Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

Class, newspaper and sleep have been dominating the majority of my time recently, and it’s been hard to get up the inspiration to really write anything, blog or fiction.

I feel like I’ve hit a point in my short story where I really need to step back and figure out some basic things, like what the plot actually is, who the characters are, etc. I guess I hoped that that would all come together as I scribbled notes here and there, but alas, all I have right now is 10 pages of random stream-of-consciousness writing. What I have learned is that I think memoir, real-life writing is more what I should go for, because looking back at what I wrote, the small parts I made up are significantly worse than what I took from my own experiences.

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I’ve gotten really into audiobooks and other audio stuff recently, whether in the form of podcasts, music, audiobooks, whatever. I’ve always loved reading, but I often have trouble getting into a book enough that I’d like to keep reading it, so for some reason this system works so much better. In the last few weeks I’ve gotten through:

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So yesterday, in between bites of homemade Mexican food, I learned that there was going to be a protest that night, the latest in a series of public action sparked by the killing of a young Mapuche man by a police officer. The Mapuche are the biggest indigenous group in the country, and have been at odds with the government over mistreatment and a lack of legal protection, among other things.

Awesome, I thought. A protest! I’ve covered protests, because after all, I did go to school at UC Santa Cruz, right?

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I just found this from an old blog, an attempt over last summer to get something going. I wrote this when I was working at the Sacramento Bee and getting ready to go back to Santa Cruz and return to City on a Hill.

Interesting how things change.

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“Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.”

Boy, ain’t that the truth. And as I’m pretty sure the great thinker Kareem Abdul-Jabar was trying to say, in our time, when your power cord dies for your computer, you’re pretty much screwed.

And so I found myself yesterday, sitting in the Santiago Times office working when suddenly my power cord stopped feeding my computer. Shit. But no time to worry about that, as I had to rush off to our first orientation at the University of Chile orientation, in which they did presentation after presentation, including several videos, showing us all about campus, its history and its significance through the years.

I never really realized what a great school it was in the greater Chilean scheme of things, because obviously it’s not really something that we talk about in the states. La Chile and La Católica are the two best universities in the country, so to tell Chileans that we’re going there is a big deal. The best way I can imagine it is if somebody came to do an exchange program to Harvard, or Yale, or one of those schools, and didn’t understand all of the baggage that goes with those names for the average American.

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Attempt 2: Rewriting is really hard, but I’ll do what I can.

So even though CVSMP doesn’t have as nice of a ring to it as my old newspaper, it seems I’ve found a place that I like to get my journalism on.

This week is a weird one in the course of the semester because our two schools, La Chile and La Católica, take wildly different schedules. La Católica, in its infinite wisdom and never-ending charity, has given its snotty, bratty, spoiled students almost two weeks off before the start of class. My stupid university, La Chile, has scheduled we, the downtrodden, to the most travel-unfriendly schedule imaginable: brief orientations held every other day in Santiago. But I’m not bitter. (more…)