Happy 2019. Those years stack up. It feels like not very long ago I was seeing Blade Runner for the first time and considering its conception of 2019. Now that we made it here, it looks like we ended up with more than enough violent bleak corruption, and none of the flying cars.

Damnit, 1982.

Successfully defended my dissertation Friday morning (30 November) in Southern California. A little less than 12 hours later, I’m home in Oregon. A little less than 24 hours before, I’d arrived in a rainstorm in the desert and now I’ve come home to one in the woods.

Dr. Tamara is going to take some getting used to.

The dissertation is turned in. The defense is scheduled for the end of the month, and I’ve arranged the plane tickets for the trip down to campus. Everything has both sped up and slowed down. I moved last week, and three-quarters of the house is filled with boxes to waist height. So many things are changing. These are good changes all, and mostly a very long time in coming. I have spent so long waiting, and hoping, that I don’t quite know how to respond to being at the end of the waiting.

I hope to enjoy learning how to do that.

My dissertation deadline was extended. This means I have two weeks to make the requested corrections and finish up the one chapter that’s been giving me grief. I’m relieved, because I’d really wanted things not to be any more rushed than necessary. As my advisor said, you only get to do this once in your lifetime.

It seems unreal that I’m almost done.

“For the ‘Romans,’ it didn’t matter much whether the lions were eating a robber or a bishop, and it probably didn’t make much of a difference to the lions, but the robber’s friends and the bishop’s friends told different stories about those leonine meals. It is in these stories that martyrdom, as opposed to execution or dinner, can be found, not in ‘what happened.’” (Boyarin, Dying for God, p. 21).

I’ve been through twelve centuries of history and at least six languages of material over the last 48 hours. Is it possible to get intellectual whiplash?

Ever closer to the completion of this dissertation. I may not have any brain cells left when I’m done…but at least I’ll be done.