Once I got past yesterday's urge for the melodramatic, as captured in the previous post, I decided that, since my brain was fried for the day, I would accomplish something else productive: desserts. Working in slow-motion, I turned out a peach cobbler, a cashew-based dessert sauce, and some chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. Mmmmm. Then I went to bed early, planning to sleep in till 8am. Of course, I had also scheduled the grocery delivery for 7:30am, so that part didn't work as well as it could have. Still, I'm sure lots of delivery men are greeted at the door in the mornings by wild-haired women, barefoot and bathrobed, their faces still covered by pillow imprints. Yeah, yeah, it sorta sounds like a set-up for one of those "I never thought it would happen to me" letters, until you remember that I also hadn't brushed my teeth yet. Anyway, I tried not to breathe too hard on the poor man. And it was, for the record, the fastest delivery they've ever made.

And now, on with they day!

Child ill. Slept almost not at all. Suspended night-weaning attempts, to help him get better faster. Oh. Oh oh oh. Ow. Cannot work today. Husband has taken wee one (thankfully much improved this morning) out and away, and I find myself wishing I were the kind of person who could nap. But napping makes me sick to my stomach and badly disoriented.

Two years of sleep deprivation. More, if you count the last few months of my pregnancy. What will the ultimate cost be? My cognition, speech, and memory are all impaired now, some days terribly so. The course I taught over the summer? I cringe when I remember some of my errors. But--on the positive?--my memory is so damaged, I can hardly recall the course now, anyway. One of my fears is that there will be lasting damage, even once the child finally learns to sleep longer than two hours at a time.

I do not dare have another child. I know my son is a high-needs kid, and that they are not all like that, but what if kid number two was the same? I cannot go through this again. I just don't have the strength, physical, mental, or psychological. I adore my little sweet pea, but I cannot lose another two years.

My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it.

May: Much writing. Gave talk. Rested for a few days; worn out.

June: Cleaned and reorganized entire apartment (OK, except for the big bedroom). Hosted many wonderful visitors. Began teaching intensive summer class.

July: Taught all month. More wonderful visitors. Son and husband had birthday (they share date and name, too--let the credit report confusions begin!) Health issues arise in last week of month.

August: Health issues resolved to my satisfaction (yay, it no longer feels like something is in my eye!), but not to that of my doctors (no no no, there must be something really, REALLY wrong with me). Tests are ordered. Then another test. Then more tests. Am currently looking at the fourth round of tests, which I expect will once again reveal that, although I have some physiological unusualness, I am in good health. Spirits not as good, what with all the worrying and aggravation, but have recently decided to cease caring about the doctorly wringing of hands and recommence normal life.

Today: research. Am working up prospectus for my dissertation proposal, and if I can ignore the woeful sounds emanating from two doctors and, soon, a third (especially since I have already decided I will refuse the lumbar puncture that I predict will shortly be demanded by third doc), I hope to have proposal done by late summer or early fall.

I heart my writing class. I frickin' heart it, you know? (Yes, I'm taking a writing class.) Suddenly, outlining makes sense again. I had reached a point where the complexity of my thoughts and arguments overwhelmed the dinky little outlining strategies I'd learned in high school. Now it's as though I've been issued outlining version 2.0--an update long overdue.

So, anyway, I'm going to sit here drinking my bowl of coffee--accidental excess of coffee brewed today--and contemplate my satisfaction with my current writing projects and, y'know, life in general.

Smug. It tastes great!

Sleepy today after another long night with toddler son. Kid just wants to nurse, nurse, nurse. The more I put my foot down and try to nurse him less at night, the more time he wants to spend nursing by day. If I put my foot down there, too, I wind up with a kid who spends a huge amount of his time, day and night, whining and crying and clinging. And lately, as I continue to steamroll him with my desire to move towards weaning, his cries have started to sound less loud and annoyed (as had been typical for him), and more soft and oh-so-sad.

I spent some time over lunch (cornmeal-breaded tofu, roasted sweet-potato wedges, kale, garlicy barbeque sauce, then frosted banana cake) researching the matter. I am relieved to find he is really quite normal. He simply isn't ready to wean, and I am making things harder not only on him but on myself by trying to force him to wean early. His sleeping pattern (waking about every 3 hours to nurse) is also completely normal for a breastfeeding, co-sleeping toddler (which is to say, most of the toddlers on planet earth).

The problem really isn't him. It isn't even feeling tired--honestly, most of my missed sleep at night comes when I argue with the kid over nursing and periodically send him to timeout for yelling too much. The problem is the normal one of comparison and fear of failure. No one else that I am personally acquainted with has a kid who behaves like this. And when the differences would come up in conversation, other people reacted in horror to my situation ("you still sleep with him? you still nurse him every few hours at night?"), thereby causing it to become an Issue in my own mind.

The rest has followed from that.

So tonight I am going to go back to following my own instincts, and cuddle and nurse the kid freely throughout the night, whenever he wants. I'm not going to argue with him over how long or how often. I'm not going to scold him for fussing. I want that soft, whimpery, forlorn cry to stop. And I'll bet I find myself a lot more rested and productive, too.

Full disclosure: I was pretty much ready to give in anyway, before I did the research that validated the normality of his behavior. Last night, after a huge blow-out over nursing ("no more till morning. night is for sleeping, not nursing or tantrums."), complete with timeouts and everything, the little one settled down in silence, only demanding that I rub his belly. After a little bit, I thought he was asleep and withdrew my hand. He reached out and pulled my hand back to his little belly. This repeated a time or two, until he lay still and quiet and didn't try to take my hand back again. I lifted myself a little to look at him (I love to watch him sleep), only to discover him lying there with his eyes wide open, a very stoic expression on his little face. Of course, I melted, wrapped my arms around him, nestled him against my body and nursed him. He was fast asleep, for really and truly, a few minutes later. Poor, sweet little guy.

Parenting far and away trumps dissertation-writing in difficulty and high stakes.

Not dead! One conference paper down, two to go. Very busy. Busy-ness compounded by (1) tutoring gig and (2) training for intern job next year. My dissertation is not getting much attention just now. But we are all well and healthy and not dead. Score!

Success! No, not on the computer-battery front, not yet. We couldn't get an appointment during times when we were free. But I have traction on my conference paper--at last!

My work the past few days has mostly consisted of tweaking my outline, jotting (and deleting) a few lines of text, and doing way more research than is called for. This is a normal loss of nerve that I get when the deadline starts to loom, and I plan my schedule accordingly. Yesterday, I took a pad of paper to a cafe--just a pad of paper and a pen, no outline, no computer, and no access to endless research materials. And there, with nothing else to distract me, I blazed through about a third of the paper. Huzzah!

Today there are plans afoot to go shopping, as my wardrobe is woefully lacking in clothes that are both conference-worthy and which fit me. I continue to lose pregnancy weight at a, well, snail's pace, requiring me to buy all new clothes every few months. It is annoying. I even tried to eat lots of really rich things this month, in the hopes of bumping my weight back up into my previous set of dressy clothes, but no luck. Fats signal the body to feel full, and I would uit eating after smaller portions, so it didn't help raise my total calorie intake enough (the only thing that really matters in weight loss or gain, contrary to all the crap dieting products on the market--seriously, want to lose weight? don't eat any pasta, white rice, potatoes, white bread, or other things made with white flour; these are the most common calorie-dense foods--not to mention, they have very little nutritional value, unlike their unrefined counterparts.) (Fun at parties? Oh, ho, this Snail is just a blast!) I think all I did was slow my weight loss enough to stick me between sizes, which isn't the most convenient outcome.

However, none of that might matter anyway, since the weather is today of the Wrath of the Gods variety. Maybe I can quickly craft something fashion-forward out of, let's see, some sheets, towels, and my son's outgrown baby clothes? Yeah, I'll let you know how that turns out.

Dear Universe,

Thank you for the ____FOOD_PICKINESS_&_TANTRUMS______ you have recently chosen to send to ___OUR_TODDLER____. However, at this time we find we have no need for your kind offering(s), due to ____WANTING_TO_STAY_SANE____. Therefore, we respectfully request that you stop by on ____TODAY!_____ at ____NOW!___ o'clock to pick up the unwanted item(s). Please don't hesitate to think of us again in the future, especially should you have any ____SLEEP____ available.

Yours truly,
SNAIL FAMILY

Gosh, that was angry.

But then, I am pretty darned angry at myself. That bears repeating: at myself. It isn't the responsibility of my friends or family to keep me on the straight and narrow regarding my dissertation. It's mine. And I've been shirking, and I'm angry.

Tomorrow I stay home (husband works; babysitter's out of town). Thursday I get back on track: out the door by 9:30 or 10am, my ass in a chair at the library, the work flowing.

It's that time again. The time when, once again, my academic work has been equated to playtime in everyone's mind. The time when, however many times I state the minute I need to walk out the door, no one pays the slightest attention. The time when my leaving for the library may be freely and endlessly delayed because my husband wants to sleep in or read the paper, or my son wants to explore the pantry or read The Snowy Day for the fifth time in a row. Yes, it's once more the time when I have to assert the value and importance of my work.

There's only so much blame I can lay on other people. Really, I'm quite complicit. I want my husband to get plenty of rest and relaxation. I want to spend time with my son, watch him discover, help him learn. Asserting that my work really is work and that my working hours really must be honored by everyone is my job, and no one else's. Sure, it's tedious that every few months, I have to put my foot down, firm and loud, and announce that This Is It, We May No Longer Disrespect Snail's Worktime, but that is simply how it is.

I need about 4 hours per day, six days a week, at the library. Lately that time has shrunk to 1, maybe 2 hours per day, maybe four days a week. But I had to stay home and let my husband rest, right? Sure, except...well, the only way I can justify not going to work is if I stop considering it really work. If I had a job at a corporation, would it be OK for me to flitter off for a day here and there, because my husband sprained his ankle or my kid is teething? I mean, maybe, just a little, right when things are most acute, but not habitually.

It is one of the things the best books on dissertation-writing tell you: treat your academic work like a job. It isn't something to put off because you don't feel like it, or your family wishes you wouldn't go, or your friends want to chat. To finish graduate school, one simply has to give up a lot of socializing time. That's how it is.

Yesterday I accidentally left the ringer off on the phone. I turned it off while I was putting my son down for a nap, and forgot to turn it back on. My best friend, I learned this morning, was exceedingly worried when she couldn't reach me. She phoned over and over all evening, at home and on our cell phones (dunno why we didn't hear those, but we didn't), and sent me emails. Her concern was very kind, even admirable. But it is exactly the kind of pressure that I have to steel myself against once more. Not being able to contact me or play with me or rely on me for some extra sleeping or relaxing time is NOT an emergency. It is a simple, normal part of a reality in which Snail is a grownup with her own grownup concerns that do not always include the gratification of other people's needs and desires before her own.

And now I need to take my 80 remaining minutes and try to get something done. (Herein lies the other problem: I am so disheartened, when I arrive at the library with less than two hours to work, I often can't get anything done anyway.) (And sometimes, rather than being too disheartened, I am too pissed off. Like today.)

Snail Out.

If anyone's been wondering where I am: my laptop's battery is very, very dead now. Thing only works when plugged in; otherwise it shuts itself off. And husband and I only have one working power adapter between us, so basically, I've only been using my machine at work, for work. For the rest, I'm trying not to break my machine any worse or hog my husband's too long. Tomorrow we're going to see about getting mine fixed.

Everything else is fine, though. My work is coming along, more or less, and husband's ankle is much improved, although he relapses every time he works it too hard. I wish I could take over all the chores and childcare and let him lie on the couch for a solid week, but I have to write this paper (and the one after that and the one after that), and I have to sleep to write it. Not to mention, husband has his own work that can't be ignored.

I'll be back. Never doubt it.

There is a difference of opinion in our household over the matter of night-nursing. One of us feels that it ought to be phasing out now, allowing--nay, encouraging--both parties to have deeper, more sustained sleep, leading to a more rested and less cranky toddler and to a mom better able to tackle each day's work, refreshed and without backaches. The other of us feels that WAH WAH BOOBIES WAH! And the third party in our household is remarkably patient about listening to this particular disagreement over and over in the wee hours of the morning.

The child is getting his two-year molars, and I sympathize. But I am getting my umpteen-year degree, and I need my rest. People talk about beauty sleep, but brainy sleep, or at least vague-coherence sleep, now that's the real thing. I can't say I've ever got up looking like a pretty pretty princess (or, really, like anything other than a wad of something the night spat out), but I do, after a good night's sleep, come out of it ready to write shit down on paper. Reasonable, sense-making shit.

Lest I sound too selfish, it should be said that I am willing to nurse him for ten or fifteen minutes every three or four hours during the night, which seems ample. My son, however, is lately fighting for twenty minute stretches every two hours. To which, quoth I: beloved child, perhaps thou hast failed to note it, yet though art, no more a mewling infant, but a strapping, toddling young lad, well-provendered in daylight hours. Nay, look, here is a sip of water and a kiss. Be thou quiet now and rest thee. Hush, hush.

To which the child: WAH BOOBIES WAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Shakespeare it ain't.

In other news: I should be ready to begin writing a proper draft of my conference paper today or maybe tomorrow. I do wish I had planned, when drawing up my schedule, for more teething. I don't know why I didn't. Son has spent his entire second year thus far in the throes of teething. Effing A.

And in other other news: I got that job for next year! I am very excited. There is a lengthy training period to be got through first--we are not simply unleashed on unsuspecting freshmen--but I expect I will find it interesting. Now I just need to line up some work for the summer, too, and maybe find an extra class to teach or TA during next year, and I will have the lineaments of an income. (My stipend is about to give out. Does it show?) I will have to give in and borrow some money, too, but the less the better, especially given the state of the economy right now.

And now I'd better do some food chores (shopping lists, food prep). Make mashed potatoes while the son sleeps, that's what I always say!

Dear Past Self,

Mwah, mwah! I LOVE you! The way you wrote ten single-spaced pages of notes for a three-page conference paper? The way you outlined and discussed the major literature on the topic? The way you jotted down what was left to be done? You, Past Self, are the best past self any current academic self could hope to have. Especially a totally overtired, scatter-witted current academic self, whose husband is mostly better now, thanks, but still needs a little help. Thank you so much, and I promise I will always try to be as good a past self to all my future selves.

Love,
Current Self

PS: Should Future Self ever get a chance to read this: dude, the Veganomicon's recipe for sauteed seitan with mushrooms and spinach is damned good! Go cook more of it right now!

Make that a stone's progress, lately. And not a rolling stone, either. My husband has sprained his ankle, so he hasn't been able to do as much housework or childcare. I have had to stay home extra, looking after the sonling so husband can keep his ankle elevated and iced. Not to mention, I've been up late every night cleaning, sweeping, and washing and drying the dishes--this in addition to my own usual share of the chores, which includes all the cooking and--at the son's own LOUD insistence--all of the nighttime and early morning childcare.

People, I am dead tired. My whole body hurts. I crave sleep like a man in the desert craves water, or like a writer craves original similes.

Tomorrow the babysitter comes. My husband will rest in the bedroom and maybe get a little writing done there, and I will go to the library and, let's be honest, most likely stare at my computer in the daze of utter exhaustion. This weekend I was supposed to wrap up the writing on my diss chapter for a while and send my pages to my advisors. Tomorrow I was supposed to get started on the first of two conference papers. Goddess alone knows what I might actually manage to accomplish tomorrow.

For now, I need to gulp down some tea, wake up, and finish getting dinner ready. My husband is watching the little one, and he can only do that for so long. Gotta go. No more time to rest.

I'm stuck in an exhaustion spiral. My non-dissertation chores all seem to have caught up to me in the past few days. They eat into my writing hours and into my sleeping hours. I cook and bake and clean, I make travel and lodging arrangements for various conferences, I track our finances to the penny, I apply for jobs, I tutor. I don't write much or sleep much. This takes its toll: I get more withdrawn, when I don't get to write. And lack of sleep leads to illness. I currently seem to be battling a case of thrush, and let me tell you: NOT FUN.

But what can I do? These other tasks simply must get done--and it isn't as if my husband isn't also dipping into his own sleep and research time to get a bunch of other tasks done--or to help me with mine. We'll get past this.

And, hey, I did get some writing done today. Let's see...206 words. Not much, but I had to spend some time researching some related historical details.

Also, I tried out some anti-fungal cream on the thrush. Pro: it has greatly improved the symptoms. Con: it gave me a rash. I'm still in no hurry to visit the student health offices on campus, though. Their job seems to be providing substandard care at a pace that even a snail gets impatient with. I do not have three hours to wait around in their offices, only to be given treatments or tests that are ineffective/inconclusive, expensive, or both. Their special trick is to order tests which require one to wait upwards of five hours for some technician to become available, which don't reveal anything pertinent, and which, although partially covered by my (crappy) student insurance, invariably results in a bill of a couple hundred dollars. (And I get anxious at having to spend an unexpected $10, right now.)

They also specialize in wrong diagnoses and protracted insurance feuds. My husband caught both in one go, when some incompetent practitioner diagnosed him with asthma and sent him home with an inhaler. He returned a few days later to express that the inhaler did nothing for his symptoms. She proceeded to discourse on how "people with his type of asthma" ought to care for themselves. He demanded at this point that she actually send him to be tested for asthma, which she vigorously refused for some time to do. (Oh, yes! Pointless tests are always OK, as when they insisted I have my gall bladder ultrasounded after I showed up for treatment for a flare-up of my bursitis, a known and pre-existing condition. That was an all-day affair, too. People, I have had bursitis for damned near ten years! I know what it feels like when my bursa gets inflammed! Oh, but gods forbid you want any of their off-the-cuff diagnoses to be backed up by evidence.) The test, which she eventually and huffily agreed my husband could have--oh, you know where this is going--revealed not a trace of asthma. The real kicker? A few months later my husband was billed for the full cost of the asthma test, and had to go several rounds with the insurance company and the health center to get them to admit that one of their doctors had, in fact, ordered the test, albeit at the patient's insistence. (Insistence that should never have been necessary in the first place.)

No, I don't run right over to those people when I get ill. I wait and see, rest and hydrate and try out a home remedy or two first. Seriously, can you blame me?

But here I am bitching, when I really and truly sat down with something positive to say today. You see, recently someone asked me what the worst piece of advice about writing was that I had ever received. I wasn't really sure what to say, because it seems to me that just about every piece of writing advice has been useful at one time or another. As one of my advisors puts it, sometimes more really is more. In no particular order, here is some advice about writing:

Write! Write something, anything. But write!

Don't write. Take a break from writing for a set period of time, maybe a day or week.

Try writing a few pages of your draft on paper, instead of on a computer.

Freewrite. Put down whatever comes into your head, for 15 or 20 minutes, to help you loosen up.

Keep a blog. You can track your progress!

Don't keep a blog. It will sap your writing energy!

Never delete anything you write.

Have a great purge and delete stuff that just isn't working.

Keep one eye on the main points of your current passage and your chapter/paper over all. Even write them down on a notecard you keep next to you.

Outline carefully and thoroughly in advance.

Begin right in with your writing, and only outline a little as you go, if you need to.

Write first thing in the morning, when you are at your freshest and most creative.

If you get stuck, use the time to work on other, related tasks, like research and bibliography-building.

Don't let your work on related tasks turn into a means of indefinite procrastination!

Carry a notebook with you at all times, to jot down your ideas. Otherwise you may forget them.

Talk aloud while you write, to keep yourself focused and lively.

Write in a private, quiet place, to avoid distraction.

Write where other people are writing. That way, if you are tempted to procrastinate, you'll know other people will see it. Harness the power of shame!

Write in a noisy place, like a cafe. With so much background buzz, you will not notice your neighbor with the stuffy nose or the sound of other people tapping on their keyboards.

Listen to music. Let its rhythms push you forward or move you to deeper contemplation.

Don't listen to music. It will distract and unfocus you.

Don't try to sound smart; that will result in you sounding weird, instead. Just focus on the concrete details of your argument.

Prize clarity above any other rhetorical value.

Drink lots of tea.

Avoid caffeine; it will make you jittery.

Write! Write first and write last. Always be writing. Write!

The weekend, in numbers:

2 hours tutoring
1 clean bathroom
2 big bags of trash
1 loaf of bread
12 muffins that taste like donuts
12 biscuits
16 snickerdoodles
1 pan of chocolate chip blondies
1 big bunch of kale
1 big pot of soup
12 cups of veg stock
3 big rounds of seitan
4 cups of tomato-cilantro hummus
2 plane tickets
1 conference registration
1 pair of little sneakers soaked from splashing in puddles

AND, after 1,767 words of outlining and 1 meeting with my advisor...

1 diss-writing mojo recovered

Bring on Monday morning.

Yesterday's meeting with one of my advisors went well, and I now have greater confidence in my ideas and my approach. However, he did find several intriguing, new ideas to add into the mix. I am drowning in ideas here, folks!

My greatest struggle as an academic has always been that I have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That is, I can readily lose sight of the broad outlines, the big picture, under a welter of details. Happily, this has also become my greatest strength. My method of working is to take all the details into my awareness, bit by bit, until my mental image of the material expands enough that the big picture emerges from it. To put it another way, I come to know the forest by first learning every tree. The patterns that I am able to perceive, using this method, are rich, complex, and nuanced. To boast a little (just a little): this is a valuable ability.

But it has its downsides. I can flail for a long time at the threshold between whole-lotta-trees and gosh-look-a-forest. I do not like models that only work if one ignores a pesky counter-example here and there. And I am drawn to elegant solutions as much as anybody else, so even when I begin to first see patterns, it may still take a fair bit of work to perceive the best one, the right one. This method is not quick or easy, and it lends itself all too readily to perfectionism.

That's where I'm stuck right now: sifting through the details, finding and testing and discarding patterns, writing in circles as I search for the One True Interpretation.

I have only a little over a week left before I must put aside my work on this chapter and attend to writing a couple of papers for talks. And once the second talk is over, I only have another two weeks to convert my work on this chapter into another talk. I need to move quickly, and to do that, I need to find a sense of certainty in my analysis, perhaps even a sense of finality.

My hope is to get back underway with my writing today. The past two weeks haven't been very productive, and it is time for that to end. My working day is short today, to allow my husband to get a turn at his own work. The bright side: I get to go home to my sweet little son all the sooner! But I had better get down to work now.

I am continuing to work through my outline, pushing myself to deal here, now, upfront, with the peskier problems and confusions that keep tripping me up when I set to actually write. I have also scheduled a meeting with one of my advisors for tomorrow, to go over my outline and make sure it is sound. Well...the main point of having this meeting is perhaps nothing more than to force me to finish this outline. I am so sick of this section of my chapter, I would like to stay home for a week and do nothing but bake cookies. (Something I probably shouldn't say on my blog, as my husband reads my blog sometimes, and I am not sure he wouldn't encourage Project Cookies-Out-the-Wazoo.)

In other news:

* Financial crisis in the Snail household! Wait, family to the rescue and we are temporarily saved! Or are we??? Snails busy themselves locating financial documents and setting up meetings and such. Eventual outcome? Still unknown.

* Computer equipment failure! But wait, new equipment purchased! But wait again, new equipment might still not be working right! Will Snail have to suck it up and finally buy a new battery for her poor little machine?

* I have a new tutoring gig, which I am enjoying. Also, I got past the first round of eliminations for a certain job next year. Next week I will have to pass an interview. In the meantime, I no longer have any interview-worthy clothes that fit me. (Somewhere between nursing and switching to a near-vegan diet I have dropped a couple clothes sizes.) Fret fret fret.

* Hey, if I do get this job, it could readily turn into a really nifty teaching position by the end of next year! Except not! Because I would have to be ABD by the end of the spring quarter, and, uh, yeah, NO, I don't think that will happen. By the end of the summer? Sure. Easily. Not by the end of the spring.

* At the end of next week, I must stop working on this diss chapter and instead turn my attention to writing two conference papers. Can I get past this nasty section of my chapter before then? Can I get close? Can I relocate my dissertation mojo?

OK, time to pack up and return to the House of the Whining Son. It's been the ruin of many a poor mom, and believe me, I know. I'm one.

In case it wasn't clear from my last post: I'm stuck in endless rewriting hell. Again. How do I keep winding up here? How???

Two reasons leap to mind: first, this is just the toughest, densest, most complex part of my chapter. It is hard. Second, I have all these little bits of stuff--ideas, observations, claims, counter-claims, etc.--and not only is it hard to organize them in a sensible fashion, but it is hard to keep them all in my head at once, to make sure they are coherent and do not contradict one another.

In response to the latter issue, I have decided to pause in my writing and to work through a detailed outline before I go back. Usually my outlines are rather rough-and-ready affairs, but this one needs to be more ramified. Son is napping now, so I'm going to dig right in, I guess.

If only I knew just where to grab this whole mess first, though! And that obnoxious Do-Re-Mi song keeps playing in my head like a taunt: "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..."

Someone shoot me in the head now. Thanks.