words to ponder

"I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale." -- Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)

"Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you have to be involved with them. Love is not a bandage to cover wounds." -- Hugh Elliott

"This thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)

"Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination." -- Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)


-¤-

What is Maturity?from Courage to Change: One Day At a Time in Al-Anon, page 63

Knowing myself.

Asking for help when I need it and acting on my own when I don't.

Admitting when I'm wrong and making amends.

Accepting love from others, even if I'm having a tough time loving myself.

Recognizing that I always have choices, and taking responsibility for the ones I make.

Seeing that life is a blessing.

Having an opinion without insisting that others share it.

Forgiving myself and others.

Recognizing my shortcomings and my strengths.

Having the courage to live one day at a time.

Acknowledging that my needs are my responsibility.

Caring for people without having to take care of them.

Accepting that I'll never be finished -- I'll always be a work-in-progress.

owww...does this mean i have maturity? huh?! whatever made me think so... napaisip pa tuloy ako.

giving ourselves a break: laguna trip

it all started with us thinking of getting away from our experiments even for just awhile. with "us", i mean my labmates and i. it was already the 21st day of december, and there we were, still working hard in the lab when everybody else was already enjoying the holidays. we felt we really needed to take a good break away from our toxic samples; and jen, my buddy in grad school, presented this enticing idea of us going to los baños, laguna.

the idea was cool and the plan was rather simple: leave manila for laguna by late afternoon or early evening of december 22, spend the rest of the night swimming in a hot spring resort in calamba, and then walk up to the mudspring of mt. makiling in los baños, laguna the following day -- just what i really wanted to do and have: out of town trip and a happy dose with nature. hmmm...

however, when the plan was conceived, jen and i were the only ones from the lab who were really sure to go. lorie, my current lab partner and an undergrad, was excited about it but said she still needed to check with her mom if she could join us. bau, our shono girl and also a grad student, had to be informed about the plan through sms because she was roaming somewhere in divisoria and had no plans of reporting to the lab that day. the semicon kids, our apprentices, and the rest of the semicon people were homebound and couldn't be dragged for the trip.

that night, i invited five of my friends to join us, and jen invited her own friends, too. of the five i invited, only three had the decency to reply: one was interested but had to decline because he, too, was homebound the next day (pa-iligan pa talaga, syet, nainggit ako!); and two expressed they wanted to go. i don't know about the other two. jen's friends couldn't come with us. given the short notice and vague itinerary, that's not so bad.

so who went, after all?

us...


that's me, yoni a.k.a. the geeemail, jen and lorie
i'm sorry, i'm currently too lazy to go on editing the pics that go with this post. anyway, that picture above was taken inside a cozy room in victoria, laguna. how we got there is definitely part of the story!

when we arrived at calamba at around 10pm, we found out from male strangers that the spring resort we were going to was already closed down due to bankruptcy. since we haven't really thought of that possibility prior to arriving there, that left us with no fallback. that also left our thinking temporarily clouded. to make matters worse, the strangers swarmed around us like flies. sounding like drunkards shouting bets, they kept on saying that we should go to this other spring resort were we can stay safely for the night. with what they were doing, they felt they were trying to help; with how they were acting, we felt they represented danger.

with no guy among us and knowing that only jen has proper self defense training, i knew it would be difficult for us to stand a chance if worse came to worst. i reminded jen that we were outnumbered. all four of us knew that we needed to get out of that situation fast. in order to get away from the annoying "advertising" beings, we rode on a passenger jeepney that would take us to los baños. unfortunately, the strangers didn't hear us when we said we were going to LB, and they took a ride on the jeepney with us, all of them not even taking a seat inside the rather empty vehicle so they wouldn't have to pay... grrrr... we had no clear plan what to do next, but riding on the jeepney was definitely better than standing out there in the dark side of the highway with them annoying people. as luck would have it, we saw a silver lining...and it was right there even way before we alighted the bus that took us to laguna.

jen's childhood friend, her kuya jason, was on the same bus. he was bound for home, we were bound for adventure. when our adventure took a rather disturbing turn, jen's kuya jason was kind to help us out. we bade him goodbye when we got out of the bus in calamba, and we soon said hello to him again when he met us in los baños, where he got out of the bus after learning of our plight. we were already scared shitless (well maybe not really scared shitless, but still scared. so, going to other spring resorts never became an option that night). kuya jason took us with him to their home in victoria, laguna. he was really kind. he even paid for our fare, for christmas' sake daw, dyahe talaga, i felt like a halfwit. his family's accommodating and really hospitable, too, considering that we arrived there without proper notice. (with "his family", i mean the entire clan...as in, sila na jud, hehehe.)

...and that explains why we were able to spend the night in a cozy bedroom with an equally cozy bathroom without shelling out any of our pesos. we had food, too!!! from espasol, to calamay, to breakfast with hotdogs, fried fish, red eggs, and rice -- all yummy. not only that, their house is very near the big lake! ahahaha... ang swerte nga naman...


the shadow of four cast on the lake

the baby shark from the big lake
well, actually, it's not a baby shark. we just called it baby shark, because kuya jason, whose hand appears in the pic, said it looks like a baby shark.

the lake, which looks like a sea due to its vastness, is home to many snakes. here, kuya jason is holding a small one. the snakes bite but their bites are not venomous enough to kill, just enough to make the victim feverish. still, venomous or not, snakes are snakes! ...and that explains why i'm almost hiding in the pic. ha ha ha!




the place is really beautiful, that's why our backgrounds look postcard-perfect. thank God, napadpad kami dito!!!


and a monarch butterfly!
after thanking our hosts for their kindness and hospitality, we left victoria with a bounty of yummy espasol to go on with our trekking plan in los baños. we arrived in LB at around 9am and immediately started hiking after we got out of the jeepney. the path leading to the mudspring was gently sloping, so the climb wasn't really that difficult. we sang songs in between talks and laughs while walking, and i took pictures from time to time.


my hike buddies: jen, yoni, lorie

just a short stretch of the path that took us to the mudspring

you have to love this. at first i thought the flowers we saw on the path were orchids, it turned out they were gumamelas (hibiscus). with the way they were scattered on the ground, it looked like they fell down straight from the sky. ahhh, but for this picture, we deliberately arranged them that way, hehehe!


and this is the reason why we came...the mudspring!
see the smoke? it's hot and acidic, and it definitely smells sulfuric! on the other side (not shown in the pic) of the mudspring is the blok-blok. the four of us called it blok-blok because it's the distinct sound the smelly mud makes.




the marker behind us says,
"This site is one of the mud pots left on Mount Makiling, an inactive volcano. A mud pot is a type of hot springs that is formed when due to volcanic heat, sulfuric acids break down surrounding rock into clay. The clay mixes with water to form mud that is very hot (~80 degrees C), sulfurous (~50mg/L), acidic (~2 pH), and varying consistency and color."
all in all, we must have walked 10 kilometers in going to and back from the mudspring. we didn't run out of breath, but we sure did get really tired legs after 5 hours of walking.

ayyyy, wait. i almost ran out of breath, but not because of the long walk. an unhealthy dog kept on following us while we were on our way, and my "dog-phobia" made my heart beat way too fast than normal, thereby draining my energy. i even absent-mindedly dropped my digital camera at some point. it was a good thing, yoni saw the cam lying on the path after it left my hand. ang phobia nga naman...! muntik pang mabiktima pati cam ko, grabe na.

p.s. the best adventures are those that are not planned.

i would love to go up mt. makiling again, and the next target would definitely be peak 2! next time. next time... and wherever peak 1 is, if i get the chance, hindi ko aatrasan!

post-birthday post

"happy birthday to you (happy birthday to me), happy birthday to you (happy birthday to me), happy birthday (happy birthday), happy birthday (happy birthday), happy birthday to you (happy birthday to me)"

i turned twenty two yesterday. i'm now twenty two. bow.

out of the 380 friends in my friendster list, 10 greeted me with personal messages. that's not so bad, considering that people nowadays no longer bother to check their friendster accounts like they used to.

out of my 12 physics major-classmates/batchmates, 6 made it known to me that they remembered my day. i don't know what happened with the other six.

in correct order, these are the people who sent me text messages to greet me happy birthday: blue, randy, hazel, yoni, kurt, papang & mamang, ilian, jericho, rose, tita emie, my cinema buddy sealdi, vl, nikki, tita binbin, tin, tita yenyen, benjie, micmic, my best friend shella, ivan, johncy, julius, kuyang, naomi.

blue sent in her text meesage out around 1:20 am. randy, who spared more of his credits to send a picture message, almost cursed blue for taking away the "first-to-greet-on-the-day" honor from him, mwehehehe. my bestfriend who used to be always the first one to greet me, managed to key in her message only after 6 pm. i thought she forgot, but it turned out she only ran out of load credits and didn't have the chance to reload until after about 6 o'clock.

since i'm currently away from most of my friends and family, those who were able to greet me face-to-face are my relatively new friends who sung with me the birthday song during our christmas party yesterday.

i got tired after the party so i just took time to sleep from 3pm to 7:30pm. after that, i treated myself to greenbelt 3 where i watched the awesome fireworks display and made myself a couch potato in one of the cozy cinemas.

no, i didn't go out with my friends. you see, when you have many sets of friends, it's so difficult to make them come together. for my case, it's so complicated. i think spending time with all of them together in one go would only bring out my almost-always-hidden multiple personalities, hahaha! it's too dangerous, i think.

during my 21st year on this planet, i...

...went home to iligan 4 times. that means, i spent money on airplane tickets for 4 round trips, which translates to 8 airplane rides. in fact, i'm talking about more than 8 plane rides considering that, at one time, the plane took the hellish manila-cagayan de oro-mactan-cagayan de oro-mactan-cagayan de oro-manila route.

...parted ways with my 09174883419 subscriber identity module because it just simply stopped working one fine day.

...lost my walkman and my cellphone on separate occasions. both items have sentimental value. i bought them with my allowance from DOST and they served as souvenirs of my scholarship.

...started this blog! yehey!

...mustered enough courage to let some of my self-made, well-crafted guards down (read: i ate more pride, believe it or not), hahaha.

...reached baguio city alone. what a personal accomplishment!

...filled the "special" notebook i have been writing on since 2002. it's so special that, so far, only i have read it! mwhehehehe... but it's meant to be given away, so i'm gonna give it away. who wants to have it? by the way, i started on a new one, too!

...was able to spend wonderful days in tagaytay and had a reload of my inspiring and rejuvenating 2002 and 2003 tagaytay experiences.

for my 22nd year, i will...

oh, we'll see.

how deep...

"Loving is a matter of timing...
it is no good meeting the right person too soon or too late."
-- from the movie, 2046

promise?

a text message from a friend:
wt f ur 2kng 2 me @ 12mdnyt n ur rum nd ur cp rng dwnstrs, i 2ld u 2 come bak nd u promisd; d prson on d fon 2ld u dat i died d previous nyt. wil u go bak 2 ur rum as u promisd?

translated from text speak, that's "what if you're talking to me at 12 midnight in your room and your cellular phone rung downstairs, i told you to come back and you promised; the person on the phone told you that i died the previous night. will you go back to your room as you promised?"

of course, i would go back to my room. but, would i go back simply because i promised? i know that my honest answer would be a no.

a promise can be fulfilled not because of the promise itself
there's a lot i can say about the given "what-if scenario" to present and/or explain my views.

first, if i were talking to a friend in my room and my cellphone would ring, i think that i wouldn't think of going downstairs to answer the midnight call if the conversation i'm having is going so well. i'd let the phone ring 'til its gonna empty its battery, and carry on with my conversation. if ever i'd decide on answering the call, i would ask my friend to go downstairs with me. from my point of view, a call made at midnight (especially if there's no special occasion like birthday) is not normal. i'd need a back up, hence, the friend has to go with me. besides, my cellphone would unlikely to be downstairs. yes, my room at home belongs to the second level, but i don't leave my cellphone "downstairs".

second, i think it's quite unfair for my part if the friend would ask me to "come back" when he/she already knows that he/she is already dead. if the person is someone close to me, then he/she would know that i would feel that way, and wouldn't even think of asking me to do something like that.

third, if i were told over the phone that a friend died, would i believe right away? of course not! i'd try to assess the information. who's calling? if the person died the previous night, why inform me (of all hours) at midnight? after all, it could just be a prank call.

but then, okay. what if i take the "what-if scenario" as is? would i go back to my room as promised?

as i've said, yes i would... but not simply because i promised.

in the given scenario, the promise was done right away and without much thought... and i can see the logic in that. the act of promising to go back to my room is easy to make. why is it easy to make? because it's easy to fulfill. why is it easy to fulfill? because it's natural for me to do just that: go back to my room. come to think of it, if i decide to go out of my room for awhile, i would naturally go back right away if i left my friend there (leaving a friend inside my room is highly unlikely, by the way). besides, my room is my own territory, my turf, my comfort zone. whatever happens, going back there does not involve effort or much thought, it's as if it's as natural as breathing. if a friend is waiting there, all the more reason that i would go there.

but what if the friend is "dead"? would i go back after knowing such info? yes, i'm going back. but i'm sure that my going back there would not be primarily driven by the promise. maybe it would be primarily driven by curiosity (to see if the friend is still there), maybe by the need to be in a place where somehow there is comfort, maybe by the need to be where i last "saw" the person...

see what i'm getting at?

i'd still be fulfilling the promise, but not because of the promise itself.

-¤-
but what if going back to my room's not natural for me? what if the promise involved going far from a comfort zone instead of going back to it? what if the promise wouldn't be that easy to fulfill? would i still keep it? i'd try to move heaven and earth.

yes.

i would try to move heaven and earth.

the countdown

2 weeks to go... and it will be my birthday.
3 weeks to go... and it will be christmas.
4 weeks to go... and it will be new year.

as simple as that.

-¤-

look, it's familiar!


carla, miezel and i in one of those kiddie corners, mwehehehe...


duck tales, reloaded...hahaha! so cute!

quotes from exupéry's the little prince

chapter 1:
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.


chapter 2:
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.


chapter 3:
"Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far..."


chapter 4:
Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.

To forget a friend is sad.


chapter 5:
...seeds are invisible. They sleep deep in the heart of the earth's darkness, until some one among them is seized with the desire to awaken. Then this little seed will stretch itself and begin--timidly at first--to push a charming little sprig inoffensively upward toward the sun.


chapter 6:
"You know--one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..."


chapter 7:
"If someone loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, 'Somewhere, my flower is there...' But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened... And you think that is not important!"


chapter 8:
"The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her..."


chapter 9:
"Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while. That is of no importance. But you--you have been just as foolish as I. Try to be happy..."


chapter 10:
"One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform."

"Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

"Then you shall judge yourself. That is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom."


chapter 11:
Conceited people never hear anything but praise.


chapter 12:
"The grown-ups are certainly very, very odd."


chapter 13:
"When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before any one else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them."


chapter 14:
"That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful."


chapter 15:
"What does that mean--'ephemeral'?"

"It means, 'which is in danger of speedy disappearance.'"


chapter 16:
The Earth is not just an ordinary planet!


chapter 17:
"I wonder whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again..."


chapter 18:
"Men? ...I saw them, several years ago. But one never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult."


chapter 19:
"What a queer planet! It is altogether dry, and altogether pointed, and altogether harsh and forbidding. And the people have no imagination. They repeat whatever one says to them..."


chapter 20:
"I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world; and all I had was a common rose. A common rose, and three volcanoes that come up to my knees--and one of them perhaps extinct forever...That doesn't make me a very great prince..."


chapter 21:
"...if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world...if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..."

"One only understands the things that one tames. Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me..."

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"Men have forgotten this truth. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."


chapter 22:
"No one is ever satisfied where he is."

"Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry..."


chapter 23:
"If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."


chapter 24:
"The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen."

My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart.

"The house, the stars, the desert--what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!"


chapter 25:
"But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart..."

One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed...


chapter 26:
"All men have the stars but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them--"

"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... You--only you--will have stars that can laugh!"

"And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!'"


chapter 27:
Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? ...no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance!

the frog massacre: not your ordinary froggy tale

before anything else, let me make something clear: it could be that in this post, i'm really talking about toads and not frogs, or both toads and frogs. i grew up thinking that toads and frogs were just the same because... toads and frogs, in my native tongue, are all referred to as baki^. ehem.

the day the sophomores in my high school killed
more than a hundred frogs was when i knew that
i wasn't meant to be a medical doctor.
it used to be that i played with frogs as a child. not only i, but also my brother and our kid neighbors who started it all. we were kinda brutal with the frogs. i remember that one late afternoon, we were boiling water using empty milk cans placed on top of our make-shift “cooking area” (three stones surrounding a fire) in the grassy part of our purok’s make-shift basketball court... when...

as if possessed...
one of our playmates casually held a frog by its hind leg
and dipped the poor creature into the boiling water.
even though we were initially a little bit shocked at what he did, we tolerated the brutality and even helped him in looking for more frogs to unceremoniously boil. the next morning, five, maybe, six or seven frogs were lying dead in our “cooking area”. geez!

okay, enough of that childhood story... let’s move on to

the real frog massacre
during our second year in high school, one of our science subjects (we had two, by the way) was biology and part of the course work was dissecting a frog. so, one day, all of us sophomores in that high school were required to bring a frog to dissect during our respective bio classes.

i remember bringing my “poor victim” to school inside a shoebox. i had it caught the night before “die-section” day somewhere in pala-o, because during that time it was quite difficult to look for frogs in my own neighborhood in tambo. the “victim” was big and hideous-looking... quite a monster for a frog (yikes!) that even my father agreed with me when i pointed out that it was very ugly.

during our biology class, my classmates and i took out our frogs for our teacher and the student teachers to see. i was never the type who would go a-shrieking at the sight of spiders or cockroaches, and i could touch a beetle, but a frog(???) waaaaaaaaaa... around that time, i already put my “frog-holding/frog-boiling” past behind me!!! hahaha... however, each of us taking bio had no choice but to deal with (read: hold) our frogs...

we were instructed to pith our frogs, secure them on our respective wooden blocks placed on top of the 3 long laboratory tables, and begin dissection.

woweeee... dissection...
it sounded fun and interesting...
...and it was(!) despite the fact that...

rendering my frog unconscious by pushing a needle through the prominent part of its head was not easy. my “victim” kept on struggling and...

i was really tempted to give it
a strong punch on the belly just to make it stop moving(*whispers* just like what the bad guys
do to helpless damsels in the movies, hehehe.)
until now, i don’t know if i really succeeded in pithing it, but i managed to secure the sorry frog with its belly-side up on my wooden block by driving nails through its limbs (just like crucifixion). quite brutal, i know, but i was just following instructions. after that, i proceeded on opening up its belly by running the tip of an improvised scalpel (a broken shaving blade securely attached to a bamboo stick, go figure!) through the skin. it still wasn’t easy, though it was something i looked forward to.

mwahihihi... a frog with an open belly,
froggy entrails to see... mweheheheang saya saya!
i had to use surgical scissors just so i could neatly open up the frog and see its insides: heart, liver, whatever... and lo! the sight of my frog’s insides was ghastly! the heart was looking okay, but the liver(???) waaaaa... it looked liked my “victim” was suffering from cirrhosis! poor froggy. i looked at the insides of my classmates’ “opened-up” frogs and most of the livers were “neat”-looking, but my frog’s liver resembled that of a chocolate cookie sprinkled with small peanuts!!! yikes! despite my tolerance for yucky things, i almost vomited at the sight of it, and i was sorely tempted to drown the “tasty-looking” liver with isopropyl alcohol!

anyway, after opening up our frogs, and seeing and identifying their insides, came the task of clearing our working tables. after removing the frogs from the blocks, they were unceremoniously dumped into one huge plastic bag. just like that.

i remember blood oozed out from one of my frog’s front limb when i removed the nail. i remember my frog still attempted to move as if to jump when all four nails were finally removed. i remember handling it as if it were a bomb ready to explode anytime. i remember feeling relieved when it finally left my hand and fell inside the plastic bag where my classmates’ “victims” were already dumped...

and i remember realizing that if i have a problem dealing with an opened-up frog, what more with an “opened-up” person?

the day i was able to perform my first dissection was the same day my dreams of becoming a medical doctor died.
well, that was my “die-section” experience. i know that despite the “yucky-ness”, i enjoyed it and can laugh about it now.

sophomores in other classes went through the same froggy ordeal that day. there were about 200 of us, so that means

about two hundred frogs kissed their lives goodbye that day.
yes, about two hundred innocent frogs... denied of their a-croaking and a-leaping existence...

until now, i don’t understand why two hundred frogs had to be dissected. i only know that a lot of us said goodbye to our dreams of pursuing medicine because of that activity.

ask sealdi aka the volcano aka kinilaw... sealdi who wanted to be a surgeon. now, she’s nowhere near becoming a surgeon: she graduated last year with a degree in english studies (anglo-american literature), and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning. go figure!

tsk... tsk... about two hundred frogs...

about two hundred frogs... massacred by young ones -- young ones with delicate cerebral matters, the celebrated specimens-of-choice of our high school’s mathematical and scientific powers that be.



this post is dedicated to kerokerokeroppi and kermit, and is written in memory of their (approximately) two hundred relatives who unfortunately got murdered in school year 1996-1997.