Saturday, March 1, 2008

Someone wants me to influence the future.

So a couple weeks ago I got a request from a teacher who's organizing a journalism conference for a bunch of local high school kids. She was asking me to speak and talk about the column and about my PR career as well, since lots of journalism students land in PR careers. (I was one of those myself - graduated from Mizzou with a journalism degree a mere 17 years ago. Man, it doesn't seem possible that college was 17 years ago.)

They were asking me to speak for 40 minutes. I was tempted, but as crazy as my schedule has been lately, I was afraid that if I committed to it, that I wouldn't be able to find the time to really devote myself to developing a 40-minute-long speech. Plus, me talking for 40 minutes sounds like a great way to put 500 high school kids into a coma. As I've often said, I'm way funnier in print than I am out loud. So, as flattered as I was by the offer, I turned it down.

What I think is really awesome is that someone thought it would rule for me to exert some sort of influence on the next generation. As if the world doesn't have enough people who read comic books, play video games, find flatulence funny, and write humor columns.

Hm. Come to think of it, the world doesn't have enough of those kinds of people.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bob, you are awesome. Hopefully, your column isn't in danger now that Dana is out too! Have a great day!

Anonymous said...

You should have done it.
1) You get to talk to some smart kids - always rewarding.
2) 40 minutes is really not that long - make it a Q&A session, put about 10-15 minutes of real material together, and they'll dig it - show them examples of good vs poor articles.
c) you would have had some fodder for another article.

Anonymous said...

I understand your whole "I'm funnier writing than I am talking" sentiment.

In fact, when I starting writing my blog (thanks to Dana's influence - boo hoo to the Post!), my mother commented that I was actually funny, and that I should be like that in "real life." Hello! I'm writing about my life. Oh well.