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A week from tomorrow our family goes on vacation. Business and school needs dictate our schedule for fifty weeks out of the year. The week between Christmas and New Years is a lull for all business things and during that lull we curl up at home and do nothing in particular. For a very long time that lull was all we had. Then about five years ago I realized that if we wanted family time, we had to declare it and defend it from encroaching business and school. I claimed Spring break as our annual vacation. It was a fixed point on our calendar.

At first we thought we would go on various different adventures. I planned to scout out new locations each year. What happened instead was that we fell in love with a place and we keep going back. This means I barely have to plan in advance. We just pick up and go when the time comes. That is probably the biggest vacation of all. Our lives are heavily pre-planned. I know what we’re going to do next year in broad sketches, next month in defined sketches, and next week in detail. Some of this forward planning is necessity. Much of it is anxiety. Our particular bundles of anxieties mean that multiple members of the family go a little crazy if they don’t know what to expect. For vacation, we know. We know where we’re going. We know what options are generally available as activities. We know we’ll decide day to day how things actually go.

I’m very much looking forward to the vacation. I’ll leave 90% of the work behind (email follows me everywhere) and bring my writing. I’m hoping to treat the trip much like a writing retreat. Hours of typing while the kids swim and then later we’ll play games or watch movies together. I’m more prepared to take advantage of a writing retreat than I ever have been before. I’m nearing the halfway point in a novel which hopes to end at 60,000 words. I’m unlikely to have any other retreat this year. On the other hand, if writing starts to feel stressy, I’ll just embrace the vacation-ness of it.

In between now and vacation there are many things to do. I’m going to need every minute of the next week to make sure all the things get done.

I’m not good enough, that is the background music playing in my head this afternoon. It colors my writing, colors my work, and brings me to near tears when poor Link had to wait a long time for me to come and pick him up because I miscalculated a timing issue. The music plays, but I find myself turning to the conductor and confronting him. So I’m not good enough, what does that have to do with anything. Also, good enough for what? Some weird warped standard in my head? Who, exactly, is keeping score here? I’d like it if the confrontation stopped the music and made the conductor slink away, but the music stays like a song stuck in my head which I can mostly ignore.

A young mother came and sat next to me at church. She is my visiting teacher and wants to know when she can come see me, as she is assigned to do. This is one of the programs of my church that I love. The women of the congregation are paired up and asked to go visit a third sister once per month. It builds friendships and community connections in some really good ways. It also adds things to my schedule. I pulled out my phone so that I could look at the calendar. After tapping through the next few days the young mother said “Wow, you’re really busy.” For a moment I pondered her life. She lives in a stay-at-home-mom world with one toddler to her charge. I suspect her hours are every bit as busy as mine, but her tasks are not the sort that get written on calendars. Mine are. I have calendars and lists. I have appointments and carpools. I wonder how my life appears to her. I had a life like hers a decade ago. I enjoyed it, but I don’t want to go back. I’m enjoying this life too. Funny how I can write that and mean it, so soon after writing about not feeling good enough. My head holds paradoxes all the time.

Kiki called yesterday. The minute I saw her name on my phone, I knew something was wrong or at least urgent. When she reaches out for social reasons she uses computer based communication methods rather than calling. She’d lost her stylus for her wacom tablet. She knew it was somewhere in her dorm room, could I please help her find it. The room, Kiki, and stylus were all over two hundred miles away from me. My ability to help was limited, so I walked her through the logic behind trying to find something that has been misplaced. Finding things is less about moving physical objects and more about tracing the thought processes that led to the item being put in an odd place. I know Kiki pretty well. Five minutes into our conversation, she found the stylus. I don’t know if I actually deserve credit for the find, but I’m going to claim it, because the story is fun.

We’ve reached the point in Patch’s cello playing where he does not always immediately drop what he’s doing and go practice when I ask him to. This has more to do with his natural disinclination to switch activities than a dislike for music practice. So I sat down with Patch and we agreed on a fixed time for cello. It comes right after dinner and right before homework. This is a good placement because dinner already interrupts and he can slide into practicing without any trouble. Of course it means that I now have yet another reason why I should be better about supplying dinner on a regular schedule.

This morning I have a congested head and a sniffly nose. Although it is possible that these things are caused by seasonal allergies, it feels more like a mild cold. The sensations are not pleasant. I’d much rather feel well, but I can’t help noticing how friendly and cuddly this cold feels in comparison to the whooping cough that rampaged through our household for six weeks and is still lingering. This cold feels like a fierce kitten to the angry tiger of whooping cough.

The minute people started coming down with the cough I knew it was going to be bad. I didn’t know it was whooping cough. I didn’t know it would cost Patch two weeks of school and Link four. I didn’t know that we would spend over a thousand dollars in copays, medication, lab tests, and cough drops. I didn’t know it would cost us even more in lost work time, lost concentration, and emotional distress. I didn’t know how bad it would be, but from day one I could tell that it was no ordinary cold.

I’ve come out of this experience with a new comprehension of why doctors worked so hard to find vaccines for these childhood diseases. Yes some of the drive was because they are sometimes deadly, but even when they weren’t, the societal cost for them is really high. I’m too young to remember epidemics of measles, mumps, or polio, but I do remember my school being half empty for several weeks because chicken pox swept through town. So I’m reaffirmed as a vaccine supporter. Even if the vaccines only impart resistance, I want us all to be as resistant as possible.

For today, I’m going to curl up in bed with my cuddly little cold and take some vitamin c. In a day or two I’ll feel better.

During LTUE I had two people ask me questions that I could not answer right away. I said I would think about the questions and blog an answer later. This is that blog.

Question #1
Background:
In my presentation on Building a Community Among Your Readers I spent some time talking about the differences between a community and a following. I felt the distinction is important because they are built in different ways and accomplish different things. To summarize: A following is creator facing and creator focused. People want to hear what the creator has to say and some of them want to respond to it. A community may be centered around a creator or a creation, but the people in it are talking to each other. They interact not just about the creator, but about all sorts of other things as well.

The question:
I was asked to list the pros and cons of building a following vs building a community.

It took me several days to figure out why I was stumped for an answer, but I finally did. The answer to this question is highly individual. One person’s con will be another person’s pro. This means that as a teacher all I can do is list the qualities of each and the listeners have to take those qualities and put them in the pro or con column on their own personal tally sheet.

I hope to write up the Community presentation in the same way that I’ve written up other presentations, but that is dependent on time available. I’ve got lots of projects overdue right now.

Question #2
Background:
I was part of a panel on using games in the classroom. We talked much about integrating games into the curriculum and I cited an example of my son’s teacher who threads history through everything else she teaches. During the colonial unit, she splits the class into colonies and all the spelling words are related to those lessons. It becomes very game-like and stacks multiple educational purposes into a single hour.

The question:
When the panel was over I was stopped by a junior high teacher of English and literature. She pointed out that many of our examples had been history or math based. She wondered if I had any ideas for literature or vocabulary based games that would be useful in a junior high classroom setting.

My answer is really only the beginning of an answer. I hope that those of you who have additional suggestions on this topic will leave them in the comments. This is the sort of brainstorming which benefits from some crowdsourcing. The suggestion I came up with in the moment was speed scrabble as a way to encourage learning vocabulary by giving a practical application for it. It does present some challenges in a classroom setting though. Further thought had me thinking about the literature itself and wondering if it would be possible to structure some classroom interactions based on the conflicts inherent in the current assigned book. A read of Merchant of Venice could be accompanied by a classroom economy of some kind with reward structures. Romeo and Juliet could be enlivened by splitting the class into Capulets and Monteques. These ideas don’t feel particularly original, but more specific ideas could flow from knowing what book is to be read and knowing the personalities of the classes in question. I would caution against any Lord of the Flies live action role play. that could get out of hand.

There is also the suggestion of having reward days earned by accomplishments made on other days. This is also not particularly original, but can be compelling if the right social structure is build about the rewards. If the kids don’t truly care about the rewards, it does nothing. I still feel like there must be some better ideas, so if you have them, please do comment.

My head is full of complicated stories which are not mine to tell. Someday, when they are done, I may be able to tell them in more detail as things we survived. Right now I’m treading carefully as is wise when walking in emotionally complex terrain. I can say that helping a socially anxious kid go back to high school when he has been sick for four weeks is not a quick process. I can also say that sometimes junior high kids do not respect their teachers as they should and then have to write letters of apology. Those sentences seem very understated considering, but they’re how I shall summarize this for now. Maybe next week I’ll have more to say.

I pulled inward this week, focused my gaze only on the day and the work in front of me. I ignored social media because it was what my heart told me I needed to do. I have so much yet to catch up on. I pulled in and in, but it wasn’t me curling inward on myself. It was me pruning away all the noise and saving my energy for core tasks. The process has left me feeling more centered than I’ve been for a long time. I’m going to just keep following my instincts and the flow of inspiration which opened back up after a long dry spell.

There is a thing that my brain does where it notes a thing that needs to be tracked and then tracks it. Locations of objects in the house are frequent items in the tracked queue, but it could be a phone call that needs to be made next month, or a prescription refill. Often I’m not even aware that I’m tracking. It is just that the relevant item pops into the front of my brain when the internal timer goes ping. There are times when this tendency is annoying, like when my brain decides to track and fret over things that are decidedly not my problem. Or when it tracks something that I’m trying to ignore, such as how long I’ve been waiting for a submission reply. This constant subconscious tracking definitely adds some tension and stress to my daily life because I’m constantly hounded with a sense that I need to hurry and get things done because more tasks are coming. Automatic tracking is both a blessing and a trial.

Right now it is not happening. I’m not tracking things in the back of my head. I have the few tasks in front of me, a normal quantity of things to do in a day. But when I reach into the back of my brain where I usually have a dozen little trackers ticking away, there is just nothing. It’s like a swirling fog. I’m too tired for the trackers to work. All my physiological energy is being used up by my daily tasks and by healing. It is so astonishingly quiet in my head without all that ticking. Yet I know that all the tasks have not gone away. It is just that now they’ll surprise me by suddenly being urgent. It also means that I’m letting people down. They expect me to remember meetings, to answer emails, to get things done. I can see lots of things I should be doing, particularly with picking up all the dropped threads of school work for my sons. I wear out before I can do them all.

It is like I’ve lost a super power. I know it will come back when I’m well again. I can see that things will return to normal, but I’m not there yet and it is frustrating.

Sorry for the radio silence. I was really tired of blogging about whooping cough and sickness. Unfortunately those things continue to be the primary defining characteristics of life in the Tayler household right now. Quarantine lifts tomorrow morning, which means that Gleek will get to go back to school. Patch and Link will have to be evaluated. None of us are contagious anymore, but the coughs are still alarming and disruptive. Howard did not catch whooping cough because of antibiotics. He caught flu instead, so while most of us have been whooping, he’s been doing fever, aches, and bronchial coughing. He appears to be on the mend, but is still not well.

So here is a small cheerful thing. I have a basil plant in a pot. It smells lovely and adding fresh basil leaves to various foods is a very happy thing.

We’re still mired in being sick. Today this made me angry. I expressed that anger by cleaning and running all the errands. Sometimes that makes me feel better. Didn’t really work this time around. I’m still grouchy and angry. Though I am very grateful to friends on twitter who made me laugh more than once today. This was a day much in need of laughter.

It was Sunday night and the convention was over. The attendees had departed for their homes and the hotel staff was doing their best to make everything back to normal. Usually Howard and I try to depart before the hotel is emptied of the people we love, but this time we stayed an extra night. We did it on purpose so that we would have time to visit with some dear friends who were local to the convention, but who had not had time to come. Two hours is not enough time to catch up when you haven’t seen a friend for two years, but we snatched the hours we had.

I sat there across the table from my friends. Howard had already said his farewells and gone, exhausted, to bed. I lingered because I don’t know when I’ll see these friends again. An anecdote wound down and my friend asked “So how are you doing. Really.” And I began to talk. I tried to summarize, but each detail trailed a cloud of explanation. They listened to all of it. At one point I found myself telling the story of the hardest day last Spring, when the Elementary school staff called me down to discuss Gleek and I met with her teacher, the principal, and three other staff members to discuss what steps were necessary going forward. It was the week when Gleek stayed at home for a few days while we figured things out. The same week when Patch’s teacher also called me to say she was worried about Patch. I was telling that story with all the details of the specific incidents, and I realized that I was using my best story teller mode.
We were laughing through the whole thing.
It was an overwhelmingly, ridiculously difficult week and that was why we laughed.

I couldn’t have laughed at that story six months ago. I’m not even sure I could have laughed two months ago. Last Sunday I laughed. Because it is done, we survived, and the details of the story display the cleverness of my daughter even in difficult emotional circumstances. I can’t promise that all hard things will have laughing later, but far more of them will than we ever expect when we’re going through them.

“How are you doing?” a friend asked. We were sitting down together over snacks, neither of us in a hurry to go anywhere. Not only that, but this friend has on prior occasions listened to me for hours while I ramble about all of the many things in my life. I knew she did not want the short polite answer. I started with the short answer. “Good. Things are good.” Because in a general assessment of all the things going on, there is far more good than difficult. When you get down to details things are more mixed, but that is always the case. We could definitely do without all the coughing. I wish I could say that I was approaching the upcoming travel without tension or guilt. I’d really like to never have to deal with an infected ingrown toenail ever again. Yet in the grand scheme these things are small. In fact if I do not write them down, then a year from now I will have forgotten that they happened. I much prefer this sort of trouble to the highly-memorable struggles of last year.

There are a few landmarks scattered about. I sent Strength of Wild Horses off to print this afternoon. Howard and I get to go to a convention together for the first time in a long time. Gleek is enjoying her weekly trip to ride horses. Patch is beginning to discover the frustrations of daily cello practice, but is still enjoying it more than not. The memorable things are good, the difficult things are forgettable. I can handle that.