I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

1. “Your girl is lovely, Hubble.”
   They put this on Netflix Watch Instantly to torture the sad gay man inside of me.
2. Philosophy vs. Masochism
   The downside of dating a philosopher is that he prizes personal truth seeking over meaningful relationships. The downside of dating a masochist is that your genuineness, a supposedly valuable quality, suddenly becomes a flaw. The downside of dating both is inevitably writing sentences like those two.
3. Here Comes Everybody
   The universality of breakups is simultaneously comforting and upsetting. The cycle of recovery might slightly differ on a case-by-case basis, but underneath it all the pain is the same in its relentlessness, its gnawing.It’s “Relax, everyone goes through this” vs. “Shut up you pathetic cliche.”
4. Hallucinations of women in the nail salon dancing around to “I Will Survive” and feeling empowered.
   I’ve apparently been watching too much Glee.
5. Revisionist history
   There’s a tendency when it comes to break ups, I think, to seize on your depression and use it as a vehicle for “seeing things differently.” This is the broken-hearted’s version of removing the rose-colored glasses, I guess. Combing through the past few weeks in my mind, I search for clues and signs that–had I not missed–could have at least given me some semblance of forethought. (The night I got back from San Francisco and broke out into hives had nothing at all to do with my cat;  When he first said “I love you” I started to cry–out of what I thought was relief but I now see was fear. A Labrador ran up and started licking my ankles. “He wants to play,” his owner said. I replied with what at the time was a sarcastic joke but now seems so much more meaningful: “Trust me, he doesn’t want to play what we’re playing.”)

   When I can’t find any red herrings, I make them up. I convince myself that he was lying, or that I was lying, or maybe even that we both were. In the present, events unfold in one honest way; in my memory, I bend them at the spine, urge them to unfold differently, retroactively applying meanings that allow this present, this awful, messy present, to feel somehow more logical.

6. Death to sentimentality
   How do you make gestures, events, people mean less? I’m not good at that. If I wasn’t so earnest or sentimental I wouldn’t feel things so deeply and it would be easy to float away, unharmed. How do you disengage from compassion? How do you teach yourself that every action that you take, or that others take, isn’t imbued with some greater meaning? Intellectually I’m aware that the subway turnstyle from which I choose to exit will have no literal or figurative bearing on the day’s events, but for some reason I can’t convince my emotional self otherwise. If I take the one all the way to the left, god help us all. This is what we call:
7. OCD
   Or maybe just being a crazy person.

Please feel free to skip this if you (understandably) don’t give a shit about my life and you just want to watch YouTube videos or read about journalism or somethin’. I don’t really want to make a Heartbreak Soup #2, so you’ll have to bear with me while I work this stuff out.
While I adored the book, I thought LOTR director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones skewed too far cheap thriller for me to actually ever pay to see. Unfortunately the trailer appeared before every movie I went to see last semester, as well as every episode of “The Real World: DC” that I consumed. There was always one quote that kind of got to me, despite my general abhorrence for the film itself. While trying to parse the line between life and death, Susie Salmon’s younger brother points to a cerulean space drawn between the earth and the sky and says, “Susie’s in the in-between!”

For the last 10 days, I myself have been living in the in-between, teetering somewhere between life and death. During the days, I force myself to live. This takes a lot of effort, because at night I basically allow myself to die. In the mornings I wake up and drink coffee, I go to work and answer e-mails and do homework and take the subway. Sometimes I even eat. At night, I lie in the dark and I cry until I’m exhausted. I will time to move faster, but then realize that it doesn’t matter—when I wake up the next day I will feel the exact same way: empty.

I am alone again.

Keep reading…

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet with some New York Times editors and tour their incredible office space. I went along with my Studio II class, which is helping to plan and launch the NYT/NYU collaborative Local East Village blog. We got a tour of the newsroom, as well as the Pulitzer hall, and even got to peek into Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s office. Suffice to say it was a media geek’s dream come true. We also got to meet with a number of NYT writers and editors, including TV reporter and Media Decoder blogger Brian Stelter, who gave us some interesting tips on web journalism:

Complete Tool Kit for a Web Journalist

1. The ability to synthesize a lot of information very quickly.
This comes mostly with reading a lot, whether it be print articles, blogs, tweets, whatever. In an all-media-all-the-time world, you have to be incredibly permeable, but also analytical about the types of information you’re absorbing.

2. The ability to write quickly and accurately.
Journalism isn’t only about meeting that 12:30am deadline anymore. In an atmosphere where you’re constantly competing with countless online (and speedy!) outlets for scoops, immediacy is key, but accuracy is the gold standard. To combine both takes a talented web journalist.

3. Twitter
For scoops, reader feedback, tips.

4. Facebook
For contacting sources who won’t call or e-mail you back.

5. Audio recorder
Whether it’s an iPhone or a digital audio recorder with a USB plug, in-person and Skype interviews require audio recorders to get transcription just right.

6. Flip cam
Multimedia is an important aspect of web journalism. Flip cams are easy-to-use, cheap, light and can record HD video instantly.

7. Personal brand/identity
Objectivity is a marketing ploy! But when writing hard news pieces it’s important to report fairly. By developing your own website or Twitter account, readers can understand your perspective and personality without you having to inject it into your articles.

8. Becoming a reliable member of the link economy
Whether it’s sending out e-mails to try to get other blogs to post about your link, or just tweeting it at them, getting linked to is one of the most crucial ways of driving traffic to your articles.

Later on we saw Brian recording a video about the iPad, which will be on the web today at 1pm. I barely caught a glimpse of the thing, which Decoder writer David Carr quickly shielded from our glance when we approached, but from the peek I did get it looks AWESOME.

We also got to meet with Social Media Editor Jennifer Preston, and Senior Editor Dana Canedy, who is in charge of Times internships. She told us she prefers to have internship candidates SNAIL MAIL their application packages to her. I was very confused, but I guess to each his/her own. Canedy talked a lot about basic human curiosity and the integral part it plays in getting good scoops. “The best stories,” she said, “come out of a sense of curiosity.”

I couldn’t agree more.