This is, I told Drew, one of my favorite parts. He’s a sports guy. One of the co-directors of the sports division this term. And he’s going to graduate in a few weeks. But he came over to the news shows this evening to do a bit of fill-in work:
He was, of course, ready, prepared, hit all his marks and drilled the delivery of a concise sports segment in a larger newscast. Did it in one take, as cool and as confident and as comfortable in the contrivance of television as someone can be.
It’s one of my favorite parts because I knew I got to watch him present tonight, and I’ll get to see him work one last time on Thursday and then he’ll start making his way out into the world, where the real work and the real learning begin. But I’m not thinking about that. I’m stuck remembering when he showed up as a freshman. When he somehow became the A1, and then talked the upperclassmen into letting him do extra segments if they found extra studio time. So he came to productions camera-ready, just in case, for several weeks. And, finally, he got his chance.
He’d written a new timely segment every week, just on the prospect of getting to stand in front of the cameras. And now it was here and they put him in front of a monitor and ran some graphics over it and he worked through the thing. It was obviously his first time, but he learned a lot, and quickly. He took the advice to heart. And now, three-and-a-half years later, he has a year of those solo social media hits under his belt. He’s taken all the classes, had the internships. He’s done the reporting and live shots. He was a beat reporter for tennis one year and football one year. He’s been a sports director. He’s hosted the talk show for about a year-and-a-half or more, now.
I stood off from the camera and watched him present tonight and thought about all those starts and stops along the way and enjoyed watching him carry himself like the young professional he is. It is, easily, the best part of my job, watching them grow like that. It’s fascinating to see. The really talented people we get, and we get some real talent, you can just see it all blur together for them. First they were halting and then they become dynamic and ready to really hone their skills.
I wish I had more time with those students, focusing on some specialized finishing school stuff, but those that go into broadcasting will get a terrific crucible experience in that new first job. May they all land somewhere exciting and sooner than later.
I did this interview on Friday, I think, and I sound exhausted! I had no idea until I listened to it on playback. Then again, I’m about six weeks into waking up tired. Everyone is pretty much in the same boat right now; keep your stones in your stone satchel.
Sorry, Kyle. It was at the end of a long week near the end of this crazy semester and I had some small degree of sleep and then I got to talk about economics.
But it’s kind of important stuff, as describing forecasts and prospects go.
Despite my exhaustion, economists are fun interviews. If you talk with them consistently you can learn a great deal about economists.
Oh, and I feel much more awake today. It’s only Tuesday, after all. No one is allowed to be tired on Tuesday. By mid-Wednesday, all bets, however, are off.
Here’s the morning show from Monday! Which they shot on Friday! And it’s a semester-ender, so, as is tradition with this show, they got a bit reflective.
They have a good time with it.
Useless fact: they were recording that show while I was talking with the economist. What does it mean? Who can say?
On Saturday we went for our bike ride and it was 46 degrees. I had on a pair of full finger gloves, two pairs of socks, a wind jacket and a DIY gaiter I made out of a toboggan. In perfect pitch with the season, it was gross and rainy. But right on this stretch of road something neat happened.
On a typical Indiana day — 46°, relentlessly gray, rainy — I surpassed my previous annual mileage record.
So every mile for the rest of the year — including the last three or so on that ride — marks a new personal best.
Why, yes, I do have a spreadsheet charting these things. Doesn’t everyone? Previously, 2013 was the best year. We did a lot of racing that year and I was starting to pile up solo miles to make up for losing out on the second half of 2012. And, I think, somewhere in those solo miles I started to see my riding as something that was mine, a carefree interlude from the rote things that control so much of our lives. Because of the triathlons I was in the pool twice a week and running several days a week and riding as much as possible. Between that and excessive work hours and the ridiculous commute I came to think of it as My Own Time. Which is, I know, a radical way to think of one’s free time.
I remember the view from the ridge I was on when the realization came to me: this is you carving out something for yourself. It was a disproportionately powerful realization; this thing that you do for fun is something you actually do for fun. It’s a conscious realization of agency you’ve always had.
One day it’s going to take, too!
Clearly the endorphins were out of whack that day.
A person’s interaction with their bike can be one of the most passionate relationships they have. It can sometimes be a mercurial one. A few years ago I ran cold on the idea of bike riding. It was something to be checked off the list before I could do other things. Almost sounds like a chore, doesn’t it? It got to that point and, suddenly, the thing that used to be an interlude was an interruption. It wasn’t my thing. It was, of course, interrupting nothing. I saw it, recognized it, and knew it. Still haven’t remedied it, but clearly I’m tapping out a rhythm to my own drummer over here.
By a curious coincidence that same year, 2017, was when my form, such as it ever was, started to vanish. It was subtle, but obvious. Couldn’t go as hard for as long, or as fast as suddenly as I once did, and so on. These are all things that are, of course, very relative. The important thing is that it happened and I noticed and it’s never been recovered.
But hey, that’s age, and not enough talent, or time. And, like any relationship, you have to put in the time. It doesn’t hurt if you bring a little innate talent to the thing, or want to work on it, besides.
I go back and forth a lot; its a thing on the list, it’s a thing I do. It’s a thing I have to do; it’s a thing I want to do more. Still trying to figure it out. I always take the ride, but the consideration always seems to be there. This isn’t, perhaps, about my bike riding at all. A year or two ago (who can even tell?) I made a Things I Want To Do List. The idea being these weren’t the tasks one must muddle through to achieve, but the things one does because they are pleasant. I spent some time on the list. There were a few drafts, as I found the proper rank order for all the common contingencies and considerations, because you should do that for your list of enjoyments. At the top of the list was “Ride your bike: whenever the weather is good.”
Maybe the solution is a lot more of those long, meandering rides that take place just because they can.
So, almost any sunny day we get for the rest of the year, because I’ll have some availability and because I am now in every-mile-is-a-new-record mode, I hope to have a little time in the saddle.
It will take many pairs of socks.
I say sunny because, otherwise, you’re just going to get glorious views like this.
Isn’t that inspiring? Doesn’t that make you want to get out there and do … something?
Like install blackout curtains through mid-March or so?
This week’s forecast includes some actual sun. I’ll be sequestered in the office. I was on work from home duty today, but tomorrow it’s back to campus. And next week, I’ll be back at the home office, or at least at the house.
Today I edited an interview I’m publishing tomorrow, caught up on email, and generally prepared for this last week of in-person work.
Most crucially, I started charting out what the next several weeks of work from home will look like. And, happily, there will be things to do. There are always things to do.
OK, perhaps that wasn’t the most crucial thing. I also had a Zoom meeting about some upcoming stories that students are reporting on. I think I may enjoy those more than they do, but I hope my participation is at least in some way useful for them.
Also, I got two new tires for the car today. I’d developed a slow leak in one that was going bald anyway, and the other wasn’t far behind. So I drove over to the tire place and put on my mask and nodded at the “Must wear a mask” sign on the door and walked inside.
And I immediately noticed that a good mask does not filter out the peculiar smell of unused vulcanized rubber. A guy was on the phone in the back office. He saw me, finished the call, hung up and put his mask on. The Boomer sitting in their chairs waiting on his car to come down off the lift did not have a mask on.
I’ve really had it with this sort of thing.
So the guy working there asked me what I needed. We went and looked at the car. He drove it into their work bay. I said, You know, it’s a nice sunny late afternoon. I’m just going to stand out here if you need me.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
What I didn’t say, and I don’t know if he inferred, was Because I don’t want to sit around that guy, or your unmasked coworkers.
But I took his response to mean that he knew what I was on about.
So I enjoyed the sun in a medium-light jacket and caught up on some current events and began wondering if I should scale that Sisyphean exercise back next week, when my car came down off the work lift. Inside, to pay, I saw that the unmasked Boomer was thankfully gone. Two of the unmasked employees were right there. And I mean, right there.
So I left just as quickly as I could. Used their hand sanitizer — I see it like water in the South, now. If it’s on offer, you take advantage of the opportunity — and got to the car and used mine, wiping down the wheel and the door features and so on, just to be sure.
I rolled down the windows, because it was, in fact, a lovely afternoon, for a few blocks to let any cooties escape. And I listened to the hum of four good tires on the road.
By the time I got back to the house it was growing dark once again. So I set about doing a few household things until dinnertime. It was the productive Monday I’ve been trying to have for the last several Mondays, really. And there’s some satisfaction in that.
Ooooh, Friday the 13th. Are you spooked yet? It’s a time when silly little superstitions like that, given way to as flights of fancy in a simpler time, might be acknowledged. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all this year —
“Because time has no meaning?”
Well, sure, random interlocutor who has appeared in this bit of text even as I write it in the CMS, but that’s not what I meant.
“Because you don’t look at calendars anymore?”
Well … right, but, really, who does? And, anyway, what are you doing here, you made-up phantasm of a person I’ve created to fill yet a few more pixels on the page?
“I’m here to be spooky. Boooooooooooo!”
Yeah, that’s not going to work because, as a rule, I run a lot of lights around the house on Fridays to help create some energy and festiveness, so —
“OK, fine. May as well explain how you noticed today was Friday the 13th, oooooooooo!”
Right. Well. Anyway. The local talk station host mentioned it yesterday evening. He started in on the whole thing, as one does, and he got about a sentence into it, and you could hear it coming in his voice, when he stopped —
“Because it put him out of sorts?”
No.
“Because his electronics died? A byproduct of Friday the 13th gremlins?”
No.
“Because he — ”
He realized no one has any use for it right now.
“So he did some conspiracy theory stuff?”
No.
“Full moon?”
No. We’re not even close to a full moon right now, anyway.
“Then what did he do next?”
He talked about basketball.
Anyway, another week in the books, and we’re one week closer to the Thanksgiving break and some time off and then virtual learning and more work from home. And we’re going to make it.
I’ll say right here, I was skeptical of the whole thing. Bringing students back from all over the nation and points beyond? I’m no public health expert, of course, but it defied common sense. To some degree, as it turned out, doing all of this flew in the face of the best advice actual public health experts would provide. But the university put a robust system into place for its nine campuses and 100,000-plus students and all of its professionals and they’ve pulled it off. I was skeptical, but if you’d asked me to draw out a best case scenario this summer it would have been surpassed in every way. I’m pleased to be proven wrong.
Sure, some people got sick, but there were contingencies plans in place. It’s in no way authoritative or exhaustive, but I have heard of one student who was hospitalized with Covid-19. More often, those who did test positive were quarantined and worked their way back to health. I’ve heard a few anecdotal cases of long haulers, but hopefully they come through it OK and sooner than later. To bring back all of those people, though, and see it work as well as it did, even as the case counts are starting to tick up these last two weeks (while they’re surging throughout the state and the region) is something of a positive.
The moment the university brought students back in August they made them all get tested. Immediately, the university became the largest testing center in this state. I don’t know if they’ll share that tidbit on the campus tours, but the parking lot outside of Assembly Hall and the dozens, if not hundreds of people who worked it, are big players in the state’s Coronavirus history now. The university continued a testing pattern throughout the term that added more and more data to the system. It wasn’t perfect. Nothing is. On this campus alone there are 46,000 students in a normal term — probably a few less this fall — and they’re all human and that’s injecting a lot of chance and habit and decision making into the best-laid plans. This is why I was skeptical. There were some problematic instances. Greek Life had a few problems, some of which were simply structural. Other things, well, yeah, they’re college students. And we all remember being 19 and how wise and considered our decision making was at the time. A few things were more forehead-slappy, but ultimately, it all worked.
We have five more days to go, but we also have a dashboard that tells us the university did better than the community, in terms of percentages. Part of that goes to the aggressive and proactive approach the university took. And part of it, I think, has to be that you’re dealing with a set of people of a certain age who, by and large, are trained to do what’s asked of them. Also, the university laid down the law on that quickly and convincingly, and continues to do so. Anecdotally, I heard of more mask difficulties with faculty than students.
And so I was skeptical. All we have to do, I said in April, is account for and rewrite human habits for everyone. People want to be social. They tend to gather close together. They have no idea what six feet means — even when you say it several times. People hug and carry on and have a good time and basically do everything that an airborne communicable disease is ready to exploit.
But here we are. And it was tough and demanding and upsetting, sure. It’s been tiresome, but it has had its moments. Students, generally, did not have the experiences they’ve come to expect or envision. Compromises had to be made in that sense, but they got a world-class education and by-and-large. Also, the working student media had an entire year’s worth of content put before them without even trying. It’s a rare and weird thing. And coming to terms with that is a lesson of its own. The students, though, they helped keep each other safe. Problems aside, they did it.
So now we turn our attention to next week, the last week. The university is offering go-home tests to students, which makes sense. One assumes there will be some clear literature on what that means and doesn’t mean. Communication, as ever, has proven to be critical and difficult.
I was very pleased when I thought up the idea of go-home mitigation testing three or four weekends ago and then learned, the very next week, that it was going to be something the university offered. I, too, have learned to think like a public health expert, at least on this one obvious thing. (Who among us hasn’t tried to be an expert this year?) Today it occurred to me that whatever a student might have caught last this week is something they’ll take home with them at the end of next week. And, again, no public health expert, but I wonder if that’s something that could have been controlled for in some way. And I wonder if that’s something the actual experts tossed around this summer when they were making all these plans.
Anyway, five more days of classes. Just four more days on campus for me, and it’s really a wind down week, anyway, given the general feel of things right now. By this time next week I’ll have oversaturated my hands for the last time for a while, I can wear fewer masks and I won’t have to maintain two separate laundry systems for around-the-house-clothes and cootie-clothes. I’ll still work and do all of the Zoom meetings that life can throw at me, but I won’t need a complete decontamination procedure at the door.
Have some sports television my students produced last night. Long on football, which, it turns out, Indiana might be good at:
And you know what we’re good at? Talking? They talked Masters, because it’s November in Augusta, too. This was a well-done program if you like hitting little white balls with elongated sticks.
And you? And your weekend? What’s in store? Anything new? Nothing new here. It’ll be very similar to every weekend since March. But, suddenly, it feels like it won’t be the same, but its own change of pace. Weekends are so often about what’s on the other side of them. And if that applies to weekends it should apply to weeks too. And what applies to the other side of next week is a welcome change. Nothing superstitious about that.
Do you know what this building is? It is quite important around here. And there might be just enough context clues to make a good guess. But do you know?
If you click on the image you will get your answer. It’s a part of our long-overdue and oft-forgotten historic marker section of the site. (Click here and you can see them all.) The goal was to ride my bicycle around to see all of the historic markers in the county where I live, take pictures of them and the locale or place being featured and share them on the site. Because the people demand weird combinations of what interest you! And, further, the people also insist you forget about the project for several years at a time, having assumed you’d just uploaded them all.
And, well, I did all of that. I rode my bike around, took the pictures, started uploading them, and then assumed I’d done it all and forget about the thing entirely. Two weeks ago I was deleting stuff off my phone — or as I like to think of it, a device that’s always telling me it’s memory is completely full — and I found some of those marker pictures. I cross referenced the site and felt immediately chagrined for the two or three people who have clicked through or stumbled in some how.
There were, I noted when I began my comparison, four historic markers and sites that had not included on the site. So I have a month of Thursday content! And in looking at all of this I was able to delete a few subdirectories of old marker photos from my laptop — or as I like to think of it, still another device that’s telling me it’s memory is full.
There is also at least one new marker. It is a replacement for one that wasn’t on display the last time I rode around looking for these. And there are, the state’s official list tells me, one other recent addition I need to cover and, hopefully, not forget entirely.
Anyway, that building above is the locale and structure featured in the second week of far-too-late updates. And, for the locals, it’s an important spot for a few other reasons, as well.
Two more markers are in the hopper and those other two new ones will wind up here eventually, as well.
After that I’ll have to start riding into neighboring counties or move entirely.
Let’s see, this county is surrounded, contiguously, by six other counties. And in those …
These are doable, some of them easily so. Another thing added to the to do list.
And if you aren’t here for that, maybe you’re here for this. It’s the late night show the students produce. The monologue is about making the jump from the kiddie’s table at Thanksgiving.
Sebastian has a point.
I like to tell the students that a lot of these experiences they are building will one day become anecdotes in job interviews one day. Tell me about a time when something broke under deadline. What’s one example of how you handle conflict in a working group, and so on. No one thought “One year I had to write/deliver/shoot/direct monologues in a mask” was going to come up.
In the other studio the sports crew did two shows tonight. And tomorrow I’ll have an interview and then more TV studio time to round out the morning. Thursday nights mean a quick turnaround, so, we’ll see you for tomorrow’s after action report.
I interviewed an economist today. I think I only used one economic term incorrectly, which is about the right sort of pace for me. I took a lot of economics classes in college — micro, macro, ag, to name a few — but that was a fair while back and he’s the expert and I only have a minor in the stuff.
He’s part of a group that’s putting out an annual projection later this week and he was kind enough to let me interview him for the third time since this summer. But, what’s nice is that he’s an economist who overlooked my misused term and just answered the question he knew that I was trying to get to.
Anyway, I’ll publish that podcast next week. I just wanted you to know you have that to look forward to. In fact, I have another interview on Friday and so there are two programs you can look forward to next week.
But you don’t have to wait that long for quality content. Here’s some more work our students did this week. Here’s Tuesday’s news show:
Freshman news anchor right there. She did a nice job, and we’re excited to see what she does next.
And then, after the news show, there was the pop culture and current events show. They had a nice interview with the people from the dance marathon.
How do you run a weekend-long dance marathon during a pandemic?
It went virtual, like so many of the things in these students lives. They raised $4.2 million, I think it was, last year. And this year, amidst everything else, they still raised almost $3 million for Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. It’s incredible what a bunch of motivated college students can do.
I was able to call it a day at a normal time and it was still (barely) daylight when I got in the car. It was all-but-dark when I got in. It’s a 4.5-mile drive. That’s the downside, the tradeoff, the other side of the coin and the yang to those long languid summer days they have here. You can stand in the yard in June and enjoy the miracle of daylight at 9:30 or so. But this time of year, if you have a schedule with just the right sort of quirk in it, you might not see the sunshine daylight all day. I saw maybe 45 minutes of it today.
Home at a reasonable time. Can’t go anywhere. So what did I do with all of this evening’s extra time?
