First Year Out: Alex Daniel
My name is Alex Daniel and I'm 23 years old. I moved to Austin from Keller, Texas in 2005 to study English Writing and Rhetoric at St. Edward's University, and since I graduated last May, I now work in Austin as a technical writer and writing tutor. In my spare time, I like to write and record music.
3 postings
1 page views
Do What You Love
11/11/09 1:14 PM
This week I learned that you should never—not ever ever ever in a million trillion years—leave anything you value in your car. It doesn’t matter if your doors are locked. It doesn’t matter if you have an alarm system. It doesn’t matter if your only valuable possession is in a black backpack on your black floorboards under the cover of the blackest night. It doesn’t even matter if you cover that backpack up with a hoodie and clothes before you head off to the bar. Someone will smash your window and steal your laptop. So went my Friday night. Even though the incident shocked and upset me, it also taught me a second lesson. For the last year or so, I’ve been recording a set of songs that I wrote onto the laptop that...Some things don't change
10/23/09 5:45 PM
When I was in Kindergarten, the fifth graders seemed older, wiser—like they had their whole lives figured out. When I myself was a bumbling fifth grader, the kids in my town who could drive seemed like mature adults ready to take on the world. When I became the reckless teenager with a license, I envied those who had already started at their college of choice because their futures seemed as good as set. Of course, when I got to St. Edward’s, I was just as directionless as everyone around me. Every time I passed what I’d built up in my mind as a threshold of knowledge and experience, I realized I’d been wrong about it all along. The most recent, of course, was college graduation. But I never heard or thought good things about college graduation....A warning
10/23/09 5:42 PM
You may be having a senior year meltdown if: You, as a typically productive person, find yourself taking three to four hour naps every afternoon. You, as a college student with a penchant for alcohol that makes your friends and family raise eyebrows, are one day alarmed by the number of empty beer bottles that have taken residence on your windowsill. You, as a normally rational person, realize your schemes to stay a student forever/flee the country/busk for a living, are getting weirder as graduation gets closer. Not that I’ve been there. Alright, fine. Guilty as charged. By the middle of last semester, I’d read so many reports about the dire job market and heard so many comments from professionals about how “it’s best to be in...
