Monthly Archives: July 2004

Got plans?

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I live for today.

I’m realising this only at age 43, although it should have been evident decades ago. The first clear sign was my entire college career.

Most of my peers probably had some inkling of what they wanted to do — if they didn’t know they wanted to be an engineer, they at least knew they would study mathematics. If they didn’t know what they would study, they usually had an inkling of the type of career they wanted, that is, business, technical, artistic, academic.

I went to college because that’s what people with my interests and goals did, and because my father thought it was the only way for women to have the opportunities he had never had.

I had no goal.

How did I choose the university I attended? Did I select an academic major and seek out the top schools in that field, like an aspiring engineer might look at MIT? Did I pick a university based on its location, so I would have the opportunity to enjoy four years in a bucolic setting?

Essentially, I stuck a pin in a directory.

My interests were varied and unfocused, as they remain today. I began by thinking I would like to pursue Native American studies, not understanding what this meant or where it would lead. I later concluded that Natives didn’t need another European-American like me to “help” them.

Then, still in idealist mode, I decided the U.S. Foreign Service was for me. Everything about the Middle East fascinated me — that’s how little I knew. I attended a Model United Nations conference where I was supposed to represent Oman. I knew next to nothing about Oman (25 years ago, you couldn’t simply go to the CIA fact sheets online, or online at all). At one point, a question arose in committee about the U.S. and oil, and when I gained the floor I gave a speech off the top of my head for which I received a long ovation. It was probably not something a representative of Oman would have said.

I worked hard, but my application to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service was summarily rejected. My dad had taken me to Buffalo for an interview with a Georgetown alumna. I had never been in such a wealthy neighbourhood, in such a richly furnished house, or in conversation with such a sophisticated person. She undoubtedly saw through me immediately. and it was an uncomfortable interview.

In the meantime, for my other three choices I considered the solicitations I’d received, including one for a great books college and another for an upper-crust women’s college where attractive girls were shown riding horses in the verdant and hilly countryside. Maybe that’s the life I wanted, but it wasn’t me. I researched the prestige factors of some others, finally selecting two universities in New York. I also applied to the University of Chicago based on its reputation, as described in the guides, without regard to location or program.

All three accepted me, so I was off to the University of Chicago as the college farthest from home and from my experience.

The University of Chicago did not require students to commit to a major until after completion of the Core. I thought that I might pursue a degree in political science or even, after encouragement by a 4th-year student, Islamic studies.

After a year’s struggle through the Core, especially math, physics, and chemistry, I began to realise that my strengths also did not lie in the social sciences.

That left . . . English language and literature.

Fortunately, I was able to take other literature courses as well, including Latin American and Russian literature. Happily, too, a course on the Anglo-Saxons counted as literature, and I was also able to take a couple of courses in English and American history. (History! Why didn’t I think of history as a major? I think I did, but it required too much reading, and I has become a slow reader.)

So I’d landed on English language and literature. It wasn’t easy and required more reading than I could handle (especially 18th and 19th century novels), but most of the time I understood the subject. My morale and grades improved. One year, I even appeared on the dean’s list.

Fast forward to graduation day, June 11, 1983. Two friends from New York and my roommate attended. I laughed at the president’s speech and pretentious manner, collected the diploma, drank some champagne, felt a little lost on Sunday, and woke up Monday . . .

Without a job. With nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no money.

While my classmates had spent the previous year (or more) applying to graduate schools and to businesses, pursuing internships, and in other productive activities, I’d done nothing. The idea of a post-college career apparently never occurred to me.

My dad now tactfully suggested I get a job. If I couldn’t within a few months, I would have to return to New York.

Just as these suggestions were rightly about to become a command, I found a jo selling tickets for the Chicago City Ballet. Then, within a couple of months, I’d obtained a job. Not a career, although it would last as long as a career without offering any of the emotional, moral, or even financial rewards.

For a while, I considered going to law school. I convinced myself, however, that the mentality does not suit me. In reality, I don’t have the mental, physical, or emotional discipline required.

I’ve also thought about a master of liberal arts degree. This would do nothing for career planning, but it might round out what I believe to be an inadequate academic background.

Another possibility was psychology or social work. Although I didn’t fare well in behavioral psychology or general classes in these areas 25 years ago, maybe life experience has better prepared me for them. Yet, in their way, they require a scientific and statistical way of thinking that has always eluded me.

Now, I’m wondering if I should to become accredited as a business communicator. I have no formal training in communications, just a lot of observational experience and intuition. If I succeed, I don’t know what I will gain as I don’t think it will change anything, and I am not sure that I feel that this is a meaningful objective. If I fail, I have a deep-seated fear there is nothing left.

I live for today. Yesterday is fraught with unplanned joy and pain, and tomorrow bears the promise of more.

Dream: Living corpses

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I had two odd and gruesome dreams. The second I don’t remember very well; there was a dark highway, with a motorcycle or bicycle accident that was spread over a distance. Someone, maybe me, tried to put out a red light in the profound darkness to prevent being hit again by someone else coming along.

The first, though — two living corpses were in a desert, desperately trying to reach and touch each other. Living corpses because one was whole but covered in gallons of its own blood and gore. The other was missing its head, neck and upper chest, and yet it was still crawling along, trying to reach the other . . . it looked as though they stopped moving just short of touching.

Then I woke up.

All the news that’s fit to print

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“Why start my day drab when I can start it with the Sun-Times? The Bright One.”

So goes a pseudo-testimonial ad for the Chicago Sun-Times, whose new tagline is “The Bright One.” I have not yet determined what is supposed to be “bright” about the Sun-Times compared to its rival across Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Tribune. The sparkling wit of its columnists? The intelligence of its reporting? The snap of its photography? The color of its graphics?

Undoubtedly, the advertising agency’s gurus were thinking of all of the above when trying to devise a tagline that would set the Sun-Times apart while subtly denigrating its competitor. The testimonial approach is meant to appeal to the conformist in all of us; after all, who would admit to preferring The Drab One to The Bright One?

Me.

I’ve never been able to take the Sun-Times seriously as a journalistic effort. Certainly, there have been bright spots in the newspaper over the years; the late Irv Kupcinet imbued gossip with class, while Roger Ebert’s head understood a good film better than the late Gene Siskel’s heart.

On the other hand, the Sun-Times replaced Ann Landers with two forgettable advice columnists chosen through a competition designed to generate publicity for the Second City’s second newspaper. Their flip, hip, and quick advice often seemed more focused on showing off their wit than on addressing the question. “All That Zazz,” named for the column’s author, indicated the shift from old-fashioned, maternal advice to modern entertainment.

A few years ago, in an effort to reach younger people who prefer to spend their intellectual time online and who can’t be bothered reading print, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune launched their respective Red Streak and Red Eye editions nearly simultaneously. Both are tabloids that generally feature a single, large colour photo and a large, bold headline on the front. On rare occasions, it’s about a current world or local event, for example, Iraq/Afghanistan or the latest Chicago porch party disaster. They are newspapers seemingly filled with non-news; one striking cover was about the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Inside, there seem to be pages and pages of photos with short captions — photos of celebrities and captions describing the event where they were photographed and the designer of their apparel. Both Red Streak and Red Eye are laid out with the same attention to aesthetics and content as the National Enquirer.

Although I’m not part of either publication’s target market, I did receive an advertising letter from one of them that informed me that I’m young, I’m bright, I’m up-and-coming, and I’m far too busy and important to get bogged down with conventional newspapers that drone on and on. I need my important information at a glance. The writer devoted a full page to such flattery, more than these publications devote to a story. As I was glancing through it, I was reminded of the indignant line uttered by an attractive young woman in a television commercial for Valtrex®, the genital herpes medication that needs to be taken only once a day: “I have a life!” (apparently devoted to spreading the joy, judging by the commercial’s visuals).

Pandering to youth has become a phenomenon in advertising that no one has explained satisfactorily. Vast amounts of advertising are tailored to the under-30 market, with much of that specifically targeted to the 18-25 market. Meanwhile, research shows a widening gap between the vast disposable income of older people (Boomers and above) and the declining income of those same 18- to 25-year-olds, a growing number of whom are living longer and longer at home primarily because they can’t afford to move out.

The prevailing theory seems to be that it’s harder to capture the youth market. Judging by magazine ads and television commercials, people my age don’t buy cars, electronics, appliances, online services, CDs, furniture, or even cosmetics. What we do buy is [insert your favourite male enhancement product name here], Ensure, vitamins and supplements, and life insurance. Apparently, we don’t even buy household cleaning products (primarily, we leave that to young, frazzled mothers) or hair coloring and anti-wrinkle creams, which we leave to aging models in the 28-33 range.

So now there are two Chicago newspapers for advertising’s much-coveted youth market. That they are generally devoid of news or in-depth reporting could be a function of the times. At the Printer’s Row book fair one year, I found a booth full of newspapers from the mid to late 1800s. They were a graphic designer’s worst nightmare — blocks and blocks of tiny copy with only a few vertical and horizontal lines and an occasional line drawing to break up the ocean of words.

One long feature detailed George Armstrong Custer’s return trip from a western adventure (clearly, he would go west one too many times). As I read about his journey, I slowly found myself immersed in it, just like a nineteenth-century reader. The reporter knew that his reader would never see Custer or anything Custer had experienced except in photos or drawings. His reader would never see the Plains or the Indians himself. It was likely the average reader would never travel more than a few dozen miles from home. For such a reader to understand Custer’s world, the reporter needed to bring it to life in relentless printed detail, in hundreds, even thousands of words.

And he did, because the reader wanted to understand. The reader wanted to live vicariously through Custer and through the reporter. Any major event merited such in-depth reporting; otherwise, it would be too remote from the reader’s day-to-day life and experience for him to comprehend. It also gave him something to talk about with his family and friends, as they imagined Custer’s adventures and journeys.

Today, Custer would take a three- or four-hour flight, and his superiors would call a press conference to report on the Indian situation. The viewer or reader would want to know the answer to one primary question: Is it resolved or not? If not, how much longer is it going to take (and, perhaps, how much is it going to cost?). A talking head anchor can fill the viewer in on the roadblocks and other issues in fewer than 60 seconds. Any other detail is extraneous.

The viewer or reader also wouldn’t need an elaborate description of Custer’s dress, hairstyle, or accoutrements; he’d appear on the news every day, and his photo would be on hundreds of news, military, and fan Web sites. Nothing about his physical journey would interest the average person; how many times have most of us flown for work or pleasure? If Custer’s politics were to differ from ours, reading about him would serve mainly to irritate us and to prove us right, as we knew we were all along.

When I was a child in western New York, there were still two rival newspapers: the Buffalo Evening News and the Courier-Express (my parents, both morning people, opted for the latter). In the 1960, there were more photos and less copy than in Custer’s day; photography and news footage would bring home the horrors of the Vietnam War and other realities in a way that words never could.

I remember best, however, an investigative series about New York’s migrant workers. I was naive enough not to have any real concept of what my father did at work or even what work meant to him. Work was just something grownups disappeared for several hours a day to do.

Through this series, I was horrified to learn that migrant workers, people like me, human beings, lived in shacks without running water or the luxury of toilets. They worked from sunrise to sundown, nearly nonstop, for pennies. While picking strawberries with my dad and aunts for couple of hours on a sunny June Saturday was exciting and fun and out of the ordinary for me, I could not imagine doing it every day for hours — and for so little reward. It was my first lesson in how one person’s summer’s day pleasure could be another’s endless toil.

Investigative print reporting still exists, beyond Woodward and Bernstein. The free weekly, the Chicago Reader, usually features a lengthy cover story about a single topic, ranging from high-profile crimes and examples of corruption to profiles of social activists. With its enormous collection of singles ads, its focus on avant-garde entertainment and art, and nontraditional cartoons like “Life in Hell,” the Reader also has its appeal to a young, club-hopping audience. Do they read that lengthy, detailed, painstakingly researched cover story or skip straight to the personals, erotic ads, and club entertainment listings? I wonder.

7 January 2019 update: The Chicago Sun-Times is now “The Hardest-Working Paper in America.” The paper works hardest, but do the journalists, press operators, and others who put it out every day?