Things are looking up

Wow, this week has been intense so far. Fortunately, I found myself with a small amount of free time tonight, so I decide to write a post. Well, "free time" might be a bit of a stretch. There are plenty of things I could, and probably should, be doing, but nothing that urgently demands my attention. It's the first time in... God, I don't know how long... that I haven't felt the pressure to work work work whenever conscious. Speaking of being conscious, I'm learning how to get by on 4 1/2 or 5 hours of sleep a night. It hasn't been too bad. Occasionally, I'll catch myself starting to nod during a particularly boring lecture, but I haven't completely passed out in class or anything. And I don't feel that exhausted, though I am looking forward to sleeping my ass off Friday night/Saturday morning.

So, things took a real turn for the better today. All this week (and this past weekend, and last week) I've been really stressed out, both because of the amount of work I've had to do, and because I was having a lot of anxiety about this story I'm working on for my news writing class. I mentioned it in a previous post-- it's the one about the new cigarette taxes in New York. Well, I've got plenty to say on the subject, and I went to the mall on Sunday and interviewed a couple people to get the average person's reaction to the taxes, and I was always confident I could write a good story. But here's the rub-- one of the requirements for the story is that you need to interview some kind of bureaucrat or public official. And, since this bill was passed into law by the New York State Legislature, I've been trying to contact members of the state assembly. I've emailed them, I left phone messages, and none of them were getting back to me. I began to get very worried that I would not be able to fulfill this requirement of the project. I mentioned my concerns to my professor the other day, and he basically told me I had to find a way to get somebody on the phone. He's a very cool guy, really understanding and helpful, but he tells it like it is.

So, based on his suggestion, I decided to shift my focus away from legislators who might not call me back and try to get in touch with the state Health Department or the bureau of taxation or something like that. That started giving me hope, because I figured I would have an easier time getting someone from one of those organizations to talk to me. So that was my plan. Today on my lunch break, I started calling the legislators and leaving messages for them again. I didn't expect any of them to talk to me, but I wanted to be able to honestly say I had made multiple efforts to contact these people, to no avail.

To my surprise, I got an assemblywoman from Onondaga County (where Syracuse is located) on the phone. At first, I thought she was going to refuse to talk to me and hang up. Right at the beginning of the conversation, she said, "I'm not the person you want to be talking to about cigarette taxes, and I'm very busy right now." But I knew this might be my only chance to talk to somebody from the state legislature, so I was determined to keep her on the phone. I blurted out what I thought would be a fairly provocative question (although I can't remember what it was now, my brain was sort of on autopilot), and she gave me answer. I immediately tossed out a follow-up question, and she kept talking. And talking. She wound up talking to me for over half an hour, and she was a great interview. She also gave the names and numbers of a couple other officials I might want to talk to.

I also called the assemblyman who sponsored the cigarette tax in Albany and got a secretary on the phone. I explained why I was calling, told her when my deadline was, and she assured me the assemblyman would call me back sometime in the next few days. If he does, that would be awesome, since he's the official I wanted to talk to most. But if he doesn't, I'll be okay, because I already got my required interview with a bureaucrat, and the assemblywoman I spoke with today gave me those other names, whom she said would be interested in the subject and will probably talk to me. There are also people from the bureau of taxation and the New York State Smokers' Quitline who are supposed to be calling me back tomorrow. So it looks like getting the necessary sources for this story isn't going to be as big of a problem as I thought it would, which is a gigantic relief to me. Now I just have to write a magnificent story. After all the stress and annoyance this thing has caused me, I am getting an A on the motherfucker.

Speaking of grades, I've gotten an A and an A- on the last two stories I wrote in this class, and I still haven't gotten an F on anything. I don't know if I've explained this before, but you get an automatic F on an assignment if it contains a fact error (i.e. misspelling someone's name, giving an incorrect age for somebody, getting an address wrong, misspelling the name of an organization, just reporting anything that's inaccurate, generally), and they have told us repeatedly that everyone gets at least one F in this course. When they told me that, I swore an oath that I would not. This is partly because I pride myself on my accuracy and my attention to minute detail, but also because I can't remember ever getting an F on anything in my life. And so far I haven't. And now the pressure is off. They announced in class today that from now on, if you get an F due to a fact error, you can fix the error, resubmit the story, write a short explanation/correction of the mistake, and then you'll get the grade you would have gotten if you hadn't made the error. This policy is not retroactive, however, so people who got F's early in the course are stuck with them.

Despite the repeated warnings that F's are commonplace in this course, I've been very surprised by how many people have been complaining about getting them. I mean, I understand if you get one. Everybody makes a mistake once in a while (even I do... occasionally), and I'm sure people are particularly prone to errors when they're just starting out in a class like this, especially if they haven't done reporting before, as most of us have not. But after the first time, wouldn't you learn your lesson and be extremely careful from that point forward? I heard a woman today say that she had gotten an F on every written assignment except the first one due to fact errors. And this is an intelligent person, or else she wouldn't have gotten into the school. I tried not to show how astounded I was by this. I don't know, I guess I've just been blessed with a proofreader's eye, and I'm thankful for it.

The icing on the cake today was that I got my first project back in my graphics class... and I got an A on it. I almost laughed out loud. I can barely draw stick figures. I couldn't design my way out of a paper sack. I mean, I get the impression that this class is not graded very harshly, in general. You take two classes in the summer, and I think for people in my program, the graphics class is partially intended to soften the blow of the grade you're going to get in news writing. But still, I was pleased. And it's not that I was particularly good at this assignment. The first time my professor looked at it while we were in the computer labs last week, he just kind of went, "Whoa... this is not going to work at all." So he gave me some advice, and I just did exactly what he told me to do. I mean, he is clearly good at this stuff, and I clearly am not, so I'm gonna take the dude's advice. I understand wanting to do things your own way and having an independent spirit and everything, but when you don't know what the hell you're doing, and an expert tells you to do it differently, you do what he says.

All right, I better cut this off. Even though, as I mentioned, there is not anything urgent that I need to do tonight, there are a couple things I want to get in order before I go to bed. So yeah, just to sum up... grad school is now going well. I'm still stressed out and sleep-deprived, but I'm starting to see the silver lining around the clouds. And the summer term is six weeks long. This is week three. At the end of the day on Friday, I will no longer be running into the woods-- I'll be running out of them. Good news indeed.

-Niz