Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Author: Mojeaux

  • The Cult of Traditional Publishing, Part 1: The math don’t lie

    I didn’t actually do the math.

    I didn’t have the numbers for one side of the colon. But based on the proliferation of newsgroups, online critique groups, publishing forums in 2008, and the number of such denizens all trying to get published, I could guess. And it was huge.

    Then there was me. 1 : x6214

    Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will.

    Maybe it's just me, but I see a lot of green in that cover.
    Maybe it’s just me, but I see a lot of green in that cover.

    I was 15 when I first found out how to go about querying and creating proposals. I even did that a couple of times for Reader’s Digest. I was rejected. It hurt, not because I was rejected, but because I was running out of time. A favorite author’s bio said she was 18 when she first published a book, which she wrote “on a whim”. If I hadn’t done it by 18, well … (Narrator: That was a lie. She was 25.)

    I was eating Harlequin Presents romances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I knew the formula. I knew the most popular tropes. I had plenty of ideas. I didn’t have such words in my vocabulary as “formula” and “trope.” It was a gut feeling, the natural rhythm of the way a good story is paced.

    You can blame her for my May-December fetish.
    You can blame her for my May-December fetish.

    I never did get a Harlequin Presents romance written. By the time I could actually write a book, I liked Harlequin Superromances better and I trained myself to write within that word count (90,000 to 120,000). It felt more complete than the 55,000 words of Presents. Well, of course it would. It was double.

    So here’s what happened:

    In 1989, I wrote my under-the-bed novel. The apprentice novel. The horrible one. The one you never want to see the light of day. It’s still out there floating around, I think.

    In 1990, I wrote my next novel. It was marginally better.

    In 1991, I wrote my third. It was good. I sent it to a publisher that had launched the careers of a bunch of NYT bestsellers. I got The Call. You know, the one where the editor calls you and congratulates you. Then … nothing. The publisher went out of business. Why? The parent company had bought it for a tax write-off and it made money. So bye bye Kismet. Yes, that was the publisher’s name. Kismet.

    If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

    In 1993, I wrote my fourth. It was really good. I sent it to Harlequin and got The Call. Sorta. The editor said, “I love this book. However, I bought one fairly similar last month that is not as good as yours, but I can’t break that contract and I can’t sell this to my editorial board. Send me something else. NAO.” I gave a brief rundown of book #3 and she passed.

    That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.
    That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.

    So I got an agent with book 4. That relationship ended in disaster after she read book 2 and told me to get a therapist. (Narrator: That book was revamped a few times, published, and remains the fan favorite.)

    In 1993, I started writing my pirate novel. I knew what I wanted to do. I also knew I didn’t have the chops to do it, so I fiddled with it for years.

    If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

    In 1993, I wrote book 5. It also got me The Call. An editor at Harlequin called me up on a Saturday morning and said, “I want to read the rest of this book. Overnight it.” She called me Tuesday evening and said, “I love this book—except the ending.” Me, having been trained to be a good, dutiful, well-behaved author, said, “I’ll rewrite it!” She sighed and said, “No, that would ruin the book. It has the ending it needs. I just can’t sell it.”

    If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

    In 1995, I was a senior in college in the creative writing program. My professor was the faculty supervisor of the uni’s lit rag. After my first assignment, he told me I had an A in the class and I could just skip the rest of the semester because he couldn’t teach me anything. But he would count it a personal favor if I stayed and did the assignments because he loved my work. That class was 8:00 a.m. after I’d spent the night working a graveyard shift at a gas station. You better believe I went to class.

    I wrote a story. He was disappointed in me for giving it a “romance novel ending,” but otherwise he loved it. My senior advisor for my capstone project happened to be a Latin teacher (no idea why) who was absolutely fascinated by my creative process. She said, “I don’t care what you do, just tell me why and how you do it.” Okay, so I expanded on my story that had caught my attention.

    It so happened that I was in Shakespeare 480 class or whatever really high number and we were studying Hamlet. I decided that somehow my religious allegory for the atonement (with a romance-novel ending) and Hamlet should go together like bread and butter. It didn’t. I couldn’t make that plot work.

    Oh, bullshit. Good generals know when to retreat.
    Oh, bullshit. Good generals know when to retreat.

    If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

    So I was bored at my graveyard job and in class and wrote book 6. That one got me a literary agent who loved it, but could not sell it, either.

    If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.

    Let us stop a moment and draw the obvious conclusion.

    It was about now I started messing with making my own galleys of book 6. I was never going to self-publish, oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Only bad writers self-published. It was the kiss of death. Even if you really were good, a publisher would never publish someone who had published himself. Still … that galley looked awfully pretty. I hesitantly called up a printer as if I were calling up a gigolo to take my virginity for me, knowing I was going to go to hell for it when I died, and said,

    “Yeah, um … how … much … would this cost?”

    “Twenty grand.”

    “Bye.”

    So even my attempt at committing the ultimate sin was unavailable to me.

    I gave up. I had enough near-misses to let me know I wasn’t a bad writer, but clearly not good enough and I obviously didn’t know how to hit the Harlequin bullseye after all.

    No, I didn’t give up trying to get published. I gave up writing altogether.

    Fast forward to 2004. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had a baby. I’ve gotten a work-at-home profession as a medical transcriptionist and was doing okay. I’ve got no creative outlet. I refuse to write and only occasionally fiddled with my pirate novel, and once in a while, I tried to make that Hamlet-atonement plot that wouldn’t work, work.

    I wasn’t entirely stupid. I still had them on floppies.
    I wasn’t entirely stupid. I still had them on floppies.

    My husband had read one of my books and liked it. He had urged me to query it again. I had. I had gotten swiftly and roundly rejected. Apparently, it hadn’t stood the test of time. In anger, I had burned all my manuscripts in the barbecue grill.

    I’ve still got no creative outlet except … counted cross stitch. I love it. (Narrator: Loved. She killed that by making it into a business.) There were lots of things I wanted to stitch, so I learned how to convert them into patterns. I then went online and found out people who were “superstars” in the cross stitch pattern world had started out doing their own and just pitched them to shops and then got picked up by distributors. Self-publishing your patterns was the mark of a professional. So I did that. Turns out, what I like and what a lot of other people like aren’t the same, and the few who did like my patterns weren’t enough to pay the bills.

    All those bubbles in my head...
    All those bubbles in my head…

    That fizzled after a few years of tinkering with it. I was okay with that. I’d had another baby. I was working my ass off at medical transcription because I had moved into a house that we should never have bought and had started having expensive problems. (Narrator: Two weeks after moving in, the back patio sliding door fell out. Just … fell out. That was a very cold winter.)

    Fast forward to 2007.

    One night, after having invoiced my contractor for my medical transcription work (it was a lot of money), I was very depressed. Not even my newly-doubled-dose of antidepressants was helping. (Narrator: Sometimes you don’t have depression. Sometimes your life just sucks.) As one gets older, one should be making more money for less effort. Otherwise, you’re not life-ing right. I sent my bill and sat there in the dark and looked at my computer. I opened up book 6 and I read my own work for the first time in years.

    It was like somebody else had written it, and it was good. Like, really good. I went to bed even more depressed and discouraged and asking, “Why did I give up on myself?”

    I woke up the next morning with the solution to my now-decade-old plot problem and I got to writing.

    The rollercoaster car had left the station.

  • David Bowie’s cod and what women really want

    The movie Labyrinth (1986) is a tale of an adolescent girl’s quest/hero’s journey/sexual awakening. It’s a fantasy that features muppets good and slightly evil and everything in between. It also features David Bowie in very tight tights with his cod on obvious display. You can’t miss it—and that’s the point.

    But why is it the point?

    THE SETUP:

    Jareth the Goblin King and his co-star. No, not the muppet.
    Jareth the Goblin King and his co-star. No, not the muppet.

    Our intrepid heroine, Sarah, is a girl whose mother ran out on the family to become an actress and from what tidbits one can glean, a relatively successful stage actress. Sarah is not resentful. In fact, she finds this wistfully romantic. Sarah has a baby brother by her not-very-new stepmother, whose treatment of Sarah is (per Sarah’s point of view) borderline abusive because she asks Sarah to babysit while Dad and she go out on a date. The viewer doesn’t get much but that the stepmother would not ask Sarah to babysit if she had a date or parties to go to and that she is frustrated that Sarah doesn’t want friends nor does she want to date or go out. Sarah just wants to live in her own fantasy world alone, cosplaying and dreaming about her mother’s glamorous life, which distresses the stepmother to no end.

    Stepmom: She treats me like the wicked stepmother in a fairy story no matter what I do.

    We get the point: Sarah’s living in her head in the starring role of Cinderella and loving every second of her victimhood. But she’s a teenager whose mother ran out on her, so that is to be expected.

    So Dad and Wicked Stepmother leave and there’s poor Sarah wandering around the house in a romantic and fanciful poet’s shirt and vest, in the dark while it’s storming outside, bemoaning her fate and talking to the baby rather hatefully, yet handling him gently.

    Sarah: I wish the Goblin King would come take you away.

    And … cue baby vanishing. An owl thumps at the window and (because she is very smart), she opens it.

    Owl: a symbol of femininity, fertility, darkness, spiritual wisdom, strategy, and represents the goddess Athena/Diana. “According to myth, an owl sat on Athena’s blind side, so that she could see the whole truth.”

    Then there stands a man, a tall man with freakish hair in RenFest garb. He’s the personification of desire, and Sarah is breathless with fear and attraction. He is Jareth the Goblin King, and she knows this instantly. She begs for her brother back. He plays with his balls to demonstrate his magic while giving her a challenge/quest/dare. If she can complete the labyrinth that surrounds the Goblin City in 13 hours, he’ll give her her baby brother back, but if she doesn’t, he will turn the baby into a goblin forever.

    And off she goes on her quest like a good little hero/ine on his/her journey, encountering all sorts of obstacles along the way, the main one being her hubris that she can defeat the Goblin King

    "Don't go that way ... If she'd'a gone that way, she'd'a gone straight to the castle."
    “Don’t go that way … If she’d’a gone that way, she’d’a gone straight to the castle.”

    She is constantly exhorted not to take things for granted and that things aren’t always what they seem. She cuts other characters off once she thinks she has all the information she needs. She doesn’t ask the right questions. She thinks her wisdom is sufficient to solve the labyrinth.

    On the surface, the movie is a morality tale and is very explicit about it: Don’t take anything for granted and stop it with the hubris. A teenage girl watching this movie will get that. She will be breathless at the idea of Jareth the Goblin King taking an interest in a lowly teenage girl, but she won’t parse that. Why do that when she has a powerful, magical man’s attention and his lust (which is in plain sight), tempting her to the pleasures of hedonism? And he blatantly uses his cod to tempt her with his presence, his devotion to her, his love and desire for her as a woman.

    Jareth: I ask for so little. Just let me rule you and you can have everything you want. … Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.

    THE DECONSTRUCTION:

    The story is a constant struggle between Sarah’s sense of adult responsibility, her burgeoning womanhood/sexuality, and her girlish dreams, desires, and fantasies.

    The struggle comes down to two pivotal moments in the movie:

    Dancin' in the streets... Oh, wait.
    Dancin’ in the streets… Oh, wait.

    Sarah has been poisoned. In her delirious state, she is at a ball, in a grown woman’s fantasy ball gown, in the middle of decadent adults, being romantically pursued by Jareth. She is confused, disoriented, even while it is the culmination of all her romantic and magical fantasies. Yet the memory of an important quest is on the edges of her mind. She chooses to rebuff Jareth’s advances and escape, turning away from her new and scary sexual feelings.

    She falls in the darkness, eventually winding up on her own bed, which is frilly. Was it a dream? Was it real? Her bedroom is full of stuffed animals (that look remarkably like her muppet friends), RenFest clothing, a shelf full of elaborately bound fairy tales, a vanity on which there’s makeup and knickknacks. Every single thing in her room is a three-dimensional representation of everything going on in the fantasy. Most importantly (which you will miss in a blink), there is a newspaper clipping of a review of her mother’s play. It’s a picture of her mother standing with her costar, who happens to look exactly like Jareth the Goblin King.

    The Goblin King is in the details.
    The Goblin King is in the details.

    She sits confused at her vanity while a character shoves all her old comforts at her and reminds her of how nice it is to be in her comfy warm and welcoming and fantastical bedroom, tempting her to stay a little girl. She’s painfully disoriented, but it’s her own room, her childhood in 108 square feet, her shelter from the world of adulthood, adult decisions, adult problems.

    On the edge of her mind, though, is a purpose, a purpose she doesn’t remember until she sees one of her fairy tales and remembers. On she forges. You know she successfully retrieves her baby brother because that’s how the quest works. Humans like that.

    In the last scene, she’s back in her house, the baby’s in the crib asleep, she goes to her room and starts putting away her childish things, Dad and Stepmom come home. The stuffed animals come to life and regretfully must leave, but they reassure her that should she ever need them …

    They don’t finish the thought, but she dances with them while an owl (femininity, fertility, darkness) sits on a tree limb outside her window and watches them before flying away.

    For now, she is firmly on the edge of girlhood and womanhood, having rejected both—for the time being—but knowing that it’s inevitable and she will leave her friends behind.

    THE CIRCUMSTANCE:

    I was not aware of this movie when it was released in June of 1986. My parents had bought a house on the opposite corner of the metro area from where I grew up and I was busy moving us. I and our trusty 1.5-ton passenger van moved that house almost all by ourselves. I was also getting ready to go to BYU. I would stay in the new house for a grand 2.5 weeks before I left for another adventure.

    I was leaving my frilly childhood bedroom and stuffed animals behind and in a month, I would be dropped off at a dorm 1200 miles away from home watching my parents drive away and going back to my dorm room alone. But what was home? A new bedroom in a new house in a suburban neighborhood like the one I’d always fantasized about? Naw. “Home” was no more home than the dorm room was. My home was gone forever and we all know you can’t go home again.

    The movie didn’t come to the BYU on-campus theater until late spring or early fall semester 1987. I don’t remember. I went with this gorgeous, funny, hyperactive Korean dude I was majorly crushing on. He couldn’t keep his leg still, bouncing it all the way through.

    But the movie worked its spell no matter how irritated and distracted I was.

    THE BREAKDOWN:

    Fast forward 20 years. I found the online romance novel scene. Self-proclaimed feminists and budding SWJs were out pounding the internet pavement preaching the gospel of the Feminist Agenda of Romance Novels. Why? Because they liked them, they felt guilty about liking them with some of their problematic themes, and wanted mainstream feminism to stop sneering at what they liked. It was simultaneous defiance and begging for approval.

    They didn’t get it. I was a romance-novel veteran and they hated the early ones where the heroine was brave and gutsy and involved herself in all sorts of feats of derring-do. They were bad. “This isn’t your mother’s rapetastic romance novel,” they would screech, not actually knowing what they were talking about. The romance novels of yesteryear had kick-ass heroines and more explicit sex than the namby-pamby stuff of the aughts.

    A major participant in Romancelandia was a women’s studies professor. Her husband was Jewish. She was Catholic, but converted to marry him. He got a job at some rinky-dink college and she was a spousal hire (“You don’t get me if you don’t hire my wife”). Instant tenure. Hot stuff in her field (ORLY).

    She had heard much wistful sighing over Labyrinth in Romancelandia so she sat down with her two tween sons and watched it. Like a good feminist and women’s studies professor, she broke it down to three things: David Bowie’s cod, phallic imagery everywhere, men (Henson and Lucas) telling such a stupid tale to fulfill their own perverse desires for a young girl. She thought it was hilarious and ridiculous, a sausagefest (with one sausage).

    She, whose respected romance novel blog* with thrice-weekly posts would routinely get close to a hundred comments (impressive even in those days, for a one-chick blog), garnered a few vague “Oh, that’s an interesting take” type comments.

    It sat there. For a week. Getting nothing more. She let it sit for a few more days. Nothing.

    Finally, I said, “I really don’t understand how you missed the entire point of the movie.” And went on to summarize the above but far more briefly and only so I wouldn’t come off as totally unhinged with rage at her stupidity.

    Because I was.

    How in the world does a feminist women’s study professor—who “loves” romance novels (but only the politically virtuous ones) (zzzzzzz) and screams to her disdainful colleagues how empowering and feminist they are—miss this?

    I stopped just shy of telling her she was a stupid traditional housewife who converted to a man’s religion to marry him, followed him to his profession, got a job on his coattails, and promptly had two children. Betty Friedan would be ashamed. There was nothing “feminist” about her, and then she missed this.

    She gave me a polite, “That’s an interesting take,” but the floodgates opened. And the comments section exploded with other gently made points about Labyrinth’s importance to both feminism and the hero’s journey and the fact that a girl was on the hero’s journey (quite groundbreaking for 1986) and a girl’s sexual awakening—and that Jim Henson and George Lucas knew more about it than any other filmmakers at the time (and maybe still) and portrayed it accurately. Details and symbolism got pulled out left and right.

    Dr. Hot Stuff: “Well, maybe I should watch it again.”

    Ya think?

    She lost a lot of credibility in Romancelandia that day, credibility that was, inexplicably, very important to her.

    My work there was done.

  • Christianity 101

    John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.

    But … why?

    The core tenet of Christianity from the git-go has been that Christ died to atone for our sins, which satisfies both justice and mercy.

    But … how?

    I have never been quite clear how the torture and murder of a completely innocent man does anything at all for justice or mercy.

    Once upon a time when I was a wee lass, about 8 or so, I was getting ready to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Eight is the age of accountability, when a person knows wrong from right. One thing we do is to make sure our 8-year-olds have a good understanding of the Atonement of Christ. Well, we try. I’m not sure that is possible with every 8-year-old, but it sure worked a treat on me.

    Did I know? Did I understand? Oh, hell by golly, yes, I did. And I didn’t like it. Not one bit. Though I could not articulate it and I wasn’t nearly as willing to be shocking as I am now, I knew exactly what it meant:

    8-year-old me: Every time I sin, Jesus can feel all the pain of his crucifixion again.

    51-year-old me: Every time I sin, I am contributing to the torture and murder of an innocent man.

    Narrator: Then she went to a Southern Baptist private school for 9 years.

    8-year-old me listening to …

    Mormons: We’re all going to one of 3 levels of heaven and the worst one is totally awesome. But you don’t want that; you want the best heaven, so forget those other two. You’re better than that. You don’t want to be with those trashy losers in the lowest of heavens, so you need to work for it. Hard. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” — Matthew 5:48

    Baptists: All you have to do to go to heaven is accept Christ into your heart as your personal savior. How big your mansion is on your street of gold and how many jewels you have in your crown depend upon your works, but you don’t have to work at all if you don’t want to. But if you don’t accept Christ as your personal savior, you’ll burn in an eternal lake of fire. “But what about murderers?” If they say the prayer to be saved, they’re good. “But what about the kids in Africa who never heard of Jesus?” Collateral damage, sorry.

    Yet I have been assured from the cradle by both Mormons and Baptists that God loves me. Yay me. I have the privilege of being loved by a Deity who is so cruel that he set up mutually exclusive commandments: Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and you must also be fruitful and multiply.

    Oh, yeah, I got dunked understanding all this and I followed the logic all the way to its end and it was way too painful to contemplate, so I towed the party lion for years and years and years.

    I hated Baptist theology for leaving all those poor ignorant bastards out in the cold with no mercy, while murderers could say a little prayer and go to heaven.

    I hadn’t yet been able to articulate what I hated about Mormon theology that required perfect behavior (from people whose very purpose is to fail and learn) with no mercy, and the people who didn’t swear, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and followed ALL the rules, got to go to the finest of heavens no matter how good in heart they were.

    Mormons: God loves you enough to bless you when you obey his commandments. By the way, here’s a list of the rules. Be perfect and you will get ALL the blessings. Bonus! You won’t have to go to that trashy heaven where all the trashy people are, which might as well be hell.

    Baptists: God loves you no matter what you do, as long as you’re saved. Sorry to all the murder victims out there who won’t see their murderers punished. You won’t care once you’re dead and living in a nicer mansion than your murderer. Sorry to all you folks who never heard of Jesus. We’ll feel sorry for your eternal suffering from above.

    Mormons have no mercy.

    Baptists have no justice.

    Narrator: And the little girl stomped her foot and screamed, “IT’S JUST NOT FAIR!”

    So here we go …

    Over the years I have grown in my faith in the Heavenly Parents [hereinafter referred to as Deity] and their love for us, no matter how many times I fall prey to the “I’m being punished for not following ALL the rules” mindset. I have grown in my faith that the Deity are all powerful, all seeing, and all knowing.

    But there’s the rub. Why would an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing Deity need to send their only begotten son to atone for our sins? Why would an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing Deity need their only begotten son to judge us in the last day to decide our eternal fate?

    I was thirty-something before I could bring myself to ask this question, though it had been simmering in my mind since I was 8. It was a very painful question to approach, even as delicately as I did. It was an even harder question to form into words to myself. And it was hard as hell all get-out to actually say it out loud and explain my reasoning to somebody. Half my literary oeuvre is dedicated to pondering this topic. By the time I asked the question so baldly in a book, it just made me angry.

    This is the question I can’t answer and haven’t been able to get a satisfactory answer from any Christian of any stripe:

    Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present Deity need an intercessor between them and their children to administer justice or grant mercy?

  • Facebook thinks I’m a Black woman

    I hate Facebook. Firstly, the interface confuses me. Secondly, the people in charge think they know me, know what I want, and know what’s best for me. They don’t. If they did, I’d be even more pissed. Thirdly, I’m sick of the ads in the middle of videos. Put an ad in a video I’m watching, the rest of that video is not getting watched (also looking at you too, YouTube).

    But this isn’t new; it’s just that now I’m not getting anything I need from social media that attracted me to it in the first place, and it’s all because they think they know what you want to see, and then serves up ads for that.

    Here’s the meat of it: You click one thing that’s interesting to you, and social media thinks that’s who you are and the only thing you want to see.

    TWITTER.

    In the early days, the point of Twitter was to see interesting conversations between people you did not follow and who did not follow you, drop in on them, add your 2 cents, and make new, interesting friends. It was like a cocktail party set to mêlée and everybody had fun.

    Now, not so much. First, you don’t see many people you don’t already follow or who follow you. Second, people guard their tribes as if it’s inside a ten-foot-thick block of ice. Prepare to be ignored or chased out of the conversation.

    Twitter’s usefulness for me is gone.

    PINTEREST.

    In the early days, the point of Pinterest was to see random things that caught your eye. You pinned them to your board. Searching was encouraged, but who would think to search for things like “Altoid tin art” if you’ve never heard of it before? I was introduced to many, many things I never knew existed through the chaos that was the Pinterest home page. “Search!” they say. “Search!” Um…can’t search what I’ve never encountered.

    Now … all you see is different versions of the same things you’ve already pinned. I do not want another elaborate late Victorian, early Edwardian spiral staircase that has been lovingly restored in the same color stain, same carpet, and same wallpaper (almost always William Morris).

    This is not useful.

    FACEBOOK.

    They have the videos tab there. I can’t stand to let a notification badge go unclicked, so I click the videos tab on my iPad. ONE TIME, I clicked on a video to watch how weaves were done. ONCE. I was curious, so I clicked. Now that’s all Facebook shows me. I want the chaos that encourages discovery, not the same stuff I looked at once to satisfy my curiosity.

    Nothing is going to change, I know. I’m shilling books (when I get up the courage to do so, I mean), and Facebook’s treatment of my posts is another rant for another day, which I will not do because everybody knows about it and rants about it and nothing changes.

    Thus, I am on Facebook because that’s really where my readers are—if Facebook allows me to reach them without paying to do so (which is a rant for another day).

    I have to remind myself: If the service is free, I’m the service. But damn. I’m missing out on a lot of fun stuff I don’t know exists and thus, cannot search for it. If you expand my horizons by showing me stuff I’ve never seen before, you would expand your list of things you can advertise.

    Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook: I’m not who you think I am, so go back to allowing me to decide what I want to look at.