The Return (of Yours Truly)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I'm baaaaaaack!

Well, at the very least, it's a good thing to the few who are probably still reading this blog of mine.

Sorry about the extreme poverty of updates. To be honest, I just haven't really been in the mood for serious updating these past three weeks or so---maybe because I'm expending more of my daily blogging energy on the journal entries I'm writing for the internship coordinator over at Rutgers. Yep, I'm required to update him every week about things I do, things I notice, etc. at The Wall Street Journal.

Or maybe it's just because I've been trying to do other things on the side which are taking up my free time. Among those things: spending about an hour reading the news every day (mostly the New York Times online; I probably should read other news sources), spending some time pleasure-reading as much as possible (current project: Jack Kerouac's On the Road, in celebration of its 50th anniversary), watching films whenever I can, listening to more music (catching up on the Beatles' complete oeuvre in anticipation of Julie Taymor's new Beatles-inspired film musical Across the Universe), etc.

I should probably add thinking about my future after I graduate in December to that list---but there's just so much to think about! Where I might want to live, where I could best afford to live, what I'd like to do, what I'd be willing to settle with job-wise...it's the real world, baby, and I'm already feeling the pressure!

If my current position at the Journal didn't instill enough pressure in me on a daily basis.

Maybe, soon enough, I'll post excerpts from some of the journal entries I've been writing for the guy over at Rutgers. For now, I'll just say this: the monitor desk is a lot different from what I was expecting, especially after working at the much more relaxed copy desk for nearly an entire summer. I was overwhelmed to the point of self-doubt and frustration during my first two weeks training, but, now that I am working by myself, it doesn't seem so bad---at least, once I realized that I was only being expected to do the best that I can, not to have some kind of super-eye in catching production-level mistakes. I mean, who can be expected to read every single article of an entire paper in three or four hours? You do the best you can do.

Well, that's it for now. I'll probably just end up exploring this Web site a bit more before I go to sleep tonight. A treasure trove, let me tell y'all!

Hopefully a more serious update will be coming soon...