The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There is quite a bit going on in my world this week.. and I'm pretty sure this blog is one of the only ways I will ever be able keep track of when all of this stuff actually happened.

Yesterday.

I talked my way into tagging along with my amazing coworker (also named Emily) while she covered the Michael Floyd press conference at Notre Dame. Long story short - ND wide receiver gets busted on DUI earlier this year, player is then suspended for x-amount of time. In a surprise twist, player is then fully reinstated just four months later, before the season begins.

I'm not a Notre Dame fan, but considering the university is obviously in our station viewing area.. I should probably know at least a little bit about what's going on. And.. I really just wanted to go to a sports press conference.

Today.

My first day working on the morning (6am) show.. I have to learn how to produce it myself so I can fill in for our regular AM producer while she is on vacation. I've managed to survive filling in for the 6 and 11 weekday producers (back to the 11p show next week!) several times, but the morning show is literally a whole other monster at the end of the book.

And if you didn't get that reference, shame on you.

In order to keep myself awake, I spent quite a bit of time on Twitter (top notch news resource, I tell you) and ended up tweeting Robin Meade (aka the really pretty anchor on HLN's Morning Express). When I tweet celebrities/well-known personalities, I know that 99.9999 percent of the time they are not going to respond.

That being said.. I have a new reason to love Robin.

Words cannot explain how ridiculously happy this made me. I would LOVE to work on Morning Express one day.

Anyway, I have round two of morning shadowing tonight/tomorrow - which actually means I have to go to bed around 4pm today. Weird.

In the meantime.

I have - of course - been back on Twitter, where I learned the rather unsettling news that a gunman may have been spotted on the Virginia Tech campus. Seeing as I was a freshman in college in April 2007, the combination of the terms "gunman" and "Virginia Tech" leave a certain pit in the bottom of my stomach.

I will never forget the events that unfolded that day. I still get the creeps when I hear the Collective Soul song that the gunman supposedly listened to on repeat, I remember the fear that we all seemed to feel knowing it could happen anywhere, and the way people came together, because that day we were all Hokies.

That was also the day that the Fort Worth-TCU Symphonic Chorale was set to perform the Verdi Requiem at Bass Hall in downtown Fort Worth. We'd been rehearsing for months.. and the Verdi is not for the faint of heart. It's intense and passionate.. something well beyond my years. Yet at 18 years old, I was singing in a massive concert with more than 100 other college students, managing my way through the words in Latin.. reading the words on the page in English.. and thinking about the irony of it all.

"Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death ... when you will come to judge the world by fire."

Not something you easily forget. Especially when it could potentially be happening again.