photo from livetradingnews.com

“So, I’ve been thinking,” I say to my husband late one night. “You know all that money we have saved up for me to do an internship.”

He looks at me skeptically. “Yeah?”

“Well, since I’m doing an internship close to home, we don’t really need it for anything, right?”

“Except for moving after you graduate,” he says, “and maybe student loans or an extra car payment if we have some leftover.”

“Yeah, except for that,” I say, waving responsibility off. “So, why do we go to England with it?”

His eyes turn soft, the way they always do before he says no. “Honey, you know we can’t afford that. We need that money for other stuff.”

“But we’ll never be able to afford it. If we don’t go now, when will we?”

“I just don’t think we should.”

“If we always do what we should, we’ll never do what we want,” I say, my arms crossing my chest as I stare him down.

“You know, you’re right,” he says with a smile. “Let’s go to England.”

And that’s how it happened my friends. We finally accepted that the conditions will never be perfect. We’ll never have enough money. And there’s always something else we “should” be doing. But we’re going anyway.

Sometimes, you just have to live.

Not kidding, this was my apartment at one point.

I know, my posts are a bit random right now. It’s taking me awhile to get back into the swing of things. This is especially difficult since I have no routine right now. Honestly, I don’t really know what to do with all my free time; it’s kind of freakin’ me out.

But hopefully that’ll change once I start my internship. I filled out the paperwork today and I start next Tuesday! Yay!

Anyway, back to the topic of this post. One of the things I’ve been doing to keep busy is super cleaning my apartment. It feels so good! I know, most of us hate cleaning, even I hate cleaning 98% of the time. But this kind of cleaning is more like purging. It’s getting rid of all the clutter and that just makes us all feel better.

My system:

Step 1-Pick a room and pull out everything that you can lift.

Step 2-Clean the room itself. Sweep out the cobwebs and wash the spots off the walls. Clean the windows and vacuum.

Step 3-Clean the things you couldn’t move. By clean, I mean really clean, not a light dusting. That duct tape that’s been on it for ten years, the gum stuck to the side. Yeah, all that stuff.

Step 4-Now it’s time to start moving things back in, but slowly. Before you put anything back examine it. Ask yourself the following questions about everything.

Is it broken? Then fix it or get rid of it.
Do you use it? If not, get rid of it.
Do you want it? If not, get rid of it.

Yes, those questions are that simple. It doesn’t matter if it was a gift from your mother-in-law. Or if it’s something you “might need someday.” Sentimental value is valid only so far. Photos have value. Grandma’s handmade quilt has value. Six year old paper roses that are crushed and faded so badly they’re unrecognizable do not. I know it hurts, but you have to think about what’s truly valuable to you.

Anything you decide to keep, clean it before putting it away. And by away, I don’t mean back in a box in the closet. Find a place for it. Yes, the closet it a valid place for things like extra blankets and shoes. But it’s not for junk storage (you shouldn’t have any “junk” after all this anyway”).

Now, the big question. Why would anyone want to do this? Because by recognizing what’s truly important and getting rid of everything else, you give the important things a higher place in your life. It’s kind of like this:

Ten years ago, your grandmother gave you a handmade quilt for your wedding. It was so beautiful and you fell in love with it. So much in love with it that you’d hate it see it get worn or dirty. You decide to put it in the closet for safekeeping. Now ten years later, your grandmother has passed away and you’ve forgotten all about her beautiful quilt. It’s buried in the closet beneath clothes that are too small (but someday you’ll fit back into?) and a broken VCR.

Until the day you clean. You get rid of the 27 inspirational wall hangings that were gifts from your in-laws, you get rid of that box of VHS tapes. You pull everything out of that closet and find your grandmother’s quilt. It’s really too beautiful to keep tucked away in a box, you think. So you pull it out and hang it on the wall.

You’ve just given something important a much more prominent place because you got rid of all the other crap.

I think that’s a much better use of space and that’s what this process is really about.

So, this is me, not telling my goals.

In other news, I got my internship at Silkworm today. Yay! I’ll be in their marketing department which I’m very excited about.

Anyway…

To catch up: School’s finally out and I made straight A’s. Woot! Last semester was even more insane than I expected with all the group projects. One project had a final report that was 130-pages long! Crazy! Work is pretty much the same as ever. I’m still conducting the monthly meetings, which is always interesting. And I’m madly in love with my husband.

Looking forward: I’m going to try to get back to posting three times a week, starting tomorrow. I’m also going to start writing again, since I pretty much stopped during the semester. The plan is to have the second draft of one story finished before the summer ends. And I’m also hoping to get a marketing internship for the summer.

Busy as ever I guess.

Just over two months ago, I posted a blog schedule that I obviously haven’t been keeping. I created the schedule with the best of intentions. Really, I did. And I thought it would be manageable to post three times a week, even with my other commitments.

Turns out, it’s not.

This semester of school has been very intense and more than a little insane. Most days, I don’t even have time to check facebook and barely manage to squeeze in email. So, I’ve decided to declutter my organizer by cutting some of the small things from my schedule. Unfortunately, my blog is one of those things.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything drastic quit writing or delete my blog completely. But I am going to put it on hiatus until the end of the semester (the blog, not the writing). You can look for me to be back posting on Monday, May 16, 2010.

I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s not fair to tell you I’ll post when I know I won’t be able to. Plus, it’ll be one less thing for me to worry about.

I’ll miss you all. See you soon!

First Day of Spring

Everyone still dressed for winter
While it’s so nice outside.

Everyone still dressed for winter
While the sun shines bright.

Everyone still dressed for winter
While the wind is warm

Everyone still dressed for winter,
Not anymore.

If you want to look at if from the perspective of books, it’s no different than the thousands of titles that sit on store shelves. Yours has to stand out above the rest if you want it to get sold.

So, marketers have come up with some pretty creative ways to break through clutter. Some of these creative efforts are pictured below.

(Special Disclaimer: Obviously none of these images are mine. They’ve been ad-napped from the websites named beneath each photo.)

tomcatadvertising.blogspot.com

37signals.com

www.thebounceagency.com

adsoftheworld.com

yoga108.org

And my personal favorite…

simplebrowser.blogspot.com

Seriously, anything is possible in the world of advertising (and it can be a strange world).

So, I’ve mentioned that for my promotions class we have a group project with a real client. Today, we met our client. According to our teacher, it was supposed to be a brief, 5 minute meeting to explain the project and make certain they were willing to work with us.

That’s what I expected when I arrived. I did not expect a conference room with five people wanting to know “What we were going to do for them.” Intimidating? Oh yeah!

To make it worse, I didn’t know anything about the place we chose to work with. It was the suggestion of another member of the group (who, by the way, wasn’t at this meeting because she had practice). Why didn’t I do some research on them before I went? Because I’m an amateur. Seriously, Candice, how hard would it have been to check out their website? Duh?

I honestly don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do that in advance. But it will certainly occur to me next time. I felt stupid and incompetent walking out of there and I don’t want to feel that way again.

So, that’s the lesson. Always be prepared because what your client expects and what you expect may be very different things.

However, just because I haven’t written anything, doesn’t mean I haven’t been plotting. But of course, I’ve been thinking about the wrong story. It’s always the characters from the stories I’m not writing that want to talk to me. (Or the character whose story has no plot, he likes yapping in my ear. Yes, I love you, but you don’t have a story! Come back when you have one, please.)

Anybody else have that problem? What do you do?