Leah Claire

My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old.  Here’s my impressions so far:

Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal.  Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.

Age 1 - 2: Hates you.  Hates you so much.  You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them.  There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.

Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe.  Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them.  Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.

Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually.  I did not realize kids were this cool.  Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn.  Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”

Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable.  Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other.  At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult.  Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers.  (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)

It essentially posits a view of human nature that there are good and bad traits, and that these traits can be neatly diagrammed into separate columns, one set of which can and should be eliminated. It tends to go along with a view that posits character development should be about scrubbing away of “flawed” traits until the character achieves more a higher level of goodness, or else the character doesn’t and falls into tragedy. This is not untrue, necessarily. There are definitely some “flaws” that are 100% bad and sometimes a good arc is about slowly losing them. However, I could call this advice incomplete.

Consider thinking about it this way. Characters have traits and often whether or not that trait is a flaw is purely circumstantial.

For instance, fairy tales I read as a child. In some, when an old beggar asked for money on the road, it was a secret test of character. The prince who gave the old man money or food would be rewarded. But in other folktales I read, the old beggar would be malevolent, and any prince who stooped to help him would be beaten, punished for letting his guard down. Now, in a story as well as in real life, either of these scenarios can occur–a stranger who asks for help can be benevolent or malevolent. So which is the flaw? Is it a “flaw” to be compassionate? or is it a “flaw” to be guarded? 

Trick question–it’s purely conditional. Both traits are simultaneously a strength and a weakness. Either has an advantage, but either comes with a price as well. And whether the price is greater than the advantage depends on circumstance. The same can be said for most character traits, in fact!

An agreeable character who gets along with everyone will be pressured into agreeing with something atrocious because it’s a commonly held viewpoint. A character who’s principled and holds firm even under great pressure will take much, much longer to change their mind when they are actually in the wrong. A character who loves animals and loves to shower them with affection will get bitten if they try the same on every animal. As the circumstances change, flaws become strengths, and strengths become weaknesses. And even a trait that’s wholly virtuous, such as compassion, comes with a price and can be turned for the worst.

You don’t have to think about inserting flaws into your character. Your character, even the most perfect “Mary Sue,” is already flawed the moment you give her any traits at all. The problem with Mary Sue isn’t a lack of flaws, it’s a lack of circumstances to challenge her properly, to show her paying the natural price. Your job as an author is to create circumstances in the narrative that 1) justify why these traits exist in your character 2) show what your character gains from these traits and then 3) change the circumstances to challenge her. 

Nowadays, with DSLR’s and a variety of lenses, we are able to depict a wide range of focal lengths by using one kind of camera.

So that is why most people on social media may seem to look thinner than they do in person (especially in selfies because the front facing camera on phones especially have short focal lengths).

Poverty has long been put down to mythical causes, be it a quirk of society – as if inequality is built into the earth – or an individual’s failings (why don’t they breed less? Work harder? Buy fewer cigarettes?). The JRF study is unflinching at skewering this. The reasons for destitution are complex, but the researchers point firmly to the role of “welfare” cuts that have dominated the political landscape since the global financial crash. Social security policies can, in many cases, directly lead to destitution “by design”, the report says, leaving people “without support when they most need it”. Two in five destitute people reported problems with the benefit system, with a quarter of all interviewees citing losing their disability benefits as a key trigger of their destitution.

[…]

There’s a risk that, with news of surging food bank use and children going without beds or clothes, this type of extreme poverty is becoming normalised. That it is [believed to be] somehow a natural part of any country or that, even if it isn’t, the problem is now so big, so overwhelming, that we can’t do anything to stop it. Of course, this isn’t true. For proof, look at the fact that the researchers found destitution has actually decreased in the past two years – an improvement put down in large part to the less stringent use of benefit sanctions (as well as improvement to the job market and reductions in migration). Further commonsense changes would go a long way towards pulling more people out of hardship, from embedding local welfare funds for families to seek out in times of financial emergency, and addressing debt recovery processes, to adapting universal credit so that the benefit system is no longer characterised by delays, sanctions and freezes.

Mask of Sorrow 

And one day we were moving fire wood from a big pile into neat little stacks for the winter and we came across a big wasp nest. Well, actually, we just kept coming across individual, very angry wasps, telling TALES of a nearby nest in the wood.

So the farmers hosting us shoo’d us away and told us we Were Not to go near the firewood again until they took care of the wasps bc they didn’t want any harm to befall us.

So I was happy for the break. I mean, we got plenty of breaks, but I never passed up the opportunity to drop where I stood and take a grass-nap.

But the French boy Could Not Abide wasps keeping him from his Duty.

SO he went back to the pile and started slowly moving logs one by one while I sat up and told him to, uh, Not Do That.

But he was determined. And when he finally found the Big Wasp Nest, and I was on my feet, he said “get ready to run.”

And let me tell you, when a Frenchmen lifts a log over his head, looking Wasps and Death Itself in the eye and tells ya that, you’re on your toes.

And he just fucking. Used a log to smash the nest. He just obliterated it and the wasps went Wild and we RAN.

But after about 15 minutes the wasps moved on, and we could get back to work.

Our hosts were HORRIFIED, and we promised we’d never do anything That Dumb again.

Which of course meant it became standard protocol for the next 10 times we found nests.

‘Having an argument you lose’, YES.