So I Just Gave My Presentation...

And I'm really sorry if it was super awkward.  Anxious lately.  I feel like my blog is a tad angsty but mind-vomit is the only way I can journal. I have to ramble or else I let myself remember that other people can read these and I'll start editing my opinions to sound smarter for the sake of appearance and worrying about what people think of them and it won't be a true representation of what I think.  So I apologize now for the conversational, familiar tone, it just makes things a lot easier.
I'm quite ramble-y and these notes were not really done in any sort of cohesive or linear fashion. Also, my animation I was planning for my presentation won't turn up how I want it to and I've hit a wall.  Debating scrapping it, which is massively frustrating.  It just doesn't capture anything that I wanted it to, with the complexities of the broken vessels and broken humanity...soul healing, etc.  I'm surprised at how much this class has gotten me thinking about souls.  Also, in Dr. Morgan's class, while talking about His Dark Materials-(see Kirra's blog for an in depth analysis) and the shaping of the souls, etc. throughout the series, we simultaneously brought up daemons in this class and I got to thinking about coincidences again.  Really great series though.  Definitely worth the discussions.

Doctor Who

So, while creepin' on Anna's blog a bit ago, I saw she posted a Doctor Who thing and I was pretty happy about it, because that show has made me think of this class about a thousand times now. Completely applicable, in pretty much every way possible.

Mostly because: "You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!"
See the Dillard post, we must not let our minds go slack. And how best to keep them sharp? Books!

Present-Ally-Edit: After watching the 50th Anniversary special, I hold this to be even more true.  The idea of summoning each and every one of your incarnations throughout time to fix an event that, to some of your incarnations is the past, and to some is the future...the idea of reshaping your own timeline somehow...sounds like it'd fit in this class if we had a little more time.

P.S. There are .gifs I could post to demonstrate this, but I can't find any at the moment.

Dillard

Interesting concept, but not my favorite.  Though I'm relatively captivated by the thought of the sheer number of dead people there are in relation to the ~7,000,000 alive on earth.  Makes me feel small and insignificant but also a part of something huge.  Her section, Numbers, was the most telling to me, making it concrete and real and so utterly massive.  It's sad, it's not a fun read by any means, but it fits the head space that I've been living in.  Though, that might not necessarily be a good thing.  Lots of melancholy books for a melancholy girl.  Whoops.

"But our minds must not go slack. How can we think straight if our minds go slack?"  That is the question indeed, Ms. Dillard, that is the question.  How do we end this cycle of our minds going slack once they are there? To answer the question, our minds would have to be sharper than slack, and thus we couldn't solve the problem.  I guess we could, just slower...not sure though, because my mind has gone slack.  The first step is admitting you have a problem, right?

I realize I keep just posting walls of text and not splitting them into paragraphs...Sorry! Typing these up from handwritten notes full of doodles and things, they're not the most organized of thoughts, but then, mine never are.

Dreams and things:

I know we were always supposed to be writing down dreams, but I don't ever remember mine unless they're particularly unpleasant, and I partly don't want to burden whoever's reading this with them and partly don't want to think about what they mean, as the inner workings of my head.  Maybe I'll get there later. I'm not sure.

How can you say that your truth is better than ours?

Or, a commentary on aggressive apathy.

"If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won..."

This.  This has been stuck in my head for ages and it's the set of words bouncing around my head all the time.  This semester would've gone spectacularly if I hadn't spent the whole time practicing a wonderful skill of not caring about anything.  I need a hobby, in other news.  It's just cold and grey but there's no snow yet and I care about tea and hiding in books than I do much else.
We were reading On Faerie Stories in Dr. Morgan's class, and talking about how faerie isn't an escape.  She can say all she wants that it's not, but my books are for me.  Oh well.

I'm just randomly searching through my planner/journal, sorry everything's out of order!

Because here are my Magus questions!

What happened to Mitford?
At one point, Conchis says to Nicholas, "All good science is art. And all good art is science." How can this line be related as significant throughout the rest of the novel?
Why did Nicholas slap Alison?
What is so irresistible about Alison?
Why the game?

Sarah Kay - If I Should Have a Daughter

This really doesn't pertain to this class, but my mom sent this to me and I thought it was a lovely sentiment in terms of regaining some positivity.  Good thinking points.

Misery Loves Company

Sad people like sad people and maybe it's because we don't want to try to be happy yet.  Creative genius spawns from misery, but I find mine missing to me still.  I, in a morbid way, love the miserable state that kicks my brain into gear, giving me a deep abyss of sad, deep, dark thoughts that let me splatter desperation on a page, sounding as profound as I come, my worst paper scribblings teeming with hidden meaning and secrets.
But everyone in my house is miserable, and maybe we've found a place past rock bottom where the creativity ceases to flow and motivation is a thing of the past.  Getting out of bed is more work than it should be and we're feeding each other's demons.  "Find someone whose demons play well with yours," they say.  Well, I have, and our demons like to play instead of letting us go.  One of my roommates doesn't get up and go to class? It's easier to sit around and not go as well, support in our disinterest.  Also, if you can't tell, I'm really bad at blogging.  I don't like telling people what I think any more than I like talking in front of people or singing in front of people or reading a presentation to people or or or...you get the point.  I feel like I've lost my ability to deal with people in any capacity whatsoever...making the staying at home thing sound like a hell of a lot better plan than going to a class and having to get in groups with people I don't know and talk about things I find myself not caring about.

Four Quartets

     That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

Of the entire Four Quartets, this may have been my favorite group of lines.  It's a tad self deprecating (as I have been of late, and that might be why I like it so much) and disparages the 'worn-out poetical fashion'.  The poetry does not matter, he says.  And yet, it does. We're to memorize Kubla Khan, and so the poetry must matter! Why do things matter? Maybe I'm thinking too deeply into this, but why do we memorize a poem to then later forget it over a laugh and "Well I used to know this!" Maybe this stems from my serious distaste for memorization in the long run.  I was a backstage kid unless there was singing going on, and even then I was usually still the stage manager.  Memorization is not my game, and I'm a little bit enchanted with the poet who will say himself that the poetry does not matter.  What matters is the point.  I've seen many a kid completely butcher a memorized line in a show, whilst the audience had no idea - the point was still conveyed.  The message, the intent, the meaning, the feeling: all of them were there.  It is not the words we try to communicate.  They are simply sounds connected in a cohesive fashion that we somehow understand, and so it is hard for me to try and memorize a poem when I've watched botched memorization amaze one audience so much more than the correct phrasing impressed an audience the next night.  Maybe I'm being contrary...I'm not sure.  It would make sense, it is in my blood.

On thinking about Nicholas Urfe

At the beginning of the semester, when reading the Magus, I couldn't deal with Nicholas.  I thought he was sort of a pain in the ass, he complained too much and I was just not a fan. Oh, you poor sod, nothing's good enough for you, even this nice girl who you've decided to leave.  But later on in the semester, after a rough series of events I began to get where he was coming from.  The emptiness began to make sense; the lack of satisfaction and the desire to drop everything and just run away...it possessed my thoughts. I wasn't okay with anything, myself included.  I wanted to shed my skin and disappear and I couldn't figure out how to get my mind back (I still haven't, as of typing this out, either...).  But I understood, and that helped, though the crushingly sad bits and pieces didn't help me understand what was going on in my head and mostly made me want to curl up and cry for a little bit.  The melancholy was not solely Tor's to bear.  But I understood Nicholas's unnecessary desires, the significance of every small detail. I was not satisfied, not settled; my mind a fog that, had I been in Nicholas's situation, would have had me there forever. Confusion came easier than answers in a way that, as an always-honors student from kindergarten onwards, seemed so impossible.  I was no longer special for being smart, it took me just as long to find the answers as the average person.  I lost my self.  Note, not myself, but my self. And that was what made me understand Nicholas.
Edit from present-day-Ally: Past Ally wrote most of this, I edited it, and there will probably be more on my issues in my head later because they've been a bit all-consuming for a while.  Not to sound depressing...just musings.

Coincidence: I've just learned that a bunch of people that I'm friends with here in Bozeman who are from all over the country were actually in the same club (DECA) as I was in high school, and some of us were at the same national event, and wound up finding out we'd been in the same place at the same time years ago, and had no idea until later when we wound up at the same school and in the same circles. Iiiit's a small world aaaaafter all, iiiit's a smaaaall world aaaafter all...etc. etc. etc.

So all of my blog posts are going to be semi-out-of-order, I've been writing in my planner because I always have it with me, so first and foremost I'm going to post my random, sort of stutter-y final paper so that it gets out there. (Here's the part for brutal honesty, I thought we had class on Thursday and that was when everything was due, so pardon typos and things! If anyone feels like checking back on my blog later, I'll have a scan up soon of a charcoal I did because my animation wouldn't turn into what I wanted it to and I scrapped it.)

Salvation Through Connection

The biggest and most important method by which ailments/disquiet of the soul can be repaired is through connection with other souls.  In talking with Tor about his project, I was struck by the idea of ailments of the soul.  A soul that can be injured just as the body can, struck down by loneliness or consuming anger, by pride or grief…a soul crippled by a feeling of emptiness.

The biggest and most important method by which ailments/disquiet of the soul can be repaired is through connection with other souls.  Gerritt’s artwork also sort of kickstarted me into a better mindset to write this than I’d been previously working with: the idea of the chasm/abyss/deep dark scary empty hole that plagues all of humanity, both man and woman (evidenced by the androgynous figure he was going to use).

Nicholas Urfe, an average man with an average life, feeling as if something is missing, with a deep longing for something, anything really to fill the emptiness in his soul.  "The pattern of destiny seemed pretty clear: down and down, and down."

By the end of the book, Nicholas has had people revolving around him, he is the center of (albeit very strange) attention, and nothing is enough.  He returns, and in the final speech of the book, knows what he needs.  “You can’t hate someone who’s really on his knees.  Who’ll never be more than half a human being without you.” He spent the entire time looking for answers, validation, experiences with which he could soothe the disquiet in his soul, and yet at the end, it seems as if he simply needed to find a kindred soul.  Maybe the way we heal ourselves is, in reality, through each other.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presents to the audience a tale of soul mates.  It essentially says that humans were much more whole, with four arms, four legs, and two faces, every part doubled.  There were three genders in this time, not our two that we have today: man, woman, and the “Androgynous”.  Each had two sets of genitalia, and the “Androgynous” had the genitalia of both men and women. Women were children of the earth, men beget by the sun, and the “Androgynous” was the child of the moon, born of the sun and the earth.  These beings were powerful, and clever.  Their strength led them to confidence in their abilities, and they threatened to challenge the gods.  Like the Titans, these beings were almost exterminated, but Zeus and the others could not bear losing those tributes given to the gods by the humans.  Instead, Zeus decided to slice them in two, both doubling the number of tributes given to the gods by doubling the number of humans, and punishing them for their hubris.  Humanity crumbled, and the half-humans were so miserable that they would simply lose the will to exist, not even eating or drinking.  As many perished, Apollo sewed them up, shaping their bodies into what we know today, and tied them up like a pouch at the navel, the only remaining sign of the original form humans had once held.  These humans, only with one set of genitalia, spent their lives longing for their other half; the other half of their soul.  Aristophanes said that when the two halves find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lay with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. They have become whole, they have found their soul mate and their love.

“Our original nature was by no means the same as it is now. In the first place, there were three kinds of human beings, not merely the two sexes, male and female, as at present: there was a third kind as well, which had equal shares of the other two, and whose name survives though, the thing itself has vanished. For ‘man-woman’¹ was then a unity in form no less than name, composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female; whereas now it has come to be merely a name of reproach. Secondly, the form of each person was round all over, with back and sides encompassing it every way; each had four arms, and legs to match these, and two faces perfectly alike on a cylindrical neck. There was one head to the two faces, which looked opposite ways; there were four ears, two privy members, and all the other parts, as may be imagined, in proportion. The creature walked upright as now, in either direction as it pleased and whenever it started running fast, it went like our acrobats, whirling over and over with legs stuck out straight; only then they had eight limbs to support and speed them swiftly round and round. The number and features of these three sexes were owing to the fact that the male was originally the offspring of the sun, and the female of the earth; while that which partook of both sexes was born of the moon, for the moon also partakes of both.¹ They were globular in their shape as in their progress, since they took after their parents. Now, they were of surprising strength and vigor, and so lofty in their notions that they even conspired against the gods;

“Thereat Zeus and the other gods debated what they should do, and were perplexed: for they felt they could not slay them like the Giants, whom they had abolished root and branch with strokes of thunder—it would be only abolishing the honors and observances they had from men; nor yet could they endure such sinful rioting. Then Zeus, putting all his wits together, spoke at length and said: ‘Methinks I can contrive that men, without ceasing to exist, shall give over their iniquity through a lessening of their strength…’

Zeus then proposed that they be cleaved in two, making them weaker but also doubling the amount of sacrifices given to the gods by virtue of doubling the population of men.  Once split, they were healed, skin bunched up and tied together forming what we now call the bellybutton. 

Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in longing for its fellow would come to it again; and then would they fling their arms about each other and in mutual embraces yearn to be grafted together, till they began to perish of hunger and general indolence, through refusing to do anything apart. And whenever on the death of one half the other was left alone, it went searching and embracing to see if it might happen on that half of the whole woman which now we call a woman, or perchance the half of the whole man. In this plight they were perishing away, when Zeus in his pity provided a fresh device. He moved their privy parts to the front—for until then they had these, like all else, on the outside, and did their begetting and bringing forth not on each other but on the earth, like the crickets. These parts he now shifted to the front, to be used for propagating on each other—in the female member by means of the male; so that if in their embracements a man should happen on a woman there might be conception and continuation of their kind; and also, if male met with male they might have satiety of their union and a relief, and so might turn their hands to their labors and their interest to ordinary life. Thus anciently is mutual love ingrained in mankind, reassembling our early estate and endeavoring to combine two in one and heal the human soul.

Well, when one of them—whether he be a boy-lover or a lover of any other sort—

happens on his own particular half, the two of them are wondrously thrilled with affection and intimacy and love, and are hardly to be induced to leave each other's side for a single moment. These are they who continue together throughout life, though they could not even say what they would have of one another. No one could imagine this to be the mere amorous connection, or that such alone could be the reason why each rejoices in the other's company with so eager a zest: obviously the soul of each is wishing for something else that it cannot express, only divining and darkly hinting what it wishes. Suppose that, as they lay together, Hephaestus should come and stand over them, and showing his implements¹ should ask: ‘What is it, good mortals, that you would have of one another?’—and suppose that in their perplexity he asked them again: ‘Do you desire to be joined in the closest possible union, so that you shall not be divided by night or by day? If that is your craving, I am ready to fuse and weld you together in a single piece, that from being two you may be made one; that so long as you live, the pair of you, being as one, may share a single life; and that when you die you may also in Hades yonder be one instead of two, having shared a single death. Bethink yourselves if this is your heart's desire, and if you will be quite contented with this lot.’ No one on hearing this, we are sure, would demur to it or would be found wishing for anything else: each would unreservedly deem that he had been offered just what he was yearning for all the time, namely, to be so joined and fused with his beloved that the two might be made one.

“The cause of it all is this, that our original form was as I have described, and we were entire; and the craving and pursuit of that entirety is called Love. Formerly, as I have said, we were one; but now for our sins we are all dispersed by God, as the Arcadians were by the Lacedaemonians¹; and we may well be afraid that if we are disorderly towards Heaven we may once more be cloven asunder and may go about in the shape of those outline-carvings on the tombs, with our noses sawn down the middle, and may thus become like tokens of split dice. Wherefore we ought all to exhort our neighbors to a pious observance of the gods, in order that we may escape harm and attain to bliss under the gallant leadership of Love. Let none in act oppose him—and it is opposing him to incur the hate of Heaven: if we make friends with the god and are reconciled, we shall have the fortune that falls to few in our day, of discovering our proper favorites. [1]

 And, secondly, I don't really have a connector here besides my ideas floating around my head, I'll present the idea of Tikkun olam, which, in the convoluted not-quite-verbatim way that I like to think about it, also says that we are in pieces, and can only put ourselves back together. In Eliot's Four Quartets, there is a section that also got me thinking of this (Edit: I had no idea Gerritt would recite the piece that contained what had started my thinking on this, but I figured I'd add this in as another coincidence).  Plato's account of souls and soulmates had me thinking of souls waiting to find their souls, and they were waiting without hope, without love--their love, their soulmate.  And yet there is faith, in God's light which has scattered around the world in the broken vessels, faith and hope and love all in the waiting, he says.  All in the waiting for our souls to be healed? Because we are not ready for thought, not without our other half.  And, without healing and our other pieces, there is no dancing, but stillness.

--Note: I have no idea how to talk about poetry in essays, so I've just left it down here.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means ‘repairing the world’ (or ‘healing the world’) which suggests humanity's shared responsibility to heal, repair and transform the world. In Judaism, the concept of tikkun olam originated in the early rabbinic period.

A sixteenth century mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria, taught that God created special clay vessels to contain the Divine light He would use to create the world. However, God's light was so vast, many of the vessels shattered, scattering shards all over creation. While most of the light returned to its Divine source, some attached itself to the broken shards. Kabbalists believe that these shards are all that is bad in the world, these broken pieces in which sparks of light are trapped.

The concept was given new meanings in the kabbalah of the medieval period and has come to possess further connotations in modern Judaism: now commonly used to refer to the pursuit of social action and social justice.  In many ways, the way we use the phrase "Tikkun Olam" today does capture the original intention. When we speak of tikkun olam, we are speaking of fixing what is broken in our society. Tikkun Olam "appears to respond to a profound sense of deep rupture in the universe…”

“… this part of Judaism that I really like. It's called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world's been broken into pieces and it's everybody's job to find them and put them back together again.”

“Well maybe we're the pieces. Maybe we are not supposed to find the pieces. Maybe we are the pieces.” – Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

If, indeed, we are the pieces, then maybe it is our job to find the piece that fits with ours to project the most light.   The integral connections between human beings are the building blocks of the human soul and the only way it can be repaired when damaged.  The connections between people not only create who we are as individuals, but also define how we interact with the world, even to the extent of the possibility of a mythical second half. There are stories from ancient Greek myths to modern Judaism, reflecting humanity’s need for connection, that our salvation lies in the congregation of the pieces.

---

[1] Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.

            The past, whether we like it or not, possesses the present in everything we do, see, and read.  The beginning of anything, an untraceable origin, is influenced by the past.  If everything that had ever happened never happened, no beginnings that we have ever heard of would have begun the way that they did.  Every minute detail of the past brings to us a present that has been influenced by that past.  For instance, legends of old, handed down through story and song, possess entire cultures, and mold them into what they are now, in our present.  The hero’s journey, something we have learned about for years in our schooling, has wildly impacted the way we read and write, and has given a platform upon which to build, evidenced in many of our texts, especially in John Barth’s Night Sea Journey. 

              There is a hero in the story, the sperm, fighting towards the destination of its journey, attributed in the title.  While some may say that it isn’t about the destination so much as it is the journey, full of trials and tribulations and obstacles, for the hero of this story and any other, the destination is still the mark that the hero has been successful, and completed the task assigned, and maybe grown from it.  The sperm is in a “sea”, an immeasurable and seemingly unconquerable place.  The journey must be trying, swimming through countless fallen soldiers, thinking that that may also come to be his fate, rendering the journey fruitless. “The heartless zeal of our (departed) leaders, like the blind ambition and good cheer of my own youth, appalls me now; for the death of my comrades I am inconsolable. If the night-sea journey has justification, it is not for us swimmers to discover it.”

            The narrator, our special sperm that makes it to his final destination, has no notable qualities, lending himself to the everyman idea, that anyone (or anything) can accomplish what they have set out to do.  He is an unlikely protagonist, not expecting his success in the least, and almost demeaning himself in the end as the fittest to survive, “…(fitness meaning, in my experience, nothing more than survival-ability, a talent whose only demonstration is the fact of survival, but whose chief ingredients seem to be strength, guile, callousness)…”, calling it a “poor irony”.  The sperm’s unexpected success is bittersweet, as millions of his comrades have fallen in this journey, and yet this sperm is the one to survive, the last man standing.  To have participated in what is essentially genocide, and to have survived, is the burden now placed upon this hero, even as Odysseus, the most obvious of the past’s heroes, saw his crew die before his eyes in Homer’s Odyssey.

            The past, and traditions that have been handed down through our time and this sperm’s time, influence how this particular sperm handles his situation.  Early on, the sperm questions the purpose, his origins and his own existence.  “Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents?” and later, “"'You only swim once.' Why bother, then?” a question many on their journey have asked themselves in countless situations. 

            As the sperm reaches his destination, he is successful, as the hero’s journey should end.  Burdened with thoughts and new purpose, the sperm is successful, and has grown.  This particular sperm, the unlikely hero of our story, who undergoes the trials and tribulations of any mythological hero, reaches his bewitching destination, his life, his purpose, his love.

Red

Robin pulled her headphones out to a muffled yell coming from the kitchen of the small apartment where she lived with her mother (but only for a few months longer, until she could leave). “Honey! Robin, come here!” She let out a sigh, throwing her red hair over her shoulder and tossing her headphones down and extricating herself from the nest she’d created in the corner of her bed. In the kitchen, her mother was holding a bottle of wine and a Tupperware full of cupcakes.  “Sweetie, could you bring this to your grandmother? I’ve still got some work to do, and the car’s out of gas. Are you okay with walking? I know it’s raining, but I’d be wonderfully grateful.”

            “Yeah, mom.  Here, I’ll just walk over with this bottle of wine and get an MIP for my troubles,” Robin said, grimacing.  She didn’t feel like walking to her grandmother’s musty apartment.  It was stuffy, and smelled like medicine and old lady.   

            “Oh, hush.  Put it in your purse, it won’t be a problem. She’s just lonely, and I don’t have the time,” Robin’s mother said, sighing.  “I know you don’t want to go, honey, but it would be a huge help.  I don’t want her to think we’ve forgotten about her…”

            Robin sighed dejectedly and handed her mother her purse.  While her mom was occupied fitting the bottle and Tupperware in the bag, Robin shot her boyfriend, Evan, a text.  “Hey, heading to gram’s. Meet me there?”  Once her mother was done Tetris-ing her purse, she grabbed it back, throwing it over her shoulder as she put her headphones back in her ears.  She strode out the door, not quite happy with the outcome, but pleased enough with the opportunity to see Evan.  Maybe it wouldn’t suck that badly. 

            Robin slammed the door on the way out, turning her music up and throwing her hood up.  She cut through a few alleyways, trying to speed up her trip so she could sneak a visit with Evan in before heading back home.  About halfway to her grandmother’s apartment, though, tingles shot down her back.  She felt like someone was watching her, but when she turned to look, of course, no one was there.  Feeling anxious, she popped out onto a main street.  As she rounded the corner though, a man in a black hoodie smoothly turned with her, keeping her stride. 

            “Hey, Red. Why’re you out here alone on such a rainy night?” he asked, eyeing her with a wolfish grin.  In the neighborhood she was in, Robin was used to catcalls on the street, and it wasn’t the first time she’d heard ‘Hey, Red’, so she chose to ignore him. But, upon closer inspection, she saw that he was quite handsome, with a crooked smile and a devilish mischief in his eyes, hidden by a dark mess of hair.  He kept pace with her swift walk, and added “I’m John.  John Smith.  Care to give me a name?”

            Robin snorted.  “Robin,” she snapped, still not taking to his charm, but taking her headphones out of her ears.

            “Ahh, Robin.  A red-breasted bird for a lovely red girl.  Out for a walk, or out for a purpose?” he asked, showing an unnerving wolfish grin for the second time. 
            Because she was almost to her destination, Robin saw no harm in telling the handsome stranger what she was doing.  “I’m going to see my grandmother, drop some things off with her, you know.  Being a good granddaughter and such.”

            “I could tag along, keep a pretty girl safe on a walk through a bad part of town, if you wanted.” John said.  John Smith? Could he have picked a more obvious fake name? Robin chuckled.  She’d heard worse and more threatening before.
            “Sure, if you want to see me to my grandmother’s, go for it.” He was charming, handsome.  He seemed exciting and intriguing, and who was she to tell him off? So she fell into stride with this stranger, feeling not a bit uneasy, but excited. He seemed dangerous, dark, but in a good way.  Roguish, maybe. 
            Her destination was coming up on the right, and she wasn’t fancying bidding this handsome stranger good night. “Want to come up with me?” She said, forgetting all about her plans with Evan. 
            He grinned that wolfish grin again.  “I’d love to,” he said.  “The better to get to know you!” Robin laughed, thinking how much her grandmother would like this new stranger. 
            They turned into the doorway, and walked up the steps to her grandmother’s apartment.  It was three stories up, not too many stairs for anyone really.  Robin knocked on her grandmother’s door.  “Grandma! It’s Robin! I’ve got cupcakes, and I’ve brought a friend!”
            “Oh my dear! Is it Evan? He’s a nice boy.” Her grandmother said as the door swung open.  But, as Robin laid eyes on her grandmother, she felt a cool blade against her neck.  John, or whatever his name actually was, was behind her, holding her in place, as she stood terrified. 

            “I’m not Evan,” he said.  “I just need money.  She’s a nice girl, and I wouldn’t wanna hurt Red, but I need money,” gasped the stranger with the wolfish grin.  He was darker now, more ominous.  Robin’s grandmother shrieked. 

            “Honey, don’t move.  I have a purse, I can give you money! It’s not much, but leave her be!” Her hands were shaking.  But, as Robin’s grandmother left to go grab her purse and money for the deceiving stranger, Robin felt the blade leave her neck alongside a dull THUMP.  She whipped around, and there was Evan, ever her knight in shining armor, and “John” slumped on the floor.

            “Figured I’d meet you here,” he said sheepishly.   “Thought I could be of some help?”