Portland, my Portland

I know, I know. This blog has laid dormant for a month. It might as well be extinct! Buuuut, it isn’t. I was on vacation, and there’s no better way to feel like you’re on holiday than to take an Internet vacation as well! My Internet access was at a minimum both by choice and force. Fact is, I was busy saying my goodbyes and getting ready to move from Portland, Ore. to Grand Rapids, Mich. with a pitstop in the Bay Area. So without further ado, here is my ode to Portland.

* * * * *

I moved to Portland post-Peace Corps. I was lost and confused and all the other classic ingredients of readjustment. Since I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do with my life anymore, I decided to focus on the only thing I still had a grasp on: lifestyle. Not that it’s perfect, but I really thought I was going to stay in Portland.

After struggling through two-thirds of my contract year with PCM, I knew I couldn’t bring myself to renew. However, it is a well-known fact that Portland is bad for media careers and for young people looking for employment. I began to familiarize myself again with that old moving bug. Except this time, it wasn’t a bug. It became a question of career v. lifestyle, and the truth was deafening: I have a lifetime for lifestyle.

I’ve finished my second week in Grand Rapids. I’m starting to settle into the town but am still without a routine. Now that I’ve traded the lifestyle I want for the career path I need, I get the gut feeling that I won’t settle till I find my way back to the West Coast. I’ll be moving every couple of years starting over and over again, hopefully to the point of ease. Never staying more than two weeks at home and always in transition, my mom often indicts me as the family nomad.

Things I will miss about Portland:

• Benson Bubblers
• PSU Farmers Market
• Uncle Paul’s Produce Market
• Blueplate milkshakes
• Food carts, esp Ziba’s Pitas
• Lompoc’s Sockeye Stout on nitro
• Darts at Lucky Lab NW
• AboutUs.org offices
• Bike path illustrations on Williams, Broadway, Vancouver
• North and South Park Blocks
• Reading books at Powell’s w/no intention of buying
• Cheap finds
• Hearing funny terms like “shabby chic”
• $3 movies at The Mission, $5 specials at Living Room Theatres, pulling my expired MofO student ID for Cinema 21
• Catfish Hash at Bridges
• Working at Goldrush when I needed to get away from the office
• The nice ladies at An Dong
• Video production for Pickathon
• PDX Drupal Group
• Twilight Criterium
• View of Mount St. Helens from our apartment window
• Milkshake runs to Burgerville

Additions since moving:

• Cheap six packs of good beer
• Wide selections of good beer
• Couscous in bulk
• Being able to walk to the grocery store
• Never thought I’d say this, but spandex biking shorts being a normal thang

Filed under: Portland, Uncategorized , Community Media Center, Grand Rapids, Portland

Another one bites the sexy city dust

We’ve all walked by the corner bistro (*ahem* Bartini) with conversations of tampons and vibrators wafting down the street. Cocktails, fancy dresses, irreverent chatter, all of it smacks of Sex & The City. And after years of resistance, I caved and watched the show. 

I’ve had my objections to S&TC over the years. As an RA my junior year, I lived in a corridor brimming with frosh girls–dressed to the nines regardless of the hour or day–who fawned over one of the only gay men in the hall. Although I had seen little of S&TC at the time, it was clear their first thought was they had found their own gay mascot, something I found rather degrading. Stanny, is my lip gloss too shiny?

But my verdict? The show grows. We all know Carrie couldn’t afford couture on her paycheck. Exaggerated smiles that wouldn’t have the same effects in the real world, all of these are the sugar-free icing on the cake. There are moments that seem unreal, but the thing is, while we’re off paving our careers, jet-setting the world, and denouncing the restraints of love and custom that plagued generations before us, at the end of the day, who doesn’t want the people who know you best to come home to?

Sure, it starts out all about sex and accessories. While I don’t enjoy such banter, it’s clear that the first few seasons addressed very real questions plaguing women in the late ’90s, something I haven’t had to face because I came of age in the mid-’00s. 

However, with new admiration also comes new objections. As I watched each season, concepts leapt out at me. Passing thoughts on how real love is painful (read: emotional abuse), calculations for the time it takes to get over a breakup, shrinks as the therapy understudies for friendships… These were the bizarre premises and justifications other girls had shared with me throughout college, leaving me speechless. Only after these last couple of weeks did I realize they were lines lifted right out of the early seasons of S&TC.

And so, with all the fandom surrounding the show and the danger of falling into its clutches, I had to wonder, where is the reality?

In the first couple of seasons, Carrie isn’t even consistent in her weekly revelations, reflecting the confusion her character is faced with. Ultimately, the reality is even though S&TC represent much of the weirdness, desires, and strength women put up with and have, the growth of these four women ultimately depend on crafted experiences. In the real world, some of the issues and self-actualization S&TC characters work through during one episode or several might or might not take as long in the real world. Or, the events that spur these insights might not come along at all. That’s where we need to stop asking ourselves, which S&TC character am I?

Filed under: Storytelling , college, feminism, Sex and The City

Social media, get over yourself

Every morning, I check my Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook for my social media breakfast. They’re the best ways to get the most relevant news based on who I subscribe to and because of this, I trust shared links even when they don’t correspond with my immediate interests. One of my favorite wielders of social media is NPR—especially effective on FB—and they had posted a new story on applying for jobs in our digital age. In a nutshell: Résumés were out. Letters of inquiry, passé. If the companies they surveyed were any indication, employers now court a 10-12% of their employees via LinkedIn.

The same topic bookended my night. This time, it was News Hour with Jim Lehrer on OPB. There are now lay-off camps, and the instructor whose seminar was shadowed took it one step further: Not only were anything to do with paper apps a relic of the past, he was disgusted by them. FB and LinkedIn are the new matchmakers. Social networking is the way to go, and nothing else will suffice. From the sounds of it, anything else could be an indication of how unvaluable you are.

Yes, social media is useful. Generally speaking, LinkedIn and Twitter are probably the most useful: You’re encouraged to sell yourself. I’m not sure how Facebook comes in since it depends on reciprocal relationships, differs in privacy settings and is used more personally.

But my beef is this: Not only is Twitter your living business card (an apt way to think of it if you’re going to use it), but you better have a blog and whip up a following. The message is go all out. Blogs are coveted by employers because it’s the most insightful digital reflection of your savvy. Can you command an audience? Are you an innovative thinker? Do you use social media effectively?

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 found the leading measure of success for bloggers to be personal satisfaction. Blogs are started for a glut of reasons, and all are legitimate. I haven’t compared the numbers lately, but back in 2006, the buzz was around Technorati Founder David Sifry’s quote that the blogosphere doubled in size every six months. We all guessed this would slowly level off, but with the economic slump, more people–especially age 40+, have been taking more enrichment courses that they hope will help them land a new job. I’ve found this in my social media classes. It explains the focus on social media at the lay-off camps. But with blogs numbering in the hundreds of millions, it’s difficult to break into the bloggerati even if you are consistent with your posts, on-topic, insightful and crossposting. Consider this Willamette Week feature from 2004. Most of the blogs listed on here have faded away or rusted over the last five years now that the Internet isn’t so shiny anymore.

It’s not fair for consultants to be slamming résumés and letters of inquiry. Perhaps a printed sheet, a manila envelope is passé, but we all put our résumés on LinkedIn. A letter of inquiry is not only valuable in highlighting certain experiences but also in showing you’ve done your homework on the employer and your values align with theirs (hopefully augmented by your experiences). A PDF of your résumé as a digital submission is still your résumé. An email inquiry or LinkedIn inquiry is still a letter of inquiry. Digital tools are another iteration, a change of medium but not intent. Social media experts should be lighting their topic forte favorably rather than employing scare tactics.

Whenever someone I’m talking to brings up how overwhelmed they feel by social media, I tell them this: You don’t need to use it all. Wearing bangles, chokers, collars, necklaces, chains and rings on all fingers is not exactly tasteful. You just need to know why each social media tool is useful and choose the right ones for you. Anything else would be inauthentic, and who wants to break that all-important mandate of social media?

Filed under: Internet , blog, blogging, Facebook, job search, jobs, letter of inquiry, LinkedIn, new media, News Hour, NPR, recession, resume, social media, social networking, Twitter, unemployment, web 2.0

Dishes for thought

Short and sweet: I was mulling over how much dishes have in common across boundaries.

Fondue
Hot Pot
Shabu-shabu

Fried Rice
Jambalaya
Paella

Filed under: Food for thought , comparisons, cuisine, food, similarities

Mom like me

I finally finished my piece for PCM’s digital storytelling class. Yes, it happened last September, but I couldn’t come up with a title! Thank goodness for Peta, who spit one out under duress.

Update: Of the many restrictions this template places, it also won’t display the video correctly. To see the original, click here.

Filed under: Storytelling , blip.tv, digital storytelling, Final Cut, media education, Photoshop, Portland Community Media, video

Chewing the cud

I’ve been collecting thoughts for the last couple of weeks, and my cup hath finally overfloweth. For the month of May, here was my food for thought:

1. One of the things that boggled me the most in college was journalists’ rigidity against advocacy. In the mid-2000s, Newsman Nick Clooney took a harrowing journey with his famous son to Darfur. Immediately following, he embarked on a tour to gather American attention. To convince the crowd of how urgent Darfur was, he said “I did what every journalist knows not to do: I became an advocate.”
   Having to distill research and as many as 40 interviews into a minimum of 450 words, reporters are likely some of the most knowledgeable on their beats. Despite this, they restrain themselves from speaking out. Only on shows sponsored by the likes of PBS or NPR do we rarely hear their opinions—usually a battle of expertise or reflection 20 years ex post facto rather than advocacy.
   Yet in recent days, journalists are finally advocating for something: Journalism’s survival, be it ideals or industry. No one is more knowledgeable of what happens in the newsroom, what ideas are being hashed, than journalists. In general, everybody should pick and choose battles, but I find it ironic that only when the issue is as intimate as their professional livelihood do journalists finally pick up their double-edged sword.
2. Condalmo recently put up a variation on Stewart Brand’s theme from Ben Greenman, editor for The New Yorker.

Information wants to be free, and everyone wants to be enslaved to that free information, irrespective of its truth, its value, or its appropriateness. These extroverted introverts are more exposed than ever, but also more protective than ever because that exposure cannot be sanely or safely regulated. The result is a broad ontological shift, a turning inside-out, where the information that should be hidden is shared and the information that should be shared is hidden. My friend Roddy feels perfectly comfortable tweeting or changing his status update to tell me that he is ambivalent about baths, or that he is watching a lizard on his windowpane, but he is reluctant to introduce me to his new girlfriend. More interestingly, he may add his new girlfriend as a friend on Facebook and possibly even change his status cryptically to indicate that he is involved, but he will not bring the real human around. If this is any indication of future trends, and I think it is, these social-networking technologies will prove corrosive to coherent identity and narrative…

The most recent WTF is Social Media also echoed this variation. I’ve often made arguments for the social Internet by pointing out how one communicates differently in person, in a letter, on the phone, online. Each does something the other cannot. This argument is becoming well-worn, but one thing Brand’s story brought up for me is whether, instead of being extrovert-introverts, the Internet-as-bosom-buddy is really a way to reject accepted social rules and cultural norms in the physical world? This doesn’t encompass Internet use entirely, but perhaps the Internet enables that collective and unspoken backlash.

3. Third World v. Developing countries: I’m curious about what term other people use. Although “third” suggests ranking, I use the former because “developing” implies a bias toward industrialized nations. From my experiences, I don’t believe any type of society–agrarian, nomadic, &c.–outranks any other; all are different and all have advantages over one another. To me, “developing” also equates wealth with acquisition and conspicuous spending.

Filed under: Food for thought, Internet, Journalism , advocacy, developing, development, Nick Clooney, norms, rules, social media, society, third world

Chinese matryoshka dolls

To my mom, my blog entries are complete gobbledygook. She understands not a word. Mom rarely makes her way to my little web patch, so I feel pretty safe about sharing my plans.

As a CTC Vista, I’m hardly raking in large sums right now, at least not enough to get my mom a sumptuous birthday present. Besides that, she regifts most of the presents I buy anyhow. With these facts in mind, I’ve decided to make her next birthday gift: customized nesting dolls, starting with my great grandmother.

Mom was the second born in a six-kid line-up, but she was the eldest daughter. She was very close to her mother, who died at a relatively young golden age of lung cancer (she was in her early 60s; I was 14 at the time). What I remember of puo-puo was something of a social butterfly, generosity, and internalizing the pain from her eldest daughter’s failed marriage (divorce was still unusual in Chinese society), 15 hours apart and nearly 7,000 miles away.

Mom in her late 20s. Her favorite descriptors for herself—loosely translated—are "carried herself well" and "Jennifer-full-of-grace."

Unfortunately, there are very few likenesses of my great grandmother, photo shoots being cost prohibitive at the time. However, there are many of my fashion maven grandmother. My favorite’s resolution is too low for my project, but I want to celebrate it anyway:

Grandma's in the foreground. I'm not sure how old she was in this photo. Mom likes to describe grandma as having a dignified beauty.

You may have realized by now there are five nesting dolls and I am one of four women. But don’t worry—I am not fool enough to give my mom a reason to start nagging about a granddaughter. To sidestep this suggestive fifth figure, I am cutting out a photo of my childhood bear, who still goes everywhere I go today.

Taken shortly after my stint with Peace Corps. Me & my Cosby.

I know this is just coincidental, but I really like that my puo-puo, mom and I are all the second-born of our families. Now that I think about it, too, the two generations before me were technically immigrant generations. My grandparents are from Shanghai and fled to Taipei prior to the communist revolution. My mom was the first of her direct family to move to the States, her older brother taking suit almost 20 years later to Canada. While I’m not an immigrant, my mom laments how I’m always trying to move away from her: Ithaca, NY; Oxford, Ohio; Urbino, Italy; Chicago, Ill.; Menkhoaneng, Lesotho; Portland, Ore.; and, in July, Grand Rapids, MI. And from my travels, I’ve come to sympathize very much with issues of assimilation, identity, community and shared culture.

Remember: Mum’s the word.

Filed under: Ethnicity, Immigration , family, family tree, matryoshka dolls, nesting dolls, photos, taiwan, women

Yummers

There are lazy Saturdays when I don’t want to walk allll the way to PSU’s farmers market. Then I think of Gabriel’s Bakery and their soft, Q-ey (Mandarin descriptor) bagels essential for my open-faced sandwich and get off my ass.

Ingredients:

• 1 bagel
• Cream cheese (I use Neufchâtel)
• 4 canned artichoke hearts, quartered
• Salt & pepper to taste

Halve the bagel and toast. Spread cream cheese over each slice. Top with artichoke hearts. Grind however much salt and pepper over the hearts, et voilà! Simple luxury for one.

Filed under: Portland , Farmers Market, food, sandwich

Echoing chambers

Back in 2006-2007 as I was cobbling together my senior thesis, participatory journalism was just a threat in the distant horizon, and journalism was trying its best to cover it in pig’s blood—its own iteration of “Carrie” or “Mean Girls.”

Two years later, Rocky Mountain News has crumbled. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in print is no more. And the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, for all their prestige and history, are at risk of being further minced or shut down.

The concepts seem more timely than ever as Internet democracy continues to eviscerate journalism as an institution. There are many pressing issues that face Internet democracy and information, including the future of hyperlinking. There’s the age-old missive of civichood spurred by engagement with “the truth.” However, as I showered this morning, I remembered a much simpler time, when the academic gentry’s biggest objection to the net was echo chambers.

One particularly memorable lecture I attended my senior year was with Legal Scholar Cass Sunstein on the debut of his book, Republic.com 2.0. He recounted his visit to the Googleplex; one of Google’s latest ventures at the time was what he termed the “Daily Me.”

‘No one can read all the news that’s published everyday, so why not set up your page to show you the stories that best represent your interests?’ … That’s Google’s question, which Google takes to be a rhetorical question—why not?

Sunstein’s main concern with social media was polarization as we handpick what and who we want to hear from.

In a world of niches, in which people are fixed to their only Daily Me … this function of democratic processes is compromised because information won’t travel across the competing echo chambers … [My] suggestion is that to the extent that [echo chambers] happen, it’s a problem for democracy. When you talk about the multiple echo chambers, you could mean one of two things. One possibility is that people very much like Senator Obama and very much like the Chicago Bears and really like Star Wars and quite like Heroes, the TV show. So those are the things they like, and their identity revolves around those four. That wouldn’t be a correction to the problem I’m concerned with; that would be more like the multiple identities where it’s all self-reinforcing. On the other hand, if people are typically curious and are fans of Senator McCain … and listening to others who disagree with him, then I wouldn’t worry at all.

Victor Navasky, former editor of The Nation, wrote about reporting on the Clinton Administration’s policies toward Bosnia, “in The Nation, it was the human rights activists v. the noninterventionists. In National Review it was the hawks v. the isolationists.” I believed Navasky’s point was applicable to the Internet and had the following to say:

With the blogosphere growing exponentially, individuals feel they have something unique to offer. The sites found on the Internet, the links and cross-references from blogs, responses and community publishing sites may reinforce a position but also present a different angle to the issue at hand. Sunstein feared that the Left and the Right might become more insular and extreme instead of promoting the discourse critical to a true republic, but in doing so, he assumed that all the various facets of the Left or the Right are already conversing with one another when there might exist an equal lack of dialogue.

Sunstein believed affinity groups would only reinforce or provide affirmation of those actions. I asked Sunstein a less refined version of what I wrote in my project:

Although there are millions of self- or community publishing sites, the more specific the interest becomes the smaller the audience of a particular participatory site will be. If a site was devoted to liberal views grouped with sports fanaticism, sci-fi films and a specific television show, and the presumption was that interaction with like-minded individuals motivates action, the action from such a specific group would be trumped by that of a more general-interest blogger base. Such a small minority would hardly be a danger to democracy.

When I asked him how he interpreted this, I was astounded by how sparse his answer was. “No.” Two years later, to toot my own horn, I feel my interpretation is well-illustrated by the Twitterverse. Twitter has set up a structure in which Tweepers do not need to reciprocate relationships. I might follow you because you talk about interesting topics to me, but you might not return the favor. The most valuable Tweepers don’t focus on “What are you doing today;” they’re linking to interesting knowledge. I’m sure I have similar values to TED’s curator, but I hardly work in the same sphere, with the same information.

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at Sunstein’s theories, but while I feel vindicated by social media as it exists now, I also find myself looking at things I feel neither I nor Sunstein considered in forming our opinions.

My friend and I were recently discussing scalability, in which an audience’s attention is the limited resource. Scalability refers to the point at which that resource is or is not maxed out. Sunstein and I had either never considered or both assumed that the audience’s attention had already reached capacity. While my evidence is mostly anecdotal, I suspect that we’ve underestimated the amount of information people are interested in and capable of consuming before hitting information overload.

SCHOOL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES—Western College Program:
Denise Cheng’s senior project

Analytical portion
Creative portion

Filed under: Internet, Journalism , Cass Sunstein, daily me, echo chamber, Google, news, print, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Twitter, Victor Navasky, Western College Program

An addict’s words of wisdom

Food for thought from my literary crush:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

− Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

Filed under: Uncategorized , attic, brain, literature, sherlock holmes