Turtles race against alcohol and substance abuse

First, let me give you the link because I can't seem to embed this video from the website to this blog:

TURTLES! RACE!

Second, it was raining.

Thankfully I brought a plastic bag to cover my camera.

Unthankfully there was a KOMU reporter standing in the MIDDLE of the turtle racing circle for most of the races.
Kids weren't even allowed inside of the circle.
She moved for the last two races so I was able to actually get overall time lapse shots.

Thirdly, the ONE computer that we have in the photo bubble with final cut express is horribly insufficient.

Also, I HATE FINAL CUT EXPRESS.
We're considered by some to be the -BEST- program in the country as far as photo-journalism and we have ONE computer set up for doing multimedia and it doesn't even have final cut pro????

Please, someone tell me what's wrong with this picture.

Three times during my editing of this movie, final cut express straight up quit. No "do you want to save," no "spinning wheel of death" no NOTHIN', just straight up cutting out.

Granted, I should have been saving more often (meaning, incessently, every five seconds, every time I blinked, but when you're a few hours into editing audio and photos and blah blah blah, you get the picture.

So, I had to re-do a bunch of work a few times over (cutting clips, rearranging them, etc etc) AND THEN-

Sometime in the afternoon, after having been working on the project since 8 that morning, Final Cut Express froze.

I tried to quit the program and open it back up, having made peace with the fact that I was now going to be set back even an hour in editing, but no, it's not that easy. Nothing is never that easy. Not for me.

Final Cut Express REFUSES TO QUIT.

I tried to force quit the program.

It won't be forced.

It is frozen and un-forceable and I have a mini-meltdown.

I don't have my external hard drive, so I realize that I may possibly end up losing the ENTIRE PROJECT.

You see, when you log out of a computer in the news room, you lose anything saved onto the hard drive.

I called my boyfriend and was fortunate to find out that he was home from work by that time and was able to drive my hard drive down to me while I hawked the computer like a gargoyle.

Thankfully I wasn't forced into the alternative situation:

Speeding home to retrieve my hard drive and then back to the newsroom, obsessing over every single thing that could go wrong/ could have gone wrong while I was gone.

By some tiny miracle, which on a positive note my life is also pretty familiar with, final cut express unfroze itself and I was able to finish working on the piece.

It's no masterpiece by any means, but it's my favorite thing that I've done for the Missourian so far because, well, I've never done time lapse photography before.

So this was a learning experience and I like those.

Well, sometimes.

Usually people use that term to put a positive spin on something really kind of crappy, or annoying, or uncomfortable that happened.

"Well you learned something, didn't you?"
"Yes, yes I did, but somehow that doesn't help the fact that I'm on fire."
(Or the fact that I tend to make the same mistakes four and five times)

Honestly, I hate having things being referred to as "learning experiences."
To me, they're just mistakes.
Learning is what you do in order to avoid making them.

This is a flaw of mine because I'm a perfectionist.

But I'm a perfectionist that does things to my standards.
Being a reporter is unfulfilling to me in that way.

I do everything to other peoples' standards.

I don't like it.

I don't know how to act or what to do because I am realizing that it doesn't -really- matter what -I- want to know or what questions I want to ask or what I want to write about.

It's about whether or not I can frame my ideas in a way that the person I am appealing to about my story will respond to- which is impossible to predict.

There's always a different person and their response to anything that has to do with me is made entirely in a matter of moments and has a ridiculous amount of variables- whether they're in a good mood, what their opinion of me (or my outfit) is, whether or not I spit out an answer to a question they have in a way that they can understand or appreciate.

This ties my tongue to my shoes.

"What's your story about" becomes, to me, the most difficult question in the world and the fact that I have, well, only seconds to say everything and anything that I need/want to makes it that much worse.

I feel insignificant, unappreciated- pretty much just like a huge fuck-up that nobody wants to deal with or talk to.

I know this is unwarranted, but I'm sensitive and I'm going through the weirdest, most stressful year of my life.
(and I'm far too honest for my own good. I don't laugh at jokes I don't think are funny. I don't lie about what I've been doing or plan on doing next, I don't lie, period. And I don't fake.)

I know that faking it till you make it is probably really really good advice- but it's not for me.

I am literally incapable without feeling sick inside.

I'm a journalist down to my bones, I guess.
Maybe that's what brought me to Mizzou in the first place.

(To quote myself, which is obnoxious, "There's so much truth in the world, why lie?"

I have wanted to be a journalist since I was a tyke, so it's honestly very sad to me to be that I now don't see myself going into it in the future.

I don't want to write on a seventh grade reading level and I don't want to feel like I'm a failure or mediocre or unimportant because that's how I feel.

This isn't the fault of anybody else. It is my flaw.

I talk too much, I think too much, I hate answering to anyone but myself, I am bi-polar and misunderstood. I either fly under the radar or I'm the only thing on the screen. I am difficult, though I do try really hard not to be.

And I'll keep trying, as long as I'm here, though the likelihood that I apply for a position at a newspaper are slim to none.

How do these people get jobs writing wittily or descriptively?

I can't even seem to get a word aside from "said" applied to a quote that I'm using in a story.

This is a big deal to me.

I will not be able to live happily if I am not allowed to say that someone responded this or quipped that.

I'm told that there is connotation to saying "according to" that it's official.

ACCORDING TO WHOM?

-Sigh-, anyway, let's not have a discussion about this.

I'm just being whiny and venting frustrations and who knows, I might just be a journalist one of these days- far in the future, once I've published a few books or I'm encouraged to.

Hopefully both.
That would be nice.