Dust

Today I was writing at our amazing local pool complex, which is open in the off-season as a park. It has been a dark and cold winter, and now we're having a week of sun. I pride myself on being a sun-shy Seattle girl but wow is this nice.

Hello again and happy Ash Wednesday 2025.

If you have spoken to me at any point in the past four years, you know that my Goal In Life is to write the four papers that went with my theology classes so that I can officially say that I finished that program. The deadline for the papers was two years after the end of the last class, going on four years ago. Officially one has to apply for extensions. I haven’t done that in a while. Yet I keep plugging along. Progress Has Been Made. Very, very slow progress. I’ve written three papers. Each one a ridiculous struggle, each well received when I finally did finish it, though there’s always the depressing realization that I’ve gone to all that work for one whole person to read it. But in any case, now I’m down to the last one. Should be the easiest. Have already put in many more hours than it should take. Am nowhere near finished. 

I’m trying, I swear. At least part of me is. Very possibly another part of me has every intention of dragging this out as long as possible. Because…finishing would mean taking the next step in pursuing a church job, an effort I’m on the one hand very attached to and on the other hand feels doomed to failure? Because it would mean looking for a job of any kind, which I’ve been saying for going on 14 (FOURTEEN!) years that I want but suspiciously have not really tried to land? Because I secretly like my life as a bad Swiss housewife? Theories abound. In any case, the fact that I’m “supposed to be writing my paper” has stopped me from doing these and any number of other things, including writing anything else, for some time now (see: the entirety of 2024, during which I posted exactly nothing here). Lately, this seems particularly unfortunate. I have Things To Say. I think. So this Lent I’m going to try writing every day again. In the worst case, the Things To Say will mysteriously evaporate because they are only in my head and do not deserve to be put to paper (screen); in the very best case some magic will occur and by Easter I’ll have written my paper. Resurrection? We’ll see! If you feel like joining me for the ride: welcome.