Reporting is like your umbrella...

Today's post is fairly work-centric, so for those who don't care about the everyday life of a small-town journalist, feel free to stop reading. And for those who work with me, I already sort of expressed these thoughts at lunch today. As those two groups compromise basically all of my readership, I hope that no one really enjoys my pithy musings.

BR, the mythical former head of the j school at W&L (only former because on time he broke his arm and it was this whole big thing - and because the current head is an amazing human being whom I love, but still, BR runs that shit) has a favorite axiom he likes to share with us student reporters, be it at the start of Journalism 101, Beat Reporting (curse you, Rockbridge Report!) or In-Depth Reporting, otherwise known as journalism capstone, otherwise known as the spring term you only heard about because you'd sold your soul, time and life force to the gods that control the j lab.

Anywho, the words he like to share are these: "Reporting is like your umbrella. It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it."

The point, dear no one, is that you're way better off talking to way more people than you'll need, gathering way more information than you'll use and generally knowing more things than you tell your readers. All good advice, especially for those of us who are secretly lazy. (So, everyone.)

BUT, the problem with putting this into practice is that I tend to worry about the umbrella's feelings. Not on a day-to-day real-world basis, of course; if we go weeks without rain I'm happy not to have disaster hair all the time and don't care one bit how my umbrella feels about its lack of use. But in the metaphorical sense, I find myself feeling bad that I can't include everyone who made time to talk to me, especially if they were easy to work with and excited about the prospect of being in the paper.

Although it isn't exactly like the situation I'm dealing with right now, the best example of this came when I was an intern in Charlotte. I was asked to work on Fourth of July, "if I was free," and though I wasn't at all free and had planned to spend the weekend in Lexington, I said yes because that is what you do when you're an intern.

(Side note: As an intern, I never understand why editors asked me if I could do something, like it was a favor. Of course I can do that story, I am literally sitting her reading television recaps of a show I don't even watch.)

My assignment for the big day was a parade in a Charlotte suburb. The concluding phase of the celebration was pretty legit; all the kids had the opportunity to participate in a tug of war involving like a fire hose and this big ball filled with water. I don't really remember exactly how it worked, but it looked super fun and the kids all loved it and everything was great.

Afterward, I did the usual creepy thing of scouting out a kid who liked he'd be good to talk to, and approaching him in a way that looked the last like I was trying to nab him for maniacal purposes. Luckily his mom was with him, so I told them I'd like to ask him a few questions for a newspaper story I was doing about the event.

The mom was so jazzed, she wholeheartedly agreed. But when I asked the little boy what he thought of the tug-of-war, the best he could muster up was "It was good." Good. Not even fun, or exciting, or refreshing, or basically any other adjective.

So, that sucked. I tried to get him to share something worthwhile, but that was just not going to happen. Disappointed, I thanked him and his mom and walked away. But then I heard her on the phone a few minutes later, excitedly telling someone that "Noah is going to be in the paper!"

Of course I tried my damnedest to fit that little boy in the story. Sadly, it just didn't work. (Looking back, I think as a real reporter now I would've put him in and stuck with it and been fine. But as an intern, and since the editor that day was a notorious hacker who would basically rewrite your story, I knew Noah was not long for this world no matter what I did.)

The situation I'm in today isn't exactly like that one, nor does that one even really line up with the umbrella analogy. But it's a more active story and I like going on tangents, so deal with it.

No, what I'm dealing with today is an overabundance of reporting for a story I'm doing on internships. The story is one that had just a vague enough idea I could talk to basically anyone and get the same information, as long as I covered, colleges, students and businesses that hire interns.

I was having a hard time, initially, lining up some of those - especially the interns - and finding photo opportunities. So I put out a ton of feelers, way more than necessary, and now find myself with a dozen pages of typed notes and several college students, intern coordinators and even businesses hoping to see their name splashed across the front page come Sunday.

I generally don't feel very beholden to businesses, even if they have really helped me out, because I know they're just invested because of the whole free advertising. But this time I really think a few of them just want to talk about how much they love their intern, and I don't want to take that away from them - and they said some interesting stuff. And there's a handful that didn't say anything too great, but are one of the places we're getting photos from, and it would look less than great if we have random photos from places not even touched on in the story.

Overall, it's not the end of the world and I'm not even that concerned. I've written a 60-inch story that will likely get chopped down by my editor this evening, and I supposed I can always blame her and a lack of infinite space if these people don't get the big screen treatment.

Still, it's a bummer. Maybe it would've been better if I just let my hair get wet.

So about this deer (A.K.A.: 101 reasons why I am not ready to be an adult)...

As you may have a heard, I hit a deer on Friday night. Actually, I've decided, based on a careful survey of the evidence, that the deer saw the Japanese deer stocking cap in my rear window (thank you, John Grigsby) and was hoping to free its friend from a life of imprisonment.

Instead, it freed my rear bumper from my car.

So now I'm driving around with a duct taped on (thank you, Barrett Mohrmann) rear bumper. It seems to be holding up well, and as I don't have a ton of disposable income at the moment (or really any moment) I sort of plan to continue in this fashion for at least a month.

But the incident has served as yet another reminder of the fact that I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how to be a grown-up. I did not even think, as I rejoiced in my state of still being alive and apparent lack of sever car damage, to stop and see if the deer was still alive, alert authorities to the dead deer in the road, take photos of otherwise do anything to prove that a deer had in fact run into my car.

Why is this significant, you ask? Because apparently, according to some quick 2 a.m. Googling, deer accidents are often covered by your insurance. I have talked to my car insurance man and learned that this is in fact the case, but I'm now concerned about the act of actually filing the claim because:

1) I have no actual proof that a deer hit me. There is a rear bumper hanging half off my car, but I could've just done that in a fit of rage.
2) Said bumper has, as mentioned, been thoroughly duct taped up to my car, so I can't even photograph it now without removing all of the duct tape and redoing it. I'm still sort of planning on doing that because I want to buy some really heavy duty tape, but I haven't yet and don't want to go through all that ridiculousness.
3) I also don't want to take the car in for an estimate or anything until I am totally ready to fix it, because I don't want them to tell me it's dangerous to drive with a duct taped on bumper and force me to leave it there and fix it NOW. Plus, doing that would also require removing the duct tape.
4) The deductible, according to Mr. Insurance Man, is $500. According to extensive Internet research and talking to one person who had similar damage, the cost of my new bumper plus installation will be between $500 and $600. What is the point of going through all this hullabaloo if it's going to save me exactly $0?

The biggest challenge, though, is that I just don't know how all of this works. As noted, I've learned a lot of this from the Internet, or excessively asking friends and family for advice/instruction. I've always patted myself on the back for my independence (which I stand by, still) but there is still many a scenario that I am just completely and totally unprepared for.

This is one of them, and I hate it. If someone just wants to become my personal assistant and handle all of this for me for a salary of nothing other than my everlasting love and appreciation, you are welcome to. I will continue being a half-grown post adolescent whining about how being an adult is hard.

Oh my god you guys...

LAST NIGHT I HIT A DEER.

That is all.

Feeding Big Bertha...

Today's blog entry will be short, but it's important that I recount to you the final part of my holiday weekend because it includes one of the finest moments of my adult life.

Sunday, Anna and I departed from Maryland in the late morning. This put me at an 11 a.m. departure time from D.C., which I feared would result in endless amounts of traffic trapping me on U.S. 66 for hours.

Luckily, it did not! Traffic getting out of the city was slow, but not standstill - the worst part was trying to navigate my way through the city streets of Georgetown, but I made it out alive, somehow. After an interminable stop at the most crowded Sheetz in the history of the world, I was cruising down 29 again, back home safely by about 3 p.m.

So the adventure part of this adventure, really, came that evening. I headed to Smith Mountain Lake for dinner with Barrett, his parents and his godmother's gigantic family. Dinner was pleasant (om nom pizza), and we encountered some giant fish (seriously these fish were terrifyingly large) who had clearly been fed way too much by children.

After dinner, though, due to the large number of children in our party, we went to the arcade. And it was awesome.

At first, Barrett wanted to play some stupid shooting game, but it was occupied. So I suggested we kill time with the Big Bertha game, where you throw little plastic balls in this giant face thing to make this woman fat (it sounds very disturbing, actually, when described) and it was just as awesome as when I was a child and played it at Shakey's. I was also jazzed to get like 10 tickets out of it - at Blade N' Skate that would've earned me so many flavored Tootsie Rolls!!

Then we did go to play the stupid shooter game, and this is where either my greatest, or most embarrassing, depending on your definition, moment took place.

We played one round - I did poorly. I am not good at these games. As Barrett was preparing to start a second round, I looked longingly for the ticket dispenser. Why were there not tickets?

Because, apparently, these stupid shooter games don't dispense any tickets. WHAT THE F.

So then, luckily hidden by some other games but still in an arcade full of children and their patient parents, I half-yelled (as in, said in more than a normal speaking voice), "I only wanna play games with tickets!!!!"

Embarrassing as it was, my outburst worked, and we played ski ball and then bought some frogs and a bug with our tickets and it was awesome.

No flavored Tootsie Rolls though. Next time.

I'm on a boat and...

Part two of my Fourth of July weekend adventure begins...now!

When last I left you good folks, Anna and I had returned home from a long day of celebrating freedom and fireworks and baseball and all things American. We arose Friday morning - once again, a little worse for wear - and readied ourselves for a long journey to the eastern shore of Maryland, where we would find BOATS.

(The theme of my weekend, I've decided, is boats. This sounds like the really terrible option for a prom theme in a teen movie or something like that. I think I might use this to write a screenplay. Anyways.)

The drive from D.C. to Easton, Maryland, where Anna's water house is takes about an hour and a half. A fairly pleasant drive, except for the DEATH DEFYING TRIP OVER THE BAY BRIDGE. I was initially very excited about driving over the Chesapeake Bay, expecting to gaze out in wonder over the pollution-filled waters and feel a love of American nature.

But as we approached, I saw that not only does the bridge go on seemingly FOREVER, it sort of bends to the left in the middle. Like, there is a turn in the bridge. A BRIDGE SHOULD NOT REQUIRE A TURN, BRIDGES SHOULD BE STRAIGHT. The really upsetting part of that turn is that you can see, very clearly, how high you are and how likely your death would be were your car to plummet off the bridge at a later point.

As you can tell, I'm not a huge fan of bridges. I'm not like actively terrified of them, but whenever I have too think to hard about anything that has the potential to kill me, I get a little freaked out. This leads to my many, many fears, as most things, I'm convinced, have the potential to kill me.

I am spending too much time on this relatively inane part of the adventure and should probably get to the boats. So, long story short, despite the terrifically high odds of death, Anna and I made it safely across and eventually arrived at her house.

This is the view from Anna's house. In the distance you can see her pier and boat. Now, boats are also something that, if you really think about it, could kill me, but I do my best to limit my fear of them.

After gorging ourselves on cheese, crackers, salsa, endless fruit, etc. provided by Anna's mom, we geared up to finally head out on the boat.

Here is my first mistake of the weekend. While applying sunscreen, I neglected to put any on my face. Why did I make this foolish choice, you ask? Well, I am a person who usually wears at least some foundation almost every day, so my face is generally protected. If I am going to be doing an outside activity for a long amount of time (hiking, running, etc.) I'll also often put on a hat to keep my ridiculous head of hair out of my face. Plus, my bangs generally protect at least the forehead section of my face, if my hair is worn down (or even, generally, in a ponytail. Rarely do I go for the pinned back bangs).

None of these things happened Friday morning. Who puts on makeup when you're going on a boat? And wearing a hat or keeping my bangs down seemed extra foolish when the wind would be whipping across my face.

So while Anna, her mom and I zoomed across creeks and rivers with reckless abandon, I rejoiced in the tan I was surely getting. Only about halfway through the day - specifically when Anna and I switched from the speedboat to a smaller kayak/paddle boat/sail boat combo (it was ridiculous, specifically the sail part) did I truly recognize the mistake I had made.

For I was now the proud of owner of what I have charmingly named "epic face sunburn." My good friend epic face sunburn took up most of my forehead, a bit of my nose and the rosiest sections of my cheeks (made extra rosy by their extreme sun damage). With sunglasses, my face was simply awash in red. But without, I was truly a sight to behold: the rare blonde-haired, pink-faced raccoon.

You can mostly see epic face sunburn in this photo, taken Saturday. Obviously, by then I'd learned the lesson about hats.

I'm certain that everyone at dinner that night was secretly mocking my ridiculous appearance, but that's okay because I'd spent the day on a boat. I may regret the lack of sunscreen down the road if I get skin cancer, and we can all return to this blog entry and laugh at me. But, BOATS.

Saturday brought more of the same, albeit with the addition of sunscreen and hats. We also boated to a waterfront bar, which was awesome because everyone was super sweaty and a mess and in swimsuits and no one cared. So that was great, because I was super sweaty and a mess and in a swimsuit.

Then Saturday night we caught crabs! SO INTENSE! This one crab fought Anna mightily when we tried to take it out of the basket with tongs (seriously, this thing had  a plan). So we left it for her mom - the solution to all of life's problems (have your parents deal with it).

After delicious, delicious crabs we watched a movie and I pretty much passed out, drained from all the sun and boating and day drinking (there was a lot of that Friday and Saturday).

All in all, a great way to celebrate America.

Up next: the adventure continues with my quest for the most tickets at a child's arcade. Steel yourselves for my awesomeness.

Freedom's just another word...

And here it is, dear readers, an actual tale of adventure! Hunker down and prepare...

We begin, as all great stories do, on a dark and stormy night. After a rather uneventful day at work, I departed on my sojourn from Lynchburg to Washington, D.C., around 5 p.m. during a break in the constant rain that I (foolishly) mistook as a good sign for my drive. If you live somewhere other than all of the United States of America, you may not know that it has rained basically all day every day for all of 2013.

Last week was particularly egregious. After about an hour of clear driving Wednesday night, I was hit by a deluge, right as my phone GPS for some reason directed me on to 64 for approximately five miles. It was terrible.

By the time I was off the heavily congested and flooding express way and making my way up to D.C. along pleasant country roads, the rains had cleared. I actually think the country roads would have been easier to drive on in the rain, but people would've been likely to drive even more annoyingly slowly than they already did, so it was probably for the best.

After rolling into the big city around 8:30, I went to Anna's fancy new house (so fancy!) and, after sufficient laziness, we went out to meet up with some old friends from college. SO FUN! Well, the most exciting part of the night out was the man we saw upon exiting the Metro. Check out this street performer action:

That's right, he is accompanied by a ventriloquist dummy. 

We stayed out probably too late on Wednesday night, but eventually made our way home despite having the WORST TAXI DRIVER EVER. Here are, in no particular order, things our taxi driver did on the way home:

1) Using voice-to-text, repeatedly angrily tried to contact someone - a friend, presumably - whose home he'd "been driving around all night" and said person was nowhere to be found. I got the impression that person did not want to hang out with this dude. 

2) Called said friend, when voice-to-texting failed, while also repeatedly asking the address and intersection where we were headed because he'd apparently forgotten.

3) Opened some sort of app on his phone while barreling down a narrow residential road at about 1 a.m., looking at his phone despite said road having two lanes of traffic and cars on either side. We could have died.

4) Upon finally dropping us off, apparently failed to understand the meaning of Anna asking for $8 back from the $20 she gave him for our $10 ride. He probably was not used to receiving tips. Instead, he gave her $11 back, so...win?

The next day brought with it a bit of a headache (seriously, being old is hell) but an early-ish rise for our trip to the baseball game! Unfortunately, after trekking about a mile downhill toward the train station in the hellish swamptown that is our nation's capital, we reached the Metro just in time to discover I'd forgotten my phone. We made our way back uphill, practically swimming through the liquid air, grabbed my phone and returned, still making it to the baseball game with plenty of time to start celebrating America with an 11:30 a.m. beer.

I'd say we still look pretty cute, despite having essentially had to swim to the baseball stadium. If you haven't gathered yet, it was extremely humid.

After celebrating America with the great tradition of incredibly overpriced beers and celebrating the Nationals victory, we met up with a friend of Ann's from work and his girlfriend and went to a bar on a boat. IT WAS ON A BOAT.

The humidity having broken, we were mostly just facing heat, but the whole boat thing made up for it. Plus, we drank margaritas...which, frozen. So overall that was great.

The bar was super crowded and did require some classic negotiating to swipe a table from a departing group, but we succeeded and ate the world's most delicious calamari and nachos for lunch. With margaritas, as mentioned. Very pro-America. 

After that, we lazily made our way down to the national mall for the fireworks. While Anna's friend's girlfriend (Ashley) and I stopped at the world's most crowded Starbucks to get us all some needed uppers (n the form of caffeine) Anna and her friend (Cameron) set out to find someone to buy us some downers (in the form of beer). Both quests were successful, and away we went.

We meandered down toward the mall, stopping at a fountain near the National Art Gallery where I almost got arrested. BUT DID NOT. Because I know one simple rule: when the police man starts whistling at you, get out of the fountain.

What's that whistling sound? Oh, I guess despite no signs to the contrary, this fountain is not open to public meandering. But I just wanted to shout "Jenny," while dramatically swimming across it.

Once we arrived at the mall, I hunkered down in the shade with some liquid refreshment while my cohorts played frisbee with children. Eventually we moved to the formally sunny part, now shaded, I got some french fries, and children continued to hassle us (the 10-year-old boys were very into Anna).

Our friend Anthony joined us eventually, and we eagerly awaited the pretty explosions in the sky that celebrate the greatness of America. 

I completely failed at taking a picture of those explosions, but Ashley managed to get a good one. Here it is. Look at it, and tell me you don't feel like singing country music and buying some rifles (joke):

Cue Anna's admirers: "Oooo. Ahhh." I kid you not, they said that after basically every firework. Or "Whoaaa!"

Attempting to avoid the masses after the show was done, we went to a BBQ place called Hill Country for beer and noms before heading home and ate THE WORLD'S GREATEST MAC N' CHEESE. I will admit to feeling pretty good at this point, though, so it may have only been pretty delicious mac n' cheese. The brisket was also great. I think I want to be buried at this place.

Anna, Anthony and I then headed back to Northwest D.C., stopping at one more last bar to make sure we'd sufficiently feted our country. After about 12 straight hours of partying, Anna and I decided we were good and went home for much deserved and needed sleep.

Hooray America!

More entries to come; I've pretty much run out of enthusiasm for this one (plus I need to build up my adventures). So stay tuned for parts two and three of Ellie's Fourth of July weekend: BOAT (or something like that), and the time I played a lot of arcade games at Smith Mountain Lake.

Catch y'all on the flip side!

Thoughts on womenfolk and whatnot...

(Disclaimer: I think I sound dumb in this post. I'm just trying to get some thoughts out there. Work with me here...this could be gold for my eventual billion-dollar book deal. Please be kind.)

It was a pretty quiet weekend here in Central Va., without many of the rollicking adventures you've come to expect from me. Be excited though, because this Wednesday I am headed to D.C. to celebrate America and then go hang out at the Chesapeake Bay. So anticipated an action-packed entry (with pictures!) in about a week.

Meanwhile, though, I can regale you with the adventures of the mind I went on this weekend. Not having many real adventures to go on, I consumed a lot of pop culture-y items. Three of said items had a lot of interesting connections to female empowerment, advancement, the history of feminism, etc. and I am now going to talk about those issues in an extremely uneducated and likely offensive way.

I say likely offensive because my initial sentence is one that is often maligned when used by any woman who cares about female issues but wants to differentiate herself from more militant, for lack of a better word, crowds. When I say I don't consider myself a feminist, I understand that is not true, at its base, because I'm an educated woman who believes in equality and would like to advance in the world and wants everybody to get paid the same amount and whatnot.

But I've also met people who are a lot "more feminist" than I am, for lack of a better phrase. My two favorite professors in college were an unmarried couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter. There were a lot of elements to their reticence to marry, but one of them was that they were both students of classic literature and history and very aware of the non-empowering (read: it's kind of like buying a woman) nature of traditional marriage. More power to them, but I am not that feminist.

And here's where my weekend pop cultural experiences come in. Friday night, Barrett and I watched the movie Hitchcock, a movie about a man who had a very complicated relationship with the powerful women in his life. Saturday, I read basically all of Tina Fey's Bossypants - feminism inherent self-explanatory. Sunday, Barrett and I watched An Education - a film that details a young woman in 1960's Britain losing her innocence and questioning the value of female advancement for the sake of female advancement (not the best way to put that, but hopefully I'll express more thoughts later).

All of these things are great, and you should check them out. They also reflect different sides of the feminism coin that I frequently ponder. Fey's fundamental argument about feminism, at least as read by me, is along the lines of the truism that the best revenge is living well. If you're working in a male-dominated field, you don't necessarily need to spend all your time reflecting on your position as a mantle-carrier for the women of the world. You also don't have to do what the boys want you to do or try to conform to their ideals of success.

You just have to be good at your job, so good that people cannot and will not ignore you. I'm really glossing over her thoughts, and kind of oversimplifying them (because I think she would, actually, identify herself as a feminist) but I liked what she said. (Especially an anecdote where Amy Poehler verbally bitch-slapped Jimmy Fallon for taking umbrage at a woman telling an off color joke.)

She reminds of my good friend Anna, who is apparently too busy and important to read this blog (read: she secretly hates me now that she has cooler friends), but whom I respect a lot for not thinking of herself as a "female computers scientist." She is just a computer scientist who happens to be female.

As to my other feminism encounters this weekend, I'd just recommend you check them out, because I have some vague ideas but no real definite takeaways. Basically, my thoughts on each are as follows:

After watching Hitchcock, which prominently displays the role Hitchcock's wife had in his success, I was disappointed to find that the epigraph of the movie mentioned that upon receiving his lifetime achievement award Hitchock said something along the lines of, "I share this, as I have everything, with Alma." Or something.

Here's the thing: that's great. But if the movie presented an at-all accurate picture of her involvement with the production of his movies, she deserved a lot more than that little line. She deserved a producer credit on Psycho as well as a screenwriting one - things Wikipedia illustrates she did not get.

An Education is a great movie, but one that I don't think answers an important question it poses. That may be, and is likely, intentional, but it's still frustrating. Near the end of the movie, the protagonist questions the point of being well-educated and getting an Oxford degree when she'll likely either become a teacher or a housewife. She tells the headmistress that they need to be able to tell the students what it's all for - and the headmistress cannot.

Then some other stuff happens that I don't want to spoil. But no one ever says, in the movie, what it is all for. Sure, the main character was about to enter a time period and a world where educated woman could do a lot more than just teach or get married - but is that all education if for, for getting the best job? I know it's not, but how do you really explain that?

I used to think about jobs post-graduation, and whether the things people were doing were "using their degree." The fact is, unless you major in engineering, computer science, math, etc. you aren't necessarily "using your degree" no matter what you do.

And say you do get married, pop out a few children and become a stay at home mom...have you wasted your education? Was the $50K a year tab worth it?

I think I sounded dumb in this blog post, but maybe my readers who have more nuanced thoughts about feminism and education and whatnot will contribute in the comments.