What You Deserve

I was about to publish this post when I learned that Kay, a dear family friend, was hit by a car the night before and killed. She ended up being my biggest supporter in my blogging efforts, leaving helpful comments and telling me that what I was doing, this side-project that I usually think of as silly, was worth someone's time. I came to value her insight immensely in the process of going through my divorce. She will be dearly missed, and it breaks my heart to think of what her family is enduring. There is nothing anyone can say that really helps during the grieving process, especially when it is in the wake of something so unthinkable. There are no words of comfort when the loss is this immense. Still, this latest post is one that I think would amuse her. Kay, wherever you are, I hope you can still read this, and I am going to knit something really awesome in your memory. 

I sent my best friend a message about how worried I am about entering some kind of second adolescence. I'm starting to get boy-crazy again, which would maybe be cute if I was 12, but it's not such a good color on a 30-year-old. It's hard to not get swept away by how intense everything is when you are through the most painful part of a breakup, and past the usual rebounding that leads you to make questionable decisions, when your brain is just running a constant scroll of "sexsexsexsexsex" and suddenly, every other guy you meet looks like the hottest motherfucker you have ever seen. It's rough trying to just be a normal person when your hormones take control of your actions and you realize you're just an animal, and a really gross, awkward one at that. I told about how trouble I was having just trying to talk to a guy I met the other night because he is so good-looking and I am like a newly-molted cicada right now, emerging with wet wings and no idea how to do anything other than swarm. She replies by saying that she thinks the guy in question is single, and immediately I kind of deflate. Great, I think, he's single. It doesn't make a difference, because he is too attractive for me.
All of what little swagger I had has gone out of me during the past few weeks and I feel like I am already starting to decay, melodramatic as that sounds. In creating the Greek yogurt of my single self, I feel like I have already consumed the good part and now all I am left with is acid whey. What it keeps coming down to is what I think I deserve, or rather, what I don't deserve. I see this ridiculously attractive man and think dangerously hopeful thoughts until I realize that he is up here, and I am down here. I am always waiting for someone to point out that I'm not pretty enough, and not only that but that I'm not cool enough or smart enough or any other thing enough. I look at myself and just think, "Don't even try. You deserve nothing."
I don't know what I deserve. I keep wondering how in the world anyone could ever even like me. Despite what a lot of people say to my face, and I try to tell myself, about my ex and how much "better" I can do, I'm hung up on how disproportionate our levels of attractiveness were. He was too good-looking for me, and he knew it because I told him. I never got over that. I can lie to myself and think that he was my floor, but really, he was my ceiling, and I think everyone else knows it, too. For how much I bitch about his remarks about this same topic when we were together, at least he didn't lie to me. He told me that I was pretty, but not as pretty as other girls, and maybe that should just be enough. I know I flip-flop on this subject a lot, but there is such a fine line between having confidence and being blind, just as there is a fine line between being realistic and having body dysmorphia. It is hard to accurately assess yourself.
Maybe in that whole time with my ex, I was getting what I deserved, because he told me the truth. When I got fat, he told me I got fat. When I didn't look good in something, he told me I didn't look good in it. On the other hand, once I lost the weight after we split up, he noticed, and he told me, and if I looked really awesome in something, he noticed that, too. It wasn't all just harsh truths with him. He was a lot of things, but he was not a liar. Say what you will about how you should treat someone you love, but at least he prepared me to just be realistic about myself. I know I'm not going to spark the interest of the ridiculously handsome man, that the best I can ask is that I get to make small talk with him for a few minutes and just know he exists.

One Fine Day To Be Nude

I was listening to Marc Maron's WTF podcast with Alison Brie the other morning. She was talking about her time studying at CalArts, telling him that the rules were, at that school, that you could be naked anytime and any place, with the exception of the cafeteria. It was funny to hear her talk about walking around in just tennis shoes to make her friends laugh, but it also sounded like my personal nightmare. Being around a bunch of people who just don't care and can be naked anywhere there isn't food being served sounds completely foreign and weird and not at all comfortable. I don't even like being naked when I am by myself. I kind of wish I could just give myself a break and be naked, all of the time or even just some of the time, without feeling like someone is watching me and doesn't like the view. I want to be half as confident as this guy: I don't know if I have body dysmorphia or if I'm just brutally honest with myself or what, but I'm still struggling with what I see when I take my clothes off.
One of the things I was looking forward to, when I finally got my own place and didn't have to consider how I might be accidentally making anyone else uncomfortable, was just being naked all the time. I couldn't get naked whenever I wanted, for obvious reasons, when Gino and I had roommates, but even when we just lived together as a couple, if I was naked, I kind of ended up having to explain why I was naked. When I moved in here and didn't have to explain anything to anyone, I did just walk around in various states of undress pretty much any time I was home, but then I started to be such a girl about it and realized that I'm not comfortable being naked. I made a joke, this past summer, when I was still heavily embittered about my failed marriage, that Gino only saw me naked a handful of times in seven years. The way I told it made it sound like I never let him see me naked, but what I actually meant was that he didn't really look at me anymore. That was true to some extent, although I was, as I tend to do, exaggerating. We got naked a lot, but he stopped seeing me when I was naked, I think, a few years ago. He would try to make me feel better about my weight gain, and how my body was just wrong in so many ways, but it was a struggle, I could tell. He would put his hands on my hips and say, "See? It's working," meaning that my constant exercising and other attempts to shrink myself down were showing, but there was an edge to his voice when he said it.
The overall impression I got from Gino telling me it was working was, "It's working a little".
It was sweet of him, and he was trying, but it must be hard to be married to someone who just continues to expand year after year. I didn't live up to my marriage vows, which were to always be the girl he fell in love with. The girl he fell in love with had curves, but also had a concave stomach, and he didn't need to craft forgiving compliments for her. She was fine, if a little underfed. He didn't have to try at all. And then I got my post-marriage body and everything changed. I understand that my excess fat grossed him out, and I didn't help matters by being so self-conscious. If I had more confidence, I could have said, "So what? You know I'm working on it and it's taking a while, but it's not like I weigh 200 pounds. Get over it," but instead, my attitude was just, "Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry."
I like my body well enough, but it's like a friend I enjoy spending time with but don't need to see all the time. I keep coming back to this place where I wish I could just say fuck it and stop apologizing for it, but I'm just not there. I haven't, truth be told, gotten naked with a lot of people. I don't just mean that I haven't had sex with a ton of people. Whenever I see women just trying on clothes with each other in movies, or going into saunas naked together without a care, I just think, "Who does that?"
I was talking to my best friend about why we, humans that is, even try to find someone to get naked with. We get something from the knowing, I think, that another person will see us naked and not run away screaming, or laugh, or both. I'm not sure she arrived at the same conclusion as me, but she doesn't have body-consciousness issues like I do, and besides, she is gorgeous and would be crazy to have them. Of course, she says the same thing to me, so there you have it.
I don't usually give myself challenges, but this week I'm trying to just be naked whenever I can. If I'm home and I don't have anywhere else to be, I'm naked. The only way I'm going to accept the way I look and learn to like it is to just force myself to deal with it all the time. Maybe if I can manage to do that, the next time I am naked with someone, I won't be waiting for them to demand that I put clothes on again. It's a silly goal, but it's something I have been really struggling with and I don't know how else to address it. So, for a little while, if you don't see me, I'm probably going to be nude.

I Stand No Chance Of Growing Up

Someone challenged me this week on why I'm doing this at all when I asked their permission to write about them in this blog. This is the first time I have ever asked, or offered to change someone's name, which doesn't make me look like such a good person, and I didn't get the response from him that I was hoping for.The long and short of it was that he didn't want me to write about him, and I was not my most mature self in dealing with his answer. It bothered me because in the course of the conversation he asked me, point-blank, why I needed to write about this when the whole point of starting this blog was to work through my emotions as they pertain to my divorce. If this has nothing to do with my divorce, and there are no emotions to work through, he reasoned, why am I even writing about it? I tried to counter that I am always honest, and something else about how I share everything, and he had no problem making me feel like that argument was hollow. In his estimation, I was just bragging, and he didn't want his name associated with my bullshit.
I had to concede to his point because he was right, to a degree, but it left me feeling kind of despondent. Saying that there are no emotions associated is an unfair assumption. There are always emotions surrounding sex, and I don't want to be the kind of person who thinks there aren't. There is a reason we don't just fuck ourselves all the time. You can't french yourself and you can't spoon yourself. Plus, I may have started this project as a way to work through my failed marriage, but I do write about other things. I have other things to work out that have nothing to do with my divorce.
I was bothered by his harsh assessments enough that I couldn't sleep at all that night.This is actually one of the many reasons why I like this person so much. Sometimes, you like someone not because they are always nice to you and they make you feel like the best person in the world, but because they aren't always nice and, occasionally, make you feel like the worst person in the world. It's a hard pill to swallow when you realize that someone sees right through you, and what they see isn't good.
The question of why I do this continued to bother me all day, leading to me question myself on whether or not it even matters. I'm the only blogger in my area, it seems, who isn't writing about being a parent, the arts, or local history, and all I can think is that what I'm writing just doesn't matter. It made sense and helped, when I started, in a similar way to how it helps when I just think out loud, but now it's mostly just about me bumbling through a bunch of bullshit and talking in circles about boys, and it seems less and less relevant. I'm stuck- I'm stuck in this cycle of caring when I shouldn't care and then talking my way around it to make it seem important. I'm growing, but I am still not a grownup.
This is going to keep coming up if I'm going to keep writing this stupid blog. Someone pointed out that I had to know it would come up eventually, because I made the choice, early on, to not change names or hide anyone's identity. I asked for this other person's permission because I wanted him to be okay with it, but he wasn't, so now I'm dealing with my reaction to that. I had to ask, though. I've never asked for anyone's okay before, because with those people, at that point at least, I didn't care. When I started this blog, I didn't think my ex and I would ever be friends again so I didn't care if his feelings were hurt. I can't conduct myself that way anymore, it has become clear, because to do so would mean risking losing a friend. I was fortunate enough already that my ex doesn't mind being written about and that the only other person I have written about doesn't read it, or is just too cool to tell me if it bothers him. As for my other friends, they haven't said anything or asked me to change their names. My sister did take issue with something I wrote about her, so I edited it to make it a little less harsh because, truthfully, what I said wasn't really fair. I can't lose any of the friends I have because I'm not very good at making new ones, and I like the ones I have, especially this one, who I am so fond of. Nothing is worth risking any of my friends never wanting to speak to me again.
He knew I had written him into my novel and seemed like he did not have a problem with that, but that might have more to do with the likelihood that no one will every read it, so it's not a threat to his privacy, and in any event, it's a work of fiction. I don't know, and somehow, the things my friends say that usually placate me are not working. I can't tell myself that I could have just written about it without asking. That argument doesn't stick because I keep coming back to asking myself why I need to do this at all. It doesn't matter and it's not helping anyone other than myself and the fact that I will just keep doing it regardless says something very specific about me. I have always been this way. I would put on a show even if no one was paying attention, and I'm still doing it, but now instead of singing songs from The Little Mermaid, I'm talking about my personal life. The only thing I can manage to not care about, most of the time, is the fact that no one cares. In the meantime, I will be more aware of what I'm writing and who might be affected by it. I also am starting to accept that I don't need to blog about every single thing that happens to me. Some things are meant to be private. Private and secret are not the same thing, just like being honest and sharing too much are not the same thing. Little by little I'm getting it.

Final Anniversary

May used to be my favorite month. April always seems like it's going to be warm enough, sunny enough, but it never is. It's usually rainy and chilly, only when it isn't (still) snowing, and even when it is sunny, it's that kind of sunny weather where people in the Northeast say, "Well, at least the sun is out!" and hug the winter coat they are still wearing around their bodies to block the freezing cold. In May we finally get the weather we deserve after such a shitty season. May used to be my favorite month, but now, and probably for a while, it is going to be The Month My Marriage Ended. I'm coming up on the 23rd, which is, if memory serves, the date that my husband finally came clean and told me that this thing we had been trying so hard to keep going was dead. I remember very clearly that it was on a Wednesday, and that week, just three days before, I had posted on Facebook, "What we got on our hands here is a dead shark," referring, of course, to our relationship. I knew the end was coming, I just, I suppose, never really expected that the end would actually come. I thought we would keep avoiding it, dancing around it, that we'd both be too chickenshit to actually say out loud that we were married, but that this was no longer a marriage.

He used to make fun of me for celebrating both of our anniversaries after we got married- the anniversary of when we got together, which was July 1st, and our wedding anniversary on April 19th. He would tease me for being sentimental, for wanting to mark the occasion of when we became a couple and I would take it, and not argue, because I knew it was silly. Last summer, July 1st came and went, and I was too busy being depressed to even notice. Now, July 1st is just another day, and April 19th is just another day. I texted him on what would have been our fifth anniversary with, "Happy non-iversary, weirdo" and the next day, he shot one back, "Yeah, happy non-iversary weirdo".
This approaching day is the final "anniversary" we will have. The day our divorce becomes official and we are irreversibly not married anymore won't matter. We stopped being married over a year ago, so receiving a judgment stating the same from a judge won't have any effect on how I feel about it. That's why I'm not in a hurry to get it over and done with. At this point, because we are so copacetic with each other and neither of us "needs" a divorce so we can marry someone else or leave the country or, I don't know, something else interesting, I could honestly give a shit.

Nearly a full year has gone by since he let the cat out of the bag, and of course I've changed since then. Losing your first real, big love has to change you, or else it wasn't worth your time. I'm already seeing that I am a little more cautious than I used to be. I used to take more risks. Of course, this caution came about more from being involved with someone else than it did from my ex asking me for a divorce. Right after we broke up, I was so obviously desperate and needy, I might as well have had a target on my back. It was stupid and typical and I still don't like myself much because of it. It taught me something, though, which is that just because a man shows up at the right time, and quotes a Hall and Oates song and really seems to like going down on you, that does not mean anything more than that he showed up at the right time and knows one line from a song and has had a lot of practice doing that one specific thing and is just showing off.
I'm interested in someone right now, which is fun for the moment, and reassuring because that has not happened in a while. The rules are different, though. I used to just go running after boys, practically screaming, "I like you! I LIKE you! I like YOU!" but I can't do that anymore. Now, if I am interested in someone, it comes with a caveat attached. Before I can even allow myself the luxury of thinking this guy is cute and funny, my subconscious smacks me back down to Earth and says, "Okay, now let's find out what the catch is."
It's not that I think I'm only attracted to weirdos or that if I like him, there must be something wrong with him because I'm just so hopeless (Cathy comic, Sex and the City, blah blah blah shoes). I'm just assuming that there is a catch, based on my recent history, and I am also preparing myself for that moment when I learn, either directly from him or through a third party, what the deal-breaker is. I have a strong aversion to being humiliated, as do most people. I was humiliated by my marriage failing and I was humiliated by the fact that Mike was splitting his time between two girls and I was not the better of the two. Humiliation can stiffen your spine, which is good, but I think my spine is stiff enough as it is and I would like to not put the cart before the horse before I know what, or rather, who, I'm dealing with here. I know it's inevitable that I will do something stupid and make an ass of myself eventually, because that's just how I roll, but I guess I'm just trying to not make such an ass of myself in such a spectacular way. I think that's an achievable goal.

You Made It Weird

I hit a roadblock in my uphill battle to just finish what I damn started in November with my novel, trying to turn a scattered, fragmented mess of words into something I can actually stand by. Separating the wheat from the chaff, I have found that a lot of those 50,000 words were chaff, and that even worse, I can't even fit a great deal of the wheat into the new version of my book. Cleaning up this thing is hard because while I love chopping off the unusable parts, I have trouble not falling in love with the parts I can no longer use, but meant a great deal to me when I wrote them.
The roadblock came about as a result of trying to write a sex scene. I had no trouble with any of the other ones I had already written because unlike those ones, this one has not happened to me in real life. I have written about all of the sex I have had so far in this thing, and the end result is I don't know how to create something new. I can take my life experiences and rework them into fiction, share every humiliating moment that actually happened, and do it with total abandon. What I can't do is write a character I don't already know and then have my main character have sex with them without criticizing my every creative impulse. If I make the character too good-looking, I criticize myself for thinking the fictionalized version of me would deserve someone that good-looking. If I make him too funny, or tall, or nice, or anything else, this little voice in my head tells me what I assume anyone who reads it would think, that I think I deserve that. I trust myself when I write about things that actually happened because I can point to the past and say, "See? That's how it really went!", but when it comes to inventing something, I am judgmental to a point that might be handicapping me.
Fiction is tricky, especially when it's the mundane kind that is just about dating and being a girl and stuff. I don't imagine writing fantasy, or mystery or sci-fi is any simpler, but it must free you up a little to just let your imagination guide you in a specific genre like that. My "fiction" is so reflective of my own life, it barely passes as fiction, and that comes with its own set of complications. As much as this piece of writing is fiction, and my fictional avatar is not me, I pass the same judgments on her about what she deserves, and I end up punishing her because I have come to the conclusion that I deserve nothing. If I deserve nothing, that means she deserves nothing. I have little sympathy for her because I feel that I have earned every bit of mistreatment I have been handed, and any time I try to just give her a fucking break, I have to ruin it for her and make it weird.
I kind of chickened out, and barely wrote any sex. I talked to my sister about it a few days after, and she and I agreed that when you have sex, you don't remember every single thing, and every thing going into a thing, you remember snippets. I don't want to get too fruity with my explanation, but I don't think in terms of what was happening in my vagina all the times I had sex, I think in terms of what was happening in my head. I've given myself permission to not muddy up my book with, "and then this happened... and then THIS happened."
I've decided t's okay for me to not be gross about it, that I don't have to come up with twenty different words for penis, because I'm not writing Twilight fanfic here. I get flinty whenever I bring up what I am writing in conversation, especially with other women, because they always giggle and ask, "Is it like Fifty Shades Of Gray?"
No, you idiots, it isn't like that awful book. My character never says, "Argh!" and her boyfriends aren't control freaks who nag her about eating and make her sign a contract that stipulates getting her vagina waxed. I try to be supportive of all writers, but Jesus Henry Christ that fucking book is doing something to the book-reading public. The lines between erotica and literature have blurred, and while that can be good because sex doesn't have to be brown paper bag/bottom drawer any longer, it can also be bad. It seems that if I want people to ever buy what I create, I either have to force more grossness into my book or just make it sterile; dirty it up or clean it up, respectively. For a book to be marketable, it seems, there has to be a hook, and I don't know if I will ever be able to get published because I don't have that hook. I'm not trying to get anybody hard with my writing, and I doubt anybody would get hard when reading it, not even accidentally. Sex can be useful in writing, especially when it's not about that. It can be informative and funny and sad. I only write it into my fiction, and into this blog, because of all of those uses, not the other ones. I made it weird, but that's kind of okay because it usually does get weird, even when I'm not the one making it weird.

Nope, No, Not Right Now

I spent Patriot's Day at work, despite the fact that the office was technically closed, getting my boss ready for trial the following day and dealing with the craziness generally associated with that. I was too busy to check news websites or generally be aware at all of what was happening outside of my cubicle. When I heard the news about the bombing in Boston, it was in passing, and though I wanted to read about it and find out what the F happened, I still had hours of work to do and knew it would take twice as long if I stopped to check Gawker for an update. It was as if my mind said, "Nope, no, not right now, not while you have 300 more pages of exhibits to Bate stamp."
After getting out of work, I had a dinner to go to, and by the time I got home it felt too late in the day for me to get into what actually happened, how many people were affected, and all the things I wasn't doing to help. I was right to wait. If I had gotten into it late Monday night, I might not have ever fallen asleep. I didn't watch the raw footage until Tuesday morning, look at the photos of the blast victims being wheeled away on stretchers, see how much devastation had come to my state's capitol while I was doing stuff that seemed less and less like it actually mattered. Nearly the same thing happened when 9/11 happened. I was in Nova Scotia at the time, living in a house with no television, so I was insulated from how huge that event was. Everything I saw was after the fact, over a month later, and by then, it was old news. I was protected by distance, far from the panic that overtook the entire nation at that moment in time.
I hate how a tragedy like this makes me feel. It's not enough to acknowledge how unthinkable this madness is, I have to think of it in terms of how it is affecting me. Me, who had no loved ones anywhere near the blast site and has little affiliation with Boston as a city. I hate that I turn it around and use a dark mirror like this to reflect how small my problems are, how fortunate I am to have two legs and arms and a beating heart. It takes three deaths and upwards of one-hundred injuries for me to see how lucky I am, that I deserve no pity, and that there are people so much worse off. It is pathetic that things only come into perspective for me when something as tragic as this happens.
Despite all the perspective or focus or whatever bullshit name I can ascribe to it, I have been anxious this week about my parents moving back to the Berkshires. When I say that, I don't mean that I am anxious because I don't want them living near me, I'm just not sure yet how I feel about it. They have been living so far away for eleven years, basically the whole time I have been becoming a tolerable person, and now they are back, and I know it's going to take me a while to be a normal-ass person around them. I have gotten used to seeing them only twice a year, and being my happiest, wackiest, funniest self when they are around, trying not to burden them, being me but with the volume turned up. It's a happy thing, a good thing, but of course it's manifesting itself as slight mania. I now have the freedom to disagree with them, fight with them, have a real relationship with them that is not just a bunch of stops along the way. I stopped over to see them the day they got in, and I had to keep reminding myself that they are here for good, that I don't need to cram in all the time with them that I possibly can before I don't see them for another six-to-twelve months.
The distraction of anticipating their arrival and the panic over how and why and who set off the bombs at the marathon has kept me from thinking about one more thing that would probably bother me more if I had time to think about it. This week, Friday, in fact, would be my fifth wedding anniversary. Five years ago, I was looking at the man I was about to marry, thinking I was going to love him forever, no matter what. That hasn't changed, really. I will still love Gino forever, just not the way I planned. We're still present in each other's lives, still mean something to each other, but there is a bitter edge to our friendship that might never go away. Thinking about how giddy and unbelievably happy I was the day I got married, I can't help now thinking about how broken I was when he told me he wanted a divorce, and I wonder if I ever will be that hopeful again. I think I will, but who knows? These days, yon can't predict anything and at the same time have to prepare for anything. Nothing is certain, except for the certainty that things like this, life changes that come from out of nowhere, are not insurmountable. Nothing is, really. If I haven't learned that by now, I might not ever learn it. Right now, my heart is not breaking for myself and the fact that my wedding anniversary is just another day, it is breaking for everyone affected by the marathon bombing and what they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

My Stupid Hurt Feelings

I don't know what is wrong with me today, and really, every day since my birthday, but I reached some kind of tipping point in terms of what I am able to suppress, roughly at 10 am. It struck me, in the way I all of a sudden notice something that I have been trying to ignore, that my ex never wished me happy birthday, and that really started to piss me off. It set off my Anger Avatar, which just happens to look and sound exactly like Krazee-Eyez Killa from my favorite episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Outwardly, I looked pretty placid, but inside, my inner monologue was just a constant scroll of, "Muthafucka, whatthefuck?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC8V7uLoVko
I sent Gino a text message wishing him a happy birthday this year, and I invited him to my party, which he did not attend. I assumed he was too busy watching the Bruins-Canucks game, which was not surprising, but I was hoping I would see him since I hardly ever run into him anymore. I did everything a friend does for another friend. I got into an argument with my father wherein I defended Gino. I told my father that he was wrong to pass judgement on someone he, truly, barely knows, and how I know he doesn't understand, but that Gino was my best friend for seven years and how I don't want to just let go of that because everyone thinks I should. I know it's just my hurt pride taking over, but god, it's really embarrassing to tell a 68-year-old man, "You're wrong! We can still be best friends! Everything is FINE!", and then find out a few days later that he was right, that Gino and I can't be as close as we used to be. My father is always right, and it still annoys me. My dad makes up for it, though, by never pointing out that he is always right, and then doing something adorable, like leaving a Facebook post on my timeline that begins, "Hey, girlfriend-" and then sending me tulips at work for my birthday.
I sent Gino a text, not so much angry as it was passive-aggressive, and he responded with a confused one, a message that basically amounted to, "What?"
Come to find out, he was distracted this week. A friend of his passed away, a friend his age, from cancer, and he didn't think to congratulate me on, oh, being born. Surprise, everyone, I'm a jerk.
I did my best to lower myself to the floor, tell him I'm here for him, and if he needs anything, please tell me. I called him out for being a shitty friend and acted, in turn, like an even shittier one. I overreacted, as I tend to do, and now I'm just trying to get him to forget that I did that. It isn't easy. Nothing about this is easy. Getting older and finding that I still act like a child is not easy. Hoping for some kind of acknowledgement from the person I used to expect it from, and not getting it, is not easy. Admitting that my father still knows best is not easy. I'm pretty good, though, with not easy. At least, I think I am. I'll keep finding out if that's true.