Second semester is ridiculous.
Yesterday was insane. Mondays are going to be like that. I roll out of bed at 5:30 a.m, get out of Boothroyd at 6:15, and work at the dining hall for four hours then go to three classes, and luckily now I'll be able to head back to the dorm for an hour and a half, but yesterday I could not. Then I attend two meetings back to back, and get back to the dorm around 8. I have about an hour for lunch. During that time I was not able to totally finish the 50 pages of reading assigned for Global Studies, or the 30 assigned for Short Story. THAT STORY WAS NOT SHORT. It wasn't even a story. It was De Las Casas' Account of the Destruction of the Indies. WHAT KIND OF CLASS IS THIS?!
I had an 8 o'clock today, followed by another class, and I'm out by 10:40. For the day. Which would be verifiably awesome, if I took naps. Which I physically cannot do. If I try to lay down on my bed, I think about all the things I should be doing. My only available sleeping days USED to be Wednesdays and Fridays. Now, it's whittled down to a single day. Because today they assigned permanent shifts for radio news. And because of God's decree or something, I got the 6 A.M Friday SHIFT. Meaning, I have to be in the newsroom around 5:40 to write my cast. REALLY. I know the morning shifts are the most heard, based on the numbers they get, but seriously. Friday. That sucks. I'm also casting at the non-crappy time of the four o'clock hour on Thursdays. I would say I could sleep in on weekends, but that's pretty much false. On weekends I'm always busy with Ithacan games and Inquirer business. It's always a party.
On the bright side, my first cast went well yesterday, even though I felt the ridiculous pressure, printing the cast for WICB a minute before I had to go on, throwing on the ear phones only to find out that they didn't work and I had to be cued awkwardly by the DJ. Writing the cast was harder than I expected, choosing what's newsworthy, and being careful to word things differently than the wires. Chris Wheatly, the radio sponsor, pointed out why radio news is so hard. "The Ithacan has a deadline once a week. We have a deadline every hour."
The meeting for Now Hear This! was pretty exciting. We have a massive crew because the sheer magnitude and quality of what we're trying to do is daunting. We have an entire studio crew, two field crews, six reporters, and four associate producers, not to mention special entertainment, business, and music segment reporters, and then a whole editing squadron for both television and the radio. See, Now Hear This! is trying to encapsulate the entire multimedia movement for journalism at Ithaca. We'll be running a half-hour long segment show (60 Minutes style) every week, PLUS an hour-long radio show and updating a website constantly with videos, blogs, and community news. Now Hear This! is for the community, not really for the college itself.
Luckily, the whole crew is a talented group of kids. So hopefully, it'll be awesome.
And hey, who needs sleep anyway? You're only in college once.
