No, I Do Not Hate A Book

One of the questions I got asked a lot from yesterday’s “Ask Me Anything” was, “What book do you hate the most?”
My answer is simple: “Why would I hate a book?”
The best a book can do is disappoint me, or not interest me, or irritate me, in which case the same thing happens: I put the book aside and never return.  I do have some Magic writers I dislike intensely, but that’s because as the ancient editor of StarCityGames.com I was forced to read about a hundred or so articles a week to keep up on things, and in many cases I repeatedly read/edited things that were not to my tastes but pleased our audience.  That was part of my job, and every job has some things you don’t want to do.
But books and short stories?  It’s hard to develop a hate for something you can abandon so easily.
“But what about DAN BROWN?” some oafs might cry, thinking that as a writer I must hate anyone who writes quote-unquote “poorly.”  But no.  That’s someone pleasing an audience that’s not me, and again, I can usually avoid that sort of thing.  I’m not irritated by someone else’s success, because I think every bestseller has something that’s appealing to people – even if I can’t see that appeal.  I’m not snobbish.  There are plenty of people who love James Patterson (my mother among them) even though I think his prose is awful.  Some people are always going to be more successful than me, and I won’t always like what they do.
Rather than getting my nose up about the unfairness of the world, I think I’d be better served by asking, “So what is he doing right?” and trying to analyze that.
I don’t hate books.  I recognize some books aren’t what I like, but “hatred” would involve them injuring me in some way, and it’s hard to injure me when I can walk away.

Story Reviews: Ramez Naam, Cat Rambo, Robert Jackson Bennett, Chen Qiufan, Lucy Snyder

In my continuing efforts to read more short stories, I’m reading Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Apex Magazine monthly.  And I figure I might as well highlight the stories I enjoyed, as to encourage you to go check some new authors out.
(Note: Thanks to medical traumas, I haven’t read this month’s Asimov’s yet.  I’m sure it has some lovely stuff.)
Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable, by Cat Rambo

Antony bought the kit at Fry’s in the gray three months after Mindy’s death. He swam in and out of fog those days, but he still went frequently to the electronics store and drifted through its aisles, examining hard drives, routers, televisions, microphones, video games, garden lights, refrigerators, ice cream makers, rice cookers, all with the same degree of interest. Which was to say little to none, barely a twitch on the meter. A jump of the arrow from E up to one.
A way to kill time. So were the evenings, watching reality shows and working his way methodically through a few joints. If pot hadn’t been legal in Seattle, it would’ve been booze, he knew, but instead the long, hard, lonely evening hours were a haze of blue smoke until he finally found himself nodding off and hauled himself into bed for a few hours of precious oblivion.
He prized those periods of nothingness.
Each day began with that horrible moment when he put a hand out to touch Mindy’s shoulder—hey, honey, I had this awful dream you died, in a boating accident, no less, when was last time we were on a boat. Then the stomach dropping realization, sudden as stepping out into an elevator shaft.
Not.
A.
Dream.
His mother called him every day at first, but he couldn’t manage the responses. Let alone the conversational give and take.
That saddened him. Made him feel guilty too. He was the only child his mother still had nearby. Both of his sisters had stayed on the other coast and were distant now as then. Still angry at his mother for unimaginable transgressions during their high school years. They both had been excellent at holding a grudge all their lives. He was the only child who’d been willing to take some responsibility for her, had helped her move out to this coast in fact.
He loved her. Bought her presents. That was how the cat, a small tortoiseshell kitten, had entered her life, riding in his coat pocket, a clot of black and orange fur, tiny triangular face split between the colors…

Cat Rambo’s tale is a beautiful exercise in both misdirection and knowing when to stop.  This is a complex story on the surface – the cat gets cloned, but is subtly wrong, and the question arises of whether they can clone the dead wife.  In a lesser writer’s hands, this story would have been a novellette, stretching out to explore disaster after disaster, Pet Sematary-style…
…but Cat hits the mark, finishing at the perfect moment, in a story that made me happy with the ending in a way I haven’t quite been happy since Vylar Kaftan’s “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno.”  Sci-fi short stories tend towards conflict and disaster and pain, and rather than dissecting a frog for you, I’ll instead encourage you to head over and read this quite-readable little gem.

Water, by Ramez Naam

The water whispered to Simon’s brain as it passed his lips. It told him of its purity, of mineral levels, of the place it was bottled. The bottle was cool in his hand, chilled perfectly to the temperature his neural implants told it he preferred. Simon closed his eyes and took a long, luxurious swallow, savoring the feel of the liquid passing down his throat, the drops of condensation on his fingers.
Perfection.
“Are you drinking that?” the woman across from him asked. “Or making love to it?”
Simon opened his eyes, smiled, and put the bottle back down on the table. “You should try some,” he told her.
Stephanie shook her head, her auburn curls swaying as she did. “I try not to drink anything with an IQ over 200….”

The fascinating thing about this story is what it lacks: it’s not filled with beautiful prose, it’s light on character, and the plot is on rails.  Which sounds like an insult, but the same can often be said about some of the best news reporting – and what we have here is essentially a newscast from a vividly-imagined future, so perfect in its details that I could have read another hundred pages of it as the ramifications of the smart-water advertisements swirled in and out of affecting Wall Street, affecting grocery-store shelves, affecting passerby on the street…
I’m fascinated by the idea of how super-advertisements will affect our lives (check my story Dead Merchandise for how I get wrapped around the axle about it), and Ramez’s vision of the future is both plausible and world-spanning.  It’s rare that an author can cram the scope of a space opera into 4,000 words or so, but damn if Ramez doesn’t do it.  This is a wonderful example of how details can sell a story, because every section is studded with bullets of plausible speculation that feel like an extension of what we know today.  They tell you that writing is all about characters, but what we have here is a story where worldbuilding is first and character second, and that stylistic choice hints at a cold future where maybe we’re all pushed aside a little by monolithic corporations.
After reading this, I went out and put his award-nominated books on my wishlist, and boy do I hope to get around to ’em soon.

A Drink For Teddy Ford, by Robert Jackson Bennett

It was often said in certain circles of town that no event could hope to match Jerry Ulkridge’s New Year’s Eve parties. The entire year was spent in anticipation of what the next one might feature. Could he possibly beat the ice sculptures of ’21? The champagne fountain of two years back? Would the first chairs of the symphony make an appearance again, performing in their elite quartet? No one could say for sure, and many would have fought or even killed to find an invitation nestled in the corner of their mailbox, promising admission to those merry, oh-so-exclusive wonders.
So it would have shocked anyone to know that Teddy Ford had received such an invitation, but had no intention of attending. He did not plan to go out at all that night, having spent the waning days of the year confined to his one-room apartment, lying on the bed and smoking and sipping wine with the radio on, and he’d decided New Year’s Eve would be no different.
But early in the evening his friend Michael Creamier came calling, and would not be turned away. “Are you completely unaware of what you’re missing, old son?” he called through the closed door. “Are you totally out of your mind? Are you barking, Teddy? Please, tell me.”
Teddy did not answer….

Full disclosure: I’m pretty much a Robert Jackson fanboy, as I’ve enjoyed everything he’s done.  (Try American Elsewhere, you won’t regret it.)  And again, what we have here is an exercise in plot-on-rails, as Teddy goes to the party, discovers a mysterious bartender who promises to make him the drink of his life, and then starts plucking ingredients straight out of people’s sorrows…
It’s a Twilight Zone-style riff – but like any good riff, success is all about the style, and RBJ really has voice down to a startling extent.  He somehow manages to nail that 1920s-1950s-style machismo, with drinks and men in ties and friendly joshing, but he does it in a way that’s not a carbon copy and somehow not excusing the excesses of the period but somehow pointing slyly at them.  And his prose is delicate and distinct, with mixing horror and beauty in evocative bits like this (and a trigger warning for those who need them):

It took some time for Teddy’s eyes to adjust. He saw people in the room, but they had not noticed his entry. He made out the considerable bulk of Michael Creamier on the bed, and below him a flash of a white calf and a slippered foot, and the pale ring of a petticoat. Michael’s hand slowly crept under the petticoat, and the leg tensed as his hand advanced.
“Michael,” said a girl’s voice. “Please, I don’t . . . I don’t want to.”
“But you do, really,” he said huskily. “Don’t you?”
“But I’ve never . . . Oh, I don’t know about this.”
“Don’t you love me?” The soft tap-tap of drunken kisses in the dark.
“Yes, but . . .”
“Then be still.” Michael’s backside shifted, and there was the tinkle of a belt buckle and a shifting of clothes. “Let’s get these . . . off . . .”
“Michael, no,” whispered the girl. “Michael, please . . .”
But Michael’s back flexed, and a soft cry came from beneath him. “There,” he said, his voice trembling. “There.”

That’s a lot of characterization for a hundred words or so, and I have to admire the economy.

 The Mao Ghost, by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu

I still remember that evening: In the heavy air, the plastic dragonflies hovered just below the eaves like miniature helicopters, drifting about slightly even though there was no wind.
I came home, and Dad was already in the house but kept the lights off. The setting sun came in through cracks in the window, and his face seemed indescribably thin in the dim, yellow light, like a stranger’s. He extended an arm toward me and the sleeve hung loose as though it contained only bones and no muscle. Without even realizing I was doing so, I tried to hang back, staying away from him.
“Qianer, come here. Let Daddy get a look at you.”
I struggled to understand the meaning behind his words. He tried to look at me every day, regardless of my wishes. It seemed that other than looking at me, he had nothing else to say or do. He was always getting my age wrong. Sometimes he would ask me if I was getting along with the other children, and I felt that he was only making conversation because whenever I brought up Xiao Qing or Nana, he always put on an expression that said I’m-interested-but-who-is-that? even though I’d already repeated those names for him at least eight million times.
“Qianer,” he said, and seemed unsure if he should go on. “I want to tell you something….”

This was a happy surprise to me, as I’m usually not big on uncertainty – I want to be rooted in the world right away, to know whether magic is real, to know whether man can fly to the moon, to know what era it is.  And yet this is a wondrously soft story, centered around magic, where “not knowing if magic works” is part of the delight of the story.  Dad thinks he’s turning into a cat-spirit, and Mom agrees with him, and so do many of the legends and history, but… is Dad insane, and Mom simply humoring him, and Qianer caught in the middle?
It’s delicate and beautiful, with a subtly broken family hanging in the center of it all, and the tension wrought from an unusual source.  I adored the quietly unobtrusive way this story made you work to meet it, and the ending is, like Cat Rambo’s, quietly perfect.  A lovely tale.

Antumbra, by Lucy Snyder

I woke in the afternoon gloom to the sound of my 20–year–old stepsister Lily dragging something heavy and wet up the back patio steps through the kitchen door. The smell of blood and brine smothered me the moment I sat up.
I swore to myself and called down to her, “What did you do?”
“You’ll see,” she sing–songed.
“Pleasant mother pheasant plucker.” I lay back on the sweat–stained sheets for a moment to gather my focus. Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough to keep my head from spinning, but it was all I could seem to get these days. The cells in my body kept waiting for the moon to move, despite all my meditating to try to tell them that the big rock blotting the sun wasn’t going anywhere.
I kept having nightmares from everything I saw in the months after the Coronado Event. In the worst dream, I was sitting in my bedroom when an earthquake hit. The walls would crack, revealing not drywall and wood but rotten meat, and cold blood would pour in, flooding everything. The red tide would sweep me off my bed and press me up against the ceiling. My stuffed toys turned into real animal carcasses floating by my head. I’d be struggling to breathe in the two inches of air between the gore and the plaster when I felt something grab my ankle. And then I’d wake up…

I find myself drawn to stories that accomplish things I usually hate.  And this is a tale that has the subtlest of errors in it, the only you only really see if you read slush for a magazine: it feels more like the first chapter in a novel than a short story.  Normally that’s a dealbreaker, because first chapters are more setup than closure, and so the story leaks out of the edges.  But with Antumbra, the ending promises at more horrors, and I want to follow those horrors to even greater depths.
And yet what a chapter!  The world is changed because the moon’s blotted out the sun, and wretched changes have flooded across the city, and everyone is mutating, desperate, and starving.  Meanwhile, one sex-obsessed sister is coming of age, and the other (entangled in an incestuous relationship) wants to save her from getting pregnant.  This is a boiling cauldron of pure body horror, done effectively; I heard Lucy read it at ConFusion, and read it to see if it held up.  It does.
The ending’s a little abrupt.  But I can forgive that when I enjoyed the journey sufficiently.  And I hope she does expand this at some point, because it’s a Joe Lansdale-style cavalcade of ick, and I kinda like that.

Eventful Times: Ask Me Anything

Well, it’s been All News in the old Casa McJuddMetz, and we’re sorely in need of some distraction.  Usually, I’d write some blog post to try to attract the Dance Of Intriguing Comments, but time’s been squeezed lately thanks to Rebecca’s latest medical upheavals.
(Interesting fact: We met with the Meyers for dinner after Rebecca’s latest MRI, and they never actually told us what Rebecca’s results were.  However, given that Eric and Kat had an appetite and were eating, we knew the news was not awful.  The overall arc of their daughter’s health can be plotted to a large extent by their caloric intake.)
(Why didn’t we ask, you might ask?  Because frankly, when someone’s struggling with a potentially fatal illness, one of the worst things you can do is to reduce their life to that illness.  There’s a tendency in people to think that it’s somehow disrespectful to discuss anything else but The Trauma, going, “Oh, I don’t want to complain about work when you have pancreatic cancer.”  No, seriously.  Complain.  Let your friends bathe in the trouble of your problems for a while, share what happinesses you have; give them a little oasis of normality when you can instead of reducing their lives to this one disease.  Last night was pretty much just a dinner out with the kids, and I for one was pretty happy about that.)
In any case, caught between the Scylla of Rebecca’s struggle and the Charybdis between things I cannot say yet, I’m gonna default to an old habit of mine:
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly. 
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful.  You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious.  Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability.  To answer your most burning question, I try to pull the lazy “Ask Me Anything” blog entry only once every three months to avoid blog-clog, and yes, I do Google to keep track of the last time I did this.

Mating Habits

When bees mate, several males fly after the queen.  They fuck her until their tiny bee-dicks drop off inside of her, and then they die.
Meanwhile, the queen flies off with eight or nine semen-pumping penises embedded in her hoo-hah, filling her up to lay thousands of eggs.

Bonobos hang upside down and fence with their penises.  Sometimes, to reconcile after a fight, they stand back-to-back and smoosh ballsacks.

Female giraffes in estrus pee in their suitors’ mouths.  The suitors swig the urine around like wine, determining if this is a fresh and fuckable beast, and if that works for them then they hump the shit out of her.

Male bowerbirds attract mates by obsessively making large art-like things out of colored pebbles and feathers and sticks, and go apeshit if you move a pebble.  The only time they move away from their hipster art project is to go knock over a couple of pebbles in their rivals’ etchings.

Bedbugs don’t have a vagina; instead, the males punch a hole straight through the carapace in their stomach to ejaculate directly into their lovers’ body cavity….
Okay, you’re probably getting a little sick of the animal kingdom here.  But my point is this:
Is being gay natural?
Is being polyamorous natural?
Who gives a flying whoopdoodle?
Frankly, the animal kingdom is full of freaky bugs doing freaky things, and I could give a crap if a bunch of penguins happen to share my bedbound tendencies.  The very point of being a human is that we get to do all sorts of things that animals don’t do – I know of no animals that start franchises, for example.   There are very few animals that direct films.  Only a precious handful of Golden Retrievers have built a spaceship to fly to the moon.
What matters most is, “Is this hurting anyone against their will?”  Which is why I’m down on, say, nonconsensual sex – which there is a lot of in the animal kingdom, by the way, and if Donald Duck were portrayed even slightly accurately he’d be a quacking rapist – or trying to have sex with living things that can’t say “yes” in a well-thought-out manner, such as drunk people or children or ducks.
I do not get the idea that if we can find evidence of this in nature, then it’s gotta be okay for us.  Nature doesn’t give a crap, guys.  Nature is where you run in the woods until you get weak enough that something eats you.  If anything, if we can find evidence that our freaky sex isn’t in nature, then maybe that’s better.
In the meantime, sure, there’s probably a gay cockatiel or a polyamorous woodlouse or a cross-dressing zebra out there.  That’s great. Don’t cite them as evidence, unless you feel like running out into the backyard to have a penis-war with your neighbor and then bump your girlfriend’s flank until she pees on you.  The main benefit of being a homo sapiens is that we occasionally get to short-circuit all of our hard-wired instincts and do something amazingly different.

Flashlight

The most merciful thing in the world, Lovecraft once said, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents.  As for me, I say we are looking into a great void, swinging the thin beam of a flashlight across the surface of something vast and unfathomable, a thing whose shape we cannot retain in our minds; it is too big.  It is too terrifying.  And were we somehow to contain the entirety of that thought within ourselves, some critical illusion we call humanity would shatter into pieces.
Like this five-year-old girl with brain cancer.

“I want to try your fruit punch,” Rebecca says, unapologetically curious as always.  She’s always had a taste for sweet things, chewing gumballs until her baby teeth started to turn clear.  And she’s always been direct, rarely rude, but punching a straight line to whatever she desires.  It’s part of her charm.
“Can’t have it, kid,” you say, sipping the spiked punch.  “This is a grown-up drink.”
And you realize: Rebecca might never have alcohol.  She may die before she gets old enough to sneak a drink in some teenaged party.  She may never be a teenager.  She may never be ten, she may never be six.
Her birthday is two months away.
This mouthful of rum is a locked door that she will never open, a single room in a vast mansion.  You go exploring, sweeping the flashlight across all of these other rooms full of dusty furniture with tarps thrown over them, waiting for her to find them.  She’ll never have a drink. She’ll never go to college.  She’ll never have a job.  She’ll never fall in love.
You realize that a child is not a child, but an arc soaring out into time and space, a potential to be fulfilled, and somewhere within her skull is an eyeball-sized mass that may grow to squeeze her brain until it literally forgets how to breathe.   Except this child is a child.  This child may only ever be a child, and then dissolve into a tangle of theories.  What would she have liked?  What would she have seen?
You look down at this beautiful wide-eyed girl, grinning like she has all the secrets in the world to tell you, and you can’t hold it all in your head.  She’s alive here, and over here she may not be.  You swing your flashlight between those two possibilities, trying to capture them both, but the beam is too narrow.  Alive.  Dead.  Alive.  Dead.
You hold her so hard, pressing her skin to yours, hoping to press her memory into your flesh forever.
But you can’t.
You know you can’t.

She’s wrestling with you, shoving a fuzzy stuffed octopus into your face, straddling your chest.  “I’ve won!” she cries, exultant in triumph.  “You are defeated!”
A girl like that can’t be sick.  She can’t.  Then the flashlight sweeps back in time to illuminate her mother’s words in the hospital:
Kids with brain tumors often look fine.  Right up until they aren’t.

We built those rooms for her.  We think they’re ready.
The flashlight sweeps across that door, and passes into the void.

You hide the octopus in a game of hide-and-seek.  You rest it on the water pipes hanging above the basement playroom, and after counting to twenty-eight – nobody’s quite sure why she stops there, but it makes sense to her – Rebecca comes looking for it.  “Is it in here?” she asks repeatedly, checking the cabinets, under the couch, behind the pillows.  You assure her it is, as she looks around, face scrunching up in confusion.
Eventually, she thinks to look up.  Her face is illuminated with a glorious learning, as she sees Mr. Octopus’s stuffed tentacles hanging down and learns a valuable lesson: things can be hidden above her.
But is it a valuable lesson if she’ll never put it to use?
Where will all of those teachings go, if she does?

Supporting a child with cancer is like being coal, crushed under a mountain of pressure.  You have nowhere to go.  You’re shoved against the hard edge of this little girl’s need, contorted into hideous shapes, conforming to the shape of necessity.
But what will happen to you once she vanishes, and there’s nothing left to hold you up?

There are no answers.  We have no certainty.  She could be around for years, or weeks.  The flashlight bobs between all of these horrors and glories – the way she curls up in her mother’s arms, the grainy horrors of MRI snapshots, the wondering if her twitching eye is the result of some tumor, the statistics of grade 3 astrocytoma survival, the success stories from those kids who beat the odds, the wonder of clinical trials.  Every day we oscillate between a thousand potential futures, so many of them terrible beyond envisioning, a handful of happy endings, and all this vibrating between quantum states is exhausting.
And yet the future coalesces but one hour at a time.
You can’t see it all at once.  Little emotions, flickering and dashing, too large to capture inside your skull.  There are times you scream from the horror of it.  There are times you ball your fists from the helplessness.  There are times when that all dissolves and you are given the solace of a minute where she’s a little girl slapping cards onto a pillow.  There are times you ride the hope before crashing into depression, and there are times you catch a glimpse of life without Rebecca and oh God you cannot function.  It’s all seen through a narrow tunnel.
I look into the eyes of my beautiful goddaughter, and I cannot see death. Then I can.  And when I see death I cannot see her, and when I see her I cannot see death and oh God I am so small and there is nothing I can do but hold her hand and hope for miracles.
She may be dying.  And as she dies, we do.  The truth is that the flashlight saves us.  If we were to see all of the monster lurking in that void we would die, are dying, and it’s only our inability to fathom the whole horror of this that allows us to function.  What’s happening to her is something alien to the human mindset, to the idea of life itself, that quiet promise that we grow.  She might not.  She might have experienced just about everything she’s going to.  She might be gone.
Rebecca is a miracle.  Even if this was all we got, she is a fucking miracle, and I want you to know that.
I just want more.
I want so much more.

Why I'm More Likely To Help Women: A Bias

Last week, someone invoked my name on Twitter, saying they’d like to friend me on Fet but were too shy.  So I emailed them to say that I understand social anxiety and of course it was fine to friend me.  Then I read her Twitter page, saw they were a blogger, saw that she’d just been through a hard divorce and her laptop had just died and she was looking for $200 to repair it, and I sent her $20 to help her on her way.
Now, that’s not unusual; I have a little fund I harvest from my writer-earnings to donate to people in trouble.  It’s not much, and I can’t donate to everyone who I think deserves it, but it does let me spot-give to folks I think need the help.
And I asked: would I have been as eager to help if this person was a guy?
The uncomfortable answer: no.  Not really.  (I have donated to guys, but way less often.)
And I thought about that for a while.  Was I white-knighting, getting off on helping women?  No, not really – I do a fair amount of pro-women blogging, but I don’t do it because I think the women need the help.  Was I unconsciously trying to curry favor with women as a way of getting into their pants?  Again, no, because I don’t recall ever actually making headway on that front from donations – though again, yeah, I probably get more date-offers because of my pro-women blogging than otherwise, so there is an upside to those essays I can’t rationally deny.  Was I doing it because I thought women were incompetent and needed the help?  Again, no…
…and I realized: it’s because I don’t trust men.
This is not a new revelation – it goes all the way back to the war on Jefferson Hill – but when I was in my heavily-bullied middle school period, the people who were picking on me were guys.  And it wasn’t just shoving me; the guys in question would frequently pretend to be my buddy in order to get me to reveal some embarrassing secret to them, which they could then share with the rest of the class, and so in the back of my head though I have guy friends I’m always waiting for them to punch me.
So most of my best friends are women.  I tend towards trusting women.  When I write squawky essays about how women are treated like shit, it’s because I often default to viewing things from a female perspective and go Hey, these jerks are hurting my friends.
And I’m more willing to help out a woman in need, because I trust them more reflexively.  They don’t have to earn my trust like men do.  I’ll help a guy out, but I don’t think I’d ever just help a random guy I only read about online ten minutes ago, because some tripwire in my brain would go, “…wait.  What are they really up to?”
That’s a bias I’m not necessarily happy with, as there are a lot of good men out there who I could be closer to, and I’m not.  It’s a bias that does more good in the universe, I think, because I know some of my essays have helped guys view women in a different light… but it’s a bias I need to examine more, see what I can do with, see how I can help.
Because while I loathe the Men’s Rights Movement as a selfish and stupid grab for white dude power, I do have to admit that personally, I can work on trusting guys a lot more.  Just as I ask men to examine their unconscious attitudes towards women, I should also dissect my attitudes towards other men, and see what I can find.  And like men examining their thoughts on women, it’s a process that takes a while and some thinky-bits.
I’m not unhappy I’m helping women, mind you.  I just should reach the hand to more dudes.  I should reach the hand to more people.  Because, you know… that’s the goal.