Just Another Manic Monday

I think I slept for about two and a half hours this morning.

Note to self: I am 38 years old. Thirty-EIGHT. One might need less sleep as one gets older, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to be about 143 to only need two and a half hours total per night. And though I might feel 143 sometimes (like, say, now), I'm not quite there yet.

But back to today's recap. . . .

I managed to get through the news quiz with only one complete blank out of 11. (We usually have only 10, but Prof. Padwe took pity on us today and decided to go with Olympic-style scoring -- he gave us an extra question so that we could count our best 10 of 11.) Here's the list for those of you playing at home:

1. Valery Lozada


2. Clarence Norman


3. Karen Hughes


4. William Bennet


5. Ronnie Earle


6. Roy Blunt


7. Throgs Neck Bridge


8. Richard Codey


9. Douglas Forrester


10. GAO


11. Tom DeLay

Today's drill was to write a narrative based on some of the 911 tapes from 9/11 that were released by the Fire Department. We were supposed to transport ourselves back in time to January 2002 and write the story from that vantage point. Oh, and because of a collating error, we only got two of the four pages at first, then had to incorporate the other two later on. I had my usual problem of coming in under the word count.

We then had an abbreviated seminar in which Prof. Padwe very reluctantly extended the deadlines on our next two assignments. The first is on the recently released test-score results among 4th- and 8th-graders in the city's public schools, and the second is a teacher profile. Although I am still perilously behind on the assignment, I did succeed in setting up an interview with the principal of the elementary school I plan to cover for the first story. I'm supposed to meet him at 7:30AM on Friday. (I have class until 9:30PM on Thursday and then again at 9:00AM on Friday, but no prob. . . .)

The highlight of the day was lunch with John Bennet, a senior editor at The New Yorker and my Art of the Profile professor. We met at his office and had lunch at the swanky Condé Nast cafeteria. He's a really colorful character -- very quotable, even if some of his language is unprintable. Anyway, we talked about all manner of things, and I mentioned that I might be interested in editing at some point. (This is actually true -- I was not sucking up.) And then the coolest thing happened -- he offered to give me a sample editing assignment FROM THE MAGAZINE. We went upstairs to his office, and, after a tour of the place, he handed me a 36-page piece and told me to edit it. And, he said, I could do a couple of these sample assignments in lieu of the next short profile assignment. Woo-hoo!!!! (Of course, I have zero time to do this. But that is not the point!)

Then I high-tailed it back to Columbia to finish my profile. Did I mention that it's of a very cool jazz vibraphonist? And did I mention that Bennet (again, he prohibited us from calling him Prof. Bennet) is a total jazz aficionado who owns virtually every jazz album ever recorded? How about the fact that I know next to nothing about music in general and jazz in particular? Not the very best set of circumstances. No, not at all.

And, of course, I continued to struggle with the profile. I finished it, and I filed it on time, but it really wasn't very good at all. My only solace is that Bennet told me over lunch that for our final profile (3,000 words), we can revise one of the short (800- to 1,000-word) pieces we've done. So I'm probably going to revise this one and hope that I can redeem it in longer form. . . .