Stranger danger

I almost gave myself a heart attack tonight. I was leaving work late and made the mistake of letting my imagination run a little too free while I was walking across the dark, deserted alley to my car. Which meant when I accidentally set my car alarm off while pulling out my keys it scared me half to death.

I jumped pretty high, but I've definitely been scared worse. Once, when I was about 14, I was with some other girls from church delivering cookies to girls who hadn't come in a while when we decided to doorbell ditch and just leave the cookies on the porch. At the final house we made our way through the cluttered yard to the front door, rang the doorbell and scattered. I ended up crouched in the dark among the weeds that had grown up around an old van with painted-over windows, the kind that screamed, "My life's ambition is to kidnap someone," that was up on blocks in the yard. I was just thinking that if I saw that van on the road I definitely wouldn't take any candy from the driver, when all of the sudden the van window above my head flew open and I found myself staring up at a very angry man yelling at me to get out of his yard. I've never run so fast in my entire life.

I've also never been brave enough to look up "stranger danger" in the dictionary because I'm pretty sure I'd see this dude's picture staring up at me giving me nightmares all over again.

Normally I don't freak myself out when I'm walking to my car, though. I've outgrown the phase I went through when I was a very little girl, when my parents would put me to bed and come back later to find me crying over whatever the week's fear was. Everything made me scared, and I mean everything. My parents had to stop showing me the Shirley Temple movie collection they had just inherited because I was freaking out that my parents were going to die or get kidnapped like poor little Shirley Temple's always seemed to be doing so she could go on a proper adventure without them hovering.

They finally bought me a Little Mermaid night light in the hopes that it would provide some comfort, but they found me crying a few days later, keeping myself awake because I was worried if I fell asleep the light would overheat and catch the wooden dresser on fire.

Parents with kids as neurotic as I was back then, just know there's hope that they will turn out relatively normal.

After all, who would have thought that about 15 years later I would intern for the New York Daily News? On my first day on the job when I was filling out paperwork they literally asked me to write down my eye color and any identifying markings in case they ended up having to identify my body at the morgue.

I should have known then what I was getting myself into. My days on the job consisted of assignments like "Go to this super sketchy Bronx neighborhood where there was a gang shootout last night and ask the guys hanging around if they know anything." My nights weren't always any better. Once three friends and I ended up walking through a pretty bad part of Harlem at about 1:30 in the morning (the only explanation I can offer for this life choice is that at age 21 my brain wasn't fully developed yet). A few blocks into our walk we were accosted by a drunk guy who we were sure was going to mug us, but fortunately the only thing he demanded was Ben's secret to getting "three womans."

When I went back to school in the fall I immediately signed up for a women-only self defense class. I'm not sure how much I would actually remember if I got attacked, and my then-boyfriend complained people were going to think he was abusing me based on the bruise patterns I occasionally sported that semester, but it was a really fun class.

Too bad it's kind of hard to beat up a car alarm.

Humans are complicated

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a journalist, it’s that the world is a complicated place. And people don’t want it to be.

Too many people aren’t capable of grasping the fact that the world isn’t divided, Disney-style, into heroes and villains. Everyone falls in a different place on the spectrum, but the truth is that we’re all a mixture of good and bad. Every single one of us.

People don’t want to hear that, though. They want their journalism like they want their fiction, with a clear-cut good guy and bad guy they can in turns root for and revile. And so they get angry if we tell the truth: that the murder victim had a criminal record, that the rapist was a straight-A student, that the two people in a conflict were both partly right and partly wrong.

I get it, it’s uncomfortable. Nobody wants to hear that Paul Ropp, who was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison for shooting a police officer in both legs and killing a police dog last spring during a robbery in Portland, is a gifted pianist with a penchant for jazz who played keyboard in my brother’s band. That he has a family who loves him. And that his partner in crime Steve-O has a magnetic sense of humor that made him well-liked by a lot of good people before he got mixed up in some pretty bad stuff.

Because if that’s the case, then one of your friends could someday go to prison for committing a horrible crime. And nobody wants to contemplate that when they could be merrily tapping away on their keyboard suggesting the villain should be, in the words of one Oregonian commenter, shot by a firing squad and “left to bleed out and die on the street.”

It goes the other way, too. Nobody wants to hear that someone they admire has any flaws, or that someone with flaws might also do some good in the world. And so they jump on the bandwagon to tear down anyone who hasn’t managed to craft an image of perfection. Exhibit A: The guy who is (depending on who you ask) either a sexist pig helping keep women from science jobs, or a brilliant scientist who landed a spacecraft on a comet before being unfairly victimized by oversensitive feminists.

Why can’t he just be the guy who is a great scientist and also made an unfortunate choice to wear a shirt adorned with scantily-clad women on television? Neither action cancels out the other, although you wouldn’t think so by reading Twitter.

People want to shut the media up about this mixture of good and bad we see in the world. They want to make all victims’ flaws off limits and all perpetrators’ good qualities forbidden. They want all of their news served up in a flawlessly-crafted narrative that allows them to be Team Darrell Wilson or Team Michael Brown instead of Team “We’ll never know exactly what happened that day in Ferguson, but it’s probable that different actions on either person’s side could have prevented a tragedy.”

I once interviewed them family of a dead 20-year-old and the family of the friend who dealt him a fatal punch during a drunken fight. One family wanted a story about their angel baby boy being ruthlessly murdered. The other wanted a story about their son’s life being ruined by a harsh prison sentence after he defended himself against an alcoholic drug dealer flying into a dangerous rage. The truth, it seemed after talking to the DA and police, was somewhere in the middle.

That’s almost always the case, which is why picking one side or the other to craft a hero versus villain narrative doesn’t do anyone any good. People need the full story, not the stereotypes. If I ever have a daughter I want her to grow up knowing that a guy with a “promising football career” can be just as dangerous as a guy with a trench coat and no friends. Both types have made news this year for becoming everything from rapists to school shooters.

At the same time, I also want my future children to see the good in the world. I want them to understand that people who make mistakes are still valued human beings in God’s eyes. That people who go to prison sometimes change their lives for the better and make a positive contribution to the world once they get out again, that the fact that someone is homeless because they made poor choices doesn’t change the fact that at the moment they’re cold and hungry.

I want them to understand that everything is connected, and that as much as the politically correct hate anything that remotely seems like “victim blaming” the truth is things don’t always happen in a bubble.

And so I’ll continue to write that the crash victim wasn’t wearing their seatbelt when they died, that the homeowner’s house burned down because they left food on the stove unattended, that the car was stolen because someone left it unlocked, and that the coroner said the victim of the fight would still be alive if he hadn’t been drunk when he got punched in the head. Because my writing those things might make the next crash victim decide to put on their seatbelt, or the next potential car theft victim decide maybe they should lock their car after all.

Humanity is a beautiful, complex, confusing thing. I wish more people would remember that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I, Phone

This week I got a new phone.

I loved my trusty little red flip phone I've had since college, but I read an article about how flip phones are in vogue again for hipsters and celebrities looking to "declutter" and I couldn't bear the thought of anyone mistaking me for a hipster. Or Donald Trump.

Actually, the real reason is some of the calls and text messages people were sending me were disappearing enroute. I can only assume they were eaten by the same monster who likes to collect half my socks from the washing machine while it's running.

I thought about getting a new flip phone, but as smart phones get increasingly more advanced dumb phones have trouble receiving photos, group texts and emojis. (Why are they called emojis now instead of emoticons? Or are they two different things? This is why I didn't want to buy a smart phone until I was old enough to have grandkids to explain these things to me.)

After some research I decided upon the Nokia Lumia 635. It seemed like a good deal, and I already have Windows 8 on my laptop so I knew how to use it.

After bringing my new phone home I activated my new SIM card and turned on my phone, at which point Cortana, the Microsoft version of Siri, introduced herself and asked if she could "be of assistance."

She went on to explain that being of assistance meant using my "location, contacts, voice input, info from email and text messages, browser history, search history, calendar details and other info" to get to know me.

Apparently if it's your phone that does this instead of a real, live person it's called a "personal assistant" instead of "stalker" or "NSA employee."

After reading up on how Cortana would use this information to subsequently choose restaurants for me, present me with articles about my favorite sports team, tell me jokes or let me know I needed to leave early for my appointment because of traffic, I had visions of starring in a high-tech remake of Fatal Attraction and decided to turn Cortana off.

She stalked me anyway. The first time I started to type in a web address on my phone the suggestions that came up were things I had Googled on my laptop. Oddly specific things that there's no way were just general suggestions.

Why does this not freak anyone else out?

She also won't stop alerting me multiple times a day that my friends are having birthdays, no matter how many ways I try and tell her to stop. Just know Cortana really cares about your birthdays, guys.
Like to the point that I'm worried she will steal my credit card number and tell Amazon to send you a present in the name of personal-assistanting me.

Luckily my phone also does normal phone stuff too. I did learn how to make a phone call, although learning how to not call people accidentally by pushing random buttons has turned out to be a bit more of a challenge.

There are a lot of random buttons on my phone that I have no idea what they do. Considering how advanced smart phones have gotten, I'm a little afraid to try them for fear of what might happen. The button with the lightning bolt could have to do with my phone's power, or I could accidentally shock myself with a Taser app. You never know these days.

What I do know is that I don't like how big my phone is. I don't understand how this is progress. We made fun of phones that size from the nineties, remember? It was like "Ha ha look at how big your phone is compared to my Razr." And now those same people are like "Hey look my phone is almost as big as my tablet! It's so much cooler than yours."

Make up your mind, people.

My phone not fitting in my pocket is not cool, it's a huge inconvenience. Is it too much to ask the fashion industry to get with the times and give women smart phone sized pockets?

I suppose the answer is yes, considering I found out the other day the reason women's buttons are inconveniently located on the left side of their shirts is from the days when women all had servants to dress them and it was easier for the serving maids to button things from that side.

I'm supposed to buy a whole new wardrobe every season, but you can't make women's shirts for right-handed people after two hundred years?

But I digress.

Overall I like my phone, despite the fact that I am also slightly worried that one day it will go all "I, Robot" on me and try to kill me (or in this case: I, Phone. Ha ha.)

For now, however, I will enjoy my ability to check Facebook, read emails, look up directions, use Google to win arguments and listen to Pandora while out and about.

I'll have to order my tinfoil hat using a library computer, though. Cortana might not like it.

Points for style

Tonight Hermiston played The Dalles at football and won, 75 to 6. Considering it was 68 to 0 at halftime, I feel like the final score was actually a victory for The Dalles.

I didn't see the game in person, but I can only imagine that The Dalles' touchdown came after Hermiston had cycled through their second and third string players and started putting their middle school team in.

I mean, The Dalles wasn't quite that bad when I went to school there. Back when we were the Eagle Indians instead of the Riverhawks and had the added distraction of playing through the snorts of laughter every time the announcer said our name. My sophomore year we didn't win a single game, and when we finally won one my junior year, against a school that was also ... whatever the opposite of undefeated is ... defeated? ... you would have thought we had won the Super Bowl by the way everyone rushed the field.

And yet, high school being high school, it was us drama kids who were the "losers." Go figure.

Our softball team was state champions. So were our cheerleaders. All of our women's sports were pretty good, come to think of it. Maybe (and I am being about three quarters of the way serious here) The Dalles should consider an all-girls football team. Or at least putting the cheerleaders in when things get tough.

The cheerleaders could probably at least get style points, which if you've ever played volleyball at the church on Tuesday and Thursday nights, you will know are a very real thing. According to whichever team is losing.

Out of curiosity when I saw the halftime score I looked up the biggest loss margin in high school football history (I'm having one of those "I'm really single right now" Friday nights). According to Wikipedia, in 1926 in Kansas Haven High School beat Sylvia High School by a score of 256 to 0. So basically even if you get beat 100 to zilch, you're not even the best at losing. Let your opponents score anything under 100 and you're just a garden variety loser.

There is something to be said for not giving up, though. My brother got into BYU after he wrote a wryly self-deprecating application essay about the lessons he learned from joining the golf team and finding out he wasn't so great at golf under pressure (He once told me he joined the tennis team to get away from the "stress and pressures of golf").

Somebody ought to be able to parlay this game into a Harvard acceptance then. Surely continuing to play in the face of a 75-0 deficit on the road is worth more life experience points than your parents paying for you to spend three days in Africa building orphanages so that the "tutor" they paid to write your entrance essay for you can testify that you have, indeed, seen for yourself that poor people exist.

After all, I turned it into a pretty good blog post, right?

Football and chocolate

Last weekend when I was in Utah I spent a couple of hours at Dairy Queen with a former roommate who still lives in the area. We caught up, spent some time gossiping about what all our friends are up to (answer: having babies) and then spent some time reminiscing about our year together in good old Apartment 10.

It was at that point that we realized we couldn't remember one of our roommate's names. She moved in about three months before the end of the year and basically only came home to sleep. But still. We lived with this girl. Three years ago we were brushing our teeth at the same sink and today I don't think I would even recognize her if I saw her walking down the street.

That's not how roommates are supposed to be. Roommates are supposed to be like the one I saw this weekend, who told me that she recently ran into a guy who had mistreated me and gave him the cold shoulder.

"I can't really remember why I'm supposed to be mad at him, but I know you were upset about it," she said. "So I ignored him for you."

That's the girl code.

I would have done the same for her if I ran into that two-timing what's-his-name from her past. That's how it works. I may have been constantly exasperated by another roommate's messy ways, but the night she came home in tears because her boyfriend had been a jerk about it when he dumped her, I handed her a fork and we ate half a pan of brownies straight from the pan and talked about how she deserved better anyway.

On the flip side, we were also there for each other in the good times, giving the proper squeals of delight when our roommate paid up with M&Ms when she finally held hands with her crush and spending half an hour analyzing the meaning behind punctuation he used in their last text conversation. It usually went something like this:

"He didn't put a smiley face at the end."
"Yeah but he didn't put a period, either, so that's a good sign."
"I guess."
"He doesn't really seem like the emoticon type, so it's probably nothing."
"Are you sure? Maybe it's his way of putting me back in the friend zone."
"Has he ever used a smiley face in a text to you before?"
"The other day he used a winky face."
"Wait, a winky face? Was it a sarcastic one?"
"I don't think so."
"Well then what are you worried about?! If he used a winky face he's def into you."

Somehow I don't think guys usually have conversations like that. I'm pretty sure theirs go more like this:

"Dude how come I never see Marissa anymore?"
"I asked her to marry her and she dumped me instead."
"Well that sucks. Do you think the Seahawks are going to win this weekend?"
"Against the Packers? For sure."

This is why it is important to keep in mind the gender of your friends before choosing a topic of conversation. Although when I went through a breakup while living at home it was my brothers who came home with ice cream, candy and a stack of movies that night, while my female best friends responded by mailing me a BYU football T-shirt.

I guess whatever your gender, football and chocolate are the answer to all of life's problems.

Every comment section ever written

Flock of ducks making home in city park

View comments...
Bob: Oh great is Obama mandating all cities buy ducks now? Him and his %&#$ regulations.
Dave: You don't like Obama because you're a racist.
Bob: Am not.
Dave: Are too.
Bob: Am not.
John: Are too.
Elmer: You libtards, always playing the race card.
Mike: Oh I suppose Faux News told you to say that?
Janet: Hi friends, I make $5000 a month working from home. Click on www.thisisdefinitelynotavirus.com to find out how you can too.
Dave: Hey you racist, I see on your Facebook profile in 2007 you posted a picture of yourself holding a gun that proves my point you're a Tea Party wingnut.
Bob: Here's a Wikipedia article about ducks that says Obama loves them. Pay no attention to the fact that the editor who just put that in has the same user name as me.
Sasha: The author of this article shouldn't have referred to the duck as a she. It promotes rape culture to assume any animals without fangs are female.
Elmer: Stay out of this, fem-Nazi.
Lisa: Why is the city using my tax dollars to pay for ducks? It's such a waist.
Karen: They're not, idiot. Read the story. Also it's waste.
Jordan: Hey author of the story, you said there are ducks living in the pond in city park but I was there three months ago and didn't see any so obviously you're wrong. A real "journalist" would actually do some research.
Joe: Blame the illegals, its all there fault.
Annie: You mean *it's and *their. I can't take you seriously when you clearly dropped out of elementary school.
Elmer: School is for sheeple. All the teachers are libtards.
Dave: And you're a racist.
Bob: Am not.
Mike: Are too.
Bob: Am not.
John: Are too.
View 197 more comments....

Unhappy camper

This weekend I took a last-minute, very quick trip to Utah to see my new nephew. (For all my Utah friends, my apologies for not having time to look you up. I'm planning to come back for Labor Day). Because we only had three days off, my parents and I thought we would leave after work on Friday and spend the night in Ontario, thus cutting off almost four hours of the next day's drive.

Since we were getting to Ontario around midnight and leaving before dawn the next morning, we thought, why spend the money on a hotel room when we could just pull up to a campsite and throw a few sleeping bags on a tarp?

I'll tell you why.

It was dark when we got to Ontario. Guided by our trusty GPS Yoda ("In five hundred feet, turn left you must") we made our way through the city and onto a dark country road. The darkness shrouded everything we wanted to see, like where the heck the campground was, but our headlights did manage to illuminate a rather large snake lying across the road. It was at that point Dad informed Mom and I that he would be sleeping in the middle.

It was also at this point that Mom revealed that most of the online reviews of our campground gave it one star. She was unconcerned, however, because some people had also given it five stars. We explained to her that if there was a flowchart for rating the campground it would look like this: Do you or a relative own this establishment? Yes --> Five stars. No --> One star.

When Yoda told us we had arrived we found ourselves staring at an empty field. We drove around a bit and soon found a sign with the word "campground" on it, near a mobile home with a large front yard.

"This must be it," Mom said.

"This is someone's home," we replied.

"No, no, I talked to the lady who runs it on her property and she said there's just kind of a random grassy area to pitch tents," Mom said. "I'm sure we're just supposed to sleep on this grass here."

We almost did just that, but once we began to look around for a bathroom, we eventually realized there was a narrow gravel road next to the campground sign, which you were supposed to drive down to get to the actual campground.

We came this close to sleeping in a stranger's front yard. That would have been great. "Don't mind us, we just got tired of driving and decided to lay down on your lawn for a few hours. Here, we got your paper for you."

When we finally arrived at the actual campground we were confronted by a lot of trailers.

"This looks like a trailer park," Dad said.

"Oh yes, I think you can rent these spaces by the month," Mom said.

"Why are we driving past a mountain of old tires and broken furniture?" I asked.

"I seem to remember the website mentioned it was next to a junkyard," Mom said. "But somebody gave it five stars, remember?"

Right.

We finally found a grassy spot between some trailers that had a tent pitched on it. Since seeing the snake Dad was having second thoughts about the no tent thing. I tried to reassure him that the short, sparse grass we were sleeping on wouldn't be appealing to wildlife, but my argument was undermined by the appearance of a baseball-sized frog.

That was a really cool frog.

After putting down some sleeping bags we found the bathrooms, which Mr. Five Stars had said were clean. If that's his definition of clean, I'd hate to see what he considers dirty.

Finally, we were ready to go to bed. We skipped the tent, preferring to enjoy the light breeze and fit in a few extra minutes of sleep. In theory, it was a good idea. In practice, mosquitos.

So many mosquitos.

At some point during the night someone threw a sheet over me, but it was too late. I had already slept soundly through the mosquito buffet. I awoke at 5 a.m. by an intense itching sensation that spread from my ankles to my face, a testament to my night as a blood donor via a hundred tiny, venomous needles that pierced everywhere from my knee to my eyelid, causing them to swell rapidly.

I felt like I had chicken pox. I looked like Quasimodo. Not cool.

When I sat up I realized that the light coming up revealed a swamp on the other side of the road, which explained the mosquitos and the frog. Dad was now sleeping in the car. I stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the water in the shower and was immediately greeting by a horrible sulfurous stench coming up through the drain. I rinsed off in the cold water anyway in an attempt to stop the itching (it didn't work). We got out of there quickly after that.

Normally, I love camping. But I don't think I'll be doing it without a tent again. It may be a great way to become one with nature, but it turns out nature includes swarms of tiny flying vampires.