I am not a blogger

Sometimes I find that I take things for granted. Last week’s banking landslide has prompted a lot of thoughts like this within me. I have been looking more closely at the way in which I live my life and the ways in which I spend my precious resources. This solitary reflection has sort of been good for me in a lot of ways because school sort of causes me to forget about myself and the things that I really need. This bit of reflection has made me more relaxed than I have been all this month. Of course it is this time in life when things really go off the chain and get a little bit ugly. For me this all culminated when I found myself stuck between two cars in an intersection on tuesday morning.

Tuesday morning when I was on my way to class I stopped at a stoplight. When I looked in my rearview mirror I saw someone coming up behind me without any sign of slowing down or stopping. I braced myself for a hit and when it came my car flew forward in to the intersection. As I went in to the intersection I hit a slow moving car in the middle of the crossing. Luckily everyone was fine and got out of their cars immediately, but unfortunately all of our cars weren’t moving on their own.

Though the accident left all of us with only some cuts and scrapes, the legal issues since then have been a bit tricky. We have all had to have meetings with our attorneys since the person that I hit has decided to sue the other driver for damages. I have been getting law advice but at this point I am not at fault or even implicated for anything. All that I really have to do is to make sure I make any court appearances and tell the whole story like it happened. I will certainly be called on to make statements and so I will have to just defend what happened from my perspective . I am not seeking any kind of insurance claim settlement so this is all sort of separated from my life. I just want them to make sure that they pay off my repair bills which are going to be quite high. I will probably get a claim settlement out of it anyway since I didn’t press for more.

Now I have yet another reason not to take things for granted. I wouldn’t say that I had a near death experience by any stretch, but I did have quite an interesting week. I also had another reason to snap out of the monotony of the semester and enjoy the things that I have going on in my life right now.

I know that the atmosphere out there right now for most students is the same as it ever is this time of the semester. We all have things to do at every minute of the day and plenty of things to keep us distracted from those things that we especially should be watching out there in the real world. The bubble we sort of set up for ourselves seems to engulf us all and keep us held in that infantile place till we hit the steaming lava meeting the sea when we graduate. I one the other hand have an interesting position at the moment since I have been working at Raymond James for a while now and this week has been the most frantic I have ever seen the place.

If you have been living in that bubble this week then you may have only heard whispers or read a fifty page blurb online about the falling giants of our economy. Firms like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers have succumbed to the extremely difficult financial straits we find ourselves in today as a nation. These giants of investing and, most specifically, real estate investing have found themselves with few options but to declare bankruptcy or be sold for next to nothing to another giant like Bank of America. All it took was a few years of bad investment advice and plenty of bank foreclosures that have forced all the money out of the pockets of these two companies till they now have little choice in the matter of their own employees’ safety and security. Now there are organizations all over the nation in similar situation and plenty of ordinary people awaiting their notice about foreclosures.

As students it may not seem to many of us that there is much for us to do about the situation. I only say that because I am of that group and if you know a way we can help then please let me know. Otherwise you can choose to either wait like the rest of us or just try to forget about it till it all gets better, or much worse. You can also choose to sit with me at the table of the worried and confused. I work for a company that works with real estate investing and general investing alike. The daily reminder of the company has probably raised my blood pressure more than my fair share and until something comes along to stabilize the situation, or I get fired, I will be ready to jump in to the bomb shelter I have no way to pay for in this economy.

As you can tell from the medium that you and I are both using, technology has really changed the ways in which all of us communicate and share ideas. This has developed in to a sort of revolution in technology as well as in all other areas of life that can be affected by instant communication to almost every other person on the planet. Thousands of people around the world have grown in to millions in just around twenty years and the visions of just a few people have done all of this. For people like us, the college student, it has shaped the ways in which our curriculum is developed and our classes can communicate.

Web design and programming is now the area where I feel that most technology advancements are being made for those seeking wealth. Large companies hire young college graduates to design or enhance their existing sites in an attempt to boost sales. Other sites provide domain names and web site templates for up and coming businesses to get started on. There are people hired specifically to both maintain and build sites on these platforms, as well as to maintain the platforms themselves. No matter what way you slice it, there is something for everyone in there as long as you can find some kind of niche that needs filling. Things like search engine optimization make no real sense to many people, but this is where big search engines figure out how exactly they should direct you to the information you are seeking. This may seem easy enough, but there is really equal access to all users to create web sites and thus there is a great deal of information out there with little to no oversight around the content. This is just open example, but there are plenty of areas in which development and research still needs done to improve the services of the internet at large.

For the college student this can seem like a huge field which requires you to be some super genius with technology. This is of course not true. Currently the newest developments in technology seem to have more to do with anatomy psychology than that of actual technological advancements. So if you are the happy liberal arts student who is more interested in why people do the things they do or like the things they like then you may just have a place for yourself within the silicon valley community that you hadn’t considered yet.

I have a really great feeling about this semester. It feels like everything is sort of just falling in to place for me right now and I really enjoy the feeling. We have all just finished week one and I hope all of us are enjoying ourselves. We all have plenty of work ahead of us and plenty of partying, but if we just take both of them one week at a time, I am sure we’ll be successful. My course load for this semester is pretty full since I still have no idea what I am going to major in. I’ll probably end up settling on some liberal arts degree since I can’t make up my mind quick enough. I don’t mind though, because then if i want to I can go to graduate school for whatever I want and no one can say that I put myself on some other kind of path. For now though I am where I am and I want to try and enjoy myself as much as possible and keep all of the drama to a minimum.

This week I am sure you all know that the big event we have coming up is the big football game saturday. I have my front row seats all ready to go since I bought my football tickets about thirty seconds after they went on sale. I learned my lesson from last year when I bought all of my tickets from the same scalper and it took me till the last game of the year to realize he was overcharging me. So I got my tickets as soon as they went on sale and I could press the submit key. Now I don’t have to worry at all about finding tickets or going to any tickets sellers when some are available. I just covered all of my bases from the start and i think that it will pay off. So when you look down at the front row this season, look for me and if one of my seats is empty, maybe I’ll let you sit with me.

After the game I am sure all of the usual antics will ensue but I hope that everyone stays safe. I had some friends last who had some pretty bad experiences and I don’t want to be walking around town and see any of you in a state like they were. I know that you all think that you are invincible, and you just might be, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in to some trouble. All right, the public service announcement is over for today. Go have fun since you worked so hard this week.