Bah, I can't write fiction. I try from time to time, and it's always boring. Part of the issue is that I really only want to write something if it's not been written before. And part of the reason is I have no talent there. I'll stick to what I'm good at: writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of unread text so it looks like I have a life, at least one interesting enough to write about, so long as the readers don't actually get past the first paragraph.

This time I thought I had it. The last few attempts have been attempting fantasy, but I don't have any good ideas of magic systems (which are my favorite part). I'd rather learn than teach, read than write. I also tend to get hung up on the plot, which was the case this time as well. This time I thought I'd write the story of boy meets girl (because that's never been done before), but only write during the moments they're actually interacting. The first "chapter" was five lines long, from the moment a mutual friend was introducing them until the moment after they shook hands and got distracted by other friends at the party. The second chapter was just the friend confirmation email from Facebook. For the third, I was attempting to write an instant message chat log. I actually wrote a program to generate the HTML for me. It turns out talking to myself on paper isn't as fun as talking to myself aloud. Five minutes into the "conversation" I alt+F4'd without saving.

On a side note, I couldn't figure out how to get a WebBrowser Winforms object to autosize, nor make it scroll to a certain point on the page (i.e. the bottom). Using LINQ's XDocument and XElement objects, though, made the page generation itself a breeze. Even ctrl+z was simple. I just kept a stack of each of the XElements I'd added, and then to undo, popped the stack and called .Remove() on the object, which removed itself from the XDocument. Magic!

I think maybe the hardest part for me, writing fiction, is creating a character other than myself. I just can't leave my own head. I think most authors, at least in their early works, write with the main character being the author. Alexander, for instance, gets woozy from the height of a chair unless he's over water, much like his character Longshark (whom, in my head, I pronounced Lawnshark) in his latest story. I would guess that Paolini acts quite a bit like Eragon, at least in his inquisitiveness. But then both them have supporting characters that are quite different from than the authors. I just end up writing copies of myself, or possibly my friends, though it turns out the way I perceive my friends is a lot more like how I perceive me, than it is how they actually are. They wouldn't say this. I would. Bah.

I do wonder what happens if you add an element to multiple XDocument objects, because .Remove()'s documentation says it removes the element from its parent, and in this case, there are multiple parents. I could try it, and report back, but I'd rather wonder than know in this case. All my friends would too.

So yes, I keep attempting and failing fiction. Mostly this happens when I reread Eragon. Two thoughts always come to mind while reading that book. One, this was make a great MMO. It really would, but the whole magic system would be incredibly complex. You'd have to write a run-time compiler for it, and then you'd have to convince people the game is fun enough to play to learn a completely made up language, and then you'd have to figure out the whole "an expert might say water and conjure something completely unrelated, like a gemstone, because he can see the link between the two" thing. After all that triviality comes the part where you have to enforce no deceit when someone speaks the ancient language. The other thought is always, "I can do this." And time and time again it proves untrue.

The last few weeks I've been thinking about something that the pastor said, that when we want to feel good about ourselves we revert to doing what we do best, specifically mentioning writing, among other things. I think that's true of me, not that I'm saying I'm necessarily a good writer, only that I take pride in it. The sermon he said this in was on Easter, and about "giving God the pen" of our lives, letting him dictate what will happen in our lives. I think God gives us certain aptitudes, and it would be foolish not to use what God has given us, so I'm wondering what God wants me to write. There is this blog, but I'd like to write a book someday too.

I guess if I want God to answer a question, like what does he want me to write about, I should ask him--I should pray. I certainly don't pray religiously. It's a habit I should get into. Hime and I call each other best friends, but we haven't seen each other since her birthday in January.

I'm in bed now, or rather, on Bill's couch in Bellingham the day after I started writing this post. Before I let it slip another day, I think I'll just post it now, short and sweet.

He is risen. He is risen indeed. It's Easter right now, so happy Easter if you happen to be reading this post today, or if you happen to read it some Sunday between March 23 and April 27 in the future, and that day also happens to be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring of your current year. Yeah.

Easter is the most important day of the year, with Christmas a close second. I don't think that's a very popular opinion, but it's mine. It is the day Jesus Christ conquered death. It is the reason we have The Good News. If I have my metaphysics right, Good Friday was the day our sins could be forgiven, but no one would believe it had Easter not happened. Or maybe I have them wrong, and it is in the act of rising again, conquering death, that we may have victory in Christ as well.

I don't think Easter is celebrated correctly. I don't really know how to explain it, but the fact that Easter is so diminished in the minds of modern society, on par with Groundhog's day or Valentine's day, speaks to the fact that it's important, and that someone or something wants it suppressed. Because it's fun to blame the greeting card industry, I'm going to do just that. No one buys Easter greeting cards, probably because so few really appreciate the resurrection of Christ. Without cards, there are few ad buys, and without the media, there's little hype. Any church that tried to make an Easter awareness commercial would probably be pegged (by me) as a little silly. But no, I can't legitimately blame the card industry. While I've never been one to find the devil under every rock (or really almost any rock), leaving no stone unturned leads me to find Satan at work here.

I find myself frustrated this morning. I go to the evening service at church for two reasons today -- one, I normally go to the evening service because I like to stay up late on Saturday evenings, which I did last night; and two, because we were asked, if we weren't bringing friends that would not normally go to church, to go to either the early morning service (not happening) or the evening service, so that there was space and parking at the nine through eleven o'clock ones. I'm frustrated because this is the first Easter that I didn't go to a morning service followed by brunch or family time of some sort, except for the Easter I was in Jamaica. This morning I got out of bed at 12:30 (having been awake for two hours before that), tagged some photos posted by Courtney from Costa Rica, and then got Arby's. It was not exactly my traditional Easter morning.

Somehow I associate tradition with observance, and so I don't feel like I've really observed Easter, the most important day of the year. Even the fact that you go to Easter service in the morning is observing that Christ rose in the morning, that the stone was found rolled away in the morning, and that the rest of the day people could marvel at it.

I actually feel guilty, like the traditions were something I was supposed to do, or else I'm in sin or something. I know that's absurd but that's still how I'd describe it.

Anyway, there's no good reason to feel bad on Easter unless you mock its meaning, and I don't believe I've done that.

This week went pretty well. Last summer, after Fir Creek, I was pretty burnt out at work for another week and a half. Somehow after the trip, I was actually doing better than I had been before the trip. I'm not sure if I was burnt out from working harder than I'm used to (three big features, basically on my own), or because it was the last few days before vacation, or because I had a feature dropped on me and it was still in black box, mountain mode because I hadn't really had time to evaluate each part to realize it was only a medium sized hill. Anyway, when I got back Sydney was my acting manager because my actual manager is on vacation (for his kids' spring break). Sydney split my feature into three parts, and I ended up with about a third the work I was expecting to do, and of that work, I'd already done about a quarter, whereas I hadn't touched the other two parts. That made it much easier for me to get back into the groove of the faster life, and on Friday I made a ton of progress. I still have to write tests (which undoubtedly will uncover another thirty necessary changes [anecdotal edit: I did indeed introduce a bug where renaming a databases shrunk it to the minimum size]), but I made it to the jiggle phase. That's where you put all the pieces loosely together and then jiggle it until it all fits. This is not an official software development term. Yet.

We had a preview feature in our last release that I wrote. Now that it's no longer a preview feature, I had to tear all the code out. It felt weird deleting a bunch of code I wrote, when I had a meeting scheduled to discuss how that code would work after they deployed it (they haven't yet released the last release with the preview feature).

I'm looking forward to work tomorrow.

Friday night, I went to Swood's for our weekly hangout time. I've never been to a Good Friday service before, and because I was at Swood's, I didn't go to one this year either. Next year I think I'll try to make it. I had a good time at Swood's, though. It might even have been better that I went there than church. Hanging out with him is therapeutic for me, restful. We ended up watching The Men Who Stare at Goats. It wasn't what I was expecting, but still pretty good.

It got me thinking about a couple things. I think everyone (or at least, of the one person for whom I can speak from experience, it's true for this one person) likes to pretend at some level that they can do things they can't. I pretend to use the Force to change traffic lights, which may or may not coincide with me watching the other lights of the intersection. I wish I were telekinetic. When I go by street lights, they turn off a lot more frequently than they do for other people I've talked to. That's either because I'm more observant to it than other people, or I really am special -- and what an amazing super power that is, especially as it's involuntary, sporadic, and makes it harder for me to see. I like to play the game in my head, but I would never actually believe it like the people in the movie did, at least without some hard evidence. This knowledge fuzzes the line for me between game and spiritual gift. I believe that all Christians have spiritual gifts, and absolutely believe that the Spirit can give them and take them away at will for a given situation. But I do also believe that some are persistent regardless of the situation. Hospitality and teaching are two such gifts, and really, I think most are like that. But it makes me wonder how much of these gifts was there to begin with? Why do we call them spiritual gifts now that they are Christians, when they probably had the same personality before they were Christians? A few times I've taken spiritual gifts tests, which are essentially aptitude tests. They don't very well cover things like the gift of healing as they assume those are more self-evident. I've consistently scored high on discernment and prophecy, and very low on every other one. So, this blurred line makes me wonder if it's actually gift, or merely the game I play in my head. It's disconcerting.

The other thing, though only roughly related, that the movie got me considering was something talked about at the PCEC retreat in February. The speaker had talked a small bit about superstition, and how so many people have it engrained in us, whether we recognize it as superstition or not, that we'll say things like, "It's going well, but I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop." I do this a lot. I play this game of karma in my head, this game of balances, and for some reason, I can't accept that there is good without there being bad to come. Maybe it's just a common pattern in our lives, so we accept it as fact or fate. We have days of sun, and eventually they're followed by days of clouds or rain, and so we think that if it's sunny, soon it will be rainy. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This, I think, weakens blessings.

It's almost time for me to leave for church. This is perfect as I have nothing else to say.