Author Archives: jessicamjonas

Waving in the Dark

16 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by in Writing

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The discouraging part of trying to kick off a writing…presence…is the feeling of being to small to be noticed. It took me several years to identify as a writer without cringing as I said the ‘W’ word. Writers are the successful people who know how to look appropriately thoughtful in black-and-white pictures, or at least they’re the people who write every day without falling in and out of good habits like I do. I’ve finally got myself in a place where I’ll admit that I can wear Old Navy sweaters and write little bits on lunch break and the Metro and in evenings that I am not too exhausted (read: one evening every two or three weeks), and it still counts.

There’s a new cringe word now, though. I’m allowed to daydream about what it would be like to be an official, full-time writer, in the same way that I can daydream about how it would have been to be a professional ballet dancer, provided I had better turnout, extension and metatarsal arches, and lost 15 pounds or so. What I can’t quite bring myself to claim is an idea that such a life (the writing one, not the dancing one) is maybe something I could try to put together for myself in real life. I can’t quite bring myself to say the word “career.”

The thing is, if we’re being completely honest, my chances of being the kind of writer who makes a steady, comfortable income doing nothing but writing are comparable to my chances of going into dance full-time, even after a vigorous stretches-and-strengthening routine and a diet. There are so many of us out there, and not enough people buying books and magazines to support us all, or even half of us, or even one in ten. But we want to be those chosen few who can do it, the Margaret Atwoods and Neil Gaimans and Junot Diazes (although even Junot Diaz is listed teaching at a college and editing a magazine as well as winning all manner of prizes for his books, so there’s a thought), and everyone is slamming away at the same goal.

So what happens for me is I end up reading WAY too much in whatever is going on in my life right in that moment. If it’s a good week, that’s not too bad, cause if I write a story in a day, or send out a bunch of things, or my stats say a bunch of people read my blog today, then I’m all like, “YEAH! I’m the best. I’m going to win at all of this!” And I immediately rewrite all my goals to see what I could get done if I kept succeeding at that rate. And that’s where the mistake comes in, because if the next week is a slow blog week, or I’m too exhausted to write, or a rejection letter comes in, I’m all like, “Everyone got together and decided I am worthless at writing, and now they will shun me forever until it gets through my thick skull that I should never type another word ever ever again.”

And that’s where having other people to talk to helps a bit. I had the following exchange with the boyfriend last night:

Me: “No one read my blog today! They read the Midnight Snack story, and decided no one should ever read anything I write ever again.”
Boyfriend: “I don’t think they thought that.”
Me: “Then explain why everyone stopped reading immediately after I posted it.”
Boyfriend: “I think if you write another post, people will read it.”
Me (narrowing eyes): “Why? Are you going to tell all your friends to read it? Am I going to get a bunch of pity views?”
Boyfriend: “No, I think if you write another post, people will want to read it.”

All right, boy. It’s on. I have a new writing project in mind to work on today, and I’m not going to tell what it is right now because it’s in the earliest of stages and I make no promises, but I am working. And there is a new post today, so even if all it does is give me a tiny kick in the pants to do something worthy of having a writer-ish blog, that’s something, too.

Mudhouse Sabbath

11 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by in Books, God

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I mentioned earlier that for a while I worked at a church at a job that sucked. What’s good is that, in addition to the awesome job at the literary journal, I also found myself working an equally awesome job at a church. I’m a youth director rather than a secretary this go-around, which is a much better fit – playing games and leading discussions with 6th to 12th graders is a lot more fun than folding bulletins. Also, the pastors at the new church are supportive and encouraging. One of them gave me Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner as a Christmas gift. It took me a few months to get around to it (I’ve always got a back-log on the ‘to read’ list), but I am fully in it now, and what a book it is.

I grew up with two religions myself. My father’s not an Orthodox Jew by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t know much beyond the skeleton of Judaism, but I grew up fasting on Yom Kippur, dipping parsley in salt water at Passover Seders and lighting candles at least four or so of the eight nights of Hanukkah (my dance and my sister’s gymnastics inevitably ate up some of those evenings). My family’s way of resolving Judaism and Christianity is to concentrate on what the faiths share, which is wonderful because it leads to a lot of openness and tolerance when it’s done right, as I believe it is in my parents’ house.

Winner takes a different approach by focusing on the differences between the faiths, specifically the differences in rites and practices such as prayer, food, weddings, and the Sabbath. What is so wonderful is that while I would have expected a focus on differences to lead to judging, Winner clearly has tremendous respect and warmth toward both sides. She grew up in a mix household, too, practicing Reform Judaism for the most part and gleaning a bit of Baptist belief from her mom’s side. In Girl Meets God, which I have not read yet, ever-stronger spiritual yearnings led her first to devout Orthodox Judaism, and then to equally devout Christianity (Anglican, I believe? I had to read up on the Internet to check it out, since she doesn’t mention a denomination in Mudhouse). Leaving Judaism for her meant leaving all the practices she was accustomed to, from keeping kosher to the way she grieved or prayed. Some transitions were easier than others (being allowed to eat shellfish is apparently one of the big perks of converting), but she found herself missing the rhythm of her Jewish life, the way even the annoying rules she had to follow kept her feeling connected to God.

Mudhouse Sabbath looks at eleven aspects of life from both the Jewish and Christian perspective, explaining what rituals each religion brings to the table, what they mean to her, and how she’s adapted or created her own practices so she can keep the attentiveness to faith that she loved in Judaism, rewritten into a Christian context. The writing is engaging and approachable, with an easy openness and honesty that makes me wish I could run into this girl on the street and be friends with her. I like the way she takes it as a matter of course that spirituality is an everyday part of life. Even though I work at a church, I don’t always pray every day or make such an attentive practice of “being religious” during the week. This book makes me want to bring more of that into my life, because the way she tells it makes it seem like such a rewarding way to be present in the days between Sunday and Sunday.

Two Jobs and a Midnight Snack

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in Growing Up, Stories, Writing

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Last May, I was working at a church, and it was awful. The pastor was a perfectionist, slow to praise and quick to point out anything I did wrong. The last straw came when he told me that he’d decided I had five typos left, and then I’d be out of a job. I hadn’t thought I was making that many mistakes, and I knew I was putting effort into my work. I also was involved in other projects, like helping overhaul the website, that were acknowledged minimally, if at all. So I quit.

About a week later, I was chatting to my MFA program director, who’s also the co-founder and editor of a literary magazine, and when she heard I needed work, she offered me a job on the spot. It’s a fantastic job. I’ve learned how to use two new computer programs since I’ve been here (not to mention a new operating system), and gotten markedly better than I used to be at two more. My bosses now are all about exploration and playfulness, and much less about mechanical perfection. I design posters, for example, for guest poets and speakers, for example, and once or twice it’s happened that a typo went to print and it hasn’t been a big deal (I keep wanting to clarify – I really don’t mess up that often, and I catch more errors than I make, but sometimes ‘night’ gets changed to ‘evening’ at the last second and I forget to switch ‘a’ to ‘an’). If I was thoughtless or careless about what I was doing, that would be another story, but in this job the bigger picture of what I’m doing matters more than any little bumps.

I’m still working on making a similar shift in my writing life. I’m still too quick to scold myself for not being as good or fast or prolific as I want to be, and need a hugely significant achievement (see Exhibit A) to happen in order to feel proud of what I’m doing. So I’m trying to quit, or rather I’m trying to be that kind of supportive presence for myself. I’ve got a new essay up in Stories & Things, a little piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but hadn’t, perhaps because I thought it was too light to really matter. Now it’s written, and it made me happy to write it, and I hope someone may read it and like it too, but what’s best is that it is there now when it wasn’t before.

Electric Writing Days, or, How I Almost Missed the Train

04 Friday Mar 2011

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Much of the time, writing comes for me in fits and starts. I spend a lot of time treating myself like an old car, thumping myself around, muttering “come onnn,” and making vague promises and threats. Once in a long, long while, though, something magical clicks into place, and I get to spend a little while being the kind of synapse-firing, electric writer that I want to be. Yesterday was one of those days.

I wrote a story in a day, people. I wrote an entire story, beginning to middle to end, in a day. It came in at 3,174 words. Most days, I’m pleased if I hit 500 words, thrilled if I get past 800. During NaNoWriMo, my go-to insane writer’s challenge, reaching 2000 makes me feel like an overachiever, since you only need to write 1,667 to stay on track (I know. “Only.”). This is half again over the kind of overreaching goal I set for myself once a year. Forgive me for bragging, but I am feeling pretty boss right now.

And it was easy! For one glorious day, every time I sat down and opened the laptop, the next sentence came forth smoothly, and the next, and I already knew which scene needed to come after that. I nearly missed my stop on the Metro because I was so engrossed in what I was doing. It’s a good thing I happened to look up to think of the right word and saw “Metro Center” on the board, or chances are I would have been halfway to Vienna by the time I realized I’d been riding too long. It’s a good thing my stop on the way home is the end of the line, too, because it happened again. I only noticed I was there when I realized I was the only person sitting in my car of the train. All in all, between Metro rides, my lunch break, and two power sessions back home, the actual, physical writing of the story took about three and a half hours.

This is not, of course, the same as saying that the story took three and a half hours to write. I’ve been mulling over the world of the story for weeks now, ever since my professor mentioned there’s this crazy experimental poet who wants to use DNA strands as a medium for writing poetry and I thought, how cool would it be if human DNA did have poetry encoded into it? What would that mean for science, and literature, and religion? Who would read it? What would happen if someone didn’t have it? I took a couple stops and starts because there were so many different ways to go with it and I couldn’t figure out whose story I wanted to tell. So two days ago I got frustrated and spent my lunch hour putting together my notes of how this world worked, and who my characters were, and what they wanted and why. I don’t usually take that kind of prep time before writing, and I’m still not sure if I’ll make a regular practice of it, just because one of the things I’m learning is how different stories can be from each other. Practices that feed one story can suck the life out of another, but for this story, at least, making an outline worked in spades.

Next week is revising time, so chances are I’ll be grumbling again, but for now I’m still on the high. These are the moments to hold onto all the other times when nothing is working, and I hope next time I find myself in that place I’ll have the presence of mind to reread this and remember the rush.

Why “Taking the Bull by the Horns” Feels Particularly Apt

28 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized, Writing

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“Submission” is a funny word for the process of sending out work. It makes it feel like it should be a passive process. My mind goes for the classical Greek metaphor, imagining some demure temple acolytes padding silently toward the altar of Publishing, clean white papers ready in hand for the sacrifice. Then, once it’s gone, it’s gone, to be accepted or rejected according to the whims of the Editors.

That’s the tricky part, you see: the acceptance or rejection. That’s what means that submissions cannot be passive, or all that submissive. It’s a lot more like the version of sacrifice where you need six or eight muscular men and thick ropes to drag some roaring animal up to where it can already smell the blood of the others. The Publishing Gods are more known for their silence and disapproval than their welcome, you see, so offerings have to be frequent and animated enough to call the attention of those who see thousand similar creatures every day. It is exhausting even to think about. Maybe there are other writers who can flippantly whip submissions into the mail, but I am not one of them. I need a certain amount of prep time to psych myself into looking up magazines, reading guidelines, looking up whether that editor with the ambiguous name is a Mr. or Ms., and shuffling through the stack of things I want to send out. By the time I get through two or three of these, I’m feeling pretty beat, which is not so good if I figure an honest-to-goodness freelance writer must have to send out dozens every week.

I do realize, however, that it’s really silly to make myself a cute little writer’s site if I’m only going to be publishing blog posts. So today I sent off five pieces in one swoop, all different: a memoir essay, a story, a handful of poems, an article, some recipes. If nothing else, you cannot fault me for not offering something from any genre I know how to write. And it does feel relieving to see them crossed off my list, even if I’m feeling a little drained. Now to see if the offerings appeal, right? Editors, I believe it is your move.

The Elephant’s Journey

23 Wednesday Feb 2011

Posted by in Books

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I have such a crush on this book, I hardly know where to begin. I picked it up because Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature (although this wasn’t the book that won him the prize). Most of the writers I turn to have won something, although it’s typically the Hugo or Nebula, or some other more niche recognition. Reading Nobel winners’ novels is one of those things I felt like I should do because it would be good for me, not necessarily something I thought I would enjoy. I always expected that the works would be deep and thought-provoking, but I felt like this element would probably come at the expense of entertainment. I’m happy to say that, at least in this case, I was wrong.

How do I explain what makes this book so wonderful? The plot is fairly straightforward: the king of Portugal, regretting having bought an elephant named Solomon who doesn’t do all that much besides eat tons of forage, decides to foist it off on a relative, the prince of Austria, using the Austrian’s wedding as the excuse, because if an elephant doesn’t make a statement as a wedding present, what does? The mahout, Subhro, and a company of assorted military personnel are selected to escort Solomon to his new home, and so they proceed. There are of course multiple encounters with people in various villages along the way, but that’s not why I’m all warm and pink about this book. (Also, while I stand by the fact that the plot is straightforward, when I see it summarized I am struck by its oddities, as well).

What makes The Elephant’s Journey so magical is the way it’s told. Saramago clearly has so much fun playing with what it means to tell a story that it’s impossible not to catch his enthusiasm. There is the moment, for example, when a character disappears—plof—and Saramago is moved to dwell a moment on what a lovely thing onomatopoeia is. “Imagine if we had to describe in detail a person suddenly disappearing from view,” he says. “It would have taken at least ten pages. Plof.” There’s so much playfulness and curiosity in the writing, and I love how Saramago invites us into easy familiarity with him in his act of putting down the story. The other amazing thing is how The Elephant’s Journey looks at what is strange and what is normal. The elephant, Solomon, himself is odd and mundane at the same time–prized by royalty in two countries for being exotic, but spending most of his time eating, sleeping, and leaving steaming messes for his keepers to clean up. Even the people in the villages the company passes through get used to the idea of an elephant in a matter of days. The book often treats human relationships as stranger things, such as the hilarious, absurd exchange between two military officials who essentially want the same thing, but escalate a dramatic list of bluffs, boasts and threats to ensure they can have it on their terms, or Saramago’s shudder at a royal husband who would go on to impregnate his wife sixteen times: “Monstrous.”

Of course, Solomon is the heart of the story, as is fitting for any story that even contains an elephant, and much more so when it stars one. It is beautiful to see the ties between him and the people around him, and to feel all the subtle transformations, and to feel subtly transformed.

This books is ideal for: people who love elephants, people who love stylistic playfulness, Portuguese lit fans, “serious” readers who still want pleasure in their reading

 

Take Two Poems and Call Me…

20 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Growing Up, Poetry

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One of the things I’m realizing is how quickly you discover new things about yourself when you have your own space. I was over-the-moon excited about how I got my new place decorated. I refused to buy anything that clashed with my vision of what my first independent home was supposed to be, and the result paid off. It feels elegant to me, modern, full of things I find beautiful. It’s just the kind of retreat I’ve imagined, and new aspects of me are blooming.

For example, at least now in the honeymoon period of apartmentdom, I am considerably neater. It helps having the physical space to put my things, but it’s also the idea that it’s mine now, and if I want a clean kitchen or living room, it’s down to me to load the dishwasher and grab the dust cloth.

Did you know I am the kind of person who reads poetry every day? I didn’t.

When I was little and my dad had to put my sister and I to bed, he wouldn’t read us bedtime stories. He tried, at first, but since we were  tiny and lacked a developed sense of social sympathy, we rejected his attempts at reading stories to us because he didn’t do the voices the way my mom did. His response? He turned to poetry (cool guy, my dad). He had this tattered, orange book from the Childcraft series and we would read poems together.

Childcraft book

My first poetry book

I had the entire first section of that book memorized. They were nursery rhymes, so they were easy, but I knew every one, every line, in order, the way you might know what song comes next on a favorite CD. I knew others in the book by heart, too. I still remember “The Lamplighter,” on page 103. I recited it once at camp. I still love “Vagabond Song,” the quintessential October poem, that I heard first at bedtime with my dad.

Perhaps because of this, I have very good associations with poetry. If I’m in a used bookstore, or have a Borders gift card, or poke through the 50-cent library discards, I am likely to leave with a book of poems in hand, more often than not by someone I’ve never heard of. I don’t read a whole lot of poetry, you see. I can only take in three or four poems in one go, max, so if I’m going to fill a 30-minute Metro ride, I need something else to pass the time. I don’t even really like reading poetry in noisy places. I’m romantic like that. I like the quiet room and the cup of tea to be there. The result is that I read lots of novels and stories, and tell people I love poetry, and then look blankly at them when they rattle off their favorites, because I don’t read it often enough to keep up.

This, of course, brings me to my current living situation. I don’t have the tea yet, in full disclosure, since grocery bills are freaking me out a little, and my first response is to cut the little indulgences, but I do have the poetry. Stacking and unstacking my bookshelf really brought it home: I have over twenty books of poetry. I have anthologies, I have trendy poets and poets who were trendy thirty or forty or fifty years ago, I’ve got books so pristine the spine isn’t even wrinkled and some that will need tape soon to keep their covers together. And I haven’t read more than two or three of them, until now. Now I can sit on my white couch in my quiet living room or lie in bed or on my kitchen floor if I want to and read poems. I’ve been doing a little experiment, starting and closing each day with a poem. I grabbed one of the anthologies, for variety, and it sits by my bed and every morning before I even groan that it is too early to be awake I read a poem, and then at night when I reach a good stopping-point in whatever other book I’m reading (or just get too tired to continue) I mark the page and get the anthology and read another poem, just before I turn out the light. It’s wonderful, bracketing my days in poetry, and while nothing was stopping me from doing this before, I never realized how beautiful and soothing a thing to do it was until I spent some time just listening to my own thoughts in this empty apartment.

Trouble with Time

16 Wednesday Feb 2011

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I’ve hit a problem with writing every day. For a while, it worked fantastically well to pull up a blank Word document when I got to work in the morning, type out a sentence or two whenever I had a moment and inspiration hit, and email myself the result at the end of the day. I was hitting anywhere from 200-1000 words in a day, making great progress on the story, but suddenly it’s not working anymore. The main issue I’m finding is that as my story progresses and complicates, it’s harder to remember where I left off. I’m starting to amass a collection of fragments and scenes without a solid connection to the previous pages of the story. When I get home, it’s about all I can do to sort out the general order of what takes place when, and more often than not I’m too tired to get in there and start writing the passages connecting what I’ve been working on. It’s getting to the point where I’m writing maybe three days a week, and I’m starting to feel frustrated. I’ve been trying to think what I should do instead, and the main idea I’ve got now is to take my laptop to work with me, so I can write on the Metro and maybe hit a few hundred words during lunch hour. It means lugging another bag around with me, but I’ll have to see if that helps me get back on track with keeping writing a priority.

More than a Room

07 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in Growing Up, Writing

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Big news: I finally made the leap! After years of dreaming and months of scraping every last dime together, I’m in my own apartment. Ms. Woolf’s making me smile lately, because I still have trouble believing I have more than just a room of my own these days. There’s a whole one-bedroom apartment with my name on the lease and my own decorations inside it — I even get a little patio/balcony so I can write outside when the weather warms up. It does mean for a while my commute to the law office job is going to hurt (I’m near Baltimore now, and the office is in D.C.), but it’s worth it for the independence.

The main thing I’ve been telling Andrew about this apartment, over and over and over, is “I have a vision.” And that’s about more than the furnishings, although he’s heard ad nauseum about white couches and dark wood furniture and modern, abstract floral rugs in black and white and red. It’s about creating the kind of space I’ve daydreamed writers live in. I promise I do know being a writer is not as simple as surrounding yourself with the trappings you think the cool writers have, but trying on the shoes does wonders for the confidence. I’m looking forward to making meals in my new place and entertaining my friends, but also to growing into a newly vitalized sense of where I want this writing thing to go.

The experiment now, in the interest of disciplining myself to submit as well as write, is to send out one piece or query every weekday. It’s going to be tough to do both submitting and writing as well as keep up my schedule (I have to admit I haven’t written any more of my novel in about a week — between making last preparations for the move and doing my homework for Experimental Forms, I was too pooped after work to rouse myself to the keyboard again), but not even Ray Bradbury says writing is easy. Exhilarating, when it’s going well, but even that doesn’t mean easy. I sent out a pretty neat query today about diary-writing, and probably it’ll get shot down, but what’s important is not only that I did it, but that I put some preliminary research into it, too, so I’m not just throwing out whatever’s on the top of my head (that’s what the blog is for!). And that when that rejection email comes, I’ll get to read it in my brand-spankin’ new shiny apartment. Once I call Comcast to come bring me the Internet, that is. Moving sucks.

Niche Markets

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Uncategorized, Writing

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some serious thinking about where I’m trying to head as a writer–doing productive daydreaming sessions about what I’d like my career life to look like, thinking over what kind of writing I could happily do or not, and writing up 5-year plans (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s plans). One of the things that jumped out at me is that if I’m going to get anywhere with this, I need to seriously step up my submission rate. Doing three a week tires me out at this point, and my guess is I need to get at least to about 25 a week if I wanted to consider supporting myself with writing. Goodness.

So I was looking through my Writer’s Market guide, trying to put together a file of potential story and article ideas, and I have to tell you something: there are some strange magazines out there. Like, I understand that people have different hobbies and interests, but we are talking some niche stuff. Here are five of my favorites:

5. Atlantic Salmon Journal: This seems kind of normal–lots of people like fishing, and salmon are pretty neat fish, if you’re into that–but you need to think long term. This is a group of about 8,500 people who are prepared to put money into the promise that every three months, enough is going to change in the arena of this one fish to merit some hundred-odd pages of news.

4. Balloon Life: I’m just really excited this magazine exists at all. It makes me happy to think of the thousands of people who love hot air balloons so much that they can say, without sarcasm, that they have adopted a balloon lifestyle. They are balloonists. You get up in the morning, in your house for once because the new issue’s coming out, grab Balloon Life, hop in the ginormous red hot air balloon tethered to your chimney and head back to your natural habitat. This is what Jules Verne wanted Heaven to be like, I promise you.

3. Toy Farmer: I would expect there to be magazines about collecting toys. I would expect there to be a market for farmers’ magazines. Toy farmers, though? I’m not even sure I knew that was a thing. And I went to the website, and they have a Toy Farmer blog, for when the new issue can’t come out fast enough to keep up with the changes in the world of toy farming, and–AND–they have this link. It’s “Zeke’s Toy Box.” I’m not making this up. And you click it, because how do you not click something as adorable as “Zeke’s Toy Box,” and it gives you even more than you had imagined. “Zeke’s Toy Box” is where kids send pictures to “Grandpa Zeke” of their own toy farming inventions, or their dad’s combine, or what have you, and it is so cute I could cry.

2. Vintage Snow Mobile Magazine: Who knew? I may have been unsure of whether I knew about toy farmers before, but I promise you, I had never before in my entire life been aware of such a thing as vintage snow mobiles until I found out there was a magazine dedicated to them. Two and a half thousand people subscribe to this magazine, too. Think about that for a moment. Two and a half thousand people care about vintage snow mobiles so badly that they pay money to read about them. I don’t even know how many people are out there buying single issues off the grocery stand (in Alaska, I guess? Canada? On which newsstand do you find this magazine?), or just walking around feeling like they’re the only people in the world who are passionate about snow mobiles that have been around for a really long time. How old does a snowmobile even have to be to qualify as vintage? I don’t even have a basic starting point to know a vintage snow mobile if I walked outside and one literally hit me.

Finally, with this last one, I knew what these must be when I read the title, and I think I maybe had a book with one in it when I was very little, but the fact that there is a magazine for this proves to me that it does not matter what it is that you care about: you are not alone. There are probably thousands out there with you, writing articles, taking pictures, hanging out in whatever pocket of the Internet posts breaking news, and painstakingly printing hundreds upon hundreds of magazine copies about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

1. Miniature Donkey Talk. Oh my goodness. I wasn’t even going to say anything here, because the title alone is better than any words I could give you, but I just read the home page of their website, and you need to see these quotes:

“The best donkey magazine being published!” Dr. Julian Cable, DVM

AT LEAST 4 times greater distribution than ANY miniature donkey publication!!!

…which suggests there are more. I think I’m feeling about the same right now as if I’d just come across incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life. I have actual goosebumps on my back.

I have not yet, I have to admit, submitted any articles or queries to any of these fine magazines. I’m not sure I’ll ever be qualified to swim in those waters. But I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for what’s out there. I’ve already started writing down the more esoteric of my interests. We’re gonna go explore.