Well, my life is going quite well. I'm all but caught up on my classics reading, Greek is proceeding apace, and except for one more poem in poetry and four more anthology pages, I'm set for that class too. Frustratingly, not all of my friends are blessed with such a stress-free existence. This isn't frustrating so much because they're stressed as because I don't know what I can do to bless them.

Ah, you say, but you don't have to bless them. And if you say that, good for you, because you have hit the nail on the head. If that were truly all I were concerned about, I would be content with interceding on their behalf in prayer. But my fix-it complex has come into play here, and what I really want to do is give them a switch - that is, something that will make them forget their stress, overriding it with a sense of love and security. My motives there are partially altruistic (I want them to have peace of mind) and partially selfish (I want to feel useful), but entirely human. Well, at least I'm aware of it.

So anyway, what's really frustrating me is that I don't know how to give people switches. In at least one case last year, all that was necessary was for me to hold the person in question. Now I feel like people just don't know what would comfort them, which is bewildering to me because I'm not used to people being so oblivious to the way they themselves work as to not be able to tell someone else what comforts them. But I suppose I can't really complain if people refuse to cater to my fix-it complex, so I'll just have to settle for interceding in prayer.

I've started to work on the human spell list, which is daunting. This could take me a while ... I've got six spells in one subcategory of one magical discipline (the disease subcategory of Inner Devastations) which has five subcategories. If that turns out to be average, that will give me thirty base spells per discipline, of which there are twelve. Think I can crank out 360 basic spells before March 20? And Inner Devastations is one of the more basic disciplines, too.

Work in the religious field is going somewhat better. Fortunately the two eastern religions are fairly straightforward. Faesi, the new eastern religion, only has one deity, Juylit. Juylit is roughly modeled on Ahura Mazda, which makes him a pretty straightforward kind of god. And the old eastern religion, the worship of the pantheon known as the Rae, is deliberately vague. The deities of the Rae were never very well defined, being inspired by the kind of divine vagueness that allowed the Egyptians to combine or redefine deities more or less at will (e.g., Amon-Ra, or Hellenistic Isis). It's the worship of the western gods that's giving me the most trouble, those twelve deities whose worship originated in Celahui, the City of the Gods. The twelve Celanni are Olympian-inspired and fairly well defined: three gods of war, three of home, three of nature, three of urban and trade life. The catch is that having decided that, I need to figure out just what each of them is the god of. The Celanni are not supposed to cover the whole world (one of the strengths of their worship is that it leaves lots of room for local gods to fit into the picture), but I need to decide just how much of it they do cover, and how they're portrayed.

Well, that's enough for now. Off to practice my music.