Sara's X10 Blog

Happy Friday! Wow, do I ever mean that.

Lately, I've been learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is one of those things where I feel like you can take a whole course on it in business school and yet learn just as much by actually doing it. Summary: If people can't find your page they won't visit it, so make sure your page keywords match your content and you'll get the visitors you need. A+. Seminar over. Thank me later. (Or thank me now! I like it when people say nice things to me.)

Spent today writing up more SEO pages for the Sentinel site, learning all about microwave interference, among other things. I have learned more random science in my month here at X10 than I think I managed to in the entirety of my schooling career. I was never too fond of textbooks (although I'd recommend The Double Helix, by James Watson, as a good read to anyone. It's about the discovery of the structure of DNA, and along with The Origin of Species, is one of the only science books that's ever been compellingly written enough to hold my interest), as I have little head for facts that don't interest me.

Sure, I'm a walking IMDb when it comes to the late nineties teen movie genre (why can I name so many Chris Klein movies off the top of my head? Why?), but I'm at approximately the same level mathematically that I was at in the fourth grade. I made it to AP Calculus by my senior year of high school, and even managed to not fail Statistics in college, but as of right now I could probably manage multiplication and anything more than that would require that I whip out the calculator. I have no head for numbers. What's the fun of questions with only one answer?

I'm looking forward to the weekend (commencing very, very soon), although I'll probably break out my usual Friday evening entertainment of stumbling through dinner and then falling asleep before midnight. Hold me back. Seriously. Actually I plan to get a lot of writing done this weekend; I feared when I started this job that writing all day would burn me out, but it turns out it just makes me even more eager to make stuff up. Then again, I don't think I've ever really had a job that killed my creativity. Even the most boring jobs would just lead to me running through song lyrics in my head all day and thinking about imaginary people doing more interesting things than, say, tagging and boxing sunglasses. Oh yeah, that was a real fun summer.

Someone asked me the other day what I was doing this summer, and it was a bit sobering to answer that I was working for the summer. And the fall. And the winter. And the spring. And then the next summer. I used to sink into despair every summer that I was working; nine-to-fiving it killed me, same thing day in day out until the weekend, and then you start it all over again. It's amazing the routines that we put up with as human beings.

It helps to have a job you actually like, though. I think this is the first job I've had where I liked most everything about it, rather than hating the work and liking the office, or liking the work and hating the hours, or liking the money and hating everything else about it. It's refreshing! Jobs you like: I recommend them.

Weekends: I recommend those also. Hope you all have a great one!