The One with the Internship

I am officially published! Credited for three articles, uncredited for two. It's terribly exciting.

Except my mother made me go to the Superstore and buy a copy of the paper, and I felt bigheaded. Everybody knows me in Backwoods, and they'd know that my story was on the front page.

I'm equating it to what a cashier would think if Angelina Jolie bought a People magazine with Angelina Jolie* on the cover.

Since my near-death experience on Friday, I've been very cautious driving. I'm considering writing about how nobody can drive in Backwoods, and then just letting people sit around and take blame. The article would be titled: Since when is passing on a corner okay? and other bad driving

I'm halfway through my internship now. The day starts at 9am, where we read The Chronicle Herald, see if they report on anything from Backwoods (I just read the articles by my classmates - one wrote about a man who buys gold teeth). Then we sit around while the regular workers drink coffee (and I tell them how coffee stunts your growth - I'm like that).

After that, we fire up our computers. The editor passes me stories that are exciting (read: not exciting) and will give me experience (read: yawn). So far I've been to municipal council (I spent the whole time looking at my watch and not paying attention), wrote a story about EastLink (chased down the media contact for a solid week before she finally answered the phone), the arena (somehow mentioning how I used to figure skate netted me a story about the arena), and a bunch of school initiatives (from a high school I didn't go to, and with which my alma mater has a huge feud).

I've started skipping lunch because I like to just keep the momentum going (read: I play Spider Solitaire** because I don't get internet on my craptop).

In the afternoon, the editor has to pick up/drive home his kids from school. So he leaves me in the office and tells me to work on whatever (which usually results in more Spider Solitaire because I'm a "fast typer"). Then we sit around until 4:30-5:00pm, when we leave.

On Fridays (I assume it's always like this), we put the paper together. He gave me the proofs to edit last week. He only checked one page last week, to make sure I didn't muck it up. Hopefully there weren't any huge grammatical errors. I'd never live that down.

So that's my internship in a nutshell.

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* This is not to say that I'm Backwoods's equivalent to Angelina Jolie, she's just the first actress who came to mind.

** I do more than play Spider Solitaire, I promise.