Tag Archive for Life

Ch-ch-changes

July 18, 2011 Personal No comments

Change is never an easy thing.

Whether you change jobs, change houses or change life partners; change is hard.

This was my baby for almost two years.

Today I sold my car. I didn’t buy another. I am car-less.

And while I feel so free, I feel quite bittersweet about the whole thing.

Logically, it made sense to sell. I use my car about once or twice a month, if that. I pay for parking. It’s hard to justify paying around $600 a month for a thing that really just sits in my garage.

But emotionally, I feel a little mixed. I bought the car when I got my last job. I needed it because the job was about an hour’s commute away, while my life was in this city.

Almost 11 months ago, I quit that job (in fact my last day was almost exactly 10 months ago), I quit that job. I no longer really needed the car, but held on to it. Now, I feel like I’ve totally cleansed myself of everything to do with my last job. Not that I’m trying to erase it, because I’m not, but the experience wasn’t the most positive and now I have nothing to remind me of it, except for a couple license plates that will be buried under my stairs with the other car remnants.

While financially it made sense to sell, it was also due to me and the kind of person I am. I’m just not a car person. Never have been. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was almost 18, didn’t really care to drive my mother’s car everywhere. Even when I lived in a small town, I loved living right downtown and walking everywhere. I don’t really know car names or makes or models. Instead I like that purple car, or the blue one, etc.

And while you can debate the reliability of public transit in the city, or the affordability of a car-sharing program, both of those better suite my lifestyle than an automobile parked in a parking space.

I’ll miss the freedom my car allowed, but I won’t miss what the car represented.

That being said, it was quite cool to walk into the bank today and go up to the teller and say, “I’d like to pay off my loan, please.”

As I walked out this was going through my head:

That old familiar feeling

September 8, 2010 Media, Personal 4 comments

Journalism is a hard industry.

If you want to succeed in it, you have to be driven, focused and tough. There used to be hundreds of others you were competing against for jobs — now with blogs and citizen journalism there are thousands. You need to stand out from the crowd.

This month marks 11 years since the first time I walked into a newsroom. I remember the feeling vividly. As a 17-year-old, the cubicles seemed to go on forever, the lighting was too harsh, the people were unknown. Within weeks, there weren’t that many desks to get through to mine, the lighting was fine, and the people all had names (well in my corner of the newsroom, but I’d know everyone soon enough).

It was in that newsroom I fell in love with the craft of being a newspaper journalist (yes, it really is a craft), and I’ve never looked back.

No matter how many times I hear the industry is dying, I can’t walk away. This is more than a job or a career to me, it is who I am in my bones.

Undoubtedly, the Internet has eaten away at the profitability of the old newspaper model, but it has also opened so many doors in ways reporters never could have imagined. With a quick Google, Facebook or Twitter search, sources can be readily at hand. Stories can be written faster because research is easier to obtain than ever before. I still subscribe to the old street reporting style, but love to use the Internet, too.

Twitter, Facebook and blogs connect you with your readers like never before. There’s so much possibility online, and that excites me. This past spring, I took an online course at the Toronto Star to beef up my web skills not because anyone told me to, but because I knew it would be a great thing to learn.

As far as I’m concerned, the web isn’t to be feared; it’s to be explored. And there’s so much out there to explore.

In a couple weeks, I’ll be feeling the way I did when I was 17. I’ll be starting a new job as a web editor at the Toronto Star. No doubt, the newsroom will seem to have hundreds of desks, the lighting will be harsh and the people will be unknown.

And I can’t wait.

Finding community on the World Wide Web

September 3, 2010 Personal 9 comments

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Internet and how different my life would be without it.

For one, I wouldn’t be writing this blog (obviously). My job would be different (obviously). I would still have a land-line phone (as it is the Internet that has kept me in touch for cheap with my family that’s long-distance).

But there are other things my life would be missing without this thing we call the world wide web — community.

Sure, Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch with people you went to school with, or worked with, or whatever-ed with, but it has also given me a community of people online I have never met, but with whom my life would not be the same had I not come across their net presence.

Sure, Twitter’s a big part of that — I tend to follow/be followed by more people I don’t know, and I really like that on Twitter. I like that aspect of it. Through these people, their tweets and their blogs, I feel like I have a whole community of friends — and it doesn’t bother me that we’ve never met.

A few examples:

@spydergrrl and I found each other because our blog entries complaining about Margaret Wente calling all bloggers male were featured on thestar.com. We’ve read each other’s blogs ever since, she’s been on Spark proclaiming her geek girl status to the world, and I just wanted to bring her chicken soup when she was sick last week. I’ve never met Tanya, but that doesn’t matter to me at all, we converse on Twitter as if we’ve known each other forever.

@opinionatedlizz started following me when I echoed a complaint of hers that she had made on Twitter, and pointed out (sadly) her complaint would never be heard by the company because their Twitter feed is automated. We both buzzed around each other’s blogs (hers is great!), and have been conversing ever since (Happy early birthday by the way!).

@saragiguere is a Toronto-based musician, who was kind enough to let me interview her for my blog (look for that feature to come later this month!). Again, it was a matter of two like-minded individuals just happening to connect on Twitter.

I’ve been lurking on @nachosatmidnite‘s blog for awhile (see they’re not all women!) and left my first comment when he went to a restaurant I had a horrible experience with. He found my blog, we started following each other on Twitter and conversing ever since. Even when I don’t agree with him, Chris is willing to publish my comments and respond to them. Not everyone is that open-minded.

@neatebuzzthenet has two great blogs everyone should follow: His Yahoo Junior Hockey one, Buzzing the Net, and Out of Left Field. Neate has been a big inspiration for me as a blogger, and a great supporter of my little blog here. He was one of the first people to start leaving comments (you know, that wasn’t my mother). He’s so smart and well-versed in every kind of sport, I feel honoured when I have an opinion to share with him that he agrees with. As a blogger, he has my respect.

@laurenonizzle half counts, since I did “officially” meet her at a workshop in May. She is a blogger extraordinaire — the kind of blogger I most definitely could never be. But I respect her immensely for building herself an online persona and brand. Especially for a kid her age. Kudos, Lauren.

Finally, all the people that do @journchat on Twitter every Monday night — they make me think critically about my craft and challenge me to do better. Thank you to all I’ve ever conversed with in that, you have no idea how much I take away from Journchat every single week.

So yes, the Interwebz can be full of crazies. You don’t know what you’re reaching into when you “meet” someone online, but when you’re really lucky, you find amazing stuff!

Thanks to those who inspire me online now, and I can’t wait to see who else is out there!

Hey Bill, we’ve had this fight before

August 13, 2010 Entertainment, Media One comment

Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly attacked comments made by Jennifer Aniston earlier this week, calling women who have babies without men “destructive to our society.”

Aniston, currently doing the talk show circuit for her forthcoming movie The Switch about a woman who has a baby on her own, had originally said that women are no longer waiting for a man to have a child:

Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child.”

After O’Reilly’s attack, she fought back, saying:

Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. And, of course, many women dream of finding Prince Charming (with fatherly instincts), but for those who’ve not yet found their Bill O’Reilly, I’m just glad science has provided a few other options.”

Here’s the thing, Bill: We’ve already had this fight about single women having babies being detrimental to our society. It happened 17 years ago to a man by the name of Dan Quayle when he attacked Murphy Brown for choosing to keep her baby and raise it on her own.

Now, I’ll give O’Reilly this; at least Jennifer Aniston is in fact a real person (unlike Murphy Brown, who was a television character), but that’s it. The argument was flawed when Quayle made it in 1992, but it’s even more flawed today.

Let’s go back. According to a Time magazine article, Quayle, who was the American vice-president at the time, made the following remarks:

“It doesn’t help matters,” Quayle complained, when Brown, “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman” is portrayed as “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life-style choice.’ “

Hmm. What did O’Reilly say again?

Right. Perhaps O’Reilly was busy back in 1992 when the whole Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown thing happened (maybe he was busy at Inside Edition), or maybe society went back in time to a time when it was a problem for women to decide to have kids on their own. I don’t know.

Here’s the thing. Conservatives say they’re pro-life, yet when it comes to a woman deciding that she’s ready to have a kid and decides she wants to do it now, on her own, this is a problem.

Who’s business is it if a single woman decides to have a baby on her own? No one’s. It’s not mine, it’s not the general population, and it’s definitely not Bill O’Reilly’s. Would being a single mom be hard? Undoubtedly so. But women have been doing it for years (think of all the women who are abandoned by the men who get them pregnant while they are pregnant — is it not better to be a single mother by choice rather than someone else forcing it on you?).

What if a man wanted to have a child on his own? Would that be a problem as well to O’Reilly? I’d wager not.

It’s well past the time that American conservatives get out of women’s reproductive health. Roe v. Wade should be left alone. Women who choose to be single mothers should be left alone. We are all people capable of making our own decisions in our own lives.

But really, someone get O’Reilly a copy of Murphy Brown. I’d love to see her give the same speech to him she gave about Quayle (and someone should also remind him that Quayle lost re-election that year — not that his comments about Murphy Brown had anything to do with it, I’m sure):

(I deleted the embedded video because it was automatically started whenever the page was opened, so click on the link for some retro Entertainment Tonight).

Who pays for the rescue?

June 11, 2010 News commentary No comments

Update June 12: Sunderland is ending her voyage, according to media reports. The Australians will not be asking for compensation to rescue Sunderland, the French have not said if they will or not.

An interesting tweet by Ottawa-based journalist Allison Cross caught my eye Friday morning:

Question: Should the 16-year-old sailor rescued today have to pay for the rescue efforts? Why or why not? #abbysunderland

Sunderland is the 16-year-old American teen attempting to create a world record by being the youngest person to sail around the world on her own. She ran into trouble Thursday somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean when she set off her emergency beacon locating device, Pete Thomas reported first on his blog.

The teen was found by an Australian search and rescue team Thursday night. According to the L.A. Times, her boat was upright, but the mast was gone. She was apparently unharmed.

Her parents are posting updates on her blog here.

Back to Cross’ question though: Should the Sunderlands pay for the “rescue” of their daughter?

The answer to that question might depend on what you consider to be a “rescue” operation. Sunderland’s parents report that the last contact they had with their daughter before Thursday night, the sea was rough. Winds were roaring up to 60 knots, and the sea was swelling 20-25 feet.

She was found unharmed, yes, but her boat was missing its mast (a vital part needed to sail around the world). There is no doubt that Sunderland pressed her button because she feared death. The fact that she was found unharmed is a miracle in and of itself. Thus, she should not be made to pay. She used her emergency beacon locator as she should have.

But, you might argue, that she was found to be fine. A little hungry, her parents report, but fine. The boat may have been missing a mast, but it was rightside up. She was on the boat waiting for a fishing vessel. She wasn’t stuck in the sea on a floating device, as one would imagine a true emergency on the sea to be.

On top of that, Sunderland is a 16-year-old girl trying to sail around the world — alone! That in itself shows recklessness. No child should have been allowed to do this in the first place. Therefore, she should have to pay the costs of emergency search and rescue.

The thing is, the case of Abby Sunderland’s emergency rescue is not black and white. Should her family have to pay for the costs of rescuing their daughter from the seas? Likely not. While she wasn’t floating in the middle of the ocean, there still is a much stronger argument that Sunderland used her beacon in what was, for her anyway, an emergency. Who are we to argue with that?

After all, we still treat people at emergency rooms who come in with a cough or a stomach ache that really aren’t emergencies at all. And they’re not charged (in Canada anyway).

Yes, people can argue that what Sunderland is doing is reckless and dangerous in itself, but that doesn’t mean she should not be allowed the same help and assistance any other person would be afforded in her situation.

If this were a 45-year-old man instead of a 16-year-old girl we were talking about, I’m willing to wager we would not even be asking the question of whether he should have to pay the costs of the rescue operation.

We have emergency services for a reason. And what I consider to be an emergency, you likely will not. The Sunderlands should not have to pay for the rescue of their daughter. Instead, we should be thankful we’re having this debate and not mourning the loss of a 16-year-old girl who decided she wanted to be the youngest person to sail around the world.

What do you think? Should the Sunderlands have to pay for their daughter’s rescue? Why or why not?

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