flexagon | I could read this every year for quite a while

I'm on page 489 of my second reading of Anathem, which I've been putting off for months now. I read it over a year ago, and there are bits of it that spoke to me a lot -- the way the main character just barely is accepted by the Edharian order but really wants to be there, the deeply dorkalicious ways of most of the characters in the book, the linguistic playfulness and send-up of our current culture. Reading it a second time is just making me happy, and more sure than ever that in general it is the right thing for me to do technical work, study technical things and hang out mostly with people who are really into what they do. It feels good to be so sure -- and it feels strange that a work of fiction should be the thing that can make me so sure about real life, although I think that happens all the time.

(I also want again to work my way through either my old calculus book or a beginning probability book, not in a huge hurry but for fun. Could this be a reasonable project for Christmas vacation, or will I still have enough left of my software side project left that I'll feel obligated to work on that? We'll see. I'm in a back-to-basics intellectual mood, lately, and less interested in bulshytt.)

It's hard not to daydream about some kind of acrobatics-and-math-and-software concent, with some music for

heisenbug and only a small number of personal possessions and lots of cats. But then, my daydreams are probably just me asking myself permission to live that way.