The easiest way to explain Opportunity Cost is to define it as the non-monetary value placed on things like time, pleasure, reputation, and productivity.

To frame this concept into an everyday scenario take this situation: It’s a Monday night and two of your favorite shows are on during the same time slot. You can watch either Law and Order or CSI. You choose to watch CSI, so now you’ve lost the opportunity to watch Law and Order. Additionally, if you had chosen to record Law and Order via DVR then your opportunity cost is the time spent watching the additional show.

We face these choices everyday whether it’s through the conduit of school, career, or our personal lives. Therefore, it’s important to understand the Opportunity Cost behind every decision we make. Do you take the non-paid internship or the job at a local retailer? Do you spend your tax return money on fixing the problem on your car or invest in a home entertainment system? Whatever decision you make is going to result in a loss, so we must evaluate our decisions in order to save the most Opportunity Cost.

As a journalist I face these situations a lot. I prefer to conduct interviews over the phone because the Opportunity Cost of the driving time takes away from transcribing my audio notes, researching background information, and other such things.

Hell, it’s not just journalists that have to deal with this in a large sum, but students in general. Let’s say you have two exams tomorrow for two different classes. Which class do you stay up all night studying for? Knowing that if you spend the night studying for your Art History final it’ll cost you a night of preparing for your English exam. So, how do you make your decision? By keeping your Opportunity Cost’s in mind perhaps you’d be better prepared for this crossroad earlier in the week or even reach a better conclusion when deciding which subject to hound over all night.

I’ve found that by training my brain to think by Opportunity Cost with even the most elementary decisions, it’s made my life much less stressed. Take my phone for instance:

When I chose to purchase a Palm Pre with unlimited data and insurance I paid the Opportunity Cost of having a lower monthly cell phone bill. However, because I chose the Palm Pre I’m enabled to check my multiple email accounts, social-networking sites, various event calendars, ect., ect., which without these features I’d be spending a great deal of time seeking out public computers, searching the web, flipping through multiple calendars. Therefore, I’m allowed to be much more productive and informed which is a Opportunity Cost greatly lesser than a lower cell phone bill, and overall made for a better decision.

On that note: what sort of Opportunity Costs do you all find yourselves faced with on a regular basis? What non-monetary values are the most important to you?

Over the last twenty-four years of my life I’ve learned one thing: as human beings we’re greatly affected by our surroundings. This is a basic concept that many people can relate to. The biggest example of this is the people that are around us. Do you have that friend that lifts your spirit anytime their around, or on the flip-side acquaintances that just put you on edge with their company?

Well, I’ve found that this isn’t isolated to the company we keep, but I hypothesize that it’s the same for objects and our environments as well. I’ve blogged in the past about how the vibe of each season is different. In fact, I’ve always felt familiar rooms, images, and habits affect how we feel about our lives at that point. Because of this whenever I need to change the way I’m feeling or I’m discontent I rearrange my room, read a different genre of fiction, switch up my daily habits, ect., ect.

There’s something else I do in order to continually feel like I’m moving forward and when needed change my frame of mind. This may sound strange, but every season I change up the wallpaper on my computer and cell phone.

This may seem arbitrary. However, I feel that it is a therapeutic device to help navigate my drive, feelings, and optimism to where I want it to be. So, I’ve decided to better explain this habit of mine I’d share my cell phone wallpaper from this past autumn and the present season we’re in, winter.

I snapped this photo with my Palm Pre sometime during autumn quarter. Summer was a restless time and I was excited to get back into the daily grind of school and study. I had this long gap between classes (5 hrs) therefore, I spent a lot of time sitting on a bench reading my assignments and studying my Arabic. The autumn air was crisp and smelled of fall, everything was orange and my feet shuffled over the varied colored leaves. Autumn is encompassed by an aura of change, and as I near graduation the growing chill in the air crept up my spine; not with the anxious drawl of winter, but an excitement for what graduation will bring to me. I felt as if the fallen leaves symbolized my last few quarters as OSU until I bud the next year, just as new leaves would bud, as a graduate. I think the feeling you get by looking at this image is how I felt throughout the autumn.

It’s just the beginning of winter quarter, but I captured this image on my first day of classes this past Monday. I felt that the autumn wallpaper no longer carried the that it had in autumn. I got to campus early, as you can see from the darkness, and was strolling towards the Oval in the frigid cold. Leaves no longer rustled under my sneakers, but instead melting salt grinding into the bottom of my shoes with each step. As I walked down the pathway I felt this would be a great image to capture the feeling of winter. The gloom, the shadows, and the bitter cold weather. However, there’s a light at the end of this path. Now, when I look at my phone I am reminded that even though the weather sucks there will be a light at the end of this path, I just need to drive myself through the snow.

This coming spring will be my last quarter at OSU before I graduate. I wonder what my wallpaper will be?

Tomorrow is New Years Eve, but it’s not just the end of another year. In fact, it’s the end of a decade. I think we’re living in a real strange time in history. Most of us grew up in a decade we call the nineties. It was a time before the technological era we live in now as adults. Perhaps a simpler time, filled with pogs and trading cards. It was the decade we traded in our cassette players for portable CD players which we had to listen to while sitting down so the tracks wouldn’t skip.

Then the millennium came and along with it the technology that we’ve grown so used to that it’s hard to imagine it at one time never existed. We don’t buy CD’s anymore but download entire albums with our smart phones from iTunes. We watch movies in IMAX; because the regular theater screens are too small. Trading cards seem like relics, and an internet profile is now as important as carrying a State ID. This was the two-thousands.

However, the other day I was wondering what this new decade truly means. This decade will be called the twenty-tens or more simply the tens. This seems so bizarre to me, because in a hundred years people will look to this decade like we look at the 1910’s and gain entertainment out of our fashion styles, merits of interest, and contemporary fads.

Thinking even further into the future, a decade from now we’ll be living in the twenties. We are the generation which will set the foundation and decide the outcomes for the next hundred years. People will look at our history as we look at the stories from the early 1900s.

Something even stranger to think about: in sixty or seventy years when the young people of that age refer to the way things were in the twenties they’ll be thinking 2020 while we’re thinking 1920. In 2100 the fashionable clubs will have theme parties where people dress as we do today, and ladies 80s won’t be the same experience we celebrate at bars today, but instead will be in a fashion we cannot even dream up right now since it doesn’t even exist yet.

How old will our children think we are when they have to pick up our prescription medication? The pharmacist will ask our birth date and they’ll have to rattle out a time from a different millennium. Their parents were born in the 1900s, isn’t that weird they’ll say. They’ll think we’re lying when we tell them that when we were kids we didn’t have cell phones and passed time smacking circles cut out of cardboard with plastic weights, or we bounced a ball to see how many metal trinkets we could pick up before it landed.

These are things we should all take into consideration. However we consider this past decade —- good or bad —- we’re setting the blueprint for the next hundred years. We’ll be the last relics of a forgotten time.

This past year went by pretty fast. Looking back at these lists was pretty nostalgic. I was able to move forward in a good direction with many avenues in my life, and I am confident that when I sit back to review 2010 I’ll have made even better progress in my activities. I have more to say, but that’s better suited for another blog. Until then — here’s my review of the year 2009!

Looking Back:

- Went back to school after taking a year off
- Wrestled all summer with my sleep patterns
- Saw friends graduate and get engaged
- Started tweeting right before it became popular
- Got a Tahoe after my Imperial broke down
- Worked for a few months at a shisha café
- Retired my Samsung Instinct for a Palm Pre
- Helped three friends move; one to New York
- Tried some Somali and Middle-Eastern dishes
- Wrote a couple freelance articles for The Lantern
- Began writing regularly for UWeekly Magazine
- Interviewed many interesting people for news articles
- Went to Jen’s wedding in Cleveland
- Got two more tattoos
- Learned how to write and read in Arabic
- Saw Cirque Dreams Illuminated at the Palace Theatre
- Watched more foreign films
- Re-connected with my favorite TV shows
- Stopped drinking hard liquor
- Stopped writing for Columbus State
- Began writing a new book
- Got my first digital camera

Popular Topics of 2009:

- Stabbing at Comfest
- H1N1
- Twilight Saga
- Celebrity Deaths
- Jobs & Career Paths

Books Read:

- Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly
- Caleb Williams by William Godwin
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
- Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
- Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
- Fall with Honor by E.E. Knight
- Valentine’s Resolve by E.E. Knight
- Illegal by Paul Levine
- The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
- Pamela by Samuel Richardson
- Evelina by Frances Burney
- She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
- The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
- The School for Scandal by Richard Sheridan
- Fantomina by Eliza Haywood
- Olaudah Equiano by himself

Movies Seen In Theatre:

- The Dark Knight
- Taken
- Confessions of a Shopaholic
- Watchmen
- I Love You, Man
- Knowing
- The Fast & Furious
- Crank: High Voltage
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Star Trek
- Angels & Demons
- Terminator Salvation
- Dance Flick
- The Hangover
- Year One
- Transformers 2
- Bruno
- The Ugly Truth
- Funny People
- G.I. Joe
- District 9
- Inglourious Basterds
- The Final Destination
- Halloween II
- Gamer
- Fame
- Surrogates
- Zombieland
- Couples Retreat
- Law Abiding Citizen
- Where the Wild Things Are
- New Moon
- Planet 51
- Ninja Assassins
- Brothers
- Avatar
- Sherlock Holmes

Plans for 2010:

- Graduate OSU in the spring
- Increase my Arabic vocabulary
- Finish the book I’m working on
- Join the Dramatist Guild of America
- Write another stage play
- Find a second regular writing gig
- Find a place to live with my girlfriend
- Outline a plan to visit Stonehenge
- Get another tattoo
- Buy a PS3 to watch Blu-rays

I know the days are getting shorter, but this is ridiculous. However, the offbeat sleep pattern I’ve adopted probably isn’t helping any. When autumn quarter wrapped up many students like me found that we had a lot more time on our hands. Personally, I really wanted to keep myself occupied since UWeekly doesn’t run through winter break either leaving me utterly unproductive.

Over the break I’ve been keeping myself busy working on a new book project and I had planned on continually studying my Arabic. While I’ve made good progress in both of these avenues I can’t help but feel as if the disruption with my sleep cycle is screwing with me.

Almost the day that the quarter ended I got sick and worse off a stuffy nose. Due to my nasal congestion being heavier at nighttime I was forced to adapt to a nocturnal schedule. I tried everything to relieve the congestion, and I mean everything. It wasn’t until a week of losing sleep that I discovered the miracle of Afrin nasal spray. A long story short - now I can sleep.

I’ve got a new problem now though, and that is re-adjusting my sleep schedule. While I’ve got nothing to worry about right now, once classes start back up there’s no way I’ll be able to keep these hours. After trying several strategies to fix this problem I’ve came up short. Hell, take a look at the timestamp on this note.

I’m starting to think that the only way to curve this new habit of staying up late and sleeping into the afternoon is to just stay up through the day following a night of sleeplessness to exhaust myself. Therefore, allowing me to hit the pillows at a decent hour. If anyone has experience with this, tips for breaking the nasty habit, or any comments then please drop your two cents!