Photo post 1: better than tv.

Taken on Friday morning. MPD car 343 had set up a sting operation to catch people who routinely blow through the stop sign at Columbia and Belmont. Every 7 or so minutes, we would hear his siren, and look out to see a new car being pulled over. Fun, right? Ms. Citizen says this went on till noon. The city needs cash!!

We opened our windows because it was unseasonably warm. We watched for a few minutes to get a sense of the officer's methodology...and the stillness of my Special K reverie was disturbed by lots of barking and yelling from the dog park. Three dogs tangled up. Two of the owners who had their dogs on leashes started yelling at the owner of the unleashed dog. "PUT YOUR DOG ON A FUCKING LEASH, YOU JERK."

The guy meekly replied, "Don't yell at people like that."

The one guy then went over to wait for the cop to finish ticketing the person on a scooter. This image captures a rare and jerky confluence, a three-way intersection of priorities. Scooter in a hurry; irritated dog owner; and po-lice, whose priority, as it turns out, did not include citing the owner of the unleashed dog.

From feb 2009

Photo post 2: A cute cat, for good measure.

From feb 2009

Photo post 3: Is that the president?

Almost as rare as Obama attending a basketball game? A Wizards win!

From feb 2009

This week in immigration story highlights

The cover piece from the Washington Post's Sunday mag is pretty well fleshed out.

To paraphrase something Huckabee said when Romney was trying to score points off of him in a Republican primary debate, aren't we a better country than one that punishes children for what their parents did? Don't we want these kids to grow up to be contributing members of society? Don't we want them to be taxpayers? I know it's not that simple, of course, but this seems like one of those cases where the rule-making should also allow for common sense.

I think if this kid's lifestory were put to a popular vote, a sizable majority of Americans would vote to let him stay. Maybe that's just me being notoriously bad at reading the popular mood, though. Immigration, particularly of the illegal kind, is one of those fun issues where any notion of left and right quickly disappear, and people get very emotional very quickly.

This piece is not from this week, but it's still topical, since it was just over a year ago that Ms. Abstract Citizen and I listened to this This American Life show on our drive back from a lovely wedding annviersary visit to the Inn at Little Washington. I had just found out that my employment authorization was screwed up, and went on a 4-week long leave of absence that led to the creation of this blog. We didn't know what would happen or how USCIS would look on the whole situation. Act Two (This American Wife) had us silently contemplating just how tenuous life can be when you marry someone from another country.

Lessons learned: life is best when you can avoid dealing with governments and forms. Whenever possible, live in the country you were born in. And marry people from that country. Otherwise, you won't be able to abide by lesson one above, since a good portion of your free time (and mental energy) will be dedicated to dealing with governments and forms.

I don't know why I'm a late adopter

but when I do get to adopting, I can compete with Angelina Jolie.

Six months ago: no hd tv, no hd TiVo, no Wii, no iphone, no facebook. Today: everything's changed!

I had this same problem with cell phones. I fought and fought and fought against owning one. I was one of the last people I knew to get one. But when I think back on the early days of the Internet, I was all over it. I'm not sure what happened between 1994 and 2000 to make such a luddite, but since then, I've basically been skeptical of every new technological innovation for no other reason than to be a contrarian.

Now, I'm loving that I can stream netflix straight to the televizzle...I love watching stuff in HD...and I can't get enough of Brian Eno's Bloom app for the iphone.

So, next time I'm being curmudgeonly about technology, someone please smack me.

Aluminum-free deodorant

I'm trying to do the right thing here, but natural deodorant is just not designed to be all-day strong. And when I overapply it to compensate for this, I smell like thai soup because of the lemongrass.

Hmmmm, thai soup.

Glenn Beck

You know that feeling where you have a band that’s small and relatively unheralded, but you think there’s something special about them? And then they get big, and you’re happy for them, but you miss when they were yours?

Sure you do. Maybe it’s not a band, but everyone knows that feeling. And that is exactly how I feel about Glenn Beck.

See, before he was America’s crazy, he was my crazy.

Other liberals would say, “Oh, you have to listen to Rush, he’s really the most powerful right wing guy,” or, “You know, Liddy is just unbreakable.” They might say, “Savage has the most entertaining show,” or “Hannity and Fox News set the agenda. It’s required listening.”

Sure, I’ve had good moments with these other guys. Liddy, likening women in the army to sending a dog to MIT to learn astrophysics? Good stuff. Laura Ingraham? She’s ai’ght. She introduced me to the Mosquitos and I feel like she and I could definitely sit down and talk music (she loves Tom Waits and other quality singer-songwriters, after all.) Hannity and Rush are almost self-parody, and I just could never get into them. Too big of an operation, too cumbersome.

Glenn Beck, on the other hand, made great right wing radio for a niche audience. He just did it better. For about two years, my daily radio lineup was:
Laura Ingraham, 9-12
Liddy, 12-2
Beck, 2-5.
Drive home: Hannity.

And Beck's show was always the highlight of my day, in terms of radio programming. At the time, Beck was just a small timer, a Philly-area novelty with a unique zest for the theatrical. And he occasionally took very principled stands (like when the Abu Ghraib photos came out, he unequivocally criticized any kind of behavior resembling torture, though of course he subscribed to the “bad apple” theory which holds that nothing that happened at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned by anyone meaningful.)

And more so than the other radio types, Beck could get confessional and explicitly emotional. He seemed to want to demolish the line between himself and the audience, and he had (probably still has) great microphone skills. In a rant, he might shout or whisper, pause for seconds at a time, sigh, and that break into a galloping paragraph of right wing indignation. It was hypnotic.

But now, Glenn Beck is no longer my crazy. I knew something was up when I checked back in after a lengthy absence and found out that he was broadcasting from New York. "Uh oh," I thought. "We've gone national." And now that he's been on CNN for a few years, he’s truly America’s crazy.

The Trumpeter Chronicles

What kind of person spends her anniversary at Wolf Creek Lodge?

The Trumpeter sits less than 20 feet from the door to my office. She is probably in her mid forties, though you’d be forgiven if you took her for being at least ten years older because of her complete lack of self-awareness. I don’t know, I usually assume that you don’t get to be as clueless as she is until you’re much, much older.

The Trumpeter dresses in bright monochromes. By which I mean: Blue. Purple. Red. Red is really her favorite. She said of a brightly colored carpet, “I just love those strong reds! I want to just lie down next to it because it makes me so happy to see those kinds of colors!”

She has at least three different monochromatic outfits: a shirt with matching jacket, pants, socks, and shoes - all part of a set. It’s vile. We joke, “Oh, it’s a BLUE day.” But really, we are crying on the inside, for the embarrassment of the human mind. She also looks like a bag lady, or like someone who needs assistance – in the form of mental health services, mostly – from the state.

On days when it’s cold, or when snow is in the forecast? She wears these enormous boots and SNOW PANTS. Mind you, she doesn’t ride the metro or anything. Nor does she ride a dog-pulled sled to work. She walks exactly 10 feet from her front door to her car, and then she parks in the garage here. Why she would possibly need heavy gear for that amount of walking is a mystery to me.

She also farts. All day long. She sits in her cube and farts, almost nonstop. This has led to some flare-ups over the years, but she simply replies that “This is not the kind of thing one can control.” Right, because no one in the history of humanity has ever held a fart in. This is why we call her the Trumpeter, or Dizzy.

One other note about her house: she is apparently a hoarder. She calls her husband – with whom she speaks to in a formal, clipped voice (“It took me months to figure out that R____ was her husband because of how she talks to him!” said one cubicle-mate) – and asks him to “clear a path” to various portions of the house. During a conversation with co-workers about the joys of having a fireplace when it’s cold outside, she quipped, “Yeah, I think we have one of those in the living room.” SHE DOESN’T KNOW FOR SURE IF SHE HAS ONE because of the amount of crap in her house. Ugh.

She once marched into her boss's office and demanded time off to have her tubes died. President Bush, she claimed, was about to criminalize abortions. You see, she was worried that she would be attacked and impregnated. Under this new set of laws, she would be forced to carry the attacker's baby to term. Now, I don't mean to downplay that as a concern. But who assumes that this will inevitably happen and demands time off to take preventive action against it? Especially considering that, you know, Roe v Wade can't really be overturned by executive order.

According to the personality test we use at work, she is a daring entrepreneur. She is the second coming of Bill Gates or something. Seriously! She is forward-looking. A visionary. A decision-maker. This irked me so that I actually held up part of a weeklong training session on this personality evaluation tool (she wasn’t in the training, but her boss was.) I demanded that she be retested or that the trainer explain how the test could have been so wrong.

Trainer: Well, maybe you’re wrong about your co-worker. Maybe she is an intrepid risk-taker.

Me: I can promise you I’m not wrong. The test is wrong. I don’t want to be mean-spirited, but the fact that the test says that she is the Indiana Jones of our company means that you are going to look very silly when people hear about this.

Trainer: How do you know the test is so wrong, though?

Me: SHE WEARS SNOWPANTS on cold days. She puts THE CLUB on her car every day – and she parks inside OUR garage! She goes to the metro Web site and determines the exact cost of her metro ride before going to the station! This person is NOT a risk-taker!

Trainer: Well, one of the interesting things about these tests is how they often lead us into these discussions…

Me: No no, don’t move on. This really is a problem for this test’s credibility in this building. [turning to the person next to me] I’m talking about K____ W______! Can you believe this?

Person next to me: Really? The test says she’s the CEO type? Wait, he’s right. We need to talk about this. The test can’t be right…

Regrettably, I haven't even touched on the fact that she is a black belt in exhibition judo and frequently wins gold medals at the Pan American games - because her team is the ONLY TEAM in the event. They don't fight - they just do poses or some shit. It's ridiculous. If that's legit, you might as well give out medals for Wii competition, as far as I'm concerned.

Things I wish some characters on “Lost” would say every now and again.

“Wow, that’s a fascinating story! However, I couldn’t help but notice that you actually used it as a diversion to avoid answering my original question, which was a pretty direct one. Can we get back to that?”

“Hey, it sounds like we’re in complete agreement! If you don’t mind, though, can we review our use of personal pronouns? I know they’re a useful shorthand, but I get this nagging feeling that your ‘we’ isn’t the same as my ‘we.’ And your ‘they’ may denote an entirely different set of people than my ‘they’ does!”

“What an odd thing to say! Can you elaborate a bit, please?”

“Oh, this sounds really interesting. Instead of shelving the conversation and picking it up later, at some undetermined point in time, perhaps we could walk and talk? I would hate for something nutty to happen that would prevent you from giving me all the details I need to fully comprehend what you just said.”

“No!! How could you possibly know that? Did you experience this FIRSTHAND? Or is it hearsay?”

“Howdy! What are you doing here? This has to be the most unlikely way for us to meet! How did you get here? What’s happened to you since I last saw you?”

I hate these phases

when I'm just so thoroughly unmoved by any kind of music. Ask me what I feel like listening to, and you'll get the same kind of blank stare you'd get if you asked me to name my favorite alpine skier.

The dangerous thing about these blah periods is that new music, in particular, gets over- or underrated. So, you check out a flavor-of-the-month band and because you react in a neutral-to-warm fashion, you assume they're for real (Interpol). Or you hear something really good, that you've been meaning to check out because it's supposed to be great for when you're feeling down or blah, and you totally fail to get that it's tremendous (Bon Iver).

And on days like today, I hate the fact that I hate meteorologists too much to take them seriously.

A personal history of beer which is neither complete nor illuminating

1. The first beer I tasted where I could “get” the flavors as described by the bottle? Pete’s Wicked Winter Brew. It had a hint of raspberry
which came through in the finish. The front end was a nice, light ale, making the fruity finish all the more enjoyable.

It just happened one day in 1996. I was drinking one, and as a big gulp went down, I suddenly tasted raspberries. Prior to then, I would read tasting notes for beer and say, “Yeah, whatever, it tastes like beer. It's either light or dark, and that's it.” After my Winter Brew epiphany, everything changed.

2. A six pack of Honey Brown was $5.99 when I was in college. I used to consider it a fine beer.

3. I have never consumed a .40.

4. The first time I remember going “upscale” with a beer purchase was a six pack of Heineken Special Dark from the Campus Citgo.

5. The first time I tried Dogfish Head’s 60-minute pale ale, I thought it was horribly bitter and unbalanced.

6. The defunct Olde Heurich brewing company made the first pale ale that I loved: the Foggy Bottom ale. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Tupper’s Hop Pocket, and that was when I really came to understand hops. In fact, Tupper’s Hop Pocket was one of the beers we served at our wedding, and it gave me a huge thrill to see that my dad really enjoyed it too - and that he found on his own, with no coaching from me. He’s not much of a beer drinker, but clearly, the Tupper’s made an impact. Or it plays to our genetics.

7. The first time I heard about Belgian beer was in an article in a Brazilian Playboy magazine. I had a subscription when I was 13. This is less weird than it sounds: most of my friends who were my age had subscriptions too, all with parental permission. Some of my friends even got the more hardcore nudie mags from their dads. I even remember having a conversation with a female classmate about a fiction piece from a recent issue of Playboy. Indeed, we read the articles, including a fantastic 3-part series that was a famous reporter’s memoirs from the 1970 World Cup. I’ve tried to locate this article online, but the combination of “world cup,” “article,” and “playboy brasil” yields some expectedly irrelevant google results.

Anyway, there was an article in an issue of Playboy about how to enjoy the fine things in life (now that I think about it, every article in every issue was more or less about that very same topic. Hmmm.) One of those things was Belgian beer. The advice I remember from the article is that you should be very careful handling the glass after the beer is poured, to avoid unnecessarily warming the beer with your fingers. Whenever possible, hold the glass from the stem rather than around the bulb.

8. Anytime I’m working out – but especially in the middle of a long run - the thing that keeps me going is the promise of a beer later in the day. At around mile 6, all I can think about is beer. I crave it in ways that I don’t understand. I’m not sure I’d be able to work out if I didn’t think I’d be able to enjoy a beer later as a result.

9. Let’s do the math. From “Trains Across the Sea” by the Silver Jews:

In 27 years
I’ve drunk 50,000 beers
And they just wash against me like the sea into a pier

From ages 17 to 20, let’s assume I drank an average of 3 beers a day, 5 times a week. That’s 15 beers a week, translating to about 780 a year. Over 4 years, that amounts to 3120 beers.

Let’s assume that for 21 to 23, I dialed it back a bit to 3 beers a day, 4 times a week. Remember, this is an average, and it includes family gatherings, work happy hours, business trips, etc. That’s 12 beers a week, or 624 a year. Over three years, that makes about 1872.

From 24 to 26, say I set myself back – disposable income, a kickball league, etc. Let’s say 4 beers a day, 5 times a week – for a total of 20 per week, or 1040 per annum. Over three years, that’s 3120 (weird how that’s the same as for 17-20, huh?)

Assume that 27 to 31, I returned to a more socially acceptable 3/4 split, like for ages 21-23 – 624 a year. Over 5 years, weirdly enough, that equals my total for 17-20 and 24-26: 3120 beers (that number, again! This is like an episode of Lost…)

Anyway, adding them all up: in 31 years I’ve drunk 11,232 beers. Meaning that David Berman consumed almost 5 times more beer than me in a considerably shorter timeframe. Which is also why he’s had infinitely more health problems than I have, I guess.

And there, folks, is my list of beer-related thoughts on this clear federal holiday.

Blow fish, blow.

Something else I can cross off the list: eating fugu. Definitely an interesting experience, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone would go out of their way to eat this if it were non-lethal. Potentially.

At the four-hour mark, I am showing no signs of dizziness, nausea, or loss of motor control. For those who are local and interested, Tako in Bethesda has fugu right now. They only get it once a year. If you'd like to pay $17 (or $32 if you'd prefer sashimi) for something that's only kinda tasty and only somewhat likely to cause you to die a slow and agonizing death - make haste!

Health care reform

Hat tip to Sprucey for making sure I read this article in a recent New Yorker about reforming health care.

The gist: we often say that a system as large as a national health care system serving 300 million can't be re-invented, that it can only be fine-tuned. Gawande shows that all of the national health care systems in Europe similarly started from less-than-ideal circumstances, and that rather than arriving at universal health care through some kind of universal template, each country had to figure out what worked for them. "Path-dependence" is a cool concept, by the way.

I especially like this paragraph:

Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.

Read it.

Hyphenated-American literature and cooking

One of the most transparent ways for what I call hyphenated-american literature is to have a character who is an immigrant rekindle a connection to their family and heritage through cooking. Unless this happens in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel or short story, it's a terrible idea.

And yet,it's definitely true that places with distinct regional cuisines do tend to evoke a special kind of homesickness that can be mitigated (or exacerbated) by cooking. Certainly Ms. Citizen felt strongly enough about her Pittsburgh connection to make cheesy potatoes and pierogies for the Super Bowl. I tried to marry Brazil and Pittsburgh (an unlikely pairing, but then again, so are we...) through color.

First up, this fantastic beef chili recipe - topped with Brazilian-style black beans and cheddar (for the black and gold effect.)

For most of my childhood, it was a given that there would be a pot of black beans on the stove at all times of the day. And so I was eager to pick up some tricks from my mom on how to make beans in the style of, I suppose, our family. The two most salient points?

1. Skim the initial film of soapy foam that forms when you initially bring the beans to a boil. This film is reputed to be the flatufactory element in beans.

2. When the beans are almost done, melt some butter in a skillet. Add generous amounts of finely chopped onions, garlic, cilantro, or other flavor ingredients you want in your beans. After these are nicely sauteed and aromatic, add one ladle's worth of beans and broth to the mixture. Slowly and methodically mash the beans into the butter, till a thick layer of garlicky/oniony gunk is formed. Salt and pepper to taste. Then, add this delicious mixture back into your big pot of beans - this will flavor the broth in ways I can't even begin to describe.

I also add made brigadeiros for the first time since I was a kid. These are a staple of kids' birthday parties. Most of ate them till our stomaches cramped up and said, "please, no more condensed milk. I beg you." They are as delicious as they are easy to make. We used yellow sprinkles for further black-and-goldness.

Incidentally, condensed milk used to be one of my favorite things to eat. Sometimes for a snack or for dessert, I would just pour a thin layer of condensed milk into a bowl - sometimes I would stuff to it, sometimes I would just scoop it up with a spoon and eat it. Don't judge.


And since I mentioned Lahiri and immigrant fiction earlier, I heartily recommend to anyone with some down time her fantastic short story "The Third and Final Continent." These last few paragraphs of it, excerpted below without any permission whatsoever, are thoroughly heartbreaking. It makes me think of my parents coming to the U.S., and all the things i never imagined they would have to learn or figure out with no guidance or help.

I like to think of that moment in Mrs. Croft's parlor as the moment when the distance between Mala and me began to lessen. Although we were not yet fully in love, I like to think of the months that followed as a honeymoon of sorts. Together we explored the city and met other Bengalis, some of whom are still friends today. We discovered that a man named Bill sold fresh fish on Prospect Street, and that a shop in Harvard Square called Cardullo's sold bay leaves and cloves. In the evenings we walked to the Charles River to watch sailboats drift across the water, or had ice-cream cones in Harvard Yard. We bought a camera with which to document our life together, and I took pictures of her posing in front of the Prudential Building, so that she could send them to her parents. At night we kissed, shy at first but quickly bold, and discovered pleasure and solace in each other's arms. I told her about my voyage on the S.S. Roma, and about Finsbury Park and the Y.M.C.A., and my evenings on the bench with Mrs. Croft. When I told her stories about my mother, she wept. It was Mala who consoled me when, reading the Globe one evening, I came across Mrs. Croft's obituary. I had not thought of her in several months—by then those six weeks of the summer were already a remote interlude in my past—but when I learned of her death I was stricken, so much so that when Mala looked up from her knitting she found me staring at the wall, unable to speak. Mrs. Croft's was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she had left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return.

As for me, I have not strayed much farther. Mala and I live in a town about twenty miles from Boston, on a tree-lined street much like Mrs. Croft's, in a house we own, with room for guests, and a garden that saves us from buying tomatoes in summer. We are American citizens now, so that we can collect Social Security when it is time. Though we visit Calcutta every few years, we have decided to grow old here. I work in a small college library. We have a son who attends Harvard University. Mala no longer drapes the end of her sari over her head, or weeps at night for her parents, but occasionally she weeps for our son. So we drive to Cambridge to visit him, or bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die.

Whenever we make that drive, I always take Massachusetts Avenue, in spite of the traffic. I barely recognize the buildings now, but each time I am there I return instantly to those six weeks as if they were only the other day, and I slow down and point to Mrs. Croft's street, saying to my son, Here was my first home in America, where I lived with a woman who was a hundred and three. "Remember?" Mala says, and smiles, amazed, as I am, that there was ever a time that we were strangers. My son always expresses his astonishment, not at Mrs.Croft's age but at how little I paid in rent, a fact nearly as inconceivable to him as a flag on the moon was to a woman born in 1866. In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his own way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

a question about the imagery in pharmaceutical ads

In most commercials, particularly pharma ones, "home" is depicted as a house in the suburbs (except of course for those commercials shamelessly reaching out to "urbane" wearers of track suit jackets or women who are "empowered" consumers of overpriced merchandise.)

Erectile dysfunction? Backyards. Indigestion? Some guy in a diner or on a plane. Aspirin? Waitress or construction worker.

Why, then, do commercials for sleep aids almost invariably feature a cityscape? I just can't figure out who the target audience is and what the message is.

Naturally, I am lying awake at 4 am thinking about this. More on that later.

Sweat. Pants.

I've written before about high school and the years after we first moved to the U.S. One thing I neglected to address is the fact that I didn't realize, at first, that it was inappropriate to wear sweat pants out in public.

I've spoken to a few different immigrants about this, including a wholly unscientific survey conducted among my male siblings. We all had a similar tale of a slow dawning realization about this. I'm not sure why it's ok in Rio to wear sweat pants out in public. Maybe it's not, and it's just something we did?

Anyway, this was hardly my only fashion faux pas. I also had this baseball hat - I liked it because it was black. It also had bright orange lettering, in a color favored by surf-type gear from Rio. I liked that too. What I didn't consider was that the lettering said: "YOU CAN'T TOUCH THIS." Maybe it wasn't even "YOU." It might have been "U." I can't say I knew what I was thinking when I got this hat. My grandparents had sent to Disneyworld with a cousin several years prior, and during the trip I bought my first discman, my first cd's, and things like cool American baseball hats.

Now, of course, I'd be fine, because of that guy on 30 Rock. But back then? I thought the hat couldn't possibly be a reference to the song. I assumed it meant something else, and I guess I wore it expecting that one day, the meaning of it would dawn on me. (This is similar to how I came to learn about Pauly Shore. Surely, I thought, I am missing part of the story. This man is not famous for the things I've seen him do on MTV, I would think. There must be more to this story, I would tell myself. In fact, there was less. Much less. But I digress.)

Anyway, so there you have me - on a couple of ill-fated days in the fall of 1992, you could have spotted me in sweat pants, wearing a flannel shirt (de rigeur for emotionally needy teenagers in the early 90s), and a "U CAN'T TOUCH THIS" baseball hat.

I am writing about this, however, for a very specific reason. Namely, that it's now ok to wear sweatpants in public. I know this because Mrs. Abstract Citizen called me just the other night, surrounded by undergrads in Uggs and sweatpants, and I thought: No. This is not fair. Damn you, youth of America. Curse your capricious changes of heart. It just ain't right.