Horrible.

I need to be better at updating!

Latest news as far as finding my niche: Discovered the Washington Semester Program for journalism and new media. Sounds amazing, but would delay my graduation by a semester. What to do? I'm leaning towards going, I fell in love with DC on my labor day trip!

More info on that to come, because currently, I don't really have any...

"Right where you should be... in Capitol City"

Lots of travelling, little time to update.

This past weekend I went with a friend to visit another good friend, Bobby Woods, at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, just a quick metro ride from Washington D.C. Bobby was injured in combat in Afghanistan a little over a month ago and there is a feature about him in the Red and Black. He is recovering astonishingly quickly and amazing all of us. When your life changes like that in an instant, or even someone else's life who is close to you, it makes you think a lot about what's important.

The point of this blog is to help me figure out where I should take my career, but I feel like I should also take some time to stop and smell the roses, right? If I work hard this last year of college and enjoy myself a little too, a job after graduation would just be icing on the cake.

And we had cake, too, in celebration of Bobby's birthday. Superman-themed, of course, because 1LT Bobby Woods is a real-life super hero.

"You can't know how you would behave in a crisis until it drops out
of the sky and knocks you down like a bandit: stealing your future, robbing you of your dreams, and mocking anything that resembles certainty. Sudden
tragic events and even slow-burning disasters teach us more about ourselves
than most of us care to know."

-Lee Woodruff, wife of Bob Woodrufff, a journalist who was seriously injured in 2006 while reporting near Taji, Iraq.

Well hello.

Part of my grade for Writing for the Web is maintaining a personal blog. I've only maintained one blog during my summer in Oxford and did a poor job of keeping it updated. I've decided to use this space to figure out what all of my professors are telling me I should already know: what do I love? What is my passion? What makes me wake up every day and think, "I have even more to say about this topic than I did yesterday?"

As an aspiring journalist, it's just not good enough to say "Hey employer, I am a fantastic writer!" I need to have something to say. I need to have a unique point of view on a topic of interest for lots of people.

That's not so easy, it seems.

I've never been one to have "favorites." When my friends order pizza, they ask what I like and I say "Everyone get what they want and I'll take a slice of each." I live for variety--it's the spice of life! However, this natural inclination has led me nowhere in the field of writing. "Cheese or pepperoni?" is the question, and "both" can not be the answer.

So it begins. I'll post whatever I like and try to figure out the common thread between it all.

Hey, if all else fails, we can still go get a pizza together. I'm very flexible when it comes to toppings.