New York, Part I

In the summer of 2010, I flew to New York City for an internship with the New York Daily News. While it was the shortest chapter of my journalism career — just seven weeks — it will be featured in multiple posts here, because a lot went on in those seven weeks.

The New York internship was not easy. Most of the other Daily News interns were native New Yorkers, but to me, the city might as well have been a foreign country. My total lack of knowledge of everything from NYC neighborhoods to how to hail a taxi often put me at a real disadvantage when I was expected to race around the city chasing stories and beating out seasoned reporters from news outlets that sometimes included the likes of the New York Times. 

The most important news outlet to beat was the New York Post. The Post and the News have a storied rivalry — the stuff of journalism legend. Every reporter, photographer and intern alike knew that with anything they turned in, their haul would be compared side by side with the Post's coverage the next day, and they would have to account for their failure on every single detail that ended up in the Post but not the News. 

I got chewed out on many occasions for not finding the same person in a crowd of bystanders that a Post reporter did. I remember one day the main assignment editor I reported to coming over to the table where I was working alongside a handful of other interns and junior reporters, grabbing the end of it, and saying he wished he could push the whole table and all of us with it out the window and into the Hudson because of how useless we had been to him that day.

This sort of thing generally led to two different responses in Post and News journalists: some resorted to subterfuge of all kinds to outwit their rival on a story, while others banded together behind their editors' backs to level the playing field. 

This played out most obviously in stakeouts. Sometimes I ended up outside a building with a News photog and a duo from the Post for hours on end, either waiting for someone to come home or waiting for them to come out of their apartment so we could shout questions at them and take their picture. (That sort of behavior was something I absolutely hated, am not proud of, and once I was done with that internship and had a little more control over how I handled stories, never did again).

Sometimes the News photog I was paired with for the day would warn me not to take my eyes off the other team for a second, but often we would all chat amiably throughout the day, and I learned a lot from those conversations. When we trusted each other, we took care of logistics like bathroom breaks by agreeing the four of us would all leave the scene together to hit the bathroom and grab some lunch from the nearest bodega. If we all stuck together during the break, then if the target of our stakeout came in or out of the building while we were gone, no one would be the wiser, and none of us would get yelled at for missing anything that the other paper got. And if our editors wouldn't give permission to leave the scene unless the other paper's team left first, well, the solution there (providing you trusted the other team not to double back) was for both sides to tell their editors at the same time that the other one was just leaving.

(Sidebar: There was one other BYU intern at the News, and she was from Canada. One day she got stuck at a stakeout for longer than necessary because when she called to check in with our editor and he asked if the Post was there, her mind jumped to the recent arrival of the mail carrier to deliver the mail, which in Canada is known as the post, and told him yes, the post had arrived.)

One of my favorite moments of collaboration came with a Post reporter who I had been through a few stakeouts with. We both showed up at a large office building one day, following the same tip that an FBI raid was about to take place. Following a fruitful off-the-record conversation with a guy loitering outside in a polo shirt and buzz cut, we plunked ourselves down across the street and watched as a collection of vans pulled up a short while later and people filed inside, returning a few minutes later with armfuls of computers and boxes.

Afterward, the other reporter and I were both told by our respective editors to stick around and see if we could catch any of the neighbors of the (alleged) mass scammers who were raided and ask what they had seen. As was often the case in New York, the doorman would not let us inside. But eventually the doorman had to leave his post momentarily to help someone carry something, and the Post reporter and I slipped inside. We searched the building, trying to look like we belonged there, until we located the raided office and had an excellent interview with the secretary for the neighboring office that yielded all sorts of colorful quotes about how they seemed shady and "dressed like gangsters."

I did, on occasion, get something the Post didn't get. One of my most triumphant moments came thanks to an appearance by Justin Bieber on the Today show.

This was at the height of Bieber fever, and there was a line of preteen girls a mile long waiting for the chance to catch a glimpse of the teen idol leaving the NBC studios on Rockefeller Plaza after the show. Many had spent the night on the sidewalk. When I called to check in with the assignment editor on the morning of the big appearance, he told me to get down there and interview a few of the girls in line about what they loved about Justin Bieber for a fluff piece about his visit to New York.

I showed up to find a couple of other news outlets had the same idea, and watched as they interviewed a handful of girls and then left. As I studied the line to see which girls might give the best quotes, it occurred to me that the girl at the very front of the line would have waited there the longest and were therefore arguably his biggest fans.

When I talked to the pair of 14-year-old girls at the head of the line, I struck gold. They had, as many girls had, spent the night before sleeping on the sidewalk. However, unlike all of the other girls, they had also spent the night before that sleeping out there — all alone. One girl's grandmother had brought them into the city, but was too old to sleep on a pool floatie on the sidewalk for two nights, and so had checked into a hotel and had let them sleep on the street all by themselves on the first night, until more girls showed up the next day.

We got a photographer down there, I convinced the girls to convince the grandmother to come down and do an interview, and the News played the story up big on social media, with polls about whether she was the worst grandmother ever or best grandmother ever, sparking major comment wars online. It was the one time the main assignment editor I worked under all summer ever complimented me on a story (technically, he ended up in the elevator with another intern who later told me he said "I should have told Jade she did a good job with the Bieber story today" but coming from the same guy that threatened to throw us into the Hudson, it was rare praise nonetheless).

I did not get to see Justin Bieber that day, but the two finalists from that year's American Idol did drive by in a limo and wave to the girls in line, much to their delight. 

It was one of many minor brushes with celebrities I had that summer. Once, I interviewed a Pussycat Doll and some of the wolves from Twilight (minus Taylor Lautner) when they were judges for a contest to sing the national anthem at the U.S. Open. Another time, my editor sent me to Spike Lee's townhouse to ask him a question about the Boston Celtics. The famed director, unfortunately, was not home, but his wife took a note from me asking him to call my editor, and he did call. 

I ended up helping cover the funeral of Lena Horne, as well. Another News reporter did most of the coverage, but after the service I followed a scrum of other reporters around outside, jotting down notes as others asked questions of talented legends like Dionne Warwick, Chita Rivera and Diahann Carroll.

The New York internship had its ups and downs, for sure. There were some bad moments (more on that later) but I don't regret doing it. I had a lot of interesting experiences and learned a lot of things from that internship, including the importance of always looking for the thing that's going to make your story stand out from the rest of the field.

My first paid journalism job

 

My first ever paid journalism job came my junior year of college, as a metro editor for the Daily Universe.

As these were part-time student positions supervising dozens of first-semester journalism and public relations students, we had 10 total student editor positions. I was one of two metro editors, meaning I supervised the reporters who were covering off-campus news, such as Provo city council meetings, alongside an editor named Courtney.

Although Courtney and I sat very close to each other, we often resorted to communicating over whatever Google’s version of chat was at the time so that we weren’t overheard by the reporters. This is because we only had a limited amount of space on the metro page every day, and we had to balance quality control with letting everyone get their byline in the print version at some point. Let’s just say some of our reporters were better than others.

(Some of them weren’t reporters at all, but public relations majors who were forced to take the class in an attempt to help them understand how journalism works so they didn’t become terribly useless PR flaks who don’t understand that if the paper is printed at 5 p.m. you can’t give me the information at 5:15 and be surprised it didn’t make it in. This should not take a college degree to figure out, but in some cases, apparently, even a college degree doesn’t help).

Many of our reporters were enthusiastic go-getters, however. I remember once we heard a report of a fire over the scanner but didn’t catch the location, and one intrepid reporter offered to go ride out to the smoke plume on her bike. This was both her and my first lesson in an important principle of local journalism, which is that plumes of smoke are almost always miles farther away than they appear. She never did make it all the way out there.

Overall, I loved the job. Newsrooms are usually fun, exciting places full of intelligent people who are the same kind of nerdy as I am.  I had awesome coworkers, including not only the student editors but the four faculty members who supervised the newsroom and were everything I could ask for in a mentor. We had spirited debates about the State of the Union address, rehashed BYU basketball wins, joked about anything and everything, and celebrated every possible holiday, from National Pancake Day to National Cardigan Day.

We also experienced some of the downsides of any newsroom, including hate mail from readers and anger from the subjects of our stories. For my friends who aren’t a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s a little hard to explain the certain flavor that early hate mail often took, but that explanation should probably start with the old joke that Catholics say their pope is infallible but don’t believe it, and members of our church say their prophet is fallible but don’t believe it.

I can’t speak to the Catholic side, but what I can speak to is that members of the church, including students at BYU, tend to have widely different ideas of what it really means when church doctrine states that, on the one hand, prophets and apostles continue to lead Jesus Christ’s church today as they did in Biblical times, passing messages from God to His children specific to their day. But on the other hand, the only perfect person to walk the Earth was Jesus Christ and therefore church leaders are flawed human beings who sometimes make mistakes.

A certain small but vocal segment of the BYU population seemed to forget the latter, and instead decided that since BYU was a church-owned school, everything that happened there was based on divine inspiration.

When we reported that people were getting undeserved parking tickets because the parking department’s new automatic license plate readers had trouble distinguishing between the letter B and the number 8, people in our newsroom generally felt that choosing a faulty brand of license plate reader was a simple mistake by some random person in Parking Services that needed fixing and not an essential part of God’s plan. But to some of the True Believers, this was the Lord’s university, and therefore any criticism of it was a sacrilegious attack on the Lord’s church and His chosen leaders.

Most of the Daily Universe editors were part of an advanced reporting class taught by Professor John Hughes, a former White House correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner and my favorite professor at BYU. Under his expert guidance we turned out all sorts of excellent investigative reporting, from a look at the budget of the student association (spoiler alert: the student leaders spent what some would call an unreasonably large amount of money on themselves) to a data analysis showing that housing prices at BYU-approved off-campus housing were rising faster than prices outside “the bubble.”

My favorite story that I worked on was one I wrote in partnership with a student named Danny, about academic cheating at BYU. We had a lot of good interviews discussing how sometimes professors at BYU were a little too trusting that BYU students were honest people, but Danny found the crown jewel of the piece, which started this way:

The paper is days overdue. It was on her to-do list, but got relegated to the back of her mind as other assignments came and went. She still hasn’t written it, and there’s no hope of turning it in on time now. Worth 15 percent of her grade, this paper could mean a letter grade difference in the course and a several decimal point change in her GPA.

But Heather isn’t worried. The 20-year-old from Kennewick, Wash. knows the professor can be absent-minded. She knows he will e-mail her later in the semester, informing her he’s missing her grade on that particular assignment. When that e-mail comes, she will be ready with her completed paper and a prepared response. “That’s strange,” she’ll say. “Here it is again.”

The original article included Heather's last name, but after some thought I took it out here, to be nice, since this is a personal blog not a newspaper, it happened when she was 12 years younger it's not essential for this story. You may think it is unbelievable that a student would agree to go on the record using her full name to describe such a strategy, but one thing I learned in journalism is that you should never assume someone won’t be willing to go on the record if you tell them that you aren’t willing to quote them without their full name.

This is one criticism I have of the national media. Journalists working for major publications have gotten far too lax about letting people stay anonymous over literally anything.

Now, I’m not saying anonymous sources don’t have their place. In my 10-year journalism career I can count on one hand the number of times I quoted a source without using their full first and last name, and all but one of those times was to protect a child. In one case in Hermiston, for example, I reported on the story of a seven-year-old accidentally shooting his two-year-old brother with a gun he found unsecured in under the front seat of his mother's care when she ran into the house to grab something after buckling up the kids. The toddler survived after brain surgery. The family agreed to an interview about the deep regret they felt about not keeping firearms locked in a safe at all times in a household with young children, in the hopes that other families would learn from their mistake, but requested their names be withheld for the sake of the seven-year-old’s future, and my editor and I agreed.

On a national level, again, there are times when using anonymous whistleblowers is reasonable to gain information vital to our nation that can’t be obtained any other way. Nixon would have never resigned without Deep Throat. But these days reporters for national media will use an anonymous source to say, “Someone says the president will announce this thing one hour from now” or other similarly trivial things that aren’t worth the way such wanton use of anonymity hurts trust in the media. The political machine in DC is allowed to get away with far too much off the record, leveraging journalists against their political opponents with no accountability. This country would be better off if papers like the Washington Post and New York Times joined together to take the same hard line on anonymous sources as journalists for local newspapers across the country who frequently tell people, “if you’re not willing to own what you’re telling me I’m not willing to write it” and often get told in return, “Alright, you can use my name, then.”

Sorry but "My golf buddies might say something disapproving" is not a valid reason to stay off the record.

Back to the Daily Universe … In addition to sometimes angering students, our investigative reporting also angered certain members of the BYU administration, who felt it was our role as a BYU-sponsored publication to focus on things that reflected positively on BYU.

Tensions between our staff and the administration escalated throughout that final semester of 2010, with professors and faculty picking sides. I learned a lot that semester about navigating office politics and navigating the line between being assertive and being insubordinate (although occasionally I channeled my frustration into being passive-aggressive instead, like when a certain professor would copy all the other professors on his emails back and forth with me show everyone how well he was handling the situation, and I would hit “reply” instead of “reply all” every time so he would have to keep looping everyone back in).

There is a lot that could be said here, but parts of it don’t feel like my story to tell, so all I’ll stick to saying that the Daily Universe staff back then were good people trying their hardest to honorably navigate the complicated balance between journalism ethics and reporting on their own school and religion, despite accusations from outside the journalism department to the contrary. We went through the wringer a bit that semester, and by the end of it I had decided that while I still loved journalism and I still loved the church, once I graduated I was moving away from Utah so I could report free from the sleepless nights that sometimes came from trying to be an objective journalist in a state where your own religion is mixed up in everything.

 As my junior year came to a close, I had a new adventure to look forward to. Every year BYU sent somewhere in the ballpark of 30 communications students to New York City for summer internships, and after initially being waitlisted, I received the news several of my fellow editors had also received: I was going to New York.

My First Internship

 

I did two internships during my time at BYU, and the first was an unpaid summer internship for my hometown newspaper, The Dalles Chronicle.

I grew up reading the Chronicle, and it shaped my idea of local journalism before I headed off to college. I had also been featured in the Chronicle a few times in high school – once, I was quoted as a student representative on a committee advising the school board; another time, I appeared in a front page photo as Cinderella’s stepmother in the spring musical. So getting my byline in that particular paper was satisfying.

Everyone at the Chronicle was significantly older than me, but the two full-time general assignment reporters, both near retirement age, were gracious in taking me under their wing. The sum total of my journalism experience thus far was a single semester at a student publication, but once I proved my worth my editor trusted me to go off and report on all sorts of stories.

I filled in for the sports reporter while he went on vacation, and while there were no high school games to cover, I filled the sports page for the week with features on off-beat “sports” like dirt biking and fly fishing. I covered various local summer events, and wrote a column defending my decision to go into journalism even though people kept telling me print was dead. One of my favorite stories I did that summer was a long Sunday feature on a tattoo artist, talking about her journey to sobriety from drugs.

During my internship I confronted one of the weaknesses that many journalists of my generation face: I really hated talking on the phone. The idea of picking up the phone and cold-calling a stranger was about as daunting as walking into an interview in my underwear.

At the Daily Universe, I had almost always been able to avoid this by using the university directory to email professors to set up an interview and then interviewing them in person. But in the real world in 2009, most businesses didn’t have a website listing all their staff email addresses, Facebook was for college students, and texting was for people who could afford to pay 10 cents a text.

I don’t know if it was more a Millennial thing or a McDowell thing. My mom and my aunt once bonded over laughing hysterically at stories of the lengths their husbands went to avoid picking up a phone. Why call the number in the window of the car you are really interested in buying, when you can just drive by it every day in the hopes that the owner will be standing there?

Either way, I had to really psyche myself up every time I made a phone call. I would literally write down a script for introducing myself and study it, rehearsing the words in my head, taking a few deep breaths and then saying to myself, “Actually, maybe I’ll do this other thing and call later.” Every time I got an answering machine, I breathed a sigh of relief.

They weren’t even hard calls, unlike later in my career, when I would have to call people to ask questions like, “Did you commit this crime you’re accused of?” or “Why did you get fired?” You would think people would yell at you or hang up on you when you told them you were going to write in the paper that they were being charged with a crime, but surprisingly, those conversations were sometimes downright pleasant. A man accused of defrauding people by collecting “investments” in creation of a biofuels plant and then allegedly spending all that money on himself, for example, cheerfully told me he would be happy to invite me to the groundbreaking when it was ready to take place.

On the other hand, sometimes the most innocuous-seeming stories you didn’t think twice about will get you yelled at. I once covered a 5k event on Thanksgiving, for example, and when I arrived I asked who was in charge and interviewed the woman who was pointed out, referring to her as “Organizer so-and-so” in the story that also featured quotes from several runners and information about the charity the event was benefitting. Later a different woman called, irate, and asked how I could be so incompetent to give someone else credit for the event that she organized. No “thank you for missing out on family time to work Thanksgiving Day to give some positive coverage of our event,” just complaints.

Anyway, I took the first step in getting over my phone phobia with my internship at the Chronicle, and survived. I couldn’t afford to spend the entire summer there, because college is expensive, but I did spend eight weeks of my four-month summer break there and then spent the next couple of months working 60-hour weeks to make up for it.

I had assumed I would be heading into my first paid journalism job in the fall, after faculty at the Daily Universe told me I did a great job as a reporter there and I should apply for a paid editor position when I came back. However, they ended up deciding to hire students who were closer to graduation and hadn’t had the opportunity for that experience yet.

This resulted in the only period of unemployment in my adult life. It was in 2009, when the recession was still going strong, and there was more supply than demand when it came to student labor. Everywhere I went that fall semester, I’d hand over my job application only to see it placed on an inch-thick stack of applications already submitted. I’d like to say that I used that extra 20 hours a week wisely, but to be honest, my grades weren’t any better, I just spent more time socializing and actually had time to watch TV for once.

I applied for the Daily Universe again as the fall semester came to a close, and at first I was once again told that there were seniors who needed the experience more than I did. But over Christmas break, I caught a lucky break: One of the girls hired had changed her mind about working there, and I was asked to take her place.

I was ready.

The Story of How I Became a Journalist

 

The first news article I ever published was in a newspaper that my brother Lance and I created. The Family News only published a single edition, created solely for the purpose of mocking my father, who had sprained his ankle by stepping on a walnut. For some reason this was very funny to us, and we let our bias on the matter show by including the line, “People say Rodney will be participating in physical therapy, which is funny because he’s a therapist too.”

Other than the front page news, titled “The Walnut Catastrophe,” the edition included an article about how our youngest brother Cole was sick that week and a tongue-in-cheek advice column in which I recommended a fictious sister frustrated by her younger brothers call Poison Control to find a suitable poison for getting rid of them

(I don’t know exactly how old I was when this took place, maybe 12? Old enough I should have had a better understanding of the purpose of Poison Control, since by then I’m pretty sure my parents had called Poison Control three times, once for each of my brothers.)

At that point, I didn’t know yet that I was going to make a career out of journalism. When I was a kid with a voracious appetite for books I said I was going to be an author, and then when I got old enough to understand how many bills adults have I went through a phase where I said I wanted to be an English teacher, because that seemed safer. During my junior year of high school, I took AP English Language, and we started off each class period reading news columns by people like George Will and Gail Collins, and I decided that being a columnist sounded like the perfect marriage of two of my great loves: Writing and telling people my opinions.

I took a journalism class my senior year, and my teacher, who went by Ms. Jennings at the time, was pretty cool.

Once, I was persuaded to skip her class by some friends who had a free period that period and wanted to hang out. It seemed like a fine idea at the time, until a few hours later when I found myself at parent-teacher conferences and realized that:

1)     My locker was next to Ms. Jennings’ room and she was sure to have noticed that I was at school that day but never quite made it to her class.

2)     This seemed sure to come up when my parents arrived at her room.

3)     My parents at this point had no idea that I occasionally did not quite make it to a class I was supposed to be attending and I wasn’t quite sure exactly how mad they would be about it.

As we made the rounds to the teachers Lance and I had, I caught a lucky break when the rest of the family was caught up by someone in the hallway and I entered Ms. Jennings’ classroom alone, looking, no doubt, incredibly guilty.

She looked at me knowingly, and said lightly, “I noticed you didn’t make it to class today. I figured after all the hard work you’ve been putting in lately you had earned a mental health day. Just know you’ve used your one for the semester.”

She did not mention anything to my parents, and out of gratitude I worked harder than ever before in her class and attended all my classes faithfully for the rest of the semester.

At the end of that class I had made up my mind that journalism did seem like something that might be a good fit, and so I signed up for some journalism prerequisites when I headed off to BYU.

Those journalism prereqs were kind of boring, to be honest. Classes about the basics of AP style really fail to capture the excitement of journalism. But I didn’t have any better ideas, so I applied for the program and was accepted.

I don’t know if this is how they still do it, but back then they throw you right into the fire your first semester in the program by making you a reporter for the school newspaper, at the time known as the Daily Universe (may it rest in peace). You were assigned a beat and spent about a million hours in the newsroom for four credits.

I was assigned the science beat, which was kind of funny considering I’m pretty sure the only reason I got a 4 on my AP Biology test in high school is that even though I couldn’t remember how the processes I was supposed to be describing on the essay portion actually worked, I had read that the judges just looked for vocabulary to check off, so I filled the essay with sentences that said things like, “Mitochondria are also involved.”

My very first story published in a newspaper printed on actual newsprint was a story about nematodes, which is a fancy way of saying I talked to a professor about his research on worms in Antarctica. It was not a very exciting story, but my parents sent me flowers congratulating me anyway, and every time I saw a student reading the paper on campus my head swelled with pride at the thought that SOMEONE IS READING SOMETHING I WROTE, even though in reality they were probably turned to the sports section.

I don’t actually remember a whole lot of other stories I wrote that semester, but a few stick out. One was a series of stories for the 200^th birthday of Charles Darwin, in which I interviewed biology professors who were all very, very big fans of Darwin. Another was a story about 2009 being the Year of Astronomy thanks to the 400^th anniversary of Galileo, in which I interviewed astronomy professors who were all very big fans of Galileo. All in all, it was a good year to be a science reporter.

The other was an interview with a professor who was studying rhinoviruses, and it’s ironic that the things that were groundbreaking to me in the interview, like the concept that people could have an asymptomatic viral respiratory infection they passed on to others unknowingly, are things that more than a decade later I would be reporting on again, this time to much more controversy.

The straw that broke the camel's back

This week I got catcalled.

A (young, female) co-worker and I were walking back from lunch downtown together because we didn't want to drive on the ice, when a group of men in a van slowed down, pulled up next to us and yelled things at us out the window.

On its face, it wasn't really a big deal. Not the first time something like that had happened to either of us, and it certainly won't be the last. But if I had been alone, if it had been getting dark or on a less busy road, I would have been thinking about how if the men, just feet away from me, jumped out and pulled me into the van there wouldn't really be anything I could do about it.

You have to think like that when you're a woman, because from the time you hit puberty society tells you don't go out alone at night or you'll get raped. Don't drink alcohol or you'll get raped. Don't leave your soda unattended or you'll get raped. Don't be alone with men you just met or you'll get raped. Don't wear tight clothes or you'll get raped. Don't stay in a hotel alone or you'll get raped. Don't run with headphones in or you'll get raped. Don't park in parking garages or you'll get raped. Don't wear your hair in a ponytail because that makes it easier for a rapist to grab you and drag you into an alley.

It's hard not to let that color everything you do, to sit and wonder if the man on the other end of the phone you've never met will be offended if you ask him to meet you in a public place for the interview instead of his home as he just suggested. You know that probably nothing will happen if you break these "rules" for not getting raped or otherwise assaulted, but you also know that if something does happen everyone will tsk tsk and say "Well what was she thinking, going for a walk by herself at 11 at night? And in that tight of jeans?"

I personally know people who have been raped. I know women who have been stalked, who have been abused. These things really happen. And you know that if they do, the police might say there's not enough evidence to make an arrest, or the jury might not believe you, or the judge might only sentence your attacker to a few months in jail or even just probation because he doesn't want to ruin a young man's sports career or the middle school girl "came onto" her teacher and he's the real victim for having his reputation ruined.

Sometimes, men don't have to yell dirty, suggestive things at you to make you feel small. Sometimes it's the "harmless old men" who "don't know any better" than to treat the men around you with a certain level of professionalism while at the same time calling you "honey" and "sweetheart" and asking why you aren't married yet instead of answering the interview questions. There's a man who sometimes comes into the newsroom to drop off literature about how women's place is in the home, serving her man, and to chastise our almost-all-female office for having jobs.

This is an actual conversation I had a couple of months ago with a customer who came in to complain he hadn't gotten a newspaper delivered that day:

Me: Here's your paper, sorry you had to come in and get it.
Him: That's OK, it got me out of some housework. I hate housework.
Me: Haha I hate housework too.
Him: Imagine that, a woman who hates housework!
Me: ...
Him: Are you single?
Me: Yes
Him: Maybe that's why.

I didn't tell him to mind his own business because I wouldn't want to lose the company a customer. Most women don't say anything when men make them feel uncomfortable. If you "make a big deal" out of someone being sexist or sexually harassing you, you know you'll probably get labelled an uptight harpy or "Feminazi" or special snowflake or skank who was asking for it or gold-digger looking for an excuse to sue.

Sometimes it's not the personal conversations, it's the whole system that is troubling. Did you know that the government didn't require female-sized crash test dummies to be included in vehicle safety tests until 2011? Before then most automakers only ran tests using dummies that were the size and shape of a man, until eventually someone thought that maybe the reason women were 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured or killed in the same type of crash as a man is because seatbelts and airbags were all designed for someone taller and heavier. Or did you know that in 2014 the National Institute of Health had to tell drug companies and medical researchers to stop using only male animals and men in most of their trials, because that habit might have something to do with the fact that women experience much higher rates of adverse reactions to medication than men?

The idea of a "pay gap" for women and men is more complicated than both sides like to claim, but I do know that all of my brothers went to college with more money in the bank than me in part because before I was old enough for a "real job" people at church only wanted to hire me to babysit five kids for $5 an hour, while they would pay my brothers $20 to spend 45 minutes mowing their lawn. And I know that pay ratio continues into adulthood for unskilled workers who are in female-dominated "pink-collar" jobs like home health aids versus male-dominated "blue-collar" jobs like construction. Even though I'm pretty sure a lot of people would rather install windows than clean up bodily fluids all day.

These types of things have always bothered me. They've always bothered lots of women, sometimes from the time they sat in history class in high school and went days without hearing a woman's name mentioned once. But listening to the future president of the United States brag that one of the perks of fame is being able to grab women by the genitals and get away with it, and hearing about the radio interview where he bragged that the best part of owning a beauty pageant was being able to walk in unannounced on the contestants while they were changing into their bikinis and they wouldn't feel like they could complain  ... and *people decided he still deserved to be the most powerful person on the planet anyway* ... that was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of women.

I listened to men -- not just distant strangers on the television but also my friends -- defend him by saying that he hires women so therefore he's not sexist. I felt like I was being told that because I am allowed to leave the house and have a job, that's it. Sexism is solved. Everything else is "just locker room talk."

Screw that. I deserve better, and so do other women.

People were so offended by our newspaper writing an article about a planned women's march nearby that they took time to write hate mail and long rants on Facebook about it. They kept talking (in between their really mature, articulate comments such as "Babys.") about how women aren't going to have their "rights" taken away. But a conversation about Constitutional rights completely misses all of the above problems.

If you're a woman and you don't see what the big deal is, or you are a Republican who feel that despite these being nonpartisan issues today's marches are too anti-Trump for your liking, and so you don't want to march or cheer on the marchers, fine, I can respect that. But if you actively go out of your way to ridicule and demean the women who have decided to speak up, I don't respect that.

When I was a kid, I was told that if a strange man did something that made me feel uncomfortable I should loudly tell him "Stop that."  Nobody told me that when I was an adult that would be considered "whining."

Snowpocalypse

Today, it snowed.

Most winters in the dry part of Oregon, this would be news. "Ah, we got a snowfall this winter," people would say. "How nice that the children get to use their sleds this year."

This winter, however, snow is not news. "It did not snow today" is news. Because for the last two months I think I have gotten more experience driving on snow and ice than I have in my last six years of car ownership combined.

It started out fun. My friends and I decided to celebrate the snow by making use of someone's hot tub, sitting in the hot water and steam as snowflakes gently drifted onto our heads, punctuated by the occasional yelps of whoever was most recently dared to go make a snow angel in their swimsuit.

Soon, however, the snow became less fun. People got into car accidents. Important meetings and fun events were cancelled. Pipes burst. Stores ran out of things. Everyone's car got stuck and had to be pushed out at least once.

Mostly, my own car has been trusty and reliable through the snow, despite its lack of snow tires. But two days when the snow was at its highest, I had to rely on others' better vehicles and winter driving skills to make it to such crucial things as work and the premier of Rouge One.

Driving in the snow in Hermiston is at least better than driving in the snow in The Dalles. Whoever designed the roads in Hermiston understood that it's OK if you have more than six inches of clearance between your side mirrors and parked cars while driving. Also, Hermiston is relatively flat, which means that if you are sitting at a stop sign there is much less chance that your vehicle will suddenly start sliding backwards down the hill while you resignedly make "Sorry" faces at everyone whose car you slide into (this can be fairly amusing to watch but not so funny to experience).

So far I've only had to make the "Sorry if I hit you there's nothing I can do please be nice and don't sue me" face at one person, and he got out of my way.

I used to live in this kind of weather all the time, when I lived in Iowa as a kid. But I've discovered that if love of snow were documented in a line graph, for most people that line dips very suddenly at the point in their life labelled "Got job that requires driving to work every day."

Now, I don't know why any adult would choose to live somewhere like Alaska, where it snows constantly and the temperature dips below freezing every winter. There are so many things about winter that aren't as fun as summer. You have to wear so many clothes in the winter, for example. A sweater, jeans, leggings and multiple pairs of socks take up so much more space in the wash than a T-shirt and shorts, not to mention if you don't want to shrink your sweater it will take approximately 4.6 years to air dry. And speaking of winter clothing, nobody's crush has ever said "Wow she looks really attractive in those snow pants."

Of course there are benefits to winter, some will argue. Hot chocolate, warm fires, an excuse to cuddle up with someone under the blankets ... but first you have to find someone willing to cuddle with you after they've seen you in snow pants.

47 texts

Tonight I was included in a group text asking a few people if they wanted to do dinner later this week. Forty-seven texts later I think we are finally done discussing dinner. Someone is going to pick up their phone later tonight and wonder why they have 47 texts, and then be really annoyed when they find out that all 47 texts are about the point of a progressive dinner (which, it turns out, involves progressing from house to house for each course and not, as my more politically-minded friends would assume, inviting a bunch of liberals around to discuss feminism and gay marriage over vegan entrées).

No matter which group of friends you're texting, in each group text you tend to have a typical breakdown. There's the person who sent the text. There's the people who respond with a simple "I'm in" or "Sounds good." There is the person who decides it's a good idea to have an entire conversation with the original sender via the group thread instead of switching to a private thread. There are the people who get pulled into that conversation against their better judgment. There is the person who lurks, reading the entire conversation without ever actually responding so everyone has no idea if they ever saw the message and plan on attending or have actually been eaten by wolves. There is the person who at some point sends a random text in the middle of the conversation that no one is entirely sure what they meant but at this point no one wants to ask and add another text to the growing number of notifications everyone is receiving. And then there is the person who eventually puts a halt to the conversation with an annoyed text about how their phone is almost out of batteries and they're in a meeting and NOT EVERYONE CARES ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION (but you know I love you guys, smiley face emoji).

That's technology for you: With every new advance in technological communication comes new and inventive ways of annoying each other. When Facebook became popular you may have thought you stopped Aunt Bertha from sending you so many chain emails when you showed her how to post memes to her wall. But then she started sending you Farmville requests and that was somehow even worse. And when email was invented you may have thought that you had found a way to cut down on the number of times your coworker called a 30-minute meeting to come up with a schedule for more meetings. But instead those co-workers just switched to hitting "Reply all" and writing "Thank you for sending this" in response to every email, guilting half the office into doing the same thing so they don't look like ungrateful swine for not being thankful enough for getting the agenda for tomorrow's meeting.

Yay technology.

I'm not sure what the equivalent was back in the olden days.

"Sorry guys, we don't have enough wood to get through the rest of the winter because Dave had to send me 13 different smoke signals last week describing what he had for lunch."

"Dang it Dave, I don't have any more room in this cage for one more carrier pigeon about how the liberal media has been unfair to Napoleon!"

"Dave, I hope it was worth another Pony Express pony dying of exhaustion so you could write me a letter saying "Haha same."

"Dear Dave STOP that's not a period at the end of the sentence STOP I actually mean STOP STOP"

I'm sure 100 years from now there will still be Daves in the world, sending one too many holograms to his friend about what he had for breakfast. And since his friends know they have all been guilty of similar technology annoyances at one point or another in their lives, they will forgive Dave after sending him a hologram saying "Some of us are in a meeting right now, Dave!"

I don't know what you're talking about

This week was fair week, which is one of our biggest coverage weeks of the year, minus general elections and the Pendleton Round-Up, which is so important in our neck of the woods that the other day someone asked a colleague how long he had worked for the paper and he answered "three Round-Ups."

There are good things and bad things about being a reporter during fair week. On the plus side, I got to wear jeans to work all week. On the downside, it was 102 degrees in the afternoons.

Like most weeks on the job, it also means I end up writing authoritatively about things that I really don't know much about. Having spent nine years of my life in Iowa and most of the rest in Eastern Oregon I am farther ahead than one of our sports reporters, who is facing the daunting task of reporting the rodeo all week while having never actually been to a rodeo before. But that doesn't mean that it's easy coming up with intelligent-sounding follow-up questions for professional rodeo stock contractors (or even seven-year-old rabbit owners) on the fly.

Being a reporter is actually kind of crazy if you think about it. Imagine you're in college and you get to your English class and the professor says "I'm giving you an assignment to write a three-page paper explaining the optimum conditions for growing asparagus and comparing the quality of this year's asparagus crop in Europe to the one in the United States. You have three hours, after which I will post your paper online and start handing out copies around campus with your name at the top so that everyone can critique your writing skills." Now repeat that every day with a new topic.

It's a lot easier to get away with faking knowledge on a topic when you're in school. When I was in AP Biology someone told me that for the essay portion the test scorers just look for specific words and phrases to check off rather than actually fact-checking your essay. Which explains why I got a 4 on my AP Bio test despite the fact that one of my three essays literally went something like this: "Plasmid DNA is involved in the process. Endonuclease is also important. And don't forget about vectors."

Unfortunately you can't write a news article this way.

Instead you have to research. And not be afraid to ask dumb questions. Sometimes it's embarrassing to admit to someone you have no idea what that word they keep using actually means. But in the long run it's a lot better to look like an idiot to one source than to 10,000 readers. And you can always preface the question with, "For my readers who don't know what that means ..."

The good news is the longer you're a reporter, the closer you come to knowing everything. Eventually you do, indeed, become knowledgeable on certain topics, like the city's general fund or the difference between Common Core and Smarter Balanced.

Of course, no matter how smart you are and how hard you try, in this line of work you will inevitably end up looking like an idiot sooner or later. You just can't publish thousands of words every day on a deadline without something going wrong eventually. Already in my career I've made mistakes ranging from misspelling heroin all the way through an article about drugs to giving someone a completely different last name halfway through an article.

Someday I'm sure I'll make the kind of mistake that becomes legendary in a community. Here it was the infamous "Amphibious pitcher" versus "Ambidextrous pitcher" headline mix-up. When I was at the Daily Universe someone labeled a front-page photo of the LDS church's leadership with the caption "Quorum of the 12 Apostates" instead of "Quorum of the 12 Apostles" after she stopped paying attention to what the spell check was actually correcting words to. And not long before I joined the staff of the Chronicle, someone accidentally undid the shrinking of a photo to fit inside the box, resulting in a front page article accompanied by a picture of just the city's planner's eyebrow labeled with his name.

Most mistakes are much more run-of-the-mill, however. Like one of my mentors used to say, even the best goalies sometimes let in the ball. If we got information wrong, let us know, but don't be snarky about what was clearly just an accidental typo. When people comment on our Facebook page pointing out a typo and ask, "Doesn't anyone there know how to spell?" the only result is that I  have to resist the very strong urge to reply "Thank you so much for setting us straight! Despite all of our college degrees and years of professional writing experience, we just couldn't agree on whether "they" has an e in it or not. Glad you cleared that up for us."

I would rather spend my energy learning about asparagus in case I ever have to write about it.

I Hate My Car, Part 12

This week my car was in the shop.

It happens. Quite frequently, in fact. I believe this is the eighth time so far this year that I've dropped it off at a mechanic. Don't ask me why I haven't bought a new car yet. I don't know. Probably for the same reasons abused women stay with their boyfriends. This time he's really sorry and he won't ever do it again, I'm sure of it.

I met my car four years ago, two months out of college and a fresh job offer in my hand. I was ready to be a Real Adult, and Real Adults drive themselves places instead of hitching a ride with nine other people in their friend's mother's old minivan. I went car shopping and came back with what my friends would eventually come to call the Truthmobile (the journalist version of the Batmobile), a 2007 Ford Taurus (Insert Ford joke here. I've heard them all by now.)

The next morning it wouldn't start. If my life were a movie, Taylor Swift would have been singing "I Knew You Were Trouble" in the background while I blithely ignored the warning signs. There was no music, however, because my life is not a movie. Also the battery was dead so the radio didn't work.

After the dealership apologized and gave me a new battery for free, life was good for a while. And by a while I mean for two months, until some lady came into work one day and told me she had hit my car in the parking lot. I went out expecting a small dent and instead found out my entire front passenger door was smashed inward. To this day I cannot fathom how she worked up that much speed in that small of a parking lot. Or how the state of Oregon granted her a driver's license when she was so blind she could not see AN ENTIRE PARKED CAR.

She had insurance though, so it was all good. And by all good I mean my car worked fine for about three more months before I had the quintessential car repair experience for every American who doesn't know anything about cars: I told a mechanic that my car was making a funny noise, they told me a part was broken, and the name of the part sounded plausible so I gave them a bunch of money and the grindy squeaky noise went away.

Life was good again, at least until about six months later when my air conditioner would only work on the highest setting. I probably would have just lived with that one, but my mom did some research online figured out how to fix it.

Next came the infamous Cardboard Box Incident of 2013, in which I backed over an empty cardboard box in the alley behind my office and it somehow ripped off the exhaust pipe that runs the length of my car.

2014, however, was the golden year for my relationship with the Truthmobile. My car worked the entire year, minus that one time the engine randomly shut off while I was driving down the road. Cars will be cars, however, so I let that one slide.

The whole random engine shut-off thing came back with a vengeance in 2015, however, at the same time the passenger side of my car started flooding every time it rained. The mechanics at the dealership were baffled by the stalling, but they did order me a new rain cowel to stop the leaking and I brought my car back I to have it installed. Then my car flooded again. Then they took an entire day to decide that the part they had installed was faulty. Then the new part came in. Then my car flooded again. Then they told me the same part but on the other side was broken. Then that part came in. Then I decided maybe it was time to get a new mechanic.

The new mechanic told me I had water in my gas tank and I just needed to use a combination of HEET and premium gas for the next month or so. The stalling got worse, though, until this week when I took it to yet another mechanic who cleaned out the throttle body and it has been working fine for two whole days now so I'm optimistic.

I should probably get a new car, but breaking up is hard to do. We have the same friends. It would be awkward if we ran into each other around town. Plus, how do people even meet new cars these days? Tinder? I'm not sure I'm ready for that type of thing.

You're not an adult

This weekend, all over the country, teenagers are graduating from high school. They've been told they're adults now, and they probably believe it, but we all know that's not true.

What they're about to be is college students, followed by a life stage called twentysomething that those of us who didn't get married at 21 experience. It's that period in life where you have all of the responsibilities of adulthood without any of the sense of responsibility of actual adulthood. That awkward transition where one minute you're sitting in an important business meeting and the next you're shooting your friend in the face with a Nerf gun.

The difference between an adult and a twentysomething are pretty clear.

Child: Your mom makes doctor and dentist appointments for you.
Adult: You make doctor and dentist appointments for yourself.
Twentysomething: You don't go to the doctor or dentist for several years and figure you probably won't die.

Child: You don't know what a 401(k) is.
Adult: You know how much you're contributing to your 401(k) each month, how much interest you earned in the last quarter and what your company match is.
Twentysomething: You have a 401(k) because you were feeling more responsible than usual when you were signing papers for your new job so you checked a box that said you wanted one, but now when you look at your paycheck each month you just think about how much pizza that money would buy instead.

Child: Your mom tells you that you can't get new glasses for another month because something about health insurance.
Adult: You wait to get new glasses for another month because you know your insurance won't pay for an eye exam until the new calendar year.
Twentysomething: "Health insurance? Yeah I think I have some of that. Do you think it'll pay for this?"

Child: Your mom does the dishes every day and sometimes you help.
Adult: You do the dishes every day.
Twentysomething: You pick up fast food on the way home because every plate in your house is dirty and ain't nobody got time to do a week's worth of dishes on a Friday night.

Child: Your parents take care of all things car-related.
Adult: You keep your car well-maintained, understand the details of your car insurance coverage and know what to do when a tail light goes out.
Twentysomething: You suspect you should probably get your oil changed but you have no idea when the last time you went in is and you're not even really sure how often it's supposed to be changed in the first place.

Child: You get excited if your parents tell you a piece of mail is addressed to you.
Adult: You promptly open all mail and then properly discard the junk mail and take care of the bills.
Twentysomething: You get pulled over for letting your tags expire and realize you probably should have opened that letter from the DMV that you vaguely remember throwing in your mail pile a month ago.

Child: Your mom drops you off for playdates then spends the whole time talking to your friend's mom while you play.
Adult: You answer the door, graciously welcome your guests to your dinner party, offer to take their coats for them and accept the gift they brought.
Twentysomething: You yell "Come in!" when someone knocks on your door and then go back to watching your movie, figuring one of your friends got bored and decided to come hang out.

Child: Your talk to your friend about her "boyfriend" who asked her through a note in class yesterday if she wanted to go out and hasn't actually talked to her since.
Adult: You're settled down with a spouse and kids.
Twentysomething: The person you like starts texting you every day and then asks if you want to hang out and you start to panic because it occurs to you that the only two options are that it doesn't work out or you stay with that person for the rest of your life and both ideas seem equally terrifying.

Child: Your mom does your laundry for you.
Adult: You do several loads of laundry each week.
Twentysomething: You bring two suitcases full of dirty clothes home when you visit your parents for the weekend because you know your mom will not only offer to do your laundry but also bleach all of the whites you keep throwing in with your colored clothes because you don't want to pay for an extra load to separate out a shirt and three pairs of socks.

Child: You beg your mom to buy sugared cereal when you go with her to the grocery store.
Adult: You buy Raisin Bran because it's healthy and you're down to only three extra boxes of cereal in the pantry.
Twentysomething: You grab some Captain Crunch because you remember you ate Oreos for breakfast the last two mornings because you were out of cereal.

The terrorist list

Last week I took a vacation to Washington, D.C. to visit a friend.

It was a fantastic trip, although the actual traveling part is never that fun. First you have to give them your luggage, which when you've had one suitcase broken and another end up in the wrong city is never comforting. Then you have to go through the security line and pass the test of taking off just the right amount of clothing and accessories (shoes and belt yes, shirt and pants no) to successfully convince the TSA you're neither crazy nor a terrorist.

I passed the test well enough not to get an extra pat-down, but when I got to D.C. I did discover that they had searched my luggage in Portland. They say it was "random" but I'm pretty sure it's because two years ago when I went to pick up my brother's best man at the airport I drove through the wrong exit and ended up in a restricted area. Giant metal tire-shredding spikes came up behind me so I couldn't just sneak back out, I had to wait for someone to come escort me. So I'm definitely on some sort of terrorist watch list at PDX now.

Once we got on the plane we sat on the tarmac for an extra half hour. The captain came out and apologized for the delay, but when they were running the pre-flight tests something hadn't worked right so they had to run some more tests to see if the plane was still safe to fly. Considering my Twitter feed on my phone was full of articles about the Germanwings crash, this wasn't very comforting. Especially after we took off and hit some serious turbulence. But we ended up not dying after all.

When I arrived at D.C. on the other end of the trip, I set my watch ahead three hours. I didn't realize how much of a problem this would be until Bethany, who had to be up for work very early the next morning, tried to go to bed at 9 p.m. Considering that's 6 p.m. on the west coast, which is when I normally get off work, I wasn't at all tired -- until I got up at the equivalent of 4:30 a.m. Pacific time the next morning and seriously regretted the amount of Netflix I had watched the night before. The time difference also messed with my eating habits, because I would eat at all the normal times -- lunch at noon, for example -- and then be hungry three hours later when it was lunchtime on the west coast. So I basically ate six meals a day, which is fine if you're a hobbit or a pregnant woman but not so good if you're just a normal human being who still wants to fit in all of your pants by the end of the week.

The next morning I dragged myself out of bed and headed out to explore the city. I had downloaded a D.C. Metro app in preparation for trip but it turns out riding the subway is like riding a bike and I managed to ride the metro all week without using the app once. Like a boss. If only I were so good at navigating aboveground, I wouldn't be on that terrorist watchlist.

In addition to my subway-riding skills, I also recalled a host of other skills from my days as an intern in New York City. Skills like having no idea where you're going while still looking like you are Definitely Not Lost. And using a single finger on the pole to keep your balance on a moving train while looking like you are Totally Not Going to Fall Over. And keeping careful track of your phone and wallet while looking like you are Really Unconcerned About Pickpockets. And then looking at the people who haven't mastered those skills and giving your neighbor the "Tourists, amiright?" eye roll.

It turns out that the metro in D.C. is a lot safer and cleaner than in New York, however, so I didn't get to use an array of other looks, including the Seriously Not Freaked Out By That Rat, the Literally Didn't Hear That Catcall, and the Honestly Don't Have Any Spare Change.

I did make one critical mistake in blending in, however. The first morning I was there it rained, and I had forgotten that people outside of Oregon use these weird contraptions called umbrellas.

 Once I got into D.C. proper every day, however, it was O.K. to look like a tourist because not many natives end up in the Smithsonian or the Lincoln Memorial on a regular basis. All of that stuff was fantastic and reminded me that even though much of what goes on in our nation's capital is absolutely ridiculous, I still wouldn't trade our Constitution and Bill of Rights for anything. Even a more intelligent Congress.

On the final day I was so sore I could barely move, and so tired I could barely stay awake. But since you don't need to do either during a cross-country flight I made it home alright.

New Moon: Paperback edition

Last week I visited my parents. When I came home I had to clear the pictures off of a new book shelf, because between the signed books that I got for my birthday, and a number of used books I picked up when my mom and I went to Goodwill, I came back with about 12 new books.

Some mothers and daughters go purse or shoe shopping together. My mom and I shop for books.

My family was always a fixture at the public library growing up. Due to our habit of passing books between family members before returning them, we paid so many late fees that the new mezzanine probably should have had our name on it. The librarians loved us anyways, to the point that when they created the waiting lists for certain new books they would automatically add our name to the top spot. If small-town municipal libraries were the sort of places to have super exclusive parties, we would have been the ones sweeping past the velvet rope with a "Don't worry about it, he's with me."

Reading out loud in the car was a family tradition growing up, one that kept my siblings and I from killing each other in the back seat after 10 hours on the road. We actually planned a couple of vacations around the release of the newest Harry Potter book, stopping at the nearest store the day it was released before setting off. After a cross-country drive to a family reunion one summer we actually pulled off to the side of the road for twenty minutes to finish the book before we drove into town.

Once when we went on a week-long camping trip to the beach my mom started reading Twilight in the car, I think in some sort of attempt to expose my brothers to the type of girliness that I, their only sister, had completely failed to introduce them to during my tomboy stage. The boys complained uproariously, but as everyone who has ever read those books knows, they're sort of addictive once you get past the obligatory reference to the smoothness of Edward's chest on every page.

Pretty soon when we retired to our tent at night one of the boys would say "You're not going to make us read that stupid book some more, are you?" in a slightly hopeful tone of voice. By the time we finished the first book they had to swallow all pride and drop their pretenses if they wanted to indulge their curiosity by reading the second book. To do so they temporarily gave up their man cards as the burly male checker at Wal-Mart held up their purchase with a grin.

"New Moon. Paperback edition. Nice choice," he said with a wink.

I don't know why they were embarrassed. When they slunk into the movie theater with my parents and I later that year, hoods pulled low over their eyes, I quickly realized I recognized quite a few of the hoodie-clad bodies ducking down furtively in their seats as my brothers' friends. It didn't seem to occur to any of them that any guy who saw them at the movie was also watching Twilight too.

Of course, the books were better. The book is always better, with the possible exception of Lord of the Rings (Which makes what Peter Jackson did to The Hobbit even more tragic. One of the great mysteries of life will always what type of brain tumor caused the same man who made The Fellowship of the Rings to decide that it would be a good idea to add a love triangle between Legolas and a female elf and a dwarf to The Hobbit. I TRUSTED YOU PETER! I TRUSTED YOU!!!).

Not that I'm mad about that or anything.

In some cases, the book should just never be made into a movie ever. Case in point: The other day I noticed Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame on Netflix and thought "Hmm ... I haven't seen that since I saw it in theaters as a small child. I don't even really remember it." I watched it and immediately realized why my parents never added it to our collection of Disney movies.

Worst. Disney. Movie. Ever.

I can't decide which was worse, the part where the evil priest sings rather pointedly about being sexually attracted to Esmerelda, or the part where he tries to drown a baby, or the part where he quizzes Quasimodo on vocabulary words like "damnation," or the message the movie sends when the beautiful girl chooses the conventionally handsome guy in the end over the guy with the good personality and we're all supposed to consider it a happy ending because really, did anyone actually think that the ugly person would not die alone?

I looked up a plot synopsis of Victor Hugo's book, having never read it, and realize the plot is basically death and sex and torture and more death. Esmerelda and Quasimodo both die. How the heck did someone read that and think "We should really adapt that into an animated movie for five year olds." That's like watching Sweeney Todd on Broadway and thinking "My kindergartener would love this!" and then making a Disney version that's basically the same except only one person dies a gruesome death at the end (oops ... spoiler alert: That's not what happens in the play.)

And then the next generation of children would be in college one day watching the movie with their little nephew and start singing along to "A Little Priest" and suddenly think "Oh my gosh how did I never notice when I was a kid that this song is about CUTTING PEOPLE UP AND BAKING THEM INTO PIES AND EATING THEM???"

Just read to your kids instead. It's so much better.

Who are you wearing?

The Oscars happened tonight. Or maybe they're still going on. Not sure. Don't really care, to be honest. I haven't seen any of this year's Best Picture nominations, so I'm not exactly invested.

Really, with so much talk this year about how the winners are selected by a bunch of out-of-touch old white guys who couldn't even tell The LEGO Movie (and everything) is awesome, why give their nomination choices so much importance? While they do sometimes hit the nail on the head, let's just all admit, Facebook friends, like the peasants we are, that we are all being pretentious when we pretend that we liked The Life of Pi better than The Avengers in 2012. Or that we actually saw The Artist.

(Random side note: I just typed "Everything is Awesome" into YouTube and the first result that came up was "Everything is Awesome 1 Hour Version." WHY???)

The thing I look forward to during awards season are the red carpets before the shows. I'm not very fashion-obsessed, but there is something petty yet satisfying about thinking "I may not be as rich or as pretty as Julianne Moore but at least my dress doesn't remind anyone of moldy bread."

Of course, sometimes I think, "I may not be as rich or as pretty or as talented or as fantastically dressed as Reese Witherspoon is tonight but at least ... Nope. I've got nothing."

The Golden Globes last week contained a lot of bad looks (it's like all the designers forgot what shape women's bodies actually are and were like "Hopefully this random pattern of fabric will cover all the right bits, but who knows?") but this year's Oscars fashions were pretty tame. Everyone is making fun of Lady Gaga's gloves, which look like she just got done cleaning a toilet and forgot to take them off before heading out the door. But this is Lady Gaga we're talking about. Shouldn't we just be congratulating her on not wearing a dress made out of meat?

(Random side note: I've always thought is was weird that instead of asking "Who designed your dress?" reporters ask "Who are you wearing?" like everyone made a dress of someone's skin, Hannibal Lector style. With Lady Gaga's infamous meat dress, that question seems infinitely more sinister.)

And of course, let's not forget that men walk the red carpet too. There just isn't as much anticipation tied to those photos. Oh look! He wore ... a black tuxedo! How groundbreaking! And it looks ... good on him! What a surprise! Just kidding. No man's appearance was ever not improved by a classic black tux.

If I ever became a celebrity or a celebrity's wife, I would buy a classy, flattering dress off the rack at the mall for fifty bucks so that when someone asked who I'm wearing I could tell them "I don't know, I bought this at Macy's and I forgot to check the label before I put it on" and watch Twitter explode. Then take the $15,000 most Oscar dresses cost and donate it to charity.

But since the chances of me marrying Chris Evans are nil, I'll have to stick to being sadly lacking in designer clothing for less heroic and statement-making reasons. I don't mind, minus the occasional moment like this weekend when I found myself sitting knee to knee in a boutique dressing room (it was the only place to sit down) with a rising star in the handbag design world, interviewing him about his rise from eastern Oregon obscurity to designing one of Oprah's top 10 must-have totes for this winter. Then I may have felt slightly self-conscious about my faux leather definitely-did-not-come-from-a-New-York-City-showroom purse stuffed full of pens and notebooks. Which he very graciously did not mention.

(Random side note: At least I'm a step ahead of one of the men in my family who, while Christmas shopping, wanted to know what size of purse Mom wears because he thought purses came in sizes like clothing.)

Well, according to social media the Oscars are indeed over and nobody even tripped on their dress and everyone who judged women on their red carpet look instead of the quality of their acting is a sexist jerk.

Sorry, Internet.

At least I'm not one of the 1,458,283 people who listened to "Everything is Awesome" on repeat for an hour.

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?