nyyki

An aphorism says that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference.

I took no note of April 8th on Wednesday, and its significance to me, until yesterday and my reaction was more "wow, that fifteen year anniversary passed," with no emotional connection at all. I don't feel good about the fifteen year silence in my life, but that the day no longer evokes depression and reenactments of what I was put through I'm pleased.

On to the twenty-first, and that'll be an easy one to remember because I've got an infusion that day.

Further progress…

I got my pst file off the old Dell's hard drive, so I have my email archive back. I'm still integrating things into the old directory tree, but I've got everything hitting the same inbox now, and that's taking some adjustment because I got engrained to the stopgap structure I used. It's a comforting problem to have because I feel like I'm no longer in a sort of holding pattern.

I got my six space rack integrated into my cockpit-like computer workspace – it has my two space rack drawer, a sliding rack tray with my old turntable on it, and two audio interface units below those things. The old four space is wedged in at the floor level with my QSC power amp in it and nothing below that – I can't think of anything rack mountable that I'd need in that workspace, and I may move the interfaces when I get my DAW computer up and running, because those belong there more than in my bedroom. I'm thinking that I can do format conversion from the bedroom and also audio mastering, though of course the room isn't long enough for the lowest frequencies (professional mastering suites are rooms forty feet long so the lowest bass frequencies can have room to cycle). In the garage my roommate found my old computer monitor and an old keyboard, though I think those were for my music computer in the past (which will reside again in my 44 space4 server rack when I get my full studio back working), so monitor needs are taken care of; I'm going with keyboard configuration unity for my workspaces, so I'll track down another Microsoft Internet Explorer keyboard (model: Rt9420 nb 5ftw and MS part number: x0 562767) and locate the rodent I was using before. Then comes the task of figuring out where to stuff it into the Zen Room.

All of this is making it clear that my computer desk and the sort of shelf arrangement I've got next to my computer is also stopgap, and all of this would be so much easier with my planned computer desk because the space under the computer shelf is designed to be terrain-free. That's going to involve locating an unstained bookshelf 4'x4'x1.5 and an unstained tabletop 3'x4' for the desk surface; both are elusive it seems.

Tomorrow I'll repack my different drums into my trailer, arranged much better this time, so more can fit in there and the garage will be far easier to deal with – I'm hoping through all of this my tea machine, second gallon pitcher, and my food processor will be easier to find, along with all of the other stuff the roommate put there during the Possum Apocalypse. Maybe the other stuff will show up too, so I can put to bed that garage searching thing.

MY tech to-do list is getting smaller – it's down to getting some stuff from a friend of mine in Irving, fixing the older computer with the dual floppy drive in it so I can rip data from a bunch of floppies of both form factors, configuring my all-in-one so it doesn't require messing with the touch screen after each scan job, fixing my server issues (most of which are hardware things but with a bit of configuration in Server 2003), updating and imaging three laptops and updating my Mac Pro, and fixing some things on my phone. A hint of a horizon is peeking up in the distance for all of this stuff

Oh, and a friend is going to be staying with me for a bit because his living situation is untenable; my two big concerns are him letting someone take all the things he's done there while resisting the urge to rescue them, and him trying to stay as busy here – I don't need that level of help around here because I dealt with that kind of stuff myself for so long. That said, he's a fellow musician, and he can help me with some of that stuff without me having to explain things for an hour or more and also do troubleshooting if a snag comes up in the process. We've been having a seriously difficulty in making music together, so that may improve too – the ideas are all there, but with how much he was doing he didn't have time. He's also going to focus a lot on his side job of building boutique guitar FX pedals and selling them on Reverb.

Life is change and change is life, and through change knowledge is gained. To me that's a good thing.

I did a thing today with friends, and this thing actually involved leaving the house. It also required that I think about what clothes to use to wrap my body.

I went to the symphony, the DSO, where they were doing a show of Danny Elfman's music that he wrote for Tim Burton movies. It was a symphony, but they had a lot of percussionists. They had a contrabass bassoon. They had a theremin too; there were saxophones in the orchestra; They had a full choir with an outstanding child soloist. And they had Danny Elfman singing songs Jack sang in i>The Nightmare Before Christmas, and that was wonderful. Two outstanding performers today – they had a violin soloist who's performed all over the place, done soundtrack work, done a lot of stuff for Danny Elfman including a piece he wrote for her called "Eleven Eleven", and wowed us to the point that she got a standing ovation. The child mentioned earlier is good, no, not only good for a child, good using adult singers with degrees good..

It was fun, though with a macabre edge of course. They did a lot of great stuff, and one of the people I was there with hasn't seen a single one of the movies or films these works were written for – he's going to correct that, and I'm going to search a descriptive video and soundtrack file of Frankenweenie.

Of course I went masked, and since I was out in public around people who don't know all the protocols I wore black sunglasses to beacon my blindness a bit more. I would like to do more things like that, but with the house issues my money is going to be a little bit tight in the same way the Sun is a tad bright and warm.

Prepare to cheer: Seth Macfarlane has the fourth season of The Orville written; it's down to scheduling, with his the thorniest. The full cast is up for it too. I'm pleased that a smart science fiction show with great characters and a trans friendly story history is returning after long hiatus.

The writing is moving again, and the current story is keeping my attention well enough that I'm making steady progress on it. I'm thinking hard in the direction of doing a 30 day challenge with my plot points for Love Meme? 3 – Ready, Set, Inaction.

The Déjà vu trilogy is out of editing. I'm taking beta readers for it now. I think of it as a hard science fiction story, so the math and science is based on what we know. Arthur C. Clarke said that hard science fiction can have one impossible thing in it and remain science fiction, and I think this meets that criterion. I've got lots of other stuff for beta readers too, if anyone's interested in catching my stuff. I tend to be genre agnostic, so the lines, if they exist at all, are often blurry. I also don't do trope-based plotlines or hew to genre story arcs (this is why the Love Meme? series isn't Romance, they're classic love stories) so those who like things that don't telegraph the ending early may enjoy my writing.

Other than that, things are grinding along like they do. My three score celebration went unnoticed by most of the people I know – thanks to the four people who called and the one who emailed. I wondered for many years how much VisageTome inflated awareness of it, and I figured it was around what I got this time around; it's one of the "features" of web 2.0 social media—it gives its merchandise inflated indications of their influence and social group size. I'm more comfortable knowing what the real situation is; yeah, that stuff feeds an extrovert in some ways, but physical proximity is its own reward.

It's been a pretty much dead time for talking books for me. The books showing up on BARD are often mystery/suspense, fantasy, some flavor of romance, or nonfiction I'm not interested in listening to.

I've gotten tired of mystery/suspense/occult stories. So many today are about the plot and mystery to the exclusion of characters, setting, or anything connecting to the human experience, and so often the characters in them are two-dimensional placeholders who can be summed up in twenty words or less, including articles and the occasional adjective.

Fantasy has its own challenges – I got past any interest in reading anything where the answer to the novel or series is magic, not people and their character traits. I keep my list of fantasy authors I'll read down to a few names – Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and a couple of others. I can't read Tolkien anymore because each time I read it I dislike it more; I find him way too wordy now, but this is understandable, because my writing style is the opposite from florid – I like my purple on my clothes, not my prose. And until I can get the entire catalog of Pratchett's Discworld novels I'm not going to delve there, because I can find no reason to frustrate myself; also, I've been told they can be somewhat britishy, especially the early ones.

And then there's romance – I started reading them because they're known for characterization and the development of the same, and they do that well because the plot is often pre-ordained by the genre. I doubt I'll pick up another period romance again unless it's written by C J Archer, and those are hybrid between fantasy with romance elements. This week I managed to get a recent issue of the magazine The Week and nothing else until I got to last week's titles in the list and one title interested me enough to give in and download it; yeah, interesting characters, and the tropes (Darkest Hour, Grand Gesture) weren't stuffed down the reader's throat, but the fornicational (note that that is not a portmanteau word, because the recreational friction in it was pretty much old hat to me, so it wasn't educational at all) scenes reminded me of why I don't want to punish myself anymore by reading about a side of life denied to me. And before someone jack-in-the-box's all over me about expectations and rejection of possibilities, note that I didn't write there about it being denied to me from now on – I'm referring to right now along with close to fifteen years of zero interest save for one brief possibility that went nowhere – that might have broken me on the topic, though I hope healing is still possible. So I got a stark reminder this morning that the romance genre isn't a healthy place for me to visit.

Isaac Asimov had an observation he revisited from time to time about how a society reacts to information – "The invention of the automobile predicted the highway system, but nobody back then could predict the drive-up ATM." (sometimes he replaced the ATM with fast food drive-thru's). So when someone I knew sent me a scan of Bill Bishop's book "The Big Sort" I read it and it fascinated me because I saw the societal impacts he mentioned in the book, along with some suspicions about how that was going to play out. That's when I started broadening my data sources – for instance, I listen to the issues of The Week, National Review, The Nation, Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Psychology Today along with a pair of music-focused compilation magazines for the blind community and three magazines oriented toward fiction. I don't think, however, that Bill Bishop's book gave the reader enough to predict Christian Nationalism/Dominionism and the massive step backward the gay and trans communities got hit with. Other things contributed to those backslides in civil rights.

So, this brings up something else – I'm making progress in my focus on accepting the things I can't change in my life so that they don't get me depressed; after a span of time some things become way toxic if thought about too often and too much, and I'm choosing to not wallow in depression. Like Thomas Covenant in the sixth novel by Steven Donaldson, sometimes you have to make the poison a part of yourself or it'll kill you. I'm not interested in suicidal ideation, at least in myself – been there, done that, it was called middle school, high school, and a lot of years after that, and I'm not living that song anymore. I know there are things in my life I can change, and I'm changing those things for the better. But there are some things I can't change, because I don't have self-empowerment in those subjects, and railing against those slings and arrows of misfortune brings up the adage, "It stops hurting when you stop beating your head against a wall."

On a more positive front, we're past the halfway point on the novel we're currently editing, and this will complete the Déjà vu trilogy. I noticed when we were editing on Wednesday that this one has a lot more physical confrontation in it, for several reasons. The first one had the main character stealthed, so there's only one situation she got into where she had to use what she was taught to defend herself. The second one there's only two scenes where she was involved, one of which she used her training again and the other one she was an observer, not an active force in that situation. Plus, she was a major rock star in that novel, so she had security on hand all the time. This third one she is without the security backup and also leveraging her knowledge of how to look her best, so she garners attention; she knows it can be troublesome, but she needs the recognition to achieve her plans.

The third novel also harkens back to the two before it a lot more. I find this understandable, because it's bringing the story to a close (I know how to count, so there are three novels in this trilogy, of course).

I'm also becoming more aware that I have many caretaker characters in my novels and shorter fiction. I'm processing that, because it's sometimes said that when a writer creates a relationship in a story on some level they're creating the kind of person they'd want to be involved with. This brings me to another point – I'm pretty much done with narcissists in my life. My current roommate is one, or at least way self-absorbed, and I can't relate to this person much anymore because we don't share interests, and for the most part never did. I'm also tamping down some resentment because this roommate situation was pretty much forced on me; I'm trying not to let that fester, and the roommate hasn't taken care of the financial side of our agreement. That said, I don't have the resources to make that situation change right now. A major disability tends to get in the way of personal agency, and I'd love to no longer get my nose rubbed in that fact. There are, however, things I *can* do, like choosing who I spend time communicating with, so those folks who seem to think that they are the smart ones and I'm an idiot or a failure or deluded may find that they're no longer given the opportunity to express those abusive perspectives anymore, or at least, I'll no longer have to deal with them any longer, because I'm not a hostage to negative connections. Also, I'm no longer the least bit interested in playing the "I'm Right" game with anyone – my life experiences have made it clear to me that I know far less than I thought I did at a younger age, and I'm no longer convinced that questions have a single answer. I want to expend my energy on those who can benefit from knowing me without either of us having to fight through so much to get a short distance up a hill.

For some reason Dixie has taken to lounging in the middle of the hallway a lot of the time. I get that it's the center of the house, it's close to the HVAC system so it can be warmer, and it's close enough that if I call her she's going to hear it unless she's asleep. That said, since I got the new doorbell she doesn't bark at it, and where she lounges is right by it since it's a Wi-Fi doorbell and I've got a power outlet halfway up the hall wall – my choice, it was added on to the switch for the attic fan.

All that said, tonight she was there until I fed her – then she moved her hanging out to my room.

I said, "What up, Dix?"
"I'm staying inside."
"Oh? Because it's cold outside and you've got such short fur?"
"No, because Morris is angry."
"Why is he angry now?"
"Sparky made him that way."
"And what did Sparky do to Morris?"
"I think it's sort of a silly thing – he started something he calls a club and told Morris he couldn't join it."
"Because Morris is a cat?"
"No, because it's a club for mutts. He says I'm a mutt."
"He's right, your mama and daddy weren't the same kind of dog, though they were different in size and color, not the important stuff like innards."
I picked up on my slip the moment I said it and hoped she wouldn't pounce on that – faint hope there, she's a terrier so pouncing is one of her major traits. "Did they both have four legs and a tail?"
"I don't know, I never met them, but I bet they did. And before you ask, ears and eyes and a nose and teeth, and yes, of course a butt too, because all dogs and most creatures have butts."
"What did they smell like?"
"I have no idea, like I said, I never met them, which also means I never smelled them; we Two Legs don't sniff each other's butts. So this is a mutt club?"
"Yeah, and Morris is growling and meowing and stomping around about it. I still don't understand something – why would looking different or not being exactly the same make someone not the same type of dog?"
Yeah, she sniffed that one out, and now I needed to navigate it with care. "Dogs and cats are different from Two Legs in how they're talked about. Bruno was a different type of dog than you because of how big he was and how his fur was different."
"So looks make dogs different?"
"Sometimes, or at least some people focus on that. You know, like the difference between you and a chihuahua or a big dog like the one next door."
"Okay, so different looks make dogs different?"
"Sort of, but not really."
"You look different from my past back leader."
Yeah, she was going there. "Yes, but we're still the same kind of people. lanalucy is the same type of Two Legs as I am, and the differences don't make her different enough to think of her as a different type of person."
"I don't understand, Pack Leader."
"Join the club, Dixie, a lot of time I don't understand why people do that either."
"So you're in a club? Are you a mutt too?"
"We don't use that term for two legs, or at least most people don't; I don't want to be around people who do. There are other clubs besides a mutt club."
"Could Morris join one of those?"
"He could, if they'd let him join; Morris likes to mess with people and argue all the time."
"Pack leader?"
"Yes, sweet dog of mine?"
"Do all pack leaders have puppy lumps?"
"What are puppy lumps?"
"Those two lumps on your body, you know, for feeding puppies."
"Oh, those, no, some pack leaders don't have them; some of them are boy pack leaders, and others don't have them for different reasons."
"Why do you and the pack leader before you have them?"
"Dixie, that's a very long conversation, and I don't have the energy to get into that part of human anatomy. It's something about how we're built. More than that can get way confusing, so let's not get into that, okay?"
"Okay, I won't ask about it. Pack leader?"
"What is it now, Holy Terrier?"
"I'm going to go lay down in the dog run now."
"Dix, we don't have a dog run."
"Okay, then what is it that lets you and me and the other Two Legs go from room to room?"
"Doors? Or the hallway? That's long and kind of narrow like a dog run."
"Yeah, that."
"Okay, go rest there, but if you want to you can sleep next to me when you get tired."
"Okay." She ran off, leaving me thinking about how else I could have explained bigotry based on physical differences in humans.

Things I Forget.
A Christmas tree. Holiday lights. Summers outdoors.
Dinners out or cooking when not alone. Picking up groceries. The casual intimacy of doing those things.
Being held, being free to share and enjoying being shared with, sleeping beside someone and waking beside someone.
All the things that let me feel confident in not being alone; being not abandoned.
Being there for someone and knowing they're there for me; banter play; making music with someone else.
Deep discussions; talking about movies or books that are common experiences for all involved.
Being loved, that love that's so much more than friendship; knowing my back is safe.
I can forget these things, often out of a need for survival as a person alone; unwanted; unneeded; an extraneous appendage to the world.
And one day, one blessed day, I might be able to forget you too; all you did; the wake where you left me to deal with your mess you made of my home and my heart; your tornadic path.
And then, so wondrous then, a time I dream of but with no hope of ever reaching, I can be at peace.
(note: I may turn this into a song -- some ideas for it are already percolating in my brain)

So… 2025.
I got a lot of writing done; I wrote a 30 day challenge last January, which is a bit unusual in a month that doesn't have 30 days. I turned out a decent amount of short stories during the rest of winter and throughout spring and the start of Summer; then July happened and things came together so I could finish five stories I'd had in process for a few years and also write something new. I've been a bit scant since then, but this has been a rough holiday season

I'm down to four novels in need of editing, one of which we're pretty deep into – this one has a lot of modern occult stuff in it, but when it comes to genre I don't color within the lines, so there's some definite polygenreism to most of what I write. Most covers are done too.

A friend has resurfaced and is working on my website (the first one – there are two more) so I hope that gets updated soon. My editor and I could use some help in setting up the book covers – I knew how to do all of that some time ago, you know, choosing backgrounds or background colors for a page, inserting graphics in text boxes and making the box frame invisible, and so on. I also could use a bit of direction on making sure the fonts I use are what the reader sees.

One of the graphics I need is stymieing me – I need a periodic table element block with the symbol the letter R, using the appropriate color to denote it's a gas at room temperature, with an atomic number of a reversed and inverted question mark, something important inn the box having a value of infinity plus or minus one, and the rest of the other things in a typical block told to me so I can populate the rest of it, or at least describe how to populate it. This is going to be the background wallpaper for www.random-element.com.

I didn't get my web 2.0 account shut down at midnight last night, because the idiots who were illegally setting off fireworks and stressing the liver and spleen out of Dixie made it hard to concentrate. I've got everything downloaded from it now, and I've given the order to delete that account; so the run from 02-01-2005 to last night is a closed chapter. My next windmill is to get LJ to delete my account, something they have been reluctant to do in the past.

I didn't much care for the hospital trip this year, it was my first time to be quarantined and it sucked the momentum out of my writing; I'm not getting inspired to delve into anything right now, which probably has a lot to do with the next thing.

I get that people move away, either to other places to live or other places to be dead. That's something my rational mind can understand, and I accept that. My heart has other feelings about this matter, and I'm far more isolated than I remember feeling in the past. Part of this is the holiday season, because for the most part it's one day after another and I know other people are having parties and family gatherings and stuff, but that isn't my reality. I heard from my sister-in-law (I'm keeping her in the family category, though I kicked her husband out long before he passed because he was a narcissistic untrustworthy grifter) and she asked me what my brother and I did for the holiday. Nothing, of course – my brother doesn't do holidays because he thinks they're a waste of energy. So it's been a way lonely time, and there's not much I can do about it because other people have made decisions that didn't include me in their concerns.

And then there's April 8th looming, getting closer. It'll be fifteen years then, and I don't know what level of aloneness and invalidation is reasonable for someone to be expected to take; I think a big part of my problem with this is that my memory's too good – I remember being a priority in someone else's life, and them being a priority in theirs too, and with my disability I can't be the independent internally strong person I was before my disability set in to stay.

I've been doing things to try to keep my spirits up, watching and listening to things I love, reading interesting books and magazines, inspiring things I've written or created, and so on, but it hasn't been as effective this holiday season. That's why it's good that's in the rear view mirror now.
My big challenge is to pound into my roommate's thick skull that I'm not a lending bank and this rental doesn't come with a five year payment plan for financial responsibilities. I swore I wouldn't carry debt for another roommate, and here I am. At some point I'm going to get frustrated and wipe what is owed to me from her and call it a bad financial decision, but that'll also include me deleting her phone number and email address from my devices and her move-out. That's a troublesome thing, though, because me living alone isn't the best idea. Still, if it's what I have to do, so be it. I've got a debt level in mind that'll trigger that set of events; it's not far off.

And of course, I'm not made of titanium – I have weak points, and if those get hit enough I'll toss my hands in the air and say, "Okay, world, you win, I'll get off your lawn."

A surrealist cries;
Mud stained from my carelessness;
Pain the only response

Back in the heyday of Livejournal this went around -- I'd like to revive it here.

Step One: Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered...whatever you're comfortable with) to your journal. The post should contain your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related ("I'd love a Snape/Hermione icon that's just for me") to medium ("I wish for _____ on DVD")
to really big ("All I want for Christmas is a new car/computer/house/TV.") The important thing is, make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want.

- If you wish for real life things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it's your address or just your email address where Santa (or one of his elves) could get in touch with you.

- Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your journal so that the holiday joy will spread.

Step Two: Surf around your friends list (or friendsfriends, or just random journals) to see who has posted their list. And now here's the
important part:

- If you see a wish you can grant, and it's in your heart to do so, make someone's wish come true. Sometimes someone's trash is another's treasure, and
if you have a leather jacket you don't want or a gift certificate you won't use--or even know where you could get someone's dream purebred Basset Hound
for free--do it.

You needn't spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn't to put people out, it's to provide everyone a chance to be someone else's holiday
elf--to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not--it's your call.

There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just...wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you'll
have the joy of knowing you made someone's holiday special.

1. Someone to assist me in getting my live Rig working like it should. This will involve configuring a program or two on two laptops along with some stuff on a couple of keyboards, and following up with another bout of configuration. No one person has to do all of this. All of it is easy, I have manuals and the knowledge to do things, and it's fairly simple work.

2. Cover assistance for my finished novels/novellas. As a blind person I can't turn my cover ideas into reality, and I feel a good cover will increase sales a lot. I've got some AI generated covers, but as a blind person I can't get them included in a document; I'll need to find out how to put a graphic description behind the picture so people who cant' see graphics can know what the picture is, and for one series of books it's an issue of knowing how to set a different page background on the first page of a document.

3. I need about 33 digital versions of gear manuals for my musical stuff. Acrobat format is preferred, but if it's all graphics I can deal with that too, because I have an excellent OCR program. My biggest challenge for all of this is that many of the sites I find what I'm looking for have a Capcha on them that doesn't have an option for VI folks, so I can't get into the site to download the manual.
The Manual List: ( Read more... )

4. I really want a white ankle-length halter dress. I haven't found any that are decent quality and don't come from a country where the sizing is messed up. By white I mean white, not any of the false white shades, and i'd like it unornamented. I think a size 18 will do the trick if there's a tie on the back at the waist.

5. I could use some website help for my three domain sites.

6. Someone to help me with getting paperwork scanned and entered into the computer. Some of this will be simple scanning and some will be reading things to me as I type. Not all of this needs to be done by one person. Any contribution of an hour or two would be greatly appreciated. This project is going to take a lot of time, but it can be done piecemeal with no trouble. And I could probably scan some things too if folks want to help at home or remotely. The first task in all of this is to sort a lot of the paper I have here so it can run more smoothly, and that's going to take about an hour.

7. I lost my copy of The Can Opener Cookbook and a couple of others in one of the thefts of 2003-2004. I also lost several of my Foods of the World hardbacks, and could use any of those you happen to find while cruising through used book stores. I'm short about eight of the spiral bound recipe books that went with these, along with the master index and menu planning guide and the three supplement books. And if you find anything I'm looking for, an OCR scan to PDF of what you find would be great.
Foods of the World Books( Read more... )

8. I have a list of books I own in hardcopy that I need to get digital copies of. I suspect much of this will come from the web, while the rest will require scanning and will require either someone owning the work or it being done here. So for the first part I probably need some resourceful internet user to locate the books I'm trying to find and send them to me. I have comprehensive lists of what I need. A lot of the books are gaming books, fiction, or books about music or recording. (Again, this list is too long to put in this message)

9. Two to three Matheson clan hunting tartan bandanas so The Holy Terrier can display her clan affiliation (I consider her to be adopted into my household). And if someone wants to go the extra mile a matching dress for a Scottish lady would be great, same tartan (I like the blue in the hunting tartan and the ancient tartan isn't too bad either -- the dress and faded tartans aren't to my taste, and the Dress tartan is aimed at young women leaving girlhood and that's not appropriate for me) I almost feel guilty for mentioning this site, but for fabric arts types Spoonflower (https://www.spoonflower.com) is a major rabbit hole.

10. Whistles. I've got the standard whistle coaches and other such folks use, but different and interesting ones are useful for when I play in percussion ensembles.

So, let me see what I might be able to help you with. You can contact me at nyyki at gypsyheir dot com for location for any of this or to ask me questions.