Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Any day now...

...I'll be ready to sit and read, or enjoy a loaf of fresh bread, or settle down with one of the seven $1 DVDs I got at Harris Teeter, without doing mental wheelies and donuts about:

-teaching English in France (darn you, UNCW careers website, for raising long-dead possibilities!)
-the Sojourners internship
-what I would do with my couch, bed, books, &c in either of the above cases
-seminary/div school wheres and whens
-the one-hour Office that's coming on tomorrow. Holly's back!
-Christmas baking and how I can limit it to ingredients I have on hand and whether my modifications to an existing recipe will be successful
-whether it will still be this cold on Saturday when I cover a Christmas parade
-whether I should buy more socks or assume this cold snap will be over soon
-when I'm going to get my necklace fixed
-the yoga I should be doing
-the running that the cold keeps me from doing (oh, shucks)
-How I Met Your Mother season 4, which is seriously tempting me to drop the more grown-up and necessary work I've vowed to do
-this very blog
-the fatigue I've felt today and yesterday even though I got almost 8 hours of sleep each night and haven't exercised. I think cold is tiring, in part because I hunch and tense my shoulders and fists like crazy.
-plenty of other stuff on plenty of scales, from "where does that comma belong?" to "where do I belong?"

Bill said this morning that it's exciting, my having so many possibilities before me. I said I had hoped that would be over and I could sit back for a while. He said I guess God didn't have that in mind. While I have had a great few weeks at work, almost eerily so, it still doesn't feel like a long-term fit. There's too much tension in the rest of life, too many things changing course. And then this stupid France thing comes up (I'm talking thirty minutes ago) and muddies the waters even further. The deadline is January 1. The engagement would begin in October. I have no clue how many people apply or how hard it is to get, but I am demonstrably awesome at French. Unlike with seminary or some of the other possibilities, this feels pretty final, like if I don't do it this go-round I will not do it. The paperwork alone is enough to deter me if I don't feel a loud and clear call to go there. But my heart did truly leap within me when I saw the possibility, more than it has in a long time. Maybe that was the coffee.