I passed my dissertation defense yesterday.

All done.

Everyone keeps asking me how it feels to be done.  I have a hard time answering, because I don’t feel done.

I realized on the way home why that is: this is the beginning, not the end.

It’s the end of school, of course.

But it’s not the end of doing everything I always did in school–reading, learning, writing, discussing, thinking.  It’s the beginning of my doing that professionally, for pay, and with the goal of making the world a little better, somehow, by the fruits of that study.  But it’s not the end of my education.

I haven’t finished the dissertation.  I’ve finished my first book.  But first implies a second, and, one hopes, several more than that.

It has been momentous for me in the sense that I finally feel that I can write a scholarly work (because four men who’ve written some very wonderful scholarly works just told me I did).  “I can write a book.”  That’s what I said out loud to myself when I got back to my car and closed the doors and had my first moment to myself.  I can write a book.  That’s what I’ve done.  And since I’ve done it, that means I can do it.

Yes, friends.  It’s taken me twenty-nine years of schooling to be able to come up with such tautologies: If I can write a book, that means I can write a book.

It seems a not-insignificant thought, however.

And it’s making me want to go to that folder on my desktop titled, “Possible future projects.”  I’ve written the outlines and basic ideas for at least ten books and several dozen research possibilities.  And now I can do them.

That’s kind of, you know, . . . exciting.

Anybody have a Thing going on this week?  Something stressful or scary or demanding?

Here’s a little (as the presenter calls it) “life hack” for you:

Two minutes tonight, and two minutes tomorrow morning before you go out and conquer Monday.  What do you think?  Give it a try and let me know.

(PS to my female academic readers: watch all the way to the end for a wonderful “Imposter Syndrome” story.)

Best deal I’ve found in forever:  Cracker Barrel’s audiobook version of Redbox.

You can rent audiobooks from any Cracker Barrel and return them to any Cracker Barrel.  There’s a lot of Cracker Barrels around, so this is, you know, fairly easy.

$3.50 a week.  That’s not bad.  That’s pretty darn good, actually.  The selection is decidedly not pretty darn good.  But for $3.50 a week, it’s still a good deal.

Especially when the road trip is getting really long and the readers on Librivox are also not pretty darn good.

I’ve just started listening to Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy.  Will let you know.

Have you listened to any good audiobooks lately?

The principal occupational hazard for an ethicist is the tendency to get really riled really easily.

Today, I’m annoyed–really, really annoyed–at insensitivity and latent misogyny in medical terminology.

Why do men have erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation but women have incompetent cervices?  Why couldn’t it be called premature effacement and dilation?  Why hasn’t it been?  Is it because there are no profitable medications to treat the condition, like there are for erectile dysfunction, and therefore no pharmaceutical spin doctor to guard over the terminology?

Why is slow growth in an otherwise flourishing baby called “failure to thrive”?  How does that make a mama feel?  Why aren’t such feelings taken into consideration?  Why has the replacement of discomfort-causing and even blaming terminology for female medical concerns so lagged behind the pace at which male medical concerns have been euphemized?

How would men feel if all the female doctors got together and started renaming their reproductive conditions the way male doctors have been naming ours all these centuries?

How much Viagra could you sell if we started calling it “incompetent penis”?  Forget the gentle-sounding “low sperm count” or its very technical (and thus exceedingly safe) “oligospermia.”  Let’s start calling it “incompetent testicular production.”  Instead of “decreased sperm motility,” let’s call it “incompetent flagella.”

House hunting isn’t particularly fun.

I suppose it might be, if we lived in a place and were ready to move up (or down, or over) in house and had all the time in the world to find the perfect place for us.

Long-distance house hunting isn’t really fun.

House hunting under a time pressure isn’t really fun.

House hunting in an entirely new city about which you know almost nothing isn’t really fun.

Seeing how other people decorate their houses is a little fun.

Home inspections are not fun.

Do you like house hunting?

What would your perfect house be like?

You know what I like best about the week after Easter?

Everybody goes back to work, all the pastel eggs and fluffy chicks and talking, egg-laying bunnies get marked down and sold off, and the secular world stops talking about its spring fertility holiday.

And the Church still has forty-nine more days to celebrate the resurrection.

Partake, all, of the banquet of faith.
Enjoy the bounty of the Lord’s goodness!
Let no one grieve being poor,
for the universal reign has been revealed.
Let no one lament persistent failings,
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
Let no one fear death,
for the death of our Saviour has set us free.
The Lord has destroyed death by enduring it.
The Lord vanquished hell when he descended into it.
The Lord put hell in turmoil even as it tasted of his flesh.
- John Chrysostom, Easter sermon

Well, I already showed you the marshmallows.

(Here’s the recipe I used.)

This was a bad move all around.  I now cannot drink hot chocolate without them.  And I keep forgetting that I don’t want to drink hot chocolate every day.

But I’ve made it worse.

I discovered that if you add a third a cup of cocoa powder to gelatin mixture when you warm it, you get these:

Cocoa marshmallows.

Oh, friends.  Where I have gone, do not follow.

Especially don’t do this.

Some day, when he is capable of rational thought, Amos will reflect on birth order theory and its alleged effect on personality, and he will scoff.

But he will be wise enough to be grateful for birth order and its effect on his parents‘ personality.

Because he benefits immensely from Theo having done it all first.

Anyone want to guess what Amos’s favorite place is?

Well, he was there yesterday.

And the day before that.

And the day before that.

And, you guessed it . . . the day before that.

This morning, guess where I found him.  No, seriously.  Guess.

I shook my finger at him and said, “No, no, Amos!”

He responded thusly:

But I’m not fooled.  This ain’t my first rodeo.

And maybe that’s why it’s less stress-making than it was when Theo did it.  Oh, yeah.  Been here, done this, clearly didn’t learn my lesson, but I remember how to handle it without losing my cool.

Or, at least, I remember how little losing my cool works on such, um, ebullient personalities.

So, apparently, there’s this thing called Pinterest out there that . . . people . . . like.

I’ve finally started playing around with it.

I’ve figured out how to pin something and how to repin something and what happens when you click on a pin and follow a pinner and all that.

I’m not addicted yet, but I can see that there may be some value to this enterprise.

Do you have any favorite pinners, boards, or what have you?

Have you ever learned something totally new thanks to Pinterest?

Have you already moved on to the Next Cool Thing and forgotten that you even have a Pinterest account?

“Wow, this oatmeal sure is yummy, Mom.”

“Finger-lickin’ good.”

“Good to the last drop!  Licking the bowl, it’s so good!”

“Oh em gee, are you serious?  The bowl is empty now?  How can this be?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!”