You ever wish life could be more like in the movies?
Oh, sorry. I don”t believe we”ve been properly introduced.
I”m Kevin, and I”m the new guy ”round these parts. Let me tell you how I arrived here.
I grew up in Union City, located in the lower East Bay. Comparatively, it was a small city at 70,000 people because it was surrounded by the much larger and higher in profile cities of Fremont and Hayward. It always irked me that Union City wasn”t denoted on California maps though smaller cities would be present.
I graduated from James Logan High School in 2002. I had an idea that I wanted to go into journalism at 16, but I wasn”t ready to try my hand in the college world as I had been bitten by the music bug.
I spent a few years playing drums in metal bands and working before enrolling at Ohlone College in the fall of 2005. I transferred to San Jose State University in the fall of 2008 and moved into an apartment a few blocks away the next year.
For the spring and fall 2010 semesters, my life was consumed by being a staff writer and then multimedia editor for the Spartan Daily, San Jose State”s student-run newspaper. During my tenure there, I wrote more than 40 stories, shot a few thousand photos and edited together many multimedia videos.
I even flew to Washington, D.C. at the end of October to cover the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” with my copy editor roommate. I don”t think I”ve ever been more challenged and had more fun in my entire life than during those two semesters.
I earned a few honors at San Jose State. I was awarded the Dean”s List for getting good grades. I earned a $1,500 scholarship for my scholastic achievements. I was also one of six to join Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honor society, which was awarded to only the top 10 percent of journalism and mass communication students.
I swear I”m not this full of myself.
I graduated at the end of fall 2010, earning a Bachelor”s of Science in journalism with a cumulative GPA of 3.729. I happen to think it”s quite hilarious that I have a B.S. in journalism.
Upon graduation, I had to embark on one of the most difficult journeys I”ve yet faced in my life: Leave behind everything and anyone I”ve ever known and move back in with my parents, who had retired to Riviera West in December 2009.
When I visited them in 2010 and saw how beautiful it was here, I also noticed a stark contrast with how life was back home. I could see the Milky Way at night. It was so quiet I could hear a speedboat out on the lake from inside the house. Gone were the crack heads that wandered the downtown San Jose neighborhood around San Jose State and the sounds of the freeway.
I”ll tell you one thing, though: I miss having things in walking distance and having many different types of convenience stores within only a few miles from home.
For the first month of my living here, I saw only the negatives in living here, especially focusing on being so far away from all my friends.
But I realized that this was the first step in a new journey for me, a chance to start new as a college graduate. I dropped off my resume at the Record-Bee hoping they would take me on, and I was ecstatic when they did.
I don”t think I could”ve picked a better place to start a new life. The beauty of Lake County, coupled with the chance of building up a great body of work at the Record-Bee, should make for an awesome new experience.
And I can entice my friends to come up and visit so we can go and check out some of the great wineries, breweries and restaurants in Lake County and the surrounding Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
Now if only I could be like Neo in “The Matrix” and be able to know everything about this place and the people in it in an instant. But I think half the fun of being here is going to be in learning all about it.
I think I”ll have many more “Whoa” moments than Neo did this way.
Kevin N. Hume can be reached at kevin.n.hume@gmail.com or call directly at 263-5636 ext. 14.
