Snapshot of a friend

Long black curls fall down over the gray, pink, blue, and burgundy stripes of her shirt. Her big brown eyes sparkle as she listens intently. We're sitting around a small table near the back of The Café -- Janelle, Michael and I -- talking quietly, chuckling, and enjoying a lunch the way we used to before the semester put us each on separate schedules.

Just as Michael walks past her to leave, she whirls in her chair, arm outstretched, and knocks the drink out of his hand, sending ice, soda, a straw, and the cup splashing onto the carpet. Her hands go immediately to her face, fingers spread wide to hide herself. She's laughing hard, but silently, her body quivering with each breath, but only a squeak escapes from behind her hands.

“I'm so sorry she says,” still squeaking, still trying to catch her breath. She's blushing through her dark skin even as he leaves.

She turns to me and gives her purse a forceful shove away from her. “I feel like I have a barrier in front of me,” she explains. She's animated today – in her actions, in her voice, in the glow on her face. She clasps her hands in her lap and leans forward as we talk. She's talking about graduating, finding a job, hoping her internship leads to employment.

She's graduating in a few weeks and, though we'll still remain friends, these quiet (though sporadic) lunches in The Café will soon become something we did back in college.

Butterflies

Butterflies.

I cannot recall what it is that I first noticed about her, but that’s because I was so lost in her from the moment I saw her on that first day of geology class. Her short blond hair brushing against her cheek, the little rounded nose, the big blue eyes looking up to see me. I was drawn to her and without thinking I found myself sitting next to her.

I accomplished remarkably little that semester and remember even less. While I cannot recall the differences between metamorphic and those other two kinds of rocks, I can recall in detail the way her face lights up when she’s happy, the cute little tattoo on the inside of her left wrist, the care with which she doodles on her foot, the way she looks when she pulls a red cap down over her eyes when she hasn’t had enough sleep. I can’t tell you the feeling of being able to toss an Altoid in her mouth from two seats away, but I remember how much we laughed when a stray one hit her in the eye. It’s not that I didn’t try to pay attention in class, but it was always more exciting to be poked or have one of her sandals tossed at me for attention.

We never did anything normally, not even flirt. We text-messaged each other from two seats away. I passed notes to her by writing them on paper and then sending pictures of them by cell phone. But the conversations were the best – the way we both leaned in, the way our eyes always met. The way no one else existed in those moments. And it never mattered what we were talking about. It was all the things that were unsaid. The way she looked at me. The way I hung on every glance.

She had chased me that day and nearly tackled me in the plaza. I hadn’t seen her and my only warning was the clapping of shoes on pavement quickly approaching from behind and then there she was – her cheeks flushed, lips parted into a big smile and the excitement in her eyes when I saw her. It was then that I knew I was in trouble. There was no going back. I felt the butterflies.

And sometimes it’s all about the butterflies.

I would say the biggest challenge and greatest frustration with working under a deadline is inevitably having to rely on sources. If that is true of news writing, it is certainly true of feature writing since feature writing is largely about people.

I've been working on a feature article about American Journalism students studying aboard as well as foreign students studying here in the United States. Two of my key sources are located in Europe. Time differences aside, it's been darned near impossible to coordinate telephone interviews. My source in Ireland, for instance, doesn't have a telephone in her dorm and therefore must call from a telephone booth outside. After a week of hit and miss, we're communicating largely by email -- and it's much more difficult to do interviews by email because you don't have the luxury of immediate follow-up questions, not to mention the fact that you miss long pauses, laughter, variations in tone, and all those things that add depth to what is being said.

So I'm venting. Sort of. Argh.

Ah, Orange!

I was a Vol from birth, whether I knew it or not. Though was born and raised in the Motor City, both of my parents are originally from Tennessee and so I have had orange running through my veins all my life.

I noticed from a young age that the love of the University of Tennessee reaches cultish fervor in East Tennessee. I've watched pickup trucks with mudflaps the size of billboards cruising the two-lane roads of Smalltown, UT flag streaming behind them. If you follow Route 25 far enough north, you'll pass a white picket fence lining the yard of an orange and white house occupied by hardcore UT lovers. Only weeks into my first semester at UT I saw a handcuffed and shackled murdered on the evening news being led to a waiting police car. He was decked out, from head to toe, in orange UT clothing. Even people who can't spell university love the Vols and will lay down and die for UT football if asked to do so.

So I came to Tennessee, forsaking the cold, bitter winters of Michigan. I left behind flat campuses in favor of the mountainous terrain and craggy cliffs that define the UT campus and, consequently, give me iron-man stamina from having traversed these obstacles. I came because, I couldn't resist the orange glow.

It's great to be a UT fan, but so much better being a Vol. It's the difference between being on the outside looking in, and being the guy sitting at the banquet table, orange frosting dripping off your face as you eat all your cake, too. It's damn good cake, too.

And Michigan is still frigg'n cold.

90.3 The Rock

Though I'm a magazine-minded journalism student, I spend an incredible amount of time at 90.3 The Rock -- the student-run radio station at the University of Tennessee -- where I DJ, schedule music, voice commercials, and even maintain the web site.

We're a pretty tightly-knit crew at the Rock, and it's not uncommon for the group to descend on the cafeteria like a pack of wolves, show up late to class together (rolls eyes), or pick fights with the Knoxville chapter of the Hell's Angels to blow off steam.

We are, for the most part, spoiled siblings.

In my spare time...

The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club. Sorry.

And Mr. King says...

Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. Sure, his stories and novels are page-turning, nail-biting masterpieces -- but I admire his ability to tell a story in such a way that the telling becomes transparent to the reader. King's mastery -- perhaps magic -- of writing is such that one cannot help but get so caught up in the story that he or she forgets that they are reading something. The language ebbs and flows so naturally that the reader sees what is in the author's mind.

King calls this telepathy in his book "On Writing." It's an appropriate description of the process, in my opinion.

A lot of writers, whether fiction or non-fiction, draw attention to the page through awkward prose, unnatural language, poorly chosen words, and unnecessarily detailed description. As an example, King tells us that there is a table draped with a red cloth. On that table is an aquarium-sized cage. Inside of that cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose. The rabbit is gnawing on a carrot held steady by one of its paws. On the rabbit's back, in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

As readers, we all see the image. Each of us will see it slightly differently in the insignificant details, but essentially we are all seeing the same image. We are linked to the author's mind telepathically, as he says, and this connection has been made using only the necessary details.

It is a simple lesson with tremendous significance for a writer, especially a feature writer who must master creative nonfiction in order to excel. It is also some of the best advice I've ever read on writing (and I've read many books on writing).

...and let there be a first post!

I'm never quite comfortable writing a personal biography, and yet I seem to often find myself caught in the dilemma of having to write one. As a journalism student, I've found that writing other people's biographies comes fairly easily, usually fueled by a great deal of creative force.

Perhaps writing a biography seems too personal and revealing. Yet, the truth is quite the opposite. My mere biography is just a list of what I've done. It may hint at what drives me, but really doesn't say much about who I am. Writing, on the other hand, is very personal and very revealing. If you want to be naked in front of a million strangers, blog.

But I digress. Or perhaps I'm procrastinating from the task at hand, which is to write a biography of myself for the feature writing class this blog has been created for.

I began college with an eye on a journalism major. Actually, it was an interdisciplinary major in journalism and public relations because the first university I attended had a terrible journalism program and so decided to just throw a bunch of classes together and call it an interdisciplinary program. Of course, every freshman thinks he or she knows what they are going to major in and I soon discovered, from my freshman perspective, that beer, women, co-ed dorms and fraternity life were the best parts of college.

By sophomore year I was a Criminal Justice major.

Switching to Criminal Justice may or may not have been influenced, in some small way, by the fact that I had began college as an Intelligence Analyst for the United States Army Reserve. But I digress once again. It's a story for another time. For now, let it add depth and perspective to my tale.

Don't get me wrong, Criminal Justice is a fascinating field. Crime scene investigation, criminal theory, Constitutional law, criminal law, abnormal psychology -- all subjects worth drooling over during course registration each semester. But something was missing and that something was actually more complicated and deep-rooted than perhaps I realized at first.

The simple truth is that I am insatiably curious, and adventurous (I'm also a hopeless romantic and a stubborn idealist, but that's another matter entirely). And I seem to have a unique perspective on the world around me that ensures that few things are insignificant to me and trivial things have exciting possibilities for rising on the cool scale. Often it is the things least expected (or noticed by others) that have me bursting at the seams to enthusiastically relate to others.

And I like love to write. I love to capture moments with my camera. I love everything that squeezes another ounce of creativity out of me. I have an ingrained need to share my perspectives on the world, current events, and whatever else with others -- not so much with the goal of influencing how they think, but rather to present them with things to think about; new ways to look at the world.

I came to the realization that at the end of my life I would have to be writing. There was simply no other way. It's a paradigm-shifting realization when, through a series of twists and turns, you come to the conclusion that you took the road most traveled and will soon be parting with that $50k salary you're receiving for slaving away in a sanitized corporate cube farm in order to plunge back into a life of student poverty for a more significant goal. It's much easier if you're single with no responsibilities to anyone but yourself and count yourself among the few truly hopeless dreamers.

So sometimes you just have to go back to where the roads first diverged and get on the right path.

So here I am, a journalism student, blogging my disconnected musings. I wouldn't trade it for the world.