this is where time comes to die

2:36am: more than you ever wanted to know about Guatemala

The short version:  332 years after the Mayans were massacred by Spanish conquistadors, the U.S. helps overthrow the democratically elected government, implementing a military regime.  We continued supporting this military government financially and politically for decades.  Over 200,000 people died during the civil war that lasted 36 years, ending in 1996.   Entire Mayan villages were massacred by government troops, including infants, and buried in mass graves.  Widespread gang rape, torture, and mutilation, portrayal of the indiginous Mayans (over 60% of the population *today*, after all this) as subhuman...

Did you know about any of this?  Why is this not taught in schools alongside the Vietnam War and the Holocaust? 

Oh, right.  Because the U.S. is the bad guy here. 

1523-24 - Spanish adventurer Pedro de Alvarado defeats the indigenous Maya and turns Guatemala into a Spanish colony.

1941 - Guatemala declares war on the Axis powers.

1944 - Juan Jose Arevalo becomes president following the overthrow of Ubico and introduces social-democratic reforms, including setting up a social security system and redistributing land to landless peasants.

Efrain Rios Montt era saw some of the war's worst episodes Born in 1926 1982: Led military coup 2003: Unsuccessful bid for presidency 2003: Guatemala general beaten in poll

1951 - Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman becomes president, continuing Arevalo's reforms.

1954 - Land reform stops with the accession to power of Colonel Carlos Castillo in a coup backed by the US and prompted by Arbenz's nationalisation of plantations of the United Fruit Company.

Indians make up about 60% of Guatemala's population 2004: Maya culture ahead of its time 2003: Drought triggered Mayan demise BBC History: Fall of the Mayan civilisation

1998 - Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi, a human rights campaigner, murdered [beaten to death with a concrete block after unearthing evidence that the military massacred thousands of civilians during the civil war.  His murderers were never punished]

1999 - UN-backed commission says security forces were behind 93% of all human rights atrocities committed during the civil war, which claimed 200,000 lives, and that senior officials had overseen 626 massacres in Maya villages.

2000 - Alfonso Portillo sworn in as president after winning elections in 1999.

2001 December - President Portillo pays $1.8 millon in compensation to the families of 226 men, women and children killed by soldiers and paramilitaries in the northern village of Las Dos Erres in 1982.

2006 July - A Spanish judge issues a warrant for the arrest of former military leader Efrain Rios Montt and other former officials over atrocities committed during the civil war.

2007 May - Guatemala ratifies an international adoption treaty, committing to make sure babies aren't bought or stolen.

2007 July - Amnesty International urges the government to ratify the CICIG as a first step towards tackling the culture of impunity it says has contributed to Guatemala's soaring murder rate.

2007 August - International election monitors say they are worried about the high murder rate among political candidates and activists in the run-up to the 9 September polls.

2007 November - Alvaro Colom of the center-left National Unity of Hope Party wins presidential elections with nearly 53 percent of the vote.

selectively copy-pasted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1215811.stm


Still proud to be an American, we do a lot of great things, but we really need to stop torturing and massacring and being complacent or even supportive of genocide.  Just a thought. 

5:39pm: So, I'm going to Guatemala in two weeks.
For six weeks.
There's medical Spanish classes involved, and maybe being a gofer in a rural clinic. And it only costs $150/week to do the program and they hook you up with a family who feeds you.

Did you know that Telemundo has the exact freaking same shit as English TV?

Allstate. Estas en buenas manos.
La nueva familia Saturn.
Pretty blonde girls getting cancer.
Yelling game shows with absurdly pretty people.
Soap operas, their telenovelas.
Investsigaciones politicas.
Mas al volver! Mas a las cinco en TeleMUNDo!
Jared from Subway.
McDonald's: me encanta.

Maybe the news has a slightly more international tendency towards south America, while we're more obsessed with Western Europe. But that's about it. Se puede usar su Visa Checkcard en la supermercada, la gasolineria...

Llame ahora para dinero rapido!

2:02am: Moments when I've felt alive
There was one class, Comp Lit II I think, with Dr. Busse.

She asked for someone to read Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" aloud. If you don't know it, it's a Duke telling his guest about a painting of his last duchess. A painting which he keeps curtained so only he sees it, and presumably he had her killed. It's subtle in that "A Modest Proposal" kind of way, horrifying in a

After the first part, I paused, but she didn't ask for another reader, so I continued.

When it was done, there was a couple seconds of silence, and then Dr. Busse said:

"Thank you, Laura. That was beautiful."

1:05pm: for your amusement, footless clowns and Pachelbel
a nice, happy clown cake for your kid's birthday.



This was in mock_the_stupid, where people offered such in depth analyses as:
"His feet are chopped off. It even looks like blood with the red there"
"Kinda looks like he's playing with himself too... just me, then?"


And then there's a rant about Pachelbel:

6:15pm: the one where I yell "FORESKIN" across a crowded room
Ecology/Evolution lecture.
somewhere around 150 students, TAs, profs
Just been talking about inheritable traits, and why Lamarckian stuff doesn't work. Cutting off rats' tails doesn't result in future generations of rats with no tails, or even shorter ones.

The question: "So, similarly, what have we been cutting off humans for generations that hasn't resulted in a phenotypic change?"

my hand goes up.
my brain engages, and contributes an exceedingly useful oh, shit.
the prof points to me, all the way in the back, "Yes, you?"
150 eyes turn to me

-cough- "Foreskin?"

"Sorry, what?"

"FORESKIN!"

"Yes, exactly!"

10:00pm: Holy fuck!

I just did Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine and got 430,000 points! I beat my old record by 75,000 points! I had a 200 note streak! I got the crazy ones at the end that are really close together!!

Oh sweet mother of God this is an addiction.




( non Guitar Hero news )

6:17pm: My new favorite movies. Let me show you them.
Me, You, and Everyone We Know
-- This movie is surreal. Interconnected lives, incredibly believable characters. Made me really happy.


Coffee and Cigarettes
-- Iggy Pop, Alfred Molina, Cate Blanchett, Jack and Meg White, a million others. there's one thing that I know, it's drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking talking talking

The Source
-- about the Beat movement, has Johnny Depp and Alan Ginsberg and a million other people.

Bukowski
-- About good old Chuck, who's becoming one of my favorite poets.
The luck of the fool is inviolate


Talk to Her
-- Pedro Almodovar. Girl in coma, good times.

4:10pm: lesbian kitties!
We have two cats.
Both are female.
One is in heat.

Neither of them are spayed (not my cats really, or they would be). They're never outside, so it's not a pressing issue, but I feel really sorry for Matilda. She goes around the apartment basically screaming "FUCK ME!" and there just aren't any tomcats around to satisfy her.

Thing is,
I keep catching them lezing out hardcore-- like Matilda's on the floor writhing around in her "I'm so sexy" mode, making these awful arrrrAAAAWWRRRLLLL noises, and then Penny comes and jumps on her. She gets on Matilda and bites her neck, which she seems to like. I caught them freaking rounding 3rd the other night. People were over. It felt kinda wrong watching one girl cat licking another girl cat's ass.

2:49pm: candidate for "worst combination ever"
Just when I thought "Beer is not a mixer" had reached every last head-in-the-sand person in the world, I come across Chelada.

Chelada, dear friends, contains Budweiser and Clamato.
Clamato is "for people who thought V8 just didn't taste clammy enough" -someguy's blog


Beer + tomato juice + clams = party in my mouth, yo. The worst party ever-- everybody stays sober, develops food poisoning, and somehow still ends up with scurvey.

5:59pm: ballistic squirrels!!!!!!!!
Loving my classes:

Biological Psychology
Cellular Neuroscience
Spanish 103
Ecology & Evolution

Biopsych:
"Everything I'm going to tell you is a lie. Everything is a gross overgeneralization, and there are more instances in which these statements are false than when they're true. But this is the only way it's going to make any sense at all."
I really like this statement. "A brain looks like this diagram" is in fact a lie-- it's not color coded, it's not neat, it's not outside the body, and ALL BRAINS ARE DIFFERENT. It's like saying "A city looks like this" and drawing the skyline of NYC. That is one viewpoint of one city at one point in time-- so yes, it's true in some sense, but it's a lie for every viewpoint of every city at every point in time OTHER than this one. The brain diagram is even more of a lie, since it's an artist's impression of what the "average" brain looks like. The average brain doesn't even exist.

Neuroscience:
"Cardiac glycosides are these things that interfere with your sodium/potassium ATPase system. You find them in foxglove, this beautiful flower. Just don't eat it. I don't recommend going around eating flowers in general, but this one especially. We have some in our backyard actually, along with a few other poisonous plants. It's ok because we don't have any kids in the house, and well I don't eat them.
The squirrels DO eat them, though. Then they go fucking ballistic and destroy all the other plants. Maybe we should get rid of them, come to think of it."

"So there's this internship. Pays something like 3 grand, and to be eligible for it you have to be..." -looks down at the sheet- "breathing." sweet.


In other news,
went to a couple parties last weekend. One was great-- I was a hit, made new friends, kissed a girl, felt hot. The other-- I felt awkward. I wish it were socially acceptable to just watch people at parties. IT was entertaining, a "thrift store chic" theme. Overwhelming amount of noise and people and color.

Jesse from Portland was in Chi-town Sunday, and I played tour guide. Hit a blues club or two, good times. I like that he had to draw a diagram when I asked him about his romantic situation.



It is fucking cold. The high tomorrow is supposed to be 9 degrees F.

1:38pm: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a $14 billion budget deficit.
What does he want to do?  
Take the money from:
- children on welfare
- closing state parks
- giving schools 10% less money

aaaahhhhhhhHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!  what is wrong with this picture?!? 
I'm all for balancing the budget, but this is about the worst plan for long-term success I can think of.  He does want to release some nonviolent prisoners early, which is a great idea.  But education?  how does that make any sense at all? 

5:20pm: words are sexy
( Intimidating Scrabulous Fu )


Now, I do have some scrabble fu. The English language and word puzzles are decidedly my bitches.
I have a big vocabulary and love to whip it out.
NOTE:
This does NOT that I bust out words like "obfuscate" in daily life--I don't need to make people feel dumb to feel smart myself, and think it's just silly to use words that the person/s you're talking to won't understand when your goal is to be understood. Also, most people hate having to have things explained to them in the middle of a conversation (it just interrupts the flow, you know?). Even in an academic paper, you're trying to get a point across to whoever's reading or grading it. It doesn't help this goal if you say "The protagonist is as doomed to fail as an zygote with a faulty JAK/STAT* pathway" in a Lit paper. Even though it may be a perfectly valid analogy, because really understanding the what those terms mean takes literally years of bio classes, this would be really dumb thing to write. I also know perfectly well when to use whom or who, but refuse to use the word whom outside academia because it sounds really fucking pretentious. And I'm DAMN sure not going to correct people's grammar in a conversation.

To keep the sex analogy going, if you have a gigantic schlong, do you walk around with it hanging out and masturbate in public? No. You save it for situations when calling attention to it would be appropriate and appreciated, unless you yourself are also just a huge dick.

My big vocabulary, just like my addiction to and skill at puzzles in general but especially word puzzles, comes out when it is needed.

But in Scrabble, the goal is simple: Get Points. The more, the better.
It does not matter whether you know what the words mean, only that you know whether or not they are words. Knowing that ZA is a word got me 74 points the other day (Z on a double letter, used in ZA and ZONES simultaneously, one of them double worded. Bitch. [Scrabble is my bitch, to be clear, not you or any actual person]). So all the stops are out, I'm not offending anybody even if I do pwn them real hard.

I think my best word was QUARTZES on a triple word, a hundred some odd points.

No one in the last... several years has beaten me at Scrabble. **

**I think. To the best of my recollection. And I'm not counting two games:
1. "speed Scrabble" with Nate, in which we each had a total of 5 minutes to use the entire game, which I lost by less than five points.

2. When Sam and Nate and Andrew and I were playing, and fifteen minutes into the game John-the-rugby-guy arrived. Essentially our first date-thing. He sits *right* next to me, third person on the couch, as in our thighs keep touching. Listening to his stories and trying not to say irreparably stupid things were my priorities then, and I was playing words like RAIN and BAD, just flat out no looking for doubles, no multiple words at once, fucking 8 point words because I was spending all of 30 seconds contemplating each turn. So yes, I came in dead last, but come on.

( if I really want to be a Scrabble master though... )


*JAnus Kinases / Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription, if anyone cares.

1:19am: Human Slinky!

4:57pm: I <3 Uncle John-- the note he put in with his Christmas gifts to us is just pure gold:

Dear Jeff,
As you can see, I picked these out in the correct sizes and had them personalized. [the gifts for me and Charlotte were two $50 postal money orders] Note the festive packaging [a UPS envelope].
Hope they contribute to some relaxing Christmas or New Year's frivolity.

Merry Christmas and hour(s) of family time!
Love,
John

7:19pm: poverty and healthcare rant
I definitely don't believe in "From each according to his ability; from each according to his needs." That idea would lead to everyone competing to be seen as the neediest and most unproductive. If you know that every completed task will just result in another one assigned, while a neglected task will result in free time, where's the incentive to work? Welfare works in the same way-- in the absence of a desire to earn what you are given, you get quotes like:

"What, [16-yearold son]? You got a job?!? Don't you go fucking up my welfare!!" (true quote)

These people ruin things for those who are actually in need of assistance through no fault of their own. Hard workers get laid off, scapegoats are needed, bosses' sons get the job, etc. Bankruptcy ruins your credit for a decade. Things are actually a lot more expensive for the poorest people. Example:

Joe earns $60 a day as a waiter. He has no friends or family, and no car. Where does he live?
A. a $300/month apartment
B. a $30/night motel (= $900/month)

Answer: B
Because Joe doesn't have $300. He certainly doesn't have first and last month's rent and a security deposit, or any credit. He does have $30/day.

Joe could spend $50/month on rice and beans, cooking them himself. But he doesn't, he spends $5/day eating at the restaurant he works at, ($150/month) because his motel room doesn't have a kitchen.

If Joe had a car, and it was a piece of shit and broke, and the repairs cost $300 to keep it running for another month, he would pay that because getting a "new" car costs $1000. Or he would just not be able to fix it, and lose his job for lack of a way to work.

And so on, with every aspect of Joe's life. He's lucky though, at least he has a job, and no kids or other dependents. Ever try to get a job when you smell like you live on the streets? And he doesn't drink or smoke or do drugs, though the miserable lifestyle of poverty results in these expensive habits for many if not most poor people. As it is he could theoretically save $10/day for a month and be able to afford a shitty apartment.

What happens when they find out that Joe has a heart condition because the cheeseburger costs $5 and the salad costs $7 where he works, so that's what he eats?

Or a simpler problem, what happens when he breaks his leg falling down stairs?
First of all, he can no longer work.
He doesn't have the option to just live with his affliction, as many poor people do. A broken leg will indeed kill you if not treated, or at least leave you crippled for life. He goes into debt, ensuring that he will probably be poor for the next several years. And you wonder why homeless people play the lottery.

( Poverty is a disease. )

7:31pm: Wrap it up, guys. Mobile County is becoming a more and more dangerous place to get laid:



Sexual diseases flourish in Mobile County
Sunday, September 16, 2007
By NADIA M. TAYLOR
Staff Reporter

Last year in Mobile County, 4,629 new cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported -- enough instances of the sexually transmitted diseases to account for one out of every 87 people, according to a Press-Register review of state and federal statistics.

That was about three times the rate in New York City and more than twice as high as Washington, D.C.

4:13am: What do you think would have happened if native Americans had discovered and implemented a system of writing before European contact?

As in many UChicago tests, there is no singular right answer.
There are only logical, fact-based answers and answers which either fail the factual, logical, or both qualities.

So?



***Obviously, at least to me, this question is a leading question toward the conclusion that the fact that Europeans had a method of permanently etching their views of history in stone, that this fact has altered the course of human history in a significant way. The history that is read is the history that is written, and if an entire race is wiped out by smallpox, that race's history is not written. The fact that I'm writing in English and not Hopi is because of Mr. Gutenberg and gunpowder.

12:07pm: floss, eat your vegetables, say "please," and...
DON'T DRIVE TIRED.

Everyone knows not to drive drunk. But they don't show you horror videos of what happens when you doze off on the freeway. It's so easy, too. Your mind wanders, as happens when you're staring ahead at yet another mile of trees and dotted white lines, and then you notice your eyelids drooping and just kind of slap yourself, smoke a cigarette, change the radio station, roll down the windows. Five minutes later it happens again, only this time the thing that snapped you back to reality was the thd-d-d-d-d-d of your tires meandering over the reflectors. There isn't a next time because then you never wake up.

Or worse, you do wake up and your car is 3 feet shorter, you have brain damage, and someone else's life is over.



I'm one lucky bitch, by the way. Examples:
1. Trying to drive from Mobile to Birmingham at 3am, I jerked awake at 75 miles per hour about to hit a sign. I swerved, and 5 seconds later I'm sideways and stopped on I-65 a foot from the concrete barrier that separates northbound/southbound traffic. If it hadn't been the ass-crack of dawn, if there had been *anyone* else on the road right then...

2. On the way from Chicago to Minneapolis, there are suddenly flashing lights behind me. Apparently I'm swerving. The cop was understanding, could see that I was just tired and not drunk or stoned, gave me a warning.



The reason I'm writing this though, is that a couple days ago Dad and I drove up to Charlotte, NC to get my dead grandmama's car. Dad'd gotten about 4 hours of sleep the night before because he's been working nights and his clocks are all messed up. On the way back, about 50 miles before Atlanta, it's dark and I'm following him in his car and he starts swerving a little. Then he edges onto the shoulder and isn't correcting himself and I BEEP the horn and he gets back on the road. This happened a couple more times, one of which involved about half a foot between him and a guardrail. I"ve never been so fucking scared in my life.

He's fine, everything's fine, but jesus fucking christ.

2:45am: Something I forgot about being a part of everyday life in the South:
Seeing a cockroach and instinctively screaming "Die! Die! Die!" as you smack at it with a shoe.

Something I absolutely love and cherish about my Dad's apartment:
AT NIGHT, IT'S DARK AND QUIET.
Not an orangey-purple sky intermingled with neon white signs-- darkness.
Not sirens, back-up beeps, and traffic-- silence.


aaahhhh.

7:50pm: mind-rapage
GRE yesterday

740 Quantitative
690 Verbal
humans have to grade my analytical writing, so those are pending.
82nd and 96th percentiles, respectively.
I learned a *bunch* of new words these last few days! <3 words.

I bet I could get these up though...

12:49pm: I played FREEBIRD on HARD and not only lived through it but 92% accurately!

Freebird is such a ridiculously long song. It's rocktastic in ways that very few songs can claim, and and and it's fast and it's just so long! I mean, most songs on the game have maybe 9 sections, something like:
1. Intro
2. Verse 1
#3. Chorus 1
4. Verse 2
5. Chorus 2
6. Bridge
7. Guitar solo
8. Chorus 3
9. End Wankery

Some have more than one guitar solo, and so there's Guitar solo A, B, C... and there's other things like "slide riffs" or an "outro" thrown in sometimes.

Freebird has practically the entire alphabet in solos!
My stats on Freebird tell me I really need to practice Guitar solos J and N. jay and freaking en.

4:21pm: what has the world come to??!
So I do the whole 21st century getting-movies-in-the-mail-and-billed-monthly thing. It's good stuff, I end up paying $1 per movie all told. The selling point of Blockbuster vs. Netflix was those extra movies you get right then when you return your old DVDs at the actual store. It's great, I just go a few blocks out of my way and get to browse things and then hand them envelopes instead of $$.

Except:
On this dark and cold winter's day, few leaves still clinging to their twigs, visions of the morning's EcoBio final dancing in my head, I ventured forth.

I walked to the video store, aiming for Dirty Harry and the Disney Alice in Wonderland.
They didn't have either.
Not just that they were both checked out. They simply don't carry those films in store.

Ok, I can queue those later. Called Bianca and Evan to see what else they were interested in seeing:
Star Wars (A New Hope), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or Indiana Jones.

They don't carry Star Wars.
Just the new three. W. T. F.?

Out of those five incredibly famous and timeless movies, the only one(s) available was (were) Indiana Jones (Raiders and Last Crusade).


It's like they're not even trying-- I mean, who was it that thought to himself, "Hmm. Star Wars? Nah, gotta make room for Bring it On (Again). Alice in Wonderland, the Disney one that everybody knows and loves? Nah, how about these TWO live-action versions of Alice in Wonderland made in the 80's? Yeah, those'll fly off the shelves."

jesus fucking christ.

2:40pm: I've always had kind of a cavalier attitude about living here. It's Chicago, you're not really safe anywhere you go, so I just kind of go about my business and it's worked pretty well.

Things just seem to keep getting more violent and closer and closer to where I live. Like that grad student who was killed last week, that's gotten everybody all shaken up-- that was three blocks south of here.
I need a break from cities.

6:10pm: ( update )


and umm biochem is making sense which scares me.
it's interesting. that scares me more. I haven't been remotely intrigued or not lost by a class with "chemistry" in the name in 3 1/2 years of taking it.

spanish is possibly i hope i hope going to be an A which will be my first A in so goddamn long.

EcoBio I just need to catch up on readings a little, but as a Bio girl I have an advantage over the Eco people-- they get lost in the math, I don't.

Apparently if I want to do anything with ecology or bio I need to learn differential equations, linear algebra, and a LOT more statistics. whodathunkit. at this point though, all we do is set differential equations to zero and solve for the equilibrium values, which is easy enough.


The roommates started cleaning. I swear I saw Bianca both take glasses from the living room to the kitchen AND wash them!!




lastly, I applied to live in this cooperative. Though it took them over a week to decide this, since there were "lots" of applicants, they CHOSE ME!
only thing is, the room that was available is suddenly not, so this just means the next time a room opens up, it'll be offered to me.
I like this place a lot. They have roof access and a backyard and someone cooks dinner every night and there are cats and dogs and good, good people. And they (we?) collectively own the house, so no one's making a profit off our rent. wheeee.
AND THEY HAVE GUITAR HERO 3!!! how did I get to be so lucky?

10:45pm: Good stuff
Thanksgiving in South Bend = SNOW! and the realization that a bunch of older mathematicians don't always have the most exhilarating conversations. Smart yes, interesting, not so much. Compared to Yoli's gigantic Puerto Rican family of last year, with insane amounts of food and people, sitting in a living room and those godawful pauses in the conversation... man, old rich white people are boring. Very nice, though, I shouldn't complain.



And though I put together a nice shiny list of things I could so totally get accomplished given four days of free time, very little of it has gotten done. I'm coming off a 10-week sprint of academic bulimia, trying to make the rent, and no sleep. Not really an excuse though, after that first 12-hour sleep night.

Left alone and to my own devices, I apparently cook, play naked Guitar Hero, and Internet.
I didn't get dressed until 4pm today, and even that was because I had to go downstairs to get new dvds out of the mailbox.



Side note: for some reason, even though the UofC bought this entire block to demolish it in a few years, they're going to the trouble of renovating everything. It's nice to have, say, mailboxes that lock and don't just hang open so everyone can see your mail. It is nice to have furnaces that work, sinks that give both hot AND cold water, and a lack of fetid puddles in the laundry room after every rain.

But I'm just going fucking insane with the incessant construction. It's on the next block, the one I have to pass on my way to everything class-like. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! WE GET IT ALREADY, YOU'RE BACKING UP! YOU'VE BEEN BACKING UP EVERY TWO SECONDS FOR THE LAST THREE MONTHS!! jesus fucking christ. And now it's not just so loud it pierces every inch of this apartment, it's in the apartment. There are 3 Mexican guys drywalling that hole in my ceiling at 8 fucking 30 A.M. when I'm ironically trying to finish my Spanish homework.

Then sometimes I go to class in the BSLC, on the other side of constructionzone, and I can STILL HEAR THE FUCKING BEEPING. Oh god, I hate it so much. There's nothing I can do about it. It's ALWAYS there. I hit things, I cry, I curl up with pillows over my ears, I avoid the place I live between the hours of 6am and 6pm, and sometimes they're even still working at 10 at fucking night, the more obtrusive things they can't do during 9-5 hours. GOD DAMN THIS IS DRIVING ME INSANE.

One morning they started jackhammering the sidewalk at 7am. I heard Evan-the-roommate shout out the window, "Shut the fuck up! It's seven in the fucking morning!" and they didn't stop. I put on pants and went outside in socks wearing a blanket, and asked them if there was possibly anything else they could be doing right then.

They stopped. They apologized.
It was amazing.

The beeping continues.