AlbertLiang.net — Blog

So everything is on hold, until I finish the GREs on Tuesday.  Except try as I might, I can’t resist the urge to look at this, read up about that, do a little research here and there, and think about video ideas, website layouts, programs I want to write, photos I want to take, and gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.  I need to concentrate!!!

In this downward spiralling economy, it got me thinking… where the heck did all of our money go?

Starting from the top:

1.) “Banks” are crashing because they over-extended their credit, which means homeowners have the cash.

2.) ”Homeowners” have given all their cash to pay for their houses, so presumably the banks have them.

3.) “Banks” loan cash out to people to buy things, such as cars and consumer goods, so let’s say Walmart has the cash.

4.) “Walmart” is laying off people, which means they don’t have it.  It means money went to 2 places: employees and merchandise manufacturers.  We assume cash that goes to employees returns back to step (3), so let’s follow the merchandise manufacturers.

5.) “Big manufacturers” are having hiring freezes or laying off people, too.  Their expenses: employees (step 3), advertising, and raw goods.

6.) “Raw goods” are…?

7.) “Advertising” means firms, designers, and media channels.  Well, none of them are crying for help right now, but I don’t think they consider themselves “well-off” right now either?

I don’t think I can trace this rabbit hole any farther, but even if one says raw goods = other countries, that doesn’t seem right, either.  All the countries around the world are in decline, except for maybe the oil producing countries, but maybe they aren’t so happy right now either with oil far, far, far below their “we-will-not-let-oil-go-below-$100-per-barrel” ultimatum they announced 2 months ago.

So… where did all of our (er… everyone’s) money go!?

I hear snow has finally fallen in Ithaca, so this is a tribute to those chilly, but wonderfully energetic five years of my life:

So the evolution begins like this:

I had a planner, one that could chart out appointments and due dates for up to a year in advance, so I could jot down all the little meetings, appointments, and assignments I had due.  The thing was extremely handy so I wouldn’t accidentally plan a meeting in the middle of a midterm, or maybe forget I have a 17-page research paper due tomorrow so maybe “Thirsty Thursday” wouldn’t be a good idea.  Or, y’know, if it’s an anniversary coming up.  (No, I can’t remember that kind of stuff, either.  If I remember your birthday, feel special… you out-ranked a girlfriend’s anniversary [sorry xgfs if you're reading this, I'm a jerk, I know])

But the planner just wouldn’t do.  It couldn’t help me plan day by day what I would be doing, or heck hour to hour.  Sure, I can look at it and say “hey, cool, I have 2 tests at the end of this week.”  But that usually translates to “hey, cool, 3 days off, 1 day to cram, and 1 whole day of exams.”  Long term projects always (without fail) became eve-night projects.  Major test and quizzes were all multiple guess alike.  So thus came along “the worksheet” – a polar opposite solution to my long-term planner.  ”The worksheet” had a blank for every hour of my day.  If I could fill it in, I did it beforehand.  If I didn’t know what I was going to be doing, I filled it in posthumously so I could map out my distribution of hours in a day.  (Not surprisingly, the distribution was usually 85/5/10, waste time/work/think about work.)  That insanely detailed, overly-disciplined method lasted for about 2.2 worksheets.  About 0.2 worksheets into day 3, it just became too much.  Too much work to tell me what I already knew.

Next came the index cards.  The index cards was some tip I picked up from a CEO (online, not in person).  The trick was to make the next day’s index card BEFORE the day started.  Like a daily agenda an executive asssistant would make outlining the day’s to-dos.  The advantage of this system was to force myself to plan out my next day… to really think about how I was going to distribute my hours and plan my day.  It creates a short-term to-do list that is practical to accomplish within the timeframe.  But the index cards can’t plan long term.  And things that don’t get struck off on one day’s index card rolls into the next, until the majority of your index cards are old “to-dos” and very little new stuff.  (Plus it just gets darned depressing to look at.)  Index card lifespan: about 3 months.  By then, I had started missing far too many important, but forward-planned, meetings because I just couldn’t remember they were coming up.

On to “the notebook” –  a nondescript Mead composition book where I could scratch things down without chronological order.  It had a running to-do list that I could add on to at any moment, and plenty of blank space to jot down ideas that just hit you whenever and wherever.  And who cares if there’s no chronology, as long as you flip through the pages often enough.  And, hey, you can keep track of multiple to-do lists (say, personal, work, and relationship), so that was a bonus.  (I’m sorry, did I just say a to-do list for a relationship?  Yeah, I did.  Were you not paying attention when I said that bit about remembering anniversaries?)

And on to the final evolution.  The sheer innovation is going to blow everything else out of the water… I think this idea is probably patentable.  Post-it notes!  (Don’t even think about patenting it before me, buddy… I totally discovered this first.)  Meeting in 4 days?  Post-it note.  GREs in 1 month?  Post-it note.  Old roomie coming down to visit in 3 weeks?  Post-it note.  Words of inspiration?  Post-it note.  (The current one says “Regroup, reorganize, rethink!!!”  Actually, no, it only has “!!”, sorry.)  Sweet!  The post-it note jazz really does work.  Except for when it doesn’t.  (Don’t you hate that?)

Problem now is… I write everything down on my post-it notes (and The Notebook occassionally gets some action, too) that if I DON’T write it down, consider it never-gettin’-done.  Didn’t write down “do laundry”?  Well, I didn’t do laundry today.  (Speaking of which, I should go write that down for tomorrow… ask me tomorrow and I’ll probably have done the laundry.)  Sometimes, I feel like I need a to-do list for the to-dos I need to add to my list.  (Imagine taking a shower and mumbling to yourself, “Dang it, I forgot to mow the lawn… must remember to write that down when I get out.” <– that’s a to-do list for a to-do list…)

Same thing goes for these blog posts.  I write the titles of the blog posts before I write the entries, and save them as drafts.  (I know a lot of bloggers do this.)  It’s my blog-to-do list, so that one day I will go fill in the content, but at least I’ll never forget the idea.  And now that this post is down, I can strike off “write to-do blog entry” from my to-do list!

I think the method of writing essays for any school application is stupid.  It’s a waste of effort that makes life harder for both the writer and the reader.  When someone (me) sits down to write an essay (it), the first thing I do is make an outline.  And then I slave away for hours and hours trying to convert the outline into an essay (“filling in the in between with prepositions and periods”).  Now that it’s fully 1999 characters long (because the limit is 2000 characters), I submit it to the school, who passes it down to a reader (poor guy/gal).  After skimming unsuccessfully through a pile of words, s/he probably will make an outline of my important points so it can be reviewed quickly later on.

Right.

Can’t I just turn in my outline instead?

If that were the case, then I think I’m done with all my grad school apps.  =)