I always forget this wasnât a thing everywhere but my high school had a fun and innovative way to torment us in PE. They got heart rate monitors. It was this awful strap that went under the bra line and paired to a watch. The first day was great cause we got to set our resting heart rate. We did this by laying in a dark room and napping.
But then once a week weâd have to strap on these monitors and go running. The monitors were old tech and didnât always pick up your heartbeat, so youâd have to use cold water between it and your skin to get a better connection, gods know why. Warm water never worked. After the day our watches would be collected and our efforts recorded.
The idea was that if your heart beat too fast you were supposed to stop, and if it was too slow youâd speed up. In practice this was ridiculous, staying in the green zone all class was ridiculously difficult.
Even people like me who were stubbornly resistant to running the mile couldnât stand the horrific constant beeping and made attempts to placate the reviled machine. It was always fairly miserable. I had PE first thing in the chilly morning, dashing cold water on my skin before running around half awake was the low point of my week.
But for some unknown reason, the teacher insisted that no play could happen on these days. We were given the freedom to run all over campus but woe betide us if we tried to make a game that actually made this enjoyable.
Weâd initiate games of tag only to get yelled at for not just⊠running. Any kind of play was forbidden. On one memorable occasion someone got a kickball and we started an impromptu soccer game with it.
If someoneâs heart rate got too high theyâd drop to their knees to wait out the shrieking of their watch so an extra element was added to the game of trying to win without going too hard. I remember being absolutely delighted, the thrill of that game still lives in my heart, hoping I could score a goal before my heartbeat betrayed me to the hated watch.
When the PE teacher found us we were soundly scolded and the ball was confiscated. Our happiness burst like a soap bubble and we turned our back to the enchantment of the green field and resumed slogging along in a grey haze as expected.
I made a Fang/Naomi fan song. It's inspired by Naomi's dialog in chapter 4 that if she were to write a song, it would be about how everyone sees colors differently. I took this and made it about Fang and Naomi's love, despite them being very different.
This is exactly the belief system that us American Jews are raised on: that everyone in the Middle East hates all Jews, wants us all dead, and wants to destroy all of the ancient Jewish historical artifacts and landmarks. This is part of the belief system that underpins the unflinching support for Israel, and why anyone criticizing Israel is labeled by the press as an antisemite.
And even if that were true - which it isn't - that still would not justify anything Israel has been doing over the past 75 years. I would tear down the Western Wall with my bare hands, brick by brick, if that would keep one more Palestinian child from being murdered.
hey you. indie creator. get rid of the corporate execs and the imaginary writers room in your brain. the cynical youtube reviewers and disney fans who want sanitized uwu gays probably are never even gonna be even slightly aware of your existence. write those unrelatable blorbos and those messy themes and that weirdly sexy violence. you have no one to answer to but yourself. give yourself what you want and maybe some day, some 3 random lesbians from the internet whose interests you have somehow exactly hit will look at your thing and think its pretty cool, and in the end thats all you ever needed