Goodnight Sweet Prince, My Stanislaus Blog

It has been, admittedly, very fun to write a blog for every pair of eyeballs that has looked for or wandered their way onto this page.

From day 1 I had a scheme, you see, I applied for this position knowing full well that it was in the advertisement of Stan State, making any content I created for this or related platforms needing to be approved and acceptable by the standards of Stanislaus.

“Oh ho,” I said to myself, “why of course, I’d be happy to follow those regulations.” I said, secretly already planning on making a blog post reviewing my favorite bathrooms on campus.

Okay, there wasn’t really a scheme, but there was a goal:

“What if I made it fun?”

Nathan in front of bathrooms

From my posts: “Powering through the Semester with DANCE” and “Nathan’s Top 3 Bathrooms of Stan State”

Sponsored content is a tricky web that you can easily get tangled up in, just ask Greg Jacquay or anyone else over at the KCSS radio station about how many words, phrases, and even ideas they have to turn down in order to maintain their non-profit status. Similarly, when you’re being paid to produce content, you’re not just needing to be true to yourself and who your audience is, suddenly you also have to be true to your boss too.

And on that hierarchy of people to be true to, you the content creator come last my friend.

I, in my infinite and wise knowledge of having grown into a grizzled and jaded old man in my decade of heavy internet usage, having seen sponsored content birth and die at alarming rates, looked at that hierarchy, shook my old-man staff at it and said: “Bah humbug.”

I’ve lived a happy life, truthfully, and I’ve been granted dozens and dozens of privileges that I’m sure I don’t even know of yet. So when asking myself what I can bring to the table as a unique voice, I ended up with “Educatedly Stupid.”

I wanted to be as authentic as possible while still fulfilling my role as an ambassador of the university, and for me, to be authentic meant to show off more than a little of my zany innards. If you scroll up to the top of this page even, you’ll see the words that I wrote up there from day one: “A Student’s sillily serious studies surrounding Stan State”.

In truth, I can’t give advice on being a first-generation student, a returning student, someone who works three jobs, is starting a family, or any of those situations because it’s simply not my life experience, and I don’t want to pretend like it is either, because that just means being  inauthentic which, see above, I’ve seen fail as a content strategy time and time again (sometimes even as I’m the one doing the failing!).

Image taken with permission from Aliyah’s ‘About Me’ section on her blog.

If you want to read the life-experience from a hardcore Stan State student working, like, a million jobs, raising a kid, and somehow inexplicably keeping a big smile on her face throughout the whole ordeal then you should read up on the Stan State, with love, Aliyah archive where there’s tons of great posts on mindfulness, self-care, and the balancing act that is college.

 

 

Image taken with permission from Manny’s #IAmStanState blog post.

If you want to read the life-experience from an incredibly intelligent student working towards his Masters in social work (because the man has a big heart and a passion for change!) then you need to read Manny Nuñez | As you should 🙂 for vulnerable and insightful journaling from a student on his road through grad school.

 

If you want to read the life-experience from a somewhat quirky college kid whose made and will continue to make lots of mistakes, but ultimately tries to entertain people and make the world just a little bit better through that…

Well in that case, I’m flattered that you’re here and reading 🙂

Nathanael Heisler posing on the exterior steps of the Vasche Library at CSU Stanislaus
Photography by Sarah Kellner at AcrosstheSeaPhotography.com

This is the end of the blog. I’m graduating, off to spread my wings and soar into the still pandemic-stricken world that will surely accept me with open arms and nothing bad will happen to me ever (I’m sure that’s how that works), but I will be far from gone.

If you want to revisit some of my favorite blog posts that I’m pretty proud of, you can check out the Hall of Fame page.

If you want to hear me in a different context, enthusiastically talking about the craziness of studying abroad amidst a pandemic, you can check out my guest-appearance on the Warriors Abroad Podcast.

And if you want to hear some of my more extended ramblings in a more produced fashion, you can listen to my Fun Facts Featuring Nathan recurring segment on the KCSS podcast page.

But beyond that? I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but knowing me I’ll always be creating something. You can follow my Twitter @NathanaelHeisl1 and I’m sure sometime somewhere I’ll stop reposting hilarious cats and start talking about something exciting I’m doing 🙂

To everyone who read, who thanked me in person, in the comments, or who shocked me by even knowing of this blog’s existence in the first place: Thank You.

Good-night sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Graduation, Regalia, and the Future

My grandmother is an amazing woman.

She lived an extraordinary life and through a set of circumstances ended up as a returning student going to college while her daughter, my mom, was going to the exact same college at the same time with her.

I’m told they actually took a dance class together, which I think is plain adorable.

But something ‘Grammie’ has always told me with a hint of pride and a big smile on her face was how she graduated Summa Cum Laude, after having spent her whole life thinking she was ‘stupid’, she came out of college with honors and a realization that the world was her oyster, she could do anything if she set her mind to it.

So when I got a package in the mail containing a golden rope and a congratulatory document listing me as Summa Cum Laude, Grammie was the first person I called up to brag to.

Congratulatory Document rewarding me Summa Cum Laude status

Undergrad has been painstakingly slow to get through, as well as blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast. I can’t believe I’ve now been in college for as long as I was in High School, nor can I believe the Nathanael who enrolled in college at 17 years old is the same Nathanael that I am today.

Education is small but mighty, and in many ways I’ve been learning this whole time without even realizing it. My perspectives have shifted, my interests have further developed, in some ways I’m more world-weary, and in some I’m more hopeful.

It’s funny. Sure I was a good student, but how much can I take credit for that when in elementary school it was my mom who sat me down and worked me through my homework? When in junior high it was my community that gave me a Spanish immersion program? And when in high school it was my saxophone teacher and jazz band that gave me purpose?

Sure I did college by myself, but what is college but an entry-level professional community?

I’ve been fortunate and blessed to have been able to put as much effort into school as I did, so while I am honored and proud to hold the awards I’ve been given, I know very well that they belong as much to my support network as they do to me. In every capacity they had in my life, and in every era.

If I continue to be lucky, then hopefully I’ll be able to give back into the world some of what I’ve been gifted myself.

Grad School’s not off the table for me, but I’m hoping to be able to get some more real world stuff going before I decide whether to plunge deeper into Academia or not. Currently (through Stanislaus’ lovely career center website) I’m interviewing for PR and Marketing internships at several local Non-Profits, I’m dialoguing with Dr. Greg Jacquay of KCSS to look into furthering my work experience in audio production, and (perhaps most excitingly!) I’ve been accepted into Columbia’s Summer 2022 Publishing Course!

Book with tree, clouds, and birds coming out of it
Image by MysticsArtDesign on Pixabay.com

Basically, I’m taking a ‘working gap year’, where I know that by this time next year, I’ll be prepping for a sojourn to New York City and getting my feet wet in the book publishing industry (everyone cross your fingers and chant with me: “Tor Books. Tor Books. Nathan wants Tor Books.”) but for now, I’m going to be trying to make my resume absolutely fire by working temporary jobs that are meaningful to me, keeping happy by visiting as many of my vaccinated friends that I can, and creating media that fulfills and expresses me.

Ultimately, I’m really excited for the future.

Nervous.

But excited 🙂

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Tune in next week for a final farewell post.

Handshake and the Career Center

Do you not have a clear direction of where you’re going to work after you graduate?

Do you need to get a part-time job while studying at Stan State?

Are you not sure how you can improve your resume further?

Then have I got a deal for you!

Three block simplistic resumes
Image by Coffee Bean on Pixabay.com

The Career Center is one of those nice little godsends where you can clearly see how people before you had the same problems as you, recognized the need to create a solution, and then actually implemented it.

The Stan State Career Center is awesome. My first job while at Stan State was as a part-time janitor. I had written up a resume for that position, and I thought it was fire, I thought nothing could stop it or me from getting hired. It turns out that a big factor of why I got hired for that job though is that simply I was the first one that stepped up!

After my time with that position and my brief sojourn abroad, I put my nose back to the grindstone and started flaunting that good old resume around again. I applied for virtual internships, remote positions, and lots of lofty and really competitive jobs that would have looked stellar on my resume.

In return, I received silence.

It turns out I had a lot of highly preventable problems with my resume. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time and know that I tend to ramble, then I’m sure you can guess what some of the things were that went wrong.

It was too long, it was too wordy, too many adverbs, not enough action verbs, I could cut some sections entirely, I didn’t need to have to list high school achievements, etc. etc. etc.

But it would have been a whole lot harder to have figured that out without the Career Center literally critiquing my resume for free for me though.

If you treat your resume like an essay you have to write, then it suddenly becomes a lot more manageable. Consider it a working draft at first, then try to cut things out for conciseness (get it down to one page!), then have someone you trust read over it. Then have someone you want to impress read over it.

The Career Center is an invaluable resource, and one that you already technically pay for as part of your tuition! They will not only have lists and lists of companies that are hiring, if you sign up for their website (Handshake!) and put some effort into getting your profile to look polished, then you will have companies contacting you asking for you to apply to their postings.

What a reversal!

Two hands shaking through computer screens
Image by mohamed Hassan on Pixabay.com

Knowing a bit about what I was going to do after I graduated (or more appropriately, what I had deferred to do thanks to the pandemic) I knew that I was going to have some time to kill with my diploma in hand before the next life step. And so, I started researching the career center, figuring out how to best do all of that, and as I was in the middle of preparing for job hunting with spreadsheets and the like, I already got called up into an interview.

I’ve got a short list I carry around with me of dream jobs that aren’t necessarily careers, but industries that I would love to work in for a season of life. As I write this now, thanks to handshake, I may already be looking to be able to cross one of those industries off the list!

Stan State has lots of hidden facets to it, all put there to help you. If you’re worried, unsure, or anything related, then you should pay a visit to the Career Center’s Webpage, maybe talk to some of the fine folks there. They will help you immensely!

How Social Media Makes Me Feel (And why you should take breaks!)

Good morn/noon/and eve!

As part of an annual November writing challenge, I started taking “social media cleanses” so that I could better focus on accomplishing goals. My social media usage has only gone up since starting college, as it becomes an important part of staying informed, listening for job openings, and keeping up with friends that are now further away than ever,

And the fact that every professor under the sun tells you to keep your eyes glued to your email notifications doesn’t help us “unplug” either.

But since that first “Twitter fast” in 2018, I’ve been more critical of my social media usage and tried to articulate just how each site makes me feel when I use it way too much. And you know what? It’s almost never positive.

There is lots and lots of discussion about the harmful effects of social media, so many that having me spout them out to you here might be little more than an echo chamber or preaching to the choir.

But, considering that for the last year I’ve been, essentially, feeding into your social media feeds myself, I figured it wouldn’t be a terrible thing for me to step back and give you the one sentence version of how social media makes me feel when I’m a little too engaged.

Believe me you, I am not here to tell you to quit these things cold turkey. That would be hypocritical to the highest degree! I’m just hoping to offer up a little reminder of what these sites can do to us and why its important to be conscientious about using them.

Instagram/Snapchat

“Aw man, look at all of my friends being prettier and happier than me.”

Phone attached to selfie-stick
Image by Tumisu on Pixabay.com

Instagram and Snapchat are the modern Facebooks, they help us connect with friends that would otherwise have slipped away, and help us keep up to date on acquaintances from around the world.

But being part of traditional social media means that they have traditional social media problems. Selection bias takes over in that we don’t want to share pictures, comments, images, or videos of ourselves in anything but our best outward face. But, we take in other people’s best experiences while we ourselves are sitting on the toilet.

Friends, we should not compare ourselves sitting on the toilet to our ex’s vacation in France. That path leads only to suffering.

Twitter

“Ooo I’m so maaaddd.”

Blue bird singing in a background
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay.com

Twitter is an essential tool for following potential employers, following shifts in industries, and for many it is the most instantly-gratifying news source out there.

There’s also no nuance present whatsoever.

Twitter is by side effect of its very existence, the ultimate rage machine. People that have nuanced opinions are physically unable to express them without subtweeting, which isn’t great for the algorithm since each subtweet will get fewer interaction than the main tweet.

There is an enormous amount of hate on Twitter. Hate for the establishment, hate for oneself, hate for others, hate for bad people, hate for good people that do bad things, and yes, they acknowledge it themselves: there is a lot of hate for Twitter on Twitter. One’s mere presence on Twitter can bring their blood to a boil.

TikTok

“Aw man, look at all of these strangers that are prettier and funnier than me.”

Pink, Yellow, and Blue color splats with TikTok logo on front
Image by David Farfan on Pixabay.com

I love TikTok. Can I say that?

A year ago that would have been a controversial statement, in the worst case even a political one, at best case an acknowledgement that it was an “app for kids”.

Now, who isn’t on TikTok? It’s overflowing with creativity and has as many niches for you to fit into under the sun. It’s video creation interface is so user friendly that even I can use it!

It also takes the control of video selection completely out of your hand and puts it in a for you page algorithm. What that means is that your unconscious biases will leak through into what you like and interact with, and before you realize it you’ll be not just in an echo chamber, but one that reflects who you want to be, not necessarily who you are.

YouTube

“I’m fine with this.”

"Subscribe" logo with notification bell
Image by Tumisu on Pixabay.com

Honestly? YouTube is totally neutral.

In my own life, YouTube has completely replaced television, so much so that I find myself isolated from people that watch daytime news and shows and I’m like: “People still watch that?” And then I realize that I might be the one out of touch.

YouTube has a nice balance of algorithmically showing you what it wants you to watch and your own self-selection through subscriptions, likes, and playlists. As a result, the most YouTube can do to show me things I don’t want to watch (say that I don’t want to watch drama news) is to show me a thumbnail, which I just scroll past.

This gives me an amount of control that I don’t have with Twitter, TikTok, or even traditional television where I physically can’t just “scroll past” without first consuming the content itself.

YouTube, as a result, is the one “social media” which is so unlike social media that I still let myself watch it even when I’m on a “cleanse”.

Conclusion

Social Media is amazing.

It’s become the thing that we live our lives on in a second way. We can have a presence that feels like it matters in the otherwise shout-int0-the-void feeling that so much of the internet feels like it has.

But when the social media itself is feeding into too much of our actual real life experiences (something that can happen when you’re stuck in your home from, oh, I don’t know, a pandemic) it might be a good idea to take a break from time to time.

Study Your Way

If someone had told 12 year old me that I would be getting my bachelor’s degree by writing essays on The Princess BrideSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I would have been so excited and happy about future me that I would have burst and my brains would have leaked out of my collapsed form.

Fantasy bridge leading into a fantasy forest
Image by Larisa Koshkina on Pixabay.com

Okay, admittedly Spider-Verse hadn’t come out when I was 12, but that’s besides the point.

The point is, that in college you can legitimately study what you want to. The freedom is intoxicating.

There’s a couple roundups throughout your entry into college, and eventually they’re going to show you a long seemingly exhaustive list of Majors for you to choose from and ask you to tick a little box next to the discipline that you want to study.

For me, it felt like a massive decision, that thing that teachers had been building up to since third grade when I was first asked to think about my future. I was terrified of ticking the wrong box, falling down a path of misery, and one day waking up in a terrible office job that I would shake my fist at and whisper: “If only I had studied a different major.”

The truth of the matter, of course, is that there is no wrong major to study.

That’s it! For real! There’s no pressure!

To a certain extent, college is all about finding yourself and doing so through academics. General Education classes can be boring or seem unnecessary at times, but they are a great opportunity for testing the waters and seeing what you really jive with. Take a math class, a performance art, and a geography! You may take a shining to it without ever realizing it.

Quite literally, I decided that I wanted to study Communications because I liked to talk to people. I liked it, thought I was good at it, and I knew that I could be better at it. I hemmed and hawed about changing my major or exploring elsewhere for my first couple years, but then as we got further and further in the course, I found I got more and more interested in it!

I started to pick classes that interested me, and I got more and more narrowed into the field and genre of academia that I really loved.

Pegasus main frame, man in arch in the back
Image by Stefan Keller on Pixabay.com

Let’s be fair here, for these final papers, I didn’t write down “The Princess Bride is the best movie of all time” over and over until I had filled up 15 pages, I took what I had learned from my professors and textbooks and applied it to the things I loved.

If you look at good old Princess Bride from one angle, you can see how the representation of hypermasculine characters that had soft sides influenced what I perceived as my ideal gender performance. If you look at it another way and juxtapose it to more modern films like Spider-Verse, you can see how cultural ideals around relationships, identity, and classism have changed and altered one another according to each film’s respective era.

could have just written a paper on my gender development. And I could have just written a paper analyzing cultural ideals changing over time.

But would I have enjoyed that? Would I have cared? Would I have put even half as much effort into those papers than I did?

No. So I incorporated my favorite movies into the papers instead.

Did I know before going to college that I adored the theory of Walter Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm and Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance?

Of course not.

I love stories, and I went to college specifically so I could advance my skills and be able to get jobs around the things that I love. I learned later about what I could dig into in school to better understand those stories and develop real-world skills to change and clarify my world views.

But I never lost that initial love and interest. So, today, I write my papers on the stories I love, and yet still prove that I’ve been paying attention for the last four years through that by talking about all the stuff I’ve learned.

I have friends and peers that are writing their final papers on non-traditional pregnancies in the TV show Friends, Shia LaBeouf’s performance art, the K-Pop industry, and first-generation college students representative of minority groups and their unique struggles.

Everyone is choosing things that they love, everyone is studying things that they love, and they’re proving that they can do a gosh-diddly-darn good job of it.

College is about a lot of things. Self-fulfillment is one of them. You don’t have to have a passion figured out, you just have to have an interest and a willingness to experiment, and soon you’ll be learning about what you love!

Vaccinated! Hallelujah! (Day trips you can do from Turlock!)

A post I’ve wanted to write literally since I got this job, but that I’ve been unable to do due to the nature of the current Unprecedented Times(patent pending) is the huge amount of day trips available for people that live in Turlock.

If you don’t know, Turlock, a medium sized city, is sometimes poo-pooed by its locals for being boring and having nothing to do in it. This is all about perspective, of course, and usually the people that will complain about that are people that grew up here and gained that High School Hometown Cynicism(patent pending) that so many of us have had.

But, it is true that all of the best things you can do in a day around here are just a day trip away. In fact, one of the biggest advantages about Turlock is the daytrips! When I talk to friends online or around the world and they ask where I am in California, I tell them that I’m a day trip away from skiing, the beach, Disneyland, and Yosemite.

My friends are usually pretty impressed with that, haha.

And now, at last, with the beautiful science juice of vaccination coursing through my veins, I can once again go on my beloved beloved day trips and introduce you to them with me! As the world is reopening, here’s three Covid-friendly day trips that you can go on basically this very weekend!

1. Oakland Zoo

Hear me out, you may think that Zoos are a place for infants and children… but when was the last time you actually went to a Zoo? Were you a child? Then friend, it’s time you go again.

Entrance of the Oakland Zoo with an ibex head to the left and african elephant head to the right

Giraffe

I dragged my sister to the Oakland Zoo, which neither of us had been to since Kindergarten, and let me tell you I have not experienced so much childish joy and imagination than we had that day.

Google told us that the average visit time was 3-4 hours, so when we were reaching up to the sixth hour of our trip and avoiding staff members as they tried to corral us stragglers out of the now closed park, we had gotten a time well worth our money.

Do you know how tall a giraffe is!?!?

No, honestly, ask yourself. Can you actually picture in your head how big a giraffe is? Can you see yourself standing next to something as tall as a building story that is alive?

If you can’t, then it’s time you visit the Zoo. From general amazement at giraffes to playing with the otters to a genuinely spiritual experience seeing California Condors which at one point had less than 22 living members of its species, it was a fantastic day that I’m so glad I got to appreciate as an adult.

Horizontally posing by a California Condor image
My sister posing in front of a life-sized California Condor wingspan. 9.5 feet!!

2. Pinecrest Lake – Cleo’s Bath

And to reverse things, here’s a place that my sister dragged me to.

Image of a serene lakeside, pine-tree forested mountains, and lots of rocks!

If you’re a local then you’ve been to Pinecrest Lake. It’s a beautiful and popular little recreation spot with boat and bike rentals that a lot of elementary schools will actually take their fifth and sixth graders up to and teach them about how to be ethical hikers. There’s a very easy lake trail that will take you around the entire lake, and it’s lovely and anyone can do it.

Also, if you’re in even just half-decent shape, you can divert up the lake path and go up to Cleo’s Bath.

Image overlooking the waterfall outwards. Pinecrest lake is in view in the very back.
If you look really closely you can see all the way down to Pinecrest Lake!

While the lake is lovely, it is very popular, a bit noisy, and sometimes hard to find a nice spot to chill in. Cleo’s Bath however, is a perfect and serene little waterfall and swimming area (when it’s not too cold!) that has way way way less people and can feel like you’re actually “out in nature”.

The trail is a little hard to follow (look for the faded blue arrows, stacked stones, and be ready to scramble up a couple rocks!) but when you get up to the top it’s so so worth it!

If you’ve been sitting at a desk for the last year, then stretch your legs, go up to Pinecrest, learn about the abandoned Steam Donkey, and scramble up to see the hidden waterfall!

3. Asilomar Beach

And here is where my sister and I have collectively dragged each other to.

Rocky Ocean with harbor seals sunbathing
Look closely to see Boberto and his friends!

Asilomar beach is my favorite beach of all time. A lot thanks to nostalgia, no doubt, but so much more so just because of the diverse experience the beach offers. When you get there, you can park directly next to the sand dunes, crawl down the staircase, and then to your left is a wide swath of sand that you can have your beautifully cliché long walk on the beach, and to your right is a big stretch of rocks that you can hop and go tide pooling on!

There’s not a more meditative experience I have been on in my life than grabbing a long sturdy stick and hopping from rock to rock, watching the hermit crabs, the anemones, the star fish, and then eventually getting to one secret rock I know of where there’s always at least one harbor seal, and if you’re lucky there’s dozens of them teaching their babies how to swim!

I’ve named one seal Boberto, and have had many conversations with him from a respectful distance. He’s very beautiful, and a great listener. You should go and try to safely and respectfully meet him too!

Conclusion

Turlock is great, I wouldn’t be writing this blog if it wasn’t, but one of the biggest advantages to it is the centralized location to other places! I’m so so happy to be able to go on these day trips again and you’ll be remiss if you don’t go out and try some of them yourself too!

____________________________________________________________________________

All images in this post are taken by me. Image of my sister is posted with her consent.

National Student Employee Appreciation Week!

Hello one and all and welcome to what is, (in maybe a case of self-aggrandizement) National Student Employee Appreciation Week!

White sign on red background with text: "We are hiring"
Image by Vishnu Vijayan on Pixabay.com

Stan State started participating in NSEA Week in 2019 and has decided that it is a worthy time and tradition to acknowledge and celebrate student employees and all the facets that they do to keep Stanislaus enriched and running smoothly. You can find out a bit more about the events and awards taking place here.

For my part, here’s my little two-cents on what it’s like to be a student employee myself, and how the existence of this job and others has enriched my life as a student and how there might be opportunities for you to participate in one too!

At my New Student Orientation, our campus ambassadors told us explicitly, for them, the best part about going to Stanislaus was being able to work here as well.

Being a college student is labor intensive. It always has been, and it always will be. College is a sort of training ground for your mind, the war camp that you go through before entering the battle of career-seeking, so all the work you go through and put into becoming your best you is not only intentional, but fundamental.

It does, however, make it really hard to find employers and jobs that are understanding of the semester-by-semester shifting schedule of a college student though. And while Stanislaus and the CSU system has implemented procedures to try and keep costs low, it’s undeniable that tuition is higher than ever before and not working for four years while you get a degree just simply isn’t an option for most people.

Enter: Student Assistants.

Familiarize yourself with this page. It shall be a blessing unto thee.

You know who does understand the ever-shifting schedules of college students? Colleges. You know who has employment opportunities specifically reserved for Stanislaus students and Stanislaus students alone? Stan State.

Being a Student Assistant at Stanislaus is an incredibly flexible experience, and that’s what you’re going to want and what you may need. It may not be enough to supplement an entire income, but it has the types of job positions that can be incorporated into an already busy or working schedule.

And, it’s a self-fulfilling sort of process. You go to school and develop relationships with some of your professors, find mentors, instructors, and people you’ll work with as a student. Those professors can be great references for applying to Student Assistant positions, and can sometimes be the ones to point out the student employment opportunities available to you in the first place. And then, the bosses and contacts you make as an assistant, can be even stronger references for you post-college!

And you’re getting paid for your labor! And you’re getting work experience!

It’s a win-win-win-win!

Plant growing out of steadily larger groupings of coins
Image by Nattanan on Pixabay.com

As I eek closer and closer to graduation, I’m made more and more aware of the hundreds if not infinite different plausible life paths my life (and my degree) can take me. So many of them are plain blank slates.

Would I be a good Rodeo Event Organizer? I have no idea! I’ve never tried even a little!

The best way to find out if you’re good at and if you want to do something is to simply get up and try to do that thing. Student Employee positions are a safe, profitable, and experiential way for you to try those things and get an early start on a better understanding of yourself and your life.

I highly consider looking into applying a position if you find one that suits you!

Is Titus what he seems????

Buckle up everyone, because I’m about to open up your eyes.

Titus. You know him. You love him.

Stanislaus's beloved mascot
Image from https://warriorathletics.com/sports/2015/8/12/GEN_0812150230.aspx?id=1045

Look at him, strong and muscular, proudly adorned in the wardrobe of a proper Spartan warrior, bringing cheer and joy to all those Stanislaus students at sporting events and club rushes and the like.

But doesn’t it seem strange that someone in the outfit and physique of a Spartan warrior is still alive and kicking in the modern day?

If the average lifespan of a human is somewhere below 100 years, and if the Roman/Byzantine empire fell in the mid 1400’s, then don’t you think it’s a tad bit strange that Titus still has his original mint condition uniform and cape?

Well, I have a theory.

One of the reasons why Roman mythology and culture is so connected to our own modern day thought, is that we have lots of surviving records of the Roman empire. They wrote down so much in fact, that their writings eventually sparked the Renaissance and the transition out of the Dark Ages when scholars studied ancient Roman texts and philosophies.

Latin characters inscribed in stone
Image by Greg Montani on Pixabay.com

But in a world where we have censuses, military movements, and philosophical thought all documented, there’s one particular group of people that just vanished into thin air, disappearing from all documentation.

Colloquially known as The Lost Roman Legion, “Legio novem Hispana” has over two hundred years of documentation to it. We know what battles it fought in, where they were during major military movements, and that it was an important facet to the Roman military, until the year Common Era 120, where they simply disappeared from the records with no explanation.

The Lost Roman Legion captured cultural consciousness in the 1950’s and scholars and fiction writers alike theorized on what could have happened to the illustrious legion. Were they defeated in the battles of Scotland? Did they defect as part of a crumbling infrastructure in the empire? Or did they learn to harness elemental forces and become wizards as is fictionalized in the 2006 fantasy series Codex Alera?

But if you ask me, I think they found the fountain of youth. They retired, spread out across the world, became mascots, and brought cheer to Stanislaus sporting events.

Is it so unlikely that Titus could be a secretly immortal being who has spent the last 19,000 years hopping around from college to college, acting as the heart of campus life, bringing joy and enthusiasm to young people’s learning minds from everywhere from The University of North Carolina to Michigan State to STANISLAUS???

And ask yourself this, have you ever truly seen Titus age?

Silhouette of a Spartan warrior overlooking a sunset
Image by mohamed Hassan on Pixabay.com

I can’t say much more without them catching on to me.

Keep your eyes and ears open, don’t let them feed you lies! We are college students! We exist for truth!

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(Tune in to KCSS 91.9fm for a chance of hearing me voice a thought piece along the same theme as this post!)

Warriors Abroad – Podcast Guest Hosted by yours Truly! (mini post)

Nathan and his friends at an Herediano soccer game
Picture depicts my friends, in order from left to right, top to bottom: Garrett, Evan (who’s being a butt and not looking at the camera), Lida, Nathan (me), Steve (hiding behind my shoulder), Emma, and Jess (who took the picture). Image is shared with their permissions.

Did you know that I studied abroad? Do you want to hear more about it than I can fit into a singular blog post? Follow the Warrior’s Abroad podcast linked here to hear me talk about my experiences in their April 1st episode!

[Your regularly scheduled Main Post will be posted on Thursday!]