Luana.me

Still a Student, After All (I Will Never Stop)

Hello! 😀 Guess what? I’ve almost completely recovered. Such a good feeling!

I have completed an article for a client today and done some social media work for them, so I feel good and accomplished. Now, time to update my personal blog and have some fun with my Character Blogs, too. Yup!

So, today’s post is about studying. Oh, I know some of you will make a face and say, “nooo, studying is awful! All that yucky homework to get done, bleh!”.

Well, I know there are teachers out there who make it really hard to enjoy a subject (been there, done that), but that’s not the ‘studying’ I’m referring to.

I used to be a university student until 2012. Computer Science undergraduate. I was really slow to progress on exams, though, because in addition to my health issues I had almost no background in Mathematics and computer architecture, so everything was new to me and I had to absorb it bit by bit.

Never mind, I told myself, I love it so much that it doesn’t matter how long I take to graduate, as long as I DO graduate, right?

Some people around me had different thoughts about the matter, though. Long story short, there was this strong idea that paying several years of tuition (albeit I paid half of it with my own money) for a student with health issues who doesn’t make steady progress wasn’t a good idea, so I was strongly pressured to quit.

[NOTE: I know I shouldn’t have cared about that idea, but not being financially independent and the excess stress and pressure added to my ‘malfunctioning’ and made studying almost impossible.]

I didn’t quit, though— I just put my studies on hold. I don’t pay tuition anymore, but my university ID is still active, so while I can’t take exams, I can still use the library and the CS lab.

I keep in touch with my old classmates, I attend to student reunions (in semi-incognito, as I can’t participate actively) and I give and get advice on subjects.

I still study. I attend lectures every time I can drop by the faculty, I study lecture materials that professors put online and I email professors who know my story and agreed to keep an open channel with me. (They also hope I’ll be back as a full- or part-time student, some day!)

So you see, I’m still a student, after all. And I will never stop being one.

It’s not just my university. I keep studying thanks to free materials from MIT’s Open Courseware and public course pages, and websites like Coursera and Udacity that let you enroll to university-grade courses for free.

Some people now know they can’t do anything to stop me.

Besides, I’m a freelancer thanks to my multi-area studies. I tend to use what I learn, so it’s thanks to the notions of Linguistics if I can write a better English and do better text translations for clients; and it’s thanks to Automata Theory if I learned to recognize patterns behind a language (natural or artificial) and understand programming better.

And if I’m starting to get a name in the freelance marketing field, it’s because I studied Marketing and SEO on my own.

So this is really it: I can be taken out of university but, in a way, university can’t be taken out of me.

This is who I am, and I love it.

From Cold to Bronchitis… And I’m Sick Once Again

It started as a cold, I swear.

That was a tad more than a week ago, can’t remember exactly, but it looked like nothing serious. I kept on working, doing my stuff, going out and so on.

Bad joke, right? Over a week later, I’m home, working through the sickness while dreaming to spend a whole day in bed, resting as my body demands. And work is crap, because when you’re sick you’re not exactly in the mental shape to do things as they should be done. I feel kind of disconnected, my brain goes ways I don’t want it to go— and I don’t need a high fever to have that. A bit less than 100°F suffices.

I can barely sleep at night, always sneezing and coughing. I only slept 4 hours last night, and believe me, it can mess up my brain even worse. Not sure this blog post will make sense after I publish it, but well… I can say I tried, at least. (And my daughter Mandi Pope is an angel! She proofread the post for me. I love you, sweetie!)

So, I have a mild bronchitis now. My chest hurts and some other stuff I don’t want to write in detail (eww). I’m taking the whole weekend off to rest and recover, and I hope my freelance clients will understand that I need rest (oh, they do! But of course they need my blog posts, so I’m doing my best to heal quickly).

This is my to-do list for Monday 27:

• Finish up a blog post for my client Jerry + the PDF checklist I’ve been working on (I’m proud of this bit of work, heheh)
• Finish up 3 blog posts for my Indian client— shouldn’t take too long, since these posts are half written and all the subheads are in place (plus, they’re short articles that only require a little research, no big effort)
• Catch up on email replies, both work and personal emails
• Setup a new calendar for the week, to also include work for my client (and friend) Brandon and for my new niche blogs, Sponsored Circle and Biz Character Blogging

That’s it, I guess. I don’t want to fill that up too much, because the stuff I listed doesn’t take ten minutes to get done, but I look forward to push it a little more next week, so I can get my backlog cleared.

And I hope to see my Love again, too, because I miss him badly. I haven’t seen him in almost two weeks now. Not cool. 🙁

Oh well. Lunch is almost ready, and then off to bed I go.

You take care, too, and careful that you don’t catch a bronchitis. I don’t want to learn that you’re going through the same crap as I do.

Love you all.

Work, Domain Names and The Freelance Life

Work work work.

My life has been all about work over the last three weeks.

Which is good! I’m hoping to reach a $1,200 monthly income starting in October, so that means my wedding and moving out also begin to turn into reality.

You can’t do a lot without money, right? 🙂

However, I’m also very tired. I tend to burnout very easily and I have to be careful with other health issues, too, so I’m going to pay more attention to my work-life balance from now on.

Also, I need to write for leisure, not just money, and this blog needs quite an update.

So, to start off, I cut down my domain number to 270 (from 340+). You might think that’s still quite a big number, but if you run several character blogs along with many other personal and business websites, you can easily see how the number jacks up pretty easily after all.

If you are interested in a domain and want to make me an offer, I have them all listed here and you can just email me to domains@luanaspinetti.com to make an offer — or buy them at $10 each. Some domains are for sale in the NameCheap Marketplace, so just look up ‘luanatf’ in the Seller field and you can buy them easily from there. 🙂

The second update concerns my health. Looks like I will have to lose some weight, but not for aesthetics — I have to do it to stop my body from producing a type of fat that gets in the way of my metabolism and my hormones, thus making it rough for my period (which has been going on for almost 3 months straight now) and my future ability to conceive.

Since the issue is serious and it might turn into an obstacle to having a family, I have to anticipate my exercise and food control plan that I originally wanted to start next year. Unfortunately, issues related to my period and uncomfortable uterus contractions require me to act faster than planned. Oh well, I can still do that, right?

To all people who mocked me all throughout my teen years for my being fat— don’t worry, I’m not doing this to let you ‘win’. LOL 🙂 I’m doing this to improve my health as well as my fertility, so this is really not about you. Ah yes— I will be losing weight but my aim is NOT to get thin — I’m looking forward to a healthier plump body, so to speak. My identity (the image I have of myself) is not thin, and it will never be. You can be as thin as you wish, of course; my own choices do not affect yours. 😉

Lastly — and then I’ll call it a day for this post — I’m trying hard to fight back shyness to be able to interview people via phone/Skype/VoIP. I need to feel in control and not stutter too much, or there’s a risk I will distract my interviewee. This is a skill I need to hone and practice practice practice, because I need it for work.

If you like Skype chats, my sweethearts, we may try chat verbally sometimes. You would help me greatly. 🙂 And I hope I can return the favor somehow.

So that’s it. Until the next post, darlings.