Zeitgeist

English classes at my college are all themed. Oddly, in the first English class you take, the topic isn't published until after you've signed up, so it's a bit of a crap shoot as far as whether you'll enjoy it. I happened to not take freshman English my freshman year, so I'm about to take it now as a sophomore (it all worked out okay; it means I get to take it as an honors course which will be more interesting). I just found out the topic for our class is "Writing the Zeitgeist." Admittedly, I had to look zeitgeist up on Wikipedia. Zeitgeist: "the spirit of the times," "the spirit of the age." Before looking it up, I was apprehensive about the strange German term, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it's exactly what I write anyway. Journalism is, by nature, taking the events and attitudes of the current time and synthesizing them into meaningful information that will communicate to the audience the pulse of the subject. In my personal writing, too (including this forum), I mostly write about my take on the way things are in the world. I, for lack of better words, report and interpret phenomena I come across in my own life. I have yet to meet anyone who is dramatically disappointed with the topical class they end up in. Perhaps there's a larger cosmic power making sure we all end up in the right place?