Movin’ On

Finally an update! I’ve said this time and time again–that this time I sincerely aim to get this blog righted and back on track. This time I mean it!

I’ve just decided it’s time to call Houston home again; so in the coming weeks I’ll be packing up and heading out.

Stay tuned as I blog my trip down the I-5 and I-10 corridors and traverse those two great belts of concrete which girdle our fair nation.

Hopefully I’ll stop at some cool places along the way.

Hello Again.

Still not dead. So much to do. Europe in two weeks. Stupid web publishing class.

Dining Dud

The past week, I’ve eaten at several popular Seattle restaurants and as I got ready to go to each, thought to myself, “I will review this restaurant for the blog.” This past weekend alone witnessed my presence grace the likes of Cafe Flora for breakfast, Table 219 for brunch, and Sushi Wave for dinner.

Unfortunately, my checkbook won’t bear any more dining excursions in the name of faux foodie blog posting, so unless blogging the intricacies of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches suddenly becomes trendy; restaurant reviews will be temporarily on hold.

Hines’ Bay Area Bankruptcies

Hines' latest default

Houston-based Hines Interests, the international real estate developer behind numerous Houston landmarks including the Galleria, has defaulted on three San Francisco-area properties within the last couple of months. The latest default, a 500,000+ square-foot building in downtown San Francisco, was surrendered to the lender after the building’s main tenant went into bankruptcy last year.

Saturday Scoop

Hello Blog,

I didn’t exactly meet my goal of posting once a day this week, but I think I’ve found just the solution. Going forward, we’ll have ‘theme’ posts which will recur on a set day of the week. Consider this the inaugural post for the ‘Saturday Scoop‘ genre, wherein  I expound the major events of my personal life from the past week.

This week was by far, among the worst work weeks (couldn’t resist the alliteration!) I’ve ever had. I left work Friday feeling unappreciated, unwanted, and for the most part, unnecessary. What I mean to say, is that I felt in some ways like I’ve outgrown my usefulness on my current team and that perhaps that is why I had such a tension-filled week. I feel like a crappy coworker and an even worse boss. Usually these sorts of feelings are just in my head and I’m actually overanalyzing the situation. We’ll see.

Otherwise: the personal deadline I had set for finding a new job within the bank (August 1), is staring me squarely in the face a week from today. The goal here has been to find a job in Greater Houston, or one that will at least enable me to afford to live elsewhere and meanwhile pay the mortgage in Seattle. Because I want to be in graduate school by next fall–there are certain things I have to do, such as: prepare my portfolio, various school appplications, get recommendation letters, and most importantly, take a GRE prep course and achieve a perfect score on the GRE. I decided that if I could not relocate to Houston (or elsewhere) by August 1; that I will just spend the next year in Seattle preparing for grad school.

Not to beat the, “I’m an angst-filled college graduate” horse anymore, but I thought graduating would mean that my anxiety would decrease. Instead, the months leading up to and now after graduation have been characterized by a high level of anxiety that seems to have stabilized not too unlike the area of high pressure that has dominated Texas weather this summer.

And a Great Rumble Came Forth…

Bobby Hadley Blogs is back in business, folks. College graduation is a nightmare, not altogether finished in fact. (Please accept my apologies if you still haven’t received your Thank You card.) Anyway, I just wanted to write an update on the state of the Blog, to let you know I will be back now that I am done with school.

With any luck I will be posting at a blistering pace of multiple times per day, but at least once daily.

As for news on the homefront: I’ve come to several important decisions. I know what I want to do with my life now. I am going to be an architect. I am going to get an M. Arch. degree from either the University of Texas-Austin, or Rice. I will spend the rest of this year preparing my graduate school applications and taking the GRE. I will enroll in graduate school, come hell or my mortgage payment, in the fall of 2010.

I am actively seeking a job which more closely aligns with my undergraduate degree in communication, but so far have been unsuccessful. I would like to relocate to one of several more cosmopolitan areas than Seattle-Tacoma-Everett. If I don’t find a job by August 1, however; graduate school applications will force me to endure the next year in this rough place.

A Spare Moment in the Madness

There are exactly nine days until I sit in a stadium with 40 or 50,000 of my fellow degree candidates and their families and friends and listen to the standing Secretary of Defense hopefully say something interesting about American foreign policy. Until then, my life is preoccupied by the breakneck pace of this last week of instruction and finals.

I have the oral portion of my Chinese final on Friday morning and the written portion on–get this–Saturday morning. For the oral portion, we are to write a 200 word essay, which we are then to memorize and recite. Why couldn’t this portion of the final be worth 85% instead of the 15% it counts for? I am struggling with writing my draft.

Then tonight I have my first final in a media effects class–where while the class has been interesting–the midterm did not, and by extension the final, will not at all correlate well to the lectures in class or meager material found in the book. In a word: anxiety.

Next Monday is my mass media law final and I don’t expect too much deviation from the quarter-long game plan there. Way out in the back, and incidentally only a day before my Communication departmental graduation ceremony, is my European media systems final. (fragment)  Given that the lowest grade I’ve made in that class is a 3.8, I don’t expect any trouble with the final exam.

Family flies in next Thursday and I’m thinking about coming home in the next few weekends–or for job interviews–whichever comes first. In the meantime, I’ll bask in the splendor of a precious few, quiet, morning sun moments–though the stock ticker blares in the background.

Making May

What a strange month May was. I started to write, but then I realized this was poignant and enough.

At it again.

So it is 4a.m. and can you guess what I am doing? Chinese homework. I just thought I’d let you know.

Can I talk for a minute about how mad I am?

Frustration.

It’s 3:30 in the morning and I am at school. I am desperately, frantically, hopelessly, despairingly–scribbling Chinese characters into my iPhone’s 词典 (that’s dictionary if you don’t read Chinese) so that it can tell me what the character is and what it means and how to pronounce it, so that I can then understand the problem on my homework worksheet, so that I can then painstakingly try and figure out the answer in a similar one-character-at-a-time fashion.

For those of you who didn’t know: being that it was my last quarter at UW, and being that I had always wanted to make the time to take Chinese; I convinced the Chinese professor to give me an add code to take Chinese 103, even though I had not taken Chinese 101 or Chinese 102. No sweat, I thought. I got this. I’m smart enough to push my way through it and catch up.

Fuck was I wrong. Yes, that is how strongly I feel about this. Enough to swear. I am so mad. I’ve always believed that if I just worked hard enough, or if I just put enough effort into something, that I could do anything I want to and do it well. I am not doing well in this Chinese class and I am on the verge of dropping it. I tried and tried and tried to do my homework tonight to the best of my ability and I simply couldn’t. I know it will be all wrong and that’s honestly the best I can do. If I were to stay here until 7:30 in the morning and get no sleep and then drive home and change for work and eat no breakfast and then drive straight back to class–maybe; just maybe I might get my homework right.

But I did that all last week and I still flunked my last test. Because guess what?! For all of my memorization of the patterns and words that we learn in class, the test features words that the students learned last year that I still don’t know. So I’m on the cusp of saying something I think I’ve probably never said in my life, “I give up.”

Better to withdraw and cut my losses than tank my GPA further goes the reasoning. I’ll talk to 老师 tomorrow and see what she thinks I should do. I suck and I hate it. Fuck my life.