Alright, fine. Kinda weird and crazy because YOUR SON IS NINE YEARS OLD AND MAYBE HE SHOULD LEARN TO TIE HIS SHOES WITHOUT THE HELP OF A MAID FIRST, but whatever. I roll my eyes and move on. A couple pages later, I find this: 

I flip back to the first story. Then back to the second. Back to the first. Back to the second. Afterwards, I stopped reading the paper.

These two stories were in the same paper, same issue, even took place in the same city. You can read them for yourself here. In the same city that a mother is expressing her pride at the fact that her not-quite-adolescent son can drive one of the family’s 18 cars (he gets to because it’s his birthday, by the way), a different mother is inconsolable because her five-year-old daughter is dead after being raped by a family friend.

There are a million factors that affect each of these stories – race, class, gender, culture, upbringing, geographic location. The families could be analyzed, data could be collected, books could be written. But, and I say this with the exhausted — and now angry — brain of a graduate student, maybe there is a semi-simple solution here.

Let’s all stop teaching our sons that, if they insist enough, they can have whatever the hell they want. 

Is it just me or does that make a ridiculous amount of sense?

Such happy interns likely do not exist. (Flickr/David Boyle)

It’s internship season now, and every post on JournalismJobs and MediaBistro proudly declares that they will not be using you as a moving tray. You will be doing Real Work, like reporting things, jumping into hard news, writing front page stories, sitting in on editorial meetings and being allowed to speak. It’ll be great! You’ll be pitching stories, poring through data, getting Deep Throat to tell you all his inner secrets and winning a Pulitzer. You’ll be consuming more coffee than you deliver.

When I see that sentence, I shudder. Not because they’re lying, but because they are telling the truth.

Internships nowadays are essentially contract jobs. In the field of journalism, and, I’m sure, many other fields, interns are expected to jump right in and do things. There isn’t time to mess up. There isn’t time to fully train you; you must be trained on the job, or come fully trained. Whereas internships before were places where students came to transcribe things and ”learn how the company runs,” now they are, for three months, fully responsible, fully jaded, fully caffeine-addicted employees. Worst of all, some of these contract positions are unpaid.

For five years, I’ve participated in internship season. I know the excruciating October to April, in which you apply to more things than you knew you were capable of applying to. I know the desperate fear that dawns on you in April when you start thinking, “Oh my God. I’m actually going to be the first student in this school’s history to actually not find an internship.” I know the mid-February anticipation you start to get every morning from 5 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., when you haven’t quite woken up yet, but you have a physical need to check your e-mail, groggily, angrily – because who the fuck checks e-mail before the sun has risen? – hoping that someone requested an interview with you while you were sleeping. I know all these emotions by heart. I welcome them each year with open arms and battle-ready eyes, last year’s wounds still visible.

You find something at the beginning of May that you deem good enough because your parents have heard of the publication. If they haven’t, you feel like a failure. You spend your tiny, two-week summer vacation preparing yourself to start impressing editors again, and trying to sew back together your shredded ego.

Your internship starts, and no one has time to ask you for coffee. You are expected to know everything about the company and the city you’re working in, because the company cannot afford to waste any of your 12-week, minimum-wage gig. They need you to go out and report a front-page story your first day on the job. This is awesome, and terrifying. Awesome, because who doesn’t want to write front-page stories as soon as they start an internship? Terrifying, because “Oh my God, I don’t know how to get in touch with the mayor of Cleveland, I just moved here yesterday, JUST GIVE ME SIX MINUTES TO EAT MY SANDWICH PLEASE.” 

You survive 84 days of the 24-hour news cycle. On your last day, you quietly eat your goodbye cake, alone at your desk, in about six minutes. You have two weeks to re-sew your ego and prepare to start impressing professors again. Oh and, don’t forget, internship season starts in a couple months. Start updating that resumé again.

May the odds be ever in your favor, or whatever.

This is the essence of me.

I was eight and a half, and I was mad. I had just woken up, my sister and my mom were gone and now I had to go to school. They had left early, so as not to trigger my rage, but I wanted to be awake when they were getting ready, so I could protest and be Very Upset about being left out of Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. My sister was ten, so she could go. I was deemed too young. I was sulky the whole day.

I got home from school after 3pm and stormed around some more. My grandmother handed me the phone: “It’s mummy!” She tried to look excited. I was still upset at my mom because she couldn’t change company policy on bringing small children to work, but I decided to talk to her anyway.

“So,” I said casually, “what are you doing?”

“Just filing things. It’s boring,” she said.

“What are all the other kids doing?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Pause.

“Not much. They’re just eating pizza.” Another pause. “And watching a movie.”

I could sense her hesitation, so I decided to push further. “What movie?”

A longer pause. “What are you doing?” she said quickly. “Do you have homework?”

“Mom! What movie?!” Now I was frantic.

She sighed, delivering the final blow. “Space Jam.”

I was broken. Torn. Devastated. Things would never be the same. How could she do this to me?

“Moooooooom!” My grandmother looked at me, startled by this outburst. “That’s not faaaaair! She doesn’t even LIKE basketball!” I was automatically mad at my sister for being ten, mad at my mom for refusing to change company policy, mad at my dad for allowing all of this to happen to me and mad at my grandparents for not stopping my parents from allowing this injustice to occur. I knew I was mad at God and Santa, too, but I couldn’t quite explain why.

By the time they got home, I had gone through the entire eight years of my life, trying to understand what I had done wrong to deserve this kind of treatment. I fell asleep questioning the very existence of human compassion and dissecting the concept of karma.

The next day at school, our class got to make peanut butter from scratch and I forgot all about Space Jam.

Two years later, I got to go to Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. I wore my best dress and we got to work at a desk and eat pizza. It was pretty cool, I guess.

I used to try really hard to make you laugh.

Without thinking about it or planning it, I used to make sure that our conversations involved your laughter, because it was a pleasure to hear. Not just hear, but listen to. Study. And, that I was the cause for such a wonderful sound, well, that was more than I deserved. When I made you laugh, I felt like I won. I felt like I was the best, strongest, smartest winner in the world.

In all the laughter, I didn’t notice at first that mine wasn’t involved. I was so focused on making you laugh that, instead of waiting for you to make me laugh, I scrambled to find the next funny joke to hear that sound again. I became obsessed.

I used to wonder what it would be like to have someone make me laugh as much as I made you laugh. I don’t know what that feels like, what it’s like to have someone so focused on your pleasure that their’s isn’t involved, isn’t thought about. Maybe it’s terrible. I don’t know. You seemed to enjoy it.

I do wish you had tried to make me laugh more, since it is a lot of fun to laugh, in general. Maybe if you had tried a little more, and I had tried a little less, we would still have laughter between us now.

Shake Anderson, a member of the Occupy Oakland Media group, speaks to the press on the morning of the one-year anniversary of the Oakland Police Department’s crackdown on the Occupy encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Private security guards and officers were positioned around Frank Ogawa Plaza throughout the day.

Occupy-related pins were being given out from 12 p.m. onwards.

A Chalkupy (the art faction of Occupy Oakland) participant shows off his decorated pants.

A papier-mache pig, painted as a police officer, looks over the Chalkupy activities.

The papier-mache pig was decorated with an OPD star and a “Vote Nobody 2012″ sticker.

Frank Ogawa Plaza quickly became a colorful place, both literally and figuratively, with artists, protesters and Oakland community members.

Birds fly over the plaza as those commemorating Occupy Oakland cheered and rallied together.

A small group of participants wore all black with black bandanas, and carried black shields with peace signs on them.

Police officers and security guards increased in numbers as the night went on but did not, for the most part, interact with those involved in the commemoration of Occupy.

I update my Google calendar. It keeps me organized. It trains me for a job-job. It helps me remember what time that interview is supposed to be and who I’m Skyping with this weekend.

I avoid some people. I’ve learned, painfully, that people suck.

If you had told me when I was 10, that I would be a cynical, doubtful person when I hit my 20′s, I wouldn’t have believed it. Because, you see, this isn’t who I am. This is me, but with the dust of the world on my clothes, and a hardened gaze as a shield.

I’ve learned the world, like everyone else, through experiences like sending out my 217th resume, or hate-”liking” an “I got engaged!” status on Facebook, or powering through an awkward hug with someone you once giggled through a movie with.

I’ve learned the world through watching, from the front row, a relationship whither and die, having that second cupcake and hating yourself for the next week for it, then hating yourself for caring.

I’ve learned the world through hitting an age where you yourself choose to start taking one-a-day vitamins, consciously deciding to stop buying t-shirts, finding an old diary and reading that, in your nine-year-old self’s plans, you would have met a nice, suitable guy, like, last Tuesday. I’ve learned the world through feeling someone give up on me and understanding that, this is actually what life is, and movies are just there to make you feel better about it temporarily.

I carry a water bottle now because you never know when you’ll taste salt water, realize it’s coming from your own eyes, and need to replenish your soul.

The six-word bio is an initiative by Smith Magazine for capturing profound and clipped life stories. It is also a component of a Berkeley student’s profile that is shared throughout the Berkeley network and shown to potential employers.

It is, more importantly, an excellent way to waste a lot of time. Kind of like extreme Twitter.

I spent literally hours trying to figure out how I wanted to represent my professional life and career goals in six words. After tens and tens of combinations, I arrived on “I wish finance was this fun.”

It’s a bit of commentary on life decisions that we all have to make and concerns that journalists have today. For me, it’s applicable to my life right now and to the constant struggle I (and we) have between passion and money.

The best runners-up:

I always come to work early.

Take me back to New York.

We probably take ourselves too seriously.

Hire me! Hire me! Hire me!

Will work for very little pay.

Able to tweet and walk simultaneously.

Wait, I need my lucky pen.

Wait, I need my lucky blazer.

Wait, I need my lucky recorder.

My internships didn’t involve delivering Starbucks.

Probably should have gone into finance.

Secret of life: do better tomorrow.

If you are going through some life crisis, or need some writing practice (or editing practice) or need ways to make your job more fun, I suggest sitting down and seeing how many you can come up with in 30 minutes, or even an hour. It’s a great way to understand what your life consists of so far and what you want it to consist of.

Concise clarification – always a good thing.

Cover of The Fountainhead (Flickr/Rodrigo Paoletti)

Dominique: “As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they’re enjoying themselves? That’s when you see the truth. Look at those who spend the money they’ve slaved for – at amusement parks and side shows. Look at those who’re rich and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in smarter speak-easies. That’s your mankind in general. I don’t want to touch it.” (143-4)

Dominique: “And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn.” (313)

Mallory: “Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me – it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice – your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there with a purpose of its own. That’s horror.” (331)

Roark: “To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” (376)

Wynand: “I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ‘find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”
    “Look, Gail.” Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life.”
    “Your strength?”
    “Your work.” He tossed the branch aside. “The material the earth offers you and what you make of it.” (551)

“His head thrown back, he felt the pull of his throat muscles and he wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from the uplift of one’s head.” (553)

Roark: “Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.” (578)

“The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought – while his hand moved rapidly – what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.” (642)

Happy 100th birthday, Teresa!

By Nausheen Husain
nhusain@mysuburbanlife.com

Westmont resident Teresa Baker has some advice for the young people of today: read more.

That’s what the newly 100-year-old offered up with other tips last week, days after she marked her centennial birthday May 30.

“I understand that people don’t read as much as they used to,” said Baker, who was born and raised in Chicago and worked as a cashier at Helping Hand Thrift Shop in Brookfield for 25 years. “They should try. Modern technology and all the new gadgets are difficult, but books are books.”

To her friends, Baker is an inspiration at age 100.

“She has lived so much, and she is so upbeat,” friend and former colleague Ann Ostrander said. “She never complains. It’s refreshing.”

Baker lived in the Little Italy neighborhood of Chicago as a child and attended Washington Irving Elementary School, where she skipped two grades.

She graduated from McKinley High School at age 16, attended Crane Junior College for six months and then began her working life at 18. She said she worked “with numbers and figures” at the main office of Sears. She later worked as a bookkeeper in Broadview, too.

Baker married Frank Baker at the age of 25, and has been a widow since 1988. She spends time with her family – a 93-year-old sister living in Downers Grove and three children – as much as possible. She also spends her days crocheting, painting, doing crossword puzzles, watching “Jeapordy” and, of course, reading. She is a fan of James Patterson novels.

To celebrate the birthday, Ostrander helped organize a surprise party for Baker at Tony’s Restaurant in Brookfield.

“Honestly, I didn’t know if we should surprise her or not,” Ostrander said. “But we thought we’d give it a shot; it was a big birthday, and she’s pretty healthy.”

Baker attributes her health to eating lightly and walking.

“They had streetcars and buses when I was younger, but I liked to walk to school, even in the snow. It was about a mile-and-a-half away from where I lived,” she said.

Does she know the secret of life?

“No, I have no idea,” she said, though she did have some recommendations. “Get interested in things you like to do, keep up with the times and read a newspaper regularly.”

*This story was originally published in the June 13, 2012 issue of the Westmont Progress. It was not posted online.