A COVID Confession

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I feel I need to admit something:

I’m scared.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “No shit, Sherlock,” given the state of *waves frantically at the world* and the possibility of a) horrible illness and possible death, b) horrible illness and possible death for people I know and love, c) economic collapse that ensures people I care about will be in dire straits or already are, d) do I really need a fourth?

The odd thing is, the fear I’m experiencing is not focused on those things. It’s something much harder to define. I figured I would talk about it here because chances are I’m not the only one having this particular variety of fear and if you are too, I don’t want you to think you’re alone.

I’m afraid of life after COVID-19. I’m afraid of the world opening back up again. I’m afraid of going back to the office. Of eating at restaurants. Of things being “normal,” or whatever “normal” is at that point.

Part of me wants nothing in this world more than the chance to go to the Alamo Drafthouse again – to eat giant soft pretzels and drink booze in a darkened theater packed with people, where everyone is laughing and gasping at the same thing. Shared experiences! Parties! Dinners out with friends! Church services! My Thursday coffee date! Sitting in Starbucks pretending to write!

Another part of me never wants to leave the house again. Wants to stay in a circumscribed little life in here and let the world keep falling to shit out there.

Out there everything is awful. It’s been awful for a long time now. In here isn’t really that much better to be honest – I can still see news, still hear about the awfulness, still read Twitter for five minutes and want to commit five felonies.

But in here my life is tiny and manageable. It’s days and days of sameness. Work, sleep, eat, watch a thing, read a thing, shower, sleep more. Do all of that again. I go shopping at most once a week. I know a lot of people are finding that utterly maddening, but I’ve been…fine.

I mentioned in a previous post that before all this began I was expanding my world. I’d started making friends at church, was joining groups and attending events. After years of smallness I was reaching out…and now I’m not, and part of me is SO RELIEVED.

It’s almost like time has stopped for a while and as soon as the world starts turning again so will time. The utter catastrofuckery of the coming election will loom even larger. I’ll feel like I have to address the goals I set for 2020 that I haven’t made a whit of progress on so far. I’ll have to deal with…everything. Right now I’m hidden away in my tower watching the world through a screen. I don’t have to touch it. I feel worry and sadness for people risking their lives on the front lines, and I feel the weight of so much death, but it’s not about me personally. It’s a tragedy I try to help with when and how I can, but I feel insulated in a way, cloistered.

Now the thing about it is, there’s not much I can do about that. Staying home and being isolated is kind of how you help right now. It’s literally the thing to do. Or not do. It’s not like I can just up and decide to be a nurse! And remembering the last few days at the office before I was sent home, the stress and worry all around me was giving me panic attacks and making me physically ill. Getting back out into that does not seem like a good use of my strengths.

I’m not judging myself for any emotion that I do or don’t feel – there’s no road map for any of this and everyone has their own way of dealing. Instead I’m trying to just observe them, let them do their thing without trying to squelch or magnify any particular feeling. I’m just trying to hold my own space and learn from all of this.

It is however distressing to feel this way. I don’t want to live small, but I also don’t want to go insane.

The societal fallout of the pandemic is going to be studied for decades. Psychologists, sociologists, every kind of -ogist out there will have things to say about the strange tangle of contradictory feelings that seems to be afflicting all of us right now. I imagine that prescriptions for antidepressants and anxiety meds will skyrocket (they probably have already) and the mental health needs of people working in health care and other essential industries will be paramount. (Well, okay, this being the US there will probably be fuck-all resources made available given how little this country cares about mental health, but in OTHER countries where the governments give a damn about the well being of their citizens that care will be paramount.)

It’s hard to say what long-term effects all this will have on me as an individual or society as a whole. Chances are a lot of effort will be spent to try and sweep it all under the rug and just get back to the deeply problematic world we knew.

I don’t want that.

Do you?

Recipe: “Joy of” Banana Nut Bread

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

This is an odd quick bread recipe because it uses the creaming method instead of the muffin method, but I doubt you care about that; what you care about is that it’s delicious, easy, and doesn’t take a lot of weird ingredients. Pretty much every megamart has vegan yogurt and butter, even during this weird COVID era; I use Earth Balance, and the store had Silk soy yogurt this time round but almond, oat, or coconut would work. (I tend to stay away from coconut milk based things in baking because to me the coconut flavor is far too bossy.)

The recipe originally came from the 1997 edition of Joy of Cooking, which as you can see in the picture is a battered, splattered old friend of mine. I veganized the recipe and altered a few things to suit my own particular style of baking which requires vanilla and spice in everything. It’s especially tasty served warm and slathered with butter.

"Joy of" Banana Nut Bread
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“Joy of” Banana Nut Bread

Recipe by Dianne Sylvan
Servings

8

servings
Prep time

20

minutes
Cooking time

45

minutes

A cakey and soft loaf studded with nuts, this recipe made me realize I love banana bread after years of firmly believing I hated it.

Ingredients

  • The Dry:

  • 1 1/3 c flour

  • 1/2 tsp salt

  • 1/2 tsp baking soda

  • 1/4 tsp baking powder

  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon or 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp cardamom

  • The Creamy:

  • 5 1/2 tablespoons vegan butter

  • 2/3 c sugar

  • 1 container nondairy vanilla yogurt (whatever sort you like)

  • 2 mashed very ripe bananas

  • 1 tsp vanilla

  • 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts

Directions

  • Preheat your oven to 350F and spray a 9″ loaf pan with no-stick.
  • Whisk together all of The Dry in a bowl.
  • With an electric mixer cream the butter and sugar for 2 minutes or until fluffy and lightened in color. Beat in the dry ingredients until the mixture looks kind of sandy.
  • Add in the yogurt and beat again until combined; then add the bananas and vanilla and beat briefly to distribute the banana. If you like chunky banana bread, and why on EARTH would you do that, fold the banana in instead of beating it.
  • Add the nuts and fold in gently. You can up the nuts if you like, I just eyeball the amount.
  • Scrape into a loaf pan and bake 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick stuck in the center comes out clean. Cool sitting on a rack in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out onto the rack and cool the rest of the way.

3 Quarantasty Meals for Vegans

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’ve been asked by more than one person if it’s harder to be vegan while sheltering-in-place.

The question kind of made me pause, because I forget that a lot of people think vegan food is esoteric or hard to find; one person however was specifically asking if I was having a hard time finding fresh produce. I also paused at that because I don’t eat nearly as much fresh produce as I should.

To further understanding of my people and to give everyone more food ideas, allow me to share some of the easy meals I have been eating during this intense and uncertain time that you might also enjoy. These aren’t meant to be precise recipes.

Bountiful Quinoa

Cook up 1 cup of quinoa per the package directions, but instead of water use vegetable broth (or add a couple tablespoons of veg broth powder to the water).

Meanwhile cook a diced onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic (you could also use garlic powder if that’s what you have) until soft in, eh, let’s say 3 tablespoons of oil. Add in two medium diced zucchini, two medium diced yellow squash, and cook until all soft and nice. If you can’t find these particular veggies use whatever your store has in stock.

I add a good shaking of this wonderful garlic herb seasoning blend to the veg while it cooks (all FreshJax products I’ve tried so far are *chef’s kiss* and they come in nice big jars). Then add a can of drained and rinsed black beans. Stir in the cooked quinoa and sprinkle chopped nuts (whatever you have or can get; I keep pecans around for my oatmeal). This makes a TON of food; I was able to eat it for five meals, and it kept quite nicely in the fridge.

BBQ Tofu Business

Tofu has been hard to find around here so when I get it, I buy two or three and freeze them. Fu that’s been frozen and thawed actually has a meatier texture! I take a block and press it for 20 minutes (I have a press but you could just as easily wrap it in a kitchen towel and press under some heavy cans), then dice up.

Toss yer fu in a combination of 2T olive oil, 2T soy sauce, 1T nutritional yeast, and 1T “poultry” seasoning or the aforementioned garlic-herb mix. If you don’t have nooch just go with the oil, soy, and whatever seasonings you like. Then lay it all out on a foil-lined, rimmed baking pan. Add to the pan a head of cauliflower that’s been separated into bite-sized florets and tossed in olive oil and salt/pepper. Bake the whole thing at 425F for 30-35 minutes, turning once.

Dump the whole thing into a bowl and squirt in as much barbecue sauce as pleases you. Consume in mass quantities. You can also leave off the sauce and just eat it like it is; it’s delicious. But the BBQ sauce makes it dynamite for me, southern gal that I am. (Make sure you read your sauce label to be sure it doesn’t have honey in it.) I can eat the entire recipe in one sitting if I’m not careful. If you can’t find cauliflower use broccoli – the pic to the left is actually green cauliflower, which was the only thing the store had that day.

Heckin’ Easy Curry

Of course I could tell you about how in India curry powder isn’t a thing and people make their own spice blends, and how the mass-marketed yellow sadness called “curry powder” is a relic of British imperialism, but if that’s what you have in your pantry, by all means, go for it. I have a couple of different curry blends from various spice purveyors, and honestly, as much as I’d like to say I blend and toast my own spices that would be a huge lie. I do that for special dishes where a more delicate touch is required. For a good old weeknight curry just use something in a jar. I recommend this, or this.

So start with an onion, diced up, and cook it in a couple tablespoons of oil along with 3-4 cloves of minced garlic and, if you have it, a 1″ knob or so of grated fresh ginger. This is awesome but if you don’t have ginger, no biggie. Add about 2 tablespoons of whatever curry spices you’re using and cook until your house smells like paradise. If you want this mess spicier add in a minced Serrano or other chile.

Now add some veg – whatever you’ve got is awesome, but my favorites are potatoes, cauliflower, and carrots, maybe a nice zucchini. You can also use bags of frozen mixed vegetables of whatever kind you’ve got. I almost always have a bag of frozen Broccoli Normandy, which is brocc, cauliflower, and carrots. If you only have one kind of veg, just use that! There’s no Curry Police outside. They’re in quarantine.

Throw that into the pot with the onion-spice mixture and add some wet stuff, say a 14oz can of crushed tomatoes and 2 cups of veg broth, or a bigger can of tomatoes and less broth, or tomatoes and water, whatever is on hand. Cook the whole mess together for 30-45 minutes or until the taters are cooked, which will depend on the size of the dice. Frozen veg cooks faster because it’s not 100% raw, so you could put the potato in for 10 minutes before adding the frozen stuff. Keep an eye on things because tomatoes cooking tend to explode all over.

When everything seems done stir in a can of coconut milk. (Or don’t, if you don’t have it, it’ll be tasty either way.) Heat it all through, serve with rice, or some manner of flat bread – roti is usually hard to find in megamarts but I won’t tell if you use tortillas. The whole wheat ones are strikingly similar. Just saying.

Hair Today…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’ve always wanted to shave my head.

I should preface this by saying I’m not overly precious about my hair. It’s been every length and configuration I’ve ever felt like trying. It’s been dyed and permed and bits of it bleached, pixie-short, or down the middle of my back. Bangs, no bangs, layers, bob, everything but dreadlocks or blonde. I’ll have it short for a long while and then something in me will think, “It would be sexier/Witchier/younger looking long,” and I start growing it out.

Once I passed forty, however, I began to understand why my mother always said women over 35 should not have long hair. It’s not a question of “should,” to me, it’s a question of “Dear god, WHY?”

I spent the last year or so letting my hair grow out, and it was shoulder-length and making me insane. My hair is extremely thick; when it’s long it’s heavy, hot, and won’t really do anything. It eats shampoo. It takes a full day to dry.

To quote an age-old meme, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Every time I cut it off I revel in the freedom I feel. A part of me always mourns, I think, because that weird idea I have that youth and attractiveness are long-hair qualities persists, even though I gave up on the whole idea of attracting male attention back in my 30s when I realized a) I don’t really like cishet men as a social class, and although there are plenty of really great individual guys, I just don’t have the energy and b) given how I look the kind of male attention I tend to attract is not the kind I want. Still, part of me feels like I’m “giving up” on myself every time I cut my hair off, a lot like how giving the finger to the weight-cycling industry was “letting myself go.”

Then I take that first shower with a new pixie cut and I remember fuck all that.

Periodically throughout the years when it’s gotten too long I’ve said, “I should just shave it all off.”

As I said in a previous post, enter COVID-19.

I had recently gotten a regrettable haircut. I was hating it. There was no way I could get it taken care of within at least a month, and my hair grows very quickly. The thought of spending weeks of shelter-in-place loathing my hair was dismaying.

Then I remembered my roommate has clippers for the dog.

(They’re human hair clippers, she just uses them on her dogs from time to time. I think she used to use them on her ex-husband too, which, let’s not go down that path.)

You know where this is going.

I now have less than half an inch of hair all over my head, and I have to say, I love it. It’s fun to rub my hands over. It dries almost instantly. It uses less than a dime-sized sploot of shampoo. It’s going to be difficult for me to let it start growing when I go back out in to the working world…and I may not bother. I am fuzzy and round like a hedgehog. I find this utterly delightful in a time when delight is much trickier to come by.

Don’t mind the ears. They’re detachable.

Even so, I stare at it in the mirror and I have a lot of complicated feelings. I see all the patchy grey mixed into my natural mouse-brown, whole swaths of razed landscape that look like they’ve been burned to ash and are waiting to fly away in the wind. I consider dyeing it, but I feel like leaving it natural for a bit, to look at myself in a rawer form. I am acutely aware of how round my face is and how small my head looks compared to my body. My eyes somehow look brighter. Occasional moments of “what the hell have I DONE?” fade into an odd sort of affection toward myself, as if with a buzzcut everything I’ve been through in life is visible, if only to me, and every prickly patch of grey is a battle scar. There is a fierce femininity in having so little hair, which I was not expecting, and also the feeling that I’ve shed some sort of armor that wasn’t protecting so much as concealing me.

The fact that I’m having this sort of experience while everything is in this lurching state of turmoil and transition is both too much and exactly enough. I feel like for a lot of us this whole strange era has stripped away a lot of the artifice and distraction that made our lives what they were. Americans in particular are dreadful at silence and stillness. The minute we have to face the sort of emotions that are coming up for us all right now, we dive into distractions – only nowadays there are fewer of those, and after you’ve baked bread and done a silly dance video for TikTok and watched all the seasons of Parks and Rec again, in the end you literally can’t get away from yourself. A lot of the funny stuff online is people trying desperately not to be still. What happens when all of that noise and busy-ness and “productivity” is unavailable?

I imagine for a lot of people it feels very similar to shaving their heads.

My suggestion? Learn to love the fuzz. It’s going to take a while for it all to grow back…assuming, by then, you still want it to.

Things I’m Doing/Not Doing

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

There are a lot of lists like this running around at the moment, but as I’m a single person without kids or a partner (I live with a roommate but we are not a couple) my list might look quite different from that of a mom of two or a health worker’s right now, so, everyone’s mileage will vary.

I find I’m relying on a lot of cheap psychological tricks these days, like making the bed, to keep up my sense of normalcy (even though nothing about any of this is normal). Here are some of the things I’ve made it a point to keep doing (or not doing) as the madness unfolds:

Meditation and Prayer

I group these together because they’re two parts of the same practice for me. I actually really enjoy meditation when I get into it, and I’ve bumped up the length of my daily sits to compensate for how much longer it takes me to settle my mind these days. I start out doing a toes-to-head body relaxation, silently asking a blessing on each part of my body (including a number of key organs, like my lungs, which remain stalwart and healthy); then I sit and talk to Deity in whatever way feels right. Usually this ends up being a round with my prayer beads, repeating four or five lines of a prayer. When I finish that I just sit, and try to rest in the Source for as long as I can.

Even if I can’t concentrate for crap, I try to stay with the whole session, and not lose patience with myself. It might seem like we all have tons of quiet space these days, but even if we don’t have a lot of outward activity, finding quiet on the inside is a whole different pile of puppies.

My Day Job

It’s funny – I was so burnt out on my day job before all this, because the first quarter of the year is utterly bananaballs in that particular industry. I had scheduled two days off way back in early March when things still made sense. I argued with myself on whether to take them or not – on the one hand it’s not like I could go anywhere on “vacation,” but on the other, burnt out is burnt out and work from home is still WORK.

Well, I took the two days, and they sucked. I had emotional lows and was bored and listless for most of the time I was awake, which wasn’t a lot. It turns out I need that structure and routine even more now. I like my day job okay, and my company is doing pretty well by us right now; I don’t think I’ll be taking another day off until we’re out of shelter-in-place unless I actually feel ill.

Avoiding the Ever-Living Shit out of the News

I swear if I have to see that goddamn smug orange clown face one more time I’ll wind up on the news myself! The weaponized soullessness of Republican “leadership” has left me so viscerally angry…and I can’t live like that, not when I have fewer constructive outlets. I try to stick to local news, as it affects me most immediately. Washington isn’t doing shit for us, our local governments are. Maybe making themselves perniciously useless is how they plan to have “small government,” whatever. If I want to poison myself I’ll just drink. At least that starts out fun.

“Making” the Bed

I don’t make my bed as a general rule, and I haven’t started per se so much as I try to pull the blankets up and at least cover up the sheets when I get up for work. It’s an interior signal that I’m “at the office” now. It also keeps the near-microscopic cat litter bits that always end up in the bed at bay for a while longer.

Using My Planner

I’ve always said that planning for me is less about productivity and more about sanity. I use my lists and calendars to anchor myself in time and space, to remind myself I was here and I did things. Coupled with the creativity I apply to my bullet journal, I rely on my planner to help me remember every day is not the same, time hasn’t evaporated completely, and this is not forever. I don’t look farther ahead than this month but I try to keep at least a page per week of things I’d like to do and things I’ve done. I don’t worry too much about actually checking everything off. Again, it’s a grounding exercise more than anything else.

Drinking Cold Brew, Literally, By the Gallon

It’s not much, but I try to order things from local places when I can, and one that I’ve been really enjoying is the cold brew from Epoch Coffee, a place a dear friend and I always went to on Thursday nights for a writerdate. They’re delivering cold brew by the gallon as well as some baked goods and packaged coffees, and using the proceeds to help maintain health insurance for their employees. Not only do I get to caffeinate with abandon, I can contribute a tiny bit to alleviating the strain of all this on a few people. I also try to shop frequently at Rabbit Food, our local vegan grocery store which thank God is still open for all my vegan junk food and specialty item needs. Buy local! Do it a lot if you can!

State of the Author

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I’m not really sure what kind of writer I am these days.

You might know that up until recently I’ve been dealing with a depressive…episode? I’m not sure what to call something that lasts more than five years. During this half a decade it felt like all the things I recognized about myself from my early 30s just sort of…stopped. Spirituality. Dancing. Blogging. Anything that used to matter to me – anything I used to write about! – stopped mattering.

In the last half of 2019 and the first bit of 2020 things started getting better. There were three primary driving forces, though I have no idea if any one was more influential than the others. First, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church a year ago, and my growing involvement with it started pulling me out of my cave, pushing me to make friends, to join in the world again. Second, I started meditating and studying tarot again, which along with church drew me back to my spiritual life. And third, I got on a combination of psych meds that WORKS. Having been on over two dozen meds and combinations of meds in the last 22 years I had about given up on anything better than baseline survival punctuated with the occasional week or two of high functioning before the inevitable, and despair-inducing, slide back into the pit. Now I measure my days from a baseline of “not bad” instead of just “alive.”

I joined church teams, I contemplated doing YouTube videos. I redid my website yet again with a fresher look. I was developing a social life again, being brave again, testing my edges.

Enter COVID-19.

As I said in my last post I am very lucky. I am not currently in danger of losing my job. I don’t have to parent during all this. I have plenty to eat and a world of entertainment at my fingertips. While I have health issues none of them really put me at greater risk for serious complications should I come down with La Rona. Aside from my student loans (LOL) all my bills are paid and I have health insurance. I can work from home pretty easily and it’s actually been kind of nice, although I miss daily interactions with my team.

When it comes to my greater work, though – by which I mean writing – I have no idea what to do with myself.

I was in the middle of a LGBTQ romance novel about werewolves that I was already growing frustrated with; I have no desire to work on it. I abandoned the fourth…fifth? attempt at starting Shadow World 8. The nonfiction project I was outlining has about as much appeal as a finger in the eye right now.

And yes, I know I don’t have to do anything. It’s not about productivity, in this case, it’s that writing is in my blood and I haven’t been letting my blood speak. I feel itchy on the inside when I’m not writing. But even before all this craziness I was in a weird place where I just…don’t know what kind of writer I am anymore.

I feel like I’m no longer on the path I was before this bout of depression started, and what started it was, largely, disillusionment over my writing career that cascaded into a ditch full of shit. So trying to write the kinds of things I used to seems a bit regressive.

(Do not take this as an indicator that I’m abandoning the Shadow World series, I am absolutely not. But no, I have no idea whatsoever when book 8 will be out, sorry guys.)

It’s easy to say “write what you want to write,” or “write what you wish you could read,” or any of the zillion other bits of helpful advice (that was sarcasm) people love to give writers. I’ve never been a Morning Pages, writing “practice” kind of gal. Writing and I have a relationship that I think ensures I’ll never be Stephen King and churn out an entire book a year. The mere thought makes me want to autodefenestrate. I think it also means I’ll never be able to get by without a day job.

I guess I’m having something of a creative identity crisis.

Not knowing what to say, how to be of service, what I need to express, or where I want to go, the obvious solution was to start blogging again, hahaha. I’m hoping to keep this up, and it’ll likely be kind of random both in frequency and subject matter (so really not all that different from Before). Right now I feel like I need to both chronicle my weird internal spooling and my experience of the world as much as I can.

So welcome back, friends, and thanks for still being here. Hope you’ll stick around. Should be weird.

Okay and Not Okay

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

The sky is just so blue.

Spring is happening in Texas even though nobody is really watching; the Earth needs neither our permission nor our attention to do what She does best. The bluebonnets have come up, blanketing the roadsides even though so few cars fly by. Trees have exploded into flower, which even sheltering in place we Austinites are acutely aware of as the pollen count makes life miserable just like it does every year. My car’s hood is coated with bright green oak pollen. There suddenly seem to be bugs everywhere. We might not have any idea what day of the week it is but we all know it’s Spring.

Rainy days are hard, stuck inside, weather and mood sliding into a grey puddle on the ground. The gravity of what’s happening presses down and leaves me feeling pinned to the floor. On sunny days it all seems much more manageable, even if all I do is look out the window at a world of crazy-vibrant greens and oh, the blue sky.

I avoid the news.

It started as a twice-a-day limit – I’d let myself check local news ONLY in the morning and at night. But enough of the national idiocy creeps in – those circle-jerk “press conferences,” catastrophe profiteering, completely unnecessary shortages of equipment and supplies. God, how we must look to the rest of the world. I know what it looks like from in here, and it’s so enraging, so depressing, I can’t deal with it anymore. So, for now, I stop clicking on links. I mute words and users all over the place. I have to stay sane. My meds are holding me together really well and I’m not risking that just to spend my days and nights poisonously angry at everything.

I am not a productive quarantista or whatever the nonsense influencer parlance is these days. I am not making progress on any of my projects, and in fact I’ve stopped even looking at them. I’m not learning a language, I’m not taking up a new hobby, I’m not forcing myself into extra productivity when productivity obsession is part of how we got here. If I feel like making or doing something, I do it; if I feel like sleeping the day away, I do that. I am working from home with my day job which gives me both a paycheck and some structure to my days, and I am grateful for both of those things. I realize what a privilege it is not to be terrified about money right now.

I am also grateful that I don’t have children. Sweet lord.

There are no rules, no proper reaction to something unprecedented. You can’t screw up something that’s never happened before. There’s no right way; there’s only the way that gets us through.

We’re all grieving what we knew and doing the best we can and maybe for you that means baking sourdough or learning guitar, but for me it means…well, apparently it means blogging again, ordering cold brew by the gallon, and listening to lofi hip hop radio – beats to study/chill to on Youtube. Next week it might mean finally starting a morning yoga practice or rereading the Harry Potter books. I have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve naps regardless.

A seedling pushing up through the soil has no idea what the world looks like. It doesn’t know what it’s getting into. Will there be enough rain? Will the sun be too harsh here and burn it to a crisp before it’s six inches tall? Is this a sidewalk crack or a meadow? The only way to know is to move toward the unknown. None of us really know what the world is going to look like when we poke our faces out again. We just have to take it one painful, scary inch at a time, and as Anna sings in Frozen 2, “Just do the next right thing.”