So I “unofficially” started my retirement yesterday—May 1! May Day! And yet it somehow doesn’t seem exactly real, for a few reasons. First of all, my official retirement date is August 31, the real 17-years-after-starting cut-off date. Also, I haven’t begun the whole medicare, social security, and pension dance yet.
But finally, the real reason my retirement semester doesn’t seem any different from past years is this: every semester, I come careening and crashing to the end. There’s finishing up classes, final exams (creating and grading), and grading papers, after all the performances, presentations, and inductions. The only real difference this time is that I don’t have to write an annual report (to prove how great I was during the year). Otherwise it seems like business as usual.
At the same time, I have this nagging awareness that in the Fall, I don’t have to go back to it. And nagging’s not quite the word; let’s try “reassuring” instead. In the meantime, I have to make certain there is some structure to my days: blog posts, walks for fitness, contacts with friends, forays into the maintenance and creative to-do lists.
Now if Eastern Europe would calm down, people in the US would stop thinking a fascistic authoritarian government is a good idea (it’s not—look at history, people!), and everything else would cease looking like we are headed for the apocalypse, I might get to enjoy retirement!
MUSOFYR 