Conclusion of Thought-ception

As the semester wraps up here at Ohio Northern University, so does all my various assignments and projects. One of those concluding assignments involves this blog directly. From Thought-ception's creation, this blog has been used to meet the blogging requirements for our social media classes throughout multiple semesters. I know, who would have guessed? The publication of this blog marks my 15th and final weekly blog requirement for my current social media class, Social Media Strategy and Campaigns.

Following the end of this semester, I am only one semester away from graduating. Wow, that is one scary thought. Although I began my college career in the preprofessional program with the intent of becoming a physician’s assistant, I realized my true calling of marketing and communication studies early enough that I could catch up on the coursework. Heading into this final semester, I do not have to take any solely social media courses. The closest course I must take is Multimedia Writing, which I doubt will require me to continuously blog.

Since I most likely will no longer need to blog, I am now in a situation of do I wish to continue blogging or not. I wish I could say I would post every now and again, but with my attention span, I cannot make that promise. I must thank all of those who have read one of my many blogs, graded and hopefully improved my blogging abilities, and anyone else who inspired or contributed to my blogs. I know before I started this blog, I had almost no knowledge how what a blog is or how to even use one. I guess you can teach old dogs new tricks. 

 

Sadly, with my unforeseeable continuation of this blog following my following signature, I cannot in good faith conclude this blog with "until next time" since there might not be a next time. With that being said, I thank again all who have been involved with this blog since its creation on Aug. 27, 2015.

Signing off one last time,

Matt

Food for Thought

I had a question pop into my head this morning when I was getting dressed that I could not figure out the answer to. That question is if dressing in "sweats" (sweatpants, sweatshirts, etc.) to go to class create judgement by those around you? I understand there is always some form of judgement no matter what one wears. The judgement that I am thinking about is more related to attractiveness of the individual. 

I can only justify a judgment being made about the individual's willingness to put forth effort based on how he or she is dressed. I wonder do those around you take that effort level shown from one’s attire and apply that to their judgment of you beyond what he or she's of you in class? For example, I sit next to Bob. He notices that I wear sweats to class and makes a judgment of me being lazy. He then justifies me as being lazy in other aspects of my life outside of what he sees from our class together. 

I also wonder if someone judges another based on dressing up compared to his or her attire. I cannot lie, I sometimes do this. I see someone wearing something that is reflective of effort given attire (for me that is jeans and a flannel shirt) and judges that individual accordingly. The reason for this question though it has anyone ever judged someone who put worth effort in his or her attire in a negative way. So, by putting forth effort in what the individual is wearing, he or she gets judged negatively based on there being no need or warrant for going that extra mile, or putting forth unneeded effort.  

I know some of what I am talking about is "random" but these are some of the many thoughts that shoot through my mind on any given day. 

Until Next Time,

Matt 

Home Sweet Home

Remember back in the day when you and your parents joked around about doing something to your "old room" after you moved out? Well that is exactly what I came back to when I came home for Thanksgiving break. I am not mad or anything, but it is just strange sleeping in my older sister's old room because my room turned into a room for my mom to do bead jewelry in. 

Anyways, I am home from Ohio Northern University for our Thanksgiving break for a full week. It is nice having technical down time, but there is never actual down time for me to enjoy. I do catch up on some well needed hours of sleep. On the other side, my daily schedule when I am home is much more filled than what it is when I am at school. I still have just as much homework as I did when I was at school. The only difference now is that I have even less motivation to do it because my body just wants to relax while I am home. 

On the lighter side of it all, we have a new house guest. Well, kind of. Our neighbor's outside cat, Salem, has taken up spending his free time and bedtime in our sunroom. The room has a dog door so that if the weather is bad or whatever, our animals can relax in the room before we can let them inside. So, it is in this nice, comfortable room that Salem now rides out the finer things in his life. He will occasionally stand and meow at our sliding doors until we go outside and pet him. He is just living the roughest of life’s, right? 

To wrap it all up, we are having a gathering of all my best friends for our fourth annual "Bros-Giving." Over the years, we have all faded away from each other, which is to be expected. Originally, I was the only one that when to a different college because they all either remanded in our hometown or went to Central Michigan University. As the years gone on, some have dropped out or transferred and the ability to get us all together for one night is becoming relatively impossible. I am sure Bros-giving will be the topic of my next blog, so be ready for all the stupid boy stories and hypermasculinity in that post. 

Until Next Time,

Matt

Fun Times of Senior Year

Hell week has arrived ladies and gentlemen. No, I am not talking about the traditional hell week that athletes of most sports undergo. My hell week revolves around the completion of many major class projects. 

The first of my major projects to be due is an internal analysis of Deloitte's tax compliance sector. Typically, this project would be a breeze for any of my other business classes, but this time it is different. Let me first start by saying the only good part about this situation is that I am in a group with five others who share the work equally. Anyways, instead of having the material and information that we need available to complete the assignment, that is not the case this time. Deloitte is not willing to share almost any information that we need to make appropriate assessments and conclusions on its internal goals and strategies. How are we supposed to understand the company if all we have available to us is the vague information it shares on its homepage? 

The second major project I must do is for my communication capstone. We must turn in a rough draft of our capstone project by Friday. Granted this is not the full paper, only the literature review, method, and timeline for next semester, it is still a lot of work. The rough drafts average around twelve pages of research. I am not the fastest writer, so this assignment is going to be rough for me. 

I know I have a few other projects I could talk about but I figured I could go on a tangent and talk about the results of the flea bombs. So, we ended up pushing back the day we were going to set the bombs off until this past Saturday. It took forever since nobody would help get the house ready. After the bombs went off, we got back to our house and it seemed as if all bugs and fleas were killed. With that in mind, we brought the dog back and washed her. And washed her. And washed her. Yet the fleas still reminded on her. Then one of the housemates brought his cat home while he was "under the influence" to say the least. He put the cat under the faucet and thought that was "good enough." Following that, our other housemates brought their cats home but let them run around for a couple hours before washing them. After all the cat’s bathes, the fleas remained. So much for everything I did because apparently, I am the only one who cares about the animals in our house. Fun stuff. 

Until Next Time,

Matt

Fleas at Every Turn

Fleas. We have fleas everywhere in our house.

I wish the fleas we had were comparable to the one is Disney's "A Bug's Life," but they are nowhere close to being similar. As I have mentioned many times before, we have a fair amount of animals in our college house. Naturally our dog is the prime suspect for which one of the animals brought the fleas in first, but the cats are not so innocent. All three of our cats love trying to go outside any chance they get. There has been well over a dozen times now that we have caught our cats roaming around outside without us knowing, so they very well could have brought in the fleas too. 

We had an issue with the fleas a few weeks back but our house vetoed my idea to flea-bomb the house to make sure all the eggs are killed. They thought that simply washing the animals would kill all remains of the fleas, but that clearly is not the case since they are back.

It has got so bad that the fleas are constantly biting me in my own bed because the animals generally sleep all the time in my room. My legs can not take much more abuse from the flea bites so I went out and bought heavy duty flea-bombs for our house. 

The only issue with this solution is that there is a lot of things to be done before the foggers can be opened, such as cleaning or putting away open food, but nobody in the house wants to actually clean. So not only is there a barrier to follow the cleaning instructions, but we also have to find a place for the animals while the foggers are do their jobs. It is always a fun time in our household and hopefully I can blog next week about how successful the flea-bombs were, but let's not jump the gun.  

Until Next Time,

Matt  

Friday Night Frights

It is a strange feeling to think all the fun I have had over the last few years is coming to end. My last undergraduate Halloween weekend is in the books. I think this year I had some of the most fun I have had on a Halloween weekend compared to all other Halloween weekends I have had here at Ohio Northern University. 

I do love getting dressed up in costumes every year because it gives a chance for me to show my truly weird self. I told myself that I would not wait until the last minute to get my costume together, but that did not happen. Come Friday around 5 p.m. I still had no costume picked out yet. So I got online and searched around and ran across a costume I could recreate with minimal effort and costs. As a fan of 1990s movies and Jim Carrey, I naturally was drawn to one of my favorite movies, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I decided on recreating the rehab scene within the movie.  

In order to pull off this costume, I only needed two things: the shirt and the tutu. The funny part about the shirt I used is it is actually part of a scrubs uniform from a good girl friend of mine whom is a nursing major. The shirt fit so tight that I could move my arms above shoulder level. The tutu was the easiest part to find because my housemate picked it up for me at a Halloween store when he went out costume shopping. 

 

Even though this movie was produce in 1994 and was fairly popular, a lot of people had no idea whom I was. I kept getting asked if I was a fairy or something along those lines. On the other hand, the people who did recognize me from the movie absolutely loved and adored my costume. 

Until Next Time,

Matt

Puppies, Puppies, and More Puppies

For the past few minutes I have been trying to figure out what to blog about. I ended up getting distracted and heading to Facebook as most procrastinators do. It was there that I saw one of the cutest puppy videos I have ever seen. The post originated from the Facebook page called The Pet Collective. The video is a collection of 15 puppy videos that highlights the cuteness of various dog breeds. I would highly suggest clicking and watching the link at the bottom of this post to get your daily dosage of puppies. 

From the first few seconds to the last few seconds of the video, the video tugs on the heart strings. I am not a great fan of the American Pit Bull Terrier puppies, but there is a few videos that highlight Australian Shepard puppies which I adore. Ohh by the way, I forget to mention there are Pembroke Welsh Corgi puppies in this video. 

This video has well over 807,000 views, 12,370 shares, more than 29,000 likes or reactions, and over 3,800 comments. I think this page has an incredibly loyal fan base on top of sharing relevant information that many users of Facebook would be willing to like or share. I honestly do not think there is a video the page has posted that I have not liked or shared since I started following it.

As promised, the following link will forward you to the video. 

Until Next Time,

Matt