth century, but it was used infre- quently. By the early nineteenth century, it had connotations of a higher status than “emigrant.” Settlers were distinct from sojourners, slaves, or convict emigrants, and initially even from lower-class free emigrants. In Australia, “‘Settlers’ were men of capital and, in the 1820s, regarded as the true colonists, to be distinguished from mere laboring ‘immigrant’ . . . though eventually all Australia’s immigrants were termed ‘settlers.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens. How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.

In the early days of the country, before we had railroads, telegraphs and steamboats—in a word, rapid transit of any sort—the States were each almost a separate nationality. At that time the subject of slavery caused but little or no disturbance to the public mind. But the country grew, rapid transit was established, and trade and commerce between the States got to be so much greater than before, that the power of the National government became more felt and recognized and, therefore, had to be enlisted in the cause of this institution.

Ben learned guitar faster than I did, not (necessarily) because he’s smarter than I am (he is), but because infant and adolescent brains are extremely plastic. Plastic brains learn quickly, but they are also highly sensitive to the good and bad in their environment. This is a boon for learning, but it is also a dangerous, precarious time. During this transition from child to adult, adolescents are much more sensitive to negative environmental influences such as trauma, stress, social rejection, and sleep deprivation. “Plasticity is the process through which the outside world gets inside us and changes us,” writes adolescent psychologist Laurence Steinberg in his book Age of Opportunity.4 In other words, before your teen can strike out on her own to change the world, the world will change her.

If you were to ask recently hired Amazon employees about what has surprised them most in their time at the company so far, one response would certainly top the list: “The eerie silence in the first 20 minutes of many meetings.” At Amazon, after a brief exchange of greetings and chitchat, everyone sits at the table, and the room goes completely silent. Silent, as in not a word. The reason for the silence? A six-page document that everyone must read before discussion begins. Amazon relies far more on the written word to develop and communicate ideas than most companies, and this difference makes for a huge competitive advantage. In this chapter we’ll talk about how and why Amazon made the transition from the use of PowerPoint (or any other presentation software) to written narratives, and how it has benefited the company—and can benefit yours too. Amazon uses two main forms of narrative. The first is known as the “six-pager.” It is used to describe, review, or propose just about any type of idea, process, or business. The second narrative form is the PR/FAQ. This one is specifically linked to the Working Backwards process for new product development. In this chapter, we’ll focus on the six-pager and in the following chapter we’ll look at the PR/FAQ.

The received wisdom about compounds is that they start out as two words, acquire a transitional hyphen, and then lose the hyphen, becoming one word. “Today” used to be hyphenated. “Ringtone” was two words for about a nanosecond before solidifying, skipping the hyphen stage completely.

Sensation Hunters (January 3, 1934), features Brennan as a stuttering waiter in a nightclub, whose scenes usually end before he can finish a sentence. Dressed in a short cutaway jacket with a lock of hair curled in the middle of his forehead, he is ridiculously slow on the uptake when he is addressed ironically by his employer—“Hey, Handsome,” “Hey, Honey”—as she brushes past him. Before he can say much, she is gone, leaving him to stare dumbly at the tray in his hands. This a typical example of the comic relief he brought to otherwise ordinary scenes, but in this case he also serves as a foil to the fast-paced world of showgirls, con artists, and pickpockets. In a way, Brennan became a specialist, employed to get scenes off to a fast start, or to make a snappy transition with just a little bit of the actor’s business—in this case straining for words that his impatient employer cannot bother to take in. His one moment of joy comes when several showgirls jostle him on their way to the stage, his one brush with stardom. And then he vanishes from the film, no longer of use to the plot.

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order—up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats—destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane things, it can be said that he's superficially right, even if ultimately he's wrong. You can't get rid of the sacrificial principle by just flicking it away as if it were a piece of dust. History isn't finished. Every day very interesting things, changes in outlook, are happening right before our eyes. In the United States and everywhere, a lot of current cultural phenomena can be unified by describing them as the discovery of new victims, or rather as their concrete rehabilitation, for in truth we've known about them for a long time: women, children, the elderly, the insane, the physically and mentally handicapped, and so forth. For example, the question of abortion, which has great importance in American debates, is no longer formulated except in the following terms: “Who is the real victim? Is it the child or is it the mother?” You can no longer defend a given position, or indeed any of them, except by making it into a contribution to the anti-victimary crusade. MT

Life is an endless circle within God. From before birth to beyond the transition called death, I am filled with life. My soul wears this earth garment I call my body, which I cherish and care for. When I finally lay it down, my soul continues to live, always in God’s care and keeping.

What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003

It’s not as simple as saying that ‘while the terminology is new, the experiences are not.’ The advent of new terminology can genuinely shift how we think about gender, as well as what names we give to our experiences. But it’s also not straightforwardly true to say that the word ‘trans’ has no history before sexology. Literary scholar Joseph Gamble has recently discovered that the 17th century writer Thomas Brown used the prefix ‘trans’ and the word ‘transition’ to refer to the spontaneous sex changes of hares as early as 1646 and even coined the adjective ‘transfeminated’ to refer to a body that has transformed from what we think of as ‘female’ to what we think of as ‘male.’ So the prefix ‘trans’ was clearly relevant to thinking about gender-malleability long before Hirschfeld leveraged it to refer to his patients he saw at his Institute for Sexual Science.

As we continued to watch, the scenes accelerated forward, and we could see individuals remembering their spiritual missions at increasingly younger ages. Here we could see the precise understanding that would soon embody the new spiritual world-view. Individuals would come of age and remember themselves as souls born from one dimension of existence into another. Although memory loss during the transition would be expected, recapturing pre-life memory would become an important early goal of education. As youths, our teachers would first guide us through the early experience of synchronicity; urge us to identify our intuitions to study certain subjects, to visit particular places, always looking for higher answers as to why we were pursuing these particular paths. As the full memory of the Insights emerged, we would find ourselves involved with certain groups, working on particular projects, bringing in our full vision of what we had wanted to do. And finally we would recover the underlying intention behind our lives. We would know that we came here to raise the vibratory level of this planet, to discover and protect the beauty and energy of its natural sites, and to ensure that all humans had access to these special locations, so that we could continue to increase our energy, ultimately instituting the Afterlife culture here in the physical. Such a worldview would especially shift the way we looked at other people. No longer would we see human beings merely in the racial dress or national origin of one particular lifetime. Instead, we would see others as brother or sister souls, engaged, like us, in a process of coming awake and of spiritualizing the planet. It would become known that the settling of certain souls into various geographical locations on the planet had occurred with great meaning. Each nation was, in fact, an enclave of specific spiritual information, shared and modeled by its citizens, information waiting to be learned and integrated. As I watched the future unfold, I could see that a world political unity, envisioned by so many, was finally being achieved— not by forcing all nations into subservience to one political body, but rather through a grassroots acknowledgment of our spiritual similarities while treasuring our local autonomy and cultural differences. As with individuals interacting in a group, each member of the family of nations was being recognized for this culture truth represented to the world at large. Before us, we saw Earth’s political struggles, so often violent, shifting into a war of words. As the tide of remembrance continued to sweep the planet, all humans began to understand that our destiny was to discuss and compare the perspectives of our relative religions and, while honoring the best of their individual doctrines at the personal level, ultimately to see that each religion supplemented the others and to integrate them into a synthesized global spirituality.

RIVER QUAY In Kansas City, if one were to bring up the topic of River Quay (pronounced “River Key”), that conversation would no doubt evolve into a conversation about River Market. Today, River Market is a hip-and-trendy neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Located just south of the Missouri River. Adorning River Market’s quaint neighborhood feel, you’ll find chic eateries. Coupled to an urban lifestyle. Complete with a streetcar. A stone’s throw to the west of Christopher S. Bond Bridge. That’s today. Today’s River Market. Yesterday’s River Quay. In 1971, Marion Trozzolo - then, a Rockhurst University professor - began renovating historic buildings alongside the “Big Muddy” in a section of Kansas City that we now know to be River Market. It was Professor Trozzolo who came up with the River Quay nickname. Trozzolo’s idea for River Quay? For River Quay to undergo a thorough, artsy-remake. Into a Kansas City-styled French Quarter. A neighborhood comparable to Chicago’s Old Town. To San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square. Trozzolo envisioned a family-friendly environ for River Quay. Unfortunately, the latter half of the ‘70’s was a rough time for this neighborhood next to the muddy Missouri. The word Quay? It's a word of French origin. The translation for Quay? Loading platform. Or wharf. Did River Quay ever become a Kansas City French Quarter? Did River Quay ever become a Kansas City Old Town? Did River Quay ever become a Kansas City Ghirardelli Square? Hardly. By the late ‘70’s, revitalization efforts in River Quay had stalled. Leaving River Quay saddled with boarded up buildings. Deserted through-streets. A neighborhood, with no vibrancy. Streets, with no traffic. Sidewalks, with no passers-by. By the late ‘70’s, developers were walking away from unfinished River Quay projects. Whereas River Quay had once - not long before - been primed for a grandiose new identity. One which bespoke of a rebirth for this neighborhood. A transition. From blight. To that of an entertainment district. Yet by the late ‘70’s, River Quay was not on its way to becoming Kansas City’s French Quarter. By the late ‘70’s, you’d still find an X-rated theatre in River Quay. With mob ties. Homeless, sleeping next to decrepit River Quay buildings. Empty River Quay buildings which had once been fancied as prime renovation opportunities. Projects, sadly cast aside and forgotten. In River Quay.  In the late 1970’s? Well, at that time, River Quay was as an unfinished idea. Full of unrealized potential. Full of unrealized promise. Disappointing, no doubt. Yet today, on those same grounds, alongside the Missouri River, we have Kansas City’s stunning River Market. A great idea. Then a detour. Yet, a happy ending - and a nice story, with a unique history- in Kansas City.

Tax Accountant Near Me: Finding the Right Professional for Your Needs When tax season approaches, finding a reliable tax accountant near you can make a world of difference. With the complex nature of tax regulations, a professional tax accountant ensures that your finances are in order and that you're maximizing your deductions. Why You Need a Tax Accountant Hiring a tax accountant can save you both time and money. Not only do they help prepare your taxes, but they also provide valuable advice on tax-saving strategies. This can be especially beneficial if you have multiple income sources, investments, or a business. In fact, many individuals and businesses overlook potential deductions due to a lack of knowledge about tax laws. A tax accountant near you will be familiar with both federal and local regulations, ensuring that you're complying with all legal requirements. How to Find a Reliable Tax Accountant Near You There are several ways to find a trustworthy tax accountant in your area. First, word of mouth can be incredibly valuable—ask friends or colleagues for recommendations. Second, online directories and reviews can help you identify top-rated professionals. Transitioning to this step, ensure you verify their qualifications and experience before making a decision. What to Expect from a Tax Accountant Once you've hired a tax accountant, expect them to review your financial documents thoroughly. They will handle the filing process and, in some cases, communicate with tax authorities on your behalf. Additionally, they may offer advice on improving your financial planning for future tax periods. Conclusion Choosing a tax accountant near you simplifies the complex tax process and ensures compliance. Whether you’re an individual or a business owner, hiring a professional accountant is a smart investment that can result in significant long-term savings.

It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated. It is only since the telegraph that information has detached itself from such solid commodities as stone and papyrus, much as money had earlier detached itself from hides, bullion, and metals, and has ended as paper. The term “communication” has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into “information movement” in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity

On November 22nd, 2018, my mother Vernita Lee passed away. I was conflicted about our relationship up until the very end. The truth is, it wasn't until I became successful that my mother started to show more interest in me. I wrestled with the question of how to take care of her - what did I owe the woman who gave me life, The bible says 'honor thy father and mother', but what did that actually mean? I decided one of the ways I could honor her would be to help care for her financially ... but there was never any real connection. I would say that the audience who watched me on television knew me better than my mother did. When her health began to decline a few years ago, I knew I needed to prepare myself for her transition. Just a few days before Thanksgiving my sister Patricia called to tell me she thought it was time. I flew to Milwaukee ... I tried to think of something to say, at one point I even picked up the manual left by the hospice care people. I read their advice thinking the whole time, how sad it was that I, Oprah Winfrey, who had spoken to thousands of people one on one should have to read a hospice manual to figure out what to say to my mother. When it was finally time to leave, something told me it would be the last time I'd ever see her but as I turned to go, the words I needed to say still wouldn't come. All I could muster was 'bye, I'll be seeing you' and I left for, ironically, a speaking engagement. On the flight home the next morning a little voice in my head whispered what I knew in my heart to be true: "you are going to regret this, you haven't finished the work". ... I turned around and went back to Milwaukee. I spent another day in that hot room and still no words came. That night I prayed for help. In the morning I meditated, and as I prepared to leave the bedroom I picked up my phone and noticed the song that was playing - Mahalia Jackson's 'Precious Lord'. If ever there was a sign, this was it. I had no idea how Mahalia Jackson appeared on my playlist. As I listened to the words, Precious Lord, take my hand Lead me on, let me stand. I am tired, I'm weak, I am worn Lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord And lead me home. I suddenly knew what to do. When I walked into my mothers room I asked if she wanted to hear the song. She nodded, and then I had another idea. I called my friend Wintley Phipps, a preacher and gospel artist, and asked him to sing Precious Lord to my dying mother. Over FaceTime from his kitchen table he sang the song a cappella and then prayed that our family would have no fear, just peace. I could see that my mother was moved. The song and the prayer had created a sort of opening for both of us. I began to talk to her about her life, her dreams, and me. Finally the words were there. I said, "It must have been hard for you, not having an education, not having a skill, not knowing what the future held. When you became pregnant, I'm sure a lot of people told you to get rid of that baby." She nodded. "But you didn't", I said. "And I want to thank you for keeping this baby". I paused, "I know that many times you didn't know what to do. You did the best you knew how to do and that's okay with me. That is okay with me. So you can leave now, knowing that it is well. It is well with my soul. It's been well for a long time." It was a sacred, beautiful moment, one of the proudest of my life. As an adult I'd learned to see my mother through a different lens; not as the mother who didn't care for me, protect me, love me or understand anything about me, but as a young girl still just a child herself; scared, alone, and unequipped to be a loving parent. I had forgiven my mother years earlier for not being the mother I needed, but she didn't know that. And in our last moments together I believe I was able to release her from the shame and the guilt of our past. I came back and I finished the work that needed to be done.

Amidst superabundance, even we in rich countries live in an omnipresent anxiety, craving "financial security" as we try to keep scarcity at bay. We make choices (even those having nothing to do with money) according to what we can "afford," and we commonly associate freedom with wealth. But when we pursue it, we find that the paradise of financial freedom is a mirage, receding as we approach it, and that the chase itself enslaves. The anxiety is always there, the scarcity always just one disaster away. We call that chase greed. Truly, it is a response to the perception of scarcity. Let me offer one more kind of evidence, for now meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive, for the artificiality or illusory nature of the scarcity we experience. Economics, it says on page one of textbooks, is the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. The expansion of the economic realm is therefore the expansion of scarcity, its incursion into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Economic behavior, particularly the exchange of money for goods, extends today into realms that were never before the subject of money exchanges. Take, for example, one of the great retail growth categories in the last decade: bottled water. If one thing is abundant on earth to the point of near-ubiquity, it is water, yet today it has become scarce, something we pay for. Child care has been another area of high economic growth in my lifetime. When I was young, it was nothing for friends or neighbors to watch each other's kids for a few hours after school, a vestige of village or tribal times when children ran free. My ex-wife Patsy speaks movingly of her childhood in rural Taiwan, where children could and did show up at any neighbor's house around dinner time to be given a bowl of rice. The community took care of the children. In other words, child care was abundant; it would have been impossible to open an after-school day care center. For something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. As the economy grows, by definition, more and more of human activity enters the realm of money, the realm of goods and services. Usually we associate economic growth with an increase in wealth, but we can also see it as impoverishment, an increase in scarcity. Things we once never dreamed of paying for, we must pay for today. Pay for using what? Using money, of course — money that we struggle and sacrifice to obtain. If one thing is scarce, it is surely money. Most people I know live in constant low-level (sometimes high-level) anxiety for fear of not having enough of it. And as the anxiety of the wealthy confirms, no amount is ever enough.

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

It seemed to me a shame—as though the flight deck were telling its charges that there was nothing much to get excited about anymore: today’s transit was much like yesterday’s, or last week’s, and the crossing of what had become called “the pond” 3 (the terminology demoting the great ocean to a body of water almost without significance) would invariably be much as was generally expected at this time of year. Ho-hum, in other words. And we passengers scarcely noticed. Having made good our nest of books and blankets, having made obligatory noises of good cheer to our stranger-neighbor, having glanced at the menu and wondered idly if it was too early to order a drink, we settled down and barely noticed a takeoff that would perhaps have enthralled us twenty years before.

While they vary in number (there are seven-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-step models) and nomenclature (every firm needs its own!), most are elaborations of Kurt Lewin’s classic insight that a cultural transition requires an [50]“unfreezing” of the old pattern before the development and “refreezing” of the new pattern. The component steps within the unfreezing stage roughly correspond to the shock-wave strategy. The steps within the development and refreezing stage roughly correspond to a grassroots strategy. In other words, killing the old culture happens top-down, then building the new culture happens bottom-up.

November–December January–February March–April May–June Sentence Skills Punctuation / Capitalization of First Word – Capitalize first word, proper nouns; use commas in a list; and insert correct end punctuation. Sentences Versus Fragments – Distinguish between a sentence and a fragment. – Correct fragments. – Identify and correct fragments and run-ons in paragraphs. Scrambled Sentences – Rearrange sequences of words into sentences, adding correct capitalization and punctuation. Sentence Types – Write a statement, question, exclamation, and command about a picture, topic, or text. – Write questions about a topic, picture, or text. Conjunctions (because, but, so) – Complete sentence stems with because, but, and so. – Independently write sentences with because, but, and so. Continue previous sentence activities. Sentence Expansion – Expand kernel sentences with appropriate Q words: who, what, when, where, why, and how. – Determine whether a specified part of a sentence tells who, what, when, where, why, and how. Sentence Combining – Combine sentences with compound subjects using pronouns, conjunctions (and, but, because, and so), and transitions when appropriate. Subordinating Conjunctions – Complete sentences beginning with subordinating conjunctions after, before, whenever, even though, since, and if. – Practice writing T.S.s with subordinating conjunctions. Continue previous sentence activities. Appositives – Identify an appositive in a sentence. – Match appositives to noun phrases. Transition Words and Phrases – Fill in correct transitions in paragraphs with blanks (time-sequence, illustration, change-of-direction, and conclusion). – Follow a given sentence with another one beginning with an illustration or cause-effect conclusion transition (Colonists needed transportation for their goods. As a result,________ Blacksmiths

January–February March–April May–June Sentence Skills Punctuation / Capitalization of First Word – Capitalize first word, proper nouns; use commas in a list; and insert correct end punctuation. Sentences Versus Fragments – Distinguish between a sentence and a fragment. – Correct fragments. – Identify and correct fragments and run-ons in paragraphs. Scrambled Sentences – Rearrange sequences of words into sentences, adding correct capitalization and punctuation. Sentence Types – Write a statement, question, exclamation, and command about a picture, topic, or text. – Write questions about a topic, picture, or text. Conjunctions (because, but, so) – Complete sentence stems with because, but, and so. – Independently write sentences with because, but, and so. Continue previous sentence activities. Sentence Expansion – Expand kernel sentences with appropriate Q words: who, what, when, where, why, and how. – Determine whether a specified part of a sentence tells who, what, when, where, why, and how. Sentence Combining – Combine sentences with compound subjects using pronouns, conjunctions (and, but, because, and so), and transitions when appropriate. Subordinating Conjunctions – Complete sentences beginning with subordinating conjunctions after, before, whenever, even though, since, and if. – Practice writing T.S.s with subordinating conjunctions. Continue previous sentence activities. Appositives – Identify an appositive in a sentence. – Match appositives to noun phrases. Transition Words and Phrases – Fill in correct transitions in paragraphs with blanks (time-sequence, illustration, change-of-direction, and conclusion). – Follow a given sentence with another one beginning with an illustration or cause-effect conclusion transition (Colonists needed transportation for their goods. As a result,________ Blacksmiths needed certain tools. Specifically,__________) Continue previous sentence activities. Appositives – Match an appositive to a noun or noun phrase. – Fill in blanks with appositives. – Given an appositive, write a sentence. – Given a topic, write a T.S. using an appositive. Transition Words and Phrases – Insert transition words or phrases (time-sequence, illustration, change-of-direction, and conclusion) into given paragraphs. Single-Sentence Summary – Given the subject, use question words without a kernel

May–June Sentence Skills Punctuation / Capitalization of First Word – Capitalize first word, proper nouns; use commas in a list; and insert correct end punctuation. Sentences Versus Fragments – Distinguish between a sentence and a fragment. – Correct fragments. – Identify and correct fragments and run-ons in paragraphs. Scrambled Sentences – Rearrange sequences of words into sentences, adding correct capitalization and punctuation. Sentence Types – Write a statement, question, exclamation, and command about a picture, topic, or text. – Write questions about a topic, picture, or text. Conjunctions (because, but, so) – Complete sentence stems with because, but, and so. – Independently write sentences with because, but, and so. Continue previous sentence activities. Sentence Expansion – Expand kernel sentences with appropriate Q words: who, what, when, where, why, and how. – Determine whether a specified part of a sentence tells who, what, when, where, why, and how. Sentence Combining – Combine sentences with compound subjects using pronouns, conjunctions (and, but, because, and so), and transitions when appropriate. Subordinating Conjunctions – Complete sentences beginning with subordinating conjunctions after, before, whenever, even though, since, and if. – Practice writing T.S.s with subordinating conjunctions. Continue previous sentence activities. Appositives – Identify an appositive in a sentence. – Match appositives to noun phrases. Transition Words and Phrases – Fill in correct transitions in paragraphs with blanks (time-sequence, illustration, change-of-direction, and conclusion). – Follow a given sentence with another one beginning with an illustration or cause-effect conclusion transition (Colonists needed transportation for their goods. As a result,________ Blacksmiths needed certain tools. Specifically,__________) Continue previous sentence activities. Appositives – Match an appositive to a noun or noun phrase. – Fill in blanks with appositives. – Given an appositive, write a sentence. – Given a topic, write a T.S. using an appositive. Transition Words and Phrases – Insert transition words or phrases (time-sequence, illustration, change-of-direction, and conclusion) into given paragraphs. Single-Sentence Summary – Given the subject, use question words without a kernel sentence to create a summary sentence. Continue previous sentence activities. Sentence Combining – Combine sentences using appositives, pronouns, and conjunctions.