Monthly Archive

My cousin is no longer in Iraq. He’s been deployed there since April 2007 with the 4th Stryker Brigade out of Fort Lewis. He left the day before my 21st birthday and he’ll be returning right about when his wife Kristena turns 21. His daughter Amaya, whom he’s only seen for a few days right after she was born, is going to start walking any day. He’ll be returning to a new sister-in-law and a new nephew. We’re all really excited for him to come home. It will be good to see him, and even better to know he’s not over there anymore.

From up here Spokane looks like a real city. It’s only a 25-minute walk from the apartment to the Spokesman building downtown.

I got to hold Ed and Fred the goldfish on my lap from Pullman to Spokane. The whole thing was quite tiring, but also exciting.

But it’s his job, so nothing to be suspicious about. This is just a belated update about the softball tournament Nick was covering last Saturday and Sunday. One of the teams he was following, Montesano, won the whole thing to become the 1A state softball champs.

During the tournament, one team lost their first game because a girl who hit what would have been a game-winning home run didn’t touch first base. They were very upset. So I was telling Nick about the technicality horror stories coaches always used to tell me, and how I got myself a lot of warnings from coaches (and officials) for stepping on the white line inside the track.

That very day the girl who won the Washington state 4A (I think) 3,200-meter run was disqualified for running on the line for three consecutive curves. All her competitors felt bad and passed their medals up and whatnot, according to a Spokesman story. I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing, because I think it’s totally irrelevant rule in a race that long, and at the same time a major part of sports is following arbitrary rules. It sucks for her, definitely, and for all the other runners who were cheated out of a fair race they could feel good about. Too bad she didn’t have good coaches to tell her horror stories she’d still remember years later.

I don’t do a whole lot of bitter complaining here, but enough is enough. What an unfortunate time to be young. It’s difficult to get a decent job as a journalist because most papers are laying people off instead of hiring them (and even if you get hired you might get laid off). In the old days, if you wanted a break after college or didn’t have a job, you got to go backpack around Europe or do a coast-to-coast roadtrip or whatever. Now, with the exchange rate, gas prices, rising airfare, and excessive and futile security measures, it’s basically impossible to do anything fun and carefree on a recent graduate’s budget

All the things that would be great about being young – knowing how to use modern technology, time, few responsibilities, good health – are thwarted by the stupid economy. And then when I’m old I won’t even get paid back in Social Security. Awesome.

Everyone seems to be leaving Pullman, finally, including me. My last phone conversation with Victor before he left Sunday reminded me of this farewell from the Evergreen staff in the 1898 commencement issue:

“To the graduating class the Evergreen bids you God-speed, and wishes you all the success possible. May your lives be examples which will bring credit upon yourselves and your alma mater.”

To finish up my post the other day about names, here are a handful that I’m still on the fence about. They didn’t fit into any of my convenient little categories, for varying reasons:

Breea Larae Rose: This name has a lot going for it. It’s pretty uncommon, without any ambiguity about how to pronounce it, which is a huge plus. It also fits into that narrow category of names that are fairly unusual but not weird at all. I’m a little skeptical about double middle names, unless there’s family meaning (like honoring both grandmas or something), but this one has decent rhythm.
VERDICT: A good name, probably stronger with the more conventional spelling of Brea.

Lariah Janae: I listed this one directly after because they’re similar in a lot of ways. I assume it’s pronounced like Mariah with an L, but it also makes me think of Lariat (ooh, remember to add to my Words Blah Blah Blah Names List). Again, distinctive and pretty without being too weird, though the pronunciation and spelling ambiguity keeps it from being ideal. The uniqueness factor might get wiped out by a life of “Lariah … like Mariah with an L.”
VERDICT: A pretty enough name that it might be worth the “like Mariah” factor. Maybe.

There’s so much more insight below.

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Fast-pitch softball looks really weird. It doesn’t seem like it should be physically possible to throw like that. I watched a bunch of the state 1A high school softball tournament today in Spokane with Nick while he was covering three of the teams. Only he’s not Spokesman Guy this week, because he’s writing for The Bellingham Herald and The Daily World (better known as Jacob’s paper). Which is sort of weird, but there’s nothing in his contract that says he can’t do it since neither of those West side papers is a competitor of the Spokesman’s.

Unlike last week’s soccer game, it was miserably windy and cold today, with just enough raindrops to make you fear how much more miserable it could get. It least I didn’t get sunburned.

Also, softball turned out to be a lot more interesting than expected. I tagged along partly because I assumed it would be so boring I’d be forced to do real work (like writing a news story and Evergreen history stuff). It was actually pretty interesting, though not something I’d want to do regularly. You know how they try to scare teens into not wanting kids by making them take care of real babies? I bet two straight months of watching weekend softball and Little League tournaments would be more effective.

I’ve long tossed professional challenges to Christina, because she’s into prestige and power and probably will be a U.S. Senator or something (if she doesn’t miss her farm too much). I don’t want to be a senator or president or anything because inefficiency and political pageantry annoy me so much.

But now, covering all this provost stuff, I just realized I would be a great provost and executive vice president. I’m not really interested in all the political and lobbying duties of a university president, but provost would be pretty cool. You have to be creative and like understanding the really big picture of how things work. You have to be sincerely diplomatic, but also decisive enough to realize someone’s toes are going to get stepped on and they’ll probably cry and that’s just too bad.

And you get to be involved in a university, where there’s always room for improvement and always potential to make a difference. So that would be pretty neat.

UPDATE: I’ve just been told by qualified sources that being provost is not so great unless you’ve got the president in your back pocket. So scratch that, being in the news industry is better because you’ve always got the First Amendment to keep people from messing with your business too much.

Today I was looking forward to a leisurely day of running, breakfast, reading the paper, lunch, reading a book, doing laundry, dinner, and going to a movie.

Then WSU announced a new provost.

I was not pleased. I have yet to have a boring day since graduation. I’ve informally been the Evergreen admin reporter, covering provost candidates, more provost candidates, A2P2 and other things that come up. But I still have no interest in looking for a job, probably because I haven’t been bored enough to care yet. How can I miss reporting the news if the news won’t let me take a break?

I do get to sleep in and go running more. So that’s nice. And I get to eat dinner and not go to class. But I’m still looking forward to a change of pace, or at the very least a change of scenery.

Let’s be honest: My favorite parts of the newspaper are the obituaries, birth announcements and Dear Abby-like syndicates. I don’t want my breakfast ruined by Myanmar; I’ll read that later on the internet.

Birth announcements are awesome because you can keep track of what people are naming their kids these days (at least in Spokane, if I’m reading the Spokesman) and give criticism when necessary. This week has been pretty good, and I mean that sincerely. There’s a lot more to laud than ridicule. These are from the past four or five days:

• Boys who need to learn to fight: Kyler Max, Kyler Scott, Tyler Christopher, Jordan James, Casey Mack
  Some people like “sensitive” boys’ names; I do not. Bemoan machismo society all you want, but a boy should never be mistaken for a girl. In defense of these Kylers, their last names were Smith and Johnson, so good for their parents for trying to do something not totally boring. But Kyler sounds even girlier than Tyler, which I predict will rapidly edge toward the feminine in the next decade. It might be fine now, but that doesn’t keep me from giggling about middle-aged men named Lynn, Stacey, Ashley or Leslie. Jordan already crossed over to the feminine like 20 years ago, as did Casey (though I know guys named both and they seem to do okay).
• Spellcheck, por favor: Gabryella Nichole, Brittlyn Grayce, Carrson Charles, Brynnley, Aryonna Alayna, Adalieah Suprice, Neveah Niccole
  Okay, I’m not especially tolerant with this just because the whole thought process drives me crazy. It goes like this: “Honey, I love this pretty name and it’s totally perfect, but it’s just not special enough for the most precious baby in the world!” “I know what to do, darling, just put in random letters so it’s spelled different!” Ugh. Gabriella is a lovely name, why the Y? Carson is perfectly solid these days, why the extra R? Ariana is one of my favorite girly-girl names ever, but why does it become better for anyone by spelling it strange? I understand the whole uniqueness thing, but substituting/adding letters is not a good way to feign creativity. I seriously hope Roxanne Aalice was a typo by the newspaper. Way to ruin an awesome name by making it impossible to spell.
• Awesome twins: Dillan Walker and Cole Garret
  Good work. They sound good together without being too “aww, twins!”
• Trends in the making?: Sydney Lynn, Sydney Rose, Kindle Catherine, Kindyl Mayson
  An older classic and a new version of Kendall that plays on the trend toward verb names – I could see these going places. Or just weird that two kids in Spokane would be named Kindle/Kindyl in the same week
• People in the paper for wedding anniversaries: Shirley, Carol, Doris, Shirley, Norma, Sheryl
  Robert, Norman, Lloyd, Mert, Charles, Duane
  Just for comparison.

Keep reading for cool middle names and my favorite of the week.

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The Spokesman-Review periodically runs a “Then & Now” feature about some local athlete from the past and what they’re doing now. Today my uncle Dick Olsen was featured for his stellar hurdles performances back when he was in high school (he won three state titles his senior year) and college at WSU.

It was a pretty good story, but unfortunately the Spokesman continues to fail at its news industry purpose of providing information to the public, instead locking all their stories behind a subscriber-only login. So instead of a happy post about “cool, my uncle’s in the paper” (and, sure, I still have a little of that reflex even after being part of the industry), it’s a rant about how newspapers have to make their online content free if they want to survive.

You see this debate back and forth on Romenesko and in newspapers’ policy, but it’s really quite simple: Old people are the only ones who think readers will pay for online content. Young people don’t want to pay, and won’t. No young person in the industry thinks making subscribers pay for online content will work. The business of newspapers has been about advertising, not subscriptions, since the penny press was invented. The internet only continues this. How about making the internet free, and charging more for the print product that old people (who are willing to pay) still want. I would be willing to pay an environmental/production fee for a paper copy, maybe. Like once a week.

You know who wants to read that story about my uncle? The congregation of his church in Las Vegas. I bet none of them subscribe to the Spokesman, so none of them enjoyed the story or increased the Spokesman’s online advertising revenue by looking at the story. The first step to building the online page views necessary to build online advertising revenue is not blocking people who want to increase your page views!

Information wants to be free, man. But that’s not the point. Anyone who realizes older readers are going to die before younger readers should be able to figure out free content is a much better business model.

UPDATE: At least for now, you can’t access the story at all through the Spokesman website without a password, but you can read the first page by doing a handy Google search of my uncle’s name.

The WSU website has a bunch of little photo/features that cycle through on the front page. Today I noticed this one had a sort of unfortunate headline considering the recent earthquake disaster.

I don’t feel bad about making fun of my alma mater’s website because I already alerted News Services that they might want to reword it.

It’s not open for business quite yet, but Christina is in the process of moving to a new blog. She’s getting on WordPress so she can update from her phone, among other reasons. Anyway, we put together this header, though there may be changes:

She wanted something that incorporated newspaper text and flowers or flower petals that would coordinate with her favorite color scheme of black, white and pink. We shot it yesterday, with a branch from a little pink tree near Murrow East and a story she wrote about that frat getting shut down for drugs.

Another little gem from a turn-of-the-century Evergreen:

I was trying to come up with a more modern equivalent but couldn’t think of anything. Though I think it’s worth noting that Evergreen ladies have been harassing male Evergreeners about smoking ever since the paper first appeared.

And yes, the Evergreen used to publish poems and other little ditties and jokes. The “Ex” means it came through Exchange, a pretty informal content-sharing system between college papers. It was kind of a matter of pride to publish clever little things other papers would find witty enough to publish.

Also, I apologize in general for the poor quality of these old images. I take pictures from the microfilm tables so I don’t have to write everything down, but they don’t turn out great because 1) I have to take them from a slant because getting directly above the projected image blocks the light source, 2) the machine itself and the old microfilm rarely focus perfectly, 3) my camera doesn’t focus well in such low light, but flash washes out the projected image, and 4) I get lazy when I’m doing this for multiple hours. Lo siento.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon rolling through old microfilm of the days of the Evergreen to finish up that history project. Lest we too often think about how awesome it would be to have a teletype machine and all the other great thing that came with being a journalist in the past, I can safely say I am glad I was not editor of the Evergreen during a time when it was okay to publish racist advertisements:

The China earthquake disaster didn’t really hit me until this morning. I knew about it almost as soon as anyone in the U.S., thanks to ever-updating NYT online. And I’ve been watching the death toll rise to more than 30,000 with hope running out for those lost or buried. I looked at a few photo slideshows and videos and was fascinated by a story about how the Chinese building boom led to shoddy construction habits that made the damage worse.

But this morning I read part of an L.A. Times story printed as a sidebar in The Spokesman-Review that tore through the news absorption gauze you get from being far away and reading too many newspaper stories and lolling about in a summer haze. It’s about Chinese college students who took in teenage kids, high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, who haven’t found their parents yet and probably won’t. Maybe it’s because I still feel like a college student and I can imagine my 15-year-old sister and 17-year-old brother the same as those Chinese kids, but it made me cry.

I found a trove of photos I took while bored during spring semester training and came across this one. We were sifting through an elaborately labeled file cabinet full of ancient stuff when we found a file folder tab for file folder tabs.

I accompanied Nick to Spokane today while he covered the state boys 4A soccer quarterfinals. Eastlake beat Mead 3-2. It was a pretty good game, and brought back memories of that time really long ago when my life was dominated by soccer. I’m not really sure why it was such a tremendously important event for the Spokesman-Review to cover, and everyone there seems equally surprised a Spokesman reporter cared about their game. They didn’t have any media preparations, but then they didn’t even have a refreshments stand, either. They did have printed rosters, so after Nick showed Ticket Booth Mom his press badge she called after him – “Spokesman Guy! Spokesman Guy!” – to give him a roster.

It was really hot. It showed; the teams scored a combined five goals in the first half, and none in the second half. They looked tired. I got sunburned and tired, too.

Making the tail end of this week’s birthdays: Victor turned 23 today, Jacob turned 23 on Thursday and baby Brian turned 22 on Tuesday. May this next year be full of wonderful times for you all.

Tonight when I called Victor he answered the phone with a jaunty little ditty: “Waa-na-na-na.”

And so forth.It’s a favorite little tune of his and Allison’s, and fits my last name quite well. Of course we all remember it from Sesame Street, but then Nick and I got curious about where it actually came from. It turns out it’s from a sauna scene of a 1968 Italian softcore porno filmed in Sweden as a pseudo-documentary. So it was just as absurd as we could have hoped.

For your listening/viewing pleasure, and in honor of Victor’s birthday, here are a number of versions:

• The Muppets version
• The original Sesame Street version
• The hit bossa nova version from 1968 by Giorgio Moroder
• The original film version (it’s as SFW as an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”)
• A better version by Cake

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Just because it keeps coming up, and Victor mentioned he couldn’t remember most of the words that would be good names if they weren’t already words, here’s my complete list. Which is to say it’s the entire list I have written down, not that it’s comprehensive, because there are a lot of good ones we’ve thought of that I forgot to write down:

• Felony (a longtime favorite)
• Pistol
• Nazi
• Machete
• Pirate/Piracy
• Rival
• Malaria
• Burglar
• Larceny
• Soviet
• Parole
• Debris
• Fahrenheit
• Wrestler
• Tyranny
• Concertina
• Havoc (newest addition)
• And the classics: Fiasco, Vendetta, Siren

Some of them I like much better than others, but that’s not the point. Try them out with your last name, come up with a solid middle name (say Jane, Alice, Mary, James, Robert, William) and tell me it wouldn’t be awesome. This is one of those nice, no-pressure daydreams that you can be relatively certain won’t ever happen. It’s a good game for car trips, walks, classes and sermons that drag on a while.

I came into the Evergreen newsroom today to do some of the reporting I still feel a little obligated to do as long as I have newroom keys and a desk with crap on it. Instead I got distracted by library books I still have out about Martha Gellhorn. I think I was mostly into that before I started this blog, so maybe I haven’t written about her yet. She was a war reporter, married to Ernest Hemingway for a while, by most accounts had such a great love and compassion for humanity as a whole that she pretty much ignored her son, and had a tendency to just leave for another war when personal life got difficult or dull. So I see her as both a role model and a cautionary tale.

Anyway, this is from a letter she wrote to Hemingway in December 1943, talking about why she does journalism:

“… if such as me did not write, far worse people would do so. I can only guarantee the truth of what I write, not ever saying that I write the whole truth, because I never know the whole truth and if I did no one would publish it. But I know I am conscientious and serious, and fake nothing, and I think really that I do a sort of negatively useful thing, in employing the space and paper that would otherwise go to someone far worse.”

I quote that part because on bad days that is the reason I keep doing journalism, at least for now. It’s an awful reason, sort of. But she had other good things to say, so I put the whole portion of that letter below.

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From the drive home from Seattle. It was raining.

I’ve been told there are a few special readers of this blog who are far more interested in posts about running shoes than journalism. This goes out to you.

Nick has been needing new running shoes. So after we went running around a little lake in Seattle, we stopped by Super Jock ‘n Jill to get him a new pair. While he was out doing the “just run down the street to see which feels better” part of acquiring new shoes, I chatted with the youngish sales guy helping us. From talking about my still-fairly-clean 858s, it came up what kind of running I’m doing these days.

I told him it’s mostly just casual now, trying to get back in shape, that running 80 to 100 miles a week took a pretty hard toll in a series of injuries once I hit college.

“That’s kind of like my wife,” he said. “She ran at UW for a while, but she used to run 80 or so in high school.”

At this point I had the defensive pride instinct about other girls who ran high mileage in high school. But then he told me her 3,200 PR in high school was 10:11 and my eyebrows went sky-high.

You see, as I explained to Nick when he returned, each year there’s a small set of high school girls in the nation who run the 3,200 in about 10:30. Maybe a dozen or so. That was me at my best. Then there are the girls who we can do nothing but gape at while they run times closer to 10 minutes.

It turns out his wife is Alison Tubbs, a name I definitely remember from my early days caring about such things. She’s two years older than me.

I don’t really miss those days. But after living in Nick’s crew world for most of the weekend, it was like stumbling into an old home.

This is the lesson I learned after getting immersed in Nick’s former rowing life in Seattle this weekend. The two sports are similar in nature and the surrounding culture:

• Both require relatively rare types of water, limiting their scope and popularity.
• Both require expensive, specialized equipment that is damaged fairly easily.
• Both make athletes chronically cold, wet and subsequently tougher. And both develop the friendships that come with group suffering.
• Both require a sense of rhythm and technique that takes a while to learn (you can really tell who’s new), along with high levels of overall fitness.
• Both are dominated by high school kids and old men in spandex.
• Both are miserable sports for parents, requiring long drives to obscure places, generous funding, and standing around all day to watch maybe 200 meters of racing (most of the race is hidden).

The actual story is below.

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Today Nick and I returned from Seattle. It was an all-around good time. We didn’t know for sure we were going until like 24 hours before we left, so the most-uttered phrase of the trip was “I’m glad we decided to do this.”

I’d been to Seattle three other times during my college years, but I’d never really seen the whole city. We had good company, good food and good weather - until today, when it rained while I drank coffee on the way out of town for a stereotypical Seattle farewell. More later, with pictures.

This weekend I am in Seattle with Nick. I couldn’t mention it before we left because he was surprising his mom for Mother’s Day. This picture is from Vantage, a traditional stopping spot by the Columbia River on the route from Pullman. The drive was uneventful, except for running over a tumbleweed and getting caught in a baby dust devil.

We’re heading back to the Eastern part of the state Tuesday, after visiting Nick’s families, friends and old haunts. It feels like vacation to me.

Somewhere an unborn child might be named Vendetta. From my blog stats:

Good sir or (more likely) madam, do not do this! Either the name is way too outrageous with way too may negative connotations, or I want it for myself.

May I tempt you with Siren instead? My friend and I came up with that one in high school, and after lengthy arguments we decided she could claim it. Since then it’s only become more fashionable, with two-syllable names ending in “n” just approaching the cusp of popularity. It’s easy to pronounce and spell, and has a nice base in mythology that sounds kind of intellectual.

Maybe this is a total overreaction, but you can’t ever be too cautious with something as important as names.

On a related note, I came up with one of my favorite recent additions to the Words That Would Be Good Names If They Weren’t Already Words list (or whatever I call it): Havoc. Victor says it sounds unidentifiably foreign, but it’s still nice except for the lack of any decent nicknames.

This multi-part story by a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter facing her 1984 rape has been getting mention on Romenesko, so today I read it. Wow. This is brave journalism, daring and deep social commentary disguised in an equally powerful personal story. Read it, preferably when you have time to sit down 45 minutes or an hour to read the whole thing, but in any case read it.

While sitting at Rico’s along Main Street in Pullman, people were suddenly getting up from their tables, pausing on the sidewalks, staring with wonder at this behemoth. I’m still not really sure what it is. Someone told me at one point but it wasn’t that interesting, something to do with electricity or something. It was going from Texas to Moses Lake on a carrier with Oregon plates. It took a team of a half-dozen people to orchestrate its movement around an ordinary street corner from Main to Grand. When it finally rounded the corner everyone applauded and cheered.

Good thing this wasn’t coming through this past weekend during graduation or the great exodus from Pullman.

Here are more photos of the massive thing and its extensive towing system.

I spotted this book near the table where I was sitting with Nick at Rico’s last night. The cover design is pretty awesome, it’s like space age-constructivist-archaic tech-futurism. This 5th edition was printed in 1963 and warned in the introduction that journalism is imperative for resisting communism. It taught me how teletype worked.

This was the highlight of an evening filled with work frustration stories (not mine, for a change). Until this happened …

Whenever you have late books or recalled books or whatever, WSU Libraries sends you a colorful notice. I kept most of these around this year as if to remind me to do something about it, and Friday I finally threw them all away. I ripped them up out of habit whenever throwing away personal information, and it made a darling little pile.

I won $100 from the university for this writing award, and they took out the amount for my library fines. I picked up the $9 check on Friday. For how much I use the library and how badly it’s underfunded, I consider it money well spent.

I woke up early, I presented, I passed. The end.

They said I had some “technical” things they would have liked changed, but not enough to actually make me change them. And that I had good “voice” in my writing, which is nice.

To fill out my last timecards, I had to look back the stories I wrote this pay period. While doing this, I noticed a major meaning-changing error that someone added into my story. This makes me incredibly angry. I know it wasn’t Christina, because I was watching over her shoulder while she edited and talked with her about that part.

Also, it was not ambiguous. Someone added a bracketed phrase to a quote that makes it incorrect. Editors: Do not change quotes without checking with the writer! Especially if the writer is sitting like 10 feet away from you! Especially don’t change quotes without at least reading carefully!

It makes me that much angrier because this now-misquoted person had previously called me about a genuine error in a story that was my fault for being sloppy on deadline (that none of my editors caught).

OK, now it’s time to get over it. But damn, that makes me angry. I beat myself up pretty hard about not getting errors, and to have someone else add them in without even trying to check with me really undermines my will to do this anymore.

Jacob’s penchant for reflection photos (mirrors, windows, puddles, etc.) reminded me of this picture from that one day Nick, Christina and I went hiking.

A long while ago, Plato was pretty skeptical of art. If you remember his Allegory of the Cave, he thought there were ideals for everything, and the things on Earth were just poor representations of those ideals. Like there was an ideal strawberry, and then all Earth strawberries were representations of that ideal. So then art, a representation of Earth things, was another step removed from the ideal. So a reflection in a photograph of an Earth thing would just blow his mind at how removed from the ideal it was.

This is why no one remembers Plato for his art theory.

Incidentally, I did a project on this for an Honors art class and got points taken off because I wasn’t “respectful” to Plato and his theories. But I got a great grade on my next project, which was about photojournalism and ended up inspiring my thesis.

This is the layout of the Murrow East basement when the Evergreen first moved in back in August 1972.

I made a rough updated version of the map for those of you who don’t spend more than half your life here.

The Evergreen moved into the new Murrow Communications Complex after it was renovated from the old Arts Hall to house the communications department, radio, television and Student Publications. They added Murrow West at that time and moved the Evergreen from its home in the basement of the CUB, where it had been since 1952 when the CUB opened.

Murrow East was originally called Science Hall when it was built in 1899. The structure was partially designed by college president E.A. Bryan, who added the semicircle shape to draw in more light for the new microscopes used on upper floors. The space now known as the Evergreen newsroom was originally an animal husbandry demonstration room. Victor says this explains all the cow ghosts.

I carried this sticker all the way to campus for Victor’s hair. He hasn’t had a haircut in a while, though you can’t tell that much in this photo because his hair is what we call “small” (as in, “Victor, why is your hair so small?”) because he just showered. My neighbors bought a potted office plant for their “Office Space” party and it’s been on the landing by the stairwell all week with this sticker.

While I wait impatiently for the future, I have to admit old technology worked pretty well for my thesis. Almost all my sources were books and articles in books, and I marked parts I wanted with little sticky strips. I’m just cheap enough that I cut Post-it notes into pieces so I don’t waste so many. This is the pile I pulled out of books before I brought them back to the library today.

The neon green ones are the oldest, from like October, followed by the boring yellow ones from the newsroom. I started using the purple ones in late January or February. I had a few random bright yellow ones that in a book I had to return a few weeks ago, which is only interesting to know because they were the same that Jacob has on his window (because I took them from him).