NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Figure I owe you faithful readers a brief update of the rest of my first week back at school, so here it is.
I was able to register into Editing and Layout class without having to wait for a special permission number. Basically, I lucked out: I looked at the online course schedule and saw that the section was green---meaning open---again after it had been red---closed---for so long. I was actually pretty happy about this (my roommate told me later in the day that he had heard me whisper "Yes!" when I was able to register into the class); now I hope the class lives up to my enthusiasm. (I subsequently dropped a Development of Mass Media class I had previously registered into.)
My schedule actually seems to divide itself quite nicely into "journalism" days and "film" days. So my Mondays and Wednesdays are all journalism classes, while my Tuesdays and Thursdays are dominated by film courses. No classes on Fridays (although I plan to do something important with my Fridays; more on that in a moment...).
Thursday night was my first Inside Beat meeting as Film Editor. The night before, our head editor had e-mailed all of us editors imploring us to try to come up with assignment ideas. I didn't come up with a great deal of film feature story ideas except cliche things like a fall movie preview (which no one called); but, of course, most of my assignments are basically film-review assignments anyway. And so, in the typically rambling little spiel I gave to the crowd of editors, staff writers and wannabe writers in our office, I tried to emphasize how I wanted a slightly stronger indie film presence in my section. So obscure foreign film releases playing at, say, the Angelika Film Center or Landmark's Sunshine Cinemas in Manhattan? I guess as long as it has generated a certain amount of buzz, it's fair game to me. And of course I encouraged writers to be proactive and come up with ideas of their own. (Editors like me don't always come up with the greatest ideas anyway.)
I was actually a little nervous before I opened my mouth to speak to the group last night, as if I was about to give a rallying speech to the troops. Nevertheless, I think I made my major points, and I was able to elaborate on them a bit more with individual wannabe writers after the meeting was over.
Look at me, assuming a position of (some kind of) power! (Unfortunately, not enough power to be able to get access into the New York Film Festival; I only found out last night that today was the last day applications for accreditation to the press/industry screenings of films being shown at the festival. That was rather disappointing, I must say.)
As for today: well, as I might have said in a previous blog entry, I am supposed to be writing a thesis this year for the Livingston College Honors Program. (I promise, I will eventually go into a little bit more depth about what that thesis is going to be about in a future post.) But of course a thesis is nothing without research, and I kinda have to get cracking on that; I didn't do much of it in the summer as I had planned (although, that said, I did decide to change my thesis topic in August, so I have a little bit of an excuse).
I don't know how much time during my four days of class I'll have to devote to intensive thesis research, so I think I will try to designate my Fridays---and maybe some Saturdays---as "thesis" days, in which I will perhaps hole myself up in one of the campus libraries and research stuff. We'll see how that works out.
Oh, and still no shower curtains. Looks like maintenance isn't going to come help us out after all (is it possible that Devco has instructed maintenance to disregard any calls for shower curtains?), so I'm going to have to go buy some this weekend, as well as do some extra packing that I neglected to do before returning to Rockoff. Sloppy sloppy me.
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