Yesterday, while I was heating up my oatmeal in the morning, my microwave spontaneously stopped working. I've never known of a microwave to go from perfect working conidtion to completely dead like this. Usually when you hear about these things breaking down, people talk about them not heating as effectively as they used to, and eventually they give it up altogether. Not so with my microwave. Perfectly fine Wednesday morning, suddenly broken Thursday morning. I suspect the problem is electrical. You plug it into the wall and it does absolutely nothing. The clock display doesn't even light up. Yes, I did plug it into a different outlet to make sure that wasn't the problem. I also checked where the power cord goes into the back of the unit to see if anything was loose, but no dice.
Now, this microwave came with the apartment, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I won't have to pay to replace it. But it's a bad thing because I have no idea how long it's going to take my landlords to fix this problem. I left them a message yesterday before I went to class, but they didn't call me back. I was halfway hoping that when I got back from campus last night there would just be a working microwave in my apartment, but no such luck. Considering I do not have an oven/stove in my place, the microwave is a fairly vital piece of equipment (I do have a Foreman grill and a hot plate, so it's not like I'm helpless, but it's still inconvenient). So far I've had no complaints at all about my landlord, but we'll see how this episode turns out.
I'm not going to write much about this now, although I'll talk about it again later (maybe when I get back from class tonight and I have more time). But I was watching the morning news and felt compelled to say something about this. If you've been following the news at all this week, you're probably aware that Barack Obama is currently doing a tour of countries overseas, and has been received very well. But in Germany the reaction to Obama was remarkable. 200,000 people showed up to see him give a speech in Berlin. Stop and really think about that for a minute. This is a guy who MIGHT become President of the United States in a few months, speaking to a crowd of Germans. I could obviously point out that even though Obama is known for drawing very large crowds by the standards of political events, 200,000 Americans are not going to go to an Obama speech. But that is not even an accurate comparison. Imagine if Dmitry Medvedev had made a speech in the United States when he was running for president of Russia, or Gordon Brown when he was trying to become England's Prime Minister, and 200,000 people showed up. We are talking about a candidate for an election in a foreign country. Can you even imagine that happening? I can't.
Now I'm trying to figure out what this means, aside from the rather obvious observation that the Germans must really like Barack Obama. I want to understand what this says about America, or about the election, or about Obama himself. I have a feeling the answer is going to be either completely irrelevant or very important.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Story's finished, trying to get a job, burgers.
So I put the finishing touches on the cigarette tax story and printed it out tonight. I'll turn it in tomorrow morning. It turned out fairly well, though it's not as good as I envisioned. Some sources didn't get back to me, and I really had too much information for a 1,000-word story, so I had to make some tough choices about what to include. As usual, holding myself to the maximum length was a struggle. My first draft ran about 1,250 but I knocked it down to 1,075. So, yes, it's still technically overlength, but not enough that it will cause any concerns. And as much as I generally hate revising or cutting things out of my writing, it reads better now than it did the first time around. I cut out some extraneous information, found ways to make sentences shorter and cleaner, etc. Good stuff.
I will post the story here eventually, but not until I get it back from my professor (which will be next Monday, if they grade these in the same amount of time they have graded other assignments). I think it's very unlikely, but I can envision a scenario in which posting the paper on the internet before my professor reads it could cause a problem, so I'll hold off.
The multimedia presentation that I had to do today (see previous post) went smoothly. It's not finished yet; we still have to put the audio and the photos together tomorrow morning and put the finishing touches on it (write captions for the photos, add a title sequence and end credits, etc.) but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Honestly, I think a lot of groups will have better presentations than ours, but I don't really care. When it comes to stuff like this, which I hate doing, my only real goal is to get it done on time while suffering as little bullshit as possible.
This week the grad school was accepting applications for fall semester positions as teaching assistants, research assistants, and office assistants in the administrative offices. I applied to a total of seven of these jobs, and if I manage to get one it'll be a huge boost to my financial situation. All the jobs give you tuition credit (two classes for most of them, three for some) and also pay a pretty decent hourly wage. If I were to get one of these jobs, I would be able to readjust my financial aid package so that I'd be taking out a lot less money in loans, which is a priority for me. I did this loan calculator thing online the other day, and it told me that if I actually borrow all the money I plan on borrowing if I don't find another source of funding, I'm going to need to be making about $86,000 a year when I graduate to be able to make my loan payments and still supply myself with food, shelter, and transportation. Yeah, journalists don't make a lot of money. I might make half that much at an entry level position, if I'm lucky. Of course, considering I will have a master's degree, and I intend to do some networking and carve out an excellent reputation for myself when I'm in school, I might be able to land a job that is significantly better than your average entry level position in journalism, but I still think it's highly doubtful I could be making $86K right out of grad school.
Now for a more enjoyable subject: burgers.
The hamburger, at its most basic level, is a very simple and only marginally satisfying meal. A slab of fried/grilled/flame-broiled beef between two halves of a bun, perhaps topped with a dollop of ketchup or a slice of American cheese. Now, I've got nothing against these simple burgers. I've eaten a ton of them in my days, and they usually taste good and sate my craving for cattle flesh. But such burgers are commonplace, run of the mill, even boring.
A finely crafted burger, on the other hand, is a meal in the truest sense of the word. It was with that in mind that I decided recently to try out a couple burger recipes of my own invention. One day the idea just popped into my head to try making chicken wing burgers-- hamburger meat mixed with wing sauce, among other things, topped with bleu cheese dressing.
So I drove down to the local Wegmans a few days ago and bought what I would need to make these burgers. Since I live alone and you cannot just buy enough beef for one or two burgers, I found myself with a quantity of meat that would be appropriate for about four decent-sized burgers. So I decided to make two chicken wing burgers, and two of another type.
I am a big fan of Chiavetta's sauce. For chicken, for steak, for cereal. Okay, maybe not that last one. But it's a fact that Chiavetta's marinade improves the taste of damn near anything. I decided that Chiavetta's burgers were an experiment I needed to conduct. So I wound up making two wing burgers and two Chiavetta's burgers.
I would term both these experiments successes, although there were some problems. The biggest one was that, since I was in both cases adding liquid to the meat, the burgers didn't hold together as well as you would like them to. They didn't fall apart on the grill or anything, they just weren't very firm. I think I could fix this problem by adding a little bit of flour to the meat before cooking, or a few bread crumbs, a little oatmeal, anything that would absorb some liquid and improve consistency.
Aside from the texture issues, the burgers tasted great. The wing burgers were not as hot/spicy as I expected them to be, especially since I added red pepper flakes and chili powder to the recipe, but I think I could fix this problem the next time around by just using more of those spices. And the flavor was excellent; it just didn't have that bite to it I was going for.
The Chiavetta's burgers, which were more or less an afterthought, were even better. The marinade just added a very distinctive flavor to the meat, and made it really juicy. Even though I'm biased since I made them myself, I would consider these some of the best and juiciest burgers I've ever had.
Obviously, the meat is the most important factor in determing the quality of a hamburger. But there are other important things that must not be overlooked. The presentation and arrangement, all the toppings and extras, are vital as well. I gave my burgers a little more texture and character by mixing green peppers and chopped onions into the meat itself before cooking, and I later topped them with lettuce, tomato, and red onion. I put bleu cheese dressing on the wing burgers, and ketchup on the Chiavetta's.
I feel the bun is often neglected when it comes to the art of burger-making. The bread is not just there to hold the sandwich together (although that is an undeniably important function), it's there because it's part of the meal. Now, I started with cheap, low-quality (but soft and tasty) buns. Wegmans brand, 99 cents for 8 of 'em, can't beat that price. So how did I make these more impressive and exotic? I coated them with margarine and then sprinkled garlic powder onto them, then put them facedown in a hot frying pan to toast them a little bit, turning them into pieces of garlic bread. I cannot claim this idea as my own. Matty's Pizzeria in Batavia serves a submarine sandwich called the Maximus which, in addition to having a badass name for a sandwich, might be the best sub ever created. The first time I tried the Maximus was when I was introduced to the idea of using garlic bread as a sandwich bun, and it's amazing. So yeah, credit the guys from Matty's for that one.
I can't really give you a recipe for these burgers, since cooking them was sort of an improvisational process, and I just threw in as much of every ingredient as seemed appropriate. I would encourage you to do the same thing, use your own discretion, experiment, see how it turns out. Anyway, here's a list of the stuff I put into the two recipes.
Chicken Wing Burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, chicken wing sauce, chili powder, red pepper flakes, garlic powder.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, bleu cheese dressing, toasted garlic bread bun.
Chiavetta's burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, Chiavetta's marinade (so it's not just a clever name), seasoned salt, red pepper flakes.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, ketchup, toasted garlic bread bun.
Okay, that's enough for tonight. Feeling good about this blog entry. Don't forget to come back next time.
-Nick
I will post the story here eventually, but not until I get it back from my professor (which will be next Monday, if they grade these in the same amount of time they have graded other assignments). I think it's very unlikely, but I can envision a scenario in which posting the paper on the internet before my professor reads it could cause a problem, so I'll hold off.
The multimedia presentation that I had to do today (see previous post) went smoothly. It's not finished yet; we still have to put the audio and the photos together tomorrow morning and put the finishing touches on it (write captions for the photos, add a title sequence and end credits, etc.) but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Honestly, I think a lot of groups will have better presentations than ours, but I don't really care. When it comes to stuff like this, which I hate doing, my only real goal is to get it done on time while suffering as little bullshit as possible.
This week the grad school was accepting applications for fall semester positions as teaching assistants, research assistants, and office assistants in the administrative offices. I applied to a total of seven of these jobs, and if I manage to get one it'll be a huge boost to my financial situation. All the jobs give you tuition credit (two classes for most of them, three for some) and also pay a pretty decent hourly wage. If I were to get one of these jobs, I would be able to readjust my financial aid package so that I'd be taking out a lot less money in loans, which is a priority for me. I did this loan calculator thing online the other day, and it told me that if I actually borrow all the money I plan on borrowing if I don't find another source of funding, I'm going to need to be making about $86,000 a year when I graduate to be able to make my loan payments and still supply myself with food, shelter, and transportation. Yeah, journalists don't make a lot of money. I might make half that much at an entry level position, if I'm lucky. Of course, considering I will have a master's degree, and I intend to do some networking and carve out an excellent reputation for myself when I'm in school, I might be able to land a job that is significantly better than your average entry level position in journalism, but I still think it's highly doubtful I could be making $86K right out of grad school.
Now for a more enjoyable subject: burgers.
The hamburger, at its most basic level, is a very simple and only marginally satisfying meal. A slab of fried/grilled/flame-broiled beef between two halves of a bun, perhaps topped with a dollop of ketchup or a slice of American cheese. Now, I've got nothing against these simple burgers. I've eaten a ton of them in my days, and they usually taste good and sate my craving for cattle flesh. But such burgers are commonplace, run of the mill, even boring.
A finely crafted burger, on the other hand, is a meal in the truest sense of the word. It was with that in mind that I decided recently to try out a couple burger recipes of my own invention. One day the idea just popped into my head to try making chicken wing burgers-- hamburger meat mixed with wing sauce, among other things, topped with bleu cheese dressing.
So I drove down to the local Wegmans a few days ago and bought what I would need to make these burgers. Since I live alone and you cannot just buy enough beef for one or two burgers, I found myself with a quantity of meat that would be appropriate for about four decent-sized burgers. So I decided to make two chicken wing burgers, and two of another type.
I am a big fan of Chiavetta's sauce. For chicken, for steak, for cereal. Okay, maybe not that last one. But it's a fact that Chiavetta's marinade improves the taste of damn near anything. I decided that Chiavetta's burgers were an experiment I needed to conduct. So I wound up making two wing burgers and two Chiavetta's burgers.
I would term both these experiments successes, although there were some problems. The biggest one was that, since I was in both cases adding liquid to the meat, the burgers didn't hold together as well as you would like them to. They didn't fall apart on the grill or anything, they just weren't very firm. I think I could fix this problem by adding a little bit of flour to the meat before cooking, or a few bread crumbs, a little oatmeal, anything that would absorb some liquid and improve consistency.
Aside from the texture issues, the burgers tasted great. The wing burgers were not as hot/spicy as I expected them to be, especially since I added red pepper flakes and chili powder to the recipe, but I think I could fix this problem the next time around by just using more of those spices. And the flavor was excellent; it just didn't have that bite to it I was going for.
The Chiavetta's burgers, which were more or less an afterthought, were even better. The marinade just added a very distinctive flavor to the meat, and made it really juicy. Even though I'm biased since I made them myself, I would consider these some of the best and juiciest burgers I've ever had.
Obviously, the meat is the most important factor in determing the quality of a hamburger. But there are other important things that must not be overlooked. The presentation and arrangement, all the toppings and extras, are vital as well. I gave my burgers a little more texture and character by mixing green peppers and chopped onions into the meat itself before cooking, and I later topped them with lettuce, tomato, and red onion. I put bleu cheese dressing on the wing burgers, and ketchup on the Chiavetta's.
I feel the bun is often neglected when it comes to the art of burger-making. The bread is not just there to hold the sandwich together (although that is an undeniably important function), it's there because it's part of the meal. Now, I started with cheap, low-quality (but soft and tasty) buns. Wegmans brand, 99 cents for 8 of 'em, can't beat that price. So how did I make these more impressive and exotic? I coated them with margarine and then sprinkled garlic powder onto them, then put them facedown in a hot frying pan to toast them a little bit, turning them into pieces of garlic bread. I cannot claim this idea as my own. Matty's Pizzeria in Batavia serves a submarine sandwich called the Maximus which, in addition to having a badass name for a sandwich, might be the best sub ever created. The first time I tried the Maximus was when I was introduced to the idea of using garlic bread as a sandwich bun, and it's amazing. So yeah, credit the guys from Matty's for that one.
I can't really give you a recipe for these burgers, since cooking them was sort of an improvisational process, and I just threw in as much of every ingredient as seemed appropriate. I would encourage you to do the same thing, use your own discretion, experiment, see how it turns out. Anyway, here's a list of the stuff I put into the two recipes.
Chicken Wing Burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, chicken wing sauce, chili powder, red pepper flakes, garlic powder.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, bleu cheese dressing, toasted garlic bread bun.
Chiavetta's burgers:
Stuff I put in the meat: Chopped green peppers, chopped onions, Chiavetta's marinade (so it's not just a clever name), seasoned salt, red pepper flakes.
Topped with: Lettuce, tomato, red onion, ketchup, toasted garlic bread bun.
Okay, that's enough for tonight. Feeling good about this blog entry. Don't forget to come back next time.
-Nick
Monday, July 21, 2008
Killing Kevin Smith, Answering the Unanswerable, more.
The big cigarette tax story is due Wednesday morning, so tonight I wrote a draft of it. Some sources I really wanted to talk to never got back to me, but I guess that's the kind of thing you have to get used to as a journalist. You make your best effort to contact all the people you think would be useful, then when your deadline is approaching, you do the best with what you have. I think the draft came out fairly well, although I will have to revise it a bit tomorrow night. It's too long, for one thing, and I think it might be a little jumbled in parts. Hopefully I'll be able to trim some stuff that's not really necessary, make it more streamlined and clear, and then I'll be all set.
Tomorrow I have to do this multimedia project where two classmates and I are going to interview a couple people, take some pictures, get audio recordings of the interviews, and then put everything together into a slide show with the audio playing over it. I'm a little concerned about this because I've never done anything like it before, and I don't think any of us are very familiar with the equipment or software we'll be using, but we'll figure it out. I think most people in the class are in the same situation we're in.
So, to explain the bizarre title of this blog post: Last week in the news writing class, we talked about writing obituaries, and we were given an assignment to write an obit for someone who is still alive and is either a celebrity or some kind of public figure. We were encouraged to choose someone we like, or someone we at least find interesting, to make the assignment more enjoyable. After thinking about a couple of people that I decided would be too difficult, for various reasons (Stephen King, Charles Barkley), I eventually settled on Kevin Smith. I got the assignment back today, received an A on it, and thought some of you might be interested in reading it. So here ya go:
Kevin Smith, the writer and director of such films as “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” died in a one-car accident July 14 near his home in Los Angeles. No one else was harmed in the crash. He was 37.
Smith became the poster boy for rags-to-riches success in the world of independent film with the release of his 1994 debut, “Clerks.” The aspiring filmmaker sold his extensive comic book collection and used credit cards to raise $27,000 to shoot the comedy about two friends working dead-end jobs in New Jersey. The film won awards at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, grossed over $3 million, and caught the eyes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who signed Smith to their production company, Miramax.
The director’s films, filled with profane and often vulgar content, consistently stirred up controversy. The late movie critic Joel Siegel got into a verbal sparring match with Smith in 2006 after Siegel walked out of a press screening of “Clerks 2.” He found the film offensive and walked out about 40 minutes into the screening, loudly declaring that it was the first time he had walked out of a movie in “30 (expletive) years.” Smith quickly responded on his web site; he blasted Siegel and said getting a bad review from him was “a badge of honor.” The two men later continued their argument on the syndicated radio show Opie and Anthony.
Smith also embraced controversy in 1999, when his fourth film, “Dogma,” was being protested by Catholic organizations. He found out that a Catholic group was gathering to protest the film at a theater in Eatontown, N.J., near his hometown. Smith made a couple of picket signs and went to protest his own movie, never revealing his identity to the other protesters. “I’ll never understand the folks who can’t simply dislike something” without going to protest it, Smith wrote on his web site at the time.
Over the years, the director developed a cult following of devoted fans, partly because he was always eager to interact with his audience. He frequently gave speeches and did question and answer sessions at colleges, some of which were compiled on the DVD, “An Evening With Kevin Smith,” and its sequel, “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder.”
The director also interacted directly with fans on the message boards of his web site, www.viewaskew.com, and wrote a very candid blog about his life at www.silentbobspeaks.com. In his blog, which he called “My Boring-Ass Life,” he discussed both his career and his experiences as a husband and father in intimate detail.
Smith met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, in March of 1998 when she was a reporter for USA Today and was assigned to write an article about him. The couple married in April 1999.
In addition to writing and directing all his films, Smith had some experience as an actor. Most notably, he cast himself as Silent Bob, a reticent but wise dope peddler, in six movies. He also played a supporting role in the Jennifer Garner romantic comedy “Catch and Release,” and had a small role in the Bruce Willis blockbuster “Live Free or Die Hard.”
Smith was born in 1970 and grew up in the suburban New Jersey town of Highlands. His home state always remained close to his heart, even after he moved to Los Angeles. All of his films are set partly or entirely in New Jersey.
Although none of Smith’s films were true blockbusters (his two highest-grossing movies, “Dogma” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” each made about $30 million), he had a significant effect on the industry. The “Clerks” success story gave hope to legions of would-be indie filmmakers, and Smith was at least partially responsible for making Ben Affleck and Matt Damon household names. Smith served as an executive producer on their breakthrough hit, “Good Will Hunting.”
“I cried when I read it,” Smith said of the “Good Will Hunting” script in the 1998 interview with Schwalbach.
Affleck appeared in almost all of Smith’s films, and starred in “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma” and “Jersey Girl.”
“I owe everything to this guy,” Affleck said of Smith in 1998.
Smith also had a very close relationship with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax and now run the Weinstein Co. The Weinstein brothers financed all Smith’s movies after “Clerks.”
“Kevin is one of the great young directors who has been an integral part of Miramax’s growth,” Harvey Weinstein told Daily Variety in 2003.
Fittingly, Smith was once again surrounded by controversy at the time of his death. His final film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” is slated for release in October 2008, and is not yet rated. The Motion Picture Association of America wants to give the movie an NC-17 rating. At the time of his death, Smith was fighting for an R rating. “The MPAA is gunning for us, I think,” star Seth Rogen told MTV last month.
Kevin Smith is survived by his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, and their daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. He will be buried in a ceremony at Bay View Cemetery in Highlands, N.J. on Thursday, July 17. The ceremony will not be open to the public, and the family requests that mourners do not send flowers.
So that's that. To get to the other part of the bizarre title for this blog post, last Monday I started a new thing where I answer an unanswerable question or respond to some sort of well-known saying (last week's was "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which I conclusively proved false). I have decided to make this a weekly feature, at least until I run out of ideas. According to my computer, it is technically no longer Monday, but 12:12 AM on Tuesday is close enough for me.
This week's unanswerable question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: The egg. I have put a lot of thought into this-- probably more thought than anyone really should, and here's my reasoning. If you answer "the egg," the argument against it is usually that the egg couldn't come first because a chicken egg must be laid by a chicken. And if you answer "the chicken," the standard argument is that a chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg. Quite the conundrum.
But I believe that evolutionary theory conclusively proves that the egg came first. Here's why:
New species are created a little bit at a time, over millions of years, as the gene pool of one species slowly develops mutations and ultimately turns into something different. So the way I figure it, at one point in time there were a number of birdlike animals that closely resembled chickens, but were not chickens. Now imagine an animal that is as close as it could possibly be to a chicken without actually being a chicken. For the purpose of this discussion, we shall call it the Prehistoric Cluckbeast. Now, the Prehistoric Cluckbeast is right on the tipping point of being a chicken. So say one of these theoretical birds lays an egg that contains a slight mutation. This tiny mutation is the final piece in the puzzle-- the chicken has been created. Several weeks later, however long it takes for a chicken egg to incubate, the world's first chicken hatches. But the hen who laid the egg is not a chicken. It is a Prehistoric Cluckbeast. And, presumably, the offspring will not immediately be recognized as a chicken, but will instead be considered a deformed Prehistoric Cluckbeast and will probably be mocked and ostracized by its peers. But it is not a fucked up Prehistoric Cluckbeast. It is a chicken.
So there you have it. Egg came first. No arguments.
All right, kind of tired and I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. I do have other news to tell you-- I am currently in the application process for a number of TA and research assistant jobs, and I recently invented two recipes for a couple of damn fine hamburgers-- but those stories can wait for another day. Peace.
-Nick
Tomorrow I have to do this multimedia project where two classmates and I are going to interview a couple people, take some pictures, get audio recordings of the interviews, and then put everything together into a slide show with the audio playing over it. I'm a little concerned about this because I've never done anything like it before, and I don't think any of us are very familiar with the equipment or software we'll be using, but we'll figure it out. I think most people in the class are in the same situation we're in.
So, to explain the bizarre title of this blog post: Last week in the news writing class, we talked about writing obituaries, and we were given an assignment to write an obit for someone who is still alive and is either a celebrity or some kind of public figure. We were encouraged to choose someone we like, or someone we at least find interesting, to make the assignment more enjoyable. After thinking about a couple of people that I decided would be too difficult, for various reasons (Stephen King, Charles Barkley), I eventually settled on Kevin Smith. I got the assignment back today, received an A on it, and thought some of you might be interested in reading it. So here ya go:
Kevin Smith, the writer and director of such films as “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” died in a one-car accident July 14 near his home in Los Angeles. No one else was harmed in the crash. He was 37.
Smith became the poster boy for rags-to-riches success in the world of independent film with the release of his 1994 debut, “Clerks.” The aspiring filmmaker sold his extensive comic book collection and used credit cards to raise $27,000 to shoot the comedy about two friends working dead-end jobs in New Jersey. The film won awards at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, grossed over $3 million, and caught the eyes of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who signed Smith to their production company, Miramax.
The director’s films, filled with profane and often vulgar content, consistently stirred up controversy. The late movie critic Joel Siegel got into a verbal sparring match with Smith in 2006 after Siegel walked out of a press screening of “Clerks 2.” He found the film offensive and walked out about 40 minutes into the screening, loudly declaring that it was the first time he had walked out of a movie in “30 (expletive) years.” Smith quickly responded on his web site; he blasted Siegel and said getting a bad review from him was “a badge of honor.” The two men later continued their argument on the syndicated radio show Opie and Anthony.
Smith also embraced controversy in 1999, when his fourth film, “Dogma,” was being protested by Catholic organizations. He found out that a Catholic group was gathering to protest the film at a theater in Eatontown, N.J., near his hometown. Smith made a couple of picket signs and went to protest his own movie, never revealing his identity to the other protesters. “I’ll never understand the folks who can’t simply dislike something” without going to protest it, Smith wrote on his web site at the time.
Over the years, the director developed a cult following of devoted fans, partly because he was always eager to interact with his audience. He frequently gave speeches and did question and answer sessions at colleges, some of which were compiled on the DVD, “An Evening With Kevin Smith,” and its sequel, “An Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder.”
The director also interacted directly with fans on the message boards of his web site, www.viewaskew.com, and wrote a very candid blog about his life at www.silentbobspeaks.com. In his blog, which he called “My Boring-Ass Life,” he discussed both his career and his experiences as a husband and father in intimate detail.
Smith met his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, in March of 1998 when she was a reporter for USA Today and was assigned to write an article about him. The couple married in April 1999.
In addition to writing and directing all his films, Smith had some experience as an actor. Most notably, he cast himself as Silent Bob, a reticent but wise dope peddler, in six movies. He also played a supporting role in the Jennifer Garner romantic comedy “Catch and Release,” and had a small role in the Bruce Willis blockbuster “Live Free or Die Hard.”
Smith was born in 1970 and grew up in the suburban New Jersey town of Highlands. His home state always remained close to his heart, even after he moved to Los Angeles. All of his films are set partly or entirely in New Jersey.
Although none of Smith’s films were true blockbusters (his two highest-grossing movies, “Dogma” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” each made about $30 million), he had a significant effect on the industry. The “Clerks” success story gave hope to legions of would-be indie filmmakers, and Smith was at least partially responsible for making Ben Affleck and Matt Damon household names. Smith served as an executive producer on their breakthrough hit, “Good Will Hunting.”
“I cried when I read it,” Smith said of the “Good Will Hunting” script in the 1998 interview with Schwalbach.
Affleck appeared in almost all of Smith’s films, and starred in “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma” and “Jersey Girl.”
“I owe everything to this guy,” Affleck said of Smith in 1998.
Smith also had a very close relationship with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who founded Miramax and now run the Weinstein Co. The Weinstein brothers financed all Smith’s movies after “Clerks.”
“Kevin is one of the great young directors who has been an integral part of Miramax’s growth,” Harvey Weinstein told Daily Variety in 2003.
Fittingly, Smith was once again surrounded by controversy at the time of his death. His final film, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” is slated for release in October 2008, and is not yet rated. The Motion Picture Association of America wants to give the movie an NC-17 rating. At the time of his death, Smith was fighting for an R rating. “The MPAA is gunning for us, I think,” star Seth Rogen told MTV last month.
Kevin Smith is survived by his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, and their daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. He will be buried in a ceremony at Bay View Cemetery in Highlands, N.J. on Thursday, July 17. The ceremony will not be open to the public, and the family requests that mourners do not send flowers.
So that's that. To get to the other part of the bizarre title for this blog post, last Monday I started a new thing where I answer an unanswerable question or respond to some sort of well-known saying (last week's was "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," which I conclusively proved false). I have decided to make this a weekly feature, at least until I run out of ideas. According to my computer, it is technically no longer Monday, but 12:12 AM on Tuesday is close enough for me.
This week's unanswerable question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Answer: The egg. I have put a lot of thought into this-- probably more thought than anyone really should, and here's my reasoning. If you answer "the egg," the argument against it is usually that the egg couldn't come first because a chicken egg must be laid by a chicken. And if you answer "the chicken," the standard argument is that a chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg. Quite the conundrum.
But I believe that evolutionary theory conclusively proves that the egg came first. Here's why:
New species are created a little bit at a time, over millions of years, as the gene pool of one species slowly develops mutations and ultimately turns into something different. So the way I figure it, at one point in time there were a number of birdlike animals that closely resembled chickens, but were not chickens. Now imagine an animal that is as close as it could possibly be to a chicken without actually being a chicken. For the purpose of this discussion, we shall call it the Prehistoric Cluckbeast. Now, the Prehistoric Cluckbeast is right on the tipping point of being a chicken. So say one of these theoretical birds lays an egg that contains a slight mutation. This tiny mutation is the final piece in the puzzle-- the chicken has been created. Several weeks later, however long it takes for a chicken egg to incubate, the world's first chicken hatches. But the hen who laid the egg is not a chicken. It is a Prehistoric Cluckbeast. And, presumably, the offspring will not immediately be recognized as a chicken, but will instead be considered a deformed Prehistoric Cluckbeast and will probably be mocked and ostracized by its peers. But it is not a fucked up Prehistoric Cluckbeast. It is a chicken.
So there you have it. Egg came first. No arguments.
All right, kind of tired and I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. I do have other news to tell you-- I am currently in the application process for a number of TA and research assistant jobs, and I recently invented two recipes for a couple of damn fine hamburgers-- but those stories can wait for another day. Peace.
-Nick
Friday, July 18, 2008
Damn, that was a long week.
This was a pretty good week, but I'm still glad to see the end of it. The way my schedule breaks down, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings are devoted to news writing, while Wednesday afternoons, Thursdays and Fridays are for graphics. So I spent the second half of this week working on my graphics project, while also trying to find time on my lunch breaks and/or after class to contact sources for my cigarette tax story, which is due next Wednesday. As mentioned in my previous post, the story is coming together pretty well, but there's still a lot of work to be done. Tomorrow I'm going to go out to a couple of locations and try to speak to people in person. When I'm home, I'm going to be reading articles and doing further research into smoking statistics online. I also need to catch up on the news I haven't been reading for the past few days (I've been too busy), and there are some non-school related things I've been putting off that I'll try to do this weekend when I have more time than I do during the week. If I use my time efficiently, I think there's even a possibility I could relax and do something just for the pleasure of it by Sunday night. Not sure what that would be, but it's a tantalizing option.
I think I have articulated my resentment and disdain for my graphics class before-- I understand these are useful skills, but I would much rather be doing "real" work than designing something on Adobe. Since I would rather remove my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than ever take a job that involves graphic design on a daily basis, I feel this class is not a practical use of my time. However, the end results of the projects are often pretty cool, as was the case today. The assignment was to make a poster or advertisement for some sort of non-profit organization. I chose the Shakespeare in the Park festival they have in Buffalo every summer. I have never actually gone to the festival, but I've been meaning to for the last few years. As my poster points out, shows run through August 17th this year, and my summer term ends August 8th, so maybe this will be the year. Anyway, I thought the poster came out pretty well, and my professor seemed to like it, so that's a bonus. It's clearly not perfect, and there are some things I would like to fix about it, but I only had so much time to work on it, and since graphics are not a high priority of mine, I am not nearly as concerned about imperfections in a design as I would be about problems in a news article, for example, or any kind of writing.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the poster:
Click on it for a closer look. I kind of made up this design on the fly after my professor told me my original design wasn't working. I just thought it over while on a smoke break and decided that a big picture of Shakespeare's face, mostly transparent, would be a cool design, especially if it were surrounded by even more transparent pictures of Shakespeare. I think it works very well, but I regret that I didn't find a better picture to use. This one looked great when it was small, but when I blew it up you can see it's not a very high-quality image. Also, I didn't do the best job of tracing and cutting out the image in Photoshop, so the images are a little rough. In my defense, I used Photoshop for the first time in my life yesterday.
Right now, I'm just looking forward to next Wednesday. That's when the cigarette tax story is due, so I won't have that to worry about anymore, and I have a group multimedia presentation due the same day. It would take quite a while to explain exactly what we're doing, but it involves taking photographs and recording an audio interview, then putting the sound and images together for an online presentation. The parameters of the assignment were pretty vague; we were just supposed to interview someone with an "unusual job." The two girls I'm working with and I are interviewing a psychic medium who says she helps people communicate with the dead. I'm not saying I believe in this kind of thing, but I'm not saying I don't believe in it, either. I'm kind of open to anything. I'm hoping I see something that absolutely blows me away. Like Mulder, I want to believe.
Speaking of which, only a week until the new X-Files flick. I'm pumped. Too bad it's gonna get trampled by The Dark Knight (even though Batman will be in its second week of release and X-Files will be the big debut. Mulder and Scully still have no chance, sadly). I'm also interested in seeing Stepbrothers, which comes out the same day as X-Files, and Midnight Meat Train on August 1st. I have actually never seen a trailer for this movie, and I don't know that much about it, but my anticipation comes from Eric's hilarious description of a trailer he saw for it one time. So if i see it and it sucks, it's all on you, buddy.
And what about that new Kiefer Sutherland horror flick? Sutherland is one of the most badass human beings on the planet, and it's got an R-rating, so you know it won't be completely lame, but the trailer still isn't doing much for me. It kind of feels like a PG-13 horror movie, then maybe they just inserted a few "fucks" into the script to boost it to an R and give it horror movie street cred. Although that seems unlikely, considering PG-13 movies generally make way more than R. I'll probably give it a shot. Maybe not in theaters, but definitely on video when it comes out. "Mirrors," I believe it's called.
Okay, I did not mean to take a hard left turn into a movie discussion. I think I'm really tired and my synapses are firing in unpredictable patterns. Back to the original topic of the post: Today marked the end of the third week of my summer term, meaning I am exactly halfway through it. Whoo-hoo! I think there will technically be more work in the second half, but I expect it to be less stressful because A-- now I know what to anticipate and B-- the two things I'm worried about most, the cigarette tax story and the multimedia presentation, will both be over on Wednesday. After that I think it should be smooth sailing. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Okay, I'm out. I'm gonna sleep like a dead man on a log. You heard me.
-Nick
PS-- I would be remiss if I didn't give a plug to the blog written by my cousin Eric and his buddy Dan. It's called Masturblog (great title, right?) and there aren't very many posts so far, but its quality absolutely makes up for its slight numbers. Read the Masturblog and you'll never look at turtles the same way again.
PPS-- Without providing any context, here is a comment I made in class this week that drew quite a few confused laughs from the people around me: "I would totally go to a gentlemen's club outlet mall."
I think I have articulated my resentment and disdain for my graphics class before-- I understand these are useful skills, but I would much rather be doing "real" work than designing something on Adobe. Since I would rather remove my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than ever take a job that involves graphic design on a daily basis, I feel this class is not a practical use of my time. However, the end results of the projects are often pretty cool, as was the case today. The assignment was to make a poster or advertisement for some sort of non-profit organization. I chose the Shakespeare in the Park festival they have in Buffalo every summer. I have never actually gone to the festival, but I've been meaning to for the last few years. As my poster points out, shows run through August 17th this year, and my summer term ends August 8th, so maybe this will be the year. Anyway, I thought the poster came out pretty well, and my professor seemed to like it, so that's a bonus. It's clearly not perfect, and there are some things I would like to fix about it, but I only had so much time to work on it, and since graphics are not a high priority of mine, I am not nearly as concerned about imperfections in a design as I would be about problems in a news article, for example, or any kind of writing.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's the poster:
Click on it for a closer look. I kind of made up this design on the fly after my professor told me my original design wasn't working. I just thought it over while on a smoke break and decided that a big picture of Shakespeare's face, mostly transparent, would be a cool design, especially if it were surrounded by even more transparent pictures of Shakespeare. I think it works very well, but I regret that I didn't find a better picture to use. This one looked great when it was small, but when I blew it up you can see it's not a very high-quality image. Also, I didn't do the best job of tracing and cutting out the image in Photoshop, so the images are a little rough. In my defense, I used Photoshop for the first time in my life yesterday.
Right now, I'm just looking forward to next Wednesday. That's when the cigarette tax story is due, so I won't have that to worry about anymore, and I have a group multimedia presentation due the same day. It would take quite a while to explain exactly what we're doing, but it involves taking photographs and recording an audio interview, then putting the sound and images together for an online presentation. The parameters of the assignment were pretty vague; we were just supposed to interview someone with an "unusual job." The two girls I'm working with and I are interviewing a psychic medium who says she helps people communicate with the dead. I'm not saying I believe in this kind of thing, but I'm not saying I don't believe in it, either. I'm kind of open to anything. I'm hoping I see something that absolutely blows me away. Like Mulder, I want to believe.
Speaking of which, only a week until the new X-Files flick. I'm pumped. Too bad it's gonna get trampled by The Dark Knight (even though Batman will be in its second week of release and X-Files will be the big debut. Mulder and Scully still have no chance, sadly). I'm also interested in seeing Stepbrothers, which comes out the same day as X-Files, and Midnight Meat Train on August 1st. I have actually never seen a trailer for this movie, and I don't know that much about it, but my anticipation comes from Eric's hilarious description of a trailer he saw for it one time. So if i see it and it sucks, it's all on you, buddy.
And what about that new Kiefer Sutherland horror flick? Sutherland is one of the most badass human beings on the planet, and it's got an R-rating, so you know it won't be completely lame, but the trailer still isn't doing much for me. It kind of feels like a PG-13 horror movie, then maybe they just inserted a few "fucks" into the script to boost it to an R and give it horror movie street cred. Although that seems unlikely, considering PG-13 movies generally make way more than R. I'll probably give it a shot. Maybe not in theaters, but definitely on video when it comes out. "Mirrors," I believe it's called.
Okay, I did not mean to take a hard left turn into a movie discussion. I think I'm really tired and my synapses are firing in unpredictable patterns. Back to the original topic of the post: Today marked the end of the third week of my summer term, meaning I am exactly halfway through it. Whoo-hoo! I think there will technically be more work in the second half, but I expect it to be less stressful because A-- now I know what to anticipate and B-- the two things I'm worried about most, the cigarette tax story and the multimedia presentation, will both be over on Wednesday. After that I think it should be smooth sailing. At least that's what I keep telling myself. Okay, I'm out. I'm gonna sleep like a dead man on a log. You heard me.
-Nick
PS-- I would be remiss if I didn't give a plug to the blog written by my cousin Eric and his buddy Dan. It's called Masturblog (great title, right?) and there aren't very many posts so far, but its quality absolutely makes up for its slight numbers. Read the Masturblog and you'll never look at turtles the same way again.
PPS-- Without providing any context, here is a comment I made in class this week that drew quite a few confused laughs from the people around me: "I would totally go to a gentlemen's club outlet mall."
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
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
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
Monday, July 14, 2008
Sometimes I am impressed by the narrative structure of my own dreams.
Okay, so I've decided to start something new on the blog. Periodically I am going to respond to sayings we're all familiar with, pieces of conventional wisdom, and I will explain why these things are true or false. I will also answer supposedly unanswerable and/or rhetorical questions (for example: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? But I won't be answering that question today, perhaps not ever. But you get the idea).
Today I will be responding to this old chestnut: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
FALSE.
Last night I had a dreaPublish Postm in which I met, began dating, and fell in love with a rather attractive and interesting woman. For a few weeks or months, everything went well, and then we had some kind of an argument, and I wound up catching her sleeping with one of my friends. In the dream, I understood the nuances and details of this situation, and it all seemed to make sense, but trying to recall it now I can't piece it all together. Anyway, the point is that the discovery of this left me with an absolutely gut-wrenching sense of betrayal and despair. So this dream had the highest of the highs-- falling in love with a seemingly perfect person-- and the lowest of the lows-- being betrayed by that apparently ideal mate AND one of your close friends. So, do we take the good with the bad? Should I have felt happy and fortunate to have experienced those positive emotions before it all went wrong? By the way, this was one of those dreams in which I was completely convinced this was real life. At no time did I have an inkling that this was a creation of my dreaming mind. And when I woke up and found myself in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning, this was the first thought that went through my head:
Well, thank God none of that ever happened.
So, if things are going to work out poorly, it is better to never love at all.
QED.
Today I will be responding to this old chestnut: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
FALSE.
Last night I had a dreaPublish Postm in which I met, began dating, and fell in love with a rather attractive and interesting woman. For a few weeks or months, everything went well, and then we had some kind of an argument, and I wound up catching her sleeping with one of my friends. In the dream, I understood the nuances and details of this situation, and it all seemed to make sense, but trying to recall it now I can't piece it all together. Anyway, the point is that the discovery of this left me with an absolutely gut-wrenching sense of betrayal and despair. So this dream had the highest of the highs-- falling in love with a seemingly perfect person-- and the lowest of the lows-- being betrayed by that apparently ideal mate AND one of your close friends. So, do we take the good with the bad? Should I have felt happy and fortunate to have experienced those positive emotions before it all went wrong? By the way, this was one of those dreams in which I was completely convinced this was real life. At no time did I have an inkling that this was a creation of my dreaming mind. And when I woke up and found myself in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning, this was the first thought that went through my head:
Well, thank God none of that ever happened.
So, if things are going to work out poorly, it is better to never love at all.
QED.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Long weekend
Sorry I haven't been posting much the past few days. Went upstate for Darren and Kate's wedding on Saturday (it was great, by the way), drove home Saturday night, got up bright and early this morning, and worked on various assignments all day (and tried to catch up on all the news I've been missing; they give us daily news quizzes in my writing class). Wanted to write about the wedding and various other subjects tonight, but now I'm exhausted and will probably go to bed soon. Probably try to write something longer tomorrow. Peace.
-nizPublish Post
-nizPublish Post
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