Maintain This Velocity Until Further Notice

After a great week at school I'm flush with enthusiasm, and more afraid of cockiness costing me what I've worked for than I am of failing for any lack of ability or worth ethic. I have to remember that my success so far this school year hasn't come primarily from my being good or super-smart, but rather that I got here by working to the best of my abilities with what I was given. It's only when I start assuming that my talents are great enough to let me coast through with less than 100% effort that I don't accomplish my goals. This is something it has taken me literally 30 years to learn, but I don't doubt it for a second.

I find myself in a position where it is so tempting to slack off, I may have to go way overboard in the other direction to compensate. I've been thinking of volunteering to tutor Principles of Microeconomics students just to have the opportunity to reactivate some of the long-dormant economic intuition in my head. I felt great about studying with my peers for a test in my hardest class recently, and studying with the group paid off more than it has for me in the past as well - I got a solid A on the test. Working with my peers (outside of my many experiences as a wage slave in food service) is strangely unexplored territory for me. I expect that there is a lot for me to gain from and learn about working with my fellow students towards shared goals more abstract than making it through the lunch rush, like mastery of a subject or exploration of an idea. On top of it all, I'm enjoying making new friends with people who share some of the intellectual fascinations that grip me. A lot of the value I'm getting from those friendships currently is linked to the encouragement to succeed in school, however, and the more comfortable I get with them as friends the more trouble I think I may have treating time with them as a study aid.

Graduate school, once the punchline to a joke about how I didn't want to spend my life, is now something I'm strongly considering. Even more surprising, I'm considering what attracts people to the college lifestyle in the long-term and wondering if teaching at the college level isn't the career for me after all. Teaching economics is the most fun thing anyone's likely to ever offer to pay me to do, so I shouldn't brush it off lightly the way I did back in 2005 when I was offered a position as a tutor in the Economics department at my school. At the time, working with people who understood less than me was the last thing I wanted to do with my time. Nowadays, spending time with people who want to learn as much as I do sounds incredible at any price, and the idea of being paid for it is unquestionably appealing.

Fall

We're entering my favorite time of year. It's difficult to overestimate how much I love fall. The relative darkness of the days, the chill bite to the air, the reds and yellows that permeate our entire culture in homage to the harvest colors I remember fondly from my childhood in the Northeast, all vie for my favorite aspect of my favorite season.

Balancing Act

Over this past week, I changed the way I use my time to allow more time for studying, skipped my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game for a weekend study group, and worked 12 hour shifts on the days I didn't have school. I found the time to do this stuff and still eat reasonably well, which has been a problem for me in the past, and as my previous post documents, I felt some pressure and stress. I'm looking at the next few months and see no sign of the pressure decreasing, and at this point I'm used to the concept enough that I'm no longer freaking out. As I began to pat myself on the back about this grown-up approach to the future, I suddenly became appalled and recoiled from the thought in horror - I was congratulating myself on forgetting what it was like to be free. I'm certainly not the first person to document this horrible dilemma, but I don't think it's ever occurred to me quite so starkly as it did tonight that "getting better" at the skills life will demand from me as a worker, a spouse, and a parent will largely consist of "getting worse" at the things that differentiate childhood from later life, and from the responsibilities of being a worker, a spouse, and a parent.

Relearning Relaxation

My internet was cut off for a few days, but there's as much lack of discipline behind my not having posted in 7 days as there is legitimate excuse. I did take the time to write this post on 10/5, though.

I'm sitting here trying to relax after a 12 hour workday. For the first time in at least 8 months, I have my old Xbox (not 360!) turned on and am trying to find a game in my collection that walks the line between challenging and easy so I don't have to detour into frustration. After destroying the computer in Fight Night '03 and being destroyed in Ninja Gaiden, I've landed on the Sonic the Hedgehog Mega Collection Plus. I suddenly stopped to think about what the 12 year old me, playing Sonic demos at now-defunct big box chains like Lechmere in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the early 90s, would think to know that at 31 I'm sitting in front of a game system more advanced than anything I could imagine at 12, with 20+ games to choose from, and actually having trouble remaining interested enough to keep playing! I think the 12 year old me would be amazed at the freedoms my life affords me now, and horrified by the freedoms I lost, that we all lose, after childhood. I wibder what the 12 year old me would think to know that I'm now married to a wonderful wife, or that I'm willingly going back to school in my 30s, or that I decided politics wasn't something I wanted to participate actively in after all.

I experienced an odd sense of cognitive dissonance when I was playing Fight Night earlier. The Atmosphere song on the soundtrack came on and for some reason threw me for a loop. I fought back tears and stark depression that threatened to overwhelm me as I remembered years lost to me forever. The feeling was so strong that I was drawn immediately to embrace my wife, as though to remind myself that aging has had its benefits. And regardless of what the 12 year old me would think of the life I live now, I'm pretty happy with it. While I often consider my childhood to be a place from which I can draw inspiration and a pure sense of myself, the fact is that I didn't know anything about the world or my place in it at that age. The same can be said of my 18 year old self, whose opinions of the present me would be different from the 12 year old's but no more valid. Ironically, neither of them is in a place to judge me, but my hope for the future and my growth lies entirely in my ability to judge and improve on them. That's not really irony I suppose; it's just the human condition. And perhaps I'm simply strange for wondering what various past incarnations of myself would think of what I've done with their former vessel, the decisions I've made with the body they once inhabited. I am them, but I am not them; I am more than they were and yet can see from within them. Those past iterations of me form an infinite series, the sum of which is me at this instant, and yet I am also more than the sum of these mes-that-were. What I know now more than I appreciated at any point before in my life is that I will never stop growing and changing mentally, spiritually and physically. That truth gives me hope for the future, and I hope my future selves agree.

Disappointing Discipline

I knew putting it in writing would make it that much harder to do. But it's not for lack of work that I haven't been writing on here, simply lack of discipline to divide my work into all the areas where I need it to be. That's one of the biggest challenges that I'm working through. So many habits that are key to success are simply not in my behavioral vocabulary. I recognize that my ADD-ish tendencies to jump around can be considered multitasking in some circles, but when I can't control the amount of my time that gets spent on the item I budgeted that time for in the first place, it's hard to call it a skill.

To the end of trying to get better at this I'm starting out by making lists of things to do. Following them is another matter, but I'm really not as worried about doing the things on the list as I am about making the list of all the things I should be doing. It's a very instructive exercise, as at any given time I'm usually horrified to see - in writing - exactly how many things I should be doing and am not.

And therein lies the key, the problem that I have to overcome. I've always felt that people who were able to manage their time and energy well were somehow superhuman - or perhaps that my inability to do so made me less than human. The latter thought is easily rejected by the sight of most of my fellow humans failing to manage their time as well as they want to, but this just reinforces the superhuman appearance of those who succeed. Horror and depression are my most common reactions to seeing a list of all the things I really ought to get accomplished during a given day, and that's before I even start on the intermediate- and long-term projects. If that's the normal human state of affairs then I need to become superhuman in order to live the life I desire - but I don't think it's normal, I think it's a defense I've learned in place of a method to handle the division of my time. So I'm attacking the problem head on with lists everywhere I can - lists on my phone, on my Google account, my calendar, post-it notes on my laptop and textbooks, and 5 reminders for each assignment, study group and test date in my schedule. If this doesn't drive the message home to my subconscious that these problems are here to stay, I don't know what will. Once I accept that there's no hiding from these obligations I can learn how to manage them. Until then, I'll be scaring myself into a better future.