May 11: Summer Plans!

I haven’t left my house more than ten times in the past two months. As of yesterday, there are 74 miles on my car since I last filled the gas tank…two months ago, and nearly half of them were from driving out to my parents’ house for Mother’s Day yesterday. From a certain point of view, I have become one of the people Tommy Shaw sang about in the slightly better than mediocre Styx song, “Too Much Time on My Hands.” You’d think, especially during a month when I proclaimed a week and a half ago I was going to be productive, that I’d manage to get a lot, or at least a little, writing done. I’d appreciate it if nobody asks how that’s going. 

I hate to sound like this guy, but sometimes I am: My headspace has a lot to say about whether or not I’m able to get any writing done. I don’t mean words on a page; I could sit down and push myself for an hour and have a thousand new words to show for it. The problem right now is that when the emotional/intellectual/physical/spiritual drain of working from the teaching end of distance learning is paired with the constant, yet vaguely mild, presence of the existential threat to self and society that comes with living in the days of COVID-19, it’s a struggle to put what’s left of yourself into making those words any good. You want proof? Two sentences back I wrote a sentence that was sixty-three words long. I mean, who does that?

Writing good words is a singular feeling. If you’re familiar with the flow state, imagine riding atop the flow on a surfboard with perfect, unshakeable balance. Things come at you so fast you have to fight to keep up. I haven’t been able to catch that wave in months. Maybe in short spurts, but not with the kind of sustained effort it takes to get any real work done. 

Generally I’m okay with this. I’d like to be using this time better, but I know that in times like these self care and all that, blah blah blah, so I have to allow myself to let a few things slide to focus more on the things I’m being paid to do, even if I’d rather not. 

But. That’s all going to change relatively soon. In less than a month, the donkey fest that was the 2020 school year will finally stumble over the finish line and my summer, such as it is, will be open. To be clear, by open I mean I won’t have any distance learning to deal with, not that I think the economy is going to be fixed and I’ll feel safe actually going anywhere. I always do what I can to get some writing done during the summer, but this year I think it’s going to be different. 

I have two projects I want to work one, one writing and one revising. My school day during this remote teaching gig has had two sets of office hours built into my schedule, the times when I had to be available online so they were the more productive parts of my day: 9-11 AM, and 1-3 PM. It struck me today that maintaining that same routine during the summer could be exactly what I need to get some real work done. Two hours in the morning, a mental break to recharge, then two more in the afternoon, then the rest of the day to do whatever needs to be done, or just wants to be done.

Before that idea occurred to me, I was thinking how transitioning from school to summer this year was going to be pretty anticlimactic. Now I’ve got something about summer to look forward to again. I have to say, it feels pretty good.