Stepping into that grocery store was intimidating, to say the least. It’s hard enough that everything is in a different language, but the types of products, arrangement, pricing, and even social interaction that takes place in the grocery store are so radically different that, despite how much I’ve traveled, foreign grocery stores still make me pause with foreign unease.

It wasn’t just Copenhagen, either. In fact, grocery shopping in Tokyo was much more difficult, for obvious linguistic reasons. But on the other end of the spectrum, even visiting a convenience store in London, or closer to home, even New York City can be a shockingly unfamiliar experience for someone like myself, who’s grown up in rural America and moved to Washington, D.C.–a city that is, well, remarkably unique. Sure, there’s no language barrier, but there’s still that odd feeling of unfamiliarity. I remember the first time I walked into a Duane Reade–it felt exactly like walking into a 7-eleven in Japan, a Netto in Copenhagen, or a Sainsbury’s in London.

Now the only reason I write all this is because this morning I got that very same feeling walking into a Rite-Aid here in Crystal City.

I walked in and was suddenly stunned by that odd feeling of out-of-place-ness. That feeling you get when you go in a place that you expect to feel comfortable, normal, and consistent, but instead are confronted with an environment radically different from your own–like walking into a foreign grocery store.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this Rite-Aid that I can pin this feeling on. The products were the same, the prices no different. Even the layout was remarkably similar to most of the CVS’s and Rite-Aids around the District. Perhaps it was my mood, my state of mind at the time, or my imagination still lost in the book I was reading on the metro.

In fact, I woke up at 3:30 because my poor roommate had managed to lock himself out of the building when he ran back outside to look for something he thought he had lost (he works late nights). We ended up talking for about 20 minutes, then I found that–surprise, surprise–I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d gone to bed at a shocking (for me, especially), 11 p.m. last night.

I stayed up and read part of Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (which is an absolutely fantastic read so far, by the way) until about 4:30 a.m. Then napped and snuggled with the kitty (don’t diss it) until about 5:00 a.m. Then I got up for real.

So what’s the point in me describing my morning to you so far? It was early, and I love it. And I feel like I’m in a constant struggle to establish a morning routine that I enjoy.

Too often, I’m waking up at 7:45 or even 8:00 a.m. and then forced to rush through the whole morning getting-ready process. No breakfast, quick shower, brush the teeth and out the door. By the time I get to work not only am I not awake, but I’m irritable from having to rush and even more tired from all the rushing. No fun at all.

This week I’ve been waking up around 6:00-6:30 a.m., and it’s nice. It’s given me a little more time to get ready in the mornings, grab a bite of breakfast, read the paper, catch up on e-mail, and prepare for the day. But I’m finding that 5:00 a.m. is really my sweet spot. Waking up that early gets me genuinely excited about being awake. There’s something incredibly special about enjoying those last minutes of darkness, watching the sunrise, experiencing the city still slumbering around you.

But waking up at 5:00 a.m. obviously isn’t easy to do. Every once in a while, like today, I can pull it off, but obviously it’s much easier to do when I crashed at 11:00 p.m., as opposed to my normal midnight, 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. bedtime. I’ve tried all the tricks: leaving my alarm on the opposite side of the room (even in an entirely different room, in fact), drinking water before bed, drinking water as soon as I wake up, jumping immediately in the shower… you name it. More often than not I wind up back in bed, at some point, and find myself groggily rushing toward the door when I finally snap out of it.

So what’s a busy college student to do? I’m not sure I have much of an answer. I need to work on going to bed earlier instead of staying up to do work, I think. I find that I’m not only more productive early in the mornings, but I’m happier while I work, too. At night I’m tired and sometimes a little irritable and well, I’m probably not getting much done.

And I suppose I’ll keep trying the tricks, and seeing if I can start finding this morning routine. Getting into a pattern of sleep at 11:00, waking at 5:00. A good six hours of sleep (more than enough for me, generally) and a nice fresh start to the morning. Wish me luck.

I’m doing my best to avoid whining on Twitter quite as much, so I figured I might try writing a quick post to complain about it instead–it’s my blog anyway, right?

My roommate (@ptklein) and I basically decided that the month of July just hates us. Not only has this entire month been unbearably hot (culminating with the record heat on Saturday and, ya know, that massive, random storm that killed people–along with everyone’s power and cable–yesterday), but we’ve discovered that we have yet to have one full week where we haven’t had at least one pretty crappy day.

There have been some redeeming days this month: I’ve had a lot of fun at most of the events I’ve been at, I’ve enjoyed the company of a lot of really great new friends lately, and I’ve managed to relax just a tad from time to time. That said, I wake up this morning and here I am coughing, wheezing, phlegmy, and my back hurts. God only knows what I did to deserve all this, but it started on Friday and doesn’t appear to be letting up soon.

Blargh. Ah well, consider this the entirety of my whining for the day–might as well make the best of everything else I can. Have a great day, folks.

I’ve been through this intersection so many times, I could resist posting this photo (and I’m too lazy this morning to write up a full, substantial post).

The DC DDOT has started posting old-timey photos of the District on Flickr, and it’s some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen in a long time. This photo depicts the main traffic circle in Tenleytown, the neighborhood near American University (where I go to school), and only one mile from where I currently live. For the past three years I’ve traveled through this circle almost every other day in some capacity or another, on my way to the metro, grabbing food with friends, or running errands to the Best Buy, Ace Hardware, or good old CVS.

It’s hard to imagine what it must’ve been like back in 1955. At the time, my business school was just being founded–that very year, in fact. From the angle in the photo, though, it doesn’t even look all that terribly different. The street remains essentially the same size and shape, although with significantly more traffic. And the large church on the left is still the defining landmark of the traffic circle.

Take a look through all the photos on the DDOT Flickr page. Enjoy!

I don’t have that much to say tonight, but this photo pretty much summed up what was on my mind today.

And now I’m not trying to be obnoxious or conceited or egotistical–God knows I don’t actually think the entire world is wrong and I’m always right (which is obviously not the case, if you know me very well at all).

Instead, I look at this as sort of a motivational tool. I want to be right, so I can help fix everything that’s wrong with the world.

It’s also an anti-frustration tool–stuck in a situation where you know you’re right and someone else is wrong? Whip this beauty of a photo out and it’ll make you feel better. It did me.

That said, I felt the need to say something about just how amazing it is to bike in the rain.

So how amazing is it? Really, really amazing.

My love affair with biking in the rain began in Copenhagen and well, it started out as a love/hate relationship. Sure, it felt kind of nice in September 2009, but as soon as it started getting colder (ya know, like the third week of September…) it wasn’t quite as nice. And sometimes it just wasn’t convenient to get all wet whenever I needed to be somewhere and, well, look decent.

But I soon got over that. After biking in Copenhagen for a few weeks, you get used to the rain and the clouds and biking in the dark on winding city streets. You get used to wearing water-resistant clothing and drying out quickly (even using bathroom hand dryers, if absolutely necessary!). And you get used to everyone else being soggy and out of breath from pedaling through the storm, too. It’s just part of life.

Once I got past that, I started to realize just how beautiful a city can be in a rain storm. It’s not always about the sun, or blue skies, or being able to see miles and miles. Sometimes it’s nice to just appreciate the calm and the overwhelming monotony of the rain, drowning out traffic noise, voices, trains, planes, you name it. Sometimes it’s nice to bike along and get absolutely soaked, like I did today, and just enjoy it. You learn to let go and get over it, realizing that there are so many worse conditions to be in than soggy.

Today I biked home from Northern Virginia and biked my way up Wisconsin Avenue. It’s not an easy bike ride–those of you familiar with that hill will back me up, I’m sure–but it’s a pretty one. Just as I almost reached the top, the skies opened up and decided to throw everything it had at me. It was like biking through a river in spots, and needless to say, by the time I reached my apartment I was thoroughly, utterly, drenched. And naturally, the rain stopped about 15 seconds before I reached my door.

I made my way upstairs, dropped my shoes outside the door, parked my soggy bike out on the deck and stripped off my ridiculously wet clothes, and then took a look outside. The bike ride was amazing, the rain came at the perfect time, and I didn’t mind being soaked at all. But what I saw out my kitchen window is what really made my night. And well, a picture is worth a thousand words:

I hope you all have an amazing night, and next time it looks rainy outside and you’re thinking about biking, but start to change your mind… go for it. Who says you can’t bike in the rain?

I have to go the cop-out route here and say, “it depends on who’s looking.”

To some, “student” might be a label used to pour an unknown person into a mold of expected knowledge and ability. Their loss.

To others (and hopefully more so with the “young/forward” set that you mention), cred comes from what you do and what you’re trying to do, not so much what’s on your bio.

It takes a lot of time to form an (accurate) impression of someone. I think you will run into people who take the ‘student’ prefix to mean that they can de-value the words/thoughts/actions of said student, but I think your work will ultimately speak for itself. That goes the other way, too: if students don’t take on a more proactive role, then maybe it’s a fitting judgment that they could use more seasoning before their words/thoughts/actions carry more weight.

Ideally (because I’m an idealist), we’re ALL students, and always will be.

I agree, for the most part, but it got me wondering… is “student” a dirty word in today’s world of professionalism and networking?

I think that it kind of is, but I don’t think it necessarily should be.

I’ve been lucky. Despite my labels–”student,” “intern,” “young”–I’ve still been, for the most part, treating with the same respect and courtesy as my colleagues and fellow professionals. This could be partly because of the crowd I hang out with, who are generally fairly young (although not always) and very progressive (but again, not always). It could also be because of the field I’m in, marketing and communications, which is a field in which young people are pioneering in ways the veterans have simply not.

That said, I do wonder–do the people who follow me on Twitter interpret my tweets differently because I am still a student? Do the people who read this blog take my advice and my thoughts with a grain of salt, because I lack the experience many other professionals have? To what extent should “experience” determine an audience’s expectation of quality?

Now I realize I’m throwing out more questions than answers here, but I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, especially in the fields of social media and marketing. I would hope that, given the nature of the industry, someone would see the label “student” and expect to learn more. I would hope they would jump at the opportunity to learn from someone with such a different and new perspective than the vast majority of their colleagues. And I would hope that my own, youthful and new experiences could be just as much a learning opportunity for those in my network as they are for me.

As I move into the “real world” it will be an interesting shift away from this. I wonder how people will view me differently, or how the opportunities offered to me will change. Will people reach out to me more because they know I have a title with two degrees? Or will they reach out to me less because they think opportunities are already there, and they’d have to pay me more to do work for them?

“Student” is a unique label. It’s one that defines experience, age, maturity, location, and professionalism. But I’ve never been a fan of labels. So what if we started considering “student” a title instead of a label? What if we started looking at the word “student” like we do “communicator” or “marketer”? What if we began to look at the unique benefits that title implies, instead of the often incorrect assumptions associated with it?

What if we made sure “student” was never mistaken for a dirty word again?

It’s been a rough day.

It started out about as bad as it gets. Shenanigans from the previous evening left me unable to find my sunglasses. My brand new, one-week old, nice pair of sunglasses. They remained lost until about 3 p.m. when the restaurant I left them in called back to tell me that yes, indeed they had them. At least that was some good news.

But unfortunately it just wasn’t meant to be. When I arrived home I turned on my Xbox 360 to put an episode of 30 Rock on, only to see it give me one big “eff you” with three blinking red lights. Online support checked, tweets sent to @xboxsupport, I was then forced to conclude that it’s pretty well dead as dead gets.

I can’t say I didn’t expect it–I purchased it on launch night, November 22, 2005, and I don’t think I know anyone who had an Xbox 360 that lasted as long as mine did (they have been plagued by hardware failures). Now I’m faced with a dilemma: I can pay $99 and wait three weeks to send it to Microsoft, have them repair it, and send it back (it’s obviously not under warranty). OR, I can try to save up a little and splurge for one of the new ones, $299, which is almost certainly not going to fail again anytime soon, and includes a much larger hard drive and built in wifi. I’ll probably do the latter–I was going to buy one at some point anyway. Just hadn’t planned on it this soon.

On top of that, we were hit by a massive storm and, as fate would have it, many of our apartment windows were open, and laundry was still “drying” on the deck. Needless to say I’ve been drying floors and walls for an hour and the clothes outside are probably not going to be dry anytime soon.

The cherry on top? People. Just dealing with some frustrating things right now. But that’s more than I want to get into with this post.

But despite this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I saw something on the bus today that reminded me to stay happy, regardless of the crap I have to deal with on one particularly bad day.

I wish I had a picture of him, but on the bus, I saw the most unhappy, mean, grumpy, and rude old man I have ever seen. And he muttered. Boy, did he mutter.

“I just don’t understand…” he started. It was a phrase I got to know well by the time I stepped off the bus, as he must’ve said it ten or 15 times.

“I just don’t understand why you would take the bus if you have a bike. Shouldn’t he be on the bike? Lazy kids these days.”

“Lazy kids” of course, meaning me. Me who biked ten miles through the city, had an important phone call at 8 p.m., and didn’t feel like biking up the largest hill in the city.

“I just don’t understand why they let people talk so loud on the bus,” he continued a moment later. This time he was referring to a quiet–literally, I could barely hear them–group of young Asian students talking in the back of the bus.

“I just don’t understand why this kid is practically sitting on me,” he said referring to the man standing politely in front him, standing close due to the crowded bus–ya know, because this is rush hour.

It got to the point where I almost couldn’t stand it anymore. Really, I almost freaked out. I started to turn to him and say, Hey, you know we can hear you. And it’s pretty damn rude. The woman sitting next to him muttered “be nice” a couple times under her breath, but she clearly didn’t care enough to stop the obnoxious comments from flowing.

But when I got off the bus I smiled. I smiled at every person I passed on the sidewalk on the way to my apartment building. And I smiled at the woman waiting inside our doorway, and I hugged my cat when I walked in my front door. Because yea, I had a crap day, but I’m also not that man.

I see good things in the world–despite all the bad. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I try not to let my personal emotions offend other people when I’m out in public. I smile at strangers, and say Hi, how are you? even to people I’ve never met before. In my humble opinion, my way is a little better way to go.

I will never be that man. I will never succumb to that kind of hate and sadness. And I’ll never give people such dirty, mean looks as that man did to me today. Because no one deserves that, regardless of how terrible, horrible, no good, very bad my day has been.

From: Mr. Bacon Miller.
Subject: MAY THE ALMIGHTY BLESS YOU
Date: July 10, 2010 3:38:21 AM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Reply-To: mr_baconmiiller1950@yahoo.com.hk

Attn: Friend,

Regards,
Mr. Bacon Miller.

RIDICULOUS.