A Girl With a Sword

almost the end

Oh, I'm having a miserable day today, but I'm so excited about life! I'm excited that it's almost the end of the semester and I'm going to have a great summer of working on papers and doing research for my assistantship and hanging out with my friends in an environment so much less stressful. It will have all of the great things about the semester without the pain I'm going through now! And I'm going to travel around and I'm going to Stanford for a month to hang out at linguistic rockstar camp (aka the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute) and I can go to San Francisco and it will be so beautiful! And I'm also excited because yesterday I gave my paper on tautological compounds in Beowulf at a Medieval Studies conference and other people liked it and thought it was a good paper! And the whole conference was so interesting and it made me feel so good about Anglo-Saxon studies and scholarship in general and we talked about what we are trying to do in studying this language and literature and why we are doing it. Plus, I got to learn important things, like how "when you complement a man's sword you complement the man himself." Yeah . . .

Now today I am writing my syntax paper (again, I wrote a draft last week, but had to throw it out, because I decided that it's analysis was all wrong) and my brain is so tired because preparing for the conference took all my sleep. I present two more papers on Wednesday, at a special linguistics colloquium, then turn them in Friday. This next week is hell week, but at least I know why I'm putting myself through this.

I'm reading through I Kings and I'm on the part when Elijah is being fed with ravens and when he's hanging out with the widow and God is making her oil and flour last longer and it just reminds me that even when we think we are completely out of energy and thoughts God still keeps things coming and makes sure we are okay and I'm just so happy about that because by the time I get to end of the semester I know I couldn't do any of this on my own. . . . But that makes me wonder, how do people who aren't Christians manage to get things done? Common grace strength? I guess so, it must be scarier, though.