Beach Blanket Thoughts

 

I've heard that it takes roughly three days to switch out of "work mode" and let go of stressors when you go on vacation. This seems true. At least, it felt true for me when my family traveled to Florida during our spring break last week.

Sometimes you don't know how tightly wound you are until you unwind. The weeks leading up to spring break moved too quickly and had been too full. All work and no play. Deadlines and commitments, plus a double wallop of bronchitis and pneumonia, plus poor sleep, plus general end-of-winter fatigue all added up to one spectacularly lackluster version of me. I felt colorless. Bland. Dull. Flat.

But something changed around the third or fourth day in Florida. At this point, my meds had kicked in — my cough receded, my lungs expanded more easily, my body felt less tired. More than that, my spark kicked in. There I was, lying on a beach towel, pleasantly warm and mostly properly sunscreened. My brain finally had churned its way through a tangled cluster of work-related-thoughts, freeing up the space to think more freely, more creatively.

To the soundtrack of gentle waves, seagull cries, lazy conversations, and aerosol sunscreen sprays up and down the beach, my body molded into the sand and I let myself breathe deeply. In that comfortably warm and hazy space, drifting between partial sleep and happy disassociation, my thoughts wandered.

Beside us were young parents with a baby. As I overheard them instruct her to not eat sand, I thought about parents and children. How do generations keep doing this? This process of being children, then having children, and raising children? How have Joel and I, specifically, done this three times over, this raising of little humans into bigger humans who intuitively know that when they see sand, it's not for eating? 

My thoughts flitted to how the sunshine makes the tips of waves glitter like diamonds, then back to whether I had applied enough sunscreen. Somehow it's never enough sunscreen, even if I'm continually re-applying. Inevitably, one rogue strip or section of my body will end the day as if it's never encountered sunscreen, turning a shocking tomato-red.

Without thoughts of work crowding every nook and cranny of my consciousness, and with the freedom that comes from being shaken loose from a routine and dropped into an entirely different setting, other thoughts appeared in stream-of-conscious wisps, random and shaken loose, rising to the surface then evaporating almost as soon as I think them: 

I think I'll become a person who does pushups. Like, regularly. I'm going to start doing pushups each morning. Maybe even each evening. I wonder what's the most common color for painting a front door? I look good in baseball caps. What makes a person classy? Why is it easier to dress nicely in the fall than it is in the summer? I should apply to give a TED talk. Yes, I'm going to give a TED talk. Add that to the list of life goals. Could I be a person who shuffle dances?

And the seagulls cried, and the waves lapped at the shore, and the sprays of sunscreen sounded in the distance, and the baby ate the sand despite her parents' warnings, and I lay there, having the best random beach blanket thoughts, and then, with a happy contented sigh, I had one more:

This is it. I've done it. I've finally unwound.

Ode to the End of February

Multiple times this past month, I've asked myself the same question: "What is wrong with you?"

I've come up with the answer. February. February is what's been wrong with me. 

There have been good moments in February. For instance, my six-year-old neighbor brought me a handmade Valentine, and that ranks pretty high. Beyond that, the month has blurred. I've taught classes (so many classes), and graded things (so many things), and been asked "what's for dinner?" roughly 300 times, which makes no mathematical sense because February only has 28 days, but somehow I'm convinced I've cooked dinner 300 times. The repetition and grayness has worn me down despite my best efforts at optimism 

I'm ready for it not to be February.

And, in very good news, this desire will be fulfilled tomorrow. Tomorrow is March, and March feels more hopeful than February. Days will grow longer. Temperatures, slowly, will start to rise. March isn't out of the tunnel, but March at least hints toward the light.

So long, February, you short, yet long, little month.

On Headphones, Shop Vacs, Acorns, and Twenty Years of Service

We're nearly through the first two weeks of the spring semester at Penn State. I'm teaching four classes this term. We've gone over the syllabi. I've learned nearly 100 names. We're establishing classroom rhythms. Students will be submitting real assignments, real soon. It's happening. We're doing this.

This year is my 21st year teaching at Penn State. I know this because I received a small acrylic plaque in the shape of the number 20 to commemorate 20 years of service this past summer. The university also sent me an email with an online catalog of prizes so I could choose a reward. I selected a set of headphones. They're decidedly mid in terms of quality.

As a side note: I've always loved my job. What I mean by "always" is that I've loved my job 90-95% of the time. This feels like an extremely high approval rating after two decades. However, when I received an acrylic 20 and headphones as the acknowledgement of 20 years of service, I wanted to quit. The reaction was swift and visceral. I put the plaque in a drawer. I don't use my headphones. True story.

Incidentally, one of the prize options from the online catalog was a shop vac. We already own an old shop vac, but retrospectively, I now wish that I would have selected this option so I could say, "This prize system for years-of-service sucks," and mean it both literally and figuratively.

I digress. This was not meant to be the point of this post.

The real point of this post is that — despite the lame acrylic plaque and janky headphones that demoralized me to the point of wanting to abandon hope (and employment) at the year 20 marker — I'm now in the midst of year 21 and I still love teaching. I still consider ways to grow, ways to explain content vividly, ways to engage students in tangible ways.

This past weekend, I thought of a way to do this. It involved making an analogy about acorns and oak trees. Acorns are amazing. The DNA of an entire oak tree is housed in an acorn, and if planted in proper conditions, that one tiny seed produces mighty growth. (If you're wondering, my analogy compared the acorn to a strong residual message statement, which, in public speaking, is the singular message that an audience remembers after everything else about a speech has been forgotten. All the content developed during a speech — every example, explanation, and argument that a speaker develops and conveys — germinates from that tiny "acorn" of a clear, focused residual message. You don't plant an acorn and grow a tomato, after all. The growth needs to match the seed. Content needs to back the point.)

That's an extremely long way of saying that I was thinking about acorns last weekend. And, in passing, I stated to my husband that it would be nice if I had acorns to pass out to one particular class of students as a tangible way for them to remember this lesson.

I didn't venture into the woods to find an oak tree and gather acorns that day, though. Then overnight and into the next morning, we were blanketed by a light dusting of snow, which further solidified why I didn't give another thought to acorn harvesting. The analogy would stand without using actual acorns as props, I figured.

But the next evening when my husband returned from work and found me sitting at my laptop, he approached me with a smile and his hands clenched together. "As I was walking back to my car, I noticed that my feet were crunching on the sidewalk. Look, acorns!"

He poured two dozen acorns from his hands onto the table.

I said all that to say this:

It's year 21, and I still love my job. At least 90-95% of the time. But better yet entirely, I love my husband even more.

Today and Every Day After

This admittance might make me sound old, but we didn't stay up to midnight last night to welcome the start of 2026. Instead, we watched college football (Miami upset Ohio State!), then headed to bed. Even if you don't see the ball in Times Square drop, it's still a new year when you wake up.

I already like when I get to flip a calendar page to a new month, so starting a whole new calendar scratches a deep itch. It's a clean slate. A reboot. A fresh start. I'm ready to organize my pantry, clean my closet, toss expired spices, and throw out old socks. 

At the same time, I've lived plenty long enough to know that I'm still me. I don't subscribe to the near-year-new-you premise, as if somehow we reach January 1 and become our true authentic selves, just 100% better in every possible way. 

What is new, though, is a promise that I rely on daily: God's mercies are new every morning. Daily mercies. Daily bread. The daily promise that I don't need to fear because the Lord never will leave me nor forsake me.

God with us — Emmanuel — isn't just a concept to sing about in Christmas songs, though I deeply appreciate those reminders. Emmanuel means that God is with us on December 25, and God is with us today, and God is with us every day after.

God is with me when I'm ugly crying, when I'm irritable, when I'm a disappointment, when I'm ashamed. God is with me when tears sting my eyes, when I feel overlooked, when I don't know the next best step to take. God is with me when I'm teaching a class, speaking on a stage, and writing a blog post. God is with me when I'm so full of joy my heart can't contain it, when I'm light with laughter, when all is well.

Emmanuel, God who became flesh, the God who has redeemed me, this Jesus who is the King of Kings — He is called Emmanuel, God with us. 

God with us today when the calendar is bright and fresh with the promise of a new year ahead, and He's with us every day after.