Adventures in Journalism 150: A Slightly More Relevant Title I’m really glad I don’t hate journalism.
Like, really glad. I’m also pretty proud of the fact that I didn’t freak out when my Journalistic Writing and Editing professor brought us brownies as a peace offering the day we got our first graded grammar labs back. They were triple fudge. I had two. I’ll admit that the day we got those labs back, I was a tad bit on the panicky side. (Let’s just say I was a little sweaty despite the Icelandic temperatures of the room I have that class in.) Professor Fallon wasted no time easing her way over to my chair, a thin slip of pure, white paper in her clutches. My name was on the top of that paper, I thought to myself. My desperate scrawls of semicolons and excessive adjective insertion – there it was, live and in person. I think she made eye contact with me the entire time, which I noted as some sort of superiority tactic. She suddenly broke out of the slow motion time-warp that I had seen the entire scene unfold in, and placed my paper face down on the table, which in my mind, was her silently telling me to pack up my hopes and dreams and drop out of the school of communication. Words were exchanged, there was a lot of nervous chuckling involved, and then she sashayed off, and I buckled down and tried to flip the paper over. The key word here being tried. I’m convinced someone pulled some sort of hoodoo magic on the thing, because all of a sudden it weighed thirty pounds and I became physically unable to turn it over. What is this sorcery? Why don’t my hands work? I can no longer go on. This is the end. Tell my family the money’s in the attic. It was then that I realized something (to make things more dramatic, we’ll call it an epiphany) -- it dawned on me that I could use this and actually learn from it (because the whole point of college is learning, right?) or I could cry into my triple fudge brownie. I chose the former and flipped it over. Hold the applause. (I also find it necessary to mention that I got a C on the lab. Don’t worry, mom. I’ll still probably get my degree. My future as a wayfaring, purposeless, carpet-bagging vagabond has yet to begin.) Ironically, my most demanding class is my favorite. I always have liked a good challenge.
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Ah, the sweet entity that is unconventional friendship formation. Have you ever seen the Taylor Swift music video for You Belong with Me? (Don’t lie, you know you have. That thing is a cinematic masterpiece and actually legendary and if you disagree just know that you are wrong.) If you have, (we’ve established you have) I’m sure you’re familiar with the scene in which a nerd glasses-clad Taylor communicates to her unnecessarily hot neighbor/guy best friend through her window. She writes quaint little notes on an oversized paper pad and then just kind of waits there until he sees them…which out of context sounds incredibly creepy...anyways, he writes back to her and it’s all very adorable (save for the fact that this whole time he’s friend-zoned the heck out of her. Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. You know this because you’ve seen the video. I digress.) Anyways, so I kind of did that. Actually, I didn’t kind of do it, I really did it, and thanks to my advances involving a pen, some paper, a window, and dollar cheeseburgers, I gained one of my first legitimate friends. To make a long story short, on move-in day, I opened my blinds and looked across the building to see a male sitting directly in front of me at his desk. The immediate thought that came into my mind was that Taylor Swift music video, by the way, in case you hadn’t inferred that type of thing about me yet. I heard about this place in Station Square called Bar Louie that had $1 cheeseburgers on Tuesdays, and obviously there was no question concerning whether or not I would be participating in dollar burger festivities, so I thought I’d ask the kid from across the window to eat one with me, Taylor Swift style. And hey, it worked! He wrote back and my roommate and I met up with him in the hallway and found out all those things you find out about each other during your first week of college. He was a fellow journalism major, and we even had our honors mass comm class together. It was a friendship made in T-Swift heaven. (Behold the photo of us to your left.) I now use his empty closet as sweater storage. So if you’ve been wondering whether or not you should try to pull this kind of thing, have no fear. As long as the other person involved isn’t a communist or something, you’ll probably succeed; and hey, you just might gain some extra storage out of the whole deal. No promises, though. I’ve officially done this college thing for three weeks now, and I can say relatively confidently that I think I’ve done a pretty darn good job so far. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of misadventures. Catching a bus (a rather complicated endeavor for a girl who’s grown up next to cows her entire life) to the strip district by myself, only to find out the establishment I intended on visiting was closed, for instance. Or that time I brought way too many articles of clothing into my tiny, shared space (I have two other roommates. God bless their souls for accepting me on that first day that was full of clothing. Lots and lots of clothing. We’re talking endless clothes). Or that other time that I decided that going to bed at 4am consistently and sleeping until noon would make me feel normal. Or that consuming strictly espresso and French fries would also make me feel normal. Also why do I eat turkey burgers now? Why is that a thing? Who even invented those? Whoever you are, you are bad at creating things, and probably should be fired.
Aside from all of that, college has been a jovial old time. I’m doing homework that I enjoy. The fact that I just typed that sentence with my actual fingers is nothing short of terrifying. Pre-Point Park, if you were to tell me that I would ever enjoy doing homework in the future, I would have laughed so hard that legitimate tears would have poured out of my eye sockets…. a Euphrates of laughter-induced tears. That would have been me. In fact, I think that's actually happened before. High school kind of ruined me. ANYWAYS. I’m friends with all these people…who are similar to me…yet different...in the best ways possible. Something I anticipated about college that I found is true is that you are only friends with the people you want to be friends with. There are no situational friends like in high school, when everyone’s kind of forced to know each other because they’re stuck in the same relative area as you. Does anyone really want to hate the person that’s always in line in front of you in the always poorly lit/endlessly gross cafeteria? Do you want to be frenemies with the person that shares the locker next to you with the death threats carved in the front? No, man! You want to try to make your day as non-miserable as possible, to even out the rest of the stuff that blows. No one wants that. Well, maybe some people do. That’s a post for another day. Instead, in college, you only make the friends you want to. Sure, those friendships have the potential to come about in unconventional ways, and yes, you do have things like roommates and coworkers you see regularly, but there’s just this thing that prevents people from making unnecessary friends. I think it’s because a lot of us don’t care. (I blame high school. I will always blame high school.) Stay tuned -- more on unconventional friendships later. |
Author // Emily BennettPart time journalism major. Full time cool person. Archives
October 2016
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