PEPPERY PLETHORA PLANNING PROTEST/SURVIVING DRIVING LESSON # 1

Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we are spoiled.
Jeremiah, 4, 13

Just made it back alive after my first Official Driving Lesson. Yup. I drove a car - a shitty little Toyota Corolla - along the waterfront in Auckland towards Mission Bay and around in the residential area in the back there.

I can’t wait to get this thing locked down so that I can get my full license. I’ll probably spend around NOK3000 altogether, which is ridiculously little compared to what I’d pay back home. It’s not uncommon to pay at least seven times that in Norway.

And that is a hell of a lot of money. Plus that you have to do all these compulsory driving lessons there, as far as I know. Here you just get a learners license, and three months after you can do the driving test for a restricted one. They sort of leave it up to you. I’ll probably get at least ten of these lessons though. I don’t want to fail the driving test - I’ll probably be pissing my pants out of nervousness and I don’t want to piss my pants more than once.

The news this morning went great. I got compliments all around and felt that I read with a “real sense of urgency” as the editor called it. I really made it sound as if it was the NEWS, and that what I was saying was IMPORTANT SHIT. Reading again tomorrow at noon. Hopefully there are some good stories out there. Feel like doing some cool interviews tomorrow.

My story on the writers festival will be played on air tomorrow too. Exciting stuff.

There was a new dude in the newsroom this morning. A journalist student who had done an exchange to Denmark and he was now in his last year. He really tried to write news with flowery language. One of his sentences was something like

“A plethora of peppery Emos are planning a protest ets. etc. “

And I was like “dude, that’s gonna sound like rap when on air, you seriously need to get rid of one of the P-words”

So he deleted the “peppery” and switched out “plethora” with “group” or something and we went on. A little bit too intense language for the 7am news… But at least he’s trying. It’s a nice change to have to edit away flowery language rather than having to deal with spelling mistakes and syntax errors.

Tonight I’ll write a story on the DNA of the extinct Tasman tiger and how they put it into a mouse to see what happened. A freaky Jurassic Park-style story. It should go down well with Forskning.no. I’m turning that place into a reliable cash cow getting about an article a week in there. Hopefully I can keep it like that for a while. If not I’m fucked. This radio-shit is taking a lot of time and doesn’t pay extremely well. But it’s fun.

And for my so-called career I suppose it’s so-called smart.

Please NRK, buy my shit.