If you’d had me in your blog reader or as a friend on Facebook or whatever, you might have noticed I’m back to writing again after a very long silence.  So, I’m sure someone who has been checking for activity so long might wonder what I’ve been up to.  Well, a lot, actually.  And I’ve got a very good reason for why my blog writing and novel writing went to a trickle, really.

I’ve probably beat this dead horse about my slacking when it comes to this blog.  I’ve talked about being busy and attempting to redouble my efforts on writing about things, and even made a promise to myself and you readers which I broke (“BLOGSPLOSION”).  Frankly, I’ll understand if the thing is kind of stupid– writing about why I’m not writing.  However, when someone lets me down (especially when it comes to updates of blogs and webcomics) I like to hear a reason– not an excuse, mind you, but a reason– for the sudden disappearance, especially when I came to get used to multiple updates a week.

That’s how I started it all out about a year ago– yeah, it’s been a year, I know because my domain registration and mapping are coming up for renewal in about a month.  I’d love to keep the domain, so I’m going to make a great effort to get updates going again so I have a reason to scrap together the money I need to do it.  Maybe if I can produce lots of material again week-to-week, I might feel comfortable with some kind of donation thing to get the couple of bucks together that I might be short.

So, anyways, here’s what I’ve been doing.

1) Sports Editor of The West Georgian: I’ve been writing sports stories for the paper, and organizing other sports writers in the paper to various events.  I’ve also been working on directing photographers to the right places to take photos of sporting events.  We’ve had to handle a rather depressing football season (only one win), and the frenetic pace of basketball, softball and baseball seasons.  I’ve tried to give coverage to the cross-country guys and girls, get coverage for the volleyball games, and do other things.  I’m proud of the expansion of the sports page, I don’t know if we’ve ever we’ve had more sports coverage at the paper in my time at the University.  I set out to make new rules for the department– do your own work, deliver the story that matters before you talk stats, strong leads, fair coverage of our home team.

By doing your own work, I meant for the sports writing team to stop the practice of rewriting press releases from the Sports Info department; I wanted us to start crafting a compelling and independent sports narrative while still doing a good service to our home team fans.  When I say to “deliver the story that matters before you talk stats”, I mean for all stories to include the strongest elements; if a record gets broken, if a player makes a big debut or return from the injured list, or if someone delivers something entirely unexpected, put it first before you start talking about At Bats, ERAs, Offensive Yardage, Completion Percentage, Rebounds or Free Throws– after all, for a fan, Sports are about the heart.

Strong Leads were a big thing for me because of all the weaknesses we must contend with, the Lead is the most common.  As well, I owe a great deal of my love for strong introductions to probably the greatest Middle School English teacher I’ve known, Mr. William Ladd of Saunders Middle School in Virginia.  On the first day of class, he showed us the importance of a strong hook through the use of a metal detector and his metallic shoulder joint replacement– suddenly, we all wanted to hear this painful story about an unfortunate trampoline accident in college.  I think he was the only teacher whose personal stories I even remember– I remember because he led the story with a compelling hook.  News stories, all of them, require just as strong of a lead.  You should walk away from the lead not just with the knowledge of Who, What, When, Why, Where and How, but also with a strong desire to learn more– even if you usually would not be interested in the subject matter.  A good news writer can use a lead to make the manliest macho man hunger to read more about a ballet.

For fair coverage of our home team, I wanted us to move away from the legacy we’d had at the paper of writing very negative stories about our teams– especially the football team.  It was fairly understandable; after all, our team had one of the longest losing streaks in the history of college football (21 games).  It was pretty embarrassing for many of us students here.  However, as hard as it was to deal with, I didn’t feel the best way to handle it was to put a negative spin on things.  So, I decided that the best way to serve the readership was by retooling our tone towards something more balanced; when we lose look for the positives– what did our folks do right, where they delivered big– and when we win, focus on the drama– plays that hurt us, how tenacious the competition was.  Every time the reader looks over one of our stories, they should feel the thrill of the game; if they watched it, they should remember their hearts racing when they saw it the first time and if they didn’t, then they should be excited enough to read through and hear more.  The folks who care enough about our sports team want to know the team hit the field hard and didn’t let up, even when they lose.

I can’t claim all the credit for the improvement of the Sports page with the paper.  Our Editor-In-Chief, Maggie Hills, did an awesome job with the layout and kept things moving.  Our News Editor, Corryn Fraser really rocked and helped make sure things got covered, even when I got too sick to work.  I was very fortunate to work with a talented team of sports writers, whose work this past year could best be described as brilliant and amazing.  I can’t wait for another year doing the Sports for the paper, and I hope to work with the same sharp talents.

2)  Appointee to the SAFBA: I don’t know how specific I can get about what happened during the meetings, but the general purpose of the SAFBA is to direct the allocations of Student Activities Fees to different departments and organizations to support and foster an active and engaged student body with funding for groups, services, opportunities and events that are both relevant and enriching.  Yeah, I know, it reads like a press release, but that’s my own reflection on the purpose of that committee.  We really did our best to look at the best ways to spend the funds we were to allocate, find the most effective programs and organizations, and efficiently disburse the funds to get the maximum effect.  We interviewed officers of student organizations– and I must say I really enjoyed those interviews with these folks, because I got to learn a great deal about the work being done throughout the college– to discover where student funds had gone in the past, and the purposes for which they were requested for in the coming year.

Being a member of this board required an amount of my time that, in relation to everything else, was fairly small– but I took the job very seriously, and spent extra time educating students in various organizations through the year about the Student Activities Fees request progress, as well as thoroughly reading through the requests and analyzing the paperwork in support of those requests.  I wanted to know and understand the big picture about how student activities fees were spent; I was amazed at all the stuff going on.  I enjoyed learning a great deal about the procedures and policies of the university, and navigating the bureaucracy so that I could help others find their way through.

3)  Presenting a Paper: I presented a paper at the Middle East Student Symposium at Georgia College and State University in April.  I delivered a presentation on my research comparing the policies of the United States and Iran towards Transsexual and Transgender individuals.  I had one of the later presentation sessions in the day, and I was surprised to see many people suddenly come in when it came my turn to present.  I was highly pleased with the response to the presentation, despite the fact that I ran over my allotted time.  I was able to answer all the questions that were asked and was pleased to offer my card afterwards to answer any more questions– in this way, I felt like I’d managed to provide an accurate and thorough understanding of the topic to the audience.  I look forward to writing more papers like that and presenting them at other venues.  The people I got to meet from colleges across Georgia were extremely great folks, and very passionate about Middle Eastern Studies.

Of course, if you’ve read my Bio here on the page, you’re probably wondering why was I writing a Middle East Studies paper, and even more so why I chose to submit it for presentation to the Symposium given that my major area is not in the field of Middle East Study but in Criminology.  Well, the biggest factor is that I had to do so, for one of my professors– he made me promise to submit the paper this year, once I’d completed it.  I wrote the paper for a Sociology 4999 (“Special Topics”) class on Social Change in the Middle East.  Since Criminology and Sociology borrow from each other a great degree, I took the class as one of my “Supporting Courses From Outside the Major Area”.  The Middle East is an area of great interest to me, mostly because it is an area of such political and socio-religious importance– the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as big as it is on the global stage, is but a tiny part of all the social tumult there.  The Middle East is historically compelling, as the region which plays host to the “Cradle of Civilization”.

4)  Classes: I am still a student in college, after all.  Still going for my Bachelor’s degree in Criminology.  I’m probably about a year away, if I were to blitz through it all at full steam.  Admittedly, I could be doing better right now and I am working on it, financial problems not withstanding (broke college student cliche goes here)– but I am putting in effort to complete the schedule in front of me, and I’ll certainly be walking for graduation before too long.  And then it’ll be on to graduate school; I’m still looking at Public Administration as a first option for my area of study, though some of my closest friends and family have brought up the idea of working towards a master’s in Psychology so I can pursue the possibility of becoming a school counselor.  I’m very interested in working with Middle and High School students, as part of my concentration in Criminology on Juvenile Delinquent behavior and gang recruitment of youths.  Maybe I’m a bit naive and wearing rose-colored sunglasses, but I’d certainly like to provide youth in risk with an understanding ear, to help them find their voice and channel their energies to positive ends.  And I think I’d do a better job of that as a school counselor in Middle or High School than as a youth probation officer.

5)  Trying to be more social: If I don’t force myself to go out when I don’t have to because of obligations or responsibilities, I can sometimes retreat into being a hermit.  And I’ve definitely spent way too much time in my room in the past, so I have to sometimes make an effort to remind myself to go out and hang out with folks.  I’ve known too many people who have similar tendencies who have just become a mess over time, and I don’t want that same fate.  So, I’ve been spending more time away from my desk and room to hang out with people around my building.  Of course, during the summer semester, so few people are around that at this point it’s not really a reason anymore– probably why I’m writing so much in this article (I’m up to 2100 words, egads!).  But folks are filtering back, and so I’m going to wrap this up and go downstairs for a bit to bug some other people.

In any case, I’m back to writing on here again for the summer.  I’ll probably put up another thing later tonight or tomorrow.  There’s a movie I’ve kind of fallen in love with that I’d like to break down and analyze:  Defending Your Life.  Since I’ve been in a bit of a Spiritual/Religious mode lately, I think I’ll write on that, given the subject matter (the afterlife).

To those still reading this blog, thanks so much for hanging in there.  I still can’t believe this thing has had over 3,205 hits!  Incredible!  Keep telling your friends, and let the folks you have told about me before that I’m back!

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