the end is not yet

For the Lord Kelvin is the only one who will save us from entropy. At least according to these yahoos.

I'm working on a story about a student who crashed on Highway 407 in February. The car was totalled, a number of safety barrels were damaged and she suffered injuries she's still getting physio for. Her dad - the registered owner of the vehicle - got a bill for more than $20,000.

I called her up and she gave me to her dad. For whatever reason, she wasn't comfortable talking to the press. Fair enough. He got the bill, he looked into it, he owned the car. The story is about the bill. I didn't push. I got what I needed from the dad, who was very nice and very helpful.

My editor wants me to get the student to talk. To push her to, if need be.

I can see her point. We are a college paper. We do need to hear from the student. I get it. But I still don't like it. And she could tell. She pointed out that as a reporter I will have to push people who don't want to talk. She told me about another student who was interning at one of the major dailies. This student was told to go get people to talk to her about the death of a little kid. At the kid's funeral.

My disgust was probably clear on my face, because my editor stressed that I had to get over the idea that I was doing something wrong. She had felt like slime in my place last year. But after you do it a couple times, you get used to it.

What I didn't say was that's what I'm afraid of.

Another great weekend is over and I'm back here.

There's a month left in the first year of my postgrad college program. I'm the college newspaper's crime reporter, our class magazine's production editor, a grudging participant in four of the five other courses we have this semester and a willing one in the fifth. I lack energy and motivation.

I'm not going to make it.

This isn't drama. It's simple truth. If I continue the way I have been, I will not make it through the term without ditching the whole thing or going nuts.

Want a reason? Take your pick. I've mentioned most of them here before. They all come down to two things: the where and the what. I'm not happy in the city and I'm not able to focus on the courses directly relevant to my career goals.

I've been neglecting my health and my friends in pursuit of something I thought mattered to me. Turns out it doesn't. This shouldn't surprise me since school was never anything more than a stepping stone across a river. A way of getting a job. Right now wading across seems more attractive.

The thing is I won't drop out before the end of term. I'm too stubborn. I'll gut it out. Which means I'll go nuts unless I change the way I've been doing things. I need to sleep more, exercise more, relax more and bitch less. Too bad there doesn't seem to be any time for that. However, I may have more time for the rest if I bitch less.

But while I won't leave before the end of the year, I make no guarantees after that. The way things look now, I'll be gone the minute I find a job doing what I want. That was the whole point, wasn't it?

It's just after 6 a.m. and I'm on my third cup of tea.

The writer's block seems to have dissolved and the article is finally on its way. Wonder what it means that it took the passing of the deadline, another wasted night procrastinating, four restless hours of unconsciousness and three cups of tea to get to this point?

I have a theory. Perhaps it's not so much that I lack motivation. Maybe what I lack is energy.

And maybe there's a better way of getting it than by sleep deprivation, frustration and caffeine.

But that's a thought for later. Right now I have an article to finish.

I came within a hair's breadth of dropping out this morning.

Last week was reading week. I spent a lot of time with family and with Christa. I even took another day off to spend with Christa. As a whole, it was perfect.

Then I came back here.

Our class is putting together a magazine this semester. Last night I developed insoluble Writer's Block. Today was the deadline for our articles.

After a while spent fruitlessly bashing my head against the block last night, I gave up and went to bed. I set the alarm for an ungodly hour and slept.

The block didn't go away when the alarm went off. I went back to bed.

After sleeping late I wasted a good deal of time trying to figure out why I should get up and go to school.

Why should I when I don't care about the program? I don't care about the television or radio classes we have to take. I don't feel like I have anything invested in the magazine. The only classes I care about are news writing and opinion writing because they are directly related to my career goals. And I can't spend the time I want to on those classes because of all the others.

What a waste. Yet another year spent inefficiently hopping across stepping stones to where I already know I want to be. How many left to go?

Better to have not gone back to school. I should have taken things into my own hands. I could have landed a part-time job somewhere that wasn't more than two hours from Christa and my family and done night school journalism classes at some community college. Done freelance work, job shadowed a crime reporter or two and got an internship on my own.

Yes, it would have been a lot of work, but so is what I'm doing now. The difference is that only a quarter of the work I'm doing now is even relevant to what I want to do long-term. And none of it is getting me any money.

These were the thoughts rolling around my head this morning that led to the big one.

Why not chuck it all and do that now?

I nearly did. I still might.

But for now I'm too stubborn to quit something I've already put eight months into. Especially when there's only five weeks left in first year and things will be more focussed next year.

Now I'm going to stop wasting time, go back to the apartment and finish the article I don't care about so my editor doesn't have a breakdown tomorrow.

The past six months have taught me a bit about what I like in terms of design and layout.

I use my blog as a launch pad to get to the blogs of friends. About a week ago I realized that I was sick of the layout of my blog.

The greens and dotted borders were driving me mad. Too busy. Not enough negative space. Not simple enough.

So I logged into Blogger for the first time in a while to see if there were any new templates.

It was weird at first. Like visiting your highschool for the first time after being away at university. That passed.

What I found was I didn't like any of the new templates. I also found that I wanted to post again, but that I'd be damned if I did so with the blog looking the way it did.

So I decided to design a new one. It took about five minutes of staring at a blank page and two minutes of doodling. The rest hasn't been so easy.

Originally I was going to build it from scratch, but quickly abandoned that as lunacy.

What I did instead was probably equally nuts.

I took the Rounders 4 template that I was using and went through it line by line, changing things and figuring out how it worked by trial and error. I've spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth and cursing and shaking fists at the monitor.

The header image was shot today on the field north of my parents' house. Wind swept across hundreds of acres to get at and freeze my face and right hand before I was satisfied with the pics.

As I thawed, I took a break to write a column on the Gaza Strip for my opinion writing class. I worked some more on this, then had dinner and watched a movie with my sister and parents. Then went back to coding, drinking and cursing.

Playing with the header image went very smoothly. Five minutes with Photoshop and it looked as much like I wanted it to as it was going to get. That was a couple hours ago.

In the time since then, the rye has worn off and I've managed to get the colours on the page to look the way I want them to.

However, as I've only had IE to test the page with, I'm sure that this masterful bit of procrastination is far from finished. That can wait.

It's past 2 a.m. and I'm going to bed now.

Tomorrow I will get up, write a news story and drive to Guelph for a whirlwind visit. In the space of three hours I plan to have coffee with Shannon, shoot the shit with Ian, Jer and Robyn and go pick up Christa from her last class.

Hopefully she will let me use her computer to upload the header image to somewhere my blog can access it from, to save the new template and to post this entry.

For now, it's just a draft.