20151005.0616

I was able to get the write-up done yesterday, but I think having pushed myself to do so as I had to do is having effects on me. Something is, anyway, and the effects are unpleasant. They are not enough to stop me from doing what I need to do, to be sure, but that does not mean I am happy to have them befall me. Why would I be expected to be? Even if I acknowledge that they are just and appropriate consequences of my actions--and I am not doing so--I need not be happy with them. We do not condemn those who labor in the fields for noting the soreness of their backs, and yet that soreness is a just and appropriate consequence of their work. Why the same should not be true for the work of the mind that I, and those like me, do eludes me.

One of the just and appropriate consequences of being trained to do the work I do is that I have developed a marked tendency to look backwards at things. I keep records, after all, and although there are many reasons for me to do so, the most accessible of them is to review events and impressions from the past. This day and month have not yielded much in this webspace; indeed, only last year did I write in this blogroll on this day. Matters have changed significantly since I was moving into the L5R Winter Court, and while there was some thought that it might be the last to be run--there is always such a thought--the end envisioned was not the same kind of end that now looms large over the IP. I continue to hold out hope that things will be well, but I know that they will change--which is needful for improvement but admits the possibility of its inverse.

The comment that it is "just a game" will suggest itself to some, I know. They are right, at one level; it is a game (a series of them, really), and there are other, much more prominent things with which to be concerned. It is a game with which I have been involved deeply for some time--since I started undergraduate work, so some fifteen years at this point. It is a game that has allowed me to be a part of an international community, one in which my voice has not always sounded out but which has valued that voice when I have used it. It introduced me to a great many people whose friendship I have valued and still value. The game helped me to graduate with honors from my baccalaureate school and get into graduate school, leading me at length to my wife and daughter, and it gave me somewhat to do to help offset a series of unhappy events at one point. So while it is a game, how just it is is far less certain. At least, it is to me.