Mike Tigas

The night outside is silent, the streets are empty, and everything is motionless. The doors to the building are locked–no way in or out, save for those basement doors that provide the only after-hours exit. I smell a pot of coffee brewing up. There’s about 20 people in the general vicinity, all working diligently (sorta) to produce a paper the next morning. Definitely one hell of a crazy college job for a crazy college student. Welcome to The Maneater.

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I designed my first page today. Just a simple little generic “arrange these articles into this page template” job, but still. Feels good to know that I turned all of these little text files and that one TIF file (for a photo) into a visually understandable page. Headlines and subheads (c-decks) and infoboxes and cutlines… Now, being highly versed in web design, I greatly understand the whole idea of perfecting the little things like spacing and how important a few pixels (or in print, “picas”) are. I should do this more often, because I think I’ve already learned a decent workflow for InDesign, at least in terms of the Maneater’s house style. In addition, spending more and more time in the Maneater office has helped me socialize a little bit more with some pretty cool people. Pretty fun networking, heh. We watched A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Girl Next Door while I was there.

It’s been a long day. (Woke up, breakfast, midterm, history class, drop film off for developing, lunch, pick film up, chill for 30 minutes, go to darkroom, eat short dinner, go to newspaper office, help Adams bring car to uncle’s house to park, park car, 10 minute walk back from lot.) Adams remarked that he doesn’t like the whole “moving around constantly thing,” but I do. I figure, it’s better than being bored. The less time I spend in my room, the more I feel like I’ve done a good thing for myself just by being out in the world. I want to be doing more with myself than just sitting at my computer all day. Hence the whole branching away from CS, which I think was a good call… I feel like I’ll enjoy my life more this way.

On the same note, Matt Adams decided he’d major in English because he realized he doesn’t like CS. So I decided to drop the CS dual major and bring that down to a minor and actually try to take classes I enjoy and get stuff out of. Hence next semester I’ll be taking Philosophy 1000, Journalism 2100 (News), Honors Humanities (Early Modern World), and a computer science course, heh. Maybe a literature class. We’ll see. (Depends on what I take at Flo over the summer.)

I have two posts in the making here, more serious and well-thought-out material because I figure you guys don’t really like hearing me bitch and ramble about my life and you might as well hear my thoughts on stuff that you’ve probably thought about, too. (boy, horrible grammar.) I’ll also eventually redesign the site. Eventually.