Andy H.

1. I'm thinking about my earliest days on the internet, which got me thinking about Keri and Vanessa, who were around at the time. We'd begun to design together our own fantasy world, called Ankersa, which was a name, as the discerning reader may already have, er, discerned, derived from combined components of our own names. We were each in charge of developing one of the three major races. I'd like to look back at the notes, and see just how worthy or silly it was, but I'm pretty sure none of us properly took any.

It gets harder to play with other people - to engage in that sort of unselfconscious shared creation. The sort of thing I had with Ankersa, or the Game, or some of WEM - though never quite with most of Waitility, which we've always been a little too careful about. It's something I try not to fret about too often, because fixating on it would probably make it harder to achieve, but I look for it, quietly, and sometimes I can find it.

(And once, it was mine at a phone call, which is one piece of an old and varied regret.)

P.S. As I periodically feel it necessary to announce, Keri's weblog is pretty awesome.

2. It's tasted like Summer for a while; now the heat is catching up. The nicest part of this is the night time and the evenings, when it gets cool but it's still warm.

One of the buildings in the cityscape has decided to build a garish neon stripe up the side facing us. I'm not sure that I like the effect.

This isn't something I say very often, but I guess I need to find a job.

David is home, who I think I had not entirely believed ever would be; I had a dream in which I realized I must be dreaming - something that has occurred only a few select times in my entire sleeping life - because David was with me, and I knew he must be in Brazil. Among many other things, while in South America he climbed a mountain, visited a city with highrises but not a single chain store, saw the world's largest field of preserved dinosaur footprints, and learned to speak fluent Portuguese, but now he really is here again, looking and talking and laughing just like he always did, entering once more the orbits of all us disparate people who have known him and pulling us back to his own.

I've been thinking about my current friendships lately, how many of them have arisen fairly recently, and the sense of discontinuity inherent in that. I know a bunch of neat people these days, and I trust some of them a lot, but there are very few people who know me well now who also knew well the person I was when I was 14, and who would react with an immediate and natural understanding if something happened to bring up emotions dating to that time. Sometimes this makes me worry that I might become disconnected from myself, that maybe there are things I feel which I have stopped expressing, and forgotten, and that I am lesser and lonelier for it.

There are two people I talk to who did and still do know me that well; David makes a third, and for that, too, I'm glad that he's back. I hope we can see one another often (I think it would be cool to do another play).

Keely, too, is home, who was in Costa Rica; I hadn't known it, but apparently she's been back for something like a month. That's probably reasonable - she left at the beginning of the Summer; David probably gave me an unrealistic unconscious expectation that people never actually come home. She went around looking restless and making strange faces, spilling offhand physical affection as is her wont, and it made me smile to see her.

And Gen Robertson is also home, who, on the rare occasion I've seen her these past two or three years, has been in town for about two days before departing on her next vast trip, or on a tree-planting foray to fund them. This time, though, she says that she means to stick around for about a year, and as a show of good faith she's enrolled in Cap College. I'm looking forward to having her around. She said she thought I should grow my beard back, which felt oddly pleasant.

All of these people were at the party at Jim's neo-Gate today, as well as several others I hadn't seen for ages even though they were in this city, and some interesting people I'd never before met. Afterward, David, Jeremy, Rayne and I went for a late, slow walk around the sea wall, and now it's the middle of the night and my legs hurt and I'm remarkably tired, which is likely to blame if any of this prose was unusually uninspired or difficult to follow. As soon as this is posted, I'll go collapse across my bed and let my legs repair themselves and the rest of me sleep, and it will be marvellous.

But I am happy.

In mostly unrelated news, I would apparently be a little dog. I always name my little dogs "the ninja".