I’m on a two-week break from teaching. Hooray!

I’ve debated whether I should take some time off from blogging, but really, what’s the point? I need to keep writing, or my skills will atrophy. At least, that’s what I delude myself into believing.

In all honesty, though, I just want to keep it up because working part-time, I already have a lot of free time. I need to fill that time with blogging, otherwise, I will obsess about housework. I’d rather work on something more productive than clean the house.

For my summer vacation, I will get a total of six days off. In reality, that’s not really much. The extra six days I get from my summer break is nice, but it really won’t change the way I live.

Case in point, I woke up this morning at 5:30 even though I really didn’t need to. I didn’t need to get ready for work. Still, I decided to continue waking up early because it’s just better to keep up the habit. It’s only two weeks of not working, so I might as well continue with the whole routine. I guess the two-week break won’t matter so much in terms of daily habits.

So now I am struggling to fill out those hours when I won’t be prepping or teaching. While I value the time to relax and to “play” I’m spending a lot of time reading. This makes me feel not as relaxed because I am reading a lot more nonfiction and science topics that requires a lot of brain power for processing.

Essentially, I’m looking forward to my nonworking time so that I can devote it to study.

I realize that vacation should be the time I take to re-charge and rest. And I think I am doing that by taking a break from teaching.

I wonder, though, if I should also take a break from learning? Is it necessary?

Like I said, I have more time now to read about the things I am interested in, so I would really like to do it by actually studying. I recently started reading Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is not an easy book to get through. I am very excited to actually sit down, take notes, and dissect the whole thing.

Part of me doubts whether I really need to do that. Maybe I should just enjoy the book for what it is, but I feel like doing that won’t make me understand the concepts. The whole thing is very interesting that I want to really wrap my head around the theories that Hawking writes about in the book. But then again, there’s really no need to go that far just to read a book.

I am trying to use my time wisely and try to prepare myself for a life in science, if I chose to pursue the PhD that I was thinking about. If I immerse myself in this world now, I’ll find out if this is really what I want to do for the next three years. So this is really part of the work I need to do in order to advance my career.

So far, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play–or more exploration than anything.

In a way, it still feels a lot like vacation.