I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons. I often go back to re-read old blog posts--by often, I mean at least two or three times a week. I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about. This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called "The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday"; I haven't finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.
This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week. And yes, that's one of my new year's aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026). But that's the joy of early July--there's still time to adjust my trajectory.
Speaking of inspirations, during my driving to the grocery store yesterday, on NPR's Fresh Air, I heard an interview with romance writer Kennedy Ryan. She's the first African American to win the RITA, the highest romance writing award. I started thinking about romance novels and wish fulfillment and the voices and faces that aren't characters in romance novels. I thought about older women characters who might get one last shot at their dreams coming true. Romance novels need an obstacle, and the inability to see oneself as romance worthy could be that obstacle. Another potent one would be that one dream is coming true, and the inability to believe that multiple dreams could come true at once.
If I wrote romance novels with older female protagonists, I'd approach it as alternate life Kristin explorations. But I was also attracted to this idea, from yesterday's interview, about creating an imaginary town, a place that becomes an escape, like all those clergy novels of the 90's.
Before I head out on my morning walk to beat the coming heat, let me also record this snippet from last year's blog post on this day: "I wonder where we will be at the halfway point of next summer. Hopefully I will be meeting with my candidacy committee to proceed to endorsement, which is usually a halfway point to ordination, but in my case, I'm doing things a bit out of order. At Lutheran seminaries, students would do CPE much earlier, often in the summer after the first year, and then they'd get to endorsement sometime in the following year, before internship (year 3 of seminary) and the last year of seminary."
Last year Kristin had no idea how much would have changed and for the better. My candidacy has now transferred to a different synod, which means I can progress towards ordination more quickly. A year ago, I was expecting to have to do a part-time internship which would last two years, in addition to needing additional seminary classes, which would mean that summer of 2028 would be the earliest I could be ordained. Now I am on track to be ordained in the first half of 2027.
Last year Kristin had hopes that she might get a tenure track job at Spartanburg Methodist College, but she would have assumed that it probably couldn't happen soon. And now I am an Associate professor on the tenure track.
This morning, I'm feeling a bit fretful about the electrical work happening at our S'burg house--we bought all sorts of fixtures thinking that the installation was included in the expensive cost to rewire the house, only to be told we'd get an update on Monday. Does this mean a proposal/invoice, as it sounded on the phone with the scheduler? Or just an update on timelines? It's tiring.
Tiring, but fixable--let me remember the saying that I first heard in one of Anne Lamotte early books, when one of her friends said that a problem solved by an infusion of cash is not really an interesting problem. It's especially not a problem when one has the money.
The sun is up to begin the day's roasting--let me go for my walk.
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