My weekends are long and delicious.
This Sunday morning, my five year old opened the door and saw the snow lilt down
from the sky. His eyes opened wide and he said, “Oh, wow.”
#
If you hadn’t noticed, my blogging
has been sparse. Okay, non-existent. People have asked me how graduate school
is going. I have consistently lied: “Awesome, easy, fun.” One of my friends who
recently graduated with her Master’s in German responded to me: “Well then, you
are doing grad school wrong!”
The truth is mid-terms have shown
their ugly faces. I don’t have tests in any of my classes. I have lots of
reading and papers. Did I say I have lots of reading and papers? I have lots of
reading and papers. And I have work in the IT department on campus and
one-on-one consultations at the University Writing Center. I have kids and a
wife. This blog, my own personal writing, and a balancing act with my schedule.
Indeed, moving from a second-shift food service schedule to the first-shift
meanderings of academia, the first half of the semester has been figuring out
this new routine. I felt overwhelmed and disconnected from my cohorts and
professors—at a loss for how to organize my life. Always behind in all of my
work.
Breath,
Steve, breath, I keep telling myself that.
In my teens, I was enthralled with essayist
Robert Fulghum. In one untitled essay, I continue to remember, Fulghum says he
is a professional breather.
That’s cool, right?
We all breath. But so seldom do we
think about the therapeutic nature of deliberate, concentrated breathing. Don’t
classify me as a creature born of 1990’s New Age metaphysical thinking. I was
never into the power of crystals. Yoga always looked painful to me, and
meditation was conducive to extended fits of snoring. My point, life has gotten
crazy, busy, random, wild, beautiful.
#
Yesterday my wife told me I seemed
more relaxed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had gotten angry. Oh yeah,
that anger stemmed from the food service industry. I enjoyed food service. I
particularly enjoyed the pizza niche. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve
probably noticed all my pizza tweets because October is National Pizza Month.
Thirty-one days of pizza tweets. I know more about pizza than you’ll ever
probably care. But my heart was always just half-way in the pizza industry. I
am forty years old, quickly staring down hard at fifty because ten years melt
away so fast, slip through the fingers like ice in June. And finally, I am only
beginning.
Meine Wochenenden sind lang und
lecker.
I opened my eyes wide and said, “Oh,
wow.”
WASTELAND: THE END OF WINTER
“I thought this book was beautiful. Having just finished it, I feel like I have just woken up from a really disturbing dream” – Rose Actor-engel, Amazon
Christine
and Jack sat on the back deck of their cottage and watched the stars
fall into the lake. They whispered to each other, "Beautiful." But Jack
did not know his life was to forever change. A plague came. Christine
died. Aliens landed and they put things in his food and soap. The
sidewalks lit up blue to let him know when he was allowed to go to the
store. Filled with drugs, sex, and cigarettes, the first of six
inter-related short stories that make up the entirety of the Wasteland
series all styled after Winesburg, Ohio and As I Lay Dying. Based
loosely off T.S. Elliot's poem of the same name, The Wasteland is told
from the perspectives of the people living inside Jack's head.
Would you like your book featured here? For free? Email me!
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