Apologies (Again)

I'm starting a new job, so I have been pushing 12 hours each day at work. The result has been me coming home to crash - not write - each day. Please enjoy these videos, until my return.

New York and DC

I spent last weekend in Washington D.C. with my parents - a trip comprised of patriotism and history - Americana-style, not nearly enough cherry blossoms to sate my yearly quota, and bookended by two long rides on the Chinatown bus.

While I appreciate a good monument as much as the next person, I have to say, the Newseum was really the highlight for me - albeit a bittersweet one (gosh, how many times have I paired some form of the word 'news' with 'bittersweet' on this blog). Having a museum for news in itself evokes images of an archaic field, but the museum did a nice job of acknowledging the history and importance of traditional newspaper forms and looking toward the future, whatever it might hold. So if anyone has plans to visit DC at any point, this is my plug for how you should spend a good half day.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed DC in all its historic glory, it really revealed how much of a New Yorker I have become. I felt strangely out of place in there: repeatedly commenting to my parents how clean everything was (and somehow this didn't seem like a good thing) and noticing how many people were wearing sweatshirts. Most of all though, I just felt like everything was moving eerily slow. Sometimes the pace of New York can be overwhelming, but it's something that I've come to thrive on. New York Magazine just published a piece talking with various famed New Yorkers about their first experience in the city. They also talked to new arrivals to the city. One person interviewed - Kit Schultz - a recent Ohio transplant, reminded me of my own move here just over a year ago:

In some ways, her story could have been told anytime in the last 50 years, and in other ways, it’s very typical of right now. She lost her job as a nanny late last year and found her prospects were dim. Before Christmas, she went out for drinks with some old college friends who are living in Brooklyn, and they invited her to come out and stay with them. So she packed a van, headed east, and arrived in New York on New Year’s Eve. A new year, a new life, she thought. Now she says, “I am having a great time here, but it’s also very hard. I’ve never been this poor in my life. I don’t exactly know what tomorrow’s stories will be or even how I will pay my cell-phone bill. But I am confident this city will continue to open up for me in ways that I cannot even imagine, and I look forward and forward.”

In January 2008, I was laid off from my job at the Free Lance and, serendipitously, Stephanie announced she needed a subleaser in her Bed-Stuy brownstone. I knew I needed a change from the small town in California where I had lived the past year. But I didn't know if I should do the impulsive thing - move to a giant metropolis with no job prospects, or the fiscally responsible thing - move home to my parents house and work at any number or jobs until I found a 'real' job prospect. That night, post-Chinese food, I opened my fortune cookie to find the message "Heads you do it, tails you go home."

Two weeks later I was on a plane with that fortune safely tucked in my wallet. Sometimes I'm not certain what exactly I'm doing here - but I'm glad the coin landed on heads.

Happy Thursday.

So I apologize for the brief blogging-hiatus. My parents are in town, so rather than write I have been traipsing about the beautiful and engaging city of New York serving as a mediocre tour guide (which basically consists of me trying to explain the difference between local and express trains and that no-I-don't-know-why-the-F-train-is-running-on-the-E-line-it's-just-Sunday-and-weird-stuff-happens-and-there's-no-rational-expression, and getting them repeatedly lost in Fort Greene, et cetera. Until my return, however, enjoy.

Money Trees

Around 2006, it seemed like every single magazine on the market was publishing ecology-centered issues. The Cosmo/Marie Claire/Allures of the magazine world featured articles on environmentally-friendly beauty products. Bride magazines talked about throwing a green bridal shower - I'm sure even Dog Fancy analyzed your puppy's carbon pawprint. Basically at that point if you wanted a new angle on an old piece, you just had to "green" it.

Well, that era has passed, it seems. And while I'm glad I won't have to see any more plays on "Green is the new [pink is the old] black", I'm not so happy the environment has been eked out of people's minds. Instead, a great multitude of articles now focus on saving money. Eco's been replaced by econ, and I guess saving green is the new black. These penny-pinching issues have become more and more frequent as the nation's economy has looked more and more bleak. Still, I was surprised to open my New Yorker Wednesday and find an article on the both the economy and the environment. The article, a short piece in The Talk of the Town, focused on the inverse relationship between economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Author David Owen writes:

"The world's principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity. The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don't spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk."

Even though the media and individuals aren't focusing on the environment, they're actually doing much more to prevent global warming than they were when it was the actual concern. I've definitely noticed this in my own life - specifically with my work. My company has prided itself on being green for quite a while now - but it's always been quite a battle for me, sometimes feeling like the sole eco-cheerleader (I know, Mom and Dad: you must be so proud/shocked). Getting people to reuse paper or make fewer copies is hard to rally support for, but when cuts are being made and you bring up the cost of all that paper, suddenly there are many more proponents.

While much of the article falls into the kind-of-intuitive-if-you-really-think-about-it category, it also does a nice job of taking things a step further. The article begs the question: if the environment and the economy do have an inverse relationship, how can we fix the economy without losing the footing we've made on the environment? For so long, the U.S. has been such a society of prosperity and excess. While many economists have suggested me may never go back to that level of superabundance (and I personally don't see that we need to go back), there is a happy medium in there. Is there enough money and jobs to be made out of green industries? It seems like now is the time to start looking for solutions that won't have us back to square one if the economy ever does go back to the "normal" of the past decade.

Cold Medicine and Media

Today Tommy, a friend from work, came in to start his shift and informed me he'd seen something on TV about the death of newspapers the night before. And thought of me. Overhearing this, another coworker looked at me nervously and hastened Tommy to be careful, as I might start crying - again.

He was only half joking. Last Tuesday, when the news officially broke that Wednesday would be the last print edition of the P-I, I sat at my desk reading article after article about the paper's demise. It was not a surprise, but it still was hard to swallow.

Sunday, an editorial ran in The Chronicle - conceivably the next big paper to fold - about the outpouring of ideas for how the save newspapers. John Diaz, the article's author and editor of the opinion page, wrote about how many conflicting ideas people have for what will save print media. On a daily basis, people email and write to tell him they have the answer for how to save the Chron. If the paper leans more to the right it will be saved; if it becomes a vocally liberal progressive paper it will be saved. If it stops publishing/starts publishing news on controversial subject matter...First big-city gay daily! one Gawker commenter suggested. The newspaper also gets its fair share of people writing to extrapolate on the solitary reason the Chron will fail. Diaz writes:

If we fail to run their favorite syndicated columnist or continue to run one they loathe ... "that's why you're losing money." If we are perceived as favoring the Giants over the A's or one political philosophy over the other or give too little or too much space to celebrity gossip ... "that's why you're losing money." My favorite link between personal interest and our financial predicament was the freelance writer who, after having his opinion-piece submission rejected, wrote: "That's why this newspaper is failing."

As much as these letters are amusing and, at times, frustrating, it's good to know that people - not exclusively journalists, editors, and publishers - are brainstorming on how to fix the current and predicament of print media. And that they care. I know many people have thought little about the impact of 'the end of days' for daily newspapers on their lives. And maybe it wouldn't affect them. I think my college journalism professor instilled and particularly romantic view of journalism in me, so I fall hard onto the belief that it will be truly detrimental to society. As a writer at salon.com advised a journalism professor struggling with the guilt at teaching students in a seemingly hopeless profession:

Journalists exercise power. Ideally, they exercise that power on behalf of the powerless...leave it to your students to create new modes for the buying and selling of this information. Their generation will do this. I feel confident about that. Teach them how to find out what is true and what is hidden, and how to say it so others can understand what it means and why it is important. Then you will have done your job and given them the gift of a lifetime.

But then, I've taken a lot of cold medicine tonight so maybe that's why I find that particularly stirring.

Economics for Dummies

Not to throw two radio shows at you in a row - but if anyone has yet to check it out, last week's This American Life is worth a listen. The show has made a name for itself examining the minute and unexamined - making even the most mundane life seem interesting. But they also do a really excellent job with hard news. Last year, they did the most thorough report on the mortgage crisis - detailing from the very micro to the very macro level about what went wrong. The report, The Giant Pool of Money, is absolutely worth checking out for anyone that hasn't heard it yet. I honestly think it was one of the best pieces of reporting I heard all year, not because it was uncovering anything profound or groundbreaking, but because it really explained something that so many other articles glossed over. With this week's episode, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, who produced the first one as well, do another great job - well, dumbing this whole "economy" thing down for people like me. Just today I was reading a New Yorker article that was talking about toxic assets and balance sheets and liabilities - and while I could generally get the gist of the whole thing before, it was nice to actually really understand it. Give those two a listen. And support public radio.

Finding Plan B

A lot of my hesitance to initially start a blog came from a stigma I held about blogging from when it first started - at least as far as my experience with it is concerned. The first blogs I knew were live journals. These were essentially a chance for people to post their diaries - complete with indulgent soul searching and melodramatic overshares - with, um, everyone. The voyeur in me would occasionally read these 'live journal blogs,' but not without a lot of tsking and judging. Blogging has clearly morphed and developed and grown up a lot. But it still easily becomes a platform to (over)share Feelings. Capital F. Which is, admittedly, where today's post comes in.

I was listening to This American Life on my train to work yesterday in a particular mood of frustration with my professional life. The episode that happened to come on my podcast was about life's change in direction and how, more often then not, we don't end up where we originally thought. Our lives don't turn out how we imagined them at 18 or 21 or 25, even. Ira Glass starts off:

There's a short story by the fiction writer Ron Carlson in which a guy loses his job after ten years. His boss tells him 'OK, go to Plan B,' and the guy says 'This was Plan B.'

Which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully to Plan A and Plan A turns out to be completely different than we thought it was going to be. And so we switch to a backup - and then the backup plan becomes our life.

Glass continued by telling about a speech he gave to a group of around 100 people. He asked them how many of their lives had turned out how they'd expected. How many of them were still on Plan A. "Out of 100, only one person raised her hand," Glass said. "Everyone else was like, Plan B? what about Plan C and D and F?"

I don't really think there's a lot of narration I need to add to this - especially with my desire to resist complete livejournaliness. With the current state of our economy there's a lot of uncertainty in the future holds. A lot of people that were pursuing jobs that seemed like safe bets are now forced to completely change direction. Journalism never seemed like the "safe bet" job, but right now its future seems particularly shaky. So the question is, at what point do you start to really think about Plan B...