- - -
"How do you say 'I'm OK' to an answering machine? How do you say 'Goodnight' to an answering machine? How do you say 'I miss you' to an answering machine? Oh, I hate your answering machine."
—The Replacements, "Answering Machine"
Forest Park Parkway to I-170. The big MoDOT sign: "11 months 11 days."
Ahh.
The courtyard at work. Pause. Postcard-perfect. People rush by, not seeing the big picture.
Upstairs, from the big picture window in the conference room: blowing sideways. A minute's difference. Four floors' difference.
11 new emails. Work.
I decided to leave that out of the email, but was still turning the phrase over in my head ("Huh, actually, that's frighteningly true") as I opened up the next document to be copy-edited ... which turned out to be a story about prostitution on the riverfront.
Ahh, sweet, disquieting synchronicity.
Edit: Upon emailing this tale to a couple coworkers, one wrote back, "Just as you were doing all that, I was keying in notes about a guy I'm profiling having a Victorian dark purple velvet sofa from a brothel in his living room!"
And several minutes later, a small earthquake took place in northern Arkansas.
There's a reason why good stories cut out these interstices (or at very least use them in deliberate ways to further the story). It's just more noise, more of the many reasons why I quit spending most of my time connected to instant messenger programs in the first place.
Now, for us millennials, instant messaging is practically a native form of communication. From the day you arrive at college until the day you leave (and buy an iPhone to keep in touch thereafter), your desktop computer (or, for these kids now, laptop) is left on 24/7 so you can receive these oh-so-important communications. It's like our version of the answering machine. To cut oneself off is unthinkable: How will you stay in touch? How will people know you're OK? And more important, how will you know that people know you're OK, that to someone, you matter?
But about a year ago—not long before my desktop computer finally bit the dust from being left on all the time—I decided to cut instant messenger out of my life. Leaving a "buddy list" open on my desktop all day just reinforced, for me, the feeling that as I sat in front of my monitor I was in fact sitting at the edge of a vast, lonely Internet precipice, a very different mental landscape than my old college friends probably envision when they sit in front of their own monitors. Maybe to my old friends, IM programs still feel like a party where everyone's invited or an ongoing conversation with the world—but they don't to me.
I've scanned too many away messages about mundane day-to-day activities. I've seen too many people whose beacon into the void is simply the same away message they've blithely left up for years—literally years—on end, even after they've already "left for Boston" or "gone to camp." And I've had too many "catch-up" conversations with people who spotted my name in their buddy list and felt obligated to chat about what kind of sandwiches they like these days and where they're working and where am I working?—performative, perfunctory conversations that made me realize just how much of whatever connection we might've had in the first place was based on proximity, and how uninterested I am in their sandwich choices.
I began to realize just how nice it must've been, last century, to be able to leave an educational institution and not keep in touch with everyone you met even briefly. To be able to live your life and become an interesting, even somewhat mysterious person whom others might seek to reconnect with at some far-off juncture—a person whom others could then ask about sandwich choices and traveling preferences and other, perhaps more fully developed, minutiae. To grow up, in short, and move on.
But as a writer, I did miss one thing about instant messenger: the ability, culled from my four years of continual connection, to come up with good away messages, short, pithy missives to the void. Those I would save. Saved away messages had for me become an electronic continuation of the set of notebooks I'd formerly kept, full of original epigrams and quotations and snippets of thought and turns of phrase scrupulously copied down. Before Twitter but post-notebook, the away message became the place I stored those ideas, as well as a means of telegraphing, alluding to and reinforcing what was most essentially important to me at the time.
But I was now without away messages. And along came Twitter. After months of scoffing at its vapid Web 2.0–ishness, I realized a couple things:
1. I should probably know something about it, if only so I could speak authoritatively about it whenever it came up in conversation.
2. It could serve as that sort of easy, compose-and-forget-about-it mental storage space I need.
So this April, I started an account. The character limitation wasn't a problem; I was used to something similar on instant messenger. Ultimately, I've found the limitation to be freeing—because rather than feeling obligated to turn a small point into a larger one just to reach the length of a blog post or essay, I can simply work on crafting it into its own best form. The limitation is something to push back against, and I need that to create anything of merit in the first place.
So that's why I Twitter. And why almost no one will ever read my Twitters, unless they're interested in documentation of my creative process. And why I don't read most other people's Twitters, least of all those put out by iReporters or representatives of media organizations.
I Twitter to provide signposts through the thicket of my own thoughts.
The 'Spaceships had finished their set at The Bluebird and were streaming back to the rock room for a quick breather before Encore No. 1, conquerers of sobriety returning through the sweaty horde. I reached out for a high five ... and he grabbed my hand, holding on for a bare, fleeting moment.
Way fangirl, but way worth it. Pollard's songs have permeated my dreams for well nigh unto two years now, and my memories of the period are inextricably bound to memories of each new GBV album. That moment wasn't about anything other than sheer, divine impulse. Though he did play "Crutch Came Slinking" —a song I thought I had zero chance of hearing—next, so perhaps some sort of telepathy transpired. (In truth, it's on the set list.)
For me and for so many others, Pollard's status as a scion of the league of professional underground rock gods is, well, unquestionable. For the faithful, this show was a little slice of heaven—a beer-soaked, 41-song salute to all that is transient and good.
And the crowd's call for a second encore? By no means was it "improbable." Pollard is known for obliging his fans. Not that we take it for granted that he'll oblige—not on your life—but if you think the request was improbable, well, you don't know GBV fans. Or Pollard. Go back to Belmont, ya hipster freak.
P.S. To the owner of the Missouri plates "DRIVR8": Rock on.
Busch, one of the theater world's most lovable female impersonators, doesn't so much skewer the notion of femininity as spear it (sometimes literally) and drag it onstage. But more than that, his renditions of the classic leading lady (à la Marlene Dietrich) left me peering underneath the hood, so to speak, of the femininity around me.
Looking back on debate night through a Charles Busch lens, it began to seem very clear to me just how much we female members of the press (to say nothing of the female politicians we've covered this season) camp it up in certain respects. The little blazers, the pantsuits, the lipstick, the hairspray—not to mention the laptops and shoulder bags and little recorders and badges that brand us "official." We can look in the mirror before stepping out the door and say to ourselves, "Yep, that looks about right." Men will come up to us on the stairs and shake our hands as colleagues. If we have these things, we are official, to anyone looking—and to anyone checking.
Yet after watching Charles Busch unfurl his gleefully realistic version of femininity, all of these things popped out at me as just so much political theater.
It's not that the women reporters around me on debate night weren't busy doing their jobs, or that their reporting wasn’t important. The free world depends on this coverage, and many of those women reporters would likely take umbrage at the insinuation that their professional persona is anything less than authentic. Just as I once witnessed Phyllis Schlafly swat down a woman who questioned her with a curt, "I think that's your problem, not mine," so too would the women of the press say that this is likely my problem, not theirs.
But to get some perspective on it: Does the free world depend on female reporters' docile willingness to traipse around amid a clump of black-clad pressmen as an almost inevitably male talking head (or a token female one) holds a "conversation" with them in sound bites? Does the free world depend on these tropes, these predictable questions and answers, this idea that everything is continuing as planned, on schedule, as foreordained?
Maybe it does. Maybe these are the ways in which we show (reassure?) ourselves that we're making progress, that we are the nation we think we are. These tropes I rail against—perhaps some theater is necessary to camouflage the sausage mill of lawmaking and governing.
It’s a privilege—truly—for a female reporter to be able to even fake a conversation with a political leader. In so many other nations, women are scarcely able to step out the door without getting shot at or kidnapped or worse. We’re also lucky to have a media machine that employs so many people who otherwise might toil in the proverbial salt mines. (Or the "book mines," as I once referred to a previous job in the depths of a bookstore.)
But that machine is shrinking—and morally, it’s growing smaller still. And at the end of the night, all that’s left is a buzzing crowd of suits shoving cameras, recorders and boom mikes at another guy in a suit, the whole mechanism moving about the room ponderously, like a black crab with many legs, a signpost stuck in the middle.
It's an open secret that the Federal Election Commission's criteria for inclusion in their database is a contribution (or series of contributions) totaling $200 or more. Anything less than that and it's very likely that you won't show up in their database.
The upshot of that? The data you and other reporters are using to comment on political donations from journalists is utterly flawed, and a poor metric for measuring any supposed "media bias." There's no way of knowing exactly how many journalists have contributed to political campaigns, given this data set, and any attempts to identify trends in such incomplete data should be labeled inconclusive at best.
My guess? There are probably a lot more journalists donating in small amounts on both sides of the aisle than the FEC database is reporting. You know what you should be pushing for? For the FEC to disclose—in writing, on its website—its criteria/cutoff point for inclusion in the database. Or—even better—for more stringent disclosure standards for all political campaigns. More transparency on all fronts from the government and candidates themselves, rather than this spurious attack on supposedly Democratic journalists.
The thing you don't know is whether one party or the other happens to have more lax internal standards of reporting, or whether campaigns are deliberately (or, perhaps due to lax standards of their own, unintentionally) fudging the data. That would require a more in-depth probe—something you certainly haven't done here.
Not only that, donating to Barack Obama or John McCain, respectively, doesn't make one a Democrat or Republican. Many independents donate to the candidate they believe will be best in office. Further, many of the donations you're "reporting," you'll notice if you actually search the FEC's database, are to local candidates, for many of whom party affiliation is only a small part of their overall platform.
Further, on a percentage basis, of the thousands of working journalists in this country, a couple hundred journalist contributors is a tiny number. What percentage would you say constitutes enough to say there's a bias in the media at large? Where do you draw the line? And where do you draw the line between the personal lives and public lives of journalists? That's where the real discussion of ethics lies, and you've completely failed to address it. Way to sidestep the very large and nebulous question of what standard we truly should be holding journalists to, and where journalists' professional lives end and their personal lives begin.
This story is an interesting idea, to be sure, and I'm certain the headline on this blog post has drawn thousands of people to your website today who otherwise would not have visited. But seriously, I expect better from a major metropolitan daily. At very least you should have included some discussion of potential discrepancies in the data. But no... you just took someone else's reporting as a jumping-off point for discussing this in a shallow manner without actually bothering to research the relevant facts yourself. And topped it off with some fluff about Obama's recent travels abroad.
You know what'll help the cachet of journalists everywhere? If people like you who happen to have a big megaphone do your homework before writing things like this. This could be a far more interesting story than what you've written, but you'll never know if you don't investigate further and raise the bar yourself.
I wince when you map out how to get it together. And collect my troubles. And brave the weather."