work, goals, and fatuous remarks
Back to just about 100% today, and back to school. School. Hoo boy, school.
No, it's fine.
It's just the predictable mid-year slump coupled with an abnormally large amount of extra stuff. There is always extra stuff, far, far above and beyond what it is even remotely possible to accomplish within your contractual work hours, but right now I am drowning and there's nothing to do about it. You just show up and do your job and remember that ultimately you're a kiddie librarian with a mediocre salary, so the world's not going to blow up and you'll be fine.
I stayed three extra hours today just to shelve books. I don't even have lesson plans for tomorrow. I brought home so much more work to do, but now it's late and I have to sleep sometime.
IT WILL BE FINE.
Anyway, that little touch of the foodborne illness is really going to set me back on this month's Try To Win metrics. Not that you have to gamify everything, but sometimes it's fun and helpful. On the new year I said I wanted to read more, write more, and walk more, but just saying that and hoping for the best wouldn't have been effective. Here are the targets along with a roughly five-week status update:
No, it's fine.
It's just the predictable mid-year slump coupled with an abnormally large amount of extra stuff. There is always extra stuff, far, far above and beyond what it is even remotely possible to accomplish within your contractual work hours, but right now I am drowning and there's nothing to do about it. You just show up and do your job and remember that ultimately you're a kiddie librarian with a mediocre salary, so the world's not going to blow up and you'll be fine.
I stayed three extra hours today just to shelve books. I don't even have lesson plans for tomorrow. I brought home so much more work to do, but now it's late and I have to sleep sometime.
IT WILL BE FINE.
Anyway, that little touch of the foodborne illness is really going to set me back on this month's Try To Win metrics. Not that you have to gamify everything, but sometimes it's fun and helpful. On the new year I said I wanted to read more, write more, and walk more, but just saying that and hoping for the best wouldn't have been effective. Here are the targets along with a roughly five-week status update:
- At least 1 children's book per day (plus whatever other perverse literature I consume for my own dark purposes) - OK, this is one of those instances where just being the slightest bit intentional about a thing leads to massive gains. Whereas I read 266 books in all of 2023, last month I read 82 new picture books, plus like four or five actual grownup books. (Three were audiobooks, but that absolutely does count as reading as long as you're actually paying attention.)
- Journal every day - Failed this one quickly, but I did write in my journal sixteen times in January, so basically every other day. The last time I hit sixteen entries in a month was November 2019, and before that, January 2013. As I have mentioned recently--and this is why I set the goal in the first place--journaling in the Modern Era of my life really took a plunge compared to Bachelor Times. Maybe 366 entries in 366 days was unrealistic, but just even conceptualizing a goal has already made me more productive.
- 10,000 steps a day (average) - This is not difficult on a school day; I often hit this before I leave work. It's the weekends, holidays, and bouts of dire illness that make 10,000 a day for a year any kind of a challenge. In January, I averaged 10,344. Right now in February, I'm at...8204, with the five days of barely moving. So I can make that up with ease. Felicitously, the walking and reading work quite in tandem. My digitally enhanced virtual cyberwalks are pretty Zen, and just doing a couple miles a day with an audiobook adds up to tens of thousands of steps and hundreds of pages in a week--in addition to what I'm already doing. On a related note, I have spent so many hours virtually "walking" around Seoul that is is now my new favorite "city."1 It looks so rad. I want to go. I sure wouldn't have to twist Kim's arm to go, if we had like ten G's just lying around for an East Asian getaway. Seoul, or maybe Tokyo, but I haven't done Tokyo as much. I almost feel like I know my way around parts of Seoul by know. If I ever did go, I can see myself pestering some friendly tour guide with incessant remarks like "hey, I've 'seen' that on my television before!" and "this place is Seoul cool!"