Category: reflections

Alone in the Universe on National Nothing Day

I’m writing this post because I just found out that tomorrow is National Nothing Day, so I won’t have a chance to write it then. Ever heard of it? The legend is that a San Francisco Examiner humor columnist, Harold Pullman Coffin, created it in 1973, probably in reaction to the proliferation of holidays in general. National Nothing Day falls on January 16 and “observing” it means you do nothing all day.

How you do nothing is up to you. The holiday from doing leads into the idea of nothingness, one example of which might be outer space. The notion that nothing is out there and that we’re alone in the universe is always up for debate. In fact, in a recently posted science news item, the author announced a study finding that there are “only” a few hundred billion stars out there, not 2 trillion as previously estimated. Therefore, that makes it more likely earthlings are alone in the universe.

No kidding, that’s what the author concluded. I couldn’t find that conclusion in the study’s findings, but I didn’t read much between that and the introduction. It’s pretty technical.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about whether we’re alone in the universe. I don’t know whether life is out there on other planets, but I hope so. The feeling of being alone in the universe sometimes makes me a little gloomy.

I’m reminded of quotes from Men in Black 2 (what doesn’t remind me of Men in Black movies?). Agent J asks his partner, Agent T, “T, when was the last time we just looked at the stars? Then he asks, “Ever get the feeling we’re alone in the universe?” Agent T says “Yes” and then a second later says “No” because he thinks the questions are some kind of test he needs to pass. When Agent J offers to buy him a piece of pie, Agent T puts his arm around him and says reassuringly, “Hey, you’re not alone in the universe.”

You could ask why Agent J, one of the Men in Black agents who police and monitor all alien life on planet earth, would ask such a question at all? He’s busting the chops of beings from other planets every day. I think what he means is that he feels alone for a different reason. He had to give up his identity as a regular person in order to be one of the Men in Black. No one can ever know him—or love him. You’ll have to watch the movie to see how that works out.

On the other hand, feeling alone in the universe is a pretty big deal to many people. In fact, for astronomers and non-scientists, it’s intriguing to speculate about it. What are humans doing here anyway? What is earth, besides being a planet in one of the many galaxies? What other life forms could be out there and what’s our relationship to them?

What if earth is some sort of exile or prison planet? Remember the 1981 movie, Escape from New York, with Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken and Lee Van Cleef as Hauk? Manhattan is the maximum-security prison for the entire country. I’m not knocking New York City; we loved our visit there several years ago. I got a senior discount on my ticket for the visit to the top of the Empire State Building.

“I’m not jumping off of this building!”–Agent J in Men in Black 3 on the Chrysler Building in New York City

Another example is Men in Black 3, in which the heavy, Boris the Animal (“It’s just Boris!”), an intergalactic psychopathic alien, was imprisoned in Lunar Max, a supermax prison on the dark side of our moon.

The Ancient Alien theorists have ideas that are just as speculative. We’re the Martians; we have alien DNA zipped into our own. Some people believe they are abducted by aliens, who conduct weird experiments on them. The kind of questions that arise echo that of the character Newton in Men in Black 2: “What’s up with anal probing? Aliens travel billions of light years just to check out our…” Newton gets abruptly interrupted by the impatient Agents K and J, but I think his question is good.

I’ve noticed there a lot more TV shows with UFO content now. Some of them talk about recently declassified documents from the military and the government. People are interviewed who have been told never to reveal what they’ve seen and heard—by supposedly real Men in Black and military officers. The witnesses come forward and discuss their experiences with fear on their faces and a few of them probably wish they’d been neuralyzed.

I don’t know what to think of it, except that sometimes I wonder if maybe we’d be better off if we were truly alone in the universe. By the way, remember to do nothing tomorrow. This will confuse the aliens.

The Most Constructive Force in the Universe

As I struggle to remember to write and say the year “2021” I noticed the University of Iowa Health Care quotation selection by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr this month pertinent to the upcoming MLK Human Rights Week, starting January 18, 2021:

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

It’s funny because, as usual, the way my sense of humor works, I also recall quotes from the movie Men in Black 3. Agent K asks Agent J, “Do you know the most destructive force in the universe?” Agent J answers with a wisecrack, “Sugar?” Agent K replies, “Regret.”

Then what is the most constructive force in the universe? Dr. King thought it was love.

Since my retirement in July of last year, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. It leaves me with too much time to reflect on my current life as a retired psychiatrist—and my past life as a consulting psychiatrist. As my thin veneer of authority, responsibility, and other lies I tell myself drop away, I become more aware of my flaws in both roles. I find deep holes in my identity as a person as my identity as a doctor fades. Just being a person who has a lot to learn about life despite being a psychiatrist—is hard. I have regrets and remorse. My sense of humor sometimes helps me get by.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and me in Vegas.

Regret can indeed be a destructive force. Though it’s similar to regret and painful, remorse could help me be a better person. It becomes more and more important that I find something constructive, both to do and to be.

 Maybe love is the most constructive force in the universe. Because quotes are sometimes misquoted and inaccurately attributed, I googled the quote “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” I found the sermon from which I think the quote is derived on a Stanford University web site. It’s called the “Loving Your Enemies” sermon and it’s published in the book, A knock at midnight: inspiration from the great sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are YouTube and Vimeo videos of an audio recording of the sermon as well. The internet being what it is, you apply hyperlinks to these and other works at the risk of the links being broken at some point, which I have found and which might be due to uncertainty about whether the text of the sermon is in the public domain.

As an aside, I’m reminded of a quote variously attributed to Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” This probably betrays my skepticism about the ability to love your enemies.

You know, it’s funny. I didn’t find the Dr. King quote, word for word, the first couple of times I scanned it in the Stanford University transcript. What I did was the thing most junior medical students do when they discover the vast load of information they have to memorize and digest. I scanned the sermon for the key words and didn’t see them.

Nor did I find it on the third read, in which I finally abandoned the scanning method and actually read the sermon. But I got the point.

If the Stanford version and my reading are accurate, what I found were probably the main ideas I needed to make sense of the sermon. King said that I have to look deep within myself first before attempting to understand anyone else, much less to love my enemies. I also would do well to look for the good in people who I judge are bad. Moreover, I gain nothing by trying to defeat my enemies. He even mentions the theories of psychologists and psychiatrists to support his profound conclusions. As I read them, I was acutely reminded of my shortcomings as a psychiatrist. You would think a psychiatrist would know how to analyze himself (and psychoanalysts do undergo analysis in training). I am not a psychoanalyst. But I am capable of reflection.

The exact quote might not be discoverable (at least to me) in King’s sermon. Nevertheless, the transformative and redemptive power of love is clearly expressed. The quote is distilled from the text of the sermon. That doesn’t mean that there might not be a different version of the sermon which could have contained each and every word. According to one writer, that may be the case. Perhaps it’s in the book, A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr.

What is more important for me at this time of my life is to accept that my search for the most constructive force in the universe will proceed in baby steps.

What I need to do is reflect on my own shortcomings and find ways to improve while avoiding making excuses. Stephen Covey said that we often blame our parents or our grandparents for our flaws. This was part of his three theories of determinism to explain man’s nature. Genetic determinism says I inherited my flaws from my grandparents (whom I never met), which implied my mistakes were encoded in my DNA. Psychic determinism supposedly explains what I got from my parents because of their mistakes in rearing me. Hmmm, I was exposed to fruitcake at Christmas. Environmental determinism implicates says that other people in my workplace, my school, my neighborhood or my country (politicians perhaps?) caused my flaws.

Covey disputed these ideas by the example of Viktor Frankl’s personal triumph over his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi death camp. His captors controlled his liberty to move about his environment. They could not control his freedom to choose what he thought and felt. He controlled his self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will to draw meaning from his experience [The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: By Stephen R. Covey. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989].

How can I see the good in my enemies, despite their obvious flaws in comparison to my own angelic perfection? And how to avoid acting on the urge to defeat them, despite the reality that there have to be winners and losers at all levels in society, including elections, sports, cribbage (at which my wife regularly beats me)? Something tells me I’m getting off to a shaky start here.

I have to crawl before I can walk; I have to walk before I can run—before I fall flat on my face for the umpteenth time. Now more than any other time in my life, I must keep trying. I must get up and try again.

ADDENDUM January 11, 2021: I tried to access the King Library and Archives (KLA) today at The King Center website. There is a message indicating the KLA page is down indefinitely and redirects the reader to the Stanford University site noted above.

Windy Terry Trueblood Trail

Day before yesterday was the eve of Christmas Eve. We ventured out on the blustery day despite the forecast for winds in excess of 40 mile per hour. We got started late in the morning and the temperatures dropped like a rocket in reverse about an hour later because of wind chill. A thin film of ice formed on the lake and it looked like the geese were leaning into the wind, which was blowing hard out of the southeast.

It almost looked like the water fowl were listening for something. In fact, we thought we heard a low-pitched hum when the wind was gusting the hardest. Sena heard it first. It came and went. I think we heard it best when we looked up at a patch of cloud-filled sky on the east side of the trail. One cloud looked sort of like a turtle’s head to me, although Sena thought it looked more like a pig’s head. The hum seemed more noticeable there.

There was a fair amount of excitement several years ago about seemingly pervasive low-pitched hums and many people were very sensitive to the noise. Some of them said it make them miserable. There is even a Wikipedia entry about the phenomenon. One guy even recorded it. I’m not sure if it’s the same sound, but it was similar. I didn’t think it was unpleasant; just odd. It’s unlikely you’ll hear it in our YouTube video, but then again, your hearing may be much keener than mine.

A heavy sign with the word “Skating” on it got knocked down by a powerful gust. We watched a very strong guy set it upright—it blew over again moments later.

Along with the wind, a blizzard was predicted for the Midwest, but it missed us. We barely got enough snow to sweep off our porch.

Merry Christmas! I hope Santa watched out for those crosswinds.

Kindness Alert!

This is just a brief announcement—a Kindness Alert. This past Saturday, we got our first load of snow of the season dumped on us, which meant we had to go out and shovel. Our driveway is pretty big. We don’t have a snowblower. This means we were out there about an hour and a half powering our way through a few inches of wet, heavy snow.

And naturally, that meant the city snowplows plugged in our driveway shortly after we went inside, foolishly congratulating ourselves on a job well done. I think there must be some kind of local ordinance requiring all driveways to be plugged with snow right after the homeowners finish clearing them. I’ve posted about this before.

But then as we watched from our front window, our neighbor interrupted his own snow removal work to clear off our driveway plug and then some. In fact, he used a snowblower and a shovel! He spent considerable time on the job. It was an impressive act of kindness. I remember wanting to rush out in the cold to thank him.

Little did I know that I would have the opportunity to return the favor. Shortly after our neighbor finished, another snow plow rumbled through and dumped more show in our driveway and even spread it around more generously in other places near the curb—and even shoved snow over the curb on the lawn. By that time, the stuff had frozen into small boulders of ice and mud.

I plodded outside again and cleaned it up. Then I noticed that the snowplow driver had also piled more snow on my neighbor’s side. In fact, I did return the favor—sooner than I thought I would.

A big shout-out for my neighbor’s act of kindness!

Music Can Heal

Here’s another post on music. This one got started while watching Eric Clapton Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 last night on the Iowa Public Broadcasting Service channel. It’s great pizza and beer music. It was the fifth event of its kind since it got started in 2004. Part of the profits go to support the substance abuse treatment center in Antigua, founded by Clapton. Although inpatient treatment programs are currently suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a virtual intensive outpatient treatment program is available.

I don’t mean to belittle Crossroads with the pizza and beer remark. I’m leading up to something and there is nothing wrong with enjoying music of any kind along with pizza and beer. Clapton and Peter Frampton did a superb job doing an old Beatles’ tune, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Clapton did the original guitar solo on that one, which I didn’t know. Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt rocked out Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken.” Many of the artists were older than me (I’m no spring chicken although they are definitely not retired). However, a newcomer, Lianne La Havas, delivered an outstanding cover of “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” originally sung by Dionne Warwick, later by Aretha Franklin.

It was great fun listening to these old songs. Most of them, except for “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” did tend to remind me of all the trouble going on in the world now, including the pandemic, political vitriol, and violence. Come to think of it, we could all use a little prayer right now.

I thought about posting the YouTube videos of a few of the Crossroads Festival songs. But I noticed that one of the YouTubers carried a large number of deleted videos, possibly due to copyright infringement issues, and they’re relatively recent. I figured the posted videos might not last long.

This brings me to an old (meaning much older than the 1960s) classical work I heard recently, “Vaughn Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” I saw it on the Light Classical cable music channel I wrote about a couple of days ago, the one about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

This one actually woke me up while I was sleeping on the couch. I frequently fall asleep to most classical music, partly because it helps me relax. However, the Vaughn Williams Fantasia didn’t just calm me—it also energized me. I’ve heard about the quality of music that can do that for people, but I was a bit skeptical. I have since looked for YouTube versions of the work, trying to find the same one I heard on the cable music channel.

I’m pretty sure I found it. It’s the one recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra (London, UK) just last month, October 2020. I’ve listened to a couple of other highly praised recordings you can hear from a YouTuber called 2ndviolinist. One was by the Boyd Neel String Orchestra conducted by Boyd Neel in 1936. The other was done by the Halle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli in 1946. Both are widely thought of as masterpieces.

The Philharmonia Orchestra players are all spaced at least 6 feet apart, adhering to the social distancing required to reduce transmission of COVID-19. If I close my eyes (or even if I don’t), this doesn’t make me nervous as I listen to the oceanic sonority of the music itself. Many comments about the recording attest to the beauty of the piece, making it a soothing treasure in our troubled times.

I’m less worried about the possibility of the video ever being deleted. I felt the same way about the one by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It isn’t just because they’re old and copyright issues may be less of an issue. It’s more because they’re probably universally viewed as vital for healing our souls. At least I hope so.

Grab a pizza and a beer—and enjoy music that heals.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: What’s in a Name?

Last night I was half-dozing while listening to our cable light classical music channel. It was the usual lineup of 200-year-old white males of the 3-B variety—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. You see a photo or artist’s rendition of a guy in a powered wig, often looking depressed or constipated, alongside of short biographical blurbs. Many of the blurbs I mentally correct for grammatical or spelling errors.

Suddenly, I was struck by what I thought was a mistake in the name of the artist—next to a photo of a Black man. The name was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Even now I initially started to type Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which also didn’t make sense, because he was not a composer. He was a famous 19th century poet who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and other works I learned from my English Literature professor, Dr. Jenny Lind Porter (that was her real name; no mix up with the Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind).

I learned a lot from Dr. Porter, although I didn’t learn anything about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was a famous 19th century composer in England. He happened to have been of mixed racial parentage, like I was. His mother (Alice Hare Martin) was white and his father was black—exactly my situation. His father (Dr. Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor) didn’t know about Samuel and they never met. I knew my father—and probably picked up some of his bad habits. Alice gave Samuel the name Coleridge because she was a fan of the poet. My name is Jim, but people often call me John, which was my father’s name.

How I got confused was a simple mental transposition of the last names. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a white man who was hooked on laudanum and wrote great poetry. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a mulatto who was not hooked on laudanum and wrote great music.

I had never seen any composers of African American descent on the cable music Light Classical channel—and we’ve been cable subscribers for many years. I have to wonder whether I just have not been paying attention or whether this is a recent phenomenon and a sign of the times.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife, Jessie Walmisley (a white woman), had two children. They named his son Hiawatha, after the native American in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha. It turns out Hiawatha (also known as Ayenwathaaa or Aiionwatha) was a real guy, an important Native American leader. Longfellow’s poem is actually about the legend of Hiawatha, which is probably not connected in any plausible way to the real life of Ayenwathaaa or Aiionwatha. Some speculate that naming their son Hiawatha might have been related to Hiawatha never knowing who his father was, which Samuel might have identified with.

The Coleridge-Taylors also had a daughter, who they initially named Gwendolyn Avril. Gwendolyn then later changed her name (why not?) to Avril Coleridge-Taylor.

Both Avril and Hiawatha went on to have distinguished careers in music. Avril was a conductor-composer in her own right—which makes me wonder why I’ve not seen any women highlighted on the Light Classical cable music channel.

Samuel was an influential and respected musical, cultural, and political leader. Sadly, he died young, of pneumonia. He was 37 years old.

I hope this helps you feel a bit less confused about all the names in this story. If you’ve got it straight, please drop me a note explaining it—so I can finally get it sorted out.

Sources I used were the Wikipedia entries for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as the Royal College of Music web presentation on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The photo of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is in the public domain, to my understanding.

Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys

We noticed the wild turkeys hung back close to edge of the woods this morning. They didn’t move out across the open land or trot across our back yard like they usually do. It’s easy to imagine that they might be more wary because they know it’s Thanksgiving Day.

Usually a dozen or so get out foraging in the early morning. I’m not sure if a dozen counts as a rafter, which is another name for a flock of them.

I’ve never heard them gobble, but you can hear them from as far away as a mile, or so I’ve read. I think the turkeys in our area might not be ordinary turkeys.

Maybe they’re more of a landing party rather than a rafter—of alien, zombie turkeys from the Pleiades. I would suspect that Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys (PZTs) can fly space craft about as well as any other alien species. That means they regularly crash them, if you believe the whole Roswell saga. I’m not sure why we think aliens are so much more intelligent than earthlings if they can’t drive any better than us.

The zombie aspect likely comes from turkeys who are slaughtered as the main course for the Thanksgiving Day menu and then are beamed up through a wormhole to the Pleiades, where they become zombified. After that, as PZTs they make regular missions to Earth to try to free their turkey brethren.

These missions often fail. It turns out that PZTs ae no better at rescue missions than driving spaceships. They can peck at assorted crap on the ground and scratch the dirt underfoot for more, which they could use as ammo for ray guns—except they can’t carry (much less shoot) ray guns. They can fly up to 55 miles an hour, leap tallish trees at a single bound, see poultry seasoning salesmen coming from a long way off—but compulsively dance in the dirt when they should be rescuing their brethren.

Well, that’s food for thought anyway. By the way, I’ve seen Pleiadian spelled a couple of different ways, so please cut me some slack today. Have a nice Thanksgiving.

Happy Anniversary

The basic definition of the word “anniversary” is the date on which an event occurred in a previous year. There are many events to which it can be attached. However, wedding anniversaries most often ring the bell, literally for those of us who got married at the Little Brown Church in the Vale in Nashua, Iowa.

Sena and I pledged our wedding vows there 43 years ago. We rang the church bell. If I posted the snapshot of that, my days would be numbered. I wore a suit tailored for a skinny young man. That outfit included the shoes. I had an afro haircut, which was the style back then.

Sena was beautiful. She still is. In the picture, she is laughing out loud as we ring the bell.

We stopped by the Little Brown Church about five years ago. We took a picture of the church bell rope. We didn’t ring the bell because there was no official person there who would have let us do that. The church recently reopened the church for services but because of the coronavirus pandemic, the web site cautions visitors about touching anything.

So, I have to try to imagine the bell ringing. I guess that’s fitting because many good and great things start with imagination.

We imagined moving to Ames, Iowa, where I graduated from Iowa State University in the mid-1980s. ISU has a pretty campus and the bells of the Campanile Carillon are there. We imagined a trip to Hawaii in 1997—and it happened. We imagined a trip to New York City in 2017 where we saw the Imagine mosaic memorial to John Lennon in in the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park.

Sena has a fertile imagination, which has led to many beautiful back and front yard gardens over the years. Some of the flowers remind me of bells.

Happy Anniversary. Let’s ring the bell.

Camping in Our Basement: Week 2

It’s week 2 of camping out in our basement because our wood floors underwent sanding and resealing. Today, the workers finished up and the floors look great.

But we still can’t move back upstairs because that would ruin the finish just applied on the floors. The final coat went on last Friday. It’ll be this coming Friday before we can move furniture back. We can’t even walk on them unless we’re in stocking feet. We have not mastered the art of levitation, which, incidentally, you can learn at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. Well, maybe that’s more like butt-hopping, otherwise known as yogic flying.

The views from our downstairs windows display the back yard, which has been full of birds feasting on the berries on the trees out there. I think those are Winterberry trees. The deer munch on the leaves. Blue jays, it turns out, save nuts and berries for later by hiding them under leaves.

So, we’re still in the basement, sleeping on the air mattresses. It’s pretty much like sleeping on the floor. We’ve discovered there’s a trick to getting in and out of them, since they’re only 12 inches high. I call it “roll in and roll out.” At first, I noticed that my calves were pretty sore after the first night. It turns out it was because I was trying to get off the air mattress the same way I get out of our regular bed. Because I swung my feet out first and tried to stand, it was like trying to do major squat exercises. I usually just sat back down pretty hard. It’s a lot like yogic flying.

Now I roll out on my hands and knees, which makes it easier to gather my legs under me and get on my feet. Getting into the air mattress is just the reverse.

I suppose we could have avoided these gymnastics by buying a queen size air mattress. It’s more the height of a regular bed—but that would have cost hundreds of dollars, believe it or not. Sena bought ours for a fraction of the price.

It’s good to be frugal.

Camping In Our Basement

We’ve been camping in our basement since yesterday. We’re having our upper level wood floors sanded and resealed. This has led to a new sense of togetherness for me and Sena. We had to get all the furniture off the floor. We were lucky enough to be able to find places to move them.

We briefly considered renting a motel room for the duration. However, the cost would outweigh the inconvenience. We opted for the total inconvenience plan. This meant we had to make the basement as comfortable as possible. We had to think of all the necessities and some of the conveniences we take for granted on the upper level and somehow make those happen downstairs.

Sena came up with the idea to use air mattresses. We’ve never used them before. I had visions of me turning blue trying to blow them up. I can’t even blow up a toy balloon. Fortunately, Sena found a model that inflates just by plugging it into a regular electrical outlet and turning a knob. It doesn’t stop filling automatically, though. The instructions warn you not to inflate more than 5 minutes because that could burn out the motor. But there is no warning about the danger of an exploding air mattress. Be careful with the levitation mode.

The last two days have been pretty noisy. If you’ve ever listened to heavy duty sanding machines, the din is tremendous and nearly constant all day long. It’s like living in a giant’s wood shop. When the screeching stops, the buzzing starts. When the buzzing stops, the whirring starts. In fact, the sound is similar to the noise of Frank’s stump grinder (see post 10/2/2020). We were a little surprised when one of the workers sanded all the way through the floor and landed on our new folding table while we were having lunch. Good workers like that are hard to find.

Sanding wood floors raises a regular haboob of dust, so we were sort of barricaded by heavy plastic on the stairway. We could sometimes hear the workers sneeze and cough, but most of the time they were muffled by masks. We never needed to wear masks against the dust because of the measures the workers took to protect us. We wore them when we talked face to face with them for the same reason—to protect them (and us) from coronavirus.

Heavy sanding also raises the temperature and it got pretty warm upstairs. On the other hand, it tends to be chillier downstairs and the furnace doesn’t come on. We’re lucky to have a little space heater.

I mentioned togetherness earlier and a smaller space like the basement has brought us together more. It’s more crowded in the kitchen (I guess I should say wet bar). The refrigerator is a blessing, even if it’s smaller. Doing the dishes can be a little bumpy, but we haven’t broken anything—yet.