Gammage was playing host to a very important and influential journalist, Mr. Seymour Hersh: an American investigative journalist and author who contributes regularly to The New Yorker on military and security matters. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. His 2004 reports on the US Military's treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib gained much attention. The lecture was free, so five of us CV students walked over and listened, trying hard to follow along with his scattered stories, slight mumbling of words, and, of course, an array of jokes referring to events before our time that we could only pretend to understand. His opening remarks: Good news and bad news. The bad news is, there are still one thousand and some odd days George Bush will be our president. The good news, when we wake up tomorrow morning, we'll have one less day with him as President. I thought that was pretty funny. In my media class, the other half of CV went to Channel 10, while the rest of us had a nice chat with Dean Callahan. Nice man, surprisingly. Very down-to-earth as well as ambitious. He says we are going to see a lot of change in the journalism program in the up and coming years, which will benefit us greatly during our junior, senior year. Surprisingly, the City of Phoenix is providing millions of dollars in funding for the expansion of the downtown campus, as well improvements for the journalism program. We all chatted about other things, but that seems to be the most important thing to mention. Just finished my weekly film journal...I thought college would get harder as the weeks past, but it really isn't. It's just a lot of work. A lot of reading and writing that takes a lot of time. When they say you spend two to three hours of study per hour spent in class, what they're really referring to is the amount of time it takes to complete your assignments. If you hate writing papers now, you're going to really struggle in college so get over it. I'm really tired and no one sleeps here. Every once in a while a door will slam or someone will throw something that just cuts right through the windows and walls and nearly startles me from my quietness. Before I retire for the night, I still need to do more editing on my English papers (three essays, due tomorrow) and, possibly, make more progress on my history reflection paper. But it's already 11:30, so we'll see. Talked to Kris earlier. It seems as though we are both dealing with similiar withdrawels of high school. Honestly, I miss that life. I miss being busy all the time, being active and involved. I miss our "group". I told Kris that I really don't think any of us took our friendship for granted, but I don't think we realized how lucky we were, how rare that kind of friendship was where no one cared about partying or drama or image...we could always be ourselves, we could always be weird and funny. I just miss all that SO much. Admittently, I am still having a bit of a hard time making friends here. A couple of the girls mentioned they were going salsa dancing tomorrow night and whil I tried to let on that I was interested, either they didn't get the message or just don't want me along because they didn't invite me. I know this is going to sound dumb, but I have no practice with being friends with girls. All my girlfriends have boyfriends so it was never a clique of just girls, we were always mixed up. Ah, well, we'll see how things go, eh? Chin up tomorrow. I'll most likely being make the trek up north this weekend. And the following weekend my boy will be back down here for a wedding. I hope he hasn't forgotten about a gift or a card...*nudge, nudge*. Carrie