maenad.net : jnl

gratified

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:04:20 -0700

On the one hand, I've submitted very few lines of code recently.

On the other, well, first there was New Orleans: A work offsite to which I didn't bring my laptop; teammates from Cambridge and London; beignets raining powdered sugar down the black geek uniform of SREs and devs at Café du Monde; I sent my mother prailines; pilgrimages via taxi to check out where Nick was behind the stick (a dive tiki bar the contents of whose Easter-Island-faced cup did me in that Tuesday night; posh variations on a Sazerac the next); and the jazz club Ryan, rda & I found serendipitously, I still hungry after the vegetarian dinner unsurprisingly failed to satisfy, looking for a slice of pizza and finding instead a woman who wailed on her oboe and then put it down to sing with a voice like Billie Holiday, and a pianist who matched her move for move.

I had 48 hours back in San Francisco with Jack. We did nothing for an entire glorious Saturday; Sunday, I sang a matinee of Bach's tricky Jesu Meine Freude chamber-choir style in Davies with a pared-down Symphony Chorus, skipped out on the Clavierübung whose length I didn't realize ahead of time would have prevented me from making the international bag-check cutoff), and fled town to Venice. I closed my eyes and paid euros for a water taxi into town -- the driver put on a soft-rock station playing covers of 80's ballads as he cut the motor and we drifted through the Grand Canal, taking the scenic route, my jaw hitting the bottom of the boat. I've read countless novels about, and seen as many operas or more set in this city, but the meaning of "built on water" doesn't become apparent until you're dropped off at the dock of your palatial hotel, and remain unsure if there's a sidewalk (alleyway, really) out back until hunger overrides Trisha's sleepiness and we ventured out to an enoteca for dinner. Completely surreal.

I got the call from stc as I was on a vaporetto dock, still luckily on my American SIM card: My promotion was successful. I probably shrieked after I hung up the phone.

What did we do in Venice? Why, what any two Staff SREs and TPMs with fancy cameras and fabulous dresses would do in the most picturesque city in the world: Ran all over (rain or shine, and we had both) and photographed each other jumping in the sculpture garden of the Guggenheim collection; swinging colorful bags on tiny, opera-set bridges; throwing our hair energetically in various directions against crumbling brick backdrops; swinging out precariously over canals while swishing our skirts; drinking €18 Negronis at twilight on the three-table hotel patio (what do you call the tiny strip of flooring supporting a few chairs between the marbled hotel lobby and the canal? "Patio" is too lawn-like in implication; "dock" too rustic) as tourists crowded into passing vaporetti leaned over the railing and snapped photographs of the glamorous expats with their cocktails. I even dragged Trisha to a Titian or two. And, dio mio, the Michelin-star restarurant right on San Marco Square we ate at one night, with its hand-blown champagne flutes and wine-colored velvet damask wallpaper, pairings from a generous som of Franciacorte and a supertuscan that came in a glass the size of my head (there is photographic evidence), delicate flavors, and somehow four ordered courses morphed into seven with amuses-bouches. Was I wrong to later tell JennyBeth that Ristorante i Quadri was the highlight of the trip? It certainly eclipsed nearly poisoning Trisha with Soave twice (a shellfish-containing fining agent in the Veneto wines, perhaps??), or the lackluster Don Giovanni in the disappointing La Fenice operahouse -- yes, yes, the degree to which I am spoiled was made so apparent in Venice, in preferring the Met or the Staatsoper to the house where Verdi premiered; in, over a solitary dinner on a canal served by a waiter who called me principessa while Trisha slept off the allergic reaction, mentally enumerating the restaurants within a square mile of my house that all do Italian better than this. I am aware. Aware, and pretty happy about my sitaution.

The Beethoven Missa Solemnis, which took up the entire following week, was sublime. I may have even done some work that week, caught up on email. I put Jack on a plane to Brazil for a conference, and then slept like a rock for what felt like two days. I've spent the entirety of this week studying documents, meeting with people, asking questions, researching, complaining loudly on public forums. Not much by way of coding, but differently productive.

Today, I went to my second ever Pilates class (I suspect laughing will hurt tomorrow), unpacked and then re-packed my suitcase, and stuffed my new, absurdly-Nori-colored purse full of eyewear and cameras. I'm now halfway to New York with a redeemed upgrade, the cloud formations at 30,000 feet always brilliantly sunlit, flying to meet Jack, whose plane from Rio gets in tomorrow morning. I can't wait.

When I say that the decade I've spent since graduating from college (I'll be skipping my reunion in two weeks to go to a yoga retreat in Hawaii) has been well-spent investing in my career and my friends, this is what I mean. This past month. Now.

Farouk

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:28:39 -0700

Farouk died almost two weeks ago. The proximate cause was cardiac arrest, brought on by pancreatitis; the underlying, of course, his long-term alcoholism which, just because he could "quit" for weeks or months at a time to produce one of his many and acclaimed translations of Arabic novels into the English (he worked longhand; drinking made his hand shake too much to hold a pen), didn't mean he didn't suffer from. We knew it wasn't good for his health, and yet didn't see this coming. 70 is always too young.

Mom's dining table in Chicago -- in the 4br, 3ba condo overlooking Lake Michagan, now just hers -- was piled with flowers and cards. Students sent quiches; Fred invited himself over and made lentil soup; phone lines and email saturated. Mom & I ran errands around the city on awful errands, to a probate attorney about the will; to the cemetery where the Muslim Community Center had reserved plots and which did Sunday burials; out to an early dinner (respite, despite the too-hipster, loud atmosphere), where I made her try radishes with butter and sea salt -- bitter tops and all, nonetheless a bright spot in the day.

For fuck's sake -- she just sold the house in Madison (in contract at the time and closed last Friday). After 35 years! Suddenly, to find yourself not only fully and solely a resident of Chicago, but sole owner of the spacious condo on Lake Michigan, and heir to the apartment in Cairo with the balcony overlooking the Nile, too. All the transitions at once!

The department, the community, came out in droves. More quiche, flowers, invitations to future dinners. I saw her eyes light up at the mention of colleagues bringing their young children over to play. She was either too sad and/or too tactful to point out that my own ovaries aren't getting any younger, but Ahmed promised me that, when I had children the ages his are now, I could reinherit the books donated from my and my sister's childhood library to his. I'm going to take him up on that.

The day after arriving back in San Francisco, I'd never been so happy to be back at work, even with 18 promotion packets to read before yesterday's committees. It helped, too, to be picked up at the aiport by the smiling J., driven home, absolved from the first day of my oncall shift, and to go read Beethoven fugues with the Symphony Chorus.

I've had at least two dreams that this was all an elaborate prank; I'm sure Mom's are worse. It's an odd thing to say about an atheistic Egyptian, but Christmas this year won't be the same without him.

keep the laptop closed

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:28:13 -0800

I very nearly didn't bring my laptop with me this morning. I stood looking at my packing list, still debating computer vs. tablet, even after I'd called a taxi. Mostly, I didn't care -- I just wanted to get back into bed, a small sleep-purring radiator of down duvets and still-dreaming boy, in which I'd want neither. But the flight said it had wifi on board (lies, it appears), and I figured I could at least reply to emails, stare listlessly at timeseries unit tests, dig through binary logs to figure out why my half-launched project isn't immediately doing what I want it to, or at least muse into my terminal screen about the dreaming boy over a glass of free wine with lunch.

On the one hand, I feel like I don't really have the time to be flying off to Minnesota for the weekend to make winter-thematic cocktails for old Madison friends and to partake of eggy stuffing and maple-syrup pecan pies until either I fall into a food coma or Jim declares it to be Hammerschlagen time, in which case the act of pounding nails into a stump in 10-degree weather ought to wake me up. Which is the plan of record for the next 48 hours. My work time has been whittled away recently -- holidays; next week's annual 3-day ski trip (the planning of which which appears to be impossible to disentangle myself from -- "no, I am not organizing food this year" turns into a 10-minute conversation anyhow; somehow I've been sucked into grocery shopping for it anyhow); the week after's planned excursion to snowboard in Breckenridge with the Q's and the dreamer -- all my own doing, but it means a full slate of 3- or 4-day work weeks right before the spring promotion cycle. And I've suddenly landed on a list that's made my interview load skyrocket, another public good that feels zero-sum with the personal good, at least until Q2. Hiding at home to work from my couch doesn't help, even though it spares me the commute -- too much an extrovert, I get bored and lonely, and find myself to actually be more productive working from a loud office an hour south.

On the other, I have too strong of a work/life division in place for my well-intentioned idea of submitting changelists from 30,000 feet to ever really have happened, at least today. I reluctantly left the boy asleep and took a towncar to the airport, bought a new hardcover novel (allowing myself to take a break, perhaps indefinite, from my public-domain kindle edition of paid-by-the-word Dickens), and the in-flight wireless isn't working anyhow, which feels corroborative. Even daily, I pretty well resist the bleeding over of one last commit. Getting more done in the same amount of time is therefore requiring greater efficiency -- always a challenge; more so when I suddenly again seem to have exciting extracurriculars: The boy above -- sweet and 27 (oh so much older than 25!), attentive and handsome -- is fast becoming a welcome fixture. Why would I work late instead of going out to mostly-vegan dinner with him, or simply slowly sipping bourbon together on my couch?

I have cardamom bitters in my suitcase. Who was I kidding? I'm really not going to to open this laptop again until Monday.

new year's lull

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:15:24 -0800

It's as if the new year shouldn't have started yet -- I'm puttering at work, as yet unmotivated and so churning out small-fry changelists; the shuttles are on a reduced schedule; half the team is still out of the office; lunch at Crittenden, the new campus, remains lackluster and un-veggie-friendly. I'm still engaging like it's still vacation, my attention scattered, posting on Facebook and waiting for the minute glow produced by each "like." Yesterday I restocked on flour, sugar, and eggs, having blown through my earlier supply in the New Year's Eve creation of peppermint bark shortbread and very spiked eggnog. I tried to roast acorn squash and failed (I should learn my lesson: Kabocha, butternut, delicata or nothing). Folded my laundry.

The dip in mental engagement makes sense, I suppose -- my 2012 projects are all either done or punted to 2013. Things that are over: Visiting family over Christmas in the Midwest; my relationship; the Nori-and-Emily spectacular of New Year's Eve, with sequins and cocktails and hairdos and glamor shots in front of the damask wallpaper and chandelier in the showpiece closet, and then coffee and slow-moving brunch and mopping the floors the next day. So many horizons, all now behind.

Not that I'm upset about any of this. (Really, anymore.) Rather that my usual vigor lacks a focal point just now, and without more projects than I can reasonably handle at any given time and people with whom to do them, boredom quickly creeps in around the edges. I was bored by the unit tests I wrote today (but pleased by their greenness). Bored by my laundry. Bored with the half-bottle of wine waiting for me on my counter; bored with the prospect of another evening roasting vegetables (fennel tonight) and telling myself to go to bed early. I went to the gym to unspool some of this directionless energy, which will probably keep me un-bored until this shuttle arrives back home.

And it's not as if I don't have projects -- a couple of large-scope ones at work; a kitchen remodel on which to move forward; the Symphony Chorus will begin making me pleasantly insane with mid-century French modernism soon enough; there's even a suggestion (well-timed) of someone new to be excited about. Plenty to begin, to resume, to run with, just as soon as I feel like running.

Maybe I'm just low on serotonin. I prescribe myself a weekend, yoga, friends' cocktail parties, and as many projects as I can fit into two sunny January days. Then I'll start 2013 for real on Monday.

lumpiness

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:48:41 -0800

Grief is lumpy, my friends tell me when I ask them why I'm still crying. It's the gravy of emotions: Smooth and free-flowing as you stir the stock into the roux (I used Bittman's roasted vegetable stock for the second year in a row at Thanksgiving last week, having Liliana do the stirring while I finished up the rainbow chard), then congealing as it cools, only to flow irregularly over the mashed potatoes with parsnips (from the Cornucopia Cookbook -- the Irish know their potatoes!). Sometimes it heats up unexpectedly and is suddenly very present again, scalding; it then cools off, and I can focus again on my newspaper, work, anything else. And reminders crop up everywhere.

London couldn't have come at a better time. After three unhappy weeks, I ran away to the cold British Isles, where nothing reminded me of him. Cornish pasties at Victoria Station every morning! Those iconic red telephone booths, which never get old! I had two more cocktails than I promised myself and ended up singing Black Coffee with the pianist at a lovely, tiny bar with an upright and house-made bitters. A hit-and-run of Dublin, just for Ciara's 30th birthday dinner, and just time enough for a coffee, new wool blanket, and Real Irish Wheat Germ(tm) before jetting back to London, to a Mumbaikar dinner with Amanda in Leicester Square. Emily came for the second week, and we ate at some fantastic restaurants (my best new discovery: Ottolenghi), sipped perfect cocktails, saw the Globe company do Twelfth Night with an all-male cast, stayed up too late drinking mint juleps at an Election Day party and still missed hearing Obama's amazing victory speech live, stuffed as many finger sandwiches and tea cakes as possible into our mouths at the poshest place I've been in a while, and then just ate banh mi and watched Notting Hill in the adorable hotel with a bottle of nice Italian wine.

That is what I call effective distraction.

Something about returning stateside, though -- not even San Francisco, but touching down in Philadelphia for an early friends' Thanksgiving -- seemed to quickly unravel my two weeks of careful patching. I started scanning the sidewalks again as I went for a jet-lagged dawn run through autumnal University City, unsure if I might run into, if not him on that coast, at least a brother.

Friday we're exchanging the items we kept at each other's houses -- t-shirts, a hairbrush, my spare pair of glasses. A needed finality. Perhaps then this lumpiness can start to settle, attenuate, and, eventually, disappear.

misaligned calendars

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:01:23 -0700

Three weeks today. Three weeks, during which he has failed to observe International Oh God I've Made A Huge Mistake Day, or to take advantage of the discount I can only imagine San Francisco-based skywriters put on their services when they heard of his predicament and pressing need, or even to send a card for the popular holiday Please Take Me Back Day. I've begun to think we're operating on different calendars. And this, I'm sure, is the problem.

It hurts. Daily. Sometimes I have heartburn; sometimes my heart just burns. I stopped clenching my jaw within three days, returned to eating normally within a week. But a visceral unease yet persists (the after-effects of the gut-punch he delivered), and my eyes are perilously, unpredictably watery. (Like now, typing this on a plane. I've started carrying tissues in all my jacket pockets, not caring who sees me weep on various forms of transit, shuttle or MUNI or airplanes). It's both predictable (taking people who aren't him to the opera; canceling the Lines Ballet tickets we had for last night; discovering new yoga positions in which it's hard to cry) and un- (walking through the De Young yesterday with Astrid & Julia, remembering that the last few museums I've been to were with him; his love of the format). I grieve continuously: Between meetings; reading the newspaper; accidentally finishing a cocktail alone at a bar and unwittingly reëntering the singles scene (I'm so not ready).

But that calendar shit, I must admit, is real. As much as he doesn't appear to have heard of the aforementioned, completely mandatory holidays, he read my calendar very well, and acted on it. (Presumptuous as it may be, I don't for a minute believe his stated reason.) I remind myself (daily) that he's 25. I'd stopped thinking about the 7-year age gap when he proved himself both literate and sociable, and managed to ignore it in the small ways it poked through -- his new apartment with its dirty carpets, though not a far cry from the Goat House of my own quadranscentennial self, stands in contrast to my second refinance, my plans for a kitchen remodel. Carpets and mortgages are themselves immaterial, but can perhaps bespeak stage in life.

The worst of it (the best of it?) is that he's not wrong about what I want, and when I want it. Whatever else this relationship taught me, it showed me that I'm ready. I've spent the last long while creating space in various ways -- job; house; self-knowledge -- and now the emotional space is there, too. I made it for him, but I think it's transferable.

I'm right now on a plane to London, ostensibly for business to meet the other half of my team, recently transplanted from Dublin; more pressingly, so I can stop looking for him on every street corner of the Mission -- for his back-lit curls and busted-ankle happy lope coming down 18th Street, for his face to pass by in the sea of neighbors at Bi-Rite, the cervecería on my corner, hoping he'll be sitting on my doorstep or waiting outside the musicians' entrance of Davies Symphony Hall with a dozen roses and an apology. Two weeks' change of scene ought to help with the pathological face-scanning, the ever-springing hope.

Better day by day (even if I haven't stopped crying).

the other shoe

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:48:37 -0700

Funny how the sound of the other shoe dropping is immediately recognizable. I flew home from New York yesterday, excited to see Lion-O after most of a week's absence, and yet instead of us having dinner and curling up on the couch, the evening took the turn I was hoping no evening would ever again take. It was the other shoe from my confession in May, closure on that topic -- and thereby on all topics between us -- in the negative.

I was so excited about him. So happy. So hopeful.

Jaime came over with Snuggle Cat (a reasonable ersatz boyfriend, as these things go) and some food (though my appetite had dropped out from under me at the same time as that shoe, and hasn't really returned yet). I managed to eat most of a Tartine morning bun between sobs this morning with Erica. Food still doesn't sound appealing, but I'm not going to waste away. And friends -- thank you, all of you -- have come out of the woodwork with messages, texts, emails, and hugs of support.

I know, horribly, how this goes: You make it through the part where your contacts regularly salt over from crying (I keep some solution on my desk, and have rinsed them out so far at least five times during the work day), then -- oh, but I don't want to think about it, the part where I return his T-shirts and he the hairbrush I kept at his place, the part where we un-sync our iPhones from our shared calendar, where I delete, or perhaps just rename, the list of things to do with him I've been keeping since Day 1.

One step at a time. First, to regain my appetite. Then I can begin to deal with the shoes littered about the floor.

zip-together sleeping bags

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:08:19 -0400

One drink (two, this time: the wine bar at ORD-C17 had Domaine Chandon and a garrulous surgeon) and 35,000 feet always confers this sense of rightness, well-being, Soma. Or it could be the eleven, twelve hours of sleep per night over the weekend in Inyo National Forest: Wine from 800-mL Platypi sipped from backpacking-light aluminum cups, sitting around a campfire on a plateau of rock facing Mammoth Mountain, the luminous moon hovering first just behind the ridgeline, then screaming silently over the whole valley of granite and waterfalls and hard-scrabble conifers tenaciously growing up into the rarefied eagle-air, the crackling fire slowly making us colder as it descended to embers, despite MacRae's dinosaur hat and our zipped-together his-and-hers sleeping bags (I had to lie on top of him in our double down cocoon to warm him back up when he and Patrick had finished the whiskey and he finally crawled in, later, when the moon was vertical, dead above the mesh window in the top of the tent). I figured, since I wasn't coming into the office Tuesday through Friday anyhow, why not spend the weekend plus Monday eating double packets of oatmeal with peanut butter in the mornings, swimming in meltwater-cold lakes at 9000 feet in the afternoons, debating Turing tests on the trail and taking bear-tests (can you open this canister?) before dinner in the evenings? And then to have a shower-beer with said boyfriend, sleep in a real bed (which, unlike a Therm-a-Rest, does not punish the extra arm of entwined sleep), and wake up to a warm 25-year-old and a pot of tea, before flying off to a conference for the rest of the week? Why not, indeed.

I fed him breakfast and took an ÜberX to the airport, where I bought an Italian novel and a San Franciscan burrito (con tofu). I've been staring out the cabin window ever since, thinking how much I'd still like to be running around the six-miles-below landscape with him: Matching titanium sporks, mountain lakes, and zip-together sleeping bags.

no disparities underwater

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:20:25 -0700

Blame it on lack of sleep -- the pager had been silent through a cocktail party and dinner party chez moi this weekend, and yet Lion-O tossed and turned in illness all Sunday night, as bad as any network outage -- but my composure cracked last night and I started slowly dripping tears into my glass of Beaujolais as we stood in his kitchen cooking pasta. I've created a disparity, and as much as I've been patient and calm, on occasion an acute spike of anxiety will piggyback on some lesser worry (should I drive up to Laurel's wedding early, or work a full week? Did the doctor call yet?), and then there goes the evening.

There's only so much to be said. I exhaust myself, then take out my salty contacts; he holds me close. I gulp air and remind myself to be patient.

Because mostly, truly, it doesn't matter. We spent the last weekend of July at FnF, dancing and staring into each other's eyes and at the blinky lights; a week later, we flew to Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean and spent nine days scuba diving, identifying reef fish, stalking turtles, dancing underwater, competing on Nitrox consumption. We rented trucks whose speedometers didn't work (but they were in km/h anyhow) and whose gears ground, and drove around the perimeter of the island with the windows down, hair blowing, half-dressed in wetsuits. We put Hazelnoot on pancakes, fried eggs and made coffee, slept in, devoured novels. We'd join the group after a late breakfast, already on their second dive, and cruise down to 80 or 100 feet, over double reefs, around a wreck, through brilliant coral, avoiding spiny lionfish and chasing adorable trunkfish, burning our tanks down to 500 PSI and then wading ashore -- fins in one hand; holding each other's with the other -- at sunset. We put on bug spray and found the whitewashed French bistro down the road, the Spanish tapas place right on the water, one glass of wine suddenly plenty after a day of surprising exertion underwater, watching the lights on the harbor, his arm around my shoulders. He gallantly carried my tanks for me and wore my dive computer when I didn't need it, two giant watches on his tanned wrist.

Who needs words and concepts when you can spend every hour of a 9-day vacation together and still fall asleep, happily entwined, back home?

My friends love him. I love him. There's just one piece left. And on good days -- most days -- I'm happy to wait.

crash under load; Nashville cure

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 18:20:37 -0700

Okay, uncle. Uncle. Ow.

I think I've found, for the first time since college, my limits. I've been oscillating toward this all year -- there was a beautiful moment in mid-January when everything seemed perfectly balanced: Work, friends, amateur choir, singing with the SF Symphony Chorus. But the evening of that first Debussy performance, out for a glass of wine after the show with friends I'd run into who had come to hear the concert, I met a nice young man who extolled David Foster Wallace, walked me home, and got my phone number. And I've been seeing a lot of Lion-O ever since, bringing me from the sweet spot between boredom and overcommitment, blazing straight past red-line, and landing me squarely in the territory of a datacenter running on reserve power, its cooling systems failing, and hardware beginning to melt. April dipped a toe in those irradiated waters (now barely covering spent fuel rods) but righted itself; June, however, approached full-on Fukushima territory. The month saw 11 rehearsals and 6 performances over my two ensembles, 3 operas (in attendance) for good measure, oncall shifts during rehearsals, one giant postmortem, and scuba lessons.

And so I crashed my immune system. Unlike the datacenters at work, I don't have a spare one and can't upgrade to newer models, and so the above schedule effectively DOS'd me. I spent the evening of the Fourth of July huddled under a duvet with a box of Kleenex on MacRae's couch, sipping chamomile tea with honey and babysitting the pager, finally cracking A Supposedly Fun Thing after almost 6 months, as he and his roommate climbed Corona Heights in search of fireworks. Thursday was worse. And yet Friday morning, buoyed by the marvels of modern medicine and my overall health having moved just slightly up and to the right, I boarded a plane with him to Nashville.

May I recommend, for your next illness, the restorative powers of 10 hours of sleep per night in an heirloom four-poster bed in Belle Meade? Endless tea, summer dinners of tomatoes and cottage cheese with squash from the garden and Chablis? Pontoon boating in 100-degree weather on Center Hill Lake; attempting to water-ski with the brothers (his ankle still barring him); sharing his old, illustrated copy of A Little Princess in the family car on the drive back into town to dinner? Rainstorms, observed from the stone archway of his grandparents' manorial home, and later through his living room windows, wetting the rosebushes outside, twilight sinking, as you finish a DFW essay on the couch and he naps, heavy and warm in the summer air, on top of you? I won't recommend the pre-dawn flight back to California to catch a full day's work on Monday morning, but the rest constitutes what I now believe to be sound medical advice.

Back at work, healthy, and without evening constraints for the first time in what feels like an eternity, I think something has to go for the fall. The Symphony Chorus is exacting but too heady to drop -- after each performance of Beethoven's 9th two weeks ago, the audience would leap to its feet, then literally roar when Ragnar came onstage and indicated us; after the penultimate show, MTT told us with great sincerity "you give good fugue" (I actually blushed) -- so it may be IOC, if only for one season.

In the pool 12 days ago with a double wetsuit and full scuba gear on, I felt short of breath. Realizing it wasn't panic, but just the physical symptoms thereof, I grabbed the two layers of 6mm neoprene and pulled them away from my chest, holding them there so my ribcage could once again expand fully. Took off one wetsuit, and I could breathe again.

The same has just got to happen to my schedule: One wetsuit has to go.