I am not ashamed to admit that I've been exceptionally incompetent to the things I promised to do with my "I have # days left of college" series. I've even been forgetful enough that I had to reread all of my college days posts in order to completely officially apologize for those listed things I ended up not doing or mentioning, so I AM SORRY. It's been exactly 105 days since I have been officially done with college excluding the actual graduation ceremony. Speaking of which I'll just make a little list of what has actually happened in those 105 days in a nutshell (and looking back at what I just typed below is going to be impossible to summarize any further unless I wanna sound not-so-witty and more robotically boring, so... sorry in advance and so much for nutshell?):
1. Future Boss's Random call. I neglected to mention that a lovely lady named Heddi called me 3 days before the portfolio show to basically hold me hostage as a Lead Designer for her company because she needed a designer to redesign her entire website "months ago" and I was the perfect candidate for this. As hard to believe as the following statement is, this lady talks more than I do. If babbling was an art form, this overly-hyped British lady would be the headmistress of a college of babbling with her own PHD in babbling so she could create an entire school of babbling for those who want to be good at babbling by learning from the MASTER of babbling known as herself. I'll admit she kind of turned me off at first with her 45 minute ear rampage known as her first impression. Throughout, I'm thinking "WOAH lady, let me tread the water first, my show hasn't even happened yet!" but then I think "anyone at that show would kill to know they have somebody begging to work for them before the show even begins" so I think about her offer and keep blogging and creating and blah blah blah.
2. The Monumental Success known as my Portfolio Show! Oh what fun it is to collect dozens of professional's business cards and know for sure that your future is SET for the moment while otherwise standing in a pair of broken heels in a slightly wrinkled gray dress that was hard to de-wrinkle without an iron (spoiler alert I wore the gray one not the green one) while still slightly feeling miserably sick due to a slight migraine. Reguardless of the ill-feeling-ness, I seemed professional in my boothness and my speakingness and huzZA I won the Best Portfolio prize for the Web Design major of the night like I cockily thought I would but still thought everybody else had a chance but MINE B*TCHES I got me a PLAQUE! Ms. Babble herself of myTab came to the show, too and wanted an answer from me about that Lead Designer position even wanting to meet up after the show to discuss more but I otherwise couldn't make it and I'll talk more about her and myTab later. Meanwhile one of my at-the-time bosses and a coworker from my job-I-was-probably-leaving were there and looked hesitantly over my large stack of accepted business cards compared to the small amount of personal business cards left. They thought I may be leaving them after my show but it was obvious later that I in fact would leave soon. Which leads me to...
3. Leaving my not-as-satisfying job for the more tantalizing world of LEAD DESIGNERRRR. (I'm adding the extra R's to make it even fancier but I realize it sounds pirate-like and I'm ok with that.) To sum up, I dove right into myTab with a humongous deadline of 30 days to redesign the entire site from SCRATCH with me as the mockup wizard and 2 offsite developers in the PHILIPPINES as the ones who actually recode it for the most part. Everything was GREAT in October, tons of mockups and such, a largely hyped travel conference that Heddi presentated through in the slowest I've ever heard her speak that myTab favored fairly well, and hey there I was the only designer. LEAD DESIGNER! MY DREAM JOB (excluding the whole working from home thing because the ultimate dream would be in a brick building with fancy colorful office furniture and happy humerous co-workers which I had none office-wise in my apartment but had some humerous co-workers at the touch of a dial or however this expression goes now with fancy smart phones). As of today it's been slower because the 30 day deadline has passed (it launched LOOKIE!: https://mytab.co) and funding to be more than part time let alone finding somewhere that is NOT working from home has yet to surface so as the first sentence of this post states... it feels like I'm retired. Not much work if any but I still have money and I can do anything all day but end up doing mostly nothing. The good life... if I'm over 60 BUT I'm 21 so I'm getting ancy.
4. I am now a proud owner of an iPhone. Life as I know it seems amazingly hard to imagine living without one now that I have my grubby little future-forward-thinking hands on it. I had been stubborn with getting one for a while but once I got one it was like my former phone known as the crackberry was a string with two cups at the end of it compared to the amazingness of everything my iPhone can do. Look at me being all hip!
5. Graduation Ceremony of AWESOME. In December right before Christmas I finally had my graduation ceremony in the same theater my orientation to the same college I am now an alumni of was back in June of 2008 when I was just a wee noob with aimlessly wandering eyes wondering what I was doing there and if this really was the best path for me. Nonetheless, my eyes were switched from aimless to focus and three years of schooling, 5 total employers and a dozen or so hopefully-life-long-friends-I-made-in-college later, I get up on stage with a black gown (a 180 contrast to my high school gown color of white which is fancifully symbolic in a way), pump my fists in the air almost over my head in a grad walk / happy dance as I take my "diploma" or case that will house my diploma that I received in the mail weeks earlier, shake the hands of the top-ranking officials of school, and almost pile-drive my teacher of 90% of my classes in the department because I'm so happy I'm done and also saw another girl do it to her director so I thought I'd copy that because it looked cool. (And the award for the longest run-on sentence goes to...)
6. My realization that life without homework is more of a miracle than I ever thought possible. And the real world isn't so bad. Even though both of my roommates are still in school for at least six months from now to a year from that, I still feel that separation of the "forced to learn in school because that's just what you do too bad you have to" state of life to the "now you can learn anything you want anytime you want and it doesn't matter when or if you get it done as long as you feel your life has purpose" state of life. Real life for me now equals spending more time with my cat in 4 months than all the hours spent in class combined (or at least it feels that way and I'm not complaining), being able to do nothing and everything at once (though it's been mostly nothing WHICH almost feels like a deserved vacation from the 16 or so years of schooling), and the idea/motto of life not being based on what I can get done but rather what I can I do to better what can be done before I die.
7. My sickness during my last quarter of school turned out to be my body's way of telling me "YOU'RE F*#&ING STRESSED." I was not allergic to my cat (thank the LORD), there turned out to not be anything weird I ate or some sort of infection or disease I contracted from who knows where. Literally the day after my portfolio show I was completely feeling 100% back to normal not-sick-at-all amazing. Yay saving money on a doctor's appointment for being stubborn? Or yay for self-exploration and life-lessoning over how stress can come in all forms whether you know you have it or not it can still STRIKE? *Shrug* I'm just glad I can keep the cat. <3
8. Oh yeah, I'm 22 now. Happy Belated Birthday to myself via this post because my birthday was 6 days ago and it was nice and low-key with a beach trip and watching movies with one of my besties. I was even able to spend that night and wake up to the new 2012 year known as my first year without forced schooling in my amazing full-size "adult bed" that my parents swapped with my twin so I can feel less like a college kid and more of the adult 22 year old me I wanted to be. (Insert "Mandy's Adult Life" song here that I have yet to compose.)
Nutshell is impossible for me and now I know (and knowing is half the battle as the camo hunk of plastic says - google GI Joe, kids). It has taken me almost an hour to write all of this, and my wrists against this not-so-ergonomic-office-space-setup at home is leading to arthritic-like pain in my wrists that only reassures the fact that this must be a glimpse of retirement. If only now I can forgo my crazy-busy-single-college-kid-life and get me a man to pass the time (because I can sense my roommates are feeling the annoyance of "when I get home you're ALWAYS THERE" and the occasional seeing friends time has drastically been reduced due to the fact that I no longer see them in class on a daily basis). Of course I've gotta get around to those hobbies (reading / writing / painting / crafting / selling said writing, painting, and crafting if I have the guts and/or motivation / selling myself as a freelancer because my web design portfolio show only grow from here / working more because feeling like you're retired at 22 isn't exactly the life I expected to have when I finished college and became super successful full-time purpose-driven working member of society but am not even close to that just yet. So now that it's way over 2am and I'm needing that real-world-less-sugared-up beauty sleep, I guess I'll stop blogging and never stop creating. After all, I'm done with college and life has just begun (4 months ago).
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