The great anti-internet experiment

So I’m really going through with it, as terrifying at it is – I’m going offline for two months as of tomorrow, and will be offline through August 19. I’m doing this for a number of reasons:

I’ve been a little overwhelmed with the volume and nature of some of the correspondence I receive – though I am very grateful for every email and comment I get, I find that I can’t always respond in a timely fashion, and the guilt and frustration of that gets to me;

I want to rewire my brain to slow down and stop taking in so much useless information;

I’ve been using the internet to make myself unhappy, and I want to break that habit;

I’m sort of losing the desire to communicate publicly, and that’s death for a writer.

(Also, I kind of want to see if I can do it, or if I crack and start bingeing on TWoP recaps of the Bachelorette by Monday.)

So I won’t be answering email, checking Facebook or Twitter, or checking or posting to this blog (or anybody else’s blog) for the next two months – I’ll be disabling my internet browser to make sure this actually happens. I’ll be reading the hard copy of the Times we subscribe to; if I need to know what the weather’s going to be, I’ll turn on NY1. I look forward to learning nothing new in the next two months about the cast of the Twilight movies, or this Speidi person people keep writing about.

Bill will be posting new episodes of the Bilge show, though we will be taking a two-week hiatus from the show – new episodes resume on Friday, July 10. And I will be reading at KGB bar on Thursday, July 16 for the Drunken! Careening! Writers! series (7pm, 85 East 4th Street, free) – I hope you’ll miss me so much by then that you’ll be inspired to come see me in person.

This may be a stupid idea; this may be career suicide; this may not even work. But whatever happens, I feel certain that I’ll learn something from it. I look forward to sharing that with you when I find out what it is. In the meantime, I’ll miss you, and hope you’ll have a great summer.

Thanks for being the best readers a writer could possible hope for. See you in August.

Qwitter?

It has come to my attention lately that I am really fucking bad at using the internet.

This realization came to me the other morning, after I spent fifteen minutes looking at the blogs and Twitter feeds of people I dislike. Why in the world would I do this? Why would I go and seek out information about people who have been hostile to me; people who, when I think about them, make me angry? Do I enjoy being angry? What could I possibly stand to gain by upsetting myself by spying on their lives? And how creepy does that make me?

Don't answer yet, because I get even creepier: After spending yet another fifteen minutes of my short, precious life reading bullshit written by assholes, hoping to find proof that they are miserable, and that they're reaping all the failure they've worked so hard to sow, I logged on to my private Twitter account and wrote nasty "blind items" about them. I called one of them a psycho drama queen; another I decried as a pompous self-promoter. My schadentwitter complete, I packed up the laptop and went to work.

About four hours later, I felt sick to my stomach. I'd just taken huge, ugly potshots at two of these women from behind the safety of my locked account, sneered at them to a bunch of people I'm trying to look good in front of. And putting other people down (no matter how much they -- trust me -- deserve it) makes me look...good? Not really. It makes me look gross and bitter and obsessed and...ugh. Creepy.

Ashamed of myself, I deleted the posts. Which is something I've done quite a bit of, lately -- posting things to Twitter and then deleting them. Because I post things in a fit of pique, and then think better of it later. Which means I should not be posting at all. 

I just did it again this morning -- I got the latest in a chain of emails that pissed me off beyond measure, and I jumped right online to complain. Never mind that some of the people who read me might know what I was referring to; never mind that I should be a professional and shut up about people I dislike, and focus on positive stuff instead. I just had to let everyone know that I was right and this mystery person was wrong and my god, people are such assholes. But that makes me the asshole. 

So I've been thinking about taking an internet break for the summer. What would life be like, I wonder, if I didn't wake up and go straight to the computer? What if I didn't spend hours each day answering email, checking Facebook, reading useless gossip on Gawker? Wouldn't it be great to NOT receive emails that piss me off? Wouldn't it be great to break myself of the habit of (as a wise friend once called it) "hate reading"? I realize that I might miss some things -- emails from readers, YouTube videos of cats doing ridiculous things -- but I feel like I might find other things to replace them -- clarity, peace, relief from the overwhelming onslaught of information.

I'm not sure if I'm going to go through with it, or how I would manage it, since (like most humans) I do a lot of business via email. But I sure am thinking about it. I would definitely miss the interaction with loyal blog readers, but I feel pretty certain that I'd return to blogging at the end of the summer -- maybe even with renewed purpose and vigor! Or maybe not. 

Either way, I want to say thank you to the many wonderful and supportive people who make the internet a pleasure by commenting on this blog and sending notes of encouragement. It's for you that I want to write a great next book; it's for you that I want to be a better blogger. It's for me that I want to be a better person.

Kid's Lib

I’ve been writing recently about my thirteenth year, which began with my mother announcing her impending marriage to my stepfather, Dave, on the cab ride home from my birthday dinner, and ended with her locking him out of the apartment, for neither the first nor the last time. In between, my half-brother was born, my breasts sprang from my chest like angry lemons, and I lost every single one of my school friends.

It hit me the other day, as I was writing in my notebook: a memory of sitting at the dining room table in our apartment on Roosevelt Island, hand-lettering flyers for the latest club I planned to start. The club was called Kid’s Lib, and its purpose was to champion the rights of children, who had no say in the conditions of their own lives. I’d got the idea from a book I’d read years before, Nobody’s Family is Going to Change; I’d also got it, I suppose, from the overwhelming sense of persecution and injustice I felt in regards to my own situation. I was stuck living with a violent creep, exiled from my bedroom to the living room to make room for his squalling infant son, and berated when I didn’t evince a proper amount of happiness with the arrangement. And that was just my mom’s house.

I remember Dave smirking at me from across the table, grabbing one of my flyers and pulling it towards him along the tabletop like a playing card. “Kid’s…Lib,” he said, really relishing the pause between the words. “Huh.” He didn’t have to say any more; I knew what “huh” meant. It meant, you are laughable, and I will enjoy watching this latest hopeless endeavor of yours fail.

I remembered this exchange the other day, this particular five seconds of my life from twenty-six years ago, and my whole body curled into a cringe. Kid’s Lib was a failure, as was my boycott of the deli on the corner by school (organized because of how they’d treated a popular girl named Caitlin, who could not possibly have cared less about me), as was my petition to force the dean of the middle school to make public a rumored list of troublemaking students, a list that, if it existed, definitely featured my own name, likely in capital letters. Nobody wanted one of my Kid’s Lib flyers, nobody wanted to come to the inaugural meeting, and I was forced to throw all my literature in a public garbage can two blocks from home, lest Dave find the discards and jeer at me some more.

This was the year that I started cutting classes and stealing from other kids’ lockers, the year I started weeping openly and ostentatiously in the middle of English class, hoping someone would ask me what was wrong. This was the year that a majority of my classmates formed the Make Janice Miserable Club, a club with a charter and officers and more than one meeting to its credit, making it infinitely more successful than Kid’s Lib.

And I know it’s gauche to feel sorry for myself in public, not that I haven’t done it before, but oh my god. I could not have been screaming for help any louder. Could it be that nobody at my tiny private school, a school that prided itself on small class size, individualized attention, and liberal values, could be bothered to pick up a phone and ask, “What the hell is going on in this kid’s home?” And what would that have done for me, anyway, besides get me in more trouble?

So it becomes the job of the adult writer to notice the pain of the thirteen-year-old. To say, okay, you could have had it worse, and no, you weren’t starving for food, but you were starving for safety, you were starving for a friend. To cringe, not out of shame, but out of empathy.

Twenty-six years later, I can’t right the wrongs. But I can write them. And that’s liberation.

This is a blog post

This is a blog post. I am writing a blog post. I said I was going to write at least one real blog post every week – not just a list of upcoming events, or the weekly Bilge show, but a real blog post, where I say something about something. So here it goes.

So what do I have to say? I promised myself I wasn’t going to write about volunteering this time around – yes, I’m back to volunteering, despite what we all learned about me being the worst, most co-dependent volunteer in the history of unpaid labor – so I will just say that I fucking HATE people who commercially sexually exploit young women and girls. I hate pimps, I hate johns, and I hate people who want to argue the issue with me. The next person who tells me that “the girls are doing it by choice” is going to get repeatedly beaten and raped, and then asked to make some fucking choices.

Sorry. I get all curse-y and violent and ALL CAPS about this issue, as hard as I try not to. But I get curse-y and violent about lots of things – it’s the product of being in the thirty-ninth year of a lifelong rage. Even with all the therapy and the exercise and the writing; even with all the mindfulness and the deep breathing and the creative hobbies and the Positive Life Changes I Have Fought Hard to Implement, I am still an angry person. Or, rather, an Angry Person. The type of person that people say they feel sorry for – as in, “I feel sorry for Janice. She’s such an angry person.” When what they really mean is, “I feel superior to Janice, who can’t control her emotions in public.”

Because the only way to win at life, or at least to win at Facebook, is to project an image of complete happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction. Everything is great! Look at my beautiful children, and/or the important work I do! I am invested in global political affairs, but only in a positive way – sign my petition! I do not have trouble falling asleep at night because I’m worrying about the cruelty and privation other beings are suffering at every moment! Not me! I don’t experience depression, and I especially don’t experience anger, because anger is for gross, disgusting people who can’t just let it go! I feel GREAT about life, especially MY life!

Well, I don’t feel great about life. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer it to the alternative, but I don’t feel great about it. I feel frustrated and sad that we were given this incredible gift – this consciousness, this existence, this planet – and most of what we choose to do with it is so stupid and meaningless, not to mention ugly and destructive. I feel frustrated with myself for wasting so much of my own time on petty bullshit, when I was the nine-year-old who planned to unite the world under a banner of fairness and compassion. I feel remorse for all the harm I’ve caused in the world, so much of it a product of my anger.

None of which I’m posting as my status update.

And now I want to reassure you that I am a happy person, that I am a successful person – not just successful (enough) as a writer, but successful as a human being. I count my blessings every day, sometimes more than once, especially if I feel like there’s a new one to add to the list; I won’t detail them here, but it goes something like: husband, family, friends, cats, security, brains, heart, health, freedom. Enough inner peace to keep me from exploding. Many more resources than most people on the planet. Awesome comments and emails from people who have read my books. I mean, come on. All of that makes me very happy, which is why you will see me, at least fifty percent of the time, walking down the street and smiling and singing to myself. When I’m not walking down the street muttering to myself, cursing under my breath at people in my way, apologizing out loud to people I haven’t seen in years, or audibly saying to myself, “I’m all right, everything’s all right,” in an effort to make it so. 

So there it is: I’m an angry, happy, successful, remorseful, grateful, miserable person. I may not win at Facebook, but I win at blog post. At least until I think better of it, and delete this post later this afternoon…

Doings

So I hope you’ve been enjoying the Bilge show as much as we’ve been enjoying it, which is an obscene amount. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun working on a project since…ever. Working with Bill is incredible – he is an unstoppable comedy machine! – and the half hour I spent last week making a pennant that says “BOOBIES” was satisfying beyond belief. I can’t wait for the next political protest we attend – while everyone around us carries “SAVE DARFUR” signs, we can bear our “BOOBIES” pennant. Because really, what the world needs is more boobies.

It’s especially gratifying to work in the medium of web video because (segue alert) it feels like a culmination of the work I was doing in the late ‘90s at Pseudo.com, the famous dotcom flameout that’s now the subject of the Sundance-winning documentary We Live in Public. Pseudo’s founder, Josh Harris, was well ahead of his time in envisioning the kind of user-created content that’s come to define and dominate online society today, and the press attention that the film is getting makes me nostalgic for the years we spent in our mouse-riddled offices on Broadway and Houston, whipping up live video shows with interactive chat, while the five percent of Americans who were even online had 26.6K baud modems. By the time Pseudo collapsed under its own weight, the company had hundreds of employees, and had burned through millions of dollars. And now, a decade later, we can produce the same kind of low-quality homegrown entertainment from our living room, for the price of a piece of oak tag, a wooden dowel, and a Sharpie.

But this is all just an excuse to brag that I’ll be performing at a private screening of We Live in Public at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday night, mere hours after I’m scheduled to read some poetry at the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop (152 Ludlow St. between Stanton and Rivington, 4pm, free). And of course we’ll be putting up a new episode of Bilge this and every Friday morning, until we get tired of having more fun than married people should be allowed to have.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

The worst blogger in the entire world

Want to hear my lame excuses for why I never update anymore?

1. "Writing about my personal life caused my window to fall open and smash on the floor during a blizzard."

Okay, none of us really believe this one, do we? I mean, it's a nice metaphor, but it's bullshit. The window blew open because it was unlocked. Writing about my personal life had nothing to do with it. If writing about my personal life caused household disasters, our entire building would be submerged in the Marianas Trench. And it would be on fire. And covered in bees. Cancer-causing bees. 

2. "I'm so busy! Uh, writing."

Well, this is kind of true. Lately, I’ve been working on a proposal for a technical book, a side project unrelated to my first two books, which I’d be writing under a pseudonym (Janice Scurry, maybe? Or…Janice Timberlake?); meanwhile, I continue to work on the incredibly painful and personal stuff I insist on writing and publishing under my own stupid name, because I never learn. I've also been volunteering again, serving on the Board of Directors for Girls Write Now, and lending a hand at GEMS (also helping to throw the GEMS tenth birthday party/reading on Friday, May 8 at 7pm at the Bowery Poetry Club – like how I worked that in there?). But I know plenty of people who are way busier than I am – with, like, day jobs and stuff – who manage to blog much more frequently than I do. These people are empirically better than me. 

3. I don’t have anything to write about.

Really? Nothing to write about? How about, you know, everything? How about the gift of life, in all of its miraculous complexity? How about social evils, and how they are bad? You know, I used to blog about feminist issues…until I got tired of having the same arguments again and again, and just decided to give up and agree that I am a feminist because I am an ugly frigid prude. (Side note: I read some reports from the SXSW conference, and it turns out that everyone on the feminist blogger panel has received death threats. Nice!) But I have not blogged about anything socially relevant in ages, which is unconscionable – I could have cured sexism by now, with the power of my blogging! But instead, I seem to write only about myself, and my upcoming readings (Sunday, April 5 at 4pm at Cakeshop – like how I worked that in there?).

Satia even wrote to me recently with a suggested topic, which had to do with giving and receiving feedback on writing, and how one can trust one’s own critical eye, not to mention others’, when tastes are so subjective. My answer: You kind of can’t, but you go with your gut anyway. Damn, I should have saved that for another post.

4. I am having an ongoing existential crisis, which manifests itself in a morbid preoccupation with death and suffering, feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness, crippling anxiety, overbearing self-loathing, and persistent anomie (that is, “a feeling of disorientation and alienation from society caused by the perceived absence of a supporting social or moral framework”).

Awww, boo hoo! The world stinks, nature is indifferent, and I’m going to die, just like everybody else! And yet I still manage to vlog about American Idol. So it would seem that I could spare a few moments from obsessing over the unknowableness of the universe, and whether or not I should drop off the grid and start leading an ethically and ecologically sustainable life (quick answer: yes I should, and no I’m not going to) in order to update my fucking blog once every pink and purple moon.

5. I’m lazy.

Soooooo lazy. Is Idol on yet? I sure do like that Anoop Desai.

Have You Heard From Her

Got a comment on this blog the other day from a reader named Lola, who wanted to know if I’ve heard from Sam since the book was published. It’s a question that comes up often enough – people want to know what happened to Sam, if she’s okay, if I ever found out anything more about her family, if she ever got better. They’re not happy with the indeterminate ending of the book; they want an epilogue, a where-are-they-now.

We all do.

I have not heard from Sam since the last conversation recorded in the book, when I called her program, she answered, she said she couldn’t talk, and she hung up on me. That was late January of 2006 – three years ago. Nothing since then. Well, almost nothing.

It’s mid-August, 2006. I’m working on the book, even as the events are still way too fresh to comprehend, ignoring my own advice about memoir writing: “You have to have the perspective of time.” I’d like to have the perspective of time, but I’d also like to make my deadline, and I’d really like to be done with the whole thing, to purge it in one painful heave and have it over with. Writing the book is almost as bad as living it, I’m discovering; every day, I pack up and go to the office and stir it all up, conjure up horrible feelings and detail terrible mistakes and dwell on them. Sometimes, I shake with rage, and I have to shut the laptop and go into the kitchen for a while, read the bulletin board, rifle through the candy bowl. Other times, I have to lie down on the sofa and shut my eyes.

Then comes the day when I am working on the scene where Sam shows up battered and bruised, and she tells me she’s been in a fight with a pimp. She’s got a shiner, and her hands are fluttering, because she had to stab him in the hollow of his throat with a pen, and she doesn’t know what happened after that because she ran. And I call the cops and try to calm her down and try to calm myself down, all the while freaking out over the idea that she may have just killed somebody in hand-to-hand combat. 

And of course, as I’m writing the scene, I realize all over again that there was no pimp, and there was no fight; that the bruises were self-inflicted; that she was lying to my face, and laughing at me the entire time for being such a gullible simp.

So I’m writing this scene, and I’m reliving it again, and I really think I’m going to lose my shit. I can’t believe how badly I was duped, how humiliated I feel, how much she cost me, and how much more she could have cost me if she hadn’t been unmasked. I’m so fucking angry at her; I hate her. I hate the girl I’ve been calling Samantha Dunleavy, and it’s high time I did something about it.

I pack up the laptop and I head home, fuming like a steam engine, choo choo up Sixth Avenue, gaining speed with every step. That’s it – I’m going to unmask her. I’m calling her program, where she’s busy wasting everyone’s time with her bullshit stories, and I don’t care if it gets her thrown out – I’m blowing up her spot. As a matter of fact, I hope she gets thrown out; she’s there on the taxpayers’ dime right now, and I’m not ready to pay another red cent for her to sit around spinning lies and smirking at how stupid we all are.

I get home, fling my bag onto the sofa, and grab my notepad with the number to her program, stabbing the buttons on my phone with vigor. A young man answers, “Hello, [Program Name and Branch], how can I help you.”

“Hi, I’m looking for Luwanda, please.” I’ve tried calling her counselor before, without success, but today, I am not taking no for an answer.

“Luwanda’s at [a different branch] now. Do you want the number there?”

“Yes, please.” I write down the number, and thank him. “But actually, I was looking for Samantha Dunleavy – is she there, please?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s at [the other branch] too.”

“Great,” I say. “Thanks again.”

And then I hang up and stare at the phone. He just told me where Sam is – she’s still at the program, just at a different branch. So she’s been there for nine or ten months now, which means she’s happy enough there, and she’s not currently in the hospital, which is also good news. And the fact that he told me where she is, rather than saying he couldn’t give me any information – that’s the most telling fact of all. If she were still a client, he’d have had to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t confirm whether she’s here or not,” or he’d have been violating the privacy policy. But he gave me the branch and the number to reach her. Which indicates to me that she’s now on staff.

Sure, and why shouldn’t she be? Many program graduates go on to join the staff. Sam had probably graduated after six months in treatment, and they’d probably hired her. She’s brilliant and sensitive – a perfect staff member, in that respect – and it makes sense that she wouldn’t have wanted to leave the program when her time was up. After all, it’s a safe place, separate from the rest of society, where she’s established a persona that’s working for her – never mind that it’s all bullshit. She’s happy where she is, and she’s a success.

So I leave her alone. I don’t call the new branch, and I don’t ask for Luwanda, and I don’t ask for her supervisor, and I certainly don’t ask for Sam. I just tuck the phone number into my files, mull over what I think I’ve learned, and leave it at that.

That was two and a half years ago, and I haven’t attempted to reach her since then. I don’t know if she’s still at the program – my guess is that she’s moved on, but I haven’t tried to confirm that. I don’t even know if my original thesis, that she’d graduated and joined the staff, was correct. Maybe whoever answered the phone was just lazy, confused, or a jerk; maybe she was still a client, and he violated her privacy; maybe she was long gone and he was mistaken about her whereabouts. Maybe he was just blowing me off. I never heard from her parents again, and never tried to contact them; Maria hasn’t heard anything, nor has she tried to make contact.

Again, my guess is that she moved on from the treatment program at some point – maybe she was exposed, or maybe she just got bored, but I don’t think she could stay in one place for more than a year or so; that wasn’t her MO. I would guess that she has not stopped manufacturing illnesses; I would also conjecture that she’s in bad physical shape right now, whether she’s in the hospital or just at large. Her organs had been severely damaged, and I doubt she gave them much of a rest. In fact, she may have succumbed to the side effects of her disease, though somehow I doubt that too. Something tells me she’s still out there, doing what she does.

Obviously, I hope that one day I’ll hear from her, or from someone who knows her, and that the mystery will be solved. We’ll finally learn what happened to her after she left my life; we’ll even learn the truth about her family, and what (if anything) might have happened in her early years to provoke such a disorder. I don’t really believe that this will happen, but I hope. And I hope that, wherever she is, she’s overcome her true illness and learned to be happy and at peace.

Again, I don’t believe. But I hope.

Homesick

Sitting here in a cybercafe in Washington DC, feeling lonely and out of place. Got a reading to do tonight; tomorrow morning I get to go home. I don't know when I got to be such a baby about traveling -- it used to be exciting to go places, stay in hotels, do readings. Now I'm just glum. Had lunch with a friend, wandered around Borders, didn't bother to reshelve my books someplace more prominent -- reshelving just makes more work for the clerks, and I'm in an everything-is-pointless mood anyway. Pining for the new apartment, for the cats, for Bill; even for the office, or the gym, or the grocery store, where the cashiers in their fingerless gloves speak rapid Spanish to each other across the aisles. Just someplace close to home. Bought some Dickens (Great Expectations, as if I have any of those) and a copy of Vogue; resisting a candy bar, though I want one desperately right now -- I know that one will lead to two or three, will lead to horrible self-loathing, will lead to a severe sugar crash right before the reading. Feel like I'm looking at the world through a window; feel like a ghost. Guess I'll walk around in the cold some more, or maybe go back to the room and read. This time tomorrow, I'll be back home. I'll post pictures of the reading and write about how fun it was and all the people I saw, and if the organizers ask me to come back and do it again sometime, I'll say sure, thanks for asking, I'd love to. Just give me enough time to forget today.

Home again

Sitting here in our new apartment, listening to the cats' water fountain trickling peacefully by the kitchen. One cat is on the easy chair nearby, another on the ottoman in the bedroom, the third under the bed -- she's still acclimating, as we all are, I suppose. But it already feels like home to me. We moved in over the course of last week -- the movers brought all our stuff from storage on Monday, we started unpacking and arranging stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday, the deliveries and repair guys all came on Thursday, more unpacking on Friday, and then Saturday we made the big leap: packed the suitcases full of clothes, the box of kitchen supplies, and the cats in their carriers, and headed down here for our first night in the new place. I was ecstatic, post-move, even as the cats were hating our guts for displacing them for the third time in a year; then I woke up yesterday with the worst virus I've had in years -- puking, aching, shivering, the whole nine. 

So I'm home today, rather than at the office, where I desperately need to go one of these days; the virus has abated somewhat, but I know I have to take it easy, have to let myself rest and recover from the stress my body's been under for, oh, about a year now. And, weirdly, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I got sick the day after the move, and not the day of. I'm grateful that I'm here in this beautiful new place, full of sunlight and steam heat that says shhhhhh, with a deep, inviting tub for soaking my aching bones. I'm grateful to rest today, instead of running around doing errands and keeping appointments and working; grateful that I have an excuse the rest of the world understands: I'm sick. And I'm grateful that my body decided to give it up all at once, the toxins that I've stored up from a year of anger and frustration and displacement, rather than store them, because I don't need them anymore. It's over. We're home again -- finally, home.

Happy Wednesday night and Thursday

Happy Wednesday night, everybody. I hope you had a really good day. I think I'm having one, myself. The writers' room was empty today, which feels like such a relief; it reminds me of when I joined in fall of 2005, and nobody was ever there except like five people. I had just gotten back from my honeymoon, where I'd spent way too much time worrying about Samantha, who'd been up and down in the hospital; within days of joining the room, I was making terse calls to doctors from the stairwell. And then -- I was glad I had a quiet place to sit and write, and concentrate, and just go through it. I cried in the bathroom on more than one occasion while writing the second book, which I tried to do way too soon after the events. I also have been known to mutter to myself in the kitchen. It's no wonder that I crave privacy, even as I seem incapable of it; it's no wonder that I felt inclined to write for hours today. It's a new year tomorrow, as it always is, and while the objective, mathematical passage of time is painful and scary to those of us who are staring down forty while still writing, oh, 1994 on their emotional checks, it's also a blessing. I mean, I have more eye wrinkles, and I either found a grey hair the other day, or one that was very, very blond, but at least it's no longer fall of 2005. I think what I'm trying to say is I look forward to tomorrow, and to the tomorrows after that; I look forward to life getting better, for me, for everyone. Happy new Thursday. Happy every new day.