Well, I'm off to Mississippi.

Fly down Wednesday, fly back Thursday, spend over a thousand dollars of someone else's money to shoot some video of a girl nailing a house together and hopefully poke at the True Meaning of Civic Engagement.

I am hoping that the Basal Meat of me doesn't get in the way of things. In my quest to save a buck I quite very nearly booked airline tickets for the wrong date. In fact, had Northwest not blocked the third-party payment, I would have. Runarounds, missed reservations for gear checkout, general incompetence in virtually every fashion on my part...maybe two years of following Fox around have given me a case of t3h st00pid. Terrifying disease, t3h st00pid.

At any rate, Ocean Springs, MS is 1,000 miles away. It'd be about $250 in gas to drive. In fact, for what we're spending to fly two people down to Gulfport, rent a car for a day, and fly back, I could buy a vehicle just to drive there including the cost of gas. In fact, that's what I'm doing in May for the BA/BE, but yeah.

This is the latest hoo-de-hoo in my verite documentary class, which at best lets me use the fancy gear for my work and at worst is a massive distraction. Truth be told, some days I give so little of a damn about the world and the people in it that investing my time into telling the story of someone trying to make it a better place seems almost hypocritical. I'm supposed to be encouraging chaos and destruction, not making some happy-handed paean to youth, truth, and justice.

When Katrina hit, I was rooting for the hurricane!

I must try to make it interesting. I must find an internal struggle, a flaw, a personal shortcoming on the part of my documentary subject and EXPLOIT IT. Only there can my sensationalist muckracking shine!

That, and I'm inherently jealous of people more on the ball than me, which is, well, rather quite a few people really.

At any rate, we're renting a Hyundai, which I will try very hard not to drive into the Bay of Biloxi.