Reviewing, Please Wait

 

     Ello. I haven't done book reviews on here before but I do work at a library. So it seems reasonable and suitable and uncharacteristically in character. I like saying things like that just so I can use the word "Oxymoron" which I like to say very much. Though come to think of it, it kind of sounds like an oxygen breathing stupid person. Or stupid oxygen? Because all stupid people breathe oxygen, and smart people do too.
Upon further investigation I discovered that "oxymoron" literally means "sharp-dull" and is derived from Greek. A similar Greek derived term, "sophomore" literally means "wise-fool". I'm not sure how to take that. Is that offensive? Complementary? Someone tell me how I should feel because I'm going to be overrun in confusion presently.

Well that sure stayed on topic.

Okay so I recently read the book Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi. Companion to Ship Breaker by the same unpronounceable author.

I'm a failure to summarize books. So I'll leave it to the professionals and I'll give you the summary off the book itself.

"In a dark future America where violence, terror and grief touch everyone, young refugees Mahlia and Mouse have managed to leave behind the war-torn lands by escaping into the jungle outskirts. But when they discover a wounded half-man, a bioengineered war beast named Tool, who is being hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers, their fragile existence quickly collapses. One is taken prisoner by merciless soldier boys, and the other is faced with an impossible decision: Risk everything to save a friend, or flee to a place where freedom might finally be possible."

I thought this was a pretty darn good book. For older teens. The violence was pretty intense at times and the cussing was pretty heavy too. I didn't feel like it was really gratuitous though. It made sense in context, but surely it could have been toned down a bit. Especially since Ship Breaker was so much milder, it was unexpected.

Drowned Cities is definitely not a light read. The story was depressing and pretty much stayed that way. However, I was impressed with how it surprised me with the plot twists a couple of times. Partially because I misread the summary before I read it the book, haha. Other things surprised me too though.

This book raises a lot of moral questions. With bio-engineered creatures that have some human DNA, sometimes seem entirely human, and with humans who are callous and act more like animals than humans after years of war, you have to wonder what defines being "human". Where is the line between humanity and animal? Interesting.

Some of the characters were surprisingly deep and the world, I thought was very detailed and well built. I found it very believable and I really was sucked into the story.

However, I personally preferred Bacigalupi's first YA book, Ship Breaker. It was still dark and realistic without making me feel like all humanity is doomed and it had less profanity. So yes, read that book. It was amazing.

Duh duh duh. Look, I actually stayed kind of focused for like four paragraphs in a row. I think that's a record for me.

Goodbye :)

This Is No Banana

    

Oh, what a to do to die today at a minute or two to two,

A thing distinctly hard to say and harder still to do,

We'll beat a tattoo at twenty to two,

With a ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-too,

And the dragon will come when he hears the drum,

At a minute or two to two today,

At a minute or two to two.

That's always been my favorite tongue twister. I love how in so few lines it builds such great suspense, I love the rhythm and the way it just feel so awesome to say, and it has a dragon which makes anything better, obviously.

Now I'm picturing an ice cream cone with a dragon on top. So maybe they make everything better -except- ice cream. Yahhh. There always has to be an exception. I think that's in the constitution somewhere. Or maybe Einstein's rules of physics, or the laws of thermodynamics. It's somewhere in something important. 

Like this blog. It's on this blog. That's an extremely prestigious place.

So I was skipping around town today looking for a yellow umbrella, I heard that we're supposed to get freezing rain within the next couple days and thought it'd be totally sweet if I could go out in the freezing rain with my umbrella, and the rain would freeze on the umbrella and I'd have an ice-brella! However, I could not find a yellow umbrella of the appropriate strength.

Then someone asked me if the mum eating toes were cute and I completely forgot what I was thinking. Oh well. So now I must leave you.

Goodbye. Oh, and by the way. Lollipops.

.

Today someone was telling me about how caffeine has a calming affect on ADHD people. 

Too much caffeine puts me to sleep. Hah. Hahaha. Ha. Squirrel.

Darker, darker. Darker?

     They're always talking about it, aren't they? How our society is descending into darkness. How it's just getting worse, how we live in horrible times. Poor us, living in these times. Haha. Haha. Ha. Ha.
     I guess yah, we do live in hard times, but I feel like everyone has. It's just a messed up world and maybe we just need to get over that and deal with it. Sure, let's try to make the world a better place, that's great, but we're really just doing damage control, the world is never going to be good, no matter how much you and I work to make it good.
     I remember learning something in chemistry about how disorder only increases, never decreases as a whole. I feel like the bad in the world is like that.
     However, before you write me off as some depressed pessimist. I do believe there is still good in this world (hallelujah!).
     I just wish people would stop complaining about the bad stuff so much and take time to appreciate the good while we still have it. Everyone has their own problems but not everyone has, say.. the amazing mom you have, or adorable puppy, the beautiful wildflowers that grow in your yard, or that crazy musical talent you're blessed with.
     Deal with the bad things that happen, you don't need to ignore them, but don't let them take over your life. Please. For my sake and your own.
     Admit it, we all hate whiny facebook statuses. ;P
 
     On another note. ARTISTIC UPDATE, OH MY GOODNESS. I recently submitted a couple pieces to the governor's art exhibition or whatever they call that. I don't expect to win or anything, I just picked out a couple pieces I'd already done and submitted them very last minute. Next year I WILL remember to actually make something for that show. Maybe.
     I've been working on the robotics website a lot, it's coming along well, check it out here.
     I've also been doing a lot of photography. The photo at the top is one of mine. Black food coloring dropped into a glass of water. Fun stuff. I also did a photo for the theme "natural beauty". It's a picture of a friend of mine with her hair sculpted (by me) into a tree shape. That was fun and required a ton of hairspray. :P I'd post it on here but I'm not sure if she would feel comfortable with a portrait of her being available to the public on here, haha. Or well, you'll just have to use your imagination ;P
     I think I mentioned trying out for my school's forum show, unfortunately we didn't make it in. We had some guitar malfunctions, so I don't think it was our fault we didn't get in ;P I'm thinking of buying some recording equipment and recording it, not sure yet, that stuff is pricy and I'm clueless soooo... yah. But if I do, I'll upload the recording to youtube or something so you can hear it.
     The viking jewelry craft I did at the library went really well, had nine people show up and they all did very well and seemed satisfied with their creations before when they left, so that was good :)

     I originally didn't include this in this post, but am adding it for a couple reasons. A: it's one of my favorite songs. B: it kind of goes with the post. C: I really like adding songs to posts. ;P
     This song makes me think of the sense of entitlement we all tend to have. "They said we'd live forvever" seems like a cry of "You promised!" to me. And maybe we don't all expect to (literally on earth) live forever. But we feel entitled to things. A lot of things. When really we deserve a big fat nada. Worse than that, we deserve punishment for being sick sinful creatures.
     We've sure got off easy, huh? Just a little simple faith and we really do get to live forever. And here we are complaining about the hard times we live in. Hmph. Shoot that sense of entitlement in the heart and let it die.  Give up everything and serve other people, serve them because it's what God wants and He sure deserves whatever He wants out of you.

Be glad when your sun comes up tomorrow and make the most of what you're given. Because building those airplanes isn't going to save you.

Since Bold Sophia Has Crossed the Sea

"Fear is a sign of humanity. Only fools are not afraid."

That's a quote from somewhere, and, so atypical of me, obviously, I don't remember where its from. But I thought it was cool.
Heh. It's true too. I mean, what kind of person falls off a cliff by accident? Not the one that's too scared to get within ten feet of the edge. It's the brave fellow who wants to show off how cool and daring he is to his friends or to himself, or maybe he's just foolish. Or she. Not necessarily just guys who are stupid. Well actually... HAHAHAHAHA.. Ignore me. Well. But don't really ignore me. Just ignore anything stupid I say. Pay attention to all my good aspects, of which I have many, like my humbleness.

But yah, maybe fear isn't always such a bad thing. It's always looked on as a negative thing, but even though it's not fun to feel afraid, it sometimes prevents things happening that are worse than that feeling of fear.

Lord Bateman wouldn't have been captured and put in prison and he wouldn't have nearly died if he had some fear and stayed home. But he was brave and went sailing around for the heck of it. If it weren't for a disobedient daughter, he'd have been a goner. What a beautiful rhyme I made this time.

On the flip-side.  Living in fear is a sucky life too. Especially when we've got all those promises from God that He'll take care of us. And besides, what happens to our earthly bodies doesn't matter, we'll be whole in heaven, man can't take away the most important part of us.

OH THE DEEP PHILOSOPHICALNESS. Is that a word? My spellcheck says no, but my spellcheck also says spellcheck isn't a word. Do you deny your own self, spellcheck??!!

Anyways, if Sophia was too afraid, she'd never have crossed the sea and gotten to marry her Lord Bateman, and there wouldn't have been such a pretty song written about them.
Of course, come to think of it, she might have sailed away across the sea because of fear of her father who was probably pretty darn mad at her.
Now, some general updates. I HAVE NEGLECTED YOU, MY DEAR BELOVED PROBABLY NO ONE, BUT HOPEFULLY NOT NO ONE, BUT A WONDERFUL PERSON WHO READS MY BLOG!!!

I use caps lock too much. Actually I just hold down shift and don't literally use caps lock. I believe in complete honestly, if you haven't noticed. But I use capital letters very much, which is ironic because it tics me off when other people use capitol letters too much.

I meant to spell tic that way. Because I like the onomatopoeic word relating to clocks far better than blood-sucking Ixodes scapularis. Random fact, I have a huge fear of ticks. If I think I might have one on my head, I am likely to pull all my hair out and scratch my scalp off. That is really disgusting. MOVING ON.

Okay, I was supposed to be giving you some general updates. Okay. So yes, I haven't posted much lately. I'm prepping for forum show at my school, in which I'll hopefully be performing a song by Dou Wei, called Shangdi Baoyou, or God Bless. I'll put the music video in this post somewhere.

I've also been busy doing stuff with the Red Plague robotics team. Hopefully redesigning their website. I'd link it but it isn't very impressive YET. But it will be. I'm working on it. Kind of. And I've been working on their open house prep and such as well.

I'm taking a photography class right now so I haven't done much of my typical art. But I'm finally learning to use photoshop. Which is good and bad because now I really want it and it's so expensive.

At the library, I've scheduled a craft club day. Made some samples and bought the materials. We're doing this really awesome viking knit jewellery thing with norse rune charms to go with the mythology theme we have right now. I'll get a pic on here... maybe... yes... alrighty. So I think they're cool, and not really bragging about myself here, because viking knit is an ancient technique (check this blog out for some of the history of it) which I never would have thought of myself. It looks pretty high end, but it's easy and cheap to make. Which is ridiculous. And awesome.

So yah. Thinking I might add some extra pages on my blog here to put some photography, maybe a poetry page, might even start posting some of my book I'm writing . . . anyone interested in seeing any of that stuff? Lemme know. If you'd like to have some of YOUR stuff on here... maybe I could do a gallery of stuff by readers.. that might be pretty sweet :) Anyways, just brainstorming right now. 

Thanks for reading, Imma heading to bed. Night!

Happy New Year's Eve's Eve!

      Today is the day before the day before the first day of the next year! Oh my gosh, that's just so incredible.
     Lessee, we have some news . . . Boardwalk Amblers Anonymous now has an official facebook page! Next maybe we'll add a Twitter, a google +, a pinterest, a myspace, a sina weibo, a . . . never mind. Just facebook for now.
    
     I think that's about all I have to say right now. Goodbye! Oh wait, what did you say? Oh? You were wondering how I survived the rest of the end of the world? I guess I did sort of stop explaining it. Where was I? Ah yes, I was buying cheese from the Wisconsin cheese man.
     He was an interesting fellow. A green hoodie with the hood up, big sunglasses with round lenses, and a heavy southern accent (southern as in south of Canada, obviously). He did seem a little shady, but he was actually really friendly and the cheese was good.
     Oh, I was farther than that? So sorry? Was I on the beach? Nope? Ohhhh, the volcano! Sorry, okay, so I was surrounded on all sides and about to be dumped into the lava, when suddenly, it erupted. Which would have been a problem, but I carried an emergency lava proof umbrella  in my pocket, so I just opened it up and everything was fine. Well, not for the punk squid squadron, or the  spat! onomatopoeia society, or the living rocks of personification, just for me and my umbrella.
      When the eruption was over I took out my cell phone and called the angry flying pigs, and they came over with their giant cannons and shot themselves at the volcano until they broke everyone out of the lava, and we took them to the hospital. I hear there were no casualties, except one worm, which was given a very touching funeral. We all wore our best brown clothes for it and wept threw mud around. He would have been proud to see it.
     Finally I got back to ohio, and since it was getting so late I decided to go straight home and meet my mom there. When I got home, our house was in quite a disarray, twenty two and a half hares were having a tea party, or so the flamingotunaman explained when I asked him what was going on.
     "Twenty two and a half hares? Did you kill one?" I began to panic.
     "Of course not, idiotic human, I'm pescetarian, I would never kill a hare! Besides, everyone knows a rabbit is half a hare," he rolled his eyes and glamorously spun around on his heels and took a proffered cup of tea from a crying hare. I looked around and realized all the hares were weeping and everyone was wearing a tuxedo, even flamingotunaman, but he didn't look even a tad upset.
     I went up to the first hare and ask him what was wrong. He just shook his head and sobbed harder. I went to the hare that was lounging sleepily on the couch and crying softer than the rest of them an ask him what the problem was.
     "Mister hare, whatever is the problem?" I asked. He jumped to his feet at the sound of my voice.
     "Well, don't be asking me miss, I'm just crying because they are, I never know what's going on so I just do what they do mostly," he explained then plopped back down on the couch. I found another hare and asked him, hoping the third time would be the charm. It wasn't, it took seven tries, for various reasons, then one pulled himself together and explained.
     "Today's my birthday. So it's not my unbirthday, and we were all born on the same day, so it's nobody's unbirthday, so we can't have an unbirthday celebration! It's the first day in hundreds of days that this has happened, we just don't know what to do!" he sobbed and sobbed.
     "Well, today is my unbirthday," I said and patted him soothingly. He immediately stopped crying and shouted with joy and announced it to all the others. They served me cake, sang the unbirthday song and gave me presents, but then the last one came up to me in the gift presentation line.
     "I don't have any gifts suitable for a girl," he said, "I ran out . . . I'm so very sorry," he began to cry.
     "Oh don't be sorry, it's fine! If you want to give me a marvelous present, you could pick up some of the mess in here, that would be amazing," I said, hoping he could maybe wipe the mud off the floor or something. He brightened up at the suggestion, and cleaned my house totally and completely and repaired everything, then all of a sudden, everybody disappeared. Then my mom came home.
     "How was your day?" she asked me.
     "Interesting," I replied. Nothing else unusual happened that day.

Okey dokes, there you go! Hope you enjoyed reading it, have a happy New Year's Eve tomorrow!

Repentance or Regret?

     I regret not posting in so long, I repent my negligence.

     Those terms, they seem like synonyms at first, but I don't think they are. Hmm. Repentance and regret.
     I saw a movie a week or so ago. There was a man who gambled, and lost, a lot. His wife obviously wasn't happy about it. She was complaining about it to this older wiser man, telling him how awful her husband was for gambling. She expected him to agree and sympathize with her. His reply was a short question.
     "Is it the gambling you mind, or the losing?"
     I thought that was a really cool thought. When we sin, and face the consequences of it, what exactly are we upset about? Are we repenting our sin, wishing we didn't do it because it was wrong, or only regretting it because we had to pay for it?
      Would we regret it if we got away with it scotch-free?
      What does scotch-free mean anyways? Is it a term referring to scotch tape being residue free? Or is it Scott-free? Or did I just make up the term just now? What are the answers to these deep philosophical questions? The answer is . . . 42.
      BAHHHH. How many roads must a man walk down?
     Seven. It must be seven. I like seven. Have I told you that seven is my favorite number? I like it a lot. You know why I like sevens? Because I can cross them like a backwards F! I told a friend that one time, and she wasn't really listening and just knew I was talking about sevens, and she said, "I hate people who cross their sevens." I didn't repeat my reasons for loving seven.
      How in Tobago did I get talking about sevens? Who could that be at this hour?

     Oh, by the way, did you enjoy the end of the world? I've been hearing some incredible tales of triumph from the survivors. Did you survive? If you did, there's this comment box thingy below. Feel free to post your survival story, it will be put in our archives and you will be named in our hallowed list of survivors of the horrific apocalypse.


     My experience was more mild than I anticipated. The day started out with a tuna fish knocking on my door. Apparently he'd read this blog and gathered that I'm vegetarian and came to me for shelter.
      "I'm being chased," he said, "I may bring you grave danger, but if you protect me, and we survive, there will be great rewards for you." I ushered him inside from the rain and took his bowler cap and scarf and purple leather trench coat and hung them up. They were so heavy with water that they tore the coat rack off the wall and hit the ground with a great splat. I shrugged and turned back to him.
     "I'll get you a towel to dry off. I'd let you sit on the coach soaked like that, but my mom would kill us both. Or worse, just kill you and cook you for dinner and make me eat you," I explained. He gasped in horror.
     "No! No! Please no!" He yelled, backing towards the door.
     "Don't worry, dear sir, I will not let her cook you," I insisted, trying to comfort him.
     "Anything but the couch! I'm fearfully afraid of couches!" Tears streamed down his face. There was an awkward pause. Then I thought of the perfect thing to say.
      "Oh." Then another pause and another moment of inspiration and enlightenment. "There's the bathtub.. Or the pond."
    "Ah a pond, perfect! Do you have any salt? I'm dreadfully craving some salt."
      I considered whether allowing him to take salt into the pond would kill the other fish or not. I debated inwardly for an hour with he stood there twiddling his fins. However, five minutes before I reached my decision, a blue bus crashed through our house, it crashed through one wall and out the other without slowing down, while the people aboard screamed,
     "The yellow jackets are coming, the yellow jackets are coming!" Soon after they left, a swarm of flying jackets burst through the hole the bus had made. The jackets' sleeves were tied around curved swords which they flung about with deadly abandon. They each had shining gold buttons and were made out of the finest of the finest green polyester.
     My head itched I scratched it and discovered the itch was caused by a miniature sized live chimpanzee. Thankfully I didn't kill it. I went to the kitchen and peeled a banana and set the chimpanzee next to the banana on the counter. Then I made a list of what I needed, packed the knives and packed the bread and prayed for holy things. I was careful what I wished for, and I was sure to crawl through the open door.
     I didn't crawl because I was too tall for the opening, absolutely not. The bus expanded the door to record heights. No, I thought it would sound more epic to tell people that I crawled out of the rubble of my home. Then I started walking.
      I made it half way down our half mile long driveway, when I half remembered I had needed to do something. But since I only half remembered, I half mindedly continued walking, though now at only half speed. I made it half way down the second half of our half mile drive ways, when I remembered the second half of how to remembered what I'd needed to do.
     "The fish!" I exclaimed. I ran back to the house and looked for the fish. I saw some squishy goop under the door that was smacked down on our floor by the bus.
     "Oh Mr. Fish! I'm so sorry," tears streamed down my face. "I promise, I cry because you died, not because I won't get my reward now. I wouldn't have accepted the reward anyways, I would have gotten my reward in heaven for my good deeds. But now you're gone!" I sobbed.
     "Oh good," I heard a voice say. I looked up. There was Mr. Fish, slurping salt up a straw and looking increasingly like a flamingo, "I was lying about the reward and such anyways." He crossed his legs and leaned on the balcony railing. I could tell he thought this position made him look cute. It made me want to throw a pineapple at his feathery scaly flamingotunaman face. "Oh, I accidentally dropped this weird iridescent triangle collection and some eggs and red paint. I mopped it all under the door. I don't think your parents will notice it now."
     "Gahhhhhh youuuuu!!" I raged and bounded up the stairs to attack him when I heard the far off tune of an ice cream truck approaching. I made a run for it, to the ice cream, not the tuna fish.
     Unfortunately the ice cream truck did not surface from its underground path to sell ice cream at our house. But since I was already at the end of the driveway, I decided to walk to my mothers workplace and ask her for the number to call the insurance company to have them come inspect the damage done to our floors from the stupid flamingotunaman's mess. Idiotic fish. If anything could make me want to eat fish, it was him. I was seriously considering stopping by McDonalds to get a fish fillet just to spite him, but decided it was unfair to eat a fish for the sins of the flamingotunaman. So I kept walking.
     Unfortunately I lost track of time and walked too far and ended up in Wisconsin instead and had to back track, which was annoying but I stopped and bought some cheese so it was alright. The journey back was a bit harder because all bodies of water simultaneously turned into volcanos. (Millions of fish died, proving the theory of evolution wrong as they failed to adapt enough to survive in lava instead of water)
     And just as I reached the peak of the tallest volcano and was walking precariously around the edge of the hike that cascaded down into a lava pit, the punk squid squadron of inconveniently inconsistently emphatically employed alliteration burst down from the sky and pointed their noodle guns at me.
      "This is the tuned tuna we are looking for!" They exclaimed exponentially in unison.
Then the spat! onomatopoeia society boomed through the surface of the lava and with a click, each member shot their grappling hooks with clanged against the rock and with grunts and groans, they climbed towards me with hungry growls coming from their stomachs.
     Then the living rocks of personification grew legs and the stones knew it was their time. They took sips of their brave water and clambered towards the volcano where they must go into the angry lava and melt with their happy ancestors. The crowds of living rocks threatened to push me off the sad edge into the furious lava myself.

This is getting long and it's rather late so I'll tell you more about it later. Vale!

Books Are Dusty and Muddy Things

To put it nicely.

See, as you may know, I work at the local library here as an assistant to the teen librarian. Today I was working on picking out books for next month's book display. I'm doing books with red and/or green covers to kind of go with the Christmas season coming up. It seemed like it'd be super easy. I could just pick out a few books from the teen section that sounded interesting and had covers with red or green on them.
Well it wasn't that simple. I'd grab a book that looked interesting and look up some reviews on it, only to discover it was full of rather disgusting content. Since that wasn't going so well, I compiled a list of all the books in the teen section with red or green covers (that took a while, there were many more than I'd expected) then proceeded to go down the list looking up reviews. Book after book I discovered to have horrible content. This was the TEEN section. My younger brother is supposed to be old enough for this stuff, and I, four years older than him, was horrified just reading reviews of these books.
Look, this blog is directed mainly at 15-18 year olds, though I try to keep it rated PG for any younger friends or siblings of friends or just plain any younger kids who read some of it. I don't even feel I could uphold my obligation to appropriateness for my audience if I even alluded to what these books graphically describe. Wow. And guess what, only a year or so ago, the library didn't allow anyone under 18 to check out any movies that weren't rated G, seventeen year-olds couldn't get Tangled, but 12 year old kid could check out a book that makes me want to throw up just reading reviews of on the Common Sense Media site. Why is it that books are so different?
I think parents often think that if a kid is reading a book, any book, its a good thing. Because it's educational and all that. It isn't so quick and easy to read a book first before giving it to their kids, so they don't. Sure, they could search through reviews, but it's a lot easier to pre-watch a movie. So they don't check as much as they should. And maybe it doesn't occur to them. Books don't come with ratings like movies and video games do. I think they probably should. That would hurt the YA book industry though.
See, that kind of trashy book sells, doesn't it? Sad to say, but it does. And the YA book industry knows that. It's not some crazy accident that there's all these horrible things in books written for teens. It's not even a decision that the author made by themselves. Books go through agents, then are read and marked up all over by and editor. Then the author gets it back and makes changes. Then the editor reads through again and makes some more suggestions, then the author, then the editor, then the author... It might even be a number of different editors. They know this is going to be marketed to teens, and I bet they know it's wrong too.
Sure, make the excuses. They're just writing realistically. They're writing what the world is really like and what teens really do today. WELL GUESS WHAT GUYS??!! Where do these teens get their ideas to do these things? From your flippin dirty novels!
And that stuff is totally unnecessary. Unless you're writing a historical fiction novel about the holocaust. And even then you don't have to swim in the details. And if you're going to do that, you have every right to, but market it to adults, please.
You can write a romance novel without getting super physical, and you can write a great adventure without dumping blood and gore on us. Tanith Lee for example. She's a adult horror novelist. And that's fine. But when she wrote the Claidi Journals for young adults (one of my favorite series ever, I might add, I can't get over how amazing the books are), there was no extreme violence, the worst language was a few occurances of D*** and the physical romance reached its height at.. like five extremely brief kisses over four books.  Let me repeat that. She's a adult horror novelist.
Write horrible graphic stuff to your heart's content if you want but please, market it to adults!
 I hate how I can't just pick whatever sounds interesting from teen sections in libraries and book stores. I hate being afraid to read because of unnecessary bad content in books. I love reading, but I read a lot less because of that.
I think I'll be praying for the YA book publishing industry. Join me?