So I says to myself, I says, "Hey, how hard could it be?" Lots of other people have done this doctoral stuff and survived...That was brilliant thinking.
Simply brilliant.
I'd forgotten how staggeringly boring academic reading can be! I'd also forgotten the wildly annoying tendency of some writers to use fancy words when simple words would do just fine. For example, can anyone please, please, please give me any possible excuse for the words "utilize" or "explicate" to exist in the English language? "I utilized a pair of green Hulk Hands to explicate a Bible verse to the children." Eew! What sort of evil academic insecurity or twisted snobbishness drives somebody to write like that? Probably somebody who doesn't spend nearly enough time playing with Hulk Hands and children if you ask me...
But I signed up for all this, didn't I?
What a doofus!
Then again, there is another way of looking at it I suppose. As I look back over the course of my life, there is a very surprising trend well worth considering. Sometimes the best, most exhilarating surprises of God are buried under a pile of very hard work. Not to go all Mr. Miaggi on us here, but sometimes there truly is something to be said for waxing a lot of old cars before trying to enter the fight. I wonder if some of us don't experience much surprise from God simply because we refuse to do the homework often necessary to receive all God wants to give us.
Yeah, that's probably true. At least that's what I'm going to be telling myself repeatedly for the next four years!
With all this in mind then, I hope you are all able to properly utilize these reflections to help explicate the difficulties of your surprise experimentations.
Or something...
