eJournalist in the Making

I had a few proud motherly moments during my trip to New York City this weekend.  Not that I’m in any way as cool as Mary’s own mom, but that we’d grown so close that it felt like my own little chickadee was spreading her wings, and that made me happy.

Mary is one of my closest friends and my roommate in college.  We were randomly assigned to the same dorm room for our freshman fall semester at UF and I couldn’t have been luckier to get such an awesome roommate. We lived together for three years in college and now she has thrown caution to the wind and moved to New York City to live out her big-city dreams, and her friends get to come spend a wistful weekend in the city with a free place to stay.

We ate some delectable food. In the East Village we had greasy but authentic savory Venezuelan arepas at Caracas, which tasted even better with a brown-bagged Corona to wash it down.  The place sat about six people total so we munched our dinner in the park.  The next day and right around the corner Colonel Sanders was put to shame by the fried chicken I had at The Pink Tea Cup. Soul food at its finest. What I was most looking forward to as far as pleasing my palate was concerned were the famous cupcakes of Magnolia Bakery.  They were good but a little dense and crumbly for my liking.  It’s hard to knock a bakery that cranks out fresh cupcakes until 12:30 at night.

Other than that we mostly just moseyed around, shopped and people-watched. The feelings of independence I gathered from living out Mary’s life in the city with her, even if it was only for three days, was just the motivation I needed and wanted to get out of my short trip.

That’s right. I’ve watched Barack’s election-night acceptance speech about 12 times since we saw it live last week on Nov. 4.  Despite the election news being off the airwaves, I still can’t get enough. Some of my favorite photo collections of our new President Elect:

Election night behind-the-scenes on Flickr

Obama with his kids on HuffPost

Scout Tufankjian’s candid photos

Callie Shell for Time Magazine

And I will now stop acting like a celebrity-obsessed teeny-bopper. It is all out of my system. Time to look past the public image and forward to the days and the years that lie ahead. I can’t wait.

It’s been a busy day in the Colliflower/Ortiz family today.  Aside from being a fairly political family and being anxious about the long-anticipated presidential election today, we were awoken around 6 a.m. this morning by my sister Courtney dropping off my nephew Owen so that her and her husband could head to the hospital.  Stella Noelle wanted in on all of the political excitement, and she showed herself to the world at 11:13 a.m. with a swift and easy delivery.  She’s a gorgeous little election day baby.  Needless to say the day has been rather hectic, only to continue with non-stop news watching for the remainder of the evening.

I’ve been debating about the “obligatory election post” and whether or not to jump on the band wagon, but I have still not yet decided.  I think I’ll be more swayed to write if this election goes a particular way. Here’s to HOPE.

Thankfully the American people will only be forcefed political advertisements for the current races for two more days.  I couldn’t be more relieved to see crappy regular commercials make their triumphant return to television.  I don’t even remember what a newscast looks or sounds like without an election going on.  Watching attack ad after attack ad not only between presidential candidates McCain and Obama, but also back and fourth between Congressional hopefuls Raul Martinez (D) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R) and between Mario Diaz-Balart (R) and Joe Garcia (D). Both Democrats are fighting the incumbent Republican Diaz-Balart brothers for a spot in the House of Reps in Washington representing Districts 21 and 25.

What bothers me the most isn’t having my light-hearted television interrupted by three minutes of negativity for the sake of winning an election.  The fact that these local campaigns do not bother to form their own campaign message but simply ride the coattails of any successful messages that seem to stick from the presidential campaigns makes it not only overly repetitive but pretty confusing to viewers.  McCain runs ads about Obama spreading the wealth that seemed to gain some traction with undecided voters.  Suddenly Joe Garcia was labeled a proponent of spreading the wealth around.  McCain is a Bush clone? Now so are the local Republican incumbents. It’s lazy mudslinging and the voters deserve better than that.

I don’t trade stocks. I don’t have a 401K. I get a bi-weekly paycheck from my part-time job that keeps me from having to ask my parents for spending money while I’m on the job search.  I just got hired and Banana Republic hasn’t announced job cuts to their sales support team.  Does the economy effect me? Not in these ways.

But…

The lack of career-starting jobs in media and journalism has decreased in the last month or so, as evidenced by the number of online media job posts on Mediabistro.com.  Before all of this stock market nastiness, there was a steady number of job openings to look at, around 500 nationwide.  That number now has dropped to 328 as of today.  Three hundred twenty eight job postings you say?! That’s plenty of opportunities! Quit your whining and get to work!  Well, yes. It should be easy.  But the reality is that “easy” means moving.  I’m a two-time world traveler! I shouldn’t be afraid to move!  The more and more that number of available jobs sinks, the more enticing a new start in a new place will become.