on success and failure

Tonight I decided to finally delve into Peter Jennings' biography, which I had been meaning to pick up for the past few days.

In case you don't know, for as much as I often deride the daily foibles of television news, there are a number of broadcast journalists whom I hold in extremely high regard, and Peter Jennings is chief among them. In fact, it was my childhood desire to emulate Jennings that first set me on the path toward my eventual career as a print and online journalist.

Anyway, I forget what it was that inspired me to move Jennings' biography to the top of my seldom acted-upon reading list, but by page 22, I was getting restless.

Now, I don't mean that the narrative — a patchwork of words from a whole slew of people who were mostly on a first-name basis with Peter, culled from transcripts of interviews and a memorial service that followed his death in 2005 — bored me or allowed my mind to wander. Rather, I was really getting into the story of Jennings' first stint anchoring on ABC, when suddenly my mind jumped ahead to what I knew would be the inevitable end of that chapter.

See, the twentysomething Jennings' time as solo anchor lasted just two years, from 1965 to 1967. As he left the anchor chair to move back into reporting, Peter Jennings with the News was seen as a perhaps novel but ultimately unsuccessful experiment of a last-place network with a fledgling news division. As Ted Koppel recalls in the biography, "(ABC) was fifth in a three-man — or a three-network — race." Jennings himself once called it "a little ridiculous" to pit a 26-year-old against the likes of Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley.

Thinking ahead to the eventual end of Jennings' first American anchoring job prompted me to think much farther back in history to another early-career epic fail — John Wesley's roughly two-year stint as a colonial chaplain in America in the 1730s. Norwood called the whole trip to Georgia an "unmitigated disaster" for both John and his brother Charles.

And yet, despite early false starts of sorts in America, both men became well-known and respected leaders in their fields. One became the face of a network; the other, the face of a movement.

Well, that got me thinking about my own life and how I've never really had a Wesley-style unmitigated disaster or a Jennings-esque assignment that comes before I'm really ready for it.

Sure, I have almost daily "epic fails," like just now when I spent a good five minutes scouring both my apartment and the downstairs laundry room for my phone, which was hiding underneath the Jennings biography that I had just put down. And I've certainly made mistakes in my personal and professional lives that I've learned from.

All along, though, I've been seen as this good kid who made good grades and did good work, and I've got an apartment full of awards, plaques and diplomas to attest to my general on-trackness, if you will.

Now, I'm not saying I want to fail at something. No one in his right mind sets out to fail for the sake of failing.

Instead, what I think I've realized tonight is that I want to set myself up for possible failure — or possible triumph — instead of too often sticking to safer paths that boast a narrower range of outcomes, which generally tend to be centered just north of mediocrity.

I've done this sort of thing before, you know. Among the awards and such, also hanging on the walls of my apartment in Palm Springs are photos and front pages from my time in Cape Town. It was a trip that almost never happened, but I thank God that it did. Over those three months, I not only saw and worked in a new part of the world, but I also made friends and discovered things about myself that I never would have back here in the States.

Although the result was decidedly more positive, my South African journey could be seen as one of Wesleyan proportions. Now, perhaps I need to seek out an assignment (professionally or personally) that I'm perhaps not yet fully suited for, much like the 26-year-old Jennings who took to the anchor chair for a short time ahead of a much longer and much more successful run as anchor that would begin more than a decade later.

Or maybe it's something else that doesn't hew quite as closely to the experiences of either of these two men whom I hold in such high esteem. Whatever it is, I know it's time for me to focus on at least one or two Big Things once again.

If I haven't led myself into unmitigated disaster or gotten in over my head by this time next year, I won't count that in and of itself as a failure. But if I've neither succeeded nor failed at something big, something important by next summer — all for lack, or even fear, of trying — that will be the worst kind of failure.

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8/17/2010 21:50

the triple threat

triple threat

Yesterday morning, when my editor got into the newsroom and I informed her that there was nothing all that exciting going on in the valley or in the world, she suggested that I maybe take it relatively easy.

After all, I had written a pair of B1 stories this week, along with two A1 stories, the latter of which was our big story on the lifting of California's same-sex marriage ban... next week... maybe.

So my editor said something along the lines of, "We won't give you any major A1 projects to do today."

But my morning project of resurrecting some of the legal analysis that was cut from Friday's Proposition 8 story for the Web eventually turned into an A1-candidate follow-up story.

Then, in the afternoon we got word that one of photographers was able to get some sweet shots of the Perseid meteor shower Thursday night that could definitely go on the front page of Saturday's paper, and I was asked to rehash my earlier meteor story so we had something to go along with the photo.

I also volunteered to put together a weather story for Saturday's paper, which I expected would go somewhere inside the Valley section — i.e., the B section — or maybe on B1 since we seemed to be light on both staff and stories yesterday.

During the editors' afternoon news meeting, though, I overheard the editor who usually picks out stories for the front page (or at least recaps the collectively-decided choices) rattle off a list of my three stories. I knew the first two were A1 candidates, but I figured the weather story would maybe just be teased from the front page to its actual home in Valley. Or, you know, maybe the editor had been asked, "What the hell was Indy doing today?" instead of "What's going on A1?"

After the meeting, I didn't bother to ask anyone about my suspicion that perhaps all of my stories would end up on the front page. I was more concerned with getting all three of the stories done and filed since I had things to do in the post-work afternoon/evening that I was running late for.

Anyway, fast-forward to this morning, when I checked Today's Front Pages on newseum.org and found that, yes, I did write all three of the front-page stories in today's Desert Sun. Awesome.

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8/14/2010 13:06

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still partyin'

Now, I know this is a stereotype, but I've found that it's a mostly true one: Gay people know how to party.

Gay bars are generally the best places to shake one's groove thang, and those pride parades (like the '08 one in Cape Town, seen at right) are like a whole bunch of disco dance parties on wheels.

Here in the desert, supporters of gay marriage have often held rallies in Palm Springs to celebrate whenever things have gone their way in the courts. But today's news that same-sex marriage would again be allowed in California... next week... if a higher court doesn't intervene in the meantime... didn't seem to prompt much hootin' and hollerin' around California.

I was on Prop. 8 watch today at work, and I was monitoring our Sacramento TV station's live feed from San Francisco, thinking that I'd hear plenty of cheers, jeers or other such commotion whenever word of decision spread through the crowd outside City Hall.

But I swear, that crowd got more riled up about passing cars that were probably honking or waving at them than they seemed to be once word of the decision started to get around.

Speaking of, the news was broken to us at TDS in a most peculiar way this afternoon. Although I was watching the wires like a hawk and we had the TVs strategically set to the cable networks we thought most likely to put the news on the air first, I first caught word of the ruling in an e-mail from a source I had been talking with. And this was not a high-level gay rights advocate or organizer or anything, just a regular guy who was keeping an eye out for the ruling and heard about it from a local television station in Sacramento. (Sadly, 'twas not the Gannett station there that I sort of had my eye on.)

In any case, even as word rolled in about the (eventual, possible) lifting of the stay on the judge's ruling overturning Proposition 8, there was never much commotion on the SF livestream. By the time cable networks were cutting to that live shot, the crowd looked considerably thinner than it did just before noon as the anticipation was still in the midst of its final upswing.

Not too long after I noticed this and got the sense that no one in our area, from either side of the issue, was getting all that hot and/or bothered about a decision with another waiting period attached, I wrote this lede for my eventual print story:

A federal judge handed supporters of gay marriage another victory — and another asterisk — on Thursday.

And I only ended up tweaking it a little bit before filing the story hours later. To me, that summed up the day. Gay marriage supporters got another piece of good news, but it wasn't quite what they were hoping for. Those pushing for Prop. 8 to stay in effect got some discouraging news, but they've got another shot at reversing the decision. I figure that for people on both sides, the judge's ruling must've seemed like an order to just wait and see.

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8/12/2010 22:37

California knows how to party…

I often gripe about how I don't get out of the desert often enough, but this past pre+weekend I definitely took full advantage of my proximity to San Diego and the L.A. area.

Friday

Aww yeah. The B-52s are on!

Friday night, I tagged along with Jodi and Hondo on a sweet trip to Del Mar for a little bit of horse-race watchin' and a whole lot of B-52s watchin'... and singin'... and dancin'.

On the way back, we also swung up into Orange County to have drinks with an old friend of Jodi's at Downtown Disney.

Sunday

beach view

Then, after church and some quehaceres on Sunday, I headed back to the O.C. to help Sam and Claudia move into their new third-floor apartment in Seal Beach. Lots of stairs plus heavy/unwieldy furniture is generally a questionable combination, but I say the sweetness of the apartment, the closeness to the beach and the view from the balcony (hell, just the presence of a balcony) all makes the upstairs moving worth it.

Sunday also spilled over into Monday morning since Sam and Claudia let me spend the night on their couch — after some errand running, box wine drinking and Up watching, of course.

Monday

best beer-holder ever

Monday afternoon, I took the 405 to the 22 to the 55 to the 91 to the 60 to the 10 to 111, which is really not as insane of a drive as it sounds and which plopped me back in Palm Springs in time for a nap and for night kickball!

Unfortunately, night kickball took on a whole new meaning this week since all the lighted fields were taken and it quickly got dark enough that no one could see the ball.

So instead we went over to kickballer Jake's nearby house and just had ourselves a little gettogether instead, complete with lots of gossiping, girl talk and relationship... er... advice, along with other sorts of fun and games. Also, the best beer holder ever was discovered. But don't worry... No kids were corrupted by the pictured beer placement; they were all sound asleep.

All in all, it was one of the best pre+weekends I've had in a while. I got myself out of town multiple times but not at the expense of some of my favorite desert activities (church, kickball, napping).

8/11/2010 22:04

Operation Ball Pit Bed

Most people who've been to one of the places I've lived since moving out of the dorms my junior year know that I inherited the balls that made up our Best C5 laundry room ball pit. The brightly colored balls are either sitting in the mesh laundry bag that we used for a fourth wall back in '05 or, more likely, spread out across the floor of my living room and/or bedroom.

How my dormmates and I came up with and executed the idea to build a ball pit is a whole other story that I don't think has ever been told online, but now's not the time for that. Suffice to say, for the time being, that I have a lot of balls.

Anyway, as I was trying to fall asleep last night, I suddenly became quite discontent with my sleeping arrangement. I was lying down, all flat and at right angles to the corners of my flat, rectangular bed... like so:

boring sleeping setup

I thought about going to sleep on my slightly more curvy couch, but I figured I'd wake up in the morning with my neck all out of whack because that can sometimes happen when I sleep with my head up on the arm of a couch.

Then I had one of my most brilliant sleepy ideas ever: What if I put the ball pit balls in my bed?

Quickly, I started gathering the balls, which were — predictably — spread out over my bedroom and living room floor, and piled them onto my bed. Then, I tweeted, "This is gonna be either the best or worst night of sleep ever," and showed the world what I was about to dive into:

This is gonna be either the best or worst night of sleep ever.

But before I got into bed, I covered the balls with a sheet and tucked them in so as to minimize overnight spillage. Then I got on top of my newly awesomized bed and rolled around until I got comfortable.

all tucked in

Surprisingly, I slept soundly through the night and awoke feeling far from battered and bruised, mostly just amused by the balls. My rolling around pulled the sheet away from one edge of the bed, so there were some goners, but most of the balls hung around until morning:

Good morning, balls...

It was in my early-morning snoozing that I finally got under the sheet and really got all up in the balls, which I found was also a pretty sweet setup. In fact, I think I'm going to try that tonight since I've got so many balls left in my bed.

how things ended up

Facebook comments on Operation Ball Pit Bed

Also this morning, I was glad to see that my ballsy adventure was so well received by my Facebook friends.

To address your comments:

Oh, and Operation Ball Pit Bed also inspired this musical tribute/retweet from Meghan:

And then a hero comes along... RT @btindrelunas This is gonna be either the best or worst night of sleep ever. http://flic.kr/p/8pmN5Zless than a minute ago via webMeghan
MeghanEvans

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8/4/2010 22:10

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