Category: Writing

Essay: Bike Messengers

I saw my first bike messenger up close in 1988 when I was visiting New York City with my family.  We were riding an elevator in that great metropolis and he got on at the same time we did.  I couldn’t take my eyes off his toned and tan skin, shiny with sweat.  He may have had tattoos or crazy hair, I don’t recall the details, but something branded him as “other,” even more so than the slight odor wafting from his body.  I stared at his functional, hardy clothing, and his bag which held his package and his book for customers to sign.  As a jaded teenager, I did my best not to gape at everything in the city, but I’m pretty sure I stared at him the entire time we shared that elevator.
Bike messengers were everywhere on that trip.  Fax machines had started to catch on, but the city still needed a ton of people to get something from here to there.  I knew that people didn’t like them because they didn’t follow traffic rules and took every opportunity for a shortcut, angering pedestrians and drivers alike, but I loved them for their athleticism, the feral look they had about them, and the vague sense of anarchy that followed them around.
When I moved to Portland, I worked downtown where my path crossed with many of the bike messengers.  It was the early 2000s by then, and between the dominance of the fax machine and the convenience of electronic messaging, I’m sure the population was greatly reduced, but they were still there.  I took walks on my lunch breaks, descending from the twentieth floor of the Wells Fargo Tower, eager for fresh air.  As I walked I took in the sights and kept track of the changes in my environment, which meant cataloging the bike messengers.
There was a woman bike messenger I was always happy to come across.  She was lean and wiry, with thick pants and wool sweaters to keep the rain from her.  She kept her brown hair cut short in a bob and her black-framed glasses and cap reminded me of a friend from college.  She rode well, but I loved passing her while she was resting.  Sometimes I would come across her chatting with other bike messengers, but one day I caught her leaning against the wall of a high-rise building, her bike next to her, her feet propped up on a planter. She had her face to the sun, eyes closed, drinking in the good weather.  At that moment, she looked like a picture of freedom.
My job at the time had a bike messenger come to pick up our deposits.  He had black curly hair and wore shorts in every kind of weather.  All the riding had pared his frame down to a gristly muscle, the kind you see on cowboys who have spent their life on the range.  He wore a typical bike messenger’s cap, not a helmet and he was all business.  I was the receptionist so I saw him every day and no matter how hard I tried, I could never engage him in conversation beyond, “hello” (in response to my greeting) or “fine” (in response to how are you/the weather/the day?).  Because I was bored at work, trying to get him to talk became a bit of a project.  Flirting didn’t work, or general good vibes or questions aside from the standard greetings. I wondered if he had a speech impediment or a general dislike for me, or if he was just socially awkward.  The plot thickened one day when my coworker said something about Audrey Hepburn to me while he was picking up his parcel. “Oh, are you talking about Roman Holiday?” he asked her.  They chatted briefly about the film and he went about his business, leaving me with my mouth agape and adding “Audrey Hepburn fan?” to my mental list I was compiling about him.

I like bike messengers because they are a part of that class of hard working blue collar workers that businesses are always trying to eliminate.  I also probably romanticize them.  Their job is hard, and it’s dependent on them staying in good health.  I know it doesn’t pay much and I have a good idea that most of them don’t have health coverage.  But I love to watch them, moving through the city, getting things to where they should go, in all kinds of weather.

Essay: Confessions of a foodie who falls for slick packaging.

I love food in general and good food in particular.  I cook the majority of the food I eat from scratch and there are all sorts of vegetables and fruits and whole grains, lean protein, etc. etc. in my regular diet.  I support organic agriculture, have bought quarters of beef, grow a few of my own vegetables and massive amounts of potatoes.  I think a lack of good food is a large part of what ails this country and I wish that everyone felt as passionate about food growing, preparation and preserving as I do.
With that said, I must confess that I have a great love for microwave entrees.
Walking down the freezer aisle of the grocery store, I feel a feeling not unlike the feeling I used to get walking down the toy aisle as a child.  There are so many choices!  And they all look so pretty!  The boxes look neat and tidy, with their square corners and their attractive photos.  The prices are quite cheap and the nutrition information is already calculated and prominently displayed. 
Unlike so many areas of my life, I can have exactly what I want.  Italian?  Yes, there are tons of pasta choices, from low fat to full fat, budget to gourmet.  Burrito?  Yes, so many attractively wrapped little packages.  Quiche?  Nancy’s has a mini quiche just for me.  What about a full meal with way too many calories in it? Marie Callender’s can step up to the plate.  Personal sized pizzas?  Lean Cuisine has me covered.  What about a grilled panini?  There are several choices.
Even heating up the food is fun.  The directions are all different, meaning I have to pay attention.  Sometimes I have to remove the plastic entirely, sometimes just poke a hole in it.  Sometimes, as with the paninis the packaging transforms into a space age type microwave “grill” after careful tearing along a perforated line.  I know the marketing people have figured out that people feel better if they have to be involved at some level of their food preparation, even if the extent of that preparation is squinting at the label and stabbing plastic repeatedly with a fork.
The other thing I love about microwave meals is portion control.  When I’m wandering the frozen aisle, I do not feel like cooking.  Because the funds for my personal chef have not yet come through, when I don’t feel like cooking my choices include finding food in the frozen aisle or going out to eat.  I love to go out to eat, but it’s a love/hate relationship.  The portions are always extremely large and I’m not very successful at limiting my consumption of the large servings.  Unlike restaurants, with microwave meals, most of the brands I buy clock in at 350 calories or less.
Take the grilled paninis I’m currently a fan of.  I get two thick slices of sourdough bread, beef, peppers and cheese all for 330 calories and less than four dollars.  If I were to purchase that same Philly-style cheesesteak from a vendor, it would cost me seven dollars, minimum, and clock in at at least three times the calories, if not four.  If I were to make it myself, it would involve purchasing an entire loaf of sourdough bread as well as making a beef and peppers mixture that would be more than one serving.  This way I have my cheesesteak, eat it and when the next meal rolls around I’m actually hungry again.

There are a ton of drawbacks to frozen entrees.  I don’t really like supporting agricultural food conglomerates by purchasing them, the packaging often seems wasteful and isn’t recyclable and most of them have entirely too much sodium.  They also have a factory made sameness about them that I can’t abide on a regular basis.  But I only have a frozen entrée every month or two, so for me they remain so much of a treat.

Essay: Movie Listings

Back in the day—and this was long, long ago, say two or three years—I could plan my trip to the movie theater in 30 seconds or less.  I simply opened to the “movie listings” page in the relevant section of my newspaper, scanned the listings from all the theaters, checked the times and decided if I did or did not want to see a movie at that time.  I did this regularly, from 1989—the time I began attending movies without my parents—until the end of the first decade of our new century.
At that point, Regal Cinemas, the main provider of first-run movies in Portland, Oregon, pulled its daily listings from the newspaper.

I understood why.  Regal has a full, robust (and also rather difficult-to-navigate)
website.  The number of subscribers to the newspaper has been declining for years.  Smartphones had begun to appear and it was easier for consumers to be able to access movie information through a phone.  I also thought at the time that Regal was a good five to ten years ahead of themselves.  There are still a lot of
people who are not interested in navigating the internet to find their movie
selections.  Why cut out a potential segment of the movie-going public?
I don’t particularly like Regal as a company, and work hard to avoid seeing movies at their theaters, so I only missed the presence of their movie listings now and again.  But that was the tipping point.  From that point on, my checking of movie listings would straddle two formats: the newspaper, for a quick easy look, and then, if necessary, a follow up on the theater website.  One website became multiple websites as more and more theaters stopped using the newspaper to advertise their flicks.
Now, instead of spending 30 seconds scanning the listings, I click on seven different movie theater websites.  Within some of those websites, I also have to
click on multiple pages as some web designer has deemed it important that each
theater take up its own page, or that every movie in the theater system—even
ones in other cities—is listed in a long list.
Regal’s website is particularly bad.  Instead of giving me a grid of all the Portland
movies which was what I had in the paper, I get to scroll through each theater.  This sounds easy enough, but because Regal specializes in the multiplex, all the movies at a particulartheater don’t fit on one web screen and regular scrolling jumps from theater to theater.  I must then employ a combination technique of pulling the screen back and forth with the mouse to read each movie listed in the theater and then scrolling to the next one.  It’s actually an improvement from earlier in the year, when it was difficult to navigate to the individual movie theater listings.  But it’s still miles away from having all the information on one page.
The thing about all this is not that it is a massive pain that frustrates me and keeps people away from the movies.  That’s annoying, for sure.  And really, the amount of “trouble” it causes me is minimal and falls squarely into the “first world problem” category.  What I feel each Friday, as I take five to ten minutes to do something that used to take 30 seconds, is a sense of frustration and loss.  Five years ago, I had no idea that the movie listings would disappear from the  newspaper.  I didn’t know to appreciate the convenience of that feature.  To paraphrase Cinderella, that metal band from the 80s, I didn’t know what I had until it was gone.  The movie listings went away because technology improved in a way that made the movie theater owners abandon something they had done for decades.
What other technological changes are in store for us in the coming years?  And will they all come in the guise of making our lives “easier” while actually making things more difficult?  I’m guessing the answer is yes.

Essay: On not getting things done.

It has been awhile since I wrote an essay.  The average temperature was 45 degrees, whereas now it’s 60 degrees.* I haven’t written an essay since February and with each passing week it gets harder and harder to think of something to write about.

My brain feels flabby. This is not unlike the feeling I get when I attempt to do pushups after I “haven’t gotten around” to them for some time.  So it’s hard for me to think of things to write about and hard for me to sit down and write and just hard in general to get back on that horse/get back into the game/get on up/get to it.
And I love writing, so there really isn’t any reason I shouldn’t be writing.  It’s just that sometimes, when I get stopped, starting becomes harder again with every passing day.  I’d like to say this is a problem just with writing, but it happens again and again.  Currently, I’ve missed a few days** of my 15-minutes-per-day-of-weeding plan, and it is very hard to get back out there.
It seems when I don’t do a regular thing regularly that the “not doing” piles up larger and larger in my brain.  From the small slice of garden I can see right now, things haven’t much changed in a week and getting back out there wouldn’t be any big deal.  But in my mind I find it hard to break the “not doing” cycle and get back out there.
I’m not entirely sure why this happens to me, but I’ve got a few theories.***  One is that I have too many interests.  I stopped writing essays because the class I was taking started taking up more and more of my time.  But then I didn’t start again after the class was over because I was sewing a dress and that took up the time that was going to the class.  Aside from general household and body maintenance (cleaning, working for pay, exercising, meditating, keeping track of finances and cooking) here’s what I would love to be doing every day:  writing, gardening, sewing, playing and singing music, and reading.  A normal day means doing all of the things above in the parentheses and maybe one other thing from my love-to-be-doing-every-day list.  This means that once per week I get to do one
thing from that list.  It’s rather discouraging.
I would love to arrange things otherwise, but until a large chunk of my day doesn’t go toward working for pay, I have to grab the bits and pieces I can and integrate them the best I can.  Or, I could let go of most of those interests, which doesn’t seem like that much fun to me.  So sometimes things get left behind, sometimes things get dropped entirely.  Sometimes it just takes me longer to find my way back to things than I would like. But this is a good first step.
*This is a made-up fact.
** “a few days” is what I always use to describe the period I
haven’t been doing something periodical.
It can mean anything from a few days to a few months to a few seasons.
***My mind never shuts off, so thinking of theories doesn’t
ever stop.

Essay: Lost essays.

Here’s to the essays that never made it onto paper. Or into a Word document.  Here’s to the stray thoughts that formulated themselves into outlines, sentences, even some full paragraphs.  Here’s to the ideas that were bandied about between friends, but occurred at times it was too inconvenient to pull out paper and pencil or sit down in front of the computer and write.

Making a point of writing one essay per week means many more of those thoughts, sentences and paragraphs do make it into essay forms, but
not nearly all of them.  It is not unusual for me to be declaiming about a topic and say, “I’m going to write an essay about this!” which for me is a way of saying, “I’m going to take my ball and go home.” Essays often seem like the best way to have the last word on a topic.  It’s also a way to say that the topic at hand is important, it deserves to have ideas parsed, sentences written, and paragraphs formed and edited.
So here’s to essay topics that were once close at hand, and their moment has passed.  Let’s take a moment to recognize:
MPAA ratings, the primary system and the Electoral College.
Why we are stuck with them forever.
This was the first topic I put on my “Essay Ideas” document in my computer.  It was during, you guessed it, the primary race, when I was frustrated once again, at being disenfranchised by the late date of our primary.  Both the MPAA ratings system and the Electoral College have bugged me for years, the former because it’s so arbitrary and has a bigger problem with sexuality (especially female sexuality) than it does with violence, the latter because it is a disenfranchising force enshrined in our Constitution.  All three of them will never, ever change because the amount of momentum required to reform them is nearly impossible to muster.
Anna v. O’Brien.  Watching the first season of Downtown Abby
got me thinking about the personality differences between the housemaid and the lady’s maid.  Then I started comparing their personalities to my own. I came out more on the O’Brien side and that pretty much killed any interest I had in shaping that topic into an essay.
Intimate Theater and NWCTC.  About the time I began writing essays, NPR had a story about intimate theater.  They were reporting about really cutting edge
stuff like one person sitting in the back of a cab with the actor and experiencing the performance that way.  It got me thinking about one of the reasons I love Northwest Classical Theatre Company so much, namely because the audience is so close to the actors.  And that’s all I have to say about that.
Nora Ephron.  I was deep in the midst of writing other things when Nora Ephron died, which meant she was added to the “idea” list, but I lost the momentum of the shock of her death. But Nora Ephron was a seminal figure in my adolescence and she deserves a full-form essay.  I’ll leave her on the list and hope someday I get around to giving her a proper tribute.
With that, I bid those topics, and many others who didn’t even make it to list, goodbye for now.  Thank you, ideas, for infiltrating my head and thank you for giving me something to think about.

Essay: Due for a broader discussion: PERS

Opening disclaimer.
One of my aunts is a PERS retiree and I am a current member of PERS, though I am in the “third tier” and will not be receiving the same benefits as my predecessors.  As an employee of an educational nonprofit required to pay into PERS, I also know how much my company pays for PERS each month.

 If you live in Oregon and are a regular reader of the Oregonian, you know that PERS is a topic of conversation.  The Oregonian’s editorial board seems to have
made PERS reform a main topic of editorials and the governor has built his
proposed budget assuming that the reforms he has proposed will be passed and
will hold up to court challenges.
If you don’t live in Oregon or pay attention to the news, PERS is the Public Employee’s Retirement System.  The whole PERS system is fairly complex and I
don’t have a complete handle on how things came about* but essentially, state
workers traded off higher pay in the 70s and 80s for what pretty much everyone
refers to as a very generous pension.  Things were fine until the economy started to tank in the late 90s/early 2000s.  When that happened, the gap between what PERS was taking in and what PERS was currently and would be paying out in the future became quite worrisome. So the legislature passed some reforms. As part of those reforms, there are now three tiers of PERS employees.  General wisdom is that Tier I employees (pre-1996 hires) have it really great, Tier II have it great and Tier III (my people) have a different plan, though at least one financial advisor has told me is still a good plan.
The governor has two plans to reform PERS.  The first is to eliminate the extra pay that PERS retirees living outside the state get to pay their Oregon taxes.  People living in other states do not pay Oregon taxes, of course, so I’m all for this plan.
The second plan I think needs a lot more discussion.  Currently, cost-of-living (COLA) increases of two percent per year are automatic for everyone.  The governor wants to make COLA increases automatic for the first $24,000 of benefits, but benefits above $24,000 would not receive a COLA.  According to the
governor and the PERS actuary, this plan “would reduce required employer
contributions to the pension system by $810 million every two years.”**
As someone who enters the amounts my company pays to PERS, I see how troubling the employer contributions are.  Aside from paying into PERS for the
employees—these amounts are based on the salary of each employee—we must also pay an additional amount so the system remains solvent.  This contribution is already best termed as “hefty”, in fact it is nearly equal to the 6% the employees put into PERS and the 6% the company puts into PERS.  This amount (it’s called the UAL) is slated it increase by 50% in July unless another solution is found.
Because I see how much my employer pays every month and how the increasing UAL amount affects our budget, the potential $810 million savings sounds like a very good thing. But I also feel conflicted, because to me, it feels like changing the
way the COLA is figured and only applying it to part of a pension is going back
on a promise that was made to state employees.
Most workers in the United States today do not have pensions.  They have mostly been replaced by a 401k system.  401k’s are systems that are much cheaper for companies to run and, as a memorable Time Magazine article outlined a few years ago*** the 401k system does not really work for retiring employees unless the stock market is booming when they retire.  Also, even if there is a pension, some companies go out of business, some raid the employee pension fund, and others do all sorts of shoddy things to their employees’ future retirement benefits.  I believe the move away from a pension system to a defined contribution system is a win for companies and a very large loss for the average worker.
PERS benefits are generous yes.  Not every PERS retiree is making bank like that damn U of O football coach**** and most are living on reasonable, if generous, pensions.  But often when people talk about generous pensions they grumble that “most people” don’t have that and so people with more benefits have to sacrifice.  However, this attitude discounts the tradeoffs that employees made year after year, taking smaller salaries in trade for a generous pension.  Changing the
terms of the pension after a person has retired seems dishonest to me, and the
argument that PERS retirees have it good and others don’t so they should have
to pay seems to be petty and small.
I think the debate that is happening now is “PERS is in trouble, PERS retirees have it good, therefore PERS retirees should have it less good”  But I think the question that we should be asking is, “is it okay to change the terms of a retirement contract after someone has worked for years under that contract?”  If the answer is no, then we need to find some other way to pay for PERS.
One PERS retiree recently wrote a letter to the editor***** pointing out that no one has ever done a survey asking PERS retirees what they think is fair.  I liked her point.  If PERS retirees are fine with COLA being capped with the first $24,000, then great. Maybe they have other ideas too.
PERS is a complex issue and deserves a broader debate than what is happening right now. It’s more complex then “they have it good, they need to pay” and it’s tougher than “I paid my dues and I deserve every penny” and it’s very hard to come up with answer to this revenue problem.   But I think with more conversation, we can.
*One summer I planned to fully research and understand PERS so I could write a simple guide for people. I never did this, but wish I had.
**”Oregonian Department of Justice offers possible legal arguments to reform Oregon’s Public Employee Retirement System.”  Ted Sickinger February 6, 2013
*** I don’t have a citation and I’m not going to look one up because I write these essays for free. But there was an article.  It struck fear in my heart.
****His pension makes my blood boil.  But he played by the system and completely won.  http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/12/mike_bellotti_former_universit.html
 *****Again, cursory searching has not turned up said letter.

Essay: It turns out I have very strong feelings about the movie the Notebook.

notebook
http://www.impawards.com/2004/notebook_ver2.html

Be aware!  This here essay is rife with spoilers.  So if you want to keep the plot of the Notebook undiscovered, stop reading.  But if you have seen it, or you plan on never seeing it, read on to discover why this is not a sweet, romantic film, it is C-R-E-E-P-Y!

Let’s look at the first meeting of Noah and Allie.  Noah, (Ryan Gosling) asks who this Allie (Rachel McAdams) is and his friend Finn explains.  Then, despite the fact that she walks up to him with not one but two guys on her arm, Noah leads by saying, “Do you want to dance?”  Note that they are not at a dance, they are at a fair.  There may be a dance at the fair, but there is no dance in the frame of the camera. Allie, quite rightly, says no and flounces off to ride the Ferris Wheel.  What an awkward beginning for Noah. I’m willing to give him a pass because maybe he’s nervous or so overcome by Allie’s beauty he makes an awkward move.  Who hasn’t done that?
 
But then Noah leaps onto the Ferris Wheel, landing in the same car as Allie and another man.  If this happened to you, would it be romantic?  No, it would be super creepy.  Even if the person who did it looked like Ryan Gosling (who I do not find attractive at all because I think he looks like a hamster, but I am aware that many women don’t see his hamster qualities, and instead find him rather dreamy).  You would not be attracted to this weird man because you don’t know this person and also invading space like that is wrong, there’s a reason we each have our own bubble.  Plus, there’s a weight limit on those Ferris Wheel cars, what if they crashed to the ground?
 
So maybe Noah is just weirdly enthusiastic and we can give him another pass? Okay, just because it is Ryan Gosling and so many women like him, let’s do that.  So what does he do then?  He blackmails Allie into saying she will go out on a date with him by hanging from the Ferris Wheel, threatening to plunge to his death.  Allie agrees to keep herself from witnessing a real-life death/maiming, but is her agreement good enough for him?  No it is not.  He makes her say she wants to go out with him loudly and repeatedly before he climbs back into the car.   Ladies, once again, put yourself in Allie’s place.  Is being blackmailed into a date
okay?  Is the potential date’s need not just for the date but for a loud proclamation of the desire to date the man in question okay?  I hope you have come to the same conclusion as me, but just in case, I will say it straight:  no it is not okay, it is rather disturbing.
 
Moving right along. Noah remains persistent about the coerced outing and eventually they go out together.  So here’s a guy on a date with a woman he is very into.  He is so into her, he risked life and limb, et cetera.  What does this guy who is crazy about this woman do on the very first date he takes her on?  He says, “You know what your problem is?” and then tells her what he thinks her problem is.  Gentlemen.  On what date is it okay to begin pronouncing your view of the flaws of your date?  Ah!  Trick question.  It’s not okay on any date.  If your date needs to deliver a diagnosis of your supposed flaws, then this person is not the person for you and the date should end.  It is never romantic to say, “do you know what your problem is?” because, really, who are you to say?
 
So then there’s a bunch of shoddy tell-don’t-show film making wherein we find out that Allie and Noah were crazy about each other and they fought all the time.  Again, there isn’t enough character development to find out why they fight all the time and why exactly they are so into each other, but I can say that if you are mostly fighting with the person you supposedly love, it’s probably not so much love and you should probably part ways and find someone you don’t fight with.
 
Then, there is a cruel parting and Allie is whisked away by her parents (who, as far as I was concerned, were right on the money) and Noah writes one letter per day to Allie for an entire year and she never writes back.  We know that Allie’s mother is intercepting the letters and she doesn’t know about them. I want to go on record as saying this is wrong of Allie’s mother and I don’t condone it.  However, after a year, Noah does the healthiest thing he does in the entire movie and moves on.  Or, at least, he stops writing to her.
 
Noah goes off to war, his tiny friend dies, he comes back and his father, happy to fan the flames of obsession, goes in with him to purchase a decrepit mansion where Noah and Allie almost had (or did have, I don’t think the film is clear on this point) sex.  Noah throws himself into restoring the decrepit mansion just the way Allie would like it.  He also grows a creepy-guy beard, perhaps to show us how focused/determined/crazy he is.  It is not an attractive beard and actually I question if Mr. Gosling–he of the fair hair–could actually grow such a hearty specimen. In fact, though I do not think Ryan Gosling is dreamy, as stated above, (hamster) overall in this movie, he did a lot with his eyes and I sort of had a window into the mmmmmmmRyanGoslingmmmmmmm world.  But that
beard during all the big reunion scenes? No ma’am, it did not work for me.
 
Someone who completely restores a house, and works obsessively (a word the film actually uses) to renovate it the way someone said once, five years ago.  Is that someone capital-R Romantic?  Or big-C-stay-away-from-me CREEPY?  I think we know the answer.  Think of someone you haven’t been in contact with for a while.  Say you run into them, go for coffee, and you find out that they had built a shrine to you in their backyard.  That’s the moment when you fake an emergency call and leave the coffee shop.
 
So that’s all Noah and Allie back in the day.  And that’s bad enough.  But  interspersed with the supposedly tragic story of the lovers is the present-day story of a sweet old couple who we later find out are Ryan and Allie.  And when I say present-day, I mean the 80s or 90s or some such thing, it was hard to tell from the clothing.
 
Present-day Allie (Gena Rowlands) has dementia and present-day Noah (James Garner, a man much more substantial than hamster Gosling,) has moved into the care facility where Allie lives so he can read from the notebook where Allie wrote their story, the same notebook that gives us the title of the movie.  As the movie progresses, we see Noah tell their story to an uncomprehending Allie, ignoring the advice of a doctor and insisting that the story always brings Allie back to him. In fact, Allie has even written in the front of the notebook that he should do this.  So he spends the day reading the story to her so she will return.
And she does “come back” and they have a dance and catch up on the news and this is all so very sweet.   It lasts for five minutes and then Allie forgets again and completely freaks out and has to be held down and sedated.
 
I ask you, is this the motivation of a loving man?  Nope.  It’s just Noah, being as obsessed and creepy as he was in his younger years.  If Allie is quite happy not
knowing who she is or who the nice man reading the story to her is, wouldn’t it be more loving and caring to just let things be? But no!  Let’s have the five
minutes of recognition followed by the potent drug cocktail.  It’s completely worth it.
 
And it goes on!
The film ends when Noah sneaks into Allie’s room, she “comes back” and mentions how nice it would be if their love can “take them away together.”   So they hold hands, fall asleep and die at the same time.  I’m sorry, but dying at
the same time as your spouse falls into the creepy category, not the “oh how
romantic” category.  Noah’s got three children and two grandchildren whom he clearly adores and instead of just letting things be, and hanging out with his family, he goes off and dies at the same time as his wife.  Several women
have said they think this is sweet and maybe if I hadn’t just watched 122 minutes of creepy behavior it would be sweet, but, alas, I had watched 122 minutes of obsession and that puts dying together into that same “ew” category.
 
So, dear reader, I implore you to continue watching this movie if you find it lovely and romantic. But if you find yourself in this same situation in real life? You might want to check the creepy meter.  It’s probably running pretty high.

Essay: On Slow News

On Monday, the Oregonian ran a commentary* by Peter Laufer, in which he attempts to convince the reader to join the “slow news” movement.  Mr. Laufer, I am happy to say I am already a member, as evidenced by the fact I read your column on Wednesday, two days after it was published.

 I already have stepped off the 24-hour news cycle, having realized that there just isn’t enough news for all 24 hours of the day.  I read the paper daily—though I don’t always finish the current day’s paper by the end of the current day—I listen to NPR while cooking dinner and that is it.**  I will, on occasion, poke about online for more information about a current event, but mostly I just keep informed as people did in the last century: by reading the newspaper and listening to the radio.
Laufer says, “We need to be able to decide for ourselves what so-called news is worth our while, not just allow ourselves to be subjected to an endless barrage of unfiltered media assaults.” What’s worked for me is to have regular times each day to check in with the world.  Mine are: on the train to and from work, when
I read the paper; also the aforementioned cooking dinner hour with NPR.  Unless some national tragedy is occurring, I can wait to wade into the details.
It’s worth noting that my definition of national tragedy is a lot stricter than the media’s view.  Here’s a tally of national tragedies in my lifetime:  the events of September 11, 2001.  That’s it. Everything else can wait until my news hour.  Remember the DC sniper?  Coverage of that event was a wake-up call for
me.  For the entire period the sniper was active, all our local news—morning, noon, evening, late night—spent a substantial amount of time reporting about something that was happening on the other side of the country.  Given that
most days there was no new news and given that few non-governmental events occurring in our nation’s capital are local it was a colossal waste of time.
Laufer also points out that the first coverage of an event
is often inaccurate.  Agreed. I would
also add that it tends to be quite hysterical.  When the shootings at Columbine High School
occurred, I recall thinking, “I can’t wait until someone writes a book about
this.”  I had to wait a decade, but the
book was worth the wait, as it carefully and completely proved that pretty much
everything we “knew” about Columbine after the shootings was not accurate.
I’d like to invite all of you to join me in the slow news movement.  We can be informed, even if we check in at limited, regular intervals.

*If you want to read the original column, it is titled “It’s OK to read yesterday’s news tomorrow.” and is available, for a time, by clicking here.

 **If I had more time, I would also read a weekly news magazine and also renew my subscription to Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly.  If I had more time and cable, I would watch the Daily Show and the Cobert Report.