One, bravery cells have been found at the hippocampus. Scientists working at Uppsala University in Sweden have found out something amazing about the human hippocampus. They've discovered that there are certain specific cells in the hippocampus that actually determine how brave we are. So the next time you work up the courage to ask someone out, or to go skydiving, you can thank your trusty bravery cells. Two, we will probably not freak out if aliens ever come to Earth. Hollywood loves to focus on what could go wrong if aliens ever came to Earth. These movies often end up in massive battles where the fate of the entire world is at stake. But researchers at Arizona State University have discovered that real, everyday people actually have a much more optimistic approach to alien life. In fact, they've determined that people would probably be pretty happy about meeting a new life form from outer space. Three, teen love is real after all, and it can impact us deeply. You've probably heard of the old saying, there's no such thing as teen love. This stems from the belief that teenagers are not mature enough to feel real love, and what they experience is just their hormones acting up. But researchers at Arizona State University have been taking this phenomenon very seriously. They found that teen love is actually so strong and emotionally impactful that it affects mental health and even future relationships. Your high school crush was true love after all. Four, the human brain has a much larger capacity than we ever thought. How many gigs of data does an average brain hold? Well, scientists thought that they had the answer until a very interesting discovery was made a few years back. Researchers at the University of California and others have determined that our brains have a capacity 10 times larger than previously thought. This means that our brains can hold roughly the entire internet. Five, young adults are the most stressed out people on earth. It turns out that millennials actually have a pretty good reason for complaining so much. According to a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, those aged 18 to 35 reported the highest amounts of stress more than any other age group. Money and finances were the biggest causes for stress across all generations. Six, saffron might just be the best antidepressant ever. Today, people are extremely wary of big pharmaceutical companies prescribing antidepressants and other medication that could do more harm than good. But according to a number of new studies, the most effective antidepressants might have been under our noses the whole time. Yes, we're talking about saffron and research has shown that it's just as effective as pharmaceuticals and has no side effects. Seven, we're only capable of being close to about 150 people. The age of social media has opened us up to an entire world of potential friends where everyone can be connected. At least that's the theory, but psychologists know that according to something called Dunbar's number, the maximum amount of friends our brains can handle is about 150. This was confirmed by recent studies which even took into account the recent rise of social media. Even after all these years, Dunbar's number seems to hold true. Eight, money can buy happiness. Kind of. You've probably heard it repeated a million times. Money can't buy happiness. Well, researchers from Purdue University and the University of Virginia might have a thing or two to say about that. When it comes to happiness, the research has shown that it only takes about $75,000 a year for emotional well-being. Boost it up to $95,000 and you won't desire any more income. Anything above that and there's no real increase in happiness. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to see more content from Psych2Go. Thanks for watching.


Oh, hello, everyone. This is Miguel Perez-Colina, I'm product manager in the Modernization and Migration Solutions team. And I want to talk to you about migration toolkit for applications. But first, a bit of an overview, OK? There's a whole related tooling around application modernization and migration, OK? So there are several phases in every application migration phase. There's the discovery phase, there's the design phase, and there's the deploy phase. So we have tools for each of those phases and different personas that are involved in them. So in the first phase, the discovery phase, we have migration analytics that is around discovery. It's pretty focused on infrastructure, but it provides quite a good set of information on the inspection of the workloads or running on virtual machines. Then in the design phase, we have ready to innovate to assess the organizational readiness to move to a hybrid cloud. And then Pathfinder, that could do an assessment on the cloud readiness of the applications that you could have in your own environment that you are developing. And last but not least, when we go to the deploy phase and we really want to go deep down into the application itself, we have the migration toolkit for applications, which is the application that I'm going to, the tool that I'm going to demo. So about the tooling portfolio, getting a bit more deep, just tiny, okay, on each of the tools. Migration analytics is a tool that you just need to deploy an appliance on your VMware environment connected to your big center and it will extract the metadata of the VMs that are running there. And it can report you several things that could help you make a decision on a migration. It's pretty oriented to lift and shift, but again, as I said, it can help you discover middleware run times and JDKs, and of course add savings to the migration. So what does it provide? Saving estimation on a migration and lift and shift for VMs to build the business case. Then a world of migration summary, which could provide a list of the workloads found and the issues, well, issues, the unestimation of the efforts that could appear on the migration of VMs. And again, when I was talking about the issues is that we can avoid many issues because we could detect the complications that could appear during a migration before it happens. So the migration goes as smooth as possible. And then the workload migration inventory with a full list of VMs and workloads in which we could find, for example, how many web logic application servers we have, how many top-tier application servers, how many Microsoft SQL databases are running and what is the size of each of them. So we can consider them for migration. Not just lift and shift, but I'll report for me in many cases and in some cases for rebuild depending on the application itself. So next step, ready to innovate. In ready to innovate, there's an assessment of an organization that has five points, architecture, automation, ways of working, working environment and leadership ambition. So we help you assess from the technical part to the organizational part of your environment of your organization and see where can you improve. So you are ready to be able to move to cloud and to adopt the new methodologies that are available, such as DevOps, Agile and so on, in case you are not already using them, of course. So in ready to innovate, we perform a questionnaire and take the details from each team, from operations, from development and we put them together, we consolidate them in a very nice graph that looks like spider web. And there you could see the five points that are being assessed and be able to see in which one you are above the average or below the average. So you could put more effort where it's more needed when it comes to investing in the organizational parts of your own company and be able to innovate ready to move to cloud and to move to the open and hybrid cloud. Then we have Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a more tactical tool. It goes more into the application themselves, but what we do is we do an assessment with a questionnaire base that it could help you discover the status of each of the applications, how well maintained it is, how it is being handled, how it is being deployed, what are the dependencies, what is it running on, how ready is it to be containerized, how ready is it to become cloud native. And then once the questionnaire is filled, you can review it with an architect and establish proposed actions if you want to rebuild or retire or replatform on applications. You can make an effort estimate on each of the applications, assess the business criticality and establish a priority. So after this, you could say, okay, these are the applications that make more sense to start working on to bring them to the cloud. So it helps you identify the best targets for you to start working on to provide you with the best benefit. What else migration took it for applications? So I'm going to talk about it. Migration took it for applications used to be known as Red Hat application migration took it. So in the migration and modernization solutions team, we are consolidating the tools and renaming them as migration took it for visualization migration took it for containers. Migration took it, of course, for applications. So this one is going to be the next version of the Red Hat application migration took it, which will be version 5.0, which will be very likely to appear by the end of July 2020. And you will be able to use it. And again, it's very easy to use. You only need a machine with JDK. You can download it as a zip file and zip it and run it. More details now. But let's go in detail on what it does. So migration took it for application. What it does is that it can examine a binary of a Java application that is being already built. I could also work with source code. Usually it's done with binaries. We put a set of binaries and it scans them and it checks what classes are being used and how they are being used. So it can provide you a good overview on which ones are, for example, specific to a proprietary application server, such as WebLogic. So if you're using a class that is specific to WebLogic that is going to stop you from bringing your application to cloud, then you could consider changing the class that you're using. So what else? We can also help in Javas upgrades and Java EE upgrades. So we can check on different versions of Javas EAP or the standard Java EE and tell you, okay, this one is being deprecated and you should change it. All this one requires some modifications, okay? What else? We are adding Springboard to Quacus rules. We have some rules on Tomcat migrating to Tomcat. So if you have applications that are very simple and do not really require the Java EE profile, but Tomcat is good enough, we can help you check which one of them are suitable to be moved to Tomcat and of course, suitable to be able to be moved to containers. For that, we have rules on cloud readiness and characterization that are based on the 12 factor app definition. What we do is analyze the applications and check which ones are having behaviors or do have components that are not suitable to be a 12 factor app. And then we flag them, we reveal them. So you can make changes and we can propose also in many cases the change to be able to be done to each one of those parts that require modification. If you want to add your own rules, of course you can, you have them pluggable. So we are delivering these in four ways. One of them is the web console, which is the most straightforward to use to just go into the web console, upload some applications, which I'm going to show right now. And again, as I said, you only need a machine with a JDK running on it. We have the command line interface, which is really good for scanning a huge lot of apps whenever you have them all together and you just want to go through them one after one or even to embed it in pipelines like JDK pipelines to could simply deploy migration tokens for applications and run it as part of the build. We have, if you want to go a bit deeper, you could even have used the made in plugin to really run it during the build. We also have some IDEA plugins for Visual Studio Code and for Eclipse and for EclipseJ and for Code Ready Studio, which is our created version of Eclipse that of course you can use and you can review while you're coding. So as you see, we have tried to go in every single step of the development process to help bring your applications to open source application servers and to containers and to the cloud. So let's go for the demo. Let's go for the demo. So let's go to the terminal. I have here the web distribution. Right now it is unseaped. So as it is used with the middleware components in Red Hat unzip and go to just unzip it, click on run MTA. If you're running on Windows, you could be on the run MTA dot path. In this case, I'm running Fedora so and I have our JDK. So I just start the application server and all the components that are part of the migration toolkit for applications and then I will be able to use it. This is the version with a web console. So I can run it easily on my laptop and be able to access it. It is pretty interesting that that this could be also deployed on OpenShift. So right now we have a template. So here we have templates. Just have to put this template in your OpenShift and it will be running right there. We are working on an operator to make it not just deployed but also maintained. So right now, if you want to run it on your OpenShift environment, you could do it and it's very well described in the official documentation. So this is a starting app. We can go to a browser. We go to localhost 8080 and it will redirect us to MTA dash web. It's probably not ready yet. So it is loading. And in there we'll find the web console for the Migration Toolkit for Applications. So let's give it a couple of seconds to start and here it is, the web console for Migration Toolkit for Applications. So it is starting up and now we'll be able to create, the first thing we do is create a project. We can create a new project. So I name it normally after the name of a city. So I'm going to go for Kodoba this time. Okay, so this is Project Kodoba and we select a set of applications. So let me choose some files that I have. So I go to Migration and I go to sample apps and I get my sample binaries and I select these five binaries pretty straightforward. I upload them, okay. Go next and then we can configure the analysis. We have the rules for migrations to EAP. This is of course Java EE based. So we have all the rules here to check if your application is Java EE compliant and if you have any class that it is not. We have also the containerization rules. Again, as I said, these are based on the 12 factor app definition. So you can check it. We have some rules that are for Linux that it could be quite interesting to see. For example, if you have Windows paths hardcoded in your applications. So there are several rules that if you are moving an application from JDK on Windows to a JDK on Linux, it will be checked. And then open JDK, just in case you haven't seen any specific class that is not related to open JDK but a proprietary JDK, well, proprietary. Yeah, proprietary that requires license JDK. So right now the tool is identifying the packages in the binaries and in a couple of seconds it will show the list of packages that I can review. So in here we have the way to use custom rules and custom labels in case I would like to use them. Custom rules, custom labels, you know. I'm not going to use it for this demo but this is a good way to be able to customize the rules in case you want to add some options in case they are needed. So I'm going to use a vanilla and let it identify the packages and analyze them. So I'm going to check just for the application packages. I'm not going to go for the third party packages and I click save and run and then the tool will start performing the analysis. Okay, it will queue it. You could run many analysis. At the same time, you could add more applications and they will get analyzed. You could create another project and start running it and you could change it here going from one project to a different one. So right now as you see, analyzing the applications it will take some seconds, not even minutes usually. So let's give it a bit of time. So once this is done, we could check here the analysis the outcome of it and we'll be able to review all the parts that have been analyzing in this set of applications. So let's give it a couple of seconds. Meanwhile, we could check the configuration just in case you would like to change it. You could go here, click it and then save and run and you will start a new analysis. You could remove some applications in case you would just want to check just a couple of them instead of the five that I have and be able to with the same analysis add a new custom rule that could be useful for you. So let's go to the results. Yes, okay, it's getting ready. 280 classes out of 1,445, okay, 300, we're getting there. So one minute, two minutes. This is the list of applications in case you would like to check one by one. So back to the analysis results. It's going to finish in a couple of seconds. Here we go, almost there. And okay, so this is a live demo as you could see. And there we are, turn left. Turn left, okay. So the analysis has finished. So we click here and we get the results. So we see the application list. We have five applications. So I really like this one. It's a very simple application that is useful for Jboss demos. So as you could see, it's fully compliant with Jboss AIP. I can click here on Jboss AIP and I see that these green ones have here the legend. These green ones are the classes that are supported by Jboss Enterprise Application Platform. And the other ones are neutral, no problem. And then we have Jboss Web Server. So here we'll see the classes that are not suitable for Tomcat, for Jboss Web Server. And in yellow, the ones that are partially supported, okay? So we could go to other applications like this one. And here we'll see that we have an unsupported class that was a WebLogic WebXML, which is specific to WebLogic. So you probably would like to have a standardized set of classes using your applications. And in case you would like to move it to Jboss Web Server, you'll see that there are many more that are related to JEE profile and that shouldn't be used. So we could take a look at the list of issues and see which one is the most common one. In this case, we have the WebLogic proprietary logger. So many applications. We found 35 incidents for this, okay? So it's a trivial issue. It's really easy to change. It's just a one by one library shop. And we could take a deeper look in here and it will show you, okay, the detail and why it is not supported. And you could see here the classes that contain this issue. Same thing with, for example, the WebLogic startup service or the JMS descriptor or other issues that could be in use that could affect the migration. So you could just take a look at, for example, this is the Cloud Mandatory. So the way we are doing remote method invocation service, well, we could see the details on why this shouldn't be used for a tough factor app, even if it's okay to use it in a JEE server. And more details on other issues on our incident farm. We could also take a look and overview on the technologies that are used. We could show them here. So you could take a look at which technologies are used in the applications and which one are using each one of them. So this provides a very good overview on them. We can take a look also at the dependencies graph. This, what this does is it shows which classes are used by more than one application. For example, we have this application. We could see it here. This is the duplicate test, okay? That is using two classes that are also used by this application, the JEE example app. We could, for example, okay, I don't want to see the worst, just so I click here and they disappear. I don't want to see the embedded walls. I could remove them. If I could also remove the embedded jars and just take a look and what are the dependencies? What is the dependency map? And it will show you a well-detailed list of dependencies between applications when it comes to common classes. We could take a look at the list of the dependencies here. So in case we want to check each one of them, okay? And check the versions or check the jars that are being used and so on. So this provides a full overview on the application list, but we could go to each application and take a look at the detailed it, you know? So let's go to this simple sample app and we'll see also a good overview on the efforts, the incidents and story points that would be required. The ones that are mandatory, the ones that are optional, the ones that are potential, the ones that are cloud mandatory in case you're thinking about moving the application to containers and make it more cloud native and the ones that are informational. So this also helps you provide, have a good view on the effort that each application is going to require and the kind of incidents that they have to be able to plan accordingly when you're going to migrate these applications to open source application servers and to containers. We can take a look at the issues, categorize, same thing, but with just one application. So in case someone is going to go and review one applications, go go to these issues and could check one by one and check again, the rules and the details on the rules and the suggestions. For example, we could go here and take a look at the login quick start on JVOS to get a good detailed introduction on how to manage the logs when you're running it on JVOS. What else? More details, you know, the efforts, the story points measured in the story points so you could assign them to the teams that are working on migrating the applications. The technology is used, but detailed for each one of the applications so you could check each one of them and the dependency graph just for this application and again, the list of dependencies. We can check on remote services and more details like enterprise of beans and server resources that could be helpful to whenever you are really getting in the details of this application itself. So with all this information, you could go edit the application, change it, recompile it, even you can run this test again to check that you didn't leave anything behind and once it is modified, you could go back and test it in your new environment, probably the hard open shift on containers and check that it's running okay and then start using or enjoying the benefits of running on the hard open shift. With this, there's one more detail about Migration Toolkit for Applications. We have plugins, one for Eclipse, one for Eclipse Che, which is the Eclipse version that is deployable under OpenShift, that you could run it under OpenShift and also for Code Ready Studio, which is our creative method for Eclipse, but we also have a plugin for Visual Studio Code in case you prefer that IDE that could help you perform these checks within your IDE directly. So thank you very much for listening and I hope you have enjoyed it and I hope you use Migration Toolkit for Applications. Please do not hesitate sending us an email to migrateandraha.com if you want more information or if you will have your own comments or suggestions. Thank you very much.


Hello and welcome to the CSS podcast where we break down what's happening on the web platform for CSS and UI. Today is an accessibility related episode, so to set the tone, follow me through a quick user experience scenario. Let's say you pushed a red button in an interface to delete something and some sort of pop-up confirmation appears above the rest of the page with the page itself blurred or darkened. As a sighted user, we can see the blurry background or semi-transparent overlay on the page and this indicates that the background page is currently off limits for interaction until we've completed the task in the pop-up or dismissed it. But as a keyboard or screen reader user, these visual affordances to keep us from interacting with the page in the background don't work because they don't have semantic meaning. The keyboard can still be moving around in the background page struggling to find the pop-up. In comes a nerd to the rescue, do-de-de-do, which is the topic of today's episode. But okay, so yeah, so what you do now is you put the inert HTML attribute on your elements that you don't want to be keyboard or screen reader accessible while this pop-up is showing and boom. Now you've matched the visual experience with the keyboard experience. Scott O'Hara calls this inclusively hidden. I like that, inclusively hidden. The JavaScript alert function is a good example of this type of focus management. It creates a pop-up that blocks all interaction around it until it's dismissed. It demands attention and it has special powers through the browser hidden from front-end developers until we got a nerd. So now we can do it too. And by now I mean in Chromium 102, Safari 15.5 and it's in Firefox nightly. So it's almost in all stable browsers. Nice and I like to think of a nerd as a way to create focus by making everything else unfocussable. Like for example, hey, I'll get you to interact with this potato by making it so that you can't interact with anything else. Right? I block the rest of the world so the potato remains. Why a potato? See episode 37 on pointers. But then this is traditionally simple. I forgot about that. Right?  This is traditionally simple to do visually but again, it's really tough to provide for non-sided users. Right. So before browsers implemented the internet attribute developers would create focus traps with JavaScript. And this would watch for focus to leave an area or component like a pop-up. And if it left JavaScript then grab focus and they would put it back inside the pop-up. But now that there's the inert attribute developers don't have to trap the focus. We can guard the focus. There's no finding and grabbing focus to put it somewhere else. There's only the interactive areas that we want to interact with remaining. Right. A nerd isn't interested in making you stay somewhere. It's interested in making other places unavailable.  Right. This is anything that's off-screen. You know, to you visually it's off-screen but to a keyboard user they can still reach it. So if it's off-screen make it a nerd. A carousel, like I just used this in GUI challenges so that the carousel is only showing one item at a time so I can use a nerd on all the elements not in view to take them out of the keyboard flow. Right. We talked about a pop-up and then you can, just like I was saying in GUI challenges you take it out of keyboard flow. This is really important to note that it's the element and all of its children. So like if you put a nerd on the body tag everything inside of the body is a nerd. Pretty much your page becomes unusable unless you have a dialogue that's in the top layer. Anyway there's a couple of exceptions but it's a superpower of a nerd versus tab index. So when we were doing focus trapping tab index was your strategy and you'd have to put it on every interactive item all the way down your dormitory. But with a nerd does the element and all of its children. So anytime a new element has appeared that's over top of existing content and deserves immediate attention, a nerd can help. But remember it's also good for off-screen content inclusively hidden. Nice. Yeah, inclusively hidden. I like that. When you put the inert attribute on an element it does a few things that you would otherwise have to hand manage. Point events are set to none. User select is set to none. And content editable is ignored. So this goes for the elements and all this descendants too as Adam just talked about. So while inert is an HTML attribute it's intersecting with CSS by enforcing some interaction style for you. Yeah, there we go. We validated the reason that we made this episode. It's CSS-y in a way. It is CSS. Well, it's the HTML attribute but there's so much overlap with HTML and CSS. Totally. Another intersection with inert is that it's an attribute. So you can use it in a CSS selector and style inerted elements. Inerted. That's totally not a worded it. A worded that inert. Elements with inert. But I hadn't thought about that before. That's a really good use case. Nice. So imagine you have the inert attribute in a selector and you set the opacity to 0.5. This can be nice because then sided users will see that something is inert. It's almost like we're in an opposite scenario as before where it's so easy to manage focus for keyboard and screen reader users that a sided user might be confused as to why something isn't clicking or scrolling. So that's the final tip. Inert by itself doesn't cause any visual change. You'll need to be in charge of matching the experience for sided and non-sided users. Tuck inert in your tool belt next to display none, visibility hidden, or your screen reader only class that has special elements for screen readers. There's also the complimentary Aria hidden equals true attribute which is available visually but not to screen readers. And lastly, tab index. Ask yourself, one, is this hidden for everyone? Two, hidden visually but is available for screen readers? Or three, hidden versus tech but not visually? And then follow that up with how should the keyboard and mouse be able to interact? Nailed it. That's all we have for today. It's a short episode of Short and Sweep where we wanted to bring your attention to this fantastic accessibility attribute that you can use now coming student browsers inert. It will be in Firefox 105 and it's currently in Chromium and Safari. If you have any CSS questions, we'd love to answer them on the show. Just tweet us with the hashtag, the CSS podcast. I'm at UNO, that's at UNA. I'm at Argyle link, ARGYLEINK and your question, it could help a lot of people. And as always, if you like the show, please give us a review on whatever podcast app you're using or share this podcast with a friend because those reviews help other people discover our show and help us have more time to deliver better content for you. Thanks y'all, looking forward to your questions. We'll see you next time.


Hi everyone, it's time. Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com here coming at you with 2020 Tops Transcendent Baseball, Hall of Fame edition, random hit break number one. Just dropped today, limited to just 50 cases, that's it. All Hall of Famers right here as you can see, it's pretty nice. Everyone gets a hit from the list below. And a very big thank you to all the people who bought their spots straight up. And congrats to the people who won their spots. I appreciate that as well. There's everyone. Thank you. So you can see that that's from Inception, that's from Bowman Sapphire, that's from Update. So those are the little designations right there. So you can rewatch that and rewatch you winning a spot if you want to.  So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to open up, if you look at the, the Nick Cam is not up right now. If you look at the Nick Cam, there's the case right here. I'll pop this open, kind of show you everything on the Nick Cam, bring everything over to the main table right here. And then I'll show you everything. We'll show you the invite, we'll show you the oversized cut auto, we'll show you the cofax, the buyback, the super fractor, the sketch card. And you can win the set as well, the base set as well as the sketch reproduction set. Right there, those will ship seal. We won't cut those open. First thing we'll do is, and we'll open up the 40 autographs as well and then type, we're after I show you everything, we'll pause the video, type everything in and then, and then we'll randomize your names, randomize all the hits and see what you end up with. That should be pretty exciting. Awesome. So again, thanks to everyone here. Let's get to opening. We pulled big case right here. So we have the invite sitting right up here on, there you go, that's the invite, got the hologram sticker on the back and everything. Set that right there. Now, let's, you can see transcendent hall of fame edition, hologram sticker there. Just all the barcode information and stuff on, on there. I know it's kind of hard to see on this camera, but it's there. There is the silver case right here. There's a look at the box. I have to trust that handle. Here's my camera angle here. You look right there. This is case 10 out of 50. And kind of see, let me catch the light there a little bit. Yeah, there you go. 10 out of 50. There's the tray right there. So cut auto and all the other individual. One of ones that looks like the graded card right there. And there's all the cards here. So this, that there is the, one or the other is the base card set. I think that's the, the silver is usually the base card set. It should be the sketch reproduction right here. Now these, these should be numbered as well. So 10 out of 50. So everything's going to be numbered 10 out of 50 for the, and there's 10 out of 50 right here. And the gold is the, or the auto. So you can see, so the base set is all 50 cards, right? And the auto is only 40 autos. So that's the auto, it's the shorter one. Yeah, and these are all, these are all sealed. You can see the tops shrink wrap right there. There's the invite right there. So you can still see everything right over here. We'll do those, we'll do those at the end after we do these. Now the autos we can open up. Got the transcendent T right there. Good law, maybe we're, younce back there. So maybe this is, I think they're alphabetical. All right, there you go. Hank Aaron, 24 out of 25. And we have, now someone's going to get a train whistle, Hank Aaron. Three out of five, nice. Out of fives and under, get the train whistle. Next up is Roberto Alomar. 12 out of 25. And it gives you the Hall of Fame year right there too, which is really cool. Then we've got Jeff Bagwell, 23 out of 25. Oh, nice, thanks Nick. There is Johnny Bench, nine out of 25. Then you've got Bogsy, Wade Bogs, nice. 25 out of 25. There should be two one-of-ones in here too, that's what Topps says. And then there's one of the one-of-ones, Wade Bogs, one-of-one, nice. So another person with a train whistle there. Then we've got another train whistle, three out of five. Rod Carew, another Rod Carew, 10 out of 25. Yeah, I like the low numbers here too, the lower numbers. And remember, all Hall of Famers, which is awesome. We've got the Hawk, Andre Doss, and 23 out of 25. Yeah, these are going to be a lot of back-to-back, so they're all in alphabetical order, McCarthy. Six out of 25, Carlton Fist, so there could be like another Fisk back there too. Yeah, the transcendent design. Tim, very beautiful indeed. We've got Bob Gibson, two out of 25, nice. Are they heavy? That's a good question. Yeah, a little bit. I don't think any heavier than any other framed card though, but yeah, there's a decent weight to it. We've got Tom Glavin, 20 out of 25, part of that great 90s braves rotation. And the frame quality looks great too. I don't know, it's kind of hard to see in this lighting, but it doesn't seem like there is... They all seem pretty clean. Ooh, whoa! One out of five, Ken Griffey Jr. That's going to be a train whistle for someone. Wow, that's a beautiful card right there, and that's nice. And we've got a Vlad Guerrero Sr., 16 out of 25. Imagine if his son became a Hall of Famer, those senior and junior dual autographs would be pretty awesome. There's another train whistle. The Man of Steel, Ricky Henderson, five out of five. Another train whistle. Reggie Jackson, two out of five. The straw that stirs the drink. Chris Rowe, how are you getting this break? Buy spots on jaskyscasebreaks.com. We've got a second case for Monday. There's the big unit, 15 out of 25. Photography now, I think he does. He does photography now, which is pretty good stuff. They're Chip Off the Old Block, Chipper Jones, 14 out of 25. We've got R.I.P. Al Kaline recently passed away, five out of 25. And we've got Sandy Kofax, 18 out of 25. Sandy into the windup. We've got Barry Larkin, 23 out of 25. Yeah, Jack B saying not one bad autograph. The old guy's putting in the effort. Yeah, good great penmanship all around here. There's Juan Marichal, nine out of 25. Hall of Fame in the early 80s. And the kids these days, you don't have good penmanship. I blame texting. Diane B, what's up? Sure who the... I don't think they've announced who the guests are going to be. A one of one Juan Marichal. There's the other one of one. Next up, Mike Musina. Yeah, he just got in recently, 21 out of 25. And out of five, Mike Musina. We've got another Oriole. I've heard of him, Cal Ripken Jr. 15 out of 25. There's Moe Mariano Rivera, six out of 25. He's got an excellent autograph. We've got Paul Molliter. 20 out of 25. I like that old Brewer's hat. Nolan Ryan, of course. Nine out of 25. The Ryan Express. And we've got another train whistle. Ryan Sandberg, four out of five. Rhino. Sorry about that. We've got Rhino again, 17 out of 25. We've got the wizard Ozzie Smith. 22 out of 25. We've got a great auto too. We've got John Smoltz. 12 out of 25. There's the big herd, 21 out of 25. Trust me, she'll like it too. Not just a eugenics pitchman, ladies and gentlemen. Hall of Famer. Jim Tomey, four out of 25. Another Jim Tomey. This time that horizontal look right there. 21 out of 25. Looks like a good feed to the pitcher. Running to first. Back here, we've got Yas, Carl Yastremski. Four out of 25. A couple more to go. Wow, another one of one. Robin Yacht. Looks like the last two are going to be Robin Yacht. Nice. Great Brewer's hat there. Excellent autograph. Another train whistle. And I think you saw the last one here. That's another Robin Yacht. This one's out of 25. Horizontal edition here. Landscape mode. 25 out of 25. There you go. There are your 40 autographs. Pretty awesome stuff. And a lot of low numbers. A lot of train whistles. We still have more. We still have more to go. These are in case I don't need you top loaders. Get out of the way. Let's see if we can get a camera on this. So everyone can see everything here. So you got the top camera here showing everything. All right. Good luck. First one is going to be one of one Barry Larkin sketch card. Is that a wood frame? Yeah, I think you got a wood frame on this too. That's sharp. Some great art there too by that artist. Nice. The next one here, you can see the top camera here. Grabbing the hit. Is going to be the one of one. There's that sandy cofax. Excellent. I like that. I do like that design. And on the far right, right over here, there's the next one. And it's the super Andre Dawson. That's nice. All right. So empty, empty, empty. And on this side should be the graded card right here. It is. Let's just reveal, just reveal. Ooh, nice. PSA 6 1960 Carl Yastremsky rookie star card. That is nice. Already graded for you. We've got another one of these in the store, folks. jaspyscasebreaks.com All right. Now, this has been an excellent case. And the one of one is going to be Can you tell by the signature? I can't. Wow. Lou Gehrig. That is amazing.  That is amazing. What a case. Remember, they only made 50 of these, so that's pretty nice. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pause the video really quick. Get the randomizer all set up for everyone. And then when we come back we'll randomize all of these names and we'll randomize all of those hits and see who ends up with what. It's pretty awesome. Thanks everybody. We'll be RB. Be right back. And we're back, ladies and gentlemen. So here we go. So once again we've got 48 items on this list thanks to Nick for typing in all of the autos while I was breaking. So the count is 48. 48 hits in this break. There's everybody right there. And then let's copy all of this. Let's come into this blank list right here. There you go. Once again, I showed this number of times. Make sure we got everybody on the list right here. Thanks again and congrats to the winners of those mini breaks and thanks to the people who bought spots straight up. Here we go. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. Five times. One and a four. Five times. Your names first. One, two, three, four, and a one. Five times. Connor down to Tim. We're going to put all these in this list separate tab right over here. One and a four for the hits. Five times. Okay, here we go. One, two, three, four. And good luck everybody. Thanks so much. We got one more. Fifth and final time again. And after five times we've got the bagsy up there. Wow, the cut auto in spot 47 which we're going to see in just a little bit. Let's scroll down really quick. Diane Bailey DB with the Lou Gehrig cut autograph. John Carlos Stallone gets the invite. Wow. And the one of the sketch card. SKS with the Super Dawson Rob you got this sketch reproduction set the copper frames and Ryan Emerson you get that sealed set of the base cards as well. That's awesome. Connor with the Bagwell Rolando with the Mariana Vera Ozzie Smith for Tim, John with the Boggs Mike McCarthy you got the Yaz graded card Leo with the Dawson to 25 CJ with the Hank Aaron Matthew S with the spot that you won you get the Ricky Henderson out of five all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop Smoltz for John Nick with the Karoo Brandon with the Vlad Josh with the one of one Sandy Kofax all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop we've got the SKS with the Super Fractor all aboard whoop whoop there's a lot of train whistles Alexander with the Jim Tomey Tim with the Sandberg Taz Otto for Josh Jeff with the Glavin Jeff S with the Musina Barry Larkin for Robert John with the Bench John H with the Tomey Todd with the Robin Yacht one of one all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop BJ Jordan with the out of five Reggie Jackson all aboard whoop whoop Jarrett with the Wanmarishaw all aboard whoop whoop Brandon with the Sandberg out of five all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop Tim with the Kofax Juan with the AJ Henderson Ryan with the, we said Ryan's already congrats Ryan Quitten with the Al-K-Line John Carlo one of one sketch Barry Larkin as a good sketch too whoop whoop we got Jeff with the Carl, there's another one of one, Jeff Peace Wade Boggs forgot about that one whoop whoop Phillip with the Cowroopkin Jr autograph Joe with the Chipper Jones Leo with the Rod Carew all aboard whoop whoop Zach with the Bob Gibson we're almost there, Timothy with the, Tim with the Roberto Alomar BJ Jordan last spot Mojo three out of five Hank Aaron autograph all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop we got Jeff Peace with the Paul Molliter for Tyler, Tim with the Nolan Ryan John Carlo with the Mike Musina all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop John you also got the VIP invite which if you don't want to go, we'll buy it off of you for a few thousand dollars of break credit jaskyscasebreaks.com if you want to we got Brandon with the Frank Thomas I forgot about the Ken Griffey Jr out of five, William Punt who won that spot all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop and we got Diane Bailey of course that Lou Gehrig was incredible DB all aboard the Big Head Express whoop whoop and Tim Burke with the Robin Yacht excellent autograph there to 25 wow that's amazing stuff boys and girls that Lou Gehrig I mean come on that's amazing stuff, thanks everybody there are the big encased hits right there thanks so much everyone for getting in, really appreciate it I mean that Lou Gehrig was definitely sitting right on top of the sponge here that Lou Gehrig was definitely the highlight of this break very special, incredibly special we've got another one in the store ladies and gentlemen, Joe for jaskyscasebreaks.com we'll be able to break that on Monday so I appreciate everybody getting into the action I'm Joe for jaskyscasebreaks.com we'll see you next time bye bye what a break


I don't think I could do it in Spanish. As a matter of fact, I had to hire someone to translate looking for Esperanza into Spanish. I couldn't do it myself. In all centers, because the plot there was Esperanza, that would definitely be really interesting for the Spanish public. Yeah. Let's say that I hired someone to translate it and that she did a very poor job. So it was money that was wasted. To give you an example, there are some things that she did a little transliteration, which is not a good idea, right? So I'd say this was the straw that broke the camel's back. You cannot say that in Spanish. It doesn't make sense. And she translated that into Spanish. We don't have that in Spanish. We have another one, a totally different one. So it just didn't make sense. I have a question. These people who have just come from Mexico, but your book is written in English, but you were interviewing them in Spanish. Yes. OK. I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, in Spanish. OK. Yeah. It was fun. Thank you. Can you eat tomatoes or strawberries? After all that? Of course. With a brand new appreciation for everything that is put in front of them. Oh, yeah. If we're good, I would like to read a little bit from my mother's funeral. When I was 13, I had a curfew. And one day I forgot my curfew because I was busy with Diego behind the stadium. And I got home very late. And rather than admitting that I had lost track of time, I just told my mom the most ridiculous lie. I told my mom that I had been kidnapped. And it was one of those lies that you know it only gets worse through the time. So it was like, who kidnapped you? Like three guys in a car? Three guys in a car? Where did they take you? And because I couldn't make anything up, I told her that I had been drugged. So the next day, she took me to the doctor to make sure that I had not been violated.   So I would like to read a little bit about that.  That's the result. And after that, we go straight to the nearest church. We're alone kneeling on a wooden pew, hands clasped, below on her chains, heads bowed before a colossal cross with a dark jizzle's affixed to it. He's missing a toe. Probably he lost it during an Easter procession. Mom doesn't notice this or the donation box sitting at his feet with a handwritten note that reads, let's give our savior his toe back. Mom whispers prayers. She says that we need to thank God, her God, that those kidnappers didn't violate me. All I can think about is the missing toe and how disgusted I am on myself for making my mom sick with worry last night, for lying to my sisters, for letting Diego touch my lemons because they were called lemons.  My mom is on her knees.  Gracias Jesus for keeping her intact. Mom can't stop hugging me.  I knew it. I knew it, she says to herself and to me, and it given the chance to every passerby. I'm still a virgin and that's all that matters. Virgin, intact and adulterated. Mom says big words all mean the same thing and her words fit me perfectly. My private self has been identified. I have been branded virgin, God's goods constantly monitored, future husband, do no fear, virgin, under close inspection. I visualize this membrane inside me, this membrane that makes me what I am. I picture it as pink, thin and translucent, like a bubble of strawberry gum, like a film of cotton candy, like a delicate Miranda Glass bowl. Does it resonate, like a drum if you tap it with your fingernails? Did the woman doctor strum it with her two gold fingers? And if she did, was it prickly like the skin of a peach, bumpy like the underside of my tongue, sleek and bouncy like a trampoline in the rain? I feel as if I have morphed from being an invisible little girl into a woman with an identity, someone whose best quality can finally be described. Virgin, this transformation, this new definition of myself proposes me into an outer world.  This is it, I think, no more hiccups of self-awareness. This time, the inclined toward full womanhood is steady. I will never sleep back, will never be free of this new me. I have a hidden trophy inside my crotch, something so valuable that in 13 years, it has been struck only by two latex fingers and sin in all its impish splendor, only by mom. I have been brooding all day. By the time the sun sets behind the cordillera, I have a pixie hair cut with a training bra made of cotton because mom says that silky underwear encourages precocious sexuality. And my silky legs glisten with a hairless glow. Alone in the bathroom, I shaved my legs, cruelly the private mom of a special location in our lives that she wanted to be a part of. I took that away from her maliciously, gladly, with swift rays of runs up and down my legs, a simple act full of spite and impulse born in the blur of the humiliation on the exam table, my private act of resistance, an urgent moment, uncontrollable and explosive like a spasm. Now we're even. Tonight, as I lean against the door jamming the bedroom, mom and I share, I think of packing my clothes and running away. But I know I can get no farther than the closet with my clothes hung. I know I suffer from a hunger that for now only my family can quench. I know that if I had to choose between freedom and family, I'll choose the tyranny of mom's love and her futile women's consoles that have taught me nothing about democracy and everything about tenacity. We used, because we were five girls, so we used to have women's consoles, that's what mom called them, where we got together to decide everything in theory. But she had already made all the decisions. We just got together to listen to my mom's decisions. So I look at mom from the hallway. She's sitting in the dark, staring at our black and white TV set. I wonder if she's looking at her own reflection on the screen. Does she see the woman I see? Late 40s, dark half moons under her sad eyes, short gray hair, a permanent frown, dark and smiling lips, a haggard woman with nothing to show for a lifetime of diapers, late night colleagues, schools and paid bills, hunger, lies, loneliness. I walk to the couch and sit beside her. She puts her arm around me. For a while, I sit rigidly, but then I close my eyes, ease against her, rest my head on her shoulder, and I feel like crying for her. I wish a new story, a secret recipe that I could give to her. I wish I could cradle her in my arms and tell her my secret, tell her that she will wake up tomorrow, stronger, better, without the uncertainty of loneliness, but somehow feeling that her life is something solid that she is carving. I wish this unnamed thing, which I do not possess, but long to share with her, will feel her with renewed fortitude and get her ready to face the day, to steer the reins of its hours and clothe its quotidian drabness and disembowel it until the day gives my mom the joy she deserves. But I have nothing to tell her, nothing to give her but the reaffirmation of my chastity. I sob quietly, why are you crying? She whispers, I'm crying for you, mama. Well, that's silly, she says. Then she rises and says good night. How are you doing for time? Great ball. One of the things that I took the freedom of doing with the ball is imagining lots of things about my mom. I imagined her wedding night. I imagined her honeymoon. And one of the things that I had to do, because I just had to do was imagine the moments before she died. For me, it was important to imagine whether or not she had experienced pain, what had gone through her mind. And it was my way to cope with the loss, which was a huge loss. I picture her last night. I think she went to bed early. She was tired. And the real world had lost its luster a long time ago. I had to tell you this. This book became what it became, because this man here turned a mess into something so beautiful. I have forgotten to say he edited my book. Such a beautiful job. It was just such a beautiful thing. Because I remember reading the manuscript and what Barn did was say, he needs more here. He needs less here. That's what we were doing this morning, right? And he just filled gaps. He was like, give me more. You know it, because this happened to you. But I don't know it. Give me more. And it just gave the whole manuscript just a beautiful change. Thank you so much. From her apartment in Diapason's, she could hear the life outside percolate into her room, the cacophony of Medellin, children playing, cars crunching gravel, sirens blaring in the distance. So much noise. People and their whims were also beginning to bother her. She often said, the more I get to know people, the more I love my dog. She never had a dog. I think she pulled the covers over her head and breathed in the lavender fragrance of the sheets. As for herself, she no longer smelled of anything. She recalled the various aromas her body had given off over the years. Guava jelly when she was a little girl. Blood when she became a woman. The patchouli scent one of her children had given her for Mother's Day, the papery of her menopause. After that, nothing. Her body had become a dry riverbed. Riverbed, devoid of milk, blood or sweat. Her body had become uninhabitable and condemned house about to implode on its foundations. She began her nightly prayers does enough as she always did. And when she woke up a few minutes later, she tried to finish that, but she could not remember which one she had been saying was another, our father or a glory bee. One of these days, she used to say, I'm going to unscrew my head and give it a good wash inside. She was finding it more and more difficult to keep tabs on life, on life. The days of the week have become indistinguishable. Church and Sundays, or is it Tuesdays? Grocery shopping on Wednesdays, or is it Saturdays? Her life was complicated by misplaced objects. Her brushes, reading glasses, house keys, all seem to have terrible minds of their own. She meant to water her plants every other day, but that night she wasn't sure if he was keeping that schedule. She fell asleep, wishing for a better tomorrow. She hoped she would emerge from this chrysalis of gloom. She would wake up lighter, less clumsy, more nimble, less lost, more assertive, less tight-chested, freer.  A black witch moth made its way into mom's room. It fluttered its wings against the walls. It hovered over the bed, the black eyes on its four wings, watching mom, watching and waiting. Mom gasped for air, making snorts that she didn't recognize as her own. Something had locked beneath the sternum obstructing her breathing.  God, I can't breathe. She sighed between gasps, swaths of color flashed in glittery snapshots of rain under her eyelids. She massaged her throat with one hand, then the other, then both. She pressed at her breastbone, my God. And whatever was lodged in her chest began to expand and sharpen, cliping at her wind pipe like a millipede. Sangre Gorio Bendito, Virgen del Carmen, Animas del Purgatorio, don't abandon me.  Her muscles hardened like cardboard left out to dry in the sun. And in a convulsed burst of speech, she called the living nurse, don't let me die. We're the only words she managed to whisper. She threw a couple of slow motion punches at the nurse as though she was drowning in quicksand, then clutched the nurse's skirt. For a few seconds, the nurse wrestled with mom's grip.  She pleaded once more. Her whisper was almost inaudible. My mother's mouth made a silent, oh, in moribund exhalations of moist air.  Her body contorted with pain. She felt the nurse's hands on her chest, pressing on the sternum with little push-ups that burned my mother's skin. She heard the nurse fumble with the telephone. Words filled the room.  You're not alone, the nurse said. I'm right here with you. She put her arms around my mother.  Then her chest jolted as if she had been hit by lightning. A few seconds later came a weaker strike followed by something similar to a quiet belch. Her jaw shifted south, then east, changing the geography of her face in quick succession. In her face was tension, then pain, then agony, then resignation. That was what the nurse saw from the outside. But inside mom, she felt something similar to drunkenness. Her head swelled and the crown relaxed and quivered, then melted into a blue sky. She was floating. Her thoughts were like fireworks exploding into each other. And in a flash of sparks, she found herself in the place she loved the most. Mariquita, her homeland. Here, in this place that smelled of avocado and earth after rain, she was no longer my mother. She was a woman. Finally, she was just Carmen. And I want to finish, it's just one and a half page. And I wrote this after the whole book had been written. This was pretty much an afterthought that it was necessary. Among Tibetan Buddhists, there is a burial custom known as Jator, in which mourners give aunts two birds of prey and offer the body of the deceased to the four great elements, earth, water, fire, and air. The vultures are seen as sky dancers, angels that take the soul into heaven, allowing the birds to eat the flesh of the dead guarantees a safe passage to the great windy place where souls are reincarnated. Jator is an act of love, a last gesture of compassion and generosity. A dead body is an empty vessel. Therefore, preventing other creatures from feasting on it is considered the ultimate display of selfishness. Bad karma. When a person dies, the body is cleaned, wrapped chin to knees in a seamless white cloth and left untouched for three days. During this time, the soul starts its slow migration out of our realm. On the third day, a dawn, body breakers called rogyapas laid the body on a flat rock atop a hill and wrapped it and dismembered. The flesh is offered first to the vultures. And after most of the flesh is gone, the rogyapas armed with mallets break the bones. They grind them with yuck, butter, flour and tea and offered the pulp to the weighting smaller birds, crows and hawks. Everything is consumed, everything is offered, everything is taken. I first learned about Jator when I was studying to become an anthropologist and I immediately loved the idea. I imagined my own Jator. My body spread wide like a banquet, birds of all sizes landing on my chest, feeding off my thighs, my face, feathery creatures taken off from my navel and landing on the runway of my belly and later back, and later coming back for more. My remains would be delicious, transcendent, ripped into submission and garnished with the savory chemicals that body secretes after rigor mortis. For years, images of my own Jator passed before my eyes and snapshops of morsels of me being whisked up into a vast Sargasso of nothingness. Sharp beaks dredging residual chunks of me from the Mariana depths of my dry arteries. How beautiful. This is how I want to go. This is how everyone should go. I thought everyone should have a Jator. Yet, my thick session with sky burials disappeared when mom died. I came out of her body and it was only after her death that I secretly claimed proprietorship of her flesh and her bones. I did not want her to be cremated or buried or embalmed. I didn't want her to be seen or touched. I didn't want anyone to utter her name. I didn't want her to be dead. There is beauty in imagined Jators. In the funeral pyres I saw along the Ganges, in the fado songs of funerals in Portugal, in the recitation of the Cavish, in faraway death rituals where the dead are strangers. But this was my mother's death, followed by a real wake, a real funeral, a real cremation. My sisters and I authorized the reduction of her body to a heap of ashes. None of it was imagined and none of it was beautiful. Three days after her death, the only traces of her lay in a tiny wooden box and we were about to leave the box behind. I volunteered to deposit the urn in the crypt. My sister had chosen an osuary in the basement of a church. At the center hanging low was a wooden crucifix. I laid the box under the bloody feet of Jesus. With both hands on the box, I recited a Buddhist prayer I had learned a long time ago. She has taken the great leap. The light of this world has faded for her. She has entered solitude with her karmic forces. She has gone into a vast silence. And as I say the word silence, I started to cry and I felt as though I was about to break into bits that would never be reunited. Mom and I had been a unified whole. Without her, there was no me. A long time ago, I had heard a rabbi on the radio explain why Jews don't cremate their dead. He had said that a grave is a place where the soul of the deceased connects with ours, that we honor their memory by returning to the grave. Oh God, we cremated mom, we have no grave. He said that ashes are the destruction of a memory, a complete divorce of the soul from this world, an act that causes pain to the soul. I choked and began to cough and the echoes bounce off the caverns walls of the basement. Sobing quietly, my sisters kept the distance. It was a Sunday and a chill came over the basement like a shroud. I wanted to put mom under my sweater, sit with her in a corner of the Oshwari, blow hot air onto the box and cover it with my hair. I wanted to shield mom from the cold. Let her go, one of my sisters said. I stood up and pressed the box against my belly, rubbed it on my chest as close to my heart as possible. Then I carried the box with what was left of mom to her new home, little door number 07632. Holding my breath, I slipped the box into the crypt. I pushed it away from this world and into her new realm with a steady hand. The box made a shh sound as it was slid out of my life. I locked the Oshwari, put the key into my sweater pocket and let out a sigh. My sisters and I locked arms and together we climbed the stairs. We surrendered the ashes and together we crossed that terrible threshold. We stood openly to the four elements and together we faced the rest of our lives with the invisible scar. It was dark outside and it was beginning to rain. I'm all yours. No, she was good. She was good. And the irony was that she complained that she couldn't breathe and she couldn't breathe and the paramedics got tired of coming to the house and there was nothing. So the last EKG that she had, the paramedics said, you know, she has the heart of a 15 year old. She's gonna die of anything but a heart and she died two days after that. Really taken with the move to imagine in nonfiction. And I'm wondering if you could talk from your own experience why it was so important in this case to imagine into your mom's life. As children, we have very little access to the lives of our parents. They are parents. My mom was always my mom. And for me, it was important to find about the woman.  I don't know. I want a grit, I want something that would make her something other than my mom. I found nothing. I found nothing. And I think in writing, I gave my mom the womaness that I missed from her. Yeah. And that's why it was important to imagine the honeymoon, the first night with that, all the trips that they did together so that I could see her as a human being, as a woman, rather than a mother. They don't speak English. It was all part of the plan. Oh, that's the truth. I started to write in about my mom's funeral probably a couple of days after she died. You get down the actual.  I wanted to learn about rigor mortis. I wanted to be able to understand what was going on in my mom's body. And it's full of enzymes and secretions and stiffness. And I wanted all of that. If I understood what was going on in my mom's body, I thought I was better off than my sisters because at least I knew what was going on. They were mourning, and I was mourning too, but I was mourning from a very different corner. Yeah, they were missing her, they felt her loss, and I was doing the same thing, but I just got very scientific about it. I just wanted to know what was going on to her body, the body that I was not going to hug ever again. I wanted to understand the physical loss. Did you get a sense of relief when you finished? How are you working through that? One of the chapters, everything else was, it was very from my heart, but probably the only chapter that gave me that sense of the revelation. It was a chapter that I wrote about finding out that I had been an unwanted child, which was not a surprise because I was number six and my mom was very poor. And I was like, I knew she didn't want to have six kids, but it was like, I'm a mother, I'm grown up, so we are more like, we are on the same level, like, hey, mom, you remember when you were pregnant with memes, oh my God, it was awful. And I'm thinking like, I don't know what I expected. I wanted the truth, but she just gave it to me between the eyes, like, yeah. So that was a pretty hard chapter, although I knew that I had been unwanted, just writing about it and coming to terms with the fact that I was not part of anyone's plan was hard. Had you never timed her? Maybe you wanted it, like you were looking for a detail that you couldn't explain or you wanted a different perspective to talk to them at all? Yeah, here's the thing. When I attended an MFA program for about three weeks, right, and one of the workshops, it became apparent that everyone had a fantastic story to write, right?  And I had nothing. I had a very ordinary childhood, nothing happened to me. We were just poor and loving and it was just, you know, trying to make it from Sunday to Monday. Nothing special. And I voiced this during one of the workshops and Ira said, surely you have a memory from childhood. Think hard is something really special, I'm thinking. Well, I don't know if this counts as special, but my sister brought a skeleton home. Is that kind of special? And I went like, what? And there you have it. She needed an A in anatomy and the nuns say we need a skeleton, so she just went and bought a body and brought it home and we cooked it. We peeled the guy at home and we put it together and it was like a family project. It was like... It was very bonding. Not only did we put the guy together, we kept the guy with us for a long time. So it was in the middle of a living room and then it was blocking the only window because it was a shotgun style little apartment. So it was covering the window so my mom moved it to the bathroom and every time we went into the restroom we had to spread the legs apart. And so, well, maybe I do have something. But, you know, it only goes to tell you that you do have a story. You always have a story to tell, right? Yeah, go ahead.  I mean, she's still alive, but I still want to know before she had me, before she had any interaction with me, I want to know who that woman was. And I feel in some way that I have wrong what she could have potentially become. And in that way, I do feel guilty. And I wish I could say, you know, if it wasn't part of the plan, you know, I asked her one day that if you had a choice, and you know it ahead of time, which not happening, and she said, I'll trade everything in the world and I don't care about my sisters, I just want to become a mother. Yeah. And that part spoke to me because I've been desperately trying to search for my mother's past, but she would always hide away and say, Right, right. As part of the past that you don't need to do because it's not important, but we were talking about this earlier on. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, you know, and they're very likely to say, this all in the past, don't worry about it, what matters is 1970 and on, right? But maybe ask on a Monday, maybe ask again on Wednesday, maybe ask again when it's full moon. And nobody will know. She's quite strong, you know, persuader, and I did try out to certain month, but I have realized this, if I could somehow, but I don't want to violate what she had done. It's just, it's like asking someone to do great favor, but I don't want to violate that. Yeah, well, I can understand that boundaries. Mm-hmm, yeah. I'm a boundary, oh, I really am, I'm sorry. You can take turns. It does make a boundary. You share so much and I'm wondering if you ever had to sort of talk with yourself about how much am I going to share all my life? All the time, yeah. All the time. And do you ever feel like, oh, I wish I hadn't gone there, maybe I put out too much? With praying alone in Qatar. It was just so, it's like everything. I mean, I didn't talk about food because I couldn't find where to put it, but I would have, you know, I just wanted to dump everything there. When the piece got accepted by the son, I went, oh no, oh no, no, no, no. And to make matters worse, the little bit that was available online was the sex part, which was the one that I didn't want anyone to read.  You can get squimaged when you're in your panties. It's like, well, I changed my mind, you know?  If you're not willing, I think it's valid, you know? If you're not willing to take your panties off, strip poker is not for you. You play something that is safer. Yeah?  But that's the really cool thing about writing memoir, you know, that you are willing to put yourself on the page, naked and vulnerable, for everyone to see, for everyone to scrutinize you, you're just there. And there is a lot of beauty to it, to that willingness to surrender to the judgment of strangers, you know? Once one is written down, it's done.  Your life is there. And I think, you know, the reality just from the side is that I would never be able to do it. But as a reader or a listener, there's such a feeling of gratitude that somebody else has put out so much of what we all have experienced and to sort of validate and make okay all the ups and downs and the busy stuff of our lives that we generally don't talk about. Yeah, but you know, even you're right. I mean, there is no way to, well, at least for me to know when too much, when something is too much. You know, am I saying too much of this? Should I just turn it down? Does the reader need to know this? And for me, the answer is always like, yes. Of course the reader wants to know that. But that's just me. It's just me. And I always struggle with this. I always wonder, do I need to say this? Do I need to go there? And it's sometimes it's pretty hard to, there are some things that I don't write about that are off limits like my children. And even then I have gone there a few times. Yeah, yeah.   And I thought that was so beautiful. And you don't usually, I don't think I've ever heard anyone juxtapose those things, you know?  And I thought it was very beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. You're unusual. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, go ahead. I was just wondering, I wasn't sure of the timeline. Did your mom ever know that you were published of any piece of work? Never. No, she had Alzheimer's when she died. So I don't think it would have made any difference. I wasn't sure of the timeline. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. You talk a lot about finding your voice. At what point do you realize that you've found it? Ask me an easy one. Do you like tomatoes and strawberries? Strawberry is nice. I don't know. I don't know. I think you just have to go with your gut feeling. You know when you own what you write. You know it. When you open the manuscript and you read this piece and you can hear yourself and you know that it comes from the heart. And it's not only heart. You know, the voice needs style and structure and all these little things. But you can have the structure. You can learn this in the program. You can have structure and the punctuation and the musicality and all that. And no heart. And the story doesn't go anywhere. You know. You know, and you just have to be very humble in this business. Just open your heart and your mind to criticism, to suggestions too. And it's just, just open yourself. Just open yourself and just take it all in. And the worst thing that we can do as writers is to fall madly in love with other words and say I refuse to delete this because I really like that. Forget it. I mean, you just need to be humble and say maybe it doesn't belong here. If it's really good, you save it for another essay. And you recycle. You revisit later on. But in that process of being open and accepting people's suggestions and accepting your weaknesses, you find your own voice. You'll know. You'll know. It's like when you go shopping for a dress. What are you looking for? I don't know. You know, I'll know when I see it. Yeah. One more question, maybe. What are you working on now? Sex. No, again, I'm combining anthropology with literary journalism and I'm working on a cross-cultural exploration of the symbolic meaning of hymen and how women lose their virginities in different cultures. Yeah. That's what I'm working on at the moment. Yeah. I just wanted to make a comment. We've been talking to some comments about the vulnerability and the sense of exposure in memoir. And I think what Adriana does that's so exceptional, which is I think what I'm feeling certainly touched by is it's not, it's yes, it's those things as well, but it's her ability to use language in such a delicate and nuanced way that the intimacy feels even richer.  It's not just because she's exposing these very private and intimate moments, it's because of how she's doing it. If I could piggyback on that, the other thing, as I was listening, because I'm sometimes sensitive to some of that, it's not ego-driven to me at all. It never seemed like it was about, I just want to be out there, I want to look at them when people look at me or anything like that. It seems so connected and grounded in such honesty. And that's why to me it's so compelling. All right, thank you. Thank you. I'm sure, I don't know. Okay. But I noticed that I'm always growing up here. Being different was in a way that it reverted, you know, unwanted this. Do you ever have to feel that you have to prove that something was different from what most people have expected? You mean here in the States? Yes. For being Latina? Yes. When I applied to the graduate program at USF, I asked the director of the program, do you think? Because English is not my native language that I stand a chance of being accepted. And she said, no. We said we have never had anyone who's not a native speaker of English.  So everyone is going to be reading, you know, a manuscript, what do you call it, a piece, but no one is going to know the name. And based on my writing I got accepted, which told me that I don't have an accent when I write, which is excellent. Right? You know, when I read stuff with an accent. But that to me was very interesting and that is probably the only time where I've had that kind of thing with language. Other than that, life has been just incredibly generous.  It's been really good and people have been very welcoming. And don't take me wrong, some of the critics have been brutal. And the problem with writing memoir is that you'll invite people's opinions about your life. I want you to appreciate or critique or love or hate my work, not me, right? So I have one of the, one women who review my book said that it was a really difficult book to read because it's very depressing and it talks a lot about death. Right? Okay, that one, whatever. But one of the reviewers accused me and I felt that as an accusation of abandoning my mom. And she said that once I found out that she was ill, I should have stayed in Colombia and instead I went as far away as possible and I moved to Alaska, abandoned in my mom. I thought that was pretty harsh. Like how dare you? Just focus on my writing. Is it good? Is it not good? Do not judge my actions. But you can't control that. Once you publish something, you are under scrutiny. Just like as man put me there. Yeah.