Blogaday 3 of 20

Day Three. So far, so good.

Long breaks from school are always interesting to me. They're not my favorite. Call me a heretic for saying it, but long breaks always mess me up. I love the idea of having a break, and getting away from school and the common grind for a bit is a necessary deal. There's a line for me though that long breaks always seem to hit, and after that point breaks just drag me down a bit.

Not that I'm saying I hate this break, because I surely don't. I'm just observing that during long breaks I tend to be sad more often than during school time or short breaks.

What's the underlying psychology there? I think it's two things. The first being that I tend to define my value with the work that I do. If I'm working hard and moving forward with life I feel really good about myself and the world around me. If I am stagnant, as is so common during long breaks, I start to get lazy and sad and less optimistic.

The second psychological part, which may or may not have anything to do with psychology, is just about lines. I think most things are about lines and balance. The difficulty is striking the balance between work and recreation, progress and relaxation. It's generally easy to find the line during school time, but during breaks I always overshoot the whole sleep till noon part. Lines are important.

~

I played a ton of basketball this morning, and that was incredibly fun. I got up and at 9 played ball with my dad and brothers for an hour. It was a good time, just classic half court stuff, good times. At 10 I went and played on the scout team against the sophomores at the high school. The assistant coach decided that his sophomores needed a chance to play against people because they hadn't had a real game during the break, so he called one of his buddies who was assigned to round up guys to come play. There were a bunch of guys that had graduated a few years ago, lots of guys I knew, so it was fun. I was the only kid still going to high school on the scout team, but I played fairly decent. It was really fun to get out there and play hard intense ball against a real team. Granted they're sophomores, and haven't played together too much yet, but it was still cool. My team had obvious size advantage, and we were working together pretty well. After seven quarters the score was 75-75, but I still figure we won. Assistant coach wanted to teach instead of win, and since he was on our team he managed to *lose* the ball to his sophomores pretty often. It was still a great time though, and good exercise. It's good to be out there with good people playing good ball on a full size court. I can't wait for Junior Jazz.

That was a long paragraph. Hmm.

So, I do want to do a post that recaps 2007. This year has been incredibly important. I'm not sure what words really describe it. Heavy might be my favorite right now. Crucial, maybe? Game-changing? I dunno, 2007 was a really really big deal. Important, for sure.

And because it's so important, it's going to be important for me to understand it better. I don't currently understand it the way I'd like to. I know it all happened, and I've got a decent idea on the timeline, but I want to sit down and analyze it for sure. That's going to involve some digging through my journal, but I'm excited about that.

So maybe soon you get a good year post. I hope so. If not a good one, at least a few thoughts on it.

One day left of break. That's a cause for celebration, but also a little bit of worry. That means tomorrow is going to be homework and getting to bed early. One of the great things about break is that nights are endless. They can be exetended as long as I need them to be. Night time is perhaps the best time of day for me. It's when I get to settle down and write and study and all that great stuff by myself. Even if the rest of the day has been terrible, I get to pause and make some progress late at night. Break has allowed me to spend forever doing that, and I love it. I spent about a solid hour a few nights ago writing in the journal, and that's not something that I get to do often. I've been reading more and cross referencing everything. I've had time to post, which has been great. I'm hoping to be able to preserve that once school starts back up. I think if I start "going to bed" earlier, say around 11 or 10, I can keep the current style night time up. I've averaged post 3AM for the whole break, and I need to at least slide that to 1AM for school. So I've got some work to do on that, but it won't be impossible.

January is looking good. We've got some good stuff coming up. Junior Jazz starts this Saturday. We've got a morningside coming up for seminary. That means that one, we'll get a cool morningside, and two that we'll have some good stuff that we need to do as a council. That's always good news. Second term ends, and with it comes the semester break. I get to go hang out with sophomores,w00t. Sterling Scholar portfolios need to wrapped up by the end of the month, and a few scholarships I'm working on applying for are deadlined. With any luck we'll get a frisbee friday in too.

It feels like a new life is starting once school starts, honestly. I'm working on being ready for it. I feel like the old and tired of school version of me laid down sometime during the break, and now I'm ready to get back and hit it all really hard. I've got five months to really thrive out there. There's much work to be done to be ready for it, but I want to make it happen.

I've only got one shot at January 08. There will be at least 17 blog posts for January, that's pretty smooth. I really think that blogaday will help the new year start right. I'm glad that I decided to go for this.

So, ladies and gentlemen, merry Tuesday. I hope things find you well. I've got me some study to do, some sleep to get under my belt, and then a full day to get some homework taken care of. I've got time to get things in order before I launch myself at the rest of my senior year. We've made the virtual half-way point. Master Chief said it well, let's finish this fight.