The Bad Boy 39;s Girl Vk

[Latanya Hariri]

Theterrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.

Brenna stirs her milkshake with her straw and takes a sip. We are both twenty. We have been friends since high school and still spend summer nights together the way we did when we were sixteen: late-night food runs in downtown Bangor, Maine, the stoplights blinking red in the dark.

But sometimes at night, when I wandered to the kitchen for a glass of water, my brother tugged me by the hand into the dark hallway. He pushed me to the carpeted floor, shimmied down my jeans, and told me it was a game.

My brother is hardened and tan. His speech is brisk and concise. He sleeps during the day with a butcher knife under his pillow and stays awake all night. I lock my bedroom door. I leave the light on and listen to the sounds of my brother pacing the kitchen. I drift off, then rip myself from sleep, thinking I hear the click of the army knife in the lock, the turning of the knob.

There is a part of me that cannot take this seriously. They cannot possibly believe that there is a rapist on campus who will suddenly reconsider his actions due to a group of angry girls with battery-operated candles. I smirk.

The nightmare follows me everywhere. At home I dream of him crouched beside me, peering over the lip of the bed. At the university I dream of him climbing the ladder to my loft, claws clicking on each rung.

I AM AFRAID to imagine my brother dead. I am afraid that if I let myself picture the coffin and the embalmed body, God will strike me down to Cana. It is the lowest circle of the Inferno, where souls freeze instead of burn, and I will spend eternity there, covered in ice except for my face, where the shame can show.

I WOULD LIKE to think love will conquer everything, that I will spend summers with my brother, and he will let me sleep on his couch and wake me up for morning runs; that we will hike in the Colorado mountains; that he will build me a world filled with unexplored terrain, a new adventure every day; that he will once again fill the familial void.

I was asleep, I say, and I heard screaming. I thought it was just a few drunk kids and it would stop. Then I realized it was a girl screaming, and she was scared. I re-create the scene: I stood at my bedroom window and watched while several boys surrounded a girl, one pressing his body close to hers as he backed her into a corner of the courtyard, shouting into her face.

I BABY-SIT for a beautiful baby girl, only thirteen months old. Her eyes are shifting from blue to brown; her hair is golden wisps. Her mother is a music teacher, and the baby presses the piano keys and sings nonsense syllables, imitating the sounds of the instrument. I would like to have a child like her someday.

Her mother waltzes in from the December chill with the groceries and my pay. She asks about my family, and I give the standard response: Mom is working long hours at the hospital; my brother just got remarried and is going on his fifth tour to Iraq.

He drives a truck across the desert in one of the convoys. He wears tan camouflage, his Ray-Ban sunglasses. Sand billows around the truck, and he runs the windshield wipers, leaning forward to peer through the glass. His world is filled with sun and heat. The vast desert emptiness welcomes him. And then he hits a roadside bomb. His truck flips on its side, and there are screams and flames. Soldiers are running, breaking glass, pulling him from the wreckage. They shake him; they check for a pulse; they wonder if he is dead.

This iconic mural is painted on the sides of fins that are attached to the building exterior. When approached from the 27th Avenue direction, the mural appears as a girl. However, when approached from the 28th avenue side, a different mural appears - of a boy. When standing facing the building, the mural is not visible at all.

Swistle (main blog)

Swistle on Bluesky

Swistle on Facebook: Facebook has locked me out of my account and does not respond when contacted, so I cannot see what you post there or interact with you there, but I think you can still friend me and then get notifications of posts! Unless I need to accept the friend request, in which case we are out of luck!

Facebook page for Swistle: Baby Names, where I am also locked out but I think you would see notifications of posts!

Want us to tackle your baby-naming problem? Email Swistle at Gmail dot com and tell me all about it. Include details such as finalist names, estimated arrival date, surname (or a name that sounds like the surname, for trying names out), names of your other children, names you've considered and rejected, names you'd use if the baby were the opposite sex, how many children you plan to have. But be sure you only send me information that's okay to post on the site---or specify which parts should not be posted.

I typically choose from questions submitted the previous week. The volume of emails we now receive means we can't answer all the questions. (Please don't re-send your question.) We tend to give priority to questions that (1) give a surname or a surname stand-in (like Neelsin for Neilson, or "it sounds like Donson, but with a J"), and (2) ask for help with a boy name OR a girl name, and (3) ask for help with a name for a USA baby (I don't know much at all about how names sound / seem / are used in other countries), and (4) address an issue not recently covered.

From HWTM, this first birthday for boy-girl twins takes a gender neutral approach that I really like. Mom Jennifer dreamed up the pinwheel theme with a coral, blue and line color palette.

This set of twins had one busy momma who styled a winter wonderland first birthday party. The creams, silvers and burlap create an amazing backdrop for a monochromatic dessert table done to perfection.

Paula Woods styled this boy-girl twins Peanuts first birthday party, and it is stunning. I love the colors, I love the chevron, and I love that the party favors included Peppermint Patties in little red dog houses.

A pink and blue vintage cowboy-cowgirl theme is a darling choice for twins. This lucky pair got to go horseback riding and dig into a sweet tables with two cakes, chocolate covered Oreos and cupcakes. See the whole party by Jack and Kate here.

These two were quite worn out toward the end of the session and they even dozed off for a few minutes, letting me snap a couple of beautiful sleepy baby portraits. Sharing a few of my favorite images from this boy girl twins session.

Potty training twins is an interesting experience, to say the least, especially if they are boy/girl twins. No two children develop exactly the same, and boys and girls have different needs and challenges in the bathroom. If you have boy/girl twins who are ready to potty train, you may wonder how to go about the process. Should you train them at the same time? Should you let them go to the bathroom together or should you separate them? A lot of these decisions will be a matter of preference or trial and error, but here are a few things that helped me get through that lovely time of teaching two little ones how to use a toilet.

A lot of questions surrounding potty training revolve around the readiness factor. Parents wonder if their kids are ready, and how they will know when the time is right. Let me take a minute to assure you that the real question is often not only: Are they ready? But also: Are you ready? One of the most important things you as a parent can give your twins during potty training is consistency. And a parent that is not ready, or that is constantly second-guessing whether or not their child is ready, is often inconsistent. They will often jump back and forth between diapers and underwear, which can be confusing to the child and can lengthen the potty training process. Wait until your child is ready and when you yourself are ready to embark on the journey, committed to consistency.

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When our boy-girl twins made the transition from infants to babies, we started to be able to embrace some of their more unique qualities because we all started getting more sleep, and they were beginning to show some of their personalities.

Most engineers have heard of the 'boy-scout rule': 'Always leave the code better than you found it.' It's often been heralded as a magic cure for technical debt; if only all software engineers behaved like good citizens, our software wouldn't deteriorate so relentlessly.

In 1941, the founder of the scouts, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell said, 'Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.' Over time, this may have morphed into, 'Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it,' but the sentiment is more-or-less the same. The point is that small but consistent efforts to keep the campground clean avoid a massive clean-up operation down the line.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) applied this rule to software engineering: 'Always leave the code better than you found it.' In other words, engineers should continuously clean up small pieces of tech debt so they never have to undertake a giant refactoring project when they're too close to technical bankruptcy. Simple enough.

All of this is due to the false assumption that investing in software quality isn't worth the cost and will slow down the pace at which we ship. However, as Martin Fowler explains, this assumption is flawed, because clean code actually allows us to ship faster.

These are difficult questions to answer. My cleaning capacity will vary based on how quickly I can complete the new work, and identifying the few things most worthy of my cleaning time is difficult when there are so many options.

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