my life has become a journalism parody.
I have spent the last three days housed up hosting a regional conference, followed by paper production. I crashed with the delegates in a hotel room on de la montagne for the last three days and somehow made it through the third and final "poster night" of wannabe student council politicians scrambling their way up escalators to pillage prime real estate space in a blur of purple.
Through the conscious, slept-and-nourishment deprived, constantly working state, I managed to laugh with colleagues through all the activity, turn down a threesome with teens, kiss a handsome environmentalist one time on each cheek and break a seven-year hiatus from McDonalds breakfast watching the sun rise with my masthead.
I feel accomplished and disgusting at seven thirty a.m., killing time before a feature writing class and washing delicates by hand.
I looked in the mirror at my tired, computer-glazed eyes and it occurred to me that I have stopped writing for myself somehow, even if it is all I seem to do between spurts of socialization.
This is an interesting job. One that kills, tires, excites and challenges me in so many different, changing ways. Have I really found vocation? Fuck.
At the office today, sagging deep into the well-worn couch around two a.m., we talked about how journalism would be so much better if we didn't have to have such intense relationships with a computer screen. The lifeless glow beckons us, clearly (even when it's seven in the morning and my bed cries out), because it is the vehicle in which I have been trained to communicate.
I love this and I hate this.
Often, the image of a throw-back era of reportage—just a (wo)man and his pen—having to explain something experienced, real, present, while capturing and creating it, moulding language, relaying story from a dial up telephone for a copy writer on the other end to transcribe. Dictation! What a concept. Our generation will never live throwback journalism.
But then again, why wax nostalgic about the olden days, many have asked me, when I have the fastest technological tools at my disposable fingertips. Why question the gifts that I have been given by the "ingenuity" of man and machine? Why wonder about how mcuh it has impacted the very basic human condition of communication. It fucks with me sometimes.
I've been trying to write this feature about technology and personal relationships and cannot seem to convince many that this pace and its place in our lives is out of control. It sometimes even seems unfair to demand people to detach from the real experience of skin, breath, exchange, gesture, eyes, words - free flowing and affected by the circumstances.
