I think the news headline this week, unless you're living under a rock the size of Texas, is the Titan Submersible.And everyone, you know I have many many things to do, but I was checking news feeds 10, 15 times a day while I'm, you know, on break at work, while I'm at home or before I go to bed, when I wake up, just to see if they'd found anything.And obviously, as of you know, it's Friday yesterday. They found what they have concluded in as much as they can ever definitively conclude, that they-  there was a catastrophic implosion and everyone died near instantaneously.And I admit to being one of those people who found a sort of morbid, I don't want to say enjoyment, but I did like some of the some of the memes my social media was just wall to wall Titan Sub. You know Tiktok, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and some of them are terrible, but some of them were very funny like the hillbilly version of the sub and you know,ghosts knocking at the door, Jack thinking it's someone finally coming to get him, all this.And I feel terrible for everyone except the CEO. I feel no. I do not feel terrible for him. He flaunted, flouted? flaunted? He ignored, not just ignored pushed back against safety regulations saying they stifled innovation. He is, that's that's some consequences. That's- he answered for his poor choices for sure. But you know Mr. Titanic, though, at what point is it enough? 35 trips down there and 35 wasn't enough. So 36 killed you. I feel terrible for the 19 year old who apparently was very hesitant to go, was not looking forward to it but wanted to please his father as as many many children adult children do.But that is definitely news headline is stuck out to me this week. I was been following that since they announced that they went missing and I'm glad there's some closure obviously. There are people who misunderstand the situation who who are like, "okay now, let's try to recover the bodies" of which they're almost certainly are none. But at least they know it as much as they ever really can what happened.

I was in college, and I don't remember what year it was. So it was either my junior or senior year. And um, and it was raining like hell. And I was getting on the bus that goes around the campus, at the library, to go toward the Y parking lot where my car was parked. And um, we stopped at-- there's another one parallel to that but the like, engineering and science buildings are next up-- parallel to that.And there was a girl [who] got on and she just looked devastated, very upset. Looked like she's had-- crying and was just like, had a bad time. And I, and I thought "I should say something. I should go over there and talk to her and comfort her."But I didn't. I just let the moment pass, I went my own way. And to this day I wonder, you know, what she was so upset about, you know, if I could have helped in any way, if I... I just feel bad. I don't know why it's stuck with me all this time, it's been eight years now. Just, just stuck with me, so.

CD players are big. I mean, iPods, nobody has iPods anymore. And when I say "iPod", people look at me, you know my students because I work with 18 year olds, they look at me so confused.I remember the first time I got--oh, it's the skinny one. It wasn't the iPod classic. It was the Nano? And it got stolen out of my car, which was devastating. I'm pretty convinced, like, we never found it. I searched everywhere, high and low. And I'd gotten that for Christmas and my mom was just kind of like, "Well, that's, that sucks." Oh, that was so devastating.And then I had to save a bunch of money from babysitting to try and buy--and I bought an iPod classic. It was a 30-gig and I used that thing through college till it died. And then when I was living in Vancouver, which was 2012, I went to--that was the last time they made the iPod classic. And that was all you could buy, it was just the big iPod classic. But of course, this was like the color and it had the nice screen. Like, this was right when the iPhone 3Gs were out, iPhone 4s and stuff, and they were making an iPod that looked like those. And so this was the classic which looked like our original iPod that we all remember and so I bought one of those. Like I was--I wanted something to hold all my music because your phone just couldn't hold the amount that I needed. Um, and I bought one of those.And then I think when I met my husband, I still had it. And we--thankfully I had the knowledge that like, "Hm, there's a collector out there that's gonna want this." Because at that point it was barely used. iPhones got better, storage on them got better. Like I didn't need it anymore, and I sold it.But I don't think I realized like the iPod was gonna go away, like the phone was gonna take over storage for music. And you know, I don't have Spotify, I have apple music but same idea. Like now we don't really need to download our music, we don't buy our music. We just pay a fee and then they pay fees to the artists.

My first fourteener - my first climb to the top of a 14,000 foot mountain - felt impossible to me personally, even though it was a very doable mountain for any semi-experienced climber. But the thing is I wasn't semi-experienced, and I especially was not experienced in snow climbing, which is when we decided to do this — in the midst of a Colorado winter. And the trade-off there is I don't know if my friends actually helped me overcome this impossible challenge. Only passively because they — they were experienced climbers. And they were always well ahead of me on this hike, but usually not far enough ahead for me to lose sight of them. But perhaps it was the knowledge that they were doing it that drove me to push myself further. So while I was like torturing myself for hours on end taking like one step per minute, once I got into that 13,000 foot plus zone, perhaps they led me to believe that it was technically possible to complete this journey, and that's what I needed. But yeah. It always makes me think of what my dad has long said. I don't know what this says about my dad, that this is one of his go-to lines, but he used to tell me that “pain is temporary.” It seems cold and over simplistic, and he didn't overuse it. It's not like he would just say it every day: “Man, I'm having a rough day. Pain is temporary.” But that's what comes to mind when I think about that hike because I can look back now and appreciate it for what it was, and what it helped me build in terms of strength and sacrifice and accomplishing a very difficult goal. But boy, I was not thinking about that line while I was climbing. All I could think about was, “This pain is — this sucks.”

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. Last weekend, I was in Texas for a wedding, which I also had a wedding the week before that, which was in town luckily. But it was kind of a weird trip because when I got to the airport, I like waited around for three or four hours until my friends got there. I was staying with them in the Airbnb. And they were running the car and the Airbnb so I couldn't just go myself. And um, and then we went to the Airbnb. It was very nice. Just kinda out in the country. And it was nice like, we kinda stayed up chatting ‘cause I hadn't seen these people in a while, and then the next day the wedding wasn’t ’til 5:30, so we got to just sleep in and chill which was nice. But that night, after we went to bed — it was funny because when I was talking to one of my friends, I said, “You know on the way here, we passed a billboard that said ‘Have pests?’ or something" like it was a, you know, pest company and it had a picture of a scorpion. And I was like, “I am so glad I live in a place where pests aren't scorpions. You know? Like, we have moths right now, but I will take those over scorpions any day.” And so after they went to bed, I was like getting ready for bed or whatever. And I saw something — like my door’s closed, and I saw something by the door, almost like I closed something between the door jamb and the door. And I was looking at it for a second. Like, it looked like a piece of straw or something and then it started moving. And the thing like — I don't know slither is the right word, but I don't know what other word to use — slithered into my room and dropped onto the floor and it was a freaking scorpion! And I was just like "How? Why?! This is the stuff of nightmares." It didn't even crawl under the door, like the thing came in through the closed door. It was just like, huh! And it was like crawling along the wall, and so I kind of waited for it to come…

In the show ‘What Would You Do?’ bystanders are tested on their willingness to step in and help others. Has there ever been a moment when you witnessed something and didn’t step up for a stranger but wished you had? What about a time when you did step up? I was single — this way before I got married, so I was young too, probably 22. And I saw a woman in high-heels and open-toed shoes out in a blizzard. And I stopped for her to give her a ride. She had, um — when I stopped she said "Hang on a second, I gotta get my baby," and she went and got her baby out of a car, her broken down car, which I saw. So I kinda knew it was someone in need. And she got her baby, and then her husband came up and said "Don’t, don't be scared." But, you know, they told me the story about how she just threw on her shoes and was running out the door to get him from work and the car broke down in the middle of this blizzard. And they just needed a ride to the top of the road. And I took 'em all the way home. I didn't think they needed to be delivered at the top of the road in the middle of a blizzard. So that was one time I stopped and I, I helped somebody else.

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. I'm talking about what I was doing New Year's Eve 1999. I thought it was very funny that that was a prompt and it's going to be very quick, but it's actually kind of a weirdly—like it's a memory that really sticks in my mind because of how lonely I felt. I was newly nine years old at the time, and my mom bartended down the road—which, we lived in rural Wisconsin, so like down the road meant, like, a mile. Which isn't that far, but this is back when people would leave their kids, especially Boomer parents, would leave their kids, just f****** home alone, you know? And so it was me and my sister—and me and my sister hated each other. We're fine now, but we hated each other at the time. She was like seven, seven or eight, whatever. And I can remember that she had brought home this like—if you can remember what the old Walmart smiley face logo looked like, imagine that but fuzzy, and it had a body, and it was white, and it was wearing one of those sashes, that said like "HAPPY 2000." And it had a top hat, and if you squeezed the hand on it, it would, like, giggle and say "Welcome to the year 2000!" And it would play like, you know, the fireworks noises and the music and whatnot. And that's all it did. And I remember sitting in my room by myself — ‘cause my parents didn't like have a babysitter anything—when it turned New Years and pressing that and just feeling so dissatisfied. But yeah, so that was -- that was kind of a crappy memory. And I think about it a lot because it's very telltale of what the rest of my home life was like. What ended up happening with that doll by the way is um, my now ex-husband has a sister who has pervasive developmental disorder. So she's in her late thirties, but her brain is basically two. And she loves any sort of stuffed animal that makes noises like that. So we ended up giving it to her and she just adored it. So I was like, "Alright cool." This, this little thing that I somehow kept for all those years found a home. And…

I had a professor in college who passed away in March, but this week was her memorial service, or her remembrance of life service. And it was just really challenging. I had both her and her husband as professors. They taught at the same university in different disciplines. And she was just a really special person, and they as a couple were really important in my life. They were one of the first examples, really, that I had seen of an incredibly functional and good marriage. They seemed to really consistently regard each other with respect and care. They were married for 52 years at the time that she passed away. And, of course, there were ups and downs during their 52 years of marriage but um, you know the small snippet of their marriage that I saw, it seemed like they were always trying to meet each other halfway and understand where the other person was coming from and ask questions from a place of curiosity, and it was just really inspiring. Um, you know, when she passed in March, I had written my art professor, the husband, a letter and I said something about how their marriage had been really inspirational to me and it’s how I hope my own partnership will look, you know, 52 years from now. And it made me reflect on the fact that all through high school, all of my close friends, nobody had a good marriage—nobody's parents, I should say, had a good marriage. And um, I just really didn't know for many, many years, for maybe even the majority of my life, if I would ever be interested in getting married. Just because I had only seen it be sort of an oppressive institution and so it just meant a lot to be able to witness their love and their marriage in such a positive way. So we went to—me and a friend of mine went to the service and I hadn’t seen my art professor in a couple of years because of Covid. They were really wary because of her illness and just, they were older, you know, regardless of her illness, so they probably would’ve been cautious. And so I walked in and I saw him and he had a cane, that was very long because he’s very tall, kind of wrapped around his forearm like a beanstalk, which…