30-Year-Old-Me and Six-Year-Old-Me agree: Skyrim is Teh Awesome. I really should have been born into that world, not this one.
I live vicariously through my Dragonborn werewolf Imperial, because she is far more badass than I could ever hope to be.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
School (eeewwwwww!)
I just started a new college class, Applied Managerial Marketing, in my Master's degree program. This class started Sunday and the first assignment and part of the second (both Discussion Board assignments, my favorite) were due tonight. The first one was a breeze: An introduction about me and why I'm going to school. Can't mess that up.
The second was not quite as breezy, but still pretty simple. I had to describe the press release as a part of the marketing campaign, then look up a Fortune 500 company and discuss two or more of its press releases. Six-Year-Old-Me insisted on choosing Walt Disney Company (currently ranked No. 65 for 2011), but noted that I should only look at two press releases because this is boooring. 30-Year-Old-Me agreed to both, after a cursory glance at two more press releases just to say I at least started my research with more. What can I say? I have a guilty conscience.
Not quite two hours before the deadline, Assignment One is done and the first part of Assignment Two is done. Parts two and three of Assignment Two are due later in the week. I will have to read and respond to two classmates' initial postings (oh, shudder — why are so many Master's-level students such godawful writers?!?) and then go a bit more in-depth by looking for some news-y response to one of the press releases a fellow classmate reports on. My choice of classmate and thus, press release, thankfully. I'm about as excited about that as I am for reading Disney's annual report.
Six-Year-Old-Me isn't even dignifying it with a thought. She's still all starry-eyed in dreaming about Disneyland and princesses and dragons. Can't say I blame her.
This class is my fifth out of 11 classes for this degree, an MBA in Marketing. I actually started this degree in late 2010, exactly six months after receiving my Bachelor's, so I should be done with it by now. However, due to burn-out, stress, a desire to maintain my current 4.0 rather than losing it to stress, and the financial implications of being done with school, I have become rather good at taking breaks between classes to draw things out until I can land a better job.
I don't want to talk about my current job hunt. I'll just leave it at the age-old question, "How the hell am I supposed to get any experience in my chosen field if nobody hires me?!?" I'm just sayin' — the Master's degree better be damn good employer-bait.
Six-Year-Old-Me thinks I should just give up and be a ballerina. Or a unicorn.
Sounds kinda nice, actually.
The second was not quite as breezy, but still pretty simple. I had to describe the press release as a part of the marketing campaign, then look up a Fortune 500 company and discuss two or more of its press releases. Six-Year-Old-Me insisted on choosing Walt Disney Company (currently ranked No. 65 for 2011), but noted that I should only look at two press releases because this is boooring. 30-Year-Old-Me agreed to both, after a cursory glance at two more press releases just to say I at least started my research with more. What can I say? I have a guilty conscience.
Not quite two hours before the deadline, Assignment One is done and the first part of Assignment Two is done. Parts two and three of Assignment Two are due later in the week. I will have to read and respond to two classmates' initial postings (oh, shudder — why are so many Master's-level students such godawful writers?!?) and then go a bit more in-depth by looking for some news-y response to one of the press releases a fellow classmate reports on. My choice of classmate and thus, press release, thankfully. I'm about as excited about that as I am for reading Disney's annual report.
Six-Year-Old-Me isn't even dignifying it with a thought. She's still all starry-eyed in dreaming about Disneyland and princesses and dragons. Can't say I blame her.
This class is my fifth out of 11 classes for this degree, an MBA in Marketing. I actually started this degree in late 2010, exactly six months after receiving my Bachelor's, so I should be done with it by now. However, due to burn-out, stress, a desire to maintain my current 4.0 rather than losing it to stress, and the financial implications of being done with school, I have become rather good at taking breaks between classes to draw things out until I can land a better job.
I don't want to talk about my current job hunt. I'll just leave it at the age-old question, "How the hell am I supposed to get any experience in my chosen field if nobody hires me?!?" I'm just sayin' — the Master's degree better be damn good employer-bait.
Six-Year-Old-Me thinks I should just give up and be a ballerina. Or a unicorn.
Sounds kinda nice, actually.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Hi there!
Greetings, Universe.
Sometimes — no, no; oftentimes, if you're like 30-Year-Old Me — it is far too easy to get swept up in the rush of here and now with deadlines and bills and appointments and disappointments. It's easy to miss the moment that's actually happening in wondering and worrying about and planning for a dozen or more different possible futures, with part of that planning being a fear of repeating not-so-fun mistakes of the past. You know the routines. You know the hopes. You know the compromises.
You know the feeling that comes with that frozen moment when you wonder where the day went, what you did with your time, and why you didn't take an extra five minutes to yourself to simply stop and be, and so do I.
30-Year-Old Me is the Queen of Deadlines, the Empress of Multitasking, the Duchess of Adding One More Thing to The Schedule. She's fast. She's organized (most days). She's reliable. She's a perfectionist and a nit-picker and has learned to enjoy eating her lunch at her desk, because that makes the non-regular work-breaks so much nicer (that's why I do that, right?)
30-Year-Old-Me's body finally caught up with her, and said, simply, "Knock it off." How? Heart palpitations. Arrhythmia, and supposedly harmless (so far) but most definitely stress-related. So 30-Year-Old-Me stopped and listened ...
Hi. My name is Sketch and I'm a dreamer stuck in a workaholic's body. I'm 30 years old, I'm working full time while going to school working on my Master's degree, and even when I'm at home, on the weekend, with nothing pressing to worry about, I worry anyway. I plan out the next day's work loads before I even know how heavy or light certain tasks will be. I plan out my breakfast and lunch while sleepless at 2:30 a.m. (I juice and blend fresh fruits and veggies for two meals a day and then get back to my meat-and-potatoes roots for dinner). I plan out potential bill-paying plans, none of which ever play out like they really should. Heck, I'm even guilty of planning out my leisure time — what book I'm going to read, what game I'm going to play, what movie to watch, etcetera.
It's kind of gross, really. I've known for a long time that I need to slow down, take each task and worry moment by moment and actually live in the here-and-now. I know that large amounts of my life have flown and are flying by without my acknowledgement, and I know that means that the perfect future I tell myself I'm striving for will never arrive, because I won't recognize its achievement if I'm always thinking about how much better or worse things could be.
So now I'm finally doing what I've wanted to do for years, but of course, being me, put off for "sometime when things settle down and I'm in the right mind frame." Turns out I have to put myself in that mind frame and make that "sometime" be now. So, now, here I am and here we are.
I'm Buddhist, or trying to be. I believe it was the Dalai Lama who said, "If you think you are Buddhist, you are not. If you think you are not Buddhist, you are." So, I thought I was, but that means I'm not, which makes me think I'm not, which means I am. And I think I like that.
So, I've been seeking mentors, everyday heroes, more mundane versions of the Buddha or the Dalai Lama in the people in my life. This is both a new revelation and something I think I've always known but not expressed. I'm lucky enough to have a sort of adopted-Buddha-Grampa in a cherished co-worker, and a more down-to-earth, gritty, reality guru in my fiancé. For a long time I wondered why that wasn't enough, but now I get it. It's that whole "believe in yourself or no one else will" thing. I kept looking to external forces to guide me, and while that's all well and good, it cannot be the base of a person's personality and functionality. I needed to find the guide in myself.
And, although I've made light with her in past blogs, I finally realized that guide is Six-Year-Old Me.
When I was six years old, the world was, for lack of a better word, awesome. Literally — everything carried with it some sense of awe, of wonder, of thrill — whether it was good, bad, weird, or mundane (by grown-up standards, of course). When I was six I could go outside after a good rain and find whole worlds in the moss-lined cracks and pits in the asphalt that now contained their own lakes, complete with the occasional drowning or drowned ant, or pale, slowly thrashing worm that was, of course, actually a sea serpent haunting that lake.
I had no real worries, but not because there was nothing to worry about (according to my mother, I have always been a worrier, even when I was too young to properly pronounce the word but tried to anyway). Rather, with a faith that must have known something I've since forgotten, I knew that eveything would be OK, somehow. I didn't know how it would all work out, I just knew it would because it always did.
That's something I forgot a very, very long time ago, but even to this day, it's held true.
Six-Year-Old Me was pretty smart, it turns out. So now I'm forcing myself to slow down and take the time to think about how I would have handled the things I face in my adult life if I had to face them at six. Six-Year-Old Me is my guide — my little, tow-headed, blue-eyed Buddha, my Better Me. I think she's got a big job ahead of her in convincing me to let go of my adult, knee-jerk reactions and worries and schedules and plans. I think she may want to throw the classic tantrum now and then. But then, so does 30-Year-Old Me, so I guess that's understandable.
I am going to reflect more on life and how it can be lived, rather than a dream and how it should be planned. I'm going to use this blog to chronicle it. I think Six-Year-Old Me is up to the task.
Am I?
Sometimes — no, no; oftentimes, if you're like 30-Year-Old Me — it is far too easy to get swept up in the rush of here and now with deadlines and bills and appointments and disappointments. It's easy to miss the moment that's actually happening in wondering and worrying about and planning for a dozen or more different possible futures, with part of that planning being a fear of repeating not-so-fun mistakes of the past. You know the routines. You know the hopes. You know the compromises.
You know the feeling that comes with that frozen moment when you wonder where the day went, what you did with your time, and why you didn't take an extra five minutes to yourself to simply stop and be, and so do I.
30-Year-Old Me is the Queen of Deadlines, the Empress of Multitasking, the Duchess of Adding One More Thing to The Schedule. She's fast. She's organized (most days). She's reliable. She's a perfectionist and a nit-picker and has learned to enjoy eating her lunch at her desk, because that makes the non-regular work-breaks so much nicer (that's why I do that, right?)
30-Year-Old-Me's body finally caught up with her, and said, simply, "Knock it off." How? Heart palpitations. Arrhythmia, and supposedly harmless (so far) but most definitely stress-related. So 30-Year-Old-Me stopped and listened ...
Hi. My name is Sketch and I'm a dreamer stuck in a workaholic's body. I'm 30 years old, I'm working full time while going to school working on my Master's degree, and even when I'm at home, on the weekend, with nothing pressing to worry about, I worry anyway. I plan out the next day's work loads before I even know how heavy or light certain tasks will be. I plan out my breakfast and lunch while sleepless at 2:30 a.m. (I juice and blend fresh fruits and veggies for two meals a day and then get back to my meat-and-potatoes roots for dinner). I plan out potential bill-paying plans, none of which ever play out like they really should. Heck, I'm even guilty of planning out my leisure time — what book I'm going to read, what game I'm going to play, what movie to watch, etcetera.
It's kind of gross, really. I've known for a long time that I need to slow down, take each task and worry moment by moment and actually live in the here-and-now. I know that large amounts of my life have flown and are flying by without my acknowledgement, and I know that means that the perfect future I tell myself I'm striving for will never arrive, because I won't recognize its achievement if I'm always thinking about how much better or worse things could be.
So now I'm finally doing what I've wanted to do for years, but of course, being me, put off for "sometime when things settle down and I'm in the right mind frame." Turns out I have to put myself in that mind frame and make that "sometime" be now. So, now, here I am and here we are.
I'm Buddhist, or trying to be. I believe it was the Dalai Lama who said, "If you think you are Buddhist, you are not. If you think you are not Buddhist, you are." So, I thought I was, but that means I'm not, which makes me think I'm not, which means I am. And I think I like that.
So, I've been seeking mentors, everyday heroes, more mundane versions of the Buddha or the Dalai Lama in the people in my life. This is both a new revelation and something I think I've always known but not expressed. I'm lucky enough to have a sort of adopted-Buddha-Grampa in a cherished co-worker, and a more down-to-earth, gritty, reality guru in my fiancé. For a long time I wondered why that wasn't enough, but now I get it. It's that whole "believe in yourself or no one else will" thing. I kept looking to external forces to guide me, and while that's all well and good, it cannot be the base of a person's personality and functionality. I needed to find the guide in myself.
And, although I've made light with her in past blogs, I finally realized that guide is Six-Year-Old Me.
When I was six years old, the world was, for lack of a better word, awesome. Literally — everything carried with it some sense of awe, of wonder, of thrill — whether it was good, bad, weird, or mundane (by grown-up standards, of course). When I was six I could go outside after a good rain and find whole worlds in the moss-lined cracks and pits in the asphalt that now contained their own lakes, complete with the occasional drowning or drowned ant, or pale, slowly thrashing worm that was, of course, actually a sea serpent haunting that lake.
I had no real worries, but not because there was nothing to worry about (according to my mother, I have always been a worrier, even when I was too young to properly pronounce the word but tried to anyway). Rather, with a faith that must have known something I've since forgotten, I knew that eveything would be OK, somehow. I didn't know how it would all work out, I just knew it would because it always did.
That's something I forgot a very, very long time ago, but even to this day, it's held true.
Six-Year-Old Me was pretty smart, it turns out. So now I'm forcing myself to slow down and take the time to think about how I would have handled the things I face in my adult life if I had to face them at six. Six-Year-Old Me is my guide — my little, tow-headed, blue-eyed Buddha, my Better Me. I think she's got a big job ahead of her in convincing me to let go of my adult, knee-jerk reactions and worries and schedules and plans. I think she may want to throw the classic tantrum now and then. But then, so does 30-Year-Old Me, so I guess that's understandable.
I am going to reflect more on life and how it can be lived, rather than a dream and how it should be planned. I'm going to use this blog to chronicle it. I think Six-Year-Old Me is up to the task.
Am I?
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