My Momentum Project goal from August, as stated a month ago: Get myself mentally ready for the school year. Granted, it’s the type of goal that’s hard to prove if it’s been reached or not, so you’ll have to trust me that it has. I’m not saying it was easy getting there. A big part of it was getting out of town for while. I was counting on this year’s trip to the Seattle area to be a big head cleanse, and it certainly got that done. It was a beautiful feeling to step off the airplane and walk through the concourse knowing there wasn’t a single thing that I absolutely had to do for several days. In retrospect, the only downside about the trip was I should have planned to stay longer than I did. (Melissa and Lynn, you were right. Next time.)
Here at home I finished off my writing for the summer, more or less... being back at school with new curriculum revisions being rolled out, I’ve heard the phrase “living document” used more than once. There is no truer example of what that is than an unpublished manuscript. Even though I’ve printed multiple copies and have shared several electronic versions since “finishing” the story, I’ve already made some minor changes as a result of proofreading. I’m sure that will continue to be the case right up until the possible day lightning strikes and my currently imaginary publisher sends the first edition to print. It helps having a piece of work that has held up well with all the revisiting it takes to thoroughly proofread it. And with the query letter almost ready to send out just as the school year begins, I’ll have that whole “job and career” thing to keep me distracted from wondering why it’s taking the agents I’ve submitting to so long to reply.
But like I said, I’m back to school now, and so much about my oncoming school year is going to be different than the last one. Since I’m someone very comfortable with routine, this much change wasn’t an easy adjustment. But once I found my way back into school life, I quickly switched over from “I’m just so overwhelmed by all of this I don’t know how I can look forward to the year” to instead thinking, “Oh, that’s right -- I AM unstoppable.” Which will last until about halfway through the third day of school, and then I’ll be back to running to stand still for the next ten months.
Which brings us to September’s goal: Stay on top of life. Having the summer off makes it easy to let priorities exist on a sliding scale. I’ll admit it -- during the summer, I can feel like I’ve had a day full of accomplishment if all I do is run the dishwasher and get the mail. The transition between summer break and the school year can be tricky, and sometimes things fall through the cracks. When all the normal daily stuff like cleaning and shopping and reading and bill paying and working out and getting the furnace checked and submitting agent queries and keeping up with TV and laundry and getting oil changes and etc. times ten has the epic chaos of the school year piled on top of it, life can get kind of nutty. This is probably why I tend to nap so much between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM on September weeknights. But this year? No procrastinating. I’m going to try staying on top of it all, taking it as it comes, preventing the to do list from growing into a horror movie, and above all eliminating as much unnecessary stress from my life as humanly possible. As soon as I’m done writing this, I’m syncing my phone and reinstalling an app I haven’t used in some time: EPIC WIN. It’s both a to-do checklist and a role-playing game that will reward me for doing the stuff I’m supposed to do anyway. Since that philosophy has become a big part of my classroom management, I figure it’s worth a shot at turning that back on my own self and seeing how effective it is.
Thirty days from now, I’ll let you know how it worked. Until then, cross your fingers for me.
