Leisure Time

For those of you (males, probably) who haven't seen the movie Almost Heroes, I'm hereby recommending it. The movie stars Matthew Perry and Chris Farley (it was his last movie), and is generally hilarious.

The plot of the story is that Matthew Perry leads an expedition to the coast to beat Lewis and Clark, and there is a scene where he tries to socially engage the poor, unlearned men he has hired. It reminds me something of my interaction with my friends and family at this point, with them being Perry, and me being poor and unlearned.

"What do you do in your leisure time," Perry asks.

He's met with blank stares.

"Lets move on," Perry says, realizing that they don't even understand the concept of leisure time, because they have none.


This is my life, minus the time available to discuss what I do in my non-existant leisure time.


In the next 10 days, the Missouri baseball team has brilliantly decided to schedule 8 games. Eight. That, for those counting at home, is a lot. A reasonable approximation for how much time I'll spend on JUST GAMES AND GAME STORIES during those 10 days is somewhere around 50 hours. And these are game stories...which my editors don't even want. They want mini-features which, for 30 games a year, is impossible. This has nothing to do with the time I'll be spending on the feature stories I'm hoping to get a job with. Or with the job I work at to make sure I get to do things like this and, say, eat. Or with school itself.

As far as the shells go, I'll admit to being less than enthused. Fortunately, that doesn't really matter, because I have to do it anyway. My only real worry is that everyone else has a LOT of knowledge about this stuff, while I have less than none. I think I'm a fantastic baseball/sports reporter because I just know what to ask and where to look. With this, I go from being good to significantly below average, just because I don't know anything about what we're talking about. The only thing saving me from depression over it is the hope that we can find a way to utilize some of my skills (yes, I have some) so that I don't drag us down, if not be a real asset.

Also, I'll be on a class field trip all spring break, so there goes any hope of catching up or, heaven forbid, even relax.

Thank you for allowing me to vent.
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Progress Report

I'm currently putting together my first big profile story for the baseball team, and it's starting out great. The guy is just a great story...my only job is to not screw it up. I have nothing done with the shells, since I just figured out what we were doing yesterday, and Monday is looking like the very earliest I'll be able to do anything...and then Thursday...and then a week after that. So yikes.