Such were the words of my RW1 professor Sig Gissler today, summing up the life of a journalist. Gissler, among other things, has a reputation of being a very good, but very strict RW1 prof. He scolded someone for being five minutes late to class today. He also is the administrator of the Pulitzers, so I suppose it’s good to stay on his good side. Hardened and raised by Chicago and the Midwest, Prof. Gissler reminds us to “put hay in the barn” or to “keep nuts in the nest” — in other words, get your stuff done ahead of time if possible and be ready for when things go awry. He also says that he has a secret weapon used in the fight against the perils of a journalist: oatmeal. According to his father, a Swedish immigrant farmer, “. . . and this is the only time I’m going to use this word — ‘Oatmeal is the only food they haven’t fucked up.’ ” He’s pretty hardcore old school, but seemingly very wise.
This was probably the most interesting part of Day 1 here at “Pulitzer’s School,” beyond the obviously compelling introductory bureaucratic lectures and explanations. Our class has 16 people in it (I’m the youngest, not surprisingly), but includes a few really interesting people, like a 20 something girl from Egypt who’s written for the New York Times from Cairo, a 20 something girl of Lebanese descent whose family fled to Monaco during the war (her French accent gave her away as having something to do with France) and has lived in Montreal, and a 25-year-old guy, Sarmad Ali, a Baghdadi who before last week hadn’t been outside of his native Iraq.
He’s traveling on a document given to him by the now-defunct CPA with a visa that had to be obtained in Amman, Jordan. I tried to befriend him after class let out today for lunch, and after we got our IDs together he treated me to a street hot dog and Pepsi. He lives in the I-House, enjoys soccer (his favorite team is Manchester United), and has been to a baseball game and finds it very boring. He completed his master’s in English Lit in Baghdad and his favorite author is Jane Austen. He’s written for the English-language publications Iraq Today, the Daily Star (Beirut), and Voice (Dubai). He’s definately someone I want to get to know.
The early evening was spent getting hors d’Ïuvres and cocktails in a mixer for the students, staff, and faculty. There I met some students from DC, South Carolina, LA, and Boston. However, the guy who really took the cake was Elias of Nairobi, Kenya. A tall and dark-skinned guy with a shaved head, he just sat down at our table and his charisma seemed to take over. He told us a little bit about his experience at University of Montana, Missoula, which was where he went to undergrad. Given how random it was that a Kenyan would end up in Montana, Elias said that he wanted to go to somewhere in the US off the beaten path, and despite all that he’d heard about racism, militias and the like — he was still determined to go to Montana. “You could fit all the black guys in Missoula on the back of a truck,” he said with a smile, “and if I got killed by a militia in Montana at least I’d be on CNN or something. If I got killed in DC, no one would care.”
“And because Missoula loves their football players, and all the blacks in town are football players, everyone would think that I was a football player. I’d be in a bar, and they’d say ‘No, you don’t have to pay, you played a great game last week,’ and it’d be great because I never had to pay for beer. Same thing if I got pulled over by cops while driving. I’d also go driving down the street and there would be these white kids in their car who would turn up their rap music and would look over at me and say ‘Whazzup dawg?’ and I’d just sort of nod and would have to turn down my NPR so I didn’t blow my cover. But because of that I want to go to Compton so I can learn how to be a real ‘brotha,’ y’know? I walk around in Harlem and they say “Hey, you talk like a white man,” and so I don’t know what to do.”
And there’s 200 some students more that I haven’t gotten to know yet.
