What Are You So Afraid of? (or: My Adventures in Phobialand)

Do you really get more scared as you get older?

I swear I didn't used to be terrified of heights or spiders or planes - but now the very thought of seeing a spider or flying on a plane at 38,000 feet (or, worse, being on a plane WITH a spider!) freaks me out.

I remember flying on planes quite a lot when I was young, particularly when we lived in Russia. Someone else can confirm this, but I don't remember it bothering me at all. But sometime around junior high or high school planes began to freak me out. And recently I've been finding that it's not just planes that bother me, but heights in general.


I discovered this latest fear just a few weeks ago, when I went to the Utah Symphony for the 11th or 12th time in the past eight months. But this time, instead of sitting on the orchestra (ground) level like I had during all the previous shows, I found myself being ushered up... Up... Up... UP to the third balcony. Which might have been fine if I had been sitting a few rows back - but instead my seat was on the sides of the balcony, right up against the 50-foot drop to the orchestra level. 

Suffice it to say, I couldn't handle it. I immediately felt myself getting dizzy as I looked down at the performers in the symphony. I had to clutch on to the sides of my seat and keep my eyes closed for much of the performance. Even then, I found myself getting lightheaded and breaking out into a sweat. I was terrified I was going to pass out and somehow fall over the 3-foot railing. Or maybe there would be an earthquake, and the balcony would collapse and I would go flying into the eternities. When I walked back up the aisle during intermission, I had to keep one part of my body touching the wall at all times (I probably looked drunk to the other concertgoers who saw me staggering up the aisle, clutching to the wall for safety.)

Abravanel Hall: I was on the highest balcony, right up against the edge.

I almost left during intermission, but mustered up my courage since it was a concert (of John Williams music) I had really been looking forward to. I still spent the rest of the concert terrified, but I was proud of myself for enduring it.

That's the thing about phobias - they're completely irrational. I was never in any danger at the concert - the chances of something catastrophic happening were approximately .0000003 (I put myself in considerably more danger when I got in my car to drive to and from the concert.) And there's also a big difference between a phobia and a regular old fear. I don't like snakes, but they don't make me want to scream and run in the opposite direction like spiders do, and they don't make me spend the next hour flicking invisible creepy-crawlies off my body. I can rationally tell myself that as long as I keep an appropriate distance from a snake, then I don't have anything to worry about. But I can't do the same with spiders - even if the horribly evil-looking spider is in a very well-secured glass cage (at a zoo, for example) it will still freak me out. Even if it's not a poisonous spider that could ever do me any real harm. I can read all the statistics about how airplanes are considerably safer than any other means of transportation, but it doesn't change the fact that cars and boats and trains don't frighten me while planes still do. One part of my fully realizes that it's irrational, but I can't seem to help it.

This is one of the most terrifying images I have ever seen. Ever. No, he's not using a harness or any ropes.

And so you say: "Well, ok, most people have some sort of phobia. You just learn to live with it and to avoid the things you're afraid of as much as possible." But that's the problem - some of the things I love to do the most require me to do the things I'm afraid of. I really love to travel, and I dream of month-long tours of Europe or Southeast Asia or South America - but how am I supposed to do it if the thought of being transported to those places makes me break out in a cold sweat? In an ideal world where I have unlimited time and money, I would just use alternative means of transportation to get everywhere - however, boats are kind of slow, and they still haven't invented trains that go under seas (thanks, shortsighted engineers!)

I mean, how do you prevent phobias from keeping you from doing the things you want to do? Two of my friends live in Phoenix and I'd love to visit them - but even though round-trip tickets are only about $100, I still can't gather up the courage to get on a plane. I'd love to go spend a long weekend in Florida or Washington state - but, well, planes! Metal tubes at 40,000 feet! Not my idea of a good time.

I will, however, force myself to get on a plane the next time an opportunity to spend time in Europe presents itself. Maybe.

(Ok, so I don't really know what the point of this blog post was. I'll just sum everything up and say: Phobias suck.)

The end.

India & Nepal Narrative: Day 2

Where was I?

…

Ahh yes… 10 months later, and I’m finally writing Part II of my India and Nepal narrative. This will probably be a bit faster paced, since at this point I mainly just want to get this all down somewhere before my memory completely fails me.

[Edit: Haha. Never mind about the faster paced thing]

 Day 2 – Delhi

When we last left our protagonists, they had finally arrived at their Delhi hotel after more than 24 nightmarish hours of sitting in airplanes. It’s the middle of the day in Delhi, but they collapse in bed and don’t wake up until the next morning. Will the new day bring better fortunes for our exhausted heroes? Let’s find out…

It’s always kind of fun to wake up in a new city after a good night’s rest. You lie there in bed, trying to figure out where you are and why you’re in this strange bed, when suddenly you’re like: “Wait! I’m in Delhi! India! What am I doing in bed?! There’s so much to do! So much to see!” And it’s really exciting and stuff.

And then you roll over and go back to sleep for two more hours.

 
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Several hours later, and we’re both ready to start the day. Now fully rested, we realize that we really are in India—one of the great countries of the world, and one with more than a billion people and a fascinating culture and thousands and thousands of years of history. It’s an enormous country, and you probably couldn’t explore all it has to offer in ten lifetimes. So the first thing we do is get on a plane and fly to Nepal.

Day 2 – Kathmandu

Nepal is less stressful than India. Kathmandu’s a big, crowded city, but it seems slightly less overwhelming than Delhi. Even though the taxi drivers are just as bad.

Upon getting out of the Kathmandu airport (which is much less nice than Delhi’s super new and sophisticated airport with its enormous (enormous) billboard outside customs suggesting that we all invest in mangoes), we find ourselves accosted by various Nepalese men trying to convince us to travel with them in their taxi so they can take us to their travel agency which is the best travel agency in this city of thousands of travel agencies. We choose one at random, and find ourselves on another of those crazy and frightening rides through a large city (“Lanes? What are those?” says our driver. Or at least I’m going to pretend that he said that, for art’s sake or something.) I’m more awake this time, and thus more cognizant of the fact that I’m in a moderately dangerous situation. So I close my eyes, clutch onto the door, and hope that I don’t die. And eventually we do reach the travel agency relatively unscathed.

Kathmandu traffic is a bit chaotic

The travel agent guy is nice, and speaks English pretty well. He tells us that he has a brother who also owns a Nepal travel agency in Florida, but we’re not entirely sure whether to believe him or not. Regardless, we tell him what he hope to do in Nepal and how much time we have. He’s slightly incredulous that we can get everything done in the four days we have, but we insist that we can and he agrees (he’s going to get money from us, after all.)

So within an hour or so of arriving in Kathmandu we’re in another taxi on our way south—and down (several thousand feet down)—towards Chitwan National Park.

The ride out of Kathmandu is fun. That is to say, it’s a little bit scary as we travel down poorly maintained winding mountain roads. It’s also a well-traveled road, so you’re not only driving on scary mountain roads, you have the double thrill of driving on scary mountain roads with lots of crazy Nepalese drivers. At one point, we go over a bridge with a hole in the side barrier, and the driver cheerfully informs us that a few years ago a taxi driver lost control of his car and went off the bridge and into the gorge and died and stuff.

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The roads in the foothills of Nepal

Chitwan: Where the Tigers (Allegedly) Roam

Anyways, we eventually get out of the mountains. We’re now in the jungle of Nepal where the ground is flat. We breathe a sigh of relief.
 

The town outside Chitwan, plus some elephants

It should be noted that this taxi ride was 4+ hours long, and we only stopped for concessions/etc. once the whole time. The taxi was small, and by the end of the trip my legs were in excruciating pain. It turns out that trying to get from Kathmandu to Chitwan National Park and then back to Kathmandu in a single day isn’t the best idea in the world. In fact, in a ranking of the twenty-nine trillion best ideas in the world, trying to get from Kathmandu to Chitwan National Park to Kathmandu in a taxi in a single day wouldn’t even get an honorable mention. Riding through the jungle on the crowded back of an elephant where you can’t even stretch your legs after spending four hours riding in a cramped taxi would also fail to rank on such a list.  But still…

Chitwan National Park is a famous park known as one of the few places in the world where you have a decent chance of spotting rhinos or the endangered and elusive Nepalese mule deer.  Err…  Tiger. I mean tiger. It’s one of the few places in the world where you have a decent chance of spotting the elusive Bengal tiger. The hotel that marks our starting point looks decent, and it’s right next to a river that apparently houses the rather ugly (and critically endangered) Gharial crocodile.

Our delicious (?) meal at the hotel outside Chitwan

I kind of wish we were spending a night or two in the hotel, since Chitwan is the kind of place you go to spend several days, with expeditions into different parts of the park each day. We only have one day (only a few hours, in fact) so we make the best of it by taking an elephant-back safari.  My legs still hurt, but:

The view from the back of an elephant

The fourth most exotic creature we encounter on our adventure

I’m riding on an elephant through the jungle of Nepal! We’re hunting tigers! There are trees! My legs hurt! Strange, jungle noises! More trees!

We were hoping to see a tiger or rhino, but they were pretty rare and I was just happy to see:

Peacock?

A peacock!

Its plumage wasn’t spread out, so it mostly (my legs hurt) just looked like a colorful bird with a really long tail. I kind of love birds, so it was kind of (my legs hurt) awesome to see.

We also saw:

The exotic deer

A deer!

Ok, the deer wasn’t particularly exciting—after all, we see them all the time in our yard in Alpine (albeit, probably a slightly different species of deer)—but still! A Nepalese deer!

And a monkey!

We saw a monkey flitting through the tops of the my legs hurt tall trees.

A tiger track?

And the footprint of a tiger, probably planted by the park owners to make us think that there are actually tigers in the area.

And trees!

The exotic deer, part deux

And a jackalope! (Wait, what?)

Lots of trees. It was very jungle-y. Tall trees, swamps, tall reeds and bushes.

And, uh…

We’re riding on the back of an elephant in Nepal. 

That’s cool, right?

And then off the elephant and back in the taxi for the 4+ hour trip back to Kathmandu.

On the way back, I see a small group of monkeys on the side of the road (or was that India? I don’t remember.)

It turns out that Kathmandu has traffic jams at one in the morning. As we’re driving up the mountain to get back into Kathmandu we find ourselves riding behind a huge line of trucks bringing supplies into the valley. So the last few miles take us a long time. And I just want to sleep. And we’re leaving for the airport to Lukla in five or six hours. And I’m tired.

And my legs hurt.

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PS. These India/Nepal posts are turning out to be really long. I meant for this to cover several days of the trip, but that didn’t quite happen. At this rate, I could get six or seven more equally long posts out of the topic (the final post to be made sometime in October of 2018.) While all the detail is good for journal purposes, I hope I’m not boring everyone to death with all the mundane details…

A bad picture of me (and some Danish guy,) just to prove that it happened

Four Side Notes Before My Next Post Goes Up in 2014

A Danish side note

Our elephant-back partners were a young couple from Denmark. We talked to them a bit before starting the elephant ride, and learned that they were currently taking a break from their university studies as they took a world tour. And by “world tour,” I’m being quite literal. They were spending 8 months or so traveling to Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and so on.

Jealous.
 

Me, and a little bit of Nate and the back of the Danish guy

An elephantine side note

Elephants are smart. And I hated the way our driver treated his elephant. Whenever it stopped to eat some of the delicious foliage or to, uh, relieve himself, the man would start beating on its ears with a stick. By the end, part of the elephant’s ginormous ear was clearly bleeding from the abuse. Still, it showed a certain amount of loyalty. The man got off to do something or another, and shortly thereafter the blanket he had been sitting on fell to the ground. After doing whatever he got off to do, the man did his little trick of standing on the elephant’s trunk and then having the elephant lift him up to his seat. However, he didn’t notice that he had lost his blanket. Nevertheless, and without any prompting, the elephant used its trunk to pick up the blanket and “hand” it to the man. Which was pretty cool.

A note about Nepalese trucks

Nepalese trucks are cooler than American semis. They’re quite colorful, and often contain amusing, poorly worded English phrases that probably don’t mean what the drivers (or whoever painted them) think they mean. Nevertheless, I was inspired by phrases like “Take Love Easy” and “No Time for Love" There were lots and lots of trucks as we slowly made our way up the mountains and back to Kathmandu, so I got to see lots of fun phrases (many were repeated, and I’ve now forgotten many of them because I didn’t write this earlier.) The traffic was especially horrendous in the last hour (around 1 am) when we were stuck in a veritable traffic jam of these trucks coming into Kathmandu and carrying everything from fruit to yaks.

One of the many profoundly captioned trucks we encountered

A note about yaks

Yaks are fantastic. I mean, just say their name a few times. Say it ten times. Say it a hundred times—it never gets old. If I ever get reincarnated, and I can’t be reincarnated as an aardvark or as a quadrilionaire in the future when there are flying cars and moonbases, then I want to be reincarnated as a yak. An attack yak named Zach (or Mac) that carries a knapsack and eats flapjacks and TicTacs and likes to read paperback(s).

(Wait, what?)

Flight Time - India Trip Day 1

It disturbs me that six months have passed since I visited India and Nepal. Fearful that I will start forgetting details of my trip, I have finally decided to record my memories of the trip on this here blog.

Day 1 – May 23rd (ish): Flight Time (sans Big Easy)


I thought about omitting the details of our flights, but decided that this is a good opportunity to whine about how much I hate airplanes.

During my trip I flew from Salt Lake City to San Francisco to meet up with Nate, then flew from San Francisco to Seoul, then from Seoul to Delhi, then from Delhi to Kathmandu, then from Kathmandu to Lukla (on a 14-seat plane), then back from Lukla to Kathmandu, to Delhi, to Seoul, to San Francisco, to Orange County (to meet up with Kristina & Tom and Mom & Dad.) About a week later I flew to DC, so that’s four more plane rides. So, for those keeping track, that’s 14 flights in about a month. Which is way too many, especially for an aerophobe/aviatophobe/pteromerhanophobia (yes, those are all words for “fear of flying”) like me. At no point, during all those many hours in the air, did I start to feel acclimated to flying in a metal tube at hundreds of miles per hour at 40,000 feet above the ground.

So how do I sum up the psychological effect of so many airplane trips in such a short space of time?

Well, I’ll begin like this: I hate airplanes. They’re cramped, uncomfortable, utilitarian, smelly, aesthetically disastrous, frightening machines. The airline companies shove you into as tight a space as possible and don’t care if, say, they make you wait on an airport tarmac for eight hours, after having already spent many, many hours in the air.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I fly I’m constantly at high attention, alert to every little bump and jerk and unexplained noise. This is a rather tense state of mind to be in for hours at a time, and, suffice it to say, I can’t sleep very well when I’m on planes. I can doze off for a few minutes, but at the first sudden noise or bump I’m as alert as can be. Heck, I can’t even concentrate on books, or movies, or video games. It’s as if some part of my subconscious is telling me that I’m not allowed to focus on anything else other than the plane, as if it’s only my mental concentration holding the plane up.

Basically the best I can do is sit back, turn on some comfort music, close my eyes, and hope that I don’t die.

In spite of all that, we got on the plane in San Francisco, made it safely over the Pacific, and after 11 or so hours of flying were able spend an hour or two in the very clean, very modern Incheon International Airport outside of Seoul before getting on our next would-be seven hour flight to Delhi. We flew over China. We flew over various other southeast Asian countries I hope to visit someday. We flew over eastern India. We fly over Delhi. We start to land in Delhi. We start to land in Delhi, but the pilot announces that we can’t land in Delhi quite yet. Because of a storm. So we circle around Delhi.

We circle around Delhi.

We circle around Delhi.
We circle around Delhi.

We circle around Delhi, 10,000 feet above Delhi, in the middle of a severe storm. We see lightening flashing outside our windows. The plane moves up and down, up and down. The plane shakes like a very old, very rough wooden roller coaster. I get nauseous.

We circle 10,000 feet above Delhi, in the middle of a severe lightning storm, in the midst of some rather nauseating turbulence, for over an hour.

And then the pilot gets on again and announces that we won’t be able to land, and that we’re going to be flying to the airport in Ahmedabad (“Where’s Ahmedabad?” the 150 non-native passengers ask at once.) We start to ascend through some pretty crappy weather—the plane goes up and down, up and down—and I feel that this is it. I’m about to die in a plane above Delhi, India.

But I don’t die, and we leave the turbulent altitudes, and two hours after our scheduled landing time we land in Ahmedabad, and are all extremely excited. We might be hundreds of miles away from where we wanted to be, but at least we’re on the ground, in India. It wasn’t a part of our plan, but maybe, even though it’s one in the morning, we can go take a quick driving tour of this random Indian city—get a chance to see what there is to see in Ahmedabad, India—while we wait for the weather to clear over Delhi so we can take off again. At the very least we can go out into the airport terminal and walk around and use real bathrooms, bathrooms designed for people larger than a member of a Pygmy tribe. At the very least we can get off this damned plane.

(I bet you can see where this is going.)

So we’re all tired, and covered with the grime of hours of air travel (if not physical grime, then psychological grime.) I feel dirty. Stiff. Tired. Unwashed.

Gross.

I want to take a shower, brush my teeth (is there anything more satisfying than brushing your teeth after 24 hours in the air?), and sleep in a clean, fully reclined bed. A clean, fully reclined bed located safely on the ground.

The flight attendant comes on and tells us to stay in our seats - tells us that we can’t leave just yet.

It’s the middle of the night at this point, but once we’re on the ground and stopped the air conditioning goes off, and it’s hot. Hot and humid. Humid and gross.

But we wait. Sweating, sleeping the sleep of people who are too hot and tired to really sleep.

We wait.

We wait.

After three hours of waiting the pilot comes on and announces, in Korean and English, that the copilot has exceeded his maximum number of flying hours for the week and that he had to leave to go to sleep. He then states, quite nonchalantly, that it will be another five hours before we’re ready to go.

And I’m pretty sure that moment where he said “five hours” was one of the worst moments, ever. In all the history of human civilization, and of the universe in general.

Words can’t really describe the sense of frustration and futility and anger of 200 people, sitting on a tarmac, but unable to leave the plane. Rather than try to describe the indescribable, I’ll simply provide some fragmentary memories and impressions that will hopefully give a glimpse into our rather sad state during those dark, dark hours:

The people are restless. Lots of arguing with flight attendants.

There’s something pleasant about being in a foreign airport late at night. So much potential. In this case, so much potential wasted.

But a stronger sense of overwhelming lethargy and listlessness.

I hate airplanes.

It’s hot, but we’re only offered water twice during the eight hours.

We wait.

People are gathered around the single open exit of the plane, because there’s a cool breeze coming from outside. No one makes a run for it through the exit, but they should have.

Je déteste des avions

Why do airplanes always smell so… Airplaney?

There are interesting birds that I’m not familiar with hanging out on the wing of the plane.

The explanation for why we can’t even go and wait in the airport terminal: The passengers of a single international flight would exceed the holding capacity of the Ahmedabad International Airport. That’s right—200 people would be too much for an international airport with fairly expansive terminals (in view of our plane), and with multiple jumbo jets already sitting on the tarmac (also within view of our plane.)

Can’t sleep.

Ich hasse Flugzeuge.

Everything is terrible.

Turgenev and Dostoevsky were wrong. The nihilists are right.

-

-

...

-

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After 8 hours, we all wake out of a daze as the pilot announces that we’re ready to take off. Less than an hour back to Delhi. We circle for a while, but are able to land. We immediately head for our hotel, which Nate reserved in advance—but in order to get there, we must endure our first Indian taxi ride.

Which, really, after all the hype, wasn’t as terrible as I had been led to believe. Yeah, it was incredibly stressful and frightening. Yeah, we were constantly inches away from a collision with cars on every side of us. Yeah, they don’t seem to care much about lanes, and instead choose to drift here and there as they will. Yeah, the whole time you’re hearing a cacophony of horns, which is how drivers communicate there (turn signals are for sissies,) which can be really aggravating to people who haven't slept (really slept) for more than 24 hours. Yeah, I spent the whole time clutching tightly to the handle on the car door. But at least it was better than riding on an airplane.

After 30 minutes of that we arrive at the Crowne Plaza hotel, which advertised itself for its close proximity to the airport.

While the hotel is fancy, it seems to have randomly been placed in the middle of the slums. Which is kind of weird. It sticks out from the rather squalid surroundings like a sore thumb—which is probably why the place is surrounded by high walls, and why there are guards at every entrance, and why they even xray your luggage and send you through a metal detector before actually getting into the lobby.

But it was a fancy hotel, in spite of its location. You could tell it was fancy by the fact that everyone wanted a tip, including the person who stood outside the elevator and pushed the Up button for us.

Our 4th story room had magnificent—even breathtaking—views of the surrounding slum.

Anyway. We’re tired, even though it’s noon. We were supposed to have arrived about twelve hours earlier—this was supposed to be our Taj Mahal day—but oh well. We change our plans around a bit, decide we’ll go to Agra on our last day in India and will still leave for Kathmandu tomorrow morning, as we had planned. We’re too tired to go out and see Delhi—plus it’s looking like it’s going to rain—so we clean up, eat a fairly decent meal (including fresh mango juice!) at the hotel, send emails at the hotel’s internet café, and then head back to our room to go to sleep.

And they were pretty decent beds (located, as they were, safely on the ground), and it was a pretty good afternoon’s and night’s rest.

DAY 1 (or DAY 20, depending on how you count, and how long that 8 hours on the ground felt) in INDIA – FIN

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After endless delays and endless anxiety, will tomorrow bring better fortunes for our two protagonists? The day will start off with another aeroplane ride, which is never a good sign—but will their trans-world trip finally prove fulfilling and enlightening? Will they finally get to see Mt. Everest, and the Taj Mahal, and all the other things they flew 10,000 miles to see? Tune in next time, dear reader, to find out!

Llama!

The only photo of the llama that has been confirmed to be genuine

So those who have ventured into that fearful realm known as "The Face Book" may have noticed a strange posting that went something like this:

"Ran into a llama on campus today."

After much demand (2 requests), I've decided I would share some information about this, uh, llamic encounter (of the second kind.)

-

The llama (or "Lama glama," as snooty people say) is a South American camelid, widely used as a pack and meat animal by Andean cultures since pre-hispanic times.

The height of a full-grown, full-size l...

But that's probably not what you came here to hear about.

Instead of telling you what happened, I decided I've give you three, equally plausible, equally exciting options to choose from. All of these MAY be the circumstances that led to The Encounter on Campus.

A. The llama in question is the pet and best friend of an eccentric millionaire widower that lives a mile or so from campus. He (the owner) had decided to take his bosom buddy on a walk to the At War! exhibit at the art museum and that was where The Encounter occurred.

The llama, by most accounts, adored the art exhibit.

B. The runners of BYU's annual "Choose to Give" charity drive decided to use a llama to draw attention to their cause (and nothing gets attention better than a llama.) BYUSA president, Jasper Willikins* says "Our charity is great. Llamas are great. So why not combine the two into a wondrous joy-o-rific supercombo of llama-charity amazingness?!"

C. A truck carrying multiple exotic animals headed for the Hogle Zoo overturned on I-15 near Provo, and Mr. Llamakins decided he wanted to use this brief, miraculous respite to visit the At War! exhibit at the BYU art museum. He made it to the exhibit (and loved it, by most accounts) - but was captured shortly thereafter (though not before the Encounter.)

Incidentally, the other creature to escape the wreckage was a muskox, who has yet to be found. Zookeeper Wilson Odenka!mp wants everyone to know that the muskox is not dangerous, and asks his fellow citizens to immediately call the DCHSFSWSQ (the zoo's animal control agency) should the shaggy beast be sighted. The muskox'sss1s name is "Hrothgar," but it also responds to "Jill." It also very much enjoys Wensleydale cheese.

Odenka!mp says of the llama's return, as well as the continued absence of the muskox: "We are so glad that the Lama glama has been returned to us, and we hope that we will soon be reunited with our dear Jill."



*Some/all names may have been changed to protect the... Something.

**Some/all quotes may have been utterly fabricated.

Not a llama




Neither a llama or a muskox, but it's so adorable I had to share it anyway.

The Fall of Alpine

It was my favorite kind of day - gray, cool, cloudy, rainy (yeah, I'm kind of a depressing person) - so I decided to go on a walk and take some pictures from our neighborhood.













I would have loved to have been able to go home afterward and take a nap and then maybe make a cup of hot chocolate and read a book... But, well, I had homework and work and those two things always seem to be conspiring against my happiness.

My Music

It's been a particularly stressful semester, and I've been listening to a lot of classical music as a way to relax. These are two of my favorite new discoveries, and I listen to them almost every day (I actually discovered both of them when they were used to memorable effect in two different movies.) No guarantee that anyone else will like them, but I find them very beautiful and evocative. Neither, unfortunately, has a particularly exciting video (though the first does show the movie where I first heard the piece.)



Does the second piece remind anyone else of "Beauty and the Beast" for some reason?

This could be amazing...