Bonus: A career that left room for life.

In this special bonus episode, Kristin sits down with Nana (Loren’s grandmother) to talk about work, family, and the quiet choices that shape a life. Raised on a farm in rural North Florida, Nana spent decades working part-time as a bookkeeper and in banking, intentionally building a career that left room to be present for her children and grandchildren.

What unfolds is a tender oral history about money watched carefully, work done well but never centered, and a long marriage built on partnership, planning, and love. It’s a reflection on what we remember at the end of a working life. And what truly counts when the job is no longer the point.

Transcript

Kristin 0:03

Welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real, a podcast about careers, detours, and the absurdity of work. Here we explore the twists, the pivots, and the tiny choices that shape our work lives with humor, feminism, and honesty. I'm your host, Kristen. Let's get into it. Hello, and welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real. Today's episode is a bonus episode, and therefore it is very special. And to introduce this episode, I have Lauren with me.

Loren 0:34

Lauren, hi. Hello. I'm here to help introduce this episode because I asked Kristen to interview my grandmother. She is older and has good stories, and I love her very much. And I wanted to capture some of those. And I thought it would be a fun treat to share portions of that interview with you.

Kristin 0:54

I am so excited that you had this idea. Um, and then that you were like, not only is it good enough for the family, but it it's good enough to edit down and share with our listeners. It's really fun.

Loren 1:06

Yeah, I mean, I I thought it was very interesting, and there are tidbits in there that I never, you know, really knew about her. It's amazing how much you can not know about one of your closest family members because she and I are very close, have a very tight relationship. Some background that I thought might be useful just for context. My family is from the North Florida area, the very rural North Florida area. So my grandmother will refer to some small towns you've never heard of, like Sneeds and Mariana and Greensboro. And those are all uh in the panhandle of Florida.

Kristin 1:41

I love it. Um yeah, I think that that's a key when we talk about Florida, uh, that people picture something specific. But what we're talking about here is like farms and rural communities.

Loren 1:54

Yeah, it's basically it's uh in Florida, just below the Georgia and Alabama border. So it's like kind of central panhandle. So it's culturally much more aligned with Georgia and Alabama than what people think of as Florida.

Kristin 2:10

I also wanted to say uh before we get into the interview that Lauren and I were both surprised. We thought we would ask Nana some questions about life and like we knew she had some jobs. We were gonna just interview her about her life and obviously like touch on work because I think work is is so fascinating no matter what that work is that you're doing in life. Um, but we did not realize she had a whole career.

Loren 2:39

Yeah, I don't know how I just never really pieced that together. Like I did know that she worked part-time, but I guess I didn't realize she had kind of Loki always worked part-time from the time that her daughters were were in school. So yeah, that was interesting. I just never really puzzled that out because she was always there to pick she like picked me up from school three days a week. I spent significant amounts of time with her as a child because instead of going to after school or daycare, you know, I spent time with her. And it was just difficult. I guess because of that, I had just kind of put her career out of my mind.

Kristin 3:21

So funny. Well, and I went into this knowing that, knowing that she was very present in your childhood. So I went into this sort of thinking that that's that's work, and I wanted to honor that. And I also wanted to honor the fact that she's really and truly kind of a mastermind. Like her husband, your grandfather, had a really impressive career, but she was she was the financial mastermind behind the whole thing, and I wanted to honor that work that that takes. But then we get into the discussion, and turns out she was passionate about bookkeeping beyond her household. It was all in all beautiful, such a fun time to sit down with her and do this. Thank you again for having the idea and for letting me. I guess I don't know, I guess thank you for trusting me with uh interviewing her and attempting to tell some of her stories.

Loren 4:11

Oh my gosh, thank you for taking the idea and running with it. I'm very pleased with the result. I did want to do one quick PSA in case any listeners get stressed out, but I am transmasculine, non-binary, and I was therefore assigned female at birth. And when I grew up, I was a little girl, and you will hear past tense references to me using what would currently be considered my incorrect pronouns, but I don't feel a way about it. I do it too, and it's just how we all talk about me. Whenever I was little, I was a girl and I was a she. And that is fine.

Kristin 4:44

I appreciate that context. Yeah, for anyone keeping score, Lauren's current pronouns are they them, and um, their grandmother will say she, her.

Loren 4:54

And that's okay.

Kristin 4:54

And it's very cute and charming. And with that, let's go into it. Enjoy. Lauren asked me to do this because I think that Lauren thought it would be like nice to capture some of your stories. My expertise and what we talked about on the podcast is very much like the jobs that we do and the ways in which that informs how we build a life. And so I really want to talk to you about jobs that you've had before because I know you have had some interesting jobs. But I also want to talk about how you and Robert built a life together. You came up from, I believe, farm life. Yeah. And um, so I thought we could sort of like focus in on some of those pivot points in your life that you built with Robert. But first, will you tell me about the family you grew up in, like your parents, your siblings, all anything from there?

Nana 5:51

Okay. Uh there were five siblings. And uh when I was only about a year old, my understanding is we moved to the farm. And up until that point, my dad had done what you call sharecrop for other people who own farms. But he was able to buy over a hundred acres. Wow, he saved up for that. Yeah, well, what you did back then, you uh signed a paper uh saying when you had a harvest, you would pay so much each harvest until you paid it. And uh that's uh uh actually we saw some of the books where someone had let him just sign his name, and he was always very careful when he had a harvest and he sold the crop, he would go back and pay what he was supposed to pay. But uh we had plenty of food and we had a change in her two of clothes and maybe one pair of shoes that we wore to church and to school. We did not have a lot of money. Uh my mom told me there would be a year at the time that um they would have no cash money. However, they could always buy the staples like flour sugar and her mother and daddy owned the little country store so we could get it from there and then pay them when the harvest came. So everything was paid when we had the harvest of the crops. So that's amazing. What was the crop? Peanuts mostly. Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh corn. We had corn and grew tomatoes, so we always had all that stuff for eating. And then we would we had cows and uh hogs. And every so often you would butcher one of those and everybody came over in the neighborhood to help you out. Wow. Church was a big part of our life. It it was our social life and our spiritual life because we all uh went to the same church, my friends and I, and we went to the same school. So we saw each other all the time.

Kristin 8:01

Was it a small town? Like how many people did you graduate with?

Nana 8:05

There was thirty, which was the light largest class that had big, yeah. You know, for quite some time. So I I can't tell you how big Sneeds it is, but that's where I grew up. But uh we we used to have a downtown, but when the Highway 90 was changed, it used to come right through the town and then they moved it uphill. The town's all gone now, they've put playgrounds there. We had a couple of department stores, movie theater and uh a pharmacy. Now there's not much. There's gas stations and a pharmacy, that's about it. Uh one of the things I remember so distinctly, we had a rolling store that would come every other Thursday. It would come to our house and mom would buy some stuff off, and we could always get one treat. And I remember you could step up and and look and they had baby roots, little tiny things. And they tasted so good they don't taste like that anymore. They were pure. We could get one treat, you know, and that was a hard decision. Mama always had biscuits, and we hardly ever had toast, you know. So I remember one night uh we had some loafed bread that she had gotten and some bananas, and we ate banana sandwiches for supper. I thought that was soup. That's delicious. That sounds amazing, actually.

Kristin 9:42

Just bananas, like butter or no?

Nana 9:44

No, we put mayonnaise on. It needed something and uh yeah. Robert didn't think it that was good at all. But I always thought, even to this day, I will eat a banana sandwich.

Kristin 9:58

Will you tell me about your siblings and where do you fall?

Nana 10:02

Okay. I had uh the oldest one was my brother, and then my older sister, and then another brother, and then I fell in next, and then Barbara is the baby of the family. She's six years younger than me.

Kristin 10:16

So wow.

Nana 10:17

I well remember people teasing me because I had been the baby for six years, and they said, You're not the baby anymore. Did you have feelings out? Yes, I didn't like it. But my older sister had to pretty well look out for me. So whatever the older siblings did, I followed and did what they did. You know, my mom was so busy because they had to when we would have crops and a lot of people would come over to help. Neighbors would always help one another, you know. And uh she would have to cook lunch for all those people. They would be like twenty, maybe. Wow. She would have to cook lunch. So she was constantly busy, you know, but each child mostly had to look out for the next one. Support siblings. Yes. Even my younger sister, she went with Robert and I on dates several times because my mom and dad, after we sold the farm, they got jobs in Chattahoochee at the uh hospital as like nurses' aides. And uh they worked there. They would have had no retirement had they not done that. So they both had a state retirement, you know. That's crazy. That worked out. We sold the farm when I was twelve. The reason we sold it, we were doing real well with it, but there came a big flood and it just flooded all out where we were, flooded our fields. You couldn't plant. We had a lot of pine trees that you could sell the turpentine, we put it in big barrels and a truck would come and haul it away and we'd make money off of that. Well, they couldn't get back there because of the water. And some guy decided he would love to buy our property, even though the flood had come and we sold it and moved closer to town. And we had a three-bedroom house and forty acres still. Okay, I'll still lie. Yeah. And uh so we had plenty of room for garden and that what have you, you know. And we were happy, Barbara and I were happy about that because we were closer to the school and we could go to the ball games and all that stuff, you know. Will you tell me about some of the like early jobs you had? We had both decided that I wanted to stay home when we had the children and take care of 'em, 'cause daycare back then was not even checked on like it was like it is now. And uh we just didn't want to take them to daycare. So I stayed home with Carol Jean. And then when Susan was born and was three years old, somehow I heard about Faith Presbyterian Church had a morning little nursery in kindergarten, and it went by the school hours. So Carol Jean was already in school, and uh I went for an interview, and uh I just thought, well, since I'm not a member of that church, they're probably not gonna hire me. And they did. So Susan was three, and they had two three-year-old groups, and we had a bathroom that divided the groups.

Kristin 13:28

Yeah.

Nana 13:28

Both rooms would share the same bathroom. And I I'll never forget I was in the opposite room from where Susan was. But when she'd come to the bathroom, she'd peek around and look at me, you know, and wave. That's a special memory. I really love that. And I would be home when Carol Jean got out of school. So perfect. And summertime we were out, so it was a perfect little job, you know. I worked there probably eight years.

Kristin 13:56

That's a really long time, actually.

Nana 13:57

And then a friend uh got me an OPS job with the state, and I worked there for several years. Or well, I sat there. It really wasn't a whole lot more than I did. But uh but then uh I left and came to a department store that was down at Tallahassee Mall Gayfers. Yeah, everybody loved Gephers. I wanna you mentioned that the other day, and I was like, tell me more about working at Gayfurst. I worked in the accounting department at Gayfurst. In the meantime, at night, I had I only had graduated from high school. So at night I decided I'd go out to the junior college and take a bookkeeping course. So I did that. So that helped. Yeah. I've always liked to work with figures, you know, and like to I'm kind of the nerd that likes to watch the money. Oh, we're gonna get to that. But uh gafers, I worked there, I think about 18 years. And then I went to the bank. They well the reason I went to the bank, they changed all the bookkeeping and did it from their home office, which was mobile. And so I didn't want to work as a sales clerk out on the floor. So I went to the Capitol City Bank, and at that time they had people at the switchboard answering the phone, not the recording. And a friend of mine from the same church I went to, she and I split a full-time eight to five position at the switchboard. That's actually so cool. They split it with a friend. And that's pretty much where I stayed then for about close to twenty years.

Kristin 15:44

Can you think of any lessons, good or bad or hard, that you learned in those years of working for the bank?

Nana 15:51

Yes, I remember when I was doing the switchboard, they would often have policemen come in and talk to the tellers about if someone came in and demanded that you hand over money. They said, always remember, give them the money and always remember if they try to take you hostage. That really made a point with me. You do anything you can to keep from being taken as hostage because your chances of being alive are much better here than they will be if they take you out of here.

Kristin 16:26

Yeah.

Nana 16:27

And I remember thinking, boy, I could just fall down in the floor and just make your body screaming and it's also a f l like a lesson in like the rest of it's not important.

Kristin 16:40

You're important. You have to do it. Right. Right.

Nana 16:43

That's really kind of lovely and so scary. It it was interesting. You saw a lot of people liked uh liked the people and at that time I had a my voice is scratchy now, but I had a very pleasant, I had so many compliments. People would when they'd come in and they would meet me and they'd say, You have the most pleasant voice on the phone.

Kristin 17:06

Ooh, good phone voice. Let's go back in time and talk about how you met Robert and then let's walk forward from there.

Nana 17:19

He and his family were coming, they lived in Greensboro, but yet they came over to Snead's area to a little Wesleyan Methodist church, which was just like two miles from my church. And we interacted with that church quite often. You know, I knew a lot of people that went in. And so I was up there one day and uh I saw him and I I was telling my older sister, I said, I really like that guy, but I was real shy now. I would really like to meet him, and she said, So maybe we'll have a chance for you to meet him. She was seven years older than me. And she was in Mariana, which is the nearest place that had department stores, and she met him on the sidewalk one day. She introduced herself and she said, We're having a revival at our church. Why don't you come sometime? Well, I was dating this other guy, and I really didn't care for this guy, and he didn't care for me. We were just we'd sit together in church, and once in a while he'd we'd have a real date, you know. But that particular night was New Year's Eve night, and we were at church. I was sitting with him, but I didn't have a date. And lo and behold, Robert came in. And my sister said, We can go somewhere after church. We'll ask him if he wants to go. She was she was lovely sister of yours. She was the one that was gonna ask him. She knew I was too shy.

Kristin 18:52

Was he your age or was he older than I was?

Nana 18:54

No, he's three he was three years old older than me. So he was like older and intimidating a little. So uh anyway, he was at church that night, and uh when church was over, my sister Neil said, We're thinking about going to uh an all-night gospel scene. And would you like to go with us? And he said, Yeah, I'd like to go. So we went and we stayed till two o'clock. Now there would I was only 16. There would be no way my mom would have let me go anywhere and stay till two o'clock. But because my older sister was with me, uh it was okay. Yes. That was on the Saturday night that we went to that. And uh so when we got back home, he didn't ask me about another date, you know, but we just said goodbye. Well, the next morning he stopped by my house after church, which was Sunday. He said, I would like you to go meet my family today. Can you do that? So I asked my mom, and again my sister went with I this sister dynamic, you're all just supporting each other. She always said, Oh, if I hadn't car helped Carolyn, she'd never made it by She did help me in a lot of ways. But uh, we did go to Stanley and ate lunch with them. Ever since then, we've always celebrated New Year's Eve like we did our anniversary. So that was 1955 and the next day was 1956. We dated all of 1956, 1957 up till August 2nd, we got married. He gave me my uh engagement ring along about Christmas time in uh 1956. So we first lived in a little counter right beside my mom's, but we only stayed there about three or four months, and then we sold it and moved to a little rental house and uh rented it for about five months. And in the meantime, he had a cousin that was uh his family was in Portland, Oregon. He was wanting to go visit his folks, and he asked Robert and I if we would go with them. And they had a nice big Cadillac, but they had three little girls. So they made the she sat in the back with the three little kids and made a little pallet for them to take a nap on. And I had to sit between the two guys. Hilarious. Oh you drove? We drove and we we would drive all one night, and then in Texas, I believe it was, she had a sister, and we stopped and spent the night with her, and then we drove all night, all day and all night another night, and he had a brother in San Francisco, so we stopped. That's so funny. I think one time we stayed in a motel.

Kristin 21:55

Okay.

Nana 21:55

You know. Yeah. But uh we stayed a whole month in Portland, Oregon with uh some of his relatives. That was interesting.

Kristin 22:03

Yeah.

Nana 22:03

And actually, after we had taken a lot of sides, uh Robert got a he was always good in construction at that time. So he got a job and he made a lot more money there than he did in Florida, you know. So we took back some money. But uh then shortly after that, when we got married, he was working with his dad in construction, building homes. His dad was not real good at charging enough money to make a profit. They were kind of going in the hole. Robert said, I'm I just can't do this. We we're gonna have to have more income. So he started looking for another job. We uh moved to Greensboro, which is a little town right out of Quincy, and he got a job with Talquin Electric as a a serviceman, electrician. Uh, he and his brother would have a little TV shop on the side and they were work at that in the evenings some, and they would have to come to Talhassee to buy tubes. Back then you don't even use tubes anymore. But the it was a parch store that the owner of it got to know Robert real well. And one time when he was in there, he said, Robert, I understand they're looking for an engineer of sorts at WCTV, the television station. Why don't you go apply for that job? You would be so good at it. And uh Robert always loved electronics. He studied it on his own. He'd never went to college. Wow, he was so He had a cousin that came to visit him one summer that had enrolled in a complete course, all the textbooks, the test, and everything, and he had become disinterested in it. So he said, Robert, if you're interested, I'll just give it to you. And Robert devoured the whole thing. Wow. So he went to the television station and he told them that he was working with Talquin and that he and his brother fixed TVs on the side, and they didn't have him fill out any papers. The only thing they asked him to do, they had a TV that was just torn apart up on the counter. And they said, Okay, we don't know what's wrong with this TV. We have taken it apart. Let's see if you can fix it. Robert said, I fixed the TV and put it back together. And they looked at me and they said, You got the job. That's so cool. It was uh several years later, after the chief engineer and the director of engineer moved on and retired, that Robert became chief engineer. And uh he he loved he loved his work. He never, never complained about going to work. Oh my gosh.

Kristin 24:55

He sounds like he was so talented. He was, but also was he really likable? It seems like he must have selected people.

Nana 25:05

Yeah, he he had a unique personality now. Um I don't know how to describe that to you, but he was just kind of forward. I mean, he didn't kind of butter up people, he'd just point blank ask you questions you wanted to ask. And sometimes I'd cringe, you know, because but uh and he didn't mind people asking him that way, you know. His personality was just a little different. But um he was very quiet, we both were at the beginning, but we both learned to be real sociable with other people. But um, everybody liked Robert. He was a very giving person, but they had to get to know him, you know, because otherwise they would thought they thought he was uh kind of sold on himself or something, you know, but he was confident in what he could do. I know one of the the pastors at the church said, Robert, you are so talented. Why didn't you become a attorney or a doctor? And Robert looked at him so point blank, he said, because I didn't want to. He said, I love doing electronics. You know, I d I didn't start doing that for the money, you know, but I'm doing well. And and that's what I enjoy. So that's what matters. Yeah, so he worked 45 years with in that position.

Kristin 26:30

That's so incredible. I would love to hear some of the things that you wanted to teach your kids. Not I mean, it can be about anything, but you know, work, religion, life, anything. Yeah.

Loren 26:44

Um one of the things that I wanted them to learn how to keep their room high. Well, sure. I won't tell you which one that we went round and round about that. I even came up with the bright idea one day that any piece of clothes that she put in the floor, I would just put in a little bag and she'd have to pay me a quarter to get it back. And when I told the grandchildren about that, they flicked at me and they said, Now that was mean. But finally, as she got older, I just gave up. I thought, you know, I'm through if I haven't taught her by now. You know, she can keep her house any way she wants to.

Kristin 27:34

It's just such a lesson in like we just are who we are. What were some of your favorite activities to do when you would pick up Lauren and or Ashley from school? What did y'all do during those?

Nana 27:47

Um sometime we would uh go to Lake Helvet, you know, and look at the ducks and feed the ducks, maybe. Um, most of the time we would come home and I had play-doh for uh I guess it was Ashley most of the time that liked to do the play-doh. Lauren kind of had different taste, you know, more Robert was more inclined to to help her with what she liked. Yeah. Like yeah, like riding on the lawnmower, she left to do she left to look in his junk drawers, that kind of thing, see what she weren't there.

Kristin 28:26

That is that is being passed on right now with our niece. She likes to look at all the lawn stuff.

Nana 28:31

We'd watch certain programs in church. I I remember getting out in the yard with them one time and I I said, now when Nana was little, we would build us a playhouse under a tree, you know, and they didn't seem to be too interested in I said we would get little cans and they was little purple beans on a tree and we'd gather them and that would be our food to cook in the pots. We had to entertain ourselves because we didn't have TV and all the stuff that they have now, you know. But uh they never did quite get that.

Kristin 29:09

I mean, I think it probably stuck more than you think because you know, to this day Lauren like looks at a tree and wants to know what it is and wants to smell the flowers. And I think that really came to me.

Nana 29:20

Yeah, Robert was always really he knew every kind of tree and he lived in the country. I've lived in the country too, but I don't know every kind of tree. But he did he most of the time would find out if he did that. That's so funny. Yeah.

Kristin 29:35

Lauren reminds me a lot of some of his pressure. Sometimes Lauren will be like, What do you think this tree is? I'm like, I don't know why you would think I would know. Why would I do that? I want to know just a little bit about I don't even know what the question is. Something about growing up with someone that you love and keeping that love alive and strong. Do you have any reflections on your really long, beautiful life with Robert?

Nana 30:06

I remember when we became engaged. See, his mother and dad had divorced when he was like 15. And uh Robert and I remember discussing that we would never say the word divorce. We would work out our problem somehow. Now that he's gone, though, I think about so many times that I should have spoken. He was pretty well kind of go along with his thing, and you'd have to kind of, hey, wait a minute, I want to do this. A lot of times I wouldn't speak up. He told he taught a Sunday school class, he told a Sunday school class. He said, Carolyn and I had been married about five years, and she was always, whatever I decided to do, she that was fine. And all of a sudden, about five years, she said, I don't want to do that. Let's do something else.

Kristin 31:01

Good for y'all.

Nana 31:04

And I was in the Sunday school class and I spoke up and I said, I had to. I said I had to voice my opinion or else I never got to do what I needed to do. Good for you. And most of the time, what he liked, I like too. Like we love to go to the mountains. We both like that, you know. Yeah. And we like now he would have traveled more probably. I kinda always thought, oh, can we afford to do that right now? You know. And uh, but I'm when I look back on it now, I'm so glad that he pushed, let's go. You know, our kids are only gonna be young one time, you know. And uh so we did quite a bit of traveling and I'm so glad we did it. Good. It was worth it. Yeah, it was worth it.

Kristin 31:51

Do you feel like you you know, you've lived these last many years alone? About twelve. Twelve years is a long time. Do you feel empowered? You feel like all the planning that you and Robert did together, you get to live a good life now.

Nana 32:07

Yeah. I do. As a matter of fact, every day I I thank God for a husband that didn't mind working and he loved his work, and God just blessed what he did because he liked to give. I like to give, but I think you need it balanced. Sometimes Robert would get a little bit out of balance because I would say, you know, we really need to save more money. And this is the question he would say, so what are we saving it for? Just like Lauren. And I would say, but what when we get old, we might need to have some help to come. And and he didn't want me to say that. He didn't want to talk about getting old, you know. Oh goodness.

Kristin 32:52

Well, is there anything else that you want to share? Remembering that this is for your family.

Nana 32:58

I'll tell you something funny that uh happened to me uh when I was six six and a half. Okay, please. Barbara was born. She was like six months old. We didn't have a car, so we would ride to church with my mother's mom and dad. He'd have a truck and he'd have a canvas on the back, and he'd people would just be standing out on the road and he'd stop and pick them up. And we would ride with him to church. Well, mom would always get in the front with Barbara, and I would get in the back with dad. We had no electricity at church now, we had just lamps. And our church would last for hours. I got sleepy, so I just lay down on one of the pews and went to sleep. And when I woke up, it was dark in the church, and I started screaming. There was one family that had not left the church, and they heard me screaming, and they came and opened the door. And he said, Honey, who is your dad and mom? He didn't know who I was. And he said, Can you tell me your dad's name? And I said, My daddy's name was Edgar Howell. And I said, Edgar Howell? I couldn't even pronounce the name. By that time, they had mom and dad had just gotten down the road, probably less than extra. Mom said she kept having this feeling, I I want to make sure that dad got Carolyn. And she asked her daddy, would you stop and let me just yell back there and see? And mom hollered back, do you have Carolyn? And he said, No, I thought you had her. Before the family could get me out in their uh vehicle, they were back at the church. Oh funny.

Kristin 34:48

That sounds awful, Did you forget your kids? You know, it happens like one one of them thought the other one had you.

Nana 34:58

But they they uh had a problem with that all my life because Because Barbara was so much younger. Yes, yeah. But uh I was I was uh scared to be in a room dark by myself for many years.

Kristin 35:15

Oh my gosh, I can imagine okay, that was really fun. And I I think Lauren and I said everything we were thinking at the top of the episode around like we really did not know that she had a whole career for many years. And I thought about it a lot, and I I sort of wondered if it was intentional on her part that no one really knew that, or that I guess Lauren didn't really know that. You know, she comes from a very traditional background and a different time, and I think she always wanted to sort of make sure that her husband's career was prioritized and that she was present for the family. And I, of course, respect that. And it just kind of cracks me up that she was probably out there being a bad bitch in the workplace, and no one knew overall, just really cute and really fun to be reflective and fun to get to know Lauren's family a little bit more when I do things like that. I also wanted to say, you know, we're in the off season right now. Doesn't even matter what today is when I say that everything's terrible out there. Has been for a long time, continues to be so. I just want to make it so clear that this podcast is rooted in feminism. It's rooted, you know, it's rooted in questioning capitalism. And importantly, it's really rooted in community. I started this because I feel like I don't know, I wanted to get to know my friends' stories and my loved ones, and I've expanded that. I continue to expand that circle next season. We're gonna hear from some incredible guests that definitely go outside of the like my immediate circle. It's gonna be really incredible. I want to tell normal people stories. I want to honor the careers that we have and also honor the fact that that is entangled with our lives every step of the way. Anyway, it's important to me that we remember that I keep front and center for everyone the fact that storytelling is community building, hearing each other and hearing our stories and hearing our humanity that helps us connect. And there's not a lot that I can do with my particular skill set, which is mostly just talking, but I know that I can help share stories and in that regard help build community. And I'm really so excited that I get to do it. I'm so glad that you're listening. I am so grateful. Stay tuned. In in a couple more weeks, we'll have one more bonus episode before we get started with season two, which will drop on February 25th. So look out for one more bonus episode. We're sort of doing a pre-work, post-work dichotomy for these bonuses. Again, please subscribe. Please leave us reviews. Thank you for listening. This is an incredible, incredible honor. Thanks for listening to everything counts, but nothing is real. Remember, even when nothing feels real, everything you do counts. Capitalism may be absurd, but so are we. And on that note, well, it's been real. Don't forget to subscribe. I'm Kristen. See you next time.