Routine: My bastion of sanity in a sea of scary, salty freedom

So I've decided that this summer will be different.

Different how? Well the plan is, this summer I won't be wishing it was September by mid-July.

When I was a kid, I used to look forward to summer with that burning desire we all get, to be free of the daily grind of school and essays and homework and reading and waking up on time and going to bed on time, etc. Summer would come, and for a few days I would bask in the lazy glow.

But laziness is really boring. I needed to be doing something, and unless I had grownups to tell me what ot do, and friends to chat with while doing it, I rarely knew what to do with myself.

I find that the same is true nowadays. Even though I'm allegedly all grown up, and theoretically have lots more responsibility, and do in fact have much more backlog on my plate to get to during those free weeks, I found my last few summers as a teacher-to-be and then a teacher to be crushingly dull. And it turns out summer day camp for adults isn't as easy to come by.

Don't get me wrong. I do have things I love to do on my own. I read voraciously, and I also like to play and sing songs, write, watch TV, play video games, take walks, all that good stuff. But deep down, I've lately been discovering how extremely social I am. People are what make my free time, and the things I choose to do with it, meaningful. Hence, eons of free time to focus on solitary passtimes can only satisfy me to a point.

Now, when I was a kid, this wasn't such a big problem. My friends were mostly my age, and they had summer off too. During the week, we would sit around doing nothing at all, together, which in my opinion is much nicer over long periods than sitting around doing nothing at all, alone. However, in the adult sphere, the reality is that the majority of my loved ones do, in fact, work through July and August. As such, spending all summer hanging out with my school friends sans intrustions like work is not an option. 

This summer, I'm going to try and make a change. While I know I can't rely on the people that make my life meaningful to keep me sane this summer, I will turn to the other element that allows me to smoothly navigate the days: plans.

I've started by coming up with a loose daily routine for the morning and early afternoon. Nothing too strenuous, but it gives me a structure to build on, rather than having to start each day from scratch wondering which of the dozens of things I haven't done yet because I didn't really want to do them in the first place I'm going to actaully get up the willpower to tackle today.



Essentially, my "job" this summer is to spend 6 to 8 hours of every weekday doing something fer goo'ness sakes!

I will wake up every day at a decent hour, and if I don't do it on my own at a truly decent hour, my alarm clock will shame me into wakefulness each morning at 10. I will spend half an hour or so reading in bed in order to feel truly awake and ready to face the day for real when I actually get up. (Being fully alert before I get out of bed helps me to begin the day with truly productive tasks, rather than slumping myself in front of the computer and mindlessly gaming for hours on end before getting down to work). I get out of bed and straight away I do a bit of morning exercise (currently various situps and planks). Then, I'll eat a healthy but simple breakfast (usually cereal and milk/yogurt, with berries on top) while I check email and facebook and such, and allow myself to surf or play on the web for a short time.

After that, things can vary in order and magnitude, but I need to at some point check off each of the following goals for the day:

• One or more household chores
• Morning bathroom routine (i.e. shower, brush teeth, all that jazz) and get dressed (no all-day pjs for me this summer! Last summer I wouldn't bother getting dressed until I needed to go out, which seemed perfectly sensible. Problem was, then I wouldn't bother going out unless I needed groceries or was meeting somebody or something, which meant I spent entire days inside when it was beautiful out and I could have been going for a random walk)
• An outdoor chore (i.e. groceries, taking out garbage or recycling) or else an indoor organizational task that requires active thought (i.e. doing my finances, organizing my teacher resources, etc.)
• Creative practice of some kind (this includes blogging, singing and playing piano -- I've chosen to learn two songs to learn this summer -- and any other creative project I may have)
• And lastly, once I've completed my morning routine, the afternoon is for some sort of outting or other leisure. This can be where I go downtown and check out Whatever-Fest, or wander around at Eaton Centre, or it can be staying at home reading a book or playing a video game. 

The last bullet may need some tweaking to involve even more structure. I want to make sure that whatever I do for that second half of the day, it's active and I'm engaged in it, rather than simply "I'm restless, what button can I click repeatedly until somebody provides me with something worth paying attention to?" Hopefully, now that I've put that thought out there, what I have will be guideline enough.

There, in an extremely detailed nutshell, is my summer experiment. We'll see how it goes!