...About How Busy I Am (Part V)?

V. The Wrap-Up

In addition to the time-vampires outlined earlier in the week, I'm also an avid film fan, I run a weekly Ultimate Frisbee game for my friends when it's warm, and I have some fitness goals I'd like to achieve (which means time spent in the gym). All of this adds up to a regularly cramped and hectic schedule. I'll admit that some of these things may seem more obviously important than others, but I've always thought that personal happiness is the single most important metric of one's life, so I'm going to continue to emphasize the "just for fun" activities as much as I'm able.

My old job is less and less important to me. My new job offers exciting possibilities, but I'm skeptical and worried about it. School is the same as it has ever been; boxes someone else decided that I needed to check off. Fine, whatever, I'll get them checked off. Magic is The Actual Best, and I've neglected that for too long. I think it's time to pick up the wand again, and this time I'm going to try and make a real go of it.

I've got some outstanding commitments to the old job that extend through the summer. I'm considering, as I mentioned, dropping one of the two shifts when the new school year begins. I figure that my daily life then will comprise of school, homework, and miscellaneous items from the To Do list in the morning, going to work in the afternoon, and then coming home and practicing for whatever the next tournament is. Not working at 7:00am every day will offer a few extra hours of practice each night, and I'm hoping this re-dedication will help me find some success. Not for my own benefit, but so that these kids that are somewhat interested in tournament Magic, or are in the midst of their own burnout, will reconsider their priorities somewhat. Tournament Magic has given me innumerable and immeasurable gifts, and I'd like as many awesome people as possible to share in that experience.

...About How Busy I Am (Part IV)?

IV. Magic: the Gathering

Getting in to competitive Magic is simply the best thing I've ever done. I've grown as a person, enjoyed an incredibly deep and satisfying game, and met the best humans on the planet. To go on and on about how strongly I feel about Magic would be an exercise in utilizing positive adjectives without repeating myself. Suffice it to say, I quite like the game.

And yet, I've spent less and less time playing it lately. I still watch coverage of and hang out at events, keep current with new cards and news, and play casually with friends once or twice a week. I maintain a Cube (a curated collection of cards from which events and games can be played), and am seemingly always working on something tangentially related to competitive Magic. But I gave up maintaining any sort of collection, or playing in events regularly, several years ago. Other things seemed like better or more important uses of my time and money. I don't really enjoy traveling, and almost never practiced for events even when I was playing, so making a real run at the professional scene didn't strike me as a good idea.

I've played in the occasional PTQ (an event which awards the winner with an invitation and plane ticket to the next professional event) or cash event, to varying success since having 'quit', but largely interact with game now only as a spectator. The reason I'm including this post in a series about why I'm so busy is because I'd like to change that. I want to help the people I care about succeed.

I think competitive Magic is a subject about which I'm both passionate and knowledgeable, and also something in which I can really help younger players excel. I'm friends with some of the best players in the state; they certainly don't need any help from me (but are obviously welcome to it if they like!). But there are some people that I know that have the potential to be truly excellent, and if I can help that process along in any way, I'd be more than thrilled. And yeah, if you're reading this and think you might be one of those people, you probably are.

So, while Magic isn't taking up a large portion of my time currently, that is one of the things I'd like to change. More details on that in tomorrow's post, wrapping up this series. Thanks for sticking with me so far!

...About How Busy I Am (Part III)?

III. CEP

As I have for the past ten years or so, each day begins at roughly 5:45 each morning as my alarm screeches, alerting me to the fact that I need to get up and shower so that I can be at Bowen by 7:00. I'm there for a couple of hours, and back again at 3:00 to watch the kids again until 6:00. For those counting, that's five hours a day, with a large gap in the middle (that I have filled with various things over the years, but is now mostly comprised of school). On days that school isn't in session (breaks or weather-related closings), we are open from 7:00am - 6:00pm, and most of the staff works six-to-eight hour shifts. This is true for summer break as well. We play games, go on field trips, do arts and crafts, and generally just try and provide the kids with a positive environment.

This is the second or third time I've tried writing this post. The previous two attempts came off far more negative and whiny than I intended. Hopefully this one reads a bit less dramatic. My enthusiasm for this position certainly has waned over the past couple of years, which is an experience I imagine most people will have after ten or more years doing mostly anything. I truly and completely believe that working at Bowen and Zachary Taylor over the past decade has been an incredibly and overwhelmingly positive experience. But I've been experience some burnout lately, and it seems pretty clear to me that I need something to change.

This could be the case for any number of reasons, but two things in particular seem to bother me more than anything else. Although the kids change somewhat year-to-year, every day at work feels like the same day that I've lived thousands of times before. We utilize the same spaces, play a lot of the same games, go on the same field trips, deal with the same behavior issues, eat the same snacks, etc. The list goes on and on. On top of that, and I'm fully aware that this may be a case of rose-colored glasses, but the kids seem to be much more aggressively mean to one another, and that just kinda sucks to be around all the time.

With that being said, I don't want to quit. There are a number of good reasons, but they all boil down to the fact that this is a very convenient job for somebody in college.. I'm considering scaling back my hours a bit; maybe only working half-days during the summer and/or maybe only working the afternoon shift when the next school year begins. Whatever ends up happening, though, this feels like the time commitment in my life most able to be trimmed down somewhat.

Tomorrow's post is going to briefly go over the thing on which I'm spent the largest percentage of my life.

...About How Busy I Am (Part II)?

II. Academia

Thus far, my path through the minefield that is higher education has been a bit less than ordinary, to say the least. The Cliffnotes version would highlight the two or three (or maybe four, depending on how you want to count things up) previous attempts at earning a silly piece of paper, only to quickly become disillusioned with the idea of spending countless hours and dollars in pursuit of something I wasn't even sure that I wanted. And, to be completely honest, I'm still not sure that I do, in fact, want to spend all of these resources for that silly piece of paper.

I'm working on a bachelor's degree in secondary education, with plans to teach high school math. As of March 2016, I have a semester's worth of classes to finish in the fall before I can apply for the professional half of the degree, which is a two-year minimum program as a full-time student. Up until this point, I have been waffling between full and part time, depending on scheduling concerns and my ever-fluctuating level of enthusiasm. This current semester and the next will be, if all goes according to plan, my last semesters as a part-time student for at least the next two years. I don't know what the workload will look like, but as this series of posts may indicate, I'm already rather constrained on time, so the increased course load is a significant concern. But that's a problem for future-me.

What I've been thinking about mostly in regards to my schooling is the apparent lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. You see, I'm not particularly jazzed about teaching apathetic high school students how to factor polynomials, or how to calculate the limits of trigonometric functions. I completely and wholeheartedly want to improve the lives of teenagers, and this was the best idea I had to accomplish that goal. I can't help but think I'm going to be an acceptable teacher at best; my heart just isn't in the material, and I have significant issues with many parts of the education system as it is currently set up. I'd love to have the attention of some kids that might like to learn about game theory or film, or kids that want to start lifting weights, but are apprehensive or scared, as I once was. Essentially, I want to use the things I've learned and in which I've found value to help kids "level up" faster than they otherwise might.

Life after high school is incredibly odd in my eyes. Nothing really changes all that much, not on its own anyway. The tools available to me now, at almost-30, are mostly the exact same tools I had available to me after graduation. Whatever positive changes I've made in the past two or three years, I could've made ten years ago, and there isn't really any good reason why I shouldn't have. And I think my experience wasn't wholly atypical. I think that the average teenager doesn't realize the power they have right now, in this very moment, and I think that helping them to realize that power is, maybe, the only thing I can reasonably try and do with my life. I simply can't imagine a future where I'm both happy and not working with and around teenagers every day. Learning things about which I'm passionate and improving myself generally has been incredibly rewarding, and I want to share that with everyone.

So I'm enrolled in the University of Louisville, checking off the boxes I'm told to I need to check off, so that I can one day get a job that only tangentially meets the criteria of what I'd like to do. And I'm doing this all so that I can be in a room with (somewhat attentive) audiences of young people. At worst I'll only be able to teach them how to memorize the things that the common core requires them to memorize, only to forget shortly thereafter. Hopefully I'll be able to do much more than that. If nothing else, I can't imagine it will end up leading to the same situation as my current job, but more on that tomorrow.

...About How Busy I Am?

Because, man, I'm really busy lately. Ironically, I only think of more and more things I can spend time on when I'm constantly in motion, driving from one obligation to the next, or spending precious hours on homework or gym sessions. This series of posts, one a day for the next week, is a direct result of being far too busy to add things to my plate, and hoping into the buffet line anyways.

There are a few central things that are occupying seemingly all of my time lately. Because I'm not used to this level of time commitment, and I'm not particularly enjoying the feeling of constant pressure, I'm hoping that examining the five main things that I spend time on will help me assess the value each of these things brings to my life, and help me when making decisions about my future trajectory. The plan is to write these in order of how long I've been doing each thing, starting with the newest demand on my time.

I. Teen Leaders' Club

I've recently taken a very small secondary position at the YMCA as a club adviser to a leadership club aimed at teens, in addition to working for the before-and-after school program at an elementary school. We have a weekly meeting where we discuss upcoming fundraisers and opportunities to earn volunteer hours, as well as some fitness-related activity. The program culminates with an optional week-long trip to the Blue Ridge Leaders' School in the mountains of North Carolina in June, where the kids will learn various leadership skills, meeting like-minded people, and generally have a good time. I'd compare it to a summer camp, but I've been told it's much closer to a school than that.

So far, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag. As is the case with most teen programs I've encountered, the kids are great. They're energetic and fun to be around, and I've found it extremely refreshing to see kids that are excited about the program in which they're enrolled. I'm constantly thinking, as they're proposing fundraising ideas or talking excitedly about volunteering, "I never would've done these things. As a teenager, or an adult!" There are lots of similarities with various training seminars to which the Y has subjected me, the key difference being that these kids are excited and enthusiastic about participating. And that has been infectious, to say the least. Also worth noting is that I took over the club from an adviser that had been with them for a year. There was another person that was supposed to help me out, but she took a position with the Girl Scouts shortly thereafter, so I feel obliged not to be yet another person to leave these kids hanging.

But the kids have never been the problem with these kinds of programs, in my experience. Rigid and inflexible structures that don't actually support positive interaction with the programs have left a sour taste in my mouth each time. This program doesn't seem to have those issues; in fact, I'm realizing more and more that I can do almost anything I want! This is the kind of freedom I've wanted to build a teen-related program I've been searching for, but realizing I now have exactly what I've been striving for is somewhat scary. I can't blame any failure on an overbearing and incorrect structure, or subpar leadership, or anything else. It's all on me; my ideas either succeed or fail on their merits and my attitude and effort. It's scary and exciting at the same time, but I'm never sure if I'm more scared or excited.

In terms of a time commitment, this is fairly light. We meet once a week for 90 minutes, the occasional weekend event, some clerical work, and the week-long trip in the summer. As the newest experience covered in this series of posts, I don't have a lot of long-term data on this one, but I'm pretty happy with spending my time in this way for now, and it seems like I enjoy it more and more each week. Which, I think, is a pretty good place to be.

Come back tomorrow for a trip into academia!