I was sitting in my engineering class and my teacher asked who were the budding journalists in the class. Although I never really thought of myself as a journalist, I was tempted to raise my hand. I didn't, and it turned out to be the right choice. All of a sudden, he started to rant about the evils of media and its manipulative and money-grubbing ways. I wanted to remind him of Woodward and Bernstein and other journalists who I've looked up to but I really couldn't blame the guy. These days people trust journalists as much as politicians.
When I got to Dartmouth, I knew, or I thought I knew, exactly the things I wanted to do. And one of them was writing for the school newspaper. So I began writing news, one of the dozens of freshmen reporters writing for the D. After awhile, it began to bore me. Regurgitating boring and dry facts, having my editors lecture me about the "D's unique writing style" and trying to understand people who spoke too fast for me to write it down got me bored with this newspaper stuff. Someone suggested that I write editorials if I was bored. That's what I did.
Usually I'm a quiet person, but I have a big and opinionated mouth if someone gets me started, so I usually end up insulting at least few people during my rant. After a rather unique experience, I wrote a piece, thinking it was a one time thing, and blitzed it to the editorials editor. It got printed and that was it.
The next morning I got a blitz from somebody I had never heard of. Curious, I opened up the blitz this person wrote, which said that she liked the editorial and hoped that I continue to write. I don't remember getting a compliment about any of the news articles that I wrote. Of course, the editors would pay compliments and thank me for my effort, but I never quite bought it. They were the kind of compliments paid out of politeness. Here was a woman who didn't know me and wrote to thank me for shooting my mouth off. Maybe I am too impressionable, but I was moved.
So I continued writing, for better or for worse. I've gotten a lot of reactions and attracted some odd attention. When I wrote to describe my UGA life, I got reprimanded by ORL for portraying the UGA position in a bad light. Apparently Dean Pelton or some administrator was upset with what I said. When I wrote to decry vegetarians, I was invited by the school radio show and got a lot of interesting blitzes from vegetarians.
But not every article was met by death threats and censures. One time, I got a blitz from the Student Assembly president who wanted to bounce some ideas off of me. This week, the Hanover town councilman called, offered to buy me coffee and wanted to discuss students' perspectives of Hanover. Even some of my stuff got picked up by U-Wire. Most people like what I say, and I was and am grateful.
I write whenever I have an epiphany and it usually takes less than ten minutes to write document, so I usually depend on my editor to make me sound sane. Sometimes I can write dozens of editorials, and sometimes I can't think of a thing to say. These articles often reflect my mood at the time of writing. I'm grateful that there is a forum to speak my mind and I hope everybody knows that this forum is available to anyone.
I still have stories I want to share, so I'll continue to write. When I run out of things to say, I'll stop. There is stuff I want to say and stories I want to tell, but some I dare not recount until I graduate.
