web analytics

JerseySmarts.com

By The End Of 2014 I’d Like To Be A Better Sleeper

Posted on by

Yesterday, I posted about the major impacts in my life in the last year. I neglected to write anything about what my New Year’s resolutions might be for 2014 because I don’t really set resolutions for myself any more. In a nutshell, I find them to be useless and not very helpful in directing my actions for the year (not even for the first few weeks or days of the new year when most people are gung ho about their resolutions). I did mention at the end of yesterday’s entry that I intend to read more in 2014. I’m not sure if that type of general comment counts as a resolution – I would err on the side of it not being a resolution, but that’s just me.

Sometimes, I'm so jealous of Garfield's life. This guy just sleeps all day and then wakes up and pounds lasagna.

Sometimes, I’m so jealous of Garfield’s life. This guy just sleeps all day and then wakes up and pounds lasagna.

And when I mention that I want to read more in 2014, I mean that I want to read material on a variety of topics. When I was younger I would read both fiction and non-fiction books just for fun. In the last year, I’ve primarily read non-fiction books for different professional development classes that I’ve been enrolled in. And I coupled those scholarly assignments with additional reading from a variety of blogs, which I think you’ve noticed in my randomly-updated Start the Weekend Right Series. All of the links that I post in the Start the Weekend Right updates come from blogs that I have in my Feedly RSS reader. Feedly has an option where you can bookmark an update from a website for future reading and, increasingly, I’ve been bookmarking articles that deal with sleep.

After reading many of those articles, I think that another one of my not-quite-a-resolutions for 2014 is to learn to be a better sleeper. I’m hesitant to write that my sleeping patterns are horrible, but I am writing this entry at 3:00am on an early Monday morning (I’m off from work this week, so being up this late doesn’t mess up my overall schedule).

Much like other areas of our lives where we know we need to improve, I know that there are certain things that I can do immediately to improve my sleep. For example, I know that if I adjust and recalibrate my diet, then there will be a direct impact on the amount of sleep that I get each night and, more importantly, on the amount of quality sleep that I get each night. Further, I know that if I work out more often during the day (especially in the morning), then my ability to fall asleep at a more decent hour will be improved. As it stands now, I typically sleep between 5 and 6 hours each night. On top of that, I wake up several times each night for different reasons from tossing and turning to going to the bathroom to getting some water to drink. The Harvard Business Review recently published an article about how some men announce how little sleep they get in act of hyper masculinity. I’m not walking down that path by a long shot – I genuinely want more and better sleep.

In 2014, I want to learn more about the causes of my sleep deprivations. The Week suggests that one of the major causes of getting less sleep is that we are exposed to too much light during the evening hours. In my case, this is definitely a problem as I park myself in front of my laptop for a few hours each night to do work to meet different deadlines. The folks over at Inc.com suggest that getting into a regular routine can help a person sleep better. For the last two months or so I’ve gotten into a routine of washing my hands before I go to sleep. This may not sound like a big deal (or it may sound like something that a person should already be doing), but elevating this action to a daily routine has helped me make the mind-body connection that it’s time to lay down and get some rest.

Getting poor sleep certainly is not a good thing for my health, either. As they recently wrote about in The Saturday Evening Post, there are real connections between a lack of quality sleep and an inability to shake off Type 2 Diabetes (which I’ve had for almost 5 years). The Post writes that an optimal amount of sleep to fight off diabetes is between 7 and 9 hours each night – I’m not even close!

There are other parts of the sleep puzzle that I’m looking forward to learning more about in 2014. For example, what affect does one’s circadian rhythm have on their sleep quality? Why is it that I often find myself wanting to doze off behind the wheel both on my way to work and on my way home from work, but not while I’m actually at the office? Does it matter if I hibernate on the weekends to make up for lost sleeping hours during the week? And just what is the real connection between not sleeping enough and gaining weight?

What I’d really like from all of this reading and learning is to be a better sleeper twelve months from now than I am today. Achieving that not-quite-a-resolution would be something worth truly celebrating.

A Very Brief, Personal Year in Review for 2013

Posted on by

As 2013 comes to an end, I thought it might be worth writing a few words about this past year in terms of what’s going on in my world. I selected the three categories below to highlight certain major events that took place in my world in 2013. These categories do not represent the totality of my life. For example, there are no categories for my social life, healthiness and working out, religious life, etc. However, I think these categories adequately reflect some of the biggest items that I’ve managed over the last 12 months.

Taking a quick inventory of some major events that took place during my 2013

Taking a quick inventory of some major events that took place during my 2013

Without further adieu, here is a brief review of my 2013.

Personal Life
The biggest event in my personal life this year occurred this past summer when my younger brother broke his neck and nearly killed himself. He broke his neck by overshooting a landing while riding a BMX bike over a jump in a wooded area near his house. My younger brother went over his handlebars and landed directly on his head (with no helmet). In what is honestly a graceful gift from God, he didn’t die in the accident – he didn’t even become a quadriplegic or even a paraplegic. In fact, as of about a month ago he has regained most of his range of motion.

My family shared some pretty mentally draining moments leading up to the series of surgeries that put my younger brother’s neck back together again. I think that my younger brother believes that the rest of us in the family want him to stop riding his bike and give up on the whole pastime of being an amateur BMX rider. That’s not true. What we do hope for, though, is that he understands how each action (and inaction) that he takes has a direct impact not just on himself, but on his family and friends and those who love him. And, hopefully, with that fundamental level of understanding as a base, he might ultimately figure out that as we get older at some point we stop doing the things that thrilled us when we were younger because there are more people relying on us as adults than as children.

Financial & Economic Review
This one’s pretty easy, right? The biggest thing that happened in my financial life in 2013 was finally repaying all of my student loan debt. As I noted in the entry linked above, before my student debt was repaid this past August I was paying an average of $2,500 per month in an effort to accelerate getting rid of these loans. A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine about his student loan debt and I commented to him that I hadn’t really started to reap the accumulative financial benefits of no longer making these payments. In other words, that $2,500 in extra money that I should have been realizing each month didn’t seem to be in my budget. Well, after some quick analysis it turns out that I was depriving and starving other areas of my financial life such that the extra money I should have seen in my account each month had to be immediately spent on other items (ranging from charitable commitments, professional development commitments, a busted laptop, and regular annual costs).

Now that those payments and commitments are complete I expect to see an immediate impact in my monthly budget. In fact, I began to see that impact during the second half of this month. And I’m confident enough in that increase that I’ve already automated certain funds to be extracted from my checking account and placed into my Capital One 360 (formerly ING Direct) account beginning in January 2013. If you know anything about Capital One 360, then you know that you can set up multiple savings accounts within your master savings account. The different accounts that I’ll either begin bolstering or funding for the first time in January 2014 include my master savings account, an account focused on paying the additional taxes that I usually owe each April, another account focused on setting money aside to purchase a home, and an account that is focused on saving up for a down payment whenever I need to buy a new car. One of the things that I’ve learned in life is that you need a reliable set of wheels, so even though I’m driving around a relatively brand new 2012 Ford Escape, I’ve been saving for my next car since I bought this one. Reliable transportation from Point A to Point B is critical.

The Business World
There were two major events in my business world this year. The first was Superstorm Sandy hitting New Jersey in October 2012. And yes, I know that October 2012 took place last year, but the aftermath of the storm had me helping to lead a new effort at my company that took me all over the state promoting my company’s new disaster recovery product.

On a personal, entrepreneurial-level the biggest thing in my world in 2013 was the founding and re-opening of a fraternity apparel company with one of my younger alumni from Monmouth University. We’ve spent the better part of 2013 re-establishing the brand and getting it back into the minds of the 130 chapters of our fraternity around the nation. And in just the last week alone we commissioned a new designer to create two designs for us to kickoff 2014 with a bang. I’ve seen one of those designs and it’s absolutely outstanding. The second one should be completed soon and I expect that it’ll be absolutely outstanding. Also in 2013, we began a very small brand extension by beginning to print high quality apparel for local groups.

And there’s a brief review of my 2013. I stopped making resolutions a few years ago because I realized that they’re all eerily similar to one another. Thus I don’t have much to write about what I want to accomplish in 2014. Among my own personal goals are the same old, same old including greater financial stability, becoming healthier, continuing to improve professionally, etc. I guess one item that I really want to focus on in 2014 is reading more. I’ve noticed that over the last 5+ years I haven’t been reading as much as I used to read. One of the greatest ways to differentiate yourself from the pack at work and in life is to read more; and as a guy who was an English major in college (i.e. I like to read and write), I should be reading a lot more than I do right now. I expect that this particular goal will obviously be helped by the fact that I just signed up for a library card (and Lord knows what type of stories I’ll have from visiting the local library).

That’s it, folks. I hope you each have a prosperous and rewarding 2014!

Causes of Exhaustion: Grading Student Research Papers

Posted on by

Ugh… I’m getting tired just thinking about this topic. As you can tell from the title of this one, I’m going to write one or two entries about things that absolutely exhaust me. In truth, these are issues that last month which absolutely ran me ragged – to the point where I just wanted to curl up in a ball and go to sleep through New Year’s Eve! You guys know that feeling – the feeling of saying, “Ah, fuck it. I don’t need this shit.”

The first and most exhausting issue (and the focus of this entry) that presented itself last month was grading my students’ research papers. Holy cow. What a mess some of these things were to read (if you can call trudging through these papers “reading”). I’ve been teaching a course at the local college for the last three years. This Thursday will be the beginning of my fourth year teaching at the college and each year the writing gets worse and worse. First, I thought it was bad when one of my students spelled “before” as “b4” (yes, someone actually did that). Then, I thought it was bad when my students submitted works cited pages on opinion papers! But 2009 was a banner year for outstanding displays of ridiculousness.

I had students copy and paste directly from Wikipedia when they are submitting opinion papers. I will repeat that – and expand – for your delight. I assign a two page opinion paper to my students and ask for their feedback on certain issues. This paper is worth 5 points on their final grade. And some students used this as an opportunity to go to Wikipedia, copy and paste an entire entry on a topic, and submit that entry as their opinion. Are you serious?! Has the age of the internet and social media destroyed the minds of America’s youth to the point where they can’t form a fucking opinion?! Good grief!

But that was a two page opinion paper. What exhausted me last month was reviewing and grading an 8 to 10 page research paper where the quality of writing was generally less than high school level and the overall grammar, spelling, and flow of the papers was just as bad. Granted, of the papers that I read there were definitely two or three home runs and another three or four that were at least written at a college level. But the rest of them… to say that I was disappointed would not be doing justice to the life-sucking exhaustion that I felt reading through these papers. And the less-than-college-quality of the work spread across a variety of issues besides spelling, grammar, and flow. One student – in a research paper – wrote that members of a certain religion (of which I am a member) and white people are generally not offended or annoyed by the Nazi party.

Go back and read that last sentence again. Yes, that’s right. A college student suggested that one specific religion and people of a certain skin tone would actually condone the Nazi party. Absolutely outrageous.

Almost none of the students knew what it meant to properly cite their sources and even more had no idea what MLA or APA format meant. It was an exhausting exercise reading their papers – absolutely exhausting.

But I can’t say that these students haven’t made an impact on me. No, in fact they’ve pushed me to the point where I’m strongly considering reducing the amount of written pages that my students have to hand in each semester. Not to worry, though. I plan on replacing those written pages with presentations – another skill that students sorely lack these days.

Who said being an adjunct professor was easy?

Some Broad Goals for 2010…

Posted on by

At JerseySmarts.com, I try to avoid adding conventionally-themed content to the blog in matters that most people deal with in their daily lives. With that in mind, I really don’t want to sound like every other blogger out there who is jumping on the bandwagon of not making New Year’s resolutions. In years past, some of you may remember that I posted New Year’s resolutions on this blog and the truth is that I met many of those goals. However, this year I want to do something different and instead of making a series of resolutions, I thought that I would just briefly comment on some broad goals that I have for myself in 2010. Much of the information included below is a whittled down version of more in-depth goals that I am mentally keeping for myself. You’ll notice that my goals fit into three broad categories: health, finances, and professional achievement. Overarching those three categories is a larger goal – the idea of fitness (discussed at the end of this entry).

Health. The biggest health issue that I have to tackle in 2010 is getting firm control over my Type 2 Diabetes. In reality, I think that the cocktail of oral medications that I’ve been taking since my August 2009 diagnosis has the situation under control, but I want to begin reducing the amount of medications that I’m taking sooner rather than later. To do that, I really only have one choice – lose a bunch of weight.

In 2010, I have a broad goal to lose some weight. I’m not talking about a gigantic weight loss where I’m losing over 100 pounds in a few months – I’ve done that before when I was a graduate student and it’s not feasible to accomplish that type of goal when I have a great deal of real world responsibilities to attend to these days. However, I’d like to lose between 5 and 7 pounds per month for the next year. I’m starting out 2010 weighing in at 340 pounds, so if I was to lose an average of 6 pounds each month, I could start 2011 weighing in at 268 pounds. Even if I was able to lose just 60 pounds in the next year, I’d be pleased. All I know is that with the onset of Type 2 Diabetes, the need to lose weight becomes very real.

Finances. Some of you might sense the gravity of my health in the words that I used above. Well, to me, it is equally important that I payoff a tremendous amount of my student loan debt in 2010. In total, I’m starting 2010 with $96,680 in student loan debt. That $96 thousand breaks down as $55,129 owed to the United States Department of Education and $41,551 owed to the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority (NJHESAA). Yes, I know that owing $96 thousand is disgusting for a guy in his late 20’s, but if you can believe it I actually started repaying my student loans in June 2006 when the total amount that I owed was $120,720. Pretty gross, right?

Some people get busy starting their lives after they graduate college or graduate school. Not me. I graduated from graduate school and started getting busy repaying my student loans. And I’ve actually been pretty successful. I’ve repaid $24,040 in principal since I began repaying these student loans. I don’t have an exact breakout of how much interest I’ve paid since June 2006, but I intend to get that number once I finally pay these damn things off.

But I digress…

In November 2009, I created a financial plan that allows me to make large payments towards the NJHESAA student loan. If I can stick to this plan, I’ll end 2010 owing about $19,000 on the NJHESAA loan. That figure doesn’t account for interest to be paid in the coming year, but it also doesn’t account for any payments over and above the ones I have laid out in my plan. Oh, and to get a head start on the 2010 goals, I began my plan for repaying this loan in early December 2009 and even devoted a large portion of my December 31, 2009 paycheck towards maintaining the head start that I have on my 2010 goal.

The NJHESAA loan is in my crosshairs…

Professional Achievement. After paying so much to get my current Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees (see above), I decided to put my plans to get a Doctorate on hold until a later time. However, I want to mentally stay in “game shape” so that when I decide to get a Doctorate I am prepared for the rigors of doctoral study from the first class through the final thesis defense. In order to keep myself thinking as an advanced degree student might think, I enrolled in a Graduate Certificate program at the local college where I teach. Why enroll in this college? That’s easy – I get to take the courses for free! Again, see above if you want to know why this might be appealing to me…

I also wrote out an entire list of goals for 2010 for my small website company – Usable Web Solutions, LLC. And as far as being an adjunct professor in the coming year, I hope to continually improve upon the classes that I teach via integrating relevant student feedback into the design of these courses and continuing to refine my course materials (PowerPoint presentations, handouts, and YouTube videos) to better teach my students.

The Overarching Goal: The Idea of Fitness
I specifically chose to write “the idea of fitness” because I want to break everyone’s idea that being “fit” only applies to one’s health. I think that the goals listed above make it very clear that I am striving towards achieving a greater level of efficiency and achievement in these three areas of my life. By doing so, I will have to train myself in certain skills and unlearn some existing habits. The end result of these efforts will be that I am in a better position come 2011 than I am at the beginning of 2010; essentially, I will be more physically, economically, and professional “fit.” And that’s why I chose “the idea of fitness” as the overarching goal for 2010 – because if I can make great strides towards achieving and hopefully achieve the three broader goals that I have listed above, then I’ll be a more “fit” person for the efforts.

We’ll be sure to check back in 2011 to see how far along I’ve come on meeting these goals! I’ve got a good feeling about 2010…

Happy New Year and a Prosperous 2010, Everyone!

Posted on by

Happy New Year, folks! I hope that you all had a safe and happy New Year’s Eve last night, celebrating the arrival of 2010 in whatever way you saw fit. Personally, I kept my New Year’s Eve festivities very low key. After a quick dinner with one of my roommates and two of our buddies I watched the ball drop from the comfort and warmth of my bedroom. Last night was the first time in many years that I opted not to go to a party to watch the ball drop and it was very relaxing, calming, and enjoyable. 🙂

Happy New Year!

Just a bit of commentary on the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, New York City last night… I watched the FOX News coverage of the parting in Times Square last night and after watching the people in the Square on the television all night, I have a few observations. First, they’re all nuts! Who would want to be out there in the cold and sleet and nasty weather with crazy people all around you? Blech! Not me. Sure, at some point in my adult life I’d like to ring in the New Year by making the pilgrimage tp New York City’s Times Square, but I’ll wait for a much warmer winter to come around before that happens.

Second, most of the people in Times Square seem to be tourists. This prompted one of my roommates and I to comment that all of the real New Yorkers are probably watching (and laughing) from the comfort of a local bar or their own homes! But thank God for those tourists bringing their economic power to the City. Tourists help keep local economies afloat and all local people thank tourists for their purchases!

Finally, I included “prosperous” in the title of this post because I really do hope that 2010 and the entire coming decade is a prosperous one for all of my family members, friends, and readers of this blog. The last decade saw too many people lose a lot of money in a variety of markets. First the technology and “.com” bubble burst and then the housing bubble exploded a few years later. In the past few years the stock market went on a slide, though it seems to be recovering. There are many people out there – myself included – who managed to make the best of these situations and actually wound up in a much better financial position than before these crises! But there are far too many people who are suffering economically, physically, and mentally so I hope that the wealth of prosperity and happiness (and so much more) come to more people in the next ten years.

As for the rest of today – sit back, relax, and enjoy the day off!