I abandoned The Needle in the Blood, by Sarah Bower, halfway through. I just wasn’t in the mood for melodramatic, steamy historical fiction set in Pre-Medieval England, following the creation of Bayeux tapestry by way of one of its embroiderers. Instead, I turned to The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak. Melodramatic, steamy historical fiction set in Tsarist Russia, following the reign of Catherine the Great from the point of view of one of her spies. I’m liking it very much so far. I had a short, but passionate affair with the Empress of All the Russias last year, reading three biographies in quick succession. I enjoy historical fiction more when I know some of the source material.

Once this is done, I want to read Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper. I couldn’t really get into those books as a child, I think they were a little bit too fantastical for me at that age. I loved whimsy, but it had to be a little more firmly grounded in reality for me. Or, at least, mythology I understood. I had the Greeks and the Romans down pat, but Celtic was out of my orbit.

After that, I think the last book I want to read this week is City of Light by Lauren Belfer. I’m about 15% through it, according to my Kindle. It’s this really interesting bit of historical fiction about Buffalo, New York during the Gilded Age years as electricity is becoming important. I like the characters.

That’s my stack for the week. I wish I’d thought to take a picture!

The protagonist has something of a privileged place in their society, they’re sort of an outsider, but everyone needs them for something. They have vaguely troubled relationships with a bunch of more-than-usually-attractive people, and they go on adventures and figure out who the bad guys are and kick ass while still being vulnerable and non-invincible and having to grow as a person. Sounds fun, right?

So, why do all my male friends start rolling their eyes when I tell them about it? Ah, yes, I do realize. How could I forget? It’s because the protagonist is female.

These are people who live and die by Harry Dresden, and does the basic premise of that series sound familiar? But, no, because the protagonist has boobs, well, clearly they get to smirk at me because I like it, because it must obviously be trashy supernatural porn. I have never been so tempted to smack people in my entire life. It happens a lot, haven’t you noticed? I’m talking about something I read, or a character I really like, and I see that smirk.

I’m sick of the smirk, my dear friends. I am well and truly sick and tired of it. If a book is about a woman, so what? If a book is supernatural werewolf porn, where do you get off judging me? What are you reading, honeybear? Last I checked it wasn’t James Joyce or anything, and even if it were I would expect your attention and respect if you decided to spend your time with me.

Listen and nod the way I do as you’re expounding for the zillionth time on some finer point of Marvel mythos, or DC relationship dynamics. Act interested. Or, here’s a thought, BE INTERESTED. These are stories! People doing neat stuff! There’s action! Adventure! Romance! (Which, by the way, isn’t shoehorned into every story in the world just for the ladeez. Men enjoy it too, thanks so much. It’s a huge motivator for the choices people make, and don’t you try telling me different.) I like the stuff you like, I’m thoughtful and I bring other perspectives to the table, even if it isn’t my favorite thing in the world. Why don’t the stories I’m more enthusiastic about than you get the same consideration?

I am honestly interested in the stories about male protagonists, and I am so sick of not getting the same attention from my male friends that I give. Even if you’re not interested, I deserve your respect. I am a thinking human being with a lot to say, and if you can’t hold in your desperate desire to feel superior then you can go fuck yourselves, because you sure as hell won’t be getting any from me.

Some authors of note despise fanfiction, claiming it makes them “nauseated” to think of other people writing using their characters. Eww, yes, the proles, the plebian mass of unworthy ickies daring to sully your precious babies with their grimy fingers. Yeah, also known as some of your most passionate readers, you ungrateful loons. My god, you’d think these authors hadn’t gone out of their way to make their creative work available to the general public. Are we allowed to think about characters, then? Have feelings about them? Please, tell us what level of emotional involvement is okay with you.

Some authors claim that they have to disapprove of fic because it would hurt their market share otherwise. Um, no. Again, see the previous point about some of your most passionate readers. They want you to write more so they can read more, and they don’t do this for the money. They do it for love of the characters, the worlds, the ideas, and the point of fic is that they are not stealing what you did, putting it in their own books for sale. No. They are, for the most part, respectfully and with full attribution, borrowing lovingly, and putting it back when they’re done.

Other authors say that they don’t really see the point to it, and encourage people to write their own stories. This is the argument I have the most sympathy for, but that’s just because I never felt particularly passionate about writing fic in the first place. But. And this is a big but. Authors, you created your characters and your world. You own them, as far as they can be owned. But you gave them to us, and if we love them enough that our love is translated to creative endeavor… well, you’re just going to have to cope. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.

I think fic writers should be welcomed affectionately, en masse. Fic writers are fans. Fic writers buy multiple copies after they wear out the first ones looking for nuance and meaning they might have missed the fiftieth time. Fic writers collect, obsess, get their friends into your work with all the fire of their enthusiasm. They are creative and brilliant and driven, and a lot of them have gone on to be published authors in their own right as they give voice to their own stories and their own worlds.

The authors who don’t like fic might as well be saying they don’t actually respect the people who love their books. And maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ve gotten too used to thinking of themselves as monolithic bestsellers, maybe they’re so wrapped up in themselves-as-authors that they’ve forgotten that a book only lives if it is read.

I’m with the fic writers on this one. There are some bad apples, obviously, but you know what? There always are. I happen to think the good outweighs the bad.

I am happiest from the reader standpoint. I love my Kindle, but I don’t want to have to give Amazon all my book money forever and ever just because that was the device and DRM bandwagon I jumped on first. I don’t want to be giving Amazon my money at all, frankly, as a result of their business practices and philanthropic contributions. I welcome the opportunity to be a a responsible consumer and take my money elsewhere if I so choose.

Running a close second with that is something Charlie Stross wrote about in one of his great blog posts. He talked about this being a marvelous opportunity for independent booksellers and smaller retailers to get back in the book game, and rescue the midlist from the “slushpile” Amazon has allowed their Kindle Store to become. This thrills me, dear fellow readers.

We want to read good books. I’m not saying everything self-published in the Kindle Store is by association terrible. I am sure there are some excellent gems in there, but there isn’t a good way of finding them. Amazon-the-corporation isn’t actually interested in its self-publishing writers, it just wants to look like it is. The way to keep as many people as possible putting their books up so that Amazon can take a cut of whatever profits happen to accrue is to have no oversight on the self-publishing process. Anything can (and does, boy, does it ever) get through.

So, back to the point. Whatever our notion of a book is, we want a good one. Our book budgets and time to read are not unlimited. Personally, I think the (again to take a concept from Stross’s post, which you should read) curated bookseller model, which served the reading (and selling) public for hundreds of years, is still the best option. If I see a book for sale, I want to know that someone along the line has read it, edited it, copyedited it, and done their best to make sure it’s ready to go. Not only that, I want to know that someone else has gone, “You know, this is a pretty good book. I think my customers would enjoy this more than they would enjoy that.”

Not only is it quality control, it is community creation. And with that alliterative idealism, I must go start my day.

In short, this is a good thing for all we readers.

I am ambivalent about this movie. I can’t decide if it is merely bad, or the worst movie I have ever seen. I don’t know if it’s the shocking misogyny, (and it actually rises to the level of “shocking,” nearly an impossibility in this day and age) or the utter disregard for physics, or the way the film smugly assumes that it is the only movie any audience member has ever seen, and therefore doesn’t even have to try.

Have you seen Die Hard 2? Have you seen Demolition Man? Have you seen that Mandy Moore movie where she’s the President’s daughter and runs off through Europe with the hot guy who turns out to be a Secret Service agent? Then you’ve seen three pieces of (comparatively!) quality cinema that will hit all the relevant plot points in Lockout, and you will have a better time.

In the genre of futuristic sci-fi extrrrravaganzas, Luc Besson is best known for The Fifth Element, and I doubt that film needs an introduction. It’s a tour de force, an imaginative, high-stakes, violent romp through averting the end of our future world. Marvelous, in the original sense of the word. There were times when I felt thought Lockout was an episode in the history of our Earth that leads to The Fifth Element, and that made me view it in a slightly more forgiving way. Slightly.

Nothing about the plot of this movie makes sense. Absolutely nothing.

Snow, played by Guy Pearce, is a wise-cracking, musclebound, everyman ex-CIA agent. He’s not likable unless you know he’s the good guy, and you know he is. How do you know? You just DO, okay? It doesn’t matter what he does, he is the Tormented and Closed-Off Good Guy. And none of yous better forget it. Get me? We know he’s the good guy because we meet him being accused of something he Did Not Do, and he is being punched in the face repeatedly during his interrogation. (About an hour into the movie, I understood all too well how the interrogator felt.) He’s accused of killing a fellow agent and stealing state secrets. Wonderful! I am almost interested! What are these secrets? Is it a weapon? Is it state secrets? Is it some wonderful new piece of technology?

Just forget about it. You’re never going to find out, anyway. Suffice it to say that we are supposed to believe Snow when he says he didn’t do anything wrong and was set up, and we are supposed to think the CIA dicks are dicks, and we do.

While this is going on, we meet Emily. The Girl. The First Daughter. She is blond and pretty and trying to help. In this case, by visiting the US’s first orbital super max prison, where the prisoners are kept in “stasis.” “Stasis” is not explained, but looks like a medically-induced coma combined with being left in a cold environment. There are reports that the stasis has negative side effects; dementia, blindness, “heightened aggressive tendencies,” etc. There are also some conspiracy theories floating around that a huge corporation is using the prisoners as guinea pigs to test the effects of long term stasis on deep space explorers. Emily wants to get to the bottom of this, interview a few inmates, figure out what’s Really Going On. No one thinks this is a good or worthwhile endeavor, and she is patronized by the Warden of the prison fairly spectacularly, which brings our Violence Against Emily count to one.

Seriously. This movie HATES Emily. It has nothing but contempt for this character, and takes every opportunity to show it, in increasingly horrible ways. I’m not really sure what its problem with her is. She wants to keep people with no rights from being mistreated, even if, as the Warden patronizingly tells her, “They’ve done some pretty horrible things to get in here.” She interviews an inmate named Hydell, a crazy man who slavers all over her and ends up causing mayhem with a gun he lifts off one her aides, who, even though he’s told he can’t bring guns into the prison section, predictably can’t help himself. And, as long as we’re on the subject, why have the President’s daughter meet with an unstable maniac when you’re trying to prove that the stasis technology doesn’t turn the inmates into unstable maniacs?

Mayhem ensues. There’s an explosion. Emily is knocked out and shot in the leg. (Violence Against Emily: 3) Hydell runs off and wakes up all the inmates on the station, who form a ravening horde of destruction. Apparently some, but not all, of the inmates have suffered negative side effects. One of the inmates who wakes up is Hydell’s brother, Alex. He hasn’t suffered negative side effects, and this is sad. Perhaps if he had, he would just kill his goddamn brother already. Hydell is impossible to control, his mental dial set permanently to “homicidal rapist loon.” Alex has it relatively together, though. His aims are uncertain, though getting released seems to be part of his plan. He has some hostages, but he doesn’t know he has the president’s daughter. I think, if this had been a better movie, Alex would have been written as the yin to Snow’s (remember Snow?) yang. He’s loyal and tough, but Bad. We have no idea what he did to get himself in here, but whatever it was, I suspect it was Hydell’s fault.

Anyway. Back on earth, Snow is told he can avoid being put into stasis and getting thrown into a super max frozen prison if he goes to a super max frozen prison of his own free will to get the girl out. He’s unhappy about this, but says yes because hey, prison sucks if you’re there against your will without heavy explosives to help get you through the day.

There are some more predictable scenes involved Emily being threatened by Hydell (VAE: 4) and protected by Alex because he thinks she’s a doctor, scenes involving a hostage negotiator getting himself killed because someone sees Snow boarding the station, and some more mayhem showing the prisoners killing each other. I was interested in the role of the ravening horde in this movie. They’re zombie-like, with no characterizations and no individuality. I wonder if the current focus on mindless villains is a symptom of how fearful we all are now of ideas… but such thoughts belong in a review of a much better movie. Lockout doesn’t deserve them.

Snow finally meets up with Emily after rescuing her from dying. (VAE: 6. This one gets two points because she suffocates to death and then to wake her up, he has to STICK A NEEDLE IN HER RIGHT EYE.) They don’t get along. I think the puerile idiots who wrote this film think verbal abuse is flirting. At one point, as they need to cross the prison without her being seen to be a girl, he forcibly holds her down to cut and color her hair, at which point she calls him a “pig.” What? WHAT? First of all, Emily is supposed to be intelligent, if too idealistic for the men around her, and she probably would have thought that one through. Oh, and then he punches her in the face so that she looks “tough.” (VAE: 7)

I think the writers wanted to play with the “love of a good woman” trope in order to sort of reform Snow and make him realize he can be a more emotionally involved man and still get the job done. Sort of. Maybe. But they are SO TERRIBLE they couldn’t even do that. Snow has nothing but contempt for her ideals, he calls her a princess, he makes a comment about how many people have died for her already, comic relief is her not being able to read a map… it makes no sense with what we know about her character. Namely, that she’s a genuinely decent person in a lousy environment and she’s doing what she can to make things better. But somehow, this movie seems to think that none of that makes her worthy. Snow tells her that she’ll only know who she is if she has to make some sort of personal sacrifice. She does, at the end, telling Alex that Hydell can have his wicked way with her instead of calling off an attack on the station necessary to saving the Eastern Seaboard from having the super max space station crash into it. Oh, wait, did I not mention that little third act twist?

We’re told that the prison isn’t in a fixed orbit around the Earth, so that without constant monitoring, it’ll crash. (Is that even POSSIBLE?) Up until now, the big dilemma has been whether to blow the prison out of the sky with the hostages still on it, including the First Daughter. The President won’t give the order with his daughter aboard, thus, sending Snow in.

Snow and Emily manage to survive re-entry in metal maintenance suits and then parachute to a light landing on a freeway. Never mind that they leave the space station at a light saunter and in NO WAY will be able to get to the 17,000 MPH they’ll need to re-enter the atmosphere instead of skipping right off, and they don’t BURN UP even though they’re wearing the space-going equivalent of tinfoil!

Oh, and at the end it turns out one of the CIA dicks was the bad guy all along, (like you didn’t see that coming) that Snow had the super secret information – so secret even the writers didn’t know what it was! – all along (like a runaway train) and that he and Emily are going to get together in the end, after she has softened him, and he has toughened her. (COVERED IN GLITTER.)

This is a stupid movie. The banter is fun, in a space jock sort of way. The performances were really good, and I think in a different movie, the characters could have come across way better and it might have been an interesting film without sacrificing the violence-on-a-space-station fun. But 95% of the writing was godawful, and there’s no coming back from that.

I live indoors and, as such, I have fairly intense feelings vis-a-vis the appropriate positioning of arachnids and insects in spatial relation to myself. Thank you very much for respecting my boundaries, and staying in your high corner of the bathroom while I had my shower. It is much appreciated.

All best,
Miranda

Or, as I’d like to subtitle it: Study finds that pervasive cultural stereotypes are pervasive! I’ll alert the media.

I can’t speak from experience, because I didn’t go to traditional school, but I think reactions like this would just have killed me. Kids aren’t dumb, they know what’s going on. They have a sense for what people think of them.

“The bias teachers revealed against white female students may very well be something they are not consciously aware of, and it’s usually subtle,” said Riegle-Crumb, “but it’s definitely present, per our research findings.”

If a girl and a boy with comparable grades are put in front of a teacher, and the teacher is even “subtly” biased towards the boy, you know what message that sends the girl? Work harder, be better, or you’ll never possibly be good enough. So some girls work harder. It’s part of the hateful web of outside approval as necessary for feeling one’s own self worth that this culture so helpfully provides girls with. For those girls, it makes them work harder. For others, it makes them doubt themselves and curl into little balls who don’t think they’re “smart.”

Would people just figure out already that there is nothing intrinsic about girls that makes them not as good at math as their male counterparts? Can we let go of these outdated, gender essentialist notions that girls and boys are “made” to be better at certain things? All of these prophecies are self-fulfilling. Gender is not what divides us. It can’t be, because women are succeeding more in the sciences all the time. So many, in fact, that certain elements have been agitating that it is because women are succeeding that men are failing.

I’m certainly chastised. Here, I’ll just run back to the kitchen so some strapping young man can have my job. It’s funny, isn’t it, that so many of the same people worry about this as promote the free market as the answer to all our cares. The educational market is speaking, babe, and women are doing better than men. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps, in some measure, because of crap like this. Maybe we’re trying to prove that we can beat the stereotypes, spurred on both by the people who want to help us succeed, and the people who expect us to fail.

What this tells me is boys and girls alike need to have the care taken to give them a chance to learn. I remember talking to a friend who said he was always jealous of the attention the girls got, and the study groups, while he was bullied for being a “nerd.” Smart was, in his school, the arena for the girls. That’s unfair, too. Everyone deserves a chance to succeed. We need to build a better world for everyone, not just let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction and raise another generation in resentment and discontent, only this time it’s the other gender that suffers. Or rather, raise both generations in resentment and discontent. Everyone feels guilty and unhappy, everybody wins!

I think not.

Math is hard. But what I wish more kids were learning is that doing the hard thing is very rewarding, and that you can figure out how to do almost anything if you apply yourself. Because you, you are amazing. Doesn’t matter what parts you have on the outside or what demons you have on the inside. You are amazing, and you can do it. Whoever you are, and whatever it is. Maybe there are people who can do it better than you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it well.

A debate began on a friend’s Facebook status over a comment the pope is purported to have made about how atheists “pick and choose” their morals. Like the impetuous fool I am, I decided to weigh in. Usually I don’t, especially in Facedebates, especially about religion. But I found I had things to say. I’ve been discussing religion a lot lately, and thinking about it more than usual. Someone I know referred to me as one of the least spiritual people he knows, and I was shocked and hurt by that assessment. I consider myself a spiritual person. I’m just not traditionally religious.

I am a macro-agnostic and a micro-atheist. My sense of wonder does not allow me to rule out the possibility that somewhere in the universe there are gods, or godlike beings, but I do not live my life as though, even if they do exist, they are terribly interested in me. Yet, my moral and ethical code is fairly restrictive in terms of how I live my life. I don’t believe in a supreme higher power of the Judeo-Christian stripe, and yet I don’t steal, murder, dishonor my parents, covet my neighbors’ anything, or any number of other forbidden activities in the Bible. I do my best at being a good person. I try to be considerate, honest, and thoughtful. Perhaps the Pope might have been more specific to say he believes that atheists pick and choose their morals as they go, suggesting that because we have no relationship with a higher power and are not accountable to a higher power, that we can allow our morals to slide when convenient. I think this, unsurprisingly, is complete and utter rot.

Never mind the convenient moral slidings of people who profess belief in these higher powers. I’m not interested in discussing hypocrisy. People will do what is in their best interests to do, especially if they can somehow explain it away, or cast it in religious terms. A religion is bigger than the acts of one person, and as many people hide behind that as live joyfully within it.

The atheists and agnostics I know are some of the best, most thoughtful, most careful people I have ever met. We do not live knowing that we will be redeemed at some later point. We have to think in terms of how our actions are going to affect us and the people we interact with, because those actions and those people are all we have. We are the sum of what we do on this earth, and this earth is, simply, it. There is no afterlife. No forgiving saviors. Only ourselves, and it’s harder by far to live with myself when I know I’ve done something wrong.

The notion of a personal and loving God is appealing. We are human beings, with all the flaws and all-too-often-realized capacity to injure others. The ideas of an entity that will always forgive, that some good-byes are not forever, that I will always have another chance to right a wrong or be forgiven for a slight, no matter how minor, are incredibly appealing. But in the end, it’s not for me. I am answerable to my own conscience and the web of people around me. Harsher critics and with more direct consequences by far than a deity and an afterlife. I believe, anyway.

I’ve had the fortune to know some intensely good and thoughtful people who believed in a god, in the more traditional form. They have loved me and welcomed me into their homes and their families without a second thought, it seemed at the time. I have also known people who were wrapped up in how good they thought they were because of what they believed. They weren’t shy about expressing opinions that would, I hope, have made them feel very embarrassed if they knew just how much I disagreed with them, and just how much they were offending me. And, without shame, I have misrepresented my beliefs to some of those people, because I was afraid of the consequences to my relationships with them if I were honest.

I don’t have a problem with people I know believing in a god, or ten gods. It matters to me how I act. How I behave. My frustrations over these issues are many, and they run deep. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, but I also don’t want to be bullied into hiding how I feel. We should all be adult enough to prepare for the possibility that everybody isn’t just going to believe what we believe. To open our minds and try to see everyone’s point of view without being dismissive. And our faiths should be able to stand up to questioning, debate, and other points of view. My faith is. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I finally have some conclusions I’m proud of.

I don’t say any of this to claim that I am better than people who have a more traditional belief system, just to put forth that I am no worse. I have faith, and belief, in many things. I feel that I stand on firm ethical ground, taught by good, strong people. The ways I come to spirituality are many and varied, they happen in churches and at concerts and in stands of trees and on beaches looking out at the ocean and in libraries and staring out at the lights of the skyline of New York, marveling at all the things people have managed to do. Because of, or in spite of, the beliefs and stories that we have carried around with us for a couple thousand years, now.

Thank you for reading.

Tonight is the first night of Passover, and for the last few weeks, I haven’t wanted to celebrate it. Part of it might be laziness, and part of it might be discomfort. Our long suffering and non-Jewish correspondent is coming, and I think I might feel a little awkward about showing him what all of this means to me. Because it does mean something to me, as much as I do not like the effects of organized religion, as angry as I am sometimes. It’s part of who I am. It’s tradition. It’s the ritual that reminds me who I am, and where I come from.

At the center of all this, I don’t want to break the chain. I always felt like, if in other places and other times I would have been persecuted for what is, essentially, an accident of genetics and history, I might as well wring as much meaning as possible out of it. I still feel that way. That means that I do consider myself Jewish, as far as it goes. (And with me, it’s not that far.) I do feel a connection to Judaism, even though I don’t believe in gods. Judaism resonates with me because it preferences your actions over your beliefs. You need to do good deeds, be a good person, and what happens in your head is between you and your god, if you have one. And I do not.

But the songs get to me. Some of the observances get to me. A professor in college told us the way one of her very religious friends described belief to her was by saying, “I am not living in the past. I am living in all time.” There is an idea some very religious Jews have that we are always receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai. That we are always being led out of Egypt. This resonates with me, even if not in a strictly religious sense.

We are always transitioning from one thing to the next. We are always on a journey, arriving and departing every moment, never stopping for anything. Anything you believe you possess is meaningless. In the story, the Hebrew slaves only had time to take what they could carry, and the same is true for all of us. Our real possessions are our memories, our minds and our hearts, and there is no way to leave those behind.

So we go on the journey, marking it year after year. We tell the story again, and we eat the food again, and I chant the way someone has always chanted, even if it wasn’t me. I hear, echoing down thousands of years, the hopes and the prayers of a community who managed to do what so many others did not. They survived. Through the power of their stories. If anything can resonate with me, it is that.

We can’t stop. But we can make memories to take with us when we inevitably have to move on to the next moment. Tomorrow night, when as much of my family as possible is gathered around the table, I’m going to do just that.

She had surgery later this month, two years ago. She scheduled it so that she would be in good enough shape to come to my college graduation. My mother has priorities, and damned if she’s going to let anything get in her way.

I had a crash course in adulthood that spring and summer. I figured out how to take care of a family and keep a three-bedroom apartment clean, and get dinner on the table nearly every night. It’s no mean feat. I don’t think most people who’ve grown up with a dedicated parent and household-wrangler appreciate just how much work goes into it, until they have to do it themselves. Being a housekeeper is a full-time job. I took care of someone recovering from major surgery, and then someone going through chemo. It wasn’t easy, and I needed a lot of help. But then I needed less help. I figured out what to do.

I’m telling you all this because as the weather gets warmer, I feel residual dread. Attacks of nausea for no reason. Headaches, which I normally never get. My body remembers stress, it remembers pain, it remembers fear. But right now I want it to remember the pride.

We did it, she and I. We got through it, and I think we did it well. I had just graduated. We watched lots of movies, lots of Jeopardy, I knit her this enormous blue shawl. We did puzzles, figured out meals, and went for walks. Every time I got her to the top of the hill in the park we cheered.

When you’re a kid, you think of adulthood as a switch being flicked. Suddenly you’re big, you’re aware, you’re sure of yourself, you know how to balance a checkbook and you know how to cook. You immediately know how to change the oil in a car and you know what all those mysterious settings on the washing machine are for. Doing taxes and buying houses come naturally. There’s nothing you can’t handle.

The reality is, and it’s a reality we don’t see often enough, really, is that only the last sentence of that paragraph is true. That’s how I feel about it, anyway. I know I can handle anything that happens, even if I have no idea how I’m going to do it.