Ernie Pyle, �Here Is Your War�
Within the next couple of days, I hope to be posting totally current reviews on this site as well as continuing to put the older ones up. I wrote this on September 20. Let�s see how true I am to my plan. Hmmmm. It seems to be September 29, now. Shows what I get for making goals.
Speaking of goals, one of the reasons I want to get more current reviews up and running, even if it makes the site a little more confusing to navigate, is because things are moving much too fast right now. If I don�t get them up soon, they�ll soon become irrelevant. Nearly as irrelevant as all these other older reviews that I�m sweating over, trying to load on.
So yeah, back to goals. My girlfriend recently posted something on her site stating goals of her own.
See, De Anza, particularly people who work on the campus paper, has a talent for sucking people in and making them take three or more years to finish with a program that should ideally take two years. Hell, it happened to me.
But eventually you realize that you should concentrate on getting the fuck out of there, and going on to a real college, where you hopefully won�t have to explain to other students that slavery was actually much more recent than 2,000 years ago. (This is pulled from a true experience from myself. Yes, people are that dumb.)
So she�s finally reached that realization, and has started on the path of taking all the terrible classes she avoided, but needs in order to graduate. Next up in her plan, is transferring. And one of the places she�s considering is San Francisco.
She hasn�t really discussed this with me.
Not to be hypersensitive, but this probably means that I don�t work into her long-term plans. Of course, that won�t be for a year. A lot can happen in a year. At the same time, I need to start figuring out what I�m going to do. When I first got the tentative acceptance from Columbia University, I drove over to her house, more freaked out than happy. I was freaked out because I wanted her with me.
I would have gone to New York had the acceptance letter gone through, but it didn�t mean anything to me. She was more important than some ivy league school that I�m probably only applying to as a middle finger to fly in the face of all of the people who expected me to fail.
As it turned out, I�m still here. But I�m also way too stagnant. So, at the beginning of October, if not sooner, I�m going to start the process for studying for the GRE. I�m taking this test in late November. Over December, I�ll be applying for graduate schools across the country.
If I get into Berkeley, I wonder if we can have a romance across the Bay.
This book helped me with those goals. It�s been a while since I read a book by a reporter that was as good as this. Pyle is a legendary reporter, and while he hardly accounts as an investigative reporter, which is my field, his mastery of keeping a story engaging is something that a lot of journalists have forgotten.
In the meantime, I ran into a reporter from The Metro on Saturday who told me that they need another music writer on staff. I sent the editor an e-mail today. If I can get in, having some clips sure won�t hurt my chances of getting into a graduate program, especially at a good school.
I�ll keep you posted. Hopefully, it won�t be two months after the fact.
