Everything I need to know, I learned in marching band

It's been four years since I was in high school and in a high school marching band. I miss getting on a football field sometimes for band practice, but I don't think I could go back. I chose not to go into Stampede band, and made the ill choice of auditioning for Outriders on an alto sax instead of my usual tenor.

A bunch of high school kids — how good could we be? At the time, there was no questioning it. Now, I see that they're (we were) just a bunch of high school kids, but you also have to consider the band has travelled to every continent but South America and Africa, has been invited back to overseas competitions numerous times, has won enough awards that there isn't enough space for them in the trophy cases, and has a name for itself.

It never was easy. But the mosquito bites, sun burns, heat stroke, heartbreak, tears, exhaustion, laughter and joy I experienced because of it? Wouldn't trade it for the world.

Which is why everything I need to know, I learned in marching band. I apply a lot of these principles to journalism, because after surviving band practice, I can't imagine any other way of doing it.

1. Be passionate. It's easy to lose sight of why you're doing what you're doing sometimes. So find a new way of doing it. People respect you more when they know you're invested in what you're doing.
2. Find passion. Even when you're exhausted (try hauling around a 16-pound instrument in the middle of a summer day), give it one more shot and give it the same energy as if it were your first.
3. Leave your baggage at the door. We were told that when we stepped on the field, it didn't matter what was going on in our lives. There would be time to deal with it — happy or sad — later. What mattered was giving your undivided attention to the drum major, and your full energy to the show. It goes back to being passionate, and invested in what you're doing. 
4. Trust each other. I was a tenor sax player, and sax players have their own way of protecting themselves on the fields. But for tubas, they can't see you on their left side because of their instrument. (And trombones need a little extra space in front.) So if you're backing up, to stand beside a tuba on his left side, you have to trust that he's standing where he's supposed to be standing, and not slightly to one side, because you can't shoulder check and he can't see you. And getting hit by a tuba hurts. The same thing for bass drums — they might possibly hurt even more.
5. Know how to teach. There's the kind way, and there's the hard knocks way. The kind way is explaining what someone is doing wrong, which works sometimes. The hard knocks way is also specific to each instrument. For saxes, our bells stick out in front. If you're going to back into us, we'll brace our instrument so that the bell ends up between your vertebrae. Even being a sax player doesn't make you immune to other sax players doing it to you if you mess up (it might even make you more likely to be on the receiving end) and believe me, it's a good reminder to pay attention to your co-ordinates.
6. Learn how to (at least) tolerate everyone. Tour days usually start at 7 a.m. (or earlier) with breakfast, and goes until at least 9 p.m. when practice ends, if not later. You're practicing in the middle of summer, in very warm weather. We once competed at night, then had to load the buses in Traverse City, Michigan, at 2 a.m. so we could make Chicago on schedule. You're with these people all. the. time. Everyone gets exhausted. Emotions run high. And you still have to love them.
7. Be there. It's not easy, to be at 7:30 a.m. practice and 6 p.m. practice and weekend practice. But people depend on you. 
8. Drink water. Even if you think you don't need to.
9. Work hard, play hard.
10. Hug like you mean it. At the end of practice, we'd often be asked to hug a couple people before we left. One of the drum majors gave the best hugs of all. I've had my fair share of fights with him, but even now, I always want just one more hug, because even after everything, he still hugs like he means it.
    Consider all the perfunctory hugs you get – in a day, in a week, whatever. And then tell me the "real" hug isn't the best thing ever.
11. (edit, July 2) Wear layers.
12. Don't  B♭ (be flat), don't B♯ (be sharp), just B♮ (be natural).

edit: Ironically, I started "Stumbling" after writing this post and found this. :)

Wanted: an attention span

For anyone following me on Twitter, I'd like to offer a half-apology, half-warning: please don't look at my favourites list.

Presumably, people use "favourites" for tweets they really like, and want to make sure people can access long after the tweet is no longer being retweeted and shared.

I use it as a means to come back to things I mean to read later. Since I run Tweetdeck on my computer at work, I use favourites to bookmark anything I don't have time for at the moment but want to come back to later, including videos, long profile pieces, even short articles I'll put aside for later; it depends what I'm doing. I also have Twitter on my phone so if I skim through tweets while waiting for a friend or something, I'll add favourites then too.

And they just keep piling up. Recently, I started going through them, hoping to clean some out (if I start reading the link and it isn't what I thought it was, or if it's something I can read and forget, then I unfavourite. Other stuff I will read and leave on there, because I know I want to keep it for a bit, but I'm not sure what to do with it). Other than that, the only time I've sat down to go through my favourite list was when I was stranded in a Second Cup in Leduc and waiting for the AMA guy to rescue my keys out of my locked car.

The problem is, I don't seem to have the attention span for it. I want to go check Facebook, I want to go play with my Wii, maybe go read a couple chapters of my book.

I'm looking into Read It Later right now, which lets you save things for offline reading and between devices (so I can access the same list on both my computer and phone) so we'll see how that goes.

I find that I'm a bit more successful reading .pdfs than I am reading directly online — I've realized this because in addition to Twitter-gathered links, I also read pieces nominated for magazine awards. (Also check out Western Magazine Awards, but not sure if you can see the actual piece.) Some are nominated/awarded for layout and photos, others for their writing, so if you're looking for something specific (usually I'm looking for writing, but all of it is interesting), pay attention to the category when you're clicking an interesting title. The links I gather from Twitter include Longreads, which, while I'm not crazy about all of the pieces and it takes some digging to find the good ones, I still love the site and Twitter page. I wish I'd known about the profile-pieces aggregation when I took a profile writing class in university and had to find profile pieces to discuss in class.

And after I'm done with Read It Later, I also want to find the application that this guy talks about.

It might eliminate my ridiculously long favourites list, but I make no promises.

Intern days

I'm not going to lie — I feel a little silly writing this.

Since I stopped working in the city in August 2009, I haven't spent any substantial amount of time in St. Albert besides the occasional visit when I lived in Edmonton last summer for four months and would drive over to St. A for an event or if I needed to wash my car. (Yes, I know Edmonton has car washes. But for me, self-serve, do-it-yourself car washes have to be stupid-proof, and there's one that meets that criteria on Green Grove Road, just off St. Albert Trail).

And so while I only spent four months working at Saint City News as an intern, it still breaks my heart a little to hear that the paper will close its doors for good at the end of this month.

The university program I graduated from requires all second years to write for a community newspaper, the Calgary Journal, so I had been published before, but this was my first time working for a "real" newspaper.

I don't know if I'm just super easy to impress, but it was a really good internship. I had some friends who, on their internships, were pretty much handed the keys and asked to put out the paper by themselves for a week or three. (Which, admittedly, while scary, is probably an OK way to learn too, though the lack of feedback would have bothered me a bit.) Other friends have interesting stories, to say the least, that would probably make me swear off journalism for some time.

I, however, got what I call "intern benefits." I was treated like any other person in the newsroom — I was assigned a list of stories each week, I worked weekend rotations with everyone else, I had some pages to lay out each week, and 40 pages of copy landed on my desk each Thursday for the first copy-editing go-round. But at the same time, as long as it didn't conflict with anything else I was working on, I was allowed to shadow the other reporter on City Hall and court cases, something I had little — read: barely any — experience with, eventually working my way up to doing a few of my own City Hall stories. As long as it wasn't near deadline, I could ask any questions I wanted about CP style, ethics and general journalism, and someone could usually give me five minutes of their time. And the editor also put up with my attempts at sports coverage when the sports reporter went on vacation.

I'm pretty sure that's where my love for copy-editing was born — I still remember the fear the first time 40 pages of copy landed on my desk. I could barely remember the copy-editing marks we'd been briefly introduced to in first year, now they're second nature.

It's also where my poor sense of direction was identified. I nearly went back to Edmonton one day because I forgot where I was heading and almost turned south on the highway (which doesn't have many easy turnaround points) because I couldn't figure out which direction I was facing. And when I was worried about getting lost going to the Edmonton Humane Society, the editor jokingly (I think) told me not to call him unless I was in Mill Woods (very south of Edmonton, while the humane society is in the north part of Edmonton, just south of St. A).

When I texted a friend to tell him the paper was closing, I think he recognized I might possibly have a bias and asked if the other paper in town was any good. I seem to think they're in a different circulation category than Saint City, but nevertheless, each paper has won its fair share of awards. It's also something that my instructors recognized when I went back to school — as an editor for the Calgary Journal in third year, one second year was getting frustrated with the layout I was working with him on, and suggested we call the production instructor over. The photo instructor heard the exchange, and suggested to S. that he let me play with the page for a bit, I'd probably learned a good thing or two after working at Saint City for the summer.

It's not like there weren't days when I didn't want to get out of bed, but for the most part, it's a really good paper, and I learned so so much — even though it was two years ago, I still refer to things I learned there, which people must be tired of, and which is why it breaks my heart a little bit. And one more thing I learned: it wasn't so much the case when I was an editor at the Reflector, but ask the editors who worked with me as an EIC at the Journal — I'm still on quite the warpath against dog-legged columns (when the column is made smaller partway down the page by an ad or other element that juts into the column).

Dream On: a (in-progress) wish list for interviews

Most of the job interviews I've had for newsroom positions are pretty standard — I'd almost say they're easier than a job interview for a corporate position. Or maybe that's just me, my personality just works better in a newsroom interview, editors aren't as concerned that I talk with my hands or talk too fast (both which I've been told are nervous tics, except I naturally talk with my hands, and the talking fast — yeah, that's super natural for me too).

But I had one newsroom interview, for an internship at a paper in western Ontario, where they asked me a bunch of character-testing questions. We'd been warned about those in an internship prep class, but they still kind of caught me off-guard.

One of the questions was, who is your dream interview?

I still don't know how to answer that question. Do I answer it selfishly, with someone I'm interested in and would never get to talk to otherwise (example given below) or do I answer for the good of the community, like in Lloydminster, Jack Kemp or Bill Kondro? (see 'virtual exhibit' tab on main page.)

At the time, my answer was I would interview the original Crickets — the two guys, J.I. Allison and Joe B. Maudlin, who were long-time bandmates and best friends of Buddy Holly in the '50s. Might as well throw in Niki Sullivan and Sonny Curtis for good measure. (note: this interview list does not take into account the fact that some of those listed might have passed away, like Niki Sullivan.)

Even now, I'd love those interviews. (That kind of interview fits into the selfish, self-serving category mentioned above, by the way.) However, I don't know if I'd interview Buddy Holly himself. I'm not sure if that's because it's hard to imagine "what if," since the man died 52 years ago, or because I get the impression he might not be the best interview ever, based on the interview tapes I have heard with him. Meet him? Hell yes. Interview him? Not sure.

The Calgary Herald ran a story on Sunday about Keith Richards, and I realized he's on my dream list to interview. He's had an intense — for lack of better word — life, and he's honest and colourful about it. I think Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings would also fit into that category.

So I started thinking — who is my dream list to interview? It's a work in progress, and embarrassingly enough, a short list right now, but:

• The Crickets — by the way, for not being a journalist, Paul McCartney did a very good job of interviewing them, and others, for the Real Buddy Holly Story documentary

• Keith Richards, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash — see above

• A veteran — I don't want the typical war story. I don't know what exactly I want, but it's on here anyways. (By the way, I've interviewed a Holocaust survivor, which I'm now realizing — not that I didn't realize it at the time — is pretty special to be able to put on my list of people I've interviewed.)

In short, I just like interesting people — but I guess, doesn't everybody? I mentioned earlier that I keep some old interviews as a pickmeup, and some of the interviews that take up the most space are the ones conducted for this story. It was a semester-long assignment, so I had certain guidelines — read: word counts — to adhere to, so some good stuff, like when he talked about the fact that he normally doesn't talk about his job, or else offers a very short description (unlike this story, which took probably five or six hours of interviews with him alone) of what he does, didn't make it into the story.

I'd love to get on a project like what the Lloyd Archives is doing, interviewing prominent members of the community, and then transcribing them for posterity. When I worked at Natural Resources Canada, I had a research project that involved reading a lot of interviews from guys who had worked for the forestry service in its early days (Canadian Forestry Service celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1999). What was interesting was that while most of the people who work at Natural Resources Canada are now scientists first, foresters second, in those days, it was reverse. And fascinating to read interviews from the 1970s and 1980s, when one of the first questions asked was, "Please state your birthdate and birthplace," and often, the reply was sometime in the late 1800s!

edit: Since this post is a work in progress, I'll note the times I add people to my wish list. 

20/20 hindsight

Sometimes, it takes me a while to write something. There have been news stories where I've had to start four or five different documents, playing with different ledes and transitions, just because I can't figure out how I want to say what I need to say.

Usually though, that kind of rearranging and re-wording only takes me a few hours — although I like to leave myself enough time before deadline to look over everything one last time, and actually rewrote probably about a quarter to a half of a story one time after it had been laid out, because it was bothering me so much.

This time though, it took me nearly two and a half months.

I was asked to write something for consideration, and the reason why isn't important at this point. But when I was trying to write what I eventually submitted — the deadline was two and a half months ago — I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say.

Last Friday was my university graduation and getting ready that morning was when I realized, I should have expanded on this sentence: today is not about today. It's about the past four years, and you can't possibly reminsce — and be thankful for — everything that has possibly in the last four — or more — years.

There's an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Season 5 where a patient was supposed to give the valedictorian address at her college, but ends up on the operating table instead. To calm her, the surgeons ask her to recite her speech anyways. The first line is, "Today is the day my life begins."

Honestly, it's a really good speech, but I don't think your life begins on graduation. In fact, in first year, the instructors warned us that Life might get in the way of school, and that's OK. We just have to deal with it.

I'm trying to figure out if I have a "favourite" memory from the past four years, because it wasn't just about Friday. I was so happy to see everyone, and more excited for this graduation than I was for my high school one, but it wasn't about Friday. It was about the past crazy four years, and the amazing people who kept me sane.

I wish I had a photo of the breakfast the Calgary Journal editors had at K.'s place in fourth year — all of us sitting on the floor with coffee mugs, talking about one of the most ridiculous semesters ever. In that case, I loved our breakfast tradition after Saturday 8 a.m. exams that started in first year.

I don't miss those huge blue bags that we carried the broadcast cameras in (I actually managed to twist a couple vertebrae carrying it one time), and for all the jokes A. and I made about the class and our projects, the saying "Where are we going? And why are we in a handbasket?" fits perfectly.

Whoever made the movie Helvetica should be shot. 'Nuff said.

I love all the people who put up with crazy, sleep-deprived me — the blue couch in the 'Flec office is an amazingly comfortable place to crash after two newspaper productions, waiting for the layout editor to drive me home — and I'm pretty there's one person who doesn't even know how much he kept me from completely breaking down during November hell weeks, but I still appreciate it so so much.

I didn't ever expect it to be easy. So maybe it's a little fitting, in a karmaic kind of way, that Friday was super easy. Because it wasn't about Friday. It was about four years of hard work, and amazing friends — and now colleagues!