Finding My Heart in San Francisco

Random stuff that I shout into the void because it helps me process them

[shadowsf2]

Shouting into the void

I may be shouting into the void, but at least I'm shouting.

I've been calling, letter-writing, and emailing my members of Congress regularly using the supports and guidance provided by Indivisible.org and 5calls.org to encourage them to fight Trump and his minions every step of the way. (Yes, I know that phone calls are the most effective, but some days, I just don't have the mana to make calls, so I'll do what I'm capable of at that moment.)

Anyway, last night around 3 am, I woke up in bed and got hit by a “why am I bothering, because this is all probably going to go to hell no matter what I do” sledgehammer. I went to the bathroom to pee -- which is why I’d woken up in the first place -- splashed some water on my face, and went back to bed. As I lay there, my brain kept telling me that I’d once read a story on Facebook that had something to do with this. A few web searches later, and I found the story I’d been thinking of.

(h/t to liberalpulpit.org, which relates the story in question in a blog post from 3 March 2018)

A reporter once asked A.J. Muste -- a social activist who, during the Vietnam War, stood outside the White House night after night -- 'Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?'

"'Oh,' Muste replied, 'I don't do this to change the country. I do this so the country won't change me.'

I sometimes forget that activism can be a form of self care.

I may be shouting into the void, but I’m gonna keep on shouting.

[shadowsf2]

Harry Potter, nice to meet you again

For the first time since the early 2010’s, I’m engaging with the Harry Potter series again.

Back in Ye Olde Days, I was active in the Harry Potter fandom. I discovered the series in 2002, when I rented the first movie from Netflix -- remember when Netflix sent you DVD’s in the mail in those red envelopes? I was on sabbatical from my teaching job at the time, so I drove to the nearby Borders -- again, remember when brick-and-mortar bookstores were a thing? -- and bought a boxed set of the first three books, because that was all that had been published at the time. I read the three books over a 48-hour period and barely noticed the time passing.

I was just starting to explore this newfangled thing called The Internet, having recently escaped America Online’s walled garden. I was checking out Yahoo! one afternoon and came across a Yahoo! Group called Harry Potter for Grownups, which turned out to be one of the early online epicenters for adult HP fandom. Reading through the posts there brought me to a bunch of things, including HP fanfiction (both gen and slash), LiveJournal (which had an active HP fandom community at the time), and the first ever HP fan convention, Nimbus, which took place in July 2003. I achieved my 15 minutes of fandom fame at Nimbus, when I took part in a panel discussion about slash in front of a packed ballroom full of slash fans and authors.

I stayed active in the fandom until 2012 or so. Hobbies come and go with me, and my interest dropped significantly after the publication of Half-Blood Prince, to the point that I read Deathly Hallows and saw the last two movies more out of a sense of perceived obligation to finish the series than an actual desire to find out how it ended. I attended the fandom convention Ascendio in 2012, had a fantastic time, and decided on the plane back home that that was how I wanted my personal Harry Potter journey to end.

Fast forward to about a week ago. I was digging through my laptop’s hard drive trying to clear up some storage space, and I stumbled upon the files for all 7 of the Harry Potter audio books (the US version). I had purchasedl the audiobooks on CD when they first came out, and I had ripped them all into iTunes so I could listen to them on my various iPod-like devices. I’m surprised I hadn’t deleted them at some point.

Nowadays, I listen to a lot of audio books, both when I’m working at my desk and during workouts. So a few days ago, I started listening to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I’m curious to see what I remember, what I’ve forgotten, and whether anything lands differently with me now than it did the first time around.

And as a possible side quest, I might also rewatch each film after I’m done with the audiobook.

As I write this, I just finished Chapter 7 of Sorcerer’s Stone. Harry has made it to Hogwarts and been sorted by the Sorting Hat, and he just fell asleep in the dorm on his first night.

It feels like I’m reconnecting with an old friend whom I used to know very well, but our lives have taken us in different directions.

[shadowsf2]

Rest versus rejuvenation

A year or so ago, I came across a post on Facebook that really hit home. I can’t find the actual post at the moment, but it went something like this:

When your phone’s battery is redlining, you can turn the phone off to conserve power, but at some point in time, you’re going to need to plug it in and recharge it.

There is a difference between rest and rejuvenation.

One of the big reasons why I retired from classroom teaching last June is that I had allowed my entire life to fall into cycles of “get ready to teach, teach, and recover from teaching”. Work -- which I did find rewarding, which is why I did it for 34 years -- had come to drive everything I did in my life, including what I did in my personal time.

For many years, my two favorite vacation destinations have been Las Vegas and Disney World. I’d head to Las Vegas on long weekends and short breaks from school, and every summer, I’d head to Orlando for a week at Disney World as a way of celebrating the end of another school year.

These trips were great at helping me rest, but they didn’t rejuvenate or invigorate me.

I used to have hobbies that did that. Starting in the mid-1990’s, I played Magic the Gathering seriously. I’d build decks, spend Saturdays at my local game shop playing against whoever else was there, and read about new decks and strategies that might improve my play. At the same time, I also got into “advantage play” in casinos, mostly by counting cards. Again, I’d spend hours practicing at home, talking to other advantage players, going to casinos to play, and then analyzing my results to see how I was doing and how I might improve.

These activities genuinely rejuvenated me. The energy and enthusiasm that I put into them gave me more of the same in return.

Somewhere along the line starting in the early 2000’s. I stopped doing things that rejuvenated me in favor of things that helped me rest. I stopped being an advantage player in casinos (which takes a lot of time and energy) and just started going to Las Vegas for fun. Instead of building, playtesting, and refining my own Magic decks, I’d play with preconstructed ones online in casual play. I didn’t have the time or energy to engage with my hobbies in the way that I used to, so I let them become things that I did when I wanted or needed to turn my brain off and just crash for a while.

So about a year ago, I began looking for a hobby that engaged me more deeply. I eventually rediscovered Minecraft, and that turns out to be fitting the bill right now. I first encountered Minecraft in 2012 but played it only casually. Since I picked it up again, I’ve been digging more deeply into it to learn more about what you can do in the game. I definitely enjoy farming and resource-gathering, and a lot of my current projects require me to learn more about redstone and what folks have dubbed “technical Minecraft”. I’ve also gotten hooked on the YouTube series HermitCraft, which follows the shenanigans of the players on the private HermitCraft server, and I’ve started interacting with other fans of the series online.

It’s nice having something in my life that recharges my battery instead of simply helping me rest.

[shadowsf2]

Mindfulness and being a frog

I’ve had a mindfulness practice for about 20 years now. 

My favorite definition of mindfulness is this:

Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on inside you and around you, without making any sort of judgment about it.

Recently, I had a wonderful reminder about how important this definition is.

My boyfriend and I had made plans to spend the weekend in San Jose, CA, at a fandom event. We’ve attended this event annually for many years, but this time around, neither of us was really looking forward to it. We talked about canceling but ultimately decided to go, and we were there from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.

For me, the first 24 hours or so were thoroughly OK. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong, but I kept on getting irritated by lots of little things. We did our fandom stuff, saw some friends, and went out to eat at a lot of our favorite places in the area. It was also nice to just be away from home for a few nights.

Come Saturday evening, I had worked myself into a massive hissy fit about nothing in particular. I turned in relatively early -- maybe 9 pm or so -- while my boyfriend stayed out for a few more hours. While I was winding down in the hotel room, I did some physical therapy, and that included doing stretches for my neck and shoulders.

Afterwards, I noticed that my mood had improved significantly. I realized that my neck had been causing me a great deal of pain all weekend long. It hadn’t pinged my radar because the pain had come on gradually. If it had hit me quickly, I would definitely have noticed it, but because it had started out as a faint twinge and then progressively gotten worse over the course of a few days, I’d adapted to it and considered it normal. It wasn’t until physical therapy had mitigated the pain that I realized how much I’d been hurting and how much the pain had been making me cranky and irritable all weekend long.

So back to our definition of mindfulness: “Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on inside you and around you, without making any sort of judgment about it.”

In this case, I had completely missed the boat on being aware of what was going on inside my body. Because the pain had increased gradually, I had endured and adapted to it, even when it reached the point where I couldn’t twist my neck at all without wincing.

There’s a story (untrue, as it turns out) that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it’ll jump out of the pot, but if you put the frog into a pot of cold water and then slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will stay there until it dies because the gradual temperature change allows it to adapt to worsening conditions until it’s too late. I was definitely a frog in this case.

I sometimes get asked what role mindfulness is for. For me, mindfulness is a tool that helps me navigate my life more smoothly and understand what’s going on when things get bumpy.

[shadowsf2]

I've been meaning to start a personal blog for some time now, and today, I decided to stop procrastinating and just dive in and create it without really having a plan about what to do next. "Diving in without a plan" is a fairly new thing for me. My usual M.O. is to make outlines, timelines, and lots of bullet-pointed lists. And that's not always a good thing, as I can easily get bogged down in planning and never get around to actually doing anything. So we'll see how this goes, but I consider the fact that I just jumped into this without a clue to be a Sign of Growth. Yay!

So who am I?

My name is Shadow, and I'm a 56-year-old queer cis man who lives in San Francisco. At the end of June 2023, I stepped away from a 34-year career as a high school teacher, and I'm currently exploring what might come next.

Some of the things I might write about here include:

The aforementioned search for "what might come next"

Teaching, learning, and curriculum development

Mindfulness and its role in my life

My ongoing quest to nurture a growth mindset

Learning differences and how they impact me

My hobbies, which currently include Minecraft, the Disney parks, casino gaming, and re-binge watching TV shows that I love.

Hey look! I seem to have written the first post for this blog! Go me!