I always love to pretend that summer is going to be some really long time, but the fact of the matter is it’s gone in an eyeblink. Ten weeks feels like it should be an enormity but it isn’t, and three of the ten are already locked away into other school-related stuff (a two-week science seminar, two days of retreat for the fall, and another three-day training) and one more will likely end up getting tied up in yet another science camp. So that’s six weeks.

I am emphatically not whining about this; most people do not get this much vacation, even if I spend as much of it as I possibly can *working* and even if I feel like I make up for it by working fifty-hour weeks or more every single week while school is in session. I bring this up only because I need to figure out how regimented I’m going to try and be with the rest of my time. I am, frankly, shitty at being on vacation. I’m capable of relaxation, but what I call relaxation seems to look like Doing Things to most other people. More than two or three days in a row of having nothing to do and I’m climbing the walls; there’s a reason I hold down two jobs even during the school year.

I’m considering getting up at regular work time during the summer, all summer long, regardless of whether I actually have to work at Other Job or not. I don’t need to do this, obviously, but building some more discipline back into my daily schedule is nothing but a good thing and if I can get myself to the point where I can get up a little bit earlier on a regular basis that would probably be useful. Ideally I’d like to spend some of the extra time either working out or writing or both. The greatest likelihood will be that I will do neither, but it’s certainly worth a try. If I could make an effort to be up at six every day, downstairs by 6:30 or so, I could get a workout in and be in the shower by 7:30, giving me either more than enough time to make it to Summer Job on time or a good head start on getting some words generated in front of the computer. I need to get another novel written. I know I’ve been saying that for forever but goddamn it I’ve done it twice and it’s ridiculous that I’m having so much difficulty generating a third.

I kinda wish I’d been born in the eighteenth century, so long as I’d managed to be born as a wealthy white guy. I look at things like the daily schedules that Thomas Jefferson set for himself (and there are dozens of other examples) and that type of discipline and focus makes me insanely jealous. Now, granted, these guys could set these sorts of schedules for themselves because they had literal slaves doing all of their real work for them. I neither have nor want slaves. I don’t even have any servants. And there’s also the question of whether they actually kept to those schedules or just lazed about all day and wished they were doing what they were supposed to be doing like I frequently do. Then again, they tried, right? Jefferson managed to teach himself six freakin’ languages. Surely I can manage to get up an hour or two before I really want to.