Going After Cacciato: It's been a Month and I Need to Write

Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (catch-ee-otto) is the book that I dated all this summer. She was my ball and chain and I couldn't help but wish I was with her younger sister The Things They Carried. But I couldn't justify hooking back up with The Things They Carried because I spend every school year with 4-7 books that I've been with more than once. I needed something new. Something fresh. And I got it.



It took me a month to read a book that could have finished in two days, and I didn't love my time with Cacciato, but like most "literary" books by the time I finished I was happy with the time I had spent. It was a surreal and fractured read, both things I like in a novel. But the fact that I just finished reading this book forced me to realize that I wasted a lot of time this summer.

I start work tomorrow. Not part-time Community College work (which I've been doing all summer), but full-time high school teacher work. I'm not sad or depressed about working. I like my job. Most of the time I love my job. I was just a bum all summer, which is what this scattered entry is all about: my lazy summer.

Things I Did This Summer:
1. I re-watched seasons 1-4 of "Dexter" in preparation for season five.
2. I beat Singularity, Limbo, Dragon Quest IX, Puzzle Quest 2, PoP: The Forgotten Sands, Alan Wake, and Eliss
3. I taught an English 101 class
4. I participated in the National Writing Project
5. I read Going after Cacciato and Teaching Literacy Tools in the Classroom6. I watched too many Braves games and seasons 1-4 of "Rescue Me."
7. I started blogging

It doesn't look so bad when I put it in list form. But I feel like my list of games shouldn't be so much longer than my list of books. I start every summer with anticipation. I even make the declaration that this is going to be "the Summer of George". But I normally end up not doing much. And this summer, like the previous, wasn't much different.