Castaways and Cutouts

I know that I am echoing Lizzy and Slate so I am not the first person to talk about this, but I too have been taken in by MTV's new little project "The Paper". I've watched all three posted episodes, and I feel like this could be a good show. At first I thought that finally all the newspaper nerds of the world were going to have their moment in the sun, and there are a few moments in the first episode that tease you that way. I especially love when Amanda likes the gray scale but Alex and the In-Chief don't like it and get it thrown out. That kind of stuff I want to see more of. I think this show is really about the kids. Just like the Laguna Beach, these kids are insanely wealthy. They don't have normal lives, but there are some similarities that exist because high school is the same pretty much anywhere. I feel for Alex when he doesn't make Editor-In-Chief, I've been there buddy and its a tough pill to swallow. My advice is just don't let it hang over you for too long. I lost both Senior Class President and Editor-In-Chief my senior year. If I had had those under my belt I might be something other than a broke grad student at PSU. I might be ruler of the universe. I most certainly would have been Mr. Spartan, capturing the much sought after CHS tri-fecta. Whatever happens in this show, I want to see how this paper comes together. I know how hard the High-O-Scope was to put together and at our biggest we had a staff of twenty. When I was a junior there were less than ten people putting the paper together. That was fun, and tough. I imagine that a staff of seventy is impossible to handle. What I like most about the show is that some of the kids seem pretty stoked to be working on the newspaper. Junior year there were a lot of people like that on HOS. Senior year there were less, and it wasn't as fun. High school newspapers are the beginning of great things, look at Kurt Vonnegut or Joan Acker, and that tradition needs to be celebrated.

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This is Amanda. Editor-In-Chief. Slate summed her up pretty well as the Tracy Flick of high school journalism. If you don't understand the reference see Election, or see it anyway because its a really great movie.

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This is Alex. He's a pretty good dude. Trying to be both friends with Amanda and friends with everyone else who hate Amanda. Texting a girl to ask her out is a classy move. I don't care who you are. That's on tape buddy, and you are going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life.

Speaking of Editor's-In-Chief, I ran into my old "boss", from junior year, Molly Sullivan. She works at a movie theater downtown. I haven't seen her since graduation, and I'm sure she didn't recognize me. We weren't friends. In fact junior year most of the paper staff did everything in their power to keep her hands off the paper. Not unlike the Amanda situation. I still remember, though, that one of my friends said, to my face, that the paper was only as good as her writing. He was talking about an issue that I had at least one story in, quite possibly more. To this day that still hurts, and I think about it every time I sit down to write. If Molly is so much better than me maybe she should be in grad school and I should be taking tickets for Regal Cinemas. Who knows, maybe she is researching a story or a novel. More likely she's stupid, but I'm not bitter, I promise.

One more thing about "The Paper". I think its pretty sweet that most of the kids in the show are Jewish. Its nice to see some of my people getting a little love from MTV. It hurts, though, to think that there are places where the kids go to Hebrew school and get to hang out with a bunch of other Jews. In Corvallis I never felt discriminated against or anything like that, but being a quarter Jewish was enough for people to refer to me as a Jew, which by the way is not in and of itself a derogatory term. Maybe if I had gone to Hebrew school I would have some sweet stories to write like Phillip Roth.

In news not about "The Paper", but from a paper, the LA Times, the discoverer of LSD died. He was 102 years old. I've never taken acid, and i really have no opinion about the drug in either way, but it really seems like a drug that defined a culture. I've read some stuff that really made me dislike Timothy Leary, but for the most part the acid generation was pretty hip. I'm pretty sure some of the best American writers were into LSD. Its kind of a sad day. But to the guys credit one-hundred and two years is a pretty good chunk of time.  

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