Oh! September...

where did you go?*

Holy bananas, it's September!**

The mornings are getting cooler, the rain is getting less refreshing and more drizzling.  OMSI is transitioning back to fall hours, and I-- I am getting That Feeling again.

You know That Feeling?  It used to be it was the pit in my stomach when I thought about going back to school, and all I had wanted to accomplish during my three months off but didn't, somehow.  And all the supplemental "this is really a good idea if you read these" books uncracked, shunted behind young adult fantasy fluff that is so much easier to cart to campgrounds.  And - oh god - calculus!

But since transitioning (nominally) from The Taught to The Teacher, summer has been my busy time.  Museums - they ramp it up when it seems everyone else is cooling their heels.  I haven't consistently had a normal human weekend in a long time.  Sometimes that grates on me, but it's the nature of the beast, and I get it.  It can be flattering, though pressure-filled, that I am someone else's vacation destination.

Anyway, since all I truly have looming over me this fall is a change in my work schedule from my precious, precious Four Tens of Freedom to a Frankensteinian schedule alternating a week of five eight-hour days and four ten-hour days (retaining the occasional three-day weekend - huzzah!), where's This Feeling coming from?  Is it the yellow leaves that come to rest on my car every morning?  Is it the progressively grayer sky?  Is it that I haven't had my windows open in a week, and the lack of oxygen is slowly stifling me?

I can't put my finger on it, but I definitely have the feeling that the wind has died down considerably, and now my sails are hanging limp and expectant.  I know the answer is paddle, me hearties! but where to point my prow?  Where did it come from, all of a sudden, this feeling that I'm killing time in this place - just waiting for... whatever it is that comes next?  This summer I was writing my own story, so feverishly that whole chapters lay strewn about me, cryptic jotted notes and outlines like "wedding, falling through glacier, food poisoning."  I never got to tell you folks about everything that happened.  There are whole adventures that haven't been memorialized either in cyberspace or (regretfully) in my own journals.  I don't want to lose them, or the melody I put them to when I write them in my head as they're happening, but the current of living was moving so swiftly on that I've been getting swept away before I could commit them to lasting forms outside of my own neurochemical sparks and memories.

It was a damn good summer.  I have the bruises and the scars to prove it.  Sore newly-discovered trapezius muscles, scrapes from resentful unused bicycles, swiftly-fading suntan lines... the physicality of the past few months now seems very important to me.  I move so much easier in the warmth, and I'm scared I'll lose the motivation and momentum in the suffusing gray fallwinterspring here.  Last time I was at a loss, I actually listened to my body and went South for warmth and movement.  Almost exactly one year ago.  I'm so tempted.  But my awesome job is here, and my awesome family, and challenges I can certainly eke out of life if I make the slightest effort.  I need a push.  A pull.  A running start.  A change?  Perhaps.  I feel things changing around me, so I may as well hitch up my warm socks and get to it.


Just Go.

*Please don't be distracted by the hamburger ad.  Mmm, hamburgers...  
**Thanks, Peyton - excellent phraseology.