Retirement suits me.

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The first few times I said this, usually in answer to a query, people said, I hope jokingly, that I should be careful not to gloat. That left me a bit gun-shy about the subject.

People didn’t stop asking, though, and over time they started to say that it’s not gloating — or even that I deserve to gloat.

I don’t think that I deserve anything. Maybe I earned retirement — twenty years at the college is nothing to sneeze at — but in many ways, I’m more fortunate than anything else, having more or less stumbled into one of the increasingly rare professions that offer pensions.

It took a while to feel like I really was retired. First, there was the month or so after I had worked my last day but wasn’t officially retired — Schrödinger’s Retirement, I called it.

Yet even when it was official, I still didn’t feel retired; I had taken summers off for years, so not driving down to the campus or logging into Canvas didn’t seem that unusual.

By late July, however, I began to feel it, when I noticed that I didn’t need to spend any time or mindspace preparing for the fall semester. I hadn’t realized how much energy I spent on these “summers off.”

At first, I found myself unsure about what to do — not in a bad way, and it’s certainly a quality problem to have. But once I convinced myself that I had retired from teaching, not from life, things started to fall into place.

So how have I been spending my time?

Most mornings, I’ve been recording music. I wrapped up a couple of my own tunes (“Lies” and “In the Right”), then turned my energies to my old band’s project, the follow-up album to Better Late Than Neverland. Aside from the thrill of hearing old songs coming back to life, recording is mentally engaging — lots to learn, lots of problems to solve.

I’ve been reading, too — not as much as I’d expected to, but more than I’d been able to for a long while. I started with Ulysses, but I’ve accumulated a reasonable list of titles since then (many of which were in the stack of gift books, both Round 1 and Round 2):

• Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You
• Richard Powers’s sprawling The Overstory
• a sci-fi book by the incomparable Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
• a historical novel, The Lilac People (I wrote about that one)
• A 19th-century novel, The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins, which was serialized in Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round (the link is to Wikipdedia)
• One of Neal Stephenson’s shorter works, Polostan
• A lovely art theory book by Brian Eno and Bette A., What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory
• Pynchon’s new Shadow Ticket

Since I’m not buried in grading (or, as likely, letting myself fall into YouTube rabbit holes as an escape from grading), I’ve managed to enjoy a few movies, most recently the immensely enjoyable Barbie. I just wrapped up a season of (guilty pleasure alert) Pamela Anderson’s turn-of-the-century TV show, V.I.P., and have started a new season of Doctor Who — one episode at a time, like in the old days, resisting, with fairly good success, the temptation to binge watch.

I’ve been toying with the possibility of writing again, too — though I hesitate to say much more than that, since I’ve committed to this in the blog far too many times over the years. We’ll see.

Ideally, I’ll stay retired — that is, I’m hoping to avoid part-time teaching. I’m not a fan of that whole system, for one thing; I’d argue that it’s largely an exploitive one. Among other issues, part-timers are paid hourly, but only for time spent in the classroom, not for the time it takes to prep or grade — a real problem for English classes, which require both in spades.

More important: I had not realized how hard I was fighting off a growing cynicism about teaching. It was a great job for so long, and I’m grateful for the opportunity I had, but things were relentlessly growing harder: endless contract negotiations, unfunded mandates from the state, national attacks on academia — and, the proverbial last straw, students’ overuse or, more often, misuse of A.I.

All this added up to a 60-cycle hum of anxiety and depression that seems to have mostly disappeared.

So, yes: retirement suits me just fine.