Like Eat, Pray, Love But Without the Food and Travel

Measuring time in semesters

Penny Zang

Jun 3, 2023

Last time: Tell Me About Your Reading Life (for paid subscribers)

“I think I deserve something beautiful.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Some of us measure time in seasons, some of us measure by the astrological calendar (this Gemini season has been fun, huh?), but my fellow educators—or anyone who is in school or lives with people still in school—know what I mean when I say I measure time by semesters.

My semesters always end with a big kind of energy or thematic feeling and it isn’t always the one I started with, no matter how much intention I had when I walked into that first department meeting of the term.

I can look back and see recent semesters of hibernation and healing following semesters of grief and loss. Semesters of creative output and dogged determination. This past spring was a semester of revision, both in my writing and my professional life. I only just realized today, as we’re going into Week 3 of the summer term, that I’m in a semester unlike all my others. A social semester. A semester not filled with dread.

This feels to me like a time of waiting but also, ahem, a bit of a truth-seeking journey. An internal quest. You know, like Eat, Pray, Love but on a teacher’s salary. Less pasta and global backdrops.

My version sounds more like a low-budget rom-com, but I’m hooked to the idea. Not to be confused with my other campus novel idea: Adjunct Fight Club.

Costco macarons is as exotic as it gets around here

I have spent the past few weeks in hyper-social mode, which is never my mode, and it has surprisingly felt energizing instead of draining. We’re talking coffee with friends, taco lunches, chatty doctor appointments and vet visits, swim practice, swim meets, strolls through the Farmer’s Market with neighbors. So much talking.

The best part of these past weeks: a visit with my best friend (since 2nd grade!) and a new friend, our sunrise visit to Pretty Place Chapel (see the first pic above), and a morning hike. It’s been the kind of rare, restorative time that I want but never know how to seek out on my own. Shoutout to Mel and Ash for all of it.

After a high, there’s always the low and I’m feeling that right now, too. There’s my lack of creativity and my broken routines. The realities of grading, the rejections, and the exhaustion. But I’m putting in the work as they say. I’m manifesting, I’m meditating, I’m reading my cards, I’m asking the universe to lead me and guide me.

As Gilbert says, (yes, another Eat, Pray, Love reference):

"If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you."

So, in this semester of waiting and truth-seeking, I expect Mourning Pages will be part of the change. I don’t know what it will look like yet, but I feel it coming.

I also want this to be a semester of wild and voracious reading with trips to book fairs and libraries, books piled on every surface, tipping over on my nightstand. Summer reading is some of the richest reading time, I’m convinced, though I kinda hate the term “beach read.”

Let’s go ahead and call this Penny’s Reading Mantra #1: There are no guilty pleasures when it comes to reading.

Austin Kleon nails it when he writes about “No More Guilty Pleasures”: “When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them. When you share your taste and your influences, have the guts to own all of it.”

Read everything you want. Fill up on the Costco macarons and don’t feel guilty about any of it.

Here’s what I’m currently reading:

And don’t miss my recap of the Best Books I Read in May (on Medium).

If you’ve got any love and light to send my way after you’ve taken care of yourself, I’ll send it right back. And I hope your semester or season or moon phase is full of the kind of surprises you want to revisit.

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