At the end of the year is when we got the raffle, at the end of the year band performance, and there was an entire table of stuff. And to show you how old I am, the one thing everyone wanted was the PlayStation, and this is the PlayStation One. This is the OG. There was other stuff too, like, there was a boombox, there was - I think CD players were just coming out. I didn't even think they had the anti-skip technology, so you had to, you know, hold it. God forbid, you played it in the car because you had to hold it level so nothing would skip. I think there was a Game Boy, maybe, but every single person wanted that PlayStation. Because not only was it new, it was hard to find. And of course, because my mom sold so much and I got so many entries into that raffle, my name was the very first name called and of course, I got that PlayStation. And I'm smiling thinking about it because my best friend still of 32 years now, we were in school together that year. She went to a different elementary school, and then she went to a religious school after that. But we were in the same school for seventh grade and we were in band. And she - my stepfather is the one who brought us there. My mom had to work that night. And my friend was so angry that I got that PlayStation. She did not talk to me for probably a week. Not a word to me on the way home, 'cause I'm like clutching this PlayStation 'cause I'm 12, and I'm beyond geeked that I have a PlayStation. No games yet. I had to wait like a couple days for my mom to take me to, I wanna say Toys R Us but it might have been Meijer, 'cause Meijer sold games at that point. I don't even know if they still do but they sold like, you know, SNES games and I believe PlayStation One games, and of course Walmart wasn't up here yet. But yeah, she was furious with me because I got that PlayStation and she didn't, and I'm going to after this, after I, you know, finish this, I am totally going to text her and say "Hey, remember that time I got…

"Have you ever been interested - have you ever become interested in something just because you had a really good experience with a particular person? One of our team members was not interested in math until they had a class with a teacher that made it exciting." Yeah, a great teacher is one of those great experiences in life for me. That's cool to hear you had that kind of experience. Yeah, branching outside math a little bit 'cause yeah, I've definitely, I remember like almost all my math teachers and what I learned for them - from them. There was always, there's almost always like some central thing that I remember about that class. Or something that they said to me. But yes, have I ever become interested in something just because you had a really good experience with a particular person and maybe something that I wouldn't have been interested in otherwise... I mean, hopefully not too on the nose, but I didn't know what sociolinguistics was before I started contributing to Michigan Diaries. I had a broad understanding of what sociology was and linguistics. And I guess you know, I'm still a lay person. But yeah, definitely have, I would say an interest in linguistics, more than I would have had I not participated in Michigan Diaries.

I want to talk about a holiday that I invented several years ago, and I am doing my darnedest to promote it. My darnedest meaning that I post about it every year on Facebook. So I guess that's not really like a lot of effort. This holiday originated on a Tuesday in October roughly five years ago when I was just having a bad day. I was feeling grumpy and I was feeling weird. And so I decided, "you know what, you know what today is? Today is Disenchantment Tuesday, that's what it is." And I was in a strange enough mood that I not only declared that day Disenchantment Tuesday, but I put it on my Outlook calendar for the second Tuesday, the next October. And every year when that time rolls around I do that again, I put it on my Outlook for the next year. And how do you observe Disenchantment Tuesday, you ask? Well, this is how you observe Disenchantment Tuesday. You try a food, TV show, song, whatever; something from your personal yesteryear that you used to love, ideally when you were a child, and you try it again to see what it's actually like. Sometimes this goes cheerfully and your Disenchantment Tuesday is derailed, and that's okay because that's a good thing. When you find out that something actually was good, that's great. But in my experience, more often than not, you find out that, "wow, that was a piece of junk. Why did I ever love that?" I'm not going to mention the specific things that I've done this with because I don't want to bad mouth companies whose employees depend on the revenue they get from selling the things that children think are awesome, that you grow up and find out are not so awesome, maybe, as you thought they were. But that's that's how you do it. That's what you do. Sometimes you're pleasantly surprised and sometimes you're not so pleasantly surprised, so, tell your friends.