For someone who is actively pursuing journalism as her career path after college, I feel a bit torn. For one thing: I’m a big fan of print.

I might as well come out and say it–the Internet scares me. Sure, I’m pretty much constantly logged into Facebook and have found Google to be invaluable in gathering background information for an assignment, not to mention the Internet provides a wealth of information that can be turned into beats, given the right attitude. However, my problem is that I enjoy being on the receiving end of the Internet. Considering my complete apathy towards accumulating viewers for this blog, I can say definitively that I lack the web interest-or initiative, if you want to look at it that way-required for journalists in the field today.

For starters, I don’t know any programming languages besides Myspace-level HTML. Search engine optimization sounds a lot like subversive advertising to me. I refuse to get a Twitter and, please discount the apparent hypocrisy of this statement please, I don’t like blogs. I have one, but I just don’t go out of my way to read other peoples’.

See? Even in the last sentence of that previous paragraph, I did something that I abhor, but that I can do because, goddamnit, this is the freakin “blogosphere”: I ended a sentence with a plural possessive noun without a modifier! I could have just added “blogs” at the end, and that would have been okay. But no, that would have been redundant since I ended the sentence before that with “blogs.” So in this case, grammatical awkwardness takes precedence over redundancy.

I hate it!

If you couldn’t already tell by now, this is a rant mostly written for my own purposes. I doubt anyone will read this anyway, given my utter lack of knowledge about SEO (that’s search engine optimization for you Luddites like me.)

Perhaps the issue at hand is that I intern at a local print newspaper. I go into my desk, which is mine since my work day coincides with the other intern’s day off, sit down at the computer, edit movie listings, write calendar listings or briefs, and usually work on an article. The process is great, but my reward at the end of it all is walking around the corner from my house and grabbing a copy of our free paper and seeing my article there with my byline next to it.

Yes! You knew it—I’m an idealistic amateur! Be that as it may, at this moment in time, I am allowed that luxury because all the work I’m doing is for free. What’s more idealistic than getting joy out of doing something you love for free, during what would otherwise be your “free time,” while your bosses and co-workers make a profit off it? Of course, when I phrase it like that, I sound resentful and, I’d like to make clear, I am anything but.

(Shit, did it again.)

With the number of jobs for news reporters declining 8 percent over the next eight years, one might conjecture that I am either a little bit stupid or in deep trouble. Chances are, I might be a little bit of both, but I still think there might be a comfortable gray area in between.

My motivations for selecting journalism as my career field are varied and subject to intense scrutiny if I reveal them in full. Initially, I wanted to do magazine journalism and wrote some pieces for an online magazine based in my home-American territory (not home-state or hometown) of Guam. That was a compromise since my original interest was creative writing. I still vacillate between my artistic inclinations and my more practical ones that have been developing during my time at this local paper internship. My interests have spread from the writing aspect to include the process of reporting. I’ve become better at asking questions, sussing out the necessary contextual information, and framing the story as fairly and accurately as possible.

Though I have opinions that I’d like to share, I know that is not my job. My job is not to impose my opinions onto my readers—to do that would be to over-casualize (another colloquial phenomenon aided by the Internet-the liberal coinage of new words) the relationship between the reporter and the audience. No, my job is to provide the facts and do so by laying them down as conscientiously as possible, so as not to misrepresent any person or idea falsely.

This all sounds like common sense, but it is difficult. The concept of a local paper begs the issue of loyalty. For example, I recently wrote an article about the transfer of $2.05 billion in funds from local redevelopment agencies to the state of California in order to prevent widening the budget deficit. I can already begin to criticize my article. For instance I picked up the terminology of “raid” in presenting the state’s actions. I don’t need to tell you that “raid” has a negative connotation and that by using the word, I seem to be suggesting to my readers that the fund transfer is a bad thing. I shared the amount that our city in particular will lose as a result of the transfer and I listed the local redevelopment projects that would consequently be cut. Even with these few facts, I already seem to be bashing the state because my audience is primarily local folk whose city will be immediately affected by the fund shift. I could be overanalyzing the article, but the point is that though journalists constantly (or should) strive for some semblance of objectivity, however elusive, a hint of subjectivity is unavoidable.

The informal blogging environment allows for unabashedly opinionated “news” to be shared freely. However, a protection against the blind consumption of radical and possibly unreliable ideas is in the reader him/herself: readers usually seek out news that will affirm his or her present beliefs. This is also a terrible thing: John Milton believed that the truth would always prevail if both sides of an idea could be presented freely, but if the interference of ideas comes from within the readers’ own head, then the media has a new serious problem to concern itself with, which of course it won’t, at least not anytime soon anyway.

I don’t want to prematurely resign myself to the belief that the effects of what I write about are out my hands because that would run contrary to my belief that my actions, and everyone else’s actions however small, are meaningful and can create a degree of change. However cynical I get when I see people doing stupid things, I am a humanist and though I may not be a complete optimist, I aspire to act optimistically. I don’t like to buy into the fatalist bullshit that would simply serve to exacerbate the problems I am writing about. If I resigned myself to the idea that all humans are incorrigibly dumb, then I might as well shoot myself right now, there is no point in my being alive. But I want to write news because a part of me believes Milton, that if I can supply the facts, disperse the ideas in the right way, people can learn to think for themselves and begin to fix things. They can stop disassociating themselves with the problems they encounter every day, stop blaming others, and take responsibility, and then take action. That is the purpose here. It all comes back to maintaining a little bit of idealist spirit. Without that, I don’t think I could be a journalist. The overwhelming stupidity of peoples’ actions would cause me to run in front of an environmentally friendly, clean air bus and end it.

I started writing about my aversion to this turn that mass media is taking into the online environment, but ended up here. I know that at some point, I’ll have to grow the fuck up and grab the reigns. Maybe I’ll learn PHP or Java or something. Maybe I’ll learn how to edit video and sound footage on some complicated program. Most likely, I’ll get a Twitter and attempt to resist getting sucked in before failing miserably and linking it up to my phone so that I can text everyone what kind of Ramen I’m eating tonight. It’s not so much a matter of if, but when I’ll give in to this incomprehensible technology that has invaded the realm of print media. And when I do, I’ll think back to the times when I was so naïve as to think that a byline on the front page of a local microdaily was justification enough to work for free, when I actually got nervous in the moments where the phone rings before the person I was interviewing answered my call. That’s if I manage to get a job of course.

Otherwise, I’ll probably be a grumpy college graduate who majored in English actually considering going to nursing school. Or worse, graduate school.

But for now, I hold the prized title of a blogger who can have virtually zero visitors and not even really care. Chilling in my own corner of the blogosphere…keeping the other assholes out.

The past month or so has gone by as a strange fainting episode, where terror and bewilderment are abundant and compressed into a few split moments, sensory perception is horribly confused between the organ and the phenomena so that I am not sure if I am seeing what I am hearing, or feeling what I am seeing-as though I could be in the dark and not even realize it until my fingers fumble against something stabbing out of a wall that is a light switch (I flick it on)-and a current of nausea carries me along until I am left on some opposite shore, too fatigued to check my pockets for what I may have lost in the waves and too traumatized to stop looking backwards at the water from whence I came…

I see something rising in the distance, smoke perhaps from a fire lit by some nomads traveling with a purpose, though the smoke may simply be a mirage, or it may be a far off sun, though here we call it a star, and the light I see may have vanished millions of years ago in a burst of dust and wind, it calls clearly out to me and though I can just barely hear it ringing out through the morning air, I hear it nonetheless.

In spite of these ridiculous thoughts, I am figuring things out. Slowly and surely, I’m here and going, whether I am slouching towards Bethelehem or going my own course.

And this is the kind of post that comes from someone who sits down to write one day without holding herself to any noble expectations. Like the ever turning earth: though in our stillness we cannot feel it, we know the ground moves.

“These things take less time and effort than blogs. Sure, it’s less public, there’s nothing to share but sometimes privacy is good. The privacy of existence.
Art is witness and thus the beauty of it is that it can expose the most private moments, the ones that often give insight into the direction of our lives, how we came to feel this way, do that thing, or love this person. But surely this attitude gives too much clout to the notion of an audience. Or perhaps not because art relies so heavily on the existence of an audience, a viewer, the more the better. And if these people can see our work for what it was meant to be, and can appreciate it the way we intended, then that is all the better as well. But what about the self-satisfaction derived from the response of an audience? Is this selfish? Does the pursuit of a satisfied audience reroute the attention we should be giving to our art, the work that is ultimately our own creation? There are the artists that give into the idea of public art, that they are mere vessels that let the world flow in and out, in and out through the medium–be it painting, photography, writing. As a result, they are merely instruments that do not so much as seek out truths or meanings in their environment, but rather target the environment and foresee the consequent accolades, only afterward imprinting a superficial meaning on what they have created (credit to Nicolai from a past conversation-this is no place for plagiarism). This is a horrible, though ubiquitous phenomenon and this is the problem with those who do not contemplate their work nearly enough, not nearly to the depths to which they should if they desire an enlightened outlook on what they are achieving.”

The inevitable link between idolatry and self-identification is most readily exemplified in advertisements, especially the ones with celebrity endorsements. Their fame is tantamount to credibility, and when their smiling faces cut to a shot of the product and the logo, often their mere presence is enough to cause the viewer to dispose of logic, for the association is purely emotional, having impressed upon us that we, too, can be “just like them.” A simple technique, yet very effective.

This is not a new idea by any means to anyone. We all know that we live in an age heavily inundated with a constant flow of information. Of course, the concept of “identity” does not necessarily imply rejection of doing the same things as others. “Identity” almost immediately connotes “individuality” or some sense of “uniqueness.” We are all different, right? And yet we seek out those who have achieved what we wish to achieve. The process sometimes works the other way, where someone engages us–emotionally, intellectually, physically–and we come to admire them. Emulation begins as a sort of experimentation, testing the waters, seeing if we are cut out for this particular lifestyle. At times we begin to assimilate with the lifestyle, taking on a “new identity” in the way someone puts on a costume on Halloween and plays the part. I suppose this practice is common more amongst younger people who are trying to discover “who they are.” Idols, a word used shamelessly and indulgently, symbolize what is possible . They cause people to visualize their own potential, assess their individual resources; they offer an incentive for change (a self-imposed, internally-conceived change) and a sense of accomplishment if emulation is successful.

Idolatry, if taken to its furthest extents, can cause disenchantment. It is the disenchantment of understanding, of unveiling a mystery, of finding out that God lives behind a curtain, of knowing the answer to “What is the meaning of life?” If that sounds like an unfair comparison, then one must remember that idols were essentially religious imagery of deities. The religious origin is interesting to note since idols represented that which humans could not come to know through direct empirical experience. Rituals–usually prayer and other forms of worship which were also “prayer”–were the only way in which the religious could come to “experience” the divine, which they believed exerted influence on their lives through mystical forces. The Church later used the word to designate “false gods”; “idol” coming from the Greek eidolon meaning “appearance,” and later “mental image, apparition, phantom.”

Taking a McLuhan approach (the belief that “the medium is the message”), the medium in this case would be difficult to detect. People read print to learn information about the person being idolized and yet the image tends to be a succinct representation of all these things, for it conjures up what we read, heard, or otherwise deduced (rightly or wrongly, by some exercise of the imagination or otherwise). We are selective about what we assign to the idol, which is not the person, for there are clear distinctions. The idol, the mental image or apparition, is not the person. The idol is our own invention. We are the Creator of that particular image. Just as a much-revered painting of Jesus is not Jesus, the “mental image” of Ronald Reagan is not Ronald Reagan. The content (person) must not be confused with the medium (idol). In fact, the content is not so much the person as it is compiled idealizations conceived by the worshiper. It is an ongoing projection of personal dreams onto a tangible figure and the subsequent projection of that figure’s success onto oneself. Hence, the idol is our own invention, a vehicle for personal desires and aspirations.

This “mental image” that constitutes the idol is what influences the worshiper. It is the admiration of a person’s success that somehow causes people to delve into his or her life for minutiae, for they have somehow become convinced that that person’s success (beauty, intellect, acting ability, demeanor, political ideas, etc.) is in some way related to whether they were an only child or where they grew up. Or, that their success is directly influenced by what brand of clothing they wear or what sexual orientation they profess. Idolatry confuses the medium with the message, as is often the case in other instances, but it also intrudes upon the individual’s ability to clearly think and decide a course of action for his or her life.

Emulating can be innocent, but if it metastasizes into full-on idolatry it can severely inhibit the exercise of independent thought for idolatry is a form of dependence. Idolatry goes far beyond admiration or respect or inspiration, which I believe are healthy and valuable attitudes. It replaces the person being idolized with a grossly exaggerated figure that ultimately denies, not encourages, the future potential of the worshiper. It encourages instead a distorted perspective based on flawed logic and overstimulated emotional responsiveness. It propagates an ideal that is ultimately irrelevant and destroys the individual’s pursuit of an “identity”–one that is realized in stages, through experience, and by a person’s self-assessment of what is relevant and realistic. I am not saying dreams are bad. I am not saying one shouldn’t have goals. I am merely saying that one’s own dreams of being a great singer should not be eclipsed by what a great singer Aretha Franklin was because then one loses sight of his or her individual gifts and nuances and is vulnerable to falling into the mind-trap of emulation and not improvement. Without improvement there can be no significant progress and we fall into a cyclical pattern of self-denial and idolatry of another.

Afterthought:
It is interesting also to note that the word “identity” means “the same,” abstracted from the Latin identitem which means “over and over.” For the purposes of this post, I’m using “identity” in the general meaning of self-awareness as related to one’s “position in life.”

-The War on Drugs and the 21st Amendment criminalize an entire generation, if not a majority of Americans.

-Why do people get so passionate about something of which they have no knowledge? Like presidents, actresses, neighbors, religion, abortion…? Opinion should not precede understanding.

-”The Great American—” is an interestingly ubiquitous adjective. Google it, and you get:

“…Music Hall”
“…Insurance Group”
“…Bash”
“…Road Trip”
“…Novel”
“…Ghost Hunt”

Nationalistic jingoism is fun. And America is great.

-I am a slave to my laptop. Well, not slave, more like indentured servant. No, more like slave. A man at Coffee Bean with his laptop was on Facebook for ages. Do that at home? Being out is for being out. Talk to actual people-a good goal.

-The Gas Lite on Wilshire and 21st Street is a nice place to talk to drunk people, or just people. It’s also a good place sometimes if you want to have a police officer walk past and ask you if you’ve seen some suspicious-looking high schoolers running past because a couple of idiots tried to drown a kid in the duck pond around 1 am. I’ve been near that duck pond playing drunk hide and seek before (I know) and it smells exactly like bird sewage. Getting drowned in that reminds me of that disgustingly sad scene from Slumdog Millionaire with the appetizing outhouses and little Jama’s photograph of Amitabh Bachchan. Regardless, I hope those kids get caught even though their victim will probably never be the same (who likes ducks anyway?). It makes me appreciate not being in high school anymore.

Call this my pathetic attempt at a comeback (even though “comeback” implies previous success.) Or disregard this completely.

I promise the next post will be slightly more optimistic, less brooding, and will actually have valuable information and/or interesting opinions. Promise.

Here is a picture of something I hope to not be doing in 2010.

Things have been very good lately, that is about as much as I can say.

Other things:
-No one laughed during SNL during the Fox News skit when some conservative pundit smiled and refused to talk about the results of New York’s 23rd Congressional District race, saying, “It’s not important…” I think someone laughed nervously. I don’t think anyone got it.
-The Leonid Meteor Shower will be viewable tonight! I live in Santa Monica, and the shower will be most spectacular in Asia. I’ll be checking it out around 1am or so (damn light pollution, give us back our night skies…) No, no one will die of a meteor crashing into their town. At its height, it will he a half-storm (500 leonids per hour, instead of the storm level 1000 or higher), at it’s lowest it will be around 20-30 meteors, in the U.S. at least. I personally didn’t see anything but Nicolai says he saw a huge burst of light. I guess it’s because I live near Wilshire Blvd.
-I have to read Dr. John Gottman’s book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” for my Psychology of Marriage, Family, and Intimacy class. I guess I’ll update this later, since I need to finish a chapter for tomorrow.

So much for a new post, eh?

“I shudder when I think of the bestial impulses that so often flood my imagination. I am considered a decent citizen because I manage to keep these mental debaucheries from becoming antisocial actions; but as far as I, a lone individual, am concerned, I am that depraved being. And perhaps these orgies of the imagination are all the worse because they are never relieved by actions.”

-Charles Burchfield, April 10, 1938

The Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood Village, California is currently housing an exhibition of watercolor paintings and sketches by the great American nature painter Charles Burchfield. If you get a chance, check it out, especially “Forest Fire in the Moonlight” and “The Sphinx and The Milky Way.” I stood in front of the latter for what felt like ages, my awed silence broken only by a fellow admirer who whispered, “Isn’t it beautiful?” It really was.

His work ranges from pure swampy goodness to the clanging of industrial America to strange sunflower wallpaper designs to dark apocalyptic nature landscapes. He maintains an inspired iconoclastic energy up until the very last of his unfinished works. The entire gallery is testament to his discerning visionary eye and feverishly prolific artistry.

I was also intrigued by his series on the abstractions of the mind-names like “Hysterical insanity” and “Morbid Evil” scrawled beneath what looked like caves, but were actually interpretations of the human mind…

Regardless, as I said, anyone with even the most remote interest in art should take a trip to the Hammer for this exhibition.

Note: Read his diary entries and notes as well to gain further insight into Burchfield’s churning, swampy, coruscating, brilliant artistic head.

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re all drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all precious gifts
But you’d better take your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

With all the controversy surrounding euthanasia and PAS in the past few years, I was intrigued (is that the right word?) when I stumbled upon a Swiss assisted suicide group known as Dignitas. Apparently Dignitas helps end the lives of terminally ill patients, suffering either physically or mentally, and is only one of the various clinics in Switzerland offering such services. Their motto? “To live with dignity, to die with dignity.”

That’s not the only interesting part. This pretty country, known for yummy chocolate and Rousseau, is now also gaining more and more attention for its “suicide tourism,” which in 2007 alone attracted 400 patients seeking a way out, 132 of them foreigners.

Founded in 1998, the group has since assisted in the deaths of 619 people. The group’s founder Ludwig Minelli cites Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights as justification for Dignitas’ unusual mission. He also claims that the consequences of a failed suicide attempt can be devastating, “often with severe consequences for the suicidal person as well as for third persons and for the budget of public health, it will be obvious that these high numbers could be reduced considerably, if society would change it’s attitude towards suicide, and this at the price of just saving costs and lives.”

But he’s not completely morbid. He also riles against “lonely suicides,” insisting that if a person receives support for this or her decision, the motive for wanting to commit suicide can be uncovered, perhaps prolonging the person’s life.

This unconventional practice of suicide clinics has helped (depending on how you define that word) the friends and families of those who want to end their lives, but who don’t want to do it the “normal” way-by gunshot, hanging, overdose, defenestration, etc.

In an article by Bella Magazine, a British man Syd Robbins tells his story about how his wife, Dorothy a.k.a. “Dot”, chose Dignitas to help her die. Faster, that is.

Dot Robbins was suffering from a terminal neuron motor disease that left her with two years to live at most. Over time, she slowly became paralyzed, was in constant pain, and, as her husband puts it, was “stripped of her dignity.” She pleaded with him to help her die peacefully, reassuring him that she was not afraid to die and that they would be reunited in heaven.

Although it was a painful decision, Syd obliged her. After struggling with the nursing home and the police who threatened him with 14 years in prison if he helped her commit suicide, and after spending his life savings of £7500 to hire paramedics and borrow aircraft, he watched his wife’s plane take off and whisk her away to a hopefully better place. He, however, had to stay behind.

Because assisted suicide is illegal in Britain, Syd Robbins could face prosecution if he accompanied his wife to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich. Shortly after leaving the U.K., Dot injected herself with the syringe that would kill her, and it was all over.

Such stories offer a legitimate argument for legalizing assisted suicide, at least in my mind. Others, on the other hand, might not.

Take the case of Betty and George Coumbias, for example. The Canadian couple from Vancouver has publicly announced their plan to become the first husband and wife to simultaneously commit suicide with legal permission. As in Britain, assisted suicide is against the law in Canada.

Both in their earlier seventies, the husband and wife have different reasons for wanting to die. George suffers from a painful and debilitating heart disease. His wife, however, expressed her own reasons in the 2007 documentary film The Suicide Tourist, saying “From the day we got married, George was all my life….I love my two daughters, but I love him more, and I don’t think I can face life without him, and since we read about Dignitas, we felt, What would be better than to die together, you know, to die in each other’s arms?” Physically, Betty is perfectly healthy.

The Journal of Medical Ethics shows that at least 21 percent of Dignitas’ patients do not have a terminal illness.

In the interest of the couple’s wishes, Minelli is working to get the Canton of Zurich to change their policies on assisted suicide being permissible only for terminally ill people, thus providing healthy people the option of dying, as well.

So the final question is: Who should be allowed to die? Is dying a personal choice? All sorts of questions regarding human liberties come in to play. Is it the government’s responsibility to protect the people from their own death wish? John Stuart Mill would perhaps disagree. But he’s dead, and the fact remains that suicide sucks for everyone involved.

It sucks because the one seeking it views death as the last option and because living has become to painful or unbearable, and it sucks for the family and friends, because they are subject to the guilt of not being able to help or alleviate the condition, mental or physical, of their loved ones, in addition to suffering a terrible loss which may have been preventable under other more serendipitous circumstances.

Regardless, the battle will rage on. The Swiss government is becoming alarmed at this so-called “trend” of suicide tourism that is attracting some ugly international attention. Minelli will continue to fight for Dignitas in the name of the individual’s right to choose to die, solely on the basis of desire, and assisted suicide opponents will continue to advocate the sanctity of life.