Want to make my dreams come true? Get me this desk for a shiny price tag of $960. Sounds like a lot (a fortune in the eyes of a college student) for a normal looking desk. But trust me, my dear friend, this desk is beyond normal.

Americans work too much. Herman Miller’s new Envelop Desk doesn’t pretend otherwise and is designed to make it comfortable to park in front of a computer for hours on end.

Watching the video on the science behind this desk blew my mind. I must confess that I am one of the millions of Americans who stare at a computer screen more than is good for our own eyes… or neck.

Envelop lets you move around in your chair, as you’re wont to do in the course of a grueling work day, without having to twist yourself into all kinds of awkward positions to keep your eyeballs on the screen.

With a 12 year warranty and 100% satisfaction guaranteed, would you splurge on an Envelop Desk?

I came across this video two days ago and it hasn’t really left my mind since. I fell in love with the production of this video as much as I fell in love with the message. Forms of digital communication, like a YouTube video, have the power of being effective by making an impact and reaching thousands; in this case almost 300,000 people. It is refreshing to find these types of messages that break the normal “noise” I’m blasted with everyday.

Have a favorite inspirational YouTube video? I’d love to watch it.

2011 has been a year of growth, professionally and personally. Remarkable experiences and moments of impact filled my year and lead me to: having some awesome internships, a trip alone and abroad, marked the beginning of my senior year, introduced me to inspiring people, moved into my first apartment, and the list could go on. So, to 2011 all I have to say is thank you, for everything and everyone.

And to all my dear friends, this is my wish to you:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. I hope you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

And I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.

-Neil Gaiman

Cheers to the new year!

How the Internet Enables Intimacy – Stefana Broadbent

I agree that internet and new age tools are not keeping people from conversational intimacy, but rather providing more and more opportunities to bridge gaps and allow connections to be made. Through tools like Facebook, Skype, Google Plus and beyond, I have the advantage of communicating and maintaining relationships that factors, such as distance, could have previously prevented.

I would argue though that the depth of these relationships are becoming shallow. Because we have multiple platforms to communicate through, the issue of quantity instead of quality arises. And we have lost a sense of balance, shifting these mediums as primary method of communication and neglecting the face-to-face conversations.

Which leads me to my question, how can we, and future generations, be disciplined to understand a balance in new age and traditional forms of communication?

I am a proud owner of the Droid Pro by Motorola and thought I would begin sharing a few of my favorite apps or ones I found myself using frequently for each month. Here are my top two for the month of July:

Fooducate Nutrition Scanner

Free in the Android Market

This app was first recommended to me last month and I can’t stop using it! If you would like to make healthier food purchasing decisions, then I highly recommend this app. Great for people like me who can’t decode a nutrition facts label. Simply scan the barcode of the item and this app with grade it on an A-F letter grade. It also provides healthier alternatives.

“Fooducate analyzes information found in each product’s nutrition panel and ingredient list. You get to see the stuff manufacturers don’t want you to notice.”

Carbodroid – Water for Fit

Free in the Android Market

Another health related app, recommended to me by my sister. I’m more than guilty when it comes to not drinking enough water and driving myself to dehydration. This is app is great for a reminder (sometimes annoying) to stay hydrated. You will receive a notification throughout the day reminding you to drink more water. And every time you do, you can fill the Droid bot according to the amount of water you drank.

What apps have you been loving lately? I would love to try them out!

I have decided to bring a new serious to this blog in efforts to bring it back to life. Please welcome Tuesday’s TED Talks. Watching these videos has been a great pastime of mine for some time. Sure, watching Robot Bar Fight as the top viewed YouTube video this week might be entertaining but only for the first 30 seconds. Instead, I’d rather spend 20 minutes watching something stimulating that leaves me with food for thought, not song lyrics stuck in my head about Friday when it’s only Tuesday.

School Kills Creativity – Sir Ken Robinson

This is one of my favorite subjects to discuss. I consider myself a creative person and believe that a change in public education is detrimental if we, as a society, want to see creativity last. Students’ minds are now restricted and trained and have the inability to think freely and question more often than it should ever be. The world needs creative thinkers for innovation.

I would love to hear your thoughts about our public education system and how it is affecting creative thinkers.

Here is an interesting look at how our internet usage is impacting the Earth and what the large internet companies are doing about it. Felt nice to see Google and Yahoo! ranked the top two greenest, while competitors like Facebook and Apple the least. (Maybe I’m being a little biased?)

It is with much pleasure to share with you a guest blog post from a peer and dear friend, David Jolly. Below is his reflection on a recent PR accomplishment at his internship.

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At my internship this past semester I had so much freedom to practice my public relation skills. I was the PR Intern at Experience Columbus and it was one of the highlights of my pr career. A little idea I had about a media pitch took off and now I will be celebrating tonight.

Allow for me to start from the beginning:

1. I read and subscribe to Nylon Guys Magazine and in each issue there is a section titled ‘Chow’. This is when the light bulb went off. I told my boss, Scott, about this section in the magazine and that we should pitch Nylon Guys a story about Columbus Spirit Scene.
2. Scott thought it was a great idea and gave me my first assignment, find the editors email address. After several Google searches I tracked down a Gmail account.  I drafted my pitch and Scott approved it and I pressed the send button. Less than 10 minutes later the editor replied. I was thrilled, she was both interested and wanted to learn more quickly so she could feature the Columbus Distillery and Spirit Scene in the July issue.
3. Scott and I worked quickly to get all of the information she needed. Over the next couple of weeks we communicated with the editor and we set up a photo shoot for the magazine. The Nylon Guys editor had all of the information she needed to do the feature and now I just had to wait until June for the Magazine to arrive.

Finally, my July Issue arrived. I turned the pages quickly and on page 59 there it was. I was so proud to see it in print.

Take a look for yourself at the power of PR. An ad this size would have cost more than $10k, but PR got this placed for free:

I’m so happy about what my career will have in store for me and tonight I will be celebrating at Mouton with Cris Dehlavi (mixologist), Tessora, MiddleWest and Watershed all featured in the magazine.

We all have dreams of things we want to do in life. Unfortunately, not many people make those dreams a reality because it always becomes “too late.”

Well to be a little frank, we need to get the hint from Nike and JUST DO IT.  I was one of those people who had a huge bucket list and wasn’t crossing anything off until I decided to just go for it.

Of course one of the biggest hold-backs keeping me from doing the things I wanted was being financially capable of paying for it all. Well here are some wise words that are every bit of truthful: where there is a will, there is a way.

I managed to travel alone to Spain for two weeks by myself without the help of my parents or anyone else. [Please note that I'm still a poor college student.] How did I do it? I decided I was capable and that’s it. Nothing was going to prevent me from going because I already told myself I was going to. And after working hard, pinching pennies and thinking I’ll never see the light at the end of the tunnel, I did it and it was the best thing I could have done.

So what’s the moral of the story?

You really are capable of doing what you want to do, you just have to decide you are going to.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. – Robert Louis Stevenson

In a little over 24 hours, I will be boarding a plane solo to spend two weeks in Valencia, Spain. The excitement builds every minute that passes and the nerves of going alone are surely fading. To give a bit of background in a brief way, I made a very spontaneous decision to buy an airplane ticket to Valencia, Spain one night alone in my dorm room. I wanted to start living life to the fullest, make my dream of traveling a reality and just get away.

It might sound a bit irrational to travel alone for the first time to a country I’ve never visited and know no one in, but at the time I bought that ticket all of those factors were the adrenaline behind my decision.

And though I wanted to just go, I knew I needed to make some formal plan for safety reasons and for my parent’s sake. So, I signed up to take some business professional Spanish classes with International House. I do already speak Spanish, but I’m excited to perfect how to speak better in a professional setting.

In the two weeks I’m over there, I’m hoping to let go of my stress and just enjoy the time I have there. I have every intention of exploring the city, meeting great people and of course lay on the beach! Observing the differences in culture between the U.S., Spain and Mexico will also be fascinating.

So for closing, I can’t wait to take this adventure and hope the experience will just open my eyes (and inspire some good blog posts).

Original post from my other blog, The Steadfast Love.

“El mundo es un libro, y quienes no viajan, leen sólo una página.” – San Agustín

Hi stranger, it’s been a while… 4 months to be exact. I’ve given the blog a facelift and thought a life update post was due to accessorize the new look. But this is also a checkpoint for myself, to see where life is at the moment:

• January – May 2012 was a lot of hard work; average 4 hours of sleep, 2 jobs and keeping up with school.
• The hard work paid off and I graduated May 12, 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in public relations and marketing communications!
• I celebrated my 21st birthday. Note to self: I might not remember the night too well, but don’t forget I really loved the dresses I wore.
• I accepted an awesome marketing job with a great company, who flew me on a private plane to Montreal on my first day (surreal).  I’m thrilled to be starting my career.
• I’ve met really interesting and inspiring people and hope to keep this trend going.
• I had to say some ‘goodbye for now’s to my international friends. Sad to see them go but can’t wait to reunite.
• I’m the maid of honor for my sister, who’s getting married in four months! Let’s hope all those wedding blogs I obsessed over in 2010 come to good use.
• The first bullet has kept me from living as healthy as I would like. But being done with school should help me get back to a better lifestyle.
• Even after all my determination to leave Ohio, I’ll be here for a few more years. Luckily, that awesome job I landed tends to take me to different places. I think this is for the best.

All in all, I love the place I am in life right now. I’ve grown up a lot in the last year, and can’t wait to keep growing. I’m purposefully living to enjoy and to contribute. My mind has hit the refresh button and is ready to go!

The more exciting part of feeling refreshed is having the new perspective. I see things differently now than 8 months ago. I’m inspired by more real things, and less of the artificial. I’m understanding the impacts of actions and really wanting to find my place to act in good will.

Let’s keep this good life going.

Con mucho amor,

Self

Want to see a disturbing-almost-unreal-can’t-stop-starring video? Watch this new dance form called Bone Breaking:

I have such an aspiration to travel, to see, to witness what’s out there. I think traveling is a common passion for people and one that is exhilarating. I’ve checked marked Mexico, Canada and Spain and have about 88 more countries to go. I hope, wherever life leads me, I can capture it through pictures like this video. It’s simply just too cool.

• Set Your Alarm Half an Hour Earlier. Rather than trying to overhaul your schedule or make massive efficiency gains, how about simply setting your alarm half an hour earlier?
• Go For a Twenty Minute Walk Before Dinner. 
• Put a Bottle of Water On Your Desk. One of the simplest tricks for drinking more water is to keep a bottle of it on your desk.
• Hide the Television Remote (and Keep a Book by the Couch). There’s nothing wrong with watching television. But for many of us, the TV becomes a default activity.
• Take a Packed Lunch to Work. Trying to save money and eat more healthily? Then take your own lunch to work.
• Skip Your Usual Starbucks Trip. Why not skip that Starbucks stop and set up an automated transfer to put $5/day into your savings account instead?
• Switch Your Light Bulbs for Energy-Saving Ones. 
• Write a Grocery List. A little planning goes a long way when it comes to grocery shopping.
• Tackle that Thing You’ve Been Putting Off. It’s surprising how much better you can feel after getting a long-standing chore off your to-do list.
• Say “Thank You” to Someone. Saying “thank you” to one person each day – whether it’s a colleague, friend or family member – can make a huge positive difference in your relationships and your own happiness.

{source: enlightr.com}

In 2012, I will:

• Take care of my self, body and mind.
• Be open to love, it’s okay to feel it again.
• Say hi to almost everyone.
• Invest in friendships, keep in touch.
• Be in the moment and soak it in.
• Make actions of impact.
• Focus on quality not quantity.
• Celebrate accomplishments before moving onto the next.

How are you making 2012 count?

A few days ago I came across a blog post, 60 Tiny Love Stories to Make You Smile. And to be honest, hardly any of them made me smile; they actually made me shed a few tears. Maybe I was just being a little emotional that day but honestly all these stories just struck a cord. Super adorable and let’s you believe in love (if you ever stopped). I wanted to share of few of my favorite stories with you:

• Today, I operated on a little girl. She needed O- blood. We didn’t have any, but her twin brother has O- blood. I explained to him that it was a matter of life and death. He sat quietly for a moment, and then said goodbye to his parents. I didn’t think anything of it until after we took his blood and he asked, “So when will I die?” He thought he was giving his life for hers. Thankfully, they’ll both be fine. MMT
• Today was the 10 year anniversary of my dad’s passing. When I was a kid he used to hum a short melody to me as I was going to sleep. When I was 18, as he rested in his hospital bed fighting cancer, the roles were reversed and I hummed the melody to him. I haven’t heard that melody since, until last night. My fiancé and I were turned on our sides looking at each other in bed when he started humming it to me. His mom used to hum it to him when he was a kid. MMT
• Today, my 11-year-old son speaks fluent sign language because his best friend, Josh, who he grew up with from the time he was an infant, is deaf. Seeing their genuine friendship evolve and grow over the years MMT.
• Today, as my 91-year-old grandfather (a military doctor, war hero, and successful business owner) rested in his hospital bed, I asked him what his greatest life accomplishment was.  He turned around, grabbed my grandmother’s hand, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Growing old with you.” MMT

TVShow Medley – Michael Alvarado & Carissa Rae

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! I miss the good ole days. What happened to all the good TV shows? Enjoy.

 I love maxi skirts, period. Unfortunately, I have never found one that fit my height. I’m 5 feet 3 inches, which isn’t too short, but all my height is in my torso leaving me with the shortest legs ever.

I had given  up on ever having the perfect maxi skirt outfit until I found THIS how-to post on making your very own skirt!

All you need:

• 2 yards of  knit/stretchy fabric
• serger or elastic thread for your bobbin
• double needle for hemming
• 2 spools of thread to match your fabric

I can’t wait to visit my parents house next time (since I’m sans sewing machine right now) to attempt making this fabulous piece.

Click here for the complete post!

Happy Sunday, happy October, happy 2011, happy life! Came across this image and it was exactly what I needed to read. Maybe you need it to. Enjoy the day and enjoy your blessings!

Incredibly creative. The best part is not having thought of any of these ideas made from such simple material. Definitely going to try a few of these out.