Okay, it's January 8th, 5.36pm. I'm on the 101 North going home, just passed the Marin Civic Center at San Pedro Road exit. And I want to talk about Rosa's motivations for her sudden act of simply leaving her surroundings, leaving her comforts and throwing herself into an unknown and unfamiliar journey place setting. Not only as a writer did she want an experience that would serve as a traumatic muse that would shock her into creativity. She knew that this was the way in which she was going to kind of fuel her writing. But what she didn't know was why she knew she did know there was something more. Not only did she knew this would happen because she had observed it in her mother. Her mother took the same type of act, took the same type of leap. And it just so happened that she was looking for her brother that day. And it was not her mother who told her not to let him go. And it was out of jealousy of that knit-wit who didn't care either way. She didn't care what her mother thought and didn't know his right hand from his left. It would have been eaten alive. It was spoiled. And what she didn't know was he had gone out drinking the night before and never actually made it. It was sitting against the wall of a cantina sleeping the alcohol off. But as she made her way to the bus depot, they called out his name. And it was through the commotion that she somehow made it on the bus. Now a little bit more about her outward appearance. Rose's mother, as she entered into puberty, her body never changed. She maintained the... her body actually started to take the shape of a man's rather than a woman's heart. Her hips never widened, her breasts never grew, and her jaw tightened and widened. She was teased so much by other girls that she absolutely hated the skin she was in. One day as a joke, she decided to put on her brother's clothes, cut her hair, and go outside and see what would happen. And the lower it would be, a whole people actually thought she was him. And she knew she knew she'd be safe because he was asleep. He was always sleeping. The only people who knew she wasn't he was her mother at home. And so quickly, within a month, the idea came and it didn't come to her. She... shortly thereafter was when she got... she had discovered that her brother, just to join his drunken friends, was joining the broseros. Well, perhaps it was that split moment where she realized the opportunity she could have if she had just taken his place. Now, that night before she had heard him and his friends drinking before they left for the cantina. She had heard them talking about how they were going to escape the overseers. And simply find a way to live on their own in Texas. And then she realized that this was not only... this was not necessarily... I mean, she was already in some form of gender slavery. So what did it matter that she left Mexico for Texas? Surely the workslavery couldn't be anywhere near as bad as the gender slavery. Well, before she knew it, she was put on the bus and it was headed towards the Texas border. Now, what I've just realized, I'm breaking the narration here. Is that one thing they did when the Mexicans got off the bus? They made them strip down. And they sprayed them. So she will have to know this in advance. And somehow... take care of it, so to speak. She will have to have stopped, well, maybe she never did shave her legs because they're too poor. It didn't really matter. Most men were probably scantily... they didn't have a lot of body here anyway. What else would be a problem? She had to take out her earrings. If they think of a lot of different things that she would have to do. But yeah, let's say she makes it all the way to the border. She makes it across the border. And then what? How much detail am I going to put into Rosa's mother's story? But either way, it was her inspiration. Rosa was her creation. And so what could Rosa do other than make the same leap just in her own way? Just as much as that leap that her mother took transformed her life and brought her to Texas. And allowed her to meet a man or maybe not meet a man, but meet another woman. And at that point she had become a man. She had literally left her past behind and become a man. And therefore she met a Mexican woman. And it somehow convinced her or perhaps she didn't want to know the truth. Perhaps she met the right woman. That allowed her, that accepted her for who she was. But Rosa knew that her leap as her leap would be an inherited one. It would be one that wasn't born out of nothing but born from another leap. And for her, it's character would be different. She would have to make it different and yet a shock to her life all the same. That's it for now.