What Is A Journalist Anyway?

The media organization where I have recently started worked is KQED, the largest public broadcasting company in Northern California.

I've been walking the ten minutes from my apartment to the station a day or two each week to write blog posts for the company's News Fix blog.

Here are links to some of those posts, both signed and unsigned:

05/24/2013 USGS   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/24/98087/usgs-seeks-earthquake-scanners#more-98087

05/24/2013  Zumper   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/24/98037/san-francisco-rent-prices-zumper

05/20/2013 Tumblr   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/20/tumblr-joins-flickr-inside-yahoos/

05/20/2013 Bay Bridge   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/20/97597/

05/17/2013 Golden State Warriors   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/17/warri/

05/17/2013 Google Glass   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/17/97460/

05/17/2013 Unemployment   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/17/97521/

05/13/2013 SF Giants   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/13/96973/

05/10/2013 Google Book Scan   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/google-book-scanning-fair-use

05/10/2013 Bratton Report   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/10/bratton-oakland/

05/08/2013 Income Disparity & Public Transit    http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/

05/07/2013 3-D guns   http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/05/07/96407/

I've provided the links here not because I think any of you would necessarily want to read these posts but because they illustrate some of the diversity of topics a journalist deals with on a daily basis.

People often ask me what it is like being a journalist. They have romantic ideas, based on TV, novels, or movies. But trust me, romance is rarely to be found in journalism. Mostly it is grinding work, pressurized as you attempt to document the news and avoid making mistakes.

You strive to be fair and balanced. Those who think journalists pursue their own political agendas are hopelessly naive. We do not have and have never had that kind of luxury.

The above list does, however, reveal some of my interest areas, since I could have written about other topics rather than the ones I chose to publish. There is a heavy dose of tech and sports running through those posts.

But my many other interests -- books, music, the environment, politics, parenting, global issues, relationships, family and on and on -- haven't yet found expression in this new venue. If I am able to continue writing there in the future, perhaps they will...

Meanwhile, I have four more upcoming days scheduled to commute to this job.

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Family Treasures

During this busy time of multiple transitions in my family, last night I attended my youngest child's 8th grade play. They performed " The Birds" by Aristophanes from 414 B.C.

It is funny, as a friend and I were saying today, how we keep reliving these comedic human dramas over and over in our current lives. Here is an example of a play from 2,027 years ago that is every bit as current as, say, The Daily Show.

Yet almost none among us knows that. Literature is, alas, among the deeply lost arts.

In any event, Julia played three roles, as an owl, a priest and an inspector. As the priest, she wore an old Afghan robe I bought some 43 years ago. I believe it is an Uzbek robe. Men wore it loosely, never using the sleeves, over their long loose shirts and pants.

They probably still do.

That would be the middle photo below.

 The Owl.

 The Priest.

The Inspector.

Today I gave her the robe, one of my few remaining artifacts from my years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan.  I originally gave it to my Dad. I think this is the first time it has been used in a dramatic performance.

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Domesticating Mammals

My 8th grader presented her academic project last night, which was about the history of animal domestication.

In the traveling bag in front of her in the second picture was Ghoasty, a feral kitten rescued by one of her brothers 12 years ago in Golden Gate Park. To this day she is a very shy cat who prefers the outdoors -- but always comes home.

Her life with our family is an entire story by itself.

As Julia explained her research to the parents and teachers who stopped by her exhibit, I reflected on how deep the intellectual and emotional roots of her interests in animals is.

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News Breaks

This week was in most ways one of the most enjoyable for me in years. Why? I worked.

I always work, of course, every single week all year long, year after year. There has never been a week when I did not work.

Because my work is something I love -- writing, story-telling.

People like me don't retire. Retirement is for those who did jobs they did not like. It was about getting by, paying bills, supporting their families, doing the right thing.

Much of the time, it was boring.

I'm 66 and collecting social security and medicare but this week I also worked, pretty much full-time, for the first time since the fall of 2010.

It made me happy.

I was in the middle of a newsroom. As news broke, people yelled, we scrambled, and provided coverage. As bits and pieces of the narrative blew into the room like a hurricane of undifferentiated facts (or non-facts), we sifted and sorted and compared notes.

Sometimes, humor took over. Often, it was pure tension.

"Is this a reality TV show or a city?"

"What's the all-time record for the most police chiefs in one city in three days?"

"We go live in five minutes. Can anyone tell me whether it is true there's a presser at 11 or not?"

***

Meanwhile, my youngest athlete has a badly sprained ankle. Twice I got calls to go and pick her up and drive her from or to school. Luckily the newsroom where I was working is a few blocks from my house, so getting to my car and to her, her school, and back, could all be done within half an hour or so.

Tonight, she insisted on going to her team's game and cheering them on, even though she can't move without crutches.

I hope she is recovered enough to play in the last game of the season, a week from tonight.

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The Life of an Itinerant Blogger

This week I am having the pleasure of blogging at yet another company. This is at least the tenth separate blogging host I've worked for over the past decade. Who knows how much of this content will ever survive into the future, but I am proud of the effort I've given post after post over many thousands of articles, and millions of words.

This is also a special week because I have been revisiting two special companies where I worked in the past. One, most recently 18 years ago; the other 24 years ago.

I'd like to write more but I am very tired after a 12-hour workday, alarm clock until now. Plus, I'll be back at it 12 hours from now once again.

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Midnight Reflections

Sometimes it feels like the only time I really relax is late on a Friday night like this one, when the teens are home safely with me, and the four of us are under one roof. Rarely is that the case. One or two of them might be here with me but usually not all three.

Tonight they all were out until late, my daughter at a dance and my sons with friends.

Last night my daughter and I went to a "root beer social" at a charter school, which is one of her options as she enters high school next fall. It is located in the Western Addition, not far from Fillmore Street, which was the area I first got to know when I migrated to San Francisco late in 1971.

The neighborhood, though always somewhat sketchy, still resonates with me as one of my "homes" these many years later.

It's west of the civic center and east of the Haight, where I lived with my older three children when they were young.

The school was impressive, especially because it features small classes (low student to teacher ratios), attentive counseling and tutoring, and an academic curriculum above that required to get into the U-C land grant universities that are the pride of this state.

It says that 95% of its students go to college, twice the state average, although I suspect that is actually 95% of all seniors, since most schools do not count anyone who drops out somewhere along the way to their senior year. (A math trick schools have perfected around here.)

But it also features a staff skilled in recognizing the different learning styles of kids. As the parent of a son diagnosed way too late to be helpful with a severe form of ADHD, I've become sensitive to how poorly our schools handle those with learning styles outside the norm.

Although in this era we call these as "disorders" or "deficits," and treat them with drugs, I suspect a generation from now our educators will simply be better at employing multiple teaching methods to accommodate the radically different way our kids learn.

My son, for example, is brilliant -- he has always managed to do well in school by developing alternative methods of learning than by reading, which tires him enormously and actually forces him in extreme cases to fall asleep.

This is just one example of how primitive our understanding remains of human brain development. Neuroscientists! That's what we need.

P.S. I've got one of those among my kids as well.

Paths Forward and Back

Note: This is a re-post from almost three years ago.

In my thirties, having already attained wise man* status, I used to advise people around the age of, say, 27, that if they were feeling confused about where they were headed in life, "just wait a few years."

"By your mid-30s, it will all be clear. It may seem like you are wandering along a path headed nowhere, but you'll actually reach a rise in the road, and when you look back, it will all suddenly make sense. You'll see every twist and turn in your path and understand why you took them."

This was immensely satisfying to me, not only because I sounded wise, but it actually reflected my own experience up until that time.

On paper, my life may have looked like a straight line, but inside my head, all was confusion. I reached the point in my early 30s when I simply couldn't figure out what I was doing or why.

Not that there were any outer manifestations of my confusion. I kept working, hard, at three jobs, being a responsible husband and father, paying my rent and driving my 1966 Volvo around town in a careful manner.

But none of that solved the existential riddles that consumed my inner clarity, leaving only a fog as impenetrable as that coating the western hills in its place.

This state yielded to a period when I thought I had it all figured out. My roles were clear, my success assured, my path ahead illuminated, with little clue that huge obstacles lay hidden in the dark.

None of it was to be -- none of my assumptions about my future held. All gave way to a new crisis, at the age of 40, when I proceeded to blow my settled life to smithereens.

If I could do one thing over, I probably would back up time and try to do that part of my life over.

But time affords us no such luxury.

Onward I plunged, headfirst into middle age as if I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth. Come to think of it, that was part of the problem. I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth.

Of course. That was it! I'd always been the big brother, the responsible one, the reliable part of any equation, while most others found a way to party and mess things up as only youths properly know how to do.

It's not nearly as forgivable to do this in middle age, yet millions of men (and women) continue to make the same mistakes I made, leaving trails of bitterness and dead-ends in their wake.

By the time I had reached the next rise in the road, there was no point in looking back. My inner fog had escaped during my mid-life crisis, erasing all traces of who I had been or where I had come from.

Now I was on my own, creating my own destiny, freed from whatever vestiges of my upbringing had accompanied me into middle age, a free man at last.

Whenever I consider writing a memoir, first I must confront this foggy past, and try to find my way back through all of the confusion and broken memories to a place when I was much more pure, when the choices I made didn't carry such slicing consequences, break such innocent hearts, and doom my future course to a path where any joy would have to intermingle with the rain of bitter tears.

It turned out to be pretty much a rerun of my first movie, not a sequel. Until it came to one big part -- the role of father to three new young children.

Through my second painful divorce, with any hope of a stable financial future torn and shredded like so many old unwritten poems, discarded along my way, I finally grew up, I suppose, and recognized what responsibility really entails.

I don't pretend to have any wisdom now. Look elsewhere for that, dear reader. And if you are still young, go ahead and act like it.

Otherwise, you may steal that chance from another young man or woman, waiting to play whatever role is left for them, once you finally move out of their way.

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* self-appointed, naturally