As in, don't wash the floor with a bowl that's sometimes eaten out of and then wash the bowl with all the other dishes and a dish cloth that hasn't been washed for months. It's gross. You probably took microbio, you know what lives in that thing.
I miss my boyfriend. He is lovely. We talked about the city out East he's in and how I would like it there. Truthfully, I could easily live in any of the places he may end up working and sometimes I forget that due to wanderlust. They're also places where finding the kind of work I want to do is possible. And all of them are closer to natural beauty and further from brutal winters. All of them are nearer to some of my close friends who've scattered across the country since grad.
In terms of world events, the timing isn't optimal. I don't expect recoveries by this time next year.
Also. How much do you love the G&M article about the death of newspapers? It makes various assertions about "who will gather the facts" and the "reliability of blogs." I hate to say it, but most papers don't gather the facts objectively. Two of the most objective and comprehensive news sources today - the CBC and the BBC - are state funded. There aren't enough foreign correspondents, giant papers rely on ambiguous AP sources to fill too many pages, often with stories that aren't really news.
In some ways, I feel most local newspapers are unhelpful to the political challenges facing Canada today. They're too quick to pick up on sensational stories that characterize other places as barbaric, too quick to make people afraid of other cultures. How often have I had someone cite a "news story" about a controversial place I've visited without context? How rarely has there been solid coverage of how social and political events abroad are legitimately affecting Canada's immigration and trade?
When I was a teenager I began providing anonymous commentary to our local newspaper to counter some of the general malice promoted against young people. To live in that city you couldn't actually tell there were any young people there - it was a college town, but the quietest one I've ever seen. Largely with the help of selective reporting by the local newspaper, the older population failed to recognize that without the post-secondary instutitions that kept students there long enough to read and breed the local economy would be devoid of any skilled labor due to many incentives to go elsewhere.
This was just one example of how the newspaper insisted on providing biased coverage that countered positive development and political activity - arguably, the city would have been better off without the "journalism" vended daily. It took until I was in University for them to start printing news with a modicum of racial sensitivity despite the increasing hostility in the area; I remember some political events that became so racialized it was heartbreaking. Rather than reflecting a variety of views, the paper pandered to hate - some ways more subtle than others.
Oh, I was employed by the paper at the time.
Blogs, on the other hand, are imperfect but naked in their ambitions. The fact is, when you're writing for free you're writing because you have something to say. You feel people need to know the truth. Maybe you have an agenda, but so did CanWest when it censored anyone who would print anti-Israel reports. Maybe you don't check your facts well, but you can bet commenters will shame you into correction if your blog is at all respected and well read.
There will still be a place for conventional news but the time for the quantity-quality balance has come. Feeding off the PR wagon for easy stories needs to end. Integrity needs to return, hopefully in hand with talent. The richest will be someone who learns how to aggregate the best, pay for it and get paid for it. Impossible? Nah. Remember, Steve Jobs got people to pay for mp3s.
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