Tuesday, May 15, 2012

It's Been Awhile

So I've never really gotten into a regular swing of posting, and writing has kind of fell to the wayside for me since my last post. Certainly not for a lack of time, as I've been home for a week and a half now. I've just been lacking direction - I have a few minor ideas to tackle sitting on my desktop, but nothing I've really been inspired to write about. I guess I'll just give the standard life update and try to ease back into blogging.

I last left you off at the beginning of Finals Week. This semester was definitely the easiest final schedule I have had at college. I was taking 15 hours, but 3 of those were from OA class. No doubt, I definitely learned a lot and it was something that I looked forward to every Monday; however, not much went into the grades for that class, and there was no final. Additionally, my Business Writing "final" was the culmination of our semester long project working with the Graduate program and the Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville. By finals week, all of our work was over - we had put together ways to launch a Facebook Page, Alumni group, and Database for the Governor's School and had given the presentation the Thursday before. So 2/5 were down right off the bat. In addition, the next two were not actual exams. A group paper for my Marketing 450 class - which was definitely a struggle working with my group, as it was all semester, but in terms of my individual work load that was not a difficult paper to write at all. After editing the other group member's portions - some of them two days after they were supposed to have them done by...*sigh* and covering the weaker portions on my own, I printed that out and turned it in a day early. Woohoo! With that paper, I also turned in my Venue Naming Rights Project for my Sports Marketing Strategy class - also a day early. Look at me go. I had taken a lot of time with this project, so I never felt rushed or had to deal with the wrath of procrastination, and I was very happy with the final product. It was a lot of fun getting to work on it, even if it's something I rarely have to tackle in professional life. Add to the fact that I got assigned the venue of RFK Stadium - home of my beloved DC United - and I really ran with it. It will surely be one of the few items in my Eportfolio that will actually be useful to me. By meeting deadlines early and having a light workload, I was able to spend a lot of time studying for my only physical exam, Services Marketing. It was partially cumulative, but it was more heavily weighted towards new material from the end of the semester. I filled out the study guide, had it memorized, and kept on plowing through my studying. I walked in confident and walked out half an hour later feeling as if I nailed it. Side note, I was on the border of an A or B in four classes, and when all was said and done, I ended up with my first 4.0! Although, I'm still very bitter that I ended up with a 3.97 freshmen year - I was taking 17 hours had all A's except for a B in my one credit Business 101 class because my margins did not match the rubric requirements on one of our only grades all semester. Womp. But nonetheless, it is a special accomplishment! I would not have guessed that this semester would be my best academically, but things came through in the end. Side note: I considered writing a "Junior Year Wrap Up" post, but just could not gather my thoughts enough over these past two weeks to sum up my year in an entry. In that vein though, this year held a lot of high expectations coming in, and it has gone out with a lot of unexpected surprises.

Which brings me to my next life update: Ladies, I am officially off the market. I won't go into the full back story, but ever since we returned from Spring Break, we had been talking/hanging out/dating/whatever label you want to put on it. Things were getting pretty serious, and by the last week I decided it was time to address the elephant in the room of "what we were" and where we were headed from here. I sought and got some great advice from close friends - especially Greg - but I was still nervous about how things would go, if it would get weird between us, etc. etc. It went well though - we discussed it, had a good talk, and decided that although the timing was indeed unfortunate, we were going to become official. It seems silly, but it's nice to have that validation - even though it was pretty clear how we both felt about each other, it was nice to hear it spoken plainly, and I really look forward to what the future holds. I don't want to get ahead of myself and get caught up in my thoughts, but regardless I'm still looking forward to it. We're long distance for the summer, which will certainly have its challenges, but in the grand scheme of things, a summer is not that long. I'll visit her at least before going off to Orientation, and hopefully we can work something out for post Orientation plans as well. It's always nice to have little milestones to look forward to like that. For now, she's out of contact away on a Maymester trip while I've got plenty of free time at home, but it's been nice all things considered. I miss her, sure, and even something as simple as a text here or there during the day is sorely missed. But it's been nice to have time to myself to do what I please before my schedule gets crazy busy. By that time she'll be working full time and I'll be running every which way with a hectic Orientation schedule, but at least I'll be surrounded by great people and have something to constantly be working on. Throw in some phone calls and Skype dates, and I think it can work out with our busy lives. From there, who knows how the last month of my summer will play out - we'll tackle that when we come to it. All in all, I'm very happy with where we stand and what lies on the horizon.

Completely off topic: After getting a new hard drive, losing all my files, and regaining my music without my precious play counts, I have embarked on the grand venture of listening to every song on my iTunes straight through. I have nearly 6,000 songs which if I just let it run all day and night would take me 15 and a half days. I've been going all of April and halfway through May, and I've made it to.....F! Granted, I have large deposits in my library and F is one of them - accompanied with A, D, and S - so I have made quite a bit of progress. But I have also noticed some bands that have not made the transition to my new iTunes, which I'll have to go back and add. It sort of bugs me in a nitpicky way that I've lost all of my ratings and play counts, but at the same time it's kind of nice to have a fresh start and be able to reevaluate everything I have. Going straight through all of my Eminem shortly followed by Emmure discographies was an over 8 hour undertaking, but they're both artists that I have not listened to in quite a bit of time. It was nice to have an excuse to just listen through it all without any hesitation of "do I really want to listen to this right now?" I'm looking forward to when I get to all my Jay-Z stuff as well, to really give that a deeper listen. Who knows how long this project will take - it might not even all get listened to by the end of the summer!

All said and done, my time at home has been much needed. Day to day there's nothing real special on my agenda, but it's nice to take a break from schoolwork and just relax. I've picked up an old favorite video game, playing a little baseball on the PS2 and doing some work with the Phillies franchise I started...oh gosh, four, five years ago? Allow me to nerd out for a while, the progress I've made in a full 162 game season baseball franchise is something that I'm oddly proud of. I'm also regularly scouring On Demand and Netflix for offbeat, interesting movies that I would enjoy, catching How I Met Your Mother on TV when I can, and even dabbling in some Friends! Would you look at that. I've also got some doctor's appointments and am working on tying up some ends before I ship back to Clemson for Orientation. I've spent a lot of time tossing and turning at night running over what I want my message to incoming students to be, what stories I want to share with them, what me opening up to complete strangers and sharing my most vulnerable stories would look like - who I could affect, what lives I could...touch? Dare I say, change? I can only hope to have such an impact. Even if I never realize it, if four years down the line a current high school senior looks back on their college career before graduation and can pick out something I said, some piece of advice I laid out, or just a feeling of acceptance and transition into college...that's a very powerful thing, to truly make a difference in someone else's life. I guess that's the passion that really inspires people to get into teaching. Not to mention, there's plenty of tangible stuff I need to do as well - get some nice khaki shorts, decorate a fellow OA's clipboard, and make my poster. Although I have a design in mind, my actual poster board lies with Tanner currently, since he was nice enough to pick it up, so I can't actually work on that until I'm back in Clemson. Regardless, despite the abundance of free time, there still is a lot to do quickly coming up on the horizon.

That's where I'm at with my life now - I need to make more of an effort to write, and I'd like to expand a little more. A lot of my close friends still don't know I've been keeping a blog, but I still want to keep a fairly small circle of friends who are aware of it. It's a bit of a conundrum - I don't want to plaster it all over Facebook and Twitter, but I also don't want to shove it in people's faces either. "'Hey how's your summer' 'I HAVE A BLOG.'" I just need to let things progress naturally, I suppose.