Today is not as warm as yesterday but from the looks of the forecast it is not near as miserable as tomorrow will be. We’re looking at snow again starting tonight though I doubt it will be of any significant amount. Usually if there is a chance of snow day I hear murmurings and rumors throughout the day, but this time there is nothing but silence. I expect bad roads and miserable coworkers first thing in the morning.
But today I feel good, or, mostly good anyway. I am sure I am coming down with a cold or at least the same nasty throat infection everyone else has had. I’m ignoring it for now with the hopes that it’s all in my head.
Over the course of the last few months I have perfected the art of reading while watching T.V. My wife and I have been binge-watching Homeland on Showtime while I read Love in the Time of Cholera and I am very proud of being able to keep up with both. I can’t, and don’t even want to, try doing both during every show or with every book but these two seem easy enough to follow along that doing both helps rather than hinders.
In fact, I was able to finally finish Love in the Time of Cholera and pick up It by Stephen King which is so long that I will have to learn to do a lot of things while reading at the same time or I’ll never get through it. I’ll also be hitting the Little Black Classics even harder so I won’t fall too far behind my goal while working my way through the tome.
Looking ahead to what is I realize I need more contemporary fiction for my book shelves. All I have lying around are essay collections or Greek history and plays. I’ll need to do a little book shopping before I get bored of either!
Temperatures are still well below freezing but the sun is out and though there is in reality only a 10 degree difference between today and yesterday I feel significantly warmer both in body and in spirit. Being halfway through the week helps too. I know I’m on the downhill side and it will only get better and easier from here.
The class is going well, but I realized today that it’s been weeks now since I have been on a route with kids and though I avoid it when I have the choice I miss it terribly when I don’t. I think after this class is done I’m going to get back out there. I don’t want to be the kind of trainer but hasn’t actually done the work in so long that none of my experiences or insights matter or apply anymore.
And anyway, I need to do something else before I get too burned out. When I’m not teaching new employees, I tend to find default to office work: paperwork, scheduling, scanning, filing, etc. but to people who don’t do that kind of work it tends to look like it isn’t work at all. I worry that I appear lazy and going out on route a few more days a week would ease that worry.
But more than for experience, or change of pace, I want to get back out there because I miss the kids. I never thought I would feel this way but over the last 13 or so years these kids have found their way into my heart. I realize now that I feel much more alive, fulfilled, and comfortable with them than I do with other adults by far. I’ve been thinking about my first dream of being a school counselor and wondering if that was in fact what I really was “meant to be” all along.
It snowed all day yesterday and throughout the night last night but the weekend was so warm that most of it melted as soon as it hit the ground. Still, there was just enough to put us on delayed schedule and make a mess of the whole day. I wish the powers that be would simply leave it alone or give us a snow day. Either is better than this. Luckily, I won’t have to deal with it since I’m inside with the class but I still think it’s the worst way to start the week.
But, considering the snow and the chaos of the delayed start, things are actually going pretty smoothly for me and the class. We have some strong personalities in this one and it’s gotten me thinking about how many people I meet a year because I am a trainer and wondering how much each encounter has influenced me. It’s like realizing how much influence your gut biome has on your mood or food cravings.
Who we all are is in part determined by those around us. How much of who I am is made up of from intimate week or two-week training sessions I’ve done over the course of 10 years or more? And, in turn, how much of me is in all those hundreds of people too?
It’s the last day I’ll have with breaks and a guaranteed lunch hour. Tomorrow the new class starts and I’m beyond anxious over it. Last night I kept waking up from dreams where the class was too big or too unfocused to teach and I had to keep reminding myself there was no need to worry yet, I had another day before the new employees begin, anyway.
I know tonight will be more of the same. Even though I know I’m good at what I do and that I have a ton of knowledge and patience to get them through the training and out onto the buses it still never seems to get easier. Public speaking is hard. Being in charge is hard. Doing things that matter is hard.
At the same time I’m excited. I like teaching people how to do what I do and I enjoy taking our small slice of the education system and making it the very best I can. After every class I get new ideas and by the time the next has started corrections and improvements have been made. This week we have changed some of the outdated (and borderline offensive) wording of the old PowerPoints and added new wheelchair crash test videos to drive home the importance of safety.
I’m brainstorming some ideas for a slide or three to start our diversity training. Eventually I’d like that to be a day of training all itself but I’m not knowledgeable enough myself but I have a mentor in mind if she’s up to taking me on. So, I’m excited not just to teach but to learn too. To make them better and to make myself better too.
This week I had hoped to take it easy, to make time for myself and my personal pursuits and interests but it looks like the hectic schedule of the last two weeks will continue for at least two more. That means I’ll need to be mindful of what little time and energy I have left over and do my best to stay positive, enthusiastic, and focused in the face of fatigue and frustration.
This week I will:
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I bring a water bottle to work every day with the intention of getting through at least two refills and I barely end put drinking half of one. This week I need to drink water, not Gatorade, not carbonated water, not juice, water, water, water. Bonus: Avoid sugary sweets throughout the day and alcohol throughout the work-week.
Update: While I was dealing with the worst of this last ulcerative colitis flare, I started drinking Gatorade and now that I am feeling better I am having the hardest time switching back to plain water. It’s almost as if I would rather drink nothing than to have plain water. This week I fought through the cravings and the taste and gulped down at least a bottle full a day. It’s getting easier.
Make those phone calls, send those emails. I have put a sticky note below the keyboard of my laptop with a list of people I’ve been needing to contact for weeks now. Most of them are over important and timely matters and I cannot allow myself to go one feeling anxious or being avoidant. There’s just no reason for it.
Update: I did make some calls but not all and I know deep down I could have but allowed myself to fall into the trap of procrastination and convenient forgetting. Phone calls aren’t easy for me. No form of communication is. Not email, text, fax, none of it but I have to get over that. I have to just grit my teeth and get it done.
Finish reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I’m less than 100 pages from the end of this book and though I’m having issues with it and though it’s getting more tedious and difficult to pick up every day I have to remember that the fastest way out is through. Bonus: finish another book from the Little Black Classics Box Set.
Update: Yes, yes, yes I finally finished Love in the Time of Cholera, and I got through Traffic by John Ruskin, the 6th book in the Penguin Little Black Classics Box Set, too. I’ve mentioned many times how much I both loved and hated Love in the Time of Cholera so I won’t get into it now but I do want to say that I was surprised by how much I loved Traffic especially after the ratings on Goodreads were so low.
Return to writing my Journal posts. I’ve been slacking on both my physical and digital journals and I have felt both their absence through burn-out, irritation, stress, and anger. I’ve had nowhere to vent my feelings except onto other people. I’ve had nowhere to put my thoughts so they circle around in my mind to no avail. For my own mental health, I need these spaces.
Update: I’ve been catching up but making time to journal properly has been hard lately. In my defense work has been overwhelming, and I came down with a nasty throat infection that is sapping what little energy I have left after those long grueling hours. I haven’t given up though, and that’s what really matters.
Start my taxes. This is the first year my wife and I are filing jointly after getting married and after job changes, interest earned, and account reimbursements I know we are facing a hefty bill. Better to get an idea of the damage so we can start planning and paying sooner rather than later. No procrastinating this year!
Update: I just forgot. I meant to begin this weekend, but I had so much to do and so much on my mind that I just forgot. Luckily there is still plenty of time to begin and a long weekend with a lot less to do or worry overcoming up at the end of this workweek. I’ll get it done.
Control my anger. I’ve been feeling very frustrated with processes, procedures, and people everywhere around me. I’ve been snapping at people who don’t deserve it or being harder and harsher with people than I mean to. This isn’t me at all. I have to find a way to resolve what is upsetting more or to cope with what I have no control over before I burn too many bridges or earn a reputation I cannot correct.
Update: I’m learning to step away, emotionally if not physically, when I feel myself getting irritated or frustrated. I’m learning to examine why it is I feel the way I do and to ask myself why it matters or what the impact really is on my life. I’m learning to be grateful, proud, and focused on my accomplishments, my privileges, and my goals and not to let the actions or opinions of others to take up so much space in my mind and in my life.
This week I will not try to be perfect. I will not try to do it all and I won’t worry so much over the mistakes of others. We all have a right to learn by trying, by making mistakes, and by correcting our mistakes. I have to allow, or, better yet, embrace this process in myself and in others.
P.S. For a look at how I fared last week check out my updated post for Week 05
Hello, happy Sunday, and thank you for stopping by for a bit of caffeine and catching up.
I wasn’t able to start the day as early as I’d hoped but I was able to start it with energy and enthusiasm and for that I’m grateful. I had hoped to get out and enjoy the beautiful spring-like weather forecasted for us but I’ve been warring with a headache for days now and my attempt to move a load of tile on my own has resulted in a sore back so I’m staying in. I’ll have to settle for what warm breezes and sunshine I can get through the open windows.
But, please, pull up a chair and grab yourself a cup. I’ve got the blond roast grounds already steeping in the French press and sweet vanilla oat milk already frothed and waiting. Let’s talk about last week.
“Most important conversations for humans, concerns those they are having with God, their loved ones, with themselves and with coffee.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar – Pritajeno zlo
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that this past week was physically and emotionally exhausting though I can’t put my finger on exactly what exhausted me.
I struggled with irritability and my social skills seemed non-existent. I was either too short and snippy with people or I joked too much and took pranks too far. I just couldn’t read anyone or any room. Other people were certainly my hell this week, so much so I needed to take a day to be alone. On Tuesday I stayed home from work and spent the day resting and recalibrating and on my return to society Wednesday I found myself improved though still imperfect.
I’m chalking it up to simple burn out and to the bad news that the break I thought I would be getting from my hectic work schedule was not to come after all.
I’d hoped for at least a week of fewer work hours and responsibilities and time and mental space to return to writing for at least a few weeks but yet another big class of new employees is start this Tuesday which means I spent the remainder of last week getting paperwork ready and calming my anxiety.
No matter how many classes I teach it never gets easier. Every time I have to overcome myself in order to get up in front of them and not only impart unto them the laws, policies, and procedures they must keep in mind when transporting students but to share with them all of my personal stories of connection and heartbreak I have experienced in my time of working with children. It’s not a prestigious job, and it isn’t a difficult one to learn, but in all teaching one must make themselves vulnerable and that isn’t easy for me to do week after week.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I spent the weekend hold up in the house again.
Friday night my wife and I took each other out on a date. After such a hard week among other people I decided once and for all that she is the only person in the world that I even like, let alone love, and I needed desperately to spend time with her.
We went out for dinner and a movie, our favorite date night routine ever since we met more than 17 years ago. We saw Parasite which wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be but is as good a film as all the critics are saying it is. Like Jojo Rabbit last week, we should have seen it months ago.
I had hoped to spend Saturday downtown but my wife was on call for work and the idea of touring the art museum with her work radio going off all day sounded too cringy to attempt. I stayed home to clean and to take care of the plants and myself. It was a nice lazy day and exactly what I needed.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that health-wise I’ve been feeling really good. My ulcerative colitis flare up is nearly 100% under control and I’ve got just one short week and a half left of tapering off of these awful steroids and I start my new medications.
I’ll be moving to a less intense steroid that works only in the gut so that my body won’t go on being devastated by what I have heard other IBD suffered refer to as the “devil’s tic-tac”. This side-effects from this last round came on much more swiftly than in previous years and the withdrawal from tapering off was harder too. I won’t get into specifics but I will say that my body has changed so much that I’m having a hard time connecting to it, loving it, and considering it part of me right now. I just hope the effects reverse quickly so I can start feeling whole again soon.
The Tuesday after this I head to the infusion center for my first dose of Enyvio, a more gut specific medication I hope will help me achieve and maintain true remission. My doctor has warned me that this medication is slow acting and that I may be dealing with a roller coaster of increasing and decreasing symptoms for the next 3-6 months!
I’m doing my best to prepare emotionally for this too, for the infusion itself and the possibility of side effects, for the long term wait and see, and for the possibility that after all of this, Entyvio my just fail me like the last two or three medications have too and we will be right back at square one, only worse, working out what to try next.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you last week was at least a good week for reading.
As of this writing, I’m sitting less than 100 pages from the end of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I really like this book but I’m really struggling to finish it. I had thought I didn’t like it as much as I did his other famous tome One Hundred Years of Solitude but it’s slowly coming back to me that there were whole weeks when I put it down because despite Márquez’s beautiful and moving prose most of the book almost seems plotless. Plus, there are more characters than I can keep track of and we move between years and incidents in their lives without warning and so quickly it becomes hard to orient yourself in the story.
Still, it’s lovely, and I know that regardless of my difficulties (and countless misgivings about the treatment of women, children, and the concepts of trauma and abuse) I’m just as in love with it as I was by the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I’m also halfway through Aphorisms on Love and Hate by Friedrich Nietzsche. I’m no expert on his philosophy but I have read one or two of his books and I of all the philosophers I’ve read he is my favorite not because of his philosophy but for the cutting and heartless way he handles the very humans he speaks of. If you want the hard truth and a dose of tough love, and we all can use that every once in a while, go read Nietzsche.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that while today was sunny and spring-like weather is forecasted to come to an end starting tomorrow. We’re expected to go from a high temperature over 70 degrees today to a high of just 25 tomorrow. Snow is expected to start falling in the evening and I hear rumors that there might be enough to cancel school Tuesday. I hate snow but I’ve got my fingers crossed we get dumped on.
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I can already feel the air outside cooling as the sun makes its way below the mountains. It’s time to close the house up and move from coffee to hard cider and snacks while we watch the big game, or more accurately, while we wait for the commercials between plays because we aren’t “football people”, or “any kind of sports people” at all. More than anything we are celebrating the end of foot for the next 7 months or so.
I hope you had a good week. I hope you’re getting through the worst of winter well. I hope that you can sense the light at the end of the tunnel and the earth preparing to burst into life soon. I hope you made time for yourself and those you love. I hope you stay safe tonight and that whichever team you’re rooting for wins.
I’m stuck in the house again. Yesterday, in an effort to feel useful, I carried boxes of tile from the car by myself and must have over worked a muscle I didn’t even know I had and now getting out of bed has become difficult and painful and leaving the house feels far from worth the suffering it will cause.
The weather is even better than yesterday and part of me is feeling really down about being inside. I’m trying to remember there are going to be many more warm days to come and plenty of chances for me to soak up the sun and see the world.
In the meantime I’m spending the day in the “creativity room” working on a new cutout poem this morning before moving into the kitchen later to meal prep and clean. Laundry was started yesterday and the groceries are already bought and brought home. It’s unusual to have to little that I have to do on a Sunday. I think I’ll make a habit out of this.
Well, I had hoped to spend the day downtown browsing exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art but I have so little physical or emotional energy that leaving the house doesn’t even sound enjoyable anymore. The weather is gorgeous and I have all the windows in the house open.
It’s been a long time since the place has been aired out. It’s been a long time since I have felt “aired out” too. We’re far from spring but that is where my mind is and where my heart longs to be. Today, even though I’m stuck inside, that is where I will pretend to be.
I’ve decided to simply rest today. I’ve given myself permission to waste time. I’m laying on the couch, eating nothing but snacks, reading nothing, writing nothing, and allowing myself all the screens and scrolling I want. I think one day here and there to indulge in all those things I’m trying so hard not to do every other day is important. One ultimate cheat day a month will keep me focused and keep my will power strong.
The end of the week, and the end of the month, has finally arrived. I have mixed feelings about both. January is probably the farthest from being my favorite month but the older I get the more I want to slow it all down, even the most miserable of months.
But today I’m eager to get to the end. I’m eager to see 5:00, to leave work, and to see my wife. It’s date night. We’re going to the movies, of course, to see Parasite, finally. I hope it will be as good as critics say. I hope the hype is real and I will love it as much as media says I will. It seems like my kind of film: slow building, a little weird, a little disturbing, and open to all kinds of interpretation.
I’m eager to see the rest of the weekend too. The weather this weekend promises to be beautiful and I have every intention of getting out to soak it up before the snow forecasted to hit by midday Monday.
Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. I bring a water bottle to work every day with the intention of getting through at least two refills and I barely end put drinking half of one. This week I need to drink water, not Gatorade, not carbonated water, not juice, water, water, water. Bonus: Avoid sugary sweets throughout the day and alcohol throughout the work-week. 
Make those phone calls, send those emails. I have put a sticky note below the keyboard of my laptop with a list of people I’ve been needing to contact for weeks now. Most of them are over important and timely matters and I cannot allow myself to go one feeling anxious or being avoidant. There’s just no reason for it.
Lisa Marie Blair 