2x04, "Getaway"

[Cal]

Duke has quite a head start though, given he's already gotten past most of the team's defences, and has a good handle on how each of them think/avoid unwanted topics. I think one of the others might be the official team therapist, should there be one, but they'll have to lean on Duke pretty hard most likely. Whether they know/realise this or not.

There have been a couple of Duke P.O.V. bits that make me think that Duke either doesn't have the ability, or doesn't think he has, to be much more than a den mother.  Although he does make a good one.

Doesn't mean he won't try, though, if he thinks it's needed and no-one else is stepping up to the plate.  But he might not be obvious about it.  This is Duke, after all, who excels at the art of the sneaky.

[Jezabella49]

It occurs to me that any psych stuff that Sol does, he does in a casual and back handed way so that it doesn't look like he is doing any, thereby not arousing resistance or animosity in his prey.

BTW, a den mother has to deal with egos, sibling rivalry, jealousy, teasing, self esteem issues, motivational issues, teaching basic etiquette as well as salt maps, leather stamping and the taxonomy of mammals and plants.

[Joe Sherry]

I'm a bit late on getting to this episode, but...umm...Emma?  Can I have my heart back?  Thanks. 

[Cole]

I'm a bit late on getting to this episode, but...umm...Emma?  Can I have my heart back?  Thanks. 

That. Exactly.

[Paul Oppenheimer]

Read more stats. Look up weird cultural stuff. (When they give us card game examples, we get rules. But we're expected to know how baseball works?)

Snorch!

[glinda_w]

Read more stats. Look up weird cultural stuff. (When they give us card game examples, we get rules. But we're expected to know how baseball works?)

Snorch!

Indeed. Seeing "baseball" and "stats" in the same paragraph reminds me of the year I worked as a newspaper proofreader (back when they had such things). Baseball stats, in 6 point. Worse than the classifieds - at least *those* made sense.

[snarke]

At the end of "The Sin Eaters," I was sitting somewhere between "annoyed" and just plain mad. Chaz was looking pretty messed up in the head, and I was getting tired of it. I wanted him fixed.

I also want to know who Emma knows who's built like Chaz, besides me. There aren't that many people out there who have to live inside a body where phrases like "bony hips" and "corrugations of his ribcage" are taken for granted, but her writing is eerily resonant with the view I have from within such a frame. The already all-but-unavoidable self-identification with Chaz was pretty much cemented in place the week I succumbed to curiosity and logged my caloric intake. For years I've assumed that I'm a self-propelled osteo-anatomy class exhibit because I just don't eat that much. Then I discovered that my average daily input was 2800 calories. Were I "moderately active," the recommended input would be 2700. For "sedentary," it's 2400. Which makes my BMI of 17.9 exceptionally improbable.

On top of which, the last two weeks of my life have really, really sucked. They're almost certainly the worst two weeks of my life, and I've got well over four decades worth of life to choose from. So many beautiful portraits of me-to-be were slashed, torched, shredded, and defaced; I've been standing in the gallery of my mind with the canvases of my future lying in tatters on the floor.

On top of which, I understand in ways that people should never have to understand (although so many of us do) what it means to doubt the integrity and reliability of your own thoughts. I wish now that I could go back in time and tell my grandmother that I really understand how she felt when she realized she was developing Alzheimer's. I thought I knew; I thought I understood how horrible it would be to feel my brain's clutch start to slip. I didn't. Now, I'm afraid to re-read "Flowers for Algernon;" a few months ago, "Next to Normal" left me trembling and speechless at intermission. I'm not sure how to believe anything, or trust anyone, if I cannot trust my own answer to the question, "Who am I?"

Thus, the vandalism in Chaz's mindscape is wrapped around me like a shroud. The distance, the modest buffer, that the act of reading provides is somewhat offset by how much worse Chaz's experiences are than the ones I'm trying to live through myself.

So, I am grateful in ways I do not yet understand myself that "Getaway" went where it did. If Chaz can survive, perhaps recover, or at least start to heal, from what the uncaring cosmos (which is to say, Emma) has deep fried him in, then I guess, maybe, so can I.

[Emma Bull]

I may not believe in universal happy endings, but I do believe in hope, and, ultimately, kindness.

Good luck, and hang in there. You're part of the web of the world.

[trinker]

At the end of "The Sin Eaters," I was sitting somewhere between "annoyed" and just plain mad. Chaz was looking pretty messed up in the head, and I was getting tired of it. I wanted him fixed.
[...]
Thus, the vandalism in Chaz's mindscape is wrapped around me like a shroud. The distance, the modest buffer, that the act of reading provides is somewhat offset by how much worse Chaz's experiences are than the ones I'm trying to live through myself.

Welcome, snarke.

I wanted you to know that I read what you wrote, and my breath caught at the devastating beauty of the wrenching description you wrote about shredded images.

Whatever it is you're going through, I'm sorry that it's awful right now, and send you the sort of hopeful thoughts that a stranger with no damned idea what's going on can and will send.

--Trinker