Today has been massively interrupt driven, but looking back on it I'm not really quite sure why. I didn't get any work done on the release notes, but I did do a lot of messing about with IE to see if we could get copy&paste working in IE 4. The answer was yes, we could, but we're not sure exactly why it works and thus aren't very comfortable telling customers to do this. Why did it take a whole day to figure this out?

That was a rhetorical question, but there's a partial answer; I'm tired. I'm very, very tired. I didn't go to sleep until about 2am, due to staying up reading a hideous Madeleine L'Engle book (The Arm of the Starfish) that really deserved to be thrown against the wall, except it's a library book so I restrained myself. It was pretty darn awful, up to and including cute names so you could tell the bad guys apart from the good guys, (Kali, Arcangelo), and some mystical pseudo-biology involving animals which are intrinsically evil and thus unable to benefit from the wonderful discoveries of our scientist. The only good part was a few pages which involved extensive quoting of Robert Frost's Two Tramps in Mud Time, a very fine poem that Robert Parker made good use of in several of his Spenser books. That wasn't enough to save this poor thing, though; I disliked it so much I actually bothered to write a review on Amazon explaining how awful it was.

Anyway, after that book I decided to start the sequel, in the belief it'd be just as obviously awful and I'd give up on L'Engle for a while. Much to my surprise it was actually decent, so I read a few chapters and then realised I was tired and finally went to sleep... only to be woken up at 5:35 this morning by a ringing phone. The fan was on, so I couldn't tell if someone was leaving a message or what the message was is so, and I quickly drifted back into a semi-conscious state in which I wasn't even sure if I'd heard the phone at all. Eventually I fell back asleep.

Repeat at 6:10. And 6:45. And 7:15. And 8:10. Did I mention I'm tired?

I just read through the Frost poem again, and this made me think about adding it to my .plan (which I decided against), which in turn led to reading the planfile on idiom and then the one still lingering on Netcom. This made me realise all of a sudden that if I keep studying Hebrew I'm going to be able to read Dahlia Ravikovitch in the original instead of in the Chana Bloch translation -- which is I think a very good translation, but of course I can't be sure of that. Anyway, it's a really cool thought; I've loved her poetry ever since I stumbled across some in an anthology I got from the library years ago, and I felt very luck to find a copy of The Window at Powell's two years ago. I guess I ought to find a good source for books from Israel, shouldn't I?

Hmn. I keep going back to thinking about the Frost poem. Am I uniting my vocation and my avocation? I actually started thinking about that a month or so ago, while reading Sayers theological essays. She has a lot to say about work as art, and life as art, and it's very solid pragmatic stuff which made me very thoughtul. There aren't any solid answers, of course, and I don't think there ever will be, but I've been enjoying thinking about it all. At times I think I've found the place where my love and my need unite -- the work of helping people with their process, which I'm learning to do in group and through BAMM, and recently more and more in my friendships. It's hard to talk about helping people in this serious way without feeling rude and arrogant, but I'm pushing through anyway because it's a big part of where my life is right now. When I stumbled across the poem last night it was so true I almost couldn't breathe; I've been trying for weeks now to describe at least to myself exactly why it is that this thing I'm learning to do is so important, and that last verse sums it all up for me. Only when love and need are one / And the work is play for mortal stakes. That's what this is, the place where everything comes together for me, and it's exhilerating and terrifying all at once. How could I possibly make this my vocation without burning out? Maybe it gets easier with a lot of practise, but still.

My, that was a sharp turn towards vulnerability, wasn't it? I think I'll stop now before I dig myself in too deep and go home, with perhaps a brief stop on the way to get saline (so my contacts will be happier) and maybe Chinese fastfood.