transition

Last semester I had a folklore class. My tall, past-middle-aged professor with a short, puffy white beard spent a lot of time talking about the folklore perspective of transition. According to custom beliefs (if I remember this correctly), it is bad luck for a person to stand upon the threshold of a doorway for very long. It's bad luck because the threshold is symbolic of transition. And if someone gets stuck in transition, well, they'll probably never escape.

A lot of folklore like this is based on fear.

Source

Good thing I'm not superstitious because this feels like the longest transition of my life. It's my last semester of my undergrad. I don't know what I'll be doing next fall.

I might go to grad school. I could go to UND or even somewhere warm like Arizona.

I might take an assistantship in an English class in Spain or somewhere in East Asia.

I might just work. But where? Grand Forks? Fargo? Minneapolis? Denver?

Eh, maybe I'll just run off and marry a random stranger.

Every time I have a conversation with someone that I don't know very well (e.g., usually my parents' friends), they always ask if I'm in school. Once they found out that, yes, I am in school and that, in fact, it's my last semester ("Oh! How exciting!"), they always always always ask,

"Well what are your plans after graduation?"

Plans? Who said I had to have plans?

I usually feel inferior after the abrupt end to that conversation, but lately I've been realizing that I'm really glad I don't have plans. I have ideas, yes, but concrete plans? Nah. I know God is working. He's given me ideas. He's opened doors. This helps my life be a lot more simplified than if I had plaaaans. I can rest, and I can watch God work instead of putting forth my own weak efforts to come up with a plan.

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I've been SPRING CLEANING!!

It's kind of fun but really laborious. I didn't realize how much stuff I had just lying around, serving no purpose. I found lots of bank statements, old textbooks, clothes I didn't even know I owned, some letters from my sponsor kid, old knick knacks (does this word really start with a k?), etc. There was a plastic bag sitting in my closet full of material, beads, and stuff. I started going through each item in that bag, one by one, to decide what to keep and what to throw out. I was also watching something on TV at the time so I was pretty distracted when suddenly I looked down and AH! there was a spider on my rug. It scared me. And I'm pretty sure it came out of that bag I was going through. Yuck. I'm never leaving junk sitting around again.

I decided to sell some of my old textbooks on Amazon. I had my first sale today! And it was my first day of selling them! I was pleased. Even though I only made about $3.. at least I won't have Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology lying around anymore.

Ever since I can remember, I've always had a junk drawer of just random stuff that I use and a lot of random stuff that maybe I'll use someday but never do. Do you have a junk drawer? If so, what is in it? Here's a picture of mine in Fargo. I don't really have one in Thompson... yet....