My Tooth Hurts & Reality Bites – Sorta.

“Sunlight is an Antiseptic” – Seth Godin (On Transparency)

My tooth is KILLING my other teeth.  They’re all in a row screaming at me to help this one tooth that I have neither the insurance or money to do.

It’s been a week since I last blogged because — well — writing is an act of honesty, of transparency.  For me, anyway.  It’s hard to put on airs or keep up facades when I write.  I mean the act is after all — Me in a silent room with my aunt’s borrowed iBook G4 computer.  And, as the Cubans say, “presumiendo” makes me feel “tan fina como el trapo de la cosina.”  That translates into: Presuming makes me feel as refined as a kitchen rag.  It makes more sense in Spanish.

Anyway, WHAT I’m trying to get at is that I’d like to blog about something helpful, positive, face-saving, but the truth of the matter is that’s just my ego trying — yet again — to avoid vulnerability, shame, and outside judgment.  It turns out I can’t help that I’m a flawed human creature thing, and my tooth hurts, and I don’t have any money for health insurance or a dentist right now.

Also, although I LOVE my art (writing and making movies), and doing it obsessively (non-stop until I pass out from physical exhaustion), the rest of my life feels beyond unmanageable.

My Part Time B Job (although I’m grateful for it) — well — hurts.  Financially, I make enough money to put $30 in my gas tank per week, eat off the Jack’s $1 menu twice a day, and go see a play once a month.  The rest of the little $$ Bling-Bling Cha-Ching I have left I always invest into my art materials — a hard drive, complimentary books (for reviewers), packaging materials, mailings, etc.  Oh yeah, and rent.

I hustle for the rest — give a little here, take a little there — in an ethical spiritual way, of course.  For instance, my aunt ROCKS and lets me use her iBook G4 laptop and I write kick arse letters on my aunt’s behalf and stay later at work to help her with her tax stuff.  My friend Linda Marie helped with all the complex formatting/tech stuff for my book The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive in order to submit it to my AMAZEDAWG (highly recommended) book distribution company Lightning Source, and I bought her dinz a bunch of times aka Ceviche Loco and paid her a bargain-price sum in small installments whenever I got paid.  Also, I am ALWAYS there for her if she ever needs help on a project, which she knows.  Etc, Etc … The poor man’s life in a capitalist system proves to be the only time communism actually works.  Tribe Members helping each other  — organically, fluidly, with an abundant spirit — realize their dreams.

I’m profoundly grateful for the blessed life I have, for the supportive, loving, brilliant, and generous group of people I am surrounded by, and privileged to call my family and friends.

That being said, I’m quite burnt out on living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, the hustle & bustle of keeping head above water …

SO, first step to changing this dynamic in my life is admitting to myself — very frankly — that it’s real and I need it to change.

What exactly needs to change?  Well, I’m not exactly sure …  These are the things I know for sure:

1) My sole purpose in life is to grow spiritually and make the art I love (movies & books).

2) Since I graduated college 7 years ago, I’ve tried to make money working full-time jobs and part-time jobs within the movie industry as a runner, receptionist, office & on-set PA, executive assistant, assistant editor, & editor in the mainstream studio system, the indie fiction world, and the documentary world (that def. being my fave).  I’ve made up to $1500 a week, yet none of these jobs quelled the restless ball of barbed wire bouncing restlessly within my chest — hankering for something more. After 1 week at a gig (like clockwork) dissatisfaction & depression would kick in and I wanted out.  Still, I’d muster up enough energy to stay between 3 months – 10 months.  After all, rent is due!

Then I thought: WELL, maybe I’ll just cut the crap and admit to myself that the only career that could make me truly happy would be one centered around the films and books brewing in me cabeza & corazon — to work on my art and help my friends out with their art.

Case closed.  Understood and accepted.  I’d relentlessly and unabashedly work on my projects and my friends’ projects because really that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.  I understand that building a career as a writer & filmmaker is going to take time — no prob, let’s get to work 🙂

Still, I need money — for equipment, rent, food, gas, car … Hmmmm, well okay I’ll apply to grants!  I know lots of artists, writers, and filmmakers living off grants!  My first short fiction film in college was funded by a $5,000 McNamara Arts Grant and it was the first grant I ever applied to!  In the meanwhile, I’ll work b-jobs I don’t have to take home with me: Sold packing tape, was a tutor, sold more packing tape, and then settled as a part-time executive assistant.  Jobs that drain bones of their luster, but kept them fed.  I applied to various grants over this 3 year period: Film Grants, Writing Grants, Minority Grants, Woman Grants … Grant Applications that usually took an entire Saturday & Sunday and probably most of Monday to do.  40 hours of work per application, thanks to that perfectionist watchdog a-hole — me.  Nothing. Got no grants.

All right then — next plan …

Well, all of my film equipment is 7 years old by this point — hanging in there with me, my body hasn’t been checked out by a doctor in about a year and a half, and hospital/credit card/school loan debt grows interest by the day.

My book is getting good reviews, my feature screenplay is one draft from being its ultimate best, and by now it’s ready to start researching/approaching appropriate producers … Which is beyond RAD.

But I’m still broker than a stripper on crack.

SO, I applied to grad school for my master’s in film theory!  I’d LOVE to teach film at a junior college while I continue making my art.  The school loans will keep me alive while I go to school (I can also afford to upgrade some equipment & buy some more necessary materials), and once I graduate — the degree will get me a professor-pay job that I’ll most likely LOVE (since I love watching movies, discussing them, and writing about them more than drinking 40’s, eating tres-leches cakes, and making out with beautiful chicas, which = A LOT OF LOVE) AND the mula made there will help me invest in my art projects and pay off debt.

Woohoo!  Now, there’s about 4 months until I hear if I was accepted by grad school and 6 months until grad school begins … Getting out of bed to make it to my exec assistant part-time job seems an almost impossible task by this point … for the barbed-wire ball is bouncing in my chest again and the money’s hella tight (close to non-existent).  GAHHHH!  This. way. isn’t. working. anymore.

Please baby jesus let me get into grad school and receive massive amounts of fafsa money and in the meanwhile — help me figure out what to do!

I must chuck my pride into the toilet and apply for an EBT card so that I can afford to shop at Trader Joe’s, which will stop the fast food industry from raping my cholesterol and blood sugar levels!

UM, so there you have it.  Transparency.  Godin’s right.  Sunlight is an antiseptic.  I feel better already.  Doing the “I’m so fabulously together I blog about it” song & dance is FAR more humiliating and boring.

I’ll finish with a quick fun little story:

2 weeks ago I was honored to be invited by event sponsor Moet & Chandon
as a guest blogger to renowned spanish newspaper La Opinion’s esteemed Latina Leader Awards (Mujeres Destacadas Awards/Luncheon) at the beautiful Millenium Biltmore where 30 inspirational leaders of the Latina community were recognized for their priceless contributions to American society in 4 different categories: Leadership, Health, Arts & Culture, and Education.

After the valet parks my car (there was no street parking or affordable parking lot nearby), I rush to a stall in the women’s bathroom and text my mom this:

Mamushka, please transfer 50 bucks into my account. I have no money to pay for parking! Lol! I get out in 2-3 hours. That’s when I would need the money. This place is swanky!!! ;)”

The first half covered my Chase account overdraft, and the rest of it went to parking.

All that said & done, I’m comforted by the fact that Winona Ryder sorta went through something like this too.  Even if only in a movie.  One of the funnest movies EVER!: Reality Bites … It does sometimes, Winona.  I agree.

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Tic Toc the alligator chimes — And Bradley Manning’s on my mind.

3:17 am or so …

I’m blogging with one finger on my annoyingly tiny android keypad. The power in the house is out, which means no computers are available to fiddle with and distract me from the ocean breeze reverberating through my ear.  It sounds as if I’ve had a concha shell pressed against it for hours.

I have SO much to do. If only I could use my computer  RIGHT now, but alas I must wait till’ morning.  The email replies, personalized query letters with accompanying press release, and book packages for mailing to reviewers will just have to wait … until well, later today.

Tic Toc the alligator chimes in the ambience of night.  My To Do list can’t be ameliorated and Bradley Manning overpowers my anxiety.  He’s become louder than the simulated concha shell reverberations.

Bradley Manning has been on my mind for the last several weeks.  Since I first read his story.

Please read it Here 1 & Here 2.

I keep replaying his quote about simply wanting to have had a normal life, to have had a nice family, help others …

All the things most of us middle-class Americans were raised to want to do and be …

I keep thinking about how his wanting this too genuinely, too purely has cost him his freedom and safety, the rest of his life.

I keep thinking about his humanity — how his humanity got the better of him, made him  susceptible to self-sacrificing heroic acts, and vulnerable to getting caught and punished for them.

I keep thinking about how Obama, one of life’s sad disappointments, gets the Nobel Peace Prize based on no real showmanship, but on Hope that he’ll show half the self-sacrifice, half the compassion, half the conscience, half the heart of Bradley Manning. Beyonce sang before millions of viewers at Obama’s inauguration while he and his wife shared a proud and tender dance.  We all hopefully celebrated that dance as one of two well-intentioned people who wanted to promote fairness — peace, freedom, equality, honesty — in the world  through their leadership and guidance. We rolled out the red carpet and handed over our futures, and the social security funds of our grandparents, to this union hoping that they’d embody the integrity and bravery of Bradley Manning.

And what do we do with the real, as opposed to symbolic, Bradley Manning?

We allow him to be charged with espionage, to be locked in a cell where he’s stripped naked, humiliated, and tortured off and on for almost a year (and counting). We allow our military to seriously consider sentencing him to either the death penalty or life in prison. We allow our elected leader of hope, our nobel prize winning Commander-in-Chief, to punish — in this 23-year old man — all the courage and compassion we profess to unitedly stand for.

I won’t lie. I get nervous posting such political rants — voicing my disappointment in the president of the US and the way he’s run his presidency (not like a Nobel Peace Prize winner), voicing my support for an “enemy of the state” —  in such a heated political climate on such a public forum.  Probably because, as I write, I wonder whether political allegiance or opposition to any person and/or party is even worth the risk?

I come from a Cuban family who supported a revolution that became the dictatorship which stripped them of all their rights. What did all their self-sacrificing support get them?  Immediately following its success, their “for the people” political party (communist) and its leader (F. Castro) turned their beloved Cuba into Alcatraz.  When they grew tired of his tyranny, disagreed, and tried to leave, that political entity quickly deemed them “enemies of the state.”  My mom would get beat up by kids at school who called her “gusano” while the teachers cheered them on. Where did my family’s risky and self-sacrificing political involvement get them?  As soon as they exercised their basic human right to disagree with the politicians they helped bring to power … harassed, robbed, and exiled.

Was it worth it? Opposing Batista, supporting Castro, disagreeing with the Castro regime … getting political at all?

I guess I could ask the same about Bradley Manning.  He’s a brilliant, beautiful, blue-eyed All-American boy from a military family who worked in a cush well-paid military intelligence job, behind the front lines — far away from harm. He had no need or obligation to sacrifice his limitless potential for prosperity, but he did anyway.

Manning joined the military to help his country because, rarely enough, I think he actually respected and believed what it stood for.  Apparently he loved its values — life, liberty, and justice for all — too sincerely because he laid everything on the line to promote them.  Manning seemed motivated in his “treasonous” actions by a genuine disturbance with the inhumane murder of civilians and the military’s hypocritical cover ups.   Manning seems to be a person with heightened empathy and an evolved conscience who cared simultaneously for the welfare of our nation and that of the nation we invaded.  It’s understandable that someone with such a unique double-edged guilt would seek relief from it by confiding in another person. In the person who ratted him out — Adrian Lamo.

I’ve compiled a couple of quotes of from Manning’s IM correspondence with Lamo:

‎”Manning: ive been so isolated so long… i just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life… but events kept forcing me to figure out ways to survive… smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything…americans have so many more rights than non-americans, its awful… i guess i follow humanist values though, have custom dogtags that say “Humanist” … i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public…i dont believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore…  only a plethora of states acting in self interest… with varying ethics and moral standards of course, but self-interest nonetheless”

Read most of their IM Discussion here.

Now he’s locked up, his rights trampled on, and his name dishonored in the name of our national security.

So yes, I’ve been thinking of Bradley Manning a lot lately.  About how we live and die politics, are benefitted or harmed by each other’s political actions,  whether we choose to “get all political” or not.

As an artist, I acknowledge that art usually affects its political landscape subversively.  This often gives an artist the luxury of either negating or accepting the truth that all art is innately political, and every artist responsible for the messages in their work.

As a literary artist, I’ll many times say literally exactly what I mean. Obviously, there’s nothing subversive about this blog post.  It’s political and apparently so am I. Ugh.  It runs in the blood.

Please read more about this American war hero & SIGN the petition to save his life!

Also, please “like” his facebook page to receive regular updates on his trial.

Thanks for reading!

All work no play makes Jack a dull boy

I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep so I’ll write.  The bones in my back are curling over and reaching for the mattress as the still air stings my eyes.  What do I want from me?!  I want something from me, but I can’t put my finger on what exactly.

It’d be nice, in moments like these, to have a pretty love to curl up with.  “In moments like these” being the stand out phrase.  I’ve given up on dating, or at least any active search on my part … for now.

Honestly, a partner person takes a lot of energy.  Energy that is very focused and fueled right now by artistic and spiritual/therapeutic pursuits.  Still, in moments like these, it’d be nice to have a honey to snuggle with.

Cuddling might silence mah’ mind.  Right?  Meh, who knows. Every night it fights against bed time to solve all problems, worries, and wonders.

Alas, only a couple of problems, worries, and wonders were solved yesterday. And such clarity had very little to do with my meandering contemplations. They resulted, I believe, from the dialogue had with the outside world when I participated in a group Think Tank.

I’ve been so obsessed with my book promotion that I haven’t sufficiently fed or nurtured my inner self.  Everything I read, everything I think about has to do with finishing “The Task at Hand.”  “The Task at hand” being promoting my book a.k.a. finishing 50 pages of research on all the phenomenal bloggists and online magazines I’d love to have review it and emailing each one or working for money at the B Job or showing up for people I love when they need me or attempting to complete my written therapy assignments.

After 3 weeks of this routine, I feel hunger pains, the growing dejection of a spirit starved for …

ART.  Other people’s art.  Films, Books, Plays, Music, Blog Posts, and Conversation.

As my friend says, “Vanessa, you can’t be a grown up all the time.”

I lent my grandma When God was A Woman before finishing it because I was so excited about it.  I have to stop doing that!  Gah.  I hate starting a new book before finishing the last one.  I’ve just been stuck, waiting on it and Overworking … When the truth is: I need ART!  Other people’s art.  Films, Books, Plays, Music, Blog Posts, and Conversation.

Although I spent yesterday from 5am – 2pm working on my book promotion, I finally forced myself to take contrary action.  Thank Baby Jesus in da manger!  From yesterday at 2pm until now, I’ve watered my plant Ms. Gloria Estefan isn’t in a Mariachi band, bathed, napped, ate, and participated in a stimulating think tank conversation with a bunch of refreshing, youthful artists where wonderful insights replenished me once again.

Then I came home and prayed/meditated.  After which, I started mulling over all there is TO DO and then a thought ROARED, GROWLED, SCOWLED at me, “YOU NEED TO STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR TO DOs!” … I needed a book — someone else’s feelings and musings — and BAD.  I knew I needed a book that The Kid not The Adult in me would pick.  A book that isn’t about marketing or film distribution or filmmaker interviews …Gah!

I breathed in deep and accepted that I probably wouldn’t get back When God was a Woman for a while.  I reached over to my unread stack of books and picked Conversations before the end of Time, which strangely resulted being about “exploring new ways of making art that reconnects directly with the world.”  The core discussion of our think tank dialogue!  Yowza.

There’s a remarkable quote in the book that sheds a lot of light on why it is I get so famished and bored inside when I don’t experience enough of other people’s art. Routinely, a starvation will set in that fills my brain with a rage that causes it to throw itself against my skull over and over and over again.  The author writes:

… I was beginning to understand how the shared experience of dialogue allows one to have and maintain one’s own point of view, while at the same time trying to understand and include another’s.  I began to see what was needed was not a monologue … but a dialogue in which I did not necessarily have a program of my own, but would simply create an empty space for whatever specific process was trying to happen.

To quiet one’s mind and embrace the influx of outside ideas proves to be a meditative and intellectually-expanding process.  For me, experiencing other people’s art isn’t leisure, but necessity.  Maybe it’s leisure too, but it’s hard for a me to enjoy the activity if I think of it that way.  Workaholism is one mean old hag!  A Workaholic, according to some free dictionary I found online, is defined as “a person who works compulsively at the expense of other pursuits.”

Ayayayayeee! Lucyeeeee!  Awareness is the first step, Acceptance is the second step, and Action is the third step.

My friend is right.  I can’t be a grown up ALL THE TIME.  I must schedule time for play in order to BROADEN my intellectual, spiritual, and creative understanding and more importantly, my personal joy.  Adult society undervalues Joy immensely.

Therefore I must read, see, and hear some cool stuff ASAP!  Dance too!

Maybe if I do I’ll turn into this:

And stop being this:

Making A Movie Day 4 — Francis Ford Coppola & My Whole Life Inventory

Alright, I’m taking a breath from breaking down my whole life’s written inventory (80 pages, 9 point font, for ages 0 – 26 written over the last year and a half) into specific resentments built up over those periods of time.  I am to read this to my group therapy mentor tomorrow from 2pm until we finish.

I probably won’t finish this assignment until right before we meet tomorrow at 2pm. Gah!!!  So, I’ll just discuss briefly with you some discourses swimming through mi brains.

Yesterday, I read an interview with Francis Ford Coppola that Baby Dewds e-mailed my way a week ago.

Francis Ford Copolla is, in my opinion and every award ceremony’s on earth, a creative mastermind.  His films make up an important part of why my favorite Cinematic Period takes place during the 60’s & 70’s — The New Hollywood Era. The New Hollywood Era — When the studio system fell to its knees and turned all its creative power over to inventive daring outsiders, like Coppola, for them to craft artistic quality films, which reflected society back to itself — in order to close the growing divide between audience and box office.

Yes, Francis Ford Coppola’s direction of the first 2 Godfathers, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Dracula, Jack and all the AMAZING films he produced and executive produced — plus the exposing documentary Hearts of Darkness — makes him THA’ Jam.

When I read this article, I realized, yet again, how much I loved and respected Coppola as a filmmaker/artist and family man.  Who wouldn’t with quotes like these:

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, “I learned so much today,” that shows something about the cinema.

…the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old…The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.” An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

I was always a good adventurer. I was never afraid of risks. I always had a good philosophy about risks. The only risk is to waste your life, so that when you die, you say, “Oh, I wish I had done this.” I did everything I wanted to do, and I continue to.

When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

Always make your work be personal. And, you never have to lie. If you lie, you will only trip yourself up. You will always get caught in a lie. It is very important for an artist not to lie, and most important is not to lie to yourself. There are some questions that are inappropriate to ask, and rather than lie, I will not answer them because it’s not a question I accept. So many times we are asked things in our work or in life that you want to lie, and all you have to do is say, “No, that is an improper question.”

So when you get into a habit of not lying when you are writing, directing, or making a film, that will carry your personal conviction into your work. And, in a society where you say you are very free but you’re not entirely free, you have to try. There is something we know that’s connected with beauty and truth. There is something ancient. We know that art is about beauty, and therefore it has to be about truth.

Ahhh, yes!  Yet again, he couples his refreshing ideas into truly invigorating statements.

Still …

When you read his quote below — you realize how far removed financially successful people become, no matter how much they want to stop the distancing, from the realities of every day people. Upon reading it, I quickly remembered why I’ve never considered anyone “my hero” and I could never worship a person as a god — because their human flaws would break my spirit long before their attributes helped it grow. Read on:

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

It’s easy to say art should be free and an artist shouldn’t get paid for their work when you’re making royalties off of 2 Godfathers and countless box office hits, and you, your daughter, and your father all have Academy Awards.  Oh, and your nephew is $40 million per movie Nick Cage.

Sure, wine money is good, but wine money was started with films-are doing-AWESOME money.  All I mean to say is that when rich — and I mean RICH — and famous — and I mean FAMOUS — artists tell the poor artist in South Gate borderline Huntington park to spend the rest of their lives in the financial trenches in order to maintain artistic integrity that poor artist exhales a deep, sad, long sigh and accepts that Francis Ford Coppola is just a regular human being like me and you … No one has ALL the answers.

That being said, I completely agree with him on creative ethics — stay true to the truth of your vision, especially the risky bits big corporate investors often want to smother, and only take into consideration the opinions of collaborators who have the betterment of the project in mind such as actors, writers, etc.

But giving your work away for free/letting people steal it off the internet while accepting that as artists we’re just bad with money so there’s no point in fighting it?! … Hmmm. Not on board with that advice, Papa Coppola.

I may do that now, but not forever!  I am joining a money-management/business betterment group next week.  Dear Baby Jesus in Da Manger, please teach me how to value my artistic efforts and turn them into lucrative sums that I can invest into more artistic endeavors!  No more CASH 4 GOLD Sundays! ;p

Bankers, Politicians, and Wine Connoisseurs should NOT be the only members of society with mula to spare a.k.a invest.  In fact, I think that scenario extremely dangerous to the cultures they form part of.  Artists — those that reflect society back to itself with truth, heart, risk, and love — should be able to sustain themselves and invest in future projects a.k.a roll in the doe too.  The greater the artistic integrity, the higher the paycheck, I say!

Although in theory Coppola doesn’t agree with this mindset, in reality he sure does. The Coppolas — Francis, Sofia, Cage, Talia, & Jason Schwartzman (to name a few) are rolling in the royalty $$$$.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with it!  I’m just saying — Artists should be paid for their work and art should be reasonably priced:  Free sometimes, affordable mostly always, and high cost only in business dealings.

You’re making royalties off my hard work?  I deserve some too.  Let’s negotiate.

While digesting what Papa Coppola has said, I realize that with everyone’s advice in life, you take what works for you and leave aside what your gut reaction/spirit doesn’t jive with …

Yes, even Francis Ford Coppola’s words of wisdom.

The perk of being raised by a social worker mama is that you’ve been brainwashed for years to truly fundamentally believe that — regardless of financial and social status — every human being is inherently equal.  Thus: Rich or no rich, famous or no famous, creative genius or no creative genius, if I agree with you I agree with you and if I don’t I don’t.

And just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I don’t think you still rock my socks off because you do.  For example, I’m barefoot right now because Francis Ford Coppola’s interview, including the comments I disagreed with, rocked my socks off. It made me “grapple.”  Grappling is good.  Grappling is growth.

Alright, back to the inner-work a.k.a finishing the resentment inventory for mentor sesh tomorrow!  Gah!!! ;p