I Know What You Did Last Summer!
Yeah, I went to the beach and prepared for college.
Yeah, you did!
… Uh, right. Man I really miss the beach. I wish I wasn’t in quarantine this summer.
Oh, you stayed inside all summer? Now I know what you did THIS Summer!
*sigh*
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Hello everyone! I’m back (for the second time).
I’m sure some of you have been in such distress over my prolonged absence from this blog. All those sleepless nights my dedicated fan-base has had, wondering “Why, why hasn’t he posted anything recently? WHERE ARE HIS NEW STORIES?”...
...Okay that fantasy bit is done. Now back to reality.
Some of you probably are reading this title and thinking “Oh yeah, I guess he hasn’t posted in a while. Wonder why.” I mean, maybe you have been dying to know. A boy can dream.
A lot of stuff has been going on in my life and the world around me. There was just too much going on for me to write articles. This blog became too time consuming and started to feel more like a chore than a hobby. I decided to take a couple months off from writing, center myself and rediscover my passion for this blog. Otherwise this blog's content would have been of pretty low quality. And you all know I couldn’t bear to do that.
Around the end of my final exams back in mid-May, I started experiencing many persistent headaches. They weren’t very painful (about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10), but they lasted for multiple days at a time, even weeks at one point. It was hard for me to concentrate on stuff, which was ironically pretty good timing.
My doctor diagnosed me with migraines (though I still question if migraines is the right word) and helped me develop strategies to find their source. Through the use of research, technology, and a general analysis of my life, I determined that stress was the main component in my problem. I tried to take things easy for a while until I could contain these headaches, which included stepping back from this blog. As fun as writing these blogs are, the personal deadlines I set for myself were contributing to the stress I was experiencing.
My overall health has improved greatly over the past month. My headaches have progressively gone away, only getting them occasionally. I’ve developed strategies to cope with being in quarantine for so long and return my mental health to a normal state. I’ve recently felt as though I am ready to return to this blog with the same passion I once typed with, with changes to reduce my stress. No need to worry about poor little ole me.
So, now that you know why I haven’t been writing, the question is: What have I been doing instead?
Staying inside. What else?
My family has been very careful with leaving the house and avoiding Coronavirus. You know, following safety guidelines and wearing the masks. I went to one graduation party okay? That was it. There were ten people there max. Every other venture to the outside world was for medical appointments and hair cuts.
Unfortunately, staying inside presents it’s own problems. It means A) I spend all my time with the same three people (which yes, can be a bit much despite how much I love them), B) My adventurous spirit has to patiently sit in the corner until health officials give it the green light to safely go out, and C) There really isn’t a lot for me to write about my Summer.
There were no vacations, no yearly trips to the Great Wolf Lodge, nothing. Just me playing video games in the dark like I’m some sort of teenage vampire. No, not THAT teenage vampire. Actually, the video game world is KINDA adventurous and KINDA like a vacation, so I guess I did do something this summer. Here’s a picture of me lying on the beach:
Ah, catching some Binary RGB rays.
The only other thing to talk about this summer was work. Yes, believe it or not I actually had two small jobs this summer. They weren’t really part time jobs, more like freelance gigs. My parents were the ones who found these jobs for me. They paid good money too, so of course I was onboard; Being the broke college student that I am.
The first job was working as an IT assistant for my mom. And by that, I mean doing all the complicated stuff on Zoom. My mom teaches classes on people centric leadership to manufacturing companies and needed me to help manage different features of zoom. You know, breakout rooms, polls, saved chats, stuff like that.
I know it doesn’t sound like a particularly difficult job, cause for the most part it wasn’t. There were a lot of times when I was just waiting around for my cue to do something. But there definitely were instances when I had to work as fast as possible for a few minutes. Once I had to alternate between dismantling/creating two entirely different sets of breakout rooms in like a couple of minutes. It’s not that easy to do so quickly, trust me.
That job was okay for the most part. I messed up a couple of times, creating breakout rooms too early and such. Nothing major that affected my mom’s work.
My second job was on the opposite end of the job spectrum. One of my father’s friends works in the waste management industry and recently got contracts to provide services to two trailer parks. He needed some guys to help out building the trash cans and delivering them.
I only worked that job for a couple of days, but man were those some of the most exhausting days of my life. First of all, I had to get up before 7 AM both days, which is about 4 hours earlier than I am used to. It also didn’t help that it was 90 degrees outside. The heat was intense those last couple of hours. At least it didn’t get obtuse.
Our main “work place” was an empty gravel field with two storage trucks: one filled to the brim with trash bins and the other with recycling. When I say “filled to the brim,” I’m not kidding. The bins were stacked thirteen cans high in rows of three. It felt like there was an endless supply of them with how long the truck was. Needless to say there was a lot of heavy lifting.
The first part of the job involved moving the appropriate amount of bins (about 260 trash, 260 recycling) to each trailer park. We had another smaller truck to load the bins onto and take to the parks.
Obviously we had to cut the stacks down, otherwise there would have been a lot of trash cans thrown around the roads. Wouldn’t that be an interesting news story? “Couple walking on the sidewalk attacked by flying trash cans. Are aliens to blame?” Actually that one seems more apt for a tabloid.
The second part of the job was building the bins and pairing them together. This part wasn’t too difficult, except this is when we had to leave the shady truck and work in the sun. We also had to pair them by placing a trash bin and putting the recycling bin INSIDE of it. Lots of heavy lifting man. At least the trash cans were empty, and clean.
In the end though it was really nice to earn those paychecks. I felt like I actually did something worthwhile with my time and contributed to the world around me.
So that’s how I spent my summer. Now, what’s in store for the future of this blog? Well, for starters I’m gonna be posting on a loose schedule. I’m not gonna take a two month long hiatus like before, but I don’t wanna stick to a strict schedule like before. Two articles a week is too much, so maybe once every week and a half?
Until next summer, stay Mattastic!
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