This semester has been slipping through my fingers so fast; I try to hold onto it and wind it around my hand, but time is moving faster than I am.

I’m torn with urges to drop everything and retreat to the mountains, but to also somehow stay chained to Albion and never leave the familiar. At times I want to kick my notebooks and homework assignments, undone, under my bed because I’m sick of spending my time working, working, working, but then I think about how terrifying it would be to not have the structure of academia waiting for me when the summer turns to fall.

At this moment, though, the main thing on my mind is the thesis deadline that’s following me around like a piece of paper stuck to my shoe.

It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. There’s a lot of work to do, and that work won’t be on this website, The Climate Pickle, which makes me feel weird.

This isn’t a death sentence for The Pickle; the time has come for me to focus my writing energies in a different place because since September 2014 all my focus has been on this blog and a lot less on the formalities of actually writing a thesis. It’s a different kind of work than what I did for each post on here.

There were days where I sat on my chocolate brown couch with my head on my computer, and the cursor in the blank new post was blinking at me expectantly, feeling like I had nothing to write about, nothing to say.

Other days, my fingers flowed across my keyboard in a symphony of clicks and clacks as words spilled on the to page effortlessly, giddy with knowledge and the feeling of thinking deeper and more complexly about climate change, turning to my housemates, “Yess. You have to listen to what I just wrote….”

Sometimes that giddiness, or sleep deprivation from finals, leads to posts that don’t make any sense after reading them now; it was like looking at a piece of art I made in the dark in the middle of the night, only to see my strokes of genius in the daylight as confusing scribbles. A good try, but no grand masterpiece.

Today was one of those days where it was hard to write. I started off, and still am, slightly uncertain with what I want to say. It’s not an ending, a weepy goodbye to my blog. I really just won’t be able to do the posts justice while juggling the other half of the Pickle–the thesis.

My job now is to put on my academic thinking cap and write the stuff for my thesis that’s the bread to the meaty goodness that is this blog, turning it into a pickle sandwich with the introduction slice, and the satisfying, taste bud-lingering conclusion slice.

Doesn’t really sound appetizing, but I’m beyond excited about it. All this work, these past two years of writing and thinking and pushing myself feel like they’re culminating into a black bound book with The Climate Pickle pressed into the cover in fancy gold lettering, my tasty, pickle-y knowledge sandwich creation.