Racheline Maltese

Public Relations for Creatives 101

I’m teaching a class at Trade School in New York on Thursday, March 31 at 8pm. It’s Public Relations for Creatives 101, and you’ll learn the basics of how to write press releases, develop media lists, pitch stories and give good interviews.

Because Trade School is based on a barter system, the cost of attending is up to you. There’s a list of things I’m looking for on the site that include various types of household assistance , a few items, as well as things that are no-cost and low-in-time (like certain types of local business recommendations).

Please check it out, spread the word, and register!

Thanks!

the distance to Mars

In the midst of everything else that happened in this very heavy news week, Maryland sent its equal marriage rights bill back to committee. Despite what was initially thought, the votes just weren’t there, the state just wasn’t ready yet.

Equal marriage rights are a tricky topic for me as a queer person, and, believe it or not, one I don’t actually like talking about. There are huge issues of heteronormativity and queer culture erasure involved in the discussion, as well as issues regarding misogyny, and an ongoing hunch I have that much of mainstream heterosexual culture is characterized by such intense and unnecessary hostility and suspicion between the genders, that what really terrifies people about equal marriage rights is the option to opt out of that misery that doesn’t really work for them, as opposed to a parallel discussion about trying to fix the often toxic male-female dynamics in this country.

A lot of the gay couples I know are married. Some legally, some spiritually, some both. Some in states where their marriages are recognized, and some in states where they aren’t. The one thing all these couples have in common? Equal marriage rights didn’t exist when they were kids, anywhere, and so they’ve all had to adjust to being pioneers. For some of them, it’s easy. For some of them, it’s easy with a bit of peculiar on the side. And for some of them, they still feel like they have to mention their spouse like a question mark, as if they won’t be believed, as if no amount of paper in the world could make it make sense — not just to others, but to themselves — even as it’s actually happening.

One of the things I think we overlook in the discussion of equal marriage rights is the importance of narrative. Not political narrative or marketing narrative or campaigning narrative, but stories, fiction, the way what is possible often comes to us through the mechanism of what it is not actually a non-fictional fact in the world.

In one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes, “The Waters of Mars,” which I love because it’s about death and sacrifice and early space exploration, there’s a small, completely incidental moment (it’s character development only, not narrative advancement), where someone mentions another man’s husband. It’s completely without note of how notable that is to us in the non-Whoniverse here and now. I don’t have time to find it in the disc, but trust me when I tell you it’s “blah blah blah his husband blah blah blah.”

New Whoniverse stuff is, of course, filled with things like this (see: the lesbians in “Gridlock”) that often get overlooked in the face of stuff like Captain Jack Harkness. But as someone who really loves the Whoniverse and really loves both those small moments and the absurdity (and promise and hope) that is the idea of Jack’s 51st century, it bears noting that some of my sadness this week over the equal marriage bill being tabled in Maryland comes from stories seeming far too far away.

Look, I don’t get a TARDIS. I don’t get the Doctor. I don’t get Jack. I don’t get Torchwood. I don’t get the wonder of the stars as we’re busily retiring the space shuttles. I don’t get all the things I’ve written and dreamed about my entire life. I don’t get to save the world. But wow, if people could just say “his husband” and “her wife” all the time without pause or uncertainty or question, that wouldn’t just be equal rights, that would, for me, be spaceships and dinosaurs and time travel and hope.

sometimes trash day is a day late

I’ve been speaking to Patty every other or every third day. Yesterday she had to run to the grocery while we were on the phone so I got to hear India. There sure are a lot of car horns. I continue to be her own personal news service. She continues to be awesome. I’m looking forward to when I get to think about her coming home (when we have a firm date, you too can join the countdown).

Yesterday I used Living Social to buy some language lessons at half price. If you’re in New York City, you can do the same thing today. And yes, that referral link helps me out, because if three of you sign up, I get my classes for free. You can use the classes any time this year (but you need to register by October) and the choices are French, Spanish, Italian, German, or Arabic (you don’t have to choose now). If I didn’t need German, I’d be all over the Arabic.

Also in the real, of classes, I’ve signed up to take something at Trade School where people barter their expertise. I’ve also signed up to teach a class, so I’ll let you know as soon as it’s on the schedule.

Don’t forget I’ll be reading from Whedonistas, along with Teresa Jusino, NancyKay Shapiro, and Priscilla Spencer on Monday night. We will have books to sell, one day before the official release, but numbers are limited, so get their early.

As I mentioned the other day, I have a lot of things I want to write about, including the marriage equality mess in Maryland and the discussion of victim-blaming regarding a New York Times article. Most of the discussion I’ve seen has been about the Times specifically or rape-culture generally, and I think there’s a useful component missing: which is about journalism systemically. But as ever, my life is deadlines, Japan is getting a lot of focus, both Wisconsin and Libya need to be getting a lot of focus, I’ve got some interview questions to send to a film maker who I’m going to talk to here, and I really need to clean the flat, so it may take a bit.

Right now, I’m out the door, as I want to visit the farmers market (mainly so I can report to Patty on it, it’s her favorite), before I come home and focus on getting stuff done.

news, agenda setting, and you

Since the beginning of this year, the news cycle has gone from what we call a 24-hour one (i.e., around the clock) to what I call an instantaneous one. Critical events happen, and there is no time to cover them with the weight and detail they deserve, before other critical events, often in unrelated areas, occur (in the 24-hour news cycle there isn’t necessarily new news, it’s just that we never stop talking — what’s been happening is something else). We went from the Arizona shooting, to MENA uprisings (which continue), to the union situation in the US (which is continuing), to today’s earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

And that’s leaving out other critical stories: WikiLeaks, the treatment of Bradley Manning, anti-bullying initiatives from the White House, equal marriage rights debates in multiple states, the appalling hearings on Islamic radicalization in the US, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the retirement from political life of the Dalai Lama. And I’m sure I’ve left out other critical stories. And that’s not even counting the stuff that’s really dropped off the radar. Like Haiti.

So what’s a person to do, when trying to do a Friday link roundup other than throw their hands up in despair?

The easy answer, the terrible answer and is my instinct to say, is I don’t know. Despite being a generalist, someone who works well on deadline, who’s very quick on the uptake, with a background in journalism and a career in media analysis, it all feels like too much, even to me, as someone whose job it is to never feel like it’s too much. But the first thing I do every morning when I wake up, is check the news on my Blackberry before I even get out of bed (something that drives Patty up the wall). I get up faster on days terrible things have happened. Today’s been one of those days.

The harder answer is, that as much as I talk about news selection and agenda setting as regards what the news puts out there, news selection and agenda setting also happens at home. It happens in what media any of us choose to consume. And, when stories get big, bad, and difficult, the impulse is often to consume less to preserve our own sense of well-being; or to consume more as if data helps us have control, as if more is always better.

But what we really need to do is be editors for ourselves. Am I annoyed ABC isn’t really covering the union crisis in the US? Yes. But I’m also annoyed when it’s all MSNBC covers, because I also need information about the MENA region (for which I’ve been relying on CNN out of the domestic options, and Al-Jezeera online for the international option). Meanwhile, I get my queer news headlines from The Advocate, but they never go into enough depth, and rely on my Twitter feed to point me to the news I need about WikiLeaks and Manning’s detention.

Of course, you aren’t me. You don’t need or want to watch two, five, or ten hours of news a day. So I’m not going to tell you to consume more news (unless you aren’t consuming any). And I’m not going to tell you what delivery technology to use. But I want to emphasize how news selection affects the information you get, especially on a day where a lot of us probably flipped on a 24-hour news channel and have left that channel on all day.

Haiti didn’t stop needing help because the media stopped covering it. The protesters in Egypt didn’t go home because the war reporters went to Libya. The right to collective bargaining isn’t safe in the US because state-level politics stories don’t often make national news. And queer people aren’t suddenly not in a civil rights battle for their very lives because you didn’t hear about a transwoman’s murder or a gay teen’s suicide or yet another damn couple who can’t get married.

The only way to get around the reality of agenda setting (which is sometimes about political agenda; sometimes about racism, sexism or homophobia; sometimes about dollars; and sometimes about an evening news program only having thirty minutes or a newspaper only having so many pages) is to do your own agenda setting which means varying your news sources as much as possible. You won’t catch everything, but you’ll catch a much broader view.

Meanwhile, I? Have dozens of issues I want to write to you about here, but I’m struggling a little at finding the interval to do so today.

I wear these things like words

I hate to begin any post with something so trite as Life’s complicated, but that seems like an easier lead-in than When I was at university, I was threatened with corrective rape.

When I was in university, I was threatened with corrective rape.

By fellow students, people I knew, people who lived in residence halls with me and served in student organizations with me, because my having a girlfriend made the school look bad, they thought. They were just going to show me what I really needed. I had to have campus security posted outside my dorm room door.

That was the same year I had to take a friend of mine to the ER after he and his boyfriend got jumped on a street corner for holding hands. There were stitches involved, because of where his head had been slammed into the corner of a newspaper vending machine.

This was also the same year I had beer bottles thrown at me from a passing truck, while walking hand in hand with my girlfriend. No, they weren’t just littering and didn’t see us; there were some slurs and the truck slowed down, pulled over, and she and I climbed over a barrier and ran through a field because we thought our lives were in danger.

It was 1991, and I had just turned 18. These experiences were hate crimes, before there was a national legal definition of such in reference to LGBT people in the US, and I was lucky they were so minor.

Yeah, I live in a world where rape threats are minor; where only20 stitches is something to be grateful for; where the fact that they didn’t catch us, means it doesn’t really count.

I don’t wear these things like badges of honor, because they’re not. I wear these things like words, because they are part of the story of my life.

Which means you don’t get to tell me, no matter what your own experiences are, how insulted or threatened I’m allowed to feel about anti-gay discourse. You also don’t get to tell me what is and is not a hate crime (it has a legal definition in the US; and we’ll try to run with that). Nor do you get to put words in my mouth when I talk about some stuff that has offended me. Believe me, if I were going to call something a hate crime, I’d use the words.

The ones that are written on me, by all the terrible things that I’m supposed to be grateful didn’t quite happen.

Life is complicated. Your mileage may vary. But don’t tell me what mine should be. Not on this subject. Not ever.

London dreaming

For about four hours last night there was a 50% chance I was going to have to fly to Bucharest for three days next week. Morning brings the news that I am not, in fact, flying to Bucharest, and I’m a little sad. Not because of Bucharest though, but because of the possibility of 3 hours in Heathrow, or, if I were really creative, a night in London.

London, and the UK in general, but mostly London, have this hold on me that’s, well, complicated. I feel a bit tortured about it, because it’s so boring and typical for someone to the US to be all, Oooo, shiny, British things even if I don’t think I’m doing that.

It’s more that London is what New York City used to be like, in the 80s, when my parents would take twelve-year-old me out to the Odeon at 2am and Madonna would be at the next time. It seethes and teems and pulsates; there is a reason why all the aliens on Doctor Who talk about how humans clamber over this world like insects. London’s a hundred neighborhoods layered on each other and grown in upon themselves like hives.

It’s also that Brick Lane feels like home.

And that huge chunks of my really weird education are only normal, or even useful, in the UK.

And that I really, really like the supermarkets.

It’s that there are women with hair as short as mine in ads for lingerie shops, that men know more than one knot for their ties, and that people aren’t revolted because my teeth don’t glow.

It’s St. Katharine’s Dock. And that I can look up and navigate by that awful bullet building, like I used to with the World Trade Center, before it came down. It’s that “the City” means something there, just like it does here, only different. And that I am somehow more acutely aware of everyone’s striving there, than I am here, which doesn’t really make any sense at all, but then, I suppose, these things rarely do.

For years, Sydney has been my long lost city, even as my time there was filled, not inappropriately, with journal entries about how far from everything it was, how exiled. But London’s, arguably, from where it was exiled.

So London’s all mythology for me, and nothing like anything I was told when I was ten and had to go on school trips each May 14 to lay daffodils at a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, before the teachers told us about the British girls we boarded during the War and then served us pineapple cake because it was Miss Hew’s favorite.

I know I seem, very easily, pretentious and lost. A lot of the time I’m playing and people don’t get that. But a lot of the time I’m not, and people don’t get that either. I grew up in this other world that doesn’t really exist, which may be why so much of my work is about defictionalization. My mother chose the school she did for me because, “All the little girls wore white gloves, like in the 1940s movies.”

I was five. I didn’t ask for that. It’s just what happened. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. It is also one that I am supposed to regret or feel shame about or guilt, but I just can’t.

But London, at least, recognizes the lies of my childhood. And better, doesn’t care.

I bet Bucharest is just lovely this time of year too.

actors, playing gay, and the perils of Twitter

Lots of things about being an actor can be less than fun. Anyone who does this sort of work will tell you that there are some parts of the job that just suck: weird working hours, unsteady pay checks, unpredictably long days, filming summer scenes in the dead of winter (how to know if you can really act: can you look happy about wearing a tank top and a mini skirt in 30 degree weather?). But few things inspire quite as much dread as love scenes.

As a performer I’ve largely been spared this, but not enough not to know that yeah, it sucks. It’s one of those things that falls somewhere between ludicrous and boring and embarrassing. Why it’s awful varies with the project and the people involved. Sometimes it’s worse when you’re genuinely attracted to the other performer; sometimes it’s worse when you can’t stand them; or when you’re buddies with their spouse. All of it’s pretty anxiety producing. For me, I get this running loop of terror in my head about how I need to give a good performance and look into it, but if I look too into it, will my partner in the scene mock me (this, for the record, has never happened, but it’s the neurosis I bring to the table — everyone has at least one).

One thing that can be, or can be assumed to be, tough for a lot of people, is doing love scenes with someone of a gender they’re not attracted to in their off-screen life. Because my tastes are wide-ranging, that’s not an experience I’ve had, but I can see how it would be super weird. And I don’t find it problematic that people find it weird. There can be a lot of social taboo going on there, no matter how progressive you are and no matter how much you get paid to pretend to be someone else.

Now, knowing, in fact, that it’s super weird for a lot of people, and that there are still way too many social stigmas out there about homosexuality (let’s face it, no one ever worried about whether a lesbian is comfortable making out with a man on screen), if you’re going to be playing gay on screen, especially in a love scene, casting will seriously, seriously ask you if you’re okay with that. Your agent will talk to you about the pros and cons of the choice. And sometimes, you’ll even have to sign something saying you won’t sue anyone if this playing gay thing leads to reputational damage (for the record: I’ve been questioned by casting more closely about my willingness to play gay, even after I’ve informed casting about my own orientation, than I have been about my willingness to have live insects placed on my body).

I’m not joking. I know we all wish I were.

So at the point that you are an actor and you’re booked to do a love scene with another actor of the same sex, and you’re straight and thinking “Oh shit, I hate filming love scenes and OH MY GOD, I’ve never kissed another dude before,” you’ve already had plenty of time not to sign up for this. I get that you’re stressed. I get that it’s weird for you. And I’m not asking you not to feel that way. Because filming love scenes SUCKS.

But in this age of constant interviews and the ill-considered opportunities for general crankiness Twitter provides, please think very carefully before you speak on the record about this experience. Because when your anxiety about this process reads as “playing gay is disgusting, and I’m worried about getting the gay cooties on me,” you look like a bit of an arse. At best. And it’s really hurtful to gay fans of a given property to hear that someone can’t stand playing a character that might be someone we can actually relate to.

This happens, unsurprisingly, all the time. It’s recently happened through some now deleted tweets in one of my fandoms of choice. And it’s happened before regarding other actors and properties that are important to me. Seriously, if you’re going to be in a film (no matter how terrible) about Alexander the Great, don’t make snide comments about the gay. Ditto for Torchwood. Double plus ditto for anything that is inherently and overwhelmingly a gay narrative.

So, “Hey, I have to do this thing that’s uncomfortable for actors in general and is new to me in this particular situation ’cause I’ve never kissed a dude before and I’m feeling a little strange about it; acting is so weird” — totally cool; it’s a weird job!

But, “Any hot chicks want to help me get the gay off?” Not cool, man, not cool.

Whedonistas reading in Brooklyn

WHEDONISTAS AT THE WAYSTATION
Readings from Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them
Featuring Elizabeth Bear, Teresa Jusino, Racheline Maltese, NancyKay Shapiro, and Priscilla Spencer.

Brooklyn Waystation
683 Washington Ave
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
MONDAY, MARCH 14TH
7:00PM
Reading to be followed by signing

Why you want to come other than the pure awesome that is Whedonistas and the fact that we should have books on hand for you to buy before you can get it anywhere else (unless you were at Gally)? The bar’s bathroom is through the TARDIS. I mean, just think about it. Jack has totally shagged someone in the TARDIS bathroom, right? Live vicariously, people, live vicariously!

The brutality of being chosen

One of my creative associates (who may have words with me at that particular phrasing in the name of identity plausible deniability) has a discussion piece up on Friends of the Text today about the premise of being chosen within texts and the idea of being chosen by texts. Thematically relevant to the stuff that interests me? You bet.

But also, of course, thematically relevant to my life. It’s easy to say, I think, and Balaka says as much in the piece, that everyone wants to be chosen. It is, she notes, like winning in the passive voice. But I wonder. Do boys want to be chosen as much as girls? Is the chosen part of the narrative what makes Harry Potter and Star Wars exciting to the male segments of their audiences? Do men have a Pygmalion narrative in their fantasies, one in which they are the transformed and not the transformer? Are women more socialized to this idea of being chosen? Is that why Twilight flies off the shelves? What’s it like, I wonder, to grow up, wanting to choose. Who is that person? And how are they formed? Were they once waiting to get chosen and finally got sick of not having magic powers or not becoming a star just for sitting at the table in the window of some diner?

It’s a sticky, nasty, uncomfortable question. At least for me. Because it touches, potentially, not just on ideas of gender, but also on ideas of dominance and submission and of leadership. It speaks to the troubling idea that chosen just means, “you’re good enough to be transmuted into gold.” It’s not just that you’re nothing without being chosen, it’s the suggestion that you’re nothing without acquiescing to the consequences of being chosen, and they are legion.

For me, this whole chosen business also speaks to ideas I have about the directorial imagination and my fears about whether I have enough of one. And it speaks to the doubt I have about the idea that the best thing anyone can do for themselves is get over that fantasy of being chosen, even though I know that waiting isn’t how to do life, poetic, rigorous, and narratively enticing though it may sometimes be.

Of course, I work in industries that largely are about “winning in the passive voice.” I write something, and then someone snatches it out of a pile of slush and publishes it. Sure, sometimes I get asked for things up front, and sure, I have to write things (which is an active endeavor) before waiting for them to get chosen, but “winning in the passive voice” is definitely the right description of the experience of it. At least for me.

Acting can be even more bizarre in that regard. You get a call; someone likes how you look; can you come in now and show us what you can do? It’s “winning in the passive voice” before there’s even a chance of winning in the active voice, and trust me, when they say you’ve got it, and it’s a contract, it doesn’t, in that moment, feel like you did anything, other than get plucked out of a crowd. A week later, you might recall how damn hard you worked for that opportunity, but the first flush of reaction is, at least for me, and I suspect for many other performers is “They picked me! Me!” Chosen.

“Winning in the passive voice.” It implies all of the benefits and none of the hard work of this success thing, doesn’t it? Seems snazzy. But there’s a real brutality that underlies it, one of clay in the kiln, and the insidious possibility that it might have actually been a certain peculiar and shifting inadequacy that brought you to attention. To be fair, I grew up as a dancer, and being chosen meant being told how you were wrong and being pressed harder and further into shapes to which you did not yet conform. But I suspect, regardless of background, that for a lot of people, it is this idea of brutality that appeals.

To return us to matters of the text and this idea of being chosen by the text, it makes me think about the work I’ve done regarding death and mourning. Or, at least, the tangential experience I’ve had in having done that work of seeing a lot of anger and distress from audiences in which beloved characters do die. Does this speak, I wonder, to this idea of being chosen by the text, and then finding out — for those who have had negative reactions to these fictional deaths — that this was really not what you signed up in that moment where you felt the text chose you. Conversely, for those of us who have felt vastly satisfied in those losses, is it because of the relief of encountering the expected brutality in our selection by the text?

And it’s not just on death that texts can brutalize us. Look at Bella in Twilight and look at our reactions. Is not the inspired longing for that type of impossibility a brutality of the text? Is not what Bella experiences in the face of the love she endures another brutality of the text, this one intradiegetic, instead of extradiegetic?

What, ultimately, do these narratives of being chosen suggest to us about the ethics of favor and brutality in our relationships with texts and in texts’ relationships with us? And how much choice do we have about those relationships, when the narratives themselves are, at base, about not having choice, and the supposedly great good fortune of that condition? Nobody ever asked Harry Potter if he wanted to save the world.

Thinky thoughts are a double thumbs up. Please make sure to give Balaka’s post some love too, especially if your reactions are more about her work than my little digression/extrapolation here. I would also particularly love to hear here from men on the subject of Pygmalion narratives and anyone who feels they are instinctively wired towards being the one who chooses.

self-oppression and secret cabals

I’m not sure why it seems I’m always talking about stuff going on regarding the community of YA readers and writers when I don’t really read YA, but yet again, something really interesting as caught my attention (most YA may not be to my taste, but all the great conversations it engenders certainly proves, once again, that trivial it is not).

Apparently, there’s a secret cabal of YA writers who will ruin your career if they feel threatened by you/you don’t like their books/you have drama with them on the Internet. Or something. I’m not sure, because again, I’m just a tourist here. This post isn’t, ultimately, about this particular situation, but this particular situation is on the way to it, so please bear with me. John Scalzi has a piece refuting the existence of the cabal, which links to Holly Black’s comments on the supposed cabal, which contains other links to discussion of the supposed cabal in comments.

What sticks out to me about this is that Wow, I have so heard this one before. I heard it regarding interpersonal politics on a BBS twenty years ago, and I hear it in fandom all the time (this community, that community, OMG, BNFs! etc. etc. etc.) and it certainly rears its head with frequency in pretty much every publishing community ever. Hell, maybe people just like fretting about supposed cabals and mafias and all the secret clubs from which they may or may not be being actively excluded.

I mean, I did post that included the Native Society yesterday. It’s not just that everybody wants to be in a secret club. It’s that everybody wants to have the righteousness of being excluded from some secret club. If you think about it, it’s kind of a weird way of feeling important, but it’s certainly effective, and it’s nice sometimes to take the onus off of the far-too-broad-to-effectively-lay-particular-blame structure of society, or luck, or, as is relevant to this writing cabal nonsense, the quality of your stuff and the skill of your networking.

But that’s another discussion lots of people are having who aren’t me, so I’m going to leave that aside for where it’s already happening with more efficacy. What I can’t help but notice is this: these cabal accusations seem, almost always (Scalzi’s refutation aside, and I’m unclear as to whether he was referenced in this or another cabal paranoia or just felt like talking about it), to be directed at women. Maybe that’s because it is arguably in largely women’s spaces that I see this stuff go down (i.e., YA lit; transformative-focused online fandom; etc.), and this whole piece is moot because my lens is just too narrow, but I do think there’s some very real misogyny in play here that’s filled with tropes that go right back to the ideas of Eve and Lilith: as if women are all liars who just won’t stay in their damn places.

That I often also see these accusations also coming from women (but again, this may be a bias in my experience based on where I hang out), is even more disturbing. I don’t need to ask who told you that life is a zero sum game and that the only way to get ahead is to whisper, loudly, behind your hand. I went to all-girls school; I live in this world. I know from whence it comes. But the damage we do to ourselves and others by assuming that sixth-grade Machiavellianism is, not only the only way we can get ahead, but is surely the only way anyone else (any woman) could have possibly gotten ahead is massive. If nothing else, it makes striving unpleasant and introduces a distraction that is derailing to whatever it is we’re actually trying to do.

Look, am I saying there aren’t groups of friends in this world who may not like you or you work and are gossips? Nope. But if you think those groups of friends have complete control over anything, you’re not examining that everything hard enough. You think the world is full secret cabals? Then stop wasting time talking about them, and be sneaky yourself, by figuring out how to navigate around the obstacles you perceive. And the trick to that generally isn’t about complaining about groups of like-minded people who collaborate or support each other in their endeavors or just happen to know each other as colleagues because they work in the same spaces. The laws of the Internet don’t just apply to porn — odds are, if you’re making it, there’s someone out there who wants to buy it.

To be frank, I find the secret cabal talk embarrassing. To me it says, look at how well we’ve let others — not the supposed cabals, but entrenched social structures that benefit from the self-marginalization that occurs when we waste time tearing each other down and jumping at shadows — train us to hold ourselves down.

Don’t buy into that crap. It’s bad.

And if you hate some (successful) people? And their stuff? And their association with each other? If you’re jealous? Get mad and make something awesome. It’s not easy, but it totally is that simple.