Meeting expectations

If my life were a series of Sesame Street episodes, the word of the day would be: Meetings.

Pretty much as soon as I woke up, I joined Mom at a local Starbucks to have breakfast with Tatjana — the wife of Magic Moreno, who I spoke to for Gladeo not long ago.

Worth reading if you haven’t.

Breakfast was a nice, quiet opportunity to relax and sip down a little coffee. Both of which are very important the week before Finals and graduation.

Speaking of relaxing. I mentioned Tarantino movies the other day, but I’ve also been chilling out by watching some speedruns from various Games Done Quick events.

For those of you who don’t know, GDQ is a series of video game marathons where games are played for record times, under conditions ranging from basic 100 percent completion to multi-player races and even bizarre hacks like randomizers.

All to raise money for charity while showing off cool tricks. Definitely worth supporting.

My tastes are currently aligned with Super Metroid, A Link to the Past and Mario Sunshine.

However, I’m watching a neat Super Mario RPG run while writing this post, so that’s worth a shout out.

GDQ aside, after breakfast I made my way to Fullerton for the semester’s last CSUF Society of Professional Journalists meeting.

We ate pizza, discussed what did or did not work about our events and elected part of the board for next year. Most of the current group is graduating, so it’s a big old passing of the torch.

My girl Kristina, who is not graduating, will be taking over as President. And I know she’s going to kill it.

From left to right: Jared Eprem, me, Harrison Faigen, Rick Piñon, Kristina Garcia and faculty advisor Frank Russell. Photo taken by Anita Ally.

Guess I’ll have to update all my social media descriptions pretty soon to reflect all this graduating/moving on from things.

That’s certainly what I started doing last night.

In the meantime, why don’t you go back and read the thing I wrote about my Smash Bros. Cinematic Universe if you haven’t! That was a fun thing to pull together and it could probably use some more hits.https://t.co/F0k6HrkxCe

— Jason Rochlin (@jdrochlin) May 8, 2019

Job applications. Gotta love them.

I’ll get back to that eventually. In the meantime, from SPJ I went to my next meeting in the Honors Center to try and complete a few more graduation requirements. Namely getting my Honors Project title page signed off on.

Which I did:

Now all I have to do is compile the stuff I’ve done so I can officially turn the damn thing in and move on.

While in the Center I had a lovely chat with Dr. Simoes as well. We spoke briefly at my presentation, but today he was more than happy to congratulate me for getting the project through this next step.

He even told me he’ll be buying a copy of my book once it’s published — so long as I sign a first edition for him.

It was very sweet.

After all of that I came back to Redondo and set up a meeting with Michelle to give back that lovely computer I’ve been holding onto. Too bad I never got it to full working condition on account of internet issue, but it’ll be much happier with a video editor where it belongs.

Once that was done, I went to probably my most important meeting of the day:

A meeting with the treadmill.

Because with all of this graduation stress on my shoulders it honestly feels great to go burn some calories and let off some steam.

Highly recommended stress relief, folks. Especially if you can watch some dope GDQ runs while you’re running!

You know I’ve got those great set-up/pay-offs.

We kindred few

The longer I’ve been going to the gym regularly, the more I’ve started to pick up on patterns of attendance amongst gym patrons.

Also, yes, this is yet another random post about my reflections on going to the gym that I’m using as a crutch on a night where I didn’t know what else to write about and happened to come up with a vague idea while actually at the gym. Figured I’d lampshade this post now and get it out-of-the-way.

Also also, yes, I’ve said  ‘gym’ five times at this point, less than 100 words in.

It’s just going to be that kind of post.

Shattered fourth wall aside, let’s get into business patterns like I established up top.

For the most part I’ve noticed the same kind of thing repeatedly. During the week, particularly Mondays and Tuesdays, a lot more folks are at the gym later in the afternoon than earlier in the day — though I admittedly haven’t gone super early in the morning to check that timeframe.

But then on the weekends, and Fridays to some extent, it’s empty at night during the same periods that are booming during the week.

Though on the surface level this difference seems a little bizarre, it actually makes a lot of sense when you think about general work week scheduling.

During the week, anyone who doesn’t get up before the sun rises to work out as a wake-up maneuver is stuck in work or school for hours on end during the day. Thus they have to go to the gym at night.

Hell I’m personally a victim of long day scheduling even this semester. My Tuesdays and Wednesdays have me out from 11:00 a.m. to at least 7:00 p.m., not encompassing the drive home. Even on my shorter Mondays and Thursdays I’m not home until at least 3:00 p.m. or so.

The weekends, however, are different.

Nobody wants to necessarily go to the gym over the weekends. Those are the free days where people spend time with their families, go out to do chores or whatever they might want/have to do when not stuck in true obligations.

So unless you’re a real gym nut, or trying to keep yourself honest and get better like me, why would you go on the weekends?

To be fair I don’t even really go until late at night on the weekends despite having most of my days open because I just get lazy. I spent time with my family, I play video games, etc.

That’s how I wind up in the gym at 7:00 p.m. with a relatively small slice of gym goers, from my experience.

It winds up being a funny experience to me because I stare around at the odd collection of vaguely goth-looking girls on the exercise bikes, somewhat heavy gentlemen doing squats between the rows of machines, old folks meandering on treadmills with their walkers set next to the apparatus and so many others thinking…

What are you all doing here on a Saturday night?

Which of course leads me to the inevitable conclusions that I, too, am at the gym on a Saturday night alongside all of them. Dealing with the newly ordered machines, avoiding the construction in the bathrooms and just sweating away. To whatever ends they might be aiming for.

I do sort of wish I could just walk up and ask for their stories without it being bizarre or creepy. Perhaps I will one day if I want to do a story about that for some outlet I land in.

But for now, imagining little headcanons for each of them is plenty fun.

Plus there’s something vaguely unifying about the thought, even if most of my time is spent tunnel visioned on the routine I’ve set up for myself while listening to podcasts or watching videos.

Even if today all I found myself thinking about was whether they noticed my brand new haircut or not.

Got that pre-shower fuzzy forehead like damn.

I’m more than aware that slipping this photo in for the sake of confirming the existence of my new doo (which I feel the need to confirm for some reason) will make it appear as a featured image on social media, thus confusing everyone about the purpose of this post and making it seem as though I’m using myself as a weird bit of clickbait.

But uhh… Guess that’s just how it goes.

Good thing I’m the only one that worries myself over things like this, right?