Every year at the end of May, a lot of signs start appearing to signal
the school year is coming to an end. My birthday comes and goes; the
final round of standardized testing ends; Memorial Day weekend and its
predictable crap weather passes; more of my non-instructional time at
school is spent packing and doing inventory instead of grading papers;
the daily temperatures (usually) begin to get warmer and everyone at
school starts crossing their fingers really, really hard that we'll
manage to get in another Track and Field Day with no rain. And when all
of these signals start appearing, it becomes impossible to not think
about the approaching summer.
Every school year I've taught through has come to an end with mixed feelings, and this one won't be an exception. But let's be honest here -- one of the undeniable perks of teaching is summer break. I won't even try to pretend otherwise. I am happy to say that in the forty combined years of my life I've spent as first a student and then a teacher, I've never known a summer without a break. It's truly a beautiful thing. The rules and routines that dictate everything about how life operates for the other nine and a half months fall away and are temporarily replaced with new ones, many of which are at your discretion. Do you want to work? Summer school, or tutoring, or curriculum writing? The opportunities are there if you're interested but you certainly don't have to. Your relationship with the alarm clock becomes more casual. You can actually be outdoors instead of just admire it through a classroom window. Everything about life can either slow down or speed up to whatever pace you decide you want. I know someone who once had decided her project for the summer was to discover the recipe for the perfect strawberry margarita. I know another who made a point of reading every article in the newspaper every morning while drinking her coffee. For me, I find that my normal amount of drive spins down to a level where accomplishing one thing in a day is more than enough to make it feel like my time was used productively.
So staying true to the title of my li'l corner of the Internet, here's roughly what I plan on doing with my summer vacation this year....
Writing: It always begins and ends with this for me. I've had summers when I've written manuscripts in my head while walking my dog through the neighborhood in the evenings, then staying up and typing out my ideas between midnight and 3:00 A.M. That would be physically impossible for me to pull off anymore, but it's fair to say that this summer more than most is going to see me spending a great deal of time living the life of an aspiring author. There are a total of three projects in the rotation in the coming weeks -- the first is a manuscript I love dearly that I plan rewriting to make it even better, the second is the one I started back in November last year that I'd finally like to finish off, and the third is one that's already done which I'll be trying to push back into the agency market to see if I can get anyone to take a look at it and hopefully represent it so I can finally make my millions and win my Newbery Award. This will mean some early mornings, some late nights, and some long afternoons, and a whole bunch of stir-crazy. My fingers are crossed that there will be some summer get-togethers scheduled for the school crowd so I don't have to rely on Facebook as a substitute for interacting with actual people. But with the kind of work I want to get to this summer, there might be times I'll have to settle for that. If anyone does cross paths with me in the summer and something about the way I carry myself seems a little off, this will probably be why.
House: I had a nice run of some redecorating last summer but didn't get to everything on the list, so maybe I'll be picking up where I left off with that. Other than that there will still be the obsessive level of cleaning and organizing I can take care of while I have so much time to take care of it; when you feel like you've had a full day for only getting one thing done, it can become really easy to stretch cleaning the house into a month-long project.
Travel: I've never been a big traveler, mostly because I think that where you go is less important than who you go there with, and even though I can navigate a single life fairly well most of the time in the every day, traveling without someone to share the experience with seems to defeat the purpose. That said, I'm giving some serious thought to taking a trip or three this summer. Depending on how the scheduling and the airfares come together, I've got some friends in the Pacific Northwest it would REALLY do me some good to see this year. Additionally I've got relatives in other corners of the country that I haven't seen in a long time it would be fun to visit, and it goes without saying that the Turtle Lake Fair is on the schedule already. That would wind up being a lot of getting around, but it feels important to do it this year, because.... talk about burying the lead... a very big announcement coming for the people who understand how big of an announcement this really is, coming from me... I'm starting to think that next summer might be when I decide to get a new dog. I'd only ever get a dog during the summer, and if I do that would make everything about traveling much more difficult. And of course because this is me we're talking about, this is something I'll need at least a year to overthink before I decide anything. So it kind of feels like a now or never deal this year.
Routine: I am most definitely a creature of habit, so I'm looking forward to discovering exactly how my routine for the summer will evolve this year. A lot of the typical checkboxes will make it on the list: morning trips to the YMCA after eating breakfast and reading the newspaper and finishing the Sudoku puzzle, taking naps whenever I damn well please, books to read, movies to anticipate and then finally see and usually find a little disappointing, awful reality TV shows to numb my brain in the evening (God bless the human experiments who volunteer to work through their personality defects while appearing on "Big Brother"), magazines to read cover to cover in one sitting, games to play, maybe even a television series or two to watch all the way through if I can figure out how to get Netflix streaming through my Blu-Ray player (I'd had enough of scratched discs showing up in the mail). But now that I think of it, my sister has a ton of shows on DVD at her house... I might have to browse over there... but anyway. You get the idea.
Seven more days with the students and one more work day afterward, but truthfully that last workday without the kids always has such a different dynamic that I barely think of it as work. And after that day is over and my staff friends do whatever it is we'll wind up doing to cap off the year before we go our separate ways, I'm ready to wake up on that first Saturday morning knowing there are seventy-nine days ahead of me filled with nothing but options.
Like I said -- it's a perk.
