Cheap Chic

Finds for under $40

A fabulous new fall look for under $40
As a single mother with four tech monster children, once I’ve paid my phone and broadband bills I rarely have any money left over to spend on myself. Unfortunately, given my chronic lack of funds, when it comes to fashion, I’m a brand snob who only wants the best. Fortunately, one of my most formidable superpowers is an uncanny ability to create something from almost nothing. 

My mission: find five distinct outfits that could fit in a backpack (I’m headed to New York in a couple of weeks, and I like to travel light).

Cute but conservative

The rules: 

1. The clothes had to be washable.
2. They had to make me feel like a comfortable cross between Sailor Moon and Condoleeza Rice—in my life, I routinely transition from soccer field to boardroom with just minutes to spare.
3. They had to meet a $40 budget.  

Yes, I will be running this meeting!

Yep, you heard me. I had exactly $40 to spend clothes for myself this fall. I started with one piece—a funky black and pink BCBG Max Azria knit poncho/skirt I inherited from a friend who has lots more money than me and amazing taste in clothes (cheap chic fashion tip number one: never turn down your friends’ hand-me-downs!) 


Three hours later, I had assembled the following:

1. Black leather Nine West knee high boots, Deseret Industries, $5.00
2. Hot pink Betsey Johnson tights, Ross, $5.99 (also included black herringbone patterned tights, not pictured)
3. Pink polka dot Italian scarf, Ross, $3.99
4. Adrienne Vittadini black scoop neck sleeveless dress/jumper, Ross, $13.99 (clearance)
5. Black and white striped elbow length Talbots t-shirt, Savers, $2.39 (I used my 20 percent off coupon when I recycled a bag of clothes).
6. Pink Ralph Lauren short-sleeved cardigan, Savers, $4.79



Channeling my inner Sailor Moon

7. Fun crocheted necklace, yard sale, 25 cents

Grand total: $36.40. With a long sleeved black t-shirt and a pair of black Ann Taylor slacks I already own, I am totally set for the Big Apple—and beyond!

Skirt or poncho? You decide!

The fun thing about these pieces is that they can go from casual to dressy, from edgy to conservative, depending on how I combine them. And they illustrate why I shop almost exclusively at thrift and consignment stores—for big brand fashions at budget prices, you are not going to beat a second-hand shop.

But this Thursday, I won’t be wearing any of these outfits. I’ll be all dolled up in a little white dress (for the 

second time) as I sign copies of Little White Dress: Women Explore the Myth and Meaning of Wedding Dresses. Proceeds benefit the Boise Valley chapter of Dress for Success. See www.dressforsuccess.org for more details about how your second-hand clothes can give women a chance at a first-class life. Happy fall shopping, y’all!

Dumb Boys

On chick lit, genre problems, and Nietzsche

Friday night, I was engaging in a bit of retail therapy at Savers, attempting to absorb, mitigate, ameliorate the gut punch that had crossed my Facebook newsfeed an hour earlier (the L-word! He used the L-word! About that 20 year-old!), when my phone rang. "I need some guy advice," my friend Katie said.

"Not sure I'm the best person at the moment," I replied, "but shoot."

You should know that Katie is a studying neurobiology at a prestigious university. She is also a 6' 1" drop dead gorgeous model. The fact that she a) has guy trouble at all and b) thinks that I can help her with it is hugely amusing. She proceeds to tell me about a 23 year-old fellow student of hers, who is kind of cute, in a nerdy sort of way, and they've kind of gone out once or twice, and he texted her last week and wanted to hang out on Friday, and she had this reception she needed to go to, so she called and asked if he wanted to go with her, and he said, no, he would rather hang out in his underwear and play xbox.

!!!!!

"So are you telling me that this guy cannot even get off his couch and put on a pair of pants for you?" I asked, stunned.

"Yeah, I guess that's what I'm telling you," she sheepishly replied.

"Do I even need to give you advice at this point? I mean, if he's really hot, and you just want to hook up... But this is not boyfriend material, Katie."

"That's what I needed to hear," she sighed.

Why is it always so easy to tell other people? And so hard to tell ourselves?

Back to the 20-year old and Facebook. My current theory is that I keep avoiding the hard truth about the situation because I'm still stuck in the life-narrative requirements of a genre I don't even like—chick lit. (Curse you, Bridget Jones!)

Here’s the chick lit book pitch: They met in college and were a perfect match. They did everything together, from watching Beavis and Butthead to studying Boethius in Latin (okay, not a major selling point) to rock climbing at sunset. Everyone—friends, professors, family—assumed. But he didn’t love her. He loved a hypothetical construct of a woman who was serving a Mormon mission in Uganda (note to editor: Too close to current plot of sold-out Broadway musical?).

She never said a word. She wrote an essay about thunderstorms, which in certain lights, might have been construed as metaphorical. Then she developed an entire theory of Platonic friendship based on the relationship, which would later, like so many of her hard-won theories, be proven dead wrong.

When his fantasy girl came back, he married her, and reality hit, hard. He stuck it out for ten years.

When her hypothetical construct of a marriage unraveled after 13 years, she ran away. To him. He was--it was--just the same. Minus the Platonic part.

They lived in different cities, were both seeing other people. But…

In life and love, timing is everything.

The truth is, there is more than one reason things have not (and will not) work out for us. Those reasons are personified by the 20 year-old, and the type of 43 year-old man who, given the choice, chose her. Maybe we can blame genetics, maybe status seeking, maybe Hugh Hefner, for this all-too-familiar midlife crisis male trope (yeah, he also has a hot, impractical car, to match the hot, impractical girlfriend).

I am not a 20 year-old hottie. I'm an attractive, accomplished, talented, successful, almost 40 year-old woman. I'm raising four children, earning a doctorate, working 8 to 7, and even pursuing my own passions--writing and music--in my spare time (midnight to 2 a.m. on Wednesdays).

I don’t have time for dumb boys, any more than Katie does.

I am truly fortunate to have plenty of close male friends, and I value their intellect, wit, and the way they stroke my ego once in a while. But after talking to Katie, I realized that this friend of so many years is not really my friend. If he were, I would not have felt that need to flee to Savers when he announced his love for his 20 year-old girlfriend on Facebook (though on the plus side, I found this awesome vintage Diane von Furstenburg dress and a pair of $5 leather boots that look new!).

Take that, chick lit! I'm in the wrong genre entirely. I assert, once more, my desire to live my thoroughly examined life in the philosophy section of the library.  Because if there’s one thing I learned when I was a 20 year-old, in graduate school, it’s that there are few sports more enjoyable than taking down an entire philosophy class of dumb boys and making them cry for their mamas.

Oh, and with respect to my erstwhile theory or Platonic friendship, I fear that Nietzsche had it right: “A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.”

Voir Dire

When telling the truth hurts

I’m squirming on a polished pew in the back of a wood paneled courtroom with more than 100 people I have never met before in my life, most of whom have the same goal I have: To get out, quickly, by any legal means necessary. In the room’s center, a massive black shape with white hair—a caricature of a figure called “Your Honor”—has absolute power over our lives for the next six weeks.

Here’s how jury duty works: Everyone seated in this room has a hard luck story. And those with the best (or worst) stories get to leave. People have come prepared—with notes from their doctors, employers, sick grandmothers—documentation of sole proprietorship, of cousins’ weddings, of nonrefundable autumn vacations.

His Honor is not particularly sympathetic to most of them.

As I listen to story after story, my heart sinks. I mean, these people are experiencing hard times that would give Dickens pause! Like everyone in the room, I’m weighing the relative merits of each tale of woe: Potential loss of dream vacation does not equal, on the moral scales of justice, potential loss of six weeks of income at the first job this person has held in two years. It seems that everyone is a sole caregiver, a project manager, the family breadwinner.

One single mother whose state assistance is about to run out stresses that she needs to look for a job, and fast. She is not released from service. But she only has two kids, I think hopefully to myself. And I have four.

The woman who speaks just before me has the perfect pitch: she is leaving Monday on a mercy mission to Africa, where she will work with children affected by HIV, and the trip has been planned for more than a year. His Honor scrutinizes the visa, gravely nods his head. Excused. That one will be hard to top, I think, and for the first time in my life, I’m nervous about the prospect of speaking in public.

I’ve got two angles here—personal, and professional. I can see that my colleagues’ professional narratives just aren’t swaying the crag-faced man in the voluminous robes. So, thinking like any good rhetorician, I decide to tailor my message to my audience, leading with professional (the weaker argument) and ending with the sucker punch personal.

The irony is that I am not aware of just how hard my own situation is to myself until I articulate it in front of a hundred strangers.

After explaining that I’m a key employee at my company (blah blah blah), I say, “And I’m involved in a custody case. I have an evidentiary hearing on September 26. And I’m representing myself.”

Speaking those words, I feel myself collapse on the inside, as if a microcosmic black hole has pierced my heart.  I feel tired, afraid, old. I’m no longer worried about whether or not the judge will excuse me from jury service. I’m worried about my sons, their devastation at their father’s abandonment, my increasing exhaustion as I try to walk the razor’s edge of demanding career and even more demanding family obligations, alone. One slip, and…but I cannot slip. I must not slip.

I don’t know what the judge says. All I hear is, “Excused.” I run to the jury holding pen, turn in my red badge. When I reach my car, I collapse in great gulping waves of tears.

Because I have one of those lives. The kind that get you excused from jury duty. And in a couple of weeks, like it or not, I will be standing in a similar wood-paneled courtroom, arguing, as Robert Frost did, “for heaven and the future’s sakes.” No crag-faced white haired judge can excuse me from the ancient sacred duty motherhood has imposed on me. I cannot bear it. I must bear it.

Voir dire means to speak the truth. And today I think, if asked to speak the truth, Cassandra-like, I would describe life as an infinite series of small betrayals.

At four I learn that bumblebees look soft but sting hard.

At nine, that the petrified forest is not a majestic grove of stone trees, but a pile of broken rocks.

At 19, in my Human Anatomy class, that we are nothing but sacks of meat (we probably taste like chicken).

At 30, in an arbitration proceeding, that the good guys don’t win.

At 35, that love is conditional.

At 39, that fathers abandon sons (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?)

And I know, as I think about these truths, as I contemplate the overwhelming absurdity of human existence, that more inconvenient truths are in store for me. And I also know that I will survive them, like I survived this day and its awful gut-sucking pain, until I don’t. At that point, I won’t care either way.

Ask any brave explorer or doer of deeds for the truth and they will tell you this: When you’re faced with a trial of any shape, size, or complexity, the only way to go is through it. Unless someone with the power excuses you, as His Honor excused me. Those fleeting moments of grace—those rare times when we are excused—are to be cherished and treasured. Even when the cost is so high.

Moral History

Two books that shock the conscience

One of the true joys of my existence is when the universe conspires to bring me two profound books on a single theme. Like variations on a haunting, timeless melody, William Vollman’s sweeping Central Europe and Alan Heathcock’s explosive Volt both explore the moral history of a place through multiple characters’ experiences.

It doesn’t matter whether the place is real—Central Europe’s World War II era German and Soviet frontline—or imagined—Krafton, Alan Heathcock’s quirky and quintessential Midwestern town that never was (but that every American will recognize). These authors have laid out with painstaking craft and heartbreaking skill the conditions that exist in the ever-shifting every-man’s land that exists between good and evil, right and wrong, joy and sorrow.  And in both books, the settings are as much a character as the morally ambiguous creatures who inhabit them.

Vollman’s book found me, as most of my books do, in a thrift store a few years ago, shortly after I had returned from a trip to Hungary and shortly before my marriage of 13 years ended in the emotional equivalent of the Dresden firebombing. Despite the fact that Central Europe had won a National Book Award, it somehow ended up at the back of my book queue, only to emerge in January of this year.

Central Europe is a loosely connected collection of novellas and short stories, all sharing a common theme, and all telling the story of World War II through the eyes of artists who lived through it: Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, filmmaker Roman Karmen, artist Kathe Kollwitz, poet Anna Akhmatova; and military commanders who fought it (the last German Field Marshall Paulus, Soviet General and defector Vlasov, and most hauntingly, SS Obersturmfuhrer Kurt Gerstein, who acted as a “witness for God” to the atrocities of the Holocaust). 

An anonymous first person narrator(s), possibly KGB and/or German Intelligence, connects each story, as does the elusive and lovely Elena Konstantinovskaya—Roman Karmen’s real-life wife, for whom Vollman imagines a love triangle with Shostakovich—and the sagas of Siegfried and Parzival that shaped Germany’s national conscience (and Hitler’s uncompromising, cruel regime).  “Parzival killed the Red Knight for us. In our name, bloodstained tank treads will soon grind down the corn. Tod wird als Freund erkannt.[i] Don’t shun the shock! Grind out more gold for him! He knows how to make it red,” Vollman’s narrator (in German uniform) says.

And later, as a Russian, he remarks sadly, hinting at a failed relationship that is never fully explained, “Once upon a time I found beauty, but beauty left me.” Vollman’s prose is by turns poetic and prosaic (as when he describes the siege of Stalingrad), depending on the needs of his narrative. The strength of his characterization is most evident in the Shostakovich stories, including a Cold War encounter with the American piano prodigy Van Cliburn. The renowned composer can never complete a thought: “Well, well, well, well. Perhaps we both…But I really…Anyway, their speeches make my ears vomit,” he says to his wife, trying to explain his refusal to join the Communist Party (years later, Shostakovich capitulates).

As Vollman tells it, the moral history of Central Europe is bankrupted by death and destruction, by the firebombing of Dresden, by 20 million Russian civilian and military casualties of World War II and more than six million murdered Jews, and finally, by the utter existential despair captured in Shostakovich’s Opus 110.

***

“I wanted to tell the moral history of a place,” Boise author Alan Heathcock said at the premiere for his debut short story collection, Volt, published by Graywolf Press this year. Heathcock was explaining the decade-spanning evolution of the all-American town at the heart of his collection. Krafton is so perfectly realized that you can picture yourself standing outside the bar where the deer crashed into the mirror, or shopping at the town’s small grocery, or battling the urge to snooze through one of Pastor Hamby’s sermons.

It’s hard for me to understand why Central Europe is called a novel, while Volt is billed as a short story collection—both books employ a similar narrative structure. Vernon Hamby and town Sheriff Helen Farreley both figure in several of Heathcock’s stories, loosely connecting them thematically. The reader first encounters Hamby as a young boy, sent on a horrifying mission by his father, while Helen embodies the morally ambiguous nature of human existence.

The craft and care that went into these stories is truly breathtaking. But sometimes you read a story or novel and notice the craft first—think Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow or Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In Heathcock’s case, the stories function first as stories; the author’s extraordinary command of language and metaphor never overshadows the story itself. My two favorites (which I could argue are essentially the same tale told from different points of view) are “Smoke” and “The Daughter.”

In the first story, the reader meets a 15-year old Vernon Hamby, who learns a harsh truth at a young age when his bloodied father appears outside his window and asks for his help.  “Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men,” Vernon thinks, echoing Vollman’s sentiments. Vernon has a very postmodern encounter with Roy Rogers, who advises the boy to sing a song, “just to smooth off the dark edges.” (I talk to Lawrence of Arabia all the time, so this scene made perfect sense to me).

Young Vernon is left with a moral quandary—how can his father, a “good” man, be responsible for the death of a stranger? “The Daughter” also deals with accidental murder; with careful foreshadowing, Heathcock lays out the circumstances that lead a daughter to cover up her mother’s misdeeds.  “’What we need is a monster for our maze,’ Evelyn said. ‘A monster to gobble up little boys.’” When a child goes missing in a corn maze, no one suspects Evelyn’s mother Miriam.

The tough moral questions are not usually right vs. wrong—it’s wrong vs. wrong that plagues us, with varying degrees of seriousness, throughout our lives. Heathcock deftly flips a switch and shows us our best/worst selves, as negatives, outlined in fierce black and white. A father kills his son. A father kills another father. A woman kills a child molester. Another woman kills a child. A son goes off to war and dies, and his parents, confronted by grief, cannot make sense of the world anymore.  We see ourselves in Krafton’s denizens, and seeing ourselves, we are left afraid, without consolation.

Life is an endless series of peach pies and corn mazes, movies and church picnics. Except when it’s not. “I ain’t well neither,” says Sheriff Helen. “Maybe none of us are.”

---

Little White Dress

On Creating a Book in One Day

When I was nine years old, while other girls were playing with Barbies, I used to create my own books, magazines and newspapers for fun. My mother would give me a sketch pad and some markers, and I would disappear for hours. Usually my self-published opuses were themed—one memorable broadsheet purported to be from the fourteenth century. As I recall, it included ads for rat poison, a human interest story on a family who lost six children to the plague, and a lengthy obituary section, complete with “engraved” portraits (so I was a bit off in my Art History chronology!).

I still like creating books and magazines.  Only now I use InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and most recently, the Adobe sketch tool on my iPad, which takes finger-painting to a whole new level. That’s only one of the reasons I love my iPad—another is that it has taken my reading enjoyment to a whole new level as well (for the future of books, see this TED talk from Push Pop Press http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html).

When I posted about thrift store wedding dresses two weeks ago, the incredibly cool facebook responses switched one of those proverbial little light bulbs on. “Let’s create a book in one day,” I said to my friend Elaine Ambrose. Elaine was the only person I could think of who would say, “Sure!” instead of blinking several times and politely trying to excuse herself from the conversation. I had worked with the pig-farmer’s daughter turned author and publishing maven on one or two previous projects, and I can tell you that if producing a book for print publication in one day is possible, Elaine and I will be the people who do it.

The book is called Little White Dress. And the book creation event is today. Local authors will gather at Elaine’s house for a writing group on steroids (or at least wine). We’ll be joined by friends from all around the globe in a project that promises to shed some light on that enduring question: “You paid HOW much for a dress you wore only one time?!?” (aside: men, I think this book is actually being written for you. If you really want to know a woman, think about her relationship to her wedding dress).

(Another aside: Is it, like, ironic or something that I will spend the entire morning in mediation trying to resolve differences with my ex-husband about our divorce agreement? When it comes to reading and interpreting that thing, he is Ruth Bader Ginsburg to my Scalia).

So the dress itself didn’t work out for me. But life has a funny way of taking you in unexpected, even delightful directions. I can’t wait to see how this one turns out.

Happily Never After: On Thrift Store Wedding Gowns and Second Chances

As I was making my weekend thrift store rounds (a quasi-religious practice), I couldn’t help but notice the yards of shimmering white fabric and gauzy tulle adorning chipped smiling mannequins in the windows of, respectively, The Salvation Army, the Youth Ranch, and St. Vincent dePaul.

 It’s wedding season. And I was not the only woman gawking, in that ironic but wistful manner only the sadder-but-wiser girl can convey, at the ridiculous but iconic costuming that is still, to this day, at the heart of every girl-turned-woman’s personal fairy tale.

“Isn’t that simply beautiful?” one woman sighed, turning to the rest of us as she reverently fingered the ivory silk charmeuse of one gown, retail price $850, Goodwill price a mere $45. It was, we agreed. Simply—minus the 423 buttons, the elaborate train, and the slip large enough to hide six or seven children—beautiful.

Actually, it was ridiculous. Let’s face it: wedding dresses are ugly. White is a bad color for just about every person on the planet. The implication behind the color—that the person wearing it has not had sex yet—is simply unrealistic in the age of on-demand birth control. And yet women everywhere spend months or years planning their big days, spending sums of money on a dress that could provide drinking water wells to third world villages, all in the name of an archaic ritual that has little meaning for the modern world.

(God bless gay marriage, by the way—maybe FINALLY someone will bring some taste and style to the costuming of this silly ritual).

But really, is there any article of clothing more tragic than a thrift store wedding dress? A wedding dress in a thrift store, by implication, is no longer a cherished thing. The story behind the dress is, implicitly and explicitly, we did not live happily ever after.

I did not live happily ever after. But when the sorting was done, and the boxes were packed, I couldn’t bring myself to toss the dress. I was not the sort of girl who gave much thought to my wedding day. I let my mother plan most of it. But I did know exactly what I wanted in a dress. I designed it myself, and my mother, a skilled seamstress, sewed it to my exact specifications and measurements. The dress was matte ivory silk (not white! Not that I couldn’t have worn white, symbolically speaking!), a bodice of the finest Venetian lace, sleeves and neckline trimmed with pearls.

I felt like a princess in that dress, on that day. It was the happiest day of my life. But 13 years later, we woke up to find that happily ever after was too much work for both of us.

I’ve almost reached what would have been my 16^th wedding anniversary. On facebook, my friends are posting anniversary pictures of themselves in poofy white gowns, surrounded by their embarrassed children, standing beside their sheepishly grinning husbands.

I’ll never be able to post that picture. But I dug up the dress, tried it on, smiled to find that it still fit after four children and all those years.

Will I ever wear another off-white dress on a day of goofy rituals? I can’t say right now that I see the attraction to that particular fairy tale. These days, I prefer the one where Cinderella breaks through the glass ceiling. But if I do decide again to don the costuming of love, I’m pretty certain of two things: 1) I will love someone enough to wear a silly dress for him (this is no small amount of love), and 2) I will buy the dress at a thrift store. Because every wedding dress deserves a second chance. 

Ad hominem--(spoiler alert! The Anarchist Soccer Mom is actually a Libertarian)

Ad Hominem
In the Sandbox of History, Mudslinging Won’t Win Points for Either Side

Conservative bellwether Andrew Breitbart looks like the Hollywood liberals he loves to hate. With his wrinkled khakis, long greying hair, and addiction to name-dropping ("Would you believe Rob Lowe is a Conservative? What about Gary Sinise?"), he would fit right in at a Hollywood liberal function--until he opens his mouth. To hear Breitbart talk, you’d think conservatives are waging some kind of holy war for the hearts, minds, and souls of Americans. At stake, he says, is our very concept of freedom. And besides, it's fun to make fun of liberals.

Andrew Breitbart is an asshole.

The worst thing is, he’s on my side. And this essay is about why a rude comment like the one I just made should never, ever be part of a meaningful political dialogue.

I have a bit of a confession to make: I'm a closet conservative with strong sympathies toward libertarian political views (yes, rumors that I sang the National Anthem at Raul Labrador’s Tea Party Endorsement Rally are entirely true). When it comes to questions like the role of government, income taxes, choice in education, and the environment, Breitbart and I probably agree on just about everything. But after hearing him speak at an Idaho Freedom Foundation celebration last week, I found myself more than a little uncomfortable with his methodology—if only because it’s so lazy.

Of course, conservatives aren’t the only ones resorting to ad hominem attacks (though the six-year old bully in me wants to point out that we are better at it, thanks to a long tradition of knife-tongued commentators like Rush and Ann Coulter). In fact, Breitbart and his liberal name calling counterparts personify what is wrong with the political climate in America today, where ridiculous sideshows about the President’s birth certificate take precedence over serious matters, like, say, national security.

I’m willing to bet that most Americans, like me, are sick and tired of all the mudslinging in the political sandbox. It's no wonder people on both the left and the right have left the playground in disgust. People like Breitbart are not debating—they’re demagoguing.  

Here’s a thought for Mr. Breitbart and others like him: maybe the people you’re calling stupid have thought hard about their erroneous opinions. Maybe they care as much about America as you do—they just have different solutions. I have several close friends who are ardent supporters of President Obama’s agenda. They point to the success of Scandinavian socialism as a role model for what America could become if we successfully balance a social safety net with the incentives-based regulated capitalism. These are not “stupid” opinions and observations. I trust that my liberal friends have thought about their political positions as hard as I have thought about mine.

What characterizes political discussions with these friends is the positive energy that comes from sincere, respectful people who value diversity and appreciate that the problems facing our nation are complex, with no simple solutions. I think listening to liberals and considering their opinions is way more fun than baiting and eviscerating them. We tacitly agree to disagree about issues, but we share a sense of respect, mutual ethics, and appreciation for diversity. Sometimes we even learn something!

I think Breitbart and his friends may be on the wrong side of rhetoric, but they are on the right side of history. A big federal government will not solve our dependency on foreign oil—companies like Dynamis Energy will. The government cannot fix healthcare, they appear to be unwilling to reign in the national debt (the single biggest threat to our national security), and they refuse to enact meaningful immigration reform laws.

But we have forgotten that most liberals and conservatives want the same thing: life, liberty, and happiness. That we disagree about how to attain those worthy goals should not be hijacked by pointless ad hominem attacks. One thing I really admired about President Reagan was the way he treated other people. Reagan-loving Conservatives should take a page out of that leader’s book. Stop using “liberal” like it’s a dirty word and start listening to what liberals actually have to say. We might be able to share a sandbox again—and forge compromises that will lead to meaningful change.