Playing a bit of catch-up

A month meandering around Europe, with only a backpack of clothes, was my remedy to the tough and stressful spring 2010 semester.  The only downside was coming home a week before the start of school and realizing that the fall 2011 semester wasn't going to be much easier.

With a 15-unit schedule, an internship, a part-time job and the position of print managing editor at The State Hornet, it hit me - my days of drinking pints in the Haufbrauhaus were over.

Guess I will have to drink in the office instead...

Responsibility? Deadlines? Sleeping? I don't even remember what that is like. A month of doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted had tainted me.

So, I landed in San Francisco International Airport a week before the start of school, but the truth is, I had to go to Sac State the very next day to start training section editors at The Hornet.

I didn't just get thrown into the lion's den - I got thrown in without clothes on.

And speaking of being in public without clothes, that's exactly how I felt in my first week back at Sac State. Sprinting around campus, spreading myself way too thin and forgetting everything along the way...maybe that trip to Amsterdam killed more brain cells than I thought.


The production of our first issue of The Hornet fell on the first day of school and was less than perfect. Technical difficulties mocked us throughout our sleepless Monday night.


Why would InDesign make its CS4 application incompatible with its CS5 application? It just makes no sense to me. The same product and they cannot coexist? Nothing like capitalism to ruin my day.


This incompatibility was the main issue that kept my boss, Leidhra Johnson, and I awake throughout the night. We opened all of the blank templates in CS5 and placed advertisements and then when our editors went to design their pages they couldn't open the document in CS4. And since we only have two computers with CS5, things moved a lot more slowly than usual. 


A few other road blocks we encountered included: adobe not opening without a password (a password which doesn't exist), PDFs growing phantom strokes, all adobe applications systematically shutting down without warning, editors forgetting to "apple save" and losing all of their design at 1 a.m., the server shutting down for three hours at 4 a.m. and having no copy editors. 


Pish-posh applesauce. We handled it. Sure, the paper wasn't sent to the printers until the last second but our first paper was completed - and that's all that matters.


Paper was finished at 9:57 a.m. and my class was at 10 a.m. So, I ran to Mendocino Hall - powered by no sleep and five red bulls. 


Classes continued throughout the day and needless to say, I drooled a little bit on my desk. Good first impression. Not.


After classes I went straight to a budget meeting for the third issue of The Hornet. Literally, I was at Sac State from 10 a.m. on Monday to 7 p.m. on Tuesday. 


When I finally take a step off of Sac State's campus that Tuesday I remember that it is my best friend's 21st birthday and that I am obligated to go out on her party bus extravaganza. So much for catching up on sleep.


So, I  pushed through the first three days of school on four hours of sleep.  


The rest of my first week was a lot of going through zombie-like motions and when I got the chance to catch up - I did. 


So maybe I'm "running myself into the ground," but when else am I going to have all these opportunities and enough energy to conquer them with? The answer is never. Life's a bitch and then you die. So get used to it people and enjoy every minute of it.