Dilemma Exchange
I'm sure a lot of people who work in an office setting run into the same dilemma each and every December, whether or not to participate in the annual Christmas party/gift exchange/karaoke sing along. It's always hard to assess the risk associated with boycotting the aspects of the entire affair that seem to be either wasteful or unappealing. How will one be perceived if one does one, the other, or both? In all likelihood, it doesn't matter one iota whether or not you choose to participate in these events, and that goes double for people who are lower in the hierarchy of the dreaded pay scale. But the issue really isn't whether or not one can afford to participate, and I'll admit freely that the money is not the issue. Well, it is, but not in the sense that I can't afford to part with it. The issue is, at least what I perceive to be, the notion that it's a waste of money and not in fact a real gift.

If you think about it, when one is approached with the offer to participate in these types of events, it is done is such a generic manner that it's almost impossible to assume the guise of someone who is really gung-ho about the prospect of buying an unspecified gift for a particular amount for an anonymous person. Isn't it hard enough to buy presents for people you do know, like your family? How can you purchase anything that will make you feel as if it's a really good gift if it's just something chosen because it fits into the price parameters? It's not as if you're buying something that you think the recipient will enjoy because you know their tastes, likes and dislikes. That's at least somewhat intriguing, but the random, anonymous gift is more of a headache than anything else. This is what I think of when overactive spending during the holidays is mentioned.

What compounds the absurdity even further is if the institution in which you work has several separate parties with the same format. If one were so inclined, you could attend more than one of these events and relive the awkward experience over again. How fun does that sound?

It's not as if this is even earthshatteringly important, but it's something that I see as putting somewhat of a damper on the holidays even though it's supposed to be part of them.

What's Really Going On?
At the risk of sounding as if I've betrayed the very nature of the political word embedded in the address to this site, I've become more and more fascinated about the very possibility that our sources of news, namely newspapers and cable news networks, create the reality in which they are reporting on. In other words, how much of what we consume is actually true to fact and not as perceived by those reporters who are employed by a politically influenced conglomerate? Who is just towing the party line and who is reporting the facts on the straight and narrow? It's hard to say, and I think the notion that "unless you've been there" takes on new significance in our world that is proliferated by sources of information that can be finely attuned to the very ideology of the reader him or herself. If one were so inclined, they could find just about any reportage on any topic as seen through the lens of one's choice, be it liberal, moderate, or conservative in nature. In fact, that may be the very problem with the advent of the numerous venues in which it's now possible to foist one's opinions on the world. One would assume that it's possible to locate a reasonably balanced opinion and reportage in at least one venue, but I'm not so sure.

Nearly every day the New York Times publishes an article about the inner workings of the Bush administration, and, obviously, they print more when there is a particular event that dominates the headlines, and they seem to publish even more when there is an event that can be described as being bad for the administration, which, at this point, you can take your pick of many. What worries me is that on these occasions, it's easy to find articles and editorials that report on the mental state of the those who make up the inner circle. For whatever reason, they almost always seem to reveal that the administration is concerned, worried, or in a frantic state over some event or another. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be in any of these conditions; in fact, they probably should be if they're affected by anything at all. However, what concerns me is that I wonder on occasion how much of this is real. Are they really in such a state of panic, or is that the way the reporters want to perceive the situation, and, further, are they writing as such because they know that their editors and, ultimately, the publisher wants to portray things as such?

The issue grows even more troublesome after days pass in which one encounters the same descriptions. The story, as they say, "grows legs" and it assumes a life of its own and, more importantly, a reality all its own. I read these passages on, what seems like, a daily basis, and I wonder, "Is this really how it is?" For an administration that's supposedly in such a state of panic, they sure act as if they're in control. They never seem to betray the fact that they are in the midst of a crisis. Of course, this particular group never seems to act as if anything is going wrong, so it's hard to judge what exactly is going on with them, and I put nothing past them in their efforts to appear in control. I just find it beyond comprehension that this reporting is in fact reporting the real situation. Nothing seems to change because of it, and one would think that a group afflicted by so many crisis would eventually reach a breaking point. Of course, they don't and things return to the status quo, whatever that may be.

My point is that I'm finding it harder to separate the buckwheat from the shaft, so to speak, and it's growing more and more apparent to me that there has to be, to sum extent, a bias to news reporting. It can't be both ways, gloomy assessments on one hand and sunny on the other. Where's the middle ground and the actual perception of what's going on?

Year's Best???
This being the end of the year, we are inevitably greeted with the yearly deluge of "year's best" lists that chronicle everything one can possibly imagine being ranked that came out in the previous year. Not one to miss out on the action, Pittsburgh's own City Paper posted its annual rankings from their annual survey of the city's best stuff.

Now, I'm not against this type of thing per say, but I have one qualm about what seems to be an exercise in redundancy. While granting that there are rankings in each respective category for "new" establishments, the majority of the rankings are devoted to heaping praise upon businesses that seem to receive the same honors each and every year. In other words, when you're given only a limited number of choices to pick from year to year, of course the same businesses are going to receive the same votes year in and year out.

To demonstrate, let's take a look at some of the more ludicrous results.

Example 1:
Best place to get bagels
BrueggerÂ’s Bagels
Various locations
2nd Panera Bread
3rd Einstein Brothers Bagels

My two biggest questions are these:
1. Could the choices be any more obvious? (Two of them have "Bagels" in their names)
2. Are there any other places to get bagels other than these establishments, or places that people think of immediately when considering buying a bagel? (Given that two of the business specialize in bagels, wouldn't it be an even bigger surprise if, say, a place really off the wall made the list, like Sushi Two?)

Example 2:
Best mass transit route
54C
2nd The T
3rd 61C

Okay, this one is of obvious concern to me. Keeping in mind this award is simply for the best route and has nothing to do with the service, I still feel a tinge ofapprehensionn awarding the 54C this distinction. Do I really have to spell out why?

Finally, a real favorite of mine.

Example 3:
Best coffeehouse
Beehive
South Side
2nd Kiva Han
3rd The Quiet Storm

Basically, according to this, these are the only three coffeehouses in Pittsburgh, or, in what's an interesting twist of irony, the only three that fit the "coffeehouse" label, because there are many more coffeehouses in Pittsburgh, but they happen to be called either Starbucks, Crazy Mocha, or Caribou Coffee, and I'd wager that these three do much more business than those that are deemed worthy of the "coffeehouse" label.

The rest of the lists are littered with your typical rankings of Indian restaurants, sports bars, and bookstores, all of which you're most likely familiar with, because there just aren't that many choices from year to year to make the rankings anything more than a formality.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that most big cities have their fair share of, for lack of a better term, off-balance citizens. Regardless of that fact, it's little comfort when you're walking down the street and you see the approach of another in a long line of derelicts who will, inevitably, ask you, in a roundabout way, for money. I've reached such a boiling point in frustration with these encounters that I usually just cut them off before they even start into their schpiel with a, "I don't have anything." That seems to be the best medicine for avoiding a drawn out diatribe that always ends in the same pleading request for a handout. This type of thing irks me in more ways than one.

First off, I'm almost insulted by the fact that these people seem to behave as if they are smarter than the average joe on the street. How else to explain the long stories that are a desperate effort to separate you from your money? I also find it interesting that the stories never vary either. Where's the logic behind encountering the same person in two different locations who just happens to have a car that broke down and is in need of gas? That's a pretty unreliable vehicle, my friend. Then there are the people who need money for bus fare. How is it that you got here in the first place? My favorite might be the ones who ask for an uneven, odd amount of change. "Do you have thirty-nine cents?"

One, I don't believe any part of your story. Two, even if you don't remember me, I do remember you, so I can piece together the illogic of your story. Three, I'm smart enough to realize that you're just asking for an odd amount of money in an effort to receive what you're really asking for, more money.

The other thing that bothers me is that these people are given free reign to perch wherever they want. There is nowhere where they aren't allowed to set up shop. Pittsburgh has passed a new set of ordinances that are supposed to crack down on the panhandling and enforce restrictions as to where and how long one is allowed to go about this business. Whether or not it's enforced is another thing. The City Paper had an article about the effect the ordinances will have on panhandlers, especially those who aren't aware of them. In an effort to portray the real victims of these laws, the article profiled a woman who asks for money because her government subsidy isn't enough for rent and food. Granted, that's a true case of the system not taking care of those who need it most, but I'll freely admit that I'm prejudiced against all panhandlers because I honestly cannot ascertain if any of them are really in need of money for food and essentials. They mention this in the article, but when you encounter enough people who are obviously looking for a handout for illegitimate purposes, it's hard not to view them all with suspicion.

Aside from some really corrosive acid, is there any substance that seems more destructive in its effects than spilled coffee?

No, in fact, coffee is proven to be the most destructive substance on planet Earth when spilled. It assumes the characteristics of some sort of supernatural entity run amuck when unleashed, no matter how much of it actually escapes its container.

Why is it that coffee seems to be attracted to white paper like a magnetic force?

Like a shark attracted to blood, coffee seems to feel the need to be absorbed by paper of all things. Regardless of where you spill it, chances are it will find paper to stain, and it won't be something harmless like an old newspaper. No, it will find a book. It will turn its pages a darker shade of brown and a warped shape that resembles some form of radio wave.

Is there anything I can do to prevent coffee from spilling on my books?

No, there really isn't a defense against coffee spills. In fact, the more you try to prevent coffee from spilling, the greater chance your coffee will adapt to the drastic measures you are adopting. It's an unstoppable force that will never be stopped in our times.

Before I further address the issue of revision that I wrote about in my last post, I have to clarify some of my comments.

When I wrote that I never had to revise a paper in all my days as an student, I meant that literally. Never once, as an undergraduate student in English and education, did I have a professor require a revision of a paper as part of the course curriculum. It might have been optional, but I just don't recall it ever happening as a required assignment in class.

This was also the same program where I got away with not taking a grammar class until my last semester. Did I suffer gradewise up until that point? No, in fact I did very well, and that leads me to something I've always had trouble with resolving in my head, the differing grading policies of all the professors I had over those years. Some marked my papers thoroughly, others didn't. It makes one wonder about the quality of one's writing. Was it grammatically correct as well as thematically interesting? Was it neither? Did the professors even know how to check for grammar? Sometimes I wondered if they did.

The comment about having a hard time accepting criticism isn't right. That makes it sound as if I had a problem with any comment that wasn't glowing praise written on a paper. I should clarify that to mean that the criticism I have a problem with is that which is written for papers intended to be rewritten. For the most part, these types of comments are vague or unhelpful. When you're confined to writing only three or four pages, you don't have a lot of room to expand upon your ideas. It's a very cut and dry paper. When the grader writes that you should do this, this and this, it's hard to fathom how you're supposed to accomplish any of it within the confines of a three to four page paper.

This leads to the related point that writing a philosophy paper is much different from writing a paper on a literary topic. Arguments have to be formed and concluded within the confines of the paper with little or no room for creativity. I don't like this at all. Parts of my paper that I think are worth keeping are earmarked for revision with little or no reason as to why. It's also not helpful when one paragraph out of the entire paper that is written in a faux-philosophical way is singled out as being what the entire paper should look like. How one is supposed to sustain a style that boils an argument down into, what I would term, talking points is beyond me. I can't sustain a paper that long without writing in a looser sense of creativity. Handcuffed might be the proper terminology to use in this instance.

Having said all that, I will admit that the paper I had to revise did need revising. The problem, though, relates back to what I was talking about earlier. I had a class over the summer where my papers weren't confined in any sense, and I was allowed to expand at length on the points I wanted to make without any fear of it being marked as being lengthy for no reason or off-topic. Again, it probably depended on the fact that I had a different grader than I do now. Both are teaching assistants, but one has a doctorate in comparative literature and the other does not. Obviously the former has a much more extensive knowledge base with regards to grammar and writing and that accounts for most of it. What I'm boggled by is the fact that the papers that we're ripping apart in our section from the other writing section seem to be awful. One of those papers happened to be the only one that my instructor deemed worthy of granting an A, an A- but an A nonetheless. I thought the paper was terrible and asked why it was granted that grade. Saying that, I realize that I might sound bitter at my grade, which was right in the heart of the majority of the distribution. I'm not, because, like I said, it definitely needed revising to some extent.

I don't know that this clarifies much of anything that I wrote previously, but I think it fleshes it out a bit.

I never revise papers. At least I never revised any of the papers I wrote as an undergraduate or graduate student. I don't think my writing is beyond reproach, but I never felt the need to write a rough-draft and revise it before turning in a final copy. I also never had a class where you were given the assignment to revise a paper. That is until this semester.

Literally, I just finished my revision before writing this post, so the juices are still flowing with regards to my opinions on the practice. I understand the need to revise and rewrite, but I have a hard time accepting the criticism that goes along with it. I won't claim that I feel all of my papers are works of genius, but I like my writing, and I like my writing of papers even more.

Heck, even in creative writing class I liked my work the way it turned out when I was done. Revise a poem? Are you crazy? It just didn't seem right.

Perhaps I believe that the process of writing is special in and of itself and shouldn't be tampered with after the fact. Writing, when you're writing, has the finality to it that other activities seem to lack. I don't want to go back and try to capture the flow I had when composing the work the first time. It's never there.

It's reminds me a lot of those times when I'm drifting off to sleep and I'm thinking of writing. My mind seems to flow in such a smooth way. Inevitably, I wake up and can't recall what I was thinking about. Where'd it go? Wherever it went, I can't bring it back just like the flow of writing a paper and hitting the final keystroke for the last word. Once it's gone, it's gone.

I'm getting buried by print. There's too much to read and only twenty-four hours in a day.

I sat there thinking to myself, "Why am I in this class? Why would someone with an English degree need to take a class with an optional writing practicum when I already know how to write?" Why indeed?

Several weeks into the semester and it's abundantly clear why I need this class. As much as it pains me to admit, I don't really know how to write a good, solid philosophy paper, a paper with premises that support a conclusion. It doesn't sound hard, but take a look at some and make a feeble attempt at it, and you're likely to come away shaking your head in frustration as to how you're supposed to get from the argument to the conclusion without meandering about for paragraph after paragraph. This is nothing like writing about the significance of the black veil in Hawthorne; this takes a certain sort of finesse and a rigorous mind that grasps the fact that your case will most likely fall apart with the slightest bit of criticism, and that fact alone isn't such a bad thing when philosophy is concerned. You can't charm your away with dense thoughts and even denser prose. There has to be something there that you can extract and say, "Here's what I believe and here's how I can prove it."

So, on the first day when the instructor assigned a one-page paper based on the argument of whether or not the class should be graded on a curve, I was blindsided with the reality that this is a lot harder than it seems it should be. One page? How can you accomplish anything in one page? First off, you can try to fall back on the old five paragraph essay format from grade school. Do you remember that? It's one of those relics of old that a lot of people seem to feel is overrated and too constraining. Why, I don't know. It's also apparently something that no one teaches in school any longer. How do I know this? Well, part of our class is devoted to writing, and we've had the opportunity to harshly criticize the writings of our classmates in the other section. All I know from this is that if you want to boost your ego a bit, try reading some undergraduate writing. You'll feel like Melville compared to some of these malcontents.

It's not all for naught, though. You can extract some nuggets from the filler, and believe me there's a lot of filler for a one-page assignment. Most of it's disorganized, poorly reasoned, and apparently without any real regard for even the most basic forms of organization (breaking points up into separate paragraphs isn't too popular amongst the kids these days). Even I am not immune to some hasty mistakes. I didn't even write it on the actual topic. I argued against curves in general and not specifically for this class.

One other thing I've learned so far is that "pious" isn't a very flexible adjective.

Almost like the changing of the seasons, new books by favorite authors seem to appear with greater frequency after an extended literary dryspell. This year, so far, has been filled with a few books, most of which have either disappointed outright or appeared to be less than stellar efforts, and, yes, I'm talking about you Palahniuk and Chabon. To add to this, Palahniuk seems to be everywhere for coverage of one his more mediocre works and seems on the verge of burning out his schtick just when it is supposedly reaching its peak (Any more mentions of audience members "passing out" during his readings due to their lurid content should be exorcised from the record right now.). So, it's refreshing to see not one but two literary ghosts reappear. Both Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy have been out of the limelight for quite some time; the varying reasons why couldn't be further apart on the scale for these widely divergent authors.

Ellis, who seemed to have drifted off into oblivion after all the hubbub from American Psycho, has resurfaced with a book, Lunar Park whose main protagonist is, I guess appropriately enough for an author who litters his works with incredibly narcissitic characters, Bret Easton Ellis. I have to confess I didn't read the entire novel due to the incredibly bad luck of receiving a copy that only circulates for seven days, which I seem to be a magnet for at the library. Anyway, what I did get to read wasn't bad, and the story seems to be a mishmash of memoir, horror story, and the usual behavior that Ellis thrives on. I have to admit, also, that I figured Ellis was burned out at this point. His books, although never masterpieces, were at least iteresting in a surface way to keep me reading. Strip them down to the bones that fill in the gaps between events, and you're not left with a lot of variation. Ellis and a few others thrived on capturing the mood of the Reagan 80's, but to try to make a long term career out of this repetitious nonsense is a little too much to sustain. I will grant that his writing seems a lot more formal, a little denser, and with a sense of purpose that his previous books lacked. When I get to finish it, I'll have a better sense of how well he accomplished this.

McCarthy, on the other hand, never seemed to be a case for burnout, but rather a master craftsman who took his time writing. Supposedly, he has several novels in various forms of completion ready to be published. No Country for Old Men isn't McCarthy's best, but it's not his worst either. It's a quick read, but you get the sense that it wasn't written quickly. Some authors just traffic in books that are so slap-dash in construction that it's not hard to imagine them cranking them out very rapidly. McCarthy is one of our better writers, and it's easy to see that what he writes serves a purpose. There's no filler, nothing seems to be unnecessary. Blood Meridian might be his best work, and, if you recall, I named it one of my five favorite books of all time. I'm hoping that at least one of those unpublished novels in waiting may have a fraction of the quality Blood Meridian is filled with from beginning to end.

There have been numerous stories over the last year or so regarding the potential negatives with having a blog online. Employees have been fired for revealing company secrets, complaining about the workplace in general, or just posting material online period. Every institution apparently has its own set of guidelines to follow regarding what types of activities are condoned and what is unacceptable. Since blogging is such a new and recent phenomenon, it has probably caught a lot of people off guard, and it makes the task of enforcing some sort of acceptable guidelines that much more difficult. As if the above mentioned instances weren't enough, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education only served to highlight yet another troublesome aspect of blogging, having potential employers read your blog.

In a column entitled "First Person," Ivan Tribble, a pseudonym for a humanities professor at an unnamed college in the Midwest, the title pretty much says it all, "Bloggers Need Not Apply." This is followed by a subtitle/quote, "Job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible, and in most cases a bloc turns out to be a negative." Tribble explains how three potential candidates were undone, not completely mind you, by the content of their blogs. One devoted his to a topic other than the humanities which worried the hiring committee that they would be devoting more time to this other area. Of course, you're not paying someone to be a humanities professor only to have them hang out in a the computer department, but this strikes me as nothing more than a hobbyist's outlet for a subject near and dear to them. Another had a personal blog that "scrupulously avoided comment about the writer's current job, coworkers, or place of employment." This was troublesome only because it had some content that was heartfelt and opinionated. The third apparently divulged how they had misrepresented some aspect of their resume to sound much more involved and important than it really was. Fair enough, but depending on the degree of exaggeration does that really disqualify a candidate? Who doesn't misrepresent themselves to some extent in a job interview?

Granted, some of these candidates actually chose to include the address to their blog with their application materials. Others were found easily by searching their names on the internet. To me, this seems wholly unfair when weighing a candidate's credentials. Sure, if you lie outright, that's a problem, but if you have a blog that isn't something you publicize yourself, then it seems to me like the most glaring form of gossip mongering. Tribble even mentions that it's hard to turn away from a blog filled with such juicy revelations. It seems hypocritical to indulge in such an activity only to then turn around and condemn the writer of the bloc as being not quite the applicant to fill the job. He also mentions that the blog wasn't the only factor in deciding against a candidate, but it's hard to imagine someone who spews such venom against the concept isn't weighing it pretty heavily in the end.

The best graffiti I've seen in the last few days:

One of those flashing arrow signs with the billboard area on the bottom positioned right beside a portable toilet proclaiming: "Pee."

The letters on a Burger King sign rearranged to read: "Try A Ultimate Whore."

On the side of a random building: "Pasta."

Everything you say is correct, to some extent. Nothing you say is wrong, and any comment you make can be greeted with some form of positive reinforcement, as long as it's not completely off the wall. At least that's what I've come to believe in the four weeks I've been in my current class. No clearer evidence could have been given for this notion than in last Thursday's class.

One student in particular has a real knack for giving answers to questions that are so incredibly vague in nature that it's almost a given that he hasn't done the readings or, in this case, watched the assigned film prior to class. My guess is that his responses are simply just that, responses for the purpose of maintaining his class participation grade. On the one hand, I should thank this guy for at least speaking. There are a handful of us who make an effort to contribute to the class discussion, but there are a few zombies in it as well who have yet to utter a single syllable. (My favorite of these muted malcontents did make an attempt to tell the instructor the name of an artist that he couldn't immediately think of. He hasn't been heard from since.) On the other hand, I'm driven to the point of insanity by the instructor's inevitable response of "good" to every one of his remarks before making an effort to either clarify his original query or, in a roundabout way, correct the remark as being not quite correct.

I'm not advocating that teachers need to have the personalities fit for third-world dictators in order to elicit responses that are genuinely thought out before being unleashed on the rest of the class, but isn't it better to just say, "No, that's not correct" than to allow someone's comments that are entirely off base to color the content of the class in the wrong way?

I am not and don't claim to be an outstanding public speaker or instructor, but I do believe I'm competent enough to construct a lesson around a specific topic or topics that progresses in a logical manner from one point to the next and eventually culminates in a desired goal of understanding or acquisition of a new skill which can be done in the span of a class period or multiple class periods. I attribute this to the fact that I do have an undergraduate degree in secondary education. As would seem likely, some of the courses required for the acquisition of this degree deal specifically with how to complete the very task mentioned above, construction of a lesson plan or a unit. This seems like a logical and necessary skill to obtain in the quest to becoming an effective, efficient teacher. This leads me to question why this very same skill isn’t required for instructors in higher education. What exactly is the difference between teaching twelfth-grade seniors and college freshmen? I don't see any.

The reason this topic seems interesting to me now is that I've started taking classes again at the university, and it's blatantly obvious that the instructor I have for this class either isn't comfortable speaking in front of others or so disorganized in his thoughts that it's impossible to ascertain whether he's making it all up as we go along or he's actually knowledgeable on the subject. I prefer to believe the latter; otherwise he wouldn't be teaching at this university, which is renowned for its Philosophy department. Also, it'd just be too painful and scary to contemplate the former. What's painful is that his speech is punctuated by "umms" and "I means" in an attempt to gather his thoughts into a coherent set of ideas and points of relevance. And he seems easily rattled by questions that jump ahead in the progression of the class's forward march. I honestly don't know how you can present yourself in such a way in the hopes of obtaining a new position in such a field. It just doesn't seem like you could and hope to succeed.

One of the general requirements for any undergraduate degree is a course in speech. These courses are usually pretty general in nature and serve little or no purpose other than to make you as a student feel a little more comfortable speaking in front of others. This leads me to suggest that this isn’t enough for anyone who is planning on teaching as a career regardless of level. Professors, old and young, suffer from this type of affliction, and it's likely that some, if not all, of this could be remedied by simply requiring perspective instructors to take a class on how to properly construct a lesson plan, which in turn would require them to perform in front of their peers, thus giving them more experience in front of a crowd.

Overall, the content will make the class valuable, and if the presentation is muddied to some extent by the inadequacies of the instructor, so be it. I'm really powerless to say otherwise. Having been out of class for a few years, it was a shocking reminder of how little patience I have. I'll have to learn to accept the style, but I'll keep on believing that it can be remedied easily.

George: Oh, what's the point? When I like them, they don't like me, when they like me, I don't like them. (Seinfeld, The Old Man)

I don't like her. I mean she's friendly and all and a nice person to talk to at work, but there's just nothing there. Part of me appreciates the notion of a "crush," but at this point I feel that there has to be some reciprocity as well.

I play with some guidelines, not many but some. This one definitely fell into one of those guideline areas: too young. Once you reach a certain point, it's time to simply admire and not delude yourself into thinking that it's possible to make something like that work, that being the younger girl/older guy hookup.

Maybe having said something that I shouldn't have led to this, a barrage of emails along with multiple phone numbers and complaints about being back home with her mom and brother. Surely, you can tell someone that you'll miss seeing them at work and not have some sort of consequences that verge on the bizarre, right?

Immaturity is the only thing I can think of, or the revelation that the last boyfriend she had broke up with her to live a life as a homosexual. (I'm not making that one up.)

During one scene in the film Garden State, Andrew Largeman pontificates on the realities of losing one's sense of "home" after you've moved out and lived in a place of one's own. The idea being, and a timeless one at that, is that you can never really go home again. I don't know how much I really agree with that premise (I don't so much agree with the premise as I know that I understand the notion. I refuse, and perhaps sentimentally so, to relinquish that notion of house and home.), but I did notice another phenomenon recently when I was home for a brief stay in which I think some of the residual effect of this idea of losing home is successfully planted.

Communication between you and your parents can and often is difficult regardless of your relationship with them. What I noticed during this most recent trip, though, is that you can sense that your family adapts, as I'm sure we do as well, to life without you. Behaviors change and voices are altered due to your presence. It's odd because you can feel that there's something of kilter but nothing that would in the least feel threatening or emotionally provocative. It's more often than not just an inkling that not having you around has either freed up a different personality trait in each one of your parents or you are now viewed in terms of being a visitor in every sense of the word (In most cases this would seem to imply an negative connotation, but that's not what I'm driving at. It would seem more likely that now you are viewed as being a visitor only in the sense that you're not staying.) in the home where you grew up. You're still welcome and everything that's theirs is also yours, but you're also likely to witness an evolutionary, perhaps that's being overly dramatic, change.

Here's a question: Has there been one day since September 11, 2001 that the New York Times hasn't mentioned the terrorist attacks? I have no way of verifying this, but I would assume that there hasn't been. Of course, sometimes this is by no fault of their own because, as we are well aware, the Bush Administration's view of history starts and stops with that very day, and they rarely if ever pass up a chance to mention the events of that historic day. Couple this along with the continuing battle over what is going to transpire on Ground Zero, the site where the towers once stood, and you can imagine that it's highly unlikely that you'll find even one instance where there isn't at least one mention of that date.

In what will come across as both an unpopular and unsympathetic stance, I feel that I have reached a saturation point with regards to the events of September 11. I won't go so far as to say that I don't care about the repercussions that are supposedly being felt to this very day, but I greet most of the news with casual indifference and, at times, outright hostility with regards to specific mentionings of its supposed complexity and the continued inability of creative peoples to do it justice. Mostly, I think, the Times is to blame for this continued exploitation, at least for what I'm exposed to on a daily basis. The writers and editors of the paper seem to feel, rightfully so, that there is a sort of collective trauma that still lingers, to some extent, in the city of New York, and the country as a whole, that reverberates continuously, but, like other events, I wonder how much of this is an actual reportage of events and what is simply perceived as being an issue for the Times. It also speaks volumes when you look on a grander scale at how miniscule an event it is when placed alongside tragedies of comparable size in other countries and how those countries have progressed or, if not progressed, at least reached a sort of understanding of the events themselves, which doesn't include invoking it on a daily basis.

The issue of media manipulation is an issue that's been flogged for years now, and I don't intend to inflict an accusation of liberal bias on the Times, but when it appears that September 11 has been stamped, coded, and copyrighted by individuals who utilize it whenever it is necessary to provide a convenient reminder of how much the country has been through, it seems to me that it loses its cache somewhat.

The issue that irks me the most with regards to this continued eulogizing is that the writers for the Times have nearly gone so far as to say that there's no artist currently producing work that can accurately portray the events of September 11 in a manner that do them justice. Writers, artists, filmmakers are all incapable, at least according to the Times, of giving the emotional weight that the day deserves in any form whether it's a novel, painting, or film. I find this not only an insult to the artists themselves but another instance of flagrant exploitation of a day that, true was a horrific day and the first true attack from a foreign invader on our soil, but not so incomprehensible as to push it beyond the ability to be expressed by talented people. To read it from the Times, one is lead to believe that artists have been pondering for years on end on how to appropriately utilize, pay tribute, or properly contextualize the mood that pervaded the country in those hours and days. One is lead to believe that writer's block isn't an adequate enough response and the root cause for the lack of creative output. It never occurs to them that, perhaps just perhaps, no one really wants to utilize this content. Perhaps no one wants to paint themselves into a corner that can't possibly be greeted with anything but wide skepticism and harsh critique. Perhaps there are more interesting subjects out there to plumb the depths of. After the few works that have addressed the issue have been greeted lukewarmly at best, doesn't it occur to them that there really isn't any incentive to invoke the numbers 9/11 if there is absolutely nothing that can be done that will satisfy those that are clamoring for a muted yet overly respectful interpretation? If that isn't the epitome of presenting unjust expectations, I don't know what is.

Recent books have gone lengths to provide specific critiques of how the Times has failed over the years to accurately cover such events as the Holocaust, the development of the atom bomb, lack of healthy skepticism over the Iraq War, and other foreign affairs. To me, this overload of continuous invocation of September 11 and the unceasing declarations of impenetrableness is nothing more than an act of compensation for their lack of coverage of other events. September 11 was not the Holocaust, not on any scale period, and their lack of coverage for whatever reasons, be it political or racial, cannot be made up for by a continuously obsessive invocation of September 11.

To add to the list of oddities you'll find here on the streets of Pittsburgh, I walked by, what appeared to be, a wall safe sitting on the sidewalk. Its door opened and resting as if any other piece of detritus. This leads me to wonder two things. One, why is it there in the first place? Two, what was inside?

Hedonism run amuck is about all I can say. A spate of movies, Closer and We Don't Live Here Anymore, and the book I'm currently reading and fighting with all my might not to toss across the room in disgust, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, paint a pretty bleak picture of the current state of relationships between the sexes. In sum, it appears as if no one is capable of being faithful and infidelity is as acceptable as any other relationship quirk. This is by no means a new thing, and it won't be the last, but it's hard for me to believe that this is how people behave. Married men, especially those who look like Jude Law, have little trouble attracting willing women with whom to commiserate their affairs. Does this type of thing occur as frequently as is suggested by these works? I can't say from either experience or secondhand knowledge. The back and forth between affairs and the continuously boorish behavior on the part of the male aggressors is such a stale and depleted idea that I'm stunned that anyone thinks it's original any longer. Some works on this subject definitely, for lack of a better term, work, like Tom Perrotta's Little Children. I'm not sure what other works are trying to accomplish. Do they want you to hate the characters? Are you supposed to sympathize with anyone? I rarely do, and I don't think I'm wrong in not doing so.

My real problem with Ford's writing is that the main character, Frank Boscombe, is portrayed throughout the majority of the book as a sophisticated man, a writer who not so much failed at his art but rather quit. He's not overly academic, although he was a teacher who couldn't teach, and he seems more like a man who would shun such groups. And he seems to have a poignant wisdom that other characters, who are inevitably much more fallible than him, aspire towards being. In other words, he doesn't seem like a phony, but, in reality, someone you could have a conversation with that wasn't devoid of all intellectual content. But Ford can't sustain this type of character for the entire novel. I've found that what usually occurs is that most novels that tend to strike a nerve in me do so about halfway through, and the complaints are usually minor but nonetheless irritating. Turns of phrase that seem way out of character appear for seemingly no reason. Dialogue that's praised by one review as showing Ford's "extraordinary ear" seems stilted and absurd in points. And finally, a character who showed so much promise early in the novel turns out to be less than noble. His ability to effortlessly bed women while married strikes, what I assume is, both a jealous nerve and an enraged moral superiority complex.

I've never understood how writers of tremendous talent let phrases that are juvenile in nature intrude upon what is already established as being a particular way of thinking for a character. To put it another way, it seems incredibly out of character for words like "boink" and phrases like "drunk as a monkey" to be associated with a character who, like I said above, is already established as being much more sophisticated. Good writers, at least those who I really admire, don't allow this type of error to occur in their works. If a certain tone of writing is established then it stays that way until the end. As for this keen ear for dialogue that Ford is supposed to have, I myself rarely if ever feel the need to end every sentence of a conversation with the name of the person with whom I am speaking. Here's some examples from a single conversation between two characters:
"What are you thinking right now, Frank?"
"It didn't seem idiotic, Walter."
"I'm not putting babies in freezers, am I, Frank?"
"Do you think I've done harm, Frank?"
"I think it doesn't matter, Walter, to tell you the truth."
This conversation goes on for pages and pages. "Walter," "Frank," "Walter," "Frank." What the hell? Who talks like this? Also, who talks in a put on accent? Apparently plenty of people do so for entire conversations and this guy runs into all of them.

Finally, to the women. When they aren't baring their breasts to Frank and begging for an affair, as one character does, they're parading around the bedroom naked. For a character whose marriage crumbled from an affair that didn't happen, which was a refreshing change from the norm, these repeated escapades and flashbacks to previous ones more than make me hate this guy. When does it end? Again, is this real life? And why are these books all the same? John Irving's The World According to Garp may have been the first book to really piss me off in this vein. The men in these books are the aggressors who have some sort of sway over all women and dominate them both intellectually and physically. Apparently, nothing has changed over the years. I'm either incredibly out of the loop, overly sensitive, or jealous beyond belief at the physical prowess portrayed in these works. It's probably a little bit of all of them.

Can you hear me?
Everyone else does it, so why can't I? Talking on a cell phone in public, that is.

Trying as hard as I might to hold a conversation with Benedict as I boarded a bus, I was greeted not with what I expected, poor reception, but a total inability on my part to focus on the phone conversation I was trying to maintain while at the same time tuning out the peripheral noise from my fellow passengers. It was not meant to be, I guess. The noise level seemed to grow higher and higher as I tried to lean towards the window and away from the sound in an effort to at least hear Benedict and, likewise, have him hear me.

What effectively ended the call was the woman in front of me with her three, yes three, kids, two of which were in a state of almost certain misery while the third, the oldest of the trio, was independent enough to sit across the aisle and cause his own brand of mischief. Their cries drowned out any sound from my phone. Watching the oldest poke the middle one with a pencil in the arm and then proceed to act as if nothing happened, only further enraged me, and I stifled the notion to tell the mother that she should leave her animals at home in cages when she's going out in public.

I told Benedict I'd have to talk to him later, and hung up. Wouldn't you know it, though, as soon as I hung up the bus entered a realm of utter calmness and the sound level tapered off to a minimum level.

What's Mine is Yours and Yours...
Having been a fan and follower of Metallica since high school and also being interested in seeing the dynamics that surround the artistic process, I've been curious to see the highly praised documentary Some Kind of Monster that chronicles the making of their most recent album and, more interestingly, their need for a group therapist. The film itself became secondary to the subject brought up during its course, the war waged by Metallica, in particular drummer Lars Ulrich, against Napster and all those who downloaded their songs. The friend I was watching the film with made it adamantly clear that he thought that the entire process of downloading songs from the internet is a loathsome activity that serves as nothing more than a way to commit robbery against the artists whose work is being distributed around the world for free. I, on the other hand, proceeded to respond with the blanket statement that I just don't care. Upon further reflection, I realize how bad this sounds, and I don't know that I successfully defended my lackadaisical response. I do know that I haven't wavered on that notion.

Honestly, I just can get myself worked up over the fact that artists are "losing" revenues on works that are being distributed by "illegal" means, especially when these artists are big name acts signed to large record labels that have the gall and the audacity to not only charge upwards of twenty dollars for new albums but also claim that they are losing profits due to the downloading craze. The crux of my friend's argument wasn't focused on the big name acts, but on those bands that are struggling to be heard and signed to a record label. Granted, I can see how this can be a problem, but, as I've mentioned before with other forms of artistic expression, I believe that there's always a reason why individuals or groups have a hard time selling their artistic ventures to large conglomerates. The reason being that it's not very good. I don't consider most of the works being published in the book world to be very good, especially the best seller list which is littered with unreadable abominations of the language and insultingly bad gimmicks that pawn themselves off as being postmodern and clever. In my rationale, if the stuff that's getting published is bad, with a few exceptions, then what are the chances that the stuff that isn't getting published is any better? We'll never know, and I know that's the point, but I just don't think we're, or more importantly I, am missing out on much.

As for the lost revenues, the last I knew there was still a highly successful market for the purchase of new products. CD sales haven't been that drastically affected. The reason sales are down, I would argue, is due to the fact that there just aren't that many good artists releasing good music any more. Moby, for example, appears to be the latest artist to have produced one tremendous album followed by a string of losers. His latest release seems to be, if one can glean anything from reviews, a rehash of his previous material and a desperate attempt to remain a significant figure on the pop scene. To address the downloading of materials by unsigned artists, I can't for the life of me imagine that there's much reason to fear that this is driving unsigned acts to switch occupations. Two people downloading tracks in Idaho from a local artist based in Pittsburgh shouldn't make or break any band. What this would have to do with them not being signed at all I haven't the slightest idea.

Friday's Wall Street Journal featured an editorial entitled "Can Justice Scalia Solve the Riddles of the Internet" by Daniel Henninger. Writing on the case before the Supreme Court of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster, Henninger proposes three conundrums that are at the heart of this debate. The first is whether or not the internet has sapped the creative will of artists who apparently are just in it for the money and derive no other form of satisfaction out of their artistic ventures. This is such an absurd notion that it's beyond comment. The second proposes that the internet has effectively eliminated the idea that works are produced for profit and created a complacent populace that sees nothing wrong with the idea that everything should be available for free. This has some merit. It's akin to the notion that everything must be on the internet. Libraries face this everyday, and it's not a phenomenon that's going to be easy to break. Young people raised on the internet see it as the be all to end all resource for everything they need. Books have become secondary if not ignored altogether. That's a problem. The third posits the notion that individuals who commit this crime of downloading see nothing wrong in their actions even when they knowingly will not commit any other types of crimes willingly. This leads into Henninger's main premise that unless we acquire a "moral or at least philosophical commitment to the legitimacy of profit...there's no hope." Henninger paints a picture of starving artists living on Red Bull and Steve Jobs swimming in the millions yielded by his iPods. The idea is about as tear jerking as a mud puddle.

Finally, the idea that artists create art because it's their job came up during the debate. I don't see it that way. If you choose to live your life as a struggling artist, that's your decision. I have neither sympathy nor condemnation for those who do so, but I also feel little towards the notion of the "starving artist" wallowing in obscurity because someone has robbed him or her of their outlet or just hasn't discovered them yet. I love art and I'll support artists that I enjoy, but I won't be forced into some sort of sympathetic symbiotic relationship that condemns either the establishment for not rooting out these special cases or the public for feeding off of their wares without proper compensation. There are more pressing matters in life, and I just don't care enough about this fight to bother.

Coffee Logic
I don't pretend to know much of anything regarding business. I don't have a degree in marketing and nor am I affiliated in any sense of the word with the business community. However, along with many other armchair quarterbacks, every once in awhile something peaks my curiosity enough to question the logistics and the thought processes of particular businesses.

I've written previously about coffeeshops for various reasons, and I'm not sure what causes them to continuously provide fodder for thought. Apparently, they serve as some sort of nexus or ground zero for the testing of marketing ideas that stretch across a wide strata of areas and differing approaches to lure in that ideal customer. I think I've pretty much seen it all when it comes to the diversifying tactics coffeeshop owners employ, and that's saying a lot considering that this medium size big city, Pittsburgh, has a certain finite amount of growth available for burgeoning businesses. Coffeeshops here are abundant. Almost circuslike in their approach, the varying array of enticements offered by coffeeshops seems endless in imagination and tact. I'm not sure how well they are received, and I'd be curious to know how many ventures are abandoned wholeheartedly after a brief trial run without success. There's only so much you can do to attract people, and there's only so much people will be willing to endure in order to obtain a simple cup of coffee. Case in point, one of my favorite shops, the Beehive, went through a radical transformation and expansion scheme that seems to only have as its end purpose the engulfing of the entire city block in which it is located. I was on a forced leave from the shop, but I've since returned to its confines with positive results.

Recently, the Southside Works has begun opening new businesses in an effort to revitalize a once empty, unprofitable chunk of land. The effort, which can only be described as the opening salvo in what promises to be a large scale battle between rival shopping complexes, has yielded one curiosity, two coffeeshops within a block of one another. Sure, on the outset that doesn't seem strange when in this town rival shops are on opposite corners, but what makes this an oddity is that the location itself is on, what I would term, the outskirts of the Southside. There isn't much roadway left before you exit a developed area and enter the forested in-between wasteland that separates the Southside from Homestead. In other words, the location is something that can only sustain itself by continuously feeding its competing retailers to each other. So the two coffeeshops are forced to compete for, what I would assume to be, a limited amount of pedestrian traffic and the business derived from the office inhabitants surrounding the complex, which I don't believe to be that numerous.

Quite possibly, the most puzzling aspect of this is that one shop, Crazy Mocha, which beat its rival, Caribou Coffee, opened first, starts the day at six in the morning! Running past this empty establishment, I couldn't help but wonder who they thought they would be serving at this early of an hour when no other shops close by are open. Residential housing isn't nearby, and the always burdensome aspect of parking seems to rule out anyone stopping in on their way to work. Like I said, I don't claim to understand business, but when this very same chain closes a shop in the heart of the University of Pittsburgh's campus, one has to wonder who is making the decisions here and for what reason. I drink a lot of coffee, but I wouldn't want to have to sell it if my life depended on it based on the backwards logic implied by the strategies employed by the shillers of the bean.

"Won't get fooled again"
I'll admit it. I fell for it, and it's one of those insidious pranks that rankles my pride everytime I think about it. Standing on a street corner waiting for the light to change in my favor as a pedestrian, I noticed a quarter on the pavement. Bending over to pick it up, I was shocked to find that it wouldn't move, not an inch. Someone with a really twisted and demented sense of humor had gone to the trouble of gluing the quarter to the sidewalk. Afterwards, my only thought was that my actions, along with countless others I'm sure, had provided this very person with a day's worth of guffawing as he or she peered out of a window from a nearby vantage point.

Having suffered this cruelty once, I've since greeted most such chance occurrences with a healthy sense of skepticism. So, as I was preparing to start my run and nearing my starting point, I happened to notice in a bus shelter a large stack of VHS tapes, perhaps twenty or so stacked in unequal distribution on the pavement and the edge of the shelter's bench. I told myself to keep walking, but I slowed up long enough to catch that written in crude lettering on the spine of one tape was "XXX," a rather awkward way to label a tape which I assumed had it actually contained the type of content the marking is associated with it would be hidden away with all the other materials. Regardless, I just kept moving. Again, the fear crept up inside of me that anyone who took even a moment longer in their curiosity, would be doing nothing more than providing someone with innumerable kicks.

Yesterday, I passed the very same bus shelter. To no surprise of my own, the tapes were all gone, whether they were picked up by city workers or unsuspecting citizens, I'll never know.

"When the going gets weird..."
I resisted the urge to post immediately on the day that the news broke that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide for a number of reasons, number one being that it seemed like a poor decision that wouldn't allow the necessary act of reflection. He's someone whose work I enjoy, some of it tremendously so, but I'm of the opinion that the majority of his work has little or no relevance to certain people my age, especially his reporting on politics. Most of the lamentations on Thompson have made a point of saying that his best work was behind him, and there's definitely a case to be made for such an accusation. However, it seems to me that he's been in a funk for quite some time, possibly starting as early as the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's downfall.

I find that a lot of his work, especially those collections of political writings from the eighties, is nearly unreadable for someone my age that at the time was so far removed from the political process as to make it irrelevant. Most of the characters he's commenting on are faceless to me, even with a profound interest in politics. Nixon was his target, and there seemed to be something, for lack of a better word, magical in the way in which all the events of the sixties and seventies (Nixon, Vietnam, Civil Rights) all coalesced at one time to create a country on the verge of something both sinister and strange. Thompson's best work reflected this uncertainty perfectly, and he was the perfect spokesperson for the counterculture. He seemed like the real deal, not a poseur like Tom Wolfe. With Nixon gone, it seemed as if he lacked a real target for his rage. Even during the eighties with Reagan in power, there seemed to be a real lack of moral corruptness for Thompson to vent on. Bush Sr. just doesn’t seem to warrant much comment at all, positive or negative, and Clinton, obviously, wasn't a target in the least. With the election of our current administration headed by another Bush and fraught with moral corruptness, abuses of power, and tighter than ever restrictions on free speech and civil rights, this seemed like the perfect time for Thompson to return to form firing shotgun blasts at enemies big and small. All the same adjectives that Thompson coined in labeling Nixon a monster could easily apply to Bush and Co.

I don’t actually think that Thompson suffered from a lack of ideas or viable targets. I do believe that his writing was affected, as so many others obviously were, by the events of September 11. Even though he thrived during the period where many, many more lives were lost in another unnecessary war, the events of that day seem much more personal, and the response by our leaders seemed to be greeted both as warranted and overreaching. The type of writing that Thompson uses to skewer his targets may not have been the best way to criticize the government. I’m not advocating the notion that he shouldn’t have written in his trademark style about Bush; in fact, I wished that he would have written more. What I do think is that, and this should come as no surprise, we live in a different time than the seventies. The types of events and the disgust generated at them and the government are definitely similar in vein and intensity, but they’re different somehow. Somehow this isn’t the same as the seventies. Vietnam isn’t equivalent to September 11, and Nixon isn’t equivalent to Bush. In the end, I don’t think Thompson lacked anything relevant to write about or lost his nerve in aiming squarely at the forces that enraged him the most. His death will remain a mystery and the no amount of speculation or criticism will change that fact. Let it be said, that his voice, regardless of intensity and affect, will be missed by many.

News Break
I'm slowly but surely ending my self-imposed embargo on all things related to NPR. I realized several weeks ago that I'd hit the proverbial wall with regards to the news. Between digesting each day's New York Times, whose reading times can vary between thirty minutes to more than an hour, the stream of NPR programs I can hear at work, and all the various other sources of news, I knew it was time for a break. I always seem to regret doing this because I know I'm going to be skimming over important stories that, should they become truly relevant, will leave me with only a cursory understanding. It just so happens that I was in one of those phases where reading books had become the most important thing to me, and I couldn't justify using that time to pour over news stories that increasingly seem to be cut and paste jobs adding reports on new developments to rehashings of older news. As always, I slowly come out of this funk with a renewed interest and start devouring the paper with a renewed sense of urgency and interest.

My problems with NPR stem from a long standing view of mine that they are stridently biased towards devoting vast amounts of time to stories that fit their own agenda, and thus making it increasingly hard for me to listen willingly without feeling manipulated. As with my other funk, I felt that it was time to give NPR another chance. As luck would have it, my decision to turn the dial back to WDUQ just happened to coincide with yet another round of what I call begging, or in their parlance a pledge drive. These pledge drives are what sucks the very life out of listening to the radio. And it's so obvious when they have one going on. The stories seem rushed, the announcers are talking faster, and then out of nowhere here it comes, a pledge solicitation. The most annoying aspect are the lame testimonials and quasi-demands to donate. These are most often associated with Ira Glass, whose pretentious air seems to ooze from his pours through the microphone and out through your speaker. None of these tactics ever make me feel as if I need to pledge.

Finally someone has broken the silence I have suffered in for far too long. A Rant in the current issue of the City Paper hits on so many points and provides such a dead-on critique of the state of DUQ that I wish I could just reproduce the entire column here. To summarize, it seems that Dan Goldberg, a longtime member of DUQ, has grown frustrated by the lack of improvements that result from these increasingly frequent pledge drives. They have apparently picked up some more national content from NPR, but I couldn't tell you what that is, and the local content still sounds the same, as if it were produced in a senior high-school. The most poignant remark Goldberg makes, though, is reserved for DUQ's musical selection that resumes once they've completed their allotment of NPR programming, which he refers to as "all elevator jazz, almost all the time."

Goldberg also makes another observation, which is both the most telling and troubling for stations like DUQ. Anyone with a decent internet connection now has access to many, many stations from around the country whose programming puts DUQ's to shame. Every time I have the chance to listen to the news on my computer at work, I find that I never even think for a moment of connecting to DUQ. Instead, I turn to NJN, a New Jersey station with a steady stream of NPR programming without terrible jazz and professionally produced local content. DUQ, which seems to want to care about the community, can't do so without a more concerted effort to create programming that's worth listening to and making improvements that are noticeable in both content and quality.

The Continuing War on Bloggers
Today's New York Times features an article prominently placed on the front page of the business section detailing the recent fallout over the resignation of a "top news executive at CNN" due to the diligence of a few bloggers who "broke" a story that wasn't going to be covered by the "mainstream" media. This comes hot on the heels of the "forced" resignation of Dan Rather due to the scandal over President Bush's service records from his time serving in the Air National Guard, again as a result of the efforts of a determined bunch of bloggers to get the story right. For good reason, this is providing warranted attention for such grass-roots initiatives that are having a very real-world affect on matters big and small. As I've written before, there seems to be a sense of overwhelming frustration and, for lack of a better term, outright fear of the power that bloggers have amassed over that past few years. If it's not labeling bloggers as delusional for their far-sightedness and bloated senses of their own self worth, then it's a smear campaign that strives to label the actions of a diligent few comparable to that of a lunatic fringe drowned in political partisanship, or as in the case of this article an "angry mob" or a "lynch mob."

I've never been a huge proponent of blogs, and I still cling to my assertion that most serve little purpose other than to allow the writers to post the most mundane observations and egotistical ramblings that seek to elevate their own self-worth. In this case, though, it seems that these bloggers are legitimately serving a purpose, that being to get stories reported either correctly or covered in the first place. The reason the "mainstream" media seems to feel the need to degrade bloggers as part of a fringe group or quacks with an ideological agenda is that they would, without any sense of pressure, drag out their own investigations and continue their noncoverage of "newsworthy" events because there would be no outside pressure to do so. Any group with newfound power is eager to exploit that fact, and bloggers are no different. This comes from a sense that perhaps the flickering flame of notoriety will be snuffed out before too long, so it better to "burn out than to fade away." Even so, it seems like an unjust response by the "mainstream" media to downgrade the efforts of bloggers who are basking in their newfound status as regulators on the plain. Off the cuff remarks, such as labeling bloggers as part of a "lynch mob" serve no purpose other than to accurately reflect how tenuous a grasp on matters "real" journalists have and betray their own lack of self-confidence in their ability to compete with the masses.

"The 1990s were great because suddenly lonely people had a place where they could all be lonely together while pretending to be fine on the outside. Well, that's what I do in coffee shops. My head may be cyclonic with desperation on the inside, but I've worked damn hard to ensure that I don't look the way I feel. I try to look as if I have a meaningful slot in society." pg. 68

"It has been said by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting." pg. 141

The above quotes appear in Douglas Coupland's latest uneven novel Eleanor Rigby. I've written about this previously, but the trend seems to be continuing, at least as far as Coupland's writing is concerned, of writers who can't seem to sustain a narrative that doesn't veer off into the outlandish and unbelievable. The book, which is a rather slim 249 pages, serves up an interesting premise at the start and an intriguing narrator, who voices the above observations. The main character, Liz Dunn, is set up as being someone whose life is filled to the brim with an overbearing sense of loneliness and isolation, and it's this quality that I truly related to and made the above quotes, especially the first one, seem very poignant. What happens, though, is that in this very short novel, Coupland hammers this point home beyond necessity. Very few pages go by without some mention of feeling neglected in some form or another. This does little to create a sense of sympathy towards the character. In fact, it works in the reverse affect; this bemoaning of the fact is nothing more than an antithesis to any narcissistic impulse that fuels the egos of the self-absorbed. So, in the end, one could care less about her being a lonely woman whose job is the only ritual in her life that seems to break up the monotonous aspects of consigned isolation.

To add further to the absurdity, the character, surprisingly or perhaps not so much so, has a lot of money. Being a lonely woman who has no need to spend money on herself or others affords her the opportunity to amass a small fortune. Why this grates on my nerves is that Coupland sets up a very believable character but has to add some aspect to her character that takes her out of the realm of believability into the arena of the stock novel character. It's troublesome to go through a novel and bond with a character so much because you can say, "Hey, I've felt exactly like that," only to have it thrown into the wind by some outlandish plot twists that distance you from the character more and more. I frequent coffeeshops, and I assume that this is an accurate portrayal of not only myself but of others who are there as well. Reading this, I was intrigued by the idea of a character who isn't good looking, is overweight, and a loner, but the fact that she's amassed a large fortune and has an absurdly romantic climax put the finishing touches to her life story all but effectively eliminates any sense of camaraderie. I wish writers would just dispense with the feel-good flourishes and just write about life as it is and how it truly flows.

More Blog Coverage and a New Cause
In my last post, I discussed the possibility that the mainstream media may have some sort of preternatural fear of blogs and blog writers. Since then, the coverage of blogs has expanded from the infrequent vanity piece to, what I would swear is, almost daily features addressing the phenomenon. Last time, I mentioned an article in The New York Times, and they've continued to churn out coverage of blogs with regards to various subjects. Now, Slate, which in and of itself is sort of a blog, has the following article reporting on a conference addressing the importance and impact of blogs.

The article serves little purpose other than to portray those who are advocates of the blog format as delusional, self-centered optimists who are misguided enough to believe their own grandiose propaganda about the format of blogs replacing old school media. Essentially, it advocates a less restrained outlook for the future of blogs, and strives to caution proponents that projecting too high a vision can lead to nothing more than a dismal downfall. In other words, the format can certainly provide a fresh direction for the media to go in, but they should be a tad more restrained in their cocky self elevating prophecies. The format will only go as far as those who are its biggest defenders are willing to keep their expectations modest and not too far flung.

......

Now for something really troubling.

Benedict always told me about different causes that required his attention. Naturally, being a pessimistic jerk, I figured he was spreading himself too thin and adopting absurd calls to action as his own personal crusade. However, now I'm taking a page out of his book.

In what amounts to a forced relocation or an outright shuttering of the proverbial shop doors, the city may be forcing out the street vendors who supply the University of Pittsburgh's students and staff with cheap, tasty, multi-ethnic food. The reason for this has to do with a plan to turn a parking lot into a grassy knoll. This parking lot being the very place where the vendors, literally, set up shop. Where does this leave the vendors? Without a place to put up their sign and open up for business, I'm afraid.

What's a man to do when the chicken teriyaki that he so loves is being threatened? Well, petitions are already out, but there has to be more. More support is needed. A grander effort has to be in the works I am hereby soliciting ideas on how to save the vendors from being pushed out of the parking lot. What can one man do in the face of overwhelming odds? Help me out here, people.

Blog Assassination
For all the attention blogs received in the past year and their inherent threat to the news conglomerates, is it any wonder that the mainstream media still isn't sure how to produce an evenhanded report examining any one aspect of them? Recently, blogs have again entered the national consciousness, as they did during the presidential campaign, with their dramatic reporting on the scene, call for donations for relief efforts, and hypothesizing on the causes of the devastating tsunami that is still dominating the headlines. However, as with most fanatical outlets, certain blogs have descended into what one could term the outer realms of conspiracy with partisan based attacks on the exact origins of the tsunami itself. The New York Times has an article in today's edition that "reports" on just this phenomenon.

To give the Times some credit they at least make an effort to balance out the critique with examples of how the process works for the best. The democratic, civilized manner, though, in which bloggers work in order to get the story right is a tad sentimental in its depiction, and one can sense that there's more than a little wild-eyed conspiracy mongering going on that doesn't get its full share of community-based editing. In other words, bloggers are depicted, at least in this article, as a tight-knit group that tries valiantly to make sure that they are taken seriously and that some few lone gunman don't ruin it for everybody. It's an odd form of socialist movement that's rarely seen anywhere else.

The mainstream media clearly still would like the bloggers to stay on the fringes. Fear of losing job security and missing the chance to break the big story because someone without press credentials breaks the story first seems to be the driving source of this subjectivity. What also troubles the media is that they have to hold up the democratic notion that everyone with the means to access the technology should be able to create a forum and add their voice to the masses already established, but this is at odds with their obvious fear that other people, again without press credentials, are sometimes doing the job better than they are. How can you reconcile that?