Growing pains me

Real life has crept up on me and I feel like I am actually beginning adulthood now. I’m in my Twenties Proper. Twenty-one didn’t count, because I was at university, and then I graduated and went on a holiday I couldn’t afford, and to a festival I couldn’t afford, and dossed around a lot even though I couldn’t afford to do that. That moving-to-London-and-running-out-of-money thing happened too.

I visited my friend Hannah one night this week. I could only stay for a few hours because she has an even more proper job now and had to go to bed at a sensible time. It’s one of those jobs where she has to actually go to an office and sit in it, doing a job, from 9-5, Monday to Friday.

I’m still working from home.

You know when they – the people older than you – said that your school days are the best of your life? You didn’t believe that being picked on, made to take your shirt off in P.E. even though you thought your body looked like a potato, and dating girls because you didn’t want to make yourself even more of a target could actually be anything other than the pile of shit it felt like. But they might have been right.

I don’t get to sit in dingy rooms hung with throws with my best friends, smoking weed and watching something weird on TV, and eating my Saturday job wages in junk food until the munchies go away any more. I guess I could do that but then everyone’d be late for work the next day. It’s not like school when we could decide how we feel about going to lessons today every day and most of the time decide that, you know what, we don’t really feel like it so let’s just go and get some chips and a Coke, and smoke a bit ’round our friend’s place, yeah? Yeah.

Things are changing, and they’re changing so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. Change is good, but change is hard, and it takes some effort.

Some things I have to make the effort to do within the foreseeable future are:

1. Apply for better-paid jobs
2. Finish this TEFL thing I’ve started and not done much about in the last fortnight
3. Think some more about my life and what I might do with it
4. Clean the flat

P.S. It’s been a while. I ran out of things to say, so I didn’t say them.

Building a Mind

Today I am suffering day number two of a god-awful hangover, and in between sips of orange juice and slices of pizza I have wondered what happened to the pledge I made to myself two blog posts ago to seriously cut down my alcohol intake. I don’t drink often, but as is typical of the British I have a tendency to drink to excess whenever I do do it. Not experiencing this dryness of the mouth and aching of the head is the reason I wanted to stop drinking in the first place, but it’s all gone a bit wrong. This has gone a bit wrong too, I think. My writing on this blog. What it is is that I feel as though I’ve begun to preach. I didn’t start posting these thoughts with the intention of shoving my views down people’s throats, but I believe I have started to do just that. I feel anger and discomfort in my own writing, and I don’t like it.

My ‘views’. I don’t feel comfortable with that term in itself. ‘View’ implies ‘opinion’ and I find the concept of opinions difficult to come to terms with. What is an opinion but a learned connection between an action or a certain belief system or a piece of music and the idea that it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?  Opinions are really just associations our brains make between a thing and a feeling. As I understand it, (and please, anyone who knows better, do correct me if I’m wrong) our brains are not like pools of water within which the ability to think is fluid and capable of taking any course we feel like. An individual thought – an idea connecting two other separate ideas – takes a strict course. It is the interaction between those two separate ideas already existing in the brain via the synapses that, I believe, are created each time we think a new thought. So it isn’t random or fluid, and it’s sort of stuck. Opinions, it seems to me, once set must be added to in order to expand one’s knowledge, or understanding, or to develop one’s empathy. So is it possible to ever truly change an opinion if that original thought – the bridging of one idea to another via a physical structure in the brain – always exists at the root of the issue? It’s like building a Lego house around a broken Lego brick which won’t come unstuck from the big green base. I don’t know. I am not remotely scientific. I have never studied the brain beyond the basics of GCSE biology.  All I can say is that I am interested in people’s opinions because they can be so solid, yet somebody else’s opinion on the same subject can be completely opposite to it. This suggests to me there is little fluidity in the creation of opinions. We set ideas in minds like we show people where to drive their cars by laying roads. Point A leads to Point B, from which the road leads directly to Point C. What a child learns, therefore, will be the basis for whatever information it collects from then on.

I have mentioned before my young siblings’ strong opinions on certain issues of particular interest to me, and how they worry me. Recently I have been worrying less about the fact that they have them, and more about the fact that they have been put there by somebody, or something. Something has taken a young head and structured it in such a way as dictates that its owner is made to believe that X is bad and Y is good, and without fluidity of thought there is no way of getting rid of that association. The car must follow the road. I can try to build upon this broken brick in such a way as reduces the influence of that small initial thought by drowning it out with ideas which contradict it, but it will always be there. It is a seed planted deep in the soil of the most fertile mind.

Each of us is a product of our influences, be they natural or nurtured, and it terrifies me that we have this capability to influence. We are all of us – no matter how much we try to fight it and to think for ourselves – we are all given a road to travel by those we are made to or choose to spend time with, or by what we read, or are made to read, or see, or are made to see. None of us is free. We are all wired like robots to behave in certain ways, filled with combinations of ones and zeros and corresponding actions and beliefs. So, I have been wondering, why do we not feel a greater duty of care over young minds? I am not a parent, although one day I hope to be, so perhaps I am completely unqualified to comment. Perhaps it is just too hard to manipulate a child’s mind in only the best ways possible. But is there no way of setting the best foundations for the construction of a mind? Surely that is our greatest responsibility in the advancement of the human race. But who am I to decide what the best way is? By my own admission I cannot think any more fluidly than the rest of humanity, so how can I ever be sure that the ideas I intend to plant in my children’s minds are not the poisonous foundations of hatred, apathy, and selfishness?

What I can do is to focus on the building blocks I choose to add to the structure that is my own mind. What foundations are laid will be in my head for the rest of my life, until perhaps my mind begins to dismantle itself, and even now I will continue to be laid roads for by outside influences which I do not choose, but cannot help, to acknowledge. I have been steadily teaching myself mostly over the last three or four years simply to question. If there is anything which can help us build positively it is questioning. Once the idea of questioning everything is established – once that seed is sown –  the ability to reassess and to stop and wonder becomes not only an ability but a compulsion. Since making the conscious effort a few years ago not to take things at face value, and to properly determine the worth, the validity, and the goodness of things on their own merits, I have enjoyed riding with the changes I can feel in my own head. There is nothing more satisfying, and nothing more important for us as human beings than influencing a mind, even if to begin with that mind is only your own.

Body versus Mind

We are all essentially physical beings. We’re clusters of cells and one day our bodies – the things that we are – will give up the fight against whatever happens to attack us, be it cancer, or heart disease, or a speeding car, and I believe that will be the end of us.

It is possible to prolong, even if only slightly, the time for which we experience being simply by taking care of ourselves. I was nearing legal adulthood by the time I began caring at all how well my body worked. I spent my childhood and teenage years wrapped pretty cosily inside my head and the thought of taking care of myself – my skin, bone, and muscle – laid dormant somewhere in the back of my mind behind the straightened hair and eye shadow that represented my yearning for physical wellness. Hair products and make up were more familiar to me then than dumbbells and running shoes, and so I took care of myself as best I knew how to in front of a mirror. At the same time I read books, falling into a bit of a love affair with Jane Austen at sixteen and seventeen, both because I enjoyed it and saw it as mentally enriching. I wanted to take care of myself physically as well as mentally even though I didn’t know how to do both.

I underwent something of a revolution between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, when I slowly developed the courage to venture into a gym – I had never been, and still am not a fan of sport – to begin figuring out how to look after myself. I began by assimilating in the only way I knew how, by sticking strictly to the treadmills where the women tended to congregate. The grunts and groans of the weights section were as frightening as the centre of the rugby pitch had been during P.E. lessons and I nervously crept around its edges for a few months before bravely venturing to try out the weight machines, which I had noticed some of the women using to hone their abs.

Since then I’ve become pretty competent at working out and eating pretty well, and I enjoy feeling healthy and fit and – something it took a while to realise I even wanted to feel – masculine. I’d always tutted at the notion of ‘masculinity’ and the image of the hefty, heaving Neanderthal I associated with it, and lifting weights perfectly complimented that image. I considered myself to be an academic and, like so many people still do, I believed that people are destined to exist as either academics or a body-obsessed ignoramuses, and that never the interests of the twain should meet. It was books or sport; essays or reps; fine wine or protein shakes. But why? Since I’ve begun taking care of myself I have faced criticism from various people – all invariably the type to consign themselves strictly to the academic division of humanity – who for one reason or another see something demeaning in my strive for physical fitness. ‘Oh, why’ – they ask, exasperatedly – ‘are you doing that?’ Well, why not? Does it say something about me that I don’t want said? Does it say ‘this person does not think’? If so, so be it. The attitudes of academics to physical exercise that I have encountered are attitudes based in ignorance. I’m inclined to believe that envy plays a part in the criticism I have received. To exercise requires determination and strong will. Just as writing an essay takes the discipline of sitting and focussing on any topic for extended periods of time, lifting dumbbells takes the discipline of ignoring the urge to relent – to do what is easier and go home to an early dinner – in order to achieve a goal.

However, even I am guilty of viewing physical gains as a result of gym workouts as something to be ashamed of for some reason. Whilst writing this, I took a break, and during this break I received a compliment on the evident progress I’ve made with my body in recent months. Even though I am proud of what I’m achieving, and intend to continue to achieve indefinitely, I couldn’t take the compliment standing tall. I shrunk away and mumbled an ‘oh, yeah, thanks’ half to myself. I’m pretty certain I blushed. I could feel the judging eyes of my academic peers burning into me as I sat there like a limp leaf, shy and not sure how to react.

Still, I am proud. I’ve come across examples in the past of intelligent people writing about the satisfaction they feel in not bowing to the pressure of the media to be slim, toned, bronze, and rippling with muscle. That’s fine. I really, truthfully, do not care what anybody else does with their body. But I consider not exercising the body in cases where it is possible to do so as equal to not exercising the mind when it is possible to do so. I could sit at home and wrap myself up in the goings on of the lives of celebrities whose every move is documented by countless identical magazines. I would learn nothing and probably not develop in any meaningful or beneficial way. What I choose to do is to read novels, informative articles, and opinions which I think will somehow enrich my mind and life in general. Similarly, I could sit at home not exercising, eating whatever I liked whilst finding out when Kim Kardashian had her last colonic. Instead, I organise myself so that I know when and for how long I will exercise and what I want to achieve with each visit to the gym. I work hard, resist temptation, and see the results. And it makes me happy.

I like to read and I like to write, and I like to run and I like to lift weights. I’m pretty content, and I’m making my choices for me. Whether or not I am influenced by the media I couldn’t say for sure. Besides, is someone who lives differently from the way I do any less influenced by what they see and are made to see? Live and let live, unless it’s life or death. I think that’s a pretty good attitude.

A new me, or something like that

When I had to give up on living in London having spent two months and all of my money there I considered my coming back to my home town to be a pretty big step in the wrong direction. I went to London for a job I didn’t want and which didn’t pay enough because, having graduated and enjoyed a great summer, all I could think to do with myself was to escape this town and just to be  in a big, new, exciting place.

The reality of returning home hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as I expected and in fact I think coming back is exactly what I needed. Going to London was great fun and a lot happened within the short space of time I spent there, but I barely had a moment to myself and career-wise I was going nowhere. I worked as a fundraiser and didn’t like, nor was particularly good at my job. Also, I couldn’t find the jobs I really wanted, and I didn’t have the relevant experience behind me that would make an application to those jobs successful even if I did find them. On top of that, my living conditions were far from ideal and at times I felt unimaginably lonely in a city of so many millions of anonymous faces. I was stuck, but found it difficult even to try to remove myself from my situation for a number of reasons including not wanting to prove everybody back home right in betting that I wouldn’t make it in London and would be home by Christmas. (As it turned out, I was back over a month before Christmas came around, well in time to spend yet another birthday back at Mum’s house.)

Since I’ve been back I’ve got a full-time job as a copywriter, I’ve moved into my own flat, and most importantly I’ve been given the time, the security, and the structure to allow me to really consider what I’m doing. I’ve got a real routine for the first time since I was at school, and as much as working nine ’til five insatiably devours the minutes, hours, and days of my life, it has given me the ability to plan like I never have before. I write all day five days a week, and in the time since I began my new job I’ve written half a novel’s worth of words on subjects I had little to absolutely no understanding of prior to writing about them. For one thing, this has shown me that perhaps writing is a serious possibility for me. I’ve always wanted to write for my living, but until now I doubted it was possible for me. Now I have ideas that are not just flitting back and forth around my head, but which seem somehow possible to harness and to translate into real pieces of work.

What I really mean to say is that I feel in control. I am ‘in a good place’, an American might say. Looking after myself all by myself, I am eating healthily without having to deal with the temptations of Mum’s (very tempting – almost irresistible) baking, and I’m working out harder than I ever have before, and with a proper weight lifting schedule to follow too. I’m also expressing myself creatively, making things with my hands, sketching, writing, and painting. It’s like I’m a real, rounded person all of a sudden.

I have a series of good intentions for the next year, or however long I end up staying here. Getting really properly physically fit is one of them and I am working on that already. Another is creative expression and I’m dealing with that too. A couple of other things I want to achieve, but haven’t yet stated on the Internet: giving up alcohol altogether, and writing for a magazine. I want to achieve both of these things this year and now I’ve said it here it’s going to be hard not to try my very hardest. Now I’ve made a promise not only to myself but to you too. I will be letting down both myself and anyone reading this if I fail.Oh, and my best friend and I are starting yoga next week. New us or something like that. Really I would just like to be able to sit in the seated angle pose without worrying that my legs are about to snap.

I sat down tonight not knowing what I wanted to say. I haven’t posted anything here for over a month, and this feels good.

The End.

P.S. I’ve developed a habit in perhaps the last nine months or so of distractedly playing with my nipples in public. Make of that what you will.

Everything will be all right.

I’m a bit prone to anxiety. Sometimes, when I’m at home, the kettle’s boiling, and the mugs are set out for Mum and me, my chest suddenly feels an almost indescribable bonding of both cavernous hollowness and virginal anal tightness, and no matter how long I stand still, hold my hand to my chest, and take deep breaths, the feeling doesn’t go away. Hours later, Mum will ask whether I’m feeling better, and most of the time I won’t be.

I started a new job today. A graduate job, too. Instead of muttering half-under-breath oh, I just work at a call centre – it’s temporary whilst rolling my eyes at my own sad existence, I can now proclaim I’m a copywriter – for a green energy company, no less, with what feels like it might just verge upon pride.

When I got up this morning, I couldn’t have smiled if I’d tried. My heart was beating as if it were racing against the hare, whilst my feet moved as if wishing to keep the tortoise company in his travels. On the day I was offered the job I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t look forward. I dreaded it. I just didn’t believe it could be. How could I hold down a real job? I’ve never had any real responsibility and been paid for it in my life. Working at a call centre I had constant supervision and worked seventeen hours a week. Now I’m going to be working full-time from home almost every day for the next ten weeks (until the company relocates to accommodate for its growing staff) and everything I am responsible for is completely down to me, with no helpful, friendly face around to reassure me if something isn’t as blindingly clear as I would like it to be. Aren’t you excited? Mum kept asking as I busied myself with making breakfast. I didn’t even answer. I mumbled a humph sort of sound, stared listlessly at the fruit bowl, then the cereal cupboard, then the eggs, the toaster, and the fridge, because breakfast I could deal with. I’ve made breakfast countless times, but I’ve never written an article on something I know nothing about and then had to submit it to someone who is paying me to write it, for it to be scrutinised, picked apart, and thrown back at me covered with red ink. By the time I’d gone to bed last night I’d decided it wasn’t unlikely that I’d be fired from my new job within the week and that the call centre would be receiving a call from me, begging them to take me back (again).

I was driven to work by my best friend who was also beginning her new job at the same company today. We were offered twin jobs, which is just typical of us. Glued at the hip anyway, we’ve got the same job too. I didn’t speak much on the journey, stared out of the window at the passing trees, and wondered how long it would all last. She was excited, and I was depressed. The call centre would reluctantly take me back, and I would hate everything, and probably try to become a dancer at a strip club in Blackpool before rotting in a plastic bag at the bottom of the Irish sea. It didn’t help matters that I’d forgotten to take along my graduation certificate, which we had been asked to take with us. That was the bruised cherry on top of a stale cake, and my fate seemed sealed. I would be kicked out before I’d put my name on the dotted line. I was useless.

But when I got there, and my new colleague, O_____, made us some tea, and began to talk through the areas we’d be writing about, my chest felt better, and it wasn’t so bad after all.  I began to see the new job as a positive thing. I might actually make something of myself. Perhaps I won’t be sleeping in a single bed in my mum’s house until I’m forty. Perhaps I might be good at something. We were taught all about things we’ve never shown an interest in before, we chatted with O_____ and our other new colleagues and, once we’d covered everything we needed to know, I left with a smile on my face.

So, at the opposite end of the day, my heart is beating not just as slowly as the tortoise moves, and my feet are moving not quite as speedily as the hare’s, and I feel okay, possibly even good. I might go so far as to say I’m excited, which is nice.

Work worries

I am sitting here at my desk with the idea of putting something down ‘on paper’, but I’m almost certain that nothing will come. I haven’t written a word outside of text messages, Twitter, and Facebook, and the odd hand-written reminder, in the last two weeks. The reason for this, I believe, is that I have had a job to do. A real job, like ‘they’, the masses, all do day, after day, after day. I have been filling shelves with food for two weeks as well as making calls for the charity for which I have worked for four years, and I have barely had a moment to myself. I have woken up, gone to work, been told what to do, done what I’ve been told, come home, slept, and repeated, and throughout this entire time I have often been aware of a cloudiness of my mind, and an inability to properly focus on anything other than the menial tasks at hand. I have worked alongside people whose lives have been consumed by this ‘busy’ routine, and whose days consist of nothing more than the simplest of thought processes at the workplace and the supposed enjoyment of numbing themselves in front of the television (the television! I have grown to fear the television, but I won’t talk about that today) at home, before repeating the miserable process the next day. This routine is excepting weekends (‘Here you are, have a small portion of your life to enjoy yourself with’ – ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Man’) when people like to do ‘nice’ things like ‘going for dinner’ or ‘watching a film’, never allowing themselves more than five minutes’ peace lest they should actually develop a disconcerting thought about the meaninglessness of our wonderfully material existence.

I can feel the constructed necessity of earning money pulling at my life down one road, but I want to take another path. If this fortnight of non-stop ‘real world’ work has taught me anything, it is that I don’t want to be a part of it. What is a life which is handed to us with terms and conditions?  We’re all in a web, and I look around and everyone else seems to be so happy to be stuck that they don’t even blink for fear of upsetting the balance, but all I want to do is kick and scream and tear at the strings (which, of course, will only cause me to become even more tangled).

When I was fifteen I had it all planned. I was going to be heterosexual, I would get married, and I would have children, and I would be a lawyer, and write books on the side, and I would wear a suit. In one way, I wish I were stupid. Stupid people live so quietly, and happily. (This sounds awfully arrogant, but I believe honest expression is the most appreciated form.) At the same time, I want to embrace my yearning for something more, and make use of it to my benefit, and the benefit of anyone who cares, or is able, to take note. I can’t help feeling that from here onwards everything is going to become only more complicated, only more of a struggle against the rules imposed over our lives, and only more of a disappointment for someone who, at aged fifteen, thought that earning money was his chief aim. That is not to say that I am not tempted by money now, but chasing a vacuous dream has somewhat lost its allure since the daydreaming days of my mid-teens when to be ‘normal’ seemed the height of fantasy. The ideas I’m chasing now are still unclear. I need time to sleep soundly before the images will properly form in front of me. If I can somehow shake off the shackles of work, and earning, and fabricated, meaningless, life-consuming responsibilities, then maybe I will figure things out.

So, I’ve written something. I have been granted a few hours of my life to myself this afternoon, before the slog continues tonight, and I have got a little bit of something off my chest. I feel like every time I write anything I am covering old ground, but if I can still write then I suppose I must still have something to say, even if it isn’t coming out as I’d like it to.

I’ll try to write soon.

The onset of odious opinions.

Aside: I’ve been putting off posting anything. The last entry I made to this blog got a few really nice reviews from a few people whose opinions really matter to me and although I felt encouraged to begin with, I have inevitably ended up in battle with that great nemesis, Self-Doubt. I have told myself that what I wrote must have been a one-off. I must have fluked it. To begin with I thought ‘fuck, yes, Ben – you are good‘ and I had to hold myself back from quickly bashing out another entry to add to that which had received so much praise. Although I’m glad that I didn’t do that, I have now reached a point at which I feel I have to post something because if I don’t then I’ll lose my way and stop posting altogether, and people will stop paying attention. (Didn’t I, in my first or second post, declare that I was writing this mainly, if not solely, for myself? I am a liar. Who writes anything with the intention of nobody ever reading it? If someone writes a journal [which I have tried and failed at a couple of times] that they claim to wish nobody else to read, then I am almost certain that they are lying too, and at the very least dream of its posthumous reading by some unknown stranger of the future who will find it beneath the loose floorboard it was left beneath.) 

What I really wanted to write about leads on almost perfectly from what I wrote about in my last post. Worried about the possibly illiberal opinions my brother might develop in the next few years as he enters that minefield that is The Teens, I didn’t consciously suspect my eight-year-old sister of being the one more likely to take the path towards black-and-white conservatism. The girl is only eight years old. I can’t hold her responsible for everything that comes out of her mouth. She is regurgitating constantly. Half of the things she and her peers talk about they most probably don’t understand. But, sitting with her and my mother, I browsing Twitter, with Come Dine With Me on in the background last night, I heard her say “he’s gay – that’s disgusting”.  For a moment I almost let myself allow the moment to pass with nothing more than my own raised eyebrows and a moment’s eye-contact with my mother to mark it, but, realising that I was calmly controlling a deep stirring of anger inside myself, I felt obliged to say something.

Me: ‘Why is that disgusting?’

Her: ‘He’s gay. He kissed that man.’

Me: ‘Why do say think that’s disgusting?’

Her: ‘Because they’re gay.’

It went something like that. Not much was said, and my mum left the room on a household errand. Abbie remained and thought no more of my chirping up at her comment, and continued to play at whatever game she was creating for herself on the footstool. Again, although I told myself to breathe and let the matter lie, I felt I had to speak up. I asked her again why she had said what she’d said and she told me that being gay ‘isn’t normal’. I told her that’s fine, but that to be ‘not normal’ isn’t bad; that to be different from most other people doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad person. There is a great difference between ‘different’ and ‘bad’. I asked her where she had got this idea that for someone to be gay is inherently bad, and she named her peers at school. I asked her what she would think if someone she knows turned out to be gay, and she told me that had she known this person was gay from the outset then she would not have become friends with them at all. My brother entered the room and joined the conversation midway through, and offered the opinion that ‘gay people are just the same as everyone else: they just love different people’. I was relieved, and delighted, (see my last post – you’ll understand) because even if this is a regurgitated opinion too, then at least the opinions he has been fed are those which I believe should be offered to all children in this day and age. Where my sister and her friends have heard what they have heard I am at a loss to imagine. What parent, teacher, or any other adult exposes a child to as strong and damaging an opinion as that?

This is where my issue lies. The children are unaccountable, and will lap up whatever it is that they are handed. At some point they might rebel against those beliefs, but I believe that usually a child will follow its childhood influencers’ values to a fair degree. So what are these siblings of mine hearing that allows them – causes them – to think this way? Perhaps it is partly what they are not hearing. The film Weekend by Andrew Haigh includes a speech by Chris New as the character Glen, outlining his ideas about the overpoweringly dominant and exclusive nature of heterosexuality in popular culture and the complete lack of any gay role models in everyday life. On adverts, in books, films, TV, stories, songs, sport, and everything in-between, we see straight people. Homosexuals are today slowly being let out of the gloom into the light of the mainstream, but are still a long way from shedding the shackles of their social subdivision. It is still considered newsworthy for a gay couple to feature on a television advert. What impact does this have on my siblings? The idea that the gays must not be spoken of is blindingly obviously insidious. Like the devil, children learn that what is not to be spoken of is bad, and not to be trusted. Don’t let children know about drugs, because they’re bad. Don’t let children hear about the rape stories on the news, because they’re bad. Don’t let children watch horror films because they’re bad. Don’t let children develop awareness of homosexuality, because it’s bad.

Is this a valid argument? I believe so. I believe that if my siblings had grown up understanding that their big brother likes other men (they are yet to find out) the way that Daddy likes women and Mummy likes men, then there would be no question in their minds that there is nothing wrong – nothing even to comment upon – about homosexuality – that homosexuality just is. I believe that the sooner we bring up our children to think this way about homosexuality amongst the various other divergences from the norms of human nature that have for so long been lauded as the good against the otherwise bad, the better for our own social development. I won’t be letting the subject lie, and I have hope for my siblings yet.

The next step? The big reveal.