donezo

presented my last, "seminal" piece of work for my master's program this afternoon. it was well received. my class is a mixed bag of documentary students and long-form magazine-style writers. i am neither. i squeaked into the class because i decided that one of my majors - i had two - wasn't worth a damn, so i dropped it and took this class instead.

if you want to get an idea of what we writers in the class were striving to do, read something written by katherine boo, formerly of the new yorker, or hanna rosin, an editor at the atlantic.

i'm going to be pitching my story to a magazine after the holidays are over. it's sort of my meal ticket, or a big break, if i get published, but i understand that it's a bit of a long shot. a feature-length story by a very green writer... hmm.

so our presentation today consisted of full screenings of all four documentaries (each around 20 minutes in length) and the 10 stories written by the long form writers. we only read excerpts. i was the second person to present, which was lucky, because we still had a full house at that point, and people were still awake. four hours later, not so much. most everyone that wasn't in the class had bounced (could you blame them? four unrelenting hours, no breaks) and the people that were there were completely saturated.

i went and drank a pitcher of 312 afterward with my good friend amy, her roomies and a couple of people from the program. the idea was that our whole class was supposed to go for drinks, but of course being journalists we just dissipate and do our own thing. MBA students we are not. by drank a pitcher i mean we each had a pitcher's worth of beer, not that we split one. this is the midwest, after all.

so now i get to pack up my life yet again, and deploy boxes to the four corners of the earth. i'm beginning to think i don't have the right to own anything. i also can't sleep and have a headache from the beer. i took a melatonin and hope to be sleeping soon.

i can do it, i can do it

reaching the home stretch in the re-write of the story that has dominated my last quarter. i mean literally dominated, because it's my master's thesis, in a way. it's the journalist take on a master's thesis. the last step in my professor's 10-step re-write guidelines (eight of which i have ignored) is to open a blank document and re-write the entire fucking thing without cutting and pasting. i've reached the last section and i just had lunch in order to give myself the mental energy to do this shit. it's been a solid three hours of concentration, which for me and my gnat's brain (thanks, internet!) is a goddamned miracle nowadays.

it's moments of mental clutter and exhaustion that i wish i was religious or that i meditated or some shit. i have crap for tools to clear my head. i feel like i need an energy injection right to the brain. if i was religious, i like to think, i could just get down on my knees and pray for some sort of brain cleaning. i've actually tried to pray, not today but some other time, and my mind wandered and i felt like an ass speaking quietly in my mind to someone that doesn't exist to me. i've also tried to meditate, but that shit was harder than hell and i think i'd rather just finish my story then have to try that again.

so i went and did the closest thing - boiled some water and made some strong, plain black tea. that'll clear the shit out of the frozen trader joe's pizza flavor i have in my mouth, at least. let's hear it for the final push!

argh. help.

tell me if you can figure this out

maybe it's the early hour, but i'm having trouble understanding the bar graph towards the top of this infographic. [click to enlarge. again, my blog template has column sizes that are too narrow for the full size, but the automated blogger sizing makes it too small. and i'm too lazy to crunch the image proportions by hand and adjust in html.]

do you get it? how can imports and exports worldwide vs. the U.S. yield such odd numbers? shouldn't the imports and exports be inverted versions of each other?

this infographic, and many others of outstanding quality, comes to you via mint.com's blog. mint.com is a great, free online service that helps people with their personal finances, to budget, reach goals, etc. i don't use the personal finance service (i keep meaning to, but, let's be honest. i live on student loans, so i know exactly how much i have to spend each quarter.), but i do subscribe to their blog. i find that it addresses financial issues that are more sophisticated than the average mass media outlet, but does so in a clear, easy-to-understand way, and often presents them in nice, modern formats like infographics for news nerds like me who like the digital stuff.

that said, i actually do know why the bar graph is yielding such odd numbers. if you look up worldwide coffee import/export numbers on a bloomberg terminal or a website that covers world economic trade numbers (morningstar might also be useful), you're basically going to get tonnage and dollar values for coffee producing around the world. if you graph them, they won't make sense, because of course it would be far too easy for the import/export numbers to be calculated in a straightforward manner.

i'm sure nothing in this post furthers the world in any positive way, but maybe someone out there can help me out.

an interesting viewing, 23 minutes

one of the professors teaching my capstone course - where i'll be working all quarter on what amounts to my final project for the program - is brent huffman. he and a chinese documentary filmaker teamed up on this project for al jazeera about chinese living in africa, and the existing tensions. it's pretty interesting.



or, you can watch it on al jazeera's website, here.

whilst lost in the land of the internet...

i'm researching and writing a draft (due tomorrow at 10 a.m., way to go procrastinator) of a long-form story about the student loan market for the upcoming quarter. i stumbled across this infographic by collegescholarships.org and ByJess.net and thought i should share. (click on it for a readable version, my damn template has such narrow columns.)

it speaks for itself.



Infographic by College Scholarships.org

damn, so

photo credits, by the way, are documented by way of photo links

grad school went and got all hard this week. wtf?! i thought i was just going to be partying the whole way through. oh wait, that's b-school. my bad.

i have something like 7 deadlines by next tuesday. didn't i used to get paid to have a to-do list like that? all of us in my main class, newswriting, kind of freaked out this morning and pressured our teacher into pushing our audio story deadline out a few days. having to crunch numbers is one thing, but when you have to interview folks you can't actually work late at night. inconvenient.

i am still working on a project where we go and hit the members of 4 suburbs with interviews. it's not fun. my classmate amy and i are devising a rather clever plan to go to local dives and conduct our interviews. it must be easier to talk to fools after a drink or two. and amy reasons that people don't wander far for their local watering hole, so we're definitely going to be getting actual residents of that town, unlike at malls, where everyone from the 3 closest states come to shop. people travel for commerce.

was feeling mighty discouraged (friggin sources won't cooperate when you want them to, i'm discovering) and then heard from my professor to call him. damn it. it turned out well, i'm getting some decent grades up front, and he said some nice things. this is still the beginning, mind you. i'm anticipating an epic fail somewhere along these lines. helped brighten my outlook a bit.

week two

[insert photo of some snow-covered street as i am beginning to understand i will be completely obsessed with the weather until summer]

so starting week two of classes. it has been a whirlwind, i suspect mainly because of how many people have told me that this year will be the craziest of my life (versus it actually being that crazy quite yet). last monday was our orientation, all eight hours of it. by the time the reception rolled around at 5 pm, i went immediately to the bar, procured booze, then bee-lined to a chair and sat in it for a few minutes without speaking or making eye contact. i was completely drained.

day two was our editing class, four hours of grammar and punctuation. it will be a useful and painful weekly occurrence.

the rest of the week was/is spent in newswriting. this class is all-day and intensive. i can't manage to put together strings of words to describe it other than my assigned projects will force me to learn how to present news in formats including written features, audio, video, written investigative reporting, written hard news reporting, and such. so far it has proved interesting, if a bit unwieldy, time-wise.

i am learning that journalists like very much to talk (about themselves, about their experiences, about people they know, about you, about people you know, about your experiences, about dude next to you, his experiences, his opinion on the kindle and how digital readers will impact the industry) and don't seem to give much of a fig about efficiency. it doesn't seem to bother most of the class, but it does bother me some. i think that at nearly 32 years old (about 10 years older than everyone else, sort of joking but not entirely) and having had a career where business processes are constantly being evaluated for efficiency... it's difficult to sit in a classroom for six hours when we could have covered the material, the assignment, and a fair amount of bullshit in three. but... that's not a big complaint. i rate the faculty as excellent so far. i've met a few people and they seem cool and interesting and funny. i like the administration. the cafeteria options are pretty shitty, but that's to be expected. i like my apartment. i ordered a new backpack because i didn't own one with a laptop sleeve (that's how long i've been out of school) and i like my new backpack. i am close to school and i like that.

so we shall proceed and see what comes next.