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July 17, 2016

July 17, 2016

One of the many things running gives me each day is an opportunity to think: to reflect on whatever’s going on in life, to anticipate what’s to come, to process that which has already happened (or is happening), and to simply try to make sense of it all and figure out my place, role, or situation therein. It simultaneously winds me up and allows me to unwind. Running, and in particular, marathon training, has given me endless opportunities to get inside my head and attempt to solve whatever maladies have cropped up in life. Have a problem? Go for a run. It’ll solve it. Miles will do the trick.

…except sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, for as great as running is — and I do sincerely think it’s pretty rad, obviously — running can’t solve every problem out there. It’s an unrealistic expectation to have, and I’d be asking too much of a physical activity, of a series of repetitive movements, to help elucidate some of my most important questions. The cathartic and meditative aspects of running can definitely help me see things more clearly, but unfortunately, even this great sport of mine can’t help me solve or understand everything, try — and try — as I might.

It has been one year, exactly, since my 30 year-old cousin, and mother of an 18 month-old daughter at the time, overdosed on heroin in northeast Ohio and died. One year. July 17, 2016. Last summer, my girls and I were visiting my family at the time, and I saw my cousin literally the day before she overdosed: probably about 12 hours before, even. My kids and I were staying at my parents’ house, and I was in bed for most of the afternoon feeling awful with a likely not-yet-diagnosed-colitis flare. My cousin was at my parents’ house, helping to clean their place for them, for which my parents were extremely grateful. When I eventually got out of bed, my cousin and I — and later, my aunt (her mom) and my parents and my kids — were all hanging out on my parents’ back porch, bullshitting, talking about our daughters and what mischief they were making, just typical parent banter. There was nothing special or life-altering to this conversation. My cousin said that she, too, was feeling like shit and that she was going to go home that night, take some Tylenol, and hopefully get to bed early. I thought nothing was remarkable about the conversation — it was a conversation I could have had with just about anyone, anywhere — and I definitely didn’t infer from anything my cousin said that she was using (again) or that she had something nefarious up her sleeve for later. We were simply humans — relatives who hadn’t seen each other in at least a year-plus, since whenever the last time was that our paths crossed when I was visiting Ohio — catching up and hanging out for a quick minute in mid-July. The mundanity of the evening, of the conversation, was universal.  

That was the last time I heard her voice and saw her alive.

The following day, after running in the morning, I was at a grocery store, standing in the dairy section picking something up for my parents, and my dad called me and simply said she’s gone. Hearing his words — words that my family and I knew could always be a possibility to hear, given what we understood to be my cousin’s ongoing battle with addiction — knocked the wind out of me. Knowing that there’s always a possibility of something coming down the pike is profoundly different than actually having it come to fruition, of hearing the unspeakable actually be spoken, no matter how much you know in your heart of hearts that it’s a possibility. We all know we will all someday die, but we still have that sense of incredulity when we learn that someone we know personally — someone we love, maybe someone to whom we are related — is gone. My knees instantly felt like they buckled, and before I knew it, I was crouching on the floor of a stupid grocery store, on the phone with my husband (who had just flown home two days before), calling and telling him the news in disbelief. Not long later, I had to figure out how to explain to my eldest — just over 5 at the time — how mommy’s cousin died (and what that means to die, to cease being alive) because of something bad called drugs, something that she put in her body on her own volition that hurt it so much that mommy’s cousin’s body just wasn’t strong enough to deal with it and so it stopped working forever. Wrapping my 32 year-old mind around my 30 year-old cousin dying from an overdose was challenging enough, but how the hell could I help my five year-old conceptualize this in a way that’d make any sense to her? Where do you even start?

And thus began the past year of processing, wondering, endlessly questioning and searching for answers — any answers — that could help me understand — that could help me understand literally anything related to addiction and using. Fuck looking for a needle in a haystack; trying to understand this stuff is like searching for a distinct grain of sand in the Sahara. Where and how do you even start?

If you follow national news even just in passing, you’ve probably seen that Ohio is in the throes of a horrendous opioid scourge. Basically anytime I see Ohio in the news from California — anytime Ohio makes its way to national news — it’s almost always opioid-related. I could throw statistics out here to help quantify the dilemma, but they’ll become outdated quickly, and numbers don’t illuminate the very real and more important human element of the problem. Here’s a quick one, though, and it’s fairly memorable: recent numbers suggest that on average, Akron is seeing about 9-10 people daily for overdoses. Akron’s not that big of a city, so that’s a fairly staggering number. Heroin is so cheap and ubiquitous now that when you take its accessibility and relative affordability and compound it with a population of people who are taking prescription painkillers (and whose prescriptions eventually run out but who have since become addicted and/or still need pain relief), it turns disastrous. That’s, of course, just in addition to people who would have used/abused in the first place, without transitioning to it from prescription painkillers. Clearly, it’s a pretty shitty scenario. Akron’s BOE is even trying to get Narcan into middle schools and high schools so that in the event of a middle schooler or high schooler overdosing on school property (which hasn’t yet happened — yet being the operative word), or coming to school after overdosing/coming into contact with the drugs at home, administrators can deliver the agents and possibly save students’ lives. And for as horrible as all of this is, this doesn’t even touch on the tragedies that have surfaced this year that involve children — toddlers, FFS! — who somehow get ahold of drugs, ingest them (as toddlers are wont to do, putting foreign objects in their mouths all the time to explore their world), and die. Holy shit. It’s that bad. It may sound like fear-mongering, but the horrific statistics show that this epidemic is literally killing individuals, young and old alike, all over Ohio.  

My cousin died just days after her 30th birthday and very shortly after the July 4th weekend, when carfentanil-laced heroin hit the streets of Akron. If you don’t know what carfentanil is, welcome to the club; very few people, including police, did before the 7/4 weekend last year. It’s a large animal sedative — think elephants, zebras, that sort of thing — and when vets administer it, they wear full-on hazmat suits because even the smallest traces can be deadly to humans. Fentanyl-laced heroin was already present there — fentanyl being the drug that toxicologists think Prince overdosed on, a synthetic (human-made) opioid that’s 50x more potent than heroin and 100x more potent than morphine, according to the CDC — so buying heroin apparently has become (much more of) a gamble in the past year. When you buy, you don’t really know what’s in what you’re getting; I guess that’s part of the risk and reward. You may get a much stronger and higher high — the purpose of lacing the drug with fentanyl or carfentanil — but your coveted high also might kill you swiftly and effortlessly, annihilating you before the needle’s out of your arm and your body’s on the floor. I don’t know what was in the heroin that killed my cousin, nor do I think speculating about it is all that helpful, but I can’t help but wonder since she died shortly after carfentanil made its debut in Akron. I’ll never know, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. She’s still gone. No (further) explanation can change that. It just sucks.

Suffice it to say that addiction is a beast. I have tried so hard to understand it in the past year, following my cousin’s death, and it has taken me nearly a year to realize that no matter how many articles I study that talk about what’s ravaging NE OH right now, or how many books about addiction I read from experts or clinicians or whoever, or how many websites I frustratingly stumble upon that needlessly politicize and moralize addiction — basically maintaining that addiction is indicative more of a “moral failing” and that it, as a medical condition, simply doesn’t exist; that it boils down to a simple choice to use or not to use, “because no one forces you to put a needle in your arm” — no matter how much I read, and how many questions I ask, and how much I hash and rehash my cousin’s situation with my family, I will never be able to arrive at a) any answers that will completely satisfy me or b) any answers at all. I want to rationalize and understand this, just as I do for basically everything else in my life, but I can’t. I’m simply incapable.

As a family member who has been trying to make sense of a death of a loved one, that’s frustrating as hell.

To be sure, probably the only unanimous thing I’ve read about addiction is that “getting it” on even the most rudimentary level will simply be beyond my understanding because I’m not an addict. Addiction is something that only addicts can understand … and understandably, for a grieving family member, for someone who wonders nearly every single day if I could have done something differently, if my family and I could have helped in some way, if we could have loved her or supported her more or less or differently, that feeling of relegated powerlessness is pretty shitty.

I’ve spent many of my runs in the past year trying to make sense of my cousin’s death. At times, I have been so, so very mad at her — raging mid-run and wondering how could you do this? How could you do this to your 18 month-old daughter?! How could you do this to your parents, who have done so much for you?! — and other times, I have felt nothing but sympathy, thinking that she was simply incapable of seeing the larger picture, of seeing beyond herself and her own self-interests, and that her addiction was what eroded her senses and brought her down to a universe where she — and only she — existed. Anger, sympathy, acceptance: I guess that’s the stages of grief, right?

Thinking about my cousin’s death in such emotional terms has done me no favors in accepting that she’s gone, but this article my sister shared with me in the past few months helped my non-addict mind understand the biology behind addiction just a little bit better. I still have so many questions, and I know I’ll never get the answers (or that even if I do, they won’t sufficiently lessen the blow of her death), but in the past year, I’ve come to terms with my cousin being more at peace now — in death — than she ever was in life, particularly in the recent past before she died. She used, she was clean for a while, she used again, she stopped — whatever her cycle was, I’ll never know what (or who, or why, or how she felt that) compelled her to start using again, and even if I did know, the answer would get me nowhere. I think it’s natural to want to point fingers and assign blame, but again: doing so won’t change a thing. Having answers to all my questions won’t bring her back, it won’t return her to her daughter, nor will it return her to my aunt and uncle.

I don’t blame my cousin for her own death, for being an addict, any more than I’d blame any other relative of mine for getting cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, or whatever; in the crudest terms possible, my cousin had an imbalance, a neurological misfiring that led her to a downward, self-destructive spiral that she was incapable of successfully navigating. That my cousin suffered from addiction doesn’t make her any less of a good person, a doting mother, or a hard-working and loving daughter; it simply speaks to the gravity of the absolute beast, bitch, hell, and fuckupedness that the disease of addiction is and the totality of destruction it can wreak on your life. It can literally happen to anyone, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s some genetic predisposition that we, societally, have yet to fully understand about this leviathanic, no-holds-barred disease. I don’t know. I doubt people who use do so thinking that they will become an addict one day and destroy their lives; hell, the very last thing my cousin posted on facebook was a link to an ABJ article that highlighted how many people had overdosed in Akron in the preceding days, and she editorialized how outrageous and saddening she thought it was. She, herself, was gone 2, maybe 3 days later, to the same thing she had lamented. What shitty irony, Alanis. Maybe my cousin — like many of us — thought she was invincible, incapable of succumbing to something over which she was positively certain she had control. Unfortunately, heartbreakingly, she was wrong.

As I’ve searched for clarity in the past year, it destroys me to know that her daughter will grow up only with the memories of her mother that her family members share with her. When G turned 18 months, I immediately felt joy — another milestone! getting so big and independent!– but also a sense that I can only liken to dread or despair, knowing that that was my cousin’s daughter’s age when my cousin died. It made the salt on the gaping wound burn more intensely.   

Nearly a year later now, I still periodically look at my cousin’s fb page — thinking that maybe what I know happened didn’t actually happen — and the endless RIP messages, the wish you were here, thinking of you, needing to hear your voice one more time messages rip me to shreds every single time. I read and re-read my cousin’s obit and am saddened, of course, but also can’t help but feel a sense of pride that my aunt and uncle explicitly talked about their daughter’s addiction and her succumbing to it. I can’t commend or applaud their bravery and courageousness enough. They could have said nothing, but they chose to talk.

I think it is really easy — tempting, even — for us to think that people who are most affected by the opioid epidemic are some shadowy figures in the underbelly of society, sketchy moral degenerates who lurk in back alleyways in major cities, but the truth of the matter is much more nuanced. It always is. People from all walks of life, from all professions, with tons of wealth or no money to their name — and their families, who are thusly implicated — now make up the tapestry of people whose lives have been undone, if not altogether ended, by this godforsaken epidemic. Lawmakers now have a huge opportunity to do something productive to combat this epidemic, but before that happens, it behooves us to talk about addiction in frank, clinical, and medical terms — as a disease, not a moral failing, not a “choice,” — much as we would if we talked about someone with heart disease, diabetes, or anything else. Addiction (and basically anything related to mental health) already has enough of a stigma; there’s seriously no need to add more to it.

You may think that you don’t know anyone whose life has been touched by addiction in some way, but by staying with me this long, reading my diatribe, now you can say that you do. My family isn’t the only one out there.

While I am not so delusional to think that my running will bring my cousin back to life or do anything to rectify or “cure” her (or anyone) of addiction, I am at least thankful that running has given me many, many opportunities over the past year to come to terms — maybe not peace, but I’m working on that — with my cousin’s abbreviated life. I look at my girls and my nephews and hope that they will never know a life ravaged by addiction. When I run trails, particularly through the expanse that connects Monument Peak over to Mission Peak and Mt. Allison, it’s often in that space — the area where I’m surrounded by nothing but hillsides, completely exposed, and rarely with any other sentient beings present, save for the occasional cow — where I think of my cousin the most and wonder what could have been for her and her life.

 

In this expanse of nothing, when it’s basically my thoughts and my environment, I inhale deeply and think that for as heartbroken as my family and I are, maybe my cousin’s death will be a wake-up call to someone — maybe the people who also used with whom she ran around, maybe whoever it was who got her to use again after being clean, maybe the person who sold her the batch that killed her — that momentary, opioid-induced highs are fleeting and that no one is invincible. It’s my sincerest hope that in thinking rationally about addiction — in talking about it, in problematizing and deconstructing the very real and complex and multi-faceted components that comprise such a profoundly life-altering and life-destroying disease — that somehow, someone, somewhere will effect some positive social change about it. It is so terribly awful that my cousin is gone, but maybe her death will help save someone’s life.

 

 

It has taken me nearly a year to figure out how to write about my cousin’s death here — on a running blog — and I know that I’m still not adequately capturing my cousin’s life, her essence, or her love for her daughter or parents. Though I will never be able to fully understand the magnitude of my cousin’s addiction or its destroying of her, as a family member, I can and do continue to mourn her and love her. If there was something I could have done, anything I could have said, to have helped her in some way, I would have. All of us would have. The only solace I can find is that in her death, she is no longer suffering… and that’s enough.

Nicole, we miss you and love you. Rest in peace.     

2016: a year.

2016: a year.

When 2015 closed and 2016 began, I wrote, rather snarkily, that my singular goal for the new year was “to go forth and kick ass.” No doubt that life is hard to plan for any of us, especially a year out, and especially when you’ve just had your second kid and are getting used to life with two kids, your oldest starting school, and the whirlwind of change that your body and mind goes through postpartum, so perhaps needless to say, I had no fucking clue how 2016 would pan out. Having done this postpartum dance before with running, I knew that it’d behoove me to simply take things a day at a time — really, that’s all that any of us can ever do, right? — and to not get too far ahead of myself.

The executive summary: my 2016 year of running, somewhere around 2010-2020 miles, was fantastic, though at times, it was shitty. Racing and training was arguably better in 2016 than it’s ever been, depending on how you slice it, and most importantly — and I do mean most importantly — the miles, the training, the racing, all of it was injury-free. I can’t ask for more than that.

Some highlights and lowlights from the year, in no particular order:

(+)

Running trails more frequently. I’m incredibly fortunate to live in an area of the country that has basically perfect running weather year-round and one that’s also home to a rich array of trails. While many parks and preserves require a decent drive from where I live, Monument Peak and Alum Rock are both very nearly in my backyard, and I spent more time running in both and AR and MP this year than in years past. Whether I was running with the baby through parts of AR with Wolfpack teammate Janet or going long with Saurabh and company on their 50k/50mi/100k training runs through Monument Peak (et al), I’ve come to the realization again and again that trail running is just good for the soul. It may sound like hippy-dippy-nonsense shit, but god is it true. I love roads, I love running as fast as I can and racing to exhaustion, but there really is something to be said for chasing elevation for a change and hauling ass up what seems like veritable Everests so you can experience a piece of the world that’s inaccessible otherwise. And — practically speaking — I’m convinced that the trails and hills made me faster on roads, helped keep me healthy, and got me strong as I worked on my strength in this first year postpartum.   

what up, Monument Peak
what up, Monument Peak
Mission-bound
Mission-bound

Tons of stroller miles with one/both of the girls. I spent tons of time on the road with one or both of my girls in 2016, either for regular ol’ training runs or “commuting” (to/from school drop-offs/pick-ups). Stroller running makes the already challenging motion of running much more difficult, no doubt, but it also makes it a lot more fun (usually). These days, when I ask the baby if she wants to go for a run, she basically drops whatever she’s doing and has a big smile on her face and runs in the direction of the stroller. Big Sis will often ask to go on a run with me, big smile across her face, too, so I feel like I’m doing something right here. I don’t push my kids to like this sport just because I do, but it’s nice to know that they’re growing up knowing that regular physical activity is part of a normal/healthy lifestyle.

these two
these two

Volunteering and spectating at RNR SJ and CIM with Big Sis. I love racing, but I think spectating comes in at a very close second. Again this year, Big Sis and I volunteered with Wolfpack as course monitors along the RocknRoll San Jose course. Doing so allowed us to keep the runners safe (natch) while we cheered and cowbelled our little hearts out. There’s no shame in my game, here: I can’t tell you how much I teared up watching Big Sis cheer her heart out for the runners, and the joy on her face when runners veered over to her for side-5s couldn’t have been more perfect. In December, we trekked up to Sac to spectate and cheer at mile 21 at CIM. It was a perfect day for a marathon, and we got to spend part of the morning with Paula while we all cheered and cowbelled so hard that one of us (ahem) began to feel very, very faint. If you ever want to make a five year-old’s day at a race, take two steps outside the tangent to give her/him a side-5.

RNR SJ '16
RNR SJ ’16
mi 21 at CIM '16
mi 21 at CIM ’16

Racing in FL over a girls’ weekend with my mom, sister, and sister-in-law. Over my sister’s birthday weekend, she, our mother, and my sister-in-law and I all flew to Jacksonville, FL, for a girls’ weekend away at the beach. I had won an entry to a half marathon there, and the weekend shook out to be about 95% R&R and 5% running. It’s rare that I get quality time with my family sans children running underfoot, and it was just a wonderful weekend away. Bonus: I ran my second-fastest HM ever, and as a workout, so I got a boost of confidence for my autumn marathon training.

family shot!
family shot!
steps from the finish line in the godforsaken sand
steps from the finish line in the godforsaken sand

Tying my marathon PR at 7 mos postpartum and then breaking my PR at 15 mos. PP. I took a bit of a leap of faith and decided to race my first marathon at 7 mos. PP in Modesto, and the training and race fared much better than I anticipated, resulting in my basically tying my PR. About seven months later, the universe aligned even better, and I finally broke my three-year-old marathon PR at Two Cities Marathon while having a good time downstate with Meredith. At TCM, I raced feeling calmer and stronger than ever before, and I am stoked to see how I can continue to improve.

P-fucking-R Cityyyyyyyy
P-fucking-R Cityyyyyyyy

Pacing a first-time marathoner to a 3:30 (and BQ). I had a rare opportunity to run an inaugural marathon and also help unofficially pace a first-time marathoner, and it was the perfect way for me to approach a marathon that I had otherwise felt a bit mentally burnt-out on. Sometimes when you’ve been doing something for a long time, you forget the little steps along the way that help enliven the process, and I couldn’t have been more pleased to share my 27th marathon nearly side-by-side with my unofficial co-pacer and friend, Chris, and his 9run6 friend and first-time marathoner, Alexia, who’d go on to finish in 3:30 — a BQ ain’t too shabby for your first marathon, gal!

Very unexpectedly PRing my half. Just a couple weeks after my marathon PR at TCM, I showed up to the Berkeley half marathon without any expectation or goal, and I was absolutely floored to destroy a three-year-old half marathon PR. I had long ago put that HM PR up on the shelf, thinking that it’d be forever untouchable, so I can’t even begin to describe the rush and joy that I get when I think of how that race went, how much fun it was, and how strong I felt from start to finish.  

another fun running adventure with Meredith and Meg :) so good to have some fun miles with these two this year
another fun running adventure with Meredith and Meg 🙂 so good to have some fun miles with these two this year
finish line pic!
finish line pic!

Getting a colitis diagnosis. This is a double-edged sword. After basically 7 years of “stomach problems,” with a couple pregnancies, international travel, surgeries, life, and everything else thrown into the mix, my GI here diagnosed me with a type of colitis that’d likely explain the incessant “stomach problems” I’ve been experiencing. With his diagnosis came medicine; with medicine came relief and an abatement of symptoms. It’s like science works or something. Crazy, isn’t it. +1000 to my improved quality of life.

(-)

Getting a colitis diagnosis. The double-edged sword aspect is that I got a colitis diagnosis, one which I’ll have for the rest of my life, adding to my other autoimmune disorder gem. I spent more time in my GI’s office, peppering him with questions, than I did with any other practitioner this year (and probably many of them combined). After a lot of conversation with him and a battery of tests, he came to this diagnosis, and together we decided that the drug’s benefits outweighed its risks. Within weeks, I had relief. I hope that this colitis becomes just something minor to manage, and while I obviously am not keen on having another lifelong autoimmune disorder that necessitates daily medication, I am grateful to have a good relationship with my GI and have no trouble being my own biggest advocate. One of the biggest takeaways I have from 2016, maybe a subject for a future post, is that the relationship we have with our bodies is one of the most important relationships we’ll ever have, and it behooves us to advocate for ourselves accordingly.   

A DNS at the SF Marathon & at pacing Santa Rosa. That colitis diagnosis I keep talking about? Well, before we got it all sorted out, let’s just say it did a number on my running and on my day-to-day life. I ultimately decided to DNS at SF Marathon and to not pace 3:35 at Santa Rosa — both decisions I wasn’t particularly eager to make — because of how god-awful my stomach felt. I have only DNSed a couple times since I started doing this stuff in ‘07, but I absolutely knew that I was making the right call at the time. As runners, it can be really hard to swallow our pride and not follow through on our goals, but if we want to do this stuff for a long time, we gotta take the long view and think big-picture. Easier said than done, I know.

My 30 year-old cousin’s death. Not at all related to running, but very much affecting my life this year, was the death of my 30 year-old cousin. I haven’t talked about it here at all, and I’m still trying to figure out (six months later) how and where I can go with it for a post — because it matters — but my thirty year-old cousin died from a heroin overdose, leaving behind her 18-month-old daughter and her parents, my aunt and uncle, without their only child. Opioid abuse has reached an epidemic level in this country, and northeast Ohio is in the thick of it. It’s heartbreaking, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone back to read her obit, thinking that I didn’t actually get the call that I did with the news, or look at her fb page (again thinking that it’s not real), only to see a litany of RIP messages. Quite honestly, it sucks. As a parent, I can’t fathom what my relatives have to be going through. I can’t rationalize it, it’s beyond my comprehension, and every time I read a news story about heroin or opioids in this country, I get equal parts depressed and just pissed as hell. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought of her, wondering if I could have said something or done something — I saw her not even 12 hours before her death — and my heart is shattered for my aunt and uncle. It’s awful. Running isn’t therapy, and no number of miles that I run will bring her back or make her not use heroin or hurt her family, but god have I ever hashed and rehashed scenarios like these (and others) in my head over so many runs since she died in mid-July.

The relationship that we develop with our bodies is a powerful one, and arguably, it’s one that many of us tend to take for granted. Once we get into the rhythm of running regularly, or running injury-free, many of us just assume that day in and day out, we’ll be able to wake-up, do our running thing, and get on with our lives. It’s often not until something huge interrupts our flow that we realize shit, a lot has to happen (on a macro and micro level) in order for me to run, and suddenly our presumption that our hobby of choice will always be there transforms into a sheer attitude of gratitude of being able to just do said hobby in the first place.

While (fortunately) 2016 didn’t beset me with any injuries, or really any niggles to speak of, as I worked to gain strength and speed in that first year postpartum — while also dealing with the shitstorm that was my stomach, and later, the anguish over my cousin — I guess you could say that I fortified my attitude toward running, both currently and in the long-term. I’m not a “have to” runner these days, nor do I plan to be one anytime soon. I don’t have to run. I get to run.

Having an attitude of gratitude toward this little hobby of mine no doubt helped fuel the fire toward getting stronger, getting faster, and just having a fucking ball out there in 2016. I didn’t expect to set any PRs this soon out from kiddo dos, and while those I set were of course awesome and special, most of my memories from this year come from all the “chop wood/carry water” miles along the way — the daily grind; the running with my kids; the trail adventures; the miles, roads, and routes that become part and parcel of my daily life.

I think I turned a corner in 2016 with my running. That said, I’m intrigued to see what’s down the road in 2017. More than that, though, I’m honestly just grateful to get to be on the road in the first place (cheese cheese cheese, but true). We’ll see what happens. I’m amenable.