Second Night in Manhattan

I’m sitting on a hotel bed in the Wolcott Hotel smack in the center of midtown Manhattan.  I’m wearing leggings and a giant sweater and eating veggie chips and vanilla oreos. (I am healthy college student.) Got out of the basement classroom of the Empire State Building about fifteen minutes ago. It’s 10:10 pm.  These things all add up to only one conclusion: I just had a 14-hour day: I am exhausted.  (So exhausted, in fact, that I’m acting like a five-year-old, according to Lindsay Burkholder. But really I was just sucking orange juice off my fingers when she said that.)

Here are some things I learned today:

-Journalism requires endless energy and incredibly thick skin. But will reward you with travel perks, interesting people, fairly unremitting adventure, and only slight commitment issues. If you make it. Mantra: No guts, no glory. 

-How to do video reporting. WATCH OUT, HOLLYWOOD. (Just kidding. I’m super rubbish at it right now.)  This morning at 9:00, after an 8:30 brief, we heard from Russ Pulliam of the Indianapolis Star.  He's a big-hitter in news-writing but he also spends time teaching homeschool kids how to write.  He's one of the gentlest souls I've ever met.  Then Paul Glader, recently with the Washington Post, whizbanged through here like a bolt of unbelievably-successful-young-journalist enthusiasm and told us how to do the whole "being good at this and getting jobs" thing.  Clayton Sizemore, from CNN, spent the afternoon teaching us how to make a video story. He sent us out to the surrounding neighborhood (midtown Manhattan) to "find and shoot a story," with some guiding principles such as: wide shot, mid shot, close-up, pan. We got back at 5:30, started writing the narration, recorded the narration, and then put the whole thing together to create a video story of no more than two minutes length by 8:00. Then we watched them all until 10:00. WHEW!!

-The NY Public Library is serving ice-cream at 1:00 pm tomorrow.

-The NY Public Library is full of friendly staff.

-The NY Public Library is also full of obnoxious tourists. Of which I am one. Here’s my theory about tourism. You have to embrace the fact that you’re a tourist for the first week – take pictures, ask millions of questions, look a little lost when you meet a nice person so that they want to help you “get to know the city” – and then, after a week of this binge-touristing, see if you can’t act like a native.

Well, it's about time for me to start thinking about crashing into my puffy white bed.

The city is full of sounds.