(with music) TOPICS: putting myself into life, the courage of feeling the fear and doing it anyway, the creative act of getting out of bed and coming away from the ledge, 'Harold & Maude,' Lewis Hyde's 'The Gift,' enthusiastic consent and giving over coercion and demanding and market exchange in life and art and sex and love and play and friendship and time and attention, making choices informed but not imprisoned by the past, the tangled webs and cages money makes for us, pitfalls and pit stops, seeing the world through the lens of a dreaming mind, ways of making meaning and following my heart, courageous over-sharing, how being raised in atmospheres of invalidation led for me to so much disregulation and distrust and self-destructive habits and overdramatic idiosyncratic weirdness and overall distress and pain. The connectivity of art versus the disconnect of extrinsically imposed rewards and demands. The courage to give, and live, and give myself to life with a big old 'YES' or even a weary 'this is not all there is' in spite of everything.