Day 24: Post-Pandemic Redefining, Part 2

My job is rough. There are times I don’t like anything about it. I’ve given much of my life to it because it’s a job that is crucial to our society, and personally important to me. Unfortunately though, it requires the people who do it to be the best versions of themselves nearly all the time, and it is more than willing to readily consume everything you let it take from you. Looking back from the perspective of at least the back nine of my career, I see I made the mistake of putting too much into it. Dedication is one thing, and it’s an important element of being a successful teacher, but there’s a tipping point when it becomes too much. I put in too much, and doing that was a mistake. Not just a little one either, but one of the defining mistakes of my life. If I were going to pass on advice to anyone in the early stages of their career, it would be to fight hard to maintain the balance you need between home and school if you’re going to have a happy life. 

Oooh wait, did I just subtly drop something in there to lead people into inferring that I’m not happy? Hmm, well, yes and no. I wouldn’t say that I’m unhappy. I’d say I’m content with my life more than anything else. Happy, though? That’s tough. I’ve always seen happiness as more aspirational than deserved; something that happens in fleeting bursts, the euphoric moments when everything about everything feels exactly as we’d want it to be, when fear and anxiety and stress and frustrations are minimized long enough to let us recognize and appreciate the moments for what they are. My life is full of problems, but it’s also full of blessings. I think acknowledging the power both of those have over how I think and feel means that being content with life is actually a pretty significant win. And I’m mostly fine with that. 

Is it enough, though? Should it be?

There are times I don’t like anything about my job, but there are also times I love everything about it. Either way, I come home at the end of the day exhausted. What about writing? Well, once again, love and hate. I love the process of it. I love the rush of seeing something I try to create from nothing but ideas become a tangible piece of art that can communicate with other people (for the record, I’m still mostly uncomfortable with referring to anything I write as “art,” but I’m slowly getting used to it). Outside of the process, there is little about the business side of writing and publishing that hasn’t frustrated me in some way or other. There’s that emotional pairing again — problems and blessings.

A lot has rolled through the media about the idea of self-care in the past year. I never paid much attention to it before, but I’ve come to see the value of it when I had to drag myself through the more challenging lows of pandemic isolation. It makes me think about what things will be or could be like once the world locks into whatever normal will prove to be. Happily it seems like we’re getting closer and closer to that time with each passing week.

When it’s here, where does that leave everything? The temptation to easily slip back into contentment will absolutely be there, holding up a soft blanket and waiting to embrace me with and endless loop of The Office reruns and Marvel movie re-watches as I enjoy being able to relax through the times I don’t have to deal with extraordinary professional challenges and questions about my validity. When normal returns, what happens next? Who will I choose to be in the post-pandemic world around me? What will I need to do differently to if I actively approach a more robust happiness, instead of just accepting what seems good enough when I’m not getting buckets of stress and criticism poured over me? Do I need wholesale changes? Actual post-pandemic redefining? Or maybe just a few well-planned tweaks? What would be enough to make the difference that I seem to feel I might need?

It’s seeming like something I'll have to figure out sooner than later.

Day 23: The Songwriting Conundrum

There are so many things I love about music. I can’t claim to like all of it — most of country music and a lot of what passes for modern day Hip Hop and Top 40 hits leaves me, I suppose, as perplexed as anyone else from older generations that shockingly doesn’t find any connection to music that never intended to include them in the audience to start with. 

The voice of the singer doesn’t need to be perfect, but needs to match and express the emotion of the song. It helps if the recording of the song demonstrates that the musicians involved are strong players, or, at the very least, devoted to their craft. Most of the time I prefer songs with a measure of complexity, the kind that sound either like the lyrics are raw with feeling and were bled out of the writer, or the music was meticulously composed so each note would be as thoughtfully placed as all the others, or both. Which isn't to say I can’t appreciate a simple and nasty Def Leppard guitar hook, either. 

If I think of the songwriters I respect the most, for whatever reasons, I find they share a lot of the qualities I’ve listed above. Granted, songs and recordings of songs are two different things; this is why the Grammy awards have had prizes for “Song of the Year” to recognize the songs and “Record of the Year” to recognize the performances. When I think of peak songwriting, I almost automatically think of Bruce Hornsby. I suspect most people reading this would either think (a) “Who?” or (b) “That guy who did 'The Way it Is' and maybe three other pop hits in 1988?” Yeah. Him. If you only know him from his radio hits thirty-five years ago, you’ve missed out on much of a remarkable music career. The guy is not only a sickeningly talented multi-instrumentalist (he’s likely a true genius when it comes to the piano), but his writing builds songs into living things that almost feel like novels. He may not be the only songwriter perched on the apex of any pyramid representing songwriters from the past fifty years, but he has his share of the real estate up there.

If, or really when, the day comes when I attempt to write at least one honest to goodness song, I know his work is going to be the direction I try to follow. I’d be lost faking my way through a chain of “Sha na na na Na na whoa-OH” sing-along choruses, or looking for the perfect coupling of romantic notions that followed both a syllabic pattern and a rhyme scheme. If I take a run at it for real, I want to aim for something that evokes a feeling of time and place, something that taps into our collective memory and brings back feelings that, while they may be a little different for everyone, will remind people of what they felt at one time, and maybe still wish they could feel again, if only for a moment. After all, if you’re going to try and tell a story, heartbreak is infinitely more interesting than happiness.

As for the music? Nope. I know my wheelhouse. I'll stick to expressing myself through the lyrics, thank you very much. Luckily though, I have a potential collaborator at the ready who I know could conjure up the music needed to match whatever I might have to say. It’s really just a matter of what and when such a project might begin.

Summer maybe? I guess we'll see....

Day 22: The Abbreviated End of Sammich Week

I couldn’t do it. 

I mean, I suppose I could have. I’m sure if I really wanted it, I could have made it happen. But I only made it through three days of Sammich Week before reaching a point where I could not carry on. Thursday night I felt like, I just…no. I can’t do another sammich. Plus Friday was my birthday and even though there wasn’t any kind of giant blow out for that, Day 5 of sammiches just didn’t feel right. Maybe I’ll try it again in the summer sometime, just to strive for redemption. 

Since I promised a recap at the beginning of the week, here’s how the first three days of Abbreviated Sammich Week had gone. Please forgive me of this profound failure, and don’t let it prevent you from supporting any of my other pointless endeavors of the future.

Monday

STORE: Subway

SAMMICH: Ham and Cheese New Fresh Melt

TOPPINGS: Green peppers, black olives, pickles, American Cheese, mayo

SIDE: Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips on the side

This felt like a cheat because I’ve had ham and cheese from Subway before (it was literally the first sammich I ever ordered from a Subway, and I have no idea why I just remembered that) but this was one of their New Fresh Melts, so I’m counting it as new. It was a little different than just normal ham and cheese, it turns out. They put a crapload of cheese on it, and actually put the veggies and mayo on before putting it in the toaster. My heavily-tattooed Sammich Artist warned me against water-based vegetables like lettuce and tomatoes; she said they’d make it all mushy in the toaster, and I took her at her word. The grill marks on the bread really seemed to be more cosmetic than anything else. 

I don’t know how much cheese they put on these new fresh melts, but wow, was this one cheesy sammich. The downside was the number of green peppers on it. I don’t mind green peppers (why else would I have ordered them?) but they overpowered all the other admittedly mild flavors, so each bite seemed to be more about them than anything else. Still very good, though. 

Also, why don’t I get Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips more often? They’re delicious.

Tuesday

STORE: Potbelly’s

SAMMICH: Pizza Sammich

TOPPINGS: Oil and Italian seasoning

SIDES: 1/2 a bag of Salt and Vinegar Zappo’s chips, and an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie

There’s been quite a bit of drama at school lately, and today ended with three different arguments happening between different members of the staff at the same time: (1) Whether Nirvana’s “Nevermind” or Guns ’n Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” was the more iconic album, (2) If Panera Bread can really be thought of as a sammich shop, and (3) a throwback to the long-running argument about whether a frozen pizza should be cooked on some kind of pan or just set directly on the rack in the stove. Two of these arguments came together in my deciding tonight’s sammich would be a pizza sammich, and the only place I knew for certain offered one was Potbelly’s. 

I made a mistake while waiting in line and looked up at the sign that listed the ingredients, discovering that the pizza sammich came with mushrooms. I know there are people who enjoy them; I’ve always thought they had the texture of accidentally biting into a piece of someone else’s thumb that had been slipped into your food as a prank. Luckily there were meatballs in there too, so I knew as long as I didn’t look at each bite, I could convince myself I was only tasting/feeling meatballs — kind of a Schrodinger’s sammich ingredient, I suppose. I got chips because salt and vinegar are great, even though I know I can only stand to eat about half the small bag before my eyes feel like they’re swelling up, and I got the cookie because I believe there are national laws on the books that require the purchase of a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie whenever someone enters, or even drives past, a Potbelly’s.

As sammiches go…eh. This was really disappointing. More of a meatball sub with the meatballs chopped up into small pieces and other toppings added than a pizza sandwich. I’d never bought one before; I doubt I will again. 

Wednesday

STORE: Tono Pizzeria + Cheesesteaks

SAMMICH: South Philly Cheesesteak

TOPPINGS: Cheez Whiz, mayo, no grilled onions

SIDES: Parmesan truffle fries

Okay, I know I said if a place served fries it wasn’t going to count, but that was mostly to box me out of finding loopholes that would let me fall back on some recognizable fast food place instead of getting actual sammiches. We have extenuating circumstances here. Tono is brand new in the area, and since it has cheesesteaks in the name, and cheesesteaks are sammiches, and my three nephews all described these sammiches with great enthusiasm barely two weeks ago, I had to give it a try. When someone walked into Rm. 126 this morning and announced in the direction of the 15 square feet I’ve claimed as my distance learning classroom space that Tono was now open for business, I knew the fates had spoken. 

I passed on the grilled onions when I made my order for three reasons: (1) Generally I despise onions. (2) Even though grilling onions takes away whatever overpowering quality of chemical imbalance they have that makes me hate raw onions so, I didn’t want to take the chance they’d dominate my first Tono sandwich, much like the green peppers did at Subway. (2) Nobody ever grilled onions as perfectly as my uncle Dave did, so there was no way they were going to live up to that standard.

Since this place is literally brand new, it was sparkly clean and generally pleasant inside, the kind of place I wouldn’t mind sitting down with someone to enjoy a meal if there were no risks associated with indoor dining. Three people worked behind the counter, and they all greeted me loudly. I think I may have been the 35th customer the store has ever had. I didn’t even get a chance to completely say I had a pick-up order before one of them was holding out a warm cardboard box for me. In and out like that, and the whole shift wished me a nice day on my way out as well, even though they had just welcomed me twenty-eight seconds earlier. 

This sammich meant business. The bread was fall-apart soft, especially after soaking up the warm juices from the steak. The Cheez Whiz was an amazing kicker, especially since I think so many people tend to group Cheez Whiz in the same category of “why would you ever voluntarily eat that?” foods like Spam. Next time I’m getting extra. I upgraded to truffle fries because somehow my current school roommate and I have had a running conversation about truffles this spring, and I was curious. They were good, but I didn’t really know what flavor to look for as to differentiate truffle fries from any other kind of seasoning. So much food that I couldn’t finish it all, despite my best efforts. I hope that deep down I care enough about my health not to go back there every three days throughout the summer. 

And so endeth Sammich Week 2021. I promise I’ll try harder next time.