If I'd stuck with astronomy I could have discovered the complicated star.

[mrissa]

Last week on e-mail one of my best friends asked how I am. Not, "Howwer yewwwwwww?" as in, "Fine howwer yewwwwww?" But really asking. The kind of question from the kind of friend where it deserves a genuine answer.

I was on the computer when the e-mail arrived, and I was not in the middle of something else, and he was still on, and I hadn't talked to him in awhile, and I thought, "I'll write right back."

I sat there for 45 minutes.

It's me, so I didn't just sit there. I paid the electric bill, and I went down and made some more ginger tea, on which my life depends these days, and I put away the earrings that had accumulated above my keyboard as earrings do accumulate above my keyboard, and I did lo these many other small tasks, and after each small task, I took a breath and looked at the e-mail I had open with, "> How are you?" ready to go.

I eventually decided on, "Complicated." When I told timprov about this, before I got to, "Complicated," he suggested, "Variable," which is also true and has the advantage that there is such a thing as a variable star, which overcame my unfondness of the word in early grade school for when people misused it in equations when it was not, in fact, variable in a particular equation, but merely unknown. Eventually I got into some of the ups and downs that comprise complicated: effects and side effects, real and fictional social thises and thats, do-loops and modes of coping.

It's much easier to dive right in with one anecdote than to try to say how you are, is I think the moral of the story, and my one anecdote is that right now it takes me 45 minutes to come up with an approximate answer to how I am. So.

More Carter Hall stuff next time, then.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Well, all right, then. And yay for more Carter Hall.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

My short response to 'how are you?' is sometimes 'every which way,' and sometimes, 'oh, you know, the usual roller coaster ride.' It's hard to speak honestly in less than anecdotes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I have a whole stable of stock responses for when it's a situation where I want to be able to get through the answer quickly. This just wasn't one of those.