The past few days I’ve spent at a tech ed conference put on by my district presenting at attending a few sessions. Generally speaking, conferences that don’t pertain to the arts offer very little for arts educators and this is not an exception. Erica, Chad and I spent some time a week or so ago getting our session planned out and we presented at 2:00 yesterday to a few more folks than we had anticipated. There were some baby teachers in our session and some administrators and a few other arts educators, we were one of two sessions geared towards the fine arts for the whole conference.

So, I’m sitting here in the cafeteria of the high school hosting and watching people stream in to hear a speaker who used to work in the district and now is in the private sector in a tech ed company. I’ve heard him speak before, followed him on Twitter until I couldn’t stand to see what he was posting and of course, he’s the only session right now. Not gonna do it.

Went climbing yesterday after the conference with Thomas and Chris and it was interesting to climb with different people. I was able to send another couple green routes and the slab wall was pretty much all new so it was packed. We climbed for about an hour and I swung by Rusty Taco to pick up dinner. It was packed too.

Yesterday on my drive up to the conference, I was overcome with some emotional tsunami shit that I wasn’t expecting. I was driving down 380, nasty enough on a good day, and whatever song was playing kicked my ass. I almost turned around and drove back and told my crew I was out but then I was at the venue. I parked and texted Erica to see if she was up there, I just needed to see a friendly face. She wasn’t but Tyler was one of the first people I saw when I walked in and it was good to see him.

I ran into some work people and played nice, kept things surface level and am trying to find my way back into the work mindset. Maybe another reason I don’t want to hear pie in the sky bullshit right now. Just keep swimming.