I shall blog again!

Uh. Apparently a brief blogging hiatus transpired. Numerous apologies. The last weeks of college, graduation antics, a stint of frustrated unemployment, two months of rain, and my recent three weeks of legitimate employment are to blame. Excuses are silly though. Blogging will recommence.

I am hungry to learn. Three months after graduating, I miss classes already. To the point where I signed up for the GRE in a fit of frustration yesterday morning. September 26, bring on the math (eeeek). I'm currently working in a development office, and while it's interesting and I'm learning new skills, my liberal arts, politically nerdy brain misses some of the content I soaked up in college. Not that I have a really concrete idea of what I want to study with my hopefully fabulous GRE scores. I have lots of ideas, actually, so I'm doing some serious research into cities, schools, programs, and professors that hit a nerd nerve with me. A smattering of concepts include:

• political rhetoric, inspired by my favorite professor senior year
• public policy
• global communications, inspired by a 2 year program through the London School of Economics and the Annenberg School at USC
• urban planning/city design
• nonprofit management
• business --don't laugh, I'm serious and I have my reasons.
• development/women's issues related programs.

I want to bring both a solid knowledge of material and a real skill set to what I do in the future, and I think a combination of work experience and more school is the way to go. Any insight into what YOU see me doing, or programs you've heard good things about?

On a completely unrelated tangent: I love cooking. I bought a set of cookbooks, and had a little internal monologue about needing to cook more often, and bring leftovers to work. Cooking's also such an easy way to entice friends over for dinner and dessert, and gratefully fed friends often bring wine :). Made delicious chili corn cakes, baked apples with balsamic, and some other tasty things (inquire for recipes), and I'll post recipes/photos as I get more creative. I also baked two batches of treats without burning them, a little more cautious after I charred two sheets of chocolate chip cookies I'd been daydreaming about.

One final note: I am reading like a fiend, due to my onset of desire to learn/think. Suggestions are welcomed, and I'm accumulating what is a pretty intense library of my books and a friend's books I'm babysitting for the year. Let's give/borrow/discuss? There's been murmurings of an actual bookclub, on the heels of our Twitter book club attempt, and I'd be so down.

What I'm Reading

Adding various things to my Google reader today, and came across a bunch of great sites and blogs that I'm looking forward to reading more of.

Although this Incomplete Manifesto is from a design company called Bruce Mau Design, I think many of the points are so applicable to lots of processes, creative or otherwise. Particular favorites include:

• Don't Clean Your Desk: You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
• Take Field Trips: The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
• Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it
• Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child): Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Other sites I'm intrigued by:

• White Hot Truth
• Daily Poetics
  
• The Happiness Project: especially because we've been trying to update The Happy List more often. Figuring out what makes you happy helps you to remember to do it.
• Wanting to read more of Bob Sutton's workplace blog too. So many conversations I've had lately about jobs and the future have circled back to wanting to work in a good environment, for a good boss, as a good employee, and what all of that means.

(One more set of interesting rules from Daily Poetics: Immaculate Heart College Art Department)

What are you reading? Any good suggestions? Also recently launched, if you're looking for a good way to get into reading print materials and not just blogs: The Twitter Book Club! Check out the first book announcement and get involved!