Tag: Philadelphia

Weekend Insert

I spent many college weekends at the library. The journalism library.

Work study program (certain publications need to be behind the desk. My desk.)

That P/T job followed two years of working at the campus TV studio.

I keep wondering how many of those communication students made it in the real world.  Has anyone landed on Page One!

After all, we weren’t Columbia Journalism School.

Just a land-grant farm University, whose football coach is still around after almost 4 decades.

(as of this edit, this is no longer true. JoePa was fired yesterday and Happy Valley turned uproar, flipping a CBS-news van on its side).

I realized then that many would go on to marketing and advertising.

A few would move up market, and eventually be settled in metros like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Occasionally, the school bulletin still advertises “insider” job openings for Associate Producer of sports TV, let’s say down in Jacksonville, FL.

But I have a feeling that many of those students who were there at the library on those weekends, are not holding communication-related jobs.

It’s too integrated a field of study. And unless you found a niche (dog food adverts), and honed in, chances are that you would end up in sales, as in my case.

Still, I hope to be surprised by a New York Times book review title, whose author I might recognize. It will be  a happy moment for me. That somehow, my butler-ing at the library on those weekends wasn’t in vain.

Words have always been cheap.

Now even memory (and expertise) faces its own deflation. Just google it.

Consequently, kids just text and invent shorthand that soooo SMS-fitting.

It’s been sequential, for movies to be derived from screen plays which are adapted from books. Now, it’s movies first, then games and cartoon or tie-ins.

If you feel socially awkward to “friend” someone online, maybe because people you actually know already died, or that they are also bewildered in this new social media landscape. Studies show that it’s the 2nd or 3rd degree connectors that somehow influence us most (see Connected, by two Harvard researchers – who found a link between obesity and those we hang out with online).

I didn’t realize then, what I now know, that those minimum-wage hours have been habit-forming for me. I have grown attached to print and the sound/smell of quiet minds at work. I know those same students perhaps still flip the channels to find out how Penn State team is doing (lost to Alabama), and maybe, still read a newspaper during commercials. Nowadays, you can hardly find any publications considered sacred or in short supply enough to be kept behind the desk. Consequently, I wonder if the school of journalism is still keeping a weekend part-timer  just for that.

Kindness from your lips

My kid’s elementary school is collecting lip balms to send to our troops overseas.

It struck me that we spend our entire life trying to do good, from small gestures to larger ones, only to see others take it away in an instant.

I saw the beautiful picture of the 9/11 girl whose life ended last Saturday in Tucson.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110110/ap_on_re_us/us_congresswoman_shot_girl

Said she wanted to attend Penn State (We are). Her grandparents live in Philadelphia,

hence the Penn State motif.

9/11 generation already shows some promises, potentials and now with its poster child.

It also struck me that with every click, every digital image and footprint, we leave behind our legacy. Henry Gates, the professor who had a run-in in Cambridge, MA last year (resulted in and resolved at Beer Summit on White House Lawn) authors a book about how DNA live in us from ancestors on down, never gone through mutation.

What we collect and store become archives for future generations.

It looked as if we lost a few leaders this past weekend, one of whom could have become Class President who delivers Commencement Address at Beaver Stadium.

In the East, there is a saying ” When Bulls and Bears are in combat, mosquitoes get smashed”.

That baseball team will miss its only girl teammate and Penn State its future recruit.

I am going out to buy some lip balms, but feel sad inside for the parents who couldn’t do a simple act of kindness I am about to do. Hug your child and have him/her hear kindness from your lips. The troops will know this too while under heavy fires.

Kindness in the most unlikely place.

 

First love

First day of  my kid’s summer. First day of  being a FT Mr Mom.

It happens! I reflect on Summer 75 when I was looking forward to resettling in Central Pennsylvania.

America, Land of the Free. Back then, I was sure the nation was still in a state of shock, and perhaps was relieved that

I wish I could hang on to that  first-love moment for this country.

Everything at the time smelled strange and was hard to categorize: from the Pennsylvania meadow to Fall foliage, and onto snow flakes and snow frosts,

the perpetuating soft rock music on the radio. American should learn to love its land and ideals all over again.

From the kindness of strangers for a foreign student potluck dinner to a  coffee refill at the Corner Room.

How about just a “hello”, because we are all here today, gone tomorrow: American or Amish.

Let’s make this ride a memorable one. Long or short, it matters who you are riding with and how you enjoy his/her presence. Even the De Niro character  (a bounty hunter) could finally appreciate his apprehended accountant at the end of Midnight Train. First love was special because it came around once, and graced us with lasting memories. BTW, the perpetual song on the radio those days that sticks out was “I will never fall in love again.”