Dilemma

Progress! I only stayed up until about 2AM or so to finisht the election piece. (Of course, I got back up at 7AM to polish it, but still.)

A little later in the morning, I went up to school to see Professor Padwe for office hours. He asked how things were going in general, and I told him that the Monday schedule and the commute were taking a much bigger toll than I had expected. He asked how much time I was spending commuting, and when I estimated 2-3 hours a day, he said that that was too much. Then he offered to let me change my beat to the Upper West Side.

I resisted -- I wanted to really challenge myself, and the UWS (where Zach and I lived, and where my parents currently live) would, I thought, be a real cop-out. Besides the fact that I know it so well, it's a very gentrified neighborhood, and I don't think it would yield the same kind of stories as, say, the South Bronx.

He told me to sleep on it over the weekend and let him know on Monday. Meanwhile, he said, I should stick with Hunts Point for the next assignment, a community-health story, because HP is rife with community-health issues (most notably asthma, but lots of other stuff as well). So I've got lots to think about.

I also had the second of five New Media classes tonight. We learned the basics of Dreamweaver, the web-publishing software, which was pretty fun. I have to say that the class is almost a vacation, although I imagine that at some point there will be some real work.