Another world

On Saturday, Meg and I went to Pacific Beach (or, as everyone calls it, PB) with Peggy and Janet, two of our housemates. As we were waiting for our lunch (huge, yummy omelets at a little breakfast/lunch places called the Broken Yolk), Peggy asked us if we would ever consider living in Southern California long term. Even though I hadn't really devoted a whole lot of time to the thought, I immediately blurted out, "No way."
I know it seems kind of silly. I'd only be here a week, not nearly long enough to know all the subtleties and good aspects of life here, but as I think about it, I've seen enough to make my decision. SoCal really is another world, and not one that I can see myself ever completely fitting in to.
To expand on something I brought up earlier, the guys we met at the Padres game were perfect examples of why this place isn't for me. [Keep in mind that this game was on a Thursday afternoon.] These guys were all dressed like skater/surfers (if you're familiar with the show "Rob & Big," they could be Rob's groupies). They had obviously had a few rounds before coming to the ballpark, and once in their seats, the craziest two of the bunch had managed to down at least five more beers each, mostly thanks to the fact that they discovered an unlocked beer cooler and proceeded to steal bottles of beer from it until someone wised up and locked the door. I'll admit that the other four or five guys were pretty tame, but I'm almost 100 percent sure none of them were married, and none of them appeared to take life too seriously (they really got a kick out of appointing someone else their secretary and passing their cell phones off this person to answer for the rest of the day). I'm not against a good time, really - but here's the kicker: These weren't a bunch of frat boys or recent grads out for an afternoon of fun. These were 30-year-old men, and this seemed more like a pattern of behavior than an afternoon off.
I know this might seem presumptuous of me - after all, I'm sure if you looked hard enough, you could find guys just like them in Cleveland or Detroit or any other Midwest city. Heck, here's a New York example that I read intently (most of the time with my jaw on my chest). But it's just the whole attitude out here - the stereotypical, laid-back, surfer-dude mentality that comes to mind when the rest of the country thinks about California. And that's totally not me.
Another case-in-point: When my friend Vanessa came down from LA the other day, we ended up at the mall near my work for a late lunch/early dinner. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in San Diego, so where was everyone? That's right - at the mall. I was ready to run someone over with my tiny red car after about 15 minutes of searching for a parking spot. It's the mall, for crying out loud. We were only there because we couldn't find a place to park downtown and were about to collapse from low blood-sugar levels. The attitude out here is, "I want to be where everyone else is." In the Midwest (or at least among my circle), the thought is, "Why are so many people out? Let's find someplace less crowded." Traffic, crowds, lines, overdevelopment and so on just make me want to tear my hair out, and overcrowding is a way of life out here. No thank you.
With all that said, San Diego is still a beautiful place, and I'm glad I'm here. I'm getting another perspective, seeing the way of life in another part of the country. And while I'm grateful for this opportunity, I'll also be grateful to get back where I belong.

One down, nine more to go

Some tidbits:

I just finished off my first week at the paper. It went pretty well, I think. My bosses have been telling me that I'm doing a good job, so unless they're habitual liars, I think I'm OK.

Meg and I went to the Padres game yesterday. It was a day game (hence why I could go), and we rode the trolley down to the ballpark. We got obstructed view seats (whoever designed Petco Park to include a part that juts out into the field was an idiot), but they weren't bad. And I got to watch David Wells pitch - not that he did that great. We also got some free entertainment courtesy of the drunken goofball guys who were sitting in front of us. And somehow, even though we were sitting in the shade, I managed to get a nasty fricking sunburn. It looks like I have a shirt on when I don't - yeah, one of those kinds. Not cool.



I bought my first bikini today. For those of you who know me, that's a pretty big deal. But everyone here seems to have them, and call it peer pressure or conformist if you'd like, but it'll be nice to fit in with the native SoCal people. Now I just have to work up the courage to wear it in public...

Tonight at the paper I got to spend some time in the composing room. The U-T is the last major paper in the country that doesn't paginate. That's right - The Post is more advanced than the San Diego paper. Anywho, for the non-journalists out there, here's a short lesson on how the U-T creates the newspaper: People lay out stories on pages on computers. The stories then get sent to the composing room and printed, but the layout means nothing. In the composing room, people cut up the printouts and use wax to paste the sections of stories onto dummy sheets. If you ever worked on like a grade school yearbook, it's the same principle. Then the pages go through a machine which makes a negative and the images get transferred onto plates, which then get fed into the presses to print the paper. Basically all other newspapers use some sort of pagination program and do the whole thing on the computer. So it's really a throwback to do paste-up. Watching these people run around with Exact-o knives cutting up sheets of paper that are already laid out was kind of strange. It seems like such a waste of human labor. But it's also pretty cool to watch it all come together - sort of like a living history museum.

I'm beginning to consider the option of a cross-country drive to get home after this is over. I want to buy a car out here, and how do you get a car from Cali to Cleveland? Well, you drive it, of course. I think it would be a fun adventure and a great opportunity to see the country that I might not ever get again. Plus I could stop and visit people on the way back (not that I really know many people in the states I'd be traveling through, but I think I could draw up a pretty decent route). But the first step to all this is buying the car. I hope Megan's friend Dan will be able to assist me with this endeavor, since the two main guys that I would go to in this situation (my dad and John) are both three time zones away. Updates forthcoming.

Pics!

Here they are - the long-awaited photos of San Jose. Click the link, then click the photos in the slideshow to see the captions : )

Settled in my new place

So I made it to San Diego in one piece yesterday - actually, in several pieces. I had a ridiculous amount of luggage to transport from the I-house to the San Jose airport and then from the San Diego airport to the car rental place to my new home in La Jolla (that's pronounced La Hoya for my fellow non-Spanish speakers). But we (myself and my suitcases) survived the journey.
Yesterday was a tad overwhelming for me. To be honest, I was sort of sick of feeling like I was attached at the hip to eight other people, and I thought I was ready to be off on my own. Then I had to fly in a tiny plane (tiny planes scare me) to a city I didn't know, rent a car on my own (which I'd never done before) and find my way to my new home, which was inhabited by people I didn't know. All this newness, coupled with the culture shock of SoCal that I experienced while trying to find food, became a bit too much for me. La Jolla is....crazy. Take any overcrowded, ritzy area you know of, throw in some palm trees and a few thousand speeding cars, and that's close to what it's like. The sheer number of apartment complexes and condos boggles the mind. And there's no grass - well, hardly any. And there's an ice rink...in the mall. I'd never really felt like a Midwestern bumpkin before, but believe me, La Jolla will do that to you. But I did get some yummy Indian food for my dinner and had some reassuring converations, so by bedtime, I felt much better. And now I'm a whole bunch better because Megan's here! It required some coordination, but I picked her up at the airport this morning, and then we set off to find our places of employment (or, in her case, potential employment). We were successful on one count (hers), but after more than an hour of driving around the city, we needed sustenance. Thank goodness for Rubio's. Yummers. We also found the path from our complex to the mall (score!), went grocery shopping with two of our housemates and visited two of the pools in our little neighborhood. Quite a productive day, I think.
Tomorrow I start at the Union-Tribune. I'm not too nervous; I think it's because I did this last summer at The Plain Dealer, so I think I know basically what to expect. Tomorrow's just HR day anyway - meaning I'll probably get to view some killer videos on sexual harassment and fill out mounds of paperwork. Oh well; it's all part of the process. I'm hoping my posts will get more regular once I establish a routine. And I promise a link to a slideshow of photos from San Jose will be included next time. If that's not enough to keep you coming back, I don't know what is ; )

Why yes, I DO know the way to San Jose

Wow, I knew I had been delinquent on the blog, but I had no idea it had been a whole week. My apologies. My life has just been pretty crazy recently. As I might have mentioned, I flew to Columbus early Friday morning. My plane stopped in Vegas, which was fun because I'd never been there (and I still really haven't - the airport doesn't count). But they have slot machines in the airport!

But other than that, the flights were long and not much fun. My dad and brother picked me up at the airport, and we drove to Logan, where my family was staying for my graduation. It was nice to see everyone again one more time before being gone for the whole summer. I also got to go out in Athens one last time, which was fabulous (you'll have to check Facebook for those pics later ; ) Graduation went well too. Totally didn't expect people to be talking on their cells and all that, but the grads weren't too disrespectful and the ceremony didn't make me want to gouge my eyes out, so I consider that a success. Packing up the bat cave and saying good-bye to people was not fun in the least, though. And heading back to the airport on Sunday for my third cross-country flight in a week was no picnic, either. But I made it back to San Jose in one piece (and flew on the same plane as Jerry Rice on the last leg of my flight), and I felt much better once I got back. I missed the kids here and wanted to hear all about what they did while I was gone.

And now I have only three-ish days left in San Jose. It's hard to believe. Today I'm going to try to take some more photos of the SJSU campus, just so all my Midwestern buddies can gape at how different their campus is from anything we have. At the moment I'm enjoying some alone time. I realized the other day that except for my flights, I basically hadn't been alone here for more than a few minutes. Very stange for a girl who relishes her alone time. So while I love everyone here, having the room to myself for an hour or two this morning feels nice. Only three more nights in this room...

Some (unsolicited) financial advice

This really doesn't have anything to do with me being in San Diego, but I came across this article in The New York Times today, and I thought it would be a useful read for many of my fellow recent graduates. Being cheaper and more practical than many of my peers, I agree with many of the author's suggestions, and I'll definitely start implementing them - once I start getting a real paycheck.

And a newspaper thought for all my journalism peeps courtesy of Bill Tillinghast, the director of the Dow Jones program out here: "The sports pages are where you read about man's successes; the front page is where you read about man's failures." Frighteningly true, eh?

Bootcamp begins...

I've now been in San Jose for 30+ hours. Posting last night probably would have been ideal, but after running on about three hours of sleep for close to 24 hours, I was ready for bed. My flights went fine. Getting up at 5 a.m. to drive to Columbus wasn't the best, but other than that I couldn't complain. I sat next to a nice man on the way to Salt Lake City, and on the flight to San Jose I sat by a really nice couple who even went so far as to give me their card so I could contact them if I needed anything while I was here. How sweet is that? I hope all Californians are that nice.

There are nine of us Dow Jones people here - Vanessa (my roommate) from Kansas; Mark and David from Oregon; Annie from Chapman; Katrina from Fresno State; Karl from Montana; and Julia and Felicia from San Jose State. Everyone is friendly, and we've been getting along pretty well for most of us having known each other for only a day and a half. We're staying in SJSU's International House, which is basically a dorm for international students. So just in case I missed sharing a room and using communal showers, I get to experience it one more time.

Bootcamp is pretty intense, as I expected it to be. The bunch of us troop over to the journalism building at 1 p.m., and there we work on a variety of tasks related to editing and journalism and newspapers. At 5 we get a dinner break, then head back for four more hours of work. Starting that late in the day is kind of nice, but going until that late at night can be draining. I hope sometime this week or next I'll be able to actually go out and do something before the session starts instead of just having time for lunch. The main reason I have so little time is that we have homework. Yes. Plenty of it, too. Stylebook worksheets, grammar sheets, and who knows what else they'll come up with for us. Plus I still have an essay test to finish for my OU English class (the last requirement of my college career).

One thing that I've discovered and found pretty interesting is that at all of the schools where my fellow campers come from, the campus newspaper is staffed at least partially by journalism classes, and many of them have faculty advisers. It seems like such a strange concept to me, coming from the independence of The Post. I know it has its ups and downs, but I guess I've never really appreciated the freedom that we had there. And the campus at SJSU is pretty, but I'd take the hills and bricks of Athens any day (well, maybe not when the roads are coated with ice). Yes, there are palm trees everywhere - and I do love me some palms - but the buildings are very 1970s, and there's nowhere near as much green space. In fact, there's a big section that's just dirty gravel instead of grass. It's definitely a world away from OU.

San Jose is an interesting place, and I'm curious to see if other cities in California are like it. The university is pretty much right downtown, so we can walk there to eat or do whatever. It's so very different from a Midwest downtown area. If I were living the same proximity to downtown Cleveland that I am right now, I'd be in a pretty rough neighborhood, potentially one that's not even residential. The streets are wide and lined with big, full trees, and there are a good number of real stores and restaurants right downtown. And we saw a Smart Car today! For those who don't know, here's a picture of one.


The city is still pretty big and bustling, and the airport is ridiculously close, but the overall feel is much more European and clean and open than the kind of downtown I'm used to.

I know this is sort of all over the place, but I had a lot to cover, and perhaps after a few entries I'll establish a good style - we'll see. I hope to take some pictures of the I House, the campus and the city sometime this week, so look forward to those : )