Hammering my life into a shape that accommodates my goals and commitments is tough and may even be impossible. Like many of my fellow wannabie-writers, I worked up a 2014 goal list. Though I did not post mine as I thought it looked pretty much like what everyone else was posting, rest assured there are plenty of reasonable goals listed. For example: I will write 1000 to 2000 words, 5-7 days a week, on my present manuscript. After a couple of weeks hard at it, however, I am frustrated to say that I have already met with trouble and have reached only a couple of my targets.
     The challenge boils down to the limited amount of time I have left after my work commitment. My career demands a lot of time, a minimum of nine hours on the job plus a two hour round-trip commute. I rise at 04:00 and try to crash between 21:00 and 22:00. Sans weekends, that leaves me with about five to six hours a day to do everything else. It sounds doable and crunchy, but as any adult knows those half dozen hours are subject to the laws of civilized life which includes everything from attending to bodily functions to having a conversation with the wife. Toss in all the other squishy domestic, social and nuts-and-bolts obligations of adult life and there are really only a couple of hours left in which to address what I ironically consider my most dearly held and important needs: my writing, my music and my health.
     It’s the unlooked for intrusions that really piss me off. For example, I am obligated to update the UC A-G Course Description for one of my classes. In the early years of my teaching career, this was a matter of a page or two. Now, with all the changes to education over the last few years, it has evolved into a document that can clock in at over 20 pages. I’m talkin’ hours of work (the level of detail required by the University of California is almost manic). Where do I get those (unpaid) hours? Yep—that would be the vast amount of sanity-saving, personality-shaping, character-building time I have after everything else is done. Yeah, my writing/music/health time.
     So this is it for the day…these few hundred words: nothing for my manuscript, nothing for my writing course, nothing for my bagpipes, no dog-walk…just this. And then I—what (alarm on my phone is ringing…I shit you not)? LOL…got to run. I forgot it’s Wednesday. I have a Student Council meeting this morning before school starts.
     Yeah, I know: want some whine with that cheese?
     Frustrated.