Sometimes the workday is slow and you can just follow bread crumbs around the Internet until you find something that stops you in your tracks:

Birdy - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (Postal Service cover) by smithblogsatlanta

Me: It really pains me that I feel as if I have to never joke around, never crack up — essentially not be myself — to be taken seriously. Or thought of as “mature.”

I feel like if I were a boy, I could do all those things and still be considered a professional.

Friend: Oh yeah, I agree. I feel like we’ve gotten to a point where a woman can be a lot of things, but we’re not quite allowed to be lots of things at once.

My friend Trevor did. And although I think, probably for my job’s sake, that I’ll never be able to quit Facebook, this made a whole mess of sense:

Dear Facebook. I’m leaving. Thank you for keeping me in touch with lots of people. Some of those people were my friends, some still are. Some I have no clue. Maybe I met you at a shady (or bright for that matter) shin-dig. You always were a strange part of my social life. I wanted to use you almost as an address book to remember to give so and so a shout, or an email, or (god help me) a letter. However, as you gobbled our whole society up, people began to use you as a filter to find the cream of their crop of friends, and specify their likes for them rather than find those things themselves. I believe we should want to meet people fresh. Spend awkward moments of silence with people here and there, learn who they are today, not who they were in their high school pictures. I think we should meet people the first time the first time. I think we should share videos and quotes and ideas in person together. I think we should hug each others cats, bikes, girlfriends, parents, and friends rather than look at pictures of them. I hate to say it, but you got too complicated, and to into yourself. Look at what you did! Instead of going to a coffee shop to read or socialize or drink coffee, you have made people look at you. And your whole point I thought was to help us know our friends were at that coffee shop in the first place.

Today I was chatting with a friend online and revealed that sometimes (rarely, but on occasion) I find myself wishing my boyfriend would get moved onto site at some bumfuck town so that I could cease working (he ardently asks me to come with him in this scenario) and spend my days drinking white wine and writing a fantastic blog that will eventually become a book that will eventually become a hit movie.

I’ve made no advances on this fantasy other than coming up with the name of said blog: Screwcap Soliloquies.

(Corks are overrated these days, I’m tellin’ ya).

There’s a lively discussion going on today on the Mizzou Journalism alumni list serv. Basically, the back story is that an alum recently espoused the virtues of a career in journalism to an aspiring young photojournalist who was having doubts about j-school, and now the alum is feeling all guilty that he recommended the world’s most worthless profession.

So he pitched his ethical conundrum to the list serv, and today there were a flood of responses about whether or not alums would recommend journalism to impressionable young people as a career.

The best response, for my money, was this short-and-sweet quote by Brian Storm (founder of MediaStorm) from a speech he gave at the j-school centennial.

“Journalists lead a rich life, but rarely get rich. We are inherently purpose-driven, not profit-driven.”

Nice, no?

So, today I applied to be Men’s Health’s next Girl Next Door (theirs is abandoning them to offer unrealistoc sex advice in Cosmo).

I sent a couple clips and a pic with plenty of clavicle, and within fifteen minutes I had this response from their senior editor:

“Thanks for reaching out. Loved the posts - it’s hilarious that they let you lush out like that - but I’m afraid you’re not quite a fit for GND.”

Not “awesome” or even “progressive,” just “hilarious.”

I think he thinks I’m a drunk.

I should admit, before anything, that not a lot of thought has gone into this.

This will probably be a space where I pose a lot of questions that I can’t answer but make a little more sense when I see them in black and white. I’ll probably write about people I don’t know, and relationships — especially the fucked up kind, and bitch about things that bug me and keep tabs on what’s happening in the world of journalism. Sound good? Great.