the little red car, and freshly shoveled front walk.
Happy valentine's day<33
Don't worry, I won't go into it. I cleaned more today. Tomorrow, blogging will be easier, when I can start a new week of entries.
What's wrong with society:
I don't think the problem is with society, but rather with me. Of course, maybe this, in itself, is the problem with society: it's not able to be flexible, progressive and fluid enough to encourage or foster the contributions of those who tend to think and act differently than most. When I talk about society, what I'm really talking about (sort of by defnition) is 'my relationship with society.' the principle problem with my relationship with society is that I'm too strange. But this is a loaded phrase: 'I'm different than everybody else.' you hear that a lot, and it carries with it the implication of 'I'm better than everyone else.' maybe I'm not as different from everyone else as I think. I eat, shit, breath and sleep -- how different could I be? Even if you move up to issues of cognition and behavior, I'm motivated by fear, the need for power, a desire for connectedness, the need to create, etc. I, too, follow my body cravings, covet, exclude and assert my dominance.
I think what makes me different is my desire to be different, even though many would echo that they, too, want to be 'just a little different.' a need *not* to fit in, a need *not* to be part of the whole: these are the traits that I exhibit to a greater degree than most.
But do i?
I think if one were to take a poll, people would be much more likely to say that they'd rather be different than everyone else than the same as everyone else. Well, I don't know. To what degree does the need to be unique and an individual in the face of 6,000,000,000 extremely similar entities overwhelm the need embrace the brotherhood of man, to share our experience of the universe, to connect and fight the lonely void? That's what it comes down to: loneliness or individuality. Here I go again with the dualism, but bear with me.
This is one of the fundamental conflicts of humanity: does one elect to be creative, independent and unique, or connected, loved and never lonely? The answer is a compromise, like every other resolution of rigid dualism -- take the middle path, as the smiling buddha says.
I'm hesitant to call myself a liberal, democrat, libertarian, minarchist, etc, because these are categories and pigeonholes that confound the reality they attempt to describe. It's much easier to say I'm *not* a liberal, I'm *not* a minarchist, and here are the reasons why. On that note, I'm *not* a conservative because refusing to alter your thoughts and actions to fit a changing world is like sitting in the corner and sulking when it rains, instead of opening up your origami book and having fun anyway.
I reject all categories. I reject all names.
My access logs reveal an interesting hit, at 10:35am EST:
198.81.129.194 - - [13/Feb/2004:15:34:49 +0000] "GET /writing/sevenlocks.html HTTP/1.0" 200 36625
A reverse-DNS lookup on the IP address revealed:
Canonical name: relay2.ucia.govThe page viewed was my seven locks piece, telling the story of my weekend in jail. So if I 'disappear,' I expect campaigns to be mounted, signs to be waved, etc. Of course, the CIA employs thousands of people, most of whom have computers in their cubicles, and some of whom I imagine have some free time to google on 'seven locks' (a search for which my article is the eleventh hit).
Speaking of all of this (issues that come up with the public nature of a having a personal website), my father mentioned that it might not be such a good idea to have pieces of writing up like those about my bunnyranch experience, my weekend in jail, or even this blog, in which I say some pretty violent and antisocial things whenever my mood fluctuates in that direction. Of course, taking out my name or even removing the pages is sort of a moot point, since I've been linked to and had my name printed by other sites over which I have no control. I guess I could change my name; I bet if I flew to canada with my u.s. Passport, then presented my canadian passport when I changed my name there, people would have a very difficult time finding me.
If I were an employer, I would most certainly google the names of prospective employees. And, if given the choice between two equally qualified candidates, I would opt for the one without a history of gun violence, mental illness, solicitation and willful unemployment. But hey, that's just me.
My only hope, I think, is employment as a bouncer or construction worker, or some job in which I'm not likely to come under a public relations-inspired brand of scrutiny. I'll see what the department of vocational rehabilitation says. Ours is a competitive workplace, and there are a lot of candidates with similar qualifications. Eliminating one is often a matter of excising the candidate who doesn't 'fit,' who is ill-suited for that company's culture. And since capitalism leads to conformity (it's easier to sell 5,000 widgets to 5,000 people who have exactly the same tastes in widgets), the qualified employee who best conforms to mainstream society tends to get hired. The only way around this is to be extremely well-qualified, but since I'm not qualified to do anything (or at least anything useful to business), and am pretty unambiguously outside the mainstream, I get sent to the bottom of the resume-heap.
I have to correct one of these problems (i originally typed 'i hate to correct one of these problems,' a freudian slip of the keyboard). I must either become so qualified that my non-conformity won't be a problem, or become so conformist that my lack of qualifications won't be a problem.
And now for something completely different.
the little red car, and freshly shoveled front walk.
it's actually a very pretty house, with the tree and bricks and yellow trim. Especially in the winter, when the dead lawn is nicely covered with snow.
our backyard. It looks kind of chaotic, because of all the snow, but it's normally quite sculpted-looking and nice. We have a little fenced-in backyard. The slats in the fence are covered with chicken-wire that prevented katy from escaping through the cracks, which she was quite able and eager to do. When katy was alive, this backyard was her little playground -- it was the perfect size, had many dark and shadowy groves of plants she could explore and sniff about in. The backyard was katy's.
the front door. Both the outside lamp and the doorbell are broken.
when you first walk in the door, this is what you see. Often, my bike lives here, but since it's been unridden for so long it's currently living in the basement, down the stairs to the left.
the finished basement used to be my room. I moved down here when I was 18 or so, as young men are wont to do. You can see that guitar note/fret/interval chart that I made next to my old pillow. Someone once asked me, in that mannish, derisive-yet-facetious way that guys have perfected as a way to undermine their peers through the filter of jocularity, 'where did you copy it from?' I didn't quite know how to respond. My fingerboard? Western music theory? That's not actually my comforter, nor my lamp. But I did install those venetian blinds. Up until very recently, this room was filled with a combination of old empty boxes and my aunt's stored belongings. I once set this room on fire. Well, at least the carpet. I tossed the butt of a clove cigarette into a box of books (rather than put it out on the carpet), and went upstairs. I was compelled by the smoke alarm and some smoke seeping up onto the living room to go back downstairs, where I found a bonfire that reached the ceiling where the box of books had been. I called 9-1-1, filled a 1-gallon pot with water, and put the fire out myself. The complete assemblage of fire-trucks then arrived, and the men grumpily sucked the smoke out of the basement with a fan, chopped up the burnt-up carpet and dumped the scraps on my front lawn. Later, an angry insurance inspector paid me a visit and tried to draw psychodynamic conclusions about my motives (was I angry at my parents because of the divorce? Was I feeling the need to get back at anyone? Etc).
the workroom. I drew 'the beatles' back in high school. The work table you see there is made out of two saw-horses and an old bookshelf, but it suffices quite well. That's my bike in the foreground -- it's been down there for a week or two because of the snow and it's bent rear axle, which I still need to get fixed ($25 or so). The liscense plate you see was from my mother's first car, the one I learned to drive on. It was a volkswagen fox, and was a really nice little car. Because of the YJZ on the plate, my mom named the car 'aegis' (the way one might pronounce 'yjz').
also the workroom. This is where the fake xmas tree is stored for 50 weeks out of the year. Note the crawl-space next to it -- it's empty. One of my greatest accomplishments to date was cleaning out the 'stored' items from there, including an old tire, a fan dating from before the house was air conditioned, and other heavy, dusty, creepy relics from this house's first owners back in the 70's. Actually, the house now has no more secret enclaves of filth, no more forgotten junk repositories, their being gutted and scraped clean over the past year or so. My townhouse development has a 'bulk pick up day' that I capitalized on to the fullest extent one month. The result was a row of gigantic unwieldy trash stretching almost the length of the row of townhouses, and generated almost exclusively by my house.
you guessed it, the washer and dryer (we're still in the workroom). Most of the appliances in this house have been replaced within the past 5 years by this appliance insurance program. Some money is paid monthly, and then men come and replace broken appliances with cheap new ones. I'm not sure if it's cost effective (for us) or not. That weird thing you see hanging over the washing machine is ~*~*ART*~*~, by the way, in case it wasn't clear.
moving upstairs to the living room, we see the tv and incredibly ancient stereo system. My mom got it as a present when she went off to college, so it's almost 50 years old. It still works perfectly well, except that the tuning band no longer lights up. There's buddha on top of the cabinet, and my mom's guitar on the left there.
a panoramic view of the living room, including the famous couches at right angles, which are often occupied in sloth.
living room. There are a lot of books here. Between my mom's, her father's and my collections, most available corners in the house are used to store books. 'the great children's book purge of 2000 or so' helped a little bit. My mom is thinking of doing a similar purge.
living room. This is where it all happens: where I sit and listen to music, download music, surf the web (wikipedia, news, stream-of-consciousness google searches), blog, chat on AIM, read and write emails, post on the SDF bulletin board, chat in the SDF com room, play SDF netris, and do other random useless things (stratego, c&o canal website, installing programs, registry tweaking, shell configuring, etc).
not really a hallway per se, but I guess that's what I have to call it. The supernova light you see there is the flash from my camera reflected in the bathroom mirror. Nothing too remarkable about the hallway, except that picture hanging next to the bathroom door -- it's there to replace a chunk of drywall my elbow took out during a rage.
the kitchen table. That plant is the only plant that's ever made it past a few weeks in this house. Mrs. White brought it over one day when she was invited to dinner several months ago, and I've taken very good care of it ever since. It's the only real plant in the house -- all the rest are fake. However, some of the fake plants were placed in the pots of plants after the original inhabitants died, and so the result is a fake plant with real dirt, which I'm sure must be a metaphor for something. Those are french doors that lead nowhere, and that let in a lot of cold air during the winter.
the kitchen/breakfast-nook. The pictures on the left wall comprise the 'family art gallery.' my aunt, mom, grandfather and I all have drawings or paintings in it. Cheesy, no?
the fridge, which needless to say plays a large roll in my consciousness. It's covered in three different sets of magnetic poetry. I think there's another, unopened one on top of the fridge. The white floppy thing you see affixed to the refrigerator door is a printed paper sign that reads 'REMEMBER THE VEGILATOR.' I put it up because I had bought a lot of fresh veggies, and didn't want to forget about them and leave them to rot in the vegetable drawer (the vegilator). But, it was dada, so I kept it around after I ate the vegetables (or they rotted away -- I don't remember which). That's the dining room you seen in shadow there, beyond the kitchen door-frame.
the dining room showcases three of my paintings from high school. I remember helen and I hung them up when my dad moved out and took most of the furniture and wall-hangings with him. The crooked painting has since been fixed. Under this table, by the way, was where katy peed for about a year, and later shat bloody stools. A vacuuming, a baking soda deoderizing, another vacuuming, several carpet shampoos, a vinegar treatment, and two pet-zyme treatments later, the carpet is now only redolent of pee when you hold your nose closer than 2 feet from the floor.
now we're upstairs. Nothing to say about the upstairs hallway, really, except that the overhead light (which is out of view) was detached for a long time. This carpet also got some pet-zyme treatment, but it didn't need it as badly as under the dining room table, which was truly something else.
my mother's bedroom. This used to be my room, years ago, but I moved into the basement shortly after my dad left. I guess it was unoccupied for some time, but was rented to a series of borders for several years. Then for some reason my mom moved into it and began renting the master bedroom out instead. When the last border left, this coincided (i think) with my return from school in baltimore, so I moved into the empty room. I think that's how it all happened. Incidentally, our borders were: ron & linda, naomi, pamela, wenchi, kee-yun, franck and amit. I think that's all of them in chronological order. Ron & linda were troublesome because they didn't pay the rent, naomi was troublesome because she ran up a $600 bill on 'psychic friends,' pamela was troublesome because she was a spoiled anal-compulsive personality, and amit was troublesome because he played an ongoing game of intellectual, cultural and social one-up-manship. Wenchi and kee-yun were nice, but franck was the best -- he was a genuine family friend. I remember when he invited his friend from NIST to come over and watch the world cup, and france won -- it was explosive. My mom and I got to practice our french with him, too. I tried to visit him in paris, but couldn't find him in the directory.
when my grandmother died, my mother took home all of her old photos, letters and various other 2-dimensional family heirlooms, many of which she framed and put up decoratively in her room.
this served as my mom's study and yoga/spirituality/poetry/etc room when my then unbroken-up family moved here in 1987. It's since served as a guest bedroom, dog-poop repository, and now it just sits there, missing one of its storm windows. This is a very cold house in the winter, even for ymir the frost giant.
the little useless upstairs room contains many books, and an old boom box that I gave my mother for mother's day when I was 15 or so. There are also old dolls of my mother's in here, one of which you can see sitting on top of the right bookcase.
another shot of my mom's study, turned now-unused room. The table there is a sewing table, and that white thing is a sewing machine that isn't usable because the bobbin has fallen into the mechanism somewhere. No one really cares.
my guitar, night-stand, amplifier, and tangle of wires. There is another tangle of wires near the computer, and sometimes these two tangles of wires have a social, usually when I am doing something sound-art-y with my macintosh and guitar. That glowing spot is a some kind of warning sticker I stuck on my amp, that reflected the camera flash. I don't know why I have that music stand -- it doesnt even have any clips on it, not to mention the fact that I read music or chord charts maybe once every three years, and even when I do, the material is usually lying on my bed next to me. I think this music stand might be a dreadful affectation. I should get rid of it.
this is where I sleep. When this picture was taken a week or so ago, I hadn't made my bed in literally years. This winter, it was so cold that I needed several blankets, and so my bed was always a tangle when I wanted to crawl in at night. So, I made my bed for a few days. Now, I just make it at night before entry, or sort of arrange the covers over myself once I'm in bed. But that's hard to do with three blankets.
there's my little imac, that got me through 2.5 years of art school. It's largely abandoned, since routers and ethernet cable are expensive. I still love it, though, and turn it on every once and a while to play maelstrom or lemmings. That bookshelf was pilfered from the basement after the great childhood book purge of 2000 (or so). It leans to the side, and is probably pretty unstable.
sort of an interesting picture. That mirror making the diamond-shaped reflection on the wall facing you was made by inmates at fulsome state prison (thus the 'FS'). That black skinny thing is a microphone boom. My beard trimmer is what you see plugged into the wall. My bathroom lies dead ahead; note the starfish on the wall.
There are two snippets of dreams that I remember from last night. The first was being with katy at the vet, and watching her limp around the waiting room in an exaggeration of the painful gait she walked in during her last day or so of life. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that we put katy to sleep at the optimum time.
The second dream-bit was more interesting, or at least more open to interpretation.
I dreamed that ana sent me over instant messenger an article on parents training their children for spelling bees by holding their heads over the toilets and imitating flushing noises with their mouths when the children spelled a word wrong. So we have 3 layers of abstraction of the event here, plus another abstracted element unlrelated to the event's presentation: dream, instant messenger, article, and fake flushing noises. I think this is a dream about intellectualization, and compressing reality into little simulation-worlds like a book, the television or the computer. I didn't directly experience getting my head flushed down the toilet for not spelling a word correctly, but rather dreamed about an article sent over instant messenger. Even then the flushing wasn't real to begin with.
Conclusion: I sit here too much, and need to get out and experience reality a little bit more.
I went to voc rehab this morning, and did nothing. I got some paperwork to fill out, and an appointment to meet with a specific counselor on the 23rd. Things move very slowly there, and in the meantime, secretaries and underlings need to be paid their salaries. It's dangerous, in the government, to get too much accomplished too efficiently, or else everyone would realize that their tax money is being flushed down the commode.
I think I might be a minarchist; at least that's the direction in which I'm leaning now. In other words, some government is a necessary condition of any society, but enough is enough already. Preserve the military and tax collectors, but that's about it -- snip away all of these social programs and other tax-dollar sink-holes, like the library of congress and ATF. I think anarchist utopias are doomed to fail because of the sheeplike nature of most and the dictatorial nature of a few, but the very basic essential function of government, which is to defend the citizenry from foreign and domestic enemies, can be preserved in a 'free' society. But what do I know? I sit at my computer all day.
Who cares?
I don't have anything to say today. Tomorrow, voc rehab. Today, my mom was on the computer, so I filled the time by going out to buy a new day planner and pens, and later by giving the carpet a third pet-stain treatment. Then, I went for a walk at 7pm or so to go and commune with seneca lake, before the crust of ice melts away. I pretended I was walking katy, and cried a little bit by the bank. I feel bad about not communing with the lake when it was colder -- today, it was probably in the 40s, and the rotting dead vegetation replaced the blue smell of frozen earth. Everything was wet, sloshy and sticky. I didn't like it. I'm not looking forward to the spring; winter was too short. The only thing that will be nice is going for bike rides, which I haven't been able to do because of the ice and snow. I don't even want to think about the summer.
My rear bike axle is bent, probably because I weigh almost 300 pounds and bike over tree roots. It will cost me $25 or so to fix it. I'm quite sure the reason my bike breaks down so frequently is because I am so heavy.
My diet of financial necessity went extremely well, and I plan to continue it, slightly modified. I will live on spaghetti, black beans and rice, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, and patio burritos, supplemented with vitamins. Hopefully this will hover around $30 a week.
I wish I had superpowers.
Problems, listed quickly before I go to bed:
That's all I can think of for now. In some sense, the debt part is the most troubling. I got some money out of my motor-pedestrian collision, and invested it in the stock market literally a few days before the .com crash. It's now about 1/3 it's orignal value; I estimate that I'll need to wait 30 years before it's back up to where it was. If I'd not invested in the stock market, but instead just let it sit around, even in a checking account, I could have payed my student loans off in full. So, I'm $25,000 in debt, and I have an art degree to show for it.
Maybe it's time for an mba.
I know there aren't enough blogs about the election and candidates, so I thought I'd try to remedy that. I was reading dennis kucinich's website, on which he says that his number-one agenda is defeating bush at any cost. So, I guess this implies that we should vote for kerry, who has a better chance of beating bush, because kucinich looks like he crawled out of a cave, has a funny last name and isn't an ex-army tough, not to mention the fact that he comes across as some kind of holier than thou, nader-esque academic 'progressive.' I like him, and would vote for him, except that like kucinich, my first priority is to get boosh out of the white house. Here's where I would talk about problems with the two-party and first-past-the-post electoral systems, if I had the energy.
If elected president of the united states, here's what I will do for the american people:
This is a troubling issue with anarchism and libertarianism. If you take away (or drastically reduce the power of) the government and the cohesion of nation-statehood, then everyone is going to invade you. A stateless nation would work if there weren't any other governments around either, but it wouldn't be long until a band of guys with polearms started claiming territory, and it's a slippery slope from there to the re-establishment of state borders.
We've seen what happens under anarchy or a severely weakened government: inevitably, war-lords spring up and start grappling for territory and resources. I sympathize with libertarians and anarchists, because I don't like to be told what to do, either. But if we were to get rid of the people telling us what to do, it wouldn't be long until others took their place.
Essentially, the problem is that it's impossible to enforce anarchy.
Hierarchical socio-political structures are an inevitability. A few people like to lead, most people like to follow, and a few hate to be lead but have no ambition to lead themselves (like myself). These people, the ones who hate to be told what to do but are unable or unwilling to tell others what to do, are most often the ones who think the government should be eliminated.
Maybe this would be a good quiz for anarchists and libertarians:
If you answered 'no' to both questions, then you have a bit of a problem.
Ultimately, libertarian and anarchist ideology is, like most things, a solipsistic misapplication of self-analyses to society at large. Because the would-be anarchist feels that s/he can't function in a society where s/he is told what to do, but feels unqualified or morally opposed to telling others what to do, s/he assumes that everyone else feels this way and that the inherent hierarchy of society that is so unworkable for them must be eliminated. In fact, most people are quite comfortable with hierarchy, whether they're towards the bottom or towards the top of the organizational chart. The world and the way it manages its resources have clearly evolved in a hierarchical way. So, my suggestion to anarchists, minarchists and libertarians who don't like the rules is to learn to take charge, instead of making plans to alter human nature.
It would be really nice if a stateless society were possible, if we could eliminate hierarchy and get by on voluntary mutual cooperation. But this is an anarchist's pipe dream. People naturally fall into either obedience or leadership.
Esr, a die-hard anarchist, argues in his essay on the myth of man the killer ape that our original sin is not violence, but rather blind obedience, and he uses this argument to refute people who challenge that the absence of government will inevitably lead to horrible violence. I agree with him. If our original sin is blind obedience, and not a violent nature, then the lack of government will inevitably lead not to bloodshed but merely to a new government. People, following their natures, will obey a few type-a, would-be leaders back into heirarchy. It isn't so much that people *want* heirachy, but rather that most love to follow and a few love to lead, and this social behavior inevitably *leads to* heirarchy.
Anarcho-libertarianism is doomed not because a hobbesian 'state of nature' will tear humanity apart after its inception, but merely because humans' natural tendencies will lead to the re-establishment of heirarchy.
Whew, I'm glad last week's blog entry is done -- that was a killer. It contained pictures, quotes, aphorisms, huge text, politics, personal anguish, and day-to-day reporting. Truly, last week's blog had everything -- I don't think I will ever be able to live up to the impossible standard I've set for myself.
I'm getting tired of sitting in this chair all day, every day, and seeing no-one but my mom. Of course, maybe this is good in a way since I have maybe two articles of clothing that both fit me and are socially acceptable. Many of my clothes neither fit me nor are socially acceptable, to say nothing of the fact that their not fitting me contributes to their unacceptability. This is a very complicated case: a lot of ins, a lot of outs.
I'm going to vocational rehabilitation on Wednesday, and I think it might be a good idea to think about what I want from them, so as to avoid being sent off to wendy's in a uniform. What I would like is a job at which I am treated with dignity and respect. The problem is that I consider following orders and working for someone to be, almost without exception, an affront to my dignity and unconducive to a relationship based on respect.
I wish I weren't so slow to learn new things at a job. Employers who have to repeat procedure over and over invariably start to think that I'm not paying attention, and therefore stop treating me with dignity and/or respect (if they ever did to begin with). I am capable of learning things quickly, but they have to be of great interest to me, like BSD or the trumpet. This is nothing I can control, or a manifestation of a 'bad attitude;' it's just an unfortunate fact that if something doesn't grab me, I'm not able to pick it up right away.
I'm not in control of what interests me. I'm sure some would argue that I am indeed in control of what I find interesting, but this position is argued because the arguer is able to force himself to be interested in things, and assumes that because he can do it everyone can. This is similar to the way some will say things like 'a sense of direction can be learned and developed.' invariably, those who say this are the people who have a good sense of direction.
A huge problem in the analysis of human behavior is the tendency of the analyst to recklessly apply statements about his or her self to others. Essentially, the key to psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc, is replacing the word 'i' with the words 'my analysis is that people.' for example, 'i don't like to ride the metro because it is too noisy' becomes 'my analysis is that people don't like to ride the metro because it is too noisy.' this amounts to basic solipsism -- projecting one's own feelings and cognition onto everyone else, and assuming that everyone is just like you because the self is the only thing that can be known or understood. People share a lot of similarities, but this doesn't mean that a self-analysis always universally applies to everybody else.
Of course, my analysis that 'people tend to draw their conclusions about society from self-analyses' was derived by the very method I warn against, so maybe I'd better digress before it's too late.
So, I hope the people at voc rehab don't make all sorts of assumptions about me, and send me to wendy's in a uniform. I can't help but repeatedly ask the same question: is it too much to ask that I like my job? That I actually enjoy the way I spend the bulk of my time and energy? Doesn't that sound reminiscent of a human right? But I don't enjoy the way I spend the bulk of my time and energy now -- it looks as though this is independant of employment status.
That was an example of an inner voice jumping in and giving me critical advice. As soon as I typed the last question mark in the above paraphraph, I was invaded by some nameless person who said 'but you don't enjoy the way you spend the bulk of your time and energy now.' it's funny how the fragments of my personality are so rude to me, and present their criticisms so mannishly. But, I find that they make good points if I listen do them, and it's better than having a person who's not a part of me say it.
I wonder if overcoming not being interested in what I don't want to be interested in isn't a matter of self discipline. It sort of goes against everything I believe, philosophically (the impossibility of free will or original thought; nihilism, general pessimism, etc), but I guess I could give it a try. When my manager at wendy's says 'teegin! Put those curly fries in the deep-fat frier!' I'll focus on the roiling sea of fat and how it makes me think of a river of beelzebub's semen, and the curly fries and how they make me think of fermion-cooled tesla coils that power intergalactic subwarp drive. Well...the problem is that I've tried this, and it doesn't really work. It honestly does help to be really interested in your work.
I am interested in, and am good at: 1) playing music 2) music theory 3) writing 4) playing with computers 5) drawing 6) snobby conceptual art. My ideal job would be one regarding which someone contacted me via email and said 'we've been looking at your website, and we'd like you to come to our facility in vancouver and perform activites 1-6 all day. Telecommuting is optional.'