American Girl

With the Veteran's flag from my father's funeral

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The Way of the Turbit

Okay, so in retrospect, that was more than a little bit manic last week.  Kinda like deciding to start exercising a little bit every day and then trying to work out four times a day and/or every chance you can get.  No wonder I crashed and burned.  And yet, oddly, I do think that the experiment worked.  Because, truth to tell, even in the midst of the flames, I did learn something.†  Several things.  One, and perhaps most importantly, it is possible to find a half hour a day for writing, even on what might otherwise feel like wholly impossible days.  And, two, doing so curiously means that the days themselves feel less impossible, less pressured .  But, three, and this is probably equally important as one and two, this does not necessarily mean trying to finish a piece of writing (no, not even a blog post) in any one segment of time that has somehow miraculously opened up.  What it means is allowing oneself to come back to the writing ev...
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Fourth Thought of the Day

This feels a little manic.  I probably shouldn't be trying to write again today.  Three posts in a day is more than enough.  But I have found yet another twenty minutes that I never knew I had, so here I am, writing again. It's like finding a treasure in your sofa when all you thought there was was loose change.  Suddenly, I have all the time in the world for writing.  More than enough.  An abundance!  I am overflowing with time, just like the Virgin Mary overflowing with graces.  It is as if I have stepped into a whole other life, one in which there is actually enough time to do everything I ever dreamed I might want to do. And then some.  I have not only written three (and counting) blog posts today.  I have walked into campus with the Dragon Baby (i.e. exercised--she walks fast on those little legs!  Especially when we go past the vet's).  I have spent two and half (or thereabouts) hours finishing preparing for class....
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Canticle of the Creatures

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(click to enlarge) Happy St. Francis Day! Statue: Francis of Assisi (d. October 3, 1226), Laudes Creaturarum , better known as the " Canticle of the Sun ." Prairie dog: Donovan, "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," from Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972).
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Glass Ceiling

I've been complaining a lot for a while now about feeling like I have reached the limits of what I am going to be able to accomplish in life, most viscerally (and vocally) in fencing , but more seriously (and melancholically) in my career, particularly my research . I have various theories about why I've been feeling like this: * delayed post-tenure depression brought on by the opportunity at long last to spend a year off actually working on my research; * fatigue brought on by working so hard this past year on my research, coupled with despair over the fact that there was no way I was going to be able to finish anything like a full draft of my next book in only a year, particularly since I was more or less starting from scratch on the research; * anxiety at the thought that my son is now a teenager, which means that he will most likely be leaving home for college within the next five years, leaving me without a reason to get to campus in the morning other than to work on my o...
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Twenty-Minute Post

This is already a disaster.  I sat down at my MacBook a full five minutes ago, intending to spend twenty minutes just writing, as per Prof. Boice's advice on working in brief, daily sessions , and it took the stupid machine a full three minutes just to boot (what has my son been downloading onto my laptop?!!!).  And then I had the thought that I should check in iTunes for a recording of some of the songs that we have been talking about in my course on Mary , and while those were downloading, it took another two or three minutes for Blogger even to open.  How can I possibly write something effective in only twenty minutes under these conditions? Okay, now I've had to move so that I am sitting in a chair rather than at the dining room table, but I'm still not settled enough to start writing about what I wanted to say.  See, there seems to be a contradiction in the advice that Prof. Boice gives.  On the one hand, he says, and I do believe him, that we can write ...
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