The blank canvas
The empty notebook
The unshaped clay
In plaintive voices
They call
Soon, I may have time
Soon, duties will diminish
Soon…
Soon, I can turn to my passions
Hours spent with brush or pen
The clay knife, sculpting, shaping
Breathing life into the creations that for now
Wait
Weep
And call for release from their emptiness
Month: April 2020
A Semester to Remember
I’ve whined about the difficulty of writing around my day job. All the class prep, grading, and keeping up with ever changing technology has devoured my spare time. Now, the inconvenience of the world’s population getting sick and dying has pushed that a little further.
Honestly, I’ve got it good. Already a hermit by nature, social distancing has not been difficult. The college where I teach announced the switch to online course delivery as we entered spring break. That meant I had time to prepare. It’s a good thing too; I needed it.
I now handle my courses through video lectures and labs. The students submit their work through our Learning Management System. As long as I stay ahead of the lectures and grading, I will do well.
It took a couple of weeks to develop a system. A full day’s work creates the lectures and labs for one class. The grading still takes forever, but at least I can plan for the lectures themselves. Fortunately, I had been reading about screenplays and movie making, so I started from a position of knowledge, sort of.
All the class activities still take place on the computer, so it is hard for me to sit and write at the keyboard. Once my day work is done, often well into the evening, I just can’t sit in front of a screen to type.
Lo, there is light at the end of the tunnel. We have about a month left of this semester. I will finally be free. My days will be my own to waste as I will. But will I waste them or will I use them to build new things? To express myself? To vomit out all my creativity onto the waiting world? Yea, I’ll probably waste a bit of it, especially that first week or two.
In the meantime, this is one of those historical events people will look back upon for centuries or even millenia. This is time to record one’s experiences, thoughts, emotions, all for the benefit of those yet to come. Like I always tell my students: if everything goes right you don’t get a story out of it.