finis

This blog deserves a proper conclusion (in keeping with its beginning).

To conclude my blog with the conclusion of my blog, I was wed. Or, to put things in their proper order, my sister was wed, making me a real, bona fide, living, breathing in-law.

Then I went back to practicing law, knocking the other leg out from under the two-legged double entendre that seemed like the cutting edge of clever back in 2004.

Then I was wed. Wed, incidentally, to probably the most faithful reader of this blog. Which is probably why he knows so many things about me for no apparent reason (caveat lector).

So, this is the way the blog ends: not with a bang or a whimper, but with a post. On tax day.

It also ends with promise of future publications elsewhere on the interwebs and assurance that its author intends (with apologies to Norton Juster) to live, if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so.

THE END

laundry list

I have such bad writer's block (and have for more than a year now) that I couldn't even get through this sentence without stopping to move the apostrophe from "writer's" to "writers'" and back again (which reminds me that I've been meaning to Google "symptoms of ADD" to see whether I have it or not).

Even in my journal it's hard to write more than a paragraph, or a couple lines of something attempting to be poetry.

(Is Facebook behind this? Or grad school?)

So this blog is kind of the equivalent of the pair of smaller-size jeans that every woman has in her closet that remind her of days that were but are no longer...but could come back if she tried...but even then, they're not even in style anymore...

But, if I were to write a blog post, here are the topics that are stewing:

• singleness (in the church/as a category/in relation to "waiting"/and careers for Christian women/and patriarchal teaching/and feminism/and contentment/and Titus 2/and fear/and celibacy)
• mortality (as a whole/related to sickness/as a shock/in many many fragments, from the last baby tooth to the first gray hair to reading glasses to menopause to losing your driver's license)
• "good," in all its theological and philosophical intricacies (yes, this again)
•  basil pesto
• tests, like the James 1 kind
• school (and teaching/and Christianity/and friendship/and compromise/and dissertation research/and politics/and faculty advisors)
• war (across history/and its aftermath)
• all the Biblical instances of God turning the natural order on its head, from Isaac to the wedding at Cana to Joshua's long day to the virgin birth to Lazarus...
• the man who walks past my window every night between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m., talking either to an invisible interlocutor via cell phone or merely to an invisible interlocutor
• the sun
• dogs
• how plants are better than dogs

I can't tell if this has been inspirational or not. But time will.

experiencing cognitive dissonance

So today I was sitting in the cafeteria waiting for some friends to join me for lunch. At the table behind me were two men discussing [what I later determined was] this exchange between David Barton and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show:

David Barton and Jon Stewart Debate Thomas Jefferson (LA Times)

I wish I would've known then that this is what they were talking about.

premature conclusions

Friendship is intertextuality.

summer

Last spring, my summer plan was to take this

to this.

 

This summer, my plan is to read things like this

 
and this

and come to a place where I can better articulate why I do what I do.

So it's basically the same project, except in my head instead of in my room.

trying again

The fiery version of Emily took a hiatus for a while and seems to be stealing back now bit by bit (and sometimes in wild spurts, which she often regrets). Whether this version blogs as much as in previous fiery-er seasons remains to be seen. Facebook nibbles diligently at the edges of the narrative urge.

What's most confusing about this blog at this point is my impending entry into -inlawhood, which takes a big whack at the concept of futureinlaw. (As for the phrase's professional interpretation, I'm still postponing that pretty successfully.)

José Hernández, Martín Fierro

Barbarism? No.
Wit and wisdom saturate
This sad gaucho’s song.