Thinking about a time when you were more independent. Well, I was thinking about something that happened with my son, actually. His fourth grade teacher was bringing their class to the campus where I worked to go to a museum, and then they were going to have lunch in the Student Union. And I, my schedule was such that it was gonna allow me to -- like, I wasn't gonna meet them at the museum, but I could meet them when they came for lunch. And, um, you know, I remember I walked in and I saw there's this group of like, you know, really rambunctious fourth graders and their teacher just sat down. And he's like going around some tables, he's like, "All right, go get your lunch. When you get it, you know, come back here. You know, we'll sit and we'll have our lunch before you get back on the bus." And my first impulse was like, "I need to go up there to the counter with my son and figure out what he wants and, you know, pay for it, and, just to make the transaction as smooth as possible, you know, using my adult self and my experience with ordering," which I had -- every time we'd go into a restaurant like this, or like to a, you know, to a fast food restaurant, I would handle the ordering. I'd say like, "What do you want?" And, you know, he would tell me and I'd tell the person. Or maybe he would tell the person, but I still would be the one who would like, you know, whip out the card or the cash and get it paid for and handle everything.  Um, but I realized... I mean, I don't know what stopped me from doing that. But I, I did stop and I just let it unfold. And I watched, you know, when these kids would go up to, and I think at the time that it was like a Wendy's in the basement of the Union, and they would go up and they would, you know, go up and they'd hem and haw, you know, like, "I'll have..." and they'd really have to think about it. You know, and then maybe they would have to look at the money that they had and didn't -- you know, it was just like taking forever.…

Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio. You know the movie The Blair Witch Project? So, I went to the movie theaters to see that movie with my friends, and, um, when it first came out, whenever -- whatever year that was. And I did not read up about the movie at all, I was just told there's this movie that’s a horror movie, it’s supposed to be really scary. And my friend who I went with was a guy who was known for kind of being a joker. He liked to make s*** up and watch people -- watch the chaos happen, and then he would fess up later, or you would figure it out and then he would just kind of sit there and laugh like, maniacally. Well, he told me that this was a real movie, that was real like a documentary. This was found footage, and it was real. And he told me that, and -- and, so I went into the movie believing everything that I was seeing was, was real. And by the time I got out of that movie, I was so -- not only sick to my stomach because of the camera, um, the way the camera was, like how it was not shot on a regular, like a regular movie. It was, you know, hand-held like camcorder style which is -- gives me motion sickness already. But I felt sick to my stomach thinking about the people who had been killed in the woods and like how they showed the guy’s like red flannel shirt. For some reason that part really upset me, when they showed like a chunk of his shirt with like some flesh in it or something, I think, I don't know. I haven't watched it since then. So, there was something about a red flannel shirt, and it had like a chunk of his arm in it or something. And it was so upsetting to me thinking that that was that guy's arm in his flannel shirt, and like it was real. And I was just thinking like "Why, why isn't anyone, like, researching this? Why isn't anyone -- why didn't anybody get like in- go to jail for this?"  And I came out of that theater and I crumpled onto the sidewalk outside of the movie theater into a…

Another fun thing that I encountered when I was in Japan was that I got to eat eel for the first time in my life. It was delicious. I had grilled eel served to me on top of a mound of rice, and it was absolutely scrumptious. Eel, I understand, is the most expensive fish that is consumed in Japan. The price depends on whether you're eating a baby eel or an adult eel. And the price depends on whether you are talking about the wholesale price or the retail price. But, retail, it can cost between ten and twenty dollars a pound in Japan. I also ate blowfish in the same restaurant where I ate eel. Blowfish has to be prepared by a highly trained chef. Because blowfish contains a sac of poison. If you eat that sac, you're gonna die. So, the chef has to know how to remove that sac from the body of the blowfish without spilling the contents of the sac all over the fish which would make it inedible. So lic- um, restaurants that serve blowfish have to be licensed to sell it and serve it, and they have to have a chef on hand licensed to prepare the blowfish for consumption. The blowfish were also absolutely delicious. And I can understand why a Japanese person would risk his or her life in order to eat a blowfish.

Our fertility specialist basically told us we don't have any chances besides IVF. So I'm off of all of my meds, and we decided to just try to get through the holidays and maybe enjoy up and through spring before we really try to make a decision. While I don't have any like moral, like, objections to IVF or anything of that nature, it sounds exhausting. The prep work sounds just very difficult, emotionally and physically, and the price tag, of course, doesn't instill a lot of excitement in me because I just don't know how we would do it. And on one hand, kids are kind of like a, you only have a little bit of time, especially if you're a woman. And so like, yeah, you might have debt. You could find a way -- you might get better, better paying jobs in the future. So it might be short term. And so making a decision based off financials about expanding your family is really short-sighted. But it's still just really concerning to think about. And we'd have to go to New York, which is just quite a bit of travel and time off, and I don't know how much I want to do that right now, or just take some time to, to breathe. So that might be more of our play right now. I'm not sure. So that's been a bummer. It's really hard to go through the holidays knowing that this isn't an option for me like my friends, to just get pregnant. Um. It's, it's quite a bummer. Um. I don't want this for us. But maybe we're not supposed to, which is also a really hard pill to swallow. And do you force that with IVF? What if it never works? Like, what do you do then? How far do you go? How badly do you want it? And I don't know the answer to those questions at the moment, because I feel very emotional about it. And I really just am angry. Like, it's so unfair. And so many people I know that -- of course, the holidays, everyone has announcements, you know, and people that, "Ope, he got us again! Wasn't planning it, but I guess we'll have another!" And you're just like, you're so flippant about it and it's -- I just want one. So, just trying to like, focus on what…