I’ve been officially on Spring Break since Friday, so I don’t have to work this week. I have plans to spend the week doing absolutely nothing but editing a book and watering my seedlings. Maybe napping, since I feel like Daylight Savings Time has screwed up my sleep cycle. A bit of dreaming about Spring.
It doesn’t feel like Spring Break. I feel like I could go to work today and college would be in session and I would have office hours today. If I went into work today, I would find myself the only one, facing a locked building. So it’s really Spring Break.
I don’t do nothing well. I hope I can occupy myself with things to get through my Spring Break.
I want to do nothing today. Absolutely nothing. I want to store up the nothingness so that when I go through my busy week, I feel rested and open to whatever the week throws at me.
It’s hard for me to do nothing. I will end up doing something, even if it’s reading Quora all day (a waste of time; I would probably accomplish more by napping). I will check on the plants in the basement and, if I feel bored enough, I will possibly write. That’s the only thing that gets me writing these days — absolute boredom, and my writing is desultory and not flowing.
If it were possible to store up sleep, I would take a nap. But napping will keep me awake at night, and I can’t afford to miss my lifetime sleep.
I will end up emulating the example of my cats, who do nothing for hours a day. Right now, Chloe is laying on the arm of my chair, cuddling up against me. I could certainly do worse.
I don’t do well with nothing to do. Yes, over these last few weeks of break (about three weeks of break) I’ve spent a lot of time just recovering from the semester, but I don’t do relaxation well. I think I’ve said this before; I get frustrated with sitting down and not accomplishing anything. With 1.5 days till the beginning of classes, I’ve had enough of relaxation.
You’d think I could have spent that time doing the projects I don’t have time for during the Spring and Fall Semester. (And, to be fair, I did some of those projects, particularly editing Gaia’s Hands, which went live on Amazon on January 1.) I could have done class prep (I did this, weeks ahead of time.) But I didn’t start a new novel or anything like that because, I admit, I needed the rest.
So over break, I got little work done, and I feel guilty for not taking time to do the work. So if someone asks me what I did over break, I’ll answer, “I didn’t do a lot of anything.” And I will feel guilty because I could have practically finished a novel by then. Or edited more work on ProWritingAid. Or something madly ambitious.
Perhaps I needed to do nothing so I could charge myself for the semester, which I think promises to be stressful: students tired of COVID restrictions in the face of even more illnesses under Omicron, the dreariness of winter and the lack of sunlight, all the minor irritations accumulating by midterms. I, as the professor, need to be the sane one (and as you might recall, I have bipolar disorder, so sanity has some challenges.) So, if it’s possible to soak up relaxation, I have been doing so. And I shouldn’t be ashamed of it.
But it’s time to get back into the work world. I can feel it.
On the fifth day of my vacation, I’m officially at the point where I don’t want to do anything but sit on the couch and binge-watch Babylon 5. This is unfortunate because I’ve been watching that with my husband and we’re two episodes from the end. So what would I binge-watch? I could watch Dune again, or Shang-Chi. (Notice a nerdy trend here?)
I don’t do nothing very well. I easily get restless and irritable. But I can’t motivate myself to do what I need to do right now, which is to edit It Takes Two to Kringle, possibly because the only reason I need to do it now is that I think I should. It’s due for uploading onto Kindle in October, and so I have plenty of time for revisions and the like.
Maybe it’s time to rest and recharge. What that looks like, I don’t know, because I don’t do nothing very well.
Words Like Me 