"It's a pleasant contrast since I am not particularly cheery most of the time."

"You don't seem particularly uncheery most of the time."

"My equanimity conceals a deep vein of cynical annoyance."

Giggle. "What, all the time?"

"I guess there are times when my mind is elsewhere."

"Surely there aren't that many things to be cynically annoyed by, eventually you'd cycle through!"

"I didn't say I was endlessly original about it!"

"I suppose you didn't, no."

"It mostly all comes back to not really caring for being grey one way or another, though I flatter myself to think that this has given me a lens into problems that I do not myself share."

"Like what?"

"I mean, people can be bad fits for any caste, or country, or whatever. And it's - practice at understanding that just because some experience has easily verbalizable features that don't sound objectively very bad doesn't mean that there aren't lots of hard-to-explain other things going on making it much worse."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Sahde's talked about stuff like that before, although I think he's more comfortable as a grey than you."

"He is comfortable in a normal grey job without having to cheat, I'm not surprised!"

"I think it's just the sex drive, though, I can't think of any other grey job he'd be okay at."

"I think it's not just that, I don't think I'd like it even if I sprung much harder, but it admittedly doesn't hurt."

"I think he doesn't really like the culture either? Just the job. But I dunno, you'd have to ask him."

"He also doesn't like grey culture much more than I do, admittedly."

"It really seems like there should be some way to improve stuff there... I mean, at least to have better subcultures that greys could move between or something? Somehow?"

"There's not nothing? Like, on the Internet I can use my real name and strangers who Citrus "Milath" figure me for green and people who know who I am know what kind of person I am even if they know I'm grey and that's all right. But school was dreadful. There were choices but there weren't enough of them, not that also promised I'd be able to get a job as an adult."

"There were appropriate non-job choices?"

"I mean, I could've kept going to intercaste schools, but they didn't have promising statistics on placement and my parents were worried. I think it was already fairly obvious that I could fall back on swim lessons but they wanted me to have more choices and intercaste schools have less specialized counseling, know fewer niche weird things to line kids up for."

"How did you fall into the blog, anyway?"

"We had a school newspaper, almost entirely sports with a little gossip and an advice column, and I needed the extra credit so I joined it, and I started desperately doing math to my arcball news. It picked up more readers on the online version than most of the features - I wasn't very good then but enough to occasionally get linked - and I did it while teaching swimming lessons for a while till it was bringing in enough I could drop the swimming lessons for research time."

"'Desperately'?"

"Have you ever read arcball news without any math in it? It's very boring. - okay, there's like a couple humorists who make that angle work but I don't think my sense of humor is broadly accessible."