the best of times are when i'm alone with

I'm procrastinating this writing assignment, so I'm going to write here instead. Actually I think I'm going to go to sleep and wake up early to write it. I just can't write at night. Actually I can, but I'm a perfectionist and it really annoys me to write something that I know is not the best I could do. And I always write more inspired things in the morning.

I just wanted to say that my classes are 100% AWESOME!! My final schedule is Journalism 202, 203 and 204. There are two other people who are taking all three classes, so I'm not the only one who's insane. I asked my professors why the J website says not to take 202 and 204 at the same time, and none of them knew, so I figured it would be okay. Actually I figured out why: because both of them are a lot of fucking work, and both involve big final projects. But J204 ends halfway before the end of the summer term, so then I'll just have two classes.

J202 is Information Gathering aka "Info Hell," and it seems like everyone I've talked to in the class is taking it for the second time because they failed it the first time. Encouraging. I was actually signed up for the class last term but I dropped it for Writing, and I'm really glad I did. There's no way I would have passed it, since I did half the work for the quarter in the last week. It seems kind of dry so far but my seemingly unending thirst for anything remotely related to journalism has been holding my attention in class.

The other two classes are a lot more fun: J203 Writing for the Media and J204 Visual Communication. The writing one is my favorite, obviously. The teacher is pretty cool and has worked at a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post. One of our "required readings" on the syllabus is... wait for it... the daily newspaper!!!!! There are even news quizzes every week!! Oh my god, I have been waiting for this moment my entire life! I kind of feel like when you're at the eye doctor and they have your vision split in two, and then they bring the two images together and they suddenly click into one. Now my free time is homework and vice versa. Because the only significant thing I really do in my free time other than talk to friends is read the newspaper. Now I don't have to feel guilty that I'm wasting time, I just tell myself, "I'm doing my homework, so it's okay!"

The first news quiz was to identify a bunch of government figures by their picture. We had to write their name and job title. The ones I got right were: Obama (obviously), Joe Biden (VP), Rahm Emanuel (chief of staff), Hillary Clinton (secretary of state), Timothy Geithner (secretary of the treasury), Nancy Pelosi (speaker of the House), and some other ones. The ones I didn't get were Janet Napolitano (secretary of homeland security), Robert Gibbs (I knew he was press secretary but couldn't remember his name), Eric Holder (know him by name as the attorney general, but didn't recognize him), Robert Gates (same, didn't recognize him, but know he's secretary of defense).

I was kind of surprised I got that many wrong, actually. And I feel it was unfair to newspaper readers rather than TV-watchers -- because when you read about the attorney general, they almost never include a photo. But the girl next to me blew my mind -- she didn't even write down Joe Biden! The only names she wrote down were Hillary and Obama. Shocking. Especially shocking in a journalism class. I guess she was probably an advertising major. Not that there's anything wrong with advertising! Okay, maybe I hate advertising, but I finally found one positive thing about it in J201 last term: It makes the press cheaper/free. So carry on, girl-sitting-next-to-me, as long as you help pay my salary as a media writer and make my newspaper cheaper.

J203, Visual Communication, seems like it will be pretty fun. We get to do photography projects and use photoshop and illustrator. It's funny, though, since I used to be an art major and my focus was photography -- visual stuff just doesn't interest me anymore. A long time ago I became frustrated with photography because frequently you aren't able to show what something looked like with a photo -- it ends up being underwhelming compared to how awesome it was in person. And often it's the other way around; you can get a photo that makes something look MORE pretty/picturesque than it really was, by playing with the angle, the light, etc. Something about that bothers me. Smoke and mirrors. Writing is a lot of work but I feel I can get closer to what I really want to convey.

I remember when I got back from Spain in 1999 with 20 rolls of film, developed it all by hand in the black and white darkroom at Reed, painstakingly messed with filters and exposure lengths to get the best image from each negative, and then put the best photos in an album. And people would just flip through it, glancing at each page for a second and moving on. I wish I had written about the trip while I was there instead of only taking photos, because I felt it was impossible for my friends to understand what it was REALLY like from glancing at that album.

So it's strange, sitting in class, because I already know almost everything he's teaching -- about layout, typography, design principles, art movements -- but it just doesn't interest me anymore. I was into visual art from when I was a toddler until I was 21. I also played a bunch of musical instruments, but from age 17-21 I decided I loved art above music. Then I was into anthropology for a few years. From age 23 until the present I decided what I really liked was writing/journalism. I hope I can hold onto this obsession long enough to make something of it, because I don't have time to switch interests again. I don't think it's going to go away, though.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll be clean for 3 weeks. It's probably today for you if you're reading this. It's not exactly getting any easier -- it is, but it's still SO HARD. Like today, I started thinking about it, and I'm really glad I didn't have enough cash. I'm not sure what I would have done otherwise. It's not that the craving is THAT BAD anymore, it's that I can be so irrational and spontaneous, and this devil that lives in my mind will take advantage of that to make me do something stupid in a split-second decision. It *is* a lot easier than it used to be years ago, now that I am doing something I love and care about. I feel like I have a reason to live, a reason to stay clean other than just "because I should."

You have no idea how happy it makes me to be in school and be able to think about journalism 24 hours a day for a REASON, and not just because I'm constantly wasting time reading the newspaper and thinking about it on my own. I'm just waiting for the momentum to run out and for it to get boring, because it seems like all the other J students are completely bored with everything. I seriously can't imagine that happening, though.

Oh, I almost forgot: I went to the meeting for the school magazine, and got assigned one of the feature-ish articles for the PRINT magazine, not just online like they originally told me. I mostly just got the assignment because I spoke up a lot in the meeting and I was the only one who said anything about one of the topics. The editor wanted someone to write about Somali pirates from their perspective, and I mentioned something from an article I read about them a few weeks ago. My infinite mental filing cabinet of NYT articles finally pays off. I posted something on Twitter about my assignment, and one of my Twitter contacts (supposedly) knows a Somali pirate and can get me in contact with him? I ended that with a question mark because it still seems incomprehensible to me, but he claims it's true. We'll see.

All my classes are small and they have a bunch of the same students in common, plus some of the people who work on the magazine, so I've already probably talked to more people outside of class than I talked to all of last term. All my classes during the spring were so huge and anonymous. I've finally met a few interesting people. This girl in my writing class said that "the newspaper is like church" and I was like, Oh my god, where have you been all my life?

love, becky