“Match to the sixth.”

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been exploring the zen center in the city where I live. It’s this absolutely lovely buddhist temple where everyone is barefoot all the time, no shoes ever, and there’s often hot green tea, and there’s a garden full of trees.

I really like the part where I don’t have to wear shoes. (It’s probably the hobbit genetics from my grandmother.)

I’ve heard various iterations of the stories and philosophies of the buddha since I was a kid. That part of the experience – the stories, anyhow – they’re important. But for me I think the practice is becoming the most important thing.

The instructions for meditation are basically to sit perfectly still and stare at a blank wall and count to ten and breathe. And if your nose itches, don’t scratch – just notice the feeling. And when you notice your thoughts start to wander, start over with the counting. Over and over again. And we do this for like ten or fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, and then shift into walking meditation, and then return to the seat and settle in for another round. Listen to the sound the building makes and breathe and watch the thoughts tumble through.

The purpose of this is to be more fully present in this moment, not distracted by rumination over the past or worry about the future. I like that purpose, in theory.

Except that at first, I – really hate this practice. I’ve tried it before with little success. It’s one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve ever put myself through. Aside from one or two instances of profound physical pain, and some of the episodes when my mental illness symptoms got just exceptionally shitty, this is right up there with the most distressing moments for me.

Because my brain never fucking quiets down. This is the mind that finds patterns in dates and license plates and phone numbers, scrambles and unscrambles the letters in every brand name, connects the dots and makes triangles in the stars with invisible lines, considers the possibility of conspiracy theories, finds words inside of other words, dredges up Poor Decisions from years ago and presents them to my conscious awareness like a cat giving her gaurdian a dead bird, as a present.

Yeah. This brain. Trying to settle down.

Worse than trying to quiet down a room of 33 seventh graders. Take it from me.

At first meditation feels like getting stuck in the dark in the cold wind on the side of the mountain without a coat. It’s fucking miserable.

The counting helps.

I’m going to keep trying because there’s a promise of some kind of peacefulness on the other side of the struggle. I think – I need to practice more often at home. I may have jumped in at the deep end.

I also keep going back because the temple is beautiful.

Steve Rogers thinks so, too.

My students have last names like Rodriguez and Garcia and Jones and Johnson and Jackson (“I’m sorry Ms. Jackson…”) and if I had a dollar for every Jeremiah in the 7th grade I would have $3, which isn’t that many dollars. But it still feels like a lot.

The inside of my brain has been giving John Nash vibes recently and I really don’t like this.

The mortifying ordeal of reading things you wrote on the internet like four years ago

The other day I heard one of my students cry out as we were packing up to leave, and I turned around, and she said this group of boys had been bothering her. And ultimately it turned out that they’d only been pulling on her hair but my first thought was something so much worse and I’ve always been protective so the first words out of my mouth before I could think were “touch her again and I will hurt you,” and that might not have been the wisest thing to say to a group of twelve year old boys. Epecially as a teacher. But somebody has to teach young men to leave girls the hell alone. And sometimes it has to be that straightforward of a message. Just to get the point across.

I could never hurt a child and I’m not proud of what I said. I just needed them to know.

Steve Rogers/Remus Lupin/Calvin O’Keefe/Palamedes Sextus/Strider/William Turner is doing so good.

When you’re tired and don’t want to sleep because of the bad dreams, consider –

if you don’t sleep well for long enough, the nightmares persist in bothering you when you are awake.

Their twisted internal logic doesn’t have to make sense to you or anyone else. They don’t even have to be real. They’re just spooky and upsetting and cause tremendous grief.

When the plots are rich and full and fascinating stories and the characters are some of the people you love, you can’t help but watch as imaginary bad things happen to them

and it’s awful

And I wish I could send you good dreams.

• Need to do work in order to be prepared to teach next week
• Prospect of being unprepared for next week is stressful
• Stress makes me not want to do work and instead run away to the woods
• Running away to the woods would not help at all with being prepared for next week

Several people have recommended taking the lesson planning to the woods and doing it there. For the portion of the work which does not require a wifi connection, this is an excellent point.

Fun writing utensils only thing keeping me going today.

Today I went shopping and brought home some flowers, cleaned the apartment, and took out the trash. There are lots of ways to say “I love you” and actions speak louder than words.

It’s 6:15AM and I’m sitting with my partner in the morning, drinking coffee with oat milk and munching on a belgian chocolate waffle. My partner’s identity is a secret; for now we’ll just call him Steve Rogers. This is the best part of my day.

Befriend janitorial staff

– the neurodivergent experience of perceiving secret worlds of cryptic meaning everywhere because people don’t often just fucking say exactly what they mean –

A random thought – AT stands for apprentice teacher, as well as Appalachian Trail. I was focusing a lot of energy on those letters for almost two years as my possible future after college – and by some coincidence manifested another reality into being.