August 29, 2003

There are precious few people I can really communicate with at a distance, and I don’t want to demand some fake response when I know there’s really not much to say. How are you, fine thanks and yourself, well gotta go, take care: It’s just a way to destroy whatever you’ve shared with someone in the process of trying to preserve a connection.

No.

No.

A wheezing, sickly, tired attempt at communication is still better than no communication at all. Brennen’s post suggests that, if you can’t do it well, you shouldn’t do it at all.

And that’s wrong. You should do your best to do whatever you’re doing well, and you should work very hard to do it. But you need to try.

Because, what is communicating well? As soon as you decide that this is enough, that you have to do that much, you’ve set up some artificial standard for what makes a connection. And life’s never that simple.

Connect. Even if it’s just a “hello.” Especially if it’s just a “hello.”

I know too many people who won’t bother to keep up a friendship, even if it just means a brief phone call to check in every once in awhile.

Eek. Significant lack of updatage recently.

It’s all that darn full-time job’s fault. I still have tons of work to do.

And, no, I’m not complaining. This is good. I’m glad that I have a reasonably useful, reasonably satisfying job. It’s not saving children from horrible death, but our soldiers will use what I write to better train the pilots, who will use that training to at least kill fewer people (fewer innocents, and more resources and fewer combattants…one nice thing about smart bombs is that you don’t have to nuke the entire mountain to knock out a power plant). It’s something.

But it’s a lot, and it’s a lot on my mind. My days currently consist of printing out code, then typing up explanations of each function. Which is exactly what I was hired to do. It’s just that there’s so much to write, I have to really push myself to write all day.

In fact, last night I got home (late) and, after making dinner, didn’t even try to write or compose or do anything else creative. I just curled up with Moby Dick and walked the decks of the Pequod for a couple of hours.

(What a weird book. I look forward to writing a review of it for the library, as I have a rather unusual take on it….)

And unfortunately, it’ll be weeks or months before I’m done with all these documents. So, there’s no telling when I can get back to a regular update schedule on this journal.