Management Oversight Provided by our Boss, Mr. Andrew Ferry

Over the last 6 months or so, I have rekindled my love of public radio.  This fall while living at home, I often found myself with little to do, so I started backwards through episodes of This American Life.  I got to around mid-2002 before I got sidetracked by real life, but every single week I look forward to the new episode.  It really makes my Monday mornings far more entertaining than most.  This morning was no exception, as I got home from classes, made tea and oatmeal, and put away some of the new additions to the kitchen (dishes, cups, etc).  I love the stories, and I even love the correspondants and hosts of the show. I also love another show.  RadioLab.  It's a lot like This American Life, but it's completely science related stories.

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If you've never listened to This American Life or RadioLab, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do yourself a favor and listen to an episode or two.  Feel free to turn it on while you are doing chores or other idle tasks, but I warn that you'll be sucked in and forget about the chores for the duration of the hour.  Please listen and support public radio.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/
http://www.radiolab.org/

Please give it a listen; you'll be glad you did.

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Completely shifting gears here, but I know that a lot of people who potentially might someday read this nonsensical blog might be aware that I am not really a morning person.  I almost got fired from a summer job when I was 18 from the middle school that I attended (supervised by a long-time family friend) because of chronic lateness.  I was a summer maintenance worker, and I had to be at work at 7AM.  (I had to resist the impulse to use the phrase "call time," but I don't really think that phrase is applicable outside the world of theater.)  I got fired from a sunglasses store by ANOTHER long-time family friend due to chronic lateness (the last straw when I showed up 45 minutes late to open the store).  However, I have made a tectonic shift in my attitude towards mornings as of late.  This semester (MY LAST SEMESTER), I have an 8AM French class.  It's really not so bad; it's taught by a very relaxed graduate student, and I already sort of took this class once before (embarrassing...).  After that, I have a really boring American History post-Civil War lecture class that is extremely boring but easy.  Also, I get up and go for a short run in the morning before class, so I'm usually up and moving about by 7.  After all of this, I usually get home around 10 or 10:15AM.  I sit down and eat a short breakfast/lunch/whatever meal, and then I usually have a very strangely large amount of time before I have anything else to do.  In my past years of college, I would have done any number of things:

A.) I wouldn't even be awake yet at this hour, so I'd continue to sleep.
B.) I would go back to sleep until around 4 in the afternoon.
C.) I would play video games or dick around on the internet (which, to be fair, I still do occasionally).
D.) I would eat anything I could find in the fridge or freezer just to pass the time, or sit in the dining hall for 45 minutes or so, going back for seconds and thirds.

However, permanently moving out of my parents' house has made me feel much more like an adult.  When I get home from class, I tend to think, "Hey, maybe I should clean up a bit, it's getting a bit messy,"which is something that I would think in the past after class, but the adolescent part of my brain would pop up and shout, "No, don't waste your time cleaning!  You should be doing things that you enjoy in your free time!"  This seems like a great idea sometimes, but as I've experienced first-hand, it can certainly lead to extreme procrastination, poor sleep schedules, failure of classes, and extreme amounts of wasted money and time.  However, when this semester started, something just sort of clicked in my head.  "Hey, you're an adult now!  You have things to manage in your life!  You better do it!"  I better do it.  Or else.

Stay tuned for two stories that have been inspired by two of my short anecdotes that I mentioned in this post: my summer job as a maintenance worker after failing out of school my freshman year, and my room when I lived in Kent, the product of adolescent laziness.