I just want to reflect quickly on our assignment from Tuesday. We had a "press conference" in class with Lt. Cmdr. Jeraldine Fyfe (aka. Prof Heinritz) and it was really cool!

We had to write a fake obituary on a local soldier who died at his home in Kalamazoo yesterday. I had a great time with the whole experience, because it was both realistic and yet so unlikely.

Real, because we had a 20 minutes conference where she talked, I scribbled like mad, and then proceeded to write an article on a deadline. Towards the last few minutes, I was so hyper and jittery (though it might have been because of the extremely strong coffee that I'd made before class). But I imagine that a real journalist's heart must race 1000 miles a second during those last few moments before deadline.

The whole experience was also extremely unreal. First of all, my classmates and I were technically all journalists striving to write the best article for our respective papers. But, instead of competing and being stealthy about our information, a small group of us sat down at the row of computers on the second floor of the library and were talking/laughing/sharing information for the remainder of the time. I'm not sure that is entirely allowed and I know it's definitely not an accurate re-creation of a typical journalist's experience. But it was so sweet to be part of that group. We spelled out names, honorific titles, ships, battles, AP technicalities, capital and lower case letters, and even punctuation for each other. Our camaraderie in this assignment was a really beautiful thing to observe and be part of. Especially because we're students and I don't think that we necessarily face the competition that real, working people do on a day to day basis. I don't really know the reasons or psychology behind that, but I just thought that was a very refreshing class period.

ok if any of my classmates are reading this, I'll see you all in 9 hours. Go to sleep soon :)