equivocality — Jeff Ngan's collection of thoughts, experiences, and projects, inspired by pretty much everything
19 Feb 13

the edge of a waterfall

There’s so much hap­pen­ing at once that it makes my head spin. Sometimes I won­der what it’d be like to be the one writ­ten about, to be on the other side of that lens. What would another per­son say about me? Would it be dif­fer­ent from what I think of myself? And would I like what was said?

I haven’t been able to write, not from a lack of time or desire, but because I can’t keep a straight thought for long enough to get it on a page. Even when I can get myself to sit down for an hour, I just end up in an end­less cycle of inspired writ­ing and crit­i­cal revi­sions. I’ve been ques­tion­ing every­thing. I don’t know what I’m work­ing towards, where I’m going to end up, or even what I want any­more. It’s easy to get over­whelmed by it all, so I have to remind myself to take every­thing one day at a time.

It’s no longer about resolv­ing strug­gles and learn­ing to grow, it’s about fun­da­men­tal changes in the per­son I am and the way I define myself. When you’re unsure of who you are, noth­ing in the world seems sta­ble. Maybe that’s why the good doc­tor asked me if I was scared of chang­ing. I told him yes, but only because I don’t know if the per­son I am now would like the per­son I’ll be later.

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05 Oct 11

a short break in adolescence

I’ve been feel­ing like an adult.

This isn’t due to my fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties or my tidy home or any other things I used to use as a mea­sure for matu­rity, but from feel­ing like every­thing makes sense. Like I have all the answers the way adults seem to do, because I can see the big pic­ture, I under­stand what truly mat­ters, and I don’t sweat the small things anymore.

It’s only now that I’m at a point where I feel like a grown up. Like this is finally who I’ll be for the rest of my life.

That’s not to say I’ve fin­ished grow­ing, that I’m not human or infal­li­ble, but there aren’t the same strug­gles or changes that I used to have, so my emo­tions and atti­tudes have evened out.

For a while I won­dered if I’d just become another turning-30 cliché, but I real­ized it was never about age. Various things have brought me to this matu­rity, from con­ver­sa­tions to rela­tion­ships to trips far away. It all hap­pened to be around the begin­ning of a new decade in my life.

Maybe I’ve been feel­ing this way only because things are going so well. It’ll take some hard­ship to test how far I’ve truly come as an adult, but until then I’ll try to live like a child, cause too often youth is wasted on the young.

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09 Jul 11

warm divinity

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Music sounds so good. It’s like every­thing has a beat I can dance to.

Sometimes I start writ­ing an entry based on notes from a few weeks ago, but I end up dis­card­ing most of them cause I don’t feel the same way any­more. It’s like I’m con­stantly shed­ding skin in the words I delete.

I tend not to over-think things now. My deci­sions are based on what I want at any spe­cific moment, instead on the future, or the con­se­quences, or what may hap­pen as a result. This regres­sion has been one of the most impor­tant (and dif­fi­cult) things I’ve learned to do. It feels like I’ve been going in the wrong direc­tion for 30 years, but at least I was able to fig­ure that out before much longer. Now I under­stand Picasso when he said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a life­time to paint like a child.”

Pat grilling

Pat on his new grill. He’s still fig­ur­ing out the hot spots.

I don’t even prac­tice gui­tar any­more, but I’ll put on a song I’m addicted to and pre­tend I’m play­ing with my favourite singers for hours. It’s not help­ing me improve (which is usu­ally what I enjoy), but by god is it fun.

The weeks lead­ing up to my trip were full-tilt cause I couldn’t stand being by myself. It was never that bad before. I even bought an iPad app that lets me watch ran­dom web­cams from around the world, just so I could have some­thing hap­pen­ing live next to me, even if it was two-thirty in the morn­ing. Usually it was a buf­falo chips restau­rant in Florida with mus­tard table­cloths, a beach resort by the sea in Italy, or an over­head cam of a sushi chef in Tokyo1.

Nowadays, I don’t mind the soli­tude or the com­pany. I’m feel­ing unwound and have set­tled into old habits; not get­ting enough sleep, eat­ing at the wrong times, never going out. The main dif­fer­ence is that I get so much less of John nowa­days, which means I feel so much more alone, but I’m strong enough to be okay with that now.

The days are bright. Like a boy, I find it hard to con­cen­trate on work when the sun fills the house with warm light.

  1. This is how I learn that sushi chefs puree wasabi using only a chef’s knife and a great deal of patience. []
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20 Mar 11

nowhere near as morbid as it sounds

All I want to do lately is go out and shoot and edit and post, but I have no sto­ries to tell. I’m still try­ing to write them, so I can put them in these cuts and look back and live for­ever in the mem­o­ries. To dance among the motion and glim­mer, and blink against the bright­ness of the sun.

I’ve been filled with such tremen­dous inten­sity, and hope, and excite­ment, buoyed by the fact that I’ll always have a gui­tar and a dis­arm­ing smile.

burlesque cake

 

Peace has been made with this new-self. It’s as if every change, every cycle I go through, takes time for me to get used to the new skin. I know I’ll always be flawed. I’ll always make mis­takes, but that means I’ll always be learning.

I’ve had enough of crazy devel­op­ments. I’ll be happy once the dust set­tles and I’m back to my reg­u­lar life again, some point beyond the sum­mer. The spring is never remark­able; it’s just a haze between the heat and the snow. It already smells like hot sum­mers nights, a com­fort­ing mix of pollen and con­crete. It’s gonna be oh so good.

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12 Mar 11

Protected: when the sunshine don't work, the good lord bring the rain in

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12 Jan 11

stability or stagnancy

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I’m liv­ing a drama-free life.

John used to tease me about my drama, con­vinced that I loved it because I always seemed to be cre­at­ing it. But drama is just a by-product of the strug­gle when you’re dis­cov­er­ing your­self and try­ing to become the per­son you’re meant to be. It’s never an easy path; oth­er­wise, you’d already be that person.

I don’t have bad days any­more either, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m han­dling things bet­ter or if I’m not chal­leng­ing myself enough.

And now that there’s no more drama, it feels like I’m fin­ished. Like there’s no next step for me to take and nowhere else to go, because I’m here. All that’s left is to enjoy this existence.

That’s not to say my life is with­out a touch of inner insta­bil­ity. I still have mem­o­ries, thoughts, lust, and love, and they’re enough to fill the mind for an entire day. But now I know everything’s gonna be okay.

cats in sunbeam

 

Now that I’m work­ing from home full-time, I barely step out­side. Living like Foul Bachelor Frog, cause yesterday’s pants are today’s pants if they have the belt in them. There’s noth­ing for me out there. It’s never worth the trou­ble any­more. I’d go out if I wasn’t so con­tent in my com­fort­able home with two cats and every­thing I need to sing or write or create.

I’m just won­der­ing if I’ll ever get tired of this.

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16 Jun 10

Baby talk

One sum­mer in my teenage years, I vol­un­teered at a kinder camp1, and that filled a gap in my knowl­edge about any­one under 10. Unfortunately, that gap only spanned chil­dren between 3 and 5, and aside from that range, I knew noth­ing about kids.

So inter­act­ing with chil­dren who’ve yet learned to speak I found espe­cially awk­ward. I never under­stood how to talk to some­one who didn’t seem to under­stand what I was say­ing. It was like talk­ing to a stuffed ani­mal, which I’m pretty sure can’t be done by any sane per­son with­out feel­ing creepy.

Rosella in the car

 

Not to men­tion how phony it sounds. Why do peo­ple raise their voices, as if a child trusts them more if they sound like them2? They don’t nor­mally talk like that.

Then I real­ized that I do kitty talk, with the boospy, and the schmoopsy, and the pokey of the belly. I talk to my cat all the time, a habit I’ve prob­a­bly picked up from liv­ing by myself for the last three years, com­bined with the fact that I’m an extreme intro­vert and stay in my house for the major­ity of my time.

Which is strange because Dolly doesn’t under­stand any­thing I’m say­ing (though I’m sure cats are intel­li­gent enough to evolve to talk if they believed any­thing a human had to say could be impor­tant). And this is after I wrote an entry seven years ago, specif­i­cally about how awk­ward I found it to talk­ing to cats.

Maybe I’m com­fort­able enough with cats now to hold a con­ver­sa­tion with one. Or maybe I’m going crazy.

Rosella with tongue out

 

I’m get­ting more com­fort­able with kids too. Not just talk­ing to them, but the idea of hav­ing them myself, maybe because my friends are get­ting mar­ried and giv­ing birth and I’m spend­ing more time with a few adorable boys and girls. I can talk to them even though they only respond in monosyllables.

Jodie Foster once described hav­ing chil­dren as the most cre­ative thing she’s ever done, and I com­pletely under­stand that now. I can’t think of any­thing more cre­ative than nur­tur­ing growth, curios­ity, imag­i­na­tion, and ideas in another human being. One day, I’d like to expe­ri­ence it for myself.

  1. Cause I had noth­ing bet­ter to do. Seriously. []
  2. Though it worked for Owen Meany. []
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19 May 09

The Price Of Moving On

Remember this one, or even this one?

I wrote those entries four years ago1. Amazing how much they apply to the sit­u­a­tion I’m in now. Except this time, I’m stronger because I know that I sur­vived this once already. It’s sad that at the end, all my efforts turned into an attempt at mak­ing sure I wouldn’t regret any­thing by giv­ing more of myself than I should have. Because when all that you’ve given makes no dif­fer­ence, and you have noth­ing left, you know for sure that there’s noth­ing else you can do. You can always say that you took the chance, and it doesn’t mat­ter if you get hurt in the end, because often you can’t sep­a­rate the two.

That’s the price you pay to look back with­out any regrets. That’s the price of mov­ing on.

And I always pay it gladly.

  1. It’s quite a trip to see that I was mature or smart enough to fig­ure this out back then. []
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19 Mar 09

Five Year Timestamp

People here say I’ve changed.

Me and grandma

It’s been five years, and my grandma used to describe me all the time as “seun”, a Cantonese word for “pure, clean, unmixed”. But when I arrived last week, she said she wouldn’t rec­og­nize me if she saw me on the street.

They used to say I looked like Leon Lai.

Leon Lai

Yeah, this guy. Now they’ll con­cede that I’m bet­ter look­ing than my dad.

People notice the white hair and say I used to have a baby face. That I’m older. Or more mature.

It’s true that I feel com­pletely dif­fer­ent than the per­son I was five years ago. I tend to reflect and eval­u­ate on a daily basis (which is far too often) so I never get a sense of any long term changes.

But now that I’m in Hong Kong again, and I look back on the per­son I was the last time I was here, I see the changes much more drastically.

It’s reflected in ways that I’m not accus­tomed to notic­ing. Not just in the way I see the world, but from the way I han­dle things. The way I speak with those older than me. My inter­ests in what they have to say. I didn’t even start work­ing yet the last time I visited.

But at the core, I’m still the same per­son. The same morals, the same logic, the same intel­lect. It seems like it’s only the way these core traits man­i­fest them­selves that has changed, most likely from the things I’ve been through.

Five years is a long time to be so blind to these changes.

It’s quite surprising.

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05 Mar 09

Sensitive To Sensitivity

I almost walked out of Tai Chi class the other night.

Someone asked me if I was going to “pass out again”, because I got light-headed the class before and had to leave early, most likely due to a side-effect of the new med­ica­tion I’m on, though I was far from pass­ing out.

I was flat-out offended, and began expe­ri­enc­ing what my ther­a­pist explained are “auto­matic thoughts” — irra­tional thoughts that affect mood neg­a­tively. I had to step back from the sit­u­a­tion, put the words out of my head, and calm myself down. If not, I would have over­re­acted, and prob­a­bly regret­ted it. But I couldn’t fig­ure out why I was so upset. After all, I’m far from one who gets offended easily.

Was I being pub­licly emas­cu­lated? Was I being judged with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of all the facts? Was my com­mit­ment to attend prac­tice after not eat­ing for two days being belit­tled? Was it the tone? Was it because I couldn’t speak back and defend myself, for fear of pol­lut­ing the sanc­tity of the class1 with my per­sonal pol­i­tics? Probably a bit of each.

I tend to have sim­i­larly bad reac­tions to peo­ple being sur­prised that I don’t know some­thing. It feels like I’m being judged, as if they pre­sume to know who I am. Even though it’s sup­posed to be a com­pli­ment, it’s a back-handed one, like say­ing “I thought you were smarter than that”. John used to be espe­cially guilty of this2, but he suc­cess­fully cor­rected the behav­iour years ago. It took a psy­chol­o­gist to point it out to him, and adverse reac­tions from sev­eral peo­ple, includ­ing me.

I know I’ve already come a long way. I’m not so sen­si­tive about my weight (for a guy) any more. I stopped car­ing what peo­ple think when I know the truth. But this inci­dent made me real­ize that I still har­bor a sen­si­tiv­ity to cer­tain things. I still have some grow­ing up to do. Still have to real­ize that peo­ple say things with­out think­ing, or don’t mean what they say, or that I may even take innocu­ous things the wrong way. Even though I feel that I had a right to be offended, I still don’t want to be.

And the fact that I was offended just makes me more upset.

  1. I approach my work with the same kind of reser­va­tion and detach­ment to remain pro­fes­sional. After all, these are sit­u­a­tions in which we can’t choose the peo­ple we work with, so there’s noth­ing to do but accept and any unpleas­ant­ness. []
  2. And quite self-aware of it. As a per­son obliv­i­ous to pop-culture, he loved to hold it over peo­ple when he knew some­thing they didn’t. []
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28 May 07

To Grow from Yielding

The most yield­ing thing in the world
  will over­come the most rigid
The most empty thing in the world
  will over­come the most full
From this comes a les­son —
  Stillness ben­e­fits more than action
  Silence ben­e­fits more than words

—Verse 43, Tao Te Ching

Sometimes, tem­per­ance is the great­est weapon.

When some­one attacks you with words or tries to make you feel any less than your­self, you merely need acquiesce.

In doing so, you dis­arm them. You rob them of their only weapon — anger — and their words lose all mean­ing and significance.

Tai Chi, as the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of Taoist philoso­phies, fol­lows the same idea.

Then you will under­stand the flow of inter­nal power, and, hav­ing repeat­edly prac­ticed and refined your tech­nique and explored your own aware­ness, you can use and con­trol your inter­nal power at will.

The T’ai Chi prin­ci­ple is as sim­ple as this: yield your­self and fol­low the exter­nal forces.

—Waysun Liao, The Essence of T’ai Chi

When your oppo­nent expands, con­tract. Create a void in your stance, and let them fill that void. By absorb­ing your opponent’s energy, you reduce it to nothing.

No one proves them­selves more inane than one who matches energy with energy, force with force.

I’ve finally come to fully under­stand such an idea. The the­ory made sense, but I never put it in prac­tice, and prac­tice is what makes the under­stand­ing com­plete. It was only recently that I had the chance to apply it. The old me was hot-headed with too much to prove. When faced with insult­ing, patron­iz­ing words, I would have reacted, instead of fol­low­ing the prin­ci­ple of wu wei. The sit­u­a­tion was a test of myself, and I passed.

From this I’ve learned how much I’ve grown.

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25 Apr 07

Words From One Who Cannot Write

I used to fancy myself a poet. Then I read a series of poems by Susan Musgrave and real­ized how naïve I was to believe such a thing. So I stuck with writ­ing, and fan­cied myself a writer, until I read Aurora’s words, mys­te­ri­ous and res­onat­ing, still bit­ter from the breakup in January.

A while ago, it felt like I ran out of things to say. Now I real­ize that it’s not a lack of sub­ject mat­ter, but a lack of conviction.

The seren­ity, bal­ance, matu­rity I’ve gained has robbed me of the pas­sion that once fueled my writing.

Even as recent as January, Dave Seah, pro­lific cre­ator of the Printable CEO, Procrastinator’s Clock, and fel­low 9ruler, said that I wrote with “literate-yet-conversational inten­sity, the kind of writ­ing that sounds good when spo­ken aloud”. Now my entries are dry and tech­ni­cal, devoid of the inten­sity I used to feel, and I fear that it’s a reflec­tion of myself.

Maybe this is why I’m so quick to embrace my moods and emo­tions. They let me write the way I used to, with the lyri­cal qual­ity and style I once enjoyed.

So I sit here, with the lights out and Leonard Cohen on, the early folk stuff before he went synth in the 80s, songs of love and hate, win­dows open to the night, try­ing to recap­ture the pas­sion that drove me to write when I started this blog.

I’m not a writer. I can’t write.

I’m sim­ply a thinker, with the need to express himself.

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26 Mar 07

New Hampshire: Conclusion

Thumbnail: Three drinks
Thumbnail: My clam appetizer
Thumbnail: Jazz night
Thumbnail: Scallop entree
Thumbnail: Tuna sushi
Thumbnail: Chinese food
Thumbnail: Pecan pie
Thumbnail: Guinness in a bottle
Thumbnail: Bath feets
Thumbnail: Fire hydrant
Thumbnail: Frozen river
Thumbnail: Fungus
Thumbnail: Cosmo horoscope
Thumbnail: Live free or die license plate
Thumbnail: The bed in my room

What an over­whelm­ing experience.

There was barely any time to explore; we took one walk and pretty much stayed within a 10km radius. Too much read­ing, test­ing, and meet­ing to do any­thing else. It felt like the time went fly­ing by, yet dragged on, the longer I was from home.

There’s some­thing about being away. Being iso­lated from your rou­tine and every­thing that’s famil­iar. It’s a dif­fer­ent set of stimuli.

As an intro­vert, you fall back on mem­o­ries and past expe­ri­ences, and it dri­ves reflec­tion and re-evaluation.

I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t affect me. I learned more about myself in the last two weeks than I did in the last year, and I’ll be writ­ing about it for weeks, if not months.

Read the rest of this entry »

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18 Dec 06

Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend: Louise

The thrill is gone
The thrill is gone away
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away
You know you done me wrong baby
And you’ll be sorry someday

BB King, The Thrill Is Gone

Our rela­tion­ship was a night­mare of ups and downs.

You had the amaz­ing abil­ity to make me feel good about myself, by say­ing the right thing with intel­li­gence and eloquence.

Yet every time I felt like I was mak­ing progress, progress that took tremen­dous effort and energy, progress for you, you would put me down. Every time I took a leap of faith and put myself out there, you would hurt me. It wasn’t even a case of bru­tal, tact­less hon­esty; you would insult my pride for no reason.

I think it betrayed a sub­con­scious inse­cu­rity. Something you would do to make your­self feel bet­ter. Like your con­stant need to prove that you’re busy and mov­ing on. It’s as if your life is empty, void, and you’re des­per­ate to fill it with something.

I had to end things when you went too far.

There were no regrets, because I did my absolute best to make things work. Even though I suf­fered, I ignored the pain, and tried work­ing through it. I only gave up when you proved too stub­born to change or understand.

The rela­tion­ship wasn’t a total loss. It was an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to the sub­cul­ture. It was pas­sion­ately sex­ual. It also made me more con­fi­dent, although I real­ize now that it wasn’t because of you. You barely gave me any trust, and every step for­ward I made, you pulled me back two. It was me who fought through all the inse­cu­ri­ties and rose to the occasion.

When you came back in January, with­out a word of apol­ogy or men­tion of the wrong you did, I had no inter­est in con­tin­u­ing the rela­tion­ship. After that, I thought of you when­ever I heard the song Buried Myself Alive by The Used.

Then, with all your let­ters and your apolo­gies and your tears, two years later, you asked “nicer than that”.

Unfortunately, it was at an unsta­ble time in my life, so I asked you to back off and wait. Your idea of back­ing off and wait­ing is leav­ing me creepy com­ments and dat­ing to fill the time. I just can’t under­stand how you keep mak­ing these mis­takes. It’s almost like you pur­posely sab­o­tage yourself.

I don’t want to be involved in the drama any­more. Nothing is ever sim­ple with you. Even though you say you’ve changed, it’s not worth the risk to me. You had your chance, and it was a damn good one.

You’ve wronged me too many times. The last time you left my house, not know­ing when or if you’d come back, I felt nothing.

I knew then that the thrill was gone.

A few other things:

The Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend series

  1. Introduction
  2. Ashley
  3. Michele
  4. Christie
  5. Jackie
  6. Louise
  7. Bronwen
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20 Oct 06

The Gerry Project

Thumbnail: Gerry 1

Thumbnail: Gerry 2

This is Gerald, or Gerry as he prefers, an alum­nus of my high-school, Upper Canada College.

Gerry was born in Germany, but being a German-Jew, he soon moved to Holland in the years lead­ing up to the Second World War. “My father was rather pre­scient”, he put it. Eventually, he came to Canada. For four years, he attended UCC, grad­u­at­ing in 1940. I was in the class of ’99. After a year at uni­ver­sity, he vol­un­teered for mil­i­tary ser­vice at 19.

19?”, I asked in dis­be­lief. With a smile on his face, he told me, “You grow up fast”.

He began as a com­mis­sioned offi­cer for an artillery unit. Responsibility of the lives of many men under his com­mand was some­thing he didn’t want, but his knowl­edge of German, Dutch, and English moved him to a more prefer­able posi­tion as an inter­ro­ga­tion offi­cer. His supe­ri­ors would send him co-ordinates of intel­li­gence to gather, some­times behind German lines, some­times in a downed tank, and a pri­vate would drive him in a jeep to obtain the information.

He sur­vived.

From left to right, his medals are:

His proud­est accom­plish­ment is the Maltese cross he wears on his chest — The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, pre­sented by the Governor General her­self. Even though he’s a com­man­der of the order, sec­ond only to knights or dames, he’s extremely mod­est about it. The framed award pre­sented to him lies in a pile of assorted things in his bedroom.


I first met Gerry a few days ago, after find­ing out about him from the bi-annual newslet­ter pub­lished by UCC. The newslet­ter, called Old Times, is a way for alumni, called Old Boys, to keep track of the goings’ on at the College. There was an arti­cle about the school’s prized Victoria Cross medal col­lec­tion being pre­sented to the new Canadian War Museum here in Ottawa. These were the same medals I walked by in the front hall dis­play case every day at school, too young to appre­ci­ate their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Gerry was one of the vet­er­ans invited to attend the pre­sen­ta­tion ceremony.

However, my inter­est in Gerry stemmed from a dif­fer­ent sec­tion in the same issue of the newslet­ter, announc­ing a photo con­test open to all past and present stu­dents. The con­test seemed like a great project, not only as a way to prac­tice my pho­to­graphic skills, but to test myself as well. I would have to find a sub­ject related to the school in some way. Gerry, being an Ottawa-area Old Boy, was my clos­est con­nec­tion. Taking pic­tures of some­one, let alone some­one I had never met before, was a daunt­ing idea, and I would have to step out of my com­fort zone to do it.

After look­ing up his name in the phone­book and gath­er­ing up the courage, I called Gerry. He was happy to meet.

I’ll be sub­mit­ting the sec­ond photo.

Update: Here are the results of the project.

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