In places like that, we all feel like outsiders. – has been my fascination with in-between places. In that regard, one thing about my time living in the various places I have – suburbia, ag-industrial-rural nowhere, urban South America, City of Big Shoulders, &c. I’m less intensive a reporter now, since my freelance is limited to document-driven pieces in the interest of avoiding any conflict of interest in my current public sector job, but I do still find myself feeling the outsider-looking-in feeling that I’m pretty sure every writer feels. You might recall people sneering about Barack Obama having been a “community organizer” I actually met community organizers, still have some on speed-dial, and I see the kind of work they do. One of the reasons I got into journalism originally was that I wanted to draw a paycheck for writing (heh), but another was that I knew it would give me broad license to go places and meet people that others do not.Īs a reporter I met governors and senators and the ragged and unwashed people so many of their policies fail to help. I’m not 100% on being here in Chicago, but I do know that it is affording me some great opportunities that I did not have. That’s my view on the way to the Orange Line each morning. Orange Line elevated train stop at 35th & Archer, Chicago, 10 Sept. At some point, we think we’ve got it all figured out, even though intellectually we must know that we haven’t.Įxcept for “grown-ups,” of course they don’t intellectually suspect there is anything to know that they haven’t already deemed tiresome. As a species, we sort of don’t believe we need to be discovering and retaining new things as we age. I think that for a lot of people, learning really does end in school, and that this is a result of our biology. It opened up new pathways in my head that hadn’t been active before. You could write a whole book on what I didn’t know, but what I didn’t anticipate that I didn’t know going in was that a trip out of the country would be great for my creativity, and not just because of a sudden lack of responsibilities. We don’t tend to make very good decisions when we’re reacting to a bad situation, or at least I don’t. I didn’t have a very coherent plan when I left for Colombia last year. “Rebellion is justice.” | A protest demanding the reinstatement of the mayor of Bogotá, 10 January 2014.
0 kommentar(er)
