Seafood = ew?

Food is good. Heck, when I'm not stuffing myself full of gobble gobble turkey, I tend to rummage around my fridge looking for the next great meal to cook. Tonight, for instance, I threw together the following interesting ingredients just like I would on Iron Chef:

1) Shrimp, tail-off, pre-cooked

2) Gluten free angel hair pasta

3) Cucumber, sliced

4) Red roasted pepper tomato soup

5) Balsamic dressing, gluten-free

I ended up with:

Angel-hair pasta with shrimp and sliced cucumbers, drizzled with balsamic dressing, and tomato soup to keep warm

DELISH! Would eat again+++++++!!!

Now, the silly thing is, earlier this week, I got a universal consensus from my dining partners who all said "Seafood? Ewwww" when I ordered fish for dinner one night. I grew up eating just about any kind of food under the sun and people here are going "ickpth?" What's up with that?

"Super-logoff" of the 'net

Relevant article here: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/super-log-off-teens-bring-street-smarts-facebook/story?id=12131071

I've been pondering about privacy and things we do in our personal lives that may directly reflect upon our professional and community interactions. Let's face it - stuff happens and we're unable to control what happens if we're not aware of it, such as rumors or bad mouthing or even stuff that's just mis-interpreted. To my knowledge, I haven't been a victim of such things (lately!) so nothing of the sort is prompting this blogpost, but what is piquing my curiosity about this phenomenon of "super log-off" is the fact that maybe it's not such a bad thing to gain more control over one's life, especially when your life could be full of drama otherwise!

Since I've had so little time to be on Facebook lately, sometimes it feels like my life is passing by without me being involved. Sure, stuff happens anyway with or without Facebook, but since now our lives are being put online for just about everyone to see, it should hypothetically only take a moment or two to see how everyone is doing, and taking even that brief moment to do so is very difficult at the moment. I'm concerned about losing touch with the people that make my life so very rich and pleasant while I'm buckling down and working longer hours.

Mind you, it's not the end of the world, and this extra workload is only temporary, but again, life is short and our days are numbered. Just trying to grab what time I do have and enjoy the marbles I have in my fishbowl, so to speak.

Challenging myself

Everybody experiences a period of insanity at least once in their lifetime. Usually, this happens right around finals week when you're cramming all night for those 2-4 hour tests the next morning. I've come to learn it's never a good idea to try to jam stuff you're supposed to REMEMBER into your brain at the last minute. Heck, I think our brains are supposed to be sponges, but it's not exactly via osmosis that we're learning here.

So, right now I'm trying to juggle my work obligations, community obligations, health obligations (volleyball!) and even trying to add to the workload something that involves actual studying - preparing for the GMAT, which I haven't even scheduled yet. The Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT for short, is a 4-hour adaptive test that's supposed to test your aptitude for solving difficult questions and be some kind of indicator as to what level of success you can expect in MBA graduate school. Frankly, I've forgotten more since I graduated with my BA than I think I'm gonna learn over the next month which is when the applications are due for Spring 2011. There's no excuse but to try and make the time to brain up whenever I can.

What's the lesson to be learned here? There's only so much I can do - and I'm definitely somewhere at my limit right now. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be making some tough decisions on what to cut back on - all the things I've committed myself to are good things, but I can't do it all - so time to figure out where to drop the axe. That's never a fun thing but I think overall everyone will benefit from having a fuller me present at the things I can commit to.