Woah, There's a Surprise.

It's not every day that you open up a local newspaper and find an article about someone you (kind of) know. This morning, though, I picked up a copy of The New Hampshire with hopes to find something to inspire my blog, and there, on page four, was a story about a local UNH student who had been arrested for an unspecified illegal usage of computers and felonious sexual assault on a minor under the age of 16. When I realized the name of the student being charged sounded vaguely familiar, I ran a quick Facebook search. Sure enough, the name belonged to a kid who sat behind me in my public speaking class with whom I was usually partnered with for in-class exercises. Actually, he wasn't really even a "kid", as revealed by the article- he's 30 years old. This came as a pretty big shock to me; the nice, sort-of-normal guy who always struck up conversations with me about generally boring topics is actually a potential 30-year-old sexual predator... Really? I had noticed he hadn't been in class for the past week, but never expected an explanation like this. Thanks, TNH.

Chimapnzee Story In-Class Exercise

Durham zookeeper, Bob Saget, was still in a midnight daze as he arrived on Madbury Road in his company pickup truck, animal restraint stick in hand, where police lights flashed and several officers surrounded a Lexus with Wyoming license plates stopped on the side of the road.

After being woken up from a deep sleep by a phone call from the Durham police, Saget couldn’t help but wonder if this was all just a strange dream. He approached the Lexus, tightening his grip on his restraint stick, only to behold the shocking reality of a chimpanzee pressing its face against the glass windshield.

Perhaps the greatest shock of all was felt by Officer Susan Smythe, who began following the Lexus as it pulled out from in front of the Tin Palace on Main Street without its headlights on. She watched as the car continued onto Madbury Road, where it began to weave back and forth across the yellow line in a careless fashion 11 mph above the speed limit. Assuming the culprit to be another drunk driver, she pulled the car over, completely unprepared for the events that would follow.

               

When Smythe shined her flashlight through the car window, she was greeted by a lone chimpanzee at the wheel, surrounded by a mess of banana peels on the car floor.

"I almost fainted," said Smythe.

In Other News, the World is Awesome

How was your weekend? Good? Yeah, probably not as good as mine.

As fate would have it, I was blessed with the rare chance to go on a UNH Outing Club trip—my first ever hike to the summit of Mount Washington. While standing in dorm room with my phone in my hand last Wednesday, I received an email offering an open spot to the first person to respond. Naturally, I pounced on that shit, and scored the last seat in the blink of an eye.

Having never really hiked a mountain before (save one trek up Manadnock when I was like, fourteen, but that doesn’t count), I was a little unsure what to expect, but what I saw that day opened my eyes to a world of beauty beyond what I had ever seen. Now, this isn’t the sort of “news” that you’d expect to see in a newspaper or anything, but it’s definitely relevant to everybody who reads it.

At the summit, the view was breathtaking, if I could only ever use that word once. We looked out on the horizon, where a pale white ocean of clouds stretched over the surrounding land, only permeated by other mountains that resembled the crests of waves frozen in time, and I couldn’t help but imagine majestic whales gracefully weaving in and out of their peaks. I’m still not sure if the tears in my eyes were because of my utter amazement or the 40-to-60-mile-per-hour gusts of wind, but it could have been from some culmination of the two.

I’d love to show you pictures of what I saw, but that would only defeat the purpose of what I am trying to say here. Pictures tend to desensitize us to this sort of natural beauty; why climb to the top when you can Google Search thousands of photos and see the same sight through an Instragram filter? Don’t cheat yourself by thinking that the view on a laptop is as good as the real thing. Go climb a mountain. Go see stuff. Wake up.

Banana Business pt. 1

So the other day, I was going about other people’s business, per usual, as any other journalist would, and I stopped at Stillings Dining Hall to ask a few faculty members why there are never any bananas in the freaking fruit baskets anymore. To my surprise, they didn’t seem too thrilled with my purpose; the two goons I talked to appeared almost insulted at my accusations—like I was harshly critiquing a work of art they had slaved over for months. It’s fair, I guess, for them to react in such a way, but I didn’t mean it in a demanding , obnoxious fashion—and I approached the situation with my best manners, of course. They complied with me and answered my questions to some extent, but what I thought was the weird part was how I’m pretty sure the main guy I was talking to was covering his name tag with his arm as if I were taking in every word he said with some nosy, malicious intent to quote him (I was). I think he thought that I was being a punk, writing a silly exposé on his dining hall, so he thought he could just laugh me off. Well, the joke’s on you pal; I’m still quoting you as anonymous. If you’re going to take yourself so seriously, trip your mustache and quit wearing that stupid-looking chef hat. And bring me bananas.

Adapt.

I expected the process of finding stories and conducting interviews to be the most challenging for me at the beginning of this class, but I guess I was wrong. I found that it’s actually the act of writing in a journalistic fashion to be the toughest. You see, making the transition into newswriting is no easy task for someone who fills most of their work with metaphors, analogies, reflective writing, and other artsy mumbo-jumbo. It’s been a matter of convincing myself to shut the hell up about what’s going on inside my head and instead, focus on covering facts about the world around me. I've found that most of my writing is reliant on voice and self-expression, and newswriting seems to require a strict adherence to a more traditional voice that is uniform to that of most newspaper writers. Or at least that’s what I think when I read news; it all seems very focused and to-the-point, whereas my ADHD-ridden brain usually prohibits me from being able to stay inside the lines without getting distracted and doodling all over the page. I’m working on it.

Surf's Up!! (Finally)

As soon as I was presented with the task of finding another story, I knew that I would be covering the upcoming tropical storms that would be providing New Hampshire with waves (and me with happiness) for days. My roommate and I have been restlessly checking the tropical outlook and buoy readings for any signs of life for the past few weeks, and the possibility of good surf made it hard to think about anything else. A wave-deprived surfer is like a smoker who hasn’t seen a cigarette in days and will stop at nothing to fulfill their fiendish desire for a lungful of black smoke. My wave-withdrawal symptoms have been in full effect, and the idea of writing a news story about surfing is the “nicotine patch” that’s keeping me going. It may not seem like news to most people, but to me, it was the light at the end of the tunnel.

My News Habits

My news habits change depending on my location. For example, when I'm at home in Massachusetts, I usually find myself reading from the newspaper sections that litter my counter-top as i get ready for work in the morning. At school, I usually come across news stories on the internet, usually via Facebook posts from my friends and headlines on my email homepage. Besides that, word of mouth is probably the most common source of news in my life. If there is anything important going on that concerns me or anyone I know, it usually comes up in dinner table conversation. In general, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about the news, admittedly -maybe it's laziness, even apathy, that keeps me from staying up-to-date with the rest of the world, but the closest thing to "news" that I check on a regular basis is music news, along with weather and surf forecasts. I wasn’t too surprised to hear about my classmates’ news habits; Twitter and Facebook seem to be the most popular sources of news nowadays.