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little good has come from being awake at 4:32 a.m.
Fie on insomnia. These are probably the kinds of hours when Napoleon planned to take over the world because he was a short, sickly Frenchman with something to prove - the thinking isn't entirely lucid. In my case, I worried.
Yesterday, a gentleman from the Manatee bureau of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune called me during our weekly meeting with Foley. The connection was awful so we only got to speak for real later that night, but he said he was looking to hire a general assignment reporter and made it sound for all the world like after seeing my portfolio (blessed be the job fair woman true to her word in passing it along) it'd take is for me to come down and have lunch with him.
Of course that's not what's going to happen - there'll be some sort of test, and lunch with the executive editor(s) and answering questions you think mean one thing but are really some kind of work-ethic diagnostic. But he sounded genuinely interested - the news editor of one of the most highly esteemed metropolitan papers in this state wants me to bat for his team. He's never met me, and our conversations all together have amounted to maybe five minutes. Maybe.
This is not unlike the reactions I've gotten from the St. Augustine Record, the Florida Times-Union and The Lakeland Ledger, prestigious papers all. I have confirmed appointments with them over the next couple of weeks that involve them putting me up in hotels and taking me out to dinner.
...Abuh?
People are remarkable. I mean, I do this myself every day, but they put all kinds faith in someone after seeing a few sheets of paper and having a conversation. Taking chances on people is life, whether offering jobs or starting relationships or taking a professor's class, but it's like tandem jumping out of an airplane - you hope the other person pulls the rip cord, not the buckle of the harness attaching you. And yeah, that's a gross dramatization, and few decisions are that final, but it's a damn brave act nonetheless.
All I've wanted for the past year is: 1. to be done with school already, and 2. to be gainfully employed at the end of it. And now that that prospect seems to loom ever-more eminently, I've somehow decided that instead of excited, I'm beside myself with gut-chilling horror.
Somewhere inside, I realize I'm 23 years old. I look and speak like an adult. I live on my own, and while no, that doesn't include paying for most of it (there's only so much one can do with $800 a month), it is my own in every other respect. Nobody wakes me up in the morning, washes my dishes, cleans my room, does my laundry, or any of the other incidentals of living. Which sounds so basic, but I remember the raw panic of it before I developed a routine of it back in freshman year. But all things considered, I am more or less my own person.
And I keep saying there's really not all that much more that the world can throw at us Alligator kids after running an overworked, underpaid, malnutritioned staff of mostly full-time college students to put together a newspaper so real (I'm not exaggerating) that many competitions don't even acknowledge us as a college publication. But that's not writing a lot more inches inches all of a sudden (though in that respect, I usually overwrite) on a daily, beat basis, and do I have not just the writing but everything else that goes into making a story happen in me? The perspective? Thoroughness? Willingness to track down and hound sources? I'm not the girl who walks into a roomful of strangers and walks up to the nearest one, and while being a reporter is oddly empowering in that respect (Mike says it's the same for him, possibly because I know what I'm going to say to them and in an official capacity) it's also exhausting, often frustrating work, as I watch it happen around me at the office all the time. I've been mostly lucky with public information officers and fraternity higher-ups and witnesses, even when the situation's been tough, but I need to learn to shove when the pushing starts. I can do that with my reporters, and god knows having "...did not return five telephone calls for comment Tuesday" printed in the paper gets attention, but I'm naturally not imposing. I'm sure that would change with the first good chewing-out I get from an editor, but I live in fear of disappointing authority figures, and this job carries an especially high risk of that.
Speaking of Mike, he and I have been tossing around the idea of tag-teaming the Times-Union interview. The editor in the paper's Tallahassee bureau is looking for two people, but as he pitched it to us, one of them would be the main writer while the other would serve more of an assistant role. Now, we'd probably work more equally than that, as we both have respective strengths (his is why, mine is how), but there would still be a division, in both the time on field and pay. And unless I work as a secretary or in a campaign office or, frankly, as a copy editor, making a career out of being support staff isn't terribly feasible. But journalists are their own people, and I'm afraid what having someone to rely on and to share blame with would do to my capacity of doing my own job.
So, on the one hand, safety, either at the Times-Union or as a copy editor at The Ledger. On the other, opportunity I'm not certain I can handle. Hm. I've been there before with my sudden appointment to Metro Editor, but then I had Justin to sit across from to teach me, and the stakes weren't nearly as high and certainly didn't involve competing with a respectable publication like the Bradenton Herald. Basically, how big of a risk should I be willing to take?
And that's even after setting aside the generalized anxiety of the fact that I'm going into a profession in which making $35,000 a year is living large, circulation has been consistently declining, and is virtually thankless, but lord help you if you trod on anyone's delicate sensibilities. The hours are impossible, yet you never truly walk away from your work. None of which is to say I don't love it, but I don't want to lose myself in it as I did Spring semester.
As an aside, I took![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
walkingshadow's word for it (rarely a risky proposition, for a nice change) and read Intersections by Kaneko. Didn't regret it. While a little Jossed by Season Two and somewhat cliched and wince-inducing in parts, on the whole I found it a well written, thoughtful and compelling montage. Also, admittedly, at least a small part of my endless affection for Rodney McKay lies with the commonalities between our personalities. Minus his penchant for astrophysics; that's something I barely passed the regular version of in high school. But my space buff manifests itself in other ways.
...And Rodney was their man. He finished school and completed a doctorate on their dime. He got a lab full of cowering minions, and an office with a view of the courtyard fishpond. He wrote on the hypothetical properties of exotic matter and the physics of micro black holes.
Then, one day, they brought him an impossible Star Trek gun that made matter disappear like a David Copperfield party trick. You can't ask any questions, they said. You can't talk about it with anyone. Oh, and if you could reverse engineer a prototype, that would be great.
And then, one much later day, they took him to a dark, soundproofed room in Langley, Virginia, and a hard-bitten military guy showed him videos of a team walking through a wall of water. When the water disappeared, the team was gone.
"Don't worry, kid," the military guy said when Rodney wiped at his wet eyes. "Took me like that too."
Yesterday, a gentleman from the Manatee bureau of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune called me during our weekly meeting with Foley. The connection was awful so we only got to speak for real later that night, but he said he was looking to hire a general assignment reporter and made it sound for all the world like after seeing my portfolio (blessed be the job fair woman true to her word in passing it along) it'd take is for me to come down and have lunch with him.
Of course that's not what's going to happen - there'll be some sort of test, and lunch with the executive editor(s) and answering questions you think mean one thing but are really some kind of work-ethic diagnostic. But he sounded genuinely interested - the news editor of one of the most highly esteemed metropolitan papers in this state wants me to bat for his team. He's never met me, and our conversations all together have amounted to maybe five minutes. Maybe.
This is not unlike the reactions I've gotten from the St. Augustine Record, the Florida Times-Union and The Lakeland Ledger, prestigious papers all. I have confirmed appointments with them over the next couple of weeks that involve them putting me up in hotels and taking me out to dinner.
...Abuh?
People are remarkable. I mean, I do this myself every day, but they put all kinds faith in someone after seeing a few sheets of paper and having a conversation. Taking chances on people is life, whether offering jobs or starting relationships or taking a professor's class, but it's like tandem jumping out of an airplane - you hope the other person pulls the rip cord, not the buckle of the harness attaching you. And yeah, that's a gross dramatization, and few decisions are that final, but it's a damn brave act nonetheless.
All I've wanted for the past year is: 1. to be done with school already, and 2. to be gainfully employed at the end of it. And now that that prospect seems to loom ever-more eminently, I've somehow decided that instead of excited, I'm beside myself with gut-chilling horror.
Somewhere inside, I realize I'm 23 years old. I look and speak like an adult. I live on my own, and while no, that doesn't include paying for most of it (there's only so much one can do with $800 a month), it is my own in every other respect. Nobody wakes me up in the morning, washes my dishes, cleans my room, does my laundry, or any of the other incidentals of living. Which sounds so basic, but I remember the raw panic of it before I developed a routine of it back in freshman year. But all things considered, I am more or less my own person.
And I keep saying there's really not all that much more that the world can throw at us Alligator kids after running an overworked, underpaid, malnutritioned staff of mostly full-time college students to put together a newspaper so real (I'm not exaggerating) that many competitions don't even acknowledge us as a college publication. But that's not writing a lot more inches inches all of a sudden (though in that respect, I usually overwrite) on a daily, beat basis, and do I have not just the writing but everything else that goes into making a story happen in me? The perspective? Thoroughness? Willingness to track down and hound sources? I'm not the girl who walks into a roomful of strangers and walks up to the nearest one, and while being a reporter is oddly empowering in that respect (Mike says it's the same for him, possibly because I know what I'm going to say to them and in an official capacity) it's also exhausting, often frustrating work, as I watch it happen around me at the office all the time. I've been mostly lucky with public information officers and fraternity higher-ups and witnesses, even when the situation's been tough, but I need to learn to shove when the pushing starts. I can do that with my reporters, and god knows having "...did not return five telephone calls for comment Tuesday" printed in the paper gets attention, but I'm naturally not imposing. I'm sure that would change with the first good chewing-out I get from an editor, but I live in fear of disappointing authority figures, and this job carries an especially high risk of that.
Speaking of Mike, he and I have been tossing around the idea of tag-teaming the Times-Union interview. The editor in the paper's Tallahassee bureau is looking for two people, but as he pitched it to us, one of them would be the main writer while the other would serve more of an assistant role. Now, we'd probably work more equally than that, as we both have respective strengths (his is why, mine is how), but there would still be a division, in both the time on field and pay. And unless I work as a secretary or in a campaign office or, frankly, as a copy editor, making a career out of being support staff isn't terribly feasible. But journalists are their own people, and I'm afraid what having someone to rely on and to share blame with would do to my capacity of doing my own job.
So, on the one hand, safety, either at the Times-Union or as a copy editor at The Ledger. On the other, opportunity I'm not certain I can handle. Hm. I've been there before with my sudden appointment to Metro Editor, but then I had Justin to sit across from to teach me, and the stakes weren't nearly as high and certainly didn't involve competing with a respectable publication like the Bradenton Herald. Basically, how big of a risk should I be willing to take?
And that's even after setting aside the generalized anxiety of the fact that I'm going into a profession in which making $35,000 a year is living large, circulation has been consistently declining, and is virtually thankless, but lord help you if you trod on anyone's delicate sensibilities. The hours are impossible, yet you never truly walk away from your work. None of which is to say I don't love it, but I don't want to lose myself in it as I did Spring semester.
As an aside, I took
walkingshadow's word for it (rarely a risky proposition, for a nice change) and read Intersections by Kaneko. Didn't regret it. While a little Jossed by Season Two and somewhat cliched and wince-inducing in parts, on the whole I found it a well written, thoughtful and compelling montage. Also, admittedly, at least a small part of my endless affection for Rodney McKay lies with the commonalities between our personalities. Minus his penchant for astrophysics; that's something I barely passed the regular version of in high school. But my space buff manifests itself in other ways....And Rodney was their man. He finished school and completed a doctorate on their dime. He got a lab full of cowering minions, and an office with a view of the courtyard fishpond. He wrote on the hypothetical properties of exotic matter and the physics of micro black holes.
Then, one day, they brought him an impossible Star Trek gun that made matter disappear like a David Copperfield party trick. You can't ask any questions, they said. You can't talk about it with anyone. Oh, and if you could reverse engineer a prototype, that would be great.
And then, one much later day, they took him to a dark, soundproofed room in Langley, Virginia, and a hard-bitten military guy showed him videos of a team walking through a wall of water. When the water disappeared, the team was gone.
"Don't worry, kid," the military guy said when Rodney wiped at his wet eyes. "Took me like that too."