This week I crossed 1500 miles on my bicycle. I’ve had the odometer since early last summer, so it’s been just over a year–with four months of that year spend abroad in Copenhagen (where I put God-knows-how-many-miles on my bike).

It’s a great feeling. And it’s a great milestone to recognize how important my bike has become to me and maintaining my sanity over the past few months.

Throughout the spring and this past summer, I’ve gotten busier and busier. My life has been turned upside-down thanks to social media, networking, and entering my final year of undergraduate study at American University, and this upcoming year isn’t getting any calmer. With three jobs, six classes, a new organization on campus and two executive board positions–not to mention maintaining posts on more than five blogs and numerous social media accounts–things are understandably a little crazy. I like it that way (I wouldn’t have it any other way, in fact) but having a little down time every day is kind of nice.

And that’s where my bike comes in. With the 15-20 miles I ride every day, it gives me just enough time to relax. No news. No social media. No talking. No distractions at all. No stress.

On my bike, it’s just me and the wind and the city I love around me. It’s navigating the winding, bumpy streets of Georgetown, or riding through the quiet little neighborhoods between Logan Circle and Dupont, or riding along the Crescent or Mt. Vernon trails, enjoying the nature around me. It’s the small amount of time every day that I can push everything else out of my mind and just focus on the wind, the smell of the world, and the beautiful, refreshing pain in my legs as I pump those pedals up Wisconsin Avenue.

In Copenhagen my bicycle became my life. It was a form of transportation, and a conversation piece. It was a form of protest for climate change during the COP15 climate change conference. It was a souvenir in my photos, videos, and my memory. It was a crap bike, but to be honest, I kind of miss it.

In DC I brought that back with me, and it changed the way I look at my city and the world around me. I learned this city like I’d never seen it before. In my first two years of college I viewed DC as a series of metro stations, small, separate communities connected by tunnels and nothing more. But the city is so much more than that–not to mention more than the politics and the nonsense headlines (“Is Washington BROKEN?” ::GASP::). My bicycle let me explore the city in new and unexpected ways.

Anyway, here’s to 1500 miles, and here’s to 1500 more.

So evidently I’m a cheap date. Well, maybe not that cheap. At tonight’s CitizenGulf DC fundraiser for recovering the gulf from the BP oil spill, I and several others auctioned off one date with ourselves to the highest bidder.

I sold for $45, to the always amazing @jillfoster. We’re planning a “morning date” for next week–despite the fact that she’s married! Of course it’s not a real date, but I offered to hang out and help her with her blog and any other personal technological projects that have been put on the back burner lately–I’m looking forward to it!

The event was a blast. When @andinarvaez contacted me earlier in the week to ask me to auction myself off, I wasn’t entirely sure what to think, but it couldn’t have been more fun. While obviously I wasn’t looking for a real date–this crowd isn’t exactly my target market, ya know–I’m thrilled to be able to hang out with such a brilliant professional like Jill!

In other news, I’m exhausted! The beginning of classes have hit hard. The classes themselves aren’t that difficult, but it’s just a lot to balance, and I’m sure I’ll adjust as the summer goes on. But more on that later… for now, I’m grabbing some shut-eye.

I originally published this post on Technorati, but felt the urge to share it with you here as well. Thanks for reading.

Today I will reach my 30,000th tweet.

Or I might have already, depending on when this is published. It's been a long and winding journey and my 30,000 some tweets so far tell a number of stories, but primarily that of myself, a young professional making my way through college, traveling the world, and working towards career success (with a little luck).

I started it all on July 20, 2007, sitting in a cramped little apartment outside of Tokyo, Japan, where I was staying for six weeks as part of a cultural exchange scholarship program. I signed up not knowing what this little micro-blogging service called Twitter was, and with no possible idea where it would take me over the course of the past three or so years.

As I tweeted out my excitement about hitting 30,000 tweets this morning, a follower asked me, "How many were of value?" That got me thinking. How many of these little 140 character messages really provided value to anyone? What have I accomplished in my 30,000 tweets, my approximate 4,200,000 characters, those 50,000-some-odd words?

To me, all of them provided value, and I've accomplished more than I ever dreamed I would with a social network.

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Here it comes.

It’s that time of year again, when my life goes from being just abnormally busy and ridiculous to absolutely-mind-esplodingly busy and ridiculous. Yup, school starts back in just under one week.

I’ll admit, I’m already feeling the pressure a little–which is odd, given that I haven’t stepped foot back in a classroom yet. It’s mostly mental, and it’s not necessarily bad, but that extra responsibility for my six (6!) classes is going to be a kick in the butt for the next few months. Thankfully my work schedule will calm down soon (cutting my hours almost in half), and with a little luck the weather will get nicer, leaving me a little less exhausted at the end of the day than I have been in this heat.

In fact, I’m kind of excited for my classes this fall (and yes, I know I say this every semester, and by the end I’m about ready to bang my head against the wall). I’m done with general education requirements, and really, based on course descriptions and syllabi alone, I’m not expecting this to be that difficult of a semester. And well hey, I slogged through six semesters and a summer course already, surely I can manage two more, right?

The biggest thing hanging over my head is the amount of ongoing projects I still have on my plate. I’m designing not one, but two websites (both of which will likely extend throughout the semester) and I have a fair amount of blogging responsibilities. Bad thing? Not really–in fact, blogging and designing are kind of nice, relaxing escapes from the textbooks and assignments I’ll be facing over the coming months. But they’re still more to do, which means I’m going to have to put a little more hustle in my step to get it all done.

Probably my biggest ongoing project–and I’m really regretting not getting this all done and out of the way in June–is my spring capstone project. While the content is finished, the website is not. And I’m contemplating turning it into an e-book, at the prodding of @amandamogul and @riethja.

But it’ll all get done. A little positive thinking and perhaps a teensy bit less sleep, and I know I’ll make it through just fine. Will it be a little stressful? Sure. But then again, I seem to kind of thrive on this stuff. And if all else fails, I know I’ve got an amazing community of friends–online and off–to turn to for a little extra moral support.

This morning I had the privilege of co-hosting a workshop with Amanda Miller Littlejohn (@amandamogul and @mopwaterpr). The subject? What else–Twitter!

Amanda let off the workshop with a quick overview of the power of Twitter and building a brand on the social network. I then concluded with a presentation of nine tips (and a bonus!) for being more efficient and effective when using Twitter and various Twitter tools. The presentation is embedded below, check below the cut for links to the tools I mention and an archive of the tweets from the workshop this morning (hashtag #dcpowertwitter). Thanks so much to Amanda for inviting me to present, @chinatowncoffee and @sprint for sponsoring coffee and Wi-Fi, and to everyone else who attended!

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