a love worth talking about

i heard the song for the first time today and cried the whole way through my first listen. my first thoughts were that it was so honest, his heart laid bare in song. it was his version of what happened.

i have writing, he uses melodies. we each have our outlet, and we each depended on them to make sense of what we were going through. language is so much more explicit, too. i wonder what it would have been like if i were a dancer, a fashion designer. what does heartbreak look like on a dress?

there are a few words in his song, audio clips from good will hunting. they’re right and appropriate, but they cut like glass. each time that one line is repeated i can feel his pain anew.

i’ve written plenty here about the breakup. over the last nine months i’ve left a trail of words in different places around the internet of what it’s been like to leave the relationship and find some peace and understanding about the whole thing. like the crumbs hansel and gretel dropped on their path through the woods, i think i could read back my blog posts and diary entries of the last few months and find my way all the way back to those raw december weeks when i broke up with him.

i write and tell stories. everything is material for something down the line, even if it’s just fodder for conversation with my girlfriends or something for the margins of my notebooks. even at my worst, when i was writhing on the floor with tear soaked, rock hard tissue balls scattered all around my head, i knew that someday it’d be something i’d use for a story.

but my second thought when i heard the song was: everyone will know, everyone will know now that someone he loved very much broke his heart, crushed him and hurt him. my ego, you know? i guess if i regret anything it’s that in order for me to be true to myself i had to hurt him. if there was some way to live my life honestly without doing that, if i could have protected him from the pain of the breakup, ah, protected both of us from the pain of the breakup, i would have liked to have chosen that route.

i’ve always loved his music. soon he’ll be playing shows again with his new EP and maybe it’ll be part of his set list. he’ll play it live for people, answer questions from curious people about the new set of songs, and it’ll be like another story of mine saved somewhere on the internet. a time in our lives memorialized in notes and words.

Filed under: breaking up, love, writing

a real post, some actual thoughts, a proper bit of writing:

i’ve got two primary pursuits these days. i’m learning to be a reporter, which is to say i am learning to research, and to probe into issues beyond the surface, and to ask the right questions, and to find the story, and to write well and concisely. which is also to say i am learning to be brave. i am learning that most of the time there is no way around picking up the phone to get someone to talk to me, i am learning that if i pick up the phone and start dialing before i’ve enough time to let my fear hold me back, i automatically commit myself to having a conversation with whoever picks up on the other end. i’ve learned that for every 4 calls i make, i usually can get 2 people who are by their desks, ready to speak to a stranger about their work, about their life experiences, about the issues they confront every day. but that doesn’t mean that for every two calls i make i’ll always get one person to pick up. the odds don’t work like that, for some reason. i usually have to call around four people before i hit two.

i’ve had bad interviews. really shitty interviews. i’ve had 6am interviews. i’ve had end of the day “is that enough for you?” interviews. i’ve had “you have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?” interviews. i’ve also had great conversations that open up a lot for me. there are so many generous people out there who, even though they’re at the top of the field, will start at square one with me. or people who are tucked away in corners of the country who have never done press calls who have incredible stories to tell. so i’m learning to be brave, and to trust the odds. i have more decent interviews than i do dead-end and awful interviews.

two weeks ago i spoke with a man in louisiana whose brother was shot to death by the police. five times in the back. he’s an organizer now. he speaks calmly and slowly, with a sometimes indecipherabale southern accent, calm words and stretched vowels that lulled me into saying “y’all” at least twice during our conversation. if i were not a reporter, i am fairly certain i’d never be able to have the guts to ever ask him what went through his mind when he found out his brother was killed. none of that made it into the piece, but we still got to talk about it for a bit. what a privilege.

i am learning to write fast and let it go, to start from scratch every morning, to pound out copy (and am intimately acquainted with dawdling, which makes me feel like a worthless good for nothing speck of a human being), to send it away and then to think later what went wrong, what needs polishing again. a flat headline? shitty lead? i hate writing headlines. but every day there is no choice. i write copy, i read a lot of the internet, i digest it, i try to make what i’m producing better.

i guess the other thing i realize is that i have a responsibility to attack life with all i’ve got. my great grandparents and grandparents and parents worked really hard all their lives, ostensibly to provide opportunities for their kids. maybe my long dead grandparents wouldn’t really approve of me becoming a writer–just today an auntie of mine bragged about how she put her foot down to her college student daughter who wants to be an english major–but they worked so that i’d have the ability to even have options. and so now i must decide for myself what i want to do with my life and talents. i think for those of us young people who have the privilege of being able to choose what we want to do with our lives, the real question is whether or not we have the courage to really go after what we want. do we? do i? i’m trying to find out.

and now it’s the end of the night and i’ve still more work to do, and i didn’t even get to writing about the other big thing in my life! all i did was write about writing! typical. i think it calls for some sylvia plath, a quote that tumblr at least gives her credit for:

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Filed under: reporting, work, writing, sylvia plath

i would call myself a reluctant reporter.

i’ve been with my employer for almost three years now and had several job titles and many responsibilities. in my latest incarnation–we’re talking about constant change and upheaval at this job–i have become a staff reporter at the magazine, which is becoming more policy oriented and DC-focused.

i thought i would hate it. i was very resistant at first. i said: oh, that DC stuff, that is very far away from me. that is another world, that is not of any interest to me, it is so insular, it is so inaccessible.

i think i still instinctively pull back whenever i see multisyllabic policy-related words hanging around in the headlines of the day while i skim newspaper websites. it all seems so soulless, standards and regulation and administrations and institutions and allocations.

but there’s not much time for questioning my duties or the editorial focus, it is time to learn to become a daily reporter now! it means teaching myself the do’s and dont’s and falling flat on my face in front of a couple thousand readers every day, mimicking the organization and structure of the news that’s already out there. faking it.

my day starts when i receive my morning assignments from my editor. he gives me little direction about who to pursue, he will maybe include a link, but no more, and send me on my way to go chase after the story as it’s developing. my practice now is to do as much background research as i can before i pick up the phone and call folks to schedule interviews.

there are inevitably moments in the day when i panic, there is the very nasty internal tug as i try to figure out out when i’ve got enough of a lay of a land that i can call up a source and engage in an informed conversation so i can get reasonable quotes from them. most days i just need to pick up the damn phone and schedule something NOW NOW NOW because the piece needs to go online before 4pm EST, even though i arrive in the office at 12pm EST, and who knows how long it will take for a source to respond to my call. sometimes i speak with people the moment they pick up the phone, sometimes i don’t hear back for hours, so i try to err on making my calls early in the day, even if that means risking that the interview is not useful enough because i don’t know enough about the topic to fully exploit my source’s knowledge and expertise and political agenda.

sometimes it means that i call a person and ask a very very basic question that reveals to them how little i know about the topic, thereby giving snobby jerks the right to say to respond to my question with: “are you serious?” and to which i respond with stunned silence, and to which the source might, as one did today, continue by repeating: “are you serious? i thought you knew what you were talking about when i started speaking ten minutes ago.” being new (and easily intimidated) means that i let this man slap me around on the phone while i do my best to maintain a professional manner and end the interview with my dignity intact. and it means i don’t think fast enough to ask the man if he’s really that much of an asshole to the people who must deal with him more regularly than i.

i’ve been covering a different topic every day, and even within one fairly specific beat, like education, a hundred topics spring from that. in the last two weeks alone i’ve covered national education standards, charter schools, public university admissions processes and affirmative action, federal funding of public schools, student loan reform, every topic under the sun. and that is just one of my beats.

i guess most surprisingly, i’ve found that when i’ve been tossed into new pools, i have actually become very passionate about whatever it is i’m tasked with covering. reform of many kinds, regulatory bodies of all sizes, it ends up being very fascinating to me. so much of it, at the end of the day, is about power and exploitation, resistance and change and holding those in power accountable. and that part i really love.

and i realized that if i’m doing my job right, i can make my readers care just as much as i’m starting to about these sorts of things.

Filed under: journalism, work, writing