Insanity
I was assigned my first-ever story from The Daily on Monday.
To keep the story short (and because I really shouldn’t be online posting this for…oh, the random people who read this blog just because they typed “Monday” or “interview” into the WordPress search engine), in the past three days I have interviewed:
- The Deputy Secretary of Administrative and Financial Services of the Philippine Senate
- The Mayor of Tkon (a little town in Pasman Island in Croatia)
- An operations officer for the International Organization of Migration (IOM)
- A training coordinator for CHF International
- The manager of the EU Project for the Estonian Ministry of Education
…Aaand a few other people whose titles are amazingly long. Gettin’ the connections, no? I’m stoked.
This article’s due on Monday, hopefully I’ll be able to finish this, the first draft of my globalization paper, the first draft of my other international studies paper, and the weekly international studies paper before Tuesday/Wednesday. Oh–and I gotta do some research for a separate globalization project and study for a midterm.
Also, I have a funeral to go to on Sunday. I’m guessing I won’t be able to take my laptop there. What do you think?
Overall, this has been an interesting and pretty awesome week and weekend. The Halloween “party” (which is in quotes because really I’m not even sure if it can really be called a party) was alright. Afterwards, my roomies and I took a midnight stroll (ok, maybe it wasn’t midnight, but it sounds so much cooler) on the Ave and got some food, while, I might add, in our costumes. One of my roomies had a pirate costume that was incredibly short and was topped off with fishnet stockings and there I was, Cleopatra, in a super-thin, spaghetti-strapped, low-cut dress with a gaudy headdress. We got some attention, I’m sure. And I’m surprised I’m not coughing with a painful sore-throat yet.
Well, Saturday was pretty uneventful actually. One should know (or maybe it doesn’t matter) it is now Sunday morning and I’m adding to this unpublished post (if, for some reason, you didn’t catch on to that, although you really should considering the date on which this is published is displayed a few inches above this). I’m just sitting here waiting for my cousin to take me to Vancouver.
My entire Saturday consisted me sitting on my ass in front of this laptop slaving away on my article. What killed me was that I was ten inches over the required length of thirty. I think I got too much information out of my interviews that I founded sincerely fascinating. BUT what else contributed to the ten inches were, I think, the long names and long titles of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship recipients. And the fact that in journalism, “U.S.” can only be used as an adjective (U.S. schools for example). Everything else, like “This is his first visit to the U.S.” is completely wrong–United States HAS to be written out. And since the length of newspaper articles depends not on the number of words but rather the number of CHARACTERS (including spaces, commas, periods, dashes, and all that jazz), and since United States is thirteen characters…well, you get the idea. So I edited that damn thing honestly over a hundred times–made really lame changes. In that example above, for example, I would’ve changed it to “This is his first U.S. visit.” That sounds terrible, but that’s not an ACTUAL example from the article. Give me some credit here.
I’m rambling.
This week should be jam packed as much as this last week. I’m looking forward to it. I kinda want Monday to be here.
