The last night

It's my last night in New York, and I feel like I've been too busy trying to sort out my online and paper and life affairs to appreciate my final hours here.

A few weeks ago, after most of my classwork was done but before the gi-normous graduation ceremony (on May 20th), I went and sat on some of the bleachers they had set out in front of Low Hall. It was sunny but near the end of the day; and as I looked at the green grass, the people relaxing on it, and the huge Butler Library in the background, I regretted not having sat there before and enjoying the beauty of the campus.

I regretted not exploring the old chemistry building and the amazing old lecture rooms in it. I regretted never making it through more than 10% of the library's rooms, and never actually sitting down to read anything in it. I regretted not going to the Hungarian Pastry Shop to study late at night, or going to more pub nights. I felt that I had barely gotten to know the campus and the community at all, and now I'm leaving.

And then, I realized, this is probably how I'll feel when I die, providing it's not a swift matter: No matter how old I get, I'll feel as though I barely got to know the world -- and now I'm being forced to leave.

(But I was really busy doing a 1-year Masters Degree! It's not fair! You can't expect me to be all social and energetic and exploratory AND get everything done so that I don't fail! --- and I'm sure enough must-do things will pop up in life to interfere with my getting-to-know-the-world.)

So I didn't have a great philosophic epiphany much beyond that, which in retrospect is probably some sort of existentialist feeling. But I did read an essay on time management by Seneca after that. It's called "On the Shortness of Life," and if you want to Google it, go ahead, because I don't have the link to the download I read on hand, and I'm not going to take the time to look for it just now.

Since that day on the Low steps, here at Columbia, I do catch myself trying to avoid wasting time on things that really don't need doing. Sometimes I do the "wasteful" things anyhow, because I still have a hard time knowing which is which.

Anyhow, my husband also spotted a grey/white hair in the middle of my head on graduation day. My first. The hair was about three or four months long. That made me panic a wee bit.

And so it is. The New York Chapter is over and joins with the Ottawa Chapter, the South England Chapter, the San Jose Chapter, the Undergrad Chapter, and now too the Grad-Student Chapter in Volume II: Adult Life.

Oh yeah, go here

Duh. I totally forgot to post this here last week, but I spent way too long putting the final version of this site up (new template, designed by a classmate):

http://behindonlinepharma.com



Go check it out.

Oh yeah! I graduated too!

I have to post Flickr pics going back to March (after I buy a "pro" account) and then work my way up to graduation and the vacation that begins... tomorrow!

Just doing it

Amen.

DFW, still,

I never knew who David Foster Wallace was before September 2008. I had an ongoing assignment to keep up with reading the news for my "Reporting and Writing I" class, part of which involved reading the Sunday Times in its entirety.*

So one Sunday I read a post-obit that called him "the best mind of his generation," and was like: Who? How don't I know about this guy?

Since then, in the course of class reading assignments and mentions of his work from magazine editors, I came across Wallace's pro-lobster essay for Gourmet magazine, his despair-on-a-cruise-ship bit for Harper's***, and his introduction to an anthology that chose to poke fun at the genre of the introduction rather than to truly introduce the anthology of the Best American Writing. The guy is... was cheeky. I'll give him that.

But I'm more and more intrigued by shortcuts he might provide to me -- with 16 years less experience than he had -- at avoiding certain self-destructive behaviors and habits, namely those of the mind.

Today an article appeared reviewing a commencement address he gave that, having been popularized on the Internet, has now been made into a one-line-per-page keepsake in the form of a printed book.****

So I started reading it and got stuck pretty early on with this quotation:

...the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.*****

I think that -- the job of reeling in a beast; of taming a dragon with bit and bridle, that -- is the hardest task, ever. And I don't know that anyone is ever able to do it; not even the monks who set themselves a 1,000 year multi-life deadline.

It can be destructive on one hand, but then again, if you never let your mind wander off into all sorts of places, be they nice and clean or creepy and dank, you'll never know where it can go and what it can find. (Which makes me think: I'd really like to attach a live-feed camera and transmitter to my cat's collar to see just where the hell he goes all day.)

I'm done. I have to put my mind to graduating now... fewer than 30 days remain. And then... the beginning. Again.

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* I shelled out the $5 or so non-tax-deductible dollars before I realized the New York Times did in fact publish an index of all the stories of the day in the online format. Just be sure to get to it before 5 or 6 or 9 p.m. or so when it switches over to the next day. I have no problem paying for news I want to read, in theory. It's just that I object to paying for news that someone else tells me I have to read for a class quiz and, unlike textbooks -- which is acts in place of -- I can't count it against my income at the end of the year.**

** Whoever said that David Foster Wallace ruined footnotes for the rest of us was full of it. If I had known I could have used footnotes, I would have. Now I know it can be done, I intend to carry it forward.

*** Harper's put all of Wallace's work in its pages in PDF form, available free via this page.

**** This has been happening so much lately -- Stuff White People Like becoming a book; Randy Pausch's Last Lecture; now even xkcd. If I have a novel I want to sell, should I just serialize it on a blog rather than bother with the world of snarky literary agents?

***** Speaking of choices, I'm now listening to spark plugs and chainsaws "sing" American Woman, first by the Guess Who, which CBC Radio 2 is playing because they like playing cover songs of Canadian content. I choose to listen to CBC Radio 2 specifically for odd little surprises such as this.

Favourite thing *this* week

I really like that a database-driven online project won a Pulitzer Prize this year.

The prize-winning National Reporting story is PolitiFact -- a visual, part-manual, part-automated online database that helps track what politicians say, so that their later actions and words can be matched against earlier ones. (I like the idea of a "pants-on-fire" index (with an animated GIF on the site to boot).

I also like that there was a music video made to promote Politifact." The lead designer/architect of the application is Matt Waite of the St. Petersburg Times/TampaBay.com.

Even if you think that Pulitzers are crap, I don't, and it means a lot to me that the area I've been really keen on getting into since December has been 'officially' recognized as journalism.

What do I mean?

I mean that the move beyond manual computer-assisted reporting has happened. Adrian Holovaty, the creator of the most-widely-used-example-of-automated-journalism (Everyblock), was asked at the Investigative Reporters and Editor's CAR conference in March whether what he does is journalism.

"Who cares?" he answered. "Who cares what the academics call it."

Aron Pilhofer called Matt Waite-and-co's Pulitzer a watershed moment, akin to the time when "The Color of Money" became the first computer-driven stats story to win a Pulitzer, in 1988.

Pilhofer goes on to say:

As of today, newsrooms have to take web journalism seriously. I'm lucky enough to work in one that does, and so is Matt. Unfortunately, we're the exception. (I'll save my screed on this subject for another time; today, let's focus on the positive.)

Pilhofer also expressed, via his tweets, that this was sort of the first time a web-primary piece of reporting got a Pulitzer -- no small feat. (Snobby-people were also shocked that Nigel Jaquiss won one in 2005 -- he's a reporter at Willamette Week, a pretty small alt-weekly in Portland.)

And since so many others (mainly g33ks) are gushing over Matt right now, I will too. I met Matt at the IRE CAR conference in Indianapolis, and wish in retrospect I'd gone to the training sessions he ran. I did get to hear him speak, and I did ask him for some technical advice (there's a video-map-datafeed project I've been wanting to developed since Christmas involved New York crime). Of all the reporters and editors I spoke to at that conference, Matt was definitely among the warmest and most helpful I don't mean to diss anyone else; I'm just saying he was tops in the advice-giving dept.

As as for the point above about newsrooms taking web journalism seriously (i.e. not focusing their multimedia and tech capabilities on hosting cat-photo contests), I hope that happens soon -- i.e. this year, so I can get a job doing what these guys are doing, and not have to invent a job.

Favourite things this week

None of this is new to the Internet, but these three items really amused me this week, so I'm sharing them with whomever happens to read this post. Also, I'm procrastinating, and wish I was producing cool stuff like this.

1) Template fail: Disney



2) New York photography win











(See Peter Funch's mashups here.)



3) YouTube mashup win: Kutiman

This is camp

As a follow up to the previous post about Frightenstein... and because people keep talking about Susan Sontag's "This is Camp" essay around me (I refuse to read it)... I have to include Grizelda.


Anyone else think she (a.k.a. Billy Van, someone says on YouTube) sounds like Seth Green playing James St. James, particularly in the troll role, in Party Monster?