My apologies for going dark on the .org for the past few weeks. By mid-December I had already become quite frazzled, and the confluence of the semester ending (and me having sixty student portfolios to grade in a very short period of time), Spookytooth’s death, the holiday season, and a cold on top that all, just left me feeling out of it. The combination of emotions resulting from Spooky’s death, going through Christmas without Dad for the first time, and feeling lonely since I didn’t have classes to teach, put me in a position where I felt like I needed to shut down and deal with my internal issues before I started writing here again. (I did keep Twittering over my break, but Twittering and blogging are two very different animals.) In the eight years since I launched the .org I don’t think I’ve taken an updating break longer than ten days, so perhaps I was overdue for a vacation from here.
As far as what happened in the interim, we survived the holidays somehow. I got about ten different video games, a few books, and some new cookware for the holidays; I gave Mom enough sweaters and sweatshirts to get her through the winter. (Speaking of which, aside from one sixty-degree day in December, it’s been unbelievably cold, with temperatures below zero most of the past twenty-four hours.) I didn’t have my car for a week, as a small, routine repair took forever thanks to the incompetence of the repair shop. I’ve also been buying an unbelievable number of CDs off of Amazon because they have so many classic CDs of artists whose material I crave (Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) between five and seven dollars. I pampered myself a bit while I was sick, and now I’m trying to get back into the old routines here. I can’t say that I’m feeling 100%, but at least I’m feeling better than I was four weeks ago.
The new semester started this past Monday; I’m only teaching two classes this term, but one of them is creative writing, my first time teaching the creative arts. It’s a once-a-week class, so I don’t want to make any assumptions based on just teaching a single class, but so far the teaching and the planning have made me think a lot about my future career, and whether I want to focus my teaching on creative writing or composition. Unfortunately, I’m moving past the point where I can really afford to take my time making these decisions, and I don’t have that many people whom I can turn to for help. I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now I’m just trying to get a better feel for my creative writing class and how well I think I can teach that class (and what good teaching it will do for me).