NickCummings.com

Now’s probably as good a time as any to look back on where I was two years ago this month. Much like it is on this beautiful June morning, the sun was shining, birds were chirping, and pollen was in full search-and-destroy mode, hell-bent on ruining my day. It didn’t, though, because I was graduating, dammit, and that’s all that mattered.

It wasn’t a clean break with the university like I’d hoped, thanks to a nasty incident involving my Honors College thesis and the last-minute set of expectations sprung upon me by a third party. I was looking at a summer mired in a painstaking, laborious rewrite of what I thought was a halfway-decent paper. Worse, I was moving back home for the first time in four years.

I’ve since moved out and back home a couple more times, so I’m getting used to the process of giving up the you-know-I-don’t-really-need-to-do-laundry-this-month joys of adulthood for the sake of being an amicable houseguest. But finding myself heading back to square one once again — moving apart from my girlfriend of a few years, without any promising job prospects or time-consuming life pursuits in mind — after two years of supposed self-improvement isn’t so great. It actually totally sucks.

But I promised myself I’d do it right this time. Being unemployed, I mean. And I think that, so far, I’ve done a bang-up job of going broke in style. I started running about a month ago with the help of a handy iPhone app called Couch to 5k (twitter.com/c25kapp), a $2.99 program that managed to accomplish the impossible feat of motivating me to exercise of my own volition. I’ve still got about half of the nine-week program to complete, but my weight’s the lowest it’s been in about eight years. Of course, it’s not getting me any closer to landing a job, but at least I feel like I’m accomplishing something.

I’ve been working on developing a system for getting stuff done, and I think I’m seeing some results. I’ve been trying out a program called Things (available on OS X and iOS only, unfortunately) that excels at intuitively categorizing and prioritizing tasks. It’s even helped me to launch a few personal projects that I hope will eventually see the light of day.

I’m also tackling David Foster Wallace’s immense novel, Infinite Jest, as part of the Infinite Summer challenge. It’s not too late to jump in! Check out an explanation and reading schedule at infinitesummer.org.

It’s not all good news, though. I’m still no closer to a fast-paced, jet-set life as a suave game designer, but I’m trying not to let that stress me out. I suppose I’m still young by most estimates; why worry?

I mean, besides the obvious.