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Seeing your own haunts and hometowns in national television documentaries is a very modern mirror. It’s a warped mirror and we know it, but we can’t shake the atavistic vanity and giddiness of seeing a piece of our own lives on television. Or the internet, such as it is now, which is how Nick and I watched Dateline’s “Death on the Palouse” (about Frederick Russell) and “The Case of the South Hill Rapist” (about Kevin Coe).
One last aside before I get to the point of all this: I know the car crash was very serious and tragic and all that — I’ve been a part of it as newspaper editor, after all — but I can’t read the title “Death on the Palouse” without saying it aloud in an overwrought dramatic voice.
And now, the point: I’m reading “Son: A Psychopath and His Victims” by Jack Olsen. Some of the attacks happened just blocks from where I live, on the same sidewalks where I run and walk to work every morning. It’s really, really creepy.
Recently I’ve been wanting a kitten (or a cat, age isn’t a big deal) enough to make a habit of perusing the adorable furry faces on Craigslist. Still, I don’t really want the commitment. So we’ve been pining for a transient cat that would come around and purr sometimes without needing expensive care like vet visits. This evening I got my wish! Vagabond kitten came over near the back deck, and he got over his skittishness pretty quickly. Pretty soon he was inviting himself in through the back door. Here are more pictures where he’s batting at my camera strap.
I’ve been half-waiting for my stimulus check for a while. I don’t do my taxes or have any clue what’s going on, but a check sounded nice. So when my mom came to visit I asked if I got a check at home. I figured it could have been something like my diploma that she didn’t mention when it arrived.
My mom suggested I check my bank account, because apparently I was signed up for direct deposit. I keep track of my finances the way I always kept track of my grades: Just do your best and assume you’ll be fine without ever bothering to check.
Flashback: Last week, walking out of the bank with Nick during my lunch break. “I have more money than I thought,” I said to him. “Neat.”
This, from an article about catching rides on friends’ private jets in the NYT Sunday Styles section:
In fact, [socialite Marjorie Gubelmann] Raein added, more often it is just a matter of friendly convenience. “It’s not like you’re some moocher,” she said. “You’re going somewhere and someone happens to have a plane.”
Green that formulation is not, and yet it does possess a kind of poetry for its beneficiaries.
The important paragraph there is the second one. Congratulations if you, like me, recognized it as an allusion to one of Federico Garcia Lorca’s more famous poems, “Romance Sonambulo.” I mean, it’s so subtle it could be accidental except that it’s so clever.
People who don’t read The New York Times think it’s stodgy and elitist. It’s actually quite playful, and while I wouldn’t rule out elitist it seems to me like a bunch of writers who’ve learned to have fun with what they do without worrying that every reader will catch every little thing. As for the readers, they catch a reference here and there and feel clever about it like they’re in on some smart-people joke. I get paranoid thinking about how much I probably miss.
I walked the block to the library on my lunch break today to read something interesting. I ended up sitting at a desk (you know, those pod-desks they have at libraries) next to an oldish man who smelled faintly of chewing tobabbo and alcohol. It was a Christina-like awkward situation because I when I came in all the pods had exactly one person sitting at each except one. So I went to that one and noticed one desk had a book and an almost-empty beverage container. It was a gamble: Sit there and assume the person had left, or sit at another pod and look weird for sitting near someone when there was an empty pod?
Anyway it wasn’t that weird except for this other guy who kept running over to the older guy asking to borrow his cell phone. He had knee-length cutoff denim shorts, glasses, a baseball hat and a ponytail out the back. He was calling to see if “she” was coming downtown now that they were off work. One of the several times he walked off with the phone, the older guy muttered, “I’m letting an idiot use my phone.”
I read a book about how the story of the toothpick demonstrates global concepts of culture and technology. I read about 15 pages and could have read more. Read on for awesome toothpick facts.
The New York Times would make chocolate chip cookies ridiculously complicated. I, on the other hand, have managed to simplify the recipe from the General Mills Alpha-Bakery Children’s Cookbook. It doesn’t even have fractions. It’s taken me years of experimentation to get it just right, and now I’m going to share it.
Today this photo caption struck me as odd:
“An avid smoker, 24-year-old singer Amy Winehouse is already showing signs of emphysema.”
It was in the Spokesman with an L.A. Times story about how Amy Winehouse shows that even young people are susceptible to emphysema. So it wasn’t the content that caught my attention, but the use of “avid.” It just seems like a word predominantly associated with positive activities, usually hobbies: an avid snowboarder, an avid gardener, an avid bicyclist, an avid pheasant hunter.
I looked it up and “avid” has two main definitions:
1) having a keen interest or enthusiasm for something
2) having an eager and even greedy desire for something
So it technically works, I guess. It seems like there are a number of alternatives, like heavy smoker, habitual smoker, relentless smoker, notorious smoker and so forth.
It’s a really picky semantic matter, but that’s the fun of it. We don’t describe alcoholics as “avid drinkers.” You would never see a criminal described as an “avid car thief” regardless of the dedication and enthusiasm evident on his rap sheet.
Maybe I’ve somehow connected “avid” with “aficionado” in my head. It would strike me as very odd and even glib to describe Winehouse as a cigarette aficionado.
And to end on a complete tangent, “aficionado” first meant fans of bullfighting and wasn’t popularized in English until Ernest Hemingway introduced it in “The Sun Also Rises.” Which I happened to pick up at the library today because there’s a part I’ve been trying to remember. I also got two drink recipe books because I’m tired of Nick always running to the internet when he wants to make a drink. It was like themed summer reading without even trying.
This is a little belated, but I had a good American Fourth of July evening at the ballpark. Nick had to cover the Spokane Indians game, so we made the best of it, and they really put on quite a good show.
The photo is from before the game when a group from Fairchild Air Force Base unfurled an enormous American flag in the outfield for the national anthem and a helicopter flyover. It doesn’t look so giant in the picture, but look at how many people were needed to hold it up. It made me wonder where they keep flags that big. What’s the largest size of American flag that the military owns?
The fireworks were lit manually, which was pretty cool. You could see the technicians’ shadows scurrying around out in the lot beyond the stadium wall. Some of the fireworks were a little low and from the press box you could see burning bits of fireworks hitting the ground and sitting there emitting blue or red sparks until they burned out.
The best part of fireworks was when they played the song that’s in “Sandlot” during the Fourth of July scene.
This is a just a follow-up from last week’s pie chart of the types of calls I took last week, updated for this week with a different format just for fun. I made sure to dutifully mark all calls this week, but again it’s not too many because there were only four days.
Here’s a pie chart similar to last week’s for easier comparison. The biggest change is the addition of the “Me” category for calls I answer from people actually trying to reach me. They had to do with ordering supplies and birth announcements, but still.
There’s a woman who writes crazy letters to the Spokesman every week. She writes on yellow steno notebook paper and folds each page vertically down the center line (hotdog-style, as we might have said in elementary school). She signs each page and it’s unclear where the letter begins and ends. She writes terrible things about her family (I found her father’s 1998 obituary in the archives) and Jimmy Carter and the whole things is tremendously paranoid and beautiful. We’d like to get her help, but we can’t track down any contact information for her. This is this week’s letter, minus last names of people who are apparently real. If you read it through a few times you start to think you can decode what it all means.
I once gave a friend advice about her hair length by explaining the economics concept of point of diminishing returns. I’ve been known to compare photography with calculus (points on a curve) and make Venn diagrams of my conflicts of interest.
Recently I’ve been reading “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond, and I keep thinking about the newspaper industry and the lessons we can learn from the Vikings and the Mayans.
This is just a sneak preview. I’ve only halfway through the book and it will take me a while to organize my thoughts on the whole thing into something useful. But it may be wonderful.
Yesterday at work I was asked to bring two portable police scanners to Radioshack because they wouldn’t work. When you turned them on, a message would come up about all the channels being locked.
Problem: I’m terrified of driving, especially an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar city. I haven’t operated a motor vehicle for more than six months, and I haven’t been behind the wheel consistently for almost a year. So then I asked Libby to do it as a way to fend off afternoon boredom, and she agreed to drop them off later because she drives that direction anyway. But I felt bad and had my own case of afternoon boredom, so I googled the problem and found out how to unlock and fix the scanners myself. It was actually really easy, but for some reason not included anywhere in the instruction manual. Then everyone thought I was quite clever.
The point of the story is that my fear of driving is not always bad because it forces me to improve my courage or my problem-solving skills.
By the way, if I ever had a cat that wasn’t spayed (and I can’t imagine why I would) I’d totally name her Necessity so I could name all her kittens after inventions (like Cottin Gin and Sliced Bread).
I really dislike the word “youngsters.”
I’ve been seeing it more recently, but it might just be catching my attention more now that it’s bothering me. I understand the difficulty in finding a good word to encompass all people from toddlers to teens, but “children” is a pretty good option without coming off as pseudo-folksy or condescending. Does anyone ever like being referred to as a youngster? It’s the word equivalent of the stereotypical rosy old aunt pinching child’s cheek. Sometimes ”youngsters” is used perfectly in earnest with sterling intentions, and that’s why it’s more equivalent to ”old folks” than “geezers.” But the distinction of genuineness doesn’t come across in print, so it just doesn’t work.
Some people (like everyone who ever had me as their editor) already know of other words I can’t stand. Myriad, plethora, kudos and utilized come to mind, though I’m sure there are others.
The common thread here is pretension. There’s too much trying to be folksy or trying to be sophisticated or offbeat or whatever. Sure, there’s a certain amount of obstinacy in hating them and I’m aware they can be quite useful. I’m also sure Ugg boots are very warm and useful in the snow. Gross.
This NYT article is an unlikely combination of topics relevant to my interests: the Supreme Court and Bob Dylan.
Chief Justice John Roberts cited a Dylan line from “Like a Rolling Stone” in a recent decision. It turns out this is not without precedent; Dylan has been quoted in 26 opinions from lower courts in the past. But the whole thing is still controversial, because - gasp! - the Supreme Court misquoted Bob Dylan.
Maybe. This is the citation, according to the NYT: ” ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).” Which is not true to the 1965 Columbia Records recording: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” But the version used by the Supreme Court is an oft-cited version of the lyrics, and the way they’re listed on Dylan’s official website. So the citation is wrong, yes, but is the quotation wrong? Which is more correct: the official lyrics or the way he sang them in the most famous recording of the song?
I wonder what Dylan thinks of his lyrics being used in a Supreme Court decision. It makes ol’ SCOTUS look almost hip, but I bet he’d think it’s stupid. It doesn’t really add anything. I’m not sure why quoting lyrics seems profound (though I still fall for it).
Also, not that it will ever come up, but Supreme Court justices are not immune to the Dylan rule on my list of exhausted cliches. And while it really ought to be an expectation for a NYT writer, the reporter of this piece still deserves a grateful mention for making no attempt at working in a “times they are a-changin’ ” reference.
Finally, I wonder if the professor quoted in the article spent many years of deliberate work and research to be labeled the “nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions,” or whether it just happened by accident.
Celebrity sighting, awesome! Cougar basketball player Aron Baynes was looking trim and teammate Caleb Forrest was back to yeti hair when they were spotted among the crowds at Hoopfest. They had a little entourage of giddy middle-schoolers following them around and left a wake of people doing double-takes and saying things like, “Is that the Baynes kid?”
Nick talked to them and looked really short. Most of the team is just staying in Pullman all summer and they came up to see the Hoopfest madness and sign stuff for fans. Nick and I agreed there were more citizen ballplayers sporting Cougar gear than Zags gear out on the courts, so it’s nice to see people haven’t forgotten. Here is a gratuitous paparazzi shot for Christina:
And if you want to reminisce with the original Christina Meets Baynes post, it’s here.
I didn’t take that many pictures because I forgot to recharge my camera battery. This is from one of the courts farthest away from the center of downtown. Other games had the Davenport Hotel or Riverfront Park as backdrops. The whole idea is crazy: What kind of city completely closes off its downtown so out-of-shape dads, shirtless high schoolers and little kids in pigtails can play 3-on-3 basketball in the streets?
I guess that’s part of what makes Spokane unique. It’s pretty cool, same as Bloomsday, because a bigger city couldn’t bother coordinating such an invasive citywide competition and smaller cities couldn’t support the influx of competitors.
It was really hot. People were eating snow cones by 9:30 a.m. (though they probably would have done that anyway” and the medic tents were passing out corny heart-shaped fans with the slogan “I’m your biggest fan!” I went to Hoopfest in the first place because Nick was reporting, so we arrived around 8:30 a.m. and were plenty happy to leave around noon.
This is the last of the self-indulgent posts about my early work, at least for now. Just in case any of you have remarkable amounts of time on your hands or want every advantage in some future blackmail scheme directed against me, here is a collection of essays ranging from eighth grade to freshman year of college.
Sometimes I feel like I came into journalism late, that I’m behind people like Brian and Jacob who did it in high school. However, I had in fact been a reporter, editor, publisher, pressman and delivery boy long before I ever got a byline in the Evergreen.
I founded and ran the New News Newspaper for my second-grade class. It think it published about monthly, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I found this old copy. It was one of the first issues, maybe the actual first one. There weren’t that many total. As usual, I apparently got into journalism due to boredom and needing a challenge.
This is nothing but a self-archives vanity post where I laugh about what a precocious child I was. Two Christmases ago (prior to better computer and better camera), I went through my old files of stuff and captured examples of my early work. I found that collection the other day and thought I’d share, in chronological order to the best of my knowledge.
It’s a well-known fact among linguists that the natural life of English words is evolving from nouns into verbs. I specifically say “evolving” and not “devolving” because I’m not a language purist. Some people will sit around moaning about how language is breaking down and whatnot, but these are probably the same people who complained about automobiles and women wearing pants and The Beatles. It’s been going on since before Shakespeare first used “torture,” “gossip,” “forward” and “lapse” as verbs (he also moved some, like “scuffle,” from a verb to a noun), so it’s about time to get over it.
The series of tubes neé internets neé cyberspace neé World Wide Web (in standard parlance) has certainly accelerated the process, partly because it spreads everything faster and partly because it provides so many new opportunities for new verbs. This is really just a continuation of my old wikiwandering post.
The argument about whether “Googling” is allowed originated during my time as a journalist, but it still seems like a really long time ago. Same with “Photoshopped” as an adjective, or lawl- neé lol- neé LOLspeak as a system of syntax. I was already an editor before papers stopped using www.MySpace.com on every reference. (Look for a manifesto regarding “website” in coming days.)
The most recent noun/verb evolution in use in my household is “internetting” for the general activity of using a computer (aka internets machine) to access the internet for general purposes like blogging, reading blogs, checking news stories, checking email or browsing YouTube (the standard round of websites). This led to the variant “internetzing,” derived from “internets,” obviously, and cuter with a Z because it looks like waltzing or something. This leads to sentences like, “I internetzed for a while after breakfast” or “I’ll just being internetzing until you’re ready to go.”
There’s a certain amount of futile nobility in trying to freeze it exactly as-is, but it’s just obstinate when it starts interfering with the purpose of language, which is communicating ideas in the most efficient way possible.
Perusing the NYT online, I came across this font article. It didn’t hold my attention the way it should, considering it includes fonts and replicating history, but that’s because it’s just an ennui sort of day.
But I did find this bit when I skimmed to the end:
Fonts can shape reality in intangible ways, as Phil Renaud, a graphic designer from Phoenix, discovered when he studied the relationship between his grades and the fonts he used for his college papers. Papers set in Georgia, a less common font with serifs, generally received A’s while those rendered in Times Roman averaged B’s.
Not a scientific study, but interesting considering how many of us printed out college papers in Georgia (the Evergreen’s body copy font) during our time at WSU. I always used Georgia, Utopia or Minion Pro.
I think the quintessential experience of being a student editor at the Evergreen was printing out a paper about free speech typed in Georgia (or Utopia) two minutes before class started on that gray paper we had for no reason in spring 2007 or the backs of dummies.
This morning I sorted colorful plastic paperclips by size so people can more easily find what they want. I took a picture because the colors were nice.
The clips come in large, medium and small. Last week I sorted them, but I only had two little bins. So I made one large clips and warm-colors medium clips and the other bin small clips and cool-colors medium clips. Since then I tidied the supply room and freed up a third little bin, so today I re-mingled the warm and cool medium clips in their own little bin to keep all the sizes separated the way the office supply gods intended.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed by my Nikon D40. Designed specifically to market SLR cameras to the average consumer, it’s not an unusual camera and doesn’t command any sort of respect in the professional world. It’s like having read “Gone With the Wind” three times – people who know very little will be impressed, and people who know quite a lot will smile indulgently and inwardly snicker. Either way is awkward.
But the same thing that makes it too pedestrian to be really awesome is what makes it a technical marvel. I played around with all the settings at first and tried to treat it like a tiny D1H (the only other SLR I’ve handled), but it just doesn’t work the same. It’s missing crucial settings like white balance, and the auto settings are just too good to not use.
Getting a library card.
The Spokane library has a fascist system of requiring you to prove residency before you can get a library card. Since the only other place I’ve ever lived that had such a requirement was Flagstaff, and there they required you to prove three months’ residency, I can only conclude that libraries’ level of fascism directly correlates with the number of homeless people in the city.
Anyway, the best part of my first paycheck at work (direct deposit doesn’t kick in until No. 2) was having my address printed and visible through the little cellophane window. I presented that envelope with my photo ID (I used my passport just to feel like it’s good for something) and was handed a library card directly.
Then I went and bought new shoes to replace one of my falling-apart pairs, and that was the second-best thing about payday.
I made Nick a new header for his blog. Read on for meandering behind-the-scenes commentary.
- I have a high tolerance for A’s, but a couple in the newspaper today for their 60th wedding anniversary caused pause for even me: Art and Anne Aalsgaard. It’s like a Scrabble draw nightmare.
- Bananas are really weird and this article was fascinating. It reminded me of passing “Oranges” by John McPhee every semester while buying textbooks and desperately wanting to read it for no logical reason. I love oranges.
- Yesterday I tested my hypothesis that the name Jayden, very popular since about 2003, has made a rapid turn toward the feminine in just the past few months. An analysis of the Spokesman’s births database backed this up, with more girl than boy Jaydens in 2008. The trend was similar in alternate spellings like Jaiden, Jaden, Jaeden and Jadyn, which surprised me because I would have assumed those were used more for girls all along. Of course there’s not nearly enough data to be reliable, but it’s still interesting. I also saw two babies named Jaymes today, once as a baby boy’s first name and once as a baby girl’s middle name.
I was walking around Riverpark Square mall during my afternoon break looking for new shoes when I saw WSU President Elson S. Floyd. He was walking toward me with a suit jacket garment bag slung over his shoulder, and he was almost past me before I got the pieces together in my brain and said hello.
He asked me what I’ve been up to, so I told him about my job. I asked him what he was doing there and he said he was on a break between meetings. He said to stay in touch and let him know if there was anything he could do to help me, and I didn’t ask him why he lied to the editors about the summer reorganization of the Division.
At work a girl named Libby and I share the front desk and the best little scissors ever. Today they broke in valiant battle with an unusually large and stubborn piece of cardboard. I wasn’t there, but it was apparently traumatizing for those who witnessed it.
Good thing Libby and I are in charge of ordering supplies. I already picked out two new pairs, though we promise not to love them more. If we can find a screwdriver we’re going to remove the beloved scissors’ mangled blade and make a glorious letter opener.
I also thought this picture might fit with the office supplies zen that Victor and I have been known to enjoy. I grayscaled the picture because the desk was a really ugly color.
After a week of rain, thunderstorms and even snow in the area, it finally took a turn for perfect. Nick and I went on an easy hike at Riverside State Park this afternoon. The river was higher and more energetic than usual, with small trees near the shores underwater up to their branches.
I was reading Sports Illustrated during breakfast this morning and turned to the column at the back even though I know Rick Reilly stopped writing sometime between now and when I used to read SI at home. The column by Selena Roberts shocked me.
She’s writing about trying to visit Pine Valley Golf Club, hailed as the nation’s top-ranked golf course:
I didn’t get past heaven’s gate. “It’s just for members,” said the polite guard with the clipboard, “just members.” We both knew I could never be one of them unless I were willing to reconfigure my plumbing with a sex change.
Women still aren’t even allowed to enter some private golf courses. Uh, what? I grew up with the idea that sexism was an anachronism, at least in its overt form. Sure, girls are expected to be more polite and grow up to make smalltalk at the office and offer to bring in brownies whenever anyone mentions it, but that’s way better than the “girls can’t handle schooling or athletic activities” mentality of not that long ago. Wikipedia tells me Pine Valley does now allow women after 1 p.m. on Sundays. Oh, fantastic!
Roberts, formerly of the NYT, makes a number of good points in her column against barring women from the elite courses: it’s discriminatory, it’s doesn’t make sense financially, it spreads the sexist reach to the corporate world where female executives can’t play a round with the guys. But it seemed strange even reading the reasons, as if they have to be reiterated. I can’t believe they actually do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about feminism and sexism recently, and it’s neat to see the discussion getting play in the national media even if it’s due to Hillary Clinton’s concession of the Democrats’ presidential nomination. I never thought about it much before college in the paradigm of feminism, but I’ve lived it for most of my life as an athlete and more recently as a journalist: Women have to fight harder to earn the same amount of respect as their male peers.
But that’s a much longer battle. I thought we’d at least won against obvious discrimination already. But I guess if rich white males need to keep a small piece of the world where their frightened selves can remember what it was like to be not just most powerful, but omnipotent, at least it’s a golf course. What a boring game.
UPDATE: Oh, they also found a last haven in anonymous internet comments. Check out the comments following Roberts’ column. Here’s an example:
SI has to get Roberts off the back page. Her articles are consistently hack jobs with little basis in fact or actual knowledge of the subject matter. The most recent article on sexism in golf, though not nearly as poorly written as the horseracing article, is still absurd. First off, private clubs can have any admission policy they want, whether you think its fair or not. They arent receiving Federal or state money, so deal with it. Oddly, private clubs(golf oriented or otherwise) only receive such scrutiny when the are all male. As far as her spillover theory, her “evidence” consists of a few antecdotes. Hey Selena, my club has a “Ladies Day” once a week. If only i had been a daughter so i could play with my Mum!!!!! /cry.
Wow.
Staying productive is the best way to fend off boredom and thinking too much. Keeping my hands busy is a good substitute for productivity. I would have been great at the colonial era when women had to sit around embroidering little pillows with axioms about the sinfulness of idle hands and such. Recently while watching “Scrubs” in the evenings I wound handsome yarn balls from a box of loose and tangled thrift-store skeins. The colors looked nice when I was done.
This morning I grabbed a tiny turquoise sticky note to put on an envelope when I was walking between the main wall of mailboxes in the newsroom and the sports/design set of mailboxes. I accidentally grabbed two sticky notes, so I stuck the extra on the counter in front of my desk as I walked by. Couldn’t just throw away a nice sticky note after all.
It has turned out to be quite the conversation piece. A number of people have commented directly about the blank note, and more people than ever before have said hello to me when they walk by. Maybe the turquoise paper grabs their attention and then they feel obligated.
I am leaving it there to refine this unscientific finding that affixing a random turquoise sticky note with no apparent purpose to your desk makes people friendlier to you. It may also have something to do with the fact that I’ve been sitting here for more than a week now.
This was what it looked like before, sans chips, cheese and black beans. It was a marvelous idea of mine. The measuring cups are out because I also made chocolate chip cookies.
The Spokane River is unusually high this year, so the falls right between downtown and Riverfront Park are unusually spectacular. Nick and I stopped by today to check it out. The water was mesmerizing.
Nick and I shared my camera and he got some Jacob-style video, too.
Sometimes I’ve thought about how it would be fun to make a comic strip about Christina’s awkward moments and life in general. I’m not sure why, because I’ve never made comic strips before, but today I made a comic version based on the phone call I had with Christina last night about her unwanted visitor.
I think it says something about modern life. I took creative license (Tor, remember that?) to give Christina a snazzy black MacBook like mine because it looked so cute.
Seriously. I know it’s summer, blah blah, but I’m not keeping your link if you don’t update at least once a week. That’s just ridiculous. Plus I’m curious about what you all are up to now that we’re not together the majority of total hours.
Thanks to those of you who do update. It makes my day.
Nick woke up yesterday wanting an orange polo shirt. So he got one with his GAP gift card. He was definitely the brightest thing in the newsroom today, and took a justifiable amount of flak for it. But given today’s industry outlook, it’s nice to know he could always find work as a traffic cone.
This was me starting preschool (thanks for the photos, Mom). I wasn’t nearly this excited today to start my new job, but it turned out pretty well. I have my own shiny badge with my photo and everything. And I know the Spokane baby names before you can.
And it’s not even really that late. I mean, people on the quarter schedule aren’t even through commencement yet, so it’s totally reasonable to be sending out my graduation thank you notes this week. I made that little crimson graphic for cards and got them printed on decently nice cardstock today at Kinko’s. The illustrations are from the 1908 and 1920 Chinook yearbooks. I wish I had more time to go through old Evergreens and Chinooks to scan their crazy art. I had a few other graduation-themed ones saved and didn’t really plan the cards looking this way, but it worked well enough so I just went with it. It took me about 35 minutes total I think.
It thunderstormed a little last night. That’s one thing I miss about the Midwest, lying in bed at night with the window open when the smell of rain starts coming in and the thunder so close you can feel it in your chest.
Spokane takes its role as the Lilac City seriously. You can go down whole streets without passing one lilac-less yard. The two go together in my mind, lilacs and thunderstorms. It reminds me of late-May track meets back home when storm season was starting and I’d come back from a cool-down run with lilacs for me and Laura and an eye to the rumbling clouds. Lilacs meant the big meets were coming. So it’s been a long time now, but I still get a little of the knotted-stomach instinct when I smell lilacs while running.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I have a funny picture of Victor that I’m not going to post right now because it’s too much trouble when I have a logic exam (my last exam ever!) in half an hour. But it got me thinking that technology is going to be awesome in the future. Someday I’ll be able to take a picture with whatever camera I want and the picture will appear in Photoshop instantaneously so I can post it immediately with little effort. All my electronics will communicate with each through the air. What’s great is that this isn’t that far off. A lot of phones already do that sort of thing, though not with great quality. The next technological innovation I’m excited about is the elimination of cords. If I want to be mobile with all my journalist tools, I need to have a phone charger cord, a separate camera battery charger with cord, camera connecting cord, and a laptop power cord (not to mention batteries for my audio recorder). If I had a video camera to carry around, that would be another cord or two. Someday all that will be gone, and I am excited.
Some of us are at Nick’s tonight, and Allison was just informed we no longer work for the Evergreen.
“We should do something unethical,” she said with mischief in her eyes. “Let’s steal all our press kits!”
Despite how busy I’ve been, Christina mentioned a need for some paper letter-cutting skills and I couldn’t resist. So during production tonight we made her presentation poster for an Honors history class that I took last year. I did my final paper on the history of smoking; Christina is doing hers on why everyone liked President Dwight Eisenhower. She’s played this video like four dozen times in the past two days and even has a subtle little dance to go along with it.
Walking home from campus around 10:20 p.m. I found myself walking the wrong direction through a swarm of people in cowboy hats and girls in short denim skirts with cowboy boots. A Dierks Bentley concert had just ended in Beasley Coliseum, and the aftermath of concertgoers sounded like this:
“That girl, omigod - and then he was like – what was she doing? - omigod - I’m in love! - whhooooAAAHHHHHHH - I mean, I’ve been drunk, but - and then when he - if I were her - hoooOOOOOOONNNNNKKK - I’m on probation ’til January! - and did you see her - omigod my feeeeeet - No I told you, he just needs stitches not staples - What? WOOOOOO - I’ve been drunk, but not like this - Who was that girl? I would’ve punched her.