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.

Newsprint fingers.

As an underemployed writer pursuing an education to work in a rapidly disappearing industry, I am on one of the lowest rungs of the impending recession.

To pinch an invisible penny I spent the afternoon wrapping gifts in a newspaper I picked up for free. Each gift is wrapped in the recipient's favourite section. My mother: life, my father: sports and my sister: the crosswords.

If the economic situation gets any worse, I may have to stop taking Mondays off and actually go into the office. Until then I'll continue to spend my days waking up late and having coffee dates with Toronto's most quote-able "fringe-hipster."

That or I'll start a prescription pill addiction, like everyone else. God bless the holidays.