Magical kingdom in the sky

This photo, which I took in Lesotho two years ago, came to mind as I perused submissions to National Geographic's photography contest.  Lesotho, strangely embedded within South Africa, is the only country entirely above 1000 meters.  It has rightly been dubbed "the magical kingdom in the sky."  And for an exhausted traveler leaving tumultuous South Africa, it was magical.

(Click for larger size. Oh, all rights reserved.)

We encountered these Basotho shepherds on Hodgken's Peak, also taking in the 360-degree view.  At 3256 meters, I struggled for air, having just arrived from Durban and the Indian Ocean coast. 

It's been over two years, but I think frequently of that 56-day trek through South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia (whew!).  It was a fantasy, traveling as a modern nomad with a map, a pack, and my hitchhiker's thumb.  From my current perch in Michigan - with legal textbooks now spread across my desk - it might feel like another existence.  But it doesn't.  I am still basically the same person I was two years ago.  As we grow older, it seems, we grow slower.

I'm still alive!

Yes, I've been quiet. I've left the computer to attend weddings or explore historic cemeteries or idle on famous bridges on cool summer nights. I still follow the news - Israel continues to evict Palestinians from their homes, meaningful health care reform hovers near the brink, poor women die in childbirth because men don't have uteruses, and children get tried as adults. But there's hopeful news, too: despite the economic slump, 13 states have expanded children's health insurance, and just yesterday, North Carolina legislators passed the Racial Justice Act, which allows death row convicts to challenge their death sentences on the basis of racial disparities.

I've also been writing at Waging Nonviolence - an inspiring blog about nonviolent movements to rectify social injustice. "Waging nonviolence is anything but passive," the About section states. "It’s an intensely active struggle for justice by the only means worthy of the goal." I've written about reducing the number of prisoners to combat overcrowding, about organizing to oppose the racist abuses of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and about the psychological scars of war on soldiers.

Finally, I wrote about the Ohio legislature's "insane budgeting decisions" for Streetvibes, the bimonthly newspaper of the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless. The article looks at the dire impact of Ohio's budget cuts to our community mental health system. As one parent advocate told me, "There is so much outrage when a severely mentally ill person commits a crime, but few resources to help them day-to-day so a crime doesn't get committed."

So it's been a busy summer, and I'm thankful.

I was there

To friends in the DC circle, it's no big deal. But Cincinnatians love it. Washington has never seemed too foreign to me, growing up in Silver Spring, my father a civil servant. But from Southwest Ohio, the marble columns of the American empire seem more distant.

As expected, it felt nothing like the protests of the 2001 inauguration and the stolen election. The crowds were thick and jubilant. I found the morning Metro busy but not overwhelmed (though others weren't so lucky). I landed within minutes at a security checkpoint, checking the list of prohibited items. "No fruit!" the guard barked when a friend Chloe tried to sneak in her tangerines. Once inside the perimeter, we walked along Pennsylvania Avenue, spoke with police officers from San Antonio, waved to the motorcade carrying Obama to the Capitol (catching a glimpse), and squeezed toward a jumbotron outside the National Museum of American History, in distant view of the Capitol.

Like you probably, I've read more than enough commentary on Obama's inaugural address. So I'll note quickly: I appreciated his shout-out to nonbelievers and three lines in particular: (1) "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." (2) "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." (3) "And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it."

As soon as Obama finished speaking, we rushed for the exits, but they were closed. The crowds meandered aimlessly, often dead-ending themselves in the courtyards between museums. We got stuck in a crowd that continued so far back that the front, fenced in and unable to progress, could not communicate their helplessness to the back. We were blocked from escape by a line of porta-potties that seemed to stretch for two miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. A friend Sebastian began to wedge out one of the porta-potties, careful not to tip it. Other people got the idea and made room for the displaced unit, chanting excitedly, “Yes we can! Yes we can!”

We walked to the south side of the Mall and entered a makeshift Obama market: Anything will sell with Obama’s face on it, and the merchants seemed capable of putting his face on anything: t-shirts, sweatshirts, towels, mints, hats, buttons, magnets, key-chains, dog-tags, posters. The crowd was almost entirely African American. Multiple items depicted Obama beside MLK, including a poster of a photo-shopped handshake that looked so real I did a double-take. One t-shirt read simply: “My president is black!” Every kitschy product was advertised as a "collector’s item," but the paraphernalia defeated its purpose. Nothing so ubiquitous could be so valuable.

The line for the men’s bathroom at the Air & Space Museum was the longest I had ever seen.

It'll take time to process whether this election - this triumph of hope over fear, as Obama likes to say - restored my embattled sense of patriotism. Despite the optimism of my HOPE-inspired peers, it's hard to forget that in the easiest choice in a generation, nearly half of America got it wrong, voting for the other guy and his blubbering fear-mongering running-mate. I also remember the miles still left to go: the counter-productive war on drugs, marriage equality, a preferential option for the poor. But inaugural moments like these remind me that lonely afternoons spent knocking on doors do, in fact, bring us closer to a More Perfect Union, that as Ted Kennedy memorably stated, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Photos collected by the Boston Globe.

My favorite YouTube gorilla

I've been quiet for a while as I try to figure out my life. It's hard work. So here's something both sentimental and rockin' to ease the transition back. The song is In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins.

I love the world

I've been repeating to myself a saying from civil rights leader and Baptist minister Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I've had to repeat it to myself lately because I've become rather calculating, thinking: What the world needs is people who do useful things for other people. I imagine these competing motivations will eventually find an equilibrium.

In the meantime, here's something to recall that there are many paths to goodness:

Kids aren't half-bad

I'm so happy. I just came from an awesome session with seven teens (aged 14-17) at Syracuse's runaway house for youth, where I've been twice before. We spent an hour in the living room talking about drug abuse. We brainstormed why people smoke even though they know it can kill them (peer pressure, addiction, lose weight); I shared some numbers on the health impacts of smoking cigarettes (male smokers are 23 times and female smokers 13 times more likely to die from lung cancer than non-smokers); and we talked about crack-cocaine and heroin and New York's Rockefeller drug laws, which impose harsh mandatory prison sentences for possessing relatively small amounts of drugs. I explained how the laws removed judicial discretion, so there's no telling the judge you're a good guy and deserve a second chance. Nope. Two ounces of crack gets you 15 years in prison.

What made me so happy was how much they really got into it. Everyone participated. We laughed, we had healthy tangents; we respected each other. It's odd because these kids actually have more fluency with drugs than I do, though I have the details. I was shocked at how quickly they trusted me - and I think now it's because I started by explaining how the odds were stacked against them (and not just because they come from broken homes). The Rockefeller drug laws are not only excessive, but the police target the Bronx over the suburbs, though whites do drugs at the same rates. Meanwhile, the tobacco companies spend billions to advertise to exactly their demographic (remember Joe Camel). Kids see almost 600 tobacco ads each year. At the one-hour mark when my session officially concluded, I told them they could go. They stayed. They were so into it that when one of them would get goofy, the others would tell him to shush. We're trying to learn here.

Update: The evening reassured me that working with kids wouldn't be horrible, if that's what I end up doing next. I had fun answering questions like, "Does cocaine make you grow armpit hair?" Answer: "No, you'll get that anyway." Or: "Are there cockroaches in prison?" Answer: "You can count it. And I mean the big kinds." I decided to leave out jokes about prison food.

Ode to springtime

Spring is back. The scene at the park was out of a movie: fifteen-year-olds holding hands and snickering about my leg-tights (yes you can snicker too), dads chasing their four-year-olds and tripping over themselves, kids flying kites with necks upturned, college ultimate players doing their warm-ups, girls and boys riding bikes down the sidewalks. A few friends and I gathered to toss a frisbee disc across the open green, laughing and poking fun. The trees are still bare against the warm blue sky, but spring is here - no doubt about it.

Syracuse and I have a relationship - it's love/hate and sometimes sentimental, with the sort of familiarity that develops over time, from observing the changing seasons and knowing what that playgrounds look like whether bombarded by snow or by kids. It's the sort of intimacy one shares with steadfast comrades and old girlfriends - the sense of uncovered secrets and shared memories. It's as if to say, I know your wardrobes, Syracuse. So I maintain a measure of reality about the weather, waiting for the clouds to roll across the sky. But that's okay: the honeymoon days are behind us and now we're truly honest with each other and probably better off.

I am attentive to the ways we ritualize and sanctify the seasons, like holidays that come year after year with their familiar tastes and smells. The stable spinning of the earth lets us reflect on times past - a year back or even much longer - to the good ol' days and the remember when's. Maybe it was the kids or the kites or the swing-sets, but today I felt like I really played.

What do you do, exactly?

Last week I submitted my resignation, effective this summer. It was a really tough move, deciding to leave a job I like when I don't know where I'm going. My boss processed the paperwork, and as I carried the forms down the hill to HR, I felt a bit like Jesus carrying his own crucifix. But all things considered, now is my time to seek out a different world. I might head toward some sort of advocacy work or teaching related to criminal justice.

I will have spent the last two years as a research assistant to nine (yep, nine) professors in the bioethics department of a medical school. I haven't written much about my work here, occasionally noting a quiet moment of appreciation, or a more perilous Indiana Jones moment in the library basement. So it's probably worth explaining what I do on a regular basis - and why I love this job.

For the most part, I spend my days working through questions asked by the faculty:

"what's the organ donation acquisition policy in Europe?"
"how many health care workers get HIV on the job?"
"what's case law on the right of prisoners to refuse treatment?"
"what's the penalty for falsifying insurance forms in NYS?"
"of organs recovered, how many are actually transplanted?"
"what criteria do insurance companies use to evaluate requests for coverage?"
"can you track down transcripts for the Abigail Alliance case?"
"which states or cities have banned trans fats?"
"where is donation after cardiac death being done?"
"how does the ratio of working people to retired people vary by country?"
"can you find info on the rising rates of obesity around the world?"
"can you find the text of NY's law on decision-making for developmentally disabled patients?"
"how much money do pharmaceutical companies spend on marketing each year?"
"does the AMA have a position on the matter? other medical professional societies?"
"do illegal immigrants have Medicaid coverage for post-organ transplant medical care?"
"how do insurance companies evaluate whether to respect an appeal for coverage?"
"is there evidence that tobacco companies target African Americans more than whites?"
"can a plaintiff require its medical expert witness to testify for its side only?"
"which countries are least car-dependent? can you find data on vehicles per capita?"
"are poor patients really the beneficiaries of free drug samples?"
"who pays for the court-ordered treatment of a minor patient?"
"how does the Veterans Administration ration its high-cost diagnostic tests?"
"does New York have an 'I'm sorry' law for physicians?"

So I have exciting workdays. The faculty are experts in their niches - global health, medical professionalism, medical creative writing, hospital policy, etc. - but everyone requires background details, especially for survey courses. So snippet by snippet, I meander through the topics. It's a wonderful job. In much of academia, people are driven to become experts in obscure topics, to know a lot about a little. My work is the opposite: I am expected to know a little about a lot.

Finally, I can't understate how wonderful it is to work for a place where people dress in comfortable clothing (well, most of the time; I still tuck in my shirt), where there's often blueberry pie or oatmeal cookies or "Friday chocolate" (or a chocolate-tasting contest) on the kitchenette counter, where the rotating "selections from the Center library" include books like Rafael Campo's book of poetry, What the Body Told and Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power. I do feel loved and supported in this office - and am so glad to have landed here among mentors and friends.

The pursuit of happiness

Am I happy? I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. But maybe that's not right. You see, I have these three questions about happiness:

1. Is happiness all it's cracked up to be?
2. Is it good to be happy?
3. Is happiness the most important goal in evaluating our lives?

For a person who's never really been all that happy, question number one has an obvious answer: No. I can live a worthwhile and satisfying life without really being happy. In fact, I think I can count the times that I've really been happy on one hand, and I don't really believe those who say unequivocally that they're happy. It's possible that I have a distorted view of happiness, that I wrongly equate it with passivity and settledness and maybe even a sort of apathy about the world. That's the view that Ivan takes in the central soliloquy of Anton Chekhov's short story, “Gooseberries”:

"Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that as happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him--sickness, poverty, loss--and nobody will see it, just as now he neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly like the wind in the aspen tree, and all is well."

Do happy people really disregard the poor and suffering? Are they self-absorbed? That bears on question two, which asks whether it's good to be happy. I'm not sure that Ivan's view in Chekhov's tale adequately and accurately represents happiness. There doesn't seem anything wrong with the sort of happiness implicit in reuniting with old friends or watching your favorite football team win the Super Bowl. A world with joyful and delighted people is, I think, a good thing. They're more creative and motivated. As Kant wrote in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (4:418), "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination."

Is happiness a worthy goal in life? Well it's certainly not the most important goal. In fact, I wonder if we should even treat it as "goal" at all. Zach quotes Yitz Greenberg who says that "if you look for happiness, it will elude you. Happiness is the by-product of living a meaningful life." The question is an area of great interest to social psychologists. One study suggests that increasing wealth has not made people happier (remember money can't buy happiness?). Another study categorized subjects as either "blissful" or "contented" and found (according to this article) that "Blissful people were more likely than the merely Contented to have rich and stable intimate relationships." The Contented, on the other hand were more highly educated and more politically engaged. For me, anyway, I think I'm content to be merely content, and I'll stop worrying about it.

Reading Rainbow: "Check it out!"

For library lovers everywhere:

7:38 a.m. on a Sunday

It was drizzling when I woke. I slept with the window open, seeking reprieve from the heat. It worked. I stay beneath the covers for a while, soaking in the coolness. I love waking up early on a Sunday. In the afternoon, I breathe in the day. There’s much to do: unfolded laundry on the bed, a friend’s essay to proofread, a book to review (for the blog, of course, where else?). It’ll get done. I’m not worried. I’m not dead yet – or dying – so there’s time for fiction. Contrast: SENSE OF URGENCY! NEED CAREER NOW! Revert: I crack open Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam and lean back, a conscious attempt to be taken by it all. Sometimes it works. The covered porch shields me from the drizzle and yet preserves the breeze. But ya know, I want to get wet. I leave this porch - my perch - and stretch out on the lawn that my housemate graciously mowed last week.

Up above is Syracuse’s characteristically grey canopy. I am fond of it.

I thought it was time for an update. Snippets:

I played an incredible game of ultimate frisbee last week. Maybe it’s the nature of the game or maybe just the people I play with, but we never succeeded in keeping score, even when we tried.

I spent a weekend with my grandparents in Pittsburgh last month. They talk about the future, the future without them, but both are doing wonderfully. Grandpa’s still kicking even with two fake hips. At 84, he says: “I don’t care what the doctors call it. I’m gonna die of old age, damnit.”

On the way home, I arrived at the airport to find that my 6:30 AM flight to Syracuse via NYC was delayed “at least an hour.” So much for getting home by 11 AM. But all was not lost. I was re-routed through Cincinnati and arrived back in Syracuse at 10:30 AM, half-an-hour earlier than I would have on the original flight. Only with the airline industry can you be early when your plane is late.

At the Syracuse airport, it took half-an-hour of shamelessly making announcements before I found someone willing to split a cab. With Syracuse’s public transportation system, I had little choice but to take a cab. The driver, a scruffy-looking guy in his thirties, of course had a story. For seven years now, he’s worked the 3 AM-to-noon shift for a total of fifty hours a week – on minimum wage. No benefits – no paid vacation, no health insurance. He says he’s looked into private plans but can’t afford them. I ask why he keeps this job. Answer: Flexible vacations. Well, I assure him, we’ll have figured out universal health care by the time you really need it. I sure hope so.

What else? I tutor a 39-year-old recovering alcoholic who is learning to read. We usually meet on Saturdays at the public library, but it was closed last week for the Labor Day weekend (nevermind that Labor Day is Monday! lame!). We met at the front door and meandered over to a park bench before deciding to walk around downtown to find signs and posters to read.

On the walk, we discuss why cigarette smoking remains legal despite its proven dangers. I blabber about the influence of industry lobbyists. Plus, I add, “we didn’t know how terrible cigarettes were for ya back then – so to some extent, we have inertia to thank for our lax tobacco laws.”

“Inertia,” he says excitedly, “I hearda that, in a movie once, I think. Whatzit mean? Oh right. When you’re in a relationship and you get bored but you can’t get the freak out.”

He says “freak” because he’s gentle like that.

Back at home, I indulgently smother an apple in peanut butter and devour it standing up.

It’s a good life.

The sun's radiance

I took two weeks off blogging, but not by design. It's good to be back. Since I'm recovering from a week in Providence and since I'm still living out of a box while I move apartments, I'm not ready to post anything substantial. But something is coming. I've been thinking about the campaign to make medicines available to the destitute poor, and how this campaign collides with intellectual property rights. I've been getting excited for the ultimate frisbee tournament I'm staffing this weekend. And I've been treating myself to fancy dinners - nutritious but no less indulgent.

I'm lucky to have a job where my duties include surveying incoming journals. So I saw that the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted an entire issue to the fight against malaria, which still kills a million people a year. What a great imperative for the research agenda and for the rest of us: Malaria "can be controlled everywhere the disease still exists, no matter how poor or remote the location or population." Besides reading JAMA, I spent part of the afternoon with the New England Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Review of Books. Not a bad day.

For one professor here at the bioethics center, I've been compiling an annotated bibliography on issues of disability, genetics, and law, focusing especially on reproductive choice and genetic discrimination. For another professor, I've been digging through recent reports of the IPCC to understand how climate change is impacting the economies of developing countries. Yes, there are days when my job is simply my job. But on other days, there's nothing I'd rather be doing.

I moved in this week with a friend who recently purchased a house. For several hours last night I schlepped over everything I own, finishing around 3:00 AM, utterly exhausted. To my dismay, I woke a few hours later when the radiance of the sun flooded the naked windows. Note to self: Buy window shades ASAP. I hadn't anticipated that moving apartments would take so long, but over the last year in Syracuse, I seem to have acquired kitchen supplies, nonessential furniture, and other household amenities that are generally associated with adulthood. In this new house, I feel quite grown-up - pleased that I will no longer have to drown quarter after quarter in public laundry machines. Then I remember that starting a fifteen hour day on just three hours of sleep is exactly the kind of feckless, youthful indiscretion I quietly adore. Oh, be still my heart.

An Indiana Jones Moment

The stacks in the library basement stretch from floor to ceiling. I've long found these quiet aisles a trusted refuge, perhaps because the books have a permanence - and a smell - that the internet can never match. The volumes are endless: Neurobiology, Neurological Clinics, Neurology - bound in dark blues, violets, and greens. The article I'm seeking - I check over my notes - was published in 1982, vol. 1204, pg. 634. I know these journals well: I run my fingers over the spines, pull out a heavy volume, and shuffle through the pages. It's second-nature, as if I'm tying my shoes.

Then I hear a soft rumble. Behind me, the massive wall begins to move. The aisle is thinning.

Interesting, I think. I should leave.

I look up one way, then down the other, then back to the first.

Like I'm Buridan's famous ass.

Oh screw it, I realize. RUUUUUNN!

I dash out, tripping over myself. The stacks heave closed behind me. I've sometimes wondered whether these electronic sliding stacks have movement sensors. Judging from the narrowness of my escape, I'm guessing they do not. The person who absently pressed the close-button is now standing beside me. She's as startled to see me as I was to find myself in the meat grinder.

"OhmygoshyouweresoquietIswearIlookedohmygoshohmygosh..."

I spend the next five minutes calming her.

Such are the perils of being a research assistant.

Bertrand Russell: "What I have lived for."

When I need a break from my reading, I peruse the library bookshelves, leaving my fortune to the book binding that catches the eye. Today, it was The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. This excerpt comes from the prologue, titled, “What I have lived for.”

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Gross anatomy: eww or awe?

Of course the smell lingers. If formaldehyde can preserve dead bodies, how can it not stay on my hands?? After leaving the cadaver lab, I rushed home, flung off my shirt, and dashed to the shower. I scrubbed furiously, as if I were allergic to my own skin. No avail. "What could possibly, possibly, make it go away?!" It had to be something strong, something formidable. So I took out the cough syrup. Instead of smelling dead, I smelled sick (and a little dead). Small improvement.

I saw about a dozen dead bodies today. A med school friend, Brendan, graciously took me to his "Gross Anatomy" lab, as the first-year course in anatomy is appropriately called. At this point in the year, the bodies were heavily dissected. Just a little skin clung on, a bit on the eye-lids, some on the toes. One body still had its fingerprints, mostly eroded but just visible.

My task was to help Brendan memorize the parts of the nasal cavity. At times, or so I told myself, it was like preparing a Thanksgiving turkey. But every once in a while, a distinctly human element came through: eyelashes, fingernails, toes, tongue, chest hair. One body had bright pink painted fingernails, as if to tell its future medical students, "DO NOT FORGET: I was once a person!" Meanwhile, bits of human flesh hang around the table. The medical students don't notice, or try not to, or at least don't notice anymore. For a future doctor, it really is more important to identify the sphenopalatine artery than to think about the person, now dead, who once looked through those dried out eyeballs.

Some critics bemoan this "dehumanization." But I am mostly grateful for it. I bet this anatomized view of the human being solves more problems than it causes.

The highlight was identifying the the malleus and incus in the middle ear. Brendan pointed them out amid a maze of veins and arteries and nerves that wound through even more veins and arteries and nerves. Out of this mess, I come away amazed at how many things could go wrong in the human body, but generally don't. I think I have a deeper appreciation for the body, for medicine, and for the over-achieving doggedness of medical students - who, god help them, have to put up with that utterly relentless smell.

Chipping away at the marble ceiling

With the news coverage welcoming Nancy Pelosi as the first female Speaker of the House, I'm feeling empowered as hell (I know, as a white male I'm already empowered, but still.) It's exciting when anybody breaks through a glass ceiling - or as NOW President Kim Gandy put it for Nancy Pelosi, "the marble ceiling.''

But I'm also wary of this hype, now swirling around the possibility of 2008's first female or African-American president. The real sign that a glass ceiling's been broken comes not from the first break-through, but from the second. Still, you can't have a second without having a first, so I'm going to be happy today.