Where to start?

Here I am in Grand Rapids, living in the real world. Well, sort of anyways. It's kind of like a job, except I don't get paid. We've worked out a plan for my compensation, all my rent and some of my food is paid for courtesy of Momentum (the company providing FoodCircles with its seed money) and in 8 weeks, if I'm still here, I'm looking at about 5-8% ownership of the company. In this first week I've been incredibly busy. Most of the week has been consumed by introductory events and meetings along with a couple informative ones about topics such as intellectual property.

I spent today attending the Tedx event. If you're unfamiliar with Ted and Tedtalks, it's just a series of presentations where everyone just talks about something cool. What I didn't know about Ted is that it's a networking hotbed. There are 3 breaks and each one is over an hour long and during this time everyone just goes into the lobby and gives each other business cards. Each person had "I innovate _____" on their name-tag and having "I innovate Android apps" as my name-tag opened a lot of doors for me. I have 5 people who I need to follow up with, 2 of which told me about jobs they'd have for me. Where were you guys 3 months ago?

Some people thrive academically at the college after a poor performance at high school. The more open environment works for them and they come into their own. I'm starting to feel like college didn't work for me but 9 to 5 does. I don't think it's because I'm not setting my own schedule or anything like that, I feel it's because the things I'm doing actually matter and others are depending on me. University always felt like it doesn't matter how I do as long as I learned the important stuff and got a passing grade. But here, I want to achieve big things.

Our house has no furniture. No couches, no tables, no TVs, no dressers, no rugs, no microwave. We didn't even have a shower curtain up until yesterday. My room holds a fold-out bed that's about as soft as the floor and only slightly cleaner. I have a bedside table that houses my keys, wallet, etc. I keep my pants and shirts hung up in the closet and my socks and underwear in a suitcase on the floor. Much of this arrangement is temporary but since I won't be in Ann Arbor for at least a couple of weeks it's going to be a long temporary. To top it off, we don't have internet and we won't have it until the end of the week. To keep myself busy I bought several movies on the cheap at meijer. Tonight's feature was "The Legend of Bagger Vance." Tomorrow I've got "The Warriors" lined up.

This isn't how I pictured my post education world. I never had a large desire to attempt entrepreneurism. Now that I'm here, I'm not sure what I would take given the choice between this and a job in corporate America. In any case, there will be time for job security and paychecks later in my life. For now I can focus on learning, networking, and making something cool.

P.S. The BSE? will be done soon, I know the winner and I've written part of the entry. It shouldn't be more than a week. (assuming I get internet soon…)