Seems I never get enough of me

Five years ago, I started this stupid blog under an even stupider name on the last day of April. Less than a week later, I graduated college, packed up my dorm, and boomeranged into my parents' basement. At the time, I was jobless, moneyless, and directionless. Right now, I have a job, a little bit of money, and some occasional sense of direction that changes depending on what I read on the Internet that day.

Am I happy? I guess so. I'm not unhappy. I wish I could save a decent amount of money, but I'm much better with my finances than I used to be. I'd like to strike a nice balance between being impulsive and being rational. I've been told I obsess over the little things and underestimate the big ones. Everytime I start talking or thinking about where I am in life, the dumb optimist side kicks in and ends it with a hearty "It could always be worse!", so I guess I'm doing okay.

There are more than 650 posts on this site. A lot of them are crap. I'm not at the point in my life where I can read them without cringing, but I'm glad I still have them for when I don't find myself so embarrassing.

What I've written on here varies widely from one post to another. I don't follow a schedule and post erratically. I know of blogs that started around the same time as mine that grew to be very, very popular. Some of them are still around. Others aren't. They disappeared slowly, like smoke, becoming private or invite only. But this fossil's still around, for now at least.

Here's a few entries that don't make me choke:

The time I dented my mother's car on Christmas

Remember when I encountered a bear while house sitting?

Like many words, 'new' has many different meanings

How I spend my Sundays

My sweaty, sorry, soul-shaking, slap-me-in-the-face-because-I-need-it 25th birthday

I know more about Star Wars than most West Virginians

An ode to a now-closed cupcake shop 

Despite this dumb website and its purpose for keeping track of memories, I've recently started journaling again for the first time in years. I've been depending on what I write here to keep track of things, but to be honest, I'd rather keep most my observations and day-to-day blahblahblahs on paper the old fashioned way. I forgot how nice it can be to scribble things down, even when my hand cramps.

Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory

By now, I'm sure you've heard the news about Mike Daisey and the This American Life retraction. In case you haven't: Mr. Daisey, a monologist, performs a show called The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Part of it focuses on the working conditions at the Foxconn plants in China which manufacture Apple products and this was featured on the radio program This American Life as a piece of journalism. It was an incredibly popular show and became the most downloaded in TAL's history. The news broke Friday that major parts of the story were fabricated. Two of the most powerful scenes- a conversation he has with underage workers and an another with a mangled hand former worker poisoned by n-hexane touching an iPad for the first time- never happened.

I listened to the Retraction episode of TAL yesterday. I respect Ira Glass and his colleagues for their honesty and owning up to this mistake. I think they will get past this and their integrity to quality journalism will remain in tact. I've also read online comments that say the work of David Sedaris (a popular TAL contributor and writer) doesn't get this kind of scrutiny and that there is no way his own stories are 100 percent accurate. Some people defended Mr. Sedaris (who has received criticism of his own) by saying as a humorist, he is not held to the same standards as a journalist. After listening to Retraction, I think the differences between them lie more with their intentions. From the TAL transcript (emphasis mine):

Mike Daisey: And everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end – to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as  journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. 
And my hope is that it makes – has made- other people delve.

Mr. Daisey didn't create his show just as entertainment. In his own words, there was a specific reaction he wanted to provoke from the audience. Mr. Sedaris, on the other hand, wasn’t trying to change the plight of the seasonal worker when he wrote about dressing as one of Santa’s elves in his breakthrough essay “Santaland”.

David Carr from the NY Times brilliantly says to his colleague Brian Stetler in this short, great conversation on the difference between theater and journalism: "One of the takeaways from this is when people have a point of view as Mr. Daisey clearly did, the maker of the Kony 2012 video about the warlord, all have a point of view, what they did was compelling radio, compelling video, but there's another word for information and news that's gathered as a service to a message: propaganda." 

Mr. Daisey may throw up the excuse that he is not a journalist, but he went on a program that operates under the high standards of journalism with writing that presents itself as investigative reporting. He lied to the producers in order for more people to hear him. Not once during the Retraction episode does Mr. Daisey flat out admit that he lied ("I wouldn't express it that way" is how he puts it) and I think that stings the most. I understand that trying to find the 'truth' is a thousand shades of grey, but when the question is "Did you to lie to us?" there are only two answers: yes or no.

One of my favorite professors always pushed me to take myself out of my nonfiction stories. He would say that our perspective as observers isn't important for the action to happen. Most of us at 19 or 20 hadn't really lived through anything interesting, so the story didn't need to be told through our first person lens. He's right, here I am years later, still struggling with wanting to put myself in my work. It's easier, but that doesn't mean it's quality writing.

Mr. Daisey is not essential to tell the story of horrid working conditions in China. He did not need to fabricate those scenes when they are actually happening but not with him in it. For him to make up parts of it as a way 'to make people care' is disrespectful of journalists who are trying to do the same thing with honest, ethical reporting.