As my brain is close to self-destruction, I will not be held responsible for the coherence of this post! 75% of my neurons seem to have been in some kind of coma for some time now. The remaining 25% are smashing their heads against the walls and desperate cries can be heard: “Why??? Why now? Why can’t you stay brain dead? What are you using us for? Studying, come on! You could live peacefully without this before…”

This is how it goes: after a day of some rollerblading, six hours of studying and dieting, I was so wasted that I slept for over 10 hours…Today I only had some 3.5 hours but….What can I say, I still have high hopes for the rest of the day! What is remarkable though is that there have been four days of studying in a row which hasn’t happened since…such a long time that I cannot remember!

The thing is my brain remembers being able to keep it up for about 8 hours without major problems, but the lack of exercise is simply too much. If I stop to think about it, constant studying ended soon after high-school. And even studying in itself became a very rarely performed activity in the past years. Right now I’m just paying the price I guess.

Well I’m going to change all that, not necessarily because I want to, but because I need to. First, to pass all the 10 exams I have to pass, second, because I need to learn Spanish in order to get a second job. I found this company that has a part time program for weekends only. But it seems English isn’t enough, and I’ll probably manage in Spanish faster than in French.

“Cultivate clerks and secretaries. They’re apt to be honest people, and they haven’t got as big a stake as their bosses in covering up what’s going on” – I found this while studying. I guess the author never met FJSC secretaries: in this case, it all depends on the phase of the moon, the day of the month, the position of certain stars and planets, but most of the times the attitude is pretty crappy! I had no problem with my year’s secretary lately. Maybe because I went there only twice since school started back in October. But there is no FJSC student that has never complained about their attitude, and teacher often back up the general opinion on the topic.

Edith Evans Asbury says journalism attracts “perpetual adolescents”, people with a sense of adventure. Another opinion on journalists – they can never be jaded, mostly because they care. “You can’t care and be jaded, or you kill yourself”.

“You leave marks on the sand that the sea of tomorrow erases”…

“Journalism places us in the unpredictable”…

All the stuff I read about my future exams has awakened something deep inside me: my “journalistic conscience”…I have pretty often moments when I think I should give it all up and go work for practically nothing within some newspaper’s staff. I want to be a staffer!

I so wanted to be a great journalist when I chose this faculty! I pictured myself writing these great articles for a great daily national newspaper, so I immediately started collaborating with a students’ newspaper. It didn’t satisfy me…Not enough journalistic work!

I was planning to join a more important newspaper and then move on to television. I imagined myself in conflict areas and I would have been the first to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever! A few weeks ago, my workmates and I used to laugh about what would happen to me if I was caught by terrorists. Their conclusion was that if they didn’t kill me on my first day of captivity, they would release me after three days tops because they’d be tired of hearing me talking and talking and talking some more.

I remember my mom once fantasizing about me being an anchorwoman. And I said no way! I so wanted to be a field reporter…Then I had my one month internship with a major TV station straight after my first year. What I found out? Copying news from agencies was something so common! And the people I admired most either left, or moved to presenting the news. I’m not saying there are no good journalists working there at the moment, I am just saying some of them should never be there…

Then I became an editor at a press monitoring agency. I tried so hard to give it the best! I started with radio and TV monitoring and then I got my own field to cover: beverages! I covered all the print media in the country (although the local newspapers were always late) and supervise every material I got from the radio & TV monitoring department. I woke up at 3.50 AM and left my house at 4.10 AM. I was pretty fast then! I practically made that monitoring field grow – luckily for I already knew a lot of stuff about the wine industry after terrorizing my colleagues and most of my teachers with projects related to that field. When the summer break came, I started doing a double shift – my daily beverages report and the morning radio/TV shift.

Gradually, my assignments were so numerous that I started working on the night shift and I was still enjoying myself. At that time I was doing an English report on the beer market (I spent half of my time - 2 days - on the seaside reading press releases from major foreign beer producers to get acquainted to the subject). I also did some projects for a major IT company, handled the tobacco report for a while, to keep it short, I worked on every report ever made on that company…

The part I loved the most was being on “the other side” because the agency also organized press conferences for another IT company and, along with my room-mate, I was an active (minor)part of these conferences.

I cannot actually state what made me change my mind completely and give up everything that had to do with journalism…My own experiences, my colleagues’ experiences…All I know is I finally quit my job when working 10-12 hours every night became to much, I took a short break and then got hired as a secretary at a foreign company, pretty small, that – at that time – had been on the market for a few months. I thought it was the coolest job ever as my bosses didn’t speak Romanian so we used English and all my work kind of involved the use of this language that I had studied and loved all my life. Then again there were a lot of foreign and “domestic” important people that had appointments with the owners, so I was completely mesmerized. After four months on the job I was promoted to marketing officer (this position does not exist in Romania, so my official position is “Chief of the Marketing Department” – I really have no idea which is the difference between this and a Marketing Manager) and got to do a lot of new things. Did I mention my salary here is way better than my top salary at the monitoring company?

I was lucky, I guess, because I love this new job as much as I loved everything connected to journalism…But still, whenever I study for an exam, or go to school, or talk to my colleagues, or read stuff on George’s site I do wonder if I made the right choice. And then I try to comfort myself: “THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON”. Really now, do they?