2012 May | Synaptic Circus of Kelli Jae Baeli

May 14th, 2012

bees, birds, CREATURES, eggs, HUMOR, procreation

2 Comments »

Birds & Bees (with giggling)

NOTE TO READER: I’ve always found the word “chicken” to be comical. I don’t know why. Thus, I will be giggling as I write about them.

So….

How exactly do birds do it? Let’s use chickens, [hehehe] shall we?

Roosters fancy themselves clever little bastards. If they want to mate, they’ll call the hens out to dinner–which is usually grain on the ground. He lets them start their dinner and then when they are focused on that, he moves in for the kill, without so much as a smooth pick-up line.

“No, seriously, go on with your dinner, I’m almost done”

We’ve all got that image of a rooster mounting a hen, but what goes on between the feathers, as it were? Have you really thought about it? Don’t lie….when I was a child I thought it was some kind of depositing of….of…liquid? That um…sort of soaked into the back of a hen and….did what deposited fertilizing liquids do. I never really imagined a micro-rooster-penis. Chickens [heheheh]with penises? [hahahah]Really? What would THAT look like, strutting around the barnyard?

Oyster Catchers mating. He seems quite pleased.

Now through the magic of Google, I know..

SIDEBAR: Ths magic was not to be had at first, because I typed in “How do chickeens mate?” first. Not sure what a chickeen is, but there was no info on it. Just the usual helpful and somewhat condescending Google message: “Did you mean ‘how do chickens mate?”?

Anyway, turns out, I was a smarter kid that I thought. No penis on roosters.

But there is an anatomical feature called a cloaca. It’s an external opening on both the rooster and the hen. When these two openings are merged in mating, it’s called a “cloacal kiss.” Hens can’t fight off a rooster, but can decide to reject the idea of having his offspring by squirting his sperm right back on him.

Wouldn’t that be interesting if human females could do that?

(try not to imagine it, I dare you).

Rooster prefer hens with larger combs–the ones on their heads, not the ones guys carry in their back pockets. It also seems to hold true for human males. I guess that’s the human equivalent to breasts. The bigger the better.

A fertilized egg takes only 24 hours to get the white part and shell. Did you know the shell is soft until it’s out in the air, and then quickly calcifies to the shells we’re familiar with?

Mr. Rooster climbs on top then, after she squats for him (because using a step-stool would be undignified). He then bends his tail under so his cloaca touches her cloaca in that aforementioned cloacal kiss.

One poster on backyardchickens.com called the act “disturbing and unromantic.” Another poster suggested you “take your husband’s beard trimmers and shave around the hen and rooster cloaca to ensure better….connection. She did not, however, offer any advice on how to explain to the husband why his shaver has a feather stuck in it.

She was then admonished by another poster, but not for using her husband’s shaver to do this, nor for not telling him she did, but for doing “Kind of a not so nice thing to a chicken.” Never mind the husband.

So there you have it. That’s how chickens do it. Hearing that song in my head “birds do it, bees do it….” Oh yeah.

What about the bees?

Well now, bees are a little more exciting. The male bee, or drone, (worker bees don’t mate, they have too much to do) mates in mid-flight with the Queen. Imagine the aerodynamic skill it takes to do that…..

Anyway, bees use penetrative, internal fertilization. The drone deposits millions of sperm

with his endophallus, which stays inside the queen in a pouch; and if he’s a honey bee, he then promptly dies, because he can’t live without his endophallus. Drones live only to mate. (Sound like any human males you know?)

The first queen to hatch stings the other queens to death in their little cells. (Kind of sounds like an episode of The Tudors).

If two or more are hatched at the same time, they fight to the death. Last Queen standing is the winner. (Now it sounds more like chess). Then the last-queen-standing begins to (check)mate with all the males. And none of the other bees call her a slut.

Unfertilized eggs become males, and fertilized eggs become females, and the queen can choose whether to fertilize the eggs she carries, or not. See? Choice is important in the bee community, too. She can also create male bees without breeding at all. If that were true for humans, it would be what I’d call a mixed blessing.

Also, a fertilized egg can become another queen, if royal jelly is fed to it (‘m not making this up)–this is a glandular secretion of nutrients and sex hormones.Royal jelly is also sold as a supplement for humans, though I’m not certain it is used to create queens. I’ll call the the palace.

Continuing….The newly created queen egg eventually pupates. This is not the process of becoming a baby dog. No, according to the dictionary, a pupa is “The nonfeeding stage between the larva and adult in the metamorphosis of holometabolous insects, during which the larva typically undergoes complete transformation within a protective cocoon or hardened case.”

Honey bees are quite a bit more civilized about community dynamics. When the colony becomes overpopulated, the old queen obligingly takes half the worker bees with her to find a new home and the younger queen then takes over the colony.

I didn’t know all this when I was 7 years old, and made a short career of Stomping Bees. (go purchase it. I’m addicted to writing, please support my habit. Many blessings will be had by you and yours). I also didn’t know all these insect-facts when my brother shot a hornet’s nest with a squirt gun and ran away as they all stung me in the face. If I had known more about bees at the time, I would have wished the same fate for him after he did his squirting.

Hornets are part of the wasp family of insects. And although we all seem to have a dimmer view of them as more aggressive, (as I did when they all stung me in the face) they are actually much more civilized in their life cycles than bees. For instance, queen hornets gather wood from available sources, chew it up and mix it with their own spit to create a nest-building material much like paper mache. Then she lays eggs in the cells she creates (which look much like a honey comb) and feeds the youngsters that hatch with pre-chewed insects, until they mature enough to spin a silky covering over the cell (like spiders do, interestingly–I wonder if that happened when a spider and a hornet got trapped together and relieved their boredom by the spider teaching the hornet how to create silk webbing?). Then the pupa-hornets go through their transformation into female workers. They take over the domestic duties and the queen lays more eggs, and when the queens are born, they go off looking for mating, and then form their own colonies elsewhere. Much more civilized than killing the other queen, but not near as entertaining.

For a more interesting and, I must say, highly entertaining essay on hornets, go to Fred Reed’s ” Thinking About Hornets” blog post. At http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed91.html

Now ends this lesson on the birds and the bees. I hope all this information has made you happy you came across my blog. If not, I’m sure there are many other posts you might find more appealing. As you can see from the tag cloud, I write about almost everything. But I only laugh at chickens. [hehehe].

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May 8th, 2012

anxiety, chemistry, commitment, domestic partnership, fear, girlfriends, globus hystericus, growth, HIGHLY SENSITIVE PERSON (HSP), love, moving, New Zealand, parenting, passion, RELATIONSHIPS, Relocation, risk, soulmates, stress, writer

Purging: I am, She is

Purging. Good for the soul they say. Also good for the tight-lipped, the guilty, and the occasional cyst. Between hours-per-day of yahoo video chatting with my betrothed, I am mostly engaged in the act of purging. As in domestic purging. This isn’t just a Spring Cleaning kind of purge either. This is the mother of all purges. The one that includes selling, tossing, or giving away 90% of everything I own. It’s necessary, it seems, when moving to another country, and not being someone with a bank account under the name Trump. It really is simpler to just get rid of it all and buy it back later once I’m there.

But this plan requires a type of letting-go that is unusual for most people in this Material World Madonna so engagingly sang about.

There’s a list psychologists use to gauge the most stressful life events. The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. In any given year of my adult life, I have experienced 70 to 80% of those, it seems. Some of those which apply now, are:

abandonment of family;
heartbreak/loss of a relationship and my two band projects I spent 7 years building;
loss of social groups;
loss of the friends associated with that social group (there is something so devastating about going from a stage, where you are applauded and admired, to just abject isolation and no friends, especially when it includes getting your heart broken by the first woman you were ever in love with).
Then after years of isolation, relocation to another state, alone;
money issues all along the way, before and after;
then the death of a family member, but being ostracized from that family and not told, nor included in obituary as surviving family member;
then to moving again to start another relationship which turned into a nightmare of epic proportions, and also ended in abuse and the arrest of the partner, leading to another move by myself under great duress;
then being stressed by the environment I had to live in;
then heartbreak again with next relationship;
betrayal and abandonment by my best friend of 11 years, and simultaneously two other friends.
And then there was another move, where I hoped to begin again, paying less rent, so I could have money to rebuild the life I wanted, convinced that I would spend my life alone and should try to make peace with that.

But I was circling the drain. I knew that I would never be happy without a partner–the RIGHT partner. I just don’t thrive alone. So I cried everyday. I lost interest in even the things that were my greatest joys–creating. Writing, especially. I was fighting a deep depression that I couldn’t seem to shake.

And then there was HER.

We connected through our writing–that passion that means the most to both of us. Soon, this connection deepened and expanded. It was like looking at a trench, closing your eyes for a moment and opening them to a view of the Grand Canyon.

We finish each others’ sentences. We share the same unique quirks. We share the same vocation, similar challenges, and kindred hearts. What i feel for her is an entirely new species of love, and the compatibility is flirting with 100%. I never thought I would meet anyone who matched every criteria I had for the perfect mate (aside from those things I had before listed as incompatible, but which have somehow turned into blessings, too). I know how deep my feelings go and how real they are, just by what I’m willing to do to be with her. What I’m willing to sacrifice, what I’m willing to risk–and without a single second of hesitation or doubt. This from someone who has had so many betrayals. Many of them freshly inflicted.

But she has renewed my belief that there are still good people in the world–though I know they exist, they have seldom crossed my path. And I know she is a good person because she is so much like me and I know I’m a good person. She is all those better things usually found only in increments in other people, and yet they are abundant in her. She laughs easily, perseveres through challenges; she has sacrificed her own needs and comforts for the needs and comforts of those she loves. I admire her parenting skills, and the way she has managed, alone, to raise five beautiful, well-adjusted and intelligent children. I admire how she accepts them and loves them for who they are, and not from some misguided attempt to fit them into boxes of her own devising. I am endeared by the fun-loving banter she shares with them, and the way I can feel their respect and love for her; her patience and kindness and good-humor, even throughout great challenge and sometimes insufferable pain.

I cherish her compassion, her honesty, her beautiful soul; I adore her humor and her laughter; I applaud her intelligence. I admire her ability to create beautiful, compelling characters and stories that say something real and meaningful amid the hordes of tripe in our literary world. I am thrilled that she shares my love of simple pleasures, and my need for serenity and creativity. And I am most taken with the way she genuinely understands, accepts, and appreciates me for all I am. It feels like she is the one I’ve been searching for my whole life, and she shares that sentiment.

Thus, I will be moving to another country and giving up all my comfort zones, almost all my belongings, including my pets and my car, for all the right reasons, and willingly, to be with someone I believe with all my heart is my soulmate.

But it is still stressful. I have redeveloped a condition called globus hystericus. Modern terminology globus pharyngis[glō′bus \-fə-ˈrin-jəs-\]

SIDEBAR: [It occurs to me that globus hystericus sounds like a condition wherein someone is afraid to travel to the other side of the world.....]

globus hystericus Etymology: L, small ball; Gk, hystera, womb.

a transitory sensation of a lump in the throat that cannot be swallowed or coughed up, often accompanying emotional conflict or acute anxiety. The condition is thought to be caused by a functional disturbance of the ninth cranial nerve and spasm of the inferior constrictor muscle that encircles the lower part of the throat. The physical examination result tends to be normal, as does the result of barium esophagraphy.

For a long time, I thought there really was something sticking in my throat, but when I think back to the times I had it, I was under a high amount of stress, and my Xanax and a warm compress on it, usually made it go away.

And of course, moving to another country to start a whole new life from scratch with a new beloved…that can be stressful, no matter how joyful the ultimate proposition feels. The stress makes sense. So many changes. The experience of deciding what is most important to me…what I must have to function in a healthy way, and what is just extra stuff I’ve collected that really holds no intrinsic value except that value I chose to give it…the act of going through all my papers and notebooks and files and scrapbooks and photo albums–all filled with remnants of those other things in my life–and being able to throw so much of it away.

Afterward, it creeps up in my consciousness, and becomes surreal. Like I will wake up and say, Wow, I had this really weird dream that I was throwing everything away….And at the same time, it is all so profoundly cathartic, and liberating, and yet still very stressful on some visceral level. I find myself walking around the apartment with a knot in my stomach, and my hands shaking, and feeling like I am just at the edge of panic. But not the panic born of doubt about the decision. Panic stemming from a lifetime of habits put in place to create my own solace–the solace I could not have with previous partnerships, and so was forced to create in perhaps an artificial way, just to get through the days. I am afraid, I am joyous. I am anxious, I am excited. But never do I second-guess the necessity of going to be with her. Of us building a life together in a country I’ve never been to. A country where I will be the foreigner. I will be the one with the accent and the strange customs.

Another country. When I think of all the adjustments I will have to make, especially as a small percentage of the population who share a unique brain architecture of Sensory Processing Sensitivity…it is daunting. But she is also one of those people, and so I know she will always understand me as only those who share your nature can. She will understand that I will not have all the familiar and comforting things I’m used to (or as many conveniences). I will be, literally, a stranger in a strange land. I will not be able to drive for a while because they all drive on the other (laughingly, read as “wrong”) side of the road and the car steering wheels are on the other side too. I’m afraid that each time I go around a corner on the left side of the road, I’ll freak out, waiting for that head-on collision. I will be giving up one of those crucial things that gives me personal autonomy. And yet, I know she would take me anywhere I wish to go. And some places I don’t even know I wish to go.

Yet on a psychological level, it’s a cognitive dissonance wrought from a lifetime of doing things one way. The thing that makes it worth it–the only thing–is that I have 100% faith in my partner and the great potential for happiness we have together. This is like no other relationship I’ve ever had. And I trust with every cell in my body, and every synaptic connection, that it will be the last one, the lasting one, the right one. The one all humans yearn for. Nothing material, no preconceived idea, no habit sprung from a previous life will keep me from pursuing it.

Whether that makes me brave and crazy–or both–I accept the label. Life is short, pleasures and good fortune, and especially love, are rare commodities, precious cargo. I am leaping off this precipice and knitting my parachute on the way down. Because I know that she is there to catch me, and nothing will compare to the comfort of her arms, the radiance of her smile, the sweetness of her heart merged with mine.

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May 8th, 2012

AUTHORS, blogging, HUMOR, Kate Genet, Kelli Jae Baeli, snakes, WRITING

Pickles, Chills, & Snakes

[This is another writing exercise between me and Kate. We each come up with a subject and both blog it, and don't see each other's version until after we've posted. It was my turn, and I suggested three unrelated nouns, made to relate in one piece. I chose pickles, chills and snakes.]

FADE IN

INT. HOUSE – DAY

Two people are standing in front of a fireplace, warming their hands. We’ll call them MELANIE and BARBARA. They have been reading Dr. Seuss books all evening and are now taking a break.

BARBARA reaches over and swipes her hand across MELANIE‘s shoulder blades.

MELANIE
What are you doing?

BARBARA
I’m getting the chill off your back.
(she stomps on it)

MELANIE
Why did you stomp on it?

BARBARA
Had to kill it.

MELANIE
Don’t kill chills!

BARBARA
Why not?

MELANIE
We can them

BARBARA
Can you can a chill?

MELANIE
Not if you stomp it. Only If you kill it.

BARBARA
How do you kill a chill?

MELANIE
With dill.

BARBARA
You can kill a chill with dill?

MELANIE
At will.

BARBARA
How do you can them?

MELANIE
When they’re not looking.

BARBARA
No, I mean, how do you go about catching them?

MELANIE
Catching a chill? Or canning them? Which is it?

BARBARA
Well first, how do you catch them?

MELANIE
You fan them with a pan.

BARBARA
That kills chills?

MELANIE
Yes.

BARBARA
And then what?

MELANIE
Then you pick them up.

BARBARA
They’re awfully cold. What do you pick them up with?

MELANIE
A feather quill

BARBARA
You fan them with a pan, and then pick them up with a feather quill?

MELANIE
That’s correct.

BARBARA
Then what?

MELANIE
You can them, then, silly.

BARBARA
But how do you can them?

MELANIE
Pack them in snow snakes.

BARBARA
Where do you get snow snakes?

MELANIE
In the snow.

BARBARA
What if it’s not snowing?

MELANIE
Then you pack them in Summer snakes.

BARBARA
What if there aren’t any snow snakes or summer snakes.

MELANIE
Well you can use Spring snakes.

BARBARA
What if there are not Spring snakes either?

MELANIE
Well then, you would be out of seasons, and since it’s always a season, there would be some sort of season snake available. And they are still covered in dill, of course.

BARBARA
Yes, I see. Seasoning is very important.

MELANIE
Yes it is.

BARBARA
Now then, what do the seasoning snakes do to the chills with dill?

MELANIE
It pickles them.

BARBARA

Are they good?

MELANIE
Oh there’s nothing quite like pickled chills.

BARBARA
Is that right?

MELANIE
Unless you’re fickle.

BARBARA
I don’t believe I’m fickle. I should like to try the pickled chills.

MELANIE
We’ll have to let the fire go out for a bit.

BARBARA
Very good. I’ll go out and fetch some snow snakes.

MELANIE
(heading for the kitchen)
I’ll get the dill.

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May 7th, 2012

blogging, cows, Eddie Izzard, guns, HUMOR, Kate Genet, Kelli Jae Baeli, WRITING

Cows With Guns

My beloved and I have made this pact, starting yesterday, that we would pick a subject and blog it separately, just to see what each of us would come up with. My suggestion yesterday was “Are writers born or made?”

Hers, for today, was “Cows with Guns.” Guess which one of us is more cerebral, and which one the goob?

She also informed me that the title is from a song called “Cows with guns.” Who knew?

I didn’t even do any research on that one except to glance over a Wikipedia page and notice it was the title of some animated film from Australia. (I always hear that song by Men at Work “I come from the land down under…can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?? You better run, you better take cover….” –which is appropriate, if the thunder is a stampede of cows with guns. Taking cover WOULD be the wise course of action).

But I think I’m digressing. Or being parenthetical. Or Parenthetically digressive. I’m supposed to be writing about Cows with Guns, not Australian pop bands from the 80′s. [And by saying this, I'm dating myself. Good thing, since no one else is dating me.]

SIDEBAR: Note that the last statement was not parenthetical because the comment was in brackets. So I was being, at best, brackish.

And…..Back to Cows with Guns.

Right away, my steel-trap mind discerns a flaw in the logic. Cows have hooves. I fail to see the efficiency of firing a gun when you don’t have fingers. They would probably end up just throwing the gun at you. Which also might be hard when they couldn’t grip it, because, again, as i so astutely pointed out, they don’t have fingers. Which reminds me that Eddie Izzard said, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. And so do monkeys if they have guns.” {Eddie Izzard is a cross-dressing stand-up comic and actor who is British and probably doesn’t own a gun. Or a cow. But he was fantastic playing a non-crossdressing gypsy in The Riches. Minnie Driver was perfect as his wife, too. Of course the show was canceled because it was so good.}

And again….back to the Armed Cows…

Cows also have what is called dichromatic vision, which means they are more sensitive to sudden movement. This would be a bad state of affairs if they had guns. They’d be shooting at everything.

Because of this vision, cows also see well far away but not so well close up. So if there WERE Cows with Guns, (in some parallel universe for which there is no logical explanation) you’d be well-advised to stand really nearby, if you know what’s good for you.

So, in conclusion, the concept of cows with guns is UDDERLY absurd.

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May 7th, 2012

AUTHORS, bad writing, editing, Fiction Writing, Kate Genet, writer, WRITING LIFE

Are Writers Born or Made?

My partner Kate Genet and I were discussing this topic, and as is my tendency, I wallow in the gray areas. A simple answer is never forthcoming and requires examination. So if I were to answer the question of whether writers are born or made, I’d have to say Both.

And then I would have to wade through the morass of That-Depends toward the destination of Picker of Nits. The first question I would throw back is “What do you mean by writer?” One could be a writer, in that she actually WRITES. But it doesn’t automatically ensure the writing is any good. So the implication I will assume here, (for the sake of brevity, and to spare you of another tangent) is that the question is really “Are Good writers born or made?” Assuming that, then there must be, I think, a seed of inherent talent planted in that literary ground, and then the individual must make the decision of whether or not to nurture it into sprouting.

But, alas, there will always be those people who fancy themselves writers, and who produce works they feel are examples of their status as “writer” only to reveal themselves as charlatans. And worse still, charlatans who are unaware of their error in thinking. Some neophyte writers use the garden of words to create a crop of plastic vegetation and expect us to oooo and ahhh over how pretty it is, how delicious it tastes, or how vibrant the flowering bud, when ultimately, the work is artificial, and that’s all there is to it.

Examples I can recall from my editing days include a truck driver who was writing a series about (surprise!) a truck driver who kept coming across terrible accidents, which included burning flesh and screams of agony, and him leaping out to save them, because he was that kind of guy, and more burning flesh or flesh burning and screams of pain and agony and rescue and burning and then another accident, on down the road for which he was also the hero….I place emphasis on burning because he used that word 27 times on one page. (If he had not become a writer, perhaps he would have gone into arson). Tedious? Yes. And also implausible, and melodramatic. The only way to save that story was to make the main character the one who sabotaged vehicles so that he could appear later to save everyone. This trucker-writer also used details about the trucker-character being a Desert Storm veteran, and described events the character experienced as a soldier which could not have taken place in that particular war, but could have in say, the Vietnam war, but then, that would make the character too old to be sexy, so, he made it Desert storm instead. I won’t belabor the details. But when I pointed out his errors, he became defensive and thought everything he wrote was just fine, even though his chapters were each one page long, and he had planned to do a series of six books, just like that, and was trying to query publishers before he’d even written the damn thing.

Then there was the other aspiring novelist who was an engineer and quite notably a certified genius. I thought I would enjoy editing his work. Turns out even geniuses can write like 12 year old boys. He also didn’t seem aware of how incredibly puerile and dull his story was. He would write page after page of dialogue that was banal, idiotic, went nowhere, and did nothing to move the story or develop character; and it was never clear who was speaking, because there were few attributions and all his characters sounded alike. And none of his characters spoke like people really speak. And the story was about the Loch Ness monster, I think. Anyway. Those are the two things that spring to mind when I think of people who identify themselves as good writers, but are sadly mistaken.

And among these types of writers will be those who accept constructive criticism with aplomb, and endeavor to learn what they need to learn to make themselves good writers, and those who erect a barricade built of ego and delusion, while continuing to cling to the fiction that their work is above reproach. The latter of these two is doomed to failure, the former, fraught with possibility.

There have been writers, also, who were born with a unique talent for telling stories on the page, but their lives, their decisions, their personalities, even, did not allow them to pursue it, and this talent was then lost to us. This is a sad proposition for me. A tragedy of epic proportions, since I feel the sharing of inspiration and knowledge and ideas are paramount to the survival and thriving of our species, and indeed an integral part of why we all exist as sentient beings.

Therefore, good writers are born, and then made…provided they recognize that about themselves and then do something about it.

—————–

for Kate’s blog about this subject, go here

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May 6th, 2012

bad writing, editing, Kate Genet, Kelli Jae Baeli, writer, WRITING, WRITING CRAFT, Writing tips

Writing Tips: To Know, To Begin, To Feel

As a writer, I am always in training. Like any vocation, it can be mastered to some degree if the individual cares enough about it. One thing I have noticed along the way, is that I have used certain phrases and words which do not serve the story in quality, plot or character development, or even in achieving clean, sharp examples of good craft.

Most of these examples refer to rough drafts, as I have been writing for 25 years, and cannot be excused for doing this in a final version, but still, it comes up in the editing process and can be applied to any writer who tackles the job of conscientious revision.

One such phrase I have had to be careful to revise, is “She knew.” (Since most of my characters are female). For example, I might write “She knew it was going to be a long day.” The cleaner way of making this point would be to write, “It was going to be a long day.” This distinction reveals itself in my dislike for simile and preference for metaphor.

“The day had felt like a time warp.”

Becomes

”The day was a time warp.”

But then, I would have to clarify whether it was a faster or slower time warp. In any case, metaphor has more muscle than simile.

Another phrase I have to be careful of using is “I began” or “She began”–

she began to move toward the door…..

My partner, author Kate Genet, says of this phrase, “I never began to do anything in my life. I’m either doing it or not doing it.” It does result in a sensation of author-fudging. We should commit to what we’re trying to say, rather than dance around it.

Same goes for instances of “She felt.” Kate reads something like, “She felt the emotion of fear welling up inside her” and her face pinches up and she complains, why not just say “She was afraid”? Better yet, she suggests (and rightly so) how about the old caveat of showing and not telling? Indicate the emotion by some physical reaction. An example from her book Orange Moon would be

“Goosebumps spread over my skin despite the sun.”

The reader, Kate points out, would recognize the situation as one that causes fear, and “how does your body react when you’re fearful? Goosebumps, legs weak, dizzy, etc.” She adds, “You don’t need to overdo that, because the reader will understand” what the proper reaction would be.

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