Letters from Lisa

My friend Chris refers to this phenomenon as “(expletive) Murphy”, as in Murphy’s Law - something that goes awry just because it’s impossible to have a travel experience in which every little thing goes smoothly. Just can’t happen. I call these sorts of incidents Monty Python moments, because they often involve long, complicated verbal exchanges with obtuse, rude, or simply incompetent customer service.

My trip has had its Monty Python moment. (Maybe this will be the only one?) It all started when I decided to go to some countries in which malaria is present, thus causing the need to take anti-malarial medication. The way it works is that you have to start taking this medicine just before you leave, so as to build up the drug in your system, and then you have to take it for a week after you get back, in order to maintain the drug in your system. If you stop taking it too soon, you expose yourself to malaria (and possibly breed a drug resistant strain - sort of like when people stop taking antibiotics after two days because they feel better.)

My doctor did careful research about exactly which of the drugs would be most effective for the particular places I was going, and calculated exactly how many pills I would need. Then, he wrote the prescription for that amount. I took it to the pharmacist at CVS, who briefly glanced at the prescription and said that they didn’t have the full amount in stock, so I’d have to come back the next day.

You can see where this is going already. I can tell.

When I went to CVS last night, the intern behind the counter grabbed my three bags of medicine and started shoving them into the bag. I asked to check them, since I am going to be away from any and all CVS pharmacies for the next six weeks and won’t have any way of replacing something missing or incorrect. She gave me a huffy look, but agreed.

“There are only 30 pills in this bottle,” I said, examining the malarial bag. “I’m going away for 6 weeks. It won’t be enough.”

The girl shrugged. “Your insurance will only pay for 30,” she replied. “That’s the maximum.”

After I got over my initial thought (which was “I’m sorry, I didn’t know we were filming a Monty Python sketch, you silly person”) I began to calmly explain to her that you need to take anti-malarial medicine for a certain period of time before, during, and after your exposure to malarial zones, etc. etc. and her response was, “Oh, well, the insurance company didn’t know that, so they can give you a waiver if you’re going to be out of the country.”

Well, hmm. “Why didn’t the pharmacist tell them that in the first place?”

Her reply? “I guess they didn’t know you needed it for being out of the country.”

I live in New Jersey. Why else would I need it?

The upshot of the whole conversation was that I needed to call the insurance company and inform them that people take anti-malarial medication when they’re exposed to malaria, so arbitrarily deciding to give someone a 30-day supply when they will be exposed to malaria for 42 days is a pretty stupid idea. If you’re going to do that, why bother paying for the first 30 days? Just let the person get malaria, and foot the huge hospital bill. At least that would be consistent.

I spent about 40 minutes today on the phone with the insurance company, or more accurately, the automated voice of the insurance company. I am starting to seriously hate those things. Press 1 to check on a claim. Press 2 to inquire about a referral. Press 3 if you can’t find 1 or 2 on the keypad, press 4 if you don’t know what a 3 looks like, press 5 if you want to track down the person whose voice was the model for this stupid automated system and yell at them for contributing to one of modern life’s most annoying scourges, just behind people who discuss their custody disputes on their cell phones on public buses and people who buy magazines because Britney Spears’ uterus is on the cover, press 6 if you LIKE the magazines with Britney’s uterus on the cover…

I pressed a whole bunch of numbers, then found out I had to call a completely different line that deals with pharmacy claims. Then I spoke to… you guessed it, another automated voice system. Hello! I am so happy to assist you with your call! Please listen carefully to the following seventeen options! Press 1 if my perkiness assauges your irritation at having to call all these different numbers just to get the medicine you were entitled to in the first place! Press 2 if you are at work and don’t have the time to be listening to this! Press 3 if you think I am overmedicated! Press 4…

I didn’t press anything, and eventually I got on the line with a real, non-perky, not-overmedicated human being. Who quickly informed me that the pharmacy needed to call a special pharmacy number to waive the 30-pill limit. She volunteered to give me this top secret number, which just happened to be printed on the back of my health insurance card with the completely obscure and misleading label “Pharmacy Helpline”.

I was sort of hoping, as I was dialing the pharmacy’s number, that I would get that particular salesperson who told me I was the one who needed to call. And I did. “Are you the girl with malaria?” she asked.

Yup, that’s me. The girl with malaria. Because you people wouldn’t give me my pills, because you couldn’t be bothered to CALL THE INSURANCE COMPANY!

“Call this number,” I told her, adding, “If there is a problem, call me right away. Do you understand???”

Everyone understood. No problems. I have my 50 anti-malarial pills. Thus concludes the Monty Python moment for my South America trip.

We’ll have graduation photos tomorrow. In the meantime, my cousin Jessica got married. I don’t have any photos of that - just a few of me with my parents before the ceremony.

The miracle was that the dress, the shoes and I all made it through the entire wedding. My dad spent 45 minutes poking extra buckle holes in the shoe straps in a vain attempt to get them to stay on my feet. And the dress - well apparently I am thinner now than I was when I wore it last summer. But it didn’t fall off, which is the important thing.

Spent the entire reception talking about Costa Rica, since apparently EVERYONE has been there and loved it. Also, I was seated next to two teachers who both went to my graduate school. Inevitably, they knew some of my current coworkers. It’s a small world.

The wedding itself was beautiful… they are obviously very committed to each other.

I can hardly believe it, but today is the last day of school. (For kids anyway… I will be in every day next week.) Things have been so frenzied that I haven’t even had time to process what this means. It doesn’t particularly feel like I am saying goodbye to the kids - I have known most of them for three years, after all, and had them in class twice now - but I am saying goodbye to my classroom teaching job. I have already started my new position as science teacher and curriculum coordinator, and will be spending the next week getting things into an organized state. When I come back from my summer trip, I’ll be in school for a few weeks before it opens for the fall, getting everything ready. Maybe there is no one day or event that earmarks “goodbye to classroom teaching” for me, since the transition has already started to happen.

Classroom teaching - the way I can describe it best is that it’s like running a family. The kids pretty much live together for seven hours a day. Each of them has their individual life going on, of course, and some of them have quite a lot going on outside of school, but your room is the focus of their day. Quite honestly, that can be a lot of responsibility. Sometimes I wonder if the people who make education policy or who just criticize education have ever supervised a group of kids for seven hours straight. One of these days I will sit down and type out, minute by minute, what a classroom teacher does all day - but right now I think that would be too overwhelming, considering I’m about to go do my classroom teacher job.

One last time.

The second annual weirdest parent comment, on ProTeacher

Just for the record, I don’t have anything weird enough to post in this contest. Certainly nothing that would win against these shockers:

I had a mom last year that didn’t quite know how to help her child with spelling. We had spelling words that go along with our phonics program as well as a few sight words. When we had the word ‘thought’, she wrote me a note that said “My husband doesn’t know what ‘thought’ means so I don’t think my child needs to know how to spell it either”.

The comment goes on to say that the parent requested the same teacher for next year, so she apparently “thought” better of her irritation.

My favorite homework excuse was “Last night was the big sale at Macys…and you know how my mom shops! By the time we got home, I couldn’t finish it.”

Hope she got some good bargains.

I had been trying to reach the mother of twin 7th grade boys to explain to her that her sons weren’t doing their work. She didn’t respond to any of my attempts. One day, she appears at the school to pick up her children. It just happened to also be report card day. I approached her and told her that I would like to take just a minute to explain to her the low marks on her sons’ report cards. As she continued to walk to the door she said, “Come on boys. Get in the car. You know mama don’t care what these teachers write on these report cards.” I never mentioned their grades to her again.

I wouldn’t normally discuss a child’s grades with the parent in front of the child (unless we’d already met and figured out together what we were going to say to the child) but she sounds desperate to get the message to the mom that the kids are floundering. And as it turns out, for good reason.

mine isn’t funny just really sad as to what parents will do to help their child win an award…
we only went camping one Friday, it’s not as if he missed any test! So why didn’t he get the perfect attendance award?
thank goodness they’re transfering

This, to me, is one of the best examples from the thread. Not only has the child learned it’s OK to miss school whenever he wants, but that he can cut corners and still feel entitled to get an award. With the word “perfect” in it, no less.

I had a parent ask me how to raise their child’s reading level. I told them that they needed to read more, especially during the summer. The parent looked at the child (a sixth grader) and said “Well, I guess it is time to get you a subscription to playboy.”

For the articles, naturally.

A mom left a nasty message on my voicemail angry because her son was expected to wash his hands after using the bathroom and before lunch. She said that washing his hands that much made them dry and flaky. YIKES!

If she thinks dry and flaky are bad, wait until she sees the symptoms of E. Coli and Hepatitis A…

I had a student come in pretty late this year carrying a note explaining that his mom had been at the casino all night and couldn’t wake up in the morning to bring him to school.

At least she wasn’t shopping at Macy’s.

At parent conferences, I had a particulary difficult parent. Her daughter was difficult and had many issues. Well mom was standing outside my classroom telling the other parents that if I said “one bad thing about her daughter she was going to pound my face in”. One particulary concerned parent interrupted my conference to give me a heads up, she was a bit scared for me. Well I couldn’t find an administrator in time, so I met with this scary woman and her life partner, who reeked of alcohol. Well mom came in, threw a quarter on the table and using a few four letter words told me to call someone who cares about her kid, “cuz it aint me”. I felt so bad for this kid.

Me too.

I’m going to link you to an amazing blog, called Ballastexistenz. Amanda is an autistic woman who writes extensively about her experiences with institutions and staff (it is bone-chilling) and is also very eloquent about the misperceptions surrounding autism as a “disease”. She has had several posts recently that I want to discuss, but I’ll start with the one from today, June 21st. It’s about the language used to describe intervention and support for autistic children, how even “neutral” descriptions make their lives sound difficult and heartbreaking. What would happen if the same language were applied to the development of a typical middle-class non-autistic child?

Let’s say a neurotypical (not just non-autistic, but neurologically typical) child is born. Call her Kate.When Kate is born, she can’t walk, talk, understand what is said to her, or feed herself. Being that this is the case, her parents are well-armed with early intervention and treatment strategies. She gets Breastfeeding Intervention, and later immense, unprecedented progress is made and she graduates to being spoon-fed. She gets Speech Therapy every day in the form of talking to her all the time in a particular specialized way designed to elicit interest, understanding, and speech. Her treatment also includes giving her interesting toys to treat her incredible lack of fine motor skills and to hone her perceptual skills and eye-hand coordination, as well as many other interventions.

These early intervention and treatment strategies are successful, and she eventually begins to walk, talk, and feed herself. But there is a lot she does not know about the world that she lives in. Beginning at the age of four, she is sent to a taxpayer-funded institution for several hours a day of intensive therapy designed to teach her about various aspects of the world. This treatment is wildly successful and in a few years she can read, write, add, subtract, and so forth, and is even capable of comprehending some amount of science and history.

Of course, childhood is not the end of the intervention required…

As Kate grows older, the treatments and interventions are changed to reflect her age and increased progress and maturity. As she reaches the transition to adulthood, she is given pre-vocational training and encouraged to think about what kind of job placement she might want.

She is also encouraged to choose between one of several residential placements. She ends up electing to move to a group home with two other adults who share the same apartment and support each other with paying the bills and daily living tasks. They receive extensive assistance at home from plumbers, electricians, and repair people who are all trained to do what is outside of these individuals’ capacity. Farmers grow, raise, harvest, and slaughter the food that the poor limited souls cannot grow for themselves, and truckers take that food to special facilities called Grocery Stores staffed by even more people. While they have undoubtedly made extensive progress since they were born, it clearly takes a lot of support just for these young women to get through their days and they are highly dependent on other people for their survival.

This even could have gone a lot further - these days kids get huge amounts of financial and emotional support from their parents well into their 20s, even to the point of parents calling college professors about their children’s grades. The process of acclimating to a new job also can require a lot of training and support in the beginning.

I think the point is well made. No one goes through life totally independent, without anyone’s help or guidance. It takes at least 18 years to produce an adult. When you put it that way, the “intensive intervention” that autistic children receive doesn’t seem that different from the intensive intervention that we ALL receive. It’s called raising our children.

Christine and I have found an addictive pasttime - looking up old classmates on the internet.

It isn’t quite as easy as one might think. People get married, change their first names (or just the spelling), move to Colorado and become rodeo stars, or crawl into little holes to hide and don’t even have email accounts, much less Friendsters or MySpaces. (We’re too old for MySpace anyway - after all, I’m far more likely now to go to a prom as a chaperone than as a guest.)

I guess some people just don’t want to be found. However, some do. And we found ‘em.

First there were the ones who were in charge of their own publicity - the actors. Those are generally easiest to find. Then there were the ones who were all keeping in touch with each other on Friendster or actively trying to connect with old friends. Some seemed to just want attention - We saw one girl who had posted literally dozens of pictures of herself in various flirty poses. So-and-so looking “thoughtful-flirty”. So-and-so looking “silly flirty”. “Very close to the camera flirty.” “Flirty with good makeup.” And so on.

And there was the introverted geeky guy who’d posted photos of himself in various shirtless poses. It took me a few minutes to recover from THAT one.

We didn’t grow up in that big of a place, so we already knew that some of our classmates were married or even had kids. What was amazing was that people were married whom we thought fell into the category of “so intensely irritating and obnoxious as to never EVER be able to share an apartment with someone, much less a bed, without at least one appearance on Dr. Phil”. I guess people mellow out with age. Or just attract someone, let’s just say, compatible.

I’m relatively easy to find. If you type my name into google, the first hit you’ll get is this site. The second is my profile on Amazon. The next few are not me, but a professor of Asian studies from Moravian college who has the same name as me. Then you get my turtle essay, some various links from people’s blogs, and more Amazon links. You can figure out, pretty much, where I’ve gone after high school.

But some of my classmates need to get on the ball. I’m particularly curious about a few who don’t seem to have internet histories of any kind. Maybe you guys don’t want to be found, and I respect that. Just a word of advice though - don’t pose shirtless unless you are in a bathing suit or work for Abercrombie and Fitch, or you will be responsible for the stomach cramps your ex-classmates get from stabs of helpless laughter.

I wonder how Paul McCartney feels, turning 64. Happy Birthday.

Instead of going for a run, I was in bed at 8 pm last night. I guess I needed to catch up. I didn’t notice that I had a lot of pain in my legs until I was lying down, but once I did, I was even more glad that I’d decided to skip my workout. I have suspected for a few weeks now that I am going to need new running shoes, since mine have been pounding the pavement for a while and are probably starting to wear out. Of all places, my big toes start to hurt while I’m running. That is definitely not a good sign. I don’t have a lot of time to go shopping for running shoes at the moment, but I may have to make time - since that is preferable to injuring myself. And especially right before a 6 week trip that is going to require a lot of walking and hiking.

I also need to do a better job of stretching - something I’ve always been very bad at. I took my first ballet class as a little girl, maybe five or six years old, and even then I couldn’t touch my toes. I found that my flexibility improved markedly when I was stretching very regularly, as during my modern dance class in college, which was four times a week. But as with everything - “use it or lose it”.

I have wanted to take a yoga class for a while - and again, since it hasn’t been a priority, I haven’t made time for it. With just a few weeks left until I leave for my trip, I doubt I will now. Definitely something to consider for the fall.

Wanting to do a lot of things is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it keeps life interesting and stretches me (sometimes literally) as a person. It’s a curse because all of the good advice says that if you want to really reap the benefits of something, you must do it regularly, if not every day. Want to write a book? Write every day. Want to run a marathon? Train every day. (Don’t necessarily run every day, but train every day.) Piano? Yoga? Knitting? You get the idea.

I see variants of this advice in the field of education all the time. Often experts will suggest that kids should practice skills for ten minutes a day, for some reason often “right before they go to bed”. Perhaps they don’t realize just how many things the kids have to practice. Can you imagine some poor fourth grader sitting down for two hours to slog through his ten minutes of multiplication facts, division facts, spelling words, cursive handwriting, reading-for-fluency practice… it can go on and on.

I would feel rather disjointed if I tried to cram all of my interests into short bursts every day - rather I end up taking the semester approach, and picking a few things to go on the back burner for a couple of weeks while I give others my full attention. This sometimes has the unfortunate side effect that I’m feeling guilty that I’m “neglecting” at least some things that are important to me, but at least I am not completely scattered. (Yet.)

And hopefully I won’t feel guilty about skipping any of it while I’m on my trip. Travel should be a 100% immersion experience. There won’t be any piano practice in the rainforest.

We had the annual social studies fair today, in which everyone displays their work and presents material to invited guests. My class chose to do a puppet show about medieval life.

I thought they did an excellent job. For one thing, we crammed in a lot of factual information, such as how long it took knights to put on their armor and what sort of weapons were used in siege warfare. For another, the show was actually funny. In one scene, the evil mercenary trader is kidnapping the Queen as part of a plot to undermine the kingdom…

Queen: Help! Help! I’m going to die!
Trader: You’re not going to die, you’re going to France!

The king is also humorous, exhorting his soldiers to prepare their attack “while I go and hide under my bed.” Later, he expresses relief that the Queen is gone, to which his trusty religious guide replies, “Sire, snap out of it! She is your wife!”

Now that the social studies fair is over, it really feels like the year is ending.

Graduation pictures
Graduation Party Pictures - featuring the cutest baby EVER.

I watched my best friend Chris graduate from veterinary school yesterday. Finally! She actually already had her diploma and had started practicing as a vet, but there is something special about the ritual of the graduation that makes it all feel official. I know I get emotional every year when I attend our school’s high school graduation, even if I don’t know any of the students personally. Life can feel so rushed and so pressured, and it’s important to be able to step back once in a while and say, “Hey, I really did something important here, I’ve actually finished part of my work for this lifetime.” It’s an artificial construct to a certain extent, but for those times where a phase of life really is ending, the overblown pomp of a ceremony can be fitting.

In college, we didn’t have a graduation day, but a full weekend. There was the honors ceremony on Friday, the baccalaureate event on Saturday, and the full university commencement on Sunday. Even then, we all split up into departments so that we could have smaller ceremonies in which our names were called. So all in all, I had to march four different times. Brown University has a very elaborate march down the hill to the First Baptist Church (in America) simulcast to the main green. First the graduates line the street and watch the procession of administration, faculty, reunion groups, and honorary degree holders (which is how I got my great photo of Steven Spielberg, who received one the year that I graduated) and then the procession reverses on itself, with the faculty and reunion folks etc. lining the streets as the graduates march down. That way everyone has a chance to be recognized and cheered. My last year of college, I didn’t really feel much of a community at school… until that procession.

My graduate school had a small ceremony in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was a nice ceremony, short and to the point. I know people who didn’t bother to go, but I didn’t spend four years getting my master’s to NOT march in the ceremony.

I was lucky to get a chance to go to Chris’s ceremony. She got 5 tickets for her own family, then extra tickets from friends who weren’t going to have many guests. I think she had about 15 people there all together.

I felt a little funny riding the subway there in my dress.

Her graduation party is this afternoon. Mmm, cannoli cake!

I got yellow fever and hepatitis A today. Tomorrow, when I’m sure I haven’t reacted, I’m going to give myself typhoid.

To be accurate, I need to give myself typhoid four times, over a period of 8 days.

Isn’t traveling awesome???

That is what I plan to do in a few minutes. After I digest my dinner a bit.

I don’t know how hard I’ll run tonight, since I just did a big workout yesterday evening and I don’t normally run on consecutive nights. This workout is a pre-emptive rescheduling, since I doubt that I’m going to want to run tomorrow.

Why? I am getting vaccinated for my trip tomorrow. The appointment is late in the afternoon. I am not particuarly squeamish about shots, but I have to say that I’m not particularly thrilled either. And I am not counting on wanting to go running afterwards.

I have a second appointment next week, in case there are so many vaccines that I can’t get them all at once. This is the part where I start wondering why I’m not vacationing someplace a bit less biologically menacing. Say… Central Park.

In general, these upcoming few weeks before the trip are going to be the busiest three weeks ever. I generally ignore my datebook or refer to it once in a while, but suddenly I am scrawling notes all over it. Tons of events - a graduation, a wedding - and errands to run. Bridesmaid dress shopping. Shower invitations. Travel clothing. Closing out the school year. It’s a good thing we finished the show in May, or I’d be one unbalanced, frazzled little person right now.

It’s OK, really. These are all things that I know will be taken care of in their time. I’m enjoying the end of the school year and starting to get really excited about the trip. Plus, I’m about to hit my first running goal - going for 30 minutes straight. (You can read more about all that on my running blog, if you’re interested.)

Time to get moving.

This morning I did something I haven’t done in years - I stayed in bed past 10 am. I was drifting in and out of wakefulness and sleep, possibly dreaming, possibly daydreaming, and was too comfortable to yank myself from the cocoon of my covers.

In college, I was great at sleeping late, if only because I didn’t know what a bedtime was. At my school, there would be concerts and movies and events starting at 8 pm, or perhaps 9, and then another round of smaller or quirkier events starting at 10 and 11. There was a tiny student-run theater on the edge of campus that ran later shows, to avoid competing with the big university productions that had a more conventional starting time. Our campus was overrun with a cappella groups, who all thought it was a fun idea to start their shows at midnight, preferably underneath the arches of various campus buildings, especially dorms. No self-respecting party-goer would ever show up at an event before 10:30 or 11, which meant that campus events tended to run into the 2-3 am range. Then you’d probably want to eat something, and lo and behold, there was Ruby’s, which would happily serve you buttermilk pancakes with fresh fruit and confectioner’s sugar at 3:30 am. (If you were willing to wait 2o-30 minutes to get a table, of course.) For the impatient, there was the crepe place that could hand you your takeout in 5 minutes or less, and of course Dunkin Donuts, open until 2 am and perfectly safe to walk to since there was always at least one squad car outside. (No, this is not a stereotype of police officers. I lived down the street from DD my senior year, and there literally was a cop car there every time I walked past it, no matter what hour of the day or night.)

So college turned us all into night owls, whether we liked it or not. Of course you go in with the intention of being a good girl or boy and getting a good night’s sleep and jogging at 7 am and doing your term paper two weeks before it’s due, but as soon as you realize that the entire pulse and rhythm of the social life is against you, it’s hard not to cave. Besides, if you live anywhere near other students, you’ll have the noise and movement factor - how to get to sleep at 10 pm when everyone is milling around getting ready to go somewhere or having a party down the hallway? This is lessened somewhat if you’re in an apartment and not the dorms, but if your neighbors are students, as they inevitably will be, it’s basically the same thing. Except for my downstairs neighbor, who was a med student and who used to ring our doorbell at 8 pm and ask us to stop clomping across our wood floor so that he could get to sleep. So we’d try to at least take our shoes off.

How do you manage to lead a productive life at school when you are eating dinner at 2 am? The universities try to accommodate kids by starting classes at civilized hours. I knew many people in college who would never take a class that started before 11 am. My earliest class started at 9 am, which was early by college standards. (Whereas now, at 9 am, I have already been at work for an hour and a half.) Some of my friends chronically slept through their nine o’clocks - including one who would go to the class and fall asleep there - but I would drag myself to the class and more or less function through it. Some classes better than others, depending on the topic. And also depending on the quality of the coffee I was drinking. I knew better than to try to swing a huge lecture class that early on, since that would give me an excuse to fall asleep. Luckily, I had some good courses in the 9 am slot.

I could even take the early weekend shifts at my job at the library and be OK, in that case because the library was so quiet at 9 am on Saturday morning. A few diehard studious types would be just waking up from their all-nighters in the carrells upstairs, and a few more would straggle over from the computer lab which was open 24/7. And that was it. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee at the circulation desk, so I’d sit in the back. I remember it as being a great job, though I was recently re-reading my journals from college and as it turns out, I thought I was really bored. (I just didn’t know better!)

I continued to nurse this wake up late/sleeping late habit through the early years of my career, though I began to find that I was coming home from work too tired to stay up extremely late. I made a valiant attempt, going out in the evenings or at least staying up to talk to people online, but my bedtime started creeping back from 12 to 11:30 to 11 to 10:30. Now I hover around 9:30-10:30, certainly no later than that. If I’m tired or not feeling well, I have even been known to voluntarily crawl into bed at 8:00, something I hadn’t done since I was ten years old.

It’s a vicious cycle, this earlier schedule. I normally wake up around 5:15 and drink the first cup of coffee of the day. Which means, on weekends, by 7 o’clock I could wake up with a caffeine headache. I have also occasionally shot out of bed at 5:30 or 6 on a Saturday morning, convinced that I’m going to be late for work. Last weekend I slept until 9, which I thought was incredibly late and a bit lazy on my part. And of course today I completely surprised myself by almost sleeping the entire morning. I’m not used to it anymore.

I like waking up early on Saturday morning. I feel like I have the whole weekend ahead of me, with the possibilities nearly endless. When I wake up late, like I did today, I feel like I’m already behind the gun, that I should have been out going places and doing things. It’s a remarkable mindset, because on weekdays I will think, “If only I could have stayed in bed for a few more hours, I would be so much more rested… I don’t feel ready to face the day!” I guess the key thing is to use the time you have in the wisest way you can.

So, with that said, I am going to go make something out of my Saturday. After I take my bath.