Series Finale

And OH HOLY COW here it is.

The Last Week. Of School. For me maybe ever.

What comes NEXT, I ask you?

(You are probably not the one[s] to ask.)

Well here are some Ideas I've had:

The only idea I have is to make enough money to pay my loans. Foresight!

I would like to stop and consider the view from where I am right now, because in a week I will not any longer have the same one.

Life is whizzing right along. A summer of weddings approaches (no one is surprised) and also of job applications and hopefully interviews and acceptances, et cetera.

I feel sometimes the same way I feel when I'm playing soccer. I'm best on defense. When I play forward I can't figure out where I should be looking. Behind me to see an oncoming pass? Ahead to make sure I'm not offsides? At the ball so that I know where I should be going? All trying to figure this out while running. I can never get it right. When the ball does come my way I'm inevitably looking the wrong way or I can't figure out what to do with it before I run out of time or room.

That's a bit incoherent, but it's how I've been feeling about life. I can't keep my eyes on the ball and on the rest of the field at the same time. I can't figure out how to live in the present and how to effectively consider the future.

At least I haven't learned how yet.

This summer might help, somehow. I'm choosing to think it will.

I get more done when I leave the apartment.

I am having such a productive day. I almost have a whole paper written before 3.30 in the afternoon that I hadn't thought about writing until I began it at 11 am.

This has also been a fundamentally unsettling day: I drank coffee and enjoyed it. After my run this morning (I hydrated with water and Gatorade post-run, and the Gatorade was awful because I brushed my teeth right before my run, but I drank it anyway) I went to Nord's. At Nord's I told the guy three things: I needed caffeine, I wanted something cold, and I wasn't a big coffee fan. He proceeded to make me an iced cold brew something or other that I poured skim milk into and drank with a growing sense of disbelief. Apparently the cold-brew process (which takes eleven hours [ridiculous]) makes the final product less acidic and bitter. It still tasted like coffee, but it was...palatable. A first for me. Normally I only like coffee in two forms: 1. ice cream 2. Seattle's Best Peppermint Mocha Trio (hot minty chocolate with just a smidge of coffee flavor).

He suggested it and I agreed because that's what I do; I agree to things. But I enjoyed it. I still don't know what to think. Am I going to like coffee? Even if I do, I refuse to become addicted. I just won't. I've lasted this long.

(The other unsettling thing about this was the effect that coffee tends to have on my withinsides. Blerg.)

Back to paper-ing. Let's see if I can finish it by 4?

Unsurprising

I can't stop listening to boyzIImen.

School of Hard Heads

Academia is hard because it is an artificial environment that intrudes into the real. It consumes my life.

I don't want it to, so when I'm done with this, I'm getting out. When I'm done. It's not as easy as it sounds--I have only a few weeks left and I can't see my way past them. But we've been over that.

What am I going to do when I don't have school as an excuse anymore? I'm serving my Tulsa church, and I love that I can do that. I'm trying to the best of my poor ability to be available to friends in need, but I'm inadequate, and I know that. Meanwhile I throw the last few minutes of my day towards Christ and I think it's the best I can do, because I'm just so busy. My busyness, examined, yields a different record of the day, the remains of which are idled (idoled) elsewhere; the between-times of tasks that I never quite seem to accomplish.

I've found my need for grace to be overwhelmingly more than I once assumed. I've found His willingness to cover me to be beyond the limits of my presumptions. And I've taken advantage of that.

Where's the line between rejoicing in the ever-presence of Grace, and abusing it? Between security and complacency?

I've spent years and years in school and now, emerging, I'm confronted with my own staggering ignorance.

More than a Mile

So...I didn't get ten pages written. More like eight.

BUT this morning at the park I ran for a mile and a half. I don't think I've ever done that before. And I'm not even in pain. Much.

Off to babysit for the day: I will have to bring a book to read, in case Little Man deigns to nap. Laptop battery and adapter coming this week! Soon I will be a normal computer-toting person, able to do my work on-the-go. Instead of precariously balanced on a chair in my living room, hoping I don't jostle the frayed and cantankerous cord as it juts awkwardly from the socket. Oh get here soon! Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds!

(that was from memory; I hope it is correct.)

By Saturday night I will have doubled my current thesis pagery. Ready? GO.