I have been free from classes for some time now. I turned in my last assignment more than a week ago and got my grades a few days later. Year two is done. One more year to go. Now it is summer break, and it truly is break time for me. I have no summer job as yet, but expect to soon. For now, I have nothing in particular to do. It's awesome. Or it was. Sometime yesterday I hit the "I'm bored now" stage. I realized I haven't actually seen anyone besides the Pennocks or my girlfriend in about a week. Just me and my apartment.
And my Xbox 360. Sarah is awesome and took it upon herself to organize several of my friends to get me one for my birthday. This helps explain the lack of blog posts. I beat Halo 3 on Heroic and picked up a number of achievements there. I've been working through Bioshock (creepy, but fascinating) more recently. I am deeply enjoying this thing. My days have been a combination of video games, reading, and to-do-lists. Finally I'm getting to a lot of things that were pushed aside by the school work. I have reached the point though where my time is starting to feel a little empty.
I recognize this feeling and I know what it means. It means two things: I need to create something and I need to talk to someone. I have at least learned about myself that I need a job, or a schedule, that lets me interact with a variety of people on a regular basis. I also need to be creating whether it be writing, designing, or simply building. I have a habit of letting myself just coast (books and video games are good for that) when I don't have anything specific to accomplish. The empty feeling that follows suggests I need to be more diligent about those things I keep saying I should do (or wish I'd done). When school was on, I always had tasks to accomplish. It represents, however, the opposite extreme, all tasks all the time and no chance to pause unless I made it myself (with all the additional guilt and stress that implies).
Fortunately, I've learned these things about myself and have a better idea about how to motivate myself. The trick is to avoid the coasting AND the exhaustion. If I had a laptop, I'd take myself away from my apartment with all its video games and books, and go find someplace to write. As it is, I set aside time earlier in the semester where I turned off my phone and my internet (I had to literally unplug the modem) and just wrote. It worked. I have most of a new story written. I'd have all of it done, but homework sort of took over my life at the end of the semester. Not entirely unexpected. Well there's no homework now. I've got time and that empty feeling that tells me I have taken the "unwinding" period a little too far. So it's time to reestablish the writing period. Let's see if I can do it every day. I think I can.
