Technically I'm on Break

Yep, technically I have plenty of time right now. My test prep classes are over and the new round doesn't begin for another couple weeks. The wedding thing is over.

Yet how come it's already Wednesday? Where has the week gone?

I've taken this opportunity to reorganize my office, partly, which means finally throwing out some of the student work I've been holding onto, for years, against the day I have to put together a teaching portfolio. I've actually STARTED putting together a teaching portfolio, featuring commented-on student work, but it's so exhausting to sort through all those years of teaching that I've never properly committed to finishing the job.

Plus I don't know exactly what it is I should be keeping. Do search committees really CARE about your comments on someone's comp paper from three years ago?

It was amazing how energized I felt on Monday. It really was like I had just completed a project, and it had gone pretty well, and I was ready to move on to the next project. Okay, nothing to stress about, just my next projects to occupy me for the next little while: a PhD and a novel. If I put my mind to something, I bring it into being.

Along these lines I took all the books off my bookshelves. Time to reorganize the shelves along the lines of what I'm ACTUALLY doing now. Time to devote the "good shelf" to only the theory books I need to read for exams. Time to devote an entire five feet of shelving to the massive test prep books that represent my current teaching committments. Time to clean out those old composition handbooks: a new edition'll probably come out by the fall when I probably next teach comp, anyway. Time for focus, time to devote my space to enabling the projects and nothing else! Singlemindedness! Focus! A ruthless cutting-away of distracting baggage!

I've even decided to take Clarissa back to the library. YOU SHOULD NOT BE THINKING ABOUT READING REALLY LONG 17TH CENTURY OR WHATEVER BOOKS, DOOFUS, WHEN YOU HAVEN'T EVEN FINISHED GRAVITY'S RAINBOW.

Now it's suddenly Wednesday, and I feel like the same old slacker, only now with an office in which everything is stacked randomly all over the floor. :) Really, I think the office reorg (and the closet purge that has to go with it) will feel productive... but part of me can't help thinking that this purging of distractions is JUST ANOTHER DISTRACTION. If I was REALLY interested in working on my exam proposal/writing a novel, wouldn't I get up and do THOSE things, instead of still more space-clearing work?

I tell myself that this is itself distraction talking, and that this investment in time and organization, IF I FOLLOW THROUGH WITH IT, really will better enable productivity, esp. when I start doing the test prep thing again.

I wish I had an entire long tall wall, made of corkboard say. I want to write out and pin up all my plans.

Meanwhile, I've also decided this is the year to start a little garden. WHICH MEANS ANOTHER PROJECT.

A particular guy from my writing workshops, back eight years ago when I was doing the MFA. He was 10 years older than me, so already 30 when we both started. (I was 21.) And he was smug. He would write on my stories, which were never ever finished, "Decide to write. Or quit." Like it was a simple choice, just like that.

I still want to smack him, like a dad who means well but misses the point. Especially on a morning like this, when I wake up to last night's dinner dishes and the prospect of a shift at the bagel store I have to cover. Not to mention health, nutrition, time with friends.

I haven't quit, even though it might not look like I'm doing it. Progress isn't measured necessarily in visible daily accretions. Sometimes it's invisible for awhile, then whole techtonics shift.

Thanks for the congratulations! Still another project I've got going is writing a diary of a wedding...