There Is Still No Fix For Introversion and Comprehension Skill's Lament

Aloneness means the world to me.

Introversion is a difficult thing to navigate.  This is news to no one.  The people I am around are well aware of my introversion's depths and shallows.  I am occasionally gripped in manic depressive cycles of changing ferocity, but the underlying truth that forms the foundation of my being, core, and interactions is introversion.  It's quiet.  It's private.  I rarely talk simply to talk.  I often spend days without saying a word to anyone beyond the few cat noises I'll make to my pets.  I don't like being around people for much time outside of a few hours, sometimes a half day, rarely a full day, but anxiety creeps in and introversion twists my nerves.  I have to be left alone for regular and frequent stints of time.

Communication is a problem.  Introverts can get trampled easily.  I don't like fighting.  I hate fighting.  I hate arguing.  At times I hate conversation, period.  However, eschewing these things makes it difficult or impossible to express displeasure with people around you.  Behold the reason why I will not go anywhere that I cannot remove myself from.  Why argue, why fight, why bother explaining what and how you are feeling when you can simply leave?  This works fantastically.  When I am finished with you, I leave.  When I have had enough of you, I leave.  When I am bored, tired, happy, have other things to do, errands to run, when I feel like you've mislead me as to what we set out to do, don't like the venue, whatever may come up, I can quite easily say a pleasant goodbye to you and remove myself to my home and it's wonderful.

I'm not forced to be someone that I'm not, you're not forced to try to peer into what is going on behind my eyes and everyone is happy or at least content with the entirety of the interaction.  I'm back home safe in my cocoon, your life goes on, nice and simple.  When you come into my home, that dynamic is destroyed.  When I am relying on you to get me back home or back to my car, that dynamic is destroyed.  When you are in my home I am relying on you to leave in a timely fashion.  When I am out with you, I am relying on you to not continue extending the day farther and farther away from an end point we agreed upon.  Just because I keep acquiescing to your saying "hey, why don't we..." with the promise that we'll relax a little bit and have a little fun before taking me back to my car, doesn't mean that I'm not screaming inside every single time the "relax and have fun" part is pushed back another half hour and another half hour and another half hour.  Eventually I will break.

You must take me home.  You must get out of my house.  And I've been trampled again.  So which one is it?  Are the people that do it not friends?  Have they not known me long enough?  Have they assumed that I've changed over the years?  Do they not care?  Do I put on a pleasant enough facade such that they don't notice until the entire thing breaks down in pieces and my grimace and crying eyes show?  Why do they keep doing it?  Because they can?  I don't know.  What are they not comprehending?

I've spoken to them a few times about it.  What do they keep forgetting about me?  It's strange.  With people I'm not friends with, people I've only just met, circumstances unfamiliar, people I've known and can't trust, I leave nothing up to them to figure out.  I rely on them for nothing.  I believe very little of what they say.  I come prepared for most any possibility and mode of extraction to protect myself from unintentional outside harm.  You are supposed to be my friend, please don't step on me.

And on that note, what I cannot deal with is the friend whose comprehension skills are so incredibly underdeveloped I couldn't have an argument or disagreement with them if I tried with all of the tact, diplomacy, conscientiousness, and kindness I can muster.

We all have that friend who immediately flies off of the handle when you tell them they've done something wrong.  That friend who will tell you that in the subjective world of right and wrong to you is something that they can dictate.  That friend who tells you when they've helped you, regardless of what the actual result of their misguided effort was.  That friend who you specifically instruct not to come over without an invitation from you, who takes it upon themselves to come to your house and scare all of your neighbors into believing something horrible has happened to you to get someone to open your door and enter your apartment because you fell asleep on the phone with them after staying up for 40 hours.  That friend who says they came over to check on you without an invitation because they were not going to let a friend die on their watch, who immediately asks you upon arrival if you have anything to drink, who happens to have brought an overnight bag and their video game remote and parts, and their tiny bottle of liquor, when all you wanted to do and did was fall asleep.  What the hell are you doing here?  No, it's not funny.  No, it's not heroic.  No, it's not friendly.  I was sleeping with my phone on silent because I am tired.  That friend who mooches all of your food and beer over the next two days and destroys what sleep you were hoping to get while managing to leave your place trashed, who you tell not to come over again without an explicit invitation because "you fell asleep while I was talking to you and I had to make sure you weren't dead" is not a reason to invite yourself over to crash at someone's house for two and a half days and make your neighbors think you may die at any moment to trick your way in, that just do not understand that what they did was patently wrong.  Regardless of how they contort their actions to fit some larger narrative of "I helped you."

No comprehension skills.  The funniest part is when, as an introvert, giving yourself time to think the events over, you let them know what they did must not be done again.  You explain to them it is hugely disruptive to your life and takes days of cleaning and rest to recover from and days of explaining and apologizing and discomfort with neighbors who now have no idea if this idiot will pop up on some random day demanding entry because I may be in some ambiguous danger and they've thrown on their hero cape (or just fucking sleeping or maybe just awake with my phone off or not even home) and their response is to get angry at you.  Not only get angry at you, but insist that they will continue to ignore your wishes, disrespect your house, and treat you like a five-year-old who may slip and fall while running with scissors who must be constantly monitored.  No comprehension skills.

You try to lay down very basic information, very basic tenets of how you would like friends to treat you and the space you want them to respect and they scream and yell at you about how wrong you are and how right they were to violate your space and how you'll live to regret and rue the day you told them how you felt and how you want to live your life and then go on to tell you they aren't going to respect your wishes or your space regardless.

So what do you do?  Do you just scream and shout back at them?  No, you're an introvert and they'll out yell you at every turn and out outrage you too.  Do you try to restate your point and your needs?  Nope, they've already shown they are not going to listen.  Don't sweat it.  Leave.  Watch them from afar for a while.  Feel free to leave them alone altogether for some time.  Maybe they need time to understand better.  They can't trample you and your introverted heart and mind if they can't interact with you.  There is no fix for introversion.  There is no fix for introversion.  There is no fix for introversion.

There is no need to fix introversion.  Take care with who you befriend.  It is important to understand that, as an introvert, you can be liable to get hurt pretty badly, whether friends mean to or not.  Relying on other people to learn how to treat you is a losing game.  It's up to you as you grow older and more experienced in navigating introversion, to learn how to maintain proper distance from the people you do call friends.  When it becomes too close, don't drive yourself to death trying to keep it together.  Open up some space and go from there.  You won't be sorry.  You may feel like an awful person who is abandoning people that thought they were your friend.  You may feel like something is wrong with you.  You may feel, at first, that you're hurting people trying to help, but that subsides quickly once you see their blindness to your being for what it is.




///Richard Wagner - "Das Rheingold Prelude"  aloneness still means the world to me.

Admissions, Missions, Poor Planning, Hobos, and Caught Out

So I didn't plan this particularly well.  Not as well as I could have.  Given my circumstances and propensity for utter restlessness.  I'm in a position where I'm dying to hit the road and run, but I just finished a six pack and I know if I go outside right now and try to do anything, my judgement will couple up with my reckless streak and I'll end up punching a hobo in the face in a train tunnel by the river and possibly getting shanked.  Nobody wants that.  Especially not the part of me that likes to not get knifed.  All I can think about, well not all, but most of what I can think about is getting out in that humid cool air and sucking lung fulls of it.  Then again I have to keep in mind the mileage I put on last week and make sure I rest my hooves enough to do it all again this week.  So maybe, not poor planning.  Maybe out smarting myself while out out smarting myself.  Or just poor planning.  That's easier to say.  I'm about ready to jump out of a second story window.

More importantly though I had to go in and delete some blogs.  Projects I had a vision for that never panned out.  Sometimes because they were joint efforts with other people and the other people never put in the effort and they metastasized into additional solo projects I couldn't support on my own along with the things I was already doing on the regular (and subsequently killed some of the regular efforts I was bending myself to in the brief time I tried to do both).  It is kind of tough to admit.  Sometimes things just don't work out anywhere near where I expect them to, which is why I am reluctant to do anything with anybody anymore.  Not that their real lives tend to take precedent.  Or maybe they do.  I have no real idea why anyone stops.  I know why I stop and start.  I just don't see those same reasons being relevant to others.  Not that I'm unique or anything like that.  I'm just unique in my limits and strengths.  No, I'm kidding.  Experience has taught me that is the case.  My perceptions of myself, however, may vary.

They went down easy though.  I downloaded the ones with enough content to want to reread them at some point.  Revisit the prisoners of the digital infomatic time capsulator 9000.  I glossed some of them as I downloaded and reviewed and decided yay or nay for axing.   What was lost is not worth going over explicitly.  What survived is a pair of joint efforts with the real j chen.  One not touched in forever and the other edited more recently than I expected, but still a year out from today.  I owe it a call back at least.  Wait and see, maybe.  A wait and see kind of deal.  The other survivors were all things with names I could pick up and immediately begin rebuilding or re-purpose, restructure, and give new life to, in light of new efforts forthcoming.  There's still Fingerslip (the long gestation writing space), there's Hateitalready (which will be repurposed from a place to rant about new products I hate already into an infrequent comic I've been putting off forever, but have wanted to do for easily three years now), there's Simplelongingundertow (which will be about sex and strictly so), and then the Encyclopediamechanica (a store house for made up tech stuff I want to have available to myself and searchable primarily for story construction and resolution of timeline continuity issues, but available to the public because sometimes the best parts of stories are the gadgets and I want that to be documented... assuming I can write and produce something worth reading and reviewing and delving deeper into [adding a richness perhaps I otherwise could not achieve on a short story budget... I dunno]).  Thems the survivors.

The mission becomes not letting myself get as caught out as I have been.  Focus.  Hocus focus were to be the names of my cats if I got a pair, but I didn't.  I have been a little bit caught out.  Caught between reading and reading up on old movies by watching them and reading up on old stories and rewatching (more like studying and breaking down) films I have enjoyed and disliked and plot lines I have enjoyed and passed off as trash and scripts.  A lot of time has been spent plotting and planning to the point of compulsion.  A lot of time has been spent, yes, dreaming still.  That is probably one of my top five primary functions.  Dream composition.  Now it's time to start making the faces and planes and points and lines intersect.  They're all there, even though I'm not always.  I had a thought about the sky being the limit, which is patently false.  What I came to was that the sky is not the limit, but the sooner you understand that, the sooner you can get to working toward putting yourself in a position where that might actually become the case through some luck, coincidence, and connection.  I glass ceiling implies a glass floor somewhere.

Anyway, the point is, what do I have to do to get laid in this town?  And more importantly.... you know, I don't think there's a second part to that.  At what age do you just forget about getting laid altogether.  Cause that shit is distracting.  Can I skip to that age?  That spot in the timeline where it's not even that you forget about it, but it's that your genitals transmogrify from a point of expression and emotion and even, sometimes, source of soul and self into little more than say a plumbing fixture or decorative coaster.  What I do know is that one of these days along my life span I am going to wake up with super powers and the world better hope I die before that day comes because I will be the worst superman ever.  Can superman even do crack?  Does he have to do supercrack to get an equivalent high?  I know there was that one superman movie where he got drunk, but seriously, if he went to a bar he would have to drink the entire bar to get drunk.  Unless his powers only apply to mechanical elements.  musculo skeletal systems.  Worst super power ever.  Or just not a great movie.  I don't know.  The point is, stuff is going to get did.  Because the stuff not getting done is gone.  Also because if things don't get done I will feel terrible and listless and end up down at the docks again fighting hobos.


///Aphex Twin - "Waxen Pith"  think time

And When I'm Swimming In Through a Tunnel I Shut My Eyes

There was a day when I was fighting substance abuse. A recent day. Joined in combat with myself. The war was being fought on several fronts, less chiefly in my mind, much more so in the fibers of my flesh. A stalemate would have ensued. Had the other side not run out of ammunition.

So I took my body on the road, like I have before. Saddled up the bicycle. Checked the metrics and vitals on it and decided the bike itself would not kill me on its own unless I was the one steeping outside the envelope. And so we went.

For three hours. Half drunk and half possessed to tear myself apart in as constructive a way as I could. The dismemberment of the arms works division exercised in full physical animosity of the frames and walls that house it.

I got back home spent. Phenomenally spent. Phenomenally spent and utterly independent of chemicals. It was beautiful. The only thing that could have made it more so would have been to stumble in doors, deposit my bicycle and fall on the floor gasping only to be collected by a love. A human being who loved my sweating, salted, corporeal, enough to fuck me right then and there in all of my disheveled, half awake, half conscious, and fully realized and exploited self.

To feel waves of pleasure wash over skin and gush from within like the cyclops eye of a New England light house against the north eastern scream of a mental squall that threatens to blot out life like a spilled canteen to an anthill, to feel those waves wash against bones and muscle incapable of putting up protest, to lose oneself in that ocean and sink and curl in the wavering cyclones of tide and circular torridity of thick and hot and cold water, inches above the punishment of coral formation and light days away from consequence, is to feel an absolute lack of control and borderline sexuality that flirts with the recklessness of the passivity of induced rape.

And that's what I wanted that afternoon. That's what I needed. What I needed was you. That's okay though, we've got time to make yet.


///Mum - "Green Grass of Tunnel" ...behind these two hills, there's a pool...

Touching One Half of the Interface, Old Contacts, and Still Making Fire

Well, I finally got up the parts and pieces to contact him. Now I just have to work myself toward opening the response. I'm sure it's nothing. Well nothing more serious than a rejection of any one thing can be.

I found rechargeable batteries for my camera. It's nice to have to use again. It's funny how the good days bleed away like sand. I need an extra set of hands to collect them and keep throwing them in my hair till it get's stuck that way permanent like.



I made a portrait. My head is tired again, but I'm working it somewhat relentlessly. I have a bad personality tick of punishing myself for everything. It's part of what motivates me to operate. I should switch that maybe. I'm not entirely sure how. I should probably get some sleep before I go to work. It's strange. The feeling approaching the punishment breaker. Artifacting. Ridiculous. I'm still and learning. I was discussing the idea of normal. It struck me that there are people who like the burning half baked you because it is. Normal isn't good enough. Or maybe. I just need a little more sleep. I'm not just telling myself that. My self is telling me.

I miss the people I've never met and the people I can never really meet because my head comes apart so easily. It's been raining today. It's been nice. I remember hearing about the water cycle in fifth grade and thinking about how awesome it would be to ride with those molecules through aquifers to the sea. That's not an occupation. It's a preoccupation? I'm thinking about finally giving in to it. I think I've already missed. I'll find out soon enough once I talk to him. We will see if it's the last thing these pupils do. And add it to the blueprint.


///Autechre - "Kalpol Introl"

The fire is still being made and the forge is still powered on, but it's starting to feel like pulling the guts out of the underside of a fish by hauling on it's jawbone. What I'm getting out I can't eat. Still gonna try though. Today is a mess. Was a mess. No vision. No visibility. I've gotta fix these road signs before I get lost again. Must get dressed and put on my face and skins. We ride for dawn. Or some place else as warm.

One of Those "Say Anything" Days

I don't know what the hell to tell you. Scratch that, I do. First off, I'm sorry I was gone for so long. It's not like me to stay away, and truth be told, I wasn't staying away as much as I've been held apart by circumstances beyond my control. Actually I kind of felt like the bearded guy with wings from Flash Gordon just then. At least my voice boomed in my head as I proclaimed the truth. It's not actually that dramatic, but I wish it were.

I guess, I really don't know what to expect from life anymore. Between the images pumped in through music and the massive filtering of said music to just the things that I don't mind slam dancing in my brain tissue and the images sucked in from television and the entire glut of information that comes unfiltered and unfilterable, my image of New York was unrealistic. "How realistic did I want it to be" is probably a more important question to ask. It's not a wasteland. It's not a shooting gallery. It's no more a hotbed of imagination and talent than any other city with a downtown and an uptown (that little detail is what makes or breaks a city for reasons locked into the evolutionary genome of bullshit socio whatevers).

I'm not making sense am I? I guess I'm just pissed off. Right now I'm that 105 year old man who sits in a high backed chair with his back to his bay windows, dressed in his three piece suit he wore to his last day of work before he retired, who cannot for the life of him remember the conversation between his ears that told him he should make the drastic change from the life he knew to the life he didn't know he would come to loathe.

We are after all in the first few hours of the first few months of the first few years of this, our new year under the banner of industry for the sake of perpetuating a life whose value lies in the work it has yet to complete. So I should be aiming for ... what? I don't fucking know.

Nope. Not true again. I do fucking know. My goal hasn't really changed. Only the operating conditions have changed. All I have to do is put food in my face, keep a simple computer, and not be homeless. If I can land a gig to make that happen I'll be good as a bar of gold. Or something. Something is getting lost in the wires again and I am blowing fuses faster than I'm replacing them and I think that's why I like talking to you. It doesn't really show me what needs to be replaced, but it does...

Okay cannot finish that thought. I think what I'm wanting to say is that I suppose if no one loves you, I'll be willing to. No pictures or links for a little while. My arrangements aren't allowing me to do the things I love doing for you. But we'll catch up later when I can think again and I stop feeling weird shit touching me. Total Promisaurus. And not like Inception promise either [I'm still gunna do it... i sware]. And my grammar will be better too. And punctuation. And that's it. Only because I told you I would fix it and I meant it. Because a man without his word is a laughing hollow eyed handshake that will eat you up from inside your dreams, like any other big city you knew.

///The Cranberries - "Dreams" who hasn't sung these lyrics to themselves? Raise your hands. To your throats and gently throttle yourselves for being too cool for school and then go youtube as soon as you feel you've punished yourself enough. Best song ever. Sure I can't listen to it 8 times in a row anymore, but that just comes with growing up. Right?

You've Got To Get Mad

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us."



Click here to play in new window if video does not play in embedded player.

The first time I heard this monologue was as the lead in to a track by Evol Intent. It's very stirring. In fact the monologue, to me, was so much more intense and meaningful than the token gesturing of the lyrics that followed I wished that, instead of lyrics, they simply allowed more of the monologue to play. The music track is below, synced (not by me) to the visuals. You might have to click through and view it directly on the youtube website if it doesn't play here.



Click thru

Sometimes seeing and hearing things like these and knowing what my own vision is for music and film, I long for a chance to go back in time and make myself put down the calculators and math books and just do the things that came naturally. I wish I could manipulate music and art well enough to create animated films or produce albums or write music. I'm sure I will at some point, but a head start would have been nice.

At any rate, hearing the monologue was so stirring in part because I feel like I am definitely in agreement. I don't think the people being gutted and ground up and swallowed and shat out into darkness in this country need to write to congress or go to sit ins or vote for people that will represent them for five minutes before succumbing (of no fault of their own) to the massive under currents of commercial/industrial pocket padding politics. If people being shafted by the education system would simply express their disappointment, their anger, at being farmed, and express it with a sustained voice and intensity there would be a positive response. Same for people getting shafted in the work place or anywhere else.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but so many things really need so much more than a drop of oil. The problem is that people are so content to get their drop of oil, their quick pay off, and then they forget that their problem hasn't been solved. Their problem hasn't even begun to be addressed, but staying angry takes so much effort and why stay angry when you can take your hand job to the bank and buy yourself a big tv and fall asleep again until your conditions become unbearable or swallows another member of your family or short changes you once more.

You've got to get mad, and you've got to be willing and committed enough to stay mad, and that's why I love that song, but I love the monologue even more.

///Amon Tobin - "Verbal (Topo Gigio Remix)" The original song, featuring MC Decimal was good, but this version takes that song and makes it an anytime anywhere "listen to it twice in a row 'cause once is never enough" kind of song. The way the bass comes up and swings and swims around your ears you almost feel like you're lying in a river as wide as lake Ontario heading for a waterfall that crashes against rocks so loudly you can't hear it.

Ladies and gentleman, if you please, I have solved religion.

First thing, (I understand if you don't particularly care, but I have to do this so that I don't forget because this also doubles as my change log) I still plan to replace the red bits still hanging out in the post headers and down next to the tags. They are out of place in the new scheme and quite frankly my skills have grown beyond those first efforts and they're kind of tacky. Not to flatter myself too hard, but who the hell else is going to?

Second thing is this: I have solved why religion is so fiercely defended. I know right? It was so obvious, but I couldn't understand before why a particularly nasty and irrational person I knew was so entrenched in their beliefs. Why were they so inclined to condemn behavior in others that they performed on a regular basis? Why did everything they say start with "if they were Godly people"? Why did different words come out of either side of their mouth every single day and somehow manage to avoid internal conflict?

And then it hit me!



Religion to this person, or at least the particular "Christian" doctrine they adopted was basically a hodge podge of the most comfortable elements in the Christian as it related to them and how they framed the world around them. Their conversion, or anyone's conversion, has nothing to do with miracles, but before I fly off to hell on a thunderbolt and a plume of fire and brimstone and "much gnashing of teeth" or however it goes, hear me out.

As much as the people who believe they're just fine treating people with respect and treating strangers with kindness and compassion and charitably is as much as some Christians say they are simply picking and choosing Jesus's nicer words and they are, apparently going to burn for it. Look a little bit closer at these nay sayers of congeniality and you can see them perpetrating the same behaviors, however with greater subtlety, and often not even that. That's when I realized every single person who has had some "religious" awakening wasn't suddenly seeing THE light. They were seeing A light.

What they would count as religion changing them is really them finally realizing what their ground state of being was. Basically: realizing who they already were. The reason why people defend religions to the death is because religion allows them to defend who they are. The guy who wants to go kill Muslims for Jesus says he is doing it for Jesus, but in his mind, maybe his subconscious mind, maybe not that deeply repressed, he is doing it because it is what he as a person wants to do. Jesus simply gives him an out. Even the people who "suffer" for their faith aren't really suffering for their faith. They are suffering because they've realized the kind of people they want to be and they are pursuing that being the same way a man who wants to smoke a cigarette smokes or a person who enjoys rock climbing goes and climbs rocks. For some of these people penance has intrinsic value in their lives because they want to be held accountable. They want to be rewarded with pain because the pain lends them meaning every Sunday.

Religion is like an old comfortable boot. You put it on and you wear it because it's comfortable to you. That's all. If you think as a husband you should be paid tribute by your wife and kids and they should wait on you hand and foot and defer to you at all times even though legislation in America has essentially made everyone equals, you'll adopt a framework that allows you to live that way. If someone brings you "God's" word and it says the man is awesome and women are second class and should do whatever you tell them to, you'll be on that wagon in no time flat. Do you have to confess Jesus as a savior? Small price to pay for total dominance, don't you think? So spout some nonsense and swear up and down by the ridiculous things you don't actually believe because what you're paying for is the peace of mind of knowing that you are justified in the things that matter to who you are as a person. It cuts the same way for other things too, but most glaringly within religion.

So, what else is new?

This:


The above is going to be the main thematic element in the hateitalready.blogspot.com site I'm planning. I thought to myself, "no one wants to read a blog that spends the entire time ragging on other things, especially things that some people really do like." It would be the same as being a forum troll except condensed to one black singularity of curmudgeonly voice. So, I have revamped the idea and I'm going to put a humorous spin on it to make it much more digestable. If there's one thing I learned from watching movies as a kid it was that a spoon full of sugar is fuggin tasty and will allow you to fly umbrellas when the wind is just right, and I intend to take that knowledge straight to the bank.

///Mathew Dear - "R + S"Tonight we'll ride and find gold in their eyes. It shines so bright. I must have it.

hey fuck head

next time you invite guests over, dont block the fucking exit. sure its fun to imagine you have so many friends who like hanging out at your place, but the reality of the situation is most of us dont want to be there but cant leave with your oblivious ass squarely in the way suggesting we try the appetizers and insisting so'n'so that we're good friends with "is totally gonna be here in like ten minutes" .

at least have the decency to leave the back door unlocked. while the grand tour is always nice, dont expect us to fall madly in love with your two room studio. so in love in fact that we actually want to hang around there till 1 am... even though we dont really know you... or like your music... or like the people that do seem to know you... or the fact that you asked everyone to bring beer and the only thing youve provided is a box of fucking ritz crackers and colored napkins and shitty music and no places to sit. dont expect us to hang out till 1am when its not worth it to take the half hour hike to a bar (that'll close in half an hour by the time we get there) and the local trains stop running and the only food we can get is a bag of chips and a pack of smokes from the all night deli... and we're all cranky because the cheap wine has managed to give us all hangovers six hours early and the beer is gone and you didnt even have the sense to buy a pack of cards for entertainment.

no we will not be impressed by the cuteness of your cat and late night reruns of bill cosby while the radio oscilates between nickelback and lil wayne for five fucking hours. how about next time not insisting everyone come to your place for a change?

kthnx.

seriously. whut thu fuck.