20150425.0809

I finished another volume, the twenty-seventh, of my journal last night. I had meant to reflect upon the experience today, to comment about the ten years of work on my journals in bound volumes rather than the hole-punched and binder-gathered legal pad pages that precede them. I was going to talk about how the journaling maps onto my graduate and post-graduate experience, since I made the switch to the bound volumes after completing my student teaching, at the end of my undergraduate days, and I switched the kind of volume I used at much the same time that I began my job search--the hallmark of the newly-minted PhD--in earnest. But I looked back at entries in this webspace and recalled that I have recently done that very thing, within the month, in fact, and so I will not wax so eloquent about my erratic, inadequate, and decade-long nighttime writing as I had intended. (I will note, though, that there is likely a metaphor in there somewhere.)

If I am going to follow a retrospective impulse, though, I might note that it has been some two years since the news came that I would be out of work in The City, and that I remain somewhat annoyed by the circumstance. A year ago today, I offered a wry comment about winter holiday shopping, not even realizing or recalling it to be National Poetry Writing Month. This day in 2012 saw me rant about something I read in the New York Times, which I read when I lived in The City and was better able to keep abreast of events in the world. It echoes, or mimics with greater ferocity, what I wrote on this day a year before, discussing my reactions to the quadricentennial of the Authorized Version (which, in its original printing, includes such works as Bel and the Dragon and the Book of Tobit, in case people think the KJV is absolute and unchanging). 25 April has evidently been a good writing day for me across the years; I should probably look back over my journals to see if I have been as god in them as I have in this webspace, at least about this day.

Retrospection will only do so much, though, particularly when it can only be indulged for short times--and I cannot at present spend more time on it than I have. There is, as ever, more work to do; the freelance piece I have begun needs finishing, and there are assignments submitted that need my comment and assessment. Other projects also require my attention, although several of them look back on other things entirely, and not always through the lens of the real. Perhaps sometime, when I have cleared out more of my docket than I currently can claim to have done, I can spend more time poring over such records as I leave on occasional nights and in the mornings and find something within them that I had not before seen.