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Every once in a while, I get a flash of clarity or a sudden feeling that everything in my brain has come together with a soft click. These are usually the moments when I feel a need to post something, so you can see that it is a relatively infrequent occurrence. It’s even more infrequent that the ‘click’ I feel is as palpable as it was last week. I swear I heard it. Like the sound of the wheels catching and aligning in a combination lock. Maybe this is evidence for Steve Huber’s theory that I am actually a robot, who knows. But a wooden robot maybe…this click was not metallic.

Two days before our car broke down Josh and I sat down at filled at a “Dignified Living Assessment” for his work (ie a budget) and made some decisions and goals about the coming year. One of these was to save money for and look for a house/condo to buy around Christmas next year. Another was to curtail our ‘dining’ spending, which is out of control chiefly because my impulse food buys at school. So, I resolved to bring more of my food to school, which would bolster my lenten resolve to fast from refined sugar. I’ve been struggling with overeating for some time and having a monetary restriction helps me more than anything else.

So, when we got the word that are car was completely dead on Thursday, several of the layers that needed to come together were already in place. The layer that was added by the car dying was of course that now I will be walking and biking so much more than before out of necessity. Josh and I were both working at home on Thursday and because easy food supplies had run out, we cooked for lunch and ate the same thing for dinner. The final click came when, after dinner, I discovered that there were sweet potatoes that I forgotten about.

What do sweet potatoes have to do with anything? When I was first cooking for myself during my sophomore year of college, I used to cook a bunch of sweet potatoes on Sundays to have for lunch and as snacks throughout the week. I was kind of an eccentric eater, but I ate very very cheaply and pretty healthily. With that moment of sudden discovery of the sweet potatoes while being resourceful about what was in our kitchen, coupled with the imminent biking and the budgeting, I had a very vivid sense that I was suddenly back in that time period and/or in the time before Josh and I got married in Philadelphia. And suddenly I felt like my eating habits and transportation habits were recalibrated.

If I have any interpretation it is that my life has slowly acquired something like layers of decadence (or at least what my brain considers decadence…whether or not a car is actually a necessity here in Atlanta is another story) over the years and throughout last week it seems like each of them might have been stripped out of my consciousness. And although not having a car will certainly complicate our lives right now, something deep in my brain has been liberated by its removal.

Or maybe its just the confluence of the above events or even the above coupled with some moments of clarity I’ve had about my work over the past week or two. I’m taking a class that is helping me develop the rationale for my project and mujerista theology is really coming to the fore. So I decided that I’m doing a language exam in Spanish instead of German. This was a liberating decision for me because it seems like one of the first practical/praxis oriented moves I’ve been able to make in a long time. Plus I was taking the German exam for very ‘guild’-oriented reasons. Then, today, (and I’m so happy about this that I could scream) I found out that will probably be able to get a job this summer as a research assistant compiling stories about how women across religious traditions have used religious resources to combat economic injustice. This opportunity meets a lot of my concerns about the summer: that I find something productive to do so that I don’t go crazy literally, that I be paid since I don’t get my stipend in the summer, that hours be flexible since I have a couple of really important weddings to go to this summer, and last but not least that it be something useful for my research. It makes me feel like my project makes sense and that it will be useful and interesting.

So, I dunno. Maybe there is something chemical that makes me have these periods of clarity. Maybe if I could rewind the last couple of weeks I’ll find that I was eating better (not sleeping better I don’t think). Or maybe it’s the spring coming already, when something perennial in me is revived, and I can feel it stirring beneath the ground even now. Spring really will be here shortly in Atlanta, but can I really be acclimated to the seasons here already? Or maybe I’m a robot. A wooden one.