Oberlin Blogs

I am the boss. It is me.

October 6, 2011

Helena Thompson ’11

I am a busy woman. This is something that I have always known and have learned to accept about myself. However, I never really realize just how many things I'm involved with on campus until I have to list them!

I was revising my resume the other day during my job application/interview preparation session (the real world! eek!), and I kept having to reduce the font size in order to make everything fit. Size 8, y'all. It's getting a little hard to read. I really don't want to make it two pages, though...but that's a conversation for another time.

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Things that have been taking up most of my time recently:

1. Being the best EIC that I can be.
I've been Editor-in-Chief of Fearless and Loathing for just under a year now, and I'm really happy with the way things are going. We've completely reorganized the editorial structure and senior staff, and we're in the process of going through a super-sweet website redesign. Earlier in the year, I used my *~mad coding skills~* to hack out something that we could use in the interim, and this is what I came up with:

I'm pretty happy with it at this point - I like the darker color scheme and the way that our category pages are looking, but I want to design some sort of awesome header and tweak a few other things around the site. I won't get into too much technobabble, but it took many, many hours tinkering with PHP and CSS and HTML to work this out and (not gonna lie) I'm proud of myself. I'm a humanities major, for goodness' sake! I'm not supposed to know how computers work! (But I do, and that's really cool. Right? Right.)

2. Learning how to be a webmaster.
This semester, I'm sitting on the OMTA board (funny story how I got there; ask me about it later) and also working as our new webmaster. We haven't had a website in a while, so it's going to be really nice to be able to link people to something when they need more information about our current shows or how to propose a production to us or whatever; this also is involving a substantial amount of coding. I recently took a trip to Ithaca to see my boyfriend, Gary, and for probably half of the ~7 hour Greyhound ride up there, I was staring at this:

I bet you can imagine how cool I felt.

We're hoping to have the site go live by the end of the month, so be sure to check it out every so often - you can even send me e-mails or something to keep me on my toes. Just shoot me one with a subject line of "HELENA WHAT ARE YOU DOING RIGHT NOW" and a body that says "YOU SHOULD BE WORKING ON THE OMTA SITE. GET OFF TUMBLR, YOU USELESS EXCUSE FOR A WEBMASTER." Or maybe something a little less harsh? I'm not really sure what I respond to best. Be creative. I know you can do it.

3. Learning how to be an adult.
Living on my own, cooking meals, managing finances, paying rent, and making sure that my utilities don't get shut off - that's what I thought being an adult meant for a really long time. Now, I'm realizing that it's much more than that! I have a job interview tomorrow with a teacher recruitment firm that matches aspiring educators with positions in private and independent schools across the globe, and while I'm not nervous, per se, I do keep thinking about the fact that I don't feel old enough to be doing this. A teacher? Me? Really? I want to do it so badly, and I know that I would probably be a pretty effective educator...but on the inside, I still feel like I'm eighteen. When I think about myself, I guess I still have this Helena-as-a-senior-in-high-school idea rolling around in my head, but that's not who I am anymore. I'm a big girl now. I'm twenty-two, an intelligent human being graduating from college soon, and moving on to the real world and big girl jobs and all kinds of scary stuff. Remember how I said I felt old in my last post? Yeah, it's not really like that anymore. No matter how much evidence I come up with to prove the opposite, I still want to be four feet tall with my head in my mom's lap while she strokes my hair and tells me that I don't have to worry about anything.

I'm worrying about a lot these days.

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It's gonna be okay, though. I'm strong; I can take whatever the world throws at me. Plus, I have awesome friends, a great job, two beautiful and loving parents, a super-sexy boyfriend, and trivia night at Slow Train. I don't have to be an adult there...

Clearly.

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