You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2009.
Virginia is not that great – trust me, I live here – but I hope you like it, because you will never be welcomed back to Pullman again. Cougs are willing to forgive mediocre seasons and even willing to endure a lot of bad ones; we also endure a lot of good coaches leaving, but we don’t forgive that.
Thanks for the good seasons while they lasted.
This clunky thing was pretty cool back when I got it Christmas ‘04. I mean, 2004! I spent part of that year in high school. Any older and it wouldn’t have a touch wheel.
I just wanted to give it credit for still working. And to admit that I’m too embarrassed to take it out of my pocket on the Metro. I can tell people are looking and judging. They should be thinking, “Wow, how impressive that iPod still works, especially since she dropped it off the elliptical like a million times and never even got it a protective case or anything!” But instead they are thinking, “Yikes, has that girl been doing unpaid internships since 2005? Even my 14-year-old niece has an iPhone. How sad.” You can just tell they’re thinking that.
The National Gallery of Art is pretty nice for sitting around and forcing myself to write a few SPLC magazine stories I’m really, really tired of writing. I make myself write until my laptop battery runs down. Very effective. The trick is finding a place where I don’t have internet access.
One part of the writing test I took at Columbia for my application was this question (and I’m paraphrasing): What is one news story the media have not covered enough and how should they cover it?
I said legal and illegal immigrants – the actual people, the ones behind the politicized debate over immigration policy. I’m not really sure why I wrote about that. I know very little about it, and maybe that’s why I chose it – surely if the media were covering the topic well I wouldn’t be so ignorant. My not-very-organized little essay ended up mostly pointing out why the media don’t cover these stories well: We don’t speak multiple languages, we don’t have the time or money to access interpreters, we could harm people by reporting about illegal immigrants, there is no obvious “timeliness” and it requires access to reporter-repellent institutions like schools, hospitals and private businesses.
All of that made me particularly pleased and impressed to see the NYT’s ongoing series “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and Their Impact.” Mostly I was impressed with myself for identifying and poorly describing a major NYT project before it launched. The interactive maps are really fun to play around with, as usual, and I liked this story because it’s about Minneapolis.
This happened on Tuesday, but I’ve been busy unthawing ever since then. The other interns and I went to the Supreme Court to try to see oral arguments for this case about campaign advertisement law. It has First Amendment implications, so the Reporters Committee filed a brief.
I arrived at the Supreme Court at 7:30 a.m. on the dot and spent the next two and half hours getting progressively colder. We all had feet so numb it was hard to walk. We took turns getting out of line to go stand in the sunshine that finally peeked over the ornate marble facade to splash an arc of heat across the far side of the plaza. The stone ground was so cold, the kind of vacuum cold that sucks all your warmth out through your feet.
Two clouded leopard cubs were born yesterday at the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center, increasing the regional levels of adorableness by more than 80,000 percent.
Their tiny faces adorned the homepage of The Washington Post for a good portion of the day, as well as the front page of the print edition. I’m a relatively intelligent, interested, media-oriented person, and today was the first non-Sunday I considered buying a copy of The Washington Post since the inauguration. Cutest solution to the newspaper industry’s problems ever?
Aww. Look at them. They’re just so adorable.
I did get two spare copies of our free commuter paper, which features an adorable leopard cub as dominant art. I’m willing to mail a copy to whoever wants one while supplies last.
It seemed like spring would never fully get here, but this weekend finally brought pleasant weather. Today was especially nice, with sunshine all day and temperatures into the 60s. I couldn’t bear to stay inside and do work, so I headed over to D.C. with no specific goals other than walking around enjoying the weather. I perused Eastern Market, which was bustling and busier than I’d ever seen before. The National Mall was covered with families on spring break pausing between museums and locals squatting out patches of good grass for picnics and frisbee. Experts expect the cherry blossoms to peak in a week and a half, and the magnolias near the Capitol are already adding splashes of soft color to the slowly greening landscape.
Happy birthday to my little sister, who turns 16 today. Amy dislikes driving as much as I do and was not especially helpful last winter when we were trying to navigate a new part of town I’m not familiar with.
Other than that (and maybe that, too), I think she’s turned out quite well. She reads good books and has a well-developed sense of irony. She has pineapple upside-down cake for her birthday every year.
Birthday messages on her Facebook wall include a total of 15 smiley face emoticons and 58 exclamation marks. Kids these days. Back when I was 16 all we had was AIM.
Everyone at work is filling out the brackets, watching the scores, debating the teams and crossing their fingers for certain upsets, but so far I’ve been sitting out this year’s Big Dance.
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament just doesn’t interest me as much without WSU. Two consecutive years isn’t enough to take it for granted, at least when you’re a lifelong WSU fan, but it’s enough to make a Cougs-less tournament a lot less fun.
And I have to mention that I am so so so tired of hearing people around here say Gonzaga like “Gon-ZAHG-a.” And people getting confused and mentioning the success of Washington like I’m happy about it.
I wore head-to-toe black to mourn for the P-I, with a bit of green for the holiday. (And if we’re being honest, celebrating the holiday really means missing friends far away, so the green was just a different shade of mourning.)
The photo is from waiting outside the 9:30 Club, where some friends and I saw the Pogues. It was an ironic day, with good news for me coming on one of the bleakest days in the history of journalism in Washington, the state where I learned to love the profession.
Update: I forgot to mention it was also my highest page views ever, beating out the inauguration day with a surge of people searching for information about the shooting in Pullman.
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