When I first started taking yoga classes, some years ago, I used to joke that of the three things yoga requires (and cultivates) — balance, strength, and flexibility — I was only good at balance. This was ironic, since in my personal and professional life I felt reasonably strong and probably way too flexible — and thus, unbalanced. But there it was: I could stay standing throughout a Tree pose, hold Chair for a while, shift my weight properly for Triangle. In yoga if not in my life, I was balanced.

This past Christmas Nick got a Wii Fit. He'd had the basic game system for a while but the balance board and the fitness exercises sounded both healthy and fun, so we splurged. About two weeks after we got the system, Nick noticed that my name turned up in the rankings of many of his favorite exercises. "I think you're using it more than I am, Mom!"

Guilty as charged. It's been hard this year to get to the gym very often — or at all — and our tae kwon do class only meets twice a week now instead of three times (not that we often made it all three times anyway). After a summer spent walking almost four miles a day, I was feeling a bit puffy and lethargic. Twenty minutes of Wii Fit in the morning made me feel as if at least I'd moved my limbs a bit before I settled into my computer chair for the rest of the day. It's not much, but it's something.

The Wii Fit, though, measures my balance. "You're a little shaky," the helpful trainer remarks. "Do you find that it's harder to hold a pose when you're tired?" No, I want to spit back at her, I find it harder to hold a pose with you nagging me! But I readjust and try again. While I can still hold Tree pose, I do wobble a bit as it continues. In fact, I've learned that I lean a bit more to the left than the right in most exercises. Or so the Wii Fit tells me. Well, it makes sense — I am a humanities professor after all, once nicknamed "Libby the Liberal" by the somewhat more conservative business partner of a friend. Some things never change.

The Wii Fit tests my memory and balance, my agility and peripheral vision. Depending on the day, I get a different pair of tests most mornings. When they are balance tests I groan inwardly. "The Dual Balance test isn't your forte, is it?" the screen asks me. Worse are the "judgment" test (avoiding moving blocks on the screen) and "agility." "Do you often find yourself blocking out things in your environment?" Why, yes, I do — that's how I get my job done!

I agree with Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Inside Higher Ed's new career columnist, that balance is a myth. I don't worry too much about how long I can hold Tree pose, and I realize that during the semester I cook fewer of the meals, attend fewer of my son's events, than I might like. But that doesn't stop me from striving for something like balance, or maybe something like equanimity. Lately Nick and I have been playing a little Wii Tennis, so he doesn't feel I've completely usurped his toy. And my balance is getting a little better, shaky though it may still be.

For a few months there, I thought I was finally getting a handle on this “balancing work and life” thing.

My private practice was doing pretty well. I felt I’d found my groove at the part-time supervisory job I started last fall. The work is sometimes intense — some of our clients are fairly high-risk — but the therapists I supervise are all competent, creative people; the cases tend to be fascinating; and I feel generally comfortable and well-liked there. I was completing my freelance writing and editing assignments on time, and still managing to see friends and hang out with my family. My fifteen-year-old son is a gifted guitarist, and he sometimes likes to use me as a backup singer, which I enjoy a great deal. I started to breathe again.

I guess that was my mistake.

Over the holidays, one of my closest friends had a major heart attack. He had no risk factors and there were no previous warning symptoms. It was terrifying. Then, when we thought he was recovering well, he had another event, which required additional surgery. He has been struggling since. Another good friend, a two-time cancer survivor, learned that her tumor markers were up, and she is not doing well on chemo. A third friend is going through a horrendous family crisis too personal to describe here.

There is not much I can do for my friends besides be there; I try to do that. I also worry, a lot, and probably work less efficiently than usual. I almost never play with deadlines, but I had to ask for a couple of extensions during this period. I let some correspondence drop that I would have wanted to continue. I let go of some volunteer work, hoping that my attention to my friends would pay off any karmic debt I was incurring. I got a little sharper and crankier than I’d like to be, and than my family would like me to be, but I still felt I was managing.

Then, a few weeks ago, a permanent freelance editing job that I had applied for months ago came through. It had been so long that I’d assumed I had been rejected, but it turned out to be just a bureaucratic snafu.

When I applied to this company, I really, really wanted to work for them. They pay pretty well, and the books they publish are fun to read. But that was before I took the supervisory position, and before my friends got sick. I couldn’t imagine how I could take on another project now.

At the same time, I didn’t see how to turn it down. Jobs like these are not easy to come by. I had an “in” because I had worked with one of their author-editor teams on a brilliant but technically problematic manuscript, and they had recommended me. But if I refused, I might not get another chance — and as a self-employed individual, I have a fairly financially precarious existence. So I accepted.

Last week, they dropped a gigantic manuscript on me with a quick turn-around time and a sheaf of instruction sheets that require more manuals and online reference sites than I have ever been exposed to in all my years of editorial work. I spread everything out on the dining table — the only space large enough to hold it all — and threatened my family not to touch anything on pain of death.

As I work through the book, I’m finding that the learning curve is not as steep as I’d feared; many of the instructions make intuitive sense and are thus easy to internalize. But in the beginning I was overwhelmed.

Then my son was hit by a car. He’s fine — a badly skinned knee and some ugly bruises — but the stress level in our household ratcheted up several notches.

After waking up at 3AM last Wednesday in a panic that someone had died overnight (nobody had), I shifted my panic to the manuscript, feeling that I would never master the instructions, let alone finish it. I got a cup of coffee and hunkered down until 7:30, when it was time to nag my son to the subway and get ready to start seeing clients. By this time I was about halfway through the book, though still feeling pretty shaky. I had a four-hour break between my last afternoon client and my first evening one, so I ran home and picked up the manuscript again — and discovered that I had misunderstood one of the instructions, resulting in a huge mistake starting from the first page. I would have to read the whole damn thing over again.

At this point, my son walked into the room, playing his guitar. “Stop it!” I snapped. He strolled past me, still playing. “Do you understand that if I mess this up, they won’t use me again?”

“No. I had no idea. That’s why I was putting my guitar away.”

Oh.

“It would be nice if you would give me the benefit of the doubt just once, you know.”

This might sound like a normal exchange between harried parent and sarcastic teenager, but not in our house. I have the nicest fifteen-year-old in the history of the universe. You have to push him pretty far to make him snap. Yet we had another such contretemps a few minutes later.

“Did something bad happen today?” I finally asked.

“No, why?”

“Because you seem on edge.”

He stared. “Me?”

Right. Not him. Me. For weeks now, going on months.

I know how easy it is for women to fall into the trap of excoriating ourselves for every decision—for spending too much time on work and neglecting our families; for having fun with the family and slighting our work. But something has gone seriously out of whack here. This is not what I want him to remember of his teenage years — his mom hunched over style sheets, cursing to herself and yelling at him to shut up. I have to let something go. I’ll figure out what it is, as soon as I have a moment to breathe.

We received our fall semester course evaluations on the first day of the spring semester. The timing seems akin to going to therapy with your ex-boyfriend immediately before setting out on a blind date with a potential new one. A strange analogy, but you get my point.

One of the things I love most about academic life is the promise of a fresh start. I spend a lot of time tweaking and analyzing my courses, but once they’re over, I relish the blank slate of each new semester. Teaching is much like the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character repeats the same day over and over until he gets it right and wins the girl. But how do teachers know if we’ve gotten it right?

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating article, it’s almost impossible to predict who will be an excellent teacher (he compares this to guessing which college quarterbacks will become great NFL players.) Yet it’s also difficult to discern who is an excellent teacher. One of the only ways that college teachers receive feedback on their teaching is through end-of-the-semester course evaluations.

Of course, the validity of student evaluations is hotly debated, with some faculty arguing that students are not qualified to judge faculty performance—and/or that professors who give high grades receive higher evaluations—while others claim that only students are uniquely qualified to judge the daily success of the class. There is research to support both sides of these debates. I’m inclined to agree with those who argue that student evaluations are one important way of judging teaching, but that they need to be used along with other methods. However, since evaluations are the most quantifiable method, they are overused as a form of assessment.

Nobody talks much about the experience of reading one’s student evaluations; we’re supposed to be indifferent to them. After all, we grade them, not vice versa. In full disclosure, I usually receive high student evaluations. Nevertheless, I find the experience of reading 150 anonymous comments about how well I do my job creepy and unsettling. What other professionals are evaluated (anonymously) by every person they encounter? As much as I uphold boundaries in the classroom, I am also very much myself—assigning texts I love, using my own humor and life experiences as examples. It’s frightening to be oneself in front of strangers, let alone be critiqued and have that feedback become part of one’s professional record.

Yet I find evaluations ultimately reassuring. My students are much more generous in judging my teaching than I am. What I remember about last semester are the times I wasn’t 100% focused, the essays I could have read more carefully, and the students I failed to engage. And yet I’ve rarely had students remember or comment on the things that I perceive as failures.

At best, student evaluations highlight an important reality of teaching: what the teacher experiences in the classroom is not what students experience. Students come to our courses with pre-existing theories and often our courses fail to overturn these ideas, an idea that is brilliantly captured in the video, A Private Universe. Students bring their own expectations, fears, and preoccupations to the class.

For example, I discovered that my stonily unresponsive morning literature class thought very highly of my teaching, even though their faces never showed it. And the class that bubbled over with energy and enthusiasm griped about my hard grading.

After 15 years of teaching college I’ve learned that my student evaluations do not necessarily correlate to the amount of preparation I do, or the topics I teach, or to the grades I give out. Which is not to suggest that these things do not matter or that I don’t put much effort into planning the perfect course. But student satisfaction seems to equate to what the educational researchers in Gladwell’s article defined (unhelpfully) as “withitness”: "a teacher's communicating to the [students] by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: 'I know what's going on').” I call this being profoundly present in the class.

So as I work to establish a relationship to these new strangers in my current courses, I try to remember that it’s less important that I do everything right than it is that I come to each class with my full attention, open to every possibility and willing to be surprised.

When I was pregnant with my daughter and unsure what was going to happen to my academic career, a woman I admire, a full-time mom/scientist, told me that she thought of her life in terms of five-year blocks. These blocks corresponded loosely with her children’s developmental stages, and with each subsequent phase she was able to take on different projects or increase the amount of time she devoted to her own interests. This bit of wisdom means a lot to me (I’ve mentioned it a few times in my blogs) because it allows me to silence the nagging, self-critical voice in my head that questions why I’d want to stay home with my kids after so many years of preparation for an academic career. Thinking of life in blocks makes it easier to say that a particular phase is not forever, or isn’t ready to be finished yet, and that I can focus on what I need to do for right now.

This year I’m marking the beginning of a new five-year block. The delineation is arbitrary, but my daughter (my youngest) recently turned five and I’m in my forty-fifth year. Five years seems like nothing…and yet it’s a lifetime. This new life-block is kind of like an open door at the end of a long corridor… I don’t know what’s coming up, but depending on what kinds of preparations or choices I’ve make, it could be a door into something new and interesting.

So, what have I done to shape the next five years? Well, career-wise things have progressed slowly. However, I have the chance to spend ten days helping a friend who’s teaching a field course early this summer. It’s not a paid gig, but it’s a great opportunity for me to work with students in a fun, informal setting. At the very least, I have the chance to renew my teaching skills, add something new to my C.V., and update my reference letters. I’m nervous, though, to be someone other than “Mama” during the course since that’s my everyday identity. Aside from a weekend away two years ago, I’ve never been away from my children for a significant length of time. It will be fun, but also a little outside of my comfort zone. At least I’ll be able to read what I want on the airplane getting there!

I’ve also started off this new five-year period having met a personal goal. When I came to Vancouver a little over five years ago, I had my heart set on joining an amazing choir I’d heard about even before moving here. After hearing them in person, I knew that singing with such a high caliber group would be a challenge, both in terms of time commitment and my own musical skills. I wasn’t sure I could pass the audition, and with a pre-schooler, an infant, and getting used to a new city, the timing just didn’t seem right. One of these days, I kept saying. In the interim, I joined a university chorus and began taking voice lessons when my daughter started pre-school. Earlier this week, five years after I first heard them, I auditioned for my dream choir…and I got in! It’s still going to be a big time commitment and I feel like I’m a little out of my league. But what an experience it will be!

My sister, who’s a little more direct in meeting her goals than I am, has a different take on the five-year plan. She simply looks at her life, asks where she wants to be in five years, and goes straight there. That philosophy seems to work well for many people. However, I can’t honestly say right now where I want these next five years to take me. I do recognize the importance of creating and being open to opportunities, wherever they might lead. And taking on challenges, even when they’re not directly career-related, keeps my heart rate up and pushes me back out into the bigger world.

Today was a snow day of sorts and tomorrow's another one, so I'm feeling a bit behind. I've been thinking, though, about what I've learned so far this semester — here's a start:

1) Startitis doesn't work when you make a big mistake near the beginning of a project but don’t notice it until the end. Ask me how I know this.

2) Administrative tasks expand to fill the time allotted, and then a little more. My husband's formula for figuring out how long it will take to get a table in a restaurant is 2n+5, where n=however long the person up front told you it would take to get a table. This may also be a useful formula for the accomplishment of administrative tasks, where n=how much time you think you have.

3) Prep for teaching, on the other hand, takes exactly as much time as allotted, especially if you allot the time just prior to class. As me how I know this, too. (And, yes, I did actually learn this some time ago, but I do keep learning it over and over.)

4) One of the perks of my new position coordinating our First Year Seminar program is that I have some administrative assistance. This is beyond delightful, truly — it is wonderful to have someone keep some of the seemingly endless lists for me, and to manage some of the data that I've been collecting. However, it's now clear to me that explaining to someone else what you want done runs the risk of taking as long as doing it. Thankfully, I have truly excellent assistance right now — so far having help has absolutely been a time-saver, not a time-sink. But I've had to get considerably more organized than is my wont in order to make that help work. (Yes, this is a good thing — and another learning experience.)

So there's what I've learned so far this semester. And I should say, too, that I'm delighted on my son's behalf that he's finally got a "real" snow day. The last snow we had fell the last day before winter break, so the fact that the city shut down for a few days made no difference to him — he was on break anyway. The snow that fell here Saturday similarly shut everything down both yesterday and today — but today was already a teacher work day and therefore wasn't a "real" snow day. Thanks, however, to a limited snow-removal budget in the city, it's clear that the school buses won't be moving tomorrow, either, so he has another day off, and this one feels like a gift. Luckily I, too, have a "househusband" who can stay home with Nick and take him sledding (as they did today) and supervise homework (ditto) so I can keep going in to the office, and learning on the job.

When wives earn more outside the home, and husbands take on more housework, marriages tend to be happier!

Men are now doing twice as much housework, and three times as much childcare, as they did in the 1960s!

It says so right here in the New York Times, so it has to be true, right?

Seriously, there seems to be increasing recognition that although gender roles may be stubborn, they’re apparently not fixed; and that when there is equality in marriage, there is more enjoyment and stability. This can only be a good thing.

The article does discuss some challenges to equality. For example, among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more is associated with poorer health. (This item particularly caught my attention because my own husband was in perfect health until I abandoned a higher-paying job than his to return to graduate school, and then learned that I was pregnant on his 50th birthday. During that period we were both plagued by stress-related symptoms—but I imagine that the prospect of starvation trumps narcissistic gratification in most cases.)

When I was growing up, very few people were even looking at these issues. It’s not just that the date wasn’t there, but that the frame didn’t exist. Among married couples, at least in the middle class, which was then considered the norm, men worked and women stayed home and managed the house and kids. If a married woman worked outside the home, everyone pitied both halves of the couple: her because her husband couldn’t take care of her, and him because he must feel emasculated.

Things are changing rapidly, and in this case, it seems, for the better. Maybe by the time my son gets married, if he does (another former given that is now an option), people once again won’t be looking at these issues — because there will be no need to.

It’s a humbling experience when you realize that, yes indeed, you are one of those over-educated Americans who can be taken in by an email that asks you for credit card information or by a telemarketing voice that promises to lower your interest rates if you will just provide them with your card number and zip code.

As I was hitting myself over the head this week after being seduced into giving out private information, I wondered, “How did I become so typical?”—a middle aged professional with no savings, two mortgages, equity lines, teenagers, loads of personal debt, and nothing that I truly own (except a car). I’m desperate to lower the interest rates on my debt, so I was (apparently) the perfect victim to answer the phone.

Besides paying off student loan debt until the age of 40, I share one other explanation with lots of other folks — I suffered a medical emergency that left me $30,000 in debt and borrowing from my retirement account. (And I was fully insured!)

Since I am starting to face the reality of my teenagers entering college in three years, I have begun to more seriously pay these cards down and only spend cash for goods, bills and the occasional vacation. But, like many Americans, the interest rates charged against my debt have put me into a situation where I am swimming against the tide. I am unable to save cash for emergencies because my debt is drowning me.

If I am in this financial situation after receiving $300,000 of excellent medical care (which insurance did cover), what about the accident victims who are uninsured? How many uninsured have lost their homes due to emergency medical costs that it takes a lifetime and a house to pay back? Is the health bill really lost after the Massachusetts election?

My quandary is that, unlike my Depression-era parents, I have chosen a lifestyle that does not allow me to save any money for medical emergencies. I don’t think it is unreasonable that I had to pay something for my excellent medical care, nor for my graduate education. As politicians debate the challenges of paying back student loans in an economy in which job availability and salary levels have not kept pace with college tuition costs, I recognize that the current cost of living is not in my favor, and that it’s not looking very good for my children either.

Here’s the good news: I’m being slammed over the head with the lesson to not say “yes” to every equity line that comes my way, which means, I hope, that I can now teach my teenagers and my college students something about life's economics. Of course, the Nanuet Union Free School district in New York teaches their 5th graders basic math skills by asking them to balance their hypothetical checkbooks. Young people may actually learn something about planning for the future when they witness their parents and their teachers face their own financial immaturity.

We're not in a 1930’s style Depression (yet), but it sure is time for a cold shower in Chicago.

I snow-balled a meltdown as I hurrumphed around this evening, distressed at the resistance of my family to help out with dinner and other immediate chores. In fact, for the last several days, maybe a week, our household has been edgy and uncomfortable; tonight things fell apart very easily. My husband glued himself to his computer shortly after walking in the door. The kids, despite all my best efforts to engage with them individually, together, while practicing, doing homework, the rest of the normal weekly activities and even through the act of making dessert together, picked at each other and exploded and dissolved into tears time after time after time. Finally I took my book and dived into bed, giving hubby his turn: to supervise bedtime alone.

When the kids were abed and it was safe to come down, I exchanged more than six words in a row to my husband and finally put together the problem: beginning of semester stress. How did I miss all the indicators? Not until I realized the huge number of exponentially blossoming tasks that he needs to complete in a too-short amount of time, administrative duties, summer research applications, teaching, grading (already!), last-minute advising (and the list goes on), did I understand our family upheaval.

In this context, I realize it’s a weird limbo time for my kids, too, who are also starting a new quarter at school. After-school activities are undetermined, new classes haven’t yet started, but are looming large. Monday (the first day of the new university semester) was a teacher-grading day, and my kids had the day off, twisting their routine. A long round of standardized testing completed the last grading block, precluding PE. There’s been a rush of worry about making sure all work has been handed in so that they can attend “movie day”, the school-wide reward for completed work. Report cards are due soon, and, I’m sure, are topics of discussion at school.

For me, the beginning of the semester came crashing in from out of the blue. Oh, I knew it had started, I just had not tuned into its impact. Somehow, despite the fact that I’ve lived a life defined by the academic calendar forever, this semester snuck up and built up in epic proportions. Semesters come and go, and beginning of semesters come and go (some more smoothly than others) and this too shall pass. The diagnosis is a relief. With the knowledge that this is temporary, my crankiness at dealing with too many wonky issues has transformed into more understanding sympathy; I can calm down my insecurities that flared up as family life has grown increasingly difficult and I seem to always do the wrong things.

I had another blog topic planned out to write about for this week, but my family stress ball took over my thoughts this time. I hope your semesters have started more smoothly!

After blogging at this site for well over a year, I start to fear that I'll repeat myself. And, sure enough, when I sat down to write a post about knitting, I discovered that I'd done it before. That earlier post was a pep talk of sorts, a reminder to myself that I need to make time for things I love that aren't directly related to my work. Sometimes that can be hard, since one of my greatest pleasures, reading novels, is indeed directly related to my work and therefore hardly "counts" as a leisure activity.

But these days reminding myself to knit seems like less of an issue — what I need, it seems, is a reminder to finish what I start. Or, perhaps even better, to start what I can finish.

Let me explain. Among some knitters, I've occasionally heard the term "startitis" — the tendency to start, but not finish, many projects. I never really understood the problem. I mostly knit fairly small projects, things I could complete in a few weeks or a month, knitting on the couch during downtime. But suddenly I find myself with several unfinished projects lying around in various stages of completion — the shawl I started almost two years ago that is still a bit beyond my level of competence, for example. The scarf that I almost certainly can't complete without another ball of a yarn I bought in England and haven't yet tracked down here. The socks that I gave my husband for Christmas, still on the needles.

Well, of course, it's the socks that are the real problem. Sock knitting is fussy and precise — unlike shawls and scarves, socks need to fit — and, while I enjoy the precision of the architecture, it does involve a little more attentiveness on my part than some other projects. (Skilled sock knitters are now laughing into their double-pointed needles as I reveal my complete amateur status here.)

So the socks are going to take a while, and in the meantime I've started a couple of other projects that are, well, easier — more likely to be finished in the next couple of weeks. Project monogamy, I've found, is not for me.

And that actually is a lesson that carries over into my working life. A course takes fifteen weeks, and there's a certainty about the ending that comes with the rhythms of academic life — there will be papers to grade, presentations to evaluate, and then it will be done. But other projects — working on curricular revision, say, or embarking on a research project — are more amorphous, indefinite in their contours and their likelihood of completion. I enjoy the attention to detail that they require, the intricacies of construction (if I change this, what happens here?) — but some days I need to work on something more limited, something I can finish.

So I'm going to stop apologizing for my startitis and make sure I always have both kinds of projects on hand — some that are small and easily completed, others that may continue for months or even years but that offer larger challenges. And one day maybe my skills will be up to my ambitions, and I'll even finish that big shawl.

I am a regular guest panelist on the British literary podcast Litopia after Dark. One of the topics discussed on last week’s show was the success, or lack thereof, of men writing in a woman’s voice, and vice versa. All of us had examples of writers who had convinced us (Roddy Doyle and Henry James are my personal favorites), and others who had missed the mark. One panelist, though, had a particularly valuable perspective to share: she had spent the first twenty-odd years of her life as a man. “I found that men took me more seriously, and were more interested in my thoughts, when I was a man,” she told us. “In general, I think women understand men much better than men understand women.”

This is my impression of pretty much all relationships between groups of unequal power, though of course there is great variation among individuals. The experience of the dominant group is presented as the default, and the less powerful group must adapt and, in a sense, become bilingual. Gay people tend to understand the straight experience better than straights understand gays, because the culture is overwhelmingly straight; heterosexuality is assumed unless there is information indicating otherwise.

Fish don’t notice the water they swim in. I never noticed, until a client pointed it out, that in nearly all mainstream fiction, characters are assumed to be white unless another color is specified. I didn’t need to notice this, because I am white; despite good intentions and efforts at improvement, I generally float (or bumble) through life assuming that my experience on this axis is the norm.

It’s not always easy for me to hear that this isn’t the case; that others suffer from, and are handicapped by, systems and conventions that have benefited me. I feel better thinking that we function in a meritocracy, and that any successive I have achieved are to my credit alone, with no unfair help from the color of my skin, my sexual and gender orientation, or my religion.

It’s difficult to suppress defensiveness, even for short periods, and listen to others’ criticisms of my groups, without trying to explain to them why they’re wrong, at least in my case. What I’ve had to learn is that nine times out of ten, members of the nondominant group already know what I think—they’ve heard it repeatedly, often with the speaker’s complete confidence that these are new ideas the listener couldn’t have been exposed to before. I’ve had to learn that polite silence and withdrawal do not usually indicate convinced acquiescence, and that those who take a moment to educate me are unusually patient and forbearing, not insulting.

This is true of women’s issues as well. Really.

This post is not intended to discourage men from commenting. It’s great to have you here. Rather, it is a suggestion that when you read posts and comments by women, about women’s issues, on a blog that is aimed primarily toward women, you consider the strong possibility that we have thought and educated ourselves about the questions under discussion, and that if our conclusions — sometimes communicated in a sort of shorthand, on the assumption that other women will know what we mean — differ from yours, lack of understanding on our part is not the only possible conclusion to be drawn.

You might want to check out Kate Harding’s thoughtful critique of Clay Shirky’s intelligent and well-intentioned essay on why women need to be more assertive in the workplace. Harding is a funny and articulate writer, and a much nicer person than I am, so it should be a painless illustration of what I’m talking about.