Today is not the first day of school for the Fall semester, but it is my first day teaching on campus.

School started last week, but I was hung up with knee surgery on Tuesday and zooming my classes while recovering for the rest of the week. So getting started was interrupted. Approaching 40, I find that the biggest challenge is sustaining projects, interests, and motivation through near-constant interruptions, whether that’s personal (childcare, divorce), health-related (COVID pandemic, knee surgery), or in my career (more on that at some point). So I’m setting up this newsletter as a challenge to myself to sustain thinking through interruption. I want to cultivate the habit of returning to where I left off and pushing forward. I don’t know entirely what I will write about—certainly some mix of literature and history, personal reflections, leftist politics, possibly stuff on childcare, music, films, anime, videogames—but I want a record of my interests and explorations so I can return to them and develop them.

I’m not very good at this, I left social media spaces some time ago finding them more distracting and draining than beneficial—particularly as someone who gets overly focused on arguments that generate more heat than light. I find it all emotionally and intellectually draining. I still like talking to people and even arguing and debating, but doing so in person where mutual empathy and desires for connection and understanding can break the competitive desire to win or in slower more considered forms, focused on clarity, not rhetorical fire.

Still, I don’t have practice in producing content (as we say nowadays). I always thought that to produce content, I needed to start with a good idea, and I never had one I thought was worth any attention. But a lesson I’ve learned from guitar playing and becoming a lifter in the last few years: you don’t start good and original. You have to practice and work. So this is practice—practice in sustaining thoughts and returning to ideas over time until they become good and until I become good at producing worthwhile writing. It’s my first day learning to make something other than an academic article, book talk, or lesson plan.

For now, I must leave and go teach. I will be introducing Greek Theater in my two sections of Humanities II, and Native American literature in the Foundations of American Literature Survey. Prepping my lesson plans, I recognized how much my skills at presenting complex information, staging discussions, and planning an 80-minute session have advanced since I started teaching full-time a decade ago. I’ve had a lot of practice. Time to start practicing communicating in new ways in preparation for life after academia.