I have a headache.

But surely, you say, there must be more to life than that? Well, not much. It's one of those fluttering headaches, the kind that's mostly behind the eyes but wanders around enough that I can't just ignore it. It's making me distracted and weird. It's bringing tears to my eyes when I turn my head too fast. I might also be feverish, but I can't really tell. My current plan is to get as far through the day as I can, and then go home and take my temperature and perhaps skip gaming if I am actually sick and not just stressed. It's so hard to tell.

People are back from Alaska, and with them many books. I now have a copy of The Gate of Ivory again, and am happily rereading it. It's very strange... I've read it so many times I have it almost memorised. Reading it again is very odd and nostalgic; I no longer react to the book itself, but to the layers and layers of my previous reactions, going all the way back to when I first read it in 1989. I'd bought the book used by mistake, and had only brought it with me to Dallas due to lack of other reading material. It was October, and I was alone in Larry's house for the day while everyone else was playing an IFGS (live-action roleplaying) game. My team's turn was tomorrow, so I had nothing to do and was enjoying my first experience of solitude. I picked up the Egan book, a bit frustrated that I didn't have anything interesting to read -- and was immediately and thoroughly hooked. Even now I can open it to any page and feel a distant echo of that wonder, threaded through with the impressions of more recent years... my realisation that the book reminded me of House Aspnes of AmberMUSH, for example. Having a massive crush on Eln, and then later wanting to be him, and now being vaguely dismayed at what that says about my past, that I wanted to be a vengeful, bitter, unfeeling man because at the time it seemed so much better than being a teenage girl.

What a muddle. I think my lucid point is that reading the book now is almost like skimming my journal -- all my reactions are tied so deeply into previous reading experiences that it's hard (impossible, almost) to actually feel the book. That's a little sad to me, and I'm glad that the other Ivory books don't have this power. I enjoy them for their wonderful selves, instead of as a reflection of my adolescence.

It's annoying that everything is about my past. That feeling comes and goes, but right now it's going on strong. This coming Sunday I'm supposed to tell my story in group and I have no idea what I'm going to say. The outline goes something like this.

I know these things. Then I hit elementary school and it becomes very fragmented and foggy; I remember many things, but I'm not sure when they happened or if they actually did happen at all, and I had strange obsessions and beliefs which don't seem to have anything to do with what I know about myself. I have absolutely true and solid memories which completely contradict one another. Then too there is another thread of memory which runs in parallel to the fragmentation -- this thread knows all the important stuff, like what classes I took, who my teachers were and how I felt about them, who I liked and who I hated. This feels like 'me', whereas the other fragmented stuff feels like a badly written story about someone who was pretending to be me, and it's very hard to take seriously.

That's elementary school. Starting around the very end (last month or so) of fifth grade things suddenly solidify and there's a firm line I can follow of what my life was like and who I was and what I felt about things. It's embarassing sometimes, because I believed absolutely wild irrational things about myself and my life, but at least it's consistent. There are holes in my memories, and there are a number of things which I recall that I can't pinpoint as to when they were (other than a vague 'before I discovered mudding, I think'), but the sense of fragmentation is much less.

So that's what I have to say, I guess. I'm glad I got it down here; it came in a rush, feverishly trying to get the words out before something stopped me. They've been sitting in my head since I saw Norm on Wednesday, and I was terribly afraid I'd forget them before Sunday -- but writing them by hand, ink on paper, was far too terrifying to consider. I hadn't actually meant to write them down here, but once I did it was easy... and now that I'm thinking about it I'm terrified again.

At some point I was talking about books -- ah, yes. Trip brought me the Egan book and also a copy of The Law of Becoming, both acquired for me by Kit in Alaska. Nice of her, that. Also, my books from Amazon came last night, so I now have a copy of A Floating Life, which is historical fiction by Simon Elegant about one of my favourite Chinese poets, Li Po. I picked it up pretty randomly (the Amazon reccomendation service suggested it), and I still haven't had time to actually start reading it -- but it looks pretty yummy. The back cover quote was to no end amusing. I'm going to have to pull out my Waley translations of Li Po & friends again, aren't I?

As you may have determined by the link above, I've joined Amazon's associates program. I'm slowly going back through old entries and linking the books that are actually good enough that I really do think other people should read them. This all seems vaguely crass and immoral, and I'm not sure why. Lots of other journalists do it, and I respect them.