Happy Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, I thought I'd jump back on the blogging wagon after a long absence (travel, final papers) and writing a little post about what it's like today living on the other side of the earth from my home.

Well, spring has sprung. This is mostly proven by the fact that I was invited to a barbeque today. A barbeque? In April? In England? Indeed. Spring fever has caught on and people are getting wild and crazy.

Not that winter's chills have completely let go, but the down jackets have been put away and the sun has come out. It's chilly and bright, perfect weather for the beginning of spring (never mind that it should have begun about a month ago).

The best thing is the sudden profusion of flowers. First there were crocuses - yellow and purple so bright and rich, and so unexpected after a grey winter, that the color seemed like it was vibrating. Then the daffodils. I've never seen so many daffodils in my life - in flower beds, lawns, meadows, cemeteries, median strips. Not to mention the daisies and other little buds dotting every green patch in sight. It's all utterly pretty.

I must say I haven't felt particularly in touch with the earth over here. I live in a very suburban atmosphere without the easy access to vast national parks or to the Pacific ocean that I have back home. I spent a few weeks at home over spring break and the contrast was amazing. I was in awe of how much open space we still have, even on an overpopulated planet.

And it's not only the calm of staring out at a big landscape, or not being able to see any man-made thing at all for miles that I miss. It's also feeling and moving with the rhythms of nature. I went hiking a lot in the desert when I was home, and in desert you just have to pay attention to the rising heat, the moment of sunrise and sunset, the movement of rain clouds, in order to stay alive.

It's scary sometimes, especially for me because I scare easy, but not nearly as scary as guns or bombs or any of the awful things that happened this week all over the world. The violence of humans inspires anger and sadness and reaction. The violence of nature inspires respect and adaptation.

As the weather becomes more hospitable over here, I'm going to make a lot of effort to get outside and see this portion of the world. The landscape is actually one of my favorite things about England, part of the reason I wanted to come here. I got to explore it a little last summer and the hiking was absolutely stunning. This summer I'll be doing more of that, trying to make the most of my time here and to keep myself sane as I write my master's dissertation. And right now I'm just appreciating the sun and beginning to emerge from the cocoon of my wintertime coziness - starting with that barbeque.

How I miss home

Happy first day of spring! I counted up today, and I'm almost 8 months into my 13-month year of living abroad. I spent today packing for a couple of weeks at home and, of course, thinking about all the things I'm looking forward to over the break. And that got me thinking about what I actually miss when I miss home. This year, when I've felt homesick, it's actually usually been a good feeling, because it reminds me of all the things and people I love back home. I'm hoping that when I get back there next year, I'll be able to appreciate those things even more than I did before I left. Of course, things always look rosy from afar, though, so I'm afraid that as soon as I get home, I'll come up with all sorts of stuff that was better over in England! So, I'm making a list here of a few things that I really want to appreciate fully when I get them back in my life.

1. Community.

Family of course is the thing I miss most. I'm very close to my family, and last year (my senior year of college), I was very close to my friends, too (when you live with people for four years, you share a lot!). But this year, I've found myself doing a lot of things alone. I eat my meals alone most of the time, do my work alone, walk to and from school alone, go grocery shopping alone, travel on trains alone. This of course makes it really sweet when I happen to have someone around to do stuff with - when one of my housemates is in the kitchen cooking dinner at the same time as me, or when I run into one of my new friends on campus and sit down to do some studying at the same table. But it's rare, and I not only miss the company I've had from my friends over the past four years and my family for my whole life. I also miss those specific people. Thank god for skype.

It's funny, because I've always thought of myself as an introvert, and I do need plenty of time alone to focus on my work or daydream or just be quiet. Too much time with too many people drains my energy and I have to recharge. But I've discovered this year that too much time without people also drains my energy. I guess the middle path is best.

2. Food.

Not just dishes at my favorite restaurants or special family recipes. No, I miss the food of all the Bay Area, because I'm beginning to realize it's pretty unique. I've complained on here before about much trouble I have finding good veggies around here, and I cannot wait to get back to my local farmer's market. I also just find that people here are less into fresh and healthy eating than me.

Back home last year, a lot of my friends were going vegetarian and even vegan. I'm still an omnivore and probably always will be, but I eat meat maybe once or twice a week, tops, because I love cooking with vegetables. Here, though, people eat so much meat, so many frozen vegetables, so many cans of beans, so much cheap take-out Chinese food. It's not that I abstain from any of those completely (except the beans, gross), but it's weird to be around people who don't know any other kind of food. I was told the other day that I was 'adventurous' for ordering dishes with eggplant and spinach at a restaurant. What?

What I feel is more than just food snobbism. It's profound gratitude that I was raised on truly fresh, local, and delicious food that's good for me and good for the planet. I feel lucky to be able to taste so many amazing things that farmer's have coaxed out of the ground, rather than eating stuff that comes out of some commercial processing plant. Finally, I'm so happy that when I'm at home, I get to buy most of my food from the people who grow it or people who are just passionate about food, to talk with them about it and maybe get a recipe tip or something, instead of grabbing my food off a supermarket shelf.

3. Weather.

Well, obviously. I've talked about this plenty on this blog. But how lucky am I to come from a place without sub-zero temperatures? Not to mention the beautiful ocean that makes the climate so temperate around San Francisco. I will be taking every opportunity to get outside and enjoy that sun when I'm back home.

Spring/Transitions

This weekend, the weather has been bizarre. Woke up to bright sun - an hour later, it was blizzarding outside my window - the clouds cleared and it sunny again - I glanced back at the window and saw snow - currently we're back to blue sky. I guess the only constant is that it's cold.

Even the temperature, though, has been swinging back and forth over the last week. After endless snowy, cold, grey weather, the sun came out, and I walked to school without a coat on for the first time in months. Everyone rushed outside to eat their lunch, and sitting inside at our computers felt ridiculous when it was so nice outside (p.s. the high was only 54 degrees, but it felt like 70 to me).

Alas, it was not to last. Now it's snowing again. In March.

That taste of spring, though, reminded me that the semester is almost over. Once again, after winter hibernation, I'm moving into a period of transitions. I'm not particularly good at transitions - I'm a creature of habits and comforts - but I also feel a great attraction to them. I love to look forward to things, whether it's a new book, an upcoming trip, or just breakfast tomorrow morning. The thing is, of course, things usually don't turn out exactly how you imagine them, and whether the reality is better or worse than anticipated, it always takes a bit of adjustment. You go to sleep, already savoring the taste of pancakes, only to wake up and find your milk has gone sour. Maybe you dissolve in a heap of tears, or maybe you end up eating some scrambled eggs that taste just as good. Or maybe someone surprises you with some fresh croissants they just brought back from the bakery, and you decide to postpone pancakes until tomorrow. There's just always that moment of recalibration that's sometimes joyful and sometimes hard.

There's a lot of patience involved in transitions. I've been listening to music on Spotify recently, which is great because I was really missing Pandora. On the radio function, you never know what song is coming next, and in the moment that the last song ends, I always start conjecturing about the next one, and it's usually not what I expect (except that this morning, I was hoping they would play something by A Fine Frenzy, and they miraculously did). Sometimes it'll be one of my favorite bands, and sometimes I'll reach immediately to click the thumbs down button. But sometimes I just don't know if I like the song yet or not, so I just sit there and listen and wait to see how I feel about it. And since the best thing about this radio function is discovering new favorite bands, that minute or two of patience and listening can really pay off.

So here I go transitioning from my last semester of classes into my first summer of truly independent writing work. Yes, I'm writing to a deadline, but the restrictions on the what, how, and why of my dissertation are pretty minimal. For someone who wants to write books, this will be good training in making my way through a big writing project without much outside structure.

I'm not saying that writing a dissertation is like listening to music or eating pancakes, but the fact is that I'll be doing a lot of those latter two things while attempting to do the former, and I like the way the micro mirrors the macro sometimes (often). I will also be living for about 5 more months in a country where the weather changes all the time. Then I'll move back across an ocean and a continent and start looking for a job. So my life will be full of transitions. I guess I better just keep listening and get ready to recalibrate.

In which cold and hot are opposites and going to the movies solves everything

Since I've been in England, I think about the weather a lot, check the forecast a lot, complain, predict, stare out the window, calculate the relative merits of different keep-warm outfits. And today I was thinking about how differently people respond to different climates. It's not just that the weather changes your mood or your habits. It also changes your attitude toward weather itself - or at least this seems to be true for me.

For the last four years, I lived in a very hot place, basically the desert. Now I live in a very cold place. Both kinds of climate can be really unpleasant of course, but in really different ways. There's something about cold weather that makes people complain about it. Even when I'm happy that it's raining or snowing, I kind of feel the need to gripe. I also fill a lot of conversations with speculations about the chance of precipitation tomorrow, the next day, over the weekend, next week....The international student handbooks weren't kidding when they said that the English love to talk about the weather.

What's ironic is that no matter how much you check the forecast or exchange predictions, it will always surprise you. The forecast changes daily. A rainy day will clear up unexpectedly, leaving you looking silly in your rain boots. And a dry day turns out to have such a thick mist that it's practically raining.

And then there's the actual cold. I really don't mind rain, but I do mind the freezing cold air that blows that rain into my face and makes my lips numb on the walk to school. Who decided it would be a good idea to settle on this island in the first place? Couldn't we just leave it to some other animals who are better adapted to the cold? And why do so many English people insist on wearing the lightest of jackets, or even no jacket at all, when it's below freezing? And then complain about how cold it is!

So that's the dynamic around cold, wet, grey weather - you talk about it endlessly, you try to predict it, you gripe and gripe, but in the end it eludes your predictions and you never do anything to make it better, never try to find the silver linings, like the fresh smell of rain or the fact that your country doesn't have a drought problem, or the fun of cozying up when it's snowing outside and drinking hot chocolate.

Hot weather is a totally different thing. I just don't remember talking about the heat so much when I was living in southern California. I suffered in it, definitely. There were days when wearing any clothes at all seemed unbearable, when working was out of the question. But when the sun is beating down, people seem to expect to feel happy, to revel in the heat - the opposite of the assumption that cold weather is always miserable and we must complain about it. Hot weather isn't an excuse to complain, it's an excuse to put on your bikini and sun bathe or buy yourself a refreshing drink.

I think part of this is that, when it is truly and really hot, silence and stillness are your best friends. Heat melts your energy away, and no one wants to waste the precious energy they have left by talking about how low-energy they are. Better to summon up some last strength and drift through the heat waves toward an air-conditioned place or a glass of cold water.

There is one constant in both extremes of climates. Going to the movies is always good. In cold places, it's a warm place to curl up for a few hours. In hot places, it's a haven of cool darkness. So yesterday I went to see a remastered print of Roman Holiday and accompanied Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck to beautiful, summery Rome, where people roll up their sleeves and eat gelato. That's the other thing about weather - it always makes you wish for its opposite - and I was really jealous of Audrey and Gregory as I stood waiting for the bus after the movie, freezing my face off.

But jealousy aside, it was a great way to spend a Sunday evening. It's such an adorable movie, with jokes that don't get old and great side characters - little sketches perfectly realized in a few moments as the journalist and the princess zoom through Rome on their Vespa. No matter what you're needing an escape from - the heat or the cold or school work or work work - it's great to watch Audrey Hepburn's princess escape her duties and responsibilities and jaunt around a beautiful city, basking in the heat, beautifully captured in the cool tones of classic black-and-white film.

spring rhythms

I know, it's not really spring yet. I would like it to be spring very much, but...it's not. However, I'm starting to believe better seasons are on the way.

The sun came out today for the first time in ages. This was a good thing. On my way to class this morning through the park, I saw some wildflowers peeping out of the (very soggy) ground. And speaking of sogginess, rain seems to have replaced snow here, and I do love rainy days sometimes. They make way for more wildflowers.

I decided to spend today cleaning, baking, reading, and doing a little yoga. I feel like spring is a time for being restorative, and I have a little extra time this week. The semester has hit the mid-way plateau - we've already struggled up the learning curve of new schedules, new professors, new topics and concepts, but we've yet to start the accelerating slide toward final papers and deadlines. Right now, I'm just moseying along for a while.

And sometimes it's good to give yourself some space, clean up the papers on your desk, glance a few weeks ahead on the calendar, catch up on your sleep, and introduce something new into your routine - a new route to school, a book that's not on a course list, a new recipe, some music you haven't listened to in a while. Over the last few weeks, I've made some changes in my daily schedule, too. For a few days, I tried writing for an hour first thing in the morning. Yesterday and today, I'm not checking the blogs I usually look at in the mornings so I can spend the time reading a novel instead.

It's funny how we all make resolutions to change our lives at New Years - I never really do it because at that time of year, I'm still feeling cozy and wintry and I'm much more ready to curl up right where I am and hibernate than I am to get out and try something new or disrupt my rhythms at all. Spring, though, is a whole other feeling. I don't necessarily feel the need to make an absolute shift, or even to make an official promise, like giving up chocolate for Lent. It's just good sometimes to shake yourself out of habit and see what it feels like to do something another way.

I might be noticing all this more because this is my first full year in a place where it actually gets cold and stays cold through February. I'm appreciating minute rises in temperature and flashes of blue sky SO much more than I would normally. Little changes can make a big difference.

Books to the power of wonderful

I suppose I could have written this post a few weeks ago, but I was busy and I forgot, and then I was reading what one of my good friends wrote about her experience reading Eat, Pray, Love after moving to a new state, and that made me want to catch up with my life and write down some thoughts about books and the people who write them and the people who read them.

When I first moved to England, knowing no one, starting courses at a new university in a new country, feeling generally both excited and terrified, there were a few days of odd limbo. Classes hadn't started yet, although I had gotten all settled into my new house and was attending various orientation events and trying to meet a lot of new people at once. But when I needed a break from introducing myself and playing the names and faces game, I was pretty lonely, so I bought a book.

It happened to be Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan's latest novel, and it happened to be wonderful and a romantic spy story that was equally indulgent and inspiring, a good story packaged as good literature (that rare combination that McEwan creates so brilliantly). But what's funny is that this scenario had all happened to me before, two years ago, when I arrived for my semester abroad in France. Equally, if not more, alienated and confused and excited-but-terrified, I looked for refuge in the small collection of books sitting in the common room of where I was living. I picked up the only book in English I saw: The Innocent by Ian McEwan.

To make this parallel even more bizarre, The Innocent is also a spy story, less romantic and more gruesome. I remember lying in bed late at night reading to the end, utterly caught up in the story and the suspense, and being so grateful for the little respite it offered me from the challenge of learning a new city/country/world.

Both books were particularly suited to my need because both are about young people entering new and unfamiliar worlds as they try to define themselves and their lives - in The Innocent, Leonard Marnham arrives in Cold War Berlin from England and gets embroiled in love and some very challenging ethics questions; in Sweet Tooth, Serena Frome graduates from Cambridge only to find herself recruited by MI5 and whisked into a world of secret money, assumed identities, and very high stakes love affairs. OK, so I was just going to school in other countries, but still, it was nice to read about their adventures as a break from my own.

So here I was, smiling to myself over the odd coincidence and the very great pleasure which a pair of fine novels in the face of difficulty can bestow. And then Ian McEwan turned up at my university to give an interview and sign books, and I got the chance to tell him how much his books meant to me and why. This was incredibly important for me, and I'm so lucky to have had that chance. It made me realize how little we get to express our thanks to people who inspire us in a manner more personal than a standing ovation or a high number of sales of a book. And I got to stand face to face with one of my favorite authors and thank him for his work, got to express my feelings (if briefly and very nervously) about a book to the person who wrote it.

So yeah, it's not often the people who read books and who write them get to meet, but it's all the more wonderful maybe for being rare and special. I saw another example of this when I went to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer and crowded into tents with other book-lovers to hear authors talk about their work and answer audience questions and the body heat generated by a bunch of people squeezed into that special space seemed to be charged with a massive energy of excitement and thrilled-to-be-here-ment that was infectious. Reading a book may be a pretty solitary, quiet activity most of the time, but it can generate big emotions, and sometimes it's just awesome to share that bigness out loud.

P.S. Speaking of books and talking about them with others, I know I said I would do a lot of reviews of/posts about the books I've been reading for my course, and I haven't much at all. But I'm going to try to do more of that because I love writing about books and I want to write down some of my thoughts about the ones I've liked best or learned the most from this semester before I settle into new books and the old ones fly out of my head. So stay tuned.

Thoughts on the perfect party

At the perfect party...

...everyone dresses up, whether in a silly costume, their softest pyjamas, or their best evening attire.

...there are enough seats for everyone, but no one stays sitting in the same seat the whole time.

...you meet new people and catch up with old friends.

...everyone is free to enjoy a drink or two, but no one feels pressured to get drunk.

...the guests compliment the hostess/host not only by saying the the food, but also by taking second helpings.

...one or two couples or groups arrive on time, and a few more later in the evening to add new energy to the group, and everyone leaves by midnight.

...there aren't too many dishes to do, and you can chill out after everyone leaves by standing at the sink letting the warm water run over your hands and carefully stacking clean dishes in the dish drain.

...no one talks about religion or politics.

...there are multiple spaces in which people can wander and plenty of nooks, balconies, gardens, sofas, kitchen counters that people can group easily around.

...one of the guests is a great photographer and snaps pictures of the evening for future nostalgia.

In other news, Happy Halloween! Hope you all get to attend or throw perfect parties today.

A collection of thoughts from a frustrated feminist

1.
When I tell people that I graduated last spring from a women's college or that I'm thinking about joining the feminist society at my new school, I get enough puzzled looks to make me feel a little self-conscious about it. I even met a couple of guys who responded by saying they were in favor of equality, not feminism. Really, did they think I meant that I hated men or wanted to institute some tyrannical matriarchy?

2.
The other day I went to a talk given by a prominent UK radio host. He was funny and interesting and I really enjoyed his talk, but at the end he told an amusing anecdote about a school where students relabeled bathrooms as "bathroom with urinal" and "bathroom without urinal" instead of men's room and women's room. The punchline was something along the lines of, 'if transgender students can't even figure out which bathroom to use, why are they going to university?'

This is very frustrating because I come from just such a school, and I've been lucky enough to talk to people who've given me a real perspective on arbitrary divisions like the one we draw between bathrooms with urinals and without. But so far I have always been on the receiving end of the education in society/gender awareness. And it's hard to start the conversation when I'm the one who's going to have to explain why that division is arbitrary and why that joke reflected an uninformed opinion from someone who clearly has never read Judith Butler.

3.
Earlier in the week, I was walking home from the university pub with friends after a night out. All the people we passed were undergraduate students heading to a party with the theme of middle school, so they were all decked out in variations on a classic school uniform. Except that almost all of the girls we passed would probably get detention for wearing their skirts too short. I don't want to generalize about a country I just moved to, but young women in England seem to wear their skirts and trousers shorter than even the girls in southern California. What's bizarre is that in California, people wear short shorts because anything else might be unbearably hot. But here, people wear even shorter shorts despite the fact that it's absolutely freezing.

I think it's actually the temperature issue, silly though it may seem, that makes me troubled with this fashion trend. When I see a girl wearing a short, flouncy sundress on a hot day, it makes me happy to see her enjoying her body and not compromising her physical comfort to someone else's standard of modesty. But when I see a girl walking down the street at 11pm in cold weather wearing a tank top and a skirt that barely covers her underpants, it makes me sad to see her torturing herself in order to conform to the norm.

I realize this is a flawed logic. Maybe the girl in California doesn't actually like wearing sundresses and only does it to fit in with her friends. And maybe the girl in England just loves the feeling of the cold wind on her bare legs. And maybe if I saw a guy on the same street in England walking around without his shirt on, I wouldn't think he was being stupid and shallow - it might even cross my mind to admire his fortitude and endurance against the cold. Which would be a total double standard.

Basically, this has been bothering and puzzling me. I really don't want to cramp or judge anyone's style, but there's just something about the spectacle of a hundred young women all dressed in skirts the same, very short, length that makes me cringe. Or at least furrow my brow as I try to figure out how I would like to respond to that.

So, I may go ahead and join the feminist society. But in the meantime, if any of you have thoughts on these issues, please share them in the comments! I would love to make this a conversation instead of just mulling it over myself.

September Things

1. Cooking

Since I moved into my share house at my new 'uni,' as they say here, I've been trying to balance grabbing quick meals at the cafeteria with lots of cooking time. For the first time in many years, I've moved out of the dorms and into a real person house, with a real person kitchen that I can keep my food in and that I only share with a few other people.

This makes me so happy, because walking downstairs and spending a half-hour stirring and chopping and tasting is one of the absolute best study breaks, especially when you've just moved to a cold place and going outside for a walk involves lots of clothes and cold hands. (That said, I do want to go explore the area more on foot. But that might wait til I get a good winter coat.)

But cooking in this particular house involves particular challenges. First, our fridge is very small. I marked out my fridge territory early, but it only consists of half-a shelf. One of my housemates calls putting away the groceries 'fridge tetris.' So I am developing mad skills not only in fitting lots of odd-shaped food objects into a compact space, but also in buying items that will either be used up quickly or be useful for a variety of different dishes. I really dislike eating the same thing every day, so I'm having to get very clever about how many different ways I can use carrot sticks or a tub of ricotta cheese.

Second, an English shop does not equal an American grocery store. I've had trouble finding something as basic (at least to me) as cornmeal in Marks & Spencer. There are really nice things about shopping there, though, like the fact that they prep your veggies for you so that you can buy a little bag of chopped butternut squash instead of having to wage war with an entire one when you get home.

Adjustments and annoyances aside, I'm having a lot of fun cooking. It's like a little game I'm playing with puzzles that occupy my mind during the walk home and, of course, delicious rewards when I solve the puzzle correctly.

Well that was long. Moving on.

2. Collared shirts and sweaters.

I've finally understood the brilliance of the fashion trend that has everyone buttoning up their collared shirts to the neck and pulling a sweater over it. Not only does it keep your neck warmer, it also makes it possible to vary your outfits in cold weather where no matter what cute t-shirt you put on, you also have to put sweaters and jackets over it. I do kind of like wearing nice things just for myself, knowing that I'm wearing a bright red t-shirt when all others see is my grey sweater. But it's also fun to let people know that you do actually change your clothes every day, and a cute little shirt collar peeking out of your sweater is a fun way to do that.

3. Conversation skills

If nothing else, the last two weeks have taught me that developing superior conversation skills is something I really want to do. When I say 'superior,' I don't mean I want to be better than everyone I'm talking to. In fact, if everyone wants to join me in making better conversation, that would make me really happy. What I mean is that I want to get beyond the inane and repetitive conversation that I've encountered so much recently.

First I was really just annoyed at how my conversations kept revolving around the same topics (where are you from, what are you studying, why did you choose this school, etc, etc, etc). And then at some point I realized that I'm half the problem. When people ask me those questions, I respond in kind instead of coming up with something more interesting or unusual to ask or comment on.

Yesterday I had an extremely annoying conversation about whether or not English food is good or bad. Here's a piece of advice. Don't have that conversation. It's boring. If the two parties disagree, you just end up arguing over it. If you agree, then there's not much to discuss, is there? Afterwards, I felt silly for not asking this person a good question, something specific that would get them talking about their course or about anything, really, that wasn't what was in front of us on our plates.

Realistically, of course, some people just aren't willing to talk about things that would interest me, because they find them boring. This particular person seems, from what I've heard so far not to enjoy learning, for example. There's not much I can do with that, because I love learning - and what is a good conversation if not a chance to learn something new about yourself or your interlocutor? But nonetheless, the experience resolved me to try harder to draw people out and be a more interesting person myself.

So, this has been a post about things beginning with C. You can now picture me holding conversations while cooking and wearing collared shirts.

The Mystery of the Flame Juggler

Cornmarket is one of the busiest streets in Oxford, and I walk down it often, because it's pedestrian only and leads to various of my favorite haunts, like Marks & Spencer. Along the way, I'm lucky to have not only a whole lot of people watching to do, but also a soundtrack, because the street is lined with buskers ranging from a guy playing a ragtime song on his guitar to a young opera singer to a pair of young men playing some really enchanting but hard to place music on the cello.

And then there is the flame juggler. He's almost always there when I pass along the street, tossing and catching three flaming torches. Or at least they look like flaming torches. The question that's been plaguing me is: is the fire real?

Evidence in support of the real fire theory:
1. He sets out a rope to create a 2 meter boundary around himself so that people don't get too close.
2. His face and hands are sooty.
3. The flames look real enough.

Evidence against the real fire theory:
1. He could be doing the boundary thing and making his face sooty just to make us think it's real.
2. The flames don't seem to give off any smoke, either visible or smellable.
3. It would be crazy dangerous if he were using real fire.

So the chances are about 50-50 right now. Clearly, I need to deepen my investigation, for example by observing him when it starts raining or when he ignites and/or quenches the flames. I'll let you know if I ever figure it out.