Hello, my baby Hello, my honey Hello, my ragtime gal!
Cutter's Log - Stardate 2001.80.01
Current Song - Mo Money Mo Problems (Notorious BIG)
I may not have a job, but all of this downtime is being spent at peace with myself. For one, I have found myself doing extremely well in conversation. Talking to others has been my achilles heel for the longest time, because of the mental condition that I have.
Probably all of the pressure building up inside my head from working for the past three years is disintigrating.
On Sunday I got to have lunch with a friend of mine at Applebees. It was great talking with him. I seemed to carry over the chatting momentum to a cross country meet I went to on Tuesday down in Erie.
The cross country meet almost never happened. I planned on covering a boys golf regional at Sycamore but I overslept. So I scrambled to find something else.
When I'm the only reporter there, I tend to stumble and stutter when I ask these complex questions to people I would like to interview. Most times I will write down questions on my notepad and look at them in the middle of the interview as a cue to what to ask next. For some reason, at this cross country meet I would up freestyling my questions and got some good quotes. I must have figured, hey, I'm the only reporter there so the readers should be proud that they have at least something (not really my best work).
As my writing philosophy, I try to keep my questions simple and easy to answer, and just search for that string of words that fits beautifully with the story. Natrually they do come.
Turns out I had another cross country meet the following day and I once again freestyled my questions ... pretty much just like how I did it the day before. Once again, I was the only reporter there.
Two days of having real good interview sessions was a blast for me. My biggest challenge would come during Friday's Little 10 Tournament finals.
When doing interviews with young ladies, I sometimes tend to be very nervous when presenting myself - I will sometimes have that "ugly" feeling lurking somewhere in my mind. My hair was a mess, I hadn't shaved, and my shirt had chest hair sticking out of it, and here I was interviewing high school girls. This feeling is a habit from when I first started conducting interviews - I was still trying to work on conversation toward girls at that time.
After talking with the coaches I asked for two girls to have an interview session with. Normally I will NOT do a double-session with two people at the same time. However, since the night was fast concluding, I had no choice to do the double-interview with the two girls, both sophomores and probably hadn't been interviewed before. The conversation was a success. I have seen and heard a couple of my writers do these double-interviews, so I tried to act as if I were like them. The transitions worked out well and the whole thing just went very well.
During the volleyball event I at least knew some people that were there, one of them one of my writers who was on assignment for another newspaper. This is usually not the case at most games that I travel to. I was also able to break the ice on some volleyball talk with a football-junkie friend of mine.
More volleyball on Saturday. Surprisingly, I was the only reporter there at the Dixon Invitational. Especially since the title match had teams with a combined record of 59-3. Just call it momentum and following the game, I guess. The more games you get to cover alone, the more confortable you feeling with conversations after the game.
After the Invitational, I found myself engaging in smalltalk with one of the people that I interviewed. That's real odd because that doesn't happen. I guess I was just lucky to be at these games alone. Going back home I stopped by a former co-worker's farewell party at Kelly's Bar and Grill downtown. Had a blast as we wished Will the best at his new gig with the Chicago Tribune.
We all did a toast with a shot of (something), and I actually drank it. I'm not a drinker, nor will I ever be - but this was only the third such occasion that I took a shot of something: a shot of wine at my sister's wedding, a shot of Bud Light at my 5th class reunion, and a shot of this stuff that is unknown to me tonight.
Okay, before I go crazy that's enough fun for the weekend.
In addition to the conversational aspect of things, the gas station hopes got another boost as another opening nearby has been created. Still waiting for the call.
Another confidence booster is something related to what has been mentioned already, but is something I'll just keep to myself for the time being.
Here's to next week!
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