Can this relationship last?

Dear Metro,

We need to talk. Our relationship is in serious trouble, and I fear we may never make it back to those happy, carefree days of our first year together, filled with joy rides to IHOP and the mall.

I've been one of your staunchest supporters for six years, Metro. I've defended your broken escalators, your random breakdowns, your rush hour delays. I've explained your mysteries to countless tourists and respected the whims of your temperamental doors. I've vowed to anyone who will listen that a life with you is a life that doesn't need a permanent car on the side, because you make sure I get everywhere I need to go.

I've demonstrated my commitment to you in hundreds of ways, from buying a SmarTrip after a year to prove I was serious about you to visiting you twice a day, five days a week, virtually without fail in the last two years. I rarely complain about the lack of a seat in the morning and I never use the countless other people in your life against you. Even though they sometimes drive me crazy, I know there's enough of you to go around.

This year, though, you've been treating me shabbily and I don't know how much more I can take. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. You and Washington's cost of living have plotted together to ensure that I can't. And the environmentalist in me doesn't want to buy a car unless there's absolutely no other option.

But you've been wreaking havoc with my schedule all summer. You've made me late to work with trains ten minutes apart during rush hour rather than the usual five (max!). You imposed your own schedule on my happy hour plans every Sunday through Thursday in August, demanding that I either get on a train by 10pm or fight my way through a delayed system to the yellow line, taking more than an hour to get home.

The first glimpse of trouble was way back in February, when you shut down every blue and yellow line station in Virginia from Friday night until Tuesday morning during President's Day weekend, despite my pleas to let me visit my friends on Valentine's Day. And now you're doing it again. I was looking forward to a relaxing Labor Day weekend with friends, maybe some shopping in Georgetown, a quick jaunt to Dupont Circle...until yesterday, when you told me you were closing three stations for the weekend, including mine. You're even closing the National Airport station. During one of the busiest tourist weekends of the year. Metro, this is serious! What is going on?

I know you're older than I am and don't have the energy you used to. I know sometimes you feel like you need a break and some time to yourself, but I depend on you, Metro, and there's no one who can take your place in my life.

Something's gotta give, Metro. Please, help me save our relationship - I don't want us to end up hating one another. I'll try harder if you will.

With love,
Jessalyn
xoxo

Listen up, corporate America!

I wish corporate America understood non-profit culture a little better. In the strange, circular way the universe sometimes operates, there's a fairly sizable portion of the corporate world that depends on the business of non-profits and NGOs to stay afloat. But NPOs and NGOs don't run on the same fuel (i.e. profit) that corporate America does, which means the latter is sometimes left scratching their collective head over what their non-profit clients want, or why they may not have landed a particular non-profit account after making a pitch that seemed, well, pitch-perfect.

When it comes to attracting business, marketing yourself well is key - the same goes for attracting donors in the non-profit world - and corporate America understands that very well. They just don't seem to realize that the vast majority of non-profit employees and managers care a zillion times more about getting their message out as far and wide as possible than they do about which company is going to bend over backward the furthest to get their business.

My "bat cave" (I don't actually have an office, I have about 1/3 of our reception area, sectioned off with various pieces of strategically-placed furniture, which a former co-worker took one look at before deciding it looked enough like Bruce Wayne's secret lair to warrant the nickname.) is regularly deluged with marketing freebies. Sure, the pens can be useful and the super-bouncy mini foam football is a good prop for pretending I'm Toby Ziegler when I have writer's block but for the most part, the gimmicky giveaways do me absolutely no good. Same goes for lunch with a corporate service provider who slips and reveals, halfway through the meal, that he actually has no idea what my organization does after working with us for nearly a year. I'd rather have eaten a sandwich sitting at my desk, thanks all the same.

What would do me a lot of good and have me taking a second look at the company, rather than rolling my eyes and practicing my trash can jump-shot, is a company that sends me a letter (better, an email, since most of us progressive non-profit types are suckers for saving the environment) letting me know they've just made a donation ($5, $10 - whatever that ridiculous pad of paper-cum-magnet I've got 20 of cost you to have produced and shipped) and would like to talk about what they can do for my cause. Because, hey, I care about what I'm doing. And I'm much more likely to listen to your ideas on how I can do it better if you seem to care about what I'm doing, too.

With very rare exceptions, the non-profit world is made up of people whose bottom line is wanting to make a difference - we're definitely not here for the money, and we're not going to sign a contract with a consultant or service provider based on the perks they're willing to offer us. We're here because we believe in something, and we want to pull together the voices of everyone who agrees with us while standing up and saying to whatever authority applies, "Hey! People care about this, and they want you to make it happen - we'll help you do it!" If a company not only offers a good product but seems to say "You know, I like what you're doing, keep up the good work," they're on my short list of go-to firms pretty much immediately. Whereas the company that's sent me two expensive, overly-packaged, overnighted gimmicks with business cards tucked inside this week is not likely to ever convince me to sit down and talk to them.

Isn't one of the first rules of Business 101 knowing your customer? Well, corporate America, getting to the heart of a non-profit is easy: know and like what they do. Bonus points if you click "donate now" or "take action."

"Democratic, progressive and patriotic" Senator Kennedy

Ted Kennedy is a name I've heard for as long as I've been alive, since well before I understood anything about American politics.

Although he was the second most senior member of the Senate and 77 years old, his remains the face that represents the progressive movement in my mind. He came of age in an America that was segregated, where women left the secretarial pool when they got married and where the GLBT community's existence wasn't even acknowledged. He was an upper-class white male from New England, more privileged than perhaps any other group in society, yet he fought relentlessly for the civil rights of every minority group in America throughout his career. What better role model - what better example of an American hero - do we have than one who advocates so fiercely for something for which he has no personal need and which can only serve to lower his own station in society?

Many people will write about Senator Kennedy in the days to come far more knowledgeably and eloquently than I can, but I came across the obituary written by LeMonde's Sylvain Cypel and was touched by the emotion with which it was written, so I wanted to share it with you. A translation of a portion of it follows:

It is not only a major figure in American politics during the last half-century who has disappeared with the death, Wednesday, August 26th, of Senator Edward Kennedy, the result of a brain tumor. He bore a mythical name and inherited a family history that made him - reluctantly, he often gave the impression - a living symbol. That of a confident, peaceful, globally-minded America, conscious of honoring its laws and civil liberties; an America inclined to give priority to a diplomatic solution over a show of strength, yet never balking at giving a demonstration of power should the need arise. A symbol, thus, of a certain political left: democratic, progressive and patriotic.

Kennedy: a name magnificent and heavy to bear. Magnificent because it is that of one of the most celebrated patrician families of New England. Heavy because his father, Joseph, the patriarch of the dynasty, suspected of having made his fortune thanks to contacts in organized crime, a democrat grown isolationist and anti-Roosevelt during World War II, had been sympathetic to Charles Lindbergh's group, America First, denounced at one time for its proximity to the Nazi regime.

A heavy symbol, above all, marked by fate. The two oldest brothers of he whom America called "Ted" were assassinated: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, JFK, in 1963, during a trip to Dallas, Texas, just three years after his accession to a White House to which he restored polish and strength. Then, in 1968, came the turn of Robert "Bobby" Kennedy, Attorney General, killed in the middle of his electoral campaign. Assassinations perpetrated under conditions and for reasons never fully resolved, but which would inflame global opinion, contributing to the creation of this "Kennedy curse," which Ted inherited...

...An acerbic critic of the tax cuts granted to the [nation's] wealthiest by the Bush administration and of its negligence after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of Louisiana in 2005, he was also an opponent of the American war in Iraq - he is one of the few to have voted against it from the beginning - to the point that former President George H.W. Bush asked him privately to curb the tone of his remarks. George W. Bush, however, always took care to be on the best of terms with Sen. Kennedy.

For this champion of the moderate Democratic agenda, whose every public appearance drew a crowd, was a great orator and peacemaker. He made respecting the structure of the American Constitution - its checks and balances - the cornerstone of his political philosophy. His first major speech as a senator, in 1964, concerned the Civil Rights Act that would lead to the abolition of all racial segregation in the United States. Defender of the weakest - the poor, women, the disabled, minorities, immigrants... - and an unapologetic reformist, over time Sen. Kennedy positioned himself as a man of principles and unrepentant pragmatism.

Beloved in the United States and around the world, Senator Kennedy's legacy is a refusal to accept any injustice, a demand for universal equality and a fighting spirit. Let's honor his memory by ensuring that his dreams for America come to fruition.

Kindle: Crave or Scorn?

We've already established that I'm a complete bookworm. Incurably, unrepentantly addicted to the written word, I am absolutely capable of sitting down (or standing up, or lying down, or leaning against something, or walking down the street) with a book and losing any sense of reality.

I've missed Metro stops, set alarms to keep myself from missing appointments, stayed up all night and skipped meals while in the grip of a particularly good story. I scribble in the margins to argue with historians about their interpretation of the facts, to underline possible foreshadowing and ponder what's to come, or to wonder why, oh why, Elinor Dashwood and her Edward can't get their act together. When the books that pull me in deepest end, I miss the characters (which is why I've read Scarlett and three different writers' takes on what came after Elizabeth and Darcy's happily-ever-after).

I struggle with the idea of ebooks and the handheld devices that hold them, like Amazon's Kindle. On one hand, it's great that you can carry around 1,500 books on the Kindle and as many as 3,500 on the Kindle DX - that's a library that would keep a librophile like me busy for several years (or in the DX's case, several more than several years!). On the other hand, a flat, cold screen will never have the same tactile qualities as a book: you can't fan back through the pages of the e-version of A Ring of Endless Light, stopping whenever there's poetry printed on a page, looking for your favorite of Vicky Austin's musings while your finger holds your place. You can't write in the margins. And when you eventually use up your virtual shelf space, you can't box up your older books and move them to the attic; you have to delete some, or buy a new reader.

Admittedly, the ability to easily travel with scads of reading material is worth some sacrifices. But there's one major sticking point for me that has nothing to do with missing feeling actual paper under my fingers: the Kindle and its sibling devices have access to the internet. Of course, they have to in order to download books anytime, anywhere, which is one of their major selling points. And what's the point of having a wireless device that's only capable of accessing one type of wireless information? But, quite frankly, I don't want to have the ability to look up directions, check my email or watch the latest CNN clips mixed up with my books. If I'm going to sit down and read, I want any interruption to be because I'm ready for one, not because I feel like - since I'm sitting with internet access in my lap - I've gone too long without checking for messages.

So I think I'm still an ebook hold-out. What about you, is Kindle something you'd love to have or want nothing to do with? What are your pros and cons?

Beautiful Places: NoVA

I was 16 the first time I came to the mid-Atlantic, headed to Georgetown for three weeks as a Junior Statesman of America. Flying into Virginia's Dulles International Airport in early July, I remember thinking "It's so green!" For a teenager who has grown up surrounded by sand and palm trees, and whose concept of natural beauty is based on the mountainous landscapes of Montana, Northern California and Vancouver Island, a mostly flat, green, deciduous forest is fascinating to look at, but not particularly pretty.

I thought downtown Washington was beautiful, with its white marble and broad avenues; I liked the look and feel of the brick in Georgetown and its narrow, tree-lined streets. But looking out my dorm room window at the river and Northern Virginia on the other side just made me think about how uncomfortable I was every time I walked out into the sauna that is summer in the mid-Atlantic.

The Potomac looked the way the air felt: like very soggy mud you'd want to avoid whenever possible and wash off immediately if it happened to come in contact with your skin. The leafy cover provided by the trees reminded me that if I stood under any of them for more than 30 seconds, at least three of the five gazillion mosquitoes who love the area's shaded, damp scenery would inevitably find me and launch an attack.

When I came back to the area two years later for college, not much had changed. The Potomac was slightly less brown, and I did enjoy being able to watch the seasons change, but I still didn't see any innate beauty in the landscape. (With the exception of fall colors. "The leaves are changing color! On that tree, and that one over there, and...all of them! Look!" was pretty much my standard line every time I walked out the door in October, and my dorm mates from cooler climates spent the month laughing at me.) In the six years since, a love of the region has snuck up on me.

I lived in Alexandria my first year out of college, in a decent-enough one bedroom, the one thing about which I absolutely loved was the view. Most of the outside wall in my living/dining room was window, and overlooked the forested rolling hills between Alexandria and Mount Vernon. I didn't pay much attention in the summer, but once the leaves started to change, I would stand at the window and just look every day.

When I started running on the Mt. Vernon Trail, I regularly jumped at birds singing in or flying out of bushes practically at my elbow as I passed. And at the rustling of some small creature in the underbrush. And at the awful, sticky feeling when I was the first person through some of the morning's spiderwebs. My pace slowed by a good 15 seconds per mile on the stretches of trail that paralleled the river, as I watched the herons and ducks come and go and the occasional fish briefly break the surface with a splash.

I still approach potential spiderweb hotspots with caution, but I've stopped jumping at every other manifestation of the region's native species in my path in favor of appreciating them: on long runs, my first moment of levity in the morning comes from the bullfrog chorus I pass heading south; I gauge the progress of the season by the height of the cattails in a marshy Potomac tributary; I know where to look for ducklings to coo over in early summer.

Lately, I've begun to find even the morning haziness that's an omnipresent indicator of humidity in July and August beautiful (even if the humidity that causes it is still completely, disgustingly, damply uncomfortable). It adds a dreamlike sheen to the landscape and makes things like the doe and her fawn playing in a meadow between the river and the US-1/395 bridge this morning feel a little like reality has momentarily bumped up against a fairy tale. Northern Virginia will likely never be the first thing that comes to mind when I think of beautiful places, but it has a lush, green-and-pastel appeal that epitomizes all the best parts of Virginia charm, and makes you wonder if its roots might be in the landscape itself.

"Is that the apocalypse, or is it just my TV?"

I love when the media realizes how ridiculous it can be, and calls itself out. Or rather, when print journalists use some of their column inches to verbally roll their eyes at their TV cousins, as TIME's James Poniewozik - author of the title quote - does in the next issue, on newsstands August 10th.

Yes, this probably puts me over my quota of TIME references for the past month, but I had to laugh reading Poniewozik's "Media Freak-outs: Every Week is Shark Week" on the Metro this morning, and couldn't resist passing it along. (He starts with a quote from 30 Rock, but sounds like a professional throughout the column. What better happy medium between pop culture and serious journalism is there?)

In honor of this week being Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, Poniewozik relates our fascination with the fear, awe and occasional hysteria these animals inspire in us to the media's sensationalist treatment of issues that are not, in fact, the crises they're made out to be. "To live every week like it's Shark Week...might be a metaphor for living in our media environment," he says.

[T]o spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor.

(This is where I started laughing, and attracted some nervous, sideways glances from my fellow Metro riders.)

And Poniewozik is exactly right. A lack of education and comprehensive health care will have a much more - and certainly much longer-lasting - negative impact on your life than the inability to buy your dream home for a time because no bank will lend you the money. But the housing market is where the numbers are crashing and burning, and things that crash and burn are what keep the ratings up. Our education and health care systems have been going up in flames for years; that crisis isn't interesting anymore. At least not interesting enough to convince people to stay tuned for the 11 o'clock news.

I rarely watch actual news broadcasts because I absolutely loathe this kind of mass hysteria-inducing reporting that the ratings game fuels. I frankly don't care what issue makes an anchor pull out their "now this is really, really serious, folks" voice. I want the most up-to-date facts so that I know what's going on in the world (which, like, OMG, so totally does not include the status of Jon and Kate Gosselin's love lives as reported on CNN!), and I want to decide for myself what my reaction is. It's the job of commentators like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow to comment on the news; a news anchor's job is to report it.

And reporting is important. Even if the day's new record low or high percentage of whatever that the media is screaming about isn't high on my list of things to lose sleep over in the long run, it's still good to know. I could just do without the screaming.

Poniewozik recognizes that the media has gotten off track:

Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace - the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark - jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever.

So in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, ruled by the cable networks, how do we get the media back on track and reporting on the issues that matter in the long-term, not just the crisis du jour?

Happiness is...

A variety of factors combined in such a way that I spent a lot of this weekend pouting: the weather was hot and disgustingly muggy, with random thunderstorms appearing out of nowhere (not that that's unusual for this time of year), most of my friends in the area were out of town or recovering from vacation and one of my closest friends on this coast - who still not only puts up with but actually feeds my Francophile-ness - moved several states south. I basically set my internal monologue to "whine" after my long run on Saturday and left it on repeat throughout the weekend.

That "there's nothing to do" mentality that, for me, accompanies this kind of pout-fest is one of my least favorite feelings in the world. I'm generally a pretty cheerful person, and getting stuck in that sort of mental funk drives me nuts (which somehow makes it worse, rather than making me snap out of it) and leaves me unfit company for anyone sane until it runs its course.

Fortunately, I woke up this morning in a much better mood and, despite being somewhat punchy from a morning run and commute in 85% humidity, I've been reminding myself of all kinds of things that put a smile on my face, which - surprise! - has succeeded in keeping one there. Here's my "happiness is..." list for today.

• Emails and IMs from friends around the globe. (And I'm once again resolving to be a better email correspondent, as a result.)
  
• My new Tropical Kiss lipstick and Prim and Copper gloss, discovered a couple of weeks ago at an Origins "Healthy Happy Hour" that a friend of mine won. The plant-based formulas make me feel better about using them, and the zingy mint in both is a definite pick-me-up.
• Photos of friends and family. I have a gazillion photos all over my apartment, but don't always focus on them, since I've kept most of them around my living space for years. One of my all-time favorites is of me and Gina on our last day of middle school, yearbooks in hand, arms around each other and huge grins on our faces (my braces, her retainer and all). I looked at it while I was putting on a pair of earrings this morning and had to grin back at our 14-year-old selves.
• Summer dresses, which in my opinion are among the most comfortable articles of clothing in existence.
  
• The "early" crew at work. The first group of my co-workers in the office most mornings is a happy, laid-back bunch that never fails to put a smile on my face. Let me tell you, that's a great feeling to start the workday with.
• Pilates tonight!
  
• Splash Zone. I'm sure that makes sense to absolutely no one, so: it's a Linda Arnold CD for kids with songs about sea life, from "That's a Habitat" to "That's A Moray." My niece sings the songs virtually non-stop, and I woke up with "Hold On and Go With the Flow" stuck in my head. Yes, it's a little odd for a 24-year-old to walk around humming "Hold on and go with the flow. That's what the rocky shore animals know!" but memories of my niece singing it at the top of her lungs are superimposed over the lyrics, and are hilariously cute.
• Nala's random sprints around the apartment, chasing a toy she's just found and had forgotten about.

What's on your list?

People + Coupons = Groupon!

High on everyone's list these days is saving money, so the fact that one of my favorite email lists exists is probably not surprising, but still fantastic: the Groupon.

What in the world, you might ask, is a Groupon? Shortest explanation: a group coupon!

It was started in Chicago in November 2008, and has since spread to Boston, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with groups launching soon in Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Dallas, Denver and Houston. Basically, Groupon collects email addresses of people in a metro area where they'd like to get a group going, then once they hit whatever their magic number is, they start soliciting merchants.

The merchants who agree to offer Groupons are guaranteed a certain number of customers who will purchase their offer - a number I believe they set at however many customers they would need to make the offer profitable for them - and one offer is sent out to each city's list every morning. They range from deep discounts at local bars and restaurants to half off (or more!) a scuba lesson, yoga class or salon treatment.

Everyone who wants to buy the day's Groupon does so online, although no one's card is charged until the merchant's "magic number" of participants is reached - a countdown to which is always visible on the site. Once enough Groupons have been bought, it's a done deal and the following morning, you can print your Groupon and head off for some cost-effective fun. (Each Groupon has an expiration date set by the merchant, but most are at least a month after the purchase date, so you don't have to rush to use it.)

Since the first Washington Groupon on May 26th, I've bought two of them - a $30 5-class card for Mind-BodyFitness (worth $75), the Pilates studio I told you about in last week's Food for Thought, and a $25 offer for $50 worth of supplies and time at Color Me Mine, one of those "pick something ceramic and get creative with paint" places.

I've been tempted by a few more - half off a scuba lesson, half off kayak and canoe rentals, a discounted all-day paintball session - but my practical, frugal side kicks in most of the time and says "Really? When (and where?!) are you going to scuba in the near future? You've never been paint-balling and it's out in the middle of nowhere; would you actually go, Miss I-Live-In-Metro-Mecca-DC-So-I-Refuse-to-Buy-a-Car?" Still, it's great to be able to (occasionally!) splurge on things I really want to do, knowing that I'm getting a fantastic deal.

If you live near one of Groupon's current or future cities, I highly recommend signing up and taking advantage of their amazing discounts. It's a great way to get out, try new things and make the most of what your area has to offer!

Food for Thought

Since I don't always have time to write a full blog post, a sad fact that results in far fewer posts than I'd like, I'm beginning a new type of post today called "Food for Thought." Basically, it'll be a few quick blips about things that are on my mind and might be on yours, usually written while I grab a bite to eat between items on my schedule (hence the title). So, here goes!

• A friend of mine introduced me to charity: water this morning (thanks, P.!) and as she put it, "I want to give them all my money!" This is the second charity whose website has made me cry this year (yes, literally - the first being The Girl Effect) and served as a reminder of why I wanted to go into non-profit/NGO work in the first place.
• I'm still loving my TIME Magazine subscription, and read three good articles on this morning's commute: "Moon Walkers," the cover story about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and a look back at the history of the space program's Apollo missions (the print edition also has nice photos and mini-bios of the Apollo astronauts); "What Price Journalism? What Would You Pay?" that talks about how nothing in journalism is free, including the freebies, and is a different take on the "print journalism is struggling/dying" issue; and "The CIA Is Keeping Secrets. Hello?" written by Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer. The last one is particularly interesting (and the title made me laugh), since it gives a former insider's perspective on CIA secrecy, and makes some great points about hypocrisy in government for appearances' sake, as well as the impracticality of too many checks and balances.
• Have you seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince or (500) Days of Summer yet? I want to see both despite the fact that I know the latter will make me cry, and have heard mostly-great reviews so far. And just finished a re-read of Harry Potter VI in preparation for the film! I only have that one in French though, so I may (as usual) be a bit confused...
• New on my list of favorite places in Washington!: Mind-BodyFitness, a Pilates studio near the Convention Center. They offer both mat and reformer workouts, and both seem to be more affordably priced than most yoga and Pilates studios in the area. Mat workout classes start at $18 for a walk-in and drop down to a little more than $12 each with a 15-class card for $185 - or a $300 pass for unlimited classes for three months. It's been awhile since I've done Pilates seriously (plus, I don't want to be so sore that it affects my running), so I'm sticking with the intro class for now, and after two classes - third one tonight! - I love it. Chris is the intro instructor and is great: I could easily do the entire class with my eyes closed, his descriptions of what you should be doing and how are so good. And the switch from the Pilates Method I learned in college to the BASI Pilates the studio uses has been easy.

That's what's on my mind today! What's on yours?

How are blogging and social media affecting print journalism?

There's the obvious answer, given the closing of Denver's Rocky Mountain News in February and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's switch to online-only reporting in March, although I'd argue that has more to do with online news outlets than blogs and social media. But as bloggers and social networking sites become more mainstream, how else are they effecting print journalism?

My mom has subscribed to TIME Magazine for as long as I can remember, and recently took them up on an offer to send a gift subscription along with her renewal - so now I can look forward to an issue of TIME in my mailbox every Saturday (woo hoo!). My mom usually left her copy open on the kitchen counter and made her way through it as she cooked dinner in the evenings or ate lunch on the weekends, and I remember reading pieces of it from time to time as I was growing up. I felt so adult, reading an article out of a news magazine, and learning bits and pieces about what was going on in the world.

I've been receiving TIME in my own mailbox for about a month now, and really enjoy reading it - usually on the Metro, where it doubles as a fan on the stifling station platforms - but I've found myself blinking in surprise a few times over the writers' use of casual language. Writing tone and style are very individual, but there are basic standards that exist for most types of writing. I had to adapt the way I wrote for Honors English my junior year in high school because my teacher didn't like my style, I learned to take a journalistic, reporting tone when I wrote for GW's The Hatchet and had to shake myself out of a formal, academic style after I graduated and started writing email copy for the non-profit I work for.

As a blogger, everything about how and what I write is up to me. I can be as casual as I want, and most bloggers are, using interjections between hyphens or parentheses (I never do that!) and often writing their own opinion - blogging isn't about presenting the facts with a subtle slant.

So I was surprised when I started noticing the same techniques in TIME, in articles of varying lengths, from features to quick blurbs. In four issues I've only noticed it three or four times, but it's been enough to get me thinking about it: is this an effect of the more casual reader-writer relationship encouraged by blogs and social networking? Or is it just a natural evolution of journalism in a society where much of our interaction with others comes in the form of words on a page or screen?

I don't know that I have an opinion on whether this kind of change is good or bad. I lean toward the bad side of neutral, not because I think it does any harm as an occasional thing but because I don't particularly want professional journalists sounding like...well, me. At least not in columns that involve serious reporting rather than a point of view. I want the facts, along with whatever (hopefully minimal) bias is implicit in the news sources I choose to use, so I can make up my own mind about the issues. And then, of course, I'll inflict my opinions on you!

What do you think - what's the source of these snippets of casual intimacy in reporting, and are they okay or should they be a journalism no-no?

"Of course it's all about me!"

This general attitude had me spending most of yesterday alternately lecturing myself on the importance of positivity and wanting to scream not-so-nice things at anyone who crossed my path.

It was one of those days when every cyclist on the trail zoomed past three inches from my elbow with nary a "Left!" to be heard, I got knocked around by people on the Metro twice my size whose mothers certainly taught them better and, about the time I was trying to eat lunch, half a dozen things suddenly appeared in my inbox that had to be done five minutes ago. (At least this time my case of the Mondays fell on the right day of the week.) Some passive-aggressive tendencies and blind-siding rounded out the day, and I arrived home frustrated and cranky. I reminded myself that it was just Monday, and that if I relaxed and got a good night's sleep, things would look better in the morning.

And they did! I ran with great weather and a beautiful sunrise glinting off the Potomac this morning, regardless of the Mercedes turning left that wanted to play chicken with me while I was obeying the little green man in the crosswalk signal at a major intersection. I even got to work a little early, despite exiting the Metro being its usual exercise in being jostled by briefcases on all sides. And I had time before work to respond to a friend's email about her frustration with the total lack of consideration she's been getting during the last few months, from companies of which she's a customer, colleagues and her state government.

Our frustrations, I think, have the same root: people just don't care about people anymore. (Which has the secondary effect of making me want to, in turn, elbow my way to the front of the line and shout at the top of my lungs until I get what I want. So far I'm well-behaved enough not to give in to temptation. Barely.)

Sure, most people still have a small inner circle of family members and friends for whom they would do just about anything, although we probably spend less time with, talking to or thinking about one another than we used to. Outside of that circle, the general public seems to care not one iota about anyone else they may come into contact with beyond the minimum it takes to get what they need for either personal or professional reasons. Everyone wants to feed starving children in India, prevent malaria in Africa and help educate women and children worldwide, but they couldn't care less about the next 30 seconds in the life of the person waiting in line next to them.

As I put it to my beleaguered friend this morning, "Yay, good, let's make sure people around the world aren't starving or dying of preventable/curable diseases, but for crying out loud, let's not step on everyone we walk past on the street while we're doing it!"

Not everyone acts this way - some of my colleagues and many of my friends are drop-everything-and-help-anyone-in-need types. I try to be one too, but I know I'm sometimes guilty of tuning out the people around me. We're all a little narcissistic; it's human nature to be at least slightly more concerned with yourself and your immediate family and/or friends than with individual people you don't know.

My concern (/rant...) is that it seems to have become not only acceptable but, in some places, standard operating procedure in society to run roughshod over everyone you've decided you don't have to care about. And that's not a good lifestyle choice for society, in general, to make. I've always been of the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" school (thanks, Mom!), but it seems like it just doesn't work anymore, as far as having any noticeable effect on society goes.

What do you think, is this actually a trend, or am I crazy? If it is a trend, is it a bad one (...and if I'm just crazy, do you know any good therapists?), or is it just the new normal and not an issue? My opinion on this one is obvious, but I'd like to hear yours.

Lifestyle envy

I have a raging case of lifestyle envy. I'm in the Seattle area on vacation for the second year in a row and last year's thoughts of "Wow, wouldn't it be great to live here?" have not faded - in fact, they've gotten stronger.

I've always loved the Pacific Northwest: the mountains, the coast, the clear air, the national parks, the hiking trails, the general outdoorsy-ness. I spent a lot of family vacations as a kid doused in mosquito repellent and scrambling through forests between Yosemite and Vancouver Island. Between that, the whale watching tours, the omnipresent coffee shops (hot chocolate for me, at the time) with endless delicious pastries and the incredible views, I always had a blast, but Southern California was unquestionably home, so I didn't pay much attention to the natives and how they lived.

Now, at 24, I'm incredibly envious of the way these people, particularly Seattlites, spend their lives. Yeah, the traffic is often terrible and commutes to and from work can be ridiculous. But Rainier National Park is a day trip from anywhere in the area, a plethora of summer fruits grow wild throughout every town in the region, one of my favorite wineries is a car ride away and Vancouver is just a ferry ride across the border.

And then there's Seattle itself, which I could rave about for approximately the next ten years, so I'll skip to my favorites: Pike Place Market, with its deliciously fresh (and local!) foods and unique shops, Beecher's Handmade Cheese, with the best macaroni and cheese on the face of the planet, Tully's Coffee, which is infinitely better than Starbucks and mass-produces compostable cups and sleeves, The Confectional, with its sinfully delicious specialty of cheesecake truffles, which, I believe, are bite-sized pieces of heaven on earth, REI's flagship store, which is the mecca of outdoor types everywhere and boasts a fantastic climbing wall that's visible from the freeway, Northwest Outdoor Center on Lake Union, where you can rent a single, double or triple kayak for as little as an hour or as much as a week, the Center for Wooden Boats, also on Lake Union, where you can rent a sailboat to glide around the lake in, watching the numerous float planes come and go... have I mentioned how much I love this place?

Not only is Seattle a great city, but its residents seem to actually take advantage of all it has to offer, something that Washingtonians are notorious for not doing. They'll work from 5am to 2pm, then jump in the car and head off to paraglide from one of the Issaquah mountains (which they run up on the way); they'll take a stroll through Pioneer Square and stop to spend half an hour sitting outside a coffee shop; they actually shop at Pike Place, rather than relinquishing it to the tourists. Then, they head home to set out their "trash" bins: the largest for recycling, another for compostable waste and the smallest for trash.

Where do I sign up, and when can I start?