J School: A month in review

It's a cold, gray, October Sunday, and I am curled up in my Gramercy apartment reading about Joe Louis as a middle-aged man. A month into the journalism master's program at NYU, the most frequent question I get from friends these days is, "How's journalism school?" The answer is, "Good."

That's a bit understated. I really like the program, the professors and my classmates. And I love being in grad school. Having been out in the working world for five years, I have a much greater appreciation for higher education than I had as a high school senior going to college. I no longer see a list of class assignments as a checklist, but as readings and experiences to be savored.

For those curious, here's the extended (and meandering) answer to "How's journalism school?":

Reading about New York in the 1920s through the eyes of New Yorker writers A.J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, and Meyer Berger...

...discussing "press ethics" questions, like "is it okay to clean up quotes? how clean can you make them before you're doing something dirty ethically?"...

...a Saturday night at the Musician's Union Local in midtown Manhattan, interviewing lawyers, anti-war veterans and a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who was born without legs, suffering from second-generation effects of Agent Orange...

...meeting up with uninsured bike messengers at an East Village diner and hearing about using super glue to treat wounds instead of getting stitches...

...falling in love with the work of Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe(!!!)...

..watching the Biden-Palin debate with classmates, enjoying lots of wine and lots of heckling...

...listening to The Week editors digest the debate...

...writing writing writing and trying to master "color"...

...resisting grad school laziness by waking up at 7 a.m. each day to write Above The Law's Morning Docket...

...reading Village Voice articles from the 70s and having Karen Durbin's "On Being a Woman Alone" resonate too deeply...

...excursions with classmates to discuss journalism while indulging in falafel, bubble tea, vegan red velvet cupcakes, and coffee, coffee, coffee (but not all at the same time)...