Bad blogger, again

Already a whole month has gone by and I haven't posted anything. Bad blogger, bad. No biscuit!

This is not to say I've been doing nothing, or even writing nothing.

School is definitely back in session for the spring, and I see that I've spent more time writing to organize at school, as usual. 'Pastoral' letters, letters to the editor, letters to the administration, letters of inquiry, letters to friends in jail, and letters to friends at seminary and elsewhere who are panicked because I am going to jail.

Let alone leaves of a notebook, stuffed full, waiting to be typed up and put to some good use: reflections on ministry, poems, articles, theologies ('God-talks'), future book chapters, rants--about life in general, and from the viewpoint of an activist seminarian in particular.

Plans. Did I mention plans? Budgets? Pro forma? Flowcharts? Yikes.

Oodles and oodles of meeting notes. Oh, and class notes. Sometimes I take those too. With rants in the margins. Or more 'God-talk'.

To-do lists. I seem to always write them, and then can never find them again when I need them.

I've been carrying around my book manuscript too, trying to make revisions. I have since learned that the worst thing to say when approached while doing this is, "I'm making revisions to my book." This will start a conversation that will quite possibly erode all the time you had planned for actually making those revisions. Apologies, Sandy, I'll send it in soon...

I need these tangible writings in life though. I need to feel paper and pen, or printed-out copy, and to see others reading and responding and the expressions on their faces when doing so. Not always, but often, when I go on jags away from writing online. Real human interaction. Call me old-fashioned, but in over a decade of writing online, I still find no fully-fulfilling substitute.

After a while, after I've had my fill though, I'll collect all these pieces and put them here, or nearby. I'm looking forward to it, and it's also a relief of sorts. In most of that past decade, I've lost track of the written pages. They simply take up too much room, and are hard to leaf through. But I can look back at the past five years on this blog, for example, and remember I used to have a very different life. That too, is helpful. And very fulfilling.

Speaking of which, I think I may be going back to that life, at least in part, soon. I had a good conversation, and need to make a few phone calls and see. More to come...