Reflection

I should not be writing a blog post right now. This is me being a typical student and finding everything I can possibly do to put off the inevitable writing assignment looming. They tell me the semester ends tomorrow, which I laugh at because I'm not really done until the 22nd.

Yet, I still must produce a Reflection Letter about the second half of the semester by tomorrow. This seems like it should be a fairly easy task, no? I write every day (especially during Holidailies). I reflect on things all the time. Writing + reflection = Easy Assignment!

Except for one minor fact. It is really hard to reflect on something when it is still happening at such a pace that you haven't even really had a solid 20-30 minutes (their recommendation) to just sit and think about what you've learned, what you've gained, what Blessings you've encountered in the process. Their language not mine. Mine is closer to, what didn't kill you, because that probably made you stronger, right?

There have obviously been good things. As I reported earlier in the week (can I just use that as my letter?), the amount of time and energy spent on this endeavor is being rewarded, by students who are miraculously showing progress, even with my teaching style that sometimes feels as wobbly as a toddler learning to walk. By getting to glean from teachers who have figured out more than I had realized I needed to know (a very scary prospect for a know-it-all in recovery, let me tell you). By getting opportunities to continue working with the age group even while I'm mega-focused on getting my impending Thesis done and written, through soccer and substitute teaching for the district.

On the other hand, there are nights like tonight when I get home after 8 pm for the third consecutive night (no end in sight for that stat either), freezing cold, tired, and brain dead. Suddenly, the prospect of writing something coherent and positively tinted seems a little bit more difficult, while the fact that I've had this *mumbling* document open and basically blank for the last 5 days is frustrating me to no end.

So I guess I should go do the damn thing so I can stop ignoring my sleep tracker app (downloaded to help me make sure I'm getting enough sleep, or at least track my lack of enough sleep...) which is telling me that I should have gone to bed 20 minutes ago. Poor sleep tracker app, so ignored.

Also, this song is totally stuck in my head now because of the title of this post. So enjoy.

Until tomorrow.

Cold

I swear, someday I'll have time to write a blog post about something other than what is happening in the moment. I miss my days of long, well thought out, in-depth posts on the deep topics. But seeing as my fingers are still kinda tingly while they're warming up from being cold, it seems like that's not going to happen tonight.

See, I left the house pretty early this morning, per the usual, and my brain got about to 5 o'clock in the afternoon when it came to planning ahead. I dressed for or brought clothes to satisfy all situations until then. I just kinda forgot to plan for it being frigid at soccer practice at 6:30 (despite it being just as cold yesterday at the game, at an earlier time), and on top of it all, didn't even have all the clothes that I thought I did. The jeans that were "in my bag" did not exist. So I ended up out there with just leggings and workout shorts layered on top of each other, no hat, and no gloves, though I did at least have a sweatshirt and a jacket.

I need to just start packing a bag to keep in my car at all times with a different type of soccer gear: gloves, scarf, hat, extra socks, a long sleeve undershirt, hand warmers... this all seems very practical. At least tomorrow is an away game, which is a bit sad in terms of travel time eating up my grading time. It does have one good point: extra time in a well-heated car to thaw out a little bit, because I definitely was not fully thawed when I got home tonight after a 10 minute drive.

Second thing to do is make a hot water bottle or some sort of travel thermos with just water, honey, and some lemon to make myself a nice throat saving concoction. This is necessary because 7 hours of gigs last weekend + cold + teaching + having to have normal conversations + reflexively singing along to the radio even when my throat hurts = Croaky voice.

I'm going to climb under my covers now and pray that warmth comes soon to save my poor tingly fingers.

Until tomorrow.

Why Not?

My title is indicative of my attitude about a month ago, when, while in the middle of not only Student Teaching, but NaNo as well, I agreed to also try to fit volunteer soccer coaching into the mix. Because why not? I mean, who needs time at home to do work?

All joking about my insane schedule aside, I actually said yes to the offer because I missed doing things that I love. Not that I don't love teaching. I do. Every time I'm at the front of the classroom or working with students, I'm pretty stoked about it. It feels like the payoff for surviving on peanuts doing anything and everything I could to just be around kids, teaching kids, even if they weren't the age group or subject matter I'm ending up it.

Every single time that I've gotten a job that didn't involve working with kids in one way or another it has petered out within a few months, tops. I think the longest I've made it since graduation college was 5 months in a job without kids. It's either been kids or (often) nothing the rest of the time. And really, it's because nothing else drives me like that possibility for life transformation. The prospect of being "that person" for even one student, the person who said something that changed how they think about the world or helped them understand something... It's a heady idea to think about.

Coaching soccer is my other happy place. Or rather, my happy place has always been a soccer field in some way, shape or form. The first practice I went to was actually on Election Night, and despite all the stress of the day for me and many of my friends, being out on the soccer field was like the best anti-depressant ever. It is a place where I can give my brain a break from focusing on all the things about my life that are out of my control, and focus instead on the sights and sounds of drills, or a game being played. I lose myself, in a good way, and I missed it when I was away from the game.

Now, a month later, I'm finally starting to learn some things. Learn the girl's names, learn what a coach actually does (because I really had no clue), learn the differences in gameplay and expectations between the different levels of play, learn all those nuances of the team and the relationships, and the league.

Who cares that I could have actual evenings at home if I wasn't doing this? I really don't right now. I was suffocating under a blanket of JUST SCHOOL AND WORK for months, and I was making it, but I didn't have any activities that actually gave me some sort of outlet and it was killing me. Now I've gotten another NaNo, and the associated temporary social life that helped breathe a breath of life into my weariness. I've gotten into a place where I get to know more people in the community, something I've done a stunningly poor job at since I moved to this area. I've gotten a place where for an hour and a half most weeknights I can give my brain a break from the constant chatter of to-do lists and lesson plans and scheduling time into my life to grade papers and...

And it's wonderful.

Until tomorrow.

Of Kittens and Couches

I've realized that the last two posts have ended without a real point, or reasoning for why I tied all those thoughts together. Mostly because the addition of caroling to my weekends (first post) makes my insane schedule even crazier, for all that it makes me money, provides some fun, and is good leadership experience when I'm singing gigs where I'm the defacto leader by virtue of experience and knowledge of the music. 

Then that leads to extra exhaustion (second post), because not only am I expending the energy of performing, but I'm also doing super fun things like sleeping on my parent's couch. The couch is not like, my favorite couch in the world. It is designed to be sat on in the specific sections, not slept on length-wise. It also puts me in the middle of all the hub bub of six people on diverse schedules, two dogs, five resident cats, and one foster kitten who spends the night in a crate in the living room being very loudly sad that he cannot be out wandering the house and sleeping on top of me. 

I'm still trying to figure out if I get more or less rest during the week, where my sleeping schedule has degraded to around 6-7 hours a night, waking up at 5 am when my poor night owl body is still very happy being in bed. It's kinda a toss-up, honestly.

Thankfully, the next couple of weekends I'm just singing Sundays because I have places to be on those Saturdays. Which simply means long driving days, which I can handle. 

And now it is time to start getting ready for gig #3 on the weekend. And driving home after that, to hopefully get a reasonable amount of sleep in my quiet, comfortable bed.

Until tomorrow.

Exhaustion

I've spent a lot of my life being pretty exhausted a lot of the time. Having depression and not knowing it for almost 10 years through junior high, high school, and college will do that for you. My depression has always, always presented as bone-crushing weariness with life that makes it difficult to actually do anything productive, let alone get ahead in stuff like chores and homework.

I didn't really understand why I somehow couldn't make myself function at the level that was expected of me in my youth without caffeine; even as early as 12 or 13, I had discovered that soda could not only make it easier for me to focus but also make it possible to attain the level of hyperactivity my friends naturally exhibited. When I got home I could collapse, but when I was hanging out with people, it was all about getting enough fake energy into my bloodstream.

Same with homework. If I could drink enough soda to kick my brain into gear, I could get everything done. More often than not, though, it was just enough to get by, and frustratingly not the extra that I knew I could do if I just could have gotten around to it perhaps the night before it was due.

I have always been very analytical about my caffeine consumption. I almost treat it as another over the counter medicine that I take. I know about how many milligrams of caffeine is in the coffee I drink most mornings versus how much is in an energy drink, tea, or a regular soda. I know which drinks affect me fastest, ala different types of hard alcohol. If I want to get buzzed super quick from booze, I drink tequila because one drink is more than enough. If I want to get that mental zing in the next half an hour because I have a paper to write, I slam a half an energy drink or a shot (or two) of espresso.

Starting in college, it became about the most efficient ways to get it into my system. Caffeine pills were not out of the question, though I recognized the slippery slope there and avoided them unless something like a sickness or trying to keep my voice alive for a performance kept me from drinking my normal stuff. Excedrin became my emergency, "I have nothing in the house and a caffeine headache" go to.

At some point in those four years, I realized I was probably legitimately addicted to caffeine and made attempts to either go cold turkey or back off my consumption severely on breaks to at least try and salvage some semblance of natural energy production. Whether or not that actually worked is somewhat up for debate, because I always go back.

I worked hard after I moved out of my parent's house to deal with this because 1) I had less than no money, and 2) I needed to be able to be more consistently functional to do fun things like hold a job and support myself on some level. A combination of actual depression medication and working out a lot of my previously totally ignored emotional issues helped with that. Did you know that completely repressing a lot of different strong emotions all at once is kinda exhausting? Neither did I, until I started working through them and noticed the difference. I even managed to get off the meds after a couple of years, which was a goal because I wasn't a huge fan of the side effects, as much as the meds helped.

I had also managed to successfully taper off my usage of energy drinks for a good couple of years before starting my Masters program. I still had them every once in a while, but not with the frequency, and often I would open one can and just sip on it for like, three days whenever I was feeling slow. I never fully got off of it, though, unfortunately. And then school hit.

Suddenly it was all back. Too much stuff to do, too many new tasks to handle, and I jumped on the energy drink train hardcore. Also the coffee train, which was one that I had stayed away from, not liking coffee for most of my life (this changed when I went to Italy and discovered real espresso, but that's a different story.

I have spent a good portion of this semester trying to moderate my consumption, after a summer of pumping myself full of various high-caffeine drinks to survive my newly early alarms, my ridiculous school workload, and the summertime drama that made all of that even more difficult to process. I even went completely cold turkey for a couple of weeks, until my first assessment was due and I realized the reason I still drink caffeine is because higher level thought happens much better with it than without it. Unfortunately, I don't see that changing any time soon, though I am still going to try and keep it at least within the bounds of moderate consumption, instead of, you know, 4 shots of espresso a day in various forms, or a couple of energy drinks instead of just one. It gets to a point where it's just not worth it anymore, and then I'm still tired.

That's what it all comes down to, really. Even with all this, I'm still tired all the time. It's been quite possibly the longest year of my life, with the possible exception of the year my sister and nephews died. But that happened in May, and this year has pretty much been insane since January. It's been school, yes. It's been work, and the drama associated with getting prepared to leave in August for student teaching, which brings us back to school... and on top of that, you know, still trying to be a person with functioning feelings and the time to occasionally stay at home for a few hours to rest. Minor details.

So exhaustion is where I'm left, clinging to the last vestiges of my willpower. Even though has grown a LOT out of necessity this year, it's almost gone. I'm starting to feel like I'm going to need a full week of just absolute nothing except for self-care activities to decompress from this year. Whether or not I'll get that is still up for debate, but at the very least, I get Christmas, a day which I'm looking forward to not out of a super-developed Christmas spirit, but because it represents the time when I finally, finally get to stop for a minute and just be.

Until tomorrow.

Fa La La La La...

For some reason, there's a major part of my life every holiday season that I rarely talk about. Perhaps because it is something I've done for so long, I never think about my involvement. I sing in my mom's Dickens caroling group, at malls and events, somewhere between 1-3 weekends a year in December. They've been rehearsing in my house since I was 8, and I've been singing with them since I was 13.

This year in particular, it actually is notable that I'm doing this. My schedule is so absurd with student teaching, volunteer soccer coaching, writing about soccer on the side, occasionally trying to spend time at home... add that to the fact that I sang a grand total of two gigs last year and haven't sung in a professional or choral context since then (aside from running a kid's choir at my work, which doesn't really count) and I was thinking, "this is insane, my voice won't survive, I don't have time to drive down there any weekend, why would I do that?" The answer turned out to be money. I haven't been making any as a student teacher and loans only go so far, and inevitably the end of the semester is when that reality starts to set in.

Which is why my Thanksgiving break started with a mad dash to get my voice back to something vaguely resembling good again. The first rehearsals were... rough, to say the least. Not only was I practicing ensemble pieces on my own without any support, I was practicing with a pitch pipe app instead of a piano. The cats were very confused. They kept sitting on the music, which was generally unhelpful and hilarious and made it difficult to focus on the notes.

I powered through, got my voice to a point where I could jump back in to a group and hold my own. Which is good because I sang two three-hour gigs last weekend. And another 7 hours this weekend, one of which is already finished thankfully.

I feel like I had a point to this whole thought, but I have no idea what it was now, hours after I started writing. This is your brain on low sleep, high busyness quota, or something like that.

Until tomorrow.

Oh, It's December Is It?

Hi, guys! It's Holidailies time again! How about that?

Do you ever have those years when it feels like every month is simultaneously really long, and goes by really fast? December snuck up on me because the last two weeks of November were so crazy, but those individual days consistently had me going, "When is this day EVER going to end?"

I know a lot of people have felt like this, but 2016 for me was one of big-time emotional stressors and absolutely zero time to process any of those emotions because of school. So... if my Holidailies stuff this year deals with some bigger stuff, don't be surprised because I'm taking any opportunity I can to work through some of it. I work through issues best by writing anyway.

For now, it's time for a NaNo recap, which will be short because I only wrote 35,000 words. 10K was my last big assessment for school, because I deemed it basically a novel anyway. That left 25,000 of actual fiction. A good 5,000 of that was the kind of story that exists solely to get the weird stuff out of your head and words flowing so that the more normal good prose can flow unfettered. The remaining 20K was a partial rewrite of my 2013 novel.

Rehashing this story was actually really successful for me. When I left off editing this novel last year, because school took over my life, I had a couple of character and plot issues that were gnawing on me. I just couldn't figure out how to fix everything without a total restructuring of everything. Starting with a fresh rewrite allowed me to pull some of those elements in holistically and also to change the direction of one of the key relationships in a way that fit the characters and the story better. Having some of that figured out gives me a good place to jump in and accomplish a lot when I'm ready to go back to it, which is a wonderful feeling. 

I didn't win NaNo (it was a pretty long shot with school and student teaching), but making so much progress even in a short amount of time was a great feeling. It was better than last year too, which was nice. It also felt great to write some fiction after months of analytical research papers. Like the feeling you get when you get out of the car in the mountains and breathe in the fresh pine scent for the first time. So refreshing, and such a great stress reliever.

Otherwise, my November was basically school. School and then more school. Some soccer (thankfully!). And a little bit of being horrified by society right now, but more on that later.

Now I have to go do my last few things before my LAST CLASS OF THE SEMESTER tonight (I'm not excited at all). 

Until tomorrow.