Category: Personal

Due to travel and being home in Minnesota all last week, this post is coming late today.

This past weekend, my girlfriend graduated from college. It was an exciting time, and she officially finished up this chapter of her life and began to look forward to the PhD program she begins in the fall. Going to commencement was exciting, having this official moment to mark the occasion. This is what I appreciate about commencement, is its role as the milestone.

I don’t think I fully appreciated my commencement in the moment. Being in a major where I didn’t know many people, it was even a little isolating to not share the entire time with my friends. Yet it is still an event I can look back at to finalize the accomplishments I had in college. It’s also the last time something like that occurs. It felt to be one of the biggest jumps into adulthood, as there were no more obvious goals set out for me, beyond survival as an adult.

I think it’s good to have times where we can celebrate ourselves, to take the moment necessary to truly reflect on what we’ve done and where we are going after the fact. I hope to be cognizant of that feeling moving forward. Although there will be no institutions to celebrate my personal accomplishments, I want to take the time to reflect regularly, acknowledge what I’ve done, then focus on moving forward.

I’ve been sitting around, trying to determine what I wanted to write for this week. I’ve had a few underwhelming posts over the past month, due to some time constraints and missed deadlines, so I’m really aiming for ideas with a bit more substance.

I try to make note of some ideas I have, whether that is quotes from books I read, ideas from podcasts, little pictures, or just something that pops into my head that I want to save for later. I was going through those notes and determined this is the right time to get to something I heard a high school girl say at a Starbucks a few months ago.

Continue reading “Looking Stupid”

I missed my first self-imposed Monday deadline in a while. I’ve actually been on Spring Break, in a sense. My girlfriend is in town visiting, and we’ve been staying pretty busy. Tomorrow we’re on our way to Universal Studios Hollywood. We both went to the Orlando location back in high school, so we’re somewhat familiar with what it has to offer. But it will be an excellent time. I just wanted to write this brief post as a marker of my failed deadline, but to keep the number of posts per week consistent enough.

I’ll have a new, full post this upcoming Monday.

The other day, I finally finished making my room fairly clean and I tidy. I put together a bookshelf to house some odds and ends, removed the final cardboard boxes still hanging around since I moved in, and sorted my papers. I felt good. But something was still missing.

This week’s Comical Start episode featured me discussing my desire for a Roomba “just to have something that seems like it’s alive in my apartment.” However, a Roomba is not in my future. After a healthy discussion of why an actual pet is not a possibility right now, Grant and I decided I would get a plant. As a result, I went out Saturday morning and got myself a little succulent.

Continue reading “A New Friend”

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A few weeks ago I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It was a pretty good book. I don’t have much experience reading Fitzgerald, and the style of his era — as well as the upper class focus — is a bit different from what I normally read. I enjoyed the story, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the quote above. It is not central to the book, but I find it particularly profound and relevant today.

Continue reading “Large Parties”

During a recent recording of OHAC, we talked about yearly themes. In short, yearly themes are meant to be broader versions of resolutions. They are not necessarily defined by explicit goals, but rather a frame of mind, or a general approach to the upcoming year. We talk about it in that episode, and there are links to episodes of the podcast Cortex with more information about the idea of yearly themes.

My theme is the *Year of Focus*. Now that I have more freetime on my hands, I want to use it to help improve my attention span and make significant progress on projects I put off while in college. The first step in this, before it was even official, was the reading binge I’ve written about a few times now.

Continue reading “Year of Focus”

This weekend I went whale watching for the first time. It was a fantastic experience. I went with Offshore Blue Adventures, which I’d probably consider the premier experience for anybody who wants to see whales and dolphins up close. They use an inflatable boat, similar to what the Coast Guard or Navy SEALs would use. The benefits of small boats on the ocean is that they ride large swells very easily; the benefits of small boats when whale and dolphin watching is that you can get closer without scaring off the animals.

We say quite a few gray whales, far more than our guide would have expected. We also saw two pods of dolphins. I had quite an obsession with whales growing up, yet beyond the odd beluga in an zoo setup, I have never actually seen one. This was one of my favorite mornings I’ve spent in San Diego so far.

Here is a Dropbox folder with a few videos I took. They were on my phone in a moving boat, but I did the best I could.

At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies.

Continue reading “Traveling Takes Practice”