Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.

the church of poetry

"the heart,
which, when caught in certain lights,
combusts and flies apart,
like rhubarb, or the night's

remains; like bear traps rusted open long,
like song"

- excerpt from Ander Monson, "At Night My Armless Brother's Heart
Sounds Like This: Systole and Diastole"

I saw Ander Monson and the amazing Nick Lantz at a reading last week. The youthful "Monsters of Poetry" series, less than a year old, is already routinely providing the best poetry in town. It was so crowded that latecomers were forced to sit on the floor, right up front at the
foot of the stage, and it was kind of churchy, sitting all uncomfortably sore-assed, staring up (or sometimes across the floor, at the patterns of the wood grain, the poet's shoes, whatever) in silence while the works were read. Another day where I wanted to say "Mmmm yeah, sir, sing it" at key lines, not just chuckle or murmur the way people do when they like a line in a poem but it's not time to applaud yet. I get frustrated with the so-called distinction between High Art and Low Art and the way you cannot shout out your love of a phrase at poetry "readings" but can at poetry "slams." It's true that there are poems that take a lot of attention, quiet meditative
woodgrain-staring, yes, where a well-placed wolf whistle would distract other audience members. But those aren't the ones where I find myself wanting to be loudly appreciative anyway. Sometimes words, bare words, unadorned by rhythm or music, still are worth getting up and dancing to.

But then you have to start talking about what a reading "should" be anyway, which is a huge discussion and I'd rather just say, "Art is art and not actually my professional field and I'm just going to go back to my corner and write some poems in my free time and let other people argue about what things 'should' be."

I'm fixated on this particular disaster

MSNBC reports,

"Haiti seems especially prone to catastrophe — from natural disasters like hurricanes, storms, floods and mudslides to crushing poverty, unstable governments, poor building standards and low literacy rates."

I'm sorry, what? I'm new to this game, but I'm pretty sure you do not sweep systematic social problems with a whole history of causation including abuse by foreign powers into the same sentence as natural catastrophe, using only a flimsy "seems to be prone to" for context. And then move on to another subject sans any further elaboration.

Hot damn, I wish more poetry readings were like poetry slams & Baptist church services, where audience members stand up and shout, "Amen, little sister!" when a particular line or sentiment is to their liking.

Orchestra concerts should be like that, too. Oh yeah, strings, sing it.

Not that I wasn't worried about the State of the Union Address potentially bumping OMG LOST SEASON PREMIER on Feb. 2, but I really hope today's reassuring announcement from the White House was did not stem solely from the overwhelming pressure of irate Hurley fans. Because when it comes down to it, that would be bullshit.

Yes yes yes yes

USA lifts HIV 22-year-old travel / immigration ban.

Wanted: Democrat who really, really wants to be governor

It would appear, after what has probably been an anxious month for the Wisconsin Democratic Party (and a gleeful one for the Republicans, if Dave Blaska is any measure...read to the end of that post), that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is taking up the boxing gloves for the next gubernatorial election.

Glad as I am to hear that someone is running for Governor on the Democratic ticket, and they're not an 18-year-old McDonald's manager, I am slightly worried about the tone of the Journal-Sentinel article. "inching toward a bid," according to one of his staff. Along with the White House's unofficial endorsement - weeks before he'd even announced a run, while there was still an arguably strong candidate still in the running - and I start to wonder whether he's doing this for his own reasons.

I tend to vote for Democrats, but from this vantage point, Barrett very much gives the impression of someone who's had their arm twisted into running. "Somebody has got to be governor, I suppose I will do it." I don't have much faith in the Republican options, either, but a tepid approach to the Governor's seat is not going to win the hearts and minds of Wisconsin's non-urban residents, Tom. I very much hope for the sake of both his campaign and the state of Wisconsin that he is genuinely interested in serving the people of this state and helping head off a potentially severe budget problem in the years ahead. The Pew study warns that we can expect more cuts to services, and, if the schools situation is any measure, higher property taxes to compensate for cuts to local government, in an economy where more people need services, and fewer people can pay their property taxes. And if that's the case, we're going to need the most dedicated public servants we can get.

Urban jungle

What if the whole reason for American overconsumption isn't actually rabid materialism, but just paranoia? I go to Walmart (that spelling is AP Style approved, folks) for a very specific item that I have so far failed to find in more socially-responsible settings, quickly determine they don't have it, and...still spend 20 minutes wandering in search of something to buy so they don't think I'm a shoplifter when I walk past the check-out counters, a little person in a big puffy merchandise-concealing coat. I mean seriously, I could hide about $300 worth of lipstick under that thing.

In addition, Walmart and its ilk have already impressed into me the fact that they possess everything a person could possibly want, and employees will think there is something wrong with a person who can leave such a store empty-handed. Or at the very least, you must be shoplifting.

I managed not to buy anything, but it was really close. Especially when I saw the $1 t-shirts. And no one accused me of shoplifting.

Death penalty, exhibit B

Following my previous post, I would like to subject the internet to a series of quotes from Scott Turow's book, Ultimate Punishment. Turow is a former prosecutor and author of many legal suspense thrillers who was also served on the Illinois Commission that influenced Governor George Ryan's decision to commute the sentences of all Illinois Death Row inmates before he left office. Turow's perspective is interesting because, while he agrees the death penalty should be an option under ideal circumstances as, as the Commission words it, "the strongest condemnation of a small number of the most heinous crimes," he believes we are not at this stage prepared to administer it fairly.

While he acknowledges also possible moral issues, Turow focuses on several examples of exonerated inmates, and cases in which the crimes of some life inmates were demonstrably worse than those of certain Death Row inmates.

And says:

“In confronting murder, we as a society ask how we should face an ultimate evil, which, if unchecked, would reduce almost all human interaction to war. We want to punish in order to prevent murder, but also as part of our effort to restore ourselves from the anxieties it raises about our ability to live with one another…"

"Murder takes us to the Land’s End of the law. Our horror and revulsion undermine our capacity to reason—and prove that justice alone will not make us whole. Only the attachments we have to each other, the antipodal experience of what goes on in the moment a murderer kills, can accomplish that. In the face of the cruelties we visit upon one another, murder being the gravest wrong among them, a sense of meaning and connection must come from outside the law.”

“I admit I am still attracted to a death penalty that would be available for the crimes of unimaginable dimensions like (John Wayne Gacy)’s, or that would fully eliminate the marginal risks that incorrigible monsters like (repeat offender who killed again after he was imprisoned) might ever again satisfy their vampire appetites…There will always be cases that cry out to me for ultimate punishment. That is not the true issue. The pivotal question instead is whether a system of justice can be constructed that reaches only the rare, right cases, without also occasionally condemning the innocent or the undeserving.”

And here is my favorite.

“After twenty-five years of attempting to establish laser-like guidelines, we still end up with a moral hodgepodge where Chris Thomas is condemned to die because he is poor and belligerent, while the likes of the Menendez brothers, who shotgunned their parents for the millions, or the Unabomber, who killed and maimed and threatened the nation for years, get life. In yet another of the perpetual paradoxes in this subject, retaining the death penalty seems to be a road to breeding disrespect for the law, because it exposes so many of its shortcomings. (emphasis added)”

Ending the death penalty, exhibit A

Consider that sometimes it is in vogue to have emotions. Consider this man in Ohio, who was convicted of doing, yes, terrible things. & when the time came to die last month, & when it proved much harder than expected, & when after two hours they still had not managed to get into his veins, he tried very politely to help.

"Several times, Broom rolled onto his left side, pointed at veins, straightened tubes or massaged his own arms to help prison staff keep a vein open. He was clearly frustrated as he leaned back on the gurney, covering his face with his hands and visibly crying." - Cincinnati Enquirer

If you cannot imagine this with needles and veins, consider moments in movies when the loser of a fight pulls his opponent's knife upward into the heart. Or lifts his arms above his heads to make a bigger target for the firing squad. I know this is not quite accurate or analogous, but it might be a useful image. Regardless, Mr. Broom's magnanimous effort to help the state kill him (like some other inmates before him who encountered difficulties in the process of being executed) is neither proof of his innocence, nor on its own reason enough to keep him alive if you have already decided that logic favors his execution. But it's a sliver of something both extremely painful and important, I think, and, I hope, a wake-up call to those who would dismiss Death Row inmates as utterly without humanity.

As I said in a comment way earlier, the problem I had with this bit of news is not that it was difficult to administer the drugs. He's just the most extreme example of a common problem in medicine - veins don't always cooperate. (Thanks to my friend Sam for pointing that out, p.s.)

The problem I have is
1. Cognitive dissonance. The process of killing killers has changed throughout human history, and lethal injection is the humane alternative to every other method that we have used in the past - hanging, the gas chamber, guillotine, firing squad. So when there is such vivid evidence that we still don't have it quite right - who would have thought ending a human life is actually a tricky and difficult business - then I question what values are driving the decision. Do we care about the inmates' wellbeing or do we not? Should we pretend we care if we don't? If we did care, would we still execute them? If we can care and still execute them, then what more can we do to ensure we are acting on how much we care?

2. As a social body, what is the impact on the rest of us to be complicit in killing our fellows? Perhaps we would be complicit by suffering murderers to live, even behind bars. But capital punishment is so much more a machine of death, a series of calculated decisions involving both elected officials and the ordinary citizen, and I wonder, following one measly philosophy class three years ago, if it makes us harder, if it tells us revenge is the Right Way Of Doing Things. In addition, if we say killing is okay at all, if we say all you need are many many rigorously-defined criteria and the backing of the entire justice system, aren't we still, on some level, condoning even those most violent and awful "illegal" killings? I'm not trying to turn this into a slippery slope argument, but I think the question of "Who are we as a society if we collectively commit these actions?" is one that should be invoked in any discussions of law.

She takes just like a woman.

Gender issues are something I find myself hesitant to write long diatribes about because I never really studied them in school and utterly lack a sense of history or the proper names for things. But I find them hella interesting, find myself thinking about them frequently, and I'm doing a lot of informal research these days for a poetry project. So in that light, I highly recommend reading this post from the folks at Jezebel.

"Just this weekend, a friend asked me what it meant that I considered myself a feminist. He wanted to know if I thought men and women were "the same." I don't.
...
It may be interesting to debate whether women are hardwired to pick up socks (I'm skeptical), but the real task of feminism is to make sure we're not forced to pick them up."

From Jezebel, "Is Margaret Atwood a Feminist? Are You?"

Recommended because:

a) Margaret Atwood does interesting work with gender in her fiction, writes beautifully cannily sharply brutally, and for me anything analyzing what she has to say about her own self-identity as a feminist is, to me, worth a gander.

And b) I think the post's writer is pretty much dead-on with how I feel, that looking for and scrutinizing gender differences (physical, mental, habitual, ecumenical, equatorial, sartorial) is mostly a waste of time and really it's more important to ensure that gender doesn't affect opportunity.

Drunk Driving Law: an ounce more prevention please.

I'm very glad to see Wisconsin's drunk driving laws continuing to get attention and, it would appear likely, very tight reforms.

There seem to be good things in both the Assembly and the Senate versions. I absolutely think ignition interlocks - those are the breathalyzers that start your car - should be required for all repeat offenders, as the Assembly has proposed. On the other hand, I also am not sure the Assembly version is strong enough on the penalty side, in making it a felony only if it's the fourth offense within five years. Knowing you risk a felony conviction could be a valuable edge on the deterrence side.

This is, of course, assuming deterrence - in which the rational citizen decides the costs of being caught engaging in the crime are too high and too likely to happen compared to the benefits and likelihood of success - is a meaningful theory of crime prevention. In the case of drunk driving, though, rational decisionmaking is often, guess what!, impaired by alcohol. People who are prone to rational thought plan ahead, of course, and find a DD or a friendly futon. And we should encourage that kind of planning ahead. But for various reasons, some people don't plan, and suddenly it's 3 a.m. and it's really not that far a drive, really, and who wants to pay for parking overnight anyway? Etc.

Furthermore, deterrence as Jeremy Bentham first articulated it relies on "swiftness, severity, and certainty" of punishment, or at least the criminal's perception thereof. And really, it's the "certainty" element we need most. A drunk person might have a vague idea of how "okay" they are, but they won't know their BAC. They won't know exactly where they fall, legally, and chances are they'll think they can handle it anyway. You can have a felony on first offense and twenty years of license revocation, but if a person can drive in a straight line, stop as needed, and stay within 5 mph of the speed limit, chances are they'll get home undetected and try it again the next weekend. We all know it happens. Once someone has been caught once, you can identify them as "trouble" and impose all the limits you like. But you have to catch them first.

Given this, I'd be much happier if we were not quite as focused on taking the people we do catch (and catch and catch and catch) and hitting them harder, maybe spending a lot of money on turning them into felons and making it harder for them to have normal, healthy lives when they're done being felons. Where is the discussion on sobriety checkpoints? Here, I'll start - vehicles may have many of the same qualities as a residence, and absolutely are subject to privacy concerns. But when you drive, you are in the public sphere, you are a public danger, and you are part of the reason driving a car is one of the most dangerous things a person can do in the United States. If a police officer wants to talk to you for a minute to make sure you're capable of driving your death machine (you will read my hyperbole and you will like it) home - and this is ALL they do unless it becomes clear that you are in fact incapable - I say the public interest most likely wins.

While this obviously wouldn't catch everyone, it would at least boost the perception that yes, you can get caught, and yeah buster, you had better make plans to crash somewhere until you're safe to drive. Studies of states where sobriety checkpoints are legal suggest that there is a deterrent effect. If the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is correct in saying it could be up to 20 percent, then Wisconsin might find a great deal of human savings in instituting such measures. There are other things we can do too, of course. Making bartenders and parking facility employees play nanny, for example. But that would just be more intrusive and, probably, less effective.

On another note, I'm very glad to see treatment getting emphasis in both the Senate and Assembly proposals. I'm speaking as someone who at one point years ago picked up her own [older relative, let us call them Z] from a police station because Z was driving drunk. With a minor on board. For the second time in five years. I saw Z, a generally "upstanding" citizen who had never had other brushes with the law, spend two months in jail, go through treatment for alcoholism and depression, and turn their life around completely. It's true that the jail was probably a big part of the wakeup call for Z, but without the resources to support necessary change, a person can easily succumb to despair. In other words, it's not enough to know you're in trouble; you need to know how you can fix it.

Of course, we would all like to assume that people are good and decent and thoughtful enough to make good intoxicated decisions based solely on how many awful things have happened when people have driven drunk. We've all been inundated with the anecdotes, so I won't repeat them, except to say it hit home especially for me last summer when a high school friend got in the wrong car and paid for it with his life. But if that were the case, we'd also be writing laws that force first offenders to paste photos of DUI-related crash victims to their ignitions and dashboards. And that would never work, right? Right?

Items and activities

1. E-mail from the office oddball: "Congrats on achieving another year of wisdom. Or perhaps, it's surmounting another year in the realm of disorder." I really like this description. It followed me home. Can I keep it? Year aged, check. Disorder surmounted, check.

2. One of the things you have to do if you want to help people learn to read is sit in on other tutoring sessions. I was shadowing a session with a very advanced student today, a woman whose native language is Russian, and we were talking about various idiomic uses of the word "cat." The book she's learning from is very old. Example sentence, "Men are never called catty, and women are never called cats."

Her question - "So where does "cathouse" come from, if women are not called cats?"
Her tutor - "I have no idea! Maybe because men/cats attend them? And it is not really about the women?"
Me - "Well. I can think of one very rude possibility."
She - "I work in a prison! Continue!"
I: "Well, umyouknow, women have cats."
She - "Of course! A pussyhouse!"

My Polish grandmother will not teach me how to swear in Polish (even though she curses in English) because in Polish it's actually too filthy for her. I bet this Russian woman would help me.

3. When you work at a newspaper, you sometimes have to know more than you let on. So when you print the obituary of someone who - you know because you have a police scanner - shot themselves in the head the week before, whose house you photographed the very same day, whose sorrowing relatives you tried not to photograph...and you finally see their picture and read about how much good they had in their lives, it's kind of a head trip. I suspect we are not supposed to know this much about people we don't know at all. Being on the edge of, but not being personally involved in such a great deal of grief is awkward, uncomfortable, slightly obscene.

Voicemail left for me by a source, on a colleague's answering machine. Imagine the voice is about 80 years old. I kind of love this man.

"I'm looking for the young new reporter lady...this is NAME about ISSUE here...and she was writing the article and I can't find her um phone number here in News Republic, I hate these *doggone* program things that you can't get to the people when you want to talk to 'em...so I just don't have her number so I'll have to get through to her tomorrow, thank you, bye bye."

It's not that reporters love pain/suffering, it's that they know(or at least strongly suspect) there are always problems everywhere and they feel like they've done a good, thorough, useful job when they find one and can write something about it. "If it bleeds, it leads," is actually a therapy maxim for reporters who have been writing too many cheery, uncontroversial community member profiles.

Is there another lamp in the room?

A Chinese woman I just met today has difficulty distinguishing between "thighs" "hips" and "waist" when her reading tutor tells her to point to each. What is the difference anyway? Don't they all blur into one excessively scrutinized but generally awesome region? The picture dictionary is full of gleaming kitchens and lavish dining rooms and women in party dresses from the 1980s. Throw pillows, candalabras, whole rooms just for entertaining guests you see once every two weeks.

When I start tutoring, I am going to assemble a Baraboo picture-dictionary from things I cut out of magazines, and it's going to include important terms like "thrift store dresser" and "crookedly-hung photos of my most wife-like platonic friend" and "window hung with purple cloth, overlooking rain."

An English girl I know would object to the section in the books that focus on pronunciation and stressing syllables according to American standards. The short objection is that as long as everyone can understand what you are saying, variations in pronunciation based on your first language should be allowed as expressions of regional autonomy. This, she says, is especially important in situations where the English teacher, often young and idealistic and anti-empire, has come from a far nation with a history of meddling, and must be careful to avoid furthering nascent empires. There is a long objection but I am not subscribed to the proper scientific journals.

Traffic jams on the information superhighway.

My friend Mary and I, (failing to find Eastgate's movie theater with three minutes before our showing of Harry Potter was due to start and ending up hauling our asses all the way to Point for a slightly later showing), discuss relationships, the meaning of happiness, the massive Internet explosion of our generation and our own personal failures in filtering all the information, tools, and various experiments underway all over the world.

It's true. The internet sometimes gives me a headache, when I think of all that is possible and how little I'm really utilizing that, and how much time and energy I could spend in creating an organized corner of cyberspace. I have three blogs (of one type or another), a very dusty Twitter account, a Facebook account, and - now that I've discovered some of the more social features like chat and GReader's content-sharing - an increasingly interactive Google account. I have a long way to go before I am using these tools to their full potentials, and I can't help feeling that my "informational" life is as much of a mess as my physical apartment, right now, minus dirty laundry.

And then there's information intake. I love to learn, and I'm interested in almost everything - it's part of why I went into journalism. But if I don't set clear goals for a period of time, I fall easily into the dread hyperlink tangent, the internet equivalent of forgetting why you walked into a room.

And choice overload. The list of subjects I want to investigate further grows faster than I get through it, and when it comes to picking where to start, I generally get little help from Google's deceptively simple search page. "Hello, Christie," it says. "I have 250 billion brains. My goal is to one day contain all of human knowledge. What did you accomplish today?"

I guess it's a matter of discipline, to some degree. Of learning to selectively filter out all the billions of pieces of data waving their arms and screaming at you - at least until you've finished the task you've set for yourself and can resume "aimless browsing time." But then again, is any research task ever truly complete? There are always finer details and larger implications to investigate. A 20 inch story almost always has the potential to lead to an entire novel. Not always an interesting one, but a novel nonetheless.

I suspect that, while there are many people out there who are using the internet thoroughly and well, it's the younger generation that's going to do it best. After all, they're growing up in a world of interconnections and information overload that I only started with, one very slow pageload at a time, in 5th grade. By then, the brain is already developing the intractable rind of mental habit. In theory (my theory, my completely unscientific theory), the kids who are growing up with modems in their cradles are going to be so used to the barrage of information by the time they can read that they'll know exactly how to filter out what they don't need or want.

And while it's my mission as a journalist to become a master of finding, organizing, and presenting fact from all formats and sources, I doubt I will ever be able to look at Google's search box without feeling at least a small temptation to shut down entirely in the face of so much choice.

Robots water the lawn

One day, someone will explain to me why I get almost physically ill when I am looking at apartments in brand-new complexes on the outskirts of town. You know, complexes of identical beige buildings with beige carpet and a fountain by the entrance that lights up at night. The woman who shows me around says, isn't this place so cute? I can't even explain why I hate it so much, except that such places promote isolation from the community, and lots of driving. And I suppose the fountain wastes water, which is not as big a deal...in Wisconsin...yet. And I'm so creeped out by new things that when new shoes are too white I cover them with paint.

But lucky me, I found the one landlord in all of Baraboo who had a 1-bedroom for rent in an old house in the center of town. I'll probably geek out and take photos once I've dusted off my bookshelves and filled them with all the possessions I've been stowing in my mom's basement since last August.

Oops! WI Governor uses outlawed veto power, breaks law.

It looks like in all the hurry to strategically veto things from the newly-passed Wisconsin state budget, Jim Doyle forgot(?) he's not as powerful as he used to be. After last cycle's budget, when he selectively deleted words from several items to create new sentences and raise the state property tax by more than 150%, and the previous budget year, when he appropriated millions of dollars from the state transportation fund-- the all-powerful "Frankenstein veto" was finally banned. The veto allowed Wisconsin governors, Democrat and Republican, enormous freedoms in vetoing language from appropriations bills - and often, as a result, creating new items within those bills, with little recourse available for the legislature.

But it's back? The Wisconsin State Journal reports that, albeit in a "minor" policy item, Doyle very clearly used the unconstitutional technique to cancel the creation of a committee to study facilities caring for the mentally retarded. In the post-error scramble, it's not yet clear what will happen to the vetoed item. And it's still not quite clear what happened that led Doyle to do it in the first place. His office blames the need for haste in approving the bill before the July 1st deadline, admittedly admirable given the budget hasn't been on time for years, but isn't it more important that we don't have to go back and fix problems for which we have very little legal precedent?

P.S. I have opinions

My brother graduated from high school today. I'm really proud of him and the rest of Memorial's class of 2009. That said, the usual graduation cliches repeated in every single speech (Cherish your friends! Follow your dreams! Make the world better! Help those in need! You have done so much! Life is the journey! You will all be shining stars of great specialness!) caused me great distress. I have lately become more aware of how lucky it is for these kids to have gone through high school in a city where the public schools are so very good. Many, many of those who graduated will be going on to college, and have grown up in environments where it's a matter of course, to the point where, five years ago, a friend of mine had great difficulty convincing one of the guidance counselors that despite her fabulous grades she really did WANT to go to the local technical college instead of aiming for a four-year university. The kids who come out of schools in Madison are miles ahead, in that respect, of many of the people I have met since leaving high school, both in other countries and this one. I wish someone, anyone, had mentioned that, had pointed out that the kids sitting in front of them were among the most privilaged in the world.

I also wish someone had mentioned the JMM student who was shot last week, Karamee Collins. Ignoring the fact that his death was a crime, and that there may have been many, many factors leading to it both longterm and shorterm, societal and individual - ignoring all that, this kid still went to that school and was a part of the community, and his death was a loss that should be acknowledged even, especially, in such a moment of triumph as today's. At my high school graduation, a nod was made to students who should have been there but were not: the boy who killed himself freshman year, the students who died in a car crash the summer before. Why wasn't that done today? While it should not be a challenge to live until you graduate, it sometimes is - and I firmly believe that should be acknowledged even as you celebrate having made it that far.