Back to the real world, or so it is as I perceive it . . . .

All my life I have planned for certain interruptions, and now I find that I live for these and become quite disgruntled when I am not surrounded by them.

For example, this is my last spring break-- ever. EV-ER. I will never get another one. So I am wondering how I am going to break up the monotony between Christmas break and summer vacation without . . . Hold on! I will never again, as long as I live, get another summer vacation or a real Christmas Break!

Is this the exchange that I have made? No more guaranteed, plan-aroundable, set-in-stone vacations in order to not have to cram for any more finals?

Bring on the finals! I want the finals! I will learn to love-- or at least like more-- the finals! Hold on-- I never dislike finals, only the cramming for them, which is still better than keeping up all semester and then REVIEWING for the exam. Where is the fun in that? There is no rush or fear of failure. No delusions, no sleep-induced hallucinations. If it were not for cram sessions, I would never have experienced laughing so hard that huge sobs wracked my body and I experienced an inability to breathe which not only left me briefly unconscious, but also allowed me to know what drowning must feel like.

I would gladly live through this two to three times a year for the rest of my life in order to always get a Christmas Break, an Easter Vacation or a Spring Break, and a Summer Vacation.

How am I to plan my life? When do I get to catch up on my cleaning? When do I get to use the eye-shades and ear plugs? When will I ever again get to wear shorts during the day on a week day? When do I wash laundry, do taxes, and hunt for a job? WHEN?

I need these interruptions. I need recuperation time. I want do-overs! I wanna go back and not take classes last summer! I wanna have gone to a beach for spring break at least once in my college career, like most of my friends did! I wanna have driven someplace and done something with this spring break! I want to go back as far as the 3rd grade and actually get one freaking vacation that did not include pneumonia, food poisoning, tonsilitis, strep, cystisis, kidney infections, the flu or common-flipping-cold! (Add to that list: broken toes, burst blood vessels, allergies, and hangnails.) I want one time in my life when I get to enjoy a snow day because I am not sick!


So, without these vacations, as I have already asked, when do I catch up on my rest and cleaning? Weekends? But weekends are for waking up, crying because even if you slept all weekend log, you would still be exhausted, realizing that there is too much to do and you lack the energy to any of it, and watching cartoons and re-runs of eighties and early nineties sit-coms.

If I have to use my weekends doing laundry and taking old clothing to the salvation army, or go out on a date with my husband? More importantly: when do I get to actually wear my shorts in public in nice weather? Or is that why women and men wear shorts less and less as they grow older? At first it is a matter of no time, but after retirement, it is a matter of not wanting to cook off the pallor established after forty years of not having the opportunity to wear shorts out of the house.

I am not certain that I will be able to survive this upheaval in my thinking. You see, I have known this schedule for every year of my life, for the most part. Getting such vacations was just a part of life-- even before I began school. (The privileges of being a teacher's kid.) The biggest change I have had to deal with thus far has been that my spring break does not often coincide with Easter in college.

Driving to the midwest is difficult enough for me! I need hills and mountains to break up my view. It is entirely possible that I feel overloaded without something to impede my ability to see forever, so to speak. I need to know that I get to break things up and that there is down time, that I need not try to determine my own schedule and/or that life is not cyclical and eternal. I need for someone else to divide my life, tasks and breaks up for me. If not, I cannot fathom my existence. Oh, yeah, and I don't recognize deadlines.