Newspapers are for the bottoms of bird cages.
I know now, after nine hours of class time spent listening to a professor speak in a graduate class, that I do not ever ever ever want to be a journalist or take any more journalism classes. I fear, you see, that he is a fair representation of journalists as a group; he has an odd worldview which I suspect may be necessary to function as an American journalist.

My professor is very unaware of himself as an entity that exists through the passing tides of time and space. For him, the world is broken into segments lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes; when the allotted time has passed, he leaves the segment and moves into the new one, never to look back. Unable, in fact, to look back. I imagine his thought structure like a path of stepping stones, joined only by the loose conception of a path, and dazzlingly individual from each other. Perhaps there is a slug on one of the stones; this is not indicative of slugs living in the garden, only indicative of the fact that this particular slug is cruising across this particular stone. Each stone, the events and happenstance surrounding it, is wholly separate from the garden, the other stones, and the walker.

For me, the world (and therefore of necessity my thought pattern) is a string of beads. The beads are separate matters joined by the tangible string of time and space; if the bead that I am inspecting is wet, there is a distinct possibility that the entire string was recently dropped in the sink; I recognize the union of many things to create a life, a world. For me, there are no 30 second to 20 minute segments as I see that events and actions affect other events and actions, and not just me as a single person, or me as representative of a group of people, etc.

Not very revolutionary. I don't believe that I am enlightening you to a shocking new way of viewing the world. I am merely astonished by my professor's blithe oblivion. Here, I wrote a poem about it today in class (bear in mind that I know nothing about poetry and wrote this merely to capture a sentiment):

In his field the grass is bitter,
stubby and broad.
He bellows his faith that it is the sweetest stemming from the earth.
He steps amongst the isolate tufts, dropping to gleefully roll upon his back,
grinding the fleas and meadow aphids into the dust.
Flies stand on his head and whisper secrets of ultimate truth into his flicking ear:
the source of the thickest clover, the sweat of the skin that can be ingested.
He gluts himself
Stands pensively
Burps up his cud
and reflects on the objective nobility of it all.