Every once and a while, the weather reports around Pittsburgh are not complete alarmist crap and we get hit with something way worse than anticipated. I can’t remember the last time I saw 18 inches of snow on the ground, but based on the news reports, it was probably in 1993. That would have made me about 15. Consider this another milestone down the path of feeling old.
Erin and I headed out to hit each other with snowballs and I got some shots of my own, local snowpocalypse.
They keep showing this advertisement during the game of Max Talbot and Sidney Crosby competing by shooting pucks into his childhood hockey net: a dryer. Today, I broke down to go watch it. I had to become a fan on Facebook to see it. Maybe I can save you the effort, no?
Not that it wasn’t worth it. If you’re a Penguins fan, that is.
Of course, tension isn’t for everyone, and Williams’ devotees will doubtless be blissfully blasting this immaculate album in their sedans on the way back to their cozy middle-class homes.
Oh ho ho! Music journalists taking swipes at boring middle-class people! So trendy and incisive! And clearly from someone who grew up on the mean streets of somewhere rough where they don’t have sedans or middle class homes.
So, you might have noticed an absence, more extended than my usual absences. Maybe not. Pretend for me, ok?
Most of that has to do with a recent job change, which I’ll talk about in more detail soon. The rest is the usual: Thanksgiving, then vacation, then Christmas, then New Years. It added up to an awful lot of blog apathy.
Am I back? Dunno. I hope so. The proof is in the Jello pudding pops. So we’ll see.
One of my Planet Money recession club friends, user47, was talking about a co worker who insulted his love of NPR right after wanting to go out to lunch with him. His response, “Needless to say, she will dine alone,” did not parse right in my mind. I thought it said She will die alone, which seemed to be a pretty badass sentiment to express about radio station insults.
Anyway he made this for me, and for that I am thankful.
There is a rule about dating women like this that older generations often have to pass onto the younger: if a woman tells you she is trouble, if she tells you that you want no part in her problems, if she swears that she has too much shit in her life to fall in love, you need to fucking believe her. Because it is all true, every word of it. She is a woman so wrapped up in her own shit that she focuses like a laser beam on them making them the very essence of her personality. You will not save her. You cannot fix her. And she will be an absolute tempest of frustration and bitterness until she finds a way to get over her own shit.
I find it kind of surprising that 214 people would admit to attending a school called “Ashley Sugar-Notch.”
It’s for real, too. Drive on I80 through Pennsylvania and you’ll see a sign proudly proclaiming that the next exit will take you to a place called Ashley Sugar Notch.
I’ve been on the internet a long time. I started messing around on a network service called Delphi in 1995. My first job two years later was as tech support for a local Internet Service Provider. I met my wife and two of my best friends on an IRC server run by SciFi channel, and met another of my closest friends writing (I hesitate to admit, and beg you to remember I was 18 at the time) fanfiction. I’ve seen communities come and go, some brushing past some kind of perfection before flaming out.
That IRC server that Scifi ran – first called Icarus, then Events – was, for most of my life, the best community I ever found. You don’t get friends and love out of an IRC community unless it’s something special. Until last year, I was convinced I’d never find anything close again. That moment of perfect beauty came and went. So it goes.
It took the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to change that. Let it never be said that the subprime mortgage industry was all bad.
I came to Planet Money like many people did: through This American Life’s fantastic “Giant Pool of Money.” I came because the only way to hold back the horror of those early days of the crisis was to stay informed. Information made my mood darker, but it also held the panic at bay. My wife can attest to how raw my nerves were; I don’t know exactly what had me so spooked, but I was very, very scared. Planet Money was my life preserver.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: To find another community as special as the one I found back on Icarus. In the past year I’ve made real friends. It’s been a while since that’s happened online. Not just net friends, either. They’ve come to mean enough to me that me and Erin flew to New Orleans just to have the chance to meet some of them. That thing I thought was just a life preserver turned out to be a boat, and I wasn’t alone in it.
Though Planet Money is a great show run by great people, there is one person who deserves much of the credit for the community the show built: Laura Conaway. Which is why I am absolutely crushed to learn that, as of today, she’s moving on to other things.
Like I said, this is not my first time to the dance. I’ve seen great work done, work that built a deserved readership but that never built a community. Blogs written by keen but distant minds, films shot by brilliant but reclusive souls and music performed from afar. And I’ve seen great work tainted by disdain for its audience. Great work married to a personal accessibility is rare, and should be treasured. For the past year, Laura Conaway of Planet Money worked to make its blog not only fantastically informative, but inclusive of all of its readers.
I was lucky enough to work with Laura during her time on Planet Money, first on a debate with another read and later on a development project that was some of the most fun coding I’ve ever done. Most of the fun of it was getting to work with Laura herself, who is such a rare mix of smart and personable that I wish everyone could have had that chance.
Back when Laura was still on the podcast itself, she used to say that this was our recession, they were just reporting it. It’s a sentiment I hope does not leave the show with her. If it does, the show will be less for it, even if the reporting stays as strong. It’s hard to do great work. It’s harder to build a community around it that’s more than an aggregation of listeners. Laura succeeded, and she did so in a very, very short time.
I say none of this to sell short the hard work of Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Caitlin Kennney, Chana Jaffe-Walt or David Kestembaum, nor any of the great interns who served at Planet Money over the past year. I wish only to point out the rare gift Laura gave to their show, a gift I hope survives beyond her tenure.
As for Laura, I can only hope that her destination is bigger, brighter and better than her point of departure. She deserves it.
Raise a glass, folks. It’s the end of the tour.
P.S. Did you know that an elegy is a type of poem? I thought it was just a style of music. The things you learn in the midst of sad news.
Look, I get it. It’s fun to feel smart. It’s nice to think there’s some everyday use for the time spent reading that book on logic a few years ago. The one that you didn’t actually finish but still have your bookmark in where you left off and are totally going to pick it back up one day. It makes you feel like you caught your debate partner in a bear trap, that you’ve proven you are more correct (or at least more intellectually honest) than them.
Sadly, that superior feeling you’ve got is probably undeserved. The cute, possibly Latin, assault you’ve launched may not apply to the situation. If you’re lucky, it might almost apply, but your desire to score some points as an intellectual has likely clouded your judgment. In other words: There’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
So I propose to you these rules. Rules that I will do my best to follow as well. They’re for our own good.
If you are not sure what that logical fallacy means, don’t use it.
