Writing is therapeutic. (Certainly, in the case of this blog, it’s cathartic as well, but that’s a whole different story.) It’s therapeutic in the way that arranging songs for my a cappella group was – it’s fun playing with lilt and cadence and trying to get everything to sound just right, mellifluous. It’s soothing to play with syntax and punctuation. (Which reminds me that Choonping tells me that he is getting formal grammar lessons from NIE. That would just spoil everything for me. Unlike the stereotypical male, I don’t believe in taking things apart to see how they work.) It’s not something I feel rabidly that I should get better at, because after a point, you don’t get “better” at writing the way you get “better” at bridge or lifting weights or DDR. (Thus, my dislike of the intrusion of the Reader, the admittance of the Other, because that’s when value rears its ugly head and compulsion and “perfectionism” – whatever that means in writing – appear.)

That, I suppose, is the joy in work at the moment. Even though I’ve no interest whatsoever in the material I’m reading, I can, at the very least, make my reports on it pleasing to eye and ear. (Have I mentioned the doctorate holder in our lab? Ugh! She’s in charge of the lion’s share of the writing, and the gobbledygook she comes up with makes me want to weep. I should reproduce more of it here some day.) Here, then, a call to arms. We must find happiness in the little things. We must write and add our quotient of beauty to a world bereft.