I am not much of a “gamer.” I haven’t owned a video game system since junior high, and even then I spent more time playing games outside and playing sports. All of my friends always had the latest and greatest gaming system available, and would often congregate to partake in mass video gaming frenzies. I would usually go, but I never played. I would hang out and laugh at them as they talked trash to one another, but it just never really interested me that much.

Recently, that has changed. I can no longer claim to be free from the tangles of the video gaming industry because I, too, have been entangled. And it came from a rather unlikely source: my iPhone.

It all began when I started seeing a series of commercials by Apple stating that “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” This simply means that there is an application available for just about anything and everything you could possibly want to do on your iPhone or iPod Touch. So I decided to see if there was an app for one of my favorite card games, Solitaire. And there is, it’s called CardShark. Then I decided that I want to try my hand at crosswords and yep, you guessed it, there’s an app for that, too (actually, there’s a lot of them; mine is called Cross Light because it’s free). Then I discovered the Scrabble app and was addicted to that for a while. Next was the word game Wordle, which is a word game in which you are given a group of six letters and have to make as many words as possible between three and six letters. This is now a favorite to play with my lovely fiancé.

But I think now I have found my favorite app, and it’s for another card game. Spades is a game for four people paired up into teams of two. Tiki Spades allows you to play online with other people, or against the computer. I have many fond memories from high school and college that involve playing spades, and now I can play it anytime I want. Which is exactly what I do.

I have found that I can waste just as much time playing this game as I can waste reading college football articles on ESPN, which is saying a lot. I sometimes lament philosophical stance of principle I was taking by not getting sucked into the gaming world. But before I can finish that thought I think about playing a game of spades, because if I have enough time to think about philosophical stances I am taking then I definitely have time to play a game of spades.

I think that everyone gets discontent. It is one of the by-products of the human condition, along with the desire to eat foods that are bad for you and liking fire. There is some primordial, written-in-our-DNA kind of urge that makes us and Caveman Cog get dissatisfied with our current environment, our current interactions, our current self. I think that is what really spawned the wheel — some person with a serious case of discontent, manifested in wanderlust.

See, I need to feel like I am living my life, instead of my life controlling me. I need to feel like my choices actually do something, that they have the power to affect and improve my life experience. When I begin to feel like I am no longer running things, I do the only thing that emphatically proves that my choices have repercussions: I sabotage. Myself.

Example: My first year of teaching.

During my first year of teaching I worked a lot. I was lesson planning and giving tutorials and going to meetings and rewriting lessons and going to professional development and meeting with other teachers and observing and reflecting on my practice. I was working so much that it seemed that Jacob Blair, the Jacob Blair that likes to run or play or talk to friends or learn or grow was dead, and had been replaced with Jacob Blair the Work Robot. So I rebelled. I actively sabotaged my ability to work. I came home from work like normal, changed like normal, snacked like normal, but instead of working, I opened a book. I then read my book. Until 3 am. I did this for three days in a row. On the fourth day I was so brain dead that I actually was like a robot, and I had no choice but to come home and sleep, but I had accomplished my goal — I proved to myself that I was still in control.

These episodes also came in smaller doses: a day here and a day there of purposefully ruining my ability to meet my responsibilities. Whenever life starts to cease the reins from me, my response seems to be to quit. And while I found those days to be immensely satisfying in terms of my feelings of control, what I am beginning to discover is that they never left me in a better place. I would have renewed feelings of efficacy, but I would still have the same daunting responsibilities with even less time to meet them.

This week I have been having another extended sabotaging session. I slept instead of worked. I took naps after school. I went climbing at odd hours. I read blogs. I basically did what I wanted and pretended I had no responsibilities. Each morning I would wake up in a panic, because the reality of responsibility was back, and it had a smiling teenage face that was supposed to learn math. I had the same due dates and times, only now I was operating on less sleep and less preparation.

Normally, the cycle ends when I am so exhausted that I reach some sort of equilibrium, but this time something different happened. A conversation.

Me: “So, I need to tell you, just so you know, that I sabotage myself”

My Boss: “What?”

I explain.

My Boss: “Oh. Yea, I do that too, except instead of going and doing nothing, I work like crazy, but it is not effective because I am unhappy and ultimately we only work well when we are happy, so all my work sucks.”

I laughed. I felt better. Someone else acted irrationally when they were pushed to the brink and felt like they were no longer living their own life. Our thoughts were not identical, nor our reactions, but the discontent was the same, and that was significant.

The cycle ended today without a giant, exhausted collapse. Instead it ended with a “Me too.”

I start every morning with the same routine. Coffee and a stack of agendas stuffed full of last night’s homework.

My school gives homework every night for every subject. And I check it every morning as the sun rises and my students devour a quick breakfast.

Homework check is a quick affair, lasting less than an hour between bathroom breaks and attendance for all 97 of our fifth grade students. I’ll admit that some mornings before the caffeine has really set into my system, I’ve gotten a bit upset with a student who doesn’t turn in his homework, doesn’t put it in order or has somehow managed to make backpack origami out of the formerly pristinely white and flat reading log I handed him the night before.

Our school holds big expectations. Homework every night, for one, is not an expectation many of my students have been used to being held to. There are two trends in those who struggle with the homework — and thus meet my wrath, or at least my frustrations, early the next morning.

The first trend is the student who is perfectly capable of finishing his or her homework, but chooses not too. Usually a few 7:30 a.m. phone calls home and a parent conference can work that problem away. The second trend is the student who simply struggles in such a fast paced environment. They’re behind from the get-go for a myriad of reasons. The whole concept of longer school days and more work is overwhelming and confusing.

I have three of these students in my homeroom right now. At first, I just grew increasingly annoyed every morning shouting their names to hurry up and bring their homework folder up to me so I could move on with the rest of my day after marking down all the missing assignments and incomplete papers the folder was sure to hold. We’re well past a month of school and these three are still, daily, missing major assignments, not getting things signed and generally showing up unprepared for morning homework check. Once the majority of the fifth grade gets a grasp on our morning routine, students such as these start to stand out like traffic cones.

Instead of moving into the rhythm of daily homework assignments, they flounder with the added work and lack the organizational skills necessary to keep track of it. What originally starts as frustration and complication in my morning routine begins to turn into sympathy for the ones lagging behind — as this is one of the many reasons schools like mine exist. It is one of the major reasons I work for a school that requires extra hours and weekends from teachers.

We’re not going to let them fall behind. We’re going to find a way to fix it.

My way, with my three traffic cones, starts not in the mornings, but in the afternoon before, in study hall. For the past week, we’ve gathered together and written each of the assignments down in their agendas, organized them by subject and put big, monstrous circles around the things they need to get signed.

This morning as I finished off my coffee, I mindlessly flipped through a stack of papers. Math, Science, Social Studies, Reading, Writing. Parent signature. All complete. All perfect. I turned to the front of the agenda to find a name and smiled.

“Javier,” I shouted, “Come here.”

He hustled up quickly and a look of relief and pride flooded his face as I offered my hand up for a high five.

“You did it. You got a check,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, biting his lip and rushing off to tell his friends.

Next came Micheal. Check. And another high five.

And then Juan, the messiest of all three, also a check. Before I could extend my hand in the congratulatory high five universally preferred by fifth grad boys, he stuck his hand out and confidently said “I’m going to do it all week. All week it will be perfect. I promise.”

“I hope so,” I said as I shook his hand.

There are certainly days I wish I had another hour in bed, worked at school that didn’t require me to be awake enough at seven in the morning to check piles of homework or didn’t have to hurry off 32 noisy 10-year-olds to the bathroom before I had downed my first cup of coffee, but today was not one of them.

There’s something to be said for taking the time to catch someone who is falling. There’s something to be learned from looking for the real problem instead of giving up on someone who is lagging behind. And there’s certainly little better than a high five and a handshake to start your morning.

There’s a fine line to me between being affable and being annoying. I try to talk up people in most circumstances. Not to be normal, but because I’m usually interested. The only exception is when I walk my dog. For some reason, I don’t like to converse around my dog. Probably because it leads to the same small talk. Whatever the reason, I just stay quiet on our little walks.

It’s late afternoon and I take my dog to the park. The place is sunny and nice and green and free of pollen. A blonde woman stops me and tells me my dog is beautiful. She says he has wonderful coloring, pretty blue eyes. I want to keep moving but she smiles and I break my silence. I crouch down to calm my dog and introduce him to her toddler. The little boy pets him harshly while the mom and I discuss common breeds. She seems nice and then suddenly calls the little boy back. It’s abrupt, but feel it’s an appropriate time to go, so I excuse myself and we go on our way.

When I get home I realize I’ve dropped my keys somewhere along our walk. I put the dog in the backyard and trot my previous footsteps. I return to the park and the blonde woman I spoke with is just leaving. We make eye contact and I begin to smile but before I do, she looks away and continues past without a word. The cold shoulder surprises me.

I retrace my walk down to the soccer field, past the barriers and into the playground. There I crouch down and find my keys in the grass. The same place I was twenty minutes beforehand. I think of the mom again and wonder if she recognized me. The wind picks up and I feel the breeze flow cool above the blades. A cold rush strikes me and I look below.

My shorts are ripped at the crotch. A great view for anyone who wants to know about male anatomy. I look up and the remaining mothers are watching me. They’re thinking, Looks like the park pervert has returned. I pickup the keys and try to walk out with some dignity. Days like this are why it’s best to just be the weird quiet guy with the dog. I’ll take that over the weird flasher any day.

I moved to California and I tiled a kitchen floor.

Because I’ve lived in intentional communities of various kinds for the past three years, moving into a former convent with six other theology students sounded ideal. The house, called Shabbat House, is big and old and feels pretty much like a convent would feel if you turned it into a normal home. A TV sits in the old chapel, and each of our bedrooms comes equipped with its own sink.

But because it’s old, the house has its fair share of repairs that need to be undertaken. And when we as a house received a donation from an “anonymous benefactor,” we decided that replacing our kitchen floor would be the perfect task. It was yellow linoleum, the kind of pattern that probably seemed bright and vibrant in 1972 but had faded to a dingy, faded remnant of its former glory.

We exchanged e-mails about the floor, ones that now seem almost heartbreakingly naïve: “We’ll just knock it out in a weekend and be done with it!” was the general consensus. I pictured two days of happily working in the kitchen with my housemates, removing linoleum and laying down tile and singing along to the Temptations or Aretha Franklin or the like.

A weekend quickly turned into 10 days of laying a subfloor, learning to mortar, and only eating what we could eat raw or microwave. Our refrigerator hummed in our dining room, and the stove sat lonely and unplugged. Dishes sat in stacks on our dining room table. As we lay tile, we realized our new floor – the color was called “Caribbean Sunrise” – clashed with our kitchen’s yellow countertops and periwinkle blue paint. And so painting was added to our list of renovations, and two more days of painting and cleaning everything that had gotten covered in cement dust were set before us.

Kitchens, for me, have always been a kind of sacred space. I believe that making and sharing a meal with other people is a sacramental act: that we are not only nourishing our bodies but our spirits, and our relationships with one another. In the communities I’ve lived in, the kitchen has been where we gather to talk about our day, laugh, cry, and use cooking as a form of procrastination or stress relief. To not have that touchstone available the first two weeks I lived in the Shabbat House made me feel disoriented and a little stressed.

But last Sunday, we finished sealing the tile, painting the cabinets a lovely buttercream color, cleaning appliances, and setting the stove and the refrigerator in their rightful places. Our dining room seemed disconcertingly empty; our kitchen felt like new.

That night, my housemate Susan and I came downstairs after one of my first days of orientation and opened up a bottle of wine. We grabbed the wine, a bag of chips and some salsa, and sat down on our new tile floor. We talked about my excitement for grad school, her past experiences, and ate and drank and enjoyed our functional kitchen. In those few minutes of sharing food and conversation, I felt things click into place in a way they hadn’t quite yet. I’m learning to call a new place “home,” and now it feels a little more like one.

I am not much of a pack rat. Things don’t carry too much of sentimental value for me unless they are a specific gift. Just ask my husband. I threw away an entire box filled with notes, photos, stuffed animals, and prom favors he gave me in high school within weeks of our dramatic break up just before college. (While I never could have known at the time I’d be married to him in another six years, I still kick myself over that one).

But there’s one thing I definitely keep. Letters. Letters, cards, notes…anything with words and anything someone took the time to write to me, I keep. Yesterday, I was gutting the closet in the office in our house and managed to pull out at least five boxes filled with cards, letters, and photos given to me over the years. Since it was a lazy afternoon, I decided to go through them and see what I could find.

After about an hour, I was surrounded on all sides by stacks and stacks of hand-written sentiments from dozens of people I’ve known in my life. The words covered almost every event in my life: confirmation, graduation, breakups, cross-country and track meets, birthdays, sick days, sad days, my engagement, wedding, my first anniversary and then of course the “just because” notes. They were from my mom, my dad, my sisters, both my brothers, my extended family, my friends I’ve known since I was 5 and friends I just met last year.

As I read them, the weight of what I was reading began to settle in my heart. I began to realize what incredibly amazing and beautiful people I have been blessed to know in my 26 years. Not only are they loving, giving people who do huge things in their lives…they go on mission trips and go to grad school and teach inner-city kids and are parents and work in churches and write books and do photography and help people…but they love me.

They have wished me the best of luck, they have told me to feel better, they want me to be successful, they want me to be blessed. They want me to be happy.

The last letter I read was from my little brother a couple Christmases ago. And as I sat reading, tears streaming down my face, I was struck by the last line of his letter:

I hope wherever you go and whatever you do, love will follow you. And if it doesn’t, and you go to the darkest place on earth, you are the love that is supposed to be there. And I hope whoever you meet along the way, you tell them about us. And how nothing could come between us. I will tell our stories to everyone I meet. The funny…the sad…the awkward. And the lovely.

The words were the most perfect, beautiful picture of the garden of papers and colors and words that surrounded me there on the carpet. Because they weren’t just words. They tell the stories that have made up my life. They are the love that has helped build me into who I am, the love that kept me going even when life felt unbearable, and the love that will continue to walk with me.

So to everyone that I love, and anyone who has been kind enough to love me back, I just want to say thank you so very much. You have enriched my life more than you’ll probably ever know.