My second class today was “Finding Your Voice in Journalism.” I hardly knew what to expect. In fact, i didn’t even really know where the class was; when i arrived at its original location down on 32nd and Market i saw that it had been reassigned to a classroom over half a mile away! The remarkable part wasn’t getting to the class, though, but my instructor Clark DeLeon. Clark used to write for both Philly daily papers, and for the past five years he wrote a regular column for America Online where he had his own keyword. What impressed me more than his digital cred was that while he wrote for the Philly Inquirer he wrote a daily column, once a day, every day. Writing a daily column is so much more intimidating than doing daily reporting… there are no facts and stories to hunt down so much as there are facets of yourself that you can put on display through the subjects you select.
I always say that i want to write a column in a weekly magazine or newspaper like the one that Liz Spikol writes for the Weekly, and even that is intimidating. She at least has an entire week, during which should could conceivably write and erase her column multiple times before settling down on a final version. Clark had no such luxury — he had to come out of a weekend with five fresh ideas and get them all written before the deadline. That takes some balls.
I haven’t got the slightest idea about what he’s going to teach me about my voice, other than he told us to write a short piece about something that makes us really angry. I think i have found a bit of a voice through this, but blogging isn’t quite the same thing as doing daily writing for the major newspaper in one of the big five metro markets in America, is it?
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Maybe what’s really getting to me is how different life actually is from television. Of course, we all know that television is just fiction, even when its plotlines are ripped from the proverbial headlines. Still, i know that i’m guilty of always expecting life to be a little more like teevee: constructing killer teasers and opening scenes in my head to neatly wrap up all of the threads my friends and i are tangled up in. Not surprisingly, there’s a theory of communication to match this sensation, and it was coined by a Dean from just down the street.
No, not from Drexel (ha!), from Penn. The man’s name is George Gerbner, and my academic obsession du jour is his Cultivation Theory. Gerbner’s entire study is based around acts of violence that consume a frightening amount of the television we watch every day. His hypothesis, which has been proven again and again through extensive field study, is that the amount of violence we watch regularly on television is an accurate predictor of the amount of violence we expect in our day to day lives. Gerbner even accounts for such an occasional addict as myself, accurately assigning me a low level of anxiety about real-life violence (and, i’m mostly just afraid of being ambushed from around dark corners by vampires).
My current kvetch isn’t about violence, though, it’s about sex. My textbook’s condensed version of Cultivation doesn’t address violence’s sordid little sister at all, and i somehow doubt that good’ol’ George would invite a visit from a random Drexel student just to talk about making whoopee, so i guess i have to field this one on my own.
Does the sexual content of television affect my expectations about life? I’d say that it does, without a doubt. I’ve watched a lot of boob-tube in my life, and i have to say that i expect out of romance what i have been taught to look for. I expect torrid affairs and even more torrid breakups … i expect magical first kisses and even more magical first times … i expect random hook ups and even more random pairings with friends i’ve had forever. Sometimes life comes through for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. All through high school i was waiting for that magic catalyst that all of my favorite characters seemed to have received to get my love-live jump-started. It never came. College came on hotter and heavier, but with a bit of deceit: those big-kid parties weren’t what i had been lead to expect. Despite that, some things actually did come out perfect. And, some breakups are just as torrid as the affairs that precede them.
If life complies just once out of an entire year with what we’re hoping for, suddenly we are infused with a sense of resonance … the feeling of our existence actually breaking down and mirroring the media just like we were secretly long for it to do. Every time we get what we want, we immediately want more; why shouldn’t we get more of what the onscreen couples have? I’ve been sitting on my couch like a proverbial potato this week watching a slew of beautiful people bed down with other people… i’ve watching scenes jump from a few tentative kisses to the morning after. I watched Buffy decide to have sex and follow through on it without coming up for air from her violent kiss. In a way i really do want it… all of it, and i feel like i’m missing something just because i don’t have it. Not because i am missing the companionship they have, or the happiness, but the raw energy that lies between the first kiss and the next morning.
The only problem is that characters don’t seem to worry about consequences, mostly because consequence is what keeps them on the air. In reality, people pay for consequences with more kinds of currency than i like to keep count of.
And, here i am, all alone in my room putting off another phone call to the one person i have the tiniest inkling of any relative interest from at all. What am i more afraid of, that it’s bound to fizzle out unlike my onscreen brethren — or that it might snowball into something i’m not ready to deal with faster than i can deal with it? I suppose it’s just like asking if i’m richer or poorer for hanging on to so much of my so-called currency.
One thing’s for sure… George Gerbner is right about television: it isn’t necessarily about real life, but it colors our perceptions of it a lot more than we initially let on.
I didn’t watch very much television last year; it’s not as though it plays a very important role in my life. I think our local news is insipid, i don’t pay for cable, and i don’t like to feel like my time is being wasting by a gaggle of fictional half-wits every week just so they can make People list of beautiful people.
Having established my general indifference towards the idiot box, i also have to admit that i love watching it in social settings. I love heckling it, and arguing over which character is cuter, and screaming in horror or delight at the newest contrivance of plot that leads two characters into one bed.
I think i could get by just on the WB, as long as i just pretend that Buffy isn’t actually a couple of channels away (though it’s still at the same time, on the same night). I’ve gotten used to despising Buffy, but lately she and the Scooby Gang have been delightfully on: on with their humor, on with their schlocky demons of the week, and on with a level of acting rarely exhibited on 20-Something dramas… namely my other two WB regulars, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. Yes, i know they’re boring, insipid, insulting hours of teevee. Yes, i set aside Wednesday night just to see them.
This week i managed to catch all three of the aforementioned programs, and there is one theme that joined them all: sex. I know that it “sells,” but the current fixation with it is astounding. Buffy and Spike. Pacey and that waitress. Dawson and Jen. Noel and that floozy. Ben and Felicity. I’m sure even more whoopee was going on off camera. The thing that’s so unusual is the way the sex happens… on television, foreplay is equivalent to the kiss after the shirt comes off but before the groping starts. Buffy skipped it entirely, instead just unzipping Spike and climbing aboard. Pacey seemed like he might just fool around, but in the next scene it was obvious his clothes had been taken off and then put back on. Felicity and Ben shared a make-up kiss, laid down on the bed, and the next thing we knew they had been “in there for an hour.”
But, the most shocking of all of the intercourse i’ve witnessed in the past two days was Dawson’s. Dawson, one of the few remaining Virgins out of the long-running formerly-teeny-bopper shows. Dawson was my hero because, in the 90210 of my life, i am Dawson … i have plenty of potential romantic entanglements, but they’re all fizzle. Yet, in this inescapably well-scripted episode he goes from joking about dating Jen, to sortof dating Jen, to kissing Jen. And then… well, we know what comes then.
It’s the lack of foreplay that gets me, i suppose. Here’s Dawson, my V-club buddy of primetime, and he melts from one kiss down to a tangle of limbs and lust. This is not to say i would not be similarly tempted by Michelle Williams, but to have lost it in such a blasé fashion totally outside of any sort of relationship seems to defeat the entire Virgin thing to begin with. Of course, it’s not like Dawson and I were waiting for marriage, or even for the right time and place. We were just waiting.
Up until tonight, that is. And, despite the questionable circumstances of his tryst, i’m happy for Dawson … he slept with someone who he really loves as a friend, and immediately afterwards he felt right about it (which is less than we could say for poor Pacey earlier in the episode). It’s just the quantity of the sex, and the apparent quality of the sex, … and the way that five or six kisses immediately lead to sex that’s … starting to get to me.
For a Communications Theory treatise on my weblogging liaisons with Rabi, truck on over to this post and check out the comment chain. I just wrote a rather long (4000+ words) paper about “Interpersonal Communication Theory and Its Application to Initially Text-Based Relationships,” which was basically just my wordy way of saying i was writing about how bloggers wind up being friends with one another. I’m still working on editing the paper appropriately for public consumption (obviously i’ll need to be a little more explanatory about some of the theories), but in the meantime you might glean something interesting from Rabi’s post. And, anyway, you shouldn’t need an excuse to read her page :p
There is a tiny spice cookie echo at the back of my mouth, and a similarly worn in feeling of comfort in my too blue attire — locked in from hours just spent on Lindsay’s floor. My birthstone is sapphire, and blue is my comfort color; today i am all in it, with just the tiny red racing stripe of interruption down each side of my jeans.
Today was Accomplishment Day, with my brain like a slot machine that just lined up three perfect cherry red pairs of cherries, and all of my accomplishments were quarters sliding shiny out of my mouth. To wit, in Critical Reasoning we talked about the gambler’s fallacy, which would seem to indicate that just because i had a successful day today doesn’t mean i should anticipate having another one tomorrow. Of course, my brain is not quite the polished chrome model of a casino machine or the red-black-red of a roulette wheel, even if sometimes it’s wrinkles and turns would have me believe that it was as random as all of that. There is a bias towards winning in this system, because every time i do something right i am more convinced that i can do it again. Two weeks ago i got one quiz back marked with a fat red A, today i got three; i am a man convinced.
Like dawn welling up over New Jersey in the early morning sky, today in Communication Theory i realized that all of these numbers and letters on my papers won’t mean anything when i’m thirty, unless i’m still in school then. Drunken scholar Kenneth Burke informed me that it’s all about my inherent guilt-redemption cycle at nine o’clock in the evening. It felt like someone had hit the pause button on my academic life in the middle of a press screening to wonder aloud at how the writer/producer/director had just made his first (fatal) flaw. I was standing outside of myself watching my accumulate checkmarks and superlatives; i was my refrigerator door, magnets gleaming as they lay in wait for another tidy 10/10 quiz to get tacked on.
At nine thirty someone brushed up against the play button by accident, and a scant score of frames later i pirouetted down the divide between our campus and Penn’s singing at the top of my lungs: the cumulative total of red letters and accounted-for numbers and solid notes and actually getting something done, just this once. For once my day made a dent.
(Bang!)