Hell Month 2025

    Hey there! At the time of writing this, I've essentially finished up most of my FSUFilm application work (which is what I wrote about for the last three months), with only my personal statement remaining. But if you're getting a little tired of me blogging about my film school application, worry not! I have been keeping busy with plenty of other responsibilities and side quests that all came crashing down on me during the month of October. Among friends, I had a pretty grisly name for this month, but for the sake of this blog, I'll be referring to this October as Hell Month 2025.

    So what exactly made October so hellish for me? Let's start with the "needs" first, meaning responsibilities that I was required to attend to. 

    I'll start off with my Kudzu responsibilities— in terms of actually managing the team meetings, the weekly readings, and being a team leader, I was having a great time! I haven't really talked about how my new position as Head Fiction Editor for Kudzu has been going on this blog since... I got the job?? But rest easy, it's been really fulfilling, fun work. I'm really proud of the team I have, since they are all smart, vocal, and productive people to work with. It took some time to get used to being "the guy in charge" but after the first week I started to get more comfortable with my leadership role. There were some growing pains regarding how I wanted people to critique the pieces, but luckily for me I have a group that is incredible and very receptive to feedback, so we solved those issues with no real problems. The majority of the stress that I had to deal with was from more behind-the-scenes issues relating to a particularly inefficient colleague of mine, whose refusal to do their job well would lead to more pressure on me. Issues ranged from not getting my feedback delivered to writers who needed it, to  running out of submissions to give my team for a couple of weeks, which really stressed me out at the time since our deadline was closing soon and we didn't yet have anything we wanted to publish. What matters is that I was able to calmly and logically reason my way through dealing with these situations and triumphing over them. I also have to acknowledge Sophie, my assistant Fiction editor, who was willing to work with me through everything and kept my head cool at times where I was stressing like crazy, things wouldn't have worked out as nicely if I didn't have her support. It may have been a rough time for me mentally, but I'm proud of how I was able to deal with these problems professionally.

    Classwork, somehow, was one of the things I was worried least amount, but it still posed a significant challenge to keep up with when combined with all of my other responsibilities. This Fall, I'm taking three actual classes: Visual Rhetoric, Issues in Publishing, and Latin American History in Film. This doesn't sound all too bad, especially in comparison to my freshman year schedule, but it was effective in sneaking up on me amidst the other issues I was dealing with. Visual Rhetoric kept my attention through the projects it would assign every other week, which I would often leave for the last few days before the deadline. These projects were pretty interesting, like tasking me with the redesign of a monument or the analysis of online comment sections, but unfortunately I had difficulty fully engaging with the content due to mental exhaustion. In the context of Hell Month 2025, this meant my Thursday and Friday nights would involve me locking in on these projects, sitting down for five to six hours each day so I could finish by the deadlines. This reflected poorly on my work ethic in terms of time management, but I managed to submit pretty great work in terms of quality according to my professor, which broke my heart thinking about how much better I could've been if I was properly dedicating time to these projects. Still, a pass is a pass. The other class that really was bothering me was Latin American History through Film (LAH). This wasn't really a homework issue, but rather a lecture issue. Every time I would go to class, I would be locked in a room for three hours trying to take meaningful notes when my professor would go on constant tangents and rarely touch on the actual films. This meant I would have problems with paying attention in class, wondering about how else I could've been using this time productively. It didn't help that the professor was a really tough grader on the homework assignments, always nitpicking a few points off of my grade for ridiculous reasons (I can't believe I was given a B for going 8 words over a 300 word limit). In isolation, I probably would've been fine with these two classes, but if I'm being honest they took sort of a backseat in relation to my other responsibilities this month.

    What I'd say was the biggest "need" stressing me out this month was my internship at the Southeast Review. I had a rocky start working for the organization as I realized that my idea of what I'd be doing for the magazine wasn't much like the mental image I had formed when applying for the position, but instead completely misleading, disguising a social media and marketing internship as an editing internship. At first I was frustrated with this deception, since I wanted more experience in a reading/editing position than what was being assigned to me (I had two batches of stories to read throughout the entire semester), but after a while I decided to lean into this experience and make the most of learning and developing skills in a marketing toolset. It wasn't easy (especially without much guidance and under pressure) but eventually I did get a better hang of the job, sending out nearly a hundred emails to different English programs throughout the country along with trying to get local businesses to donate to our fundraising campaign. 

    This is where Hell Month 2025 kicks in for me, as it is the month where the SER Fall Fundraiser would be held. My responsibilities regarding the fundraiser were simple on paper, as I joined a group concerned with the scheduling and planning of the event with the hopes that I could bang out a schedule resembling last year's event and call it a day. This turned out very differently: I was consumed by the pressure of having everything run perfectly smoothly on the night of the event. With another group member, we had to reinvent the entire schedule that was planned down to the minute since we had a very tight timeframe to work within, and I had to communicate with other groups concerning marketing and logistics to make sure everything we had planned was even possible. I think I genuinely had a nightmare or two of the event in the nights leading up to the event. The great news is that the event was a smash hit vibes-wise, with everything running perfectly and on time. I was running around like a maniac checking in on every member of the organization to make sure they didn't need anything, so by the time I finally relaxed a little, the event was nearly over. Financially, I think we barely broke even, which was a pretty bad look, but the positive reputation our organization developed after the event night was good enough that we didn't get chewed out too badly by our bosses the week after.
 

  The final "need" I dealt with this month was the start of my employment at my university library's Starbucks. I haven't had a paying job since my high school misadventures at Dunkin' Donuts, so this was a bit of a cold shock to my schedule, which had become accustomed to the free time I enjoyed prior to Hell Month 2025. So of course, not knowing my limits, I decided that this month was clearly the best time to get a job and further clutter my schedule. Within days, I was already heavily regretting this decision, so much so that I would find any excuse possible to complain about the job I had barely worked at and fantasize about quitting as soon as I found another job to transfer to. What a tantrum!

Of course, as time passed, I got more and more used to working under The Siren. I realized which stations I preferred (my heart belongs to the refreshers bar and the warming station) and which ones I despised (hot bar). By the time week three or four rolled around, I had made better friends with my coworkers, I got used to waking up early and going to work, and I discovered my favorite thing to do at work, which was manage the register and take orders. It reminded me a lot of these games that I used to play all of the time when I was younger, except now I just had to type some buttons and talk to people warmly instead of making any of the drinks myself. I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay working here, but for the time being, it gets the job done and pays me "well".

    That's all I was stressed about in terms of "needs," but unfortunately for me, I struggle with identifying when to stop adding things to my plate. There were a few other things that were adding to my super-crammed schedule that weren't necessary, but I wanted to do them for fun or otherwise.

    For example, I made a pact with my good friend Matt that we would attend every home football game for the Noles this Fall semester. Our team's record has been... inconsistent during our time here. During our freshman year, we were an undefeated college football team that unfortunately got snubbed at the end of the season after a tragic injury to our star quarterback, Jordan Travis. The year after that, we had an awful replacement QB, along with some generally bad team management, which led to a pretty bad losing season for the Noles. So, with an optimistic spirit between us, Matt and I figured that this season would be a good one to maintain the flow of winning/losing seasons for our team. We were so sure of this, that we ended up buying matching FSU overalls to wear to every football game together. While I don't yet regret the purchase, this would prove to be a sort of clown uniform with how the games went this season. We kicked off the season with an incredible upset win against Alabama, which excited Matt and I, only for every other game to be a horrific loss. We still showed up to every game (because we aren't sore losers) but man, was it hard to maintain excitement after a losing streak where we would get humiliated at home every weekend.

    So maybe sports isn't the place to find happiness this month! Maybe I should look forward to the light at the end of the Hell Month 2025 tunnel: Talloween! But instead of choosing a low effort funny costume to go out and party with, like any other self-respecting college-aged man, I wanted to try something different this year. With the excitement around Deltarune Chapter 3+4's release earlier this year, I decided that my costume would be referencing my favorite character from the new drop, Mr. Tenna the TV-head man himself! The fun part being putting together a costume that took a little more effort than usual, using a tie, custom jacket, and of course, the iconic TV head. This didn't take forever to put together, but it was yet another thing I was cramming into my already-packed schedule, meaning that most of the time I spent working on the TV head in particular was in the morning times I had before class or work. In spite of a limited timeframe, however, I had a lot of fun putting together the project! I hadn't worked on a creative crafts project by myself in forever, so I enjoyed working with my hands to measure out the panels of cardboard and painting the head purple. My biggest regret was the TV screen that represented the face— I originally intended for the screen to be semi-transparent so I could see through the head whenever I would wear it, but nothing that I was trying was working sufficiently :( I had to just accept that visibility would be a feature to sacrifice for having a complete (ish) costume by my deadline. I still really liked it though! If I have more time next semester, I'd like to treat this costume as "Draft 1" and improve on the design for my next rendition of the Tenna costume.

    Yes, this was an incredibly busy month for me, but in hindsight I wouldn't have it any other way. No matter what happens, this will be my final year as an undergraduate at Florida State University, so I want to make the most of it! Whether that manifests in pushing my limits socially or academically, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. All that is left for me is to finish strong, and I intend on doing that!

...I wouldn't mind a little less work though.