Story time

For the past few days I have been walking the streets of the North Shore to interview as many random people as I can. To be brief, I am covering personal finance and economy stories for the next four weeks, and the interviews I conduct this weekend are critical to finding foundations for these stories.

As a result, I am realizing how incredibly difficult it is to find good stories.

I finally saw that I always took good news stories for granted, but today that has changed.

It's easy as sin to think of great stories, but to actually find evidence of them in the real world is another matter.

It takes a lot of hope, endurance and resolve to delve underneath some people's answers to poke at the real flesh of what they are saying, and even then it's not guaranteed that what oozes out is worthy of a story. Yet, no matter how much I try to track down awesome stories, I find them incredibly evasive. Many times it feels like chasing a ghost of my mind.

After a few hours of tiresome interviewing, I sat at the Metra station in Wilmette, cold and sleepy. I looked down the endless strip of metal and wood to my left, to my right, and wondered how wonderful it would be to have a story find me.

Then I realized that I have known this wonder - that I have been the one sought after by the Story itself.

It is, after all, the greatest story of them all. If it were left up to me to find it, I would be in infinitely vexing, fatally deep despair. But to have it find me - that is incredibly liberating. I can rest now, because I have it and it has me.

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On another note, I sent my absentee ballot yesterday. I won't say who I voted for here, but I wanted to share this photo and caption that a good friend of mine shared with me.

© Callie Shell / Aurora for Time

Journalism student stunned by his own ignorance

After his first six days of graduate classes at the Medill School of Journalism, Jason Hahn, 26, was embarrassed by how much he didn't know about writing properly.

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I just wrote a horrible headline and a lame lede.

I'm only seven days into this quarter, but I have already come to realize that I did not know a damn thing about proper writing. I have full confidence that every blog post I've ever published to the Web was riddled with flagrant errors.

Here are a few things lingering in my mind (in no particular order):

1) I know nothing about commas.
2) Obituary writing is actually a noble, significant craft.
3) I hate AP style.
4) It's amazing how everyone in a classroom can write different headlines and ledes for the same exact story. They're like snowflakes.
5) In college, liberal arts professors hated on Christianity; in graduate school, journalism professors (and 97% of the class) hate on McCain/Palin.
6) It's nice to be in the majority this time.
7) I never thought about journalism as a crucial part of the democratic process.
8) Journalism is a vilified profession, but it has so much potential to be a sublime one.
9) Maybe being an editor wouldn't be such a bad idea.
10) I still don't know what I specifically want to do.