On life and love…

That’s what I’ve named the category for all these general posts, so it’s fitting to have a blog post by the same name.

Life is going well. I spend my time working (school work and for money), chillin’ with WO, Thorning, reading, and sleeping. I have stopped doing things with NSBE. I have started back running after a two-week hiatus. I have joined another club and am content to be a mere participant with no responsibilities other than attending the weekly meetings and going to Steak ‘n Shake afterwards.

I’m about 80 pages into Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil by Inga Muscio and I just started Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve yesterday.

In fact, I have picked up about three books that are full of responses to The Bell Curve. I’ve written about The Bell Curve before, although I couldn’t find a post about the book written after I’d finished reading it. If I could recapture first impressions, I would, but I’ve talked with so many people about it since then, my ideas are heavily influenced. I dug up and posted my essay from that class, but I didn’t hit many of the points in the book that were personal for me, so it may be rather boring.

Thorn is wearing me out, though. I’m having writer trouble and editor trouble and money trouble. Everyone thinks their problems are equally important, so I have someone clamoring at me about drinks and pizza choices at a higher volume than one of my editors saying he has no content at all for his page or that the Thorn server is dead.

Which happened. Thursday, I had to quickly acquire and install a new power supply for the Thorn server amidst a crowd of people waiting to start working. Even that didn’t work immediately, which leads me to be frustrated with some of the hardware choices made in putting together the server. Which means I need better contigency plans for hardware failure.

Thorn is difficult because it often feels like I don’t have anyone to turn to for help. Luke and Bob could split things up (like making purchases, getting pizza and drinks, etc.), and both of them had me just about whenever they needed me.

I’m finding myself dropping off pizza at the Wednesday meetings, then having to run back to the Thorn office to get sodas to take them to the meeting, which is minor, but f’ing tiring. All purchases have to made by me, which involve me scheduling time and money to go into town to get supplies. I’m also having to pick up the slack in the advertising department, meaning I’m mass-mailing folks in my free time and will soon be mass-calling/faxing people, which is time-consuming. I’m also having issues with the printers of the paper, since there seems to be an issue with the instructions in my emails. I’m managing the website myself now, which means that after emailing the paper in (which occured at 03:30 this week), I spend the next while updating the website. I also need to redesign it and hack together a patch for the CGI scripts used to manage content.

Add to this the clamoring voice of ten people demanding my attention for eight different topics two nights a week, and I am about to start lopping off heads. Two people caught my restrained wrath last week, and a couple more are on my “You’re gonna to want to get off my nuts real quick” list.

We picked up some good recruits, though. Some are standing out as particularly interesting, and if I can keep them, we may have an awesome team here pretty soon. We even have an editorial cartoonist, which is new for us (and she’s good).

But on the whole, life is good and managable.