Every picture tells a story, don't it?

My co-worker Heather showed me a picture her girlfriend took of her. Done on a digital camera with the "Sunset" setting. Red light as background shining from the back, birthing her in a corona of ruby light. She, in low-light underexposed shroud-shadow, looking like a growing mushroom cloud from the heat-burned footage at the Alamogordo nuclear testing grounds. Radiant. A million degrees rushing out, chasing violated atoms fried out in an invisible blossom. The primal forces of the universe unleashed.

Making a list

A couple Saturdays from now, I'm taking part in a journalism course, teaching dozens of college students about the joys and miseries of going out and getting a gig in the news business. I did something like this when I was in grad school and i hated it. Don't ask me why I'm doing it again. I just have some overwhelming urge to help out some plebes a couple semesters out from braving the harsh world of media mergers, corporate news and a dreadful business market.

I'm on a panel with two others about how to break into the market. The other two, compared to me, have had pretty straight-arrow careers. School, internship, job. I took a Tom Joad-type journey throughout the 90s. School, intern, job, grad school, newspaper for three weeks, first high tech job, high tech temp, web design job, freelance web job, reporter, desk editor/designer, tech writer, copy editor, web site manager and finally calendar editor. It's going to be very hard to condense my life into a one-minute history for the kids. My subject for the panel is the "Things I Wish I Would Have Done While I Was In School." Not to say my educational years were misused and poorly spent, just I look back and see things I wish I would have done differently. A sort of "Ghost of Christmas Past."

I had to come up with a list of 10 things to talk about for about eight minutes. Ten, because our adviser told us that the kids like to have things in easily digestible nuggets. Top 10, famous by Letterman, is part of the ever-growing iconography spread by the USA Today virus. Although I'm not great in front of crowd, this is something I could talk about for hours. Maybe it's for the best I have a few minutes. Wifey says I tend to ramble.

Anyway, my top 10 things to do while you are still in school (for journalism majors and the rest of you looking to alter your lives)

- Take a foreign language, or brush up on the one you took in high school
- Take a trip outside of the country.
- Brush up on the current goings-on in media law
- Take a gathering information course.
- Take a tour of your local paper and talk to editors, reporters, photographers, etc.
- Get involved in a shadow project
- Start gathering your clips
- Take different courses (like business or poetry, statistics would be a good idea)
- Take different media courses (if you are a reporter, take a photo or design class or two)
- Consider grad school

Today's Word: Bridge

From One Word

Gibson. His bridge trilogy. A society in transit, locked on the broken San Francisco Bay Bridge. Two bridges in Seattle. Both ready to sink into the Sound at the next temblor. Little else to add. Bridges are fatalistic and noble things.


P.S.
This'll be the first and only time I use a Rod Stewart lyric as an entry title. Promise.