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November 5

This blog’s going to be limited to some scattered notes from Thursday…

Where are the Bush supporters in our generation? I know they’re out there – almost half of us voted for the guy.

Maybe we’re not looking in the right places (we started in blue states, we’re in the great blue Northwest now, and we still haven’t hit the South) or maybe we’re not talking to the right people. It’s true, we haven’t actively sought out any elephants, but we haven’t sought out any donkeys either. So far we’ve met three republicans, one in Wisconsin and two in North Dakota, which isn’t very many.

Something’s fishy and I’ve decided it could be one of three things:

1. We don’t, for whatever reason, meet conservatives.
2. The statistics are wrong and our generation is actually 90% liberal.
3. Everyone who used to like Bush has jumped ship like prep school girls off the Uggz train.

Because almost everybody we’ve talked to so far hates Bush. Their feelings range from “I think he’s ruining our country” to “The man is a murderer.” Maybe we’ll just have to go out of our way to seek out the conservatives from now on. So, if you’re a Bush-backer and you live somewhere on our planned itinerary, shoot me an email and we’ll come interview you so we can get both sides of the story.

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Wigs and I profiled Christopher “Cree” Gordon in Eugene, Oregon on Thursday. I’m not sure whether to call his story sad or inspirational, so I guess it must be some of both. I’ll be writing all about him soon so I don’t want to spoil the whole thing, but the basics of his history are as follows: He’s a twenty-year-old biracial kid (white mom, black dad) from Louisiana who left his home town for New Orleans about a year and a half ago. He found himself on the streets in the big city with no way to take care of himself. So he started going out in the French quarter and at the end of the night, he would go home with any man who would take care of him, give him a shower, maybe some cash. It was a dangerous existence but Christopher calls it “survival sex.” He was literally using sex as a way to survive. One of the men he met convinced him to move out to Eugene, but once in Eugene he took an HIV test (he just wanted the ten bucks you get for taking the test) and found out that he was positive. After the initial shock, he began volunteering for the HIV Alliance, found an apartment, and enrolled in the University of Oregon (he’ll begin taking classes there next semester). That’s the briefest scratch across the surface of his story, it’s even sadder when you hear the details, but the kid is full of hope and he smiles through the retelling of even the toughest times. He’s a strong dude.

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Through Christopher, Wigs and I met some students at the University of Oregon Black Student Union and entered into a discussion on the issues that young African-Americans are facing today. We talked about politics, black leaders, and black entertainment (is Dave Chappelle a good thing or a bad thing? Are rappers good ambassadors for the black community? Should sixteen-year-old white girls listen to hip-hop?) and I should probably write a 1,000 word blog about this, but I just don’t have time right now.

So for now, back in four. Email adam@tyap.com to be notified when new blogs are posted.

Every Generation Has Its Jerks

October 31

Most places we go, people are nice. Strangers around the country have cooked meals for us, given us directions, let us use their showers, and even bought us books just because they thought we’d like them (we probably will) and because they thought we might not have enough money to buy books (we don’t). But sometimes people are not nice, and we have to talk about those people too.

We have to talk about people who aren’t nice for two reasons:

1. This project is supposed to be unbiased and unfiltered, or at least as unbiased and as unfiltered as possible. We set out to present a fair portrait of our generation , even if sometimes the picture isn’t pretty. So if we left out the derelicts, the junkies, and the poopheads, we wouldn’t be fair and balanced.

2. Vengeance is sweet. And the vengeance that gets doled out (like lightning bolts) from a lofty peak (like Mount Olympus or http://www.theyoungamericansproject.com/adams_blog.html) is the sweetest.

So. To the guy who was in the room on the second floor of the TKE house at the University of Washington on Saturday night: you’re pretty much the biggest jerk I’ve ever met.

We were hanging out with Scott and Jesse, two freshmen at UW, so we were having a freshmen-in-college kind of night. You know, some Beirut, some beers, some extremely long walks across campus to a party because nobody has a car, and even longer waits at the tap because you don’t have any pull and you’re not an 18 year-old girl wearing four square inches worth of tank top. And oh yeah, it was the Saturday before Halloween so everyone was disguised as Navy SEALS, homeless people, or nuns. (If you’re a girl, this means somehow cutting and hiking your costume until it ‘s turned you into a promiscuous Navy SEAL, a slutty homeless person, or a nun who doubles as a whore.)

Sure, we almost got thrown through a glass-fronted cabinet on several occasions by a 6’13” member of the UW men’s crew team (he thought Scott had asked for too much beer and then he thought Matt had stolen his beer), but it was all a misunderstanding and nobody got hurt. We also infiltrated a house party and everyone there was very nice to us and for some reason we ended up manning the keg for a solid twenty minutes, handing out beers to students who undoubtedly had a much more legitimate claim on the tap than we did.

Everything was going fine until we got to TKE. There was no reason for us to be there, really. Wigs’ friend had been there, but now he was gone, and Wigs was gone too, so it was just me, Scott, and Jesse. The house was mostly quiet but I heard some rap music bouncing around somewhere upstairs. I told Scott and Jesse that I was going to check it out. They told me not to, but I didn’t listen to them because I thought they were just nervous about being in a fraternity that wasn’t their own.

The thing about traveling around the country and not knowing anyone and needing to talk to people in order to get a good, representative take on the generation is that sometimes you have to go out of your way to meet people. For me, that’s not so easy. I’m generally the type of person who doesn’t make an effort to talk to strangers (I think this is the lingering result of all those warnings about “Not Getting Into Econoline Vans with Strange Men in Sunglasses,” and “Checking Your Candy When You Go Trick-or-Treating to Make Sure There Are No Needles”). But The Young Americans Project is about making connections, and to be honest, more often than not, we are the strange men in sunglasses, only we drive an RV instead of an Econoline Van and we don’t molest little kids.

I traced the rap music to its source, a standard fraternity room on the second floor of Tau Kappa Epsilon (or “teek” for those who like acronyms), and met Alec (I’m pretty sure it was Alec) who asked me where I was from and then told me he had hella relatives in Maine. I was getting some cold glances from the other kids in the room (a couple guys, a couple girls), but whatever, they’d warm up to me.

That’s when one of the girls came up to me and asked me in a very hostile tone why the fuck I was there. I tried to explain about the project and meeting people and not worrying about strange men in sunglasses anymore, but she wasn’t listening, and instead of responding to anything I had said, she stated bluntly that I had bad breath.

Then one of the guys put on a clown mask, grabbed a bottle, and asked me if I wanted him to smash the bottle on my face. No, I said. “Then why the fuck are you in my room?” he asked. I was going to answer, but I wasn’t so sure anymore why the fuck I was in the room, and I was starting to feel like I wanted to be somewhere else. “What would you do if someone came into your house in Maine?” the guy asked. I told him I would do what we always do – ask them if they want something to drink. He disagreed. He thought that I would smash a bottle over the person’s face, and then from there, he segued into reminding me that he wanted to smash his bottle over my face. He also told me that I looked ridiculous, a statement that was somewhat true. It was, after all, Halloween, and I had thrown on every odd scrap of clothing available in the RV. Looking ridiculous on Halloween is kind of the point.

So I left TKE.

Why devote so much space to this clown-faced jerk? Well, like I said earlier, I think it’s important to talk about everyone, not just the good people. We’re lucky – most of the people we’ve talked to have fallen in the “good” category, but every now and then, evil appears. And it’s also important that some dean at the University of Washington reads this, finds the kid in the clown mask, and kicks him out of school. That would make me happy.

I woke up this morning thinking two things:

1. Too often kids who party think that being drunk gives them carte blanche to be a jerk. I don’t buy this. If you’re a jerk when you’re drunk, don’t drink.

2. I’m a supporter of fraternities – I was a frat guy myself – but if the Greek life cultivates, in any way, kids like Clown Face, then I’m in favor of getting rid of fraternities and sororities wherever that’s a problem.

It would be a tough move to make, but if it rids the world of a few jerks, it’s worth it.

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On Saturday we also went to the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. They have the original queen alien from Alien there (the one Sigourney Weaver had to kill) and it looks like it has even worse breath than I allegedly had on Saturday night. Our tour guide, Christian, showed us around and then answered some questions on camera. He’s got an American passport because he was born in L.A. and his mom is American, but he’s got an English accent and he’s lived in about a dozen cities.

It seems to rain a lot in the Northwest.

Happy Halloween.

Back in four. Email adam@tyap.com to be notified when new blogs are posted.

October 26

Slideshows aren't really my style, so I figured I'd put all my best pictures in a blog and then discuss. These photographs will probably catapult me to Ansel Adams status and win me a Nobel Peace Prize for photography, but guys, it will still just be me, Adam.

This is the first picture I took on the trip. We're outside a bar called Four Kegs in Columbus, Ohio. Is this picture worth looking at? Absolutely not. But nobody else is putting pictures of bars on this website, an omission that represents a form of dishonesty because sometimes we do go to bars. This one was full of drunk kids, country music, fights, and Liquid Dope. Read my October 2nd blog for more on Four Kegs and the guy in the "Define Girlfriend" shirt.

Here's another example of a picture nobody else is posting. I used the timer feature on my Canon Elph (self-call) to snap this shot of me driving out of Detroit. I think it came out pretty well, except for some reason you can't see my eyes, I look extremely pale, my teeth are yellow, and I have more wrinkles than an elephant scrotum. Oh wait, that's just how I smile.

Hey, here's a question: what band or artist do you think has been played most frequently on the radio so far? If you guessed Hall & Oates, you're way off. It's actually Kelly Clarkson by a long shot. On a related note, Elton John has been on the radio eight times to the Beatles' seven. We keep track of such things.

Can you see what it says on the sign? It says 8 Mile Rd., which of course is where Rabbit, played by Eminem in the film 8Mile, grew up. None of that matters though. What matters is that I took this picture while driving 110 mph down the highway, one-handed, with eyes closed. Yo Ben and Matt, I'd like to see you pull off a skill shot like this one with your big clunky Nikons. Yeah, right.

Here's a Minute Mystery for you: guess what that is on my pant leg, why it's there, who's responsible, and where I am. All the clues are contained in the picture. First reader to email me with the correct answer wins a free autographed TYAP bumper sticker.

Sometimes people don't want you to take their picture. But sometimes this guy, Julio, pretends he's going for your camera and then gropes you instead.

"Your website is awesome!!!!" screams Corey in the crowded bar as he holds his pool cue and makes his hands look loke horns.

Here are some South Dakotans we met at Bob's.

Here are Matt and Wigs eating at Bob's. Notice that the curvy counter makes it impossible for them to have a conversation with each other. The awkwardness of this counter has been rivaled only by the bar setup at the Million Dollar Cowboy in Jackson, WY, where instead of bar stools, they have saddles. Try looking cool, talking to the person next to you, and pretending to ride a horse all at the same time. It's not easy.

Check out this sausagefest! Seriously though, these guys are cooking sausage (or at least watching someone else cook sausage). I took this picture outside the Kennebec, North Dakota Fire Department, where we were attending a pancake breakfast.

Here's Matt and Wigs looking scruffy in front of one of the big red firetrucks. They're dressed similarly.

This is part of my "Behind the Scenes" series, showing how pictures get made.

Also part of the "Behind the Scenes" series.

They hooked up later.

If you can explain what 100% INGREDIENTS means, and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, I'll give you a dollar.

I swear to God that's a trail.

This is Matt working hard to get his blog in three days late.

I'm pretty good at taking pictures early in the morning when we all look awful. Good lighting here, too. This picture's from the Gateway diner in North Dakota and I used the timer feature on my camera again. I'm probably the nastiest photographer ever.

Ben pushing truck. Me watching. See, if I were to get involved with the pushing of this truck, I wouldn't have been able to capture the moment on camera. It's moments like these that affirm my status as an expert observor, documentarian, and supervisor (because I was also telling Ben how to push the truck, which is a pretty important job.)

That's all my pictures. Now here's what happened yesterday...

Went to the Jackson, Wyoming Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, where they sell construction products. They let us go to the dump and throw things into a pile, which is always enjoyable.

Took off for Boise, picked up 18 year-old hitchhiker, Vernon Blazor. Ended up profiling him. Matt will write about this eventually.

Back in four. Email adam@tyap.com to be notified when new blogs are posted.

 

October 22

Here’s why I don’t like heights: if you’re in a high place and you fall, you die. If you’re not in a high place and you fall, you might look silly and uncoordinated, but you probably won’t die. So here’s a thought experiment for you: walk along a curb that’s roughly six inches off the street. Try to balance on it. Now fall. What happens? Did you die? Yeah, right.

Question: What if the person doing the thought experiment dies because they fall into the street and get hit by a passing Lincoln Navigator?
Answer: Oh.
Question: I think you should make sure they walk on the curb when there are no cars around.
Answer: You’re absolutely right.

Okay, so from now on, when you’re doing this thought experiment, look out for cars, because if you get hit by a Lincoln Navigator and die, it ruins my whole point. But let’s get to the second part of the experiment. Drive to a city and find a skyscraper that’s under construction. Sneak into the worksite (I suggest wearing a hard hat, carrying a thermos, and calling everyone “Chief”) and climb all the way to the top floor. Find a beam that’s roughly the same width as the curb and make sure there’s nothing underneath it to break your fall other than street or sidewalk. Start walking along the beam, then fall. Are you still alive? I doubt it, Chief.

So here’s the question you have to ask yourself: why would anyone prefer to walk on the skyscraper beam over the curb? It doesn’t make any sense. Picking the skyscraper over the curb would be like favoring a swimming pool full of lava over water. Would you rather eat fresh Chinese food, or Chinese food that’s been sitting in a dumpster in Texas for two weeks? I would take the new food every time, just like I would always pick the curb over the skyscraper beam.

Yet, for some stupid reason, people go rock climbing. I’ve never understood it, I’ve never advocated it, and I’ve always thought that people who like to climb rocks are probably missing something crucial in the decision-making part of their brains. However, this trip is about trying new things and meeting new people, and sometimes those new things and those new people have to be stupid.

So I went to a climbing gym in Missoula, Montana yesterday. I was there to profile Ben Brunsvold, a sophomore at the University of Montana and a climbing enthusiast. I was also there to overcome my fear of heights, even though it’s not something I really want to overcome because it frequently prevents me from falling, which I like. I look at is as a safety feature, like airbags or a water wings.

From what I learned in the Missoula Rock Garden, climbing is all about being extremely uncomfortable, and then later, when you’re done, being glad that you’re not uncomfortable anymore. Even the equipment is designed with discomfort in mind. Climbing shoes have been adapted from the ancient Chinese tradition of foot-binding, and they’re supposed to make it so your foot shrinks to half it size, which in China used to be considered sexy. The harnesses, which go around your waist, legs, and groin, are supposed to make it so your testicles shrink to half their size, which in no nation, not even China, has ever been considered sexy.

Your harness gets clipped to a carabiner, a slim metal ring that supposedly can withstand the force of something like forty elephants falling from the height of seven thousand feet. Sounds like a lie to me though. The carabiner attached me to one end of a skinny rope and Ben was hooked into the other end. He was ready to belay me, which meant that he’d be my spotter and take the slack out of the rope as I climbed the wall. The rope left my carabiner, went up to the ceiling, took a lap around a pulley, and came back down to Ben. In theory, if I fell, Ben would stop the rope and I would be fine. Ben, however, weighs at least thirty pounds less than me, so I’m pretty sure that if I actually had fallen, I would have crashed all the way to the ground as Ben flew up to the ceiling. (Ben tried to explain that the friction of the rope on the pulley and his ATC, which looks like this,

the thing he was using for belaying would counterbalance our weight difference. I think he just made that up though.)

 

Here's a picture of what I think would have happened if I fell:

The wall I was supposed to be climbing was one face of a spike that rose all the way to the ceiling. Matt, who was also with us, estimates that the spike was around sixty feet high, but I’d put it closer to three miles.

At first, climbing’s easy. You just lift yourself up from one hold to the next like you’re climbing a poorly designed ladder. But as I ascended, I became more and more tired, and every time I looked down, Ben and Matt looked smaller and smaller. Ben had told me not to look down, but sometimes you have to check where your feet are, and when you do this, it’s kind of hard not to notice the ground sneering up at you, waiting to break your neck.

Almost to the top and very fatigued, I began to cheat. I was using whatever hold I could find, not just the ones labeled with yellow tape. My path was the yellow-tape path, but there was another path, called “Pour les enfants,” which in French means, “You’re a little girl if you use these holds.” Call me a little girl all you want: I’ll gladly use the enfant holds if it means reaching the top. So that’s what I did.

Ben eased me down to the ground and I collapsed on my back and looked at the ceiling. Did I feel a sense of accomplishment? I did, in my forearms. Climbers call this “getting pumped.” I enjoy getting pumped and I now know why people go climbing. It’s like a mental and physical puzzle. It’s a personal test of will, strength, nerves, and decision-making. And if you’re climbing up a really high face, you can pull down your pants and poop, and it will fall all the way down to the bottom of the cliff. Then after you’ve been to the top and back, when you take off your climbing shoes and your harness, you get to feel comfortable again.

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Also in Missoula…

We had breakfast burritos at Catalyst on Higgins St.!

Ben (our Ben, not the Ben I profiled) made friends with two guys, Brian and Mark, who sell their paintings in a gallery on Front St. I joined Ben at the photo gallery for a couple cold Coors. It’s a pretty cool gig that Brian and Mark have. They hang out, paint, sell some paintings, and on Friday afternoons, share beers with a couple strangers like me and Ben. Thanks, Brian and Mark. You guys are cool.

Ben and I played hoops at the Montana gym and met probably the sweetest dude we’ve ever met, Grant, who let us into the gym without Montana Student IDs in exchange for calling him the sweetest dude we’ve ever met in my blog. Ben hurt his ankle in our second game and Wigs filled in for him. Ben’s the best basketball player in our group, by a long shot, so Wigs had big shoes to fill, but he came out firing. His first shot missed the backboard by eight feet, but then he settled down and finished with at least five points, ten rebounds, and eighteen flagrant fouls. Wigs sparked a comeback and we almost beat our opponents, but in the end, we just sucked too much.

At night we went to a park where a band had been playing but then the band stopped playing so everyone moved to a house and had a pumpkin carving contest.

We ran into our new climbing buddy, Ben, at the party (Missoula’s small enough for this to happen) and then went with him and Alex, our Missoula tour guide, to the Oxford, which is one of the more bizarre restaurants on the planet. It features a full bar that’s just under a shotgun rack, a 24/7 poker table, painted portraits of all their regulars, and a waitstaff that doesn’t bother with formalities like “saying hello” or “smiling.” It’s a great place and I’ll go back the next time I’m in Missoula, which will hopefully be soon.

Back in four. Email adam@tyap.com to be notified when new columns are posted.

October 19

There was some confusion as to why we were in Bowman, North Dakota on Monday, and I’ll try to clear that up – we were there because the town sits on the intersection of the highway that heads north from South Dakota and the highway that leads west to Montana.  Location, location, location made Bowman our ND destination.  So this should explain why we slept in the Bowman truck weigh-in station on Sunday night.

Breakfast at the Gateway Diner.  Our waitress was surly from the moment we arrived.  We’ve run into a string of these servers now.  Perhaps we smell bad.  We do smell bad.  But a lot of people smell bad.  Angry waitresses and “Welcome Hunters!” signs: this is Dakota.

But Dakota is also Emmett and Jean, the octogenarian couple we met in Marmarth, just six miles from the border of Montana.  We had stopped on Main Street, a road that looks like a ball of tumbleweed rolled through ten years ago and took everything with it.  The town’s coated in dust and the chipped paint on a restaurant sign advertises steak that hasn’t been served in years.  Emmett saw us taking pictures and invited us into his house because he had some things he thought would interest us.

These things of interest were the totem polls and antler horns that his son carves.  Emmett is a bit of a whittler himself – he makes small wooden minarets that tap dance when inspired by a bucking dance floor.  Jean made us cookies and Emmett handed Ben and I the keys to his ’62 Chevy truck (a picture of it’s on our home page right now).  After a grappling match with the choke and the clutch, Ben managed to fire up the Chevy and we took of on a tour of Marmarth.  We went a couple blocks and then I wanted to try driving, so Ben shut her off, and I slid behind the steering wheel.  I turned the ignition and the old Chevy sputtered, coughed, yawned, stretched, and fell asleep.  She was out of gas and the battery was dead.

Ben and I pushed the truck several dusty blocks, but eventually reached a hill that was too steep to ascend.  We hoofed it back to Emmett’s and he said he’d take care of the situation.  He drove us back to the truck in his van, we gave the Chevy some gas, and Emmett jumped it with the van.  A few minutes later, she was runnin’ again.

We were soon runnin’ again too, off to Bozeman, Montana.  Big Sky country. 

Back in four.  Email adam@tyap.com to be notified when new blogs are posted.

 

What the Hell Are We Doing at a Chinese Buffet in Kansas?

October 14

Sometime during lunch yesterday I realized what I was doing and where I was, and I had to look across the table and ask Matt, “What the hell are we doing at a Chinese buffet in Kansas?”

These are the types of questions that get asked on our trip.  There’s always a moment during the day when you awaken from whatever trance you were in and you can’t remember whether it’s Wednesday or Thursday, or whether you’re in Kansas or Iowa.  I was having one of these moments yesterday in Lin’s Chinese Buffet in Atchison, Kansas, a small town on the border of Missouri and Nebraska. 

Lin’s should be applauded not just for its excellent “Buffet Lo Mein,” but also for its rebellion against corporate America.  The restaurant used to be a Wendy’s.  Usually chains like Wendy’s or Starbucks kick out little guys like Lin, but Lin had apparently kicked out Wendy.  He did, however, keep the pictures of Wendy that hang above the bathroom door signs for MEN and WOMEN.

We enjoyed Atchison – all of it except for the seven-mile long trains that pass over 10th Street for thousands of minutes at a time.  It’s just that most people probably go their entire lives without seeing Atchison, and to be honest, we were only there because we had to go through Kansas, and Atchison is the most convenient spot to get to when you’re heading west from Des Moines to Omaha. Actually, it’s not that convenient.  Last night, after arriving at Wigs’ first cousin once removed’s house in Nebraska, Matt asked me how far out of the way we had gone to arrive in Atchison.  “More than fifteen miles?” he inquired.  “More like two hundred,” I said.

But everything is out of the way if you think about it.  This entire trip is an exercise in going out of the way. 

In fact, we did have something to do in Atchison.  We were helping to build a house.  None of us had much experience with construction – I used a buzz saw for the first time ever, and hopefully I’ll never do it again, because saws are scary and they eat fingers and spit chunks of wood at your eyes. 

We were helping the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate for the day.  It was a way to take a break from our normal schedule and help a community to build something.  (We’ll be doing the same thing at several stops along the way).  Our working partners were a retired general surgeon, a retired minister, a retired carpenter, and a retired steel worker.  The minister and doctor were both named Joe.

They showed us how to put up plywood siding and then cover it with Styrofoam insulation.  From the beginning of the day to the end of the day, we watched the house change.  It went from a plywood box to a blue Styrofoam box, but at least it would be a warm box (once the roof goes on, anyway).  We probably weren’t the best carpenters ever: I can’t count how many times I drove a nail in sideways, and at one point Ben almost killed me by dropping a hammer off a ladder.  But we had fun, and we got free donuts.

The donuts came from John Bishop, the man who organizes HFH in Atchison.  He also owns a donut shop and maybe he should think about pursuing a career in publicity because he set up two interviews for us.  A woman from the local paper stopped by and so did a woman named Rachel from the country radio station.  Rachel came back in the afternoon to give us a recorded CD of the interview.  Our voices were interwoven with Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again.  We might try to turn that into a podcast soon.  

It felt good to help make a house.  I like making stuff.  In the afternoon, the woman we were building the house for, Michelle, and her six-year-old son, Micah, stopped by and helped sweep up.  Hopefully they’ll like their new house.  I think it will be warm enough.

To help a Habitat for Humanity in your neck of the woods, check out www.habitat.org (they’re also doing some good stuff on the Gulf Coast).

Back in four.  Email adam@tyap.com if you’d like to be notified when new blogs are posted.

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Oct. 31 blog
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BLOGS 1-5
BLOGS 11-15
BLOGS 16-20
 
 
 
 
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