on a sunday windy and drear

[highlyeccentric]

I really ought to be fiddling with history, but i need to take a while to recoup, i think. lately i've been too tired and frazzled to study effectively :( i keep trying to take time out and it's not getting me anywhere.
i can, however, count pens with great skill. bet you never knew i was hiding THAT talent. On the bright side the manager wants me to contact him when i get my semester 2 timetable, if my hours are ok then i'll have a job there. so that's good.

I'm in a blue funk alright. Combination of: essay stress; impending change of location; the downside of academic addiction; and one of those slump periods where i talk about the church a lot, i'm still talking theology as fluently if not more so, but faith seems to have dissipated somehow while i was looking at other things. cjhartley123 had a nice fat post on such things last week, to which i responded in reasonable depth. somehow i didn't notice along the way that I'm there at the moment. Perhaps because i was so happily discussing theology.

Sigh... I've burnt myself out, brainwise. I'm going to have to fight to get these last couple of essays done. Obviously I was too eager at the begining of semester. :P I guess it's like any addiction (not that i've had many, academia is my lifelong vice)... great at first, and you hand over your whole life in the belief you'll never want it back. Then it turns nasty and drives you night and day, and you've no idea how to claim back your time, your mind, your sanity.
Maybe it's like getting married- easy to get into hard to get out of.
At any rate i can neither bring myself to take decent time out from study, nor study effectively. I do a lot of sitting here with a book open, browsing the net.

Other downside of this brain-out is that theology becomes just one more way to twist that academic addiction. I can't resist it, you throw me a theological question and I'll bite. But it's not doing anything for me anymore. The problem with being such a brainiac child is that I never really developed any non-academic ways of relating to God. So when i shut down like this, it's like God shuts down too. And each time feels like it's the only time, i have to fight to remember that things were just like this last year. And the year before that.
I was pretty burnt out at the end of last year, too. I remember deciding i was going to institute a computer-free day, as some form of sabbath observance. that never happened.
I can't remember which semester it was in last year, but it was toward the end of it, Prof. Shboul showed us a video of the Hajj pilgrimage in ARIS. I sat there and cried. Wierd, huh. But there it was, all these people doing apparently absurd things, but it meant something. At the time, it seemed like no matter how many things I did, absurd or otherwise, it was all just going through the motions.

Right now I don't feel like I'm even making any motions. John was talking tonight about 'companion stories'. I'm not exactly sure what those were, he wasn't very good at explaining them. But it was something to do with things you carry with you, memories or ideas or habits or whatever, which give you inspiration and keep you going. I don't remember what mine are. Mine is not a story about an anglo-saxon bishop, fantastic as those bishops were. (Most of them, too, were doing really absurd stuff that meant an unbelievable amount.)

I didn't think very hard at easter camp this year. The theme was 'Who Do You Say That I Am'. I felt that i'd got all the really important stuff down the year we had Pete Hobson. This is why I call myself his fangirl (*glares at David*).
Then I realised- i don't remember what it was that i learnt that year. It was earth shattering, and i can't remember what it was all about. There was something about grace.

I can't remember who my God is. I can list any number of things God isn't. I think it's possible I've isn't-ed God out of relevance.

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[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

:) *hugs you back too*