maybe it's a little too early to be jaded with this.
so i'd thought about going to europe next semester, and now i am beginning to regret relinquishing that opportunity, because i want to get out of here.
i was sitting in the lounge on a saturday night in the middle of the thunderstorm, and i realized-and this may have stemmed from sheer virtue of the fact that i was, in fact, in the office on a saturday night-that the office is incredibly depressing. nothing there is colorful, everything is old, everything is cold, there are dead computers, dead telephones, dead dead dead. the coke machine is the only thing that stands out from the white walls, ugly phones and blah-colored couches, and it's usually all sold out anyway. most people usually are too busy or too stressed or too frustrated up there to be happy. and yet we never leave, and we sit around, like on that saturday night, four people in the lounge who more-or-less run this whole thing. and i was wondering whether i have confidence in myself, in next year's staff, i was wondering whether the staff has confidence in itself.
anyway, nearly everyone i know will be somewhere else this summer or next year: london, madrid, venice, bangkok, shanghai, mexico, malawi. and i will be wasting away in durham. again. stuck in that office, writing about things that only matter in the short-run, that will only get thrust into some corner with the other bound volumes of news that no one remembers, for future editors to dig up during their summers here and flip through half-heartedly, wondering if they too are just going to be some name on some masthead, reconvening with their staff in the 50th reunion tent saying hey, remember when we broke that news? and saying, well no, no not really. or else saying, oh yes, so-and-so had that byline. and that would be that and they'd look away, a little confused and disheartened, wondering if that time was wasted, wondering if it was worth it, because none of them really became journalists anyway.
i was sitting in the lounge on a saturday night in the middle of the thunderstorm, and i realized-and this may have stemmed from sheer virtue of the fact that i was, in fact, in the office on a saturday night-that the office is incredibly depressing. nothing there is colorful, everything is old, everything is cold, there are dead computers, dead telephones, dead dead dead. the coke machine is the only thing that stands out from the white walls, ugly phones and blah-colored couches, and it's usually all sold out anyway. most people usually are too busy or too stressed or too frustrated up there to be happy. and yet we never leave, and we sit around, like on that saturday night, four people in the lounge who more-or-less run this whole thing. and i was wondering whether i have confidence in myself, in next year's staff, i was wondering whether the staff has confidence in itself.
anyway, nearly everyone i know will be somewhere else this summer or next year: london, madrid, venice, bangkok, shanghai, mexico, malawi. and i will be wasting away in durham. again. stuck in that office, writing about things that only matter in the short-run, that will only get thrust into some corner with the other bound volumes of news that no one remembers, for future editors to dig up during their summers here and flip through half-heartedly, wondering if they too are just going to be some name on some masthead, reconvening with their staff in the 50th reunion tent saying hey, remember when we broke that news? and saying, well no, no not really. or else saying, oh yes, so-and-so had that byline. and that would be that and they'd look away, a little confused and disheartened, wondering if that time was wasted, wondering if it was worth it, because none of them really became journalists anyway.