Rebuilding, B3-style

Every few years or so, I hit a moment in my life where everything changes. Sometimes the good happens - my meeting Lacey turned me from a lazy gamer into a biking, weight-losing lovestruck fool - while the bad also happens - miserable failures in college - for example.

Nearly two weeks ago, I hit one of those defining moments.

So the past two weeks have been nothing but constant reflection for me. Last week was easily the hardest week of my life - I did something I should not have a while back, and I can't explain why I did it. Lying has always been trouble for me, and I pushed a little too far, a little too hard, and hurt someone who means the world to me. Suffice to say, we agreed that we love each other enough to work out my problems, discuss our options, and above all else, stick together and get through our problems. So far, our recovery has been tremendously successful.

But that doesn't mean that I'm out of the woods yet... in fact, as I mentioned, I've been spending lots of time trying to put my life in order. It is not an exaggeration to say that a time of great change is coming for me - and I need to make sure that I'm on the right path going forward, putting the proper priorities first.

During a time when I can barely control my own schedule, it's hell to have the unplanned happen: video games, random trips out, and a lack of motivation hurt me to no end right now. In the remaining five full weeks of school, I need to do an incredible amount of work - and these five weeks should matter the world to me: I graduate in the first week of May. School is over. No more classes. It's fascinating to me: I'm done with "the grind" - although I know I'll never stop learning. Quite the contrary, once summer begins, I plan to reflect on my five years at BGSU and study like hell everything that I have learned thus far. On top of full-time at Meijer, job-hunting, studying, and (hopefully) biking, I'm going to be a very busy person.

So that's all that I need to prepare for in the coming months. I can do it... right?

Well in order to get there and get through all that needs to be done, I need to make better decisions now: my priorities right now (in about this order), look like this: school, Colleen, work, writing, and free time. Juggling the first three items on that list is a bitch, although I feel that I do it pretty well (I hope Colleen agrees with me!). Still, sometimes I get the feeling that I need more space, and that's what this past week has been about.

I'm beginning a process of moving some of my digital life offline in an effort to privatize myself. In a world where I want more control over my day to day life, I find it necessary to scale back the convenience of broadcasting myself all over the Internet in favor of being able to stick to my own private schedule.

Thus, the changes that I'm slowly beginning to implement are:

• Until I begin working a full-time job that takes advantage of my degree, my Google Calendar and public contact information will be... well, less public... as in, not available.
• My Facebook and MySpace profiles will becom smaller, more limited, and highly private however possible, and may see complete removals in the near future, depending on my career needs.
• The BrandonBruno.com portal is being dropped until well into summer. In the meantime, the URL will point to Critically Correct. Sometime after graduation, I plan to relaunch it with a strong focus on content: either 1) an all-in-one blog/calendar/profile page or 2) a services page of some kind (most likely small tech support stuff or hosting for my software development projects). Point is, it will be changing.

I hope these temporary changes are for the better, namely for the sake of allowing me to better balance my professional and personal lives.

With that, I will be heading to bed shortly. I will certainly be updating Critically Correct on a more regular schedule now, so stay tuned for lots of news and updates of how things have been going for me.

B3 out.