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 2002.12.15 EPISODE 13, in which the Joint Chiefs want an answer
hus ends the first semester of coursework. And while I spend my time presenting what amounts to mock data, Trent Lott is deep-frying his political career and Al Gore is exiting stage left at the time his party is most desperate for a voice. The new election cycle is beginning in earnest before the new Congress has even been sworn in, fully three months before it started last time around. Can you imagine being a Representative, having just won your seat a month and a half ago, having to hear already that your party's presumptive candidate will or will not have coattails to help or hinder your re-election effort? Honestly, what is the point of a two-year term at this juncture? The endoftermness is palpable now. Almost nobody showed up to this week's 658 lab section, which was all exam review. 901, rather than having a speaker this week, was free food and shit shooting. People have stopped asking, "How's your semester going?" and started in with, "Are you staying here for break?" Already I'm starting to feel break mode coming on. With no scholarly reading to do until next year, my mind is free to think the way it likes to think and to develop ideas in a natural fashion. At the bar on Friday somebody from the 970 project was surprised to find out that I have no interest in becoming one of those research prof lifers. Apparently I bore the stench of the academy to such a degree that she had to remark three times how shocked she was that I didn't care about becoming a doctor. It got me thinking about how this go-'round differs from the undergrad years at Tech. My last term there, it became painfully obvious that pushing to finish in four years was a bad idea. Hell, finishing at all started to seem like a bad idea once I got an honest look at the job market. If there'd been a good way to do it, I'd have stepped right into a graduate digital design program and tried to never leave. Now, I can already feel the outside world calling. To stay here would seem like a copout. This just serves to reinforce my belief that the classwork at Tech was a big waste of time. Not only have I never used my BA in the working world, I found absolutely no direction in what I learned. I'll be flying to San Francisco two days before Xmas, which means ten hours or so of flight time in which to try to outline some writing for the break and for next semester. I really want to have something concrete in my hands going into the media practice class, especially since my other classes are going to be very reading intensive. Between San Fran and a trip to Detroit for the GLI hockey tournament, I'm hopeful that I can come up with something worth going on about. Of course, it's going to hard to escape the Democratic 2003 expo that's sure to find a solid perch in the year's early news cycles. I don't want to write the superficial political stuff right now but I'm worried that nothing else will capture my imagination in quite the same way. I could spit out five pages on Al Gore's SNL or the segregationist elephant in the Congressional living room but no matter what I put into it, it would feel rote. Three months into my life's fourth major chapter is too dynamic a time for that. Aaron Veenstra is the managing editor of Etc. House Productions and a Master's student in Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. |
