Returning emotions?

I think just until this week, I will go on with my boring blogs. I have never considered life to be really entertaining since high school. It was more of a vessel that kept me on the ground. Chaining me down and restricting me. To think that my perspective have changed a little these days. It is rather a surprise. I can see some light in this...human life of mine, and it is interesting. Life was all about acquiring things, living to obtain more knowledge, more acceptance, more skills. Now, it is a bit different, there is some hint of hope in life right now. It may be love, it may be that I am graduating in a year and ready to move on to a new set of life, it may be because I met wonderful people here at Medill, maybe its because I met Tom G, nevermind. Roger Boye, that's it! …or...it may be something else that I have not quite caught on to yet. However, life has been more joyful, and I feel like I am becoming that once optimistic, idealistic, and happy, Clemence Dongwoo Kim again. Cogito Ergo Sum, is my favorite quote. Now, I think I might want to change it so that I feel, therefore I am...rather than..I think therefore I am...My logic is now telling me that even if I am a thinking machine (oxymoron..hm) if I do not incorporate feeling, my emotion, my life may be worth nothing. No identity, no personality... Although I do not trust my emotion completely yet...I will not leave my emotions and feelings outside of my world ever again. Of course, some instructors may jump out and yell at you, "DON'T EDITORIALIZE!!" Well, at least there is one emotion I am sure I will recognize thanks to my previous experiences and experiences from here...love...that,I will always recognize and trust completely...a deceitful friend it is...but I will trust that I...can still love. Right?

Journalist’s masquerade

The constant conflict between the journalism cherubs and the theatre cherubs brought upon me an idea that I had not think of before. Aristotle states in his book, 'Poetics,' that theatre is an 'imitation' of emotion, action, and life. In a sense, theatre is a language, for as an art form, it evokes and expresses emotions.

Okay, now it may seem like I am praising theatre, and I am. However, let me add that journalism is also a form of language in human society. I personally believe journalism can go further as in expression and evocation of emotion, than can any other language. Descriptive articles, reports, investigation, etc all show part of human life and action, and evokes and expresses human emotion. Not only does journalism achieve the stated, but it also requires one to become someone else while writing. When writing a story, especially during an interview or while writing a special on an individual, a journalist may need to become someone who they are not to bring out the best story that may be hidden within the individual. Journalism, in another word, innately requires theatre. Journalists often have to put on a mask to bring out a story; actors are the same, except that they do not write the result of their masquerade. What I find funny about actors is that the ability to act as a certain character depends on whether the actor has absorbed the character as his persona or not. Some may disagree, but I believe that an actor has to absorb the character, and completely be the character who he or she is trying to portray, to a point in which he or she can be unconscious about the character to 'act.' If an actor cannot do that, he or she has not written a good story, in a journalistic term. Journalists, however, when confronted with the problem of the masquerade, are put in a different situation. They have to be aware that they have to portray a different character while keeping in mind the story they are looking for with their individual persona. They cannot delve into this another persona and lose the point of their being becoming someone else.

    Basically, journalists have to strive to be an actor, a writer, a linguist, and an artist; all at the same time. Now this has been a rather complicated, beat-around-the-bush type of a writing. To summarize my point more frankly, journalists are more than just writers and are better than the actors.