Party in the j school library. I’m working on a timeline of the flood of ’93, and it’s super boring. Seriously God bless search engines online because they really make things so much easier than flipping through this old thing searching for something that I need. Then again Google also makes it a lot harder for people to be sneaky and it knows everything about us and all the embarrassing things I search sometimes such as “are unicorns Scotland’s national animal?” WHICH THEY ARE BY THE WAY… fun fact of the day.

Though it does make me feel like I should be in a scene from the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or something cool and BA.

When I was young, I was in love with my words. Getting edited was the most painful process on those 2 page, double spaced, papers about the inner motivations of savage boys on an island with a conch shell or the most annoying character that ever lived (Holden Caufield) or whatever other topic I wrote about in those short short (I say this in hindsight) papers before college.

Yesterday, I picked up a story for Liz when she needed it last minute. Fine fine, no matter. Story easy enough call someone get some information, use a press release, check the clips. I talked with the ACE a bunch to find out what he wanted, wrote up a story. Then watched as he rewrote the entire thing. I suppose it’s a good thing my attachment to words has weakened, or else it would have been heartbreaking. After we finished and he asked me what I felt about it, I said “well at least I wrote the headline.” Part joke, part passive aggressive bitterness I must admit, I guess I must also admit I’m not good at doing something I am passionate about. I wasn’t attached to any of the words in my story about American Airlines because, well, I never would have cared about it on my own. Still don’t really care about it. But that’s really been the only story I didn’t ‘like’ just did it to get it done with. And it was the most brutal editing, as well.

I have always been one who pretty much despises crime and politics stories, most “hard news” stories, to be honest. I might even go so far to say I might be part of the news hating generation, ironically enough. Which makes working at a newspaper hard at times, and has probably been one of the main causes of several “what-am-I-doing-with-my-life” sessions throughout the past few weeks. But I suppose this class is required, but it’s sort of a bummer the Vox beat doesn’t exist. It’s not so bad as I’m making it out, especially when I get to work on stories that I pick/pitch stories that I am interested in (veering as far away from crime and politics as possible).

Only thirty more minutes of GA shift left, where hopefully I won’t be forced to go to the police station again. I seriously could think of a thousand things I’d rather do than that, one of them including drowning.

Interviewing Bob the firework man for our multimedia project was probably my favorite thing I had to do so far, I just hope that I end up liking this more than convergence reporting even though I’m starting to think that might have been a better fit for me now, since it seems to be the only stories I pitch are longer more involved pieces that err on the side of magaziney rather than breaking news. C’est la vie.

No looking back now though.