Boy am I tired.

Spring -- grass cutting -- Cardinal Baseball
What more could a man want?

I don't remember a year when I had to cut the grass twice in March.  Are you kidding me?  I'm tired, exhausted even, which is silly because I had help today.  I didn't have to do it all by myself.  Jean and Megan both pitched in. Still, I'm exhausted.  It's the weed eating that really gets to me.  I have a bad back and lately, I have had arthritis or something in my shoulders.  It just hurts.

I'm still coughing from the respiratory infection that I've had since March 9, but I do feel better.  I just don't know how I will be affected by breathing in a host of pollen and gnats and other things I'd rather not think about.  I have been taking enough medicine to sink a battleship.

I'm restless at this point in my life.  I'm happy, don't get me wrong, in almost every area.  I think it's my work that bothers me the most.  I'm getting too tired to do all the work required to really keep up in teaching.  It's especially bad with two night classes in addition to my full-time job at North County High School.  The two night classes are composition classes so I am always grading papers.  I'm not sure what I would like to do besides teach.  I'm not sure if there is anything I could do, or more likely, anything anyone would want to hire me to do since I'm 53.  I'm not whining here; I'm just expressing my thoughts.

I'm going to be spending some time in Iowa City working with the ACT program.  From what I have read about Iowa City, it is the kind of town I would love to live in.  A lot like Cape Girardeau, I think. College town.  Lots of cultural and literary events.  Damn, I would love that lifestyle.  One of my students asked me the other day if I would have done anything different in my life if I had the chance to do it over.  I had assigned them a journal topic with that same prompt.  I thought for a minute and this is what I said.   I believe if I could do it over, I would not have gone into teaching.  I would continue being a graduate assistant until I got my master's degree in English.  Then, I would have started work on my PHD.  I would have liked to give creative writing a real shot.  I would have liked to be a writer.  Instead of teaching high school as a back up, I think I would have wanted to continue teaching at the college level.  I know.  Would haves, should haves, and could haves are enough to drive a person crazy.

Teaching has been rewarding in many ways, but I am so tired.  So tired.

I still haven't given up my dreams of writing full time, and I am still writing quite a bit.  I write for the ACT test often.  It's a good part-time gig, but it isn't the kind of writing I envisioned myself doing a long time ago.  I am still doing other writing.  I just finished a screenplay that I like for a rough draft.  It needs a lot of work though.  I think I'm going to start work on another one.  Tongue Tied is a dystopian piece that I have worked on as a novel.  I think it would be a good movie.  Maybe, with the hunger games success, dystopian movies will get big, and I will be able to sell one. Hunger Games, like Harry Potter, will be a very successful franchise.  They are amazing books.