I am utterly envious of Liralen's journal, of how she writes so clearly and sincerely and strongly about things which in my own writing I can't even stand to mention. She's not afraid to mention when she feels lost or hurt or confused or scared or angry or (the biggest monster which cannot be named for me) depressed, unsure, miserable. It's a foolish envy, I know; she has a lot more years than I do, and doubtless in the past had her own time of struggling to speak from the heart. And does even now, in ways and places, I know. But still, I envy her clarity and comfort with herself. It seems like I keep tripping over my own feet in reading her writing, brought up short by the realisation that she's saying something I feel very much myself, but don't dare say. I told her online that I wished I was better at writing from my heart, and she said, "Well, trying frequently should help with that wish!". True, true, true. And, as always, I ask myself: what am I afraid of?

I have for a very long time had this fear that if I talk about a moment of depression or despair, a moment of feeling that I have forgot my way, that somehow the perception that my friends have of me will be forever damaged. I understand a part of this; I'm afraid of not being seen by the people who matter to me. I am a person who can do pretty much anything once I really put my mind to it, someone who is passionate about a wide range of interests and accomplishes a lot with that passion. Somehow it seems that if I also admit, in writing, in this journal, that I have days when the world is gray and flat and I am confused and depressed and don't know what I want, people will see that and only that, forevermore. Why should they? Why do I think that would happen?

I know that at times I look in on someone's journal, read a bit about their life, and am just overcome with how utterly horrible and depressing it seems to me, how miserable they seem and how numbly and docilely they accept that misery. I don't want anyone reading this, friend or stranger, to go away feeling that I'm a pitiful person, stuck in a miserable life and helpless to get out of it. I don't want someone reading this to leave it thinking that I am blindly accepting something terrible because I'm not self-aware enough to know any better. That's the antithesis of who I am, who I want to be. And, to be completely honest, it's how I spent most of my childhood, unable to see the nightmare I was living because as a child there was truly no escape except to grow up.

I fear, deepest down, that if someone clicks away from this journal thinking that, it will be true.

As I was writing I came across that in Liralen's journal, and smiled wryly to see her questioning herself even as I lauded her for being past all that. Really, is anyone? But I will hold on to that answer for myself as well; if I want to write from the heart then drama has its place.

While writing this entry I've been engaging in the usual endless round of worldly distractions. For instance, I have added javadoc to both the project I finished last week and the project I finished last night (more on this in a bit), and am playing battlefaeries, and trying to make a dinner plan, and right this second I'm looking into setting up automatic payment for my car insurance, since it's a bill I tend to forget about. But oh, the Farmer's Insurance website is so terrible, and the shopping card thingy they're using for their billing is even worse; it's not really usable as it stands now. I have this incredible urge to email them and offer to rewrite it out of the kindness of my heart. I wonder what they'd say?

That urge bespeaks a certain confidence on my part as to the quality of my code. Yay! The projects I've done in the last two weeks are definitely paying off. Which reminds me, I was going to talk about the project I finished last night, since I was fretting about it on Wednesday. Even after Millbrae I couldn't really get anywhere with it; I kept being sure I was making mistakes in my exception handling, and not being able to remember the useful things Yan said in my code review last week despite the notes I took, and the longer this went on the more paralysed I got, until I finally just gave up and went home. Talking to Jim that night I figured out what the paralysis was about, and when I hit it again on Thursday morning I somehow managed to resolve that when I got back from lunch I would just work through it. So -- I did! I had a great lunch at Lucy's Tea House with Moria, and then spent about four really focused hours coding. The tool is now working, a sample of the output has been officially approved by Yan, and all is well in the world. Thus I've had today mostly to flick (aside from the javadoc), and I've really been enjoying it. I'm feeling a bit of antisocial-guilt, though; it's deves' birthday, and a bunch of people are in the nearby conference room watching a movie to celebrate. I wanted to keep writing, so I'm here instead of there, having sent him 'happy birthday want to have lunch next week?' mail to assuage my mild guilt.

I finished The Tale of Murasaki this morning, which is a historical novel by Liza Dalby about Murasaki Shikibu, the woman who wrote Genji Monogatari, which is considered the world's first novel. I read about the first quarter of Genji, only to be very squicked when the eponymous hero took in a child, raised her to be his 'perfect woman', and started sleeping with her when she was a teenager. Ick, ick, ick. But Dalby's novel about Murasaki was very enjoyable, and Sei Shonagon (my favourite Heian writer) had a cameo -- Dalby managed to capture her voice really well, to my delight. The book had some typical first-novel flaws, mostly tonal ones; Dalby (whose previous works have all been non-fiction) stuck in a lot of footnotes where she could have just fitted some exposition into the story, and occasionally the narrator (Murasaki herself) used a French phrase or something else equally inappropriate. Still, it made me want to try reading Genji again, which I would've said nothing could make me do. At the very least I think I'll borrow Murasaki's diaries from the library on my next trip.

My fingers are growing tired, and it's 5pm. I think I'll finish my cup of mediocre tea (Lipton black -- I'm out of non-herbal tea here at work, I need to bring some more in on Monday) and go home, to do something I-know-not-what. Definitely not play Asheron's Call, I say firmly, even as I feel myself tempted to do so. Maybe start in on this enormous history of Europe in the 17th century I've been putting off for a while.

Dinner tonight at Rangoon!

And oh, I have to add this: I dreamed last night that Carl was running a LaRP and had cast me as American Shotou Jeanne, which was like Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne (as you might guess from the name) but turned into an American-style comic book heroine instead of a Japanese manga character. Bizarre but cheerful.