Elizabethan quince & rosepetal jam is very, very good. I finally opened my little jar of it and spread some on toasted challah (which toasts nicely unevenly, so the crust gets crunchy and the inside is still soft and very warm) and it's really nice. Almost too sweet to have any flavour to it; I can't taste the rose at all but the quince is so rich it reminds me of honey, but more complex. Warm summer days with the smell of flowers heavy in still air, that's what it makes me think of.

But on to the agonising! Do I just have an aversion to writing in June? Because I meant to, and meant to, and even started up an entry which has just made it into public view, but I never got around to actually writing regularly. The reason, for once, is actually very clear to me. There's a dimension of my life I don't discuss in here, the truly personal stuff about therapy and recovery process and self-discovery and all that jazz. With no job to fill up my time the whole self-knowledge process has taken centre stage in my days in varied ways, and since I'm not comfortable sharing it with the world I end up paralysed, unable to write. After all, just imagine an entry that looked like this:

I got up today, did some stuff I won't describe, had a lunch with so-and-so which was notable for something else I don't like to mention, came home, spent a few hours online discussing personal items with a friend, then Jim came home! We had dinner, discussed a few private things, watched some television, and went to bed.

Who on earth would want to read that? Who on earth would want to write that?? I'm embarassed even leaving it around as a parody. I am a firm believer in the 'if you can't talk about it, don't mention it' school, despite it being an ideal I can't always live up to. Yet at the same time, the thought of writing a linear account of my day filled with cats and Jim and books but leaving out the six meaty hours of intensive personal emotional work seems dishonest, and by now, dear readers, I think you all know how obsessed I am with honesty. What to do? I think (distilled from several paragraphs of agonising that I suspect my audience is much happier without) that the answer is to go ahead and write as I usually do, linear or scattered as I feel like it, and to muddle through the overly-personal stuff with enough suggestions of structure that I don't feel like I'm lying, but not so much that I collapse my own boundaries and end up saying something I regret. Hopefully this will leave me with something I can reread a few years from now without cringing over what a false picture it is. I do so want to be real -- but safe. And there's no way to figure it out except by doing it, I suppose, but it's in my nature to try to think things out too much ahead of time.

One of the hardest and most annoying things about this whole thing is how much obeying all this fear of being seen is just living up to old conditioning. The rules say "don't tell", and here I am, not telling. It is the right thing to do, I know that, because I need to choose whom I share things with and how much and when, and a public web-journal is just not the way to go about that. But I hate it that the rules are there at all; I hate it that obeying them makes me safe when if they didn't exist there'd be nothing to fear; I hate the way they're a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today is a lazy Sunday, although the spectre of going to group in a few hours hangs over my head as always. It is in fact an especially appreciated lazy Sunday, as I'm in the midst of taking Level 2 (Intro to Weapons & Multiple Assailants) from BAMM, and thus my last three Sundays have been filled with learning new ways to kick people in the head, cheering for my fellow students as they kick people in the head, and of course kicking people in the head myself. Not to mention the enormous amount of emotional energy which is spent in dealing with what it would really be like to have someone hold a knife to your throat or a gun to your head, or to have a group of people gang up on you and try to pin you to the ground. Plus of course a sizable percentage of the class has actually had some of these things occur, so there's even more emotion floating around, along with anxiety and tension and the occasional blessed release as one of us finally breaks down and cries (or screams) about something that happened years ago. After two weeks of being very caught up in being a "good student" (I blame this on assisting, and want to remember it for when I take other upper level classes), last week I managed to let go and get some real work done, which was good. Anyway, we have this weekend off due to 4 July, and then two more weeks and that's it. I am very glad not to be in class right now, but I'm also sad that there's only two weeks left; the bonding thing has occured and I am attached to the women in my class and dreading the inevitable parting. I wonder if any of us will manage to stay in touch better than my basics class did?

So, a lazy Sunday. So far all I've done is eat challah (anyone with a short memory may refer to the top of this page for details), write here, read a bit, and adore Hayama. He was being awfully cute -- no surprise there -- when I got out of the shower he followed me into the dining room, leapt up onto the table, and began rolling around on his back waving his paws around while I petted him, until finally I decided what he really wanted was a good brushing. And I seemed to be right; he rubbed his cheeks up against the brush and purred loudly and fell over so I could get at his tummy. He really is an amazingly affectionate cat, although he still prefers to sleep under the bed rather than on it with me and Jim and Jinian.

As noted in the June entry, I'm reading everything by C.S. Lewis I can find in the Mountain View library, with the exception of his fiction -- I read the Narnia books as a child and loved them, whereas Till We Have Faces depressed me amazingly, and I think his Space Trilogy would get flung across the room. So perhaps someday I'll go back and (re)read his fiction, but for the moment I'm enjoying myself with the theology and studies of english literature. Right now I'm actually off on a minor tangent, reading the diaries of his older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, which as you might imagine is part of what inspired me to start writing here again. This elder Mr. Lewis has an eye for the beauty of nature that I can't really imagine, but it's lovely to read all his detailed descriptions of "the extraordinary beauty of the lower wood seen from this unaccustomed viewpoint; especially beautiful was the purplish colour at the tops of the young trees." It's exactly the sort of thing I never notice in my own life but reading this makes me want to start paying attention, plus of course it makes me want to go to England & Ireland and appreciate all this countryside he's describing for myself. But really, I think I'd do better to learn to appreciate my own neighbourhood before setting out for parts unknown.

The other notable piece of reading I've done lately is Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard, which is the story of the lives of four sisters in Georgian England, reconstructed from their letters and diaries. Usually even the most amiable non-fiction takes me a few weeks to get through, but this I devoured in record time; it was incredibly readable, detailed enough to give context for their world but without getting bogged down, and each sister had such a distinct and vibrant personality that by the end of the book I felt rather as though I knew them -- perhaps not well, but at least a little. There was a long bit about letter writing towards the middle of the book that made me yearn to go write long letters to absolutely everyone I knew -- a discussion of letter-writing as a studied art, with Madame de Sevigne (whose letters I have) as the model to which all aspired. The thought that writing a good interesting letter is an art that can be learned is exciting; of course I want to go out there and start learning it immediately. But really, the first use of my writing time ought to be towards my fiction, which is languishing neglected in a notebook somewhere around the house.

Following after Jim, I've started turning my CDs into mp3s. This has been very enlightening; I'm discovering that I own a number of CDs I couldn't care less about (which are being put in a bag to be sold/bartered), and that there are quite a few artists (such as 10,000 Maniacs) that I'd like to have a lot more of. It also means I can listen to whatever music I want without stirring from my laptop, which for a lazy person like myself is ideal. The final glory of it is that I can now test out ideas for mix tapes before actually having to record anything. I don't know when I'll actually take advantage of this but I'm sure I'll be inspired eventually. I've got a few thoughts for tapes percolating in the back of my head already; one for Kiseki (my From Light to Darkness character), one to send to Jen-in-Canada, and perhaps one for Sovay, my character in Chrisber's Game X.

With the hour of group fast approaching, I'll sign off here and go back to lying around reading W.H. Lewis's diaries and having my hair groomed by Hayama. I intend to write tomorrow; let us hope I remember this when I wake up in the morning.