Living vicariously through myself

Well, I decided I am going to go visit Olivia in New York this weekend.  It's a couple days in New York, and we might go see Shakespeare in Central Park or a show on Broadway if we can get tickets for reasonable prices.  I wanted to take Amtrak's Acela express train up there, but the price was just too much.

Then, next weekend I head up to Ann Arbor for the Burns tournament.  The field is very strong, but it'll be a good time and the game show round that Mike does is great fun.  I probably won't finish last, and it's always good to see friends.

I'm going to apply for a job at Purdue in the next day or two.  It's a job at their student radio station (an NPR affiliate) hosting public affairs and news shows, as well as training students.  The benefits are good, and the pay is reasonable -- between $27,000 and $30,000.  The job would be a great chance to do radio, teach, and be in close proximity to DPU and to WIBC, where I'd hopefully start anchoring on the weekends.  Also, it gives me a good base to begin work with Infoble -- both reading news for them and producing the daily sports talk show they're giving me the chance to do.

The next five weeks will probably be pretty hectic.  There's a lot going on, both at school and away from it.  Before I know it, it'll be September and hopefully I'll have a job somewhere in the Midwest.  This is about the time I've worried about for 5 years -- the time where I have to market myself to employers and convince someone to take a chance on me.  I've got some decent resume material, and now I guess we get to see if it's good enough.  I do know that when I take that first job in broadcasting, it'll be the most amazing feeling of relief and accomplishment that I've felt.  That's what I've been working for.

1.  You know what the first thing you notice about someone on the Metro is?  Their toenails.  And you can tell a fair amount about someone from the colors on their feet, I think.  Many, many women have red toenails.  These women are usually in suits or are reading the Washington Post.  Other colors seem to denote someone who doesn't have to take their job quite as seriously or someone not yet old enough to have to be a part of the workforce.
 
2.  Apparently I'm the first person in Medill's DC program in a decade to want to go into radio.  Everyone else wants their mug on TV every night -- the very thing I want to avoid.  I'm going to apply for TV and print jobs as well as radio gigs, but I've told people that I'd take a radio job in a smaller market over a TV job in a slightly larger market, providing the pay discrepancy was not too big.  If I get a radio anchor or reporter job, I'll say it pays to follow your dream and do anything possible to make it come true.  If you work hard, are a team player and have a goal, you can get it.  Don't compromise, push back when necessary and always keep your eyes ahead.  I told Ken Bode a year and a half ago that I was going to push against the TV track.  I kept my promise.
 
3.  It's funny the people that interest us enough to want to pursue a relationship with them -- funny in the connections we find.  There's one Medill girl I was interested in who's totally the opposite of most things I've become.  She's from the east coast, a Republican, and is a foot shorter than me.  All this and she has a male friend I refer to as "FuturePast Boyfriend", because that's essentially how she described him to me. 
 
Another girl makes much more sense but didn't really occur to me until recently.  She's from the Midwest, went to school in Indiana and even knows what a Bonner Scholar is.  The drive here would be to get her to stay in the midwest or in DC, should we have a mutual interest in one another.  She wants to go back to California (where she was working before coming to Medill), but she's a Midwestern girl through and through.  I appreciate that about her, even though she likely doesn't realize it.
 
4.  But at some point, relationships have to make sense in terms of time and space, as well.  In a month and a half, hopefully I'll have a job somewhere.  While the time might gel for 6 more weeks with someone I know now, the place likely will not.  So it's a little hard to try to start something now.  Long-distance relationships make no sense, and no relationships work if people have any sort of an "I don't know" factor.  I'll bide my time, I think.
 
5.  I've started going to breakfast at the National Press Club every morning.  I used my NU activities fee to become a member, so it's free, which is nice when I think about grocery shopping each week.  And the first day I was there, an older man named Ray came up to me, asked if I was new in town, and asked if I wanted to go eat with the small group of people he was eating with.  At least it's nice to have some company in the morning and not just sit there reading the Washington Post and having orange juice.  I'm by far the youngest person except for one girl who's working for the Library of Congress for the summer.  It's the continuation of a long pattern for me -- I get along with people much older than myself almost better than I do with my peers.
 
6.  I'm trying to decide if I could stay in Washington when September rolls around.  It sounds like there might be a job at the top news radio station in DC (where a girl just got hired out of Medill).  She came to speak and help teach the class how to use the editing software, and it was clear she had far less experience with radio than I did, so that should bode well.  DC is ok, but it's not near anyone who's near to me.  I don't think I'd want to be that far away from my family for very long unless the situation was amazingly good.  I don't mind living in Northern Virginia, but things move very slowly here.  I prefer the faster pace of the midwest and I prefer the people, too.  People there tend more to have the "Midwestern sensibility", as one of my classmates put it a while back.  It's something you don't notice until it's not there -- and then there's not necessarily a void, but there's a space that you know should be filled by something.

Ok, lots of stuff has happened and people are beginning to bug me about a new post, so here's an update.
 
1. Livi came to visit last weekend.  On Friday evening, we played some Halo with Jeff and went to bed early so we could get up and head to see some of the Smithsonian museums Saturday.  We ended up hitting the Hirschorn Gallery of modern art and the Air and Space Museum, which frankly I found a little underwhelming.  I'd seen pictures and things, but the Museum of Science and Industy in Chicago blows the doors off the Air and Space Museum.  Further proof there's no reason to live anywhere but Chicagoland if you can help it.  The Hirschorn was interesting, but also somewhat perplexing at times (which may have been the aim).  One of the oddest things was an entire room (a very large room, at that) with three projection screens that had video of an elephant just basically existing in a room very similar to the one we were standing in.  There was no rhyme or reason to it -- the elephant was just there.
 
On Sunday, we went to the National Zoo, which wasn't bad.  It was a little hot and the land the zoo is on is kinda hilly, but it's a good zoo and the animals were fun.  I got a few decent pictures from the weekend.  You can see them here.
 
2.  This week was hell on wheels in the newsroom.  There was incident after incident.  I must have angered Toth the News God (a creation of Larry Steulpnagel, one of the Chicago broadcast professors).  The one thing to remember throughout all this is that I have to get my stories to the CBS news feed the day I do them by 5:30 pm. 
 
The first story I wanted to do this week involved Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, who was vehemently for the gay marriage amendment (which everyone knew was going to fail), and happened to be having a press conference announcing positive changes made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  So I was going to go do a story on how kids are safer (Old News Saw: "You can't go wrong with critters or kids") and then get McConnell on the record about the marriage amendment.  Instead, when I call to pitch these stories, I'm told that the manager of Lexington's airport will be in DC that same day at a hearing to talk about in-line baggage screening (esentially they screen the baggage on the way to the plane instead of in the lobby).  Somehow, this is a better story, so I'm sent out on a 4-hour odyssey to do this piece of garbage.  I get done with the story plenty early, and offer to take the tapes of a couple other people to the feed as well.  I drop them all off at 4:45 and head home. 
 
When my metro train emerges from the tunnel a few stops from home, my cell phone lets me know I have a message.  It's the news room telling me I had sent the wrong tape to the feed and to please call.  I do, and it turns out they found the right tape and got it to CBS in time, but now everyone is going to rag on me about sending the right tape.
 
The following day, I do a story about McConnell speaking to the Senate about a bill that would buy out a Depression-era tobacco quota.  Kentucky is a big tobacco state and it's a good story.  I knew McConnell would be testifying because his press secretary called me about 5 minutes prior.  This was just enough time to call WKYT and confirm they wanted the story.  I didn't have time to get to Capitol Hill, so one of the TV production companies from downstairs took the feed in for me.  When McConnell was done, I went down, got the tape and brought it back...only to find out the whole thing had a bad tracking problem that rendered it unusable.  Fortunately, they had made another dub I could use, so I dodged a bullet there.  I did a quick 40 second package, and was done by 3:30.  CBS had the tape by about 4:00.  At 4:15, CBS called to say the tape had a tracking problem and green flecks throughout the video.  Translation: it needs to be redone -- and fast.  I ran back down, got the McConnell tape again, and got it to CBS with about 10 minutes to spare before the feed ended, but it was more trouble I didn't need.
 
3.  Dan was in Washington for training this week, so we hung out a little bit and took in some of the DC cuisine.  When I say "took in", I mean "searched for things we could afford to eat".  We ate at a place in Dupont Circle called Wrapworks which was pretty good.  We also had Malaysian food on Monday which was pretty tasty.  He expecs he'll be back in a few weeks for work, so hopefully we'll get to hang out a little more and actually do something besides just eat.  Our hope was to go see the Capitol Steps, but sadly they were on the road touring.
 
There's more things I've been thinking about, but those will come at a later date.  Speaking of dates, for those concerned, nothing ever happened (and probably won't).  THIS IS NOT A PLEA FOR PITY, IT'S JUST A FACT.  I'm not sad about it -- it just wasn't to be. 
 
Have a good night everybody.

I finally caved in this afternoon and bought an 80 gig external hard drive. It's USB 2.0, but my computer currently is not. It's very slow in transfer time, so I think I'll probably have to go get a USB 2.0 PCI card. My only hope is that I can use it AND my wireless card at the same time.

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this week and I have some problems with it.

1. I'm disappointed with Michael Moore. He has the capability to be a good documentarian (Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine), but he went over the line here. I am not a Bush supporter or apologist, but Moore takes a few too many liberties. As a journalist, you're taught to portray the truth, fact after fact, and let the people makes their own decisions. What Moore does is diametrically opposed to this: He TELLS you what to think and what to focus on -- often better than most political spin doctors.

2. This brings me to my next point. It's obvious that Moore has been overcome with his celebrity. When he made Roger and Me, he was trying to affect change by showing something that was unfair. Fahrenheit 9/11 is Moore trying to use his celebrity to get George Bush out of office, often using callous stunts and scenarios which are completely out fo the realm of possibility.

3. What Ralph Nader was to the 2000 election, Michael Moore might be to the 2004 incarnation. He's NOT going to help the Democrats with thisfilm -- in fact, I'd be surprised if he doesn't make people madder at him than they ever were at Bush. I wonder if it wasn't a calculated move by Quentin Tarantino and the rest of the committee at Cannes that awarded the film the Palm D'or -- knowing that there would be enormous press buzz if it won and knowing that people would therefore go see it.

4. However, I also now wonder if people are that smart. My suspicion is that I look at this like a person whose job is based on the facade of objectivity, and others will simply take the film at face value. Since most people are dumber than a box of rocks -- especially where politics is concerned -- Tarantino's strategy might backfire (which would inevitably be a good outcome, of course).


I also saw Spiderman 2 last night. It was pretty entertaining and, from what I understand, follows the comic book story threads pretty well. There were major problems with the physics of the movie, though. The two most notable problems were these:

1. If Spiderman swoops down at full speed to grad two children out of the street, he probably crushes them, or at least knocks the wind out of them. He does NOT just grab them and set them down a few seconds later in the park.

2. If you have a self-sustaining fusion reaction that amounts to a giant ball of magnetized, molten metal, you CANNOT destroy it by dumping it in the nearest river. An implausible solution to the story's biggest plot twist.

I only got to the movie yesterday after taking literally the entire day working on one TV story, because things just kept going wrong. I worked from 9 am to 6:30 pm on this story, in the process foresaking my radio story on the same issue and my internet sports broadcast for the people at Infoble. And I 't be won't be able to get back anywhere near "on schedule" until Tuesday because of the stupid holiday weekend.

This 3-day weekend is my frst real weekend in Vienna, though. With any luck, I'll have a date tonight or Monday. We'll see.