4 Years Later

I was an intern at the Washington Post's multimedia desk during the last Presidential Inauguration. I went out to the National Mall at 4 a.m., hoping to capture some of the early scene before reporting for my desk shift later in the morning. I took photographs of the crowds beginning to arrive, and got a sense of how giant the event would be. I remember the bitter cold, more than anything else. Returning to the WP office in Arlington by 10, the crowd's cheering was audible across the river as the President took his oath.

Since I'm no longer a 'member of the press' it would take an act of Congress to get me out of bed that early again. The crowd is expected to be smaller this year and the city is still buzzing, but I'm not as thrilled as I was four years ago to go out into the freezing morning just to say "I was there."I found a journal entry from 1/19/09 - it's clear that I wasn't planning on attending the Inauguration then, either, and went as a 'hail mary' to make myself feel better about what was turning into a repetitive and unrewarding internship:"felt pessimistic today about work. I was doing - seemed like I was sitting there not doing anything productive. Very bad attitude at some points. The captions seem very.. something. Boring? I just can't shake the feeling that I'm wasting time and could be doing more important work. Tomorrow I'm going to endure ridiculous crowds so I can sit there, and what? Re-size pictures? Maybe one an hour? It's kind of irritating and I'm getting frustrated. Feel like I really missed the boat on the whole inauguration project. I need more to do, or a paycheck, or something, or I need to find somewhere else. Maybe still time to do something important - Push myself to the limit, wake up at 4, head to the mall, snap some photos, back to WP by 11, there til 7, home by 12, recover Weds. It's possible."I ended up taking my own advice, 'pushing myself to the limit' (I apparently had a pretty fragile limit, 4 years ago). I wasn't assigned the task of going out to shoot that morning, but I did anyway - and some of my photos are still, 4 years later, featured on the Washington Post website, which generated millions of views that day, and many since.