Happy Twenty-Ten. Here's the obligatory New Year list.

Well, actually two lists. They sort of address a smattering of my interests, categorizing them into things I hope go away and things I hope come about. Some is serious, some is not so much.

These are things I hope go away in the next decade:

Tiger Woods. Please go away. And while we’re at it, let’s also do away with all the celebrity gossip about famous men cheating on their wives. Not that I don’t think they all deserve to be ridiculed and publicly humiliated, but I frankly just don’t care. Actually, just all celebrity gossip and news should go away. I don’t know what we are going to talk about on Friday nights at the bar, but we will figure something out.

Twilight. And vampire stuff in general. I mean, I sort of got into True Blood, but I hated myself for it a little.

All the H_N1 hype. And yes, I am making the assumption that there will be another flu next year. (Hmm…Feline flu?) Next year there will be some other strain, I just hope the hysteria dies down a bit as time goes on.

Ugg boots. UGH boots. I can’t even believe how long these have stayed popular.

College binge drinking. We all love a cocktail/cold beer/glass of wine. Or two, or three. But, at the risk of sounding like my mother, the binge-drinking problem in America has become absolutely insane over the past 10 years. The CDC estimates that 75% of the alcohol consumed by adults in the United States is consumed in the form of binge drinking. Vehicular homicide, unsafe sex, date rape situations, yuck. I don’t expect binge drinking to disappear entirely, but it would be great if it did, and wasn’t replaced instead by an alternative drug. Happy, social drinking is in. Puking and waking up next to strangers, not so much.

Excessive spending. People need to save more and spend less. Banks need to stop lending money out to people with bad credit. This irresponsibility put us in a recession. Everyone needs to grow up.

Facebook. Bane of my Internet existence. Takes up way too much of my time and ultimately serves no purpose that other more legitimate social networking Web sites don't already have to offer. That being said, unless everyone else stops using it, I probably won’t either. Therein lies the rub. I mean, going into the PR field, I should embrace Facebook, but I just can’t help but have a love-hate relationship.

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These are things I think and hope we’ll see over the next decade:


Better interactivity and involvement with personal health. Let me explain what I mean by this. So you go to the doctor, you get weighed and poked and prodded and then you are sent on your merry way, with nothing really tangible in hand, no record of your own so you can monitor your health. People need to have a better way of keeping tabs on things like their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, even things like birth marks on their body to make sure they don’t change too much over time. Doctors can easily miss things. Most of them are super busy, forgetful, or incompetent, and especially if you are going to multiple doctors, it would be fantastic if there was a more convenient way to just pop in all the information on your health into a central location online. Google is working on something like this, but it’s very difficult to work with and needs a lot more development. I would imagine that people would be nervous about this sort of transition, because you might think if all that information is out floating around in the interwebs, anyone will be able to get their filthy little hands on it. There would of course need to be proper security in place, this information would need to be protected just like our credit card information is all protected online. [Update: Yeah, this guy knows what I'm talkin' about.]

More widespread access to and knowledge of CSA’s and farmers’ markets. I actually dream about this kind of stuff.

Better pay for interns. Read: any pay for interns. And along with this, just more jobs in general. I’m a big believer in the economy turning around in the next few years. It’ll bounce back. I am fine with unpaid internships for college students just getting their feet wet in something, but it’s becoming a bit exploitative how much interns are being expected to do with no pay at many places.

Environmentally-friendly technology and products will become more affordable, available and mainstream. Hybrid cars will becomes the norm. Energy-efficient appliances will be the only kind you can get. Plastic forks will be replaced by bio-degradable forks made of corn—you get the idea.

Faster Internet connectivity, better battery power capacity (in all kinds of technologies), and advancements in data storage. Like, who would have thought five years ago that we would have a terabyte hard drive available for home use? Craziness I tell you. Maybe one day my Internet download speed at my apartment will surpass 3.32 Mbps. Sweet, can’t wait.

A renewed respect for journalism. Journalism has been going through a difficult transition as citizen journalism on the Internet has grown and newspapers have lost money and their workforce. But I see a transformation happening soon, where objective journalism will find a better place in society and people will realize its importance much more. Um, this is really vague. I'll blog about it later in more detail.

HDR high-dynamic range imaging photography will begin replacing traditional photography. I don’t even know how they would do this, but what if they made a camera that could? Oh boy. Can you imagine a world where HDR photos were everywhere? My head can’t even wrap around this concept. What a beautiful thing it would be.




Anyway, who wants to join me in this new decade? We can sit around sober, talk about our health and personal savings plans, and eat locally grown food with forks made of corn. No, but seriously.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The end of an era, sort of

I might venture to say the past week and a half, and by extension this entire semester, has been full of some of the "bests" I have ever had in college. Now, this is saying a lot, considering the end of the semester is always really stressful. But, I must say, I think mine went quite smoothly. It was jam-packed with final projects and exams and papers and little sleep, but I made it through. We always make it through. I took some awesome classes and learned a ton and was inspired by one in particular enough to pursue the area further in an independent study. The "best" part comes in with the quality time I spent with my friends. Let's face it, I burnt myself taking cinnamon buns out of the oven during a family breakfast we were making, and I am now sad because the 'scar' I thought I would have forever to remember the day is actually almost completely healed and gone--that's true friendship.

The saddest part about the end of this semester was making the decision not to return as an editor to The Eagle in the spring. It was a really hard decision. I know many others on staff share this same sentiment (especially our editor-in-chief aka my bestie/roomie, Jen Calantone): The Eagle is our baby. It's been the lifeblood of my college experience. It will continue to be even next semester, as I plan to still write the health column, which I am pumped about, as well as take photos as often as I possibly can. I learned so much working for a college newspaper. It hasn't made me necessarily want to go into journalism, however it has improved my writing and photography skills and taught me a lot about how journalists think and what they want to report on, which will prove incredibly important in the PR field. It has also showed me so much about teamwork. Every Sunday and Wednesday we all get together (play music and make loud, sometimes inappropriate comments)--and we collectively make a newspaper. There's been the wonderful days when I got to take pictures of presidential candidate Barack Obama at his Jan. 28 rally at AU when Senator Kennedy endorsed him...and there's the equally wonderful days when that man becomes President Obama. Then, there's the tragic days, like when we had to report on Senator Kennedy passing away on Aug. 26 of this year.

But despite having worked at a newspaper on arguably the most politically active campus in the country during one of the most politically exciting times in the history of this country, not every day was so thrilling. Some days, we'd realize the first sex column of the semester sparked the most popular debate and follow-up editorials and letters to the editor we saw all semester--and I personally would almost lose hope (although not really in the legitimacy of the publication, but more so in the future of this generation.) There's still the negative comments on stories about how writers are bad or stories are boring, or just the lack of comments on stories that are important. There's still the days you look around and think, does all this effort really mean anything to anyone?

By contrast, there are the days we have said, "If a news story happens on campus and The Eagle doesn't cover it, does it really happen?"

Well, it was interesting, because last Thursday when my class was presenting our research to AU's Music Program following a semester-long project, we starting talking about how to increase the awareness of musical performances on campus. A few people suggested they advertise more in The Eagle and maybe pitch ideas to The Scene section about feature stories, say if there was something special a particular musician had done or something. Our client looked dubious. "Does anyone really read The Eagle though? Who here reads The Eagle?" Nearly every person in the class raised their hand. Granted, we're all communication students, but still. It's the campus newspaper, it reports on issues relevant to the students on campus--of course students should want to read it. My point here is, what we do does matter. We create a dialogue. We report on what is important for a very specific, niche population at a university. We take improving our reporting very seriously. We on the photo team take improving our photos very seriously. The design team takes designing creative pages seriously. It's our job. And I loved every second of it and will miss it terribly.

But I think what I will miss most is the people, the co-workers who became my best friends. (I don't know if any of you will read this. I will probably find a way to bring it to your attention though, so you better read it!) I learned so much from all of you--technically speaking and in deeper, more intangible ways. Thank you.

Anyhow, before I go too overboard on the mushiness...this entry goes out to all my Eagle staffer friends, past and present, who hold a special place in my heart. I have one final message for all of you to keep in mind, whether it's a good day or a bad day or an in-between day:

When it's time to party, we will always party hard. Party hard.