Hiatus

My sabbatical officially starts on Thursday, I guess; that’s when my contract at school resumes, but I’m heading out this afternoon for some yoga study in Olympia to prepare for my yoga study in India (yeah, I know…) so, I’m thinking that the content of my time away from school really starts with this workshop, which begins tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM (yeah, I know…).

Consequently, I’m hereby designating this 327-word posting as my last entry on 327 Words until at least I return from Mysore in March.

(Keep track of my sabbatical, though, in sometimes more, sometimes fewer than 327 words at sabblogtical.blogspot.com.)

I’ve been churning out a 327-word essay with fanatical regularity for over five years now, and think it’s time, in keeping with the sabbatical theme, to try something a little different. This isn’t to say that I won’t keep applying myself to the writing form of which I am no doubt the world’s exalted master, it’s simply that I’m interested in seeing what happens if I spend the time I’ve typically devoted to this practice (usually between twenty minutes and an hour a day) to something else.

I surmise that the world will keep spinning on its axis, but I want to find out for sure.

It’s been a good run, and I’ve usually enjoyed the writing (no doubt more than those doing the reading), but it’s probably time to branch out—maybe even to 328 or 330 word essays.

Blogger tells me that 327 Words has 1305 posts (this will make 1306). That means I’ve spent something on the order of 900 hours writing these essays. That’s like twenty-two weeks of a full-time, 40 hour-a-week job.

Although at such job, you’d never write steadily for those 40 hours, so figuring about halftime working, halftime chatting with co-workers, etc., it’s almost like I’ve spent an entire year of employment at this task.

Even at my relatively paltry salary as a community college teacher, somebody owes me bank; I look forward to the checks in my mailbox when I return.

Lazy

If there’s any truth to the old chestnut which has it that whatever you do the first day of the year defines what you’ll be doing the other 364, then this is going to the laziest twelve months I’ve ever lived.

Jen and I succeeded mightily in our New Year’s Eve celebrations and didn’t get home from seeing the band X, then closing down a bar where some friends were reveling, then walking across town in the cold for omelets and toast at our chums’ apartment until 5:00 in the morning, so we both managed to lie abed until almost noon, (something I’m pretty sure I didn’t do once in all of 2010), and even after we did rise, my activities have amounted to little more than puttering about the house, doing a bit of shopping, and reading the big fat book I’ve been working through for the last couple weeks, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which, although it bills itself as literary fiction, is hardly much more than Harry Potter for grownups.

But I’m going to cut myself some slack, this being a holiday and all; while I may not have done much to make the world a better place, I didn’t at least, do anything that made it significantly worse, which is more than can be said for the actors in the Budweiser commercial that’s airing as I half-heartedly watch hockey, of all things, on the television, as I type.

It will be interesting to see what 2011 has in store for us; of course, the feature event for me will be my trip to India in a little over two weeks. My only fear, at this point, is that it won’t be exotic enough; Mysore, where I’m going will be overrun with Westerners, and promises to be somewhat less like India than other parts of the country. Still, it will certainly be a stark contrast to today, even if I don’t rise till noon.