The Scribe

I recently landed a job at the UCCS campus paper, The Scribe. I'm a reporter, which is awesome, because now, whenever I get a great idea for a story I can exclaim, "What a scoop!" and head off to my smoke-filled office and churn out another story on my typewriter. Good times. Seriously, though, it's not really going to be that great at first. For my initial few stories, I'm going to have to do all the crappy stuff none of the other reporters want to do. This week, I'm supposed to cover something on campus called the "Tree of Peace." I don't even know where this tree is. (Apparently, as I'd found out later, it's been several trees over the years. When one dies, they just move the plaque to the tree next to it.) What's so funny is that a boring-as-hell story like that would be right at home in this snooze-fest of a paper (it's not going to be like that forever, though. We're actually changing formats this week to make it more entertaining and eye-catching. At the moment, however, it's still boring). What I really wanted to do was a sort of "Hollywood Minute" thing where I just rip on pop culture in a short column, but somebody suggested a feature that's so similar to my idea, I'll never get to propose it. The one feature I did land is kind of a quirky one. It's called "Strange Medicine," and it's just a short column on weird diseases and unusual medical news. I can't go all-out and make it a joke right away, but I'm hoping that, over time, I'll be able to make this piece popular with a hefty dose of my caustic wit. Fingers crossed. Until then, I'll be stuck writing about walking corpse syndrome, in which the patient, having undergone surgery with anesthesia, believes that he/she has lost one or more limbs. "What do you mean everything's fine?! Get that bastard who chopped my arms off!"