I am so over this shit.

Reader, excuse me for a moment. I am having a fit.

… I MISS MY BOOKS.

As you may be aware, I am currently in the middle of another in a series of temporary living experiences: “home,” whatever that means at this stage, is somewhere in the American Northeast. I, however, am not. I am in a tiny, minimally furnished, undecorated room in the south of England, with only the “necessities” (broadly defined) of an MA student’s life.

I and my books are not in the same place.

This is one of many symptoms of the temporariness of my life here, one that in many ways encapsulates the exilic feeling I have from time to time. My life is unstable, the world I’ve built here clearly defined by its inevitable end, its dissolution, at the end of the summer. I need stability. I need my books.

I miss my Eliot. I miss my Wallace Stevens. I miss my full collections of the works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. I miss my Middlemarch. I miss my mammoth anthologies. I miss my non-book ephemera — my course readers from undergrad, drafts of my thesis with Professor Wry’s handwriting all over them, my course notes and their marginal observations on the state of my brain, my journals dating back to early high school.

After a long day of, largely, drudgery, I need the solace of a well-worn, over-read paperback. I need the Four Quartets, god damn it. There are perhaps three books in my bedroom that are not either products of the Renaissance or keystones of critical theory, and one of them is authored by Anne McCaffrey. My library quota has been filled with books on Shakespeare editorship, early British nationhood, the history of the book, and recusant poetics. Right now, I don’t need any of those things. I need a break from my intellectual world, and this just ain’t cutting it.

More than their content, though, I miss my books. I miss their comforting plenitude, voluminousness, ubiquity. The bedroom I lived in for years in my parents’ house is bursting with books. They, not the studs and drywall and insulation and wooden siding, are what sheltered me from the violences of the outside world. They are, in many ways, my home.

I have always thought of the true moment of growing up, the genuine moving-on, the real “on my own,” as being the moment when I move into a place and take all of my books with me. I will do this in September. I want it now.

I need something vaguely resembling stable domesticity. I need to go to a place, stay there for years, make it my own. And I need my fucking books.

In which mouse permits herself to indulge her delusions of grandeur

The light blogging, reader, can be laid at the feet of any of several causes — frenetic/ecstatic work-madness; a real, honest-to-god social life (girl scout’s honor, it’s true); the charms of a certain beguiling Victorianist; laziness; the usual sense a graduate student gets of having nothing to say because her entire life can be summed up in one sentence: “I, uh, read a lot.”

Beyond the ecstatic bounds of everyday existence (happiness, reader: it’s possible), life lately has been mostly ruminating. Fantasies about my future life as a Ph.D. student in American City* occupy a large slice of my time, to be honest. It is a tremendous relief even to be able to entertain such fantasies, let alone to have in my grasp the promise of their realization — or of the realization of something like them.

What they do for me, these fantasies, is to put my life here at Brit Uni into context. Only when I got my first offer did I realize that part of the anxiety that was turning me into a giant ball of goo for so many months was the sense that, without the opportunity to take the next step in my academic career, my work here would have no purpose. This work delights me, inspires me, frustrates me, yes — this work is a total experience, and would be worthwhile for its own sake. Yet I had always, I now realize, the constant nagging fear that this M.A. might turn out to be just one more in a series of detours I’ve been making since I finished undergrad. What if I found myself, come March, applying for teaching jobs? Or, come September, (o horror) temping and scrambling anew to discover some direction for my life?

I’ve felt much the way I did my final year in undergrad — what is this for? Where am I going? When can I start something big, something ambitious, something serious? I wasn’t ready, then, for that something — and was mature enough at least to know that. Just two years later, I am ready — I am sure of it.

This is big, reader. This Ph.D. Combined with the idea of what comes after it, it’s bloody huge. That alone thrills me — the joy of embarcation. Or rather, the joy of having already embarked, and now at last setting a firm course. I discover, suddenly, how far I have already come — how much I’ve learned already, how much this study has shaped my thoughts, my habits, my intellectual and professional desires. How swiftly I have begun to hone myself. How dear to me are the relationships that I am forging. So swiftly! I’ve been here only five months, and already, so much has changed, or grown, or come out of absolutely bloody nowhere and knocked me flat with shock. And think! Think what six more years of this will do. A whole new person — a scholar, a professional — will come out of this. She is, indeed, already beginning to emerge.

I have a purpose, suddenly. It seems insane, I know, to pin such a grand thing as “purpose” on such a trivial thing as admittance to a graduate program. But that trivial thing gives shape to my current universe — what I am doing is not just a lark, after all, but a substantial project, a job, a professional endeavor.

One great constant in the life of a student is her sense of the insignificance, the insufficiency, of her own work — she has wild ambitions, and never the time, the energy, the resources, nor simply the intellectual wherewithal to realize them. Nothing, nothing is ever enough. The compensation for that frustration has just been delivered to me: this insufficiency becomes acceptable when it becomes part of a process, an apprenticeship, this continual building and rebuilding of self or selves.

Most importantly, this sense of purpose has cleared away the dross of uncertainty so that I can get down to the essence of my life here: the immediacy of present work. I love it, reader. I love this work intensely. And now, even now, I get to experience the extraordinary joy of beginning, slowly, to transform that love into a viable career.

What luck I have, reader. What tremendous fucking luck.

—-

*When everyone’s contractually agreed to be everyone else’s partner of whatever sort, the pseudonyms will become more descriptive, in keeping with my overall unstated blogging ethic of transparent pseudonymity.

In which mouse has had a birthday, and thus muses inanely on aging

Reader, your mouse is now twenty-four years old. She is beginning to think that she will always feel as Clarissa Dalloway does, crossing a street on her way through Westminster: very young, and at the same time unspeakably aged.

Flavia’s recent post on age and aging, in which she notes her relief at having left her twenties behind in favor of a more directed, settled sort of life, got me thinking about this birthday more deeply than I usually might. Now, I get where she’s coming from, for sure. Having moved ten times in the past six years, I’m a little bit ready to, um, stop doing that all the damn time. Some settled domesticity would go a long way to making me feel less like a child and more like an adult. It would be nice, yessir, to live in a place with furniture that didn’t come off a sidewalk somewhere or out of someone’s dead grandmother’s basement. A stable income, however small, would also be… well, novel, and a little comforting. Knowing where I am going to be – geographically, if not psychically – a year, two years, three years from now would also be comforting. But since such stability is not my immediate future I am prepared to accept nomadism – plenty of perfectly successful cultures do it, after all – and to continue carrying my books (and my yurt) around on my back until something more predictable comes along.

However, there is a liberty to this thing called Youth that I am heartily enjoying. I’m not tied down by anything at all. I own virtually nothing, aside from my clothes and my books. I have no professional obligations or responsibilities of any kind, except for the necessity of not burning any bridges and of juicing the networks whenever possible. The extremely remote possibility of future children is still, well, extremely remote. A “long-term” partnership, also a remote potentiality, still means three to five years.

It’s not yet “too late” for anything. All those places to which I want to travel? All those books I want to read? All those love affairs I look forward to having? Still possibilities. The only question is which, and when, and with whom — not whether.

As I write this, I am realizing how much our culture, or maybe just I, define the difference between youth and adulthood in terms of property – what you make, what you own, what you can afford. I had a conversation at the beginning of the summer with Professor Zuckerman* about how grad school, and the dawn of academic life generally, can be infantilizing precisely because it delays the Stuff-accretion process that we tend to associate with maturity. She told me that she had found herself unsettled by the instability of grad school life and by her start in the professoriat because she longed for a solid domestic life in which fewer question marks would need to be appended to every aspect of her life. We talked about the odd phenomenon of advanced degrees conferring middle class status while simultaneously stripping away all real economic assets, and how part of becoming a grad student is accepting that your lifestyle will never be in accord with those of your non-academic friends.

I thought about this for a while, and then I told her that this instability is something that I intend to cherish, because it comes to take the place of the wider uncertainties of youth that setting myself on an academic path has eliminated. I have only recently realized just how many options there are in the world, how many possibilities I have shunted out of my line of sight in favor of professorial ambitions. While it will always be possible to jump ship and do absolutely anything else, I nevertheless frequently get the feeling that the path on which I’ve set myself is in some ways rather narrow, rather limited. If all goes as planned, I will never, say, move to Tblisi and teach French literature to young Georgians, or become a hack freelance journalist, or found a progressive free school in the woods. Which is all just fine, but I’m a restless, twitchy little soul and, to paraphrase Woody Allen, such a soul needs to maintain constant motion, or it dies.

Okay, so right now that motion is more like trying to keep my balance at the top of a loose pile of rocks in the middle of an earthquake — and it can only get worse — but I take what I can get. Maybe what it comes down to is that I just like to be scared.

*Who, if she reads this blog, which I doubt she does, is more than welcome to provide a better pseudonym, because this one, while moderately a propos, sucks.

** First image copyright Allison Reuling, second image whothefrack knows.

In which mouse confronts her anxieties

A few weeks ago, a certain Wise Person who likes to give really good advice gave me some really good advice: as you go forth into the universe, don’t expect to have your hand held.

Yeah yeah yeah, I get it, I thought. I’m a strong, independent sort of young lass, and I can totally hack it on my own.

But here’s the thing: I never have. Hacked it, you know. On my own.

Remember all that about applying to Ph.D. programs? Well, there’s a pile of stuff sitting on my improvised desk (an outsize endtable sequestered in a corner of this awkward half-room that no one ever uses) that hasn’t been touched in, oh, three weeks. Spreadsheets detailing various programs’ funding packages and degree requirements; printouts of English department websites; lists of faculty types and their publications; a halfheartedly scrawled-on copy of the second chapter of my undergrad thesis; a sheet of paper with seven different versions of the same sentence about Assia Djebar crossed out and rewritten, followed by the beginning of an eighth sentence about Nabokov; a book of practice GRE literature subject tests, and so on. Just sitting there. I haven’t even entered that room in days.

I’m not losing heart, I’m just lost. I have no idea how to do this stuff. I’ve been justifying putting it off in part by telling myself that I want to talk it over thoroughly with this person or that person, gather advice, before I continue. I realized, the other night, that what I want is not good advice, but to be told what to do, and shown how to do it. Which is weird, because that’s not something that anyone’s done for me since high school, and not something I particularly enjoyed about high school. But these applications have some kind of strange power over me, and I just cannot face them.

Part of this, of course, is my ineradicable sense that I am somehow extraordinarily inadequate. Your basic impostor syndrome: I sit down to write a new sentence or chop a limb out of my would-be writing sample, and can’t shake the feeling that I’m a total fraud. (In part, I just now realize, because in a way I actually am a fraud: I’m trying to sell the student I’ll be in one or two or three years, and not the person I am now. Which is impossible. Weirdly, this makes me feel better.)

Whatever. The bottom line is that I want my goddamn hand held, and that makes me angry with myself.

Okay, then, mouse, I say, take a deep breath. This is called growing up and you’re just gonna hafta do it sooner or later, so let’s just suck it up and make it sooner — say, nowish. Use that big smart brain of yours to carve out a little space for yourself, and get going. Screw sheepishness, screw inadequacy, screw all the bullshit and distractions that are keeping you from banging away at this thing. Just get moving, and the rest will follow.

Once I had that tiny revelation, another quickly followed: I’m not as alone as I think I am. I have very good mentors, and they care about me and about what happens to me. And part of that caring is helping me to see that I can, after all, accomplish things more or less under my own steam, and that I owe it to myself to do exactly that.

I just need to decide on a first step, and then kick this thing back into gear. That will happen tomorrow.

For now, the appropriate step is clearly beer and John From Cincinnati. Goodnight.

(Oh, image copyright Dorothy Gambrell blah blah etc. Thanks, Dorothy.)

Talkin’ ’bout my generation

Professor Lyrical has been putting together a new frosh course on literary identity construction, the idea being to communicate that you are, more or less, what you read or write and that, like Emma Bovary, if you’re not careful, what you read can destroy you. Or, in the case of Onegin’s Tatiana, learning what your own literary sources are will renew you, even empower you.

On the syllabus for this course is Roth’s Human Stain, which I am now reading for the first time, enjoying thinking about how Lyrical will teach it and how her froshlings will engage with it. And it has just caused me to experience an astonishing revelation. These students were nine years old for the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment hearings. They were nine.

When Bush was first elected, they were eleven. On September 11, 2001, they were twelve. Twelve. They came into their political consciousnesses — not to mention their literary ones — under Bush. He is the only president they have known in their lives as critical thinkers and engagers with the world. Clinton was mine.

This seems to me to be a crucial divide. They are only six years younger than I am, but theirs is a new generation. They are Bush’s kids.

They will read this novel, saturated as it is with what Roth calls the “ecstasy of sanctimony” of the Clinton-Lewinski moment, through the eyes of kids who came of age under Bush. “No,” Roth writes, “if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.” But he wrote that sentence before the Christian Right fulfilled the totality of its sanctimonious destiny, and the students who came to their own maturity right along with it will read that sentence differently than I do.

Lyrical, who came of age under Eisenhower and in many ways became who she is in Krushchev’s U.S.S.R., doubtless has a third, entirely different perspective on both the novel and her students’ potential readings of it.

What this comes down to, I suppose, is how strange it is not only to be an adult, but to have adult memories. Stranger still to realize how deeply colored one’s identity is by who happened to be the Big Man in Charge when one was a teenager. This simple fact makes me think of this year’s entering class as foreign to me. What are their ideals, I wonder? What politicized them? What fierce, inchoate angers have they nursed since they were twelve and a mad cowboy hijacked their country, and how are their fierce, inchoate angers different from my own?

What will Coleman Silk mean to them?

Entering graduate school; drinking the Kool-Aid

Horace is calling for posts: “required reading for graduate students.” Inspired by this post by Dr. Crazy, which scared me, um, just a tiny bit. And then caused me to do a lot of important considering.

As you, devoted reader, know, this could not be more timely for mouse here. She’s coming down from her Acceptance And Validation High and beginning to quake in her little mouse-sized boots. (Did I tell you this would happen? I totally told you this would happen. At least I know myself well.)

I do a good job of cycling through freaking the eff out and rationalizing the freak-out, between threatening to jump and talking myself down. First I got angry at Dr. Crazy for her post, which I deemed unnecessarily and intentionally intimidating. Then I freaked when I realized that she’s probably one hundred per cent dead-on, particularly as she’s been applauded by many around the ’sphere for perfectly evoking the grad experience. Then I said to myself, “Hey, mouse, you know what? You were just saying that the academy is a cult, that graduate school is a long and humiliating mortification-of-the-flesh induction into that cult, and that if you get to a point where you can’t take it any more, that’s probably a sign that you don’t want to do this for your whole life after all, and it will be good to know that. You know that Dr. Crazy’s right, and what she describes is, after all, what you’re looking for as you dash across the sea to begin your fiery baptism.” I realized that Dr. Crazy’s post was a kind act — sort of like when my dentist said to me the other day, “I’m not going to lie to you, this is going to hurt like fuck.” And then he stuck a sharp thing in my gums and it did hurt like fuck, but I was grateful for his honesty and my mouth is now a better place.

Dental divagations aside, I think I have a few things running in my favor as I begin this process. I record them here to help me through the next explosion of anxiety.

1) I’ve been lucky to receive an excellent training in academic rigor — thanks, Petri Dish. I have no illusions about what graduate work looks like, about what kinds of conversations I will be expected to participate in, what level of discourse I will be expected to maintain, to what standards of critical thought and breadth / depth of knowledge I will be held. I have also had the benefit of excellent mentoring that has provided me with what I need to keep up with various debates of which I will need to be aware, and with a strong sense of the value of tenacity (a nice euphemism for “monomania,” dontcha think?).

2) I neither expect nor want a repeat of undergrad. I don’t think of this embarcation as the start of a voyage into the Wonderful World of Lit-Lovin’. I am healthily nostalgic about my time in the Petri Dish, where I was profoundly happy, but I do not miss it. In my final semester, I knew I was ready to leave because I found myself having the same kinds of conversations over and over. I had gleaned what I needed, and was ready for the Next Step.

3) Having a handful of friends at various stages ahead of me in the Cult (not to mention reading way too many blogs) keeps me sober regarding the day-to-day realities of graduate students and of young – or not-so-young – academics. It also inspires me to keep up with their modes of exploring the world and conversing about it.

4) I am blessed – this is not language I use lightly – with the support of a few individuals who have shepherded me through my novitiate thus far. Some of them knew me as a very wee mouse, when I made a lot of stupid mistakes, and have watched me turn myself around without ever witholding their support. That support, and my sense that I must continue to earn it, will continue to be a deeply important anchor as I progress stubbornly along this insane path.

5) I am healthily aware that I am at a turning-point in my academic “career” (that’s “career” as in “the herd of antelope went careering over the cliff without ever seeing what lay ahead of them”). The other day I listened to Professor Wry talk about her current book project, which looks like it’s going to be quite the event when it’s finished, with a mixture of awe and fear. Awe at her critical creativity and at the sudden sense that I was watching someone come into her fullest intellectual individuality and strength, watching her own joy at recognizing and testing that strength; fear at the dawning realization of how terribly far from that achievement I am myself, and how terribly difficult it will be to get there. (Wry’s been tenured for a while, and this will be her second monograph.) I found myself wanting to emulate her interests, her curiosities and methods of inquiry, and realized that in many ways I am still a babe hiding behind her mama’s regalia.

Originality is not expected, nor should it be, of undergraduates. The work I’ve done to date is entirely – and fittingly – derivative, synthetic, in the most basic of ways. Or simply emulative. Now is the time to begin to ask myself to think, read, and write as myself, and to be aware of how that self is changing and developing, and use that change and development in my thinking, reading, and writing. I have no illusions about how difficult that will be, or about how much time and work it will take to begin to make that change. And I’m okay with that.

6) More simply, Brit Uni seems like a kind place, and has, to all appearances, a wonderfully cohesive community of postgrads and faculty. I think it will offer me the support and structure that I need. This is an enormous source of relief.

7) I have spent a year just about as far from the academy as a mouse can get, and gained the appropriate Perspective that allows me to see just how much I do want to throw myself into it and stay there, and how much I do, after all, belong there. I didn’t realize how important this was until Wry noted that at this time last year I was a little ambivalent, and more than a little freaked out, and that now I have a clear set of goals and a plan to achieve them. I didn’t get there consciously, but I think that’s made the process all the more important.

8) Starting with an M.A. seems on all fronts like an excellent way to ease myself into this process. It will give me time and space to develop, particularly as a writer and as a participant in an academic community. I started undergrad before I was ready, which had disastrous consequences (see “stupid mistakes,” above) that took a lot of getting-out-of. I know that I think and react slowly, that transitions take a lot of energy and time for me, and that I must therefore tread carefully. I also know that I have carefully considered every aspect of the decision to do this program(me), and that I am going about this in the way that makes the most sense for me. To start a Ph.D. now would, perhaps, prove to be foolish (see “antelope,” above).

In other words, I am cautious, and doing my best to keep myself alert to inevitable blindsides, confusion, and upsets. I think this caution is really what people are recommending when they give me the canned Grad School Talk that I quickly came to loathe and only now begin to appreciate.

The bottom line is that there’s no way to know what you’re getting into when you decide to join a completely mystified cult whose very members warn you about joining. The very best you can do is to keep that notion firmly at the front of your mind, keep yourself aware of your self, and plow ahead.

That and maintain a healthy skepticism about Kool-Aid.

A domestic evening scene

This is just to say that I am grateful for my relationship with my father. Some of you have heard me give my canned spiel, a spiel that begins, “It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that I did not have a conversation with my father until I was sixteen years old…”

And it isn’t.

But I just spent the past three hours talking comfortably and continuously with him about stuff I care about a whole lot, which also happens to be stuff he’s got a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for. He respects me and what I have to say. When he doesn’t know something, he asks me. When I don’t know, I run up and get the appropriate book or dash to the computer to track down the answer, and we read it together. The conversation began with such a question: “Did Shakespeare have an ‘original’ for Falstaff?” I ran for my Arden 1 Henry IV and read the introductory material on that question aloud. We talked for a long while about Falstaff, Shakespeare, texts and editing, poetry. He told me stories about his sister, Jean, typing his undergraduate papers and howling with laughter with his librarian mother and aunt. He told me lots of stories, many of which I’d heard before. I listened and laughed and when he asked me if I’d heard these stories I smiled and said, “No.”

I don’t know anyone else – well, maybe one other person – who would listen to me reading ten pages about Sir John Oldcastle and what he may or may not have been doing on the Elizabethan stage. As I looked around us at the rapidly-filling ashtray, the antics of the dog, the scattered empty teacups and cigarette boxes and the books and magazines piled around our feet on the ottoman, I thought, “This is miraculous.”

How did we get here? How, sometime in the middle of my twentieth year, did we suddenly begin to understand each other? I’ve marvelled at it ever since, and I am deeply grateful for it.

In which mouse surveys her prospects, carresses her ego

“Je n’aurais pas eu le culot d’aller réclamer mon livre à Dieu sur le Sinaï, même si en tant que souris j’avais trouvé l’énergie de grimper sur la montagne.”
– Hélène Cixous

Sitting amid a pile of papers and books on my bed last night, with a laptop on my knee and a golden retriever on my feet, I was haunted by the following question:

What was Gayatri Spivak like as a graduate student?

Why Spivak was the Great Mind that happened to come to me out of the void is irrelevant. Last night I reached a certain point in my frivolous work on some of the weirder points in the work of a poet I adore mostly in spite of myself. I recognized that point — I’ve come to it before, and as I develop as a fledgling scholar I come to it more and more often. It’s the point at which I begin to fail to see the work in front of me because I’ve allowed my head to become clouded with A Crucial Theoretical or Methodological Question. Last night’s Question happened to be the same one that kept plaguing me (and perpetually provoking in my advisor the scary half-smile that earns her the pseudonym Professor Wry) throughout my undergrad thesis, and which happens to be The Question that The Field has been totally preoccupied with for at least twenty-five years, if not the entire twentieth century.

The reason I should not be bothered by this Question is not that it has been rendered unimportant by the unfathomable amount of ink spilled over it. It continues to be important, and sometime soon, I think, some bright kid is going to have to dig us all out of the inky muck by posing it in a new way. I should let the Question aside, and let the poems and my small measure of critical savvy do what they can for me, because I am simply not equipped to deal with it. Yet.

It’s the “not yet” that got me wondering about the wee Gayatri (or whoever). Part of the bizarro in-betweenness of being young and having a stellar, if troubled, undergraduate career behind me and an uncertain, if hopeful, graduate career ahead of me is located in that “not yet.” I’ve read widely enough in The Field — both the texts of the relevant period and the critical ink spilled over them — to be able to identify the crucial questions, and am up-to-date enough with the scholarship to be aware of some current confusion (not to say “impending crisis”). But I’m nowhere near well-read enough, nor are my critical muscles nearly well-enough developed, to jump into that morass myself. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t have a high enough opinion of myself to think that I should be entitled to bring something to the mess. I’m delighted to be, and to remain for a while, in the experimental phase of a fledgling scholar’s life. I was not That Kid who viewed her undergraduate thesis as an Important Contribution to her field. Still less do I view the current project as anything more than a line on a CV and a chance to throw a stone at my fears of public speaking.

It is nevertheless strange to experience this recurring or cyclical moment in my experiments — the moment when, having done the necessary footwork, having discovered something wonderful or disturbing in some text somewhere, having gathered whatever threads need to be gathered and begun to stitch together one of my characteristic weirdo patchwork arguments, I suddenly come up against this same glass wall. I bang my head against it for a while — usually with Professor Wry’s voice in the back of my mind, a drawling monotone gently dragging me back to the text, goddammit — only to fall back, exhausted and a little embarrassed, into the comfy arena of synthetic scholarship and close-reading.

As I said, I’m happy to be there. I dread the day when I’ll have to start publishing — my panties are in enough of a twist as it is with this “paper” I’m to give at this “conference” (believe me, the quotation marks are warranted). But the voice of doubt in the back of my mind, battling with the voices of encouragement, wants to know whether this is, really, a normal phase, or whether I’m not, somehow, behind the curve. The voice of doubt wants to know whether the glass wall is there for everyone, whether the wee Gayatri (or whoever) came up against a similar one over and over again. How perplexed were the looks her professors continually shot her over her inchoate seminar papers? How annoyed were her classmates by her incessant harping on the same theme? Am I alone here? The voice is countered by another that says I should feel good about being able to see through the wall — the “It could be so much worse, mouse” that tells me I could be hurtling at a hundred miles an hour towards fortified stone I won’t notice until it’s too late.

All this comes down to, I suppose, is the simple fact that it’s strange and also wonderful to be very young and a little too ambitious. So we’ll just let The Question linger there in the air and get back to work, aware of its lingering presence but happy to just let it be, for now.