In a song about Superman, The Spin Doctors inadvertently underscore two universal truth about journalists… we’re superheroes and we’re hot. Even if dating us gets a little bit complicated.

“I’ve got it so bad for this little journalist”

-”Jimmy Olsen’s Blues” by The Spin Doctors

This one’s a newish song with a shout-out to our kissin’ cousins over at public radio.

“You don’t like anything on local radio
so you fumble around ’til you land on NPR
and listen to world news.”

-”World News” by Local Natives

“He’s a WHAT? he’s a WHAT?
He’s a newspaper man
and he gets his best ideas
from a newspaper stand.”

-”Dancing Choose” by TV on the Radio

Sometimes this is how I feel at the end of the week, after typing up five days worth of “other news” headlines…

“And that’s part of our world tonight,
for the CBS evening news, Dan Rather reporting.
Good night, and have a great weekend.”

-”Rocked by Rape” by The Evolution Control Committee

Rocked By Rape

The Evolution Control Committee | MySpace Music Videos

I want to sing this one every night at 6 p.m. when I see the red “On Air” lights flash on in the newsroom.

“Here is the news
Coming to you every
hour upon the hour
The weather’s fine but there
may be a meteor shower.”

-”Here is the News” by ELO

Now on to a couple of un-lovesongs to journalists, especially rock journalists. They make me think of that scene in Almost Famous…”Here I am, telling secrets to the one guy you don’t tell secrets to.”

First up, “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The Bob Dylan version has been scrubbed from YouTube (Thanks, Sony) so you get the Stephen Malkmus cover…

“You have many contacts
Among the lumberjacks
To get you facts
When somebody attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect.”

-”Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan

Then, there’s this. Those that can’t do… write?

“Hey, Mr. Reporter,
How ’bout talking about yourself?
Do you like what you’re doing,
Or is it that you can do nothing else?”

-”Mr. Reporter” by the Kinks

No news is bad news? Bad news is good news? Hmm….

“I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh.”

-”A Day in the Life” by the Beatles

That’s all good and well, but who among us actually reads or writes the news these days? What is it we’re actually doing? Well, I’m glad you asked. We…

“Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
load it, check it, quit – rewrite it,
plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
drag and drop it, zip – unzip it.”

-”Technologic” by Daft Punk

“Time and again, however well we know the landscape of love,
and the little church-yard with lamenting names,
and the frightfully silent ravine wherein all the others
end: time and again we go out two together,
under the old trees, lie down again and again
between the flowers, face to face with the sky.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

I know I’ve mentioned Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery, several times before. But it’s just one of those rare, special places and that bears repeating, especially if this turns out to be the “last” visit.

We went after brunch last Sunday– found it less crowded, more serene than any park, with all the obelisks and weeping angels pleasantly nestled along the winding path. You can wander for an hour and not run into anybody except graveyard geese and a herd of poky deer. And the three groundhogs, who we’ve named Chuckles, Chantelle and Col. Watson over the last year of visits. (Col. Watson is pictured below.)

[View with PicLens]

It was kind of humid and heady, about to storm. We either almost got attacked by a rabid beast OR missed a chance to go to Narnia. We reminisced about how cold it had been during our last visit together, at New Years, when I was still unemployed, sleeping in the “fashion room” for a bit, living in limbo. We day-dreamed that we’d fallen into another dimension where everything was a graveyard except for some Evil Wizard’s castle on Penn Avenue and we had to escape to break the curse.

By the next time I go to Pittsburgh, the friend who lives across the street from the cemetery will have moved across town and in with his boyfriend who is somehow starting grad school and no longer a shyish German elevator stranger in his freshman year of college.

We could drive back, I suppose, but graveyard adventures are the kind that you’re supposed to stumble into. Not that I’m the type to get glum over the passage of time– if there’s anything to be learned from fantasy stories, it’s that no place is as good as the real life place, even ridiculous French beach resorts or ornate Gothic cemeteries.

When you’ve made all the big leaps without too much thought, it’s strange to consider the moment right before a bunch of little things change. You lift your other foot out of Neverland and it comes down on deciding your favorite brand of bagged lettuce and how to share closets or caulk showers.

You realize the flirting college summer camp counselors are getting married, the cousin who shared the waterbed with you at Grandma’s is pregnant and that you’re negotiating a salary instead of navigating how to sneak $5 bottles of champagne into a college dorm.

Luckily, there are graveyards just about everywhere you go. And between entropy and mischief, we should have no problem keeping busy.

“There are sailing ships that pass
All our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children ’til she lets them go at last…”

-”Passing Afternoon” by Iron & Wine

“Warmth in the early mornin’ chill, my girl
Warmth in the early April.”

I’m not crazy about the morning-times, especially when they show up on Monday after a bit too much carousing on Sunday night.

But sunny days are better than most and the best days of all are when you decide to chalk up your hairstyle as a loss, slap on your helmet and get back to commuting by bike.

In both respects, today was radiant.

Since the time changed, the neighborhood in North East D.C. where I work part-time in the mornings has looked positively lovely.

I’m almost always alone at work for the first half hour or so, in the basement loft of an old school-house, and I’ve begun to regard those quiet moments alone with my thermos of coffee as a really pleasant way to warm up to the day.

I’ll be finishing up the project I’ve been working on there this week and moving on to limbo and another job-search, I suppose.

As much as I’ll enjoy sleeping in, a little bit of me might actually miss having a reason to wake up and enjoy the spring morning. I know I’ll also miss seeing the charming little business in the last two photos. I wonder who goes there…

[View with PicLens]

“A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around…”

A bit histrionic, I know.

But since the intellectuals who brought us death panels have moved on to spitting, spewing hateful racist epithets, accusing their coworkers of infanticide, heralding the coming apocalypse and comparing the spring rain to the tears of the founding fathers, we’ve already significantly overshot the line of polite civility.

It’s all in the name of  “what the American people really want.”

As a real American, I feel qualified to say that, by and large, what the American people really want is a Big Mac, a handful of extra strength Tylenol and not to be scared out of their wits that the soviets are coming to kill grandma, by leaders who should know better.

I’m not so sure the health bill will radically change my life or bend the cost curve enough to reform the health industry. But the Potomac is yet to run red with the blood of patriots and nobody’s painted a hammer and sickle on the capitol dome.

Buying private insurance was relatively painless for me and unless they find a way to medicate exceptional clumsiness, bad joke-telling, or trypophobia, I don’t really need it anyway.

But I’m not most people. There’s my friend in Chicago who was turned down for the same low-cost health insurance plan I have, just because she takes a prescription medication. And all the unemployed journos I know who now might be able to get back on mom’s insurance for a few more years.

And people like Vic Chestnut. The quadriplegic musician talked to Terry Gross about his difficulties getting adequate health coverage, right before he killed himself last Christmas.

These clearly aren’t layabouts who are trying to defraud medicare or file frivolous lawsuits… just people who could use a break for once.

I’m not trying to lambaste well-reasoned fiscal conservatism or a desire to rein in the deficit or create a smaller government. The feds aren’t your mom, so put your own dishes in the sink.

But I also think it’s despicable to leverage the free market economy as an excuse to deprive people of a long, full life. If we really believed that a rising tide lifted all boats, then we should believe in investing in our human capital and improving the health and wellness of our workforce. Anything less is untenable.

Plus, by making health care a luxury good that only the elite tan and fit John Boehners among us can afford, are we really distancing ourselves from how that dreaded  “socialism” has been implemented in our modern world?

The writing’s on the barn, as it were: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

All Americans are created equal –endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights– but some Americans are more deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than others, because they’re not poor or sick?

That’s the kind of complete disregard for social justice that makes me want to throw all the tea into the harbor.

With all the talk of the evil socialist quagmire, I turned to the writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn for a little perspective. His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is based on his own experience in the Soviet Gulag after his writing displeased Stalin.

This remains the only book to give me a nightmare as an adult and I can’t think of anything more irrational than equating it with laws that make multinational corporations a little more culpable for human suffering.

Here’s an excerpt:

Several voices called after him, “Keep smiling,” “Don’t let them get you down” — but there was nothing much you could say.  Gang 104 had built the punishment block themselves and knew all about it: the walls were stone, the floor cement, there were no windows at all, the stove was kept just warm enough for the ice on the wall to melt and form puddles on the floor.  You slept on bare boards, got three hundred grams of bread a day, skilly only every third day.Ten days!  Ten days in that cell block, if they were strict about it and made you sit out the whole stint, meant your health was ruined for life.  It meant tuberculosis and the rest of your days in the hospital.

Fifteen days in there and you’d be six feet under.

Thank heaven for your cozy hut, and keep your nose clean.

My mom found this during a spring cleaning/archiving blitz and e-mailed it to me over the weekend. It’s not as precocious a writing sample as my  “Declaration of Inde-bedness” and it didn’t help me get into Northwestern like the “Why I Want to be an Astronaut” essay.

But it does tell us two very important things. 1.) My poor spelling is in no way a recent affliction. 2.) I know what I’m worth and I won’t take a penny less.

I don’t recall writing this, but I’m pretty sure the tooth fairy did leave me a ‘dolor’ per ‘molor’ instead of the usual 50 cent piece.

So far, I’m pleased with the Honda and how it has sailed me smoothly to work and back home again.

But a new car is also a burdensome reminder of money spent before it’s earned and of how things haven’t quite shaped up the way you hoped they might.

For too long, I’ve been a single and self-sufficient bike-and-bus-taking do less harmer, occasionally driving a beater as a mea culpa for driving at all. Now I spend about two hours loping around in a car every day, clinging to my travel mug and pulling my hair.  All fender bending, no sparkling pioneer spirit. But it has to do for now.

The Honda is by far the nicest, classiest car I’ve ever had and so I’m cycling through all of those typical new relationship feelings. I love the way it smells and I want to mess around with all the buttons and take it out on the highway and roll down the windows.

Such is love in the springtime.

It’s nerve-wracking, though, starting out before that first scratch or door ding. Facing a car that’s never left you stranded on the highway or told you in anger that its last owner was a better driver… but knowing it probably will.

And Lord knows,  I’ve been hurt before. There was the Buick Century that gave me a black eye when I wrecked it dramatically at age 17. And the Taurus– he always disappointed me and still I stayed, because I wasn’t convinced that I could do any better.

The Porsche, of course, remains flashy, unpractical and high-maintenance. The “roommate’s hot older brother in a band” car who forgets your name while he’s kissing you, but always wanders back into your mind after a couple of beers when it’s warm out and a particular song is playing.

I’m guilty of overlooking pragmatism and reliability in favor of a confidant swagger or hot paint-job. But as much as I don’t want to admit it, maybe I am the kind of girl who really could use a nice car for a change.

I can’t promise I’ll always be a good driver or that I’ll never leave an empty Diet Coke bottle in the back seat, but I think the Honda and I are going to get along just fine. Or that’s how it seems at first blush.

And now, a good ol’ silly song about findin’ a “new” man… or car, as it were.

“Girl, that’s so not cool in so many ways
These were supposed to be my carefree single days
Instead I’m punching walls and coming up with ways
Ways to win you back from your new man”

-Mason Jennings

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

-Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

So, my car got stolen on Thursday morning from a quiet by stretch of street near the Checkers on G and 14th NE. If you’re playing along at home, this is the fourth–count ‘em– fourth police report I’ve filed in 18 months.

Obviously, a reference to Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail after he was caught... carjacking for Civil Rights?

I was startled, sure, and greatly annoyed.  But not particularly surprised. I bought myself a cupcake and took the bus to my other job and waited for the cops to call and hoped it would all work out. They did… it didn’t.

The officer said they broke in with a couple of screw drivers and took a joy-ride to Maryland where they led the State Police in hot pursuit before slamming my car through a fence, blowing out the (new) tires and then trying to run.

I’m planning to FOIA the cruiser dash camera video just to have a good souvenir…

They weren’t looking for a way to get around or trying to sell it for money or parts. Not even for drugs, because at least drugs are a reason. They stole my car just to intentionally smash it up.

Because busting up an 11-year-old Ford Taurus the color of cough syrup is really the way to stick it to the man.

The cop told me it was “pretty beat up” but he didn’t mention three busted tires, both mirrors knocked off, chassis twisted and bent, ignition ripped out, door locks smashed and inspiring verses inscribed in the back seat.

I inherited “The Ferrari” from my mom in my sophomore year of college. It was banged up, the heater and defroster were terrible and it was always running out transmission fluid. It wasn’t a great car and I don’t like driving anyway. But I have to get to two different public transit-inaccessible jobs every day and at some point you’ve got to be practical.

I bought another car yesterday, an ‘07 Honda Civic, because I had to and because everything sort of fell into place with the financing and the price and even the color.

So, now I have a car payment. And two brand new screwdrivers (tags and all) and a large brick (not sure if they were planning to smash my windows or if they were just stealing part of someone’s house).

And I have a few words of wisdom, earned through my tenure as a cops reporter, a student of social science and a frequent victim of unlawful hijinks:

Resign yourself to this. We’re not playing by Omar’s rules here– we are all in the game now. Those kids are young and angry and now they’ll go to jail. Because they did something wrong, but also because they’re probably poor and black and have been failed by the educational and social systems in a city full of polished marble and shiny BMWs where we spend 7 hours in shrewd political maneuvers over budget reconcilliation instead of how best to provide health care to sick people.

Because hope at the ballot box doesn’t equate change in the South East any more than tea party politics help me get a job with benefits and pay my student loans.

When those kids get out of jail, they’ll be slightly older and more angry and probably addicted to drugs. And they’ll be unable to find work and unable to get rehab and when my new car gets stolen I’ll know that we were all holding that screw driver.

I have advice for the car thieves, too. Don’t ever, ever, ever run from the cops.

Robbin’ people with a six gun,
I fought the law and the law won.
I fought the law and the law won.

Working two jobs is simultaneously more and less complicated than I anticipated. I say this, cresting my second full week of high-speed sprinting from bed to metro to car to Virginia and back to bed again. Throw in some fuming over snow detours and chugging of caffeinated beverages and you have a good picture.

I can’t seem to summon the physical energy that used to propel me through long days, so I’m trying to ramp up the mental game. With grocery lists and color-coded Google calendar pages and a whole lot of post-its.  I’m washing dishes in REM sleep. I’m sewing buttons on the metro. I’m eating cereal while jogging. Dr. Gawande, you ain’t got nothing on this.

I miss the boundless vigor of my Daily Athenaeum days–  spending more hours at the college newspaper office than in apartment, ducking out of lectures to conduct interviews on my cell phone, ditching class for deadline and being hungry for more.

Our passionate little faction treated reporting like the kegs of Yuengling we drove to Pennsylvania to buy for staffer parties. We gulped down stories, for fear they would spoil. Or worse, that they’d get scooped. We lived on beer and coffee and Red Bull, spilled burrito innards on our FOIA documents, showed up bedraggled after too few hours of sleep and generally spiraled out of control with anger and passion and the giggles.

We were all in it together. And it’s harder to find my legs in these kinds of relentless hours without Jon’s slushie runs and Tricia’s whimsy and Ry’s…  insistence that we get-back-to-work-goddammit-and-stop-fooling-around. Plus, I’ve been living like a grown-up for too long now to flip the switch back to all that mess.

So, I’m looking for a new way to make it all work. And I think part of it is not getting ahead of myself and staying alert and present in what I’m doing instead of getting swept up in all the frenzy.

After all, that’s how I ended up doing a face-plant onto the dining room floor yesterday on my way up from the basement. My mind was up the stairs and out the door, packing a lunch and shoveling out my car instead of focusing on my feet.

So focus. And coffee. A whole lot of coffee.

I tend to  skip over this particular song because it’s so chaotic and messy, but I think it’s well suited to my current frazzled state of mind… excluding, of course, the part about indolence…

Up with caffeine and down with a shot.
Constantly worried about what I’ve got.
Distracting my work but I can’t make a stop
and my confidence on and my confidence off.
And I sink to the bottom and rise to the top
and I think to myself that I do this a lot.
World outside just goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes…

-The Avett Bros.

Too much gumbo: The Hanky Story
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sashawolff/ / CC BY 2.0

There’s an agonizing, pivotal moment in every Super Bowl game in which the end-zone is crossed, the ball is fumbled, the flag is thrown. In other words– by the time you realize that you’ve had too much dip and beer, it’s really too late for a fourth-quarter comeback.

Or, in the case of Super Bowl 2010, you’ve had too much dip, beer and gumbo… delicious, spicy New Orleans-style gumbo with cornbread. Who dat ate too many football munchies is going to have to shovel a lot more snow this week if she expects her dress pants to fit.

Since the blizzard put the kibosh on my normal morning gig, I made myself pull on the ol’ Under Armour and go for a jog. As I lumbered through snow-drift and shin-deep slush (and probably dog urine) to the compelling rhythms of the Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast, I couldn’t help but marvel at how the transition to adulthood zaps all of the the magic that a childhood snow day once held.

Still, it was nice to get out of the house and breathe a little fresh air, laced with exhaust fumes…

Becoming the deadbeat partner in the precarious exercise tango is an annoyance of the big move I neglected to anticipate. Since leaving my pretty cheap gym membership behind in West Virginia, I’ve started running both a money and a time deficit. Eventually the snow will stop and I’ll be back to my good ol’ 9-9, without much time for pounding the ice-covered pavement.

My predisposition toward plumpness aside, I get really anxious if I have to spend too much time cooped up at home. I’m at my best zipping around on a bicylce, but since I also suffer from a nearly-reptilian cold-bloodedness, the gym usually suffices at this time of year.

The options appear to be slim. The Washington Sports Club is near my house and open until almost midnight. But it appears to be about $70 a month, which would put a major crimp in my budget. The Y is a little cheaper but not as close, nor open as late. More importantly, do I really have enough get up and go to be up at 5:30 a.m. or plow on after 11 to jazzercize or whatever the kids are doing these days? Survey says no.

Is there an option I’m missing here, Washingtonians? Running the capitol stairs in heels during my lunch-break? Trying out some Metro-rail yoga moves? I’m going to do a little more research and get back to you on that one.