Firsts -- an update
This is a post of firsts — my first post in 2014, my first post in this new blog design, and the first post on the new domain. I chose 42409 as a website name, taking the number from a lyric of Adam Pascal’s, a singer-songwriter I’m particularly fond of. His song, Book of Endings, begins:
Ice is forming around her broken heart /
Four this morning, she wrote him one last time /
Journal entry number 42409 /
'He just needs some /
Well, he needs a bit more time’.
The lyric stuck in my head, but evidently not in many other people’s — I used get a lot of complaints that people couldn’t remember the website address. That, coupled with a belief I heard attributed to Paul Graham that you don’t own a brand until you own its .com, compelled me to set tommycollison.com up as my primary domain.
Right, that’s enough housekeeping — on to some news. I’m back in NYC after spending Xmas at home with my family back in Ireland. NYU doesn’t officially start back for me until January 27, so I’m looking forward to having some time in the city without classwork and assignments to do. With the time free, I find I’m reading and writing a lot more. You can see what I read in 2013 here, and I’ve set myself a GoodReads challenge of reading 60 books this year. At the moment, I’m about halfway through Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, and only a handful of pages from fining Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s “Inside Wikileaks”. I most recently read Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. I’ll try to blog some longer thoughts about each of these books over the coming days.
In terms of writing, I’m about 20,000 words into a story idea that’s been bouncing around in my head since mid-Autumn. It’s an idea I had reading about the Wikileaks saga and the Snowden affair (as I saw it titled somewhere recently), and I’m hoping to have the story, which has no projected word-count, edited and posted here before the end of the month. Stay tuned — I have a handful of ideas that I want to get written in some shape or form before the Spring semester starts.
Speaking of the Spring semester, I’m quite excited to start it. My modules are essay-writing, Spanish, international politics, and a class described as “understanding the natural world and the relation of humans to it”, drawing from literary, philosophical, and scientific texts. On paper, my undergrad major is still Journalism, but I’m not sure how long I’ll stay with that decision. Even if I did want to change it, though, my Spring courses wouldn’t change. For this reason, I’m holding off thinking too deeply about what I want to major in until it becomes an immediate decision. (I don’t have to officially declare a major until the end of my second year here.) Other contenders might be politics, English, or history.
One thing I am aware of is that journalism is a skill-set as opposed to a body of knowledge like history is — perhaps there’s something to be said about getting an undergraduate degree in a defined body of knowledge. The advice I’ve gotten is that I should inform my writing (with history or politics, for example) rather than learn how to write (which is how I’ve heard a journalism degree described. An obvious oversimplification, but there’s probably some truth in it). It’s worth noting here that international politics in the Spring will be the first politics class I’ve ever taken. I could write a blog in the summer about how politics would be an awful fit for me, and that’d be okay — your freshman year’s for academic experimentation.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a friend’s apartment reading "Inside Wikileaks" and listening to music — I’m still as big an alt rock junkie as ever. After my first college semester, I feel that I’ve earned the right to take a couple days relaxing, reading, and writing, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Temperatures have been reasonably mild in NYC over the last few days, but are set to drop to 11ºF/-12ºC in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. The storms in the US, particularly the midwest and northeast, are apparently making headlines back in Ireland — I’m more concerned for my home country though, considering that it’s been hammered by storm conditions for weeks. I’m enjoying NYC in the relative quiet of January: I thought that Greenwich Village wouldn’t feel the same with NYU closed for the Xmas break, but New York (like other cities) exists in many different forms — I’m just seeing its quiet side right now.
