Fan Club Of Eight Years Olds

It was a pretty busy week; I was out half the day on Tuesday, since I was going to see a sleep study that night, and even though I went home and slept for three hours I was still exhausted and booked up on Wednesday. Busy weeks make me always focus on Thursday: If I can live through Thursday at about noon, then I'm set.

Also, I took off Friday this week, so if I could make it through until Thursday afternoon, then I was practically free.

My managing editor volunteers at a local elementary school, and they'd invited her to come present for career day. Since it was Thursday and she's busy putting out the paper, she asked us reporters if any of us wanted to go. I volunteered because it sounded like fun. I can entertain a group of third grade students for a half hour, no problem. There were many years when I was in high school and my entire income came from birthday money and babysitting.

I contacted the school counselors, who asked if I could do two classes instead of just one. I said sure, and my ME gave me little tiny notebooks with the paper's name on them to hand out to the kids, and I got a giant bag of pens from the children's hospital, since I figured a lot of kids had heard of it or been there before.

I showed up about five minutes late, parked across the street and tried to run across the street to the school. I ended up dropping most of the notebooks in the middle of the street, and a kind semi-truck driver stopped so I could pick them up without getting killed. There was a volunteer student aide in the library waiting for me, and she lead me to the first third-grade class.

When I started talking, I found myself getting flushed and my voice quaking a bit. Then I remembered that I could definitely spell better than the kids, and I was good. I talked about what I did, and they asked a lot of questions. I handed out notebooks after explaining that most of my life is spent taking notes, and they all excitedly wanted to write my e-mail address and the paper's website address in there. That took forever. Seriously. I said the website like 10 times and spelled it out and wrote it on the board and they still got it wrong.

Then my aide took me to my next class, and these kids were a little slower to get in to everything, but then they kept me there for an hour, asking question after question. The good news is they were good questions and I had plenty of good reporting stories to entertain them with. I told them about going out with a falconer to scare grackles, Dumpster-diving with anarchist freegans, finding a blind man's dog, trying my hand at being a crane operator, and doing the sleep study. I encouraged them to be nosy, ask questions, and always be curious. One girl in particular seemed to love this, and asked as many questions as she could possibly think of. The teacher finally cut them off, and as I was leaving the students all waved and the one girl wanted to get a hug.

I was smart. I didn't tell them that they won't get paid much and that journalism is changing and freaking out everyone involved in the industry. With any luck, one of those students will become a journalist and get into the business so I can someday retire. My 401k won't exist at that point, but I need some other kid to get suckered into this business so I can die anywhere but at my desk. (Just kidding. I did tell them I usually love my profession.)

So I took off Friday, and so did Dan, but he was invited to come in and speak to a couple of intro journalism classes at SMU so I tagged along. They were hour and a half classes, and Dan's presentation was about online journalism, and it was a really interesting presentation and then Q&A. (I'm not being biased, either. Not too biased. The students got into it and the discussions.) It's always strange to see someone in their professional role when you're used to seeing them elsewhere. It's like going to one of those take your kids to work days and seeing your parent doing something other than getting you snacks or telling you to clean your freaking room.

Naturally, every off day has a result, so Dan's working today. It's Saturday. It's ok, though. We got up and went to a bike race before he had to go in, and he did really well in the race, and then I went back to bed because I was cold and tired. My sister is in town today to see her best friend, so the three of us are on our way out to get lunch. Fooood. Then I'm going shopping. If I were a housewife, I could live every day like this!