As I am writing this one of my new furry roomates is stealing my chair yet again. Throughout the day and night they have been using it individuay and in tandem; cute but nonetheless inconvienent.
The month of May seemingly gone and went without much being acheived thanks to a nagging feeling of doubt and a monumental case of writers block. It has been a true whopper of journalistic constipation that has plauged me and any attempts to break through it has only tightened its grip on my psyche.
Throught the second semester of the print journalism program I had intended to atempt to post video entries to my blog and hopefully this ends up being the inagrial vlog or whatever it the proper term is(so much for that plan). This past semester has been a difficult one for myslef and others. My lack of blog posts should be evidence of that and my current hamfisted atempt to slavage a bevy of incompletes from the semesters subjects is the death knell of a grim acedemic performance that I feel was more or less phoned in.
In this digitized, pasword protected and commercialized Ireality that we currently exist in it has become all to easy to forget the importnace of being mindful of the past. We are fatally obsessed with the future and the advancements offered by the snake oil salesmen of the information age. I digress,but it’s what I am good at and I can't help it.
In trying to find guidance from the past I find I only half-heartedly endeavour to avoid the technologically induced blindness caused by the shiny tools and quick and dirty methods of the trade. Looking to the past I see a rose coloured and romanticized version of journalism. A lost art practiced by hard as nails fedora wearing walking stereotypes, dinosaurs and Neanderthals that evolved into the best and brightest of generations past. Present day is faced with the ever growing, lumbering hulk of multimedia and citizen journalism. These new evolutionary steps are facilitated and augmented by the tempting conviences of the world wide web; a digital whore of babylon that takes all comers. It is all to easy to defame and lament the tools that both empower and hobble us as human beings and journalists. I speak from years of experience of bitching and moaning about technology ruining all my nostalgic ideas of how things should be.
I am a terminal fool, you are not paid to lsiten to this drivel, William S. Burroughs once said something to that effect and it seems somehow fitting. I recently finished reading the mans first novel, entitled Junky, and in doing so I have a newfound respect for him and his work. I had hoped that delving into a familirar and favoured area of literature would help to break me out of my own literary impotency. I fear it may be a case of too little to late, sounds too much like a cop out at this point but I think a brief online rant hardly qualifies as a miraculous recovery. It’s a start goddam it, but where it leads is another mystery.
As it stands my progress in the print journalism program is in limbo, I am unsure if I can pull enough classes out the fire and my chances at entering into second year seem to fade with every passing minute.The alternatives are inumerable on my path and I stand at a literal and figurative fork in the road. As always I am insuferable in indulging in the nerotic pratice of exploring and agonizing over all my options till I’ve worked myslef into a mad frenzy of self loathing and doubt. So it is that a constructive practice is perverted into a orgy of whining and cranky ruminations.
Alltthough I often fancy myslef a realist I find that my own perceptions of reality come at a different angle than the everage joe, which may go to explain the flaw in my world view, but that is reality for you. Bryon Gyson said that man is a bad animal and I often wonder what kind of man a bad animal makes. Some of us are too afraid to seek out and correct our flaws and those of us at the other end of the spectrum cannot see anything but our flaws and the flaws of others. Living a life consumed with correcting every little problem we see within ourseleves and others is no way for a human being to live; let alone a bad animal.
Where does all this driveling nonsenecal rambling leave me? Pretty well the same place I started off at I suppose. The option of signing into the three year advanced journalism program is always, well, an option and the fact that a photojournalist who has woked for the Toront star for 22 years said that the new program is the type of thing sure to get employers salavating makes it the obvious choice. I’ve never been one to partake in the obvious and expected and Idealy I wanted to follow up my first year in the print journalism program with the second year and get my diploma or whatever scrap of paper my time and money would net me.
As it happens, the chances of the latter happening are seemingly not as great as I had hoped and I have no one to blame but myself. So as a backup plan in case of the eventuality of the events of the past month transpiring in a negative way (i.e my limp dicked atempt to pull my marks out of the toilet) I applied to and accepted a spot in the photojournalism program at Loyalist. At the outset this was my first program of choice and by all accounts and purposes I should be happy to get the spot but that nagging feeling that I should take full advantage of this last run of the print journalism program still clings to every fibre of my acedemic being.
I guess I have to face the cold hard fact that thing never seem to work out as you picture them, hell you would think I would be used to that by now. Seems like learing from my own past is a skill that I choose to foget from time to time especially when I am trying to learn form someone elses past.
