A Random Synopsis of the Last Few Weeks

I've been super busy lately and therefore I am not maintaining my personal blog (i.e. this one) nearly as often as I'd like. Here are a few updates in bullet-point fashion if any of my loyal readership is at all interested:

• I covered Super Tuesday by speaking with like, 30 Obama supporters, when all I needed was ONE Hillary supporter. (Read story here.)
  
• Last Saturday I went to New Jersey to spend the afternoon with my Gram. That was good. Sometimes it feels really good to get out of the city. Though the suburbs do scare me. A lot.
• Mitch moved into a new apartment over the weekend and out of the rathole he got stuck with after the fire. Thank goodness.
• My internship at ABC rocks. And I can't say anything more about it or Disney will sue the pants off me.
• I registered a Web site. . . . Soon, you'll be able to check out this blog, and everything else on earth I have any control over, on www.kathrynlurie.com. But not yet. I have to make it first. Funny how that works.
• Leonard Nimoy was at school on Thursday to observe the Journalistic Judgment class, which I am not in. I did see him wandering around the school a bit afterward though. He's one of the founding benefactors of my school. Which makes him super cool in my book.
• Just in time for the Oscars next weekend, I have finally completed the viewing of the last of the films that are nominated for Best Picture (a personal tradition going back years and years). I will write my own little one-line predictions in another post.
• I have been pretty ill all weekend and I'm currently trying to will myself into writing my Craft piece for tomorrow. I can't exactly talk because my throat is raw from this crazy severe coughing and near-retching for the past 48 hours. Fun times.

10 Year High School Reunion

The weekend before my move (yes, I'm going just a bit out of sequence here), I traveled to my little itty bitty home town of Susquehanna, PA, to attend my 10-year high school reunion.

The party was a lot of fun--it was so good to see the people I grew up with and what they were doing with their lives. Here are (from left to right) Mike Medlar, Jake Lee, Justin and me.

Here's the president of our class (and organizer of the party), Adam Albert, gettin' down at a bar post-reunion. Adam's now a doctor doing humanitarian work in places like Guatemala.
And here's Justin, my best friend from high school, who is now a tour manager for Roadrunner Records in NYC. He's an exception to the rule of a 10-year reunion, though--I've been in touch with him ever since high school. :-)

News at 11

So. This month marks a huge change in my life. I am moving to New York City and beginning graduate work at the City University of New York's new Graduate School of Journalism. When I began the tedious grad-school application process, I knew that I would apply to NYU and Columbia. I didn't intend on applying anywhere else, but then I read a New York Times article about this new journalism school that had just opened that was a part of CUNY, and it sounded terrific, so I decided to apply there as well.

After the essays, tests, interviews, etc., I got accepted at both NYU and CUNY and waitlisted at Columbia. The reason I chose CUNY--for anyone who's wondering, as I have had a lot of people express their surprise at my selection of CUNY over NYU--is because after I spent a lot of time researching all three programs, I came to the conclusion that the CUNY program is the most progressive, interactive, and attractive of the three. The (completely Mac-based) facility is amazing--it's housed in two stories of the old Herald Tribune building in Times Square, and the new New York Times headquarters are being built directly next door. I fell head over heels for the program, and I love that it's public education, and it has a terrific faculty--professors who have worked (and in a lot of cases, like most adjunct profs, still do work) at CNN, Rolling Stone, Newsday, the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, etc. These people have won Emmys, Pulitzers and the like, and I'm so excited to start learning from them.

Nate (one of my very best friends who's moving with me to NYC) and I got an awesome 4-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and we are moving in on 8/30. I am already in the city because my orientation starts tomorrow. Today I was at the school to let the techies there install all this awesome new software on my computer. (Seriously, we got hooked up.)

I was very sad to leave Metroland, but the time had come. I was feeling a bit burnt out, and I was dealing with some difficult circumstances. But I love the paper and hope that they get a new website going and make the changes they have talked about recently.

That is the update for now. Plenty more to come. Wish me luck!