Miss you.

This past week has been ridiculous…hence the absurdly late entry. All I can do is strive to be better about it going forward.

Recently I’ve been thinking an awful lot about my best friend who passed away from cancer a few years after we graduated from college. This past weekend was the 9th anniversary of her passing. Nine years. My friends and I are all getting old. Getting fat. Graying out whatever hair hasn’t already fallen out. Then I look at old photos of her and I can’t stop thinking about how she will be perpetually young and beautiful. I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that she never got a chance to experience. And then I remind myself that it does no good to dwell on “what-ifs.”

As for everything else going on in my life, I’m happy to report that I’m no longer as utterly exhausted as I was a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what the change is—I’m not getting any more sleep. Still, I feel much more rested and relaxed than I have in quite a while.

My music writing has taken a back seat and I’m honestly okay with that right now. It’s not that I don’t have the time. I just don’t feel compelled to write anything at the moment. That will probably change soon. In the meantime, I’m not going to force it.

This is shorter than I wanted it to be, but I need to start unwinding for the night. More later this week.

Comic mischief and the exact opposite.

(Heads up—this one takes a hard left turn a few paragraphs down. I suppose that’s life, though.)

I swear I meant to write this yesterday, but life got in the way…and by “life” I mean yard work and gaming. Spilling my life onto virtual paper is great and all, but come on—Princess Zelda needs me, like…now.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve played on a handheld, and I’d forgotten just how amazing it is to have something that isn’t your phone to play with. I’ve been splitting my time this week between Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild (much more devoted toward the latter). After playing a bunch of hyper-realistic action games on PS4 (I’m looking at you, Red Dead), a little “comic mischief” or “fantasy violence” is a nice change of pace. I haven’t truly field tested this thing yet—we’ll see how it holds up on my first long plane trip (hopefully happening this summer to Atlanta if things work out right).

Along those lines, I’ve officially filed to run in my first semi-large scale election. It’s not for an office, but rather to serve as a state delegate for the NEA Representative Assembly in Georgia this summer. I’m not actually expecting to win, but stranger things have happened. It’s not as daunting as it seems; I’m not running against the whole state—I would be chosen to fill a delegate seat from our county. If I don’t win it at the state level, our local union also has two delegate slots that I can run for later. We’ll see.

Switching gears (completely), we had our annual lockdown/active shooter drill this week. If you’re not a public school teacher, PLEASE watch at least the first couple minutes of this. (This is the video we’re shown every year to prepare for the drill). I don’t know what else to say about this.

Mass shootings. This new coronavirus. The death of the American republic. What a fucking horrible world we live in…

…at times. It’s not all bad. You have to find something to keep smiling about.

At least Mario’s got my back.

Built-in failure…

Survived another week.

We’re only one month into the new year and I already feel behind…like I’m not accomplishing anything. I know that’s not entirely true—but when your progress is moving nowhere near as fast as the calendar, you start to question your life.

A little over a week ago, I broke down and finally bought myself a Nintendo Switch. This is something that I’d been eyeing for the past couple years, but I could never really justify pulling the trigger on the purchase. I’m not sure what changed last week. All I know is that I literally said “Screw it…I deserve this,” as I clicked on the button to confirm my order. It’s a wonderful little machine, perfect for making myself even more anti-social around my family.

Despite all of the wonderful games that are now available to me, I’ve found myself playing Mahjong Solitaire on it quite a bit. I was introduced to it by my dad (who was also a gamer, although one who primarily loved anything that involves strategy and/or a good narrative). We used to play it together all the time when I was young. Thinking back, so many of my best memories involved being curled up in a blanket next to him playing some sort of video game.

The thing I love the most about most games (but this one in particular) is that it forces you to accept failure as a natural part of life. The game has a simple enough objective: there are a bunch of tiles arranged in a pattern that must be cleared by matching them two at a time. The hard part is that there are four of each type of tile, so you have to be careful about which pair you remove first or you could end up locking yourself up down the road. This is what happens most of the time; the tiles are arranged and stacked in such a way that you almost always end up fucking yourself the first time through.

If you know (and accept) that you’re most likely going to fail the first time, you approach it differently. You’re not scared to mess up, because you know this run isn’t “for real”—it’s just to see what’s underneath everything. It’s the second time through that tests how well you’ve managed to learn from your mistakes. I’ve gone through about 50 different puzzles already of varying difficulty. I’m proud to say that so far, only one of them has managed to beat me more than once.

Okay, enough for now. Time to turn off my brain.

Change of plans.

Starting today, I’m going to be switching to weekly posts instead of the ridiculous goal of trying to do this every single day. I simply don’t have the energy (and frankly, enough to write about) to justify trying to do any more than that.

I started to include the word “time” in that last sentence but deleted it because it’s simply not true. Honestly, I have plenty of time—I just don’t use it very well most of the time.

“…then you can start to make it better.”

This morning I was listening to The Beatles while I was driving to work. A 2002 live version of Paul McCartney singing “Hey Jude” started playing and I found myself crying (hard) by the end of it.

Back in 2011, my best friend from college passed away after a four year battle with cancer. Another of her closest friends and I were responsible for planning her memorial service, which ended up taking the form of a concert. At the end of the service, I conducted a choir made up of her friends which sang my arrangement of “Here Comes the Sun/Hey Jude.” I remember holding it together during the entire time I was around people that weekend. It wasn’t until I was driving home that Sunday afternoon that I finally allowed myself to let everything out.

Hearing “Hey Jude” this morning brought all of it back suddenly…and quite unexpectedly. I haven’t cried that hard since that day following the service.

If you have chronic aches and pains, you eventually get used to the physical pain and it just becomes one more thing you learn to live with…until the moment you somehow manage to find some relief from it. Even if it’s just temporary, it’s a miraculous feeling when it happens. It also makes you realize just how much shit you’ve been putting up with.

Crying this morning felt good. It felt really good. I’ve been bottling up a lot of emotions for a long, long time. Today was the equivalent of slightly opening a bottle of soda. It wasn’t enough to release all of the pressure, but it was just enough to remind me of what “normal” used to be.

I need therapy.

Filling space.

I’ve been trying to will myself to write something for the past 20 minutes, but the well is dry. It’s still relatively early, but I’m going to call it a night soon. I want to use this weekend to sleep in. The problem is that I always end up beating myself up for “wasting” a perfectly good morning if I’m not up shortly after dawn…even when I don’t have to be. I really need to get over that.

I can’t do this anymore tonight…I don’t feel well.

Sleep.

Halfway there.

Had a good meeting with my student teacher this afternoon. He starts officially next week, but we met today to go over a few things in preparation for his first day. Things feel a little tentative right now since we’ve only met twice and we’re still trying to figure each other out. I’m looking forward to working with him. I just hope that he ends up having a good experience with this.

I’ve been in meetings all week. Monday was a union rep council meeting. Yesterday was with our instructional leadership team. Today was a normal staff meeting and planning with the student teacher. Tomorrow is the first meeting of our district’s new Innovation Council. On Friday I’m going to get the hell out of there as soon as the bell rings. I need this three day weekend badly.

Ugh. I need sleep.

A change.

After doing a lot of thinking about it, I’m almost positive that I’m going to be switching to a weekly posting schedule starting at the end of this week. There’s just too much going on with me to devote any real time to this during the work week. Weekly Saturday posts are a much more realistic goal. That’s not to say I won’t write more…but this really just has to do with me trying keep my sanity. At the end of the day, writing here is just a way for me to work some things out in my brain. I don’t want it to become burdensome or forced (which is honestly what’s happening here). I think waiting a week will give me a chance to digest life a bit better instead of trying to unpack everything shortly after it happens.

I’m actually proud of myself for being as consistent with it as I’ve been up to this point. I’ve written more (garbage) here in the past two weeks than I have in the past two years. Celebrate the little victories, I suppose.

Running on fumes.

I think this is the busiest January I’ve had in almost a decade. I feel like I’m pulling high school band director hours again. I’m going to be driving both to and from work in the dark this entire week. I hope my body can handle this. I haven’t been treating myself well for quite a while.

I actually have more to say, but I’m finding it hard to keep my eyes open anymore. Looks like another short one tonight.

Brunch.

I just got home from spending half the day with my wife, in-laws and their friends. This wasn’t something I particularly wanted to be doing on a Sunday before the week from hell at work. Lately I’ve been having frequent feelings of “ugh, fuck this and fuck these people.” And then of course, I always end up going through the mental exercise of trying to figure out if my reaction is just laziness or high-functioning social anxiety. They look similar.

And so I just sat there at the table, casually molesting my cup of overpriced coffee. Every once in a while, I would look up and answer the occasional question about my job…or some other bullshit “I’m only asking this because I feel bad that you’re sitting there silently and heaven forbid someone enjoy their fucking eggs in peace” kind of question.

I made the mistake of telling my wife that I’d rather not go to these things, and she said, “I go to a ton of shit with you that I don’t want to be at, but I don’t complain about it.” Because, you know…that’s exactly the type of caring response you like to hear from your life partner.

So here I am…writing it all down here because it’s too much effort to talk with anybody about these things.

Now I’m going to go turn my brain off with a nap so that I can wake up in a couple hours and stress about how much I have to get done before tomorrow.