Week Twenty-Nine: March 22nd

Last week was my Spring Break and, though my days of Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale during Harley Week at Daytona are long past, I did travel to Colorado for the week.

Then again, "break" was hardly what I would call it: I spent about six to seven hours each day working on my computer, typing papers for my National Board Certification (for teaching.) It is a crazy year-long process that calls for you to collect student work samples, videotape several lessons and write four huge papers that feature little to no actual writing and lots of robotic regurgitation to prove you met their standards. I should have thought twice about this one, knowing how little I like to play other peoples' games and jump through other peoples' hoops. But, once I was in, I was in!

This was how I spent my Spring Break: typing in hotel bathrooms, trying to ignore the bloodstains at one Super 8 in North Platte, NE; typing in darkened corners after my family had gone to bed; typing in the car with a hat yanked far down over my eyes, as to avoid the nausea-inducing objects whipping past the windows; typing early in the morning in my sister-in-law's basement before anyone else woke up, and then repeating the process after they went to bed. And still, I returned home the following week with work left to do, knowing my late-nights and shirked sleep had only just begun.

So really, this look came more out of necessity: I didn't even bring my razor on the trip, and the grizzled look helped me stay angry as the snarl under my neck continually velcroed my short collars.