(Previously.)

It's the tenth day of the third November of my life (that I am willing to admit to), and I am determined to wring some sort of high-sounding interpretation out of the cool air and damp sidewalks: perhaps a contrast, something about the events that directly prompt fundamental life changes (on the one hand), and the events that indirectly catalyze fundamental life changes by means of enabling the construction of a legible narrative in which the changes can be plausibly attributed to them (on the other).

Today I am constructing a narrative about my life fundamentally changing because the coffee hegemon has started selling those medicinal (right) cranberry/cream-cheese triangles again. Not that hastening my inevitable horrible cardiac death with dessert bars is like a series arc or anything, but it's a thing I learned today that is salient enough to be repurposed as a trigger, a reminder that the autumn–winter windustrial complex is upon us again, that this is supposed to be my favorite time of year, that there simply is no reason I won't attune myself to perceive nature's cyclic harmonies, then perform every San Francisco software engineer's sacred duty and disrupt the living fuck out of them.

I quit my dayjob a few months ago. I said I was taking a sabbatical from my programming career to work on my own projects: there's a lot of math that I've been wanting to learn properly for a long time (game theory, Bayesian networks/structual causal models, analysis), and there's a lot of writing that I fear I must do (although for branding and market-segmentation purposes, I'm pretending that's someone else's story).

I have made some progress on these goals, but—as one would have predicted from an Outside (i.e., No Fun) View model trained on my historical behavior during periods of underemployment- or school-holiday-induced freedom—it's been disappointingly slow on a day-to-day level: it is easier to let an hour blur by in daydreams or low-quality internet reading than it is to actually study or actually write, and a day is only made of so many hours.

My dominant emotions surrounding this observation are guilt and shame. Guilt: that I'm failing my moral responsibility to be intellectually productive, a duty owed to the human spirit and maybe even the Bayes-structure itself. Shame: that a hypothetical adversary could use the fact of my slothfulness as evidence against my beauty, that the failure to live up to the promise of my ideals could be construed to deny or disparage the ideal itself.

Well, I do have a moral responsibility to be intellectually productive which is owed to the human spirit; this cannot be doubted. But I've been wondering lately if it might be better to let go of the shame and even most of the guilt. This not because shame and guilt can't be useful emotions, but rather that I might be thought of as having outgrown them.

I think the shame is born of insecurity: I spent a lot of years resenting school and resenting a culture that didn't have a concept of intellectual life or paths to economic success outside of school, resulting in a desperate need to prove myself: if I don't create given the time and freedom to do so, couldn't pawns of the system use it as ammunition to sneer at me and proclaim that no one can possibly do anything worthwhile without a teacher to command them to do it? And if I don't create, would they even be wrong?

Having something to prove was a useful motivation—it drove me to learn math, at least, to an extent that's probably hard to motivate without a status gradient at work. But now, at age 29—thanks to the software industry for a niche where my talents are economically legible, thanks to the aspiring-rationalist subculture for a community where I feel respected—I think I've exited the world I resented. Whatever I had to prove, I've either proved it by now or have extracted myself from the need to please any doubters.

What, then, should take the place of a desperate need to prove one's value as a source of motivation? What is to be the new emotional reaction to observations of slow progress, if not shame and horror and fear at what my enemies would make of this?

Shame creates an incentive to deny or minimize the culpable action, to distort the map of what actually happened in order to protect oneself: "I didn't do that; it's not what it looks like." I think I would prefer to draw on sources of motivation that don't have this property, that can accept the reality of what actually happened without pain ...

[16:03:37] <alice>  I'm back from literally running, metaphorically from
                    figurative demons
[16:03:50] <alice>  including the celebrity demon-prince Rateirs-Blak
[16:05:37] <carol>  alice: ?
[16:05:49] <carol>  oh
[16:05:55] <alice>  there's no canonical Latin-alphabet transliteration of his
                    name, because mortals fear to set it in writing
[16:06:08] <alice>  or maybe they just can't think of how or never make
                    the effort to do so; it's unclear

It's not so much that writing is hard, so much as it is that not-writing is easy; so easy, in fact, that one can spend hours, days, or years not-writing without even noticing the magnitude of the crime—the wrongful nonexistence of everything left unsaid.

I want to code all of the things, but I also want to write at least some of the things, but sometimes putting things in words—simple things, things I know—can be hard. Every other day I dream of getting in some writing in the night after I return from the code mines across the bay, but the box where the writing tool lives is the same as the box where you can read everything that anyone else has ever written, and you can guess what I really do then, when it's easier to read than to farm, to eat than to write.

But writing is important, because we can imagine nearby possible worlds in which the distribution of verbal skills is incompetenceward of our own, and the people in those worlds are sadder and poorer than us, the clumsiness of their attempts at communication leaving them less effective at coordinating their activities to dominate nature: colleagues maneuver against each other, ineffectually; television is less interesting; lovers stare into each others' eyes having less idea than you of what they're really looking at.

And in our own world, where people can say more, but not enough—I can read, but I'm missing something ... I can reckon with 'rithmetic, which serves a purpose, but cannot in human terms express the richness of vision that courses through ... something. And it cannot be a part of inner peace and glory until paired with something that does, high though the price may be for that something!

The second R, which is yet not an R. I want this more than I can say.

As far as I can tell, I don't have any kind of synesthesia. You can't be too sure (which means, you can easily be entirely too sure), what with our na(t)ive theories of psychology being so inadequate that everything we believe about other minds is but a filament of noise and conjecture, but your probability distribution about the mapping of sensory inputs to perceptions for me is probably not so different as mine of the same for you (dear reader of whom I know nothing)—roses seem red, violets would seem blue if we spoke a language that didn't already have a word for violet—which means that when I tell you that there's a musty, stale odor around a blog that hasn't been updated in a month and change, it's only a trite metaphor and not a perceptual reality of any sort. Still, even if you can't smell it (if your senses are like mine; if your fox, like mine, still hasn't bothered to implement the HTML5 <aroma> element), it's an ominous thing, to see a blog hovering near the boundary between life and death, a corpus perhaps on the way to being a corpse. The internet is littered with the latter, monuments to people who reliably had something to say, month after month ... until they missed a month, and then it wasn't long before they missed another.

Now I can assure you that that will never happen to this place while I'm still breathing—this blog lives exactly as long as I do—only that's not a precise way of speaking; what I can do is offer you my assurance, which is a different thing from you actually feeling assured, which is a different thing still from that which was assured against actually never coming to pass. But I think these differences—between feeling and reality, between saying and reality—I think these enormous differences are much greater than the tiny, barely-perceptible gap between seeing so many gloriously intricate things to say, and making the time and words to express them on your blog when you are so busy with your trade in the manufacture of useful machinery (and the green tiles which are its highly-coveted industrial byproduct). But if all I can observe is that the gap is barely perceptible, then by the enormity of the earlier differences, I am not licensed to infer that the gap is tiny, not when the only reason I am telling you this is that I would die of shame if my monthly archives sidebar skipped a month for the first time since May of 'aught-twelve, not during this second year of my life in which I am supposed to write a compiler and a bad novelette even though it is for all intents and tens of intensive purposes practically March.

You don't want to write today. If you don't want to write today, you won't want to write tomorrow. Show that you will never write anything. (Hint: induction.)

"I've been thinking about writing a novel."

"I don't understand."

"I said, I've been thinking about writing a novel. What's there not to understand?"

"The phrase thinking about writing. Is that even grammatical? And if so, what could it possibly mean?"

"What? It's perfectly gram—oh, I get it. Fine. No hedging: I am going to write a novel!"

"Sorry, I still don't get it. I know what it means to have written something, or to be at a keyboard writing something. But to be going to write something, in the unobservable future? Even if the concept is coherent—and I'm not sure it is—how could you possibly know?"

Overdue book fines are a terrible sin, not because of the harm done to other library stakeholders, but because of what they say about you as a person: not only did you not get around to finishing the books you (apparently erroneously) thought you wanted to read, but you weren't even responsible enough to bring them back on time.