Today marked the beginning of my return to the closest thing I have to a real adult life: a corporate job (internship) at Dell. Among the constant tom-foolery and jack-assery of college life, there's really not much during they day that resembles what life will really be like after I graduate and become a big 'ol grown-up... besides paying bills I guess.

But this summer and last, I had a chance to see what life might be like working a typical 40-hour-a-week corporate job for a big company. It's all there: the daily commute in shit traffic, the infamous cube farms, the meetings, and all the bureaucracy and processes you would expect to see in a Fortune 20 company with over 90,000 employees worldwide.

Corporate culture is funny to me, though. Everyone seems to have this personality they put on when interacting at the office-- almost like this faux casual way of talking, but in such a way as to not offend anyone or say something too non-PC.

There's also the semi-awkward closeness you can develop with people you work with on a daily basis. You interact with these people every day... maybe even go out to eat lunch with them and joke around some... but in reality... you aren't even remotely close to them. Though you might spend more time with them during the week than some friends, you don't have even the slightest idea as to what type of music they like, what their hobbies are... their dreams, hopes, fears.

From this sort of distance that you can put yourself from your co-workers coupled with the need to work well together to be an effective team, a very weird relationship is formed. Your team is basically a bastardized family unit; everyone has his own role, status, and importance while their "real" lives back home are immaterial.

At the office, everyone is expected to do their job without outside factors effect them. Regardless of background, emotional situations, family, race, gender... anything... the second you swipe your badge and step into the building you become An Employee, with all the accrued emotional and personal baggage you carry veiled behind the business-casual attire and 5' 10" cubical walls.

This isn't to say you can't have real relationship with people at work, or that you can't ever get to know people and develop good friends at the office... it's more of just a reflection of the general type of interactions I've noticed. If you never got to know anybody on a personal level... I'm sure work would seem like an emotionless hell-hole.

And who would want to work at a place like that?

So a friend of mine sent me a link to a video of a guy that calls himself The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper) rapping about good site design practices and SEO optimization. This guy is pretty ridiculous... and he has some more videos on his YouTube profile as well if you want to check them out. Here's the video:

Pretty damned funny, I think. In other news, I start working for Dell tomorrow. I'm looking forward to having (at least temporarily, before Fall tuition is due) a positive  derivative to my $/time graph.

I'll be working in the enterprise product group on a new family of servers with the board team, as well as doing some work for the firmware guys. My manager also mentioned that they need somebody to port an aging MS Access database to a MySQL/PHP solution, and since I've learned quite a bit about that stuff from doing this site, it would make a great side project.

I'm also very much looking forward to getting into a routine again... the next few weeks are crucial for getting my fat ass into a workout and running schedule. I'm hoping I can run 4-5 times a week and work out least twice, but hopefully three times.

One last thing-- today I basically just wasted away my life with Derek in what was a quintessential summer day:  woke up lazily at about 1 PM, then proceeded to make sandwiches, then read some out in the sun followed by a swim spot, and then Randall's for some grosh. We made some questionably-shitty frozen pizzas dinner, and then in a bit we're going to be making some Rice Krispies treats.

Does it get any better than that?

So this has been the longest gap in updates since I started regularly posting again... whoops.

Summer is here! This has been the main cause of my lack of enthusiasm for updating; I've been too busy having nothing to do and enjoying the shit out of my free time before works starts up at Dell to sit and try to come up with something to write about.

Also, Nicolle makes a great point-- without the oppressively dismal and unforgivingly constant pressure of tests, homework, and projects, there's very little reason to partake in typical procrastination activities like blogging. I somehow managed to survive the semester... although my increasingly desperate blog entries might have seemed to indicate that I was heading towards an eminate academic crash and burn.

I'm spending the next 6 days or so in New Orleans... hanging with the aforementioned cutie pie at Tulane University. Besides hitting up Bourbon St. and exercising my newly-aquired legal status, I'm hoping to get into my running routine (some) and hit up the gym if she's able to sneak me in. And though I might have too high of expectations for my lazy ass, I want to get back into photography, so I brought my camera and we'll see if anything magical will happen.

I realize this is nothing more than a filler entry-- but eventually I will write about some more interesting stuff when I have a chance this week. Topics that are floating around in my head include everything from my embarrassing inability to say letters correctly when spelling out loud, to waxing philosophical on my ideas about free will... or maybe just more of the typical horseshit I usually churn out.

Stay tuned.

If today is any indication of what the days of summer are going to be like, I'm in for a real treat. Walking out of my apartment this morning at 11:30, the weather was 80 degrees and sunny, with a light breeze.

To wrap it all up, the new bar in West Campus, Cuatros, was playing some very chill summer music... and then (in the most cliché way imaginable) two midriff-bearing and very cute girls run by listening to their iPods. It was like the beginning scene to some shitty summer movie... where an impossibly high number of interesting things happen in sync along the main character's path for 5 minutes while nothing important occurs so the movie can have the intro credits roll.

Of course, this picturesque scene was rudely interrupted by my own annoyingly acute awareness that I have two finals left to take before I can even remotely pretend it's really summer. The jarring context switch that was falling out of my day-dreaming state was the mental equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the dick.

Anyway... I've got a final in 1.33333333 hours and I'm camped out in an abandoned classroom getting in some last-minute cram time whilst longingly looking out the window at the multi-million-dollar Gregory pool complex. Time to get back to studying...

As this semester is (finally) drawing to a close, I'm anxiously awaiting to rejoin the ranks of humanity any day now. I've developed the bad habit lately of completely and utterly thowing any resemblence of a regular biological cycle out the window... and it's definitely caught up to me.

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week... stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody's day in China than it would a person's in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time... and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you'll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I'll realize rather indifferently that I haven't eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not... as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes... I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I've ever had to do for school... ever. But there really isn't any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer's-stereotype BITCH... then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.