The Outline

The Philosophy

The namesake of this blog provides you all with a description of where I am in life. I generally refer to live in seasons which of course I take from Ecclesiastes. For several years now, this passage has been dear to my heart and close to my heart is where I shall keep it. To me it only makes sense that it should be, at the very least, in my first “real” blog. Let me interject that it is truly refreshing to be able to write without in text citation.

Ecclesiastes 3

A Time for Everything

1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
6 a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
9 What does the worker gain from his toil?
10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Courtesy of Bible Gateway.com


(YET AGAIN WITH THE CITATIONS!)

But as of lately, I’ve been feeling—well, out of place. Currently, I feel as though I’m not in any of these seasons-perhaps a mixture of them or just between the lines. As Casting Crowns (I just can’t stop with the citations now can I) put it so eloquently…somewhere in the middle. “Somewhere between the new and the old, somewhere between who I am and who I used to be, somewhere in the middle you’ll find me. Somewhere between the wrong and the right, somewhere between the darkness and the light, somewhere between who I was and who Your making me, somewhere in the middle you’ll find me.”

The Middle

This is the part where I tell you what the current middle consists of. I am still working on my thesis proposal and in fact have a meeting with my advisor at 1pm today. I should have completed by proposal weeks ago and begun working on my data collection for my thesis by now, but that did not happen. It didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, mostly because when I started this whole process I didn’t know what I was doing. I arbitrarily chose something to research and didn’t even consider the philosophical or theoretical background. Not to mention, I also started this when I was planning the wedding and taking a full load of courses which pulled me in all directions. It’s not that I’m unthankful for those experiences because I learned a lot about things I need to know about. It’s just that I was never able to focus on any one thing. Then school was out, and I went into wedding mode for the next 2 months (yes I was still in wedding mode post ceremony). After coming back from the honeymoon, fully moving Corey in, and organizing all of the wonderful gifts we received it was time to get a part time job so that we weren’t totally broke all of the time. Shortly after, my sister moved in and school started. I hadn’t looked at my proposal in months. So, a few days before it started I completed all of the edits that Dr. McCusker had scribbled in red and insisting that I must have written it in my sleep. This was not a compliment however true.
Then we began the process of turning my proposal into something readable. We focused on one section at a time, one week at a time, and finally ended with a decent proposal, except. Well, except that I still did not have a theoretical foundation but at least I knew that I wanted to focus in political economy. Political economy focuses on how the organization of our economy is impacted by a variety of issues, none the least politics. For example, capitalism only works as well as it does because of the serious physical property and intellectual property rights. Well, this being said those of you who know me want to understand what in the world (pun intended) this has to do with geography. Well if this is your question just send me an email and I will be happy to explain it to you however, I probably shouldn’t re-write my theoretical approach on my blog (someone might steal it). And at this point, I decided to embark upon the Marxist journey of understanding how capitalism affects space and society—which began with a long conversation with the talented Dr.Hanham.

After reading and digesting and writing a theoretical approach, as well as some serious restructuring of my proposal I gave Dr.McCusker a copy on Monday night and we will be discussing it today. So I should propose by the end of the semester—let’s hope (and pray, seriously). That said it should be known that my timeline will take me through the summer to complete the thesis and therefore I will not actually graduate until December 08, but should be able to get a job in the Fall of 08. I am stuck in Morgantown until this thesis is finished!

So, basically, I am in the middle of a Master’s Degree.

This has become a really long post. I think I’ll end it here and save more rants for another day.

My birthday is tomorrow- I’ll be 24. Half way to 48.

somewhere in the middle