Tuesday, February 24, 2009

OK, OK, I know it's not healthy to dwell on bad news, but I had to share this Facebook message I just got from my friend, Andrea, who works at a newspaper in St. Louis.
Duuuuuude!
I totally forgot you were going to J-school! Holy buckets. Didn't you get the news flash? Journalism's dead, baby. Even still, I'd have to imagine a degree from Columbia's gotta get you a pretty sweet gig somewhere. Weren't you looking into magazine writing or something? I can absolutely, unwaveringly tell you that newspapers are dead. We've had three layoffs in the past six months, and we're now being forced to take weeklong, unpaid furloughs... and our contract with XXXXX is up in June.
Needless to say, I'm over it. I have been for more than a year, but I didn't get my shit together enough to transition to another profession until last fall. That's when I started studying for the law school admissions test. I'm now shockingly neck-deep in acceptances (I may have applied to a few too many schools...) and trying to decide between Portland, Denver and Seattle.
I met Andrea five years ago when she came to Kona to work for the West Hawaii Today. She stayed there a year or two, then took the gig in St. Louis.

In an interesting sidenote, another ex-West Hawaii Today reporter, a young lady originally from Hilo, who wound up in New Mexico, is also attempting to get into law school.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

OK, OK. I know I haven't been too enthused about journalism school of late, or even just journalism, but look at this! Can you really blame me?!


If you want to check out the full page and see the answer to "How does a young, laid-off journalist recover?" (that was verbatim), go here http://tinyurl.com/db874h .
I just don't know what to say...

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

I am endlessly amazed at how small the world can be.

So yesterday, I met up with a classmate from Emerson, with whom I studied film. Troy was in town working on a television series, a fact I learned from his Facebook status message. (He, in the last 9 years, or so, has become something of an expert on childbirth and he has produced several series for places like the Discovery Channel.) We met at the bus station because he was pressed for time and had to get to a location in New Jersey, but we did have a good chance to catch up.

Troy is doing this TV stuff, which is neat, but more interestingly, he's become a medium. (Read about him here http://www.troyparkinson.com/) Like the kind that receive messages from dead people. He started developing his medium skills in Boston ("Everyone can do it--it's like a muscle that can be exercised," he says), unbeknownst to me, and others, and now he's got a Web site, does a radio show, is writing a book and has been featured on Fargo (where he's from) news.

Random, right?

Then he tells me he was just in Hawaii for five weeks, waiting for a baby to be born (so he could tape the process). Not only was he in Hawaii, but he was in Kona, my home town!

Troy stayed at the Dragonfly Ranch and loved it. He said he also really loved Hawaii because, unlike in Fargo, where he is a somewhat cautious about with whom he shares his spiritual work, people in Hawaii really dig stuff like crystals, tarot cards, aura readings and talking to dolphins. He became the in-house medium and it was good.

Now, among the guests at the Dragonfly Ranch for whom Troy read was Ian Usher. Mr. Usher, an Englishman, sold his life on eBay and is aiming to achieve 100 goals in 100 weeks. (Learn more at http://www.100goals100weeks.com) However, oddly enough, I had already heard about Mr. Usher because my friend Karin, a journalist in Hawaii, wrote about him here http://www.hawaii247.org/2009/01/18/man-with-a-lot-of-goals-visits-big-island/ .

But to top it all off, Mr. Usher was quite impressed with Troy's reading, so he blogged about it here http://100goals100weeks.blogspot.com/2009/01/mystic-reading-with-troy.html !

So to sum up: We're all connected and the Internet is amazing.

Monday, February 16, 2009

I keep the Merriam-Webster Online Web site open almost all the time when I read or write. At a fancy-pants school like Columbia, I double my efforts to be sure that I am using a word accurately, and that I look up words I don't know to expand my vocabulary.

So today I went to the site to find something and this was at the top of the page, in the "Open Dictionary" section:

red bottomosity

noun:
State of humiliation

I am clearly not the only one who invents words and phrases.