theology&geometry

I have got to disabuse myself of these fairytale notions.

… will not relent until I am petrified, will it? Hardening, hardening, crackling, smooth. Let everything — blood, sweat, bile — roll off like dew. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out, no blinking, eyes open always so I can see the lesson. And I swear, there isn’t one. There never is.

I’m at my parents’ house. A couple of escaped convicts are running around the area. Mom’s been catching me up on their tale. Apparently they got out of a Louisiana prison work arrangement thingy, and made their way up the Delta. They’ve been offing people and taking their cars. My sister sent me a text this morning saying that she heard on the scanner that they were last spotted in Lexington in a yellow truck with an orange light bar on top, a bed topper, and government tags.

So… Yep.

Here’s the news story.

Internet friends,

I am using the Woo Bueno theme. I want to add a time stamp to my posts. Probably in each post’s footer. Can someone write/find some code or something for me that will do that elegantly, and then tell me exactly which theme file(s) to put that code in, and where? (This is not part of my theme options; I checked.)

Can someone do that for me? I am too tired/impatient to go digging around for that info and then troubleshoot it myself. I want someone who reads this to be all “Oh yeah, I can do/find that really easily” and then do it and send it to me, no skin off anyone’s back and no minutes off anyone’s clock.

If someone can do that for me I will buy that someone a beer or send that someone a free photograph. I cannot promise that either the beer or the photograph will be anything super fancy but I swear I will make that happen if you come through for me.

Yours in pixels,
LT

Dear Package-Delivery Workers of America from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Yes, I figured out to use the back door the architect of this house thoughtfully installed for sticky situations such as these. But still. Funny.

Last weekend I traveled to my hometown to reunite with two of my very oldest friends, Tamara and Crystal. We were thick as thieves in high school (with bouts of adolescent spattiness throughout our friendships, of course), and then went our separate ways after graduation. Tamara and I — with the exception of some months of no communication because we are sometimes stubborn, foolish girls — have mostly kept in constant contact, but I lost touch with Crystal. The three of us got together in Alabama back in … 2003? My memory is bad. But that was the last time we all hung out. Until last weekend.

I’d like to be able to say it was just like old times, and I guess in some ways it was, but it was incredible how much we all had changed. And not just the way we’d changed, but the ways in which the very worlds around us had changed and changed us. Our families have expanded and contracted, often simultaneously. We’ve had to confront the mortality and vulnerability of our parents and our own bodies. We are no longer invincible, and we know it.

It is always so interesting getting with your oldest friends and telling old stories. They remember what I’ve forgotten and I remember what they don’t. Except some things they remember seem so improbable to me (Crystal said she remembered being at my house the night Princess Diana was killed, and how we’d spent time at my grandmother’s house, trying to sneak cigarettes; I would have DIED of stress overload trying to smoke around my house or my grandmother’s house), and really prove that memories are just stories we console ourselves with. What I think I know about myself — or anyone else — is not necessarily what’s true. (Yes, please do insert “what is truth?” tangent here.)

Crystal brought along another of our classmates, Tim, who showed us pictures and video on his phone of his two kids. These are not tiny baby children; he is a proud pop of a little girl who is old enough to know all the dance moves to some popular song I’ve never heard but who is still too naive to realize her dad is making a video of her on his phone that will embarrass her for the rest of her life, if he thinks to put it on a disc. It is not quite right to think of anyone I went to school with as being in charge of anyone else’s tiny life, but as I coast into my thirties (and Facebookstalk everyone from HCHS who friends me), I’m willing to bet that my and Tamara’s and Crystal’s childfree status puts us firmly in the minority. I’m taking bets on which one of us will end up knocked up first.

“Are y’all going to the reunion?” Crystal asked us. Without hesitation, a chorus of “uh, no” erupted from all mouths in the room. Although, I’ll admit, I’m conflicted. There are some people I really would like to catch up with. I do still get a little sick to my stomach when I think about high school, but I wonder if I’ve not grown up enough to be over most of that by now. It wasn’t all that bad, was it? I imagine the sickness I feel is actually shame over how I acted in high school. I was a wet blanket — a stone-faced high-horsin’ bitch a lot of the time, partially as a function of what was back then clearly some serious social anxiety. I’m terrified that I will never be forgiven for that, the way that I still have not quite forgiven some people for being who they were in high school too.

Whew. High school. What a country.

I want to get up to Buffalo to visit Tamara this winter. Yes, that’s insane, I know. But that’s when I’ll have time off and, well, winter is just around the corner, don’t you know, and if I am going to truly experience her chosen home for its charms, I think in the middle of a backbreaking snow storm would be the perfect way to do it. I hope the manfriend isn’t sick of me by then, so we can both go and he can go see his beloved Bills lose in person. Heh.

Counting the hours.

Why do I get sucked in to dumb arguments? WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY

This has been a week for the books. I had a one-day weekend and then hit the ground running Monday, only to run headlong into the bloodiest police shootout in Memphis-area history at the end of the week.

I don’t know exactly what happened, other than it was awful. Just awful. Awful and weird.

But I am in the business of awful. I see and hear a lot of it, every day. I miss a lot of it too. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of awful out there. When you work in the industry I have come to love, you come to accept the awfulness as it comes. You have to. And you have to think of it from the perspective of am I doing my job? Which is weird, because it necessitates that you check your emotions at the door. It must seem crass to some people that, during a tragedy like this one, I agonized over type size and gutter widths and visual balance. But those things matter.

Events like the West Memphis shootout really test a news organization’s mettle. For all the paper’s struggles and faults, I feel like we covered the hell out of this story. It was awesome to see the newsroom buzzing with activity until late into the night. The story, which was so weird and vague to begin with, took a definite turn for the nutty late into the night when the reporters began really tracking down who the people in the white van were.

There’s been lots and lots of debate over the photograph we used on the website and on A1. Many people seem to think that as soon as we got a shot of a dead person, we did a little jig and slapped it on the front page just to sell newspapers. Many people seem to think we delight in the chance to broadcast carnage far and wide. I guess that’s a fun way of thinking about the evil mainstream media, which obviously want to ruin life for everyone, but it wasn’t like that at all.

All night long, in comments everywhere, I read that we should be ashamed of ourselves, that we’d stooped to some morally reprehensible level for depicting a dead kid. We were accused of sensationalizing his death, and of needing ethics lessons, and of having standards lower than Fark and the National Enquirer. Someone even compared publishing the photo to publishing the names of rape victims.

I have some very strong visceral reactions to these criticisms. But I’m trying to be diplomatic here and not belittle anyone. (Look, ma! I am growing up!) I think having this debate is good, and I’m glad people are engaged and thinking about news and how it works. (I wish they would think about it more.)

Thursday, we looked at the photo and all remarked at how young the guy in it looked. But that was pure speculation at the time (and my argument is, he’s 16? wow, that makes he photograph even more compelling than before). What mattered was the weight of the story that that picture told. That is a freaking great news photograph. Alan Spearman took the photograph that will define this incident. That is an image that speaks to the violence of the situation that thirty inches of narration just can’t quite get at.

I’m glad our ME wrote this, even though a part of me gets so tired of having to explain why the newspaper does the basic things it does. I mean, we have commenters incredulous that we didn’t blur out the kid’s face (uh … ), and one who even tried to argue that it’s illegal to publish photos of dead minors. There are some very real misconceptions driving people’s ideas of what news is and should be, and I have no doubt that our own actions have contributed to that in the past.

People always say, “How would you feel if that was YOUR son/brother/dad/etc. in that picture?!” Well, I’d feel pretty terrible, I’m sure. But every person everywhere is someone’s son/brother/cousin/mother/lover. We can’t choose to stop short of documenting these events just because someone out there is going to have a real hard time with that documentation. No story would ever be told were that the case.

I understand why people are upset. It’s an upsetting photograph. It’s an upsetting ordeal entirely. But dishing out “shame on you” after “shame on you” to the paper, what’s that about, exactly?

Well, I can tell you I’m not ashamed. There was a story that needed to be told. Some terrible shit went down in West Memphis, and the daily newspaper documented he hell out of it. I’m proud. Somebody had to do it. I’ll proudly call myself part of the team that did.

Fun fact: The body laid below the fold in the rack (intentionally), so the idea that we put a dead body on the page to sell papers doesn’t hold much water anyway.