Week 6 Autobiographical Slice

"Oh, I want your shirt!" someone said to the teacher as they walked in.

"Okay, here!" the teacher said, and started unbuttoning it.

This is how my time in journalism started. When I first thought of taking journalism it was because I had liked the teacher when I had taken a class with her before. In general, I had no real interest in it, though I did like writing.

At first, we were mostly just learning the basics of journalism, especially since many people were new in the class. We had to get information on someone's position, office, etc. in the college. My interviewing experiences started off well as the person immediately responded to emails. This was not to continue.

I was assigned a story on the basketball team. The first time, the coach responded. But not the second, or the third. Or the fourth. Thus, that story never materialized.

Amongst all this, I was getting more into journalism the more the teacher said on it. We edited stories in class, and it was really fun to see how good she was at changing wording and rearranging/condensing sentences.

I covered the art gallery later. Several artists were on display, so I went and covered the opening. It was like an actual report, so I decided I would do well at it. I went a couple hours early before the reception. All the pictures were up, so I pulled out my (pretty good) digital camera. And I went through and picked out three works that I liked, and started taking photos of them. The librarian had sent me two pictures, but the pieces in the picture were- less than interesting. Thus, I took pictures of a photograph of a polar bear, and a painting of a bridge. I took about thirty pictures of each of them, trying to get the lighting/blur right. I had to make sure I was holding the camera perfectly still to make it perfect. So I went back and took about thirty more of each, then looked at them. Then I took more pictures...

The bridge one was very impressive. Good quotes always help an article, so I was hoping some of the artists would be at the reception. Maybe even the person that did the bridge.

Thus, when people gathered for the reception, I stood at the back and hovered. I identified four artists and their works from hearing talk. The person who had painted the bridge, a small Korean looking student, was there. Many people were admiring his bridge, and his friends were pointing him out, while he was shying away.

I figured that even though he's shy, I might consider talking to him. The reception opened with speeches, and I took quotes as a couple of artists talked. They tried to push the bridge painter to talk, but he declined very quietly.

So, I figured that I would just keep an eye on him and decided whether to approach him or not. So as he walked around in the bookcases, eating cookies, I kept out of sight watching him through the bookcases and following him. It's not like I'm good at approaching people either, especially since he probably wouldn't want to give one anyway.

Eventually, I worked out the article in my head and figured that I had enough quotes. Though a lot of people didn't recognize it as a polar bear.

I started picking up how to write articles pretty quickly. It was like a science. When the class edited articles, I contributed a lot, and when mine was read by everyone they generally all had no suggestions. I could have taken this as I knew what I was doing, or that they all had no clue how to edit. I like to think I knew what I was doing.

I wrote on the chef competition, even without the winning chef getting back to me. Then I wrote an editorial on the accuplacer.

The next semester, the teacher tried to assign roles more, and mine was proofreader and editor. For an assignment, I emailed someone, and got no response. She assigned stories in pairs to start, which made it difficult to start. I covered an overall sports story with someone else, which turned into two stories, with one about a 5k/10k race. We went and interviewed the athletic director for half an hour in his hot stuffy room with the fan on medium. I was actually fortunate that I had the other person since he used a recorder to record the entire interview. Otherwise I would have been missing a lot of quotes.

But that was about as much as he did. I wrote the article on the race, since as I was in it (a requirement for baseball conditioning) I could add more detail. He wrote the overall sports story, and sent it to me. It was a mess, and it took me half an hour to edit it to a decent level. I sent him mine, and he sent it back exactly the same.

Then, as the editor, I needed to edit all the stories. The teacher sent them to me, and fortunately none of them were as difficult as the earlier one. I changed a ton of wording, sentence structure. I tried not to change people's stories too much, but to perfect them. And it's fun. It's a science. The second time I did it was late at night. I had meant to do it over a day earlier, but was overloaded with homework from my other 5 classes. Even so, the more I do it, the more I enjoy taking something that needs a little work, and making it into something a lot better.

Week 5 Adult Memoir

For sports teams, there's one problem when it comes to away games- they are a long ways away. In leagues like senior league, you of course drive yourself, unless it's to another state or something. But school leagues generally have buses. The ride down often is entertaining and a good way to get to know players better. School buses usually are used for high schools and such, but colleges generally can and do get better.

Like our college. No one on our baseball team really knew what type of bus we would have for our first trip down. It turned out to be a Bar Harbor tour bus. It wasn't a bad bus, except that it had no bathroom, and every other seat had the floor sticking up so that only one person could sit there. But it wasn't bad, and the driver was very nice and fast.

Of course, we would have had nicer buses, except that we were a new program. Eventually we got Cyr buses, with bathrooms and televisions. And curtains, and other helpful things.

Bus rides are often long. But they're often fun. With things like a bunch of players singing badly, or such. Things like playing with our equipment manager is fun. Like when some of the players were throwing things at him, and kept missing. Then they gave me an important mission: hit him hard in the head with a crumpled up McDonalds bag. I was closer than them, but still a good ways away, but hit him directly in the head. "I thought we were friends," was his response.

We started getting really nice Cyr buses. Occasionally, we would get a "party bus." Large and black, it has seats that go around the outside, so that we are all facing each other. The entire back wall is a huge television, and there are coolers and flashing lights. It was fun taking it down to the playoffs, considering that a cyr bus was the best the other teams had, some of them just had vans. Some of the players from one team actually were looking inside.

Sometimes we have to ride with the softball team, which can result in things such as: "This means war!" as they throw coins back and forth from one end of the bus to the other. This ended when one of the softball players threw a battery and hit one of our players in the head, leaving him with a bruise.

Altogether, the buses are only a way of transport, but the variation through the last couple of years has been interesting.

Week 4 Childhood Memoir

One of the more exciting plays in baseball is the diving catch. Many people would agree that it's a play that can fire up the entire team. But, if you miss the ball, unless the hit directed you towards a backup, then the runner is likely to get a lot of extra bases as a result.

Ever since I started playing college baseball, I really worked at improving my diving abilities, until I was easily the best player on the team at diving- getting parallel off the ground and full extension, coming down with the ball. But even with diving in practice a lot, I haven't gotten to dive much in games. Seeing an SMCC player make a great full extension dive, getting into the air to catch a ball when it would have been the go ahead hit if he let it drop, and possibly three runs if he missed it, makes me realize the guts it takes to do that. It was a ball down the right field line, so he had no backup.

All I can do is hope to be in that position someday. It's all a a matter of chance and luck to be in that position to begin with. The few diving catches I have gotten have been strange though.

In spite of diving a lot in practice, I never really had the opportunity in games. One reason would be that despite playing outfield a good bit, I pretty much never had the ball hit to me. The joke for the coaches was to put me wherever they didn't want the ball to be hit.

Then, in an all star game when I was ten, the ball was hit to me in the air when I was in centerfield, and I caught it. It was the first time I had caught a fly ball in a game. Then a ball was hit into the left center field gap by a lefty. It went for a double. In the next to last inning, I was in left field, with the tying and go ahead runners on second and third with two outs. And after being out of the game after hitting the double, the lefty came back in for his second at bat. And I knew he was hitting it the same spot he did the last one. I took several steps in, though not too many, since I didn't want to get burned over my head. But he hit it exactly where I expected it, a line drive to shallow left center where he had hit the last one. I charged it and made a diving catch.

Those were the only two catches of fly balls that I had in little league. So the diving opportunities were lacking. Then I played junior league, senior league, college. The hitters actually consistently hit the ball to the outfield. I stopped counting how many fly balls I had caught. When I was at third base, I dove in foul territory and caught one. While pitching, I dove and caught a popup, then my glove side elbow hit the ground when I landed, and the ball popped up in the air. After rolling over, I looked up, and caught the ball with my bare hand as it came down.

There's nothing more fun than diving, even in practice. And it's been a while since I've had one in a game. Hopefully that wait won't last much longer.

Week 3 Travel Tone

We put the equipment under the bus. It was our baseball team's first games of the year. Unlike previous years, we had a black player on the team, named Marcus.

"What are these for?" he asked. The back of the seats on the bus had things that looked like handles.

"I don't know," another player said.

"Hey Winston! Wake up!" Markus said, pulling on the handle and shaking the seat ahead of him. Winston woke up abruptly.

After laughing for a bit, "I was right at that point where I was about to fall asleep," Winston said.

"Your eyes were as large as dinner plates," Marcus said. "But anyways, what are these handles for?"

"Probably for old people to be able to stand up," I said.

"Ah, yeah that's probably it."

Later Marcus moved back. The coach came back to count.

"Where's Marcus?" he asked.

"In the back of the bus where he should be," a player said.

Marcus doesn't mind these types of jokes.

After our first games, which we lost, we headed to the hotel. The coaches said that they would order pizza, and each room would get one. Instead, they ended up just setting them all in the lobby and everyone just started eating there.

I went back and told the person I was rooming with, Bobby, who was in the shower. I ended up managing to get some for him, since it all disappeared rapidly.

We walked to the store later. Last year, some players walking to this store were accosted by a homeless man who said he was living in a cardboard box, and asked for money. Nothing of the sort happened to us, and we headed back.

The person I was rooming with, Bobby, tried to make a call with the hotel room's phone. It said outside the hotel, start the number with 9, and then add 1 for long distance. Then he did 1-207... But it didn't let him get that far, since he had just put in 911. He was connected to emergency services, and had to give his name and address. Five minutes later a police officer showed up at our room and asked him the same questions.

Our games the next day were against the University of New Hampshire, which of course were expected to be difficult. We played on their turf soccer field with collapsible fence and wooden mound. Heavy winds played with the ball, and there were a few fielding mistakes on the day. We lost the first game badly, we were actually getting no hit until I hit a double in the last inning before we were mercied.

In the second game, I went 2-3 with an RBI. After my second single, our Puerto Rican recruit doubled the deep right center, and I scored from first. The catcher tried to block the plate with his foot, but I slid into it and tipped him over.

This was more fun than I had in most wins that we had. We were still down 15-6, but I was more excited than I had been in any other game before. I accidentally high fived our equipment manager in the face.

On the bus on the way back, Marcus woke up Winston again. Then Marcus stuck a chewing tobacco sticker on the Puerto Rican's head. The Puerto Rican stuck it on Winston's head.

"What's this?" Winston said.

"Put it on the Jack's head," I said.

"Yeah, do it," Bobby said.

"Good job today Jack," Winston said, patting the equipment manager's head.

"Thanks Winston, so did you."

The equipment manager never noticed the sticker being placed on his hat. He went for maybe another hour talking to people with a sticker on his hat.

"He still hasn't noticed," I said.

"Hey Jack, I like your hat," Bobby said.

"Thanks Bobby, I like yours too," he replied.

"I like the top of your hat," Bobby said.

"Thanks?"

"I like the button on the very top of your hat."

Jack finally took it off and looked at it.

"Oh, wow, how long has that been on there?" he asked.

"All day," Bobby said.

"Seriously?!"

"Yeah, someone put it on you this morning," I said. "I didn't see who."

"That was me," Bobby said.

"Wow, I've been walking around with this on my hat all day? I feel like an idiot now," Jack said.

Later, I said to Bobby: "He probably never would have noticed if you didn't point it out."

"Yeah, he's so dumb, watch this," Bobby said. "What did Winston say when he put the sticker on?"

"Good job today Jack," I said.

"Okay," Bobby walked over and sat next to Jack.

"Good job today Jack," he patted the equipment manager's head.

"Same to you Bobby," Jack said.

Bobby laughed and looked back at me.

"Does this seem familiar?" he asked, patting Jack's head still.

After a minute- "Oh, it was Winston that put the sticker on," Jack said.

It was all good natured playing with him, he doesn't mind either. And even though our coach always says that it's never fun to lose, I think it can be more fun than winning sometimes.

Week 2 Coherence

We were losing again. Besides our one starting pitcher, we had pretty much nothing. He didn't start this game. Instead, he is currently standing in the dugout, next to me. The game is almost over, and the pitcher has been talking with an assistant coach, who's standing outside the dugout.

"Look at those wasps," the pitcher says, "They look funny. They're digging in the dirt, they've been doing that all game."

Several small bee/wasp like creatures are landing in the dirt, then small clouds of dust are coming up.

The pitcher leans forwards over the waist high dugout wall, and spits at one of the wasps. He misses. He tries again. This repeats several times.

"You're cheating, you're leaning closer to it," the assistant coach said.

"It keeps moving," the pitcher says.

"Oh, I almost got it," he says as the game continues in front of us.

He switches to another one as that one leaves.

"There, I kind of got it."

The assistant coach takes a step or two nearer.

"Long range," he says, and spits at the wasp. He hits it directly.

"Oho! Lucky, I can't even hit it from here," the pitcher says.

He leans way out over the dugout, and spits repeatedly from directly over the wasp. It misses to the left, then the right. Then to high, too low. Finally, the pitcher heads back into the dugout, and grabs a baseball. He jumps over onto the field and whacks the wasp with the baseball.

"There. If anyone asks it was a giant hornet. It was big enough that they could have seen it all the way in the other team's dugout."

"Yeah," the assistant coach says, "or a giant tarantula."

Nature Descriptive Attempt

A poodle jumps over a log. We had been walking through the trees for a while. But it was not the normal trees in an open area, logs, branches, entire trees were scattered about the ground. It was a logging area, so it was not too surprising. However, even though the strange terrain worked for me, I wasn't sure if a poodle would be agile enough.

Instead she flies through the air, leaping about as high as an average person would, and landing lightly on the other side. She has no trouble with the footing, and just jumps repeatedly like a kangaroo. Unfortunately she has a leash on her, and drags her owner behind. Instead of walking her, the owner was being dragged.

We finally reach the stream. Water flows through a ditch in the trees and undergrowth. The other side is easier to traverse here, so we use rocks in the stream to get across. The poodle scorns those, and instead just gracefully flies over the several foot wide stream, landing effortlessly on the other side.

The banks of the stream get incredibly tall here. Steep as well, but the poodle doesn't seem to care, as she skips and jumps over rocks, through the trees, through bushes. This is where one of our dogs fell in the river, he just slipped and fell over the side. But it doesn't seem like the poodle is in any danger of that. She seems more sure footed than most people.

We finally get to the edge. This is truly an extreme plunge. A pretty sheer slope going a long ways down to the water. After finding a shallower part, we can make our way down to the Penobscot river. Unlike some rivers and things, this one doesn't really have a shore, as the sheer hill starts up pretty much right at the edge. But the view is amazing, out across the river that's wide enough to look like a lake.

Whether the poodle can appreciate the view or not is questionable. But discovering her leaping abilities may have been just as fun for her.