Sept. 18 I’ll be returning to Kent to participate sit quietly in the back and speak when spoken to at an online journalism panel for the Poynter Media Ethics Workshop. From CMS Wire:
This year, the theme is “Whose Rules?” which addresses online ethics for bloggers and blogging. The aim is to bring together top media professionals, bloggers, industry experts for “a no-holds-barred discussion of online ethics” and rules for bloggers.
My full-time job is meeting interesting people - people who, most of the time, don’t even realize how interesting they really are. And I don’t just meet them, I get to ask them questions about their lives and take their picture. That’s my job. My full-time job.
Every morning I wake up, pack up my gear, stop by the office to pick up assignments and then I spend the day exploring a city of 90,000 people. This is my third day of work and so far I’ve met farmers, politicians, carnies, emergency officials, citizens, children. And the next few months hold nothing but possibility.
Every day I spend 8 to 12 hours doing my favorite thing in the world. And I get paid to do it.
That’s a good feeling.
Today I launched Lima’s Newest Daughter, a photographic exploration of life, love and the human experience … in Lima, Ohio. Part assignments from my new job, part photo exploration, it is an epic journey into the Lima psyche. Word.
Moving to a town I’ve never been to, to an apartment I’ve never seen, with a roommate I’ve never met to work at a paper I’ve never read.
Here comes adventure.
Congratulations, Panc ‘n Pie!
Saturday night around midnight, I was making my way down Main Street to catch a Doctor Teeeth show when I heard voices from a car stopped at a nearby stoplight.
“Hey, Beth, why don’t you leave BUS alone?” A man’s voice called out, followed by a woman: “Actually, why don’t you just leave?”
I stopped and looked back over my shoulder before I remembered my general policy when anti-fans voice their disdain in public: Don’t break your stride. Just keep walking, because no conversation that starts with an insult will end well.
The next day, on my way to work, a young black woman with toddlers in tow passed me on the sidewalk and called out, “Good morning, white bitch.” (*This exchange I believe was instigated with a sense of levity, but it threw me at first nonetheless.)
The day after that, while my landlord and I chatted on my back deck, he noticed someone had shoddily screwed two gold screws into my deck so they stuck out about two inches. They were directly in front of my door.
“This may sound weird,” he said, scratching his head, “but that looks like sabotage to me.”
It has been three months since my BUS column ran, two months since my last column ran in the Stater and one month since I’ve even had a reason to think or talk about that whole fiasco.
Perhaps some people out there still have something to say.
I made my first Muxtape today, and forgive me, but it has a theme.
I feel like I can learn a lot about myself by examining the music I listen to. That’s why I like to make little archives of my life by creating playlists by date so that, one day, I will be able to revisit months, semesters, seasons in my life by listening to the songs I was playing in heavy rotation at the time.
This playlist does a pretty honest job of explaining how my life feels at this moment. For some songs it’s the feel of it, others the lyrics, others are songs filled with memories from a time I am in the mood to remember. And like the playlists archived in my iPod, this playlist will one day move out of rotation and I’ll update the Muxtape. I will move on.
… when I’m ready.
Summer is off to a slow start (which isn’t a bad thing), but I’m in limbo at the moment. I’m waiting to hear back on a possible internship, but until I hear from Dream Newspaper, I can’t get my contract renewed at my current job … which puts me in a bit of a money pickle.
And I need stuff to shoot! I like to take pictures. Do you? If you don’t, you should hire me for all your photo/video/multimedia needs.
Check out my updated portfolio at bethcan.com and e-mail me at bethrankin.photoATgmail.com and we can talk ideas, availability, rates … the sky is the limit.
I feel pretty stuck until I know where my life is headed. I’ve started to get the ball rolling in Dream Paper City by finding temporary housing, researching not-so-temporary housing and starting a photo project. But here in Kent, there are concert tickets to be bought, freelance jobs to be set up, trips to be taken, leases to be renewed, projects to be started …
I hope I find out what’s going on soon. My life is waiting to be lived.
I just learned that at Friday night’s end-of-semester Stater banquet/drunk baby journalist dance-a-thon, I was awarded the Ron Clark Award for outstanding opinion writing, an accolade I was honored with in 2004 as well.
Unfortunately I missed the banquet as I was shooting the senior sculpture students’ show at Davey Drill.
This is my last semester ever as a Stater staffer, so … thanks. Really, truly.
