The backward glance on 2009. I was broke ass broke. Not as broke as I was in 2007 or in 2011, but still. Pretty fucking broke. I was trying out forms, thinking about Other Modernisms, especially Brazilian. I was two years out of grad school, 34 years old, teaching five classes a semester/quarter, at Northwestern University and The School of the Art Institute: trying to break into student's minds and out of my own. Maybe it was the following year that I delivered a lecture on my own work to the Adv Ptg kids at SAIC and walked away shame spiralling. I remember sitting on the train that afternoon unable to move, hunched into my own shame and self-disgust... groping around in my feelings for a reason, an explanation. The kids had barely responded to my artist talk. They had not insulted me. I forced myself to stretch, to move into and through the shame, and as I walked away from the train, toward a meeting at Northwestern, I could feel a new understanding accumulating. I began learning how to remain flexible inside formerly crippling self-judgment. How to stop reading the passive faces of students and peers as condemnation. How to step away from self-imposed prisons.