A week on Sunday (no. 29)

Intro

Life's little upheavals that take me away from the finely-honed desk routine, that - granted permission in the name of flexibility - impinge on otherwise "ruthlessly managed" spare time, leave me sometimes in a restless craving for creativity. In fact, I think that's an understatement. 

When I can't sit and write, the air suddenly feels thinner. 

The strange thing is that at a remove from this practice, I get a little delusional... I start having doubts, like, "Surely, this writing is frivolous!" But then I start feeling ill and joyless and I have to rush myself back into this practice. The very thing you're reading is my cure against narcissism; it is an inherently humble way of sharing what I’m doing and thinking about.

Daytrip

Upheavals in my life aren't bad... summers in Manitoba are amazing and to be taken full advantage of. We joined friends for a little excursion to Steep Rock

where we ate lunch

borrowed a paddleboard

and watched the sun set.

And various other things...

Our godson made the local French-community newspaper La Liberté and I sent him pictures of us reading the article, as well as this little spoof:

Normally Christian plants a cherry tomato plant beside the garage door, but this year, the tomato size turned out to be unexpectedly small. They're a candy-tomato variety that are eaten like tomato-flavoured blueberries.

Leave them out on the counter to dry, and your son might rearrange them like so:

Enjoyed

This Canadaland episode on the Hudson's Bay history, apparently now for sale, had Taylor Noakes on as a guest, and at one point, commenting on Canada's history, he said: “I personally think that [...] a lot of Canadians, unfortunately, are really not comfortable with the complexity of Canada's history. I mean, this idea has practically been hammered into our own heads for decades that our history is not interesting.” 

That “not interesting” bit is kindling to the fire of any historical research I do!

In the latest episode of What It's Like to Be... Dan Heath interviews a speechwriter. I liked the whole episode, but I especially liked how the guest, Stephen Krupin, in answer to what “aspect [he] consistently savors” says:

I love in the writing process when you feel a puzzle piece clicking into place. Either a narrative device that through trial and error you discover and it holds the whole speech together, or a detail in the research or from history that vividly tells a story or an anecdote that serves as a perfect metaphor or maybe a counterintuitive twist that surprises the audience. When you find those and you think “this is something I can build everything else around”, or, “I can nail an ending, or nail the end of a section”, that feels really good.

Eating

For the longest time, my lunch has revolved around two eggs.

But recently, to follow in my fibre-preaching husband's footsteps, to not let this bag of Red River Cereal linger in the pantry and expire, I switched the main component, and now lunch looks more like this.

It feels healthful.

While I feel the same as Adam Roberts does about people's dietary restrictions... that they can be viewed “as fun, creative challenges,” I like to think that the attitude can be expanded to encompass my own family's food preferences. A recent win in favour of this point is Christian's comment that the only recipe in his whole life in which he actually likes black beans, is Deb Perelman's Swiss Chard Enchiladas. (You can have a peek on Amazon). (And yes, I've mentionned them before!)

Postcards

At the end of summer, plants look a little discheveled. The green has faded, and weeds, having claimed a space in the sun, stand about as tree leaves gather along the path they border.

The berries are abundant and colourful this year.

And some mornings this week have been so calm that the river was transformed to glass.

Trees are turning yellow, and geese are arriving…

Happy Sunday!

Friday Five

Hello, hello! Welcome to another edition of things on my mind and before my eyes.

1 Thinking

Conversations with Tyler recently interviewed Alan Taylor (episode 217). I’m especially attentive with the guest is a historian, and there’s a part of the interview that focused specifically on “the (modern) practice of history”. In a response to Tyler’s question about coming out of a “good but not very, very top school” Alan discussed the academic field as he sees it today, saying:

The number of job openings for historians has shrunk dramatically. There are lots of complicated reasons for why that’s happened, but the general answer is that there’s a much smaller public investment in higher education, particularly in the liberal arts, and particularly in nonquantitative arts of the liberal arts.

Now that could be depressing to hear, but instead, I feel a little thrill… History’s place in education, at all levels is something I want to learn more about. I suspect that somehow, there’s been a change in society and the way history is viewed and I find that intriguing.

A link from the newsletter Dense Discovery (no. 299) lead me to read this substack article by Freya India, in which she writes:

My guess is that what we need most in this chaotic world is moral direction. What we need most in a rapidly changing world is rootedness. Could just be me but when I listen to the misery and confusion of my generation beneath it I hear a heartbreaking need—a need to be bound to others, to a community, to a moral code, to something more.

Don’t history and rootedness rhyme? If not literally, figuratively?

2 Eating

Our garden has started producing string beans just this week, and so the menu plan reflects their abundance with Salade niçoise, and this other recipe from Market Math, which, (shh!) is just barely a recipe, in fact, I could tell it to you here… It’s browned ground pork (about 230g) with a big pile of thinly sliced beans (about 340g) and a clove or two of garlic microplaned and a tablespoon or so of soy sauce sauteed until the beans are tender. Served on rice. Mmm.

3 Reading

I heard about this graphic memoir on Longform (RIP!) and reserved a copy at the library. The kids say it has a scary cover, but it has turned out to be a enjoyable read. I also liked listening to Tessa Hulls talk about how she made the book on the Youtube channel Sequetial Artists Workshop here.

4 Listening

I learned a lot from Andrew Leland’s book The Country of the Blind, which I listened to as an audiobook. (Kevin Brown has a great review here). I particularly like how he writes about choosing to walk around with a gentle half smile, an idea he learned from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I remember after pandemic restrictions eased and you could walk around maskless, I felt annoyed about having to think of arranging my face when it was easier to scowl, the way one could behind a mask. Remembering to half-smile is far more pleasant, even if effortful.

5 the view here

There is nothing like the serenity of a calmly flowing river to jolt you from a mind pulsing with computer-screen glare.

Happy Friday!





Friday Five

Welcome to another edition of this, er, blog. Why blog? Because its fun! And because I don't think you need another newsletter subscription. (I have so many that I don't pay for and lament the fact that they are not in a feed, that putting them in a feed would require its own feedly subscription and I'm Séraphin Poudrier as far as all that is concerned.) (Do you know what kind of monthly bill I’d have to pay for all the newsletters I like following? Uh…) On with the list!

1. Historical research detours

Sometimes history is taught from an arbitrary point... In Manitoba we might learn for example that Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière and Marie-Anne Gaboury were the first white couple to arrive on the plains of St. Boniface.  They are, after all, Louis Riel's grandparents. So while we make do with this image of a man and woman arriving on this frontier in their uncomfortable clothes, on their uncomfortable cart, greeted with warmth by the busily harangued bishop, worry-worn but happy to see this nice white couple, it's exciting to to push that frame and pan out a little... This week I read a local history of the parish of St. Justin, from where they came, the priest that ministered there for 45 years (Denis Gérin) who was related to Quebec's first sociologist (Léon Gérin) and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie who wrote "Un canadien errant" - a ditty my father-in-law would sing to the grandkids. 

2. Historical research finds the drama

One of the families who immigrated to Manitoba from Quebec, came from the town of St. Scholastique. To get an idea of where such a place is, research lead me to discover that the town was forced to give way to the Mirabel airport in 1969. In this case, history leads the willing person into a noisy and vibrant drama, the way, in winter, you could be driving along a lamp-lit road and only be greeted by people the moment you open the door to a raucous party. I find it just as exciting!

3. eating

A plate of sticky chicken, rice and pickled vegetables hit the spot with this week's warmer temperatures. I made Ali Slagel's version, but Lynn Crawford and Lora Kirk's "General Gemma's Chicken" in Hearth and Home is good, so is Julia Turshen's "Sticky Chicken" in Simply Julia, but she also has a recipe for tofu with rice and pickled vegetables that could rival the chicken options listed so far. Mmm... quick pickled vegetables feel so effortlessly summer. I also tried out Smitten Kitchen's Blondie Chipwiches. The cakey-cookie layer is easy-peasy, but assembly is a little tricky.

4. Teacher gifts

End of June marks the end of the school year and I have teacher gifts on my mind. Need some local ideas?

5. Scenery here

After the dandelions come the clover...

Friday Five

This week's roundup of ideas center around a theme: that of travel and exploration as a metaphor for my studies. It is inspired by the audiobook I just finished, titled Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, and the subsequent connections made across podcasts, websites and other books.

1.

It all begins with longing. When Kate Harris set out to bike along the Silk Road, she did so in response to an intense longing to explore. It is a theme that comes up more than once in her book. For example, she notes the irony in noticing posters in Asia with a scene that looks like it is set in Canada: 

Across the tent, tacked to its supportive beams, a glossy poster caught my eye. It featured juicy-looking burgers, golden french fries, bowls of cherries and oranges and ice cream and foamy milk shakes, all spread on a red and white picnic blanket in a lush forest next to a waterfall. I'd seen similar posters all across western China [...]. They fascinated me, not just for the torturously improbable feast they portrayed, food that was the stuff of fantasy, unavailable for thousands of miles, but for the odd familiarity of the scene. For all I could tell, the posters showcased woodsy, rural Ontario, where my own bedroom walls had been tacked with posters of mountains and deserts, of horizons picked clean by wind. We were longing right past each other. (Chap 2)

In Susan Cain's most recent book, Bittersweet, longing is an important aspect of bittersweetness. She writes:

Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.

This idea - of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love - is the heart of this book."

2.

We are all plagued by the desire to be original. When I began my research, I hoped I was cutting a new path that would lead to new discoveries. Instead, the more research I've done, the more historians I've found who have laid tracks parallel to my own. I think this means two things: the first is that it is human nature to want to stake out one's individual merit, and to have hubristic ideas about it. It is better to discover oneself as part of a community. Secondly, venturing out with a project in mind is a good and necessary part of one's personal development. Again, Harris writes about this in her book, with the example of Alexandra David-Neel: 

Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within. She didn't even have the luxury of a blank literary or geographic slate when it came to Tibet. Dozens of Europeans had already been there, from diplomats to missionaries to soldiers. They'd drawn maps, written reports, even owned real estate in Lhasa. That none of this deterred the Frenchwoman was deeply consoling to me, a hint that exploration was possible despite precedent, that even artificial borders were by definition frontiers, and therefore worth breaching as a matter of principle. (Chap 1)

And in her book’s conclusion, Harris writes:

But exploration more than anything is like falling in love, the experience feels singular, unprecedented and revolutionary despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the silk road or walk on the moon for you.

3.

Distractions and procrastination. I'm writing through the results of the research, working through another chapter, and sometimes, as much as I like writing, I am seized by the desire to escape it. I start thinking that the story of the small town would better be communicated in a graphic novel, or an interactive website. Or what if what the world really needs right now is a comprehensive map featuring every travel writer's journey in the books they wrote? That way, I reason, if you wanted to travel vicariously without any of the discomfort, you could pick a place and see the books written about it!

Such digressions of thought are like desert mirages, and they're a normal part of writing. They do sometimes lead to interesting rabbit holes though... I discovered the website Wikimapia, for example, and Richard Kreitner's article titled “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips” on Atlas Obscura. (He also wrote a book with selected works of fiction and their settings around the world.)

4.

On the subject of writing. Travel writing, as a genre, isn't easy to pull off, as Tyler Cowen writes in a blog post titled "Why is most travel writing so bad?" Rory Stewart, on a podcast episode of Always Take Notes, is also critical of some aspects of the genre. 

[...] it absurdly inflected with a strange form of decadent asceticism, it too often relies on essentially mocking foreigners [it's] very very unaware of the actual political context of people's lives, it's anthropologically primitive, it has no real interest in the actual structures of society

Then again, every genre has its weak spots and examples of poor execution. Criticism is instructive (preferably when one isn't the subject of it!).

5.

Finally, a balance between history and the present, between thinking and doing. Thanks to Tyler Cowen's recent podcast episode I learned about Paul Salopek's years-long project of walking across the continents. The premise is fascinating, and Salopek uses his talents to highlight "slowing down and finding humanity." In one of his recent dispatches, he writes about human migration. And there was this line: "History—as scribbled by smug homebodies—often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers." I wonder if he's highlighting a tension between people who stay at home and people like himself who choose to venture out to see life "on the ground." I don't think one should exclude the other... Rory Stewart (back to that episode on Always Take Notes) marries both aspects.... the walking and the history: 

[...] you access communities that you can's access except on foot, and you're walking at the same pace as everybody else. [...] Walking therefore exposes me to the landscape but [also] to the human components and history of the landscape. Things make sense for me as a historian by walking: the distance that Alexander the Great had to walk, or the Genghis Khan's army had to walk makes sense to me [...]. 

It's been a thought-provoking week! Pictures taken this week while walking the dog are on Instagram.

Happy Friday!

Friday Five

I like a snappy list of random things, don't you?

1. It's almost Christmas, and my favourite places to shop in Winnipeg are Black Market Provisions and Toad Hall Toys. These stars look so pretty and tonight, it would be fun to go to a Student Show and Sale. The Events Calendar here feels so festive! Christian and I adopted the idea of keeping a Google Doc of gift ideas for each other from this episode of Hidden Brain.

2. What will you do with your history degree? (I don't know!) However, reading the Canadian Historical Association's report was oddly comforting. Also, people studying history are fewer and fewer in number apparently... 

3. I've started baking, because cookies are delightful and my sister is visiting which is all the more impetus for making things cozy here! (Maybe I’ll try a new recipe?)

4. Last week I spent the days intensively working on a surprise for the family. I'm the kind of person that almost bursts at the thought of having to keep a surprise and avoiding doing so requires an attitude of cool indifference - as if I had to decide to draw a curtain over all the scenes my imagination puts together. And I have lots of imagination! Not enough to write a novel, unfortunately, but enough to amuse myself with silliness. Years ago I took my SLR and photographed made-up scenes using my then-toddlers' toys. I thought that things that made me laugh would be too ridiculous to share and stopped.

5. I've often been paralyzed by the thought of perfection. Drawing has been somewhat therapeutic in this regard. I've been forcing myself to draw a person (whole or just the face) everyday for the past few months after stumbling over myself in the last year and a half. It's more than just accepting that results take practice... it's getting over the enthusiasm of a new idea and accepting that desire for a result must be subdued. Meekly, it becomes a habit and a habit in its purest form should be executed with a kind of simple attention that is light and not grasping or weighed down with expectation. And reaching that mode of working takes its own time and suffers onslaughts of impatience, but that's fine... that's just how it is. 

Here's what to do...

Because the kids were home from school, doing school at home, I too stayed home but did no school. Sacrificing school was fine, I told myself, because summer would come and teachers would be home too, and I’d pick up my research again like an old friend, and push ahead with plenty of time for my own study.

So bright and perky on that first day of summer, I checked in with the archives and got an e-mail after the weekend was over, to inform me that the archives are closed under provincial restrictions.

Small spaces with lone researchers are taboo places for Covid cases. Things like old paper shuffled in the silence of concentration in air-conditioned rooms, just lay welcoming viruses, you know. And then I suppose that when the province puts archives into the same category as libraries and museums, disgruntled historians are too few in number, too shy in disposition perhaps, to make the necessary ruckus required for 25% capacity… or 50.

“I’ll bet you,” my husband said, “I’ll bet you Thermëa is open.”

And he was right.

So I took my pale skin to Thermëa, with him, where we shocked our systems hot and cold and laid in the sun, where I temporarily, really, only for a moment, forgot that I could not go and spend time looking through Langevin’s letters under high-ceilinged fluorescent lights.

Reading

Near summer’s end, I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, drawn to the book because of quotes on the subject of agriculture here. It was a fascinating read! Here are a few things that stuck with me.

On pages 90-91, Harari talks about Gobekli Tepe an archaeological site dating from 9500 B.C. from pre-agricultural societies. He posits that a common belief enabled the cooperation of Neolithic peoples and that villages grew around this site later, and furthermore, that the initial domestication of wheat 30 kilometres away wasn’t a coincidence but the natural development of people coming and living together. This is contrary to the assumption of the hunter-gatherer, then agriculture then religion order you might assume. But the book is full of these idea reversals and that is what makes it an invigorating read.

This is what Harari has to say about capitalism:

/…/ Smith made the following novel argument: when a landlord, a weaver, or a shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants, in order to further increase his profits. The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity.

It may not strike you as very original, because we all live in a capitalist world that takes Smith’s argument for granted. We hear variations on this theme every day in the news. Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.

Inevitably I think of Trump, most especially during the first debate. But Harari goes on to compare capitalism to a force stronger than religion.

Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. (p 185)

Or perhaps, more to the point, Harari compares capitalism to the most compelling religion ever invented:

The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Conficius a temper tantrum.

In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television. (p 349)

He explained the way modern science isn’t just about technology but that it “differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways: the willingness to admit ignorance, the centrality of observation and mathematics, and the acquisition of new powers.” (p. 250-251)

One chapter has a lyrical conclusion:

We may conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other. History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.

And then there’s this fascinating discussion about happiness, its only-recent study and its meaning in history:

The crucial importance of human expectations has far-reaching implications for understanding the history of happiness. If happiness depended only on objective conditions such as wealth, health and social relations, it would have been relatively easy to investigate in history. The finding that it depends on subjective expectations makes the task of historians far harder. We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillisers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure, and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors did.

It’s hard to accept this line of thinking. The problem is a fallacy of reasoning embedded deep in our psyches. When we try to guess or imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won’t work because it pastes our expectations on the material conditions of others. In modern affluent societies it is customary to take a shower and change your clothes every day. Medieval peasants went without washing for months on end, and hardly ever changed their clothes. The very thought of living like that, filthy and reeking to the bone, is abhorrent to us. Yet medieval peasants seem not to have minded. They were used to the feel and smell of a long-unlaundered shirt. It’s not that they wanted a change of clothes but couldn’t get it – they had what they wanted. So, at least as far as clothing goes, they were content. […]

… our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn’t so important whether people’s expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

Harari is fun to read because he acknowledges questions, answers them or else tells you why there isn’t an answer yet. Reading Sapiens makes you feel like you have a falcon’s eye over centuries of human development.

A visit to Ste Geneviève MB

When you go to Ste-Geneviève, you leave the wide grey highway that whizzes past the longitudinal centre of Canada, and take a side road called Rosewood. It’s a much narrower asphalt road poured in the sixties - an event the residents celebrated. The Ste Geneviève town is located on the top of the Canadian shield, and you notice this as you drive along Rosewood road. The fields on both sides grow wheat and corn, potatoes and barley, until you reach an elevation and the fields draw back, the pale soft wheat stems meet with low green foliage and rough oak. At the corner where the road meets 41E, there is a convenience store built at an angle with a gas station. Ste Geneviève is then just a little further on that right turn.

Lichen lined paths lead perpendicular, one to the Taché presbytery and the other to the church. The presbytery is crowded with old things. The entrance has a desk and chair and oil lamp and a picture of Ste Geneviève the patron of Paris. French Canadian towns were often named after the saint whose feast day it was when they were founded. Ste Genevieve seems like a gentle presence; a soft, young female one amid all the Taché relics. In a room beside the entrance are old vestments and dark crucifixes, and a curious elaborately fringed parasol once used during outdoor processions of the Blessed Sacrament. Pictures of Taché, his predecessor and successor are on the wall and a short computer-printed biography too. The hall leads to rooms across from each other and a present-day office at the end. One room is a kitchen painted mint-green full of old kitchen things. A dried bouquet of roses is plopped in a wide antique ceramic jar. The other room, painted yellow, has a collection of tools and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf where the books on various aspects of French-Canadian history gather at either end of the long shelves. Ste Geneviève’s bound centenary book’s title is embossed in gold-leaf and its pages are still fresh and white. 

The upstairs has four small rooms, one of which is an off-limits storage space. The other three are meant to represent scenes from a nun’s life, since a congregation once assisted the town. In one room there are two single beds with patchwork bedspreads, topped with yellowed letter exchanges in plastic sheets and photocopies of photos of nuns who had taught in Ste Geneviève. The other room is a washing room with a large vanity and washbasin, metal curling pins, bobby pins and three flat cast irons for company. The other room is a miniature classroom with a few desks and one big costumed doll with his hand raised, enthusiastically waiting for the invisible teacher. Teaching implements are gathered there, books, a map and a chalkboard with flowery adolescent writing wishing the visitor a good day. 

The church is kept locked, but a lady sitting in the presbytery back office is happy to open it for me. We go inside the plain exterior and the space is calm and quiet. Everything is made of wood. Square supporting beams beautifully encased in wood support a ceiling covered in wood, a stunning design of thin planks running one way, and then another, in big squares from the rear to the front. A white space between the dark wood wainscoting and the dark wood ceiling keeps the church from being dungeon-like and light streams in from the windows and falls on single-strand cobwebs. There are two rows of pews that lead to the altar that sits atop a navy blue carpet with a giant pink flower print. The church has a collection of well-preserved statues; some inherent to the place, others donated from elsewhere. Two wood crosses lay on their side near the front and I later learn that they were both used to top the steeple. One was taken down because it was old; the second was struck by lightning. 

A statue of Ste Geneviève inside the church.

A statue of Ste Geneviève inside the church.


This lightning strike was a big event. It was 1981 when the church had just been closed and its parishioners told to attend mass at neighbouring parishes. It was the first Sunday that mass wasn’t being celebrated in Ste Geneviève and a storm arose and a bolt of lightning struck the church. Someone heard it and rushed out to see that the church was on fire. The lady telling me this had seven children. One of her sons ran to get his camera and took pictures as the steeple burst into flame and fire-fighters were called. They came in time to save the structure, and only the steeple and part of the roof needed replacing. Thanks to her son’s moment to moment pictures, insurance covered the costs of repair. Today multiple prints of those pictures stay displayed in the church and in the rectory. 

The lightning bolt story gave me shivers. The parish is the hometown of an old, now deceased family friend and I had gone to find snippets of her family story. When I used to blog for Travel Manitoba I felt obliged to play up a place’s charm, even if I wasn’t sure I could convince someone to make the trip. But now I write for myself. I went; this is what I saw. I’m naturally curious and I’m energized by these quirky, quiet adventures. If you are too, then you should go.