Racing to catch up

So TODD wrote this the other day,

"whats been irking me lately is that our generation (this is a large generalization) doesnt know how to eat and excersice nor do we know how to manage our finance. i feel like im relearning lessons that humans have known forever but america has just bred all the good stuff right out of us. truely rolling your sleeves up and going to work doesnt mean the same thing as it did 100 years ago. learning to cook, learning to garden, to run, to be active, to read the classics. . . i dont think this stuff comes as naturally as it did and now im racing to catch up on the brink of 30 years old. its like a reverse midlife crisis. instead of a convertable, i want a stuffy degree in art history."

and I found myself relieved that I am not alone in feeling... hmmm maybe like I'm not using all of my potential, nor have I been for the past several years. (This has nothing, by the way, to do with being remarried; it's just a self thing.) I remember running into his blog several years ago and thinking that this was something I should be doing. I needed a way to challenge myself and keep myself accountable to the things in life I love or am interested in. At that point, I felt that I hadn't been THINKING or DOING; I was too caught up in work and trying to survive as a teacher to bring the strong and fun parts of my past into adulthood. This did change when I started graduate school in the fall of 2003 and got back into academia, but I still need to rev it up in the way of creativity, humor, and learning... also in reading. I'm probably the worst English teacher reader I know. I'm a part-of-the-book reader, never finishing much, reading much more of Vanity Fair than anything else. Um, I guess you could also add half of lots of adolescent lit books to the mix, too.

So I don't know if that's what Todd was hinting at, but it's supper time, so that will have to do for now. I think I kind of mentally latched on to the "racing to catch up" part. In case you didn't notice.

Did I mention that Stephen is the cook at our house? =) And that I should learn how to cook sometime...