So what happened? Did I let the blog go entirely? Did the depressive extreme of the bipolar spectrum I described last month - last month? - send Chris into a tailspin from which she hasn't yet recovered? Has the opposite happened, and my writing been such a rousing success that I don't care about blogging any more? Can you tell anything by the fact that I keep shifting back and forth between first and third person, as I try not to let October go the way of September?
Besides, one of the things I've learned in the interim is that my work at the J School is better when I write here- when I share my experiences on the beat, the things I'm learning, the way I did with my very first story. I should have done the same with the second; I should have written every day (as I'd started to, below) about the fearless Father Brady. But I was drowning, and disoriented by the emotional roller coaster of RW1.
It is,of course, the intended course of this reporting class - that every bit of weak or cowardly reporting, every un-tight paragraph, every sloppy referent gets slashes on paper and references in conference and "I'm worried." This only intensified, to the nth degree, with the arrival of Dale Maharidge -- Dale's brilliant, encouraging in general (he looked at my clips and liked them) and ruthless in his editing and coaching. He also puts grades on things and thus gave me, recently, the first C+ I've gotten since a psycho Cinema professor accused me of plagiarizing a paper at Binghamton.
In the meantime, ALL the stories have had to happen are on a far-shorter lead time than I'm used to: some in one day, like the two AP daybook exercises (one of which I bungled so badly that it was irreparable), others in 2-3 days max (reporting Monday, class Tues-Wed, deadline Thurs). Thus every story already feels half-baked when I submit it, then is justly pilloried, and so on.
This is, of course, exactly what I'm paying for; but it gives the whole experience, as I've been saying lately, the emotional quality of being battered. You feel great - interviews are great, you're learning things, you get nachas for this or that small thing in drill - and then BOOM the crit puts you somewhere over the edge.
Dale's got used to seeing me in tears, and likely doesnt take it seriously any more: I am honestly trying to put an end to these hissy fits, but it's not as easy as it sounds. (Likely I should eat more. I've lost 7 pounds so far, simply from not having the time, inclination. or money to eat. I've never been this way, and I do think it's made me more brittle than I need to be -- it all gets tied in with trying to keep my fatigue levels at bay, managing the caffeine and my meds and so on and so on.)
Meanwhile the sense of overall deadline pressure really sets in with the other classes - Reporting on Courts and Trials, Critical Issues in Journalism, the law class and the masters' project, which is a long, 5000+ word magazine piece on a matter of some import. You sort of feel like you can't handle any of it, until the effort even to write a pitch feels leaden.
Then you wake up, shake it off, and soon are back on the high of the work -- pushing, meeting people/talking to them, and trying to ride the pulse of the stuff scheduled for you as well as the reporting. (If you think it's just me, check out our class' loose group blog, The Ten Month Beat.)
Now that I've reverted to second person, it's time to get specific again. But much of the above has held, I was reassured to learn, for many of my classmates. Not that it hurt any less. Until - as I said to Cynthia Cotts, my master's adviser, last week: "I'm talking to you about this big project, and part of me firmly believes that I'm incapable of writing a postcard home to my mother."
Still, I have some faith that at least some of my beat stories will ultimatelt turn out OK - and I'll post here, tomorrow, the most recent one, which I actually like quite a lot. I've met and been welcomed by some wonderful people in Astoria, thanks largely to one former student from La Guardia Community
College.
I chose Astoria as my
beat, and decided to keep it (after flirtations w/others, like Fort
Hamilton – too far! , Marble Hill/Kingsbridge (too scary!), snd so on)
largely because of the inexhaustible mix of cultures on every block,after getting I
had gotten a whiff after teaching at La Guardia, where I taught students from Uzbekistan, Nepal, both Koreas,
all Chinas, Bosnia, the subcontinent, and up and down Central and South
Americas. Suzanne is one of the reasons I stuck with Astoria,
even after I learned that there were 12 other J-06 types (including this blogger, who writes largely in French) who'd chosen the region. Oh, but I have my Queens secret weapon, I thought in total arrogance.
Now, I think it's more like they have me. At least I hope they will
begin to think that way.
A striking young Trinidad native in her early thirties, Suzanne has,
through her activism on behalf of her three children, become a presence
in many of the schools in District 30. She's someone that students
approach when they're upset: in the time I walked around with her, two
or three grownups did the same, to which I was introduced as "my
professor."
As we talked, that first day, she walked me around some of Astoria I'd not been to
the last time: through low-rise streets with small brick attached
houses and apartment blocks, Greek and Italian restaurants and churches
- including Mt. Carmel, a century-old building in blond stone and
ordinary brick, with a notation of mass times: ENGLISH 7 A.M., SPANISH
8 A.M., ITALIAN 9 A.M., ENGLISH 10 A.M., VIETNAMESE 11 and so forth.
(Mt. Carmel is, in fact, where I was to spend the rest of the week that
I wasn't at Columbia.)
As we began to cross 30th Street, she said about one of the
apartment blocks: "Graffiti. We haven't had that around here until
recently." Spoken like a true homeowner, though she's a renter --
spoken like a community leader, anyway.
"So many people from India are coming to the neighborhood," she said
as we walked past women in glorious salwa kameez and Hindi names on
doctors' offices. Then she put me back on the train to go off to the
community board meeting - but also to get ready for what turned out to
be just my first interview the next day with Father Edmund Edmund L.
Brady.
A slender white-haired man of 72, Brady turned out to be so much of
a story that I ended up spending Wednesday and Thursday afternoons with
him -- meeting alternately with him and with members of his "Z Crew,"
the youth empowerment group I'd first heard about from Suzanne. That's
when I met Bree and Jessie (not their real names), as well as others
who had been part of the group's First Big Battle -- a struggle to gain
clarity on the issue of school uniforms. Along the way I heard enough
about gangs in the schools to think of it as a separate story.
Father Brady himself turned out to be an old lefty: he was trained
by Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation in community organizing,
back when he was in Bushwick in the early 1980s, in the aftermath of
the 1977 blackout.
My second Astoria story turned out to be a profile of him -- one I'll post immediately after this, even though I'm theoretically in the process of revising it for publication. If you look closely at that story, you'll see what my next one after that was: and soon I'll be writing yet another education story, ALSO from that wellspring.
In between, though, has been My Week in Law Enforcement, which I'll throw up here tomorrow night -- as I'm journaling my day, tomorrow, at the Queens Criminal Court. In the meantime, I have some hopes that my masters' project and my first paper for the Covering Courts class will help me revisit Book of Days, which I've neglected even worse than here. Now that I think of it.
Time to plunge back in - with phone calls and prep for the week. I'll try to think of it as getting back into Dr.Who's Tardis, to hurtle toward new worlds and fresh horrors, small victories, and likely a bit of comedy along the way.