Columbia does holiday lights with manic thoroughness. Lights lights lights! Best time of year.

They’ve been winding yards and yards of lights around every trunk and branch for about two weeks now.  Last night was the official lighting, which reportedly involved hot chocolate and singing.

It finally started coming together in my head, so I went to the nearly desolate journalism school and comandeered a white board for half an hour. I have a dozen reporting checklists scribbled in notebooks, but this is the first time I felt like I know enough to make a writing plan.

Then I photographed it and erased it.

The other day I listened to NPR and sipped tea while I made plum scones. It felt like somebody else’s ideal morning, though I enjoyed it plenty myself. Here’s the recipe I sort of used, before I changed everything and measured none of it. Really. I didn’t use a single measuring device.

I forgot to take a picture when the scones came out of the oven, but they turned out well, all things considered. Ha. In fact, I listened to “This American Life” and it was the Thanksgiving supernatural birds episode, in case anyone else listened to it. The first two stories were so fascinating I just thought about them instead of listening to the rest of it.

My roommate and I went to the parade Thanksgiving morning, just to see it. We took the train down and found a decent side street facing Central Park, north of Columbus Circle. We weren’t too concerned about getting awesome seats, but it was a warm day and pleasant to be there.

All the kids are like, “SPONGEBOOOOOOBBBBB!” They also went crazy for the Dora balloon, which I photographed last year. Since my dad works at General Mills, my parents told me to look for the new Pillsbury Dough Boy balloon. I can’t think of a character more natural as a balloon. There is was, just coming around the corner – and my camera battery died. I couldn’t even check to see if I’d been able to get one frame, but I did.

All fall I’ve been saying, “A year ago I’d never even been to New York.” Well, now I can’t ever say that again. Unlike last year, I got to see Santa Claus at this year’s parade. I took a bad video. Santa’s welcome reminds me of another time I stood around in a big crowd.

Then, after Jay and I survived the crowded subway back uptown, we ran into some unusual fauna a few blocks from our apartment.

I’m pretty sure I never picked up a copy of The New Yorker before last weekend. I’m kind of proud of that.

Of course, I realize that’s not too far off from the proud ignorance that reinforces the East Coast elitist disdain for the rest of the nation. So I read an issue at the library. It was pretty interesting. I particularly liked this article about Hollywood’s expert accent coach.

I also read the New York Review of Books, or tried to. I like books, after all, and since I live in New York I’ve tried to become less suspicious of any publication that insists on making the city’s name part of its own. But I did not really need to spend my Saturday reading a review about a book about Emerson’s thoughts about crafting sentences. During the few paragraphs I did read, I was filled with the overwhelming feeling that I had turned the page on this subject before.

I’ve still never read The Atlantic, but there’s always another Saturday.

One last snobbish anti-snobbery note: After reading this bizarre meditation on campus bicycles during class last week, I was delighted by this Slate criticism. I’ll let that suffice for my own unimpressed reaction, other than to say that I love the phrase “literary minstrel routines” and dislike Mencken’s “On Being an American” for the same reasons. The faux-wonder thing is only bearable when it’s precocious and, though many of them would disagree, I do not think old men earn a second adolescence just because they once accomplished something meaningful.

A handful of friends and strangers have commented in recent weeks about the cluttered state of my laptop desktop. I know, I know, so I finally got organized and threw a few virtual reams of scrap paper into the recycling bin. Also found this, which I apparently saved a while ago for the sake of some old Evergreen lolz.

Hahaha.

I’m not caffeinated today, but some combination of music and weather and thought added up to about the same effect. So, despite the fact that it was raining and the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything yet, I decided I absolutely needed to spend my lunch hour between classes at the Lehman Library where they keep old J-School master’s projects.

I was looking for these.

If you can’t read the titles: Christopher J. Chivers (‘95) writing about the Marines and Damien Cave (‘98) writing about theater.

They’re long pieces and I didn’t have time to read them through (non-circulating books are annoying), but I did read the “P.S.” method notes at the end of each. Good stuff. And I did make time to get lunch.

That’s what one of my classmates asked yesterday when I brought sugar cookies for the class. They were frosted with red and blue sugar on top, but I forgot to take a photo at that point. I made more than 120 star-shaped cookies and left most of them with the student veterans at City College, whom I’m writing about for my master’s project.

The cookies were a day early because today I am running around to parades and things. And yes, I believe Veterans Day can be a cookie holiday if you want it to be. Why not? Veterans like cookies just like everyone else. Better than shopping the Macy’s sale.

I troll the local Craigslist categories a few times a week for story ideas (surprising how much you find) and this caught my attention:

Losing a notebook sucks, but the description made me laugh. How would you describe your lost Moleskine? I think the most distinguishing characteristic of mine is teeny tiny handwriting.

I hope the person gets it back one way or another.

Check it out, Nick and I and Rajah Bose are quoted (as is Ben Shors, and Brian Immel is mentioned) in this WSU Magazine article by Hannelore Sudermann about the depressing state of newspapers in Washington state. The story feels a little like a mini-Spokesman/Evergreen reunion.

Even as a journalist, it’s kind of strange to see our familiar stories all organized in print. It makes those long days answering calls at the Spokesman seem like a very long time ago. The story includes a piece of my “journalism history and goals” essay for my Columbia application, which I guess I may as well share for context. Keep in mind that I was writing with the intention of getting accepted, though I think it’s all pretty genuine. Also keep in mind how different things were a year ago when I wrote this on plane trips from New York to Minneapolis and Minneapolis to Seattle; in some ways all of 2009 has been my successful attempt to postpone the personal despair of a shrinking industry.

I want to make sure I don’t come off as dismissive of the small towns, the small papers, the weeklies and the talented former coworkers keeping their communities informed. You all know I admire that so much, and I don’t think it’s condescending to lament talented people not getting the recognition and influence they deserve. I almost wrote another one of my long meditations on ambition and loyalty and East Coast vs. the West, but I’ll spare you all.

Yesterday brought another reminder that newspapers are not okay. Somewhere between the people who will sentimentally cling to print and the people who will triumphantly tally their Twitter followers are a whole lot of people losing the journalism jobs that defined their lives. Stories go untold, talents and knowledge go wasted. Part of the joy of school is insulating ourselves, however temporarily, from the pessimism that looms in every newsroom. The illusion doesn’t hold.

One final note: I got the last word in the magazine article, which is fun. I said it in real life with the emphasis on “should”: “If we’re doing something we think is important, we should be working hard for it.”