I clearly wasn't meant to be a reporter

I was a pretty good reporter. I was young, I only took one journalism class, and I was never great. But I was pretty good. I was especially thorough in my research, and you could count on me for a very good 5,000-word feature on just about anything.

But there's a reason I choose to be a behind-the-scenes guy. I do enjoy the little bit of writing that blogging here and professionally affords me. But I was not meant to be part of the circus Guardian blogger Paolo Bandini describes:

Just to my left, a short Hispanic man dressed as a genie - complete with shiny black cape and an enormous gold turban - is sharing his prediction for the Super Bowl with New York Giants reserve guard Kevin Boothe. Directly ahead of me seven-time Pro Bowler Michael Strahan has just launched into his best rendition of an Alicia Keys number I don't recognise. To my right, another hack is conducting his interviews entirely through the monkey puppet on his left hand.

I mean, I'm sure I'd love press-area seats for the Super Bowl, especially in a Phoenix winter (I hate Phoenix summer, but it's not a bad town otherwise). But that just sounds like a lower level of purgatory or an upper level of hell to me.

Bubbie's Kitchen

If you're one of the people who reads this blog with any sort of regularity, there's a good chance you're also one of those people who doesn't hear from me as often as you should.

I've always been bad about keeping in touch. With everybody (sometimes even myself, but that's a whole other discussion, which we shan't have now).

I visited my parents briefly at the end of June last year, and promised my grandparents I would take some time at the end of July or beginning of August to come see them and spend a day or two.

What I didn't know – and no one else in my family knew – at the end of June was that my grandmother (we call her Bubbie, which is Yiddish) had stomach cancer. She was diagnosed in late July, I saw her on Wednesday, August 1, and she died Monday night, August 6.

It turns out I still can't keep my composure while I write that.

When you went to see Bubbie, everything revolved around food. If you lined up all the blueberry muffins I ate from a dish in her kitchen, you'd have a blueberry muffin bridge from New York to Paris. My sister probably has eaten enough chopped herring to have entirely depopulated Lake Superior of that particular fish, forever.

Sitting around with the Rabbi before the funeral, we realized all of our stories included over the Red Sox or food, and the Red Sox definitely got some short shrift.

And so we're starting a new project to preserve her recipes. Please visit Bubbie's Kitchen, prepare and enjoy. There's not much up yet, but I'm working on collecting more.

Trend 2008: Dead 20-somethings

Here we are, 23 days into 2008. Actor Brad Renfro has died this year at 25. Actor Heath Ledger was found dead yesterday at 28. Britney Spears is spiraling downward. Amy Winehouse was recently photographed smoking crack.

Crack. Seriously? I don't have the energy to write about the gentrification of the drug and the hegemonic co-opting of a conspiracy theory. Maybe someday.

The point is, the number is getting smaller. Mozart, Jesus, Charlie Parker -- dead in their early 30s. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain. Do people never learn?

Keep on walking

I'm not really an advice column sorta guy, but Emily Yoffe (who writes 'Dear Prudence' for Slate) has my favorite piece of advice to date:

Dear Prudence,
I'm 24, and I've been with my boyfriend for about 18 months. We were friends in high school, then met again after college, and started living together almost immediately. We have been talking about marriage lately, which I am beyond excited about; however, my boyfriend has informed me that I need to lose 20 pounds before he will propose. He claims that's the only reason he hasn't asked me yet. In his words, he wants "a hot wife." Am I crazy to think that unconditional and true love still exists? Everything else in our relationship is great. I don't want to walk away from something so wonderful, but this just seems a little ridiculous. Help!

—In Love With Mr. Vain

Dear In Love,
I have a plan that will make both of you happy. It begins with you starting on a new exercise program. Get a comfortable outfit and a pair of excellent workout shoes. Then put all your worldly possession in a suitcase, pick it up, walk out the door, and keep on walking.

—Prudie

The Lost: Photographs, memories, and conveyance

I don't take very good photos of people when they're posing. The spontaneous photos I take of people, however, tend to be really good.

I have one of my brother I love. It's at his graduation from the University of Hartford. The lighting was bad, and I decided to take without a flash – or a tripod. What resulted what his smiling face in the center of the frame, surrounded on all four sides by the golden blurs of the theater lights bouncing off the mortarboards of those students standing around him.

I have another one I really like of my friend A—. She is photographing a section of the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, NY (see a slideshow I put together of the town). It's a black and white photo, taken from behind her and to her left. She didn't know I was taking it, and it's a positively beautiful picture.

The Lost author Daniel Mendelsohn has traveled to Australia to meet a man who dated one of his long-lost cousins, and meets, as well, others from Bolechow, the town his family came from. Among them is a woman who was a friend of another of his cousins.

Mendelsohn has been carrying around photos of the family he wants so desperately to learn about. And he discovers that what he is carrying around are photographs from someone else's memory.

Unconsciously, I think this is the reason posed photos never look right to me. It's because we're faking the memory. We're not recording something that's happening, we're recording something we've caused.

I suppose this is also why when I set about to sell photos, it surprises me which photos people want. I realize now that it's because the photos I connect to most hold some sort of meaning for me outside the photo, and even if the general mood is conveyed in the photo, the extraneous factors – whom I was with, how I felt, how they felt, what drove me to that particular location – they are all things that never make it through.

Every year Syracuse manages to track down a 60-foot Christmas tree. It sits at the edge of Clinton Square, next to the ice rink. The tree is photographed often, but I have a photo from an unusual angle at an unusual time. It's night, it's snowing, and I'm facing the tree from the middle of Erie Blvd., a full block away from the tree. It's a black and white image, and I could probably make 100 copies and be good on holiday and birthday gifts for a long time.

People love the photo; I do, too.

What the photo can't possibly convey, though, is the calm that lets one stand in the middle of a usually busy street on a weekend night. It doesn't convey the feeling that I just sat through a concert, watching my old friend S— perform while sharing a table with my new friend A—, whom S— had introduced me to. It doesn't convey the frustrated feelings of A&mdash's crushed crush that night. It doesn't convey the crush I had at the time on my new friend. There was a lot of release in that photo. A lot of release.

But not all of that needs to be conveyed in the photo, because I know there are thousands of other people who have their memories of the tree, of snow, of downtown. And the photo might mean something entirely different to them.

And that's OK.

For more posts on The Lost, click here.

Primary Election Stuff

Fortunately, this year's presidential primary season is greatly condensed. Pretty much any primary after Feb. 5 means zippo.

I'm registered "unenrolled," and I've decided to stay that way. In 2004, I switched my registration to Democrat so that I could vote for Dennis Kucinich in the primary, but frankly, I'm just not going to bother this year. There's no one running I'm truly excited about.

I will probably have a brief comment after Super Duper Tuesday, but for now, the only comment I need to make has already been made.

Worth Saving

Sometimes I wonder if downtown's worth saving. Usually this happens on a rainy Sunday morning, like today...

Getting off the bus, I walked Fayette St. from Salina to Clinton. Looking across the street:

• Boarded up windows
• Boarded up doors
• For Sale or Lease
• Coming Soon
• Availability

And then there's the Clinton Street Pub on the corner with its fading residency hotel above it, and next to that, as you turn the corner, there's Ron Paul's local headquarters, which will be vacant once he runs out of money for his presidential run, and then another available spot just on the other side of the Hot Shoppe.

And when it's gray and there's no one else on the street, it's really damn depressing.

But by the time I got to Freedom of Espresso, and had a couple of sips, man, did I feel better. Sean Kirst writes today about a couple of guys getting off the train after the SU basketball game and sticking downtown for a bite and a beer.

And then Andy Breuer walked in to pick up some coffee. You might not know Andy, but if you're local, you've seen his name – on the Heuber-Breuer equipment everywhere there's an important local construction project going on. That dude knows what it takes, and he's working for it.

GitaGilad.com

This has been way too long in coming, but it's up and ready, baby.

Gita Gilad takes some awesome photos, and she's real creative when it comes to collages and such -- stuff I never would have though of doing, really.

You can now check out and buy her photos online, so go do it, right now!

Heroes - Pete Carroll

I wanted to get to this earlier in the week, but didn't get a chance.

If you follow college football even a little, you know that Pete Carroll is the head coach of USC. You also know his teams are consistently among the best in the nation.

What you might not know – and what I didn't learn until Tuesday night, watching his Trojans eat the Illini for dinner – is Carroll's one heckuva guy off the field.

Carroll is one of the founders of A Better L.A.. He heads into south-central L.A. in hopes of reducing gang violence and putting young people to work. In fact, he's placed over 40 at-risk youth in jobs in the past several years. Here's more.

He also has someone on his staff with the title Special Assistant to the Head Coach.

Sounds like a job hired out by an egoist and given to some butt-kissing yes man, no?

Kinda, but for the fact that Carroll special assistant is Ricky Rosas, an 18-year-old who survived leukemia as a young child. The leukemia stunted Ricky's growth – he's 4'8" and 91 pounds – and he is learning disabled. He can't drive, so he takes two buses to work at the USC campus every day.

Rosas is universally loved on campus, and has been getting a fair bit of media attention.

Dear college football coaches,

This is how you make a difference in your community.