Things People Get Wrong (Part 2)

There are two behaviours from people that I can't handle: Shouting about one thing when they're actually angry about something else or giving me the silent treatment. Seriously, few things make me more angry and frustrated and hurt (when it is directed at me) than these.

The main problem with them is that the thing you're actually angry about doesn't end up being resolved because you're going on about something completely different, or you're not talking about it at all! So it's pointless. It also confuses the person you're being angry at.

I had a lot of this from my mother (I'm thinking of renaming this blog as something like "A Tribute to Freud"). Her favourite thing thing to shout about was my lack of music practice. If she'd had a bad day, if she was tired and grumpy, if she needed a cigarette... You guessed it. She'd take it out on me, about the fact that I hadn't touched one of my instruments in a month and the other one in a lot longer.

She also had this habit of just not speaking to me. She'd go through all the motions (driving me to school etc), but she wouldn't talk to me or look at me. She'd just have this sour look on her face the whole time I was around. It was fucking awful to go through, and she could maintain it for over a week if she wanted to. 

It may have been a control thing, and that she knew she could make me do what she wanted to by either verbally beating me down in to submission. She could control me, even if she couldn't control whatever else she was feeling or whatever else was actually going on. It ultimately doesn't matter, because the end result was the same: I got confused and angry at her, I did what I was told to avoid having to go through the same thing again. The sad part is that I started to hate playing music because I always played it in anger, all because she wasn't able to talk openly about what was actually going on in her head.

So the next time you're angry about something, take a step back and think about what is really making you angry, and be angry about that. Not about your partner having left the towel on the floor or the plate on the table, or whatever. Figure out what is really bugging you before you get into a fight over something that is relatively inconsequential and not at all related.

Ask yourself: Is it really worth damaging the relationship for?

And please, don't ever do this to me because I'll probably cry.

I am an anxious person.

There is one thin you really should never do with me, and that is say "Can I speak to you privately when you have a minute?"

Seriously, Don't Do It.

You see, I'm paranoid. I mean, really paranoid. If it is something that you can't say in front of other people, then there is a reason you can't say it in front of other people. In a professional environment, this means that you are either talking to me about me, or about someone else. Given I don't really know about what stupid things other people are doing in this place, I can only assume that you're talking about me.

If you have something to talk to me about, just tell me what it is. Seriously. I need to know or I'll be panicky and working out how to tell my husband and housemate that I've been fired the entire time until we have that talk and I finally find out that what you actually want is my opinion on what colour to paint the wall in your office.

Why I'm not particularly good at anything

One of the problems with ADHD is that I tend to get bored with things before I get good at them. In fact, not getting good at things quickly is more inclined to make me get bored with them. If I have to keep practicing the same skill over and over again without noticing an great difference, I get fed up with it and try to do something else.

This is one of the problems with going to the gym. If I don't see results of some sort within a few weeks, I start to get frustrated and to despair. I get sick of doing the same thing but to no avail.

It's why I'm having some trouble with my motivation to cycle lately - I hadn't noticed any increase in the ease of the ride (in fact, it got harder and harder for a while) or a decrease in how long the ride takes or even an increased ability to ride in more often, which brought my spirits way down. Even figuring out why I was finding it more difficult didn't help much, because by that point I'd regressed a bit and the thought of having to do a huge amount of work just to get back to the level at which I was a few weeks ago... My goodness, that's a horrible thought.

It's easier to just give up and not do it. Having to do the whole thing again, or having to put massive effort into achieving a really minor improvement just doesn't seem worth while, especially when I see other people putting in less and achieving the same, or even more.

Then there's the fear of seeing just how far I've regressed, which is even more reason to not do it because if I avoid it, then I'll avoid the frustration of knowing I used to be better at this, and being annoyed at myself for letting it slip.

It kind of makes you feel a bit failsome and lazy. That brings me down even further, and really reduces my motivation to do anything. So, I've employed my husband to make me do some riding. There is a point where I just need someone to help keep me going, because I am beyond being able to do it myself.

Here's hoping that it works.

Why I cycle

There are a lot of good reasons for cycling as much as possible. 

• You're saving the Earth by not creating carbon emissions through the use of a car.
• You're saving money by not buying petrol ($100/year to service your bike is far less than typical annual fuel costs).
• You're saving your health through regular exercise (after my first week of cycling, my resting heart rate went from between 85 and 90bpm to between 68 and 73bpm; that's a huge difference for just a week of riding every other day).
• You're saving money on a gym membership, because the time you would normally spend at the gym is being spent on exercise anyway.

These are all definite reasons for me to cycle, not to mention that finding a type of exercise which I enjoy and can do on a regular basis is particularly important for me because of my ADHD. I'm told that exercise is very good for it, and I noticed this before I even suspected that I had it. When I was at the gym four days per week, I was in a far better state than when I wasn't exercising. I'm basically like a puppy, in that if I don't get my daily walk I start to tear up the furinture. And your shoes.

But these reasons, while compelling in and of themselves, are not the main reason I cycle. Quite simply, I cycle because it feels good. I get a fully sensational experience - I get to see, hear, feel, and smell the world around me in ways I can't possibly get at the gym, or even on a slow walk. I enjoy the stiffness in my muscles the day after a particularly hard ride; it's a reminder that I'm doing something worth-while and that my body is responding to it.

When you think about it, enjoyment is really the only thing that works when it comes to changing your habits and doing more exercise. If you don't like what you're doing, you won't enjoy it and none of these "reasons" are going to be reason enough. So if you want to get healthier, rather than kicking yourself for avoiding the gym or the running and feeling bad about making excuses, try something else. No matter how good the exercise you're trying to make yourself do looks on paper, if you don't actually like it, you'll never get anywhere. Whereas if the whole point of it is to enjoy it while you're doing it, it'll feel less like hard work and all those benefits will be the cherry on top.

Of course, if you can't find any exercise you enjoy doing, then you'll just have to pick the one you hate least and bear it for all eternity.

Childhood influences

I've been reading Disney Princess Recovery, which is an excellent blog about dealing with media influences on children. Lately, it's had me thinking about my own Disney movie experiences, and why I didn't fall under the Princess spell as a child.

So, I wrote a list of my favourite Disney movies from when I was a kid. Here they are, in alphanumeric order:

• 101 Dalmations (original)
• Alice in Wonderland
• Basil: The Great Mouse Detective
• Dumbo
• The Fox and the Hound
• The Jungle Book
• Lady and the Tramp
• Peter Pan
• Pinocchio
• Robin Hood
• The Sword in the Stone

As you can see, none of my favourite movies had anything to do with princesses. Some of them involved romances and all but one had a male lead, but they were pretty much all just adventure flicks where the romance wasn't the central part of the story. The fact that I didn't really understand the difference between boys and girls would have helped, because while I knew that I fell into the category of "girl", which apparently had to do with what you carried in your trousers and determined whether you were allowed to wear skirts, I didn't really have any real concept of gender (I still don't feel particularly gendered to this day, to be perfectly honest, but I might write more on that later). So I had no problem with relating to the male leads in those movies.

I did see the Princess movies and I enjoyed them. I even played mermaid games, though in those I was the Mermaid Princess with magic powers who commanded a ninja-like army of mermen, whose tails I could conjure and turn into legs at will to improve their swimming or fighting abilities. I think this is where my imagination was influenced by Heman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Star Wars and other such things. I was also brought up on healthy doses of Greek Mythology, which helped in terms of imagining myself with Godlike powers and the kind of conniving that only ancient gods are capable of.

Basically, I was a tomboy. I had girl friends, but didn't play with them much. I tried to join in a game with barbies once, and was told off for holding the doll the wrong way. I thought the other girls were really stupid for being fussy about something so trivial, so I went back to the sandpit to throw sand at boys again. I was that kind of kid. And it's not like I didn't own Barbie dolls - I did. I just didn't understand why you had to hold them in a specific way to play with them.

I guess my parents were lucky in that regard - I just didn't care about what a girl "should" or "shouldn't" do. Then again, I had no attention span so it would have been difficult for me to care about anything other than HEY LOOK A SQUIRREL!

Differing definitions

I used to do a martial art, and part of that was a strength and conditioning (S&C) class. This class was a lot of fun, but it was hard-core. If you hadn't been doing it for a while, the warm-up alone was enough to nearly kill you. The rest of the class was designed to work the muscles in your body until you could barely walk, and if you didn't take showers with alternating hot and cold water that night you would not be able to make it down a flight of stairs the next day (going downward is most definitely more painful than going upward!).

I also have SVT, which means that my heart will happily beat at over 200bpm, just because it feels like it.

As a result of a few years of doing S&C on a weekly basis and having a wacky heart condition, I see "light", "moderate" and "hard" exercise differently to how most people seem to. Allow me to define the standard terms in my own words:

Light exersise (moderate walking pace; moderate cycling pace on flat ground): You aren't actually doing any work. You can hold a conversation, so you may as well be sitting all the couch and channel-surfing for all the good it's doing you.

Moderate exercise: Ok, your heart rate's up a little. You've now graduated to walking from the couch to the fridge as far as actual benefit goes.

Hard exercise: Finally, you got off your lazy arse and did something. It's a start.

You see, when I was at the gym my idea of actually doing work on the treadmill was the treadmill's idea of "STOP NOW YOU'RE GOING TO GIVE YOURSELF A HEART ATTACK!!!". My idea of a "working" heart rate is 170bpm or more, when apparently for my age it should be at around 155bpm.

Also thanks to S&C, I don't see exercise-induced muscular pain as any real kind of problem. For me, sore muscles are really just part of every-day live. You complain a little, but ultimately you just get on with things.

This means that I'm probably fitter than I think I am, but also that I'm harder on myself than I probably should be! None the less, I think I'll get back on my bicycle.

Me: 1. Me: 0

So much of my life and keeping it functional is about beating myself at my own game. I have had to figure out how my own psychology works, and then how to get around it. Sometimes, I do this simply by appealing to my own vindictive nature. Other times, I have to just be aware of what sort of things are likely to get in my way (and this I learn from past experience).

I wrote recently about how having a new bike that's fully kitted out for any situation is all part of my plan for not having any excuses to take any transport other than a bike. Well, this is a big part of it. I figured out (from experience)  the sorts of excuses I'm likely to give when it comes to what sort of transport I take, and I worked around them.

A few years ago, I desperately needed to lose weight (I managed to gain about 20kg), so I joined the gym at school. Fortunately, I also had a car. So, I had no excuse NOT to go to the gym, as I could take my gym bag by car (dragging it along by bus would have put me off) and the gym was right there on campus so I had no reason at all not to go, as long as I had an hour free, which I did on most days.

The simple fact is that I am completely and utterly paranoid. I have absolutely no sense of how long things take, so the time I'm using up just getting to places is unbelievably important. I'm also forgetful and paranoid about being forgetful, so taking PT for an hour to get to work is out of the question, because what if I realise part-way that I'd left something at home?? No, just no.

The world isn't out to get me, I'm out to get myself. And I'm also out to thwart myself. And thwart the thwarting. Because I won't stand for any thwarting going on in MY head. I think my brain just exploded.

In any case: I'm self-aware, I'm paranoid, and I am also sneaky enough to be able to figure out ways around a lot of those neurose and get it to work most of the time!

Sleep habits

I do envy the way other people seem to be able to fall asleep. I tend to just lie there for ages, trying to find something to focus on that won't make me so tense that I'm lying there awake for hours.

I guess that's meditation. I sort of have to latch on to an idea and just follow it, and I'll eventually drift off. Unfortunately, in order to work, it needs to be a neutral idea; not something that will get me hyped up or angry or feel any strong emotion. It just needs to be something fairly bland that I can follow a long, like a trail into the land of sleep.

It's an absolute pain in the arse, especially when the person (or people) you're sharing a room with have clearly dozed of half a dozen times while you're still trying to get your brain to JUST SLOW DOWN. It's especially obvious if you're sharing a bed, because people tend to twitch in weird ways and click their jaws and do all sorts of things as they're drifting off. And then they snore.

If you haven't managed to fall asleep before the snoring starts, you're doomed. You can just hope that they'll enter the next phase of their sleep cycle soon and stop with the jack-hammer. Meanwhile, you just have to try not to focus on the angry train of thought about how they're asleep while you're not and how DARE THEY snore and interrupt your careful and strategic search for the PERFECT SLEEP MANTRA.

Why not think about the same thing each night, I hear you say? Because it's boring, that's why. No, seriously. It's like watching the same episode of the same TV show every single night before you go to sleep. Eventually, you'll want to ram your head through the damned screen. Except in this instance, your head is the TV, and that leads to really mind-boggling levels of recursion...

So, sleep is difficult to find. I need to go to bed at a reasonably similar hour every night and I need to meditate before I can get anywhere in that department. And then there are all the little things to deal with, like having all my limbs evenly covered, warm enough, not too warm, sheets not crinkled, etc etc ad nauseum.

No wonder I'm tired so much of the time :-/

Stress and its effects on the mind and body

Stress affects people in different ways. There are some standard symptoms, but there are a few things which are a bit more specific to certain people. For instance, stress can affect sleep. It can result in insomnia and general tiredness. For me, it affects my dreams.

I first noticed a link between the two when I repeated first year engineering. I was very stressed about the situation and started having nightmares a few times per week. This stopped almost miraculously when I received my offer for the teaching degree that I had applied for transfer to.

But it's not just nightmares which happen when I'm under stress: I also act out dreams. To date, I have:

• Texted in my sleep
• Used tissues when dreaming about crying
• Performed martial arts moves on my furniture
• Jumped out of bed
• Removed my clothes 

The most interesting one was the last on that list, but specifically an incident where I went to bed wearing two layers and woke up wearing only the outer layer.


My brain is a strange and fascinating thing.

OCD and out the other side...

I’m a little bit OCD. Just a little bit. You see, I tend to eat my M&Ms in coloured pairs. Two blue ones, or two brown ones, or two red ones. I’ve had people ask what I do when I don’t have two the same, to which the solution is that I go for colours that are shades of each other. For example: Brown and yellow; blue and green; red and yellow etc. Or I bite one in half and that works too.

I always feel a little bit guilty when I do this.

When I’m pairing my socks, they need to be in proper pairs. Not just the same colour, but also the same texture. The elastic bands at the top need to be the same width and tightness. These last two are even more important than colour, because I can’t see the colours but I can feel the difference when I’m wearing them, and it distracts me. A lot.

I had this fear when I was a kid that I was going cross-eyed because I can see my nose. Kinda. The tip of it is just within my field of vision. I eventually figured out that this is not the case, but rather than ONE eye might be going off in the wrong direction because when I look down, I can see one side of my nose much more than the other. I eventually worked out that it’s because my nose isn’t perfectly symmetrical. That was a relief, because it looks symmetrical enough from another’s perspective.

Going permanently cross-eyed was what I was told
would happen if I kept crossing my eyes.
So I kept having to examine just how cross-eyed I was...

I basically need symmetry. I think this links back to the ADHD, because apparently one of the quirks this gives me is noticing things that are out of place. So if I pick up a brown M&M and then a blue one, the blue one will be out of place next to the brown one, because brown came first so I’m clearly going with brown.

Like when I noticed the purple layer coming off the frame of my sunglasses. A tiny bit was peeling. It was out of place, so I had to remove it. I spent the next 45mins peeling the purple off my sunnies until they were pretty much universally silver. There was a tiny bit left right in the middle of the bridge, but that’s ok because it was right in the middle so it wasn’t asymmetrical and I could deal with that.

Yes, I am clearly insane.

"I'm constantly worrying that everyone thinks I'm paranoid" or "Paging Dr Freud!"

DISCLAIMER: This entry contains some  very personal stuff. Please be nice about it.

Behold! The typical Neurotic Woman:

Notice how she is assuming, from a delay in response to a text message, that her partner is going to leave her; assuming the worst possible reason for the delayed reply.

I try very hard not to be That Woman, but it is something I battle with in most of my relationships. It is getting less difficult with (many years of) practice, but in some situations I still have to put a conscious effort into not assuming that I've Done Something Wrong.

A recent conversation has traced this back to (you guessed it!) my mother. Allow me to illustrate. Please consider the following situation:

That's right, I got my ears pierced at age 21 after wanting it done for over 3 years. Now, here are my mother's possible reactions to this news:

If you guessed (c), you would be right

Of course, the really wacky part is that it could have been any one of these three. 

Another example was when I lost my graphics calculator. She could have

a) screamed at me
b) burst into tears of disappointment
or
c) told me off for being forgetful and taken me out to get a new one.

In this case, it was (b). But it could just as easily have been (a) or (c).

When I got to tell her that I wasn't being kicked out of university after failing all of my first year, the options were joy and smiles and love, a continuation of treating me like the scum of the earth (which she'd been doing since finding out I'd failed), or jumping straight into "Lets get you ready for repeating!" mode. The actual reaction wasn't any of these, as she burst into tears of... Something. Probably relief, but one can't be certain.

By the age of 7, I had a minor panic attack every time we left a party because my mother was so damned good at happy farewells that I had no idea whether I'd cop it afterward for some minor indiscretion which I hadn't even known I'd committed (like asking for too many glasses of milk). In fact, the happier and nicer she was as we left, the more I panicked.

The end result of 2.5 decades of this particular variety of mindfuck is, basically, that I tend to assume that I've done something I wrong. That my relationships with people will suffer if I'm not perfect.

Boyfriend din't call me tonight? Something must be wrong.
Friend has gone quiet in a conversation? I must have done or said something to offend.
Friend has cancelled on a party I invited them to? They hate me now because I told them I didn't like their haircut.

This is all stuff which I know is irrational. I know that it's really unlikely to be the worst case scenario. But my brain automatically jumps to that conclusion, because if I have done something wrong and ruined an entire relationship, then I damned well need to be prepared for it!

This was a very good strategy when dealing with someone whose alignment was very clearly Chaotic Neutral, one that has been described as "equally likely to kill it or paint it purple" if they come into contact with a stray dog. Unfortunately, this defense strategy doesn't work so well with people who are reasonably predictable and who do respond to things in more appropriate ways.

I'm working on it. I'm improving. I'm learning to "self-sooth" and not give in to the instincts which tell me I've just ruined everything forever. It's not easy, but I'm glad it's coming along. I like the feeling of gradually becoming more sane :-)

Metacognition

One of the problems with planning to maintain a blog, with regular entries, is knowing what to write. I am one of those people who cannot think under pressure - it is as close to impossible as something can be.

I also have the issue of near-constant metacognition (thinking about thinking); if I’m actually trying to come up with ideas and I don’t freeze completely, I’ll start thinking about the way my brain is working and which thoughts I’m having and why those specific thoughts? Is this a natural progression of the cognitive process, or am I forcing it and coming not coming up with anything because I’m trying too hard to come up with something?

It’s one of the problems with not only being very self-aware, but also with having done an education degree where a big focus was metacognition, and the extension of that was learning about how you learn/learning how to learn. If you think about it too hard, you get nowhere and then your brain explodes. This could actually explain a lot about me.

So here I am, hoping for inspiration on something to blog about, and I think I have it in the form of a post about metacognition and why it’s an absolute pain if you’re like me and take it a little too far.

I just can’t use it more than once, or it becomes cheating.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

We all have books which we love and which we hate. We all have reasons for that love or hate, be they related to the quality of the writing, the nature of the characters, or the progression of the plot. Here is a post on a specific book and why it is wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG, because it incorrectly portrays a world-view.



As part of English for my final year of secondary school, I had to study The Outsider (or The Stranger, depending on the translation) by Albert Camus. I hate that book. More than the book, I hate the standard interpretation of it, which is that this book is about Existentialism. It is not.

The lead character in this book (Meursault) is one who shows and feels little emotion and forms no attachments. He has no great ambition. Really, he just is. His emotional spectrum seems to range from neutral to this is nice.

The people who claim that this book is “Existentialist” only remember the first half of the definition of existentialism: That life has no intrinsic meaning. They forget the second, and most important part: Therefore, we must give it that meaning ourselves. Another cause for concern is that I have met English teachers who were unaware of this distinction, and they danm well should be if they are teaching this book! So, if you're an English teacher reading this and were not aware, go inform yourself! This is important. Camus himself rejected the "existentialist" label, because he considered this books to be on absurdism.

"Oh, the burden of human choice!"

That “life has no meaning” is a philosophy known as Nihilism, and at its deepest this book is about a nihilist character. I get extremely angry and peeved when people use this book in an attempt to illustrate existentialism, because I just happen to be an existentialist. Believe it or not, it was studying this book which made me realise that. But only because my English teacher was smart and informed enough to remember that second part of the definition for existentialism.

I would say that a much more accurate description of the character is that he is a psychopath (that is, has Antisocial Personality Disorder). Key characteristics include:

• Lack of remorse, shame or guilt
• Shallow emotions
• Lack of capacity to form attachments
• Callousness/Lack of empathy
• Poor behavioural controls/Impulsive nature
• Lack of realistic life plan
• Substance abuse

There are others, of course, but I would say that Meursault displays all of the above. I, on the other hand do not display any of these. Of the characteristics which are not on that list, the only one I have is "impulsivity", and I already have a diagnosis for that.

I am an existentialist. My life has meaning. The people in my life and the things I do hold meaning for me. I do not believe that this meaning is innate or predetermined by some more powerful being, but by me as they are mine. It is a liberating, empowering, wonderful thing because I have those choices, subject only to my biology (which is inescapable to a great degree, so I accept it where necessary).

I am not a nihilist. I am not a psychopath. Stop using this book to describe a worldview which it does not actually represent.

Common Sense: Knowing when to hold yourself back, even when there's nothing else to do the job.

Sound effects

People are noisy beings. They’re always making noise - shifting, clicking, rustling..

I don’t like people noises. This is ensured partly by my lack of filter - if someone near me is making a sound and there isn’t another, much louder sound to drown them out, I can’t block it out.

I do try to be polite and not mention it - I really do. But, like anyone, there is only so much gnashing, chewing, popping, rustling that I can take.

You see, people will gulp and and gnaw and swallow and smack, oblivious to the fact that I am taking it all in, indiscriminately. They don’t know because I don’t usually say anything, and they can’t know because they don’t seem to hear it the way I do.

This makes having dinner with people really awkward for me because I know I can’t say anything, because they’re just eating, but all I hear is a series of crunches and scrapes and taps and swallows and more chewing....

Eating in front of the TV isn’t bad because there’s background noise to help drown it out, but if macadamia nuts are in question then it’s just scraping and scraping and crunching REALLY LOUDLY and then more crunching!

In a silent room with someone who’s ingesting is the absolute pits for me, because their chewing and swallowing are REALLY REALLY LOUD compared to the silence everywhere else, and if they’re playing with their hair or biting their nails or, god forbid, ACTUALLY BREATHING it makes me want to throw something at them.

And if they have a cold or hayfever and, then you have them not only twisting and scraping hairs against one another AND swallowing AND BREATHING AND CHEWING AND SNIFFING AND OH MY GOD WILL SOMEONE HAND ME THE FRIGGIN’ FLAME THROWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

KKKKSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

We are experiencing technical difficulties. The normal program will resume on August 23rd.

I hate calling companies on the phone.

The reason for this is that I've had some long and drawn-out experiences with calling up various companies to get problems fixed. Every time I need to, I freeze. Because this is what my brain conjures up for me:

Kindly made pretty by my Fiancé.
My original was a bit bedraggled...

Things which were not included in this flowchart are:

• Explaining your problem to the Real Person (first and second, if you selected the wrong option to start with)
• Having both Real People check your personal details
• Explaining your problem again, because they weren't ready for it the first time as they need to know who you are
• Spelling your name a few times before resorting to Alphas and Bravos and Charlies because your name is kinda foreign and they can't figure out which letter you're trying to sound out over a dodgy landline.

 Seriously, I'd rather just send an email.

Brainy goodness

I have a vindictive streak. Now, being "vindictive" has a lot of negative connotations; one of its synonyms is "spiteful".


Fortunately for everyone else, my vindictive streak is aimed primarily at myself.


I'll give you an example:
I've been feeling a bit down lately. It's the usual stuff: Stress from family, stress at work, blah blah ad nauseum. I found myself feeling extremely unmotivated, as a result. It went something like this:


Me: I should cook dinner!
Brain: Don't wanna.
Me: But... Dinner!
Brain: Don't wanna.
Me: Well, I should at least do some work.
Brain: Don't wanna.
Me: Couldn't I ju...
Brain: Don't wanna.
Me: WELL STUFF YOU BRAIN! I'M GOING TO DO IT ANYWAY MUAHAHAHAHAH! WATCH ME COOK THAT DINNER!!!


I fall into a small portion of the population which is actually motivated to do things by feeling totally unmotivated to do things.


Yes, I'm utterly insane.