aiwendel asked me that at the Calling last night. It's odd; I've always known that I had an unusually strong tendency to answer ‘How are you?’ with an actual description of how I was, rather than with the ISO standard ‘Oh, fine, fine’ that satisfies the demands of small talk with minimal effort. But on being asked ‘Are you happy?’, which should in theory be practically the same question, I actually found myself stopping and thinking, and giving a very different answer. It seems my answers to ‘How are you?’ haven't been nearly as truthful as I'd thought.

And (after thinking about it a bit) no, I'm not happy. But on the other hand, neither am I unhappy. I'm sort of in-between, balanced between lots of things. There are an enormous number of things I want; there's no way I can possibly have all of them (often simply because there's not enough time in the day), and just to add confusion, some of them I simultaneously want and don't want. So every time I get some of one thing I want, it's necessarily balanced by losing (the possibility of) some of something else I want. Hence, it's been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely happy without simultaneously making me feel sad for another reason. On the plus side, it's also been a long time since anything made me feel genuinely upset without also having a bright side to look on.

It's difficult to imagine a way in which this might change in the foreseeable future. I suppose something would have to come along which would make me so happy that it outweighed the myriad little disappointments it would inevitably cause in other areas. This would take quite some doing, I suspect…

It was an excellent question to be asked, though. I urge anyone else who hasn't happened to give it much thought recently to do so.

Hmmm. While contemplating my previous entry about little things not typically making me either any happier or any less happy, I seem to have accidentally proved a theorem in geometry. Oddly this has made me happier, because geometric theorems are shiny :-)

(Consider a polygon, and a point moving around inside it. Consider the sum of the shortest distances from the point to each side of the polygon. Theorem: if the polygon is regular, then this sum remains completely constant no matter where the point moves inside it. Proof, and relevance to my emotional life, left as exercises for the reader…)

Shinier still. drswirly has found a much better proof of my geometric theorem than mine, and in particular his proof demonstrates that the polygon doesn't need to be regular – it only has to be convex and have all sides the same length. Very pretty.

(Someone pointed out that I wrote ‘shortest distance’ where I meant ‘perpendicular distance’, as well. Each edge of the polygon should be considered to be extended as far as necessary.)

I should shut up about maths, really. Particularly since I've been doing maths at work for a few weeks and it's been quite stressful, and to my immense relief it all started working properly today so I can take a break and do something less taxing, so quite why I'm now wibbling on about maths in this diary for fun is beyond me.

Anyway. This evening is supposed to contain sofa therapy, so I shall return to the sofa.