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I have decided that I will work on this project I have been assigned longhand.

It is a thing that I will go through phases on, the ways in which I work. Sometimes, I will work with a pen in my paw and paper on my desk, books all scattered around. At other times, my desk will bear a great screen and I will type on a keyboard adapted to work with the digger claws I bear as a skunk, all of my research in buffers and panes scattered across the view. Rarely, I will work solely in my head, words committed directly to an exocortex, sources bubbling up through my mind from the libraries at the heart of our System like so much fizz in a drink.

These phases will last a year or ten, and then meld seamlessly into the next. That is where I am now. I am in the midst of a dovetail. I am coming off a period of working in my head, because my paw craves the weight of a pen.

This is not strictly true, I think, now that I put it to words. I do not think this change is wholly natural. The world ended for some baker's dozen months and now I am unsettled.

All of life comes in phases, overlapping and intertwined. It is a braid. It is a melody. It is a story that we tell ourselves from day to day about who we are.

It is a braid and a story and there are phases within our lives, and yet there still exists the world around us, gently impinging here, wrenching us into some new reality there.

We were wrenched. We were ripped from being and it was only through the tireless efforts of who knows how many engineers both embodied and embedded, that we were slowly mended, woven back into the fabric of life. When we crashed, all 2.3 trillion of us, we were all in the middle of \emph{something,} and now we must take into account that the universe continued without us for some time. We must take into account that, no matter what our \emph{something} was, it was interrupted.

I had been working on an essay at the time of the crash. It took me nearly nine months to return to the act of writing, for even though it lingered there in an exo, I could not bring myself to write it. There was too much to do, and there was too much that was fraught with life, for we all, I think, had our worries that the apocalypse was not yet finished with us.

I am now unsettled, because the world ended, and so instead of writing this report for Rav From Whence in my head, as I did for my last few papers, I will write it out by hand.

But that is not my only project, is it? There is \emph{this} one, too. There is this story that I am telling you myself about who I am and who I was, and that is being written close to my heart. It will live in an exo and, if I am honest with myself, likely never see the light of day. I will write it in my thoughts in those moments between, the minutes before I sleep at night and before I rise in the morning, the slow walks I might take to clear my head. I will wrangle my thoughts, lasso them together, coerce them into words and then think them directly into my memory that I may draw upon them for\ldots whatever. I do not know what I might need these thoughts for, but I nonetheless feel compelled to note them down.

My therapist has guided me towards journaling several times over the years to greater or less effect. When last we met, she did not bring it up, and yet hear I am, essentially journaling.

I wonder why? Why is it that this project belongs to the ink of a pen, yet the journal I keep belongs in my thoughts? Is it that it is so much more private? Do I worry about committing these words to paper?

Perhaps it is that there is some issue of privacy. Am I worried about my words being seen or read by another?

I do not think so. With some projects, when I have worked long-hand, I have taken joy in the act of writing and then simply committed the words to memory and dismissed the written sheets themselves. It is not that the words might exist in some tangible form, but the act of writing itself.

Perhaps it is that committing words to paper would mean that I would be setting them down in some way more concrete than simply thinking of them.

In this case, it is the \emph{committing} that is the important part. Am I perhaps afraid of my thoughts on the Century Attack and on this assignment from Rav? Would seeing my words, unchanging, on the page, whining of this or that, be too much akin to pinning these thoughts specifically to those grumpinesses, bitternesses?

This, I think is partially true. There is truth in the fact that, when writing by hand, part of the goal \emph{is} to pin down a meaning to a word. It is to write a thing into being. That is not the case with this journal, if journal it is.

Perhaps, though, perhaps I am just embarrassed. Perhaps the feelings that drove me to start cataloguing these experiences are ones that I am merely too embarrassed to set to paper, too shy of what they might suggest. Am I really such a whiner? Do I really kvetch about every little thing?

Apparently, and that is why I think this is the most true of these reasons yet.

And besides, it is not as though I have any thought of publishing this work, and would not even if I were to write it out longhand or sit at my desk typing. To write as though that were the case would be to hem myself in, draw boundaries around these embarrassing thoughts and promise myself that they in particular will not see the light of day.
