Brian Arens | Professional Voice Actor for E-Learning & Narration

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I was 26, and about as dumb in all human things as any 26-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she'd been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters. The thing that takes my breath away when I think back on it all is that I never wanted to read her in the first place. It happened quite by accident and very much against my will. I'd been eager when I'd gone back to school to get my PhD the year before, to fill the gaps in my literary education. Chaucer and Shakespeare, Melville and Milton. But the one area of English literature that held no interest for me, that positively repelled me, was 19th century British fiction. What could be duller, I thought, than a bunch of long, heavy novels by women novelists in stilted language on trivial subjects? The very titles sounded ridiculous. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch. But nothing symbolized the dullness and narrowness of that whole body of work like the name Jane Austen. Wasn't she the one who wrote those silly, romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy. What I really wanted to study was modernism, the literature that had formed my identity as a reader, and in many ways, as a person. Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, complex, difficult, sophisticated works. Like so many young men, I needed to think of myself as a rebel, and modernism, with its revolutionary intensity, confirmed my self-image. I'd pass my days in a cloud of angry sarcasm, making silent speeches as I stalked down Broadway in my John Lennon coat, against everything conventional, respectable, and pious. I'd walk right up alongside the buildings in the shadows, makes you feel like a rat scuttling for cover, to aggravate my sense of alienation. If I was waiting for someone and had nowhere else to go, I'd sit right down on the sidewalk with my Kerouac or my Catch-22, just to try and stop me. I smoked weed, listened to The Clash, and snorted at the business monkeys who'd sold out to the man. Like the modernists, I was hot to change the world, even if I wasn't sure exactly how. At the very least, I knew I wasn't gonna let the world change me. I was Dostoevsky's underground man raging against the machine. I was Stephen Dedalus, the rebel artist who runs rings around the grownups. I was Conrad's Marlowe, the world-weary truth teller who punches through hypocrisy and lies. Needless to say, I was not the easiest person to get along with. In fact, I wonder that my friends put up with me at all. Like so many guys, I thought that a good conversation meant holding forth about all the supposedly important things I knew, books, history, politics, whatever. But I wasn't just aggressively certain of myself. Of course, I never let anyone finish a sentence and delivered my opinions as if they'd come direct from Sinai. I was also oblivious to the feelings of the people around me, a bulldozer stuck in overdrive, because it had never occurred to me to imagine how things might look from someone else's point of view. My best friend, who knew me better than I knew myself, once introduced me to a friend of hers named Honor. Just as I was gearing up to reel off all the stupid puns I could think of, Your Honor, honored to meet you, and so forth. My friend caught the smirk spreading across my face and cut me off before I could make an idiot of myself. Billy, she explained with the weary patience with which you might address a difficult child, she's already heard them all. Basically, I had no insight into myself or anyone else.

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A basic reality of unhappy intimacies is the judgment each party develops towards their partner. No relationship can flourish with such mutual harshness. In moving through life, it is necessary to make many evaluations. Being here would serve me better than being there. This food is not good for my body. This car is not good for my wallet. We call this discrimination, an essential quality for living in the world. Judgment is something quite different and involves the closing of our heart. From birth, we are exposed to judgment of ourselves and others as a standard accompaniment to every aspect of our lives. Judging others has a comfortable, familiar, at-home quality, tempting us to indulge frequently in the pure pleasure of it. We expend a vast amount of energy in judging ourselves and others, particularly in response to fear-based behavior. We judge others for their anger, for their self-centeredness, their insensitivity, their inconsistency, their greed. All are things for which we judge ourselves. Closing the heart may also manifest as failing to see the unique beauty of another. When the heart is truly open, there is a natural sense of appreciation for others, even while being aware of their imperfections. An early warning sign of the heart's closing is the loss of appreciation. Even though you may not be consciously aware of judging your partner, lack of appreciation dampens the love and the flow of energy between you. Am I saying judgment is bad? How is one to regard inhumanity, violence? At a more immediate level, how is one to regard the insensitive behavior of one's partner? Do I need to close my heart when my partner doesn't keep agreements or isn't tuned into my needs or gets angry at me unfairly or treats me insensitively? How is one to respond, in short, when confronted with another's fear? My own fear presents its case with convincing logic and consummate skill. It asserts that I need judgment to move through the world. If I have a problem with my partner, my discomfort is due to their behavior. In order to remain safe, I must close my heart to them. My deeper wisdom has a different perspective. If my heart were truly open to my partner at this moment, would there really be a problem? Perhaps it suggests the only problem lies in the fact that my heart is closed. To this, there is only one solution.

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For a long time, though, unlike his puzzle boxes, her father's model of their neighborhood makes little sense to her. It's not like the real world. Its streets are empty, its pavements static. To her fingers, it serves as little more than a tiny and insufficient facsimile. He persists in asking Marie-Laure to run her fingers over it, to recognize different houses, the angles of streets. And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up Rue Cuvier, to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes. Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery. I know, papa. He picks her up and spins her around three times. Now, he says, you're going to take us home. Her mouth drops open. I want you to think of the model, Marie. But I can't possibly. I'm one step behind you. I won't let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are. I do not. You do. Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind. Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time. It's far, papa. Six blocks at least. Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first? The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout. Breaks hiss. Someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond? A staircase? A cliff? She turns 90 degrees. Three steps forward. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. Papa? I'm here. Six paces, seven paces, eight. A roar of noise, an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing, overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women come out, jostling her as they pass. Marie-Laure drops her cane. She begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. It's so big, she whispers. You can do this, Marie. She cannot.

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Training books commonly begin with an overview of the fitness program and lay out a few rules for how the program is to be followed. There's often a discussion of equipment and usually a brief review of training principles. But I'm not going to start that way. Instead, I want to begin with what I consider to be the most important asset every athlete must develop and nurture before beginning a training program. That asset is mental fitness. No athlete will ever reach his or her goals without a sound mental strategy and a commitment to success. So before we talk about anything else, let's look at why you want to take on the challenge of triathlon and how you can develop a winning approach to your training. Master the principles in this chapter and you will be on the path to a triathlon season marked by high achievement. The common denominator for all of the high-performance triathletes I have known is a can-do attitude. It's a sure thing that they will succeed. They're convinced of it. This leads me to believe that mental fitness is at least as important as physical fitness, perhaps even more so. A mentally fit athlete always figures out a way. High achievement always starts with a dream and triathletes are big dreamers. They dream of what may be achieved in the coming season, finishing an Ironman, taking a podium placing at a favorite race, achieving a top 10 national ranking, qualifying for a world championship, or some other big dream. I really don't know which comes first, the big dream or the will to achieve. I suspect it's the latter. But they go hand in hand. Because of this, I believe it is imperative that triathletes develop mental fitness along with their physical fitness. And just like physical fitness, mental fitness can be trained. In fact, physical fitness and mental fitness are similar in that both must be trained consistently.

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Just as the disappearance of a ship below the horizon seems a puzzle if one misconstrues the Earth to be flat, our misconception that the universe is only three-dimensional leads to apparent paradoxes about the Big Bang in the expanding universe. For example, since all galaxies seem to be rushing outward from the Milky Way, it would appear that we occupy the center of the universe, the place where the Big Bang occurred. Many people ask after they're shown that creatures on any other galaxy would make the same observation and come to the same conclusion. Well then, where exactly in space did the Big Bang happen? Others focus their thoughts not on the center of the universe but on its edge. Surely, they say, some galaxies are out leading the way, those that form the outer shell of the expanding sphere unleashed by the Big Bang. Wouldn't beings on those galaxies look back to see galaxies at their backsides with only emptiness out in front? And from the most sophisticated comes a worse puzzle. How can we look farther out into space and thus back into time and see a bigger and bigger volume when we know that the universe was smaller in the past? These and similar conundra are born from basic misconceptions about the nature of space and time, the ones we get from intuition, that is, the circuitry evolved in our brains to deal with perceptions of the immediate world. In order even to make sense of these questions, we must begin to accept the true nature of space and time, a reality totally outside our experiences. We quite naturally imagine space as a fixed framework, unbending and static, and time as a ticking clock, steady and precise, absolute standards against which all events can be measured. This was the world that Newton described so brilliantly with his new math, a world where the trajectories of apples and planets yielded with equal ease to the calculus. Newton's laws are an excellent description of the world we perceive with our senses, but his system is only an approximation, albeit a magnificent one, that breaks down when we deal in vast distances and great speeds. Albert Einstein was the first to grapple successfully with this larger domain when he was trying to understand how the laws of physics would appear to different observers in relative motion. Newton's laws of mechanics describe how objects move in response to external forces and give simple rules to transform from one observer to another. For example, consider a baseball pitcher tossing a lazy 50 miles per hour curve ball forward from the backseat of a convertible automobile traveling at 60 miles per hour. The pitcher would not be surprised to learn that a batter on the sidewalk will be terrorized by a blazing 110 miles per hour fastball. Such simple rules had been found to hold as exactly as could be measured for some 200 years, but by the end of the 18th century, a few disturbing contradictions had surfaced.

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This kale? Sweeter. Arugula? Perfectly peppery. Let me introduce you to greens shattering the sustainability glass ceiling. You see, Aerofarm's vertical farming yields nearly 400 times more per acre than traditional farming. Oh, and it's all organic. Get Aerofarm's microgreens at Whole Foods and Amazon.

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That is Chris in front of Chris an impossible spicy chicken sandwich and the bird-based spicy chicken sandwich We've asked Chris which one of these is impossible plant-based deliciousness Chris Chris oh right No talking with your mouth full. Well. I guess we have our answer find yours today at impossiblefoods.com

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Who am I? Where did I go? Lost. Work. Responsibilities. What everyone else sees, expects. Feel. Reset. Reconnect. Lululemon.

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At Star, I get unmatched service, earn interest on my checking, get access to paychecks two days early, and even earn rewards points when I spend. I mean, with all these perks, who wouldn't feel like a celeb? Star Credit Union. Smart money made easy.

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Explore the evolution of performance, where art, science, and technology meet. Audi.

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Transactional education. Some don't have time, others the money. The opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, should be available to all. It is Udemy.

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Picture this, it's the early days of social media and people are just figuring out how to use it. Along comes Hootsuite, the world's first social media management platform. Fast forward to today, and we've been on the social media scene for over a decade. Over the years, we've adapted our software to help businesses use social media more efficiently across multiple platforms, improve their customer service, and gain deeper insights about their reach.

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In 1907, history was made when Fairmont San Francisco, Nob Hill's Grand Dame, opened its doors. The iconic hotel soon became the city's venue of choice for glittering balls, presidential visits, and political gatherings, making the name Fairmont synonymous with place of occasion. Today, when you think of a landmark hotel around the world, chances are it's a Fairmont hotel.

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Naked & Famous is not a normal denim company, and we never will be. Instead of relying on celebrity endorsements and expensive ad campaigns, we devote all of our resources to sourcing the world's best fabric and turning it into awesome jeans. No advertising, no washes, no pre-distressing, no nonsense. Just excellent denim at a reasonable price. All of our products are proudly cut, made, and sewn in Canada. Always have been. Always will be.

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Creating our shared future is a shared responsibility. For our part, Bank of America is contributing to a more inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous future. And we do so by harnessing the power of purpose. That means fully leveraging our resources, capabilities, and influence to help address issues that matter most to those we serve. We offer tailored solutions, insights, and advice and bring forward broader industry learnings and thought leadership to make a meaningful impact. Bank of America

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In the narrow Thermopylae Pass in northern Greece, 7,000 ancient Greek soldiers await an onslaught of epic proportions. Leading the Greeks are 300 of the most ferocious warriors of the ancient world, the Spartans. They will soon face the largest fighting force ever assembled at the time, nearly 300,000 soldiers of the mighty Persian Empire.

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Ludwig van Beethoven was born into a musical family in the sleepy town of Bonn, Germany, in 1770. Bonn was a quiet outpost of the simmering Holy Roman Empire. Revolt was in the air, and would soon spread across Europe. The aristocrats who had ruled for centuries didn't realize it, but their world was on the verge of collapse.

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The tiny town of Fairhaven, Vermont is about as far removed from big city crime as any place in the country. Violence was virtually unheard of, but all of that changed on a March afternoon in 1998. Chris Marquis, a 17-year-old high school student, was home alone when he received what looked like a normal package. Chris opened the box. Inside was a smaller box, wrapped with string. He cut the string, and there was a huge explosion.

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Welcome to the Lululemon team. You, my friend, are a big part of our mission to bring Lululemon out of the just-for-women space and help our male customers understand we're a brand for all genders. And hey, if an athletic guy like you works here and wears Lululemon, then any male-identifying person should feel great shopping here. Except, um, that's a sports bra. Okay, let's go over our apparel first.

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Welcome to PC Security 101 for Small Business Owners. Here, you'll gain the knowledge to feel more secure about selling your services online. You will understand when your computer or website is being attacked, know how to protect your network from hackers, learn how to keep your customer and personal data private.

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Timmy was upset that Carla wouldn't share her pencil crayons, but calling her a mean name wasn't okay. What do you think Timmy should have done instead? Read the possible answers, then tap the colored pencil crayon that you think is hovering over the right answer.

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Janelle, I understand you have a question about Gina's termination. How can I help? I was wondering if I need to provide her with a letter outlining why she was terminated. Well, there is no federal requirement for employers to provide written notice about why someone is being terminated. But we do have a practice of providing the reasons in writing. This reduces the likelihood of the terminated employee spinning up their own, possibly illegal reason for the termination, and then claiming there is no documentation to the contrary.

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The Higgs field is a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components that form a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU2 symmetry. Its shape means that below extremely high energies, such as those seen during the first picosecond of the Big Bang, the Higgs field in its ground state takes less energy to have a non-zero vacuum expectation than a zero value.

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This is a Patagonian nine-nippled fluffy penguin. Kind of hard to count nipples under all that fur. But brave scientists never let us down. Anyway, our waddling friend here is tired of carrying around a boring, basic backpack. With Herschel Supply Co., you'll never have to sacrifice fashion for function again. Whether you're headed to class, hitting the gym, or just being a penguin. With nearly ten tatas. Seriously, are the copywriters at this company high?

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There's no David's Tea without a healthy planet. Our emphasis on conscious choices sets us apart and keeps us growing. This year, we're committed to transitioning our company to a fully recyclable and compostable offering. These choices are centered around what we call Positiva Tea, where we keep what's right for both our local communities and our global partners, top of mind, always.

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We don't chill. We take things to the next level. At IMAX this means going to space 24 times more than any single astronaut. Developing the highest resolution film cameras in the world capable of traveling to the deepest depths of the ocean and the top of Everest. This limited edition capsule collection is made for fans like us who push the limits and sit at the edge of their seats. Get your IMAX gear at store.imax.com

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Bigger smiles, cozier naps, warmer welcomes every time you walk in the door. That's what happened to Stacy after she adopted Ralphie Bullingsley, her French Bulldog, from Petco. Because when you adopt a pet, so many things change for the better, for everyone. Not only does it give an abandoned pet like Ralphie here a loving home, but it also opens up an additional spot in the shelter so that more pets can be saved. Click Search Adoptable Pets below and we'll help you get started.

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Cytokines may act on the cells that secrete them, autocrine action, on nearby cells, paracrine action, or in some instances on distant cells, endocrine action. Certain inflammatory cytokines are also involved in nerve injury or inflammation-induced central sensitization and are related to the development of contralateral hyperalgesia or allodynia.

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At AstraZeneca, we are leading a revolution in oncology to redefine cancer care. Our bold ambition is to provide cures for cancer in every form. Our oncology strategy is built with one goal in mind. To push the boundaries of science, to change the practice of medicine, and transform the lives of patients living with cancer.

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While it is not unusual for those of us in the Alopecia Areata community to feel overwhelmed with a new diagnosis, ongoing treatment, or other challenges, the National Alopecia Areata Foundation is here to tell you that there is hope. Medical and scientific research hold the promise of better treatments, and one day, the possibility of a cure.

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Mrs. Fairfax, thanks for coming back in. Your x-rays are back and the cause of your back pain is what I suspected, degenerative arthritis. You can see that on the x-ray? We can. Look closely at the edges of the vertebrae surrounding your L4 disc. See how they look scalloped and not as smooth as this picture of a healthy spine? These altered edges between the joints then cause inflammation or swelling, which is what we call arthritis.

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The medical transcription process begins when a medical professional records patient-related information into a phone, handheld digital recorder, or another digital recording device. After the voice files have been completed, they can be uploaded to a secure server so that medical transcriptionists can download them and begin transcribing them.