Wednesday night was another hard deadline night at the CT. It probably would have been a lot easier if we hadn't found out about an important, page-one story at 7 that night. That, and the printer was completely fucked up. It seemed to be working well enough at the beginning of the night, but by the time we were done, only one computer could print and even that took like 5 minutes between when you hit "Print" and when the ink hit the paper. Not good.

Despite that stuff, I'm liking it. Most of the stories I've work on in the past year and a half have been stuff no one but the people mentioned in it would care about, or stuff which is exciting in the same way as a car accident, but not really important. And if you think about it, that's no surprise at all, because a whole lot of news is like that. But still, every once in a while, I've been lucky enough to working on important stories that seem interesting and meaningful. Everything's relative, of course - when I say "important", I mean "important to the campus community," which is obviously pretty small. But it's a question of type, not degree.

If I were more eloquent or outgoing, maybe I'd want to be a politician. I don't know, that's a hard "What If?" to figure out. As it is, I'm enjoying journalism.

Thursday, however, I wasn't thinking like that. If I had followed my plan of taking naps before and after my Creative Writing class, and then going to fencing, that day would have been much different. As it is, there was a writing assignment I had put off until the last minute, so I couldn't nap before it. And I decided to eat dinner and watch a little TV, so I didn't sleep after it. So when a friend reminded me of an unpleasant truth while talking, it... well, I think it would have been pretty painful anyway, just because of the kind of person I am. Everyone has their sensitive points, and loneliness is my big one. But when you take that sensitive point, add the fact that I haven't had an actual date in almost a year, and then pour thirty-six hours without sleep on top of it, the result is not unlike those papier mâché volcanoes you made back in school. You know, the ones with vinegar and baking soda.

Thanks for having been there, Gretchen.

Heh... cool. You know the word "papier mâché"? This is more or less the first time I've used it since I was a kid, and I noticed what it means: "chewed paper", literally. If nothing else, being multilingual teaches you all kinds of puns. Hmmm... someday, when I'm a published author, I'll have to work a mountain made out of chewed and eaten paper into a story...