For Lack of a Better Word

It has been over a month since finishing the spring semester. I spent weeks researching and writing three substantial papers, on women and power in Chaucer, on Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth's use of river ecology in nationalist poetics, and on magic and the body in The Tempest. As you might expect, my brain was fried.

Since completing this work, I have spent my time not writing, but reading all the "fun" books that build up over the course of the school year. Oddly enough, my hands started to itch. I felt weird, reading and thinking but not writing. Writing, as the rhet/comp folks like to say, holds reading's hand. They skip together down the path of critical thinking.

And yet here was this empty, forlorn blog that I started almost one year ago. A forum, largely private (because I know few read this) for writing about what I read and think and presumably sending these notions out into the void. The challenge now is to not get fed up with writing on the blog. I have never been one for forced journaling. (That gerund makes me cringe and turning into a substantive verb is even worse... "to journal"... ugh.) In college, I took a yoga class. Since I had all my classes taken, I indulged myself in ballet, yoga, and badminton for college credit. Back to the yoga. The instructor mandated writing daily journal entries which would be turned in for part of the final grade. I was one of those people who would make up a week's worth of entries in one sitting and be done with it. I dislike writing about my feelings, even to myself. Hopefully I never end up in therapy that prescribes journaling as part of the healing process.

So why blog then? Well, I need to keep my writing fingers in shape for the coming school year, and I think that I have something to share with you. The first goal should be easy; I could just type the alphabet over and over again. The second, we'll see. I make no promises.