Life as a Balancing Act

(First, a bit of housekeeping: Since I blog infrequently, and occasionally hear from people in the real world that they check the site regularly for updates, I thought I would point out that this is not a necessity! For one, since I DO post so infrequently and know that it is a shame, I try to diligently post a link to the blog with a notice that something new has arrived on my Twitter account, which also updates my Facebook status. Thus if you already follow me on those sites, you "won't miss a thang" as Aerosmith would put it. However if you are not quite up-to-date with the 21st Century, there is a nice, old school way to see if I have updated my site without actually clicking through to it or typing in the address: RSS. See "What is RSS?" if you are unfamiliar. To subscribe to my RSS, simply go to this link: http://www.matt-cook.com/feeds/posts/default or add that to your RSS reader. That's your technology time-saver of the day.)

Now on with the post.

My life has been a real balancing act lately. Don't get me wrong; it's nothing compared to last semester's terror of balancing all the preparation necessary for graduating (as a Scholar, no less!) and getting married. But still it's been interesting, to say the least, that my "mentally relaxing" year off from school and education to prepare for grad school has turned out this hectic.

First of all are the health problems. (In case you missed it, I might have Crohn's disease or something else unpleasant.) It's cost time, money and productivity. There have been plenty of days where I haven't felt like doing a thing at work, other than put my head on the desk and wait for my stomach pain to cease. Those were fun days. Fortunately, I haven't felt nearly that bad in two weeks. Unfortunately, after over a month of seeing Dr. Nuako I still don't have a diagnosis. (This is in no way his fault, of course. My symptoms aren't playing nicely. He said yesterday that this would be easier to figure out if my symptoms were worse.) Instead, I have four or five potential diagnoses, and a handful of expensive tests that should figure it all out. So we'll see where all that goes. I tell you what, though, if I'm not reeling in pain I'm less inclined to bother with all the tests. Dr. Nuako himself said that he didn't really think all of the tests recommended by the pathologists were necessary. So for now I continue on in "wait mode." Like I said, as long as I'm not throwing up in pain and I don't have tuberculosis (yeah, I'm being tested for that, too), I'll be ok.

But that's just one part of the balancing act. Then there's work. Ah, work. I've been pushing very hard to finish Phase I of my project over the last couple weeks, and did so successfully. After a meeting with the boss and others this week, it's now time to turn to the longer, more excruciating part of the job: video interviews with students. I don't know how easy or hard this will be, in all honesty, but I imagine it's going to be hard work to coordinate. The big picture deadline is a looong time away, fortunately, so there's lots of time to get this done.

The third and final part of the balancing act is the colossal grad school application project. After four days in Wisconsin and Minnesota over fall break, my work ethic on this front has had a new fervor. The looming deadline of Nov. 3 is drawing nigh: the day on which I take the GRE. (It's named the Graduate Record Exam, but you could also call it the Great Reckoning of Eternity. Kidding, but only slightly.)

Most people have said not to worry about the GRE and to just get some sleep before hand... but are you kidding me? I'm studying as hard as I can! My reasoning is pretty solid: I'm shooting for as high a score as possible, given that I'm applying to four top-10 geography programs and the odd-ball Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP!) program, but even that is at Virginia Tech. All of these applications consider the same key things: GRE scores, undergraduate record, letters of recommendation/statement of intent, and compatibility with faculty. So the GRE is one of four key components. People apply to these programs with perfect 1600s. So what number do you think I'm shooting for?

Just one more reason my life is a balancing act.

Living in the Clutter

Today I had a sneaking suspicion that everyone -- even the most clean among us -- have one place or space in their lives that are utterly void of organization, and perhaps, cleanliness.

I think it's human nature.

It's what separates us mere mortals who claim to be OCD-esque in nature from those who truly have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (No matter how much you think you are like Adrian Monk from, well, the TV show Monk, you probably don't have OCD.)

And that utterly unorganized space in your life? Well that's just proof that you're human.

I started thinking about this when I walked by my coworker Josh's car this morning. Despite maintaining a cubicle that tops the office in terms of organization and feng shui, his car had to have at least half a dozen empty plastic water bottles in the passenger seat, bowling shoes in the back, and I have his word that up until a week or two ago, his tuxedo from the David Johnson Chorus had been in the back of the car since the end of their performance season in April.

For geography professor Dr. Mark Simpson, it's his UTM office that is catastrophically cluttered. The man is a meteorology/climatology professor, but it looks like a tornado might be sneaking through his windows at night. (No offense, Dr. Simpson.)

For The Pacer staff, it's pretty much the entire office. Everyone's desk space mimics that of former Pacer managing editor Will York to some degree. Now that I'm gone, I think cleanliness will fall even further from the priority list.

My mom has her scrapbooking room, a room for creative clutter (though I'm sure she'll tell you it's not that bad).

My sister and her husband have...their entire house. OK, maybe they don't fit into that "most clean" category I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Rachel has a nasty habit of rearranging every four to six months anyway, so whatever works for them...

But for Karen and me, it's our "office" or "study" at home. The office is the one room we have yet to fully tackle in our new half-duplex. Nevermind the dishes in the kitchen that never seem to stop piling up (our dishwasher is small). It's the office that I can't stand.

Maybe we just have too many things going on in there.

For one, it's home to our music, and that means a keyboard on one wall and my bass guitar rig next to it in a corner, not to mention our extensive collective sheet music library scattered in boxes and bags everywhere. We need a filing cabinet. Badly. I keep thinking to myself that if we could just get that done, then the rest of the room might fall in place. I think we're going to buy a filing cabinet or something from Wal-Mart or look at office product stores in Jackson this weekend.

It can't wait any longer.

Then there are our desks. I bought mine for (get this) $15 on Craigslist.com and it's a very nice desk. Karen's came from her mom, and it, too, is a nice computer desk. But there's the problem of drawer space. Not a single drawer on either desk. This is a problem, especially when you consider that we both "moved desks" from our apartments in the University Village, which came with three-drawer desks and an upper shelf in the provided furniture. Most of my "desk stuff" is in two shoe boxes on my desk's shelves; everything else is clutter and crammed on top of the desk. Karen's stuff is everywhere, from the floor to on top of her desk.

We never spend much time in the office. Why bother when you can hardly see the floor? I don't even use my Macbook much anymore, though that's partly to blame because I sit at this computer at work seven to eight hours a day, plus there's the iPhone in my pocket. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the Internet are in my pocket, so why bother climbing through the office to use my laptop? I blame this for my lack of posting pictures to Flickr, by the way. I'm so far behind on that. I think I've uploaded six or seven Costa Rica photos out of several dozen, then there are plenty of photos of our puppy, and the Tennessee Safari Park from last Saturday...

It seems never ending.

So what should we do with this office? There's no where else in the house to put stuff; we've finally improved the other rooms of the house to the point that they are livable and the floor is visible. We've thought about putting shelves in the office as one possible solution, and certainly the music library going into a filing cabinet will help, but what are your thoughts?

Such a Bum

Man, it's hard to be a blogger.

Well, OK, it's not that difficult if you're someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don't know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don't read it, but Karen does.)

But I'm not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I'm not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.

So anyway, I've had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There's no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I'd give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We've mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I'm sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.

Wait, didn't I say that I wasn't in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.

Since I'm on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I've downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I'm taking that trade-off.

• Twitterific (For following twitter updates)
• Stanza (eBook reader with several libraries of free books)
• Facebook
• USA Today
• Lose It! (A food/exercise counter similar to NutriMirror)
• AT&T myWireless (account manager and bill pay)
• e*Trades Mobile Pro
• Shazam
• Remote (iTunes remote control)
• Yelp
• Restaurants Nutrition
• 8 (a "glasses of water" counter)
• iFitness (the only paid app, has 100's of exercises demonstrated, plus user workouts)
• Instapaper (Downloads Web pages you don't have time to read so you can come back to them later)
• Bible
• Barnes & Noble Bookstore
  
• Flixter (movie times, trailers)
• Amazon.com
• WebMD
• Free German Essentials (a trial version with only 130 or so vocabulary words; the full version has 1000's of vocab to learn)
• Currency converter
• Wikipanion (Wikipedia search)
• AP Mobile (though I'm liking USA Today better, might get rid of this one)
• Wi-Fi Finder
• Mancala
• myLite (flashlight plus some other cool things like strobe light)
• Harry Potter 6 (interactive game, haven't looked at it yet)
• iSniper lite (Free trial game, kinda boring)
• iHandgun (Sound emulator)
• Lightsaber (Sound emulator)

See what fun can be had! Why do I get the feeling that some of you are criticizing my productivity...

The most interesting UTM experience to date

(Jennifer Cook's Caption: Jenny and Matt prepare to capture our office birdie.)

(Photos courtesy of Jennifer Cook's cell phone)

As promised from my tweet yesterday, I have to blog about the crazy experience yesterday afternoon involving rescuing a little wren from Gooch Hall.

It all started when I went to Gooch to meet with Kristy Crawford and Michael Poore from the College of Education/Education Department. We ended up rescheduling the meeting for today (Thursday) instead, but since I was already in Gooch I decided to see if Tomi was around in the Communications Office or if anyone was at The Pacer office.

Of course they weren't.

I was about to leave by taking the stairs near the vending machines on the third floor when I was startled by a flapping sound.

A young wren had found its way into the building (probably through the doors to the smoke deck/balcony.)

So I went back into the Communications Office where only Mrs. Glenda, the department secretary, was around. I told her about the bird, but she said she had already seen it and called Maintenance but they weren't going to do anything about the bird. (Let's face it...who is going to have experience catching birds and wants to waste that much time? I don't blame them.)

But against my first instinct to just leave the building and let the bird die, I decided to try to work it toward the balcony doors to free it. I figured I owed it to bird-kind...since last week I accidentally hit one of those suicidal birds that like to fly across the street at the exact same time that cars are coming. I also thought Karen would be impressed at my humanity...and it did seem pretty inhumane to just not do anything.

Well...needless to say, it is practically impossible to get a bird to do what you want it to do. I probably spent 10 minutes walking slowly after the bird in the hallway outside of the Comm office. It would fly from the vending machine area (where there is a large window, but like every single window in Gooch, it doesn't open!) down the hall to the stairwell where it would sit on the door or the handrail. Three or four times I walked toward it in the stairwell only to have it fly back down the hall toward the vending machine area with the window.

Then I got the idea to try to work it downstairs. (I don't know why I thought this was a good idea.) When I got to the stairwell on the third floor, I tried to fill the doorway by holding up my arms and it actually worked to get him to go down the flight of stairs instead of back over my head.

But then things went wrong... it flew down the hallway toward the second floor vending machines (the layout in Gooch is basically the same on each floor in case you didn't know). So I went after the wren again, and this time when he flew away from the vending machine/window he landed in a fake tree at the corner of the hallway.

"Great," I thought. "If I could only pick up the tree and work IT outside..."

As I approached the tree, of course, the wren flew out and back down the hallway. Only this time...he stopped on the door frame of an open office! (At this point...I thought "Oh crap. I just made this somebody else's problem.") I went to the office where a professor (I think?) was reading a book. She must have been really engaged in the book, because she didn't hear the bird fly into her office and she didn't even hear me walk in until I knocked at her door.

"Did you just see a bird fly in here?"

"No..." Then I pointed it out to her.

"Well I don't want the bird in here." Then it flew around the corner as I started to approach it. I heard screaming. The office connects with a suite of offices that houses the Educations Student Services. The wren had flown into Jennifer Cook's office. (Jennifer is the director of the ESS, and many people have asked me if she and her husband Doug are my parents over the years, since their daughter and I are the same age/went to grade school together.)

After the screaming, the people in the office (Jennifer, Jenny Hahn and Debbie Stigall) were kind of frantic, and I heard Jennifer tell them that a bird just flew in their office. So I ran down the hall and entered the ESS from the other door (the one the bird didn't fly through). They quickly told me that there was a bird in their office...and I, of course, trying not to laugh, told them that I had seen the bird fly in through the other door.

To make a long story a little bit briefer, we managed to get the bird out of Jennifer's office, only to have it fly in Jenny Hahn's office where we closed the door to make sure it wouldn't get out. Armed with a sweater and a plastic cup, Ms. Jenny and I tried to catch the bird but to no avail. It kept flitting from the window to the door to sit on some hangers on the back of the door, then back to the blinds...it was interesting to say the least. After a few minutes, we rushed out of the office, closing the wren back in, to try to figure out what to do next.

I told them that maintenance wouldn't do anything about it, so while Ms. Jenny went down the hall to the Dean's Office to fetch a grad assistant, Jennifer called the Biology and Ag departments. None of the professors were in (keep in mind that it was 4:30 by this point and it's summer term). She was about to call Dr. David Pitts, a biology professor with lots of birding experience, at home. But in came the graduate assistant from the Dean's office. He walked very calmly toward the office and closed himself in with the wren.

We heard lots of interesting noises, some of which involved the bird flying from blinds to hangers again and the opening of an umbrella. A few minutes into this, Ms. Jenny walked back into her office to try to help.

After a few more minutes, Ms. Jenny opens the door and the grad assistant has the wren tightly in his hands. The umbrella is open on the floor in the office. I'm both impressed and curious how he caught the wren, but evidently he has some experience with birds. He let it outside Gooch Hall, where hopefully it can now live in peace.

As for me -- well let's just say that I don't plan to take up the bird catching business.

Blogging from Work

I'm two days into my new job as an IT Specialist II at the Instructional Technology Center at UTM and I'm already out of things to do.

Well, sort of...

I'm lacking some of the key software I need to get started on Web developing, but I thought I'd blog since it's been at least a blue moon since my last post.

Since then I've:

Successfully defended my Scholars Project.
Finished finals.
Graduated.
Moved out of university housing and back into my parentals' house for three weeks. This includes moving plenty of furniture, and lots of Karen's stuff.
Joined the church league softball team...and subsequently only made it to one game of four. (Is it sad that I'm too busy to play softball during the summer?)
Drowned in insurance options from the university as a full-time staff person.
Set up my new cubicle and Mac Pro.
Received free swag for being a new employee (including scissors, tape dispenser and stapler!)
Drunk lots of coffee to stay awake after getting up at 7 since I have to be at work at 8ish.


And there's more...but enough for now.

Michael Jordan quote

I found a great Michael Jordan quote today from "flipping through" a few blogs.

"I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot . . . and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why . . . I succeed."

Michael Jordan

I'm running with that theme of stay positive as much as I can from now until April 17 at 5 p.m. (Scholars Defense)

Visualizing the Weekend Ahead

I know I often post tweets or blogs about how busy I am, but since I made a to-do list today on a digital sticky note (gotta love Macs) I thought I would post it for everyone to see what I'm doing between the time this is written and Sunday night. The good news is that not all of this has to be done by Monday, but most of it is due by Tuesday or Wednesday.

I have a feeling this won't make sense to a lot of you, considering this is a mixture of putting together a rough draft of my senior communications portfolio, a Communications law test, Photojournalism assignment, Comm and the World Wide Web project, and Scholars project writing. Whew.

To Do:
Finish Berlin's 4-5 lives
Photo Essay Topic Brainstorm
Examine Comm Law Study Guide - Determine what to study/read
Gather 20 oldest portfolio clips and put in template with art.
Study Session I - Comm Law
Finish personal Web page template
Write Berlin's 6-7 lives
Make Divider Pages and Executive Summaries in Indesign
Study Session II - Comm Law
Finish Berlin's 8-9 lives
Gather 20 more clips and put in template with art.
Finish personal Web page content
Write Berlin's 10th life
Gather remaining clips (20-30 stories + editorials)
Copy Edit
Gather published photos and any other docs needed for portfolio
Print portfolio
Study Session III - Comm Law

At some point: Make sure The Pacer is ok, go to church, sleep.

In other news, Karen and I signed for an apartment today and got a lot of wedding planning stuff done this week, so that's a little less stress on our plates now.

Peace.

More Scholars Project Thoughts

I had a scary realization today.

I have approximately five more meetings (going by the current schedule) with Dr. Rogers until I defend my University Scholars project. This means that insanity might be setting in a little more often in the next month and a half. I work well under deadlines; everybody knows that... but this is one heck of a deadline.

So the moral of the story is that I'm almost to the point where I have to drop everything but the essentials. Sorry if I seem unavailable until May 9 (graduation). That's just how it has to be. Life after I defend my project (don't have an exact date yet -- I'm shooting for as late in April as possible) will be miserable if I don't shoot for as high as standard as I want to because so many other things got in the way. That's my spiel and I'm sticking to it.

Lessons Learned

I learned a valuable lesson today about myself. I should never give blood in the morning.

I got up around 9 a.m., ate at 9:30 and went to give blood around 10. I didn't think about the possibility of not having digested that food yet. After donating I was really lightheaded and stayed on the bloodmobile until nearly 11. The staff took great care of me and a friend of one of my roommates made sure I made it back to the village without passing out.

On top of being lightheaded (which eventually went away with more fluids and food) the whole experience wasn't as great as the last two times I've given. My biggest problem? Arm hair. Their tourniquet really hurts when it pulls arm hair, and since I'm a slow giver for some reason (they always have to tell me to do something different or tighten the tourniquet to get my blood flowing faster) I always end up with a sore arm. This was compounded today because I ended up with a bruised arm from the needle. That's nice and sore now.

So the moral of the story is to give blood in the afternoon. And possibly go to bloodmobile #4, because I ended up with a bruise from the staff on #3. Maybe that's just a coincidence.

Let's get the creative juices flowing again...

It's been about a month since I've really worked on my University Scholars project. I've done some data-gathering and organizing over the break, but I really wanted to get more written...and it didn't happen. Now it's time to start cranking out a page or two every day (except Sundays) from here until mid-March or early April.

And I can't seem to get started. I've false-started two or three times this week. (That means that I've gotten as far as opening the Word document, scrolling down to the place to start writing, and then I've let it sit there.) So far, on my next two-three page segment on Unter den Linden that I've been wanting to finish for a month, I've got this much written:

"Throughout its history, Berlin’s most well known boulevard"

And that's it. I can't even write a complete sentence!

Anyway, I'm blogging just to get a feel for writing a few things out again. I don't know if I've hit a road block to creativity, writer's block, or whatever. I don't think it's senioritis creeping in, cause I'm really interested in most of my classes this semester and I'm not even that busy yet.

Well...Karen came over and wants to eat lunch now so I'm off the hook for the moment. Any inspiration you want to send my way, readers, would be appreciated.