The unsung hero

So in light of today’s confessional, I need to talk about something that occurred to me Saturday and has been percolating ever since.

One reason I despise sitcoms is because so often the dad is made out to be an idiot. Yeah. He is. He goes to work (usually at a job he hates), provides for his family, and gets slammed at every turn. Why is he putting up with this?

A mobile phone commercial from a couple of years ago (I forget the provider) has stuck in my head. A middle-class black family, with the kids completely disrespecting the father for some reason, and I thought, “Yeah, that Stupid Dad thing transcends race. All dads are stupid according to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.” The only dad I can recall on TV who wasn’t portrayed as terminally stupid was Bill Cosby, but as everybody knows, he’s got very definite opinions about what is and is not acceptable behavior in parent-child relationships.

Anyway …

Saturday I went out (outside!) to blow leaves. Manual labor gives me the opportunity to let my mind wander, and I was thinking about my husband, who was at work, a typically structured corporate-type job (albeit with hours that are a bit out of the norm), one he sometimes doesn’t care for very much. But it’s secure and we have good health insurance.

I’d been spending my day fiddle-farting around. Did a couple of ebook jobs, did a little DDJ, did some cleaning, some reading … Yelled at my kids (that’s normal). I decided to go do this little chore and it occurred to me about an hour into the job that my husband is the reason I have the freedom to fiddle-fart around, arrange my day any way I want it, and …

… self-publish.

I would never have done this without him behind me. He believed in my talent when I didn’t and spent years pounding his faith into my head. He sacrifices endlessly for me financially and with his time, and this venture that would not exist without him.

No, I would never have done this on my own. It was him, his faith in me, his willingness to sacrifice everything for me. He bears my temper tantrums and my moodiness and my not-very-niceness (read: bitch-on-wheels-ness) with grace and equanimity. He comforts me and dries my tears and helps me solve my problems. He gave me children and supports them and me, helps corral them to let me work.

I’d have nothing were it not for him.

The first movie I ever took my kids to:

A still shot from the movie WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE with a very large monster looming in an instructive manner over a small boy dressed in a tiger costume.Where the Wild Things Are.

Why?

This article and this quote:

Q: What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?

Maurice Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

My new author hero.

Then a commenter (on whichever blog linked it; I can’t remember) said, “Thank you for not contributing to the pussification of America.”

So … I took my kids.

3-almost-4-year-old XY TD was interested until his popcorn ran out and then it might as well have been church with better seats, for all the attention he paid. Besides, he is unscareable.

6-year-old XX TD seemed more engaged with the movie … until she lost one of her quarters. Oh the weeping. Over which I was unmoved because I TOLD her to put it in her pocket or she’d lose it. Ta da! Mama’s right again.

Me? I cried in spots. It’s a mom’s movie. Yeah, I’ve been that torn, that tired, that struggling, that scattered, that out of control.  So has my kid.

I got it.

I mean, I got what I could between trying to corral my own little Max and telling the Drama Princess to suck it up.

Seven years, no itching

A picture of the Mormon Nauvoo temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, Photoshopped with soft pastel filters.

Here’s to me and Dude, who got married 7 years ago in the LDS Nauvoo, Illinois temple (very soon after it re-opened). Yeah, we got married on a Friday. The 13th. On purpose.

And in case you think you’re seeing things, yes, this is what I posted last year. Because it’s been over a year blogging and I love him more now than I did last year.

Convergence

I’ve been pondering a weighty topic for the last week or so, wondering why a couple of Christian concepts seem to be mutually exclusive, and, moreover, how shall I reconcile those?

No, I’m not telling you what they are. I ran across a passage in a book that spoke to my questions (although didn’t answer them, precisely). So I’m just going to post the passage. Character names are left out, as I want it to stand on its own without any preconceived notions.

[The man] smiled. “What does this look like to you, Miss [ … ]?” He pointed around the room.

“This?” She laughed suddenly, looking at the faces of the men against the golden sunburst of rays filling the great windows. “This looks like … You know, I never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word—and now—now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that some day, in heaven, you will see those great departed whom you had not seen on earth, and you choose, from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet.”

[ … ]

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“And if you met those great men in heaven,” asked [another], “what would you want to say to them?”

“Just … just ‘hello,’ I guess.”

“That’s not all,” said [he]. “There’s something you’d want to hear from them. I didn’t know it, either, until I saw him for the first time” —he pointed to [a third man]— “and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss [ … ], you’d want them to look at you and to say, ‘Well done.’”

Finding time to write

I swear I see this at least once a week on some writer’s blog or another.  I am unsympathetic, but perhaps it’s because if I don’t have time to write, I don’t spend X number of minutes writing a blog post about how I don’t have time to write.

Color me curmudgeonly, but a writer writes, even if it’s only in his head, plotting, working through a problem, playing what-if, taking notes into one of those micro-recorder key chain thingies, having a scrap piece of paper and a pencil, churning your issues over with a friend or talking to yourself.  I don’t care.

Writing isn’t always about sitting in front of a blank computer screen and staring at it.  It’s about fostering the world you’re building and the characters you’re creating. Do you really do that in front of a computer screen, pounding out each word like it’s a chore?

I want to know something:  How much of your story  could you have written if you hadn’t spent that time on your blog complaining about not having any time to write? Or is writing a chore for you who can’t find time to write?

The definition of honor

The XX Tax Deduction is 5 and in kindergarten.  All day.  She has an account she can use to pay for her breakfast and lunch, and we just put money in it from the web.  Nifteee. Yet … she comes home every day and says, “I’m STARVED!”  Oh, really?  Have a snack.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, we found out she’s been throwing her entree in the trash wholesale.  Every day.  And she’s starved when she comes home from school?  Well, lemme tell ya.  Two parental unit heads blew up. So.

We cut her off.  Now, she’d been begging to let her take lunch to school in her nifty Dora lunch box (not a real one, just a little play tin thing), but we wouldn’t let her.  So we knew that sending lunch to school with her would be no punishment.  But … she loves having breakfast at school and always eats all of it.

Bye bye school breakfast. That made her howl.

Bye bye school lunch, bye bye Dora tin-with-a-handle thing, bye bye hot variety.

Today is day 5 of bologna-and-cheese-on-white-with-Miracle-Whip, cheese cubes, and a bag of carrots. In a brown paper bag. Welcome to my childhood, kid, enjoy.  She was forbidden to try to access her account and she was told to bring home whatever she didn’t eat. Today is also day 5 she didn’t eat her lunch and brought it home, ate it after school because she was STARVED and wasn’t allowed anything else until she did.

Except today … Her current best friend had his birthday party, for which his mother brought the class pizza for lunch.  Since we had not anticipated such a thing happening, we didn’t tell her she could eat whatever was brought as a treat.

Even though she loves pizza above all other foods and it broke her heart to watch the other kids eat, she didn’t have any.

Because we told her she had to eat the lunch we gave her and nothing else.

How valuable is knowledge?

NOTE: This is the third in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I will be cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.

Outside of David’s and my continuing exploration of how to monetize our work (and for me, this means fiction), I’ve come across some interesting things that really only cement my opinion that, in a misguided attempt to be generous, knowledge is flung around like rotting leaves on a late fall day: plentiful, soggy, and seemingly worthless.

In ages past, knowledge was specialized and carefully husbanded, passed down from father to son or from master to apprentice, under the craft guild’s auspices: tailoring, goldsmithing, masonry, jewel cutting. These trades were respected, well paid, and each had their—get it?—guild to watch out for the trade. (I won’t go into the differences between a guild and a union at this time.)

This Old House logoNot that long ago, esoteric specialized trades with their own secrets began to write how-to books. I still liken this to the groundbreaking This Old House (and if you don’t know how groundbreaking this was in the building and remodeling industry, you just weren’t paying attention or you weren’t born yet). In 1979, I was 11 and I ate it up, glued to PBS every Saturday morning. (There’s a genome for DIYers, you see.) Still, the how-to books got bought and people learned these things—and they paid for the privilege.

A couple of years ago, I thought I’d undertake the task of making drapes, so I bought (oooh, there’s that word again) an e-book on the subject. It was self-published, an A-to-Z how-to with simple instructions laid out for an idiot ADDer like me, and far superior to anything I’d seen in a bookstore or at the library. It was $24.95 and worth every penny. (Never did get around to doing the drapes, but now I understand the concepts and principles of drape-making.)

Today, I went looking for how to create dollhouse plans and build a dollhouse. Now, I have never been into dollhouses and this project has to do with my current WIP, Stay, for which I want to build Whittaker House (a gothic revival mansion inn) and its surrounds in miniature. And I found this: FREE dollhouse plans and instructions.

I would’ve paid money for instructions like that, perhaps as an e-book or as a serial or a do-along project. I mean, she seems to know what she’s talking about, right? I wondered, “What’s wrong with that woman?”

Meme of a brass fairy garden ornament reading a book, with a cat looking over its shoulder with the text “Dis same book she was reedin las year She not 2 smart.”But then I looked at the header of my own blog, where it says, CREATING E-BOOK SERIES. I’ve been spending hours and hours building the next post on this (in case anybody was wondering where the hell it was). What’s wrong with that woman in the mirror?

Three things:

  1. I’m a dilettante. I’m not sure I’m doing this the “right” way. I can only share what I’ve done; thus, I’m not sure my knowledge is actually worth anything.
  2. I like to teach, and any bit of knowledge will spur me on.
  3. I’m a compulsive helper. Knowledge is power and I think there are a lot of people out there who could use some empowerment.

If I had a penis and had gone to a master to teach me, say, stone cutting, my father would have paid the master to take me on as an apprentice. I would have served in his household in whatever capacity in exchange for room and board and knowledge for a period of 7 years (or more), which would have made me little better than an indentured servant. And then I would have struck out on my next phase as a journeyman and continued training. Once I earned the title of master under stringent training and specification, I could then say, “These are my credentials because I gave 14 years of my life to my trade in money, blood, sweat, and tears, and I am now in a position to charge money for my expertise and get my own little slave.”

If I had gone to college and enrolled in their fashion program, I would have paid tuition and gained credentials that told people, “Yeah, I kind of know what I’m talking about, so you need to pay me for my knowledge.” Oh, wait. I did do that. And I have a couple of awards to show for that. In my particular field of textiles, I’m considered a bit of an expert. So I charge.

But I didn’t go anywhere to learn how to create e-books. I learned my CSS and (X)HTML on my own from the free sites online (which sites exist in order to promote a standard markup). I learned the software programs by hit-or-miss. Nobody taught me; I didn’t ask anybody to teach me. I don’t feel I know enough to charge.

So why am I doing it?

To get traffic here into my blog to get you to buy my book. I am an expert on the subject of The Proviso, so I want to get paid for it. I am fortunate in that a couple of people have mostly agreed with me on my level of expertise.

Rightly or wrongly, some knowledge has to be given away to entice you to buy my product. Sometimes, those enticements don’t seem related. Obviously, there are some problems with the method I’ve chosen, which is to say, the people most likely to show up here to take the knowledge I’m offering free are probably writing books of their own and I should view them as my competition. They probably view me as their competition, too.

But say I’m wrong and it’s painfully obvious to everyone (except me and the people who take my advice) that I have no clue what I’m doing. Well, then my competition will screw up, too.

Sometimes free isn’t worth what you paid for it and can actually cost you a whole lot of real time and cash.

Shit or get off the pot

So around the bloggernacle I go about twice a week. I don’t spend too much time there because everybody discusses the same things over and over and over again and it’s wearying. The feminists fondle the patriarchy of the church like a worry doll; the academes throw around their $100 words and concepts that I don’t understand (click away! click away!); the more-righteous-than-Mojo bewail the crumbling standards in the church and how wicked the world is; the artistes ask, “Where are our Miltons and Shakespeares?”

Yawn and no big.

But then there are the people with way too much time on their hands who come up with nifty ideas that they want Someone Else to (help) implement Right Now and then wail and moan that these ideas haven’t come to fruition and what is wrong with You All?

Endlessly.

This isn’t an LDS blog phenomenon, so don’t think I’m picking on my own again. I see it in every sector of the web I visit, in the smaller niche communities where, apparently, because we’re “all in this together,” we’re all supposed to roll with the Next Great Idea because of some artificial construct of solidarity.

And every time I see the same permabloggers on every blog they contribute to express their desire for the same thing they expressed elsewhere, with the same plaintive whiny tone, I just want to say, “Do it your owndamnself.”

I see all sorts of ideas and requests for programs and calls to change, but the work product is pretty much 50,000 words of “Why won’t you support Meeeeeeeeeeeeee and my Great Ideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee????” spread across about 14 blogs, mired in clarifications and addenda and backpeddling.

Oh, and speaking of backpeddling. When I began the process of actually implementing a (better, I thought) version of one of these ideas and shared it with one of the terminal whiners, the response was: “Yeah, good luck with that” with the internet equivalent of a sneer and no offer of help—for an idea that was GREAT! until it A) morphed out of this person’s comfort zone and B) started to require thought and action and money.

This happened to a friend of mine, too, in an interwebz community I inhabit, but she doesn’t. However, she’s good at looking at ideas and finding ways to monetize them. So she contacted the person with the Great Idea and the minute it involved A) work and B) money, the person promptly ignored her.

Eh, fuck ’em and the ideas they rode in on.

I’m not taking any of it seriously anymore until I see some evidence that it’s more than simply masturbating to Idea PrØn.

Jukeboxes and libraries

I have a bunch of beautiful books. They’re mostly in hardback because I don’t see paperbacks as objets d’art the way I do my hardback books. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read hardbacks, certainly. If I have it, I read it. But there’s just something substantial about a hardback book. Specifically, I’m thinking of my faux leatherbound books, but no matter.

As I go around the ebook blogs like Teleread and The Book is Dead, a bunch of dissociated rememberies from my childhood plague me. They’re always the same ones, played in different order, but in a loop:

Remembery #1.A small plastic panda that is a transistor radio. The eyes are knobs, and the belly is the speaker.

The mp3 player was only a Wish when I was a child (think 1970s) with my little panda transistor radio barely capable of tuning in the jazz station, but playing disco just fine and dandy. Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.

I had my Wish in my mind like a jukebox, playing all the songs I loved and none of the songs I didn’t love, all in one place, in the palm of my hand. Even as I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy albums and then, once I got a “boom box,” couldn’t afford to buy cassettes, either. I taped random songs off the radio and tried my best to come up with as clean a version as a K-Tel compilation cassette as I could. It didn’t work and my wish became a longing so intense sometimes I couldn’t bear it. Then I got a Walkman, which was a step up, but my ADD/OCD could not be happy. Why, oh why, was there no way to buy a song at a time? What would that look like? How could it be done?A Rio Karma, an mp3 player that is not made by Apple

My Wish: a jukebox in my hand, with all the songs I loved and none of the songs I hated, with the ability to purchase one song at a time.

Remembery #2.

Dark house post family bedtime. Flashlight. Book. Covers. You all know this routine. For my mother, it was hiding in the back of a closet. With a flashlight. And a book. Why didn’t my book come with a light? You know, something handy, that I could clip onto it? That way I didn’t have to give my flashlight a blow job every time I had to turn the page.

Remembery #3.

Jean-Luc Picard sitting in his cabin reading a hardback book. To me, this was nothing until a crew member questioned him. Wesley, maybe? I can’t remember. Too young to know what a hardback book with paper pages was. To Picard, it was an antique. To Wesley, it was a novelty.

DISCLAIMER: I didn’t watch Star Trek much. Not the original, not the Next Generation, not Voyager, or many of the spinoffs (although I actually enjoyed Deep Space 9 because everybody on that show had serious faults and weren’t a bunch of Mary Sues and Gary Stus running around knowing how to deal with every situation). This is why my remembering an STNG episode is so…exceptional. And it had to do with a book and what must have happened to books to evoke the reaction Picard’s hardback paper book evoked.

An eBookwise ebook reader.
eBookwise reader

Something that could store a library in one spot? Like my dream of a jukebox in my hand. Could it be? A library in my hand?

Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was old enough to know it could be done, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because the jukebox in my hand hadn’t materialized yet or if it had, I didn’t know about it.

You have to know something about me that makes my need for such things a compulsion (you know, besides my mental disorders): I am an anti-packrat. I hate Stuff. I have Stuff I don’t hate, really, but if it can be condensed, packed, and stored out of sight until I need it, so I can have SPACE, I am more kindly disposed toward Stuff. (Oh, Space Bags, how I would love thee if every blanket we own weren’t in use because it’s as cold as a witch’s tit outside.) I don’t like knickknacks, either. And as I get older, the Mies van der Rohe school of architecture (mid-century modern) gets more and more attractive to me.

The only things I collect and store without driving my OCD/ADD batty is data. And mp3s. And now, ebooks.

(I like lots of art, though, so as soon as the Tax Deductions stop coloring on the walls, I’ll paint and put up my art. It’s difficult to deal with the child who writes her name on the wall and then blames her little brother, who doesn’t know how to read, much less write.)

I haven’t quite figured out how to go completely minimalist, given the life of a family and its needs for Stuff.

But the jukebox-and-library in hand is a good start.

Why I go to church

Something happened this past week which greatly upset me. Trying to be stoic (Stoic isn’t exactly my middle name, right?), I did not cry. I attempted to put it out of my mind. I worked a lot. Last night, still trying to not cry, I dragged my Tax Deductions all over town shopping (uh, not exactly normal, see). Then I put them to bed and started a Home Improvement Project. Woke up this morning still determined not to cry, to put it in perspective, not to think about it, and go to church hoping that the pew we usually sit in wasn’t occupied (which, irrationally, annoys me every time it happens).

And sitting in church, holding onto my Tax Deductions with Dude playing with my hair, I started to cry. And I kept crying. All the way through sacrament meeting and Sunday school (that would be 2 hours in Protestant and Catholic time). Dude briefly made me laugh by appending “But ours sparkle” to a comment someone made during Sunday school. But I sat out Relief Society as usual and tried to read a sharply amusing/ironic piece called Byuck. And it was amusing for a while—

—until a woman I’ve known for 15 years but rarely have a chance to sit down and converse with (but when we do, though … ) asked me how I was doing. Sincerely.

The question, “How are you?” asked sincerely is probably the hardest question in the world to answer. Maybe even harder than, “What is the meaning of life?”

And I started to cry again. I laid it all out for her. When I was finished, she drew an analogy for me that made me understand that it was just one small drop of water in the ocean of my life. And I felt better.

Now, this friend always makes me feel better, but we aren’t BFFs. Never have been. It would not have occurred to me to call her and say, “Make me feel better,” but in retrospect, she is the only one who could have done so.

I feel better.

’Cause I went to church today.

When does a blog stop being yours?

In romance [well, in other genres also? I don’t know], sometimes authors strike such a chord with readers that the characters the author created seem to belong to the readers (aka fans). When an author does something bad to one of her characters, much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. Well, you know, you write romance, you know that there needs to be a happily ever after (HEA) or at least a happily for now (HFN) ending. (We will parse the romance “formula” later.)

Well, I can see why there’d be some legitimate reason for distress here. The author created these worlds and people and they belong to her, true, but the public pays to read about them. Do they have an expectation to get the story they want/expect/hope for or not? Hell, I don’t know. I’m going to write my Imaginary Friends the way my Imaginary Friends tell me to. [Uhm, I’m independent. I can do that.] But I have to expect that some people are going to cry foul if I just completely make one of them [insert horribleness here].

But now over at one of my must-stops for blog cruising, Dear Author, apparently the blog has ceased belonging to the person who built it, maintains it, and pays for it—

Do you not think that unless you know the full story before you judge?

Welll … I do and I don’t. She presented her side of the story in the article, and I didn’t buy it. Yes, it’s possible they left stuff out. It’s possible she spent hours making a passionate case and the reporter discarded all of that and went for the killer angle.

But to say you can’t have a thought or a knee-jerk reaction or an opinion without knowing every detail of everyone’s side of the story does seem a bit much to me. To me, there’s is very little that could fully justify this woman’s decision. That might not be the case for everyone. I admit that, having been the child of a non-custodial mother, my feelings on this may be sharper than others’s (and my Mom was always in touch, I saw her regularly, all of that, but nothing ever fully takes away the feeling that you needed your Mom and she wasn’t there, for whatever reason.) It may be partly the fact that I am a mother and cannot fathom any force on this planet that would induce me to leave my children like that.

Women leave their families every day, but I think there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and I think this woman simply did it the wrong way.

Women who leave their children are judged much more harshly than men who do the same – yet women do it much more rarely, and usually with a lot more compulsion. I would look at this and say, it must have been something truly extraordinary that made her do this. Maybe her reasons still wouldn’t pass the moral bar, but peering at someone else’s family with a microscope is something I believe we shouldn’t do unless we’re involved.

And that is true, to some extent. Yes, they are judged more harshly then men by some. Not by me. When a friend of mine left his pregnant wife (he “didn’t think he wanted to be married after all”) he ceased being my friend. Point blank. I told him exactly what I thought of him and his actions and that was it.

Perhaps it’s cyncial of me. But I just can’t look at this woman and be as sympathetic as you can. You say it must have been something extraordinary; I say it’s possible, but it feels more like she just wasn’t happy and met some guy online and decided to run off and be with him. What sort of “absive husband” who doesn’t let his wife have access to a vehicle or money (yet she was apparently able to clear out their savings), let her go on solo vacations to England after he’s found evidence she’s been having online affairs? Why divorce through this “special process” by which you say you can’t find the other person if they’ve been sending emails, cards, and gifts?

I simply look at the situation and think, that child has some legitimate greivances, and of all the parties involved, she’s the one I’m inclined to believe.

But you have made a salient point, I think. I can’t agree with it, but I do think it’s valid.

—which is a far different matter from creating books that you then persuade the public to buy who then eats them up and feeds your bank account.

I’m watching this train wreck of a thread and wondering: Why, if people don’t like a thread, a blog, don’t they simply stop reading? This isn’t Usenet, people (darn it). It’s Jane’s blog. She can post what she wants to and expect reasonably that people will remember that fact—without having to confront people who feel betrayed that what she said in her own house didn’t exactly fulfill their reading expectations that day. The sense of entitlement running through the thread is kind of … interesting.

Yo, all you gotta do is not go there. Or not read. Or sumpin. When did Jane’s blog become yours?

I yam what I yam

I try to be literary. Really, I do. That’s what Smart People do.

I read Racy Romance Reviews and Read For Pleasure and Teach Me Tonight and I think, “Gee, these women are Smart.” I am not that Smart. So I don’t comment much.

I read the in-depth reviews at Dear Author when they talk about worldbuilding and layering symbolism and use all sorts of literary techniques I learned but didn’t absorb for whatever reason. I read Mrs. Giggles reviews, wherein she’s snarkalicious but not (IMO) unkind—and I think, “Gee, these people are Smart.”

I read A Motley Vision and occasionally, Segullah. I read Theric and Tyler and Trevor. I think, “Gee, these people are Smart.” I am not that Smart. So I don’t comment much, except at AMV, where I probably drive the regular inhabitants insane with my less-than-suave sensitivities. Every time I post there I think, “That was a stupid thing to say.” But I let it lie because that’s who I am, even if I don’t like it sometimes.

And this is why I didn’t study English lit. I can’t analyze worth a damn and half the time, I don’t even know what the existing analyses are saying. I suppose there’s something to be said against a writer who doesn’t think about Great Works beyond “thumbs up” and “thumbs down,” but really, I’ve just come to the point where I have to admit that I like what I like and a good portion of it is crass and commercial.

Then again, sometimes the labels are deceiving. Perhaps I do like crass and commercial, but most times when I pick up a romance novel that intrigues me (mostly historicals), they’re rich and complex, layered and moving so that I’m still thinking about them long after. Sometimes they depend more heavily on characterization or on plot, leaning to one side or the other, but I really don’t care. When they strike a balance—well, that’s a lagniappe.

All I want is a good book to curl up with and a story that sticks with me a while.

But hey—I liked “I’m Too Sexy,” too.