Tralfamidorian Summer:

Imaginary interlocutor (to me): So, how’s your summer going so far?

Public Persona (to fictive interlocutor): Well, I’ve put fifty plus hours of time into playing video games in the past week, so that’s like working overtime. I took the day off from that and spent most of today cleaning and organizing. I watched Oprah… I’ll probably spend the rest of the week wrestling eight boxes of un-filed paper work down to three or four. I might watch Oprah again. I will not watch The View. Jes is still working, so I’ve taken her lunch a few times. I hope I am decompressing, but I’m not sure yet. It doesn’t really feel like it. I think it would help to actually get away.

As an additional stressor, I’ve been taking lots of house tours in the afternoons and evenings. Roughly every other day I go and look at four or five – sometimes with Jes and sometimes not. It’s a little exhausting to perpetually rearrange your finances and furniture on hypothetical floor plans. As we get more and more tired of beat up property, our range of price interest is slowly creeping up. We have crested the hill of rehab that I can do and are sliding down the slippery slope of work that I want to do – less drywall, more landscaping. Part of that is having already lost much of the summer to the search. We would have had to have closed already for me to make much use of my time off. If we made an offer today, we wouldn’t close until July. We are working our realtor Tina, but she’s game – chasing the ever illusive seller-paid commission. We found out tonight – in true St. Louis style – that twenty some odd years ago I went to grade school with one of her good friends.

Marinetti I bemoan, futurism falters in the provinces, where the past is never past.

On the work front, I cranked out my AP syllabus last Friday and sent it off, so I am waiting to hear back from the audit people to see if I need to revise anything. I needed a principal’s sign off on the initial draft and ended up hanging out with him on Monday for more than an hour. He’s going to be a good boss. Soon I’ll need to start reading, or rereading as the case may be, what I’ll be teaching in the fall. The rigor of the AP schedule is such that I am not going to be able to closely read with the kids and manage my other duties I need to have a jump on them. Having your summer off translates practically to having your summer less scheduled. Still, there are worse things than getting paid to read, think, and talk about great literature.

I spent a little time in my online photo album tonight. The time jump between most of my uploaded pictures and now is a little jarring. The gap in pictures is an indicator of how much time and energy has been shifted into my working life. I ran into a friend the other day at the store and she remarked that my once frequent emails about BBQs and such had dropped off to only one in the last six months. I’m not unique in this. Many of my friends have, of both necessity and choice, placed more emphasis on their families and careers. I am part of several expanded circles of friends and in many of them there is talk of planning some kind of yearly get together just to make sure it happens.


Poetic synopses of sentiment on the transformations of time:

Here I am in a new marriage, with a son halfway here, and I am reflecting on the recent passing of Kurt V. and the explosive departure of Hunter S. and the slow slide of William B., all of which surround me in a far off way like mountains composing the foothill’s horizon, and the centipedes and silverfish of summer windowsills gallop out their million moment steps betwixt birth and death to the deep ocean refrain “So it goes…”