Day 18: Post-Pandemic Redefining, Part 1

 I've been back at school for about a month now, give or take a day or two. Before that first day back, I believe it's entirely possible I went an entire year of my life wearing t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweatpants, and shorts. 

The thing is, if you threw a few pairs of jeans into that mix, you'd basically be describing at least 85% of my wardrobe. Fine, let's not kid ourselves - the number is higher than 85%, but 85% seems like the highest number I can list without openly humiliating myself for dressing like a 15-year-old. (Yes, I've used that line before in describing my wardrobe, and yes, people have commented that making that comparison is insulting to 15-year-olds.)

Since I've been back to school, I've been sticking close to the jeans-and-sweatshirt aesthetic, mostly because I'm housed in a classroom that isn't known for its warm temperatures. This has mostly worked out because it hasn't been a terribly warm spring so far, at least not until this week, but since the room I'm in nearly all day is still cold, the sweatshirts are totally justifiable. And comfortable. Kind of like walking around in a nice cozy blanket, which I did more than once during The Winter of Isolation.

However, things definitely seem to be on the upturn now, at least as far as the pandemic goes. I mean, even TARGET, for crying out loud, has lifted their mask restrictions. I don't know if that means I'll stop wearing mine in public, but maybe if Target isn't super busy? Anyway. The day is coming when things will return to some semblance or normalcy again. Probably a new version, but definitely a recognizable version. 

One of the things I pondered most heavily during The Winter of Isolation was what I wanted life to be like once that somewhat normal returned. It was a deep list of thoughts I'll be exploring later in the month in a different post, but one thing I felt pretty set on was how there were so many different aspects of my life that I had grown to accept as good enough. I have an old car. My bath and hand towels still do the job of drying, but they aren't super comfortable. There's nothing about it that's fancy, but the mileage is low since my commute is short, so that's good enough. My kitchenware is starting to show its age, but it still keeps my food off the table. Although I don't know if I still need to keep using the same Coca-Cola glasses I won playing Whiffle Ball Tic Tac Toe at some low-rent Wisconsin county fair in 1988....

Hopefully you get the idea. Things were good enough. Does life need to be just good enough? Good enough seems like a compromise, and one thing I learned during the pandemic is that maybe there are aspects of my life and my world where if I don't really need to compromise, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I could push for things to be at least little better. 

This take us up to today, and one serious truth I know about myself after living through the Covid Months: I am so tired of sweatpants. One of the best things about going back to school was how I really had to wear actual pants again. So, I've been thinking a lot (I learned yesterday that's a phrase that scares my principal a little when I say it, incidentally): My wardrobe needs an overhaul. The follow-up question to that, though? What direction to go? I mean, I ain't James Bond, or a professional football player walking in front of the media on the morning of game day, or some YouTube Clownshoes dying for attention. I feel that somewhere there is a true core Tom aesthetic, but maybe one that can be even gradually upgraded out of the 15-year-old realm. I mean, one of my teaching partners literally laughed out loud last year when she tried to visualize me wearing a button down shirt, and I totally understood where she was coming from. 

So, my question tonight: I'm solidly an adult be any working definition. What items do people feel should be found in the closet of any self-respecting adult male? If I'm going to make a wardrobe upgrade this summer, what suggestions are out there about where I should begin?

Just so you know, giving up my concert t-shirts is totally a deal breaker....

Day 7: Routine

I’m not looking for sympathy here. Really, I'm not. Today's post is more about thinking out loud.

I know full well there are three types of people in the world: (1) Those who work in education and understand how relaxing and restorative it is to have summers off, (2) those who don’t work in education but have enough perspective about it to empathize with teachers and appreciate why having that much time off is valuable for us, and (3) the people who think they know better and are all too quick to criticize teachers and think they went into the profession because it’s such a sweet gig to get the summers off, so all those ungrateful teachers should stop complaining about everything.

Again, I’m not asking for sympathy. But if you’re someone who even has a toe on the line of that third category -- if you really need to constantly bathe in your own self-righteous ignorance, please keep it to yourself. Also you might want to skip the rest of this post because it will probably irritate you.

As the school year is ending, I’m in a pretty good place. In fact, a lot of my school year has been pretty good. It hasn’t been perfect, but one very helpful part has been the schedule I’ve worked with. It’s been nice most days, hitting the ground running as we start the day and maintaining that pace for a few hours, then having the afternoon to catch up, spin down, and even start thinking ahead to the next day.

It has me thinking that it might be a good idea to construct a mostly regular schedule to follow during summer break. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful thing to have the chance as an adult to spend a day (or days, or weeks) with nothing to do and all day to do it. But too much of that can easily become too much. I know myself well enough to understand how much I need structure.

I can’t have a daily schedule broken down by half-hour or hour increments, because that would stress me out when I slip off of it, which I would. I think it’d be nice to have regular things to do each day, with the built-in flexibility to occasionally skip them when there are other demands. I know I’ll have a list of summer chores I hope to accomplish, and a list of summer adventures I’d like to have as well. I’m probably going to have to do more school work than usual this year, with two new curriculum packages to learn. In past years I’ve covered my refrigerator door with Post-It notes in an effort to make my To Do List more engaging. That’s only worked sometimes though, and usually leaves me feeling guilty about some of the things I never got around to doing.

The question is, what do I build into that structure? How much time do I allot for daily tasks, or household chores? What things do I want to have accomplished by the end of the summer that I could break down into small, daily steps? What experiences do I want to have that would best be pursued with all of this time off? I spent a lot of time sitting around my house reading and watching TV last year, but all of that was with the goal of helping my newly-adopted pal Freddie gradually acclimate to his new home. This year shouldn't have to be the same.

Working this out is a minor problem, if it’s a problem at all. And it’s surely a nice one to have.

Day 29: Existing vs. Living

Memorial Day has come and gone, so we are officially in the homestretch leading to summer break. Depending on how one chooses to look at the calendar, our district either has seven or eight days left. I’m going with seven (even though it's technically eight).

My terribly generous Secret Santa gave me a cube of Post-It Notes for one of my gifts this year. I’ve been saving them for the summer, knowing it was likely I’d once again be turning my refrigerator door into a summer To-Do list. In the past I’ve organized my summer tasks and sorted them by color. I have five colors to work with this year, but I’m not sure how to categorize things. 

One color will have to be devoted to procrastination jobs, the kinds of things that really need to get done and I always put off until the summer because there’s more time: getting the light above the kitchen sink fixed, cleaning out the garage, going to that dentist appointment that doesn’t require taking a half day off and calling a substitute, getting the oil changed and tires rotated. 

But what about the other four? 

Do I list the books I want to read or the movies I want to see? That kind of makes them feel like homework assignments, and ones that aren’t so hard to accomplish if I’m planning on doing them anyway. 

Do I set the paces for long-term goals? How many trips to the Y each week? How many words written or pages revised daily? How much time spent each day practicing my new guitar? These ideas make me wonder how much I want to set myself into a full routine when I’ve been looking forward to having so many wide open days ahead of me.

Should I list school-related projects? I always intend to do some because the end of one school year seems like an exceptionally fertile time when it comes to thinking of ideas I want to try implementing when the next one starts, but I know myself too well. Truly ambitious school projects simply won’t get done in the summer.

When I start planning out my summer fridge list. I always think back to a kindergarten teacher I know who once said she was starting her summer break with one goal in mind — figuring out the perfect recipe for a strawberry daiquiri. She told people this like it was the punchline to a joke, but I really think she meant to do it. To me, it seemed like a near-perfect summertime goal (at least for someone who really liked strawberry daiquiris). It wasn’t so ambitious that there would be a lot of room to fail. It would leave her with plenty of time to just enjoy the slowly passing days. She’d have some fun with it, no matter what, and probably would have something to show for it at the end.

This year, turning 50 sits in my head a little. I was given a pretty landmark gift for a landmark birthday -- a brand new electric guitar. I love the guitar and have always felt a hole in my life from not knowing how to really play it, and 50 seems like a great age to finally dive in to something like that. Why wait longer, you know? What could I be missing out on that I don’t even know I’m missing out on? Who knows how much time any of us have left to do the things we’d like to try? 

Maybe one of my Post-It color categories should be used to list personal challenges or new experiences. Not a bucket list so much because I imagine I have at least a few more years left in me, but things I haven’t tried before, because maybe it’s never even occurred to me to try them. What better time to do things like this when I get a blessed seventy-nine days off from work? 

Now it’s just a matter of thinking up what should go on that list. 

Day 19: The MOA Joy Test

Not long ago, I had a friend tell me, in an unsolicited and unexpected manner, that I didn’t have joy in my life, and it would be good for me to correct this. “Teaching can’t count because you do that for a living,” she said. “And writing can’t either, because you work at that with a goal in mind.” These are both fair points, because both teaching and writing are endeavors that require a lot of effort, and, as much as I love them both, they each come with TREMENDOUS amounts of frustration and usually from nine different directions all at once.

Now, to be clear, I wasn’t at all offended when this topic was brought up. Clearly I spend a lot of time immersed in self-reflection, so to be able to have a conversation like this was kind of a thinking-out-loud treat. That this person had even thought about the subject long enough to form any kind of conclusion was touching, and also surprising, considering my general belief that people tend to forget I exist unless I’m directly in their line of sight.

The thing is, I didn’t really disagree, although in retrospect I’m not entirely sure we were exactly thinking about the same thing. From her point of view, she wasn’t criticizing me for having a joyless life, but thinking more of how I could benefit from having that something else, that something extra that could provide me with emotional highs just for the sake of doing something and loving it. From my point of view, I was thinking that, yeah, my emotional spectrum is pretty leveled, and doesn’t really reach into that high register very often. I suppose this isn’t great, but it’s okay. Joy is an extreme. I think anyone claiming to feel constant joy would be purposefully oblivious to the horrible things going on in the world, and consequently might not be equipped for the harder times and disappointments that will eventually come to pass. I also think that to truly experience moments of pure joy, they can’t happen too frequently. Joy is an extreme, and like most extremes, having too much of it would be diluted.

Infrequent joy isn’t bad. If you felt it constantly, it wouldn’t mean as much. To really appreciate how powerful joy truly can be, you have to be familiar with what life is like in its absence. I don’t think most people walk around existing in joy clouds, but are more likely generally happy with how life is, or, even more likely, are just comfortably content. I’d put myself in that last category, and I’m generally fine with it.

Maybe a little more joy wouldn’t be so bad, however. But this begs the question: How do you get there? What or where are those extra things that can be pursued to enhance life? Every pursuit needs a starting point. 

I think a good starting point, at least as good as anywhere else, could be the Mall of America. 

Don’t get me wrong; I do not see the Mall of America, or MOA for the locals, as any kind of Taj Mahal of Joy. I’m not crazy about shopping, and even if I were, going there just to buy things would barely be worth the opportunity cost, if at all. MOA is more of a destination itself, a place you go to intending to spend time, and often if you have out of town visitors who haven’t seen the place dozens of times and would still be impressed by it. 

Walking laps to cover all four levels would be fairly strenuous; trust me, I’ve done it before. There are over five hundred places to spend your money there. Each one of those businesses was opened with a specific target audience in mind, so somehow they are all meant to appeal to a specific type of potential joy. Do you have a need for imported Alpaca clothing? Prefer high-end electronics? Looking to turn a day of crayon shopping into a full-fledged experience? Shop for dog-exclusive gourmet products? Have you read “The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe” enough times to be curious about what exactly is so great about turkish delight it would make Edmund sell out his brother and sisters? The good folk at MOA have got you covered. 

So why start a Joy Pursuit there? The way I see it, almost every imaginable interest is being addressed in one of those more than five hundred businesses. I think it would make perfect sense to walk past every store, kiosk, restaurant, or amusement found there and mentally list the things that caught your attention, then afterward look back over the list and think over why each item was included. Somewhere on that list could be the beginnings of a new interest, or hobby, or joy. If I make my way out to MOA this summer, I might just do that. It could lead to some discoveries about myself I may not have otherwise ever realized.

Or, maybe I’ll just adopt a dog.

Day 6: The Venn Diagram of Summer Vacation

Even though May is only getting started, the teacher part of me can almost taste summer in the early morning springtime breeze. The snow has finally melted (I live in Minnesota, so I feel I need to condition that so I don’t jinx anything), the sunrise is getting earlier, the days are warmer, the number of school days remaining are down to a reasonable number for beginning a countdown, which is either 23 or 24 for us, depending on whether or not you count the day after the students leave; I don’t. We are definitely in the homestretch of the school year.

This is the time I start thinking about what needs to be done before I can close off the year good. I know what grade I’ll be teaching next year so that helps me out with deciding what materials I need and what I should pack up to either pass on to another teacher or have shipped off to another school. All of the state testing is completed, so I’m able to at least start thinking about what grading I already have completed and maybe getting a head start on completing parts of my progress reports. It’s a great feeling to be able to walk away from school on the last day and know there aren’t any loose ends.

What happens after that, though? There is a small percentage of the working population that ever experiences having approximately eighty days off each year (and I’ll remind anyone who wants to moan about teachers enjoying their time off: Our summer break isn’t paid so we’re essentially laid off for those months, and we easily have to cram thirteen months of work into the nine and a half months we spend at school each year, so we tend to feel it’s been well-earned). From my experience, most teachers spend their summers in one of two categories: Enjoying the time off and relaxing, or taking advantage of the time off to get things done.

Last year I was a get things done guy, spending at least six hours of most days parked in front of my laptop drafting a new manuscript. I’m glad I did and I’m proud of the accomplishment, but it didn’t leave a lot of time for savoring the time off, especially with a manufactured deadline waiting in late August. However, when it was time to go back to school, I felt a little like I’d missed out on something — not any one thing in particular, but just an overall sense of lost opportunity. 

I haven’t started thinking much about my summer break yet. There’s still a month of school to complete which will definitely have some adventurous moments to it, and a birthday to navigate, not to mention a few weeks of life where anything could happen. I’m close to deciding about getting a dog, and I have a few projects I really want to get done. Right now though, I’m hoping to find a reasonable balance in my summer this year. If I strive to end my school year without any loose ends, it would probably feel just as good to start the next one the same way. 

And relaxed.

The April 2018 Version of 10 Good Things

We had a record-setting and history-making blizzard in the Cities this past weekend. Getting snow like this so late in the season feels like adding insult to injury since the weather hasn’t been the greatest for the past four months or so, not to mention that things at school have felt slightly off-kilter as of late (and it hasn’t just been me feeling that way).

When things have kind of dragged in the past, I’ve found it helpful to remind myself about some of the good things currently going on in life. That slight shift in mindset can make a difference in how I see things overall. In the hope of returning to school tomorrow after our unexpected snow day with a brighter perspective, here are ten of the good things I’ve got going on right now I'd like to share: 

1 - One most spring mornings, I can go into my classroom and open the blinds to fill my room with the morning sunrise. This is so much more welcome than starting the day with the dark and gloom of winter.

2 - State testing will be done in just a few weeks, and the most stressful part of the school year will come to an end. We’ll be in the homestretch at that point, and even though that usually introduces different kinds of stress, it also has some nice highlights, and is usually my favorite part of the school year.

3 - I’ve recently discovered Bai Andes Coconut Lime flavored water, and it’s incredible.

4 - Even though I don’t see my nephews as frequently now that only the youngest is still in high school and the older two live in another state, they all seem to be happy in their lives. Which makes me happy.

5 - I’ll be making a long overdue visit to my Pacific Northwest family very soon. Few things are as relaxing as being around this group of people, who are as happy to see me as I am to see them.

6 - Over the course of the school year so far, I’ve quietly dropped just over thirty pounds.

7 - I recently went back to read an older manuscript, which I hadn’t looked at or thought about very much for a few years. It was the first time I was able to read it as a book instead of a collection of chapters or a work in progress. I was astonished and relieved and proud about what I had somehow managed to accomplish in writing it. I feel optimistic about its future.

8 - "Avengers: Infinity War" opens in just under two weeks. I've been looking forward to seeing this movie for years. I'd love to make it a Friday night movie event, but I'll also be perfectly happy to see it on my own as a Saturday matinee.

9 - I have a package arriving in the mail today. It’s nothing huge or life-changing, but it’s given me something to look forward to for the past few days.

10 - The snowfall from the weekend may extend an already prolonged winter by another week or two, or possibly three, but eventually it’s all going to melt.

I’m assuming. 

The Pros and Cons of Goal Setting

Two years ago a friend posted a photo online at the beginning of summer break that caught my eye. She and her family had made a giant poster filled with the fun things they wanted to do that summer. I borrowed the idea and gave it a little tweak, instead making my list out of Post-It Notes and turning my refrigerator door into one big colorful Summertime To-Do List.

It turned out pretty well. I didn’t complete every note, but I got to most of them. The whole thing added some welcomed structure to my summer, not to mention it really felt satisfying to peel off those notes when I was finished with them. I liked the idea well enough that I did it again last year, to about the same degree of success. 

Summer break for 2017 starts in just a few more days, and I’m not sure whether or not I want to cover the fridge in Post-Its again. I'm definitely a list guy, and this can be a great way to push myself into doing things I normally might not do if there weren’t goals attached. Making a list can motivate you to try new things, explore interesting places, and give yourself some experiences and adventures that you otherwise might not have. It’s also a great way to keep track of books to read, movies to see, or shows to binge. A list like this can help make sure time doesn’t slip by without having some fun, and can help provide the summer with a narrative.

My one mistake was making a list had actual To-Do list tasks mixed in with the summertime fun goals. A lot of these tasks are things I mean to get done during the summer because I’ve nearly procrastinated them into oblivion during the rest of the year. The problem is I’ll continue to procrastinate since I know I have the whole summer to get them done. Giving yourself things to do seems easy at the beginning of the summer when there’s all the time in the world ahead of you. The notes with those unpleasant chores and boring appointments have always been some of the last ones I've accomplished, if they even get addressed at all. By late August they end up staring at me from a mostly empty refrigerator door, almost taking on an attitude because they’ve gone ignored for so long.

Goal setting can be a good way to get things done, but it can also be defeating if it isn’t managed carefully. When you set goals, you need to consider how much motivation you’ll bring to your attempt. How badly do you really want to accomplish these things? Are those goals making it onto the list because you know you should really get them done, or because you genuinely want to achieve them? How many things on the list are Want-To instead of Have-To?

I know I’ll have to get some of those stupid chores taken care of this summer. I also know there will be some I continue to ignore, as long as they aren’t demanding me to deal with them. That leaves me with wondering whether or not to include them, if I make a list. 

Which begs the question: Should I even make a list? Should I take advantage of this newly-discovered and hard fought wave of optimism I’m riding after such a long and personally dark winter and wait for the discoveries and adventures present themselves? Or would it be better to give myself the challenges of taking steps outside of my comfort zone?

What’s better — to intentionally aim for the things I might not otherwise consider, or to use this my time off to let things spontaneously evolve as they will? 

I have exactly three days to make up my mind.

Summer Adventures

Eight days.

That’s what remains of the 2016-2017 school year. Technically it’s nine days because the teachers work one day longer than the students have to be there, but not many teachers I know really count that; a day at school without students around can be a little piece of vacation all on its own. Going by either count you subscribe to, we’re down to single digits now. Summer is so close I can taste it.

However, I find I’m not exactly chomping at the proverbial bit for it to arrive. Yes, I’m certainly plenty ready to put what remains of the school year behind me and move on into non-educational nothingness for a few months. But other than the multiple hours of daily freedom and the nicer weather (at least when there aren’t any life-threatening storms going on), I don’t have a long list of things about summer I’m specifically excited about. For the last few summers, my time off has been broken down into a small number of predictable categories, the short list of which is so mundane and middle-aged I won’t bore you with here. I guess when this happens a certain number of years it becomes routine, and routine can become predictable and too comfortable and, to an extent, mildly dull.

I want my summer to have a narrative. I want more than just a small handful of my days to start with the energy of anticipation, and maybe even have some carry slight harmless anxiety about the unknown and promise of the unexpected. I want some adventures.

Having stated this, let’s take a moment to back up and slap down some definitions on exactly what I mean by “adventures.” I’m not looking to skydive or rock climb or wander into the woods for three days with nothing but the clothes on my back and a makeshift toothbrush in my pocket to challenge my survival aptitude. I’m thinking more about new things to do to break up the routine. For me, my list of low-grade summer adventures could include things such as watching some more of Nephew #2’s baseball games, since this will likely be the last summer he plays. It could mean going to a midnight showing of a new movie and seeing it with an excited crowd instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour and seeing it early Friday afternoon in a mostly-empty theater. It could mean driving to some small town in the middle of the most rural part of the state just because a newspaper article or a television story said they had the best ham and cheese sandwich in the five-state area, and I wanted to experience it for myself. It could mean going to see some band play at a casino even if I’m only mildly interested in seeing them, just because I’ve never seen a concert at a casino before. It could even just mean putting together an epic ten-hour playlist and using that time to clean out my garage like it’s never been cleaned out before, or making up some reason to have people over to my house. 

I wouldn’t say I’m exactly looking for suggestions of what kind of adventures I could find to fill my summer. Given enough time, ideas will always present themselves. I just either need the time or the motivation to follow through on them. Also it’s been my experience that if I were to solicit recommendations, I would end up getting a list of other people’s favorite things to do. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but I'm really looking more for some interesting experiences and distractions than the beginnings of a new hobby. I wouldn’t say no to suggestions, nor would I necessarily say no to co-adventurers; being introverted doesn’t mean that you hate being around people, after all. It just means you don’t rely on it the same way most other people do. 

So if I’m hoping for a summer of as-of-yet undefined adventures, but I’m not exactly looking to collect ideas of things to try, where exactly am I going with this post? 

I guess I don’t really know. I don’t really know where I’m going with my summer yet either, though. Right now, with a few weeks to go before it all becomes official, that seems like part of the fun.

Time Flies/Time Stands Still

Yesterday was my birthday. Number 49. I’m not going to sugar-coat this — Year 48 was a bite in the ass for the most part, and I’m glad to see it disappearing in the rearview mirror. The school year that took up most of it had a number of challenges, and I painted myself into a corner with a manuscript idea that, for all the early excitement and ambition I had in the planning stages, blew up in my face and knocked me out of a writing habit for months. On top of all that, I lost a good friend of mine. It was a year with too many situations that pushed me into doing some hard and cold self-evaluation, and not always coming to conclusions that left me feeling warm and fuzzy and confident.

Turning 49 isn’t any landmark age by itself, other than being one last year to try and get things right before turning 50. I wouldn’t call this line of thinking a midlife crisis; the idea that I could be turning 49 and still be at midlife would likely be too generous by at least a decade. Do I care about turning 50? No and yes. No in the sense that I stopped being concerned about getting older the day my younger sister stopped having birthdays. But in the sense of seeing 50 as a benchmark year, which it undeniably is? It makes me consider what things I still haven’t done with my life that I’d always thought would be checked off and settled by now. Not only that, but what kind of life will I have entering my fifties? How prepared will I be for anything and everything that follows? And what can I still do with my one remaining year of forties to give myself a good start on that?

One thing I noticed this year, more than I think I ever have before, was how much older all of the reliable things and people from my life have become. I caught life doing something I already knew it did, but had never seen such strong examples of before. Time was standing still for me, and at the same time it was flying past. My middle nephew finishes high school in a matter of days and will soon begin a new stage of life that no one can predict or anticipate. Some of my cousins are already grandparents. People I’ve known since they were born are graduating from college. People I’ve had around me throughout my entire career are retiring.

When your job follows a very regimented schedule for each day and each week, it’s easy to lose track of yourself in the routine. You reach a point where you don’t even need to think about what you’re doing, because you know exactly what to expect down to the minute. It’s too easy to let that same routine carry over into the evenings and weekends, and before you know it life is just skipping along down the road without you even noticing. The days and weeks blend together, and they seem to drag on and on and on.

But they really don’t. Time evaporates when you aren’t paying attention to it. Without warning, the time you were hoping for (or counting on) to follow through on your hopes or dreams is a fraction of what it was when those hopes and dreams were only taking shape. I can put together plans of something I hope to do during any week or month, then get distracted by the everyday things and suddenly wonder where the time went, and how I didn’t get anything done. 

Do I really want my lasting legacy to be that I created a useful and complete template for lesson plans? 

Recently I downloaded a new release from a favorite band that I’ve been looking forward to for months. Upon the first listen, I was disappointed with everything about it because it didn’t sound anything like their previous work. I thought about my irritation throughout the day as I refused to play it again. I knew that, for whatever reason, this album was what the band felt they had to say right now, and this was the way they chose to say it. From that point of view, I broke down and listened again. Taking the music for what it was instead of what I had expected it to be made me rethink it. It still wasn’t what I had hoped for, but that didn’t mean it was without value or something I should readily dismiss.

I suppose life could, and probably should, be looked at the same way. Maybe while I’m using the next twelve months to try making myself into someone I can be comfortable with at 50, I’ll consider that perspective. Maybe it should be enough to accept all aspects of life as they are, as the results of my choices, instead of focusing on what was never realized. There seems like a certain calm in assuming that kind of acceptance. Something about it feels right. 

But that doesn’t mean I have to stop hoping I can still reach for something else.

Day 26: Tales from the Big Desk

I tend to get reflective about teaching as the school year begins drawing to a close. As I was thinking about topics to write about here for the end of this year, I began browsing through older school-related posts, to try and stay away from writing about any themes I've covered before. I noticed most of my teacher posts had gone up either close to the beginning or the end of the school year. 

Since several of my teacher friends are 'Summer Vacation' readers and they enjoy the school posts, I've collected ten of my favorites here. You may have missed some of these the first time around since some go back a few years, but now, if you like reading the funny or thoughtful or inspiring posts about school life, you might connect with something here. Click the title of the post if you'd like to read more. 

In chronological order: 

Like vs. Love vs. Pity vs. Hate - May 25, 2010

This was about how you can have so many mixed feelings for your students, and regardless of how frustrated and angry they can make you, it's impossible to hate them.

Snowpants in June, or the Last Day of School - June 9, 2011

A glimpse into the carnival of chaos that makes up the last day. 

Episode 4: Paying Back Karma - July 22, 2011

From a series of posts when I was reflecting on the events in my life that influenced the direction of my teaching, and when my 6th grade teacher taught me about second chances.

Just Got Back - Sept. 11, 2011

Some detailed and telling reflections on the beginning of the school year. 

Graduation Day, Part 2 - June 4, 2012

Based on the reactions there were to it, one of the most emotionally charged I've written, telling the story of when I went to my nephew's high school graduation and had some incredible surprises.

My Life as a Talk Show Host - March 28, 2013

In which I made comparisons between the structures of late night talk shows and a typical day at school. 

Day 6: Human Sudoku - May 6, 2013

From my first year of May posts, when I gave a glimpse into how much thought has to go into effective seating charts, which also shows how much thought has to go into some of the smallest points of the school day just to make everything work. 

Day 29: Planting the Seeds - May 29, 2013

Reflecting on responsibilities of teaching, how difficult they are, how important they are, and how unfortunately open-ended the results can be.

The Compendium of 5th Grade Zen - June 8, 2014

All the Zen moments started in 5th grade. Some of my favorites came from those years. Here was a list of them all on what was, at the time, my last day as a 5th grade teacher. 

Everything You Need to Know About Teaching 3rd Grade - Sept. 4, 2014

If you've ever worked with 8-year-olds, you'll recognize so much of this as true. 

If you've got some time tonight or over the long Memorial Day weekend (which is promising lousy weather, at least in these parts), come on back and give some of these a look!

Day 19: Blue Sky Clarity, or 100 Minutes of Meditation

If you’ve been following the progression of the May posts this year, you might remember how I was standing on the edge of burn out earlier in the month. Thankfully I found my way out of that, and I’m now in a place where I can look ahead to the rest of the school year, and beyond, with more optimism and less dread. Back when I was knee-deep in the stress though, I was actively looking for things I might be able to do that would help my fight that off.

Sometime around then I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Stuff You Should Know. During a break the hosts did an ad for an app that is supposed to give users an introduction to meditation. It starts out very gently, guiding you through a series of ten minute sessions, once daily over a ten-day period.

I’ve never seriously considered meditating before. It all looks like quietly sitting to me, and any time I’ve tried to do that my mind takes off in nine different directions. However, our school social worker recently completed a series of lessons about mindfulness that really impressed me. When I looked up this app, I saw that a lot of what it presented was based around the idea of mindfulness. At that point I didn’t think I needed it as much for immediate stress relief, but I was still curious enough to see what I might be able to get out of it. Since the first ten-day cycle was free, I gave it a try.

Day 1: The guy doing the talking has a mostly pleasant British accent. He starts off speaking conversationally, but when it’s time to begin the mediation he sounds purposefully sleepy. There are a lot of prompts about breathing, noticing how the body feels, being aware of the sounds in the room, things like that. Within minutes of finishing, out of nowhere, I have AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” playing in my head. Weird. Maybe I didn’t internalize it all so much.

Day 2: I sit down to meditate right before bed, thinking it might help me sleep, even though falling asleep isn’t really a problem. Maybe I’m just making an excuse for sticking this into the very last moment of my daily routine. In a few minutes I’m relaxed enough to fall asleep sitting up, and missed half of what I the British guy was telling me to do.

Day 3: Once again I try this right before bed. In fact I tried starting in bed, thinking if I fell asleep again I’d be all set, but then got up and decided I should probably do it sitting up like I’m supposed to. Brit mentioned the idea of problem solving in life, about not running into the traffic of our problems and trying to make them all stop at once, but sometimes just stay off to the side and and being aware of them; not in the sense of ignoring the problems, but knowing you can’t solve them all and being mindful of where you are instead of trying to do everything at once. This is hard for me. If I’m idle when I feel there’s a problem I need to solve I start feeling depressed very quickly, like I have to always be moving forward to justify my existence. This was difficult to wrap my head around.

Day 4: I took the advice of Brit and moved my meditating to right away in the morning. It helped my focus. I like having things to do in the morning. Walking, reading the newspaper, eating breakfast in the kitchen instead of inhaling something quick at my school desk has always helped me frame the day as being more complete than going straight from alarm to getting ready for school to school. It was calming to take that ten minutes to not think forward, and just be.

Day 5: My first Saturday, which usually would be the day of the week that would find me the most calm and clear-headed already. There was a short animation to watch today, about how sometimes too much effort can be counterproductive. This marked the second day in a row of reaching the end of my ten minutes without sleeping, so I figured I should probably do the rest of my sessions in the morning. Plus that way it doesn’t cut into my Hogan’s Heroes reruns.

Day 6: My first Sunday. I’m slipping into the steps pretty naturally now, just because I’ve heard the prompts enough times to know what to expect. There are some mentions to the effort that goes into trying to force things to change, but as far as what I’m doing to meditate the routine is the same thing each day. Nothing really noteworthy. 

Day 7: My first Monday morning, which should really be the most useful time since Monday is not my favorite day of the week. Another animation talked about how the calm blue sky always there above us, even if we can’t always see it through the clouds. These ideas are introduced without any direction to reflect on them other than a brief mention at the end. I try to bring the ideas into my reflections when I feel I’m supposed to, but when I’m told to “just let the mind wander” it always goes somewhere else. Maybe I’m meant to keep that idea with me throughout the day.

Day 8: I got up too early and fell back to sleep halfway through, only to wake up at the end. I wasn’t ready to turn myself over to the process today, and stood up at the end with a mindset of “Okay, that’s done now. What’s next?” Nothing internalized.

Day 9: Early again. I’m prompted to think about letting the mind clear and rest so I can access the thoughts below the surface; what good things would you find there, and what would you find that needed to be let go? The 10 minutes went fast today. I actually pulled myself from some completely random train of thought that was building and back to focus once without being reminded. When it came time to let the mind wander, it went into this surreal vision of peaceful collapse that evolved into a slowly exploding color pattern, which brought itself to a dead stop and became almost like a painting. I stood up and ignored my usual routine of getting ready for school right away, and instead sat down to write. I left the morning news off, I didn’t play any music, I just sat and thought and let the ideas present themselves. I took an hour to let morning be an independent part of my day instead of a prologue to school. If felt really good, taking away the stress of pre-anticipation and letting myself just be. Did that mindset come from meditating? I really don’t know.

Day 10: The last day. I started off strong, knowing the routine pretty well, but soon I was fighting off the urge to think about writing this post since I was all too aware of how this was my last session. My mind kept going back to that instead of focusing on this, feeling that, appreciating, or noticing things but not doing anything with them. I caught up with the routine again just as it ended. I had wondered where my mind would go when I cut it loose to wander on this last day. Today it didn’t really go anywhere. 

As far as growth experiments go, I was glad I tried it, but I’m not necessarily convinced it made such a difference that my life is now in the first steps of a brand new path. If anything, my biggest takeaway was that I now have a better idea of what goes on when people talk about their own meditation. 

Will I continue working on this, now that my free ten days are over and I would have to start a subscription? 

I really don’t know.

Day 1: Introducing the Narrative and Fighting off the Burn

Welcome to another month of daily posts here at ‘Summer Vacation.’ In what could best be described as either an experiment or a goal, this year I'm trying to link each of my thirty-one May posts into a form of loosely-connected narrative. You see, normally once the calendar flips to May, there are reasons to celebrate: springtime weather has arrived, bringing more daylight and warmer temperatures; we’re down to the last full month of the school year, with the tantalizing promise of summer in the not-too-distant future; my birthday even shows up this month, for anyone who might feel that’s important (which isn’t necessarily me). May is when the world seems to open back up for real as the cold, gray, damp, dark depression that has plagued our lives since probably November finally fades away. 

This year, however? Not so much. This year I’m finding that as we step into the first day of May, I am just a few degrees away from being pretty thoroughly burned out. 

Without elaborating, it hasn’t always been a warm and easy and comfortable year at school. For numerous and varied reasons, this year has presented a number of unusual challenges, particularly in recent months. Stress is high and morale is low, and I think everyone feels it to some degree, and there’s so much coming and going from different directions that it couldn't be pinned on any one person or source. Suffice it to say that our school is on the verge of what promises to be the most transitional year we’ve had in well over a decade. I can’t imagine how anyone on our staff, from the teachers to the custodians to the principal to the office staff to the playground supervisors, would be immune from the tension and stressors these changes are bringing into our lives. We have a good staff, though. And we’re all coping with things the best we can. All of the uncertainties we’re will eventually straighten themselves out, and I’m confident we’ll be ready to move forward into whatever the next school year will be. 

I know that out of all the question marks people at school are facing right now, mine have to be among the most insignificant. Still, as someone who too often lets my empathy get the better of me, it’s difficult to watch people who are important to me struggling to cope or try and figure out what they want from their futures, and that itself can take an emotional toll. Which it has. 

I don’t like being a person who wakes up wondering which problem will dominate the day, or what new ones might surface. I don’t like seeing my friends living with so much uncertainty. I don’t like spending the first two hours of my work day wishing I were somewhere else. I don’t like wondering who I can trust or who trusts me, or if I’m inventing trust issues that don’t really exist in the first place. I don’t like being this person directly, or even indirectly, dealing with these things when I know the class I’ve worked with for the past two years deserves more. They’ve been a good group, and, predictable and petty gripes and frustrations aside, they deserve a strong finish to this year if it’s going to be the end of our time together. Not to mention I think I’ve been in the game long enough now that I’ve probably earned the right to end my school year on a positive note, instead of limping out to my car to drive home feeling used up on that last day.

So I’ve decided not to be that person. Or at least take as many steps as I can in the effort of fighting that person off. 

Getting back to that connecting narrative I mentioned in the beginning? Each of my posts this month will somehow reflect on what I can try or what I am doing, at least tangentially, to fight back this feeling of being burned out. What are the positive things I have that can help me find more balance if I focus my energy in different directions? How can I be more of a help to the people around me going through the same things? How can I reconcile whatever changes are coming my way, and are there any positives to find in them? What good do I have that I should refocus on, or what are some new levels of good I can explore? How can I get myself to the end of this month and be mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally ready to send my students off into their summer vacations and futures with positive and memorable closure?

This is only Day 1. Stay tuned and find out. I know I’m curious to find out what will happen.

Christmas Up the Fridge

Thanksgiving is over. The out-of-town visitors have returned home. Most of the leftovers have been eaten. The carnival of bedlam that is Black Friday has come and gone. The oldies radio station in the Cities (which now mainly plays the music I listened to while growing up, and let me tell you sometime about what an existential kick in the mouth that is) has made its annual switch over to perpetual Christmas music.

I used to love Christmas. For a kid like me with an overactive imagination and energy to spare, it was all too easy to get caught up in the season. My sisters and I went to a parochial elementary school, so the holiday became completely integrated with everything about our school lives for an entire month. Waiting for the TV specials to air, and watching when they did because it only happened once each year, was an event. Decorating the tree and the house were cherished family traditions. The handful of Christmas albums in my parents' somewhat minimal record collection were favorites, just because they seemed to resonate a bit differently. It was always exciting to come home for winter break during college, knowing how much family and cousin time there would be. Even the one piece of writing I did of any note, before the past few years, was seeing a play I wrote produced by a community theater group. It was about a little boy who wanted to stay up late on Christmas Eve to ask Santa Claus to help him find his missing dog.

But things happened as I got older, and now, to put it simply, I find Christmas to be one of the most depressing times of the year. I'll spare you the details about why, but all too frequently I find myself wandering through the season feeling much like Charlie Brown in his beloved TV special. He sees everyone around him so involved and happy and full of cheer, and is left slightly perplexed about why he can't allow myself to see it all the same way. (If you know the special, you also know Charlie Brown tends to overthink his way through the story. It's no secret this is an issue of mine as well.)

Luckily though, I've learned in adulthood to try and be proactive about such problems. The way I see it, if you know some kind of emotional obstacle is just on your horizon, why not find ways to circumvent it before it becomes overwhelming? Which brings us to this year, the Christmas season of 2015.

I know myself well enough to realize I'm much happier when I'm working toward a goal. This past summer I had some success with that by covering my refrigerator door with a collection of sticky notes, each one listing either a task there'd be time to accomplish during the summer or some kind of small adventure I could have. I didn't get every item on this massive To-Do list completed, but I finished enough of it to make my summer into something it otherwise would not have been. In the spirit of proactivity, I've decided to bring that idea back for Christmas. I've come to think of the holiday season as the stretch of time between the first day back to school after Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, which essentially means the month of December, give or take a few days. I don't plan on going with the sticky notes like in the summer, but instead, for a more seasonal touch, I bought a set of note-sized gift tags, like these:

The problem now is trying to think of what to include that will help squeeze some joy out of a time when I tend to lean the other way. There are some traditions to list and look forward to, but they might not be enough to chase off holiday blues, or even help push me toward my goal. So today, just as the holiday season is about to start, I'm putting out the call for any ideas or recommendations people might have about things to include on the December gift tag Fridge List. What are things you enjoy? What traditions do you have? What might you suggest to nudge me out of the funk I know is coming, but won't necessarily overly-stress me in the process? If you're someone in my daily life, what are some things we could do together? These don't even have to be holiday-specific ideas, but things that could be done this time of year, especially with winter break coming up in a few weeks. 

So...any ideas? 

The Summer of the Fridge

Tomorrow brings an end to the Summer of the Fridge, when I took a multi-colored stack of Post-Its and turned my refrigerator door into a massive mosaic of a to-do list, made up of summertime adventures and the sorts of tasks I keep procrastinating away during the school year. It was a fairly productive idea, to the point where I added more items in early August to keep the momentum going while I still had to take care of my less adventurous chores. Altogether, including both the original tasks and the ones added later, I had some sixty to seventy items on my list.

Here's what it looked like at the start of summer break...

...and here's what it looks like today, on the last day before I report back to school:

As driven as I usually am regarding to-do lists, I never seem to completely finish them off, and instead end up making compromises with myself about why the last few items don't get done. Even though there's nothing remaining on the fridge that requires emergency attention, I do look at those last few lonely notes in the second picture and feel some slight mental bruising; I seem to process my ideas of success and failure in terms of absolutes more than I probably should. But that's a topic for a different post.

It's likely I'll give those last few notes an asterisk and extend my available summer until the day the kids start school, so I can get more done and hate my failings a bit less. It wasn't such a bad summer after all, so why end it on a defeatist note? I did get a lot of things done I'd been wanting to for years, and I had some good times along the way as well. I read some good books, listened to some great music, and had a couple of good weekend extended family trips in July. I watched some great (and not so great) television, got into a habit of long morning walks, and did a remodeling / redecorating / reorganizing of my home office that I've wanted to do for years (even if I was nudged into that pretty strongly when the hard drive on my computer crashed and burned).

I didn't immerse myself in writing as thoroughly as I had last summer, but I did get some good work done on revising a second manuscript some of you may know -- The Ghost of Lake Emily. It's about as different from Following Infinity as I could probably get while staying in the middle grade range, and with any luck those stories will turn out to be my first two published works. Even though I've put a lot of thought and work into the Emily revisions, there wasn't much pressure to get through them quickly, but of course I'm still working on them because when writing is a job, Rule #1 is you show up and do the work. The things I'm working on right now -- restructuring parts of the story, reinventing relationships between characters, even redefining some of the characters, all of that beautifully frustrating and painstaking work that makes other people tell writers they don't understand how we can stick with it -- are all tasks that shouldn't be rushed. And anyway, I decided at some point to pull back just a little and follow my agent's advice from earlier in the year, when she and I talked about all of the waiting going on right now. "Enjoy the lull," she said, "because it will be the last one you have in...forever." I've had over a year to learn how consuming it can be to maintain a balance between two different careers, and since I suspect that's only going to become more pronounced as things progress, I thought enjoying the lull wouldn't be such a bad idea. Still, I suspect that someday I'm going to enjoy NOT having a writing lull even more.

And so ends another summer vacation. I'm going to spare all of us any summative statements or force-fed wisdom about beginning a new school year and all the promises and challenges that come with it, and instead just say I'm vaguely optimistic about it. I'm not happy to see break end, but I'm not completely dreading the idea of going back, either. I'm just hoping to successfully navigate my way through all of the highs and lows of the next ten months, and do some good along the way.

Now there's nothing left for me to do but show up tomorrow morning and start discovering what the next year has in store.

Rebooting the Fridge

Each summer a teacher friend of mine makes a poster-sized To-Do list with her kids, writing down all of the fun and adventures they hope to have while on vacation. Any summer lists I've made in the past have been little more than documents on my computer desktop, and instead of fun and adventures I've usually just listed jobs that really should be taken care of that I've managed to procrastinate into near oblivion during the school year.

This year I decided to go a different route and make my summer To-Do list more engaging. Since I don't have any poster paper, I did the next best thing and covered the refrigerator door in colorful Post-It notes, each with a different job or adventure or experience written on it. After the task is finished, I pull it down from the fridge and throw it away, which has been a lot more viscerally satisfying than just crossing things off a list. The fridge has been both a constant reminder of things I need to accomplish before school starts and a source of ideas for slow and empty afternoons. It's worked so well that it's likely I'll do the same thing next year. I'm even putting together plans of how I can use this same kind of format in my classroom  this fall.

However.

I'm a little over halfway through my summer break as I write this, and I feel myself losing momentum. Granted, I've gone from having the whole fridge covered at the start to only most of the freezer door left at this point, but there's a lot of purple on that freezer door. See, when I started, I color-coded each of the things I wrote down. Blue Post-Its were for entertainment ("binge this series, read this book, etc.") yellow ones were for things that somehow involved shopping ("get a new bookshelf for the home office"), red were for thing related to writing ("prepare a Middle Grade Minded post for August"), and green were for new experiences or special events ("take a day trip up to St. Cloud"). The purple ones were my least favorite, since purple was the color for summer jobs -- clean the garage, get the furnace tuned up, go to the dentist...the kinds of things that need to be done at some point but are easy to keep putting off. I think that's the nature of To-Do lists, to pounce on the things that are fun and interesting and easy first, and let the boring, stupid ones sit there until you don't have any choice left but to take care of them.

August starts in a couple of days, and because of an amazing schedule this year, I'm not due back to school until just about the very end! So even though the few weeks of break we had in June zipped by and now the entire month of July is almost done, there is still essentially an entire month of summer vacation left! A couple of years ago I blogged about a New Year's resolution I had, setting a different goal to work on each month instead of trying to sustain one thing for a whole year. It worked out pretty well, but my biggest takeaway from it was just how much can be accomplished in a month when you set your mind to it.

Anyway. Because of the collaborative efforts between the writer and the teacher parts of my brain, I've developed a strong tendency to look at almost anything I'm doing in life and try to find ways to do it better. So why not do the same thing with the fridge, and remake my collection of Post-Its into something that will make August more fun than an ever-present reminder of how the school year is closing in while I still have so many things I need to do?

Some things on the current list are coming off, and a lot more will be going up. I'm going to try to stick to a few rules to learn from previous mistakes:
1 - Be specific about the things I include.
2 - Only have one item on each note. None of this "do this thing this many times," because it's so much better to rip the note off the fridge right away.
3 - Make sure some things are challenging, but not so far out of my comfort zone that they'll just be this source of stress staring me down every time I walk into the kitchen.
4 - Only include jobs that absolutely have to be done.
5 - Make sure a lot of things up there will help me to make the most out of the month of summer that still remains.

Making the list longer will keep me busy, but that isn't such a bad thing. After all, you can get a lot done in a month if you set your mind to it.

Any suggestions?

Day 1: Ruts and Routines

I usually have some self-reflective moments at the beginning of a new month: How close is the day-to-day life I’m currently living to the life I wish I had? What I could do with this chunk of time marked off on the calendar, if I really tried? What things could I change, or what goals could I accomplish in the next thirty days?

This train of thought usually gets me fired up with ambition at first, but too often that slows down as I start seeing whatever goals I think up as ranging anywhere from being difficult to insurmountable. Then it becomes too easy to start beating myself up over why I don’t have these goals or habits as a part of my life in the first place, which leads me to thinking about how firmly developed a lot of my routines are: getting a Diet Coke at lunch just because I get a Diet Coke at lunch (I’m not even much of a Diet Coke fan); doing my grocery shopping on the same day each week and following the same route through the store to buy the same things; playing the same games on the iPad while not really watching shows I have saved on the DVR even though I lost interest in them long ago; going to bed when the 10 o’clock news comes on, not because I’m tired, but because the 10 o’clock news is on and that’s when it’s time to go to bed.

How many of these things take up time and thought and energy that could be better spent elsewhere? How many of my routines would be better described as bad habits? What things about life am I missing out on just because I’m so often making the easy choice to not choose? Routines can be dangerous if they end up leading into ruts, and ruts are the worst. Few things can suck the joy out of life faster than trudging through an existence where every day is exactly the same. You can find yourself thinking of how there’s nothing to look forward to or get excited about, and even the few things that come along to break up the monotony don’t seem to have the power to shake you loose from the daily everything all over again. Trust me, I’ve been there.

But sometimes moments arrive that can change your perspective. One positive routine I’m working to reclaim these days is getting back in the habit of early morning walks, now that the temperatures are getting warmer again as winter has finally retreated. It doesn’t always happen as often as I’d like, since there are still some mornings when I’ll roll over and flip on the TV to watch the morning news instead, just because that’s been my habit through the winter and it’s so much easier to do. In fact, that’s exactly what I did this morning. But when I got home from school I had an ambitious moment of resolve and decided I’d just get out and take an afternoon walk instead. There’s no law that says I have to do it in the morning. It was still comfortably cool out, so why not enjoy it while I could? I brought up some calm and relaxing walking music on the iPod (The Lumineers, for anyone interested), and started off. I didn’t get to enjoy the golden light of the sunrise, but the partly cloudy late afternoon sky still had a particular beauty to it I could appreciate, and would have missed out on seeing if I had walked that morning instead.

While on my last lap around the neighborhood, I saw some of my neighbors, an older couple who live next door to me, also out walking and coming the other direction. It was great to see them out since it wasn’t two months ago when the wife had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance one night. We stopped and chatted briefly, making small talk about the nice weather and how summer was on the way.

“Yeah, twenty-six more days,” I said, then quickly added, “at least for me. That’s how many I have left before my summer break.”

“You teach?” the wife asked.

“Yep, at an elementary school just a few miles away,” I answered, pointing in my best approximated direction of which way school would have been from there. She then took my hand in both of hers and gave me the most heartfelt thank you of appreciation I’ve had in quite some time. We talked about school a little, and their grandchildren. After we went our separate ways I walked on thinking of how that encounter never would have happened at 6:00 AM. And I just felt good about things, with the barely perceptible breeze on my face and the bright sun coming through the clouds. Once again I started reflecting back to how it was the first day of a new month.

As I finished my final lap I thought to myself, “Quit being such a baby. Nobody’s life is perfect, and if you’re going to be honest with yourself, your life really leaves you with very little to complain about. If there are things you aren't satisfied with, do something about them. Find the routine to change, and bring in some small reinventions. Step out of your rut, however manufactured or perceived it might be. Just find the direction you want, and go the way you go.”

Tonight that doesn't seem so difficult to do.

Yet Another Thirty-One

I admit it: I haven't been posting much on Summer Vacation lately. There's a reason for it though, and it's not for a lack of ideas.

Two years ago I was on a year-long New Year's resolution quest to set and meet a different goal every month. The idea had been to look for some small way to improve life each month, instead of trying to take on one goal that would last all year. I figured if the goals were reasonably attainable and I only had to keep each of them going for one month, I'd probably have more success. Overall it worked out okay.

My goal for May 2013 had been to write a new post here every day, which turned out to be one of the goals I met. It was a lot of work -- something close to the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in November -- but I enjoyed it enough to do it again the following year. My 2014 May posting marathon was also a success, in that I managed to post every day. I'm not going to claim each post was a landmark of entertainment or insight or revelation, but I felt pretty good about what I had done when it was over.

Since it almost feels like a tradition for me now, I've decided to give it a go one more time -- one blog post for each day of the month, starting Friday, May 1st. Luckily I've planned ahead this time and have stashed away a list of possible topics; I haven't started writing any of them yet (it's my own rule that all of the physical writing needs to take place during May), but one thing I've come to realize about my process is that I benefit from taking time beforehand to think things over, so once the calendar changes out of April I should be ready to hit the ground running.

I'm sure some of the ideas on my list right now won't make the final cut, and I'm equally sure other things will happen during May to inspire new topics. Even though I'm usually an obsessive planner when it comes to writing, having the entire month mapped out ahead of me would take away from the fun; there's something about the tiny bit of panic of having to think up and write a brand new post each day that gives the whole project a more dynamic quality on the writing end.

Additionally, since I believe I've done this same thing during each of the two previous blog runs, I'm putting out a call to anybody who might have ideas about topics for me to take on. I like the challenge of starting with an idea that isn't mine and having to build around it. If you have an idea, share it as a comment on the Facebook link I'll post, or on the comment section right here, or even on Twitter if that's where you find this. I've also had people write guest posts during both previous years and I'm planning to try and do that again this year -- I've got someone in mind I'll be hitting up soon (the initials A.E. are all I will give up as a hint), but if anyone else is interested in writing a guest post for whatever reason, we can certainly talk. Let me know. It makes one less day I have to worry about.

Eleven days and counting....

Day 31 - Another May Down

And here we are at the end of another May. For a second year in a row I pulled off writing a post each day of the month. Some were more detailed and deeper and emotional, while others were more to the point or superficial, but I think they all at least had something to say.

I was talking with a co-worker just last night about blogging when she mentioned she was thinking about starting one. I’ve had this one going now for about a week more than five years. It’s difficult to remember a time when I didn’t have this outlet available. I started it as another way to keep the writing muscles in shape and I feel it’s helped in that regard, but I think it’s also revealed quite a bit about me, and probably more than I originally intended. If someone didn’t feel they knew me very well and wanted to get a clearer picture of who I am, they'd only need to run through the some of the archive listed off to the left of the browser window and read. I’m pretty sure that between the things I chose to write about and what I said and how I said it, they would get a good connect-the-dots idea. The twist to that is how I’ve been broadcasting the makings of that perception on the Internet for the world to see while I'm so closely guarded in real life. It's still surprising when someone in my daily life will reference a particular post they read. Sure, I’ll see comments and replies show up, on the Facebook links I post more than anywhere else, but even after five years I can’t reliably say who reads these posts regularly, who might click on them occasionally, and who doesn’t even know they exist. The writer side of me would be very interested in knowing that, but the introvert side of me has a tiny mental hitch every time I find out about someone new who has read any of this.

When I finished last May, I thought about the progress in terms of numbers: Likes, comments, retweets, favorites, hits. This year I followed that all with more curiosity than active interest. Not sure what the difference was between this year and last year, but pulling back on that made the whole process more enjoyable. Hopefully that was reflected in the posts for anyone who read them along the way.

I also remember being pretty burned out on posting by the time I reached the end of the month last year. Happily that isn’t the case this time. It might be a week or so until I get some new content up again, but I am making it a goal to post more actively as my actual summer vacation gets underway, as well as beyond that. This upcoming break has a unique to feel to it, and I’m interested to see where it goes. But of course that’s still two calendar weeks away and I have a lot to do between now and then, most of which involves closing down my eighteen years in fifth grade.

But once that’s taken care of, and I’m able to switch over to my second job being full-time instead of moonlighting, and when the school year kicks in again and all the consistency to which I’ve grown accustomed will be redefined? You can count on me having something to say about it.

Another Thirty-One

Earlier today I was reflecting on the events in my daily life from a year ago and how much has changed since then. Some of the things happening to me and the people in my world in that time have been great, some have been pretty dark, and a lot of them could really be tagged as life-changing. As I was processing all of this, I thought back to the Momentum project I had going last year, and how my goal for May had been to write a blog post for each day of the month. The results were somewhat mixed depending on how you look at it, and even though I reached the goal I didn't really come through it with any new realizations about the purpose for keeping a blog, which ultimately I had kind of been hoping for.

However, some recent conversations I've had brought me back to what the reason had originally been when I started the blog: simply to write. I wanted to give my brain and my written voice some exercise, to explore some topics that I might otherwise not write about, and to generally keep the writing in shape. A lot of my non-school time is already devoted to writing and rewriting and editing and revising and thinking about revising and editing again when I decide what I've written kind of sucks.... you get the idea. I'm approaching all of that work with a newfound purpose and direction, and even though it doesn't always come easy there's a built-in excitement about it that pushes me forward. Making time for blog posts along the way? That could be more of a challenge, and I think it would be good for me. It's been my experience that writing a blog is a lot like exercising, because if you let yourself slip out of the habit it's not easy to pick back up where you left off. And I think this might be the perfect opportunity to give "Summer Vacation" a jump-start back into activity.

So today's big announcement is that, just like I did last year, I'm challenging myself to write some kind of blog post every day for the month of May. I'll post links on both Facebook and Twitter to keep myself accountable, and I'll do my darnedest to make sure clicking on those links will be worthwhile. If I remember right, I only half-surrendered and hit the wall one time last year, so cross your fingers I'll be able to come up with better ideas than cutting and pasting in my grocery lists. Because nobody wants to read that.

Wish me luck, and stay tuned....

Twelve Down / One Down / The Pursuit of Happiness

And so the momentum project finally comes to a close. It was a year ago I figured taking on a New Year's resolution was too ambitious and too long-term of a project to sustain, so instead I'd try a different "project" each month. To review:

JANUARY: Finish the 2012 NaNoWriMo manuscript. FAIL. Even though I was over 60,000 words by the end of November, I didn't push through to the end of what was a particularly ambitious story. At least not yet. I still mean to finish it someday.
FEBRUARY: Make healthy choices whenever the opportunities presented themselves. SUCCESS. I wasn't perfect, but I held to the idea pretty well. Unfortunately it takes more than 28 days to establish a long-term habit, so that idea faded off once the accountability was gone.
MARCH: Organize all of my digital files. FAIL. Turns out I have a lot of them, and I care far less about how organized they are than I thought I did.
APRIL: Really clean the house. SUCCESS. But I had the pressure of Taco Party #1 to motivate me.
MAY: Write a blog post every day for a month. SUCCESS, in the sense that I actually did it. But the result made me reconsider my reasons for bothering to continue the blog at all -- something I've been thinking about ever since then, and even more in the past few days with a new year right around the corner.
JUNE: Fall off the face of the earth. SUCCESS. After the way the school year ended, I needed time to just let life drift along. June took care of that nicely.
JULY: Finish my "Following Infinity" rewrite. SUCCESS. Now its just waiting for the world to discover it, even if that means one person at a time for the present.
AUGUST: Get myself mentally ready for the school year. Qualified SUCCESS, because I wasn't as ready to dive back in as I wanted to be. But a well-timed vacation and a few other moments gave me some valuable perspective.
SEPTEMBER: Stay on top of life. SUCCESS. Normally by the time the school year is a few weeks old, I've become swamped with the things I need to do between my teaching and my civilian life. Some proactive thinking helped a lot. Happily I've done fairly well at maintaining this.
OCTOBER: Prepare for NaNoWriMo 2013. SUCCESS. By the time I reached the end of the month, I was ready to tear into the new manuscript with a pile of ideas and plot devices and a busload of fairly developed characters just waiting for more definition.
NOVEMBER: Reach the NaNoWriMo goal of writing 50,000 words in a month. Which I did, but once again, even if I wound up with a word count that topped 70,000 by the time the month ended I still haven't finish the story. Yet.
Which brings us to DECEMBER, in which I set the goal of having a happy month. With only a couple days left I think I can call this one a success. Not only did I manage to avoid the unpleasant moments that made the previous December so difficult, but I had some happier ones take their place. And this whole late December/all of January time of the year is not my favorite, so to feel like the month went well is a pretty big thing.

Where does this leave me at the end of 2013? It's nice knowing I stuck to the project for the whole year, but few of the things I tried to do made any difference in the end, so the point could be argued that the endeavor was a waste of time... at least outside of the goals related to writing, which are probably things I would have done anyway and just used as placeholders to avoid taking on goals that would have been more challenging or significant.

So I don't think I'll be continuing any of this project-of-the-month business anymore. And I don't see any resolutions being made for 2014. There are still things about life I would like to learn or experience or change or improve, but to make any of those stated goals with deadlines would only add pressure that wouldn't help get them done. Maybe 2014 won't be a year for a resolution, but instead just a year that I decide to give some new things a try.

But regardless of how the project turned out, I think it's fair to say that in 2013 I at least made it down the hill when it came to writing. As for what comes next? This year's experience of taking a four-year-old manuscript out of the archive and seeing it come back to life in exciting ways is proof there's really no way to tell what the future holds -- an idea that both excites and intimidates me. Someone told me not long ago they were confident I had a big year ahead of me. Maybe. Maybe not. There's no way to see it coming until it happens. All anyone can ever do is put themselves in the best positions possible for when the right opportunities come along. For all I know the next few weeks could bring on some big changes, or the whole year could just quietly pass by.

Now it's just a matter of being ready to live with whatever comes along.