While working through a fairly productive day today, I brought up my Mac dashboard to check the countdown widgets, looking to see how many days were left until I should give up on the next agent on the list. There was another widget there off in the corner, one that I had put up 40 days ago that had 40 more days left on its countdown.
40 days until school starts. Yes. My 2010 summer vacation is half over.
For the record, I'm counting the first day of school as the first day when I am contractually required to show up at my school at 8:35 in the morning and work a full day. There are going to be several days when I go into my classroom on my own time for a few hours here and there to get a head start on setting up my room, and there 2-3 days of technology work I'll need to attend to before the year actually begins (luckily, these are all PAID days), and then there's the potential of going to Summer Institute for two days in a couple of weeks. Summer Institute is staff development training that takes place, well, in the summer. It's a great idea since it happens when teachers have time to go, and I openly acknowledge the value of staff development, but most of the times I've gone to Summer Institute have wound up with me suffering through such an overpowering combination of boredom and stir-craziness that I've considered slowly chewing off one of my pinky fingers just to remind myself I'm alive. And please understand, this has almost everything to do with my undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and nothing to do with the sessions -- a convenient qualifier for me to throw out there, since I've been the presenter a few times myself. After all, the second best part of SI is that it's voluntary (the best part being the money we get for going). But right now, two weeks out and thinking about sitting in a high school classroom painted in a shade of industrial white that had to be engineered to lull one into complacency? I shudder. However, they are paid days that will be an enormous help in the coming months, so there are certainly WAY bigger problems I could have. But not whine? Where's the fun in that?
So 5 paid days out of 40 really isn't the end of the world. The hardest thing to believe is that there are still 40 days of summer remaining. Speaking for myself, June is mostly defined by shaking off the previous school year, July is the meat and potatoes of summer vacation, and August is when the new year begins to slowly creep into my psyche. I remember writing something on here about how the beginning of the last school year felt routine for me, but there's nothing about this upcoming one that feels that way, which is really good. But it's too early to begin thinking about that yet.
My summer has been remarkably uneventful this year, which, seriously, doesn't bother me a lot. I had a good time with my cousins for a weekend in Wisconsin, I've played fewer video games than I've read books, I've gotten into the habit of staying up late enough to see if Craig Ferguson is going to open his show with a puppet, I've celebrated Garbage Day about six times, I've put in well over 200 miles of cardio work at the Y (and a big thank you to those two ladies sitting poolside in my line of sight today that made my time on the stationary bike much easier to endure), I've seen eight or so movies, I've watched the first season of Mad Men on DVD (Pete Campbell = Weasel who needs a good slap, because it would be more insulting than a punch in the face), I've worked out a couple chapters of one book, finished revising another one, and have fought though great conceptual struggles with a third, I've downloaded 11 new albums from iTunes, and have walked Spencer through the neighborhood approximately 34 times. I did have an unpleasant streak of days in there largely defined by anger, depression, and self-pity which is thankfully over, and I'm easily sitting here tonight in the best health I've been in for what has to be close to fifteen years -- a statement so much more ironic than most people will ever understand.
The biggest disappointments of the summer have been: (1) One book I'm having trouble getting off the ground; it went nowhere for the longest time until I was able to reconcile a big plot problem I couldn't get past, but now that seems to be more or less resolved, and (2) The still mysterious absence of the white iPhone 4. Yeah, Antennagate. I know. I don't care. I always planned to get a bumper anyway and still will, because I'm going to get one. My contract is over on my current phone, which I hate so much I don't even turn the @#$% thing on anymore, and the VERY DAY I'm able to pre-order the white iPhone, I'll be putting the gears of commerce in motion. Why the white one? Why wait, when I could just get the black one pre-ordered now? BECAUSE IT LOOKS SO MUCH COOLER. And I know that's a stupid reason, but for someone as visually attuned as I am, it's a good enough reason for me to continue waiting. At least that's what I keep telling myself....
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