Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Hey, Guess I'm OK, Then

H/T to reader for cajoling me out of my blogging vacation. But, I guess I better chime in:

"'어글리 백인 강사' 조심하세요" ("Beware the Ugly White Teacher")

Man, that's some racist shit. It gets better:

"백인 영어강사, 한국 여성에 에이즈 위협" ("White English Teacher Threatens Korean Woman With AIDS")

The stupidity of the "sports newspaper" hardly needs to be pointed out. And I'll be mercifully brief in my points.

1) Get with the 21st century. Learn the difference between being HIV+ and contracting AIDS. Newspapers in Korea continue to not know the difference and add to the ignorance about this topic.

2) This is just the perfect case the media's been waiting for, assuming it's even true, since the source is a web site of an organization of hagwons – now, that's calling the kettle black – illegally creating a blacklist that would get any of us foreigners sued to high heaven if we named blacklists of evil hagwons. Since the source is a blog and an email from hotmail, I'd say that double-confirming the sources and getting some additional confirmation would be in order. And if this story turns out to be as full of shit as when YTN reported Bill Gates as having been murdered, or the non-existent Mad Max atmosphere of Hongdae, don't look for a retraction in any Korean newspaper.

3) As for the email, if that guy's a native speaker of English, then I'll be a monkey's 삼촌.

What I want to know is – where's the interview with this mystery Australian? Is there confirmation from any outside source, say, a doctor or organization that says he tested positive? All we have is a Konglish-laden email from Hotmail? OOO-K.

4) Even if said evil white Australian English teacher actually sent the email, what evidence separates this from just a vindictive email sent by a jilted lover? If so, the guy's guilty of being a dick, but this is not newspaper worthy.

I must say that what is more interesting is how the use of HIV as a weapon is made possible in a society where being HIV+ is a crime. Were this woman to test positive, this woman would never find employment in Korea, be completely socially ostracized, and forbidden from living in the normal population, shipped off to the "AIDS colonies" where such transgressors against the psychological desire to not deal with this issue are sent.

The moral of this story, if true? A responsible newspaper media would point out the importance of at least using condoms and other means of protection, instead of perpetuating the harmful (and not just to foreigners) myth that only "dirty foreigners" can "have AIDS."

One of the reasons I know about this is because I edited several HIV/AIDS-related reports for the Korean CDC related to this topic, and let me tell you, the level of ignorance in public policy about HIV/AIDS in this country is scary, and in the end, the people overwhelmingly hurt by this stupidity are Korean citizens themselves.

Criminalizing the HIV+ and effectually stamping out any desire to actually be voluntarily tested, thereby effectively reducing the spread of the disease by encouraging people to confirm their status rather than the reality, which is that a person in a high-risk group would be wise to avoid testing, since you're a criminal either way; as they say in Korean, "모르는 게 약."

Glad to see the Korean media at it again: using flimsy sources, beating the drum of the AIDS-infested, foreign sexual predator, and adding to the body of ignorance and fear about HIV/AIDS.

Good, responsible journalism for the nation.

And according to the newspapers, you don't have to beware ME, since I'm not WHITE! So ditch the condoms, Korean ladies, and let's get ready for some sharing of dirty heroin needles, home blood transfusions, and bareback anal action!

This is one black, drug-abusing, AIDS-infested sexual predator ready to PAR-TAY! Forget those WHITE English teachers – you're totally safe with me! All those Thai hookers back in Thailand were totally safe – trust me, baby!

And you know what they say about BLACK, drug-abusing, AIDS-infested sexual predators, heh heh heh...

Keep It Together, Ladies

Just funny. And random. And ridiculous. This is why I love the YouTube era.

Gotta love it. "Time is going by really, really, really slow."

Thanks for that one, Elaine.

Transform With Me

OK – so, sadly, besides other important events in my life and the world, the thing I am most specifically looking forward to is The Transformers movie. Because, as I said months ago (here and here), that shit is going to rock.

Watching in on YouTube is weak, and only Yahoo has the official trailer, from standard up to 1080 HD, so watch it here. The robots look pretty freakin' real, dude.

This time, unlike the James Bond non-event, I want to make an expedition with dozens of other pumped Americans who understand this as an earth-shattering cultural event. Which it – ahem – is.

So, as a reply to this post, please indicate whether you want to make a night out it by going to catch the Transformers, preferably with a little bit of Jack in the Coke Zero. I saw Matrix: Reloaded a bit lit – made it much better.

I just can't fathom watching The Transformers with a sedate, completely silent crowd here. Doesn't matter whether the movie's bad or good when people are cheering like at a football game. When I saw Episode II of Star Wars, the eager crowd made those vile love scenes not only bearable, but deadly funny. It just occurred to me that I would really like to see Megatron being given a Can of Whoopass™ by Optimus Prime with a cheering section present.

Isn't that what you want, fellow Americans?

So, please send both a public RSVP (as a comment, so others can see how many are going) and private confirmation (as an email to the address at the top of the page with your contact info, number of tix needed, and "TRANSFORMERS" in the subject line so it doesn't get lost in my endless mail shuffle).

Date: July 4th (perhaps 3rd if they pull a Spiderman 3 and open here a day early or not)
Time: 9 or 10-ish
Goal: I'd like to get a whole cheering section!

Remember – it'll be a transformative experience for us all. Hehe.

Well, I'm Not Surprised, Actually

From the English Chosun (HT to the Nomad):

Meanwhile, Gwangmyeong Mayor Lee Hyo-seon has invited censure again with offensive remarks about African-Americans. Lee was forced to give up his membership in the Grand National Party after he made derogatory remarks about Jeolla Province last July. On Monday, Lee made the faux pas at a luncheon with a visiting delegation from the Washington branch of the presidential Advisory Council on Democratic and Peaceful Unification. “When I visited Washington D.C., I saw niggers swarm all around the city," he said. "How can you live in such a scary place? I was so afraid that I didn’t come out of my hotel at night.”

Well, I'm obviously not too surprised at this and how it found expression, since the most virulent expressions of Korean-on-Black racism seem to find their most fiery fuel in the Korean AMERICAN community and bounce back across the water to visiting Koreans, who take this as the gospel of people "who would know."

In 1996, in my second year of working as an ETA middle school teacher on Cheju Island, my co-teacher had been applying to a program that picked schoolteachers from each province to attend a nine-month, all-expenses paid language enrichment program at Florida State University.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, there was the creaton of a superficially "fair" new rule that the Cheju Board of Education had made up that suddenly stipulated 10 years of teaching experience as a requirement to apply, which all teachers on the very conservative Cheju Island knew meant "no women."

You see, it was a commonly-known fact, as well as oft-used technique to "disinvite" unpopular coworkers, that if you didn't give a married woman at least a day's notice about a department event or other after work/after school get-together, that she couldn't go. On Chejudo – which was so conservative that it made Seoul at the time look positively libertarian by comparison (it was controversial at the time to even marry a non-Cheju person) – even being away from the house and husband for a day meant cooking and preparing everything in advance and leaving portions in well-marked containers.

Leaving the island for the better part of a year, for any teacher who would have been around 34 years old at the youngest (what with the new 10-year teaching requirement and all), was socially impossible. And since the program was designed to help develop English skills in the provinces, where there were few foreign teachers living and working at the time, the assumption was that fresh, young teachers would go and get great English skills, and then come back to improve English education back in the boonies.

Well, for the Cheju Board of Education, it turned into a 9-month paid vacation exclusively for older male teachers. The excuse had been that two young female teachers from the year before had gotten "too friendly" with the natives and there were even rumors – brace yourselves – that they had even had American boyfriends. Oh, the horror!

So they went to America, socialized primarily with Americans, and perhaps even get romantically involved with the "외국인" there. Oh, the shame, the shame!

Hey – at least they were getting out there and whatever they were doing, I'm sure their English improved. Even if these girls were getting their respective freaks on doing the reverse cowgirl atop blonde surfer dudes in the back room of the bar while chugging Hennesey straight out the bottle – shit, at least their English was certainly improving. Which is kind of the frickin' point, right?

Know what happened the year it became a gentlemen-only club? It was reported back to me that the teachers had been told by their Korean guides and connections in the local Korean community there to "never, under any circumstances approach a Black person" and that going outside after 8 PM meant risking very likely getting shot.

The teachers had even been told to sleep on the floor instead of the beds, since it was Korean style, anyway and the bonus was that it further decreased the risk of getting hit by collateral fire from drive-by shootings.

It's not that these teachers were living in the hood in some gang-infested neighborhood in Miami or whatever; they were all put up in very nice university facilities on the campus, I hear, paid for with Korean taxpayer dollars.

So the Cheju people, who had discriminated out anyone who might have had the verve – nay, common sense – to take what they were being told by their America-based Korean tour guides, restauranteurs, and other interested parties with a few pounds of salt, were all sitting back in Korea, pissed and frustrated, and definitely not learning any English.

And their Chejudo superiors, mostly less linguistically capable men in their 40's (all the Fulbrights at the time used to joke that the person who spoke English the worst in their school departments were the department heads, who were invariably older, male, and couldn't speak a lick of English to save their life – my department head avoided me in school and never came to the meetings because I was never, ever able to decipher a word he was saying and we had to revert to my elementary Korean or another English teacher to translate for us) didn't learn much more, actually.

The "betters" of the female applicants left behind on Chejudo spent most of their time working hard not to meet any Americans (since the "spics" were surely not faring any better than the "niggers" in the Korean rumor mill) in their nine months in Florida, they did their best to never leave the house in the evening, and never went anywhere without a Korean tour company leading the way in insulated, isolated, pre-packaged tours.

So the people from the provinces all stayed in the same houses, and I heard that the Cheju group ate exclusively Korean food, stayed indoors, and the only departure from classes were guided tours and Korean events.

The sheer display of cultural ignorance, blatant display of gender discrimination, and total waste of time that this became for the Cheju people (I don't know about how the other provinces fared and can't speak to that) left a level of rage that I could only get a taste of, when I was watching my co-teacher and other colleagues pull their figurative hair out.

Or, you could take the only time I actually saw or heard someone be called the word "nigger" in Korea – in English – it turned out, after the police came when my female friend slapped the shit out of him after he got in her face with absolutely no provocation and commanded her to "Go back to America, nigger!" – our crime had been walking back to the Fulbright yeogwan from the convenience store after getting some ice cream – that guy turned out to have spent 10 years in LA, world capital of racial "understanding."

Knowing how the rumor mill works here, especially when it comes to representing foreign or racial "Others", it's no surprise at all to hear that a visiting Korean mayor didn't know what was Korean "inside speak" and "public speak" – his main crime was just that he echoed the likely "깜둥이들은 위험해" sentiments in a too-public forum; had it just been at the dinner table after the main event, I'm sure conversation would have carried on without a hitch, and certainly without having been outed in the newspaper.

And after all, that's what his Korean American guide had been telling him; who is he to go against the conventional wisdom?

While there may be people who resist this way of thinking, they are still in the minority in the overseas Korean community; so, to me, the words of this mayor, to anyone who knows their overseas Korean communities, certainly isn't "news."

Happy Teachers' Day!

And in celebration of that, we have a video made by "Notorious Joe" McPherson and his super group of special kids, whom he teaches in his school full of children with special powers.

The X-Men, you say?

Nay!

It's the "Clash of the Superkids" and the fight is ON, baby!

I think the budget and special effects in this podcast looks about like what they spent in X-Men 3. Ouch for them, good for Joe and the kids!

Now, that's entertainment!

No More Country-Fried Chicken For You

That's right – Chili's is no more.

Our fates must have been linked. Today, I was sitting around thinking up a change of pace for my Sunday evening eats, and I realized I hadn't been to Chili's in ages. So I hitched up my wagon train, rustled up a friend, and got down there.

And found the mood kind of...depressing. The servers were unfamiliar (understandable after nearly a year) and seemed like they didn't know what they were doing. It was pretty noticeable after the stellar food and service I'd remembered from here. And then we found out the reason: Chili's is closing.

Yep, after being one of the few to enter Korea in the early/mid-1990's (Chili's came into Korea in 1997), Chili's is packing it up, a casualty of the ongoing, monumental battle to the death between TGI Friday's and Outback, which I think the latter franchise is winning – and not by quality, by the way, but rather by sheer attrition. Have you seen the sheer amount of Outbacks that they'll stick just about anywhere nowadays? I swear they're gonna make Outback 포장마차 (street stands) soon, handing out bread, slinging Orangeades, and serving overpriced pasta to eager passersby.

The manager, with whom I spoke after finding out the grim news, told me that their second 5-year contract had ended, and since the trend is heading for Korean dishes and "family restaurants" in Korea, the company managing the restaurant had decided to call the game. And with a competitor as cutthroat as Outback ("Outback vs. Outback," indeed!), wouldn't you dust yourself off and go home?

And after hearing the explanation about how Outbacks expand here – apparently the franchise and establishment fees come out of an existing Outback such that each one founds the next, sorta like cell division – I suddenly understood why there are so many Outbacks in so many unlikely places, while TGI Fridays generally stick to ritzy areas with lots of young foot traffic. They're like the Borg, dude.

The manager wasn't able to give me any cool souvenirs, since they have to destroy all the Chili's paraphernalia while documenting it on camera, and send the proof back to the mothership back in the US. Bummer. But I must say, I had my share of good times here, and some damn good daiquiris. I'm a lightweight; so sue me.

Anyway, good bye, good-ass Cobb salad; goodbye to the only country-fried chicken you can get in Korea; and a final goodbye to "southwestern eggrolls," whatever the hell those were – even though they were pretty good.

Man, I shoulda taken a picture of my meal, and ordered a real margarita. Damn.

"There...is...another," said the manager, before he went away; yet, it's kind of a false hope, since the "other Chili's" is inside the Osan Air Force Base. That's doesn't help me much, since I don't get down to Osan much, and I don't think wearing a short skirt and waiting outside the gate is going to get me in, nor would the exercise be worth a mere peppercorn cheddar burger.

So, it's a melancholy Sunday. I guess I'll have to get back to my habit of having high hopes for the Outback "Blooming Onion," but realizing 1/3 of the way through it that it is a truly disgusting dish. I guess I just like the idea of it. How do they make those things, anyway?

I'll just end this post by exclaiming, in a mixture of dejection, defeat, and exasperation, "Damn you, Outbacks! Damn you all to Hell!!!!!!!!!!"

In my mind, I'm kneeling naked on the beach, pounding my hands uselessly into the sand. Except that I'm looking at a huge statue of an overly-cheery Outback server, holding one of those dry-ass, brown bread rolls they serve under her arm. And she winks down at me every three minutes, smiling as she asks whether I'm enjoying my meal, twisting the knife a bit more. She looks very pleased with herself and all her fucking "flair."

"You know, the Nazis had flair," a wise man once said.

Damn right they did.

Bastards.

"All Over You Like Egg In a Bowl of Bibimbap!"

This just in from The Marmot's Hole: Stephen Colbert "reigning in Rain."

Funny stuff, and indeed, showing Korea's "rising cultural profile."

Torture, American Style

Man – and I thought the Rodney King incident was bad.

Read this, if you can stomach it. That warning isn't so much because of the graphic content (although it is graphic), but because of how disgusting this case is, and how there are now more incentives (or just the knowledge that military policy is to look the other way) to torture to get information.

The guy in question, tortured by the cops to sign a confession, was saved only because his wife was smart enough to start a tape recorder before she was forced to leave the house. Had she not, who would have believed her? Or the petty drug peddler? Who believes the US or cops or the Bush administration is capable of any of this, even when they're caught red-handed?

And they've been caught red-handed! But the shit don't stick, apparently. Because it's the exception, right? Right? Even when the President is trying to make torture a part of US military policy? So when is this unacceptable? When it's OK to practice on American citizens? Or "those people?" Or you?

Funny thing is, exactly what happened to "those people" at Abu Graib happened to an American citizen. On tape. With an FBI transcript of the tape. Those guys went to jail because a smart wife got lucky. What if they had caught her with the tape? Think she would have gotten her Miranda rights read to her?

Same with Abu Graib. One good American out of the rotten of that bunch who were committing war crimes in those pictures handed them over to his superior officer when they came across his lap. As he should have. Now, he's in a witness protection program, because many of his fellow servicemembers consider him a 'traitor." But the men who are beating, raping, killing – and taking pictures of it, to boot – are the real traitors to all Americans.

People say we're fighting "a war on terror," but what's the point if you become as corrupt as the people we're fighting? And since now the "land of freedom" is detaining and torturing human beings in the very dungeons built by our former enemies in Eastern Europe and even Iraq, who's winning the war, again? Did we even win the Cold War, really?

This is fucking embarrassing, and enrages me, as an American, more than any of these fairweather patriots could ever know. I can't see how any true patriot could support an administration that even hints at defending laws and policies that include torture, secret trials, interrogation without counsel, or even being arrested and held without charge, or the government even having to acknowledge they have you. That's what Patriots I and II would enable.

Oh, and your citizenship to be stripped if you are declared a "terrorist." And guess who decides that? Without guarantee of due process of the law? Yes, it may sound alarmist, but the legal groundwork for the state to be able to do this to American citizens – to disappear you completely without legal representation, recourse, or even being able to make that proverbial phone call – is already half-laid. Patriot I is law, see. If there had been more terrorist incidents, and the fear got to an unimaginable fever pitch, do you think they wouldn't have easily passed Patriot II, which the Republicans, by the way, had already conveniently (and secretly) drawn up?

When did current events start resembling the plot of a Star Wars movie?

Oh, that was Reagan, actually. My bad. When he used a science-fiction movie as the basis for a national defense strategy, against the protestations of all the scientific minds consulted on the project at the time.

Now, I guess we're back to Episodes I, II, and III for reals, right?

Abu Graib, CIA torture chambers in Eastern Europe, the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Patriot Act, and the fact that Patriot II was penned, its existence denied, and then admitted only after the full text of it had been leaked to the Internet.

Wait – the Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton for getting his Johnson Waxed™ and lying about it, but Bush, Cheney, and company are taking a drippy shit all over both the spirit and letter of the American Constitution, and it's OK?

I don't know how any Bushites can even look in the mirror and call themselves "patriots" and wave the American flag. They need to take a good, hard look at the first ten amendments and the Constitution and think about the unjust war we're in, the lies we were told to get us there, the shredding of our basic American principles when we torture people in secret dungeons, and how this bodes well for us in the long run of history – not just the short run of politics and vested interests.

A Hot Button Topic

OK, I'll bite.

I think the kid's right, and I've written about the same things, although I think he's just guilty of thinking he's showing the expat community "the light" with his undergraduate Ethnic Studies tools (I should know, since I've taught, at some point, most of what he's regurgitating here) when he's pointing out the perfectly obvious to anyone who's lived here a long time.

And I don't think he's talking "mumbo jumbo" or getting too deep into "critical theory" – it's pretty simple and straightforward, actually. I HATE critical theory, but it is sometimes useful, even if it's fun to bash its most many bad writers and the egregious cases of mental masturbation onto paper. I'm one of the ones who rolled my eyes and groaned the most in my department's core course seminars; I also got a reputation for being the "conservative guy" in my department. Oh, the irony.

In any case, I think it's pretty simple: There is the fact of European and American colonialism, and the power of English, whiteness, and American policy does exert force on the world. If one is "white," you cannot exist outside of it (nor can anyone who is not "white"). The problem with calling it "white privilege" is that you can't talk about WP within the United States and WP outside as exactly the same thing, although they are linked.

That's the mistake I made with my first major post on the topic, and the comments to that post (mostly rude and irrational, but a few made some real valid points) made that critical slip in logic clear; I think I defined WP too broadly, painted it with too large a brush, especially when we're talking about the real fact that whites are indeed "raced" in a place like Korea, and do not enjoy social power here. This is an important and easy-to-miss fact that many US-based considerations of American power vis-a-vis Asia continually miss, since extending American hegemony from slaves to Indian policy to Hiroshima to camptown girls is an easy thing to do rhetorically, but to leave the analysis at that masks the complexities of the issues and cultures and history involved.

That's why Chungmoo Choi's piece in the book Dangerous Women seemed so thin and her lead-in to her part of the book so hard to swallow: to argue that primping to show a good face to the white highway patrolman who's pulled her over, as the alleged symbol of white male American power, and link that to the camptown prostitutes whom she imagines does the same to American GI's, implying that both her (as a comfortable American academic with most likely a pretty nice car) and a Korean woman in a markedly different situation (a prostitute who lacks social options and advantages for a whole lot of reasons besides just American hegemony) share some essential subjectivity – that's a crock of shit, to put a fine, academic point on it. And it comes from not examining one's own point of privilege and and critical difference (being an upper-class American academic who has likely never been in the socio-economic position to even consider selling her body to any man, let alone an American GI) from the people with whom you claim to share a common point of view.

Americans have to be careful before looking at things in terms of identity politics that really only apply on the American side of the big water; and too many Asian American scholars, theorists, and undergraduates often make this mistake – and I include myself in that group.

"Whites" may enjoy advantages over people who are stigmatized both by Korean cultural patterns as well as the influence of say, the American media, which has perpetuated the same stereotypes of blacks as dirty, dumb, and dangerous across the world – but in the end, foreigners here are generally in the same boat when it comes to being part of a social group devoid of any real social or political power. And what that means for whites who live say, in Vietnam or the Philippines, also depends on how American (white) power connects to the actual, lived conditions of life in those countries, which depends on their particular histories, cultures, and other more specific factors.

That's why I think many whites here in Korea – from what I see in my comments, as well as here, as well as talk about with friends – bristle when people start talking about "white privilege" in the Korean context.

Which is also why I think Lee's being careful to point out the immense privilege enjoyed by some kyopos – especially, in Korea's case, American kyopos – is key; in a way, there are the benefits of being both insider and fetishized Other, and even the apparent disadvantages of being a kyopo (being held to unrealistic linguistic and cultural expectations of native Koreans, for example) are a function of what is an expectation – an affective inclusion – that few "real" foreigners ever get access to.

I think this is a point worth emphasizing, much more than the "white privilege" allegedly "enjoyed" by so many here. Lee's talking on a level much higher than the standard "git yer hands off 'my' wimmin!" mode that defines a base level of critique for many (male) kyopos and Korean nationals, so I think to attack him on that point is a bit straw man in itself; but I also think that Lee's missing a major point, one that I missed myself in the critique (and link) I mentioned above.

In the end, I think Lee's critique to be totally valid, he needs to have a real point; that's what I think is wrong with his analysis. So whites get treated differently here than most Others? Sure. But you gotta complexify it and think about what that means here – not just extend one's American Ethnic Studies learning, which can be arguably valid in the specific context of America. One has to nuance any critique with a consideration of what it means in terms of historical/cultural factors, i.e. being "white" doesn't help apparently white women from being stigmatized as Russian hookers and bar girls, and being "black" in a certain way gets you treated a whole lot better when you are an American who speaks American English, as opposed to a Nigerian laborer with an accent, demeanor, and different "look" that even Koreans instantly pick up.

Why do you think so many Nigerians here bend over backwards to show off the accoutrements of being unmistakably "American," with the hip-hop clothes and other "American" affectations? That's the power of American hegemony, too.

I just think that what we see as "white privilege" here isn't the "white privilege" that we see back home. If anything, the fetishization of, preference for, desire to experience "things white" are simply one more manifestation of American hegemony in general, more than the extension of the power that comes with having white skin in countries in which whites have always enjoyed the majority of economic, political, and social power.

To say that WP here and back home are the same is a critical mistake, an easy-to-make elision that can really undermine any attempt to delve deeper, or have a real conversation about this.

And a P.S. –

To those who simply dismiss this as "mumbo-jumbo" and the product of "Equality Studies", which I guess, is a sarcastic stand-in for real-world departments such as "Ethnic Studies" or "Peace and Conflict Studies" or "Women's Studies", all of which many in the academy would have to admit, no matter how begrudgingly, have contributed a great deal to the way even the most conservative departments and disciplines such as History, Anthropology, or Political Science conduct themselves – have you actually read a lot of the work in those stodgy departments before these new fields from the 1960's and 70's shook things up? One shouldn't be so quick to write off these new ways of producing academic knowledge, even if one doesn't like their styles or most extreme practitioners.

My Sundae Afternoon

I got Coldstone Creamed on a "sundae." When you break a low-sugar diet, you might as smash it into bits and stomp on them, grinding them bits into fine, chalky dust. That's about what my Apple Pie sunday did to my efforts to keep my blood sugar down, along with my risk of type-II diabetes. Oh, well – I'm pretty good most of the week. But I slapped myself silly with sugar, cinnamon, and sweet, evil syrups.

And I don't even have a sweet tooth. It was my friend's fault. Not mine. Hehe.

Coldstone Creamery's been in Korea for a bit, but I thought I'd spread the love with pictures, anyway. The one I hit was right outside the Ehwa Women's University front gate.

Happy Monday morning, everyone.