You should spend a bit of time to learn about producer / consumer design pattern with events.
Basically, you would have two loops running in parallel, where the top loop (producer) handles the events and the consumer loop (consumer) executes the state triggered by the events.
The messages from the producer to the consumer loop are typically passed using a queue or notifier.
The reason I am mentionning this is so that your program can scale and to ensure a better response from the GUI.
It is worth investing time to learn what I suggest. You'll be using that architecture more often than you can imagine.
