The dollars and cents of it

The check comes on the twentieth of every month. Then the mouth swallows. Poured into convenience stores and bill payments. There is the Bell bill from last August that goes each month unanswered.

Friends fold bills into envelopes, marked with dates like dollar calendars. My best savings tip is to search for jobs on the home stretch and dream up future poverty. Second best is to sketch travel plans and admit I’d rather spend there than here, keep it in my pocket.

Wait for the exchange rate to ship upwards, live rent-free, and chip away at donuts owed to father. Click onto Media Job Hunt and Lonely Planet, re-read Down and Out in Paris and London.

Stamped paper promises

The day began with breakfast: bacon, sausage, toast, coffee, and chocolate chip pancakes. I was the only man in the deli wearing a suit. A shirt and tie had been requested; the final hoop to jump through before the school handed over our papers and sent the lot of us on our way.

Graduation day. So soon, finally, etc. After breakfast the family was sent off and morning mimosas were poured. The four of us toasted to ourselves on a balcony overlooking the square of city block we’d spent the previous four years. We gulped it all down.

We showed up late and seemed early, traded our names for robes and other rituals. We were lined up, arranged, re-arranged, and led on an audience-less parade across the quad.

Other people’s parents bombarded us inside the theatre, waving frantically and flashing cameras in our faces. People we hadn’t heard of, deans and presidents listed on calendars but never seen or spoken to, gave the same speeches they’d given at the morning edition and would again at the third ceremony later that afternoon.

We were told again to stand and walk across the stage, shake hands with further faceless academics. Finally, at the edge of the room a final hand reaches out, this time familiar from so many Thursday afternoons in his classroom where we shared our secrets and our words.

So he smiles and says, “you’ve made it,” and I pull back my hand and give him a hug. Follow the path off stage, check spelling (R-U-S-S-M-A-R-T-I-N), shake head and say to self, “Yeah. I guess I did.”

At the bottom of the cup: the end of the semester

It's over. No longer will my tweets read: I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me. I made it. Marks aren't in, and I'm making few promises my GPA is on the rise, but at least for now, it's over.

The last exam was essay-form, which was easily filled with Obama-speech references and Aerosmith lyrics. Then, joined by some of my closest classmates, we made our way to a pub decorated like a library, if only for irony. We put down our pens and raised our pints in celebration, hoping we could drink away at least some of what we'd learned.

Until autumn ends our summer bliss, I'll have only books borrowed from friends filling my head. Critical analysis and academic rhetoric will warp into beach paperbacks and cottage prose. I will still be up late reading, but the biline will not read Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag or Naomi Klein.

Until the first day of September, it just me.
Me, and Bukowski.

I slump my shoulders, sigh, and say, "I feel like I've taken a degree in social media complaining."

I see my instructor's ears perk up. I silently hope I'm not again called "defensive" by someone who has their paycheques signed by the school I pay to attend. He doesn't say a word.

On the walk from school to home we discuss the fourty-odd dollars we had just shelled out, only to have a graduate student pry into us with questions we've already heard.

The Internet? We're connected. Blogs? We have our own. Facebook, A Smaller World, Second Life, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Digg, Twitter. The list goes on. We get it. What we want to know: why are we pursuing a degree that reads like an RSS feed?

Are bloggers journalists? Will print survive? Is the blogosphere democratic? Is there a need for a code of ethics online?

Most of us don't care. Those are questions for ancient print masters and poorly paid journalism professors. For our generation of blogger-slash-journalists, who have always had the Internet and always will, there is only one answer to these questions. To quote Billy Corgan: definitely, maybe.

We've never thought of the media as stable, we weren't expecting to make much money and to us the Internet was never a "fad". YouTube must seem like revolutionary technology to 40-somethings who can explain the finer details of the printing press, but the school is missing something. New classes have never known a world without Friendster, HotorNot, Livejournal or ICQ. To sell the blogosphere back to students is like selling a fish water.

And eventually people will stop buying it. For now, we need that degree. Or, we think we do. As the elevator opens at my floor, my friend and I make a biting realization: had we gone to college, we would probably have jobs by now.

As I reach my front door I'm reminded of a class reading. On page fourty of The Elements of Journalism, Nightline's Ted Koppel is quoted, saying, "Journalism schools are an absolute and total waste of time."

Maybe, I have learned something at J-school after all.