#bcitradioarts

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#5. Wanna be our friend?

I know it’s unhealthy to think of media personalities as your friends, even if that is the image that they create in being inviting, approachable, inside-jokey. It cuts both ways and members from a comedy Youtube channel I watch (and whose podcast I listen to), Funhaus, have more than once addressed the parasocial relationship that inevitably forms between them and their own fanbase. Much of their brand is based on a fun and friendly friend-group dynamic that plays video games together and riff Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style. Wanting to step into the role of producer for our own podcast we’re about to start, I have been thinking about the format and tone of this hypothetical show, and unfortunately, the image of presenting yourself this way is one I would still strive for. It creates a sense of community and yes, cults are bad, but devoted followings are something any content creator would kill to have.

Wanna be our friend?

For how much I listen to podcasts, making my own seems daunting. It is the freedom and open-endedness of it. I have a habit of getting in my own way most of the time when it comes to overthinking things. What qualifications do I have that somebody would want to listen to me? In the same way, why would anybody choose to read my writing? I mean, they don’t on this blog, but they do elsewhere. I like to think that my style draws readers in somehow. Maybe podcasting is the same way.

Thinking about all the podcasts I do listen to, few are actually experts. Well, experts in the way that I think of nuclear physicists or neuro-surgeons (science is hard, okay) who appear on news segments, but you could make a pretty compelling case that long-time industry vets of games or sports journalism are experts too, certainly of their craft, but they’re more likely to be the ones sitting across from and interviewing the “experts.” I tune in for podcast hosts’ personalities, chiefly. Any amount of expertise they may bring to the table is welcomed but secondary. Sometimes the fan take on things is more listenable than a group of overly qualified people who just have no presence or ear for radio.

My favourite podcasters tend to be specifically some kind of journalist or creative at the producer level. Usually not just actors, or just performers, or just athletes. While they may have interesting experiences, they can’t carry a podcast for me. If I’m subscribing to a podcast I’m in it for the long haul. There needs to be something or someone I’m coming back for each week. I specify at a producer level because if you take, for example, The Always Sunny Podcast—my newest obsession—while the hosts are the actors, they’re also the creators, writers, and producers of the FX sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

They bring in an incredible amount of depth about the creative process and their choices (and obstacles!) in the writers' room and on set and off. It also helps that they are incredibly funny and polished storytellers (and performers). Even though they are more prolific and successful now (Charlie Day is becoming a household name, Rob McElhenney co-owns an English football team with Ryan Reynolds) they’ve always maintained a close-knit, indie rock band vibe. Doubly so when they look back at their early seasons of the show where they had to do almost everything themselves. Most fans of the show know that it basically started with the three guys and a $100 budget. That it’s still going is a huge success story, and now we’ve been able to watch their podcast grow and get better with help from their producer (TV writer and producer Megan Ganz) as they continue to experiment with its format. In the last year they’ve added special guest episodes, did fan call-in shows, and even turned it into a video podcast and film on a gorgeous, specially-created set. Not all podcasts benefit from having video but their on-screen presence is undeniable and elevates their work. Charlie and Glenn Howerton excel at physical comedy and being able to watch the bits they launch into is a treat.

Podcasting, to me, is about presentation. And not even visual presentation. Journalists are naturally used to presenting information to an audience and strengthening their stories with different sources and background research, and it helps if they also have something interesting to say because they don’t necessarily need to be objective here. One site in particular comes to mind: Giant Bomb, arguably the driving force of the overall shift to personality-driven games media in 2008, where you had viewers tuning in specifically to find out what its hosts thought of new (and retro) video games in the forms of long-form videos (40+ minute Quick Looks), video and written reviews, and scheduled live-stream productions (all pre-Twitch and Youtube Live). There were no staff writers and editors like in traditional games media outlets and the brand itself took a backseat in favour of the name-recognition and popularity of its main, audience-facing personalities.

I followed Giant Bomb’s podcast The Giant Bombcast for decades, and even its many side projects or off-shoots as its founders and employees moved locations or left over the years: Screened.com, Giant Bomb East’s The Beastcast, a Formula 1 podcast Alt+F1 (which later changed to Shift+F1 when its hosts left the company and continued the show), the breakaway media company Nextlander and its podcast, and most recently The Jeff Gerstmann Show. While they are now mostly separate groups, they share the same DNA: they all have a similar style and sound and have comparable levels of industry knowledge.

Shift+F1 is a staple in my podcast diet and it’s an interesting case because none of the hosts are F1 journalists, just fans, yet all come from a games journalism background and the show is well-researched and comprehensive as a result. Anything else they add is infectious fan excitement and speculation. And the hosts being who they are (having listened to them talk about video games before) made the transition to talking about speedy racecars that much easier and the more attractive option, rather than having to listen to a bunch of random podcasts until I found a group that I liked.

The Poscast is one of two baseball podcasts I listen to (the other being Effectively Wild—pure journalism) and it is hosted by Joe Posnanski (sportswriter and journalist) and Michael Schur (television producer/writer responsible for shows like Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, and an avid sports fan). This dynamic combines the deep journalistic knowledge of the game as well as the way-more-than-average sports fan’s knowledge all wrapped up in comedic banter to keep things engaging and personable.

There seems to be no one right way of doing it, and what I like is completely different to the next person. The only thing I can do now is sit down and start recording and take it from there. As Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo once said after a ballsy overtake, sometimes you just gotta lick the stamp and send it. So that’s where I’m at with things. I can think this thing to death and never get it off the ground or just go for it. It’s going to be sports related with a focus on storytelling, playing to our strengths. We don’t have the benefit of having known each other for years, sadly, and can’t rely on easygoing conversation to drive the podcast. But with any luck it’ll be a project we can continue working on long after and maybe eventually we will have that dynamic.

Check us out on Twitter?

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#4. 80's ski-movie villains

I’ve been sick so gimme a break alright. I minored in Film Studies, I might make a James Bond podcast or I might not.

I dug into some older James Bond and my takeaway is this: watch For Your Eyes Only (1981). There are 27 movies and this one is better than a lot of them. The Roger Moore version of Bond has very little traction among viewers my age and in my region (though I might even extend that sentiment to most of North America in general). My parents definitely preferred things like Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as young adults to anything Bond-related. Moore’s Bond is sometimes called “The Gentleman Bond,” and while it’s hard to make the distinction when all the actors wear the tux, it’s in the way Moore embodies the rank and title of “Commander Bond” no other actor (so far) has. The man can smoke a cigar and you can buy into his upper-crust Britishness as a Naval-officer-turned-intelligence-agent. Moore’s and Sean Connery’s Bonds can both stroll into a casino and turn on the charm at the bar, although Connery’s Bond is more likely to corner and grope you in a barn.

The James Bond you grew up with is usually your Bond. For me it’s always been Brosnan. The fact that I was too young to have seen him in other films only cemented it in my brain by making him pop up in other things as “Hey look it’s James Bond!” going forward well beyond his tenure as 007. Daniel Craig had a film career before Bond, and I watched Connery in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989) and Entrapment (1999) long before I checked out Dr. No (1962). Licensed movie tie-in videogames were a huge part of the industry and had their heyday when Brosnan was Bond then legit died out partway through Craig’s run.

In retrospect, Brosnan gets a bad rap, but that’s because the movies he was in more or less let him down. His Bond achieved a harmonious blend of suave, pretty-boy Bond (Moore) and sweaty killer (Timothy Dalton, Craig). Maybe he was too pretty because a few years later we got Craig’s Bond brutally drowning bad guys in mop buckets.

I watched Moore in Live and Let Die (1973), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), For Your Eyes Only, and Octopussy (1983). Most of his Bond films are less serious, rollicking adventure flicks. Not too far away from the Austin Powers takes on the genre. There’s a sequence in Octopussy where he dresses up as a clown to infiltrate an East German circus. Even in the more serious For Your Eyes Only there is a wild brawl between Bond and hockey players on the ice.

While The Spy Who Loved Me feels very much like an austere 70’s movie (it is one of Moore’s better outings as well) with fight scenes that look exaggerated like stage-fighting and sweeping large-scale shootouts that reminded me of old war movies like The Longest Day (1962), the jump to For Your Eyes Only was jarring. In a good way. The stunts feel dangerous and oftentimes spectacular, cuts are much quicker, and everything feels high-octane. The music pulses as bad guys rip through the ski resort dressed like 80’s jerks—very ski movie villain—except they have guns. It does feel as though this movie paved the way for so many of the action heavy hitters of that decade in terms of the action sequence.

It was also the most wrapped up in a Bond story I’ve ever been. Bond’s mission is not overly complicated: investigate a very bad man. His mission goes sideways when he crosses paths with a woman hellbent on revenge, and together they go from clue to clue, continent to continent, all while surviving various attempts on their lives. There is a twist and it blindsided me. I was 100% committed to the ride at that point.

I never thought of Bond movies as fun until I watched these ones. Connery Bond films are more about sneaking around and spying, Dalton and Brosnan’s films are actiony, and Craig’s emotional and gritty, Casino Royale (2006) arguably a response to the backlash of Die Another Day’s (2002) over the top silliness, and the successful Jason Bourne style of espionage thriller that dominated the mid 2000s.

I’m not saying that the next Bond needs to go back to being laidback and humorous, but Moore’s films caught me at the right time in my life. I’m less self-serious than ever before and I’m tired of being miserable all the time. Most of the time I want something dumb and fun. I wouldn’t have had the temperament to laugh at the ridiculousness of some of it when I was in my teens. There is no film I ever wish I’d discovered sooner. There is only now and there is maybe tomorrow, and that suits me just fine. The more you mature, the more you appreciate.

That seems to be a running theme here, right?

PS: I also watched Never Say Never Again (1983). Connery came back and it's not part of the "official" Eon-produced films. It's pretty rad and also very 80's. There's a fight scene like something out of Indiana Jones.

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#3. Ok, web designers should be paid more

We had a couple of stressful midterms here, our first semester at BCIT. Coffee and late nights studying, sure, and then we went and got it over with. Brief pain. The whole band-aid.

I never lost more sleep than I did worrying about our personal website assignment. Like advanced psychological torture, this is how you induce elevated levels of stress and severe sleep deprivation. Step one: blank canvas. Step two: worth 30 marks.

And these ain’t any old completion or “you tried” marks. Some requirements were clear cut: a set number of pieces of work/projects to show off and some necessary pages (about, contact, privacy policy). Anything else is up to you, and on you, if you know what I mean. You can spend hours building up block by block and coming away feeling accomplished when you see it take shape and come together, and then the next day you can spend hours trying to figure out why this plugin isn’t doing the thing you need it to do, Googling for help, trying a same-but-different-plugin, dropping in bits of HTML somebody on Quora left on a tangentially related issue twelve years ago, and then convincing yourself that your site will be perfectly fine without that cool feature you really wanted. Like an art form, there is no such thing as time management. There is only messing around and messing up.

Nobody sets out to make a shitty website. But it might end up that way because 1) they literally can’t see colour 2) this font screams “fun” 3) “what do now?” and 4) “oh god, what did I just do?”

Numbers 3 and 4 are interchangeable but also just kinda states of being, all throughout the process?

Once we hit the ground running with our domains and hosting and our about pages, we had carte blanche. Free reign, but with a looming deadline. Like players exiting Vault 101 and stepping out into the wasteland for the first time: breathtaking freedom, but oh so barren and, oh yeah, you’ll probably die out here so get moving. Building a website is fun until you run into a problem.

My portfolio of writing (as well as video and audio work) came together quickly. Wasting my time is my number one hobby and I had no shortage of things I’d worked on previously, good and bad. And if it’s not evident by now, I just *love* talking about myself. I could big up all these things I had rotting away on my hard drive with fun descriptions no problem. Another requirement squared away.

Then it came time for the home page. Here I struggled. Thinking about it began to keep me up at night. Because this was no longer a question of learning the site editor and adding fancy bells and whistles, it was a visual design problem. At this point all I had was pages full of text and media and PDF embeds. It was maybe one step up from whatever we came up with in our Grade 9 Info Tech class, where we learned how to build a simple webpage with HTML. Open tags, close tags. It struck me that even though things are basically drag ‘n drop templates or pre-made themes in EasyWP, with barely any effort you can still create a site that looked like it was made by children—in other words, a real early Oughts-ass looking website. Where were the safety rails? Nobody should have that terrible power. Really irresponsible, is what it is.

I already talked about myself in my about page, I already talked about my work in their respective content pages, so what would my front page say or even look like? It’s 2022 and I haven’t typed a specific url into my address bar in actual years. My daily web experience begins with some sort of feed (it’s Reddit, Reddit is my only feed). So I felt like a moron when I had to Google examples of pretty cool front pages.

But I found one that caught my eye. It had attitude. From the photo choice to the lettering. The gears in my head turned. I found an old photo somewhere in the Cloud some friends and I had taken a couple years ago down in Birch Bay, Washington. An Insta-worthy glam shot. It became my new website cover photo, and it makes me laugh every time I pull up my homepage because what you don’t see (I cropped out), attached to the hand I’m holding, is my buddy’s shockingly hairy arm. And my website was always called “From the mind of Jordan Wong,” from day one. It knows what it's doing. It was only fitting I go with this layout.

I handed my website in and the next day I rolled into class with utmost confidence. Like I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Our instructor, Paul, told us right away that he had a look at our websites… and he’s giving us a week to work on them some more.

It’s a gutpunch that didn’t register until I went up to the front of the room, to show off my website to everybody on the big screens, and Paul told me he looked at mine last night and it was one he actually wanted to talk about. Site functionality issues, I think it was he said. Well god dammit I was already in the captain’s chair and all I could do was plug in the address and hit go with all eyes on me. It felt like an ambush.

So he didn’t like the homepage. Or something. He referred to it as “bold.” Well I told myself, it was a stylistic choice and I stand by it! I liked my magenta/orange colour palette (Zune colours, I call ‘em), I liked that you had the words fade in all cinematically like that, even if you had to scroll down a little. The icon columns were too far down (they were originally below the cover photo). I didn’t see what the big deal was. So I sat on it another few days, and that weekend I came down with a pretty nasty flu? Virus? Whatever it was, it made me sweaty and feverish and put me on the couch for the entire week.

The night before the stupid site was due again, I knew what needed to be done and got myself into a sitting position and got to work. Cover photo: widescreen fix. Don’t know how to do it properly with Photoshop content aware fill and it looks jank. Okay, just live with it. Move my navigation icons higher, assume the user doesn’t know how to scroll down. Done. Now what? The navigation icon columns Paul helped me implement are breaking the hyperlinks on my rightmost column—and only if I mouseover from the right? Google has no solutions. Resizing the column widths does nothing, nor does changing the number of columns there are. Disaster. I was about to delete the columns completely when I decided to try throwing an animation on that block.

Whatever it did, it worked. It made the Contact icon and text link clickable again.

Except… that animation wouldn’t fire off at the same time as the title. I had to scroll a tiny bit down before it did. I refreshed and tried again. Nothing again until I scrolled. I panicked.

Oh my god, Paul’s going to think I’m an asshole, I thought. I assure you, I wasn’t deliberately trying to make visitors scroll down this time. Moving the blocks as high as they could go did nothing. Adjusting the height of the cover photo did nothing. It was already 12 o’clock midnight and I needed to wake up at 6:15AM for school, still feverish. (There was an un-skippable engagement for another class: a 20-minute meeting that I waited in my car almost two hours for, by the way.) I couldn’t go to bed until I’d solved the issue. I went so far as to try rebuilding the entire front page from scratch but had to stop when I couldn’t remember how to get my cover photo stretched full screen, nor could I remember how to get the font for my titles the same as it was previously. (Protip: copy block, paste block.)

In the end I think I got it. I had a block of similar icons on another page that I copied over and just swapped the icons and links. This one seemed to play nicer, seemed to fire off its animation at the same time as my bold, beautiful title text, so all hyperlinks worked. The moment I saw that, I saved it up and called it a night. I didn’t want to touch it again lest something else break.

So that was my foray into web design. A minute to break, a literal hour to put back. Hours spent writing content and organizing layouts, and hours wasted trying and failing to put in new fancy features. Dreaming too big and getting slapped back to reality. For instance, I went through four or five different PDF embed plugins before settling for embedding Google Drive PDFs with an iframe. Not the prettiest but it'll have to do. I was really, really trying to get the flowpaper plugin working.

I’ve always been a form over function guy. Sue me. But I’ll stick to my guns: I know what I like. Even if I need to find a workaround. The Fantastic Mr. Fox clip I have on my contact page, technically against the rules of the assignment by way of implementation (so a pretty easy fix) but when pointed out the first time, before Paul could elaborate, I couldn’t have been more resolute and quicker on the draw when I said, “I’m keeping that.”

Wanna check out my site? jordan-wong.com

EDIT: Reviews are in!!! One website critic (it's Paul) gave it 29.5/30! I definitely won't let that go to my head or anything.

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#2. The Trench Run

That’s a Star Wars reference but I’m gonna hit you with a different metaphorical comparison: voiceover performance is a Formula 1 driver throwing his car around a race circuit. Stick with me, it’ll come up again before the end. Team Hamilton.

I look forward to Mondays. I really do. We get to do stuff. The big draw of BCIT was its purported focus on the technical side of the industry. Getting to do yoga on a drizzly Friday morning as a required class is an interesting perk, but for me it’s all about getting behind a mic. It’s the only way I know how to get better: by doing stuff. Recording a voiceover, playing it back, and really hearing if I sound terrible or just okay. In the weeks since the start of our Sound Design course, I’ve been going into the voice recording booth with much more swagger—whether that’s completely unfounded confidence on my part or not—hitting record, and just going for it. I know how I want to sound and it’s up to me to nail it in one or two takes because we’re a little under the gun. We don’t have all day to do this, nor should it take that long.

Enunciation and clarity are one thing—you know if you’ve screwed something up pretty quickly—but intonation and delivery is something you develop an ear for. There’s the artfulness coming in, the musicianship. Anybody can learn to play the right notes, but there’s something to be said about having the feel for it. Expressiveness, style. Think Keith Richards’ choppy, chuggy style of guitarwork contrasted with Mick Taylor’s smooth and bendy (Santana-like) sound in the golden age of the Stones discography, and no, I’m not going to justify that remark.

You can get direction and, conversely, give it to a vocal talent, but I feel like being extremely hands-on is only necessary if the delivery sounds really off. Like if the script clearly calls for a serious, sombre tone and the performer has chosen literally any other way to do it, you got a problem. What I like to do is have the performer run through it as a practice take, recording the entire time, and then pointing out what to keep or change. Right off the bat you can tell if you’re both on the same page or not. Then the rest is up to personal interpretation and not making any flubs. On the other side of the glass, coming in with an idea of how it should sound already in your head goes a long way both in helping you make it through the script without stumbles, and selling your version of the script read. If you don’t sound confident in how a line should sound, you’re going to be reading it the way the guy behind the monitor thinks it should sound. You might like that, or you might hate it. For me, hearing the script read by a few different people before going in there myself is super helpful.

Like a motorsport driver (boom!) waiting to leave the garage and get down the pitlane for an outlap during qualy, I get a preview of difficult sections (tongue twisters, weirdly written phrases) of the track, and I can mentally note what I need to do to get my voice to fit the script in order to pull off the cleanest run—for each corner, the optimal racing line to take and what gear to be in, the best braking point, etc.

If you’re not familiar with Formula 1, no, this is not the racing series where cars go around a circle. They turn right as well as left. Every track is built differently and each and every corner has its own personality. And like a problem to be solved, there is a best solution that a driver needs to figure out in order to enter and exit a turn without losing much time. Not flying over the kerb, or being forced to take a line that makes them slow down to a crawl just to make it through and, as a result, being stuck in a low gear on the exit so that they need to shift up and gain back their speed. Or they do it perfectly, and they’re onto the next. Those precious tenths of a second gained or lost are what decide race winners, being in the points or just outside of them. It’s this process hundreds upon hundreds of times each 305km-long Grand Prix.

Formula 1 is like a chess match. It’s not always thrilling, but it is strategic. That’s what makes the sport so interesting to me. (That and the dramz.) Racecraft is a driver’s precision control of a 1700lb machine at speeds exceeding 360km/h, the tactical decisions they make regarding positioning and playing chicken, and the twitch reflexes needed to pull all of that off. Think if Luke Skywalker didn’t have any talent and immediately flew into a wall during the trench run. And on that note, the first half of Top Gun: Maverick is actually a racing film.

As voice performers, we’re not so much focused on speed (although you gotta get it within those 30 seconds AND save some extra room for sound effects and music) and yeah, I know, you don't have to worry about some maniac trying to run you off the road, but you do have to worry about precision and control. Knowing your voice, and knowing your way through a script is the difference between a good or a bad recording session, and can save you much head-ache when it comes time to edit. Individually, you know all these words. You speak the language, probably. But put together, sentences present their own challenges. Cadence is a whole thing. Pausing just the right amount. Not being surprised by the next sentence that comes out of nowhere and your mouth becoming mumbly, mushy, and tongue-flappy. If you mess up, yeah, you won’t die in a fiery wreck, but you’ll probably feel terrible about yourself. Be better, dude.

Cover photo: "Formula 1™" is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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#1. Back to School

Bit of background: I am 30. There, I said it. My birthday was in late August and I wanted to celebrate the end of an era with a real rager. I hadn’t had a pukey-afternoon-hangover in a while and thought that it was high time to get back to basics. At the start of 2022 I decided I would go back to school, which started in September, and thought, “Here comes toil, here comes drudgery.” (This coming after I left my job at the start of August because of toil, because of drudgery.) This was my last chance to feel like a twenty-something again.

In my friend group, birthday celebrations were uncommon and made even less frequent because of social distancing in the COVID years. This year, we resolved to write each others’ birthdays down in our phones and sure enough, we went through them one by one. Korean BBQ here (and Korean BBQ there—birthday-boy got COVID so we went twice in two weeks), an Irish Pub, yet another Korean restaurant, and then it was my turn. Not to be outdone, I pitched my idea to the group: Jordan-fest ’22.

It would be multiple days, that part was non-negotiable. And we would do things that were a hassle any other time but this, this special, once-in-a-lifetime birthday. You couldn’t turn 30 again, could you? You wouldn’t deny me this, this the day of my daughter’s weddingbirth? I decided we would do a LAN, and then go to the beach the next day. As kids we used to stay up all night playing 16-players-on-four-TVs Halo and eating way too much pizza. The glory days.

Who doesn’t like that?

Adults. That’s who. Adults don’t like that.

The day of, my good buddy woke up and decided he would give me a headache. He never put a wireless card into his computer when he built it, he texted me. At six in the morning. This got me out of bed scrambling to find an ethernet hub (failing at that), then trying to unplug and re-plug my modem into another phone line (failing at that too). Pro tip: you can plug a computer with no wi-fi into a computer that does have a wireless card, enable it under network settings, and get internet that way. Crisis averted.

The day would ultimately claim my buddy’s glass side-panel, and a 38-year old solid oak table that we tried to pick up and move. A friend had to show up later (and he came with no computer) because he and his SO and their dog just moved into a new condo literally the day before. We played an 18-year-old computer game, SWAT 4, for an hour. Then we packed it all up. And it had been sort of a blast. The worries and obstacles and stress from the day, that all melted away. Everybody was out the door before 1 AM.

The next day, we headed to the beach after some delay—my buddy’s 10-month old baby had to nap. My buddy turns 30 in November. And I was headed to school again.

I don’t love being a student. After the last go-around, in 2016, I swore I would never go back. I’d had enough with papers and textbooks and worrying about grades. But settling into a job and just sticking it out because of the pandemic will change almost anybody’s mind, if you don’t love what it is you do. And I didn’t. I went to school for writing, not to be a public servant and talk on the phone for eight hours a day (I worked for Statistics Canada, so if you’ve ever gotten a call from us, you know what’s up. You just have to bear it). I settled into a routine of late nights and sleeping in ‘til noon. So I broke the hell out of that promise to myself and started looking forward to school.

The idea of a shakeup, enrolling at BCIT, having mentally stimulating and fulfilling days improved my mood and my outlook. I would quickly get over crawling out of bed at 6:15 AM every morning and fighting my way down the freeway like Mad Max and taking seven classes a week and doing homework and writing papers and cramming for midterm exams because it’s one step closer to what I want to do with my life. I want to create. I want a career being creative. Even if I start it this late, and my friends are getting married, having kids, settling down.

And hey, a few weeks later, one of my friends—the one getting married—he popped the question to me when we were riding in his car: will you be my best man? I said I would, and we hugged it out. “What do you wanna do for a bachelor party?” I asked him.

He shrugged and said, “Maybe a LAN? That was fun.”

So there’s the takeaway of this little parable. Things are hard, things take time, things get in the way, but stick with it and things will turn out. That, I gotta believe.