November - New delights and old worries

Posted by Krystyna Hunt in

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For the first time we are now writing online, for The Sheridan Sun Online – and I like it!  We chose from a selection of beats to cover and I got the Arts beat, which is what I love the best.  And no groups.  We do this all on our own.  I felt relieved also because the online publication goes out to the internet world.  Anyone searching for a topic might have the search engine come up with my article and if they’re interested, than I am writing for them.  I do not have to tailor my writing for the interests of 18-20 year-olds from the surrounding suburbs anymore.

We design our own pages on Dreamweaver, search out ideas and sources anywhere we can find them, and write them for almost any length – within reason.  No need for a strict amount of words that have to fit into a fixed space.  There is tons of space on the internet, and I’m loving it.  I wrote articles on our city gallery, a collective of artists, a screenplay readers group, a local film festival and a Meetup group of theatre goers I belong to.  And I did not once have to get quotes from an 18 to 20-year-old I found in the cafeteria.

After an awkward start, the group of 3, (Roman, Alan and Eleanor), I was parachuted into started doing our video productions together.  All 3 were friends from high school and didn’t quite expect me to be their 4^th (who does?) but when they realized I was not going to pull any mother or grandmother trips on them, and they could talk dirty in front of me, they calmed down.  They liked me better when I came up with all the ideas, could write scripts in 5 minutes, had a good idea of how to tell a story visually and was willing to sneak into places they were afraid to go, with a hidden camera. We sort of even, kind of, sort of became friends – almost. 

I say almost because we had a really hard time getting our final assignment together and sometimes they didn’t show up to class, and they had the camera and our assignment.  Roman quit college without telling the other two.  Alan and Eleanor (a couple) were dreadfully behind in other assignments and couldn’t meet to plan the last shoot, and I was all alone.  Prof Cynthia said all of us had to come up with the final assignment somehow or else lose 20% of the marks, just like the rest of the class.  Alan and Eleanor went off and did the assignment without me, so I had no choice but to sign out a video camera on my own and do a video shoot, writing, camera work, interviewing and editing, all by myself.  I did a story on the college’s day care.  It was rough, but all told not bad, seeing the challenges I was up against.  Prof Cynthia was very proud of what I managed to pull together.

But to be honest most of our productions were pretty bad by professional standards.  Basically we were taught to make decent home movies.  We used a Canon HD camcorder, which at $599 is basically a home camcorder.  The pros still have huge black video cameras they have to steady on their shoulders.  Our editing suite was iMovie, a program that comes with an Applie computer.  The pros use  Adobe Premier or Final Cut.  But we didn’t have to be good in the class, all we had to do was show that we understood the concepts of broadcast news and made a brave attempt to make a good one.

However, Life Writing proved to be a disappointment.  Cybernation was so well organized, but for an ADHD person like myself Life Writing was extraordinarily disorganized.  Tests were due on different days of different weeks, and sometimes tests were on subjects we had not yet studied.  It was very stressful for me to have to check and double check to see what was different this week, and what expectations would come out of the blue.  I enjoyed reading the assigned memoirs and even writing some memoirs but the gamesmanship of online posting this program demanded left me confused and dismayed.

We had to a group presentation and was pleased to meet our central organizer, Samantha, a 19-year-old advertising management student who had picked the right profession.  She was promotional and she was organizational.  She took charge immediately and I was so relieved.  However, she too obviously had suffered from group work PTSD because she practically shrieked at us about how we better get our share done on time, and better do our load of the work, because she wasn’t going to do it for us.  I did as instructed, but the other two did not send her their part of the work until the last 2 days before it had to be sent to the instructor and Samantha, who had to streamline it and coordinate it, was so pissed off she was not a person you wanted to communicate with that weekend.

Shock time however.  I was turned down for the bursary to help students in financial need.  My calculations showed that my available funds were about $100 more than my financial needs.  But who can count on $100 over being a finite amount?  On another calculation, or emergency comes up I could easily be $100 under and I would qualify.  I thought insomuch as my personal income was so low, never mind that it was $100 over my stated needs, I thought I would qualify for the bursary.  Why should anyone have to live as frugally as I calculated I could?  Also, I had to include my government loans as income.  But for tax purposes loans are not considered income, they are considered liabilities.  That meant I had to go into greater debt because my personal funds were so low, therefore I was in financial need.  But nope, they considered the high amount of my loans to mean I was living high on the hog and they weren’t going to contribute to such a profligate lifestyle.  I had not accounted for that in my financing.  With my cousin not being able to give me the $1,000 she gave me last year, and now $2,000 down in bursaries, I started feeling a panic I had not had for at least a year and a half.