Life :)

Life :)

Auckland – Part 1

July 16, 2016 by 0 Comments

I’m writing this from a crummy hostel in central Auckland. I’ve stayed in crummier ones than this, like the one in Boston last year where it was inhumanly hot in my room, particularly the second time I stayed there. But that time there was Boston! ready to be explored. Downtown Auckland ain’t Boston, that’s for sure. It does almost nothing for me. It’s certainly cleaner and smarter than I remember it, but that just makes the place look more clinical and stark, because all I see are big office buildings housing big financial institutions. The Vero tower with the loo-seat roof, the Lumley tower, the bloody Tower tower. As well as the insurers, many of which are owned by the same company anyway, there are of course the Australian-owned banks and the complete grand slam of Big Four auditing firms. There are nice little alleyways like Vulcan Lane but look up and you can’t help but see AIG or IAG, I forget which, towering overhead. At the bottom end of Queen Street there are souvenir shops and high-end clothes shops and Burger King and McDonald’s and not a lot else. I don’t have that big a problem with Auckland having an area like that; I just don’t think it should be the first thing you see when you get off the plane or the cruise ship. For someone’s first taste of New Zealand, it’s not very tasty. It isn’t even Colby or Edam.

On Thursday I walked from Downtown to Wynyard Quarter, part of the city that didn’t exist when I last lived here. Along the way there were new maritime-themed restaurants with mock sails flapping in the strong breeze that I’d brought up from Wellington, but all that newness and unremitting whiteness felt nautically nasty. Wynyard Quarter itself I felt more positive about, even if you still couldn’t escape ASB and ANZ. Kids and families were using the area – it was school holidays – and it was altogether a good place for exercising and socialising and Pokémon Go-ising. The fish market made for an interesting (and kid-friendly) focal point. Maybe the summer weather would bring out buskers. I hope so. I had lunch there and a lovely catch-up with a lady who worked at Autism NZ when I lived in Auckland and for some time after. Our conversation was more me-centric than I’d anticipated, and the message I got from her was clear: I need to be who I am and not ashamed of who I am. Going to Romania would seem to be a good start in that regard. When I started this blog nine months ago that was the overriding positive theme, and it’s time I got back there.

My room in this hostel is absolutely fine really. I’ve slept well – in contrast to my last few nights in Wellington – and have felt relaxed most of the time I’ve been in Auckland. And I’ve saved some money. I fly back tomorrow evening – I’ll write more about Auckland and the people I’ve met here in my next post.

Life :) - Tennis

Tennis and high taste

July 12, 2016 by 0 Comments

Writing about a tennis match, as I’ve done dozens of times here and on my previous blog, has always been a useful exercise. I think that’s because tennis is such a mental game; when I read back my accounts of old tennis matches I get a pretty good idea of where my head was at at the time.

My head was not in a good place yesterday morning, but at least the sun was shining and I wouldn’t be out there for very long anyway. When we played in the club champs in April under a shorter format he thrashed me 9-1, rattling off eight games in a row. Before yesterday’s match he said he a bit of an upset stomach but even if he’d had a mild case of Zika I wouldn’t have fancied my chances. We practised our serves and a few more of mine went in than they have of late. He called W as I spun my Wilson to determine choice of serve. That surprised me: his name begins with M. It came up M and, encouraged to some extent by my practice serves, I opened proceedings. I immediately double-faulted, but I won my serve to 30, broke him and held again to move ahead 3-0. I defended well and was error-free in those three games. Gosh, I hope I’ll have enough pink Robinsons to see me through. I might be here a while after all. But my opponent picked up the pace, I mistimed a few shots, and it all started to crumble. By the time I next looked like winning a game, the set had almost gone. I fell behind 3-6, 0-2. Eight games in a row. It’s happened again! He then eased off the gas ever so slightly and to my relief I won a game. Two in fact. At 4-2 down the end was surely near, but he began to struggle physically and I sensed I had a semblance of a chance if I dug deep. I then surprised myself with the number of winners I hit on both wings. I served for the set at 5-4 and was broken to love, but I got a second opportunity at 6-5 and played a solid game to close out the set. One set all, and something wasn’t right down the other end. Will he carry on? Ask if I’ll play a super tie-break? He did neither of those things. Instead he shook my hand. It didn’t exactly feel like a win for me but I was happy to find some rhythm, some energy, and to cut down on the double faults. I’m playing again tomorrow night in this winter competition that I’d been hoping would just go away. Meanwhile I was happy to see Andy Murray win his second Wimbledon. For the first time in eleven grand slam finals he caught a break and avoided Federer and Djokovic. Serena on the other hand looks set to become the greatest of all time on the women’s side.

I spent a lot of time with my cousin’s family at the weekend. My aunt and uncle had come up from Timaru, and flew back down this morning with my cousin’s two youngest boys. On Saturday my cousin treated us all to dinner at Logan Brown, a place I’ve walked past literally hundreds of times and never thought I’d go in. Fain daining (that’s how you pronounce it, right?) is a completely foreign concept to me. But the kids helped make the atmosphere relaxing. I had gnocchi and gurnard and an apple tart and it was all amazing with drizzles and garnishes and Portobello mushrooms and the way they somehow cooked the cauliflower. It was so good I could have easily eaten it all again. Come to think of it there might even have been room in my tummy for a third go-around. I suppose being filled up isn’t what you go to Logan Brown for. Yesterday afternoon my aunt and uncle came over to my place for the first time. It was great to have a chat and to drag out the map of Romania and talk about some of the places I might go to with people who genuinely seemed to care. We then had dinner at my cousin’s place. How wonderful it was to spend time with people I feel comfortable with, and to share jokes and ideas and hopes and frustrations. That’s something I don’t experience nearly enough.

I gave a good English lesson tonight. We talked about this morning’s final of Euro 2016 and words for countries and nationalities. When I talked about plurals of words ending in ‘y‘ I’m sure I lost him, but his wife was in the room, she knew what a vowel was, and she clearly understood why we write countries and nationalities but boys, days and trolleys. We discussed flight times and routes to Myanmar and the UK, and we went through some airport-related vocabulary.

My parents will be back from their trip in about two weeks. They’ve had bad colds, the weather hasn’t cooperated, and it’s all taken quite a bit out of them. It’s easy to forget that they’re 66 and 67.

I’m flying up to Auckland on Wednesday evening.

Life :) - My big plan

It’s the pits

July 10, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Tuesday I fell into a deep depressive hole and had no real intention of crawling out. Oh god, I have no idea what’s going on at work anymore, I can’t think or concentrate or remember anything and what has happened so many times in the past is happening again. By the afternoon I was dangerous. I wanted to break something and could easily have done so. I got home and everything felt absolutely awful. I lurched from one wall to another, shouting. I sensibly took Wednesday off work and my mood improved during the day. That afternoon I had a complimentary space-age-style eye test (through my AA membership) and everything was fine on that score. I’m lucky to have good eyesight. I had dinner with my carpool mate, who has been so good to me, at the Willis Street night market.

It’s tough at the moment. I have very little and I am even less. This adventure is perhaps my last chance to be something, somebody, and there’s so much to do before I go. The Brexit vote didn’t help. For one thing, I’m poorer to the tune of five figures as a result (I didn’t mention that, did I?) and could have prevented at least some of that loss.

I have to play a singles tennis match tomorrow morning and expect to lose badly. The beauty of tennis is that one-sided matches usually end quickly.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Motivation

June 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

I haven’t felt great the last few days. I’ve had no motivation to cross off any of the items on my overwhelming to-do list. Some of those items involve making decisions, so yeah, forget it.

I go away in under three months. The very thing that makes going to Romania possible – my complete lack of dependent family or dependent anybody – is what makes it so damn hard. I’m on my own here. But last night my carpool mate and I discussed my list over a drink, and what a useful process that was. Getting people to make decisions and draw timelines is precisely his thing. All the high-fiving and sentences ending in ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ would have been annoying if I didn’t know him better, but I’ve now got some plans in place that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him. We decided that I’ll travel around Romania for a while to begin with instead of settling immediately in one place, except in the unlikely event that I get a job before I go. I’ll get to know the country much better that way, and besides it should be fun.

The Brexit vote and fallout haven’t helped my mood. The vote to leave the EU has caused political turmoil not seen in Britain since the Second World War. It’s fascinating in a way to see it unfold, but it’s also very upsetting. To see Nigel Farage speak with such pomposity and lack of magnanimity in the European parliament was troubling. To deliberately antagonise the people you’ll be brokering an exit deal with, what was he thinking? It’s like he didn’t care about British people other than himself. Millions of good people voted to leave, but the Leave-supporting politicians all seem bad, evil, despicable people. Millions of good people have nobody fighting their corner anymore.

It beggars belief that no coherent plan for “leave” was set out before the referendum. “Leave the European Union”. That was it. So much mayhem could have been alleviated with some planning. The Scotland referendum was a similar story, and I was thankful that on that occasion they voted for the status quo.

Just to rub it in, England exited Euro 2016 at the hands of Iceland, whose population is roughly that of Wellington. I saw the last quarter-hour of England’s embarrassing 2-1 defeat on the TV at work. I mentioned in my last post that English used to have a separate letter for the th sound. Well Icelandic still does, two in fact. They’re called eth (uppercase Ð, lowercase ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ). Eth is used for the voiced th sound, as in this and that, while thorn is used for the unvoiced th sound, as in thick and thin. Icelandic also has an interesting naming system. Supposedly 80% of Icelandic people believe in elves, and roads have been rerouted so as not to disturb their caves. Björk is from Iceland, as are the band Of Monsters and Men.

I’d dread to think where I’d be if my flatmate was still here.

Language learning - Life :) - Politics

In other news…

June 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a relatively normal Saturday. In the morning I watched my cousin’s youngest boy play football and dropped him off after his four mini-games. “I’m a defender,” he said with pride and excitement just before the games started. He defended resolutely and was awarded joint player of the day for the second week in a row. I had lunch with my cousin, then went for a drink in Petone with probably my best friend, or at least the person I have most in common with here in Wellington. We talked about Brexit, work, the Spanish election (go Podemos!), travel, and more Brexit. Later I saw Independence Day 2 with my friend from the tennis club. The rest of the world doesn’t accept “America saves the world” as it did in 1996, and there was more laughter from the audience than I can ever remember from a non-comedy film.

Today I haven’t been in contact with anybody and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my English teaching tomorrow; it’s time I concentrated on that and my exit plans. Kiwexit? Kexit? Plenty of portmanteaux have been bandied about for the possibility of other countries leaving the EU: Czech-out, Italeave, Finnish and so on. How about, off the top of my head, a Frog-off?

Here’s an article in the Guardian about Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town that once had a thriving steelworks but has in recent times relied on EU money (a lot of it) to stay afloat. It has very little immigration. Ebbw Vale voted decisively (62%) to leave the EU. The number of people who voted against their interests is quite remarkable.

EU-funded road in Wales

The road sign above is interesting to me. The word for Wales in Welsh is Cymru but, like other Welsh words, it undergoes mutation in some circumstances, meaning the initial letter changes depending on (I think) the last letter of the previous word. In some cases Cymru becomes Gymru, and in other cases it turns into the weird-looking (to my eyes) Nghymru. Another example: maes (which means field) turns into faes after certain letters such as n. Apparently Welsh speakers make the mutations when they speak without really thinking about it. This changing of the initial letter is just one reason why using a dictionary in Welsh can be quite challenging. Another is that some digraphs such as ff, th and ng act as single letters. (Imagine for a minute that th, when it makes a single sound, counts as a single letter in English that comes between t and u in the alphabet. This isn’t as silly as it sounds: th was once written as a single very-different-looking letter in English. The word think would then come after time in the dictionary, and athlete would come after attempt. But pothole, which just contains t followed by h and not the th letter (because there’s no th sound), would come before potion, not after it. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? But these sorts of things crop up all the time when using dictionaries or other alphabetical lists in Welsh.) Welsh is fascinating but I need to be concentrating on Romanian. I also need to be getting into linguistics properly but have no idea how. It’s frustrating as hell.

Life :) - Politics

It’s out!

June 26, 2016 by 0 Comments

It was all going so well on Friday morning. Nigel Farage’s near-concession was splashed all over the front page of the Sun. But then actual results started coming in. Sunderland were 61% out, Newcastle only marginally in. Those two results were much more favourable to Leave than had been predicted. Maybe it was just a North-East thing. But as other declarations dribbled in from different parts of the country that favoured Leave, the writing was on the wall. I’d worked out the night before that for Remain to win they would need to be at about 53% by the time our meeting started because many of the Leave-friendly areas would declare later (the same pattern that you see at a UK general election but less pronounced because people were voting less along party lines). Instead it was almost a dead tie at that point, and I knew it was all over. I felt sick. Some other people at work were following it, but not as closely as me. “Look how close it is! It could go either way! And doesn’t that map look pretty?!” No, there’s only one way this is going now and it looks bloody ugly.

It’s sad for me because I’ve invested a lot of emotional energy into my plan to take control of my life (to use a slogan from the Leave side). It has created so much uncertainty. I’m now glued to Al Jazeera and news websites when I’d much rather be learning Romanian or making travel plans. I’m losing sleep. My take is that the exit process will take two years from when the infamous Article 50 is invoked; the UK will still be part of the EU during that time. So my immediate future should be safe. But I just don’t know for sure.

But it’s also sad for the country that it’s come to this. I perfectly understand the people of Sunderland sticking two fingers up to London and the South-East who have reaped most of the benefits of Britain’s supposedly strong economy. Mines, shipyards, car plants and steelworks have closed down in the last forty years with nothing to replace them except insecure data-entry-type jobs that a bright twelve-year-old could easily do. And with increased automation even those crappy jobs are disappearing. As manufacturing has vanished in Wales, the North-East, South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, so have communities. Successive Tory and Labour governments simply haven’t given a toss (and who do you vote for in a FPTP system when the two main parties are basically the same?). The influx of Eastern European immigrants after those countries were admitted to the EU certainly hasn’t helped either, but that’s only one in a very long line of reasons why so many people are struggling. It’s a shame that the EU had to bear the brunt of everyone’s understandable anger, rather than lying domestic politicians.

A lot has been made of the difference in voting patterns between the haves and have-nots, but to my mind it’s been overstated. It’s true that well-off metropolitan types voted to stay and have-almost-nothings in neglected areas voted to leave. But a lot of very well-heeled, often older people in rural areas will have voted out too. I can’t see the stats for Common Lane in Hemingford Abbots (two million quid, anyone?), not far from where I grew up, but I bet they voted out by a good margin. As someone who voted to stay, I see the Common Lane “outers” as my enemies. My dad, who is quite well off himself (but less so than before the pound and stock markets plunged), voted out. But he’s 66 and has very fond memories of Britain before it joined the EU in 1973. I’m pretty sure my brother also voted out. Mum didn’t vote, but she could hardly conceal her glee at the prospect of the EU collapsing.

The Remain side failed to make an emotional case for staying in the EU, and I think that’s where they lost it. The more they talked about economic risks, the more working-class people said “bring it on”, let those obscene edifices poking out of the London skyline burn to the ground, the system isn’t working for me. The new post-Brexit system, whatever form it takes, won’t work for them either unfortunately, I’m sure of that. That’s what makes the outcome so upsetting for me: the Leave voters were sold a complete lie. As for Nigel Farage who called the result a victory “for the ordinary people, for the real people, for the decent people”, seriously man, piss off.

Cambridge, where I was born, voted 74% in; Peterborough were 61% out. A huge difference, just as I predicted. Other liberal, young, affluent university towns like Oxford (70%), Bristol (62%), Exeter (55%), Brighton (69%) and Norwich (56%) all voted in. Mum talked about all those academic areas, implying that people who live in those places don’t know anything about the real world. How did we end up here? Anybody who knows anything about anything, and has studied or writes about the thing they know about, is now seen as some intellectual oddball who is hopelessly out of touch, and therefore can’t be trusted. Thirty years ago TV was full of shows like Tomorrow’s World, Johnny Ball’s Think It Do It, Open University, even Countdown, all stuff that broadened the mind. How times have changed.

Scotland of course voted to remain by a large margin (62%) and I don’t think it’ll be long before they exit the UK via a second referendum. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined that. The events of Thursday night, and those of the preceding weeks, were like a massive earthquake. The rebuild will be long and painful. I can’t thank my mother enough for ensuring that my brother and I had New Zealand citizenship from an early age.

Life :) - My big plan - Politics

Nerve-wracking

June 23, 2016 by 0 Comments

Voting in the EU referendum has begun (well voting in person has; I sent in my postal vote three weeks ago). I don’t know which way it’ll go and I’m extremely nervous. It could affect me and millions of other people profoundly and it’s just so binary. What’s more, I have to attend a meeting between two and four tomorrow afternoon, when over the half the results will come out. If I’m lucky I might be able to follow the headline figures on my phone. It’s times like these I wish I was more normal and only had to worry about the ABs (and if they lost I’d have plenty of mates to commiserate with).

I wish we’d heard more of this kind of rhetoric from the Remain side. It’s a wonderful, rousing speech. More of that and we’d be looking at a crushing win for Remain, but instead…

I got my new passport yesterday, with the words “European Union” on the front.

I told my boss I’m leaving, in the middle of what has been a stressful week for him, not that I’ve never known him to have a non-stressful week. I think he was OK with it.

Life :) - Politics

Sad times

June 19, 2016 by 0 Comments

Jo Cox, the British Labour MP who was shot and stabbed on Thursday, sounded absolutely lovely and full of compassion. It’s so sad that two small children are now without a mother. Her suspected murderer has just appeared in court; he gave his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. He sounds seriously messed up.

The compassion that Jo Cox showed in spades appears to be in increasing short supply in Britain. The picture of the UK that is beamed to me via various news websites (and therefore may not be entirely accurate) does not resemble the tolerant place I was brought up in, and that makes me sad. I’m seeing a lot of anger and resentment and hatred there now, and this EU referendum has given people an outlet for that. I don’t blame them in a way, but the EU is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is that successive governments over the last 35 years haven’t done enough to help poor people and poor communities. Britain’s economy is increasingly concentrated in London and the south-east. That includes St Ives in Cambridgeshire where my parents are staying now. Dad said he’s seen no evidence of the sort of anger I’m talking about, but then he wouldn’t in a town which is only a guided busway ride away from Cambridge, an outward-looking city which is likely to vote Remain by one of the largest percentage margins in the whole of England. If instead he went for a half-hour drive to the Welland Estate in Peterborough, parts of which some buses wouldn’t go through (and maybe still don’t) because it was too dangerous, I’m sure he’d see it. In 2003 I lived and worked in Peterborough, which is in the same county as Cambridge (sort of), but it’s really a world away and I expect it to vote Leave by a hefty margin.

How will Jo Cox’s murder affect the referendum? It sounds crass to even ask, but I think for such a huge decision we have to. Before the event I was picking a fairly comfortable win for Leave by nearly ten points. The more coverage the referendum and the campaigns got, the more it seemed to favour Leave as it became the mainstream option, and I could see that continuing right up until voting day. (This is the opposite of what some commentators were saying, i.e. that more attention would lead to a higher turnout, especially amongst Remain-friendly younger people.) The murder itself might garner some sympathy votes for Remain, but perhaps more importantly there hasn’t been any campaigning for two days and what campaigning is left will probably be more civil than before the shooting. I can see the pendulum swinging back towards Remain but will it be enough to get them over the line? I’m not so sure. And if it is enough but only just, people will say that the murder changed the result. What a terrible mess.

Life :)

Sick of playing these games

June 16, 2016 by 0 Comments

Ever since work moved out of town in late 2014 I’ve been carpooling with a 28-year-old guy who lives near the zoo in Newtown. Lately he’s been riding his bike to my place and I’ve driven him to work from there. He has a similar outlook on life to me but is far more extroverted and that outlook is far more obvious in the way he dresses and behaves. In fact we’re polar opposites when it comes to people. The absence of human interaction for significant periods is a necessity to me, and I rarely if ever get the urge to interact with lots of people all at once, but he just loves that. He loves it so much that whenever we have a team meeting at work, he feels the need to hijack the beginning of it by making everyone play a game. Today’s game involved people standing around in a circle and giving funny hand signals, a haka-like gesture, and some others that I’ve forgotten. I was out of my comfort zone, everyone knew it, and I knew that everyone knew it. I panicked and said I had “no fucking clue what was going on” which pretty much summed up the situation I found myself in. The only thing I really understood was one particular manoeuvre that would eliminate me from the game, so after one other person had been knocked out I made that gesture (oh, silly me!) and sat down. I then texted my carpool mate: “You just demonstrated why I’m going to Romania.” He’s the only one who knows I’m going there. At least I hope he is. It might seem a piffling thing, but I do find those games and team building activities, and frankly most of the team stuff that’s unavoidable at work, very uncomfortable and entirely demotivating. I really wish it wasn’t like this. It’s why I have to stick with my guns on my big adventure and do my English teaching, and not end up in some team environment where a guy just like my carpool mate – let’s call him Bogdan – decides to play some crazy game and I end up embarrassing myself and swearing in Romanian.

Last night I had my penultimate marimba session, and the last with our usual teacher before she goes to Germany. I’m completely within my comfort zone there. It feels great to do something that gets me animated after work where I’m really just going through the motions, and I’m not too bad at it because it relies on pattern recognition. I love seeing other people getting animated too when they’re just starting out. I see it when they play the bass marimba, which requires some serious arm action, for the first time.

Many people in the UK will be voting Leave as an act of desperation and I can’t say I blame them. I just don’t think leaving the EU will help them any more than a Donald Trump presidency will help desperate Americans, given the sort of characters who will be leading the country in the (now very likely) event of Brexit. At least a Trump presidency would be reversible four years later.

Language teaching - Life :) - My big plan

Made my mind up

June 13, 2016 by 0 Comments

I always feel energised after my English lesson and tonight was no different. I started off with a “twenty questions” game where my student had to guess the five items in a shoebox I’d brought along. After randomly guessing that the first item was a book, he struggled a bit. He kept wanting to guess specific items rather than attributes: Is it red? Is it soft? Can you eat it? Is it made of wood? Do you use it in the bathroom? But we got there in the end. I then showed him some pictures of a typical Kiwi winter and we “commentated” on them. Lots of useful words there: scarf, hood, walking stick, steam, smoke, logs, chimney, stuck, mud, and so on. And that was the end of the lesson. Time flies when you’re having fun, and for me (and hopefully for him too, but I can’t really tell) it is fun. He also said he wanted to get a job working in a park or garden and would be happy to study first; I’ll ring up the council tomorrow and ask what they can do.

I’ve made up my mind now. I want to teach English, learn foreign languages, study linguistics (maybe one day becoming really knowledgeable in a specific field) and travel. Lots and lots of travel. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve given on making money beyond what I need to survive with a modest level of comfort. It feels good to know what I want, and don’t want, out of life. If I hadn’t gone on that fantastic trip to America last year I probably still wouldn’t know.

I still don’t know where to base myself in Romania. My parents had reservations about Timișoara, but they were around lack of shops the likes of which you find in cities with tourism, unrenovated buildings, and a slightly dated public transport system. None of those three things bother me. Timișoara almost certainly will modernise its trams, but I’d actually like to try the old ones first. And I’d much rather get there before Emporio Armani does than after. Sibiu is incredibly picturesque and is much more “done up” – I think it got a cash injection from becoming Capital of Culture in 2007, but it doesn’t have all the markets and old trams that I know I’ll like. Sibiu has other stunningly beautiful places nearby, well, within a few inches on my 12-miles-to-an-inch map, and that’s significant plus for sure, and it has the possibility of volunteer teaching in rural areas close by, which would help me get my foot in the door. Timișoara would be better if I wanted to get to other places in different countries such as Belgrade. And of course there are other places I could go like Oradea in the north-west which I really like the look of.

Talking of Belgrade, you can take a train from there to Bar on the coast of Montenegro, a 12½-hour trip taking in 245 tunnels and 435 bridges, all for 21 euros! I must do that, after first catching a train or bus, or both, from wherever I decide to base myself in Romania.

Shocking scenes from Marseille (another place I want to visit – stupidly long but totally awesome train ride, here we come) at the weekend. Lots of criticism levelled at the police for not segregating the English and Russian fans, but all that tribalism, all that visceral hatred that necessitates segregation in the first place, it’s just so far from me that I have a hard time understanding it. The behaviour of the Russians makes one fearful of what might happen at the 2018 World Cup. But the events in southern France pale in comparison to the mass shooting in Orlando. Just terrible. Sometimes I fear for the future of humanity.