No Room on the Back Burner

Happy New Year, everyone, and Happy Epiphany.

Epiphany is the celebration of the arrival of the Wise Men at Jesus' home - historically figured to be about three years beyond the manger scene where their figures are so often placed.

The word is used by fiction writers - their main characters must have an epiphany! And by self-help gurus - you realize that if you eat a bag of chips every day, you will continue to gain weight and feel crummy? Epiphany!

My Epiphany epiphany is that I will never, ever finish the work I have to do.

I return to school Friday. I have not written my syllabi. I have not written a book review - and, in fact, I have not even finished reading the book, which seems to be some sort of requirement. I have not completed - or even worked on - three other projects.

Part of this is because I came down with a miserable fluish thing right after Christmas that I am still fighting. Part of it is because I taught an overage, directed a play, and otherwise overworked myself in the fall semester, and somehow thought I deserved a rest.

And part of it is because I've always had faith in an infinite back burner, where projects would happily simmer until I had the time to pull them forward and finish cooking them (to extend the metaphor to an annoying degree). Sadly, my projects will soon be falling off the back of the range as I push more and more tasks to those overburdened back burners.

My epiphanic* wishes for my readers, both real and imagined, are health, energy, and a much bigger stove in 2014.

*Yes, epiphanic. I looked it up.