tm dot μ dot ν

too busy to capitalize title

this is the current away message on my aol instant messenger:

Uh, yeah, I'm super busy. And by super busy I mean I have three-hundred pages of reading for Monday and two term papers due Friday And another Monday And I might be going to New Jersey this weekend And I might be going home next week Wednesday And I have no clue what I'm going to do with my life. If anyone sees my mom or my best friend tell her/him to call me before I break down entirely -- I love y'all. Oh, and I would like you to know that I have not exaggerated at all. I seriously have that much work to do. Maybe I will just not sleep for the next five days.

so yes and yes I realize I could have done some of this work earlier except for the part that I had work that I was doing then. and hopefully in nine days I will be home and then I can rest, if by rest you mean rush around frantically catching up with various friends and spending money i don't have going to movies with said friends.

uh, money. which reminds me to update you on the whole campus job / health card / lack of paying thing. basically there is no new news. I am still working. I am still not getting paid. I am still angry.

right now, i just wish I could not be in school. i don't want that mystical little paper that lets me get a Good Job and a Successful Life if it means sacrificing another three years of my life. It would be different if I didn't have anything better to do. But I have all these, as Mr. Strauss would put it, "Big Questions" that I would like to sit down and write about and think about. Questions like What does it mean to be a Christian and an intellectual and What is shalom and What does a Christian society look like and Whom should I vote for.

Plus new ones that were added today when I visited the Orthodox Presbyterian Church which Steve Veldkamp and Andrea Hensen attend, and which by the way I really loved (sorry, way too tired to do links) and ended up in a several-hours-long theological discussion: What is worship, What is formal worship, What do we mean when we say that the Bible is the Word of God and isn't Jesus the Word of God, What role does art have in worship, Is the Gospel a spoken thing. Even more questions that now I need to deal with (read: SHELF WHILE I DO SCHOOLWORK).

It's frustrating especially because some of these papers I would really enjoy writing, like the Reformation Theology one on the Anglican Communion and what we can learn from their church structure and the Philosophy paper on Postmodernism.

And meanwhile concepts like 'regulative principle of worship' to 'postmodernism' and 'Kingdom' and 'shalom' and 'worship' and 'Platonism' and 'tradition' and 'church-state separation' and 'ideology' and the ever-popular 'Herman Dooyeweerd' are running around in my head at high speed, screaming their lungs out, bumping into one another and making it nigh impossible for me to get anything done.

I think that my attempts to also keep an eye on American, Canadian, British, French, Spanish, Iraqi and Israeli/Palestinian politics and current events via blog-reading should really be discarded for the next week, as should my reading of various Christian bloggers. They only add more words, pictures and comments
to my overloaded brain.

And so now it's almost three. I've been in bed since 1 but have been unable to sleep despite being tired. It's so good to write again; I truly miss writing prose and poetry in this blog and in my offline journal. I console myself with writing snatches, mere turns of phrase really, in my head on off-moments or making sure the prose I write for my papers shines. But writing papers is not the same as taking a thought you want to think and thinking it out on paper (or on screen, you know what I mean.)

So, good night. I will likely not be back for a week at least.

Posted by Tim at March 8, 2004 02:59 AM | TrackBack