marvelously mundane

It’s Vegan MoFo again, and since I’ve kinda been working in the food industry for the last few months, I wanted to write a little about it.

I have a habit of visiting restaurants, bakeries, and food trucks I like on a fairly regular basis. Like at least once a week. That’s how I start to get to know people who work at these establishments, and sometimes become really good friends with them. That’s basically how I came to work part-time at Whiffies Fried Pies months ago. And from that experience filling in, the daughter of the owners of Los Gorditos asked me to work a Saturday shift, then another and another until I started working there 6 days a week.

I can’t express just how much I love both of these places. Incredible stories of how they began and the crazy nicest people in the world running them.

And, now, the food.

Both Whiffies and Los Gorditos have vegan items. Gregg, the owner of Whiffies, which opened in late Spring of 2009, and I have talked at length about the evolution of vegan/vegetarian options in town over the years, especially among food carts.

Ugggghhh, so I’ve (obviously) decided to stop doing the May daily blogging challenge.
I didn’t always feel that I had something worthwhile to contribute, especially when I was on deadline trying to finish other work. I am a night owl, accomplishing more without daytime distractions, so do a large amount of work after 10pm. Trying to finish blog entries before midnight — yes, I was probably worrying too much about the wording of the entries as well, so doing multiple revisions — was stealing too much time from my other projects.
I definitely have been thinking about this a lot the last few days and weeks, and will be refocusing my attentions to writing posts about the work I am doing, rather than general posts about myself.

I've been busy! Here's the view of the Seattle bay from Pike Place Market.

Since my last entries, I moderated a panel at Digital Journalism Camp, went to Seattle with the Vegan Iron Chef crew, attended BarCamp Portland, had a friend visit from New York, started working a part-time occasional job Friday nights, participated in Hands Across Hawthorne, and have continued to help plan Open Source Bridge and Vegan Iron Chef, while trying to keep up on photographing street art and recording gendered and unisex bathrooms around town. Oh, and both my mom and sister had birthdays, and mine is coming up in June, on Father’s Day.
Things will be calming down a bit after the week-long Open Source Bridge conference is over, and I’ll be able to work on a decent editorial calendar and have more meaningful things to post when I do post.
Thanks for the patience!

I don’t talk openly about a good portion of my past. But, it’s often the things I talk the least about that have affected me the most.
Throughout elementary school, I was in the GATE program. Gifted and Talented Education. It was just one class per grade level at my school, so I pretty much saw the same kids every day from 2nd to 6th grade. We got to know each other *extremely* well.
I went to school in Anaheim, California, known most famously for Disneyland. But, back in the late 80s/early 90s, if you went just a few blocks away from the park, you would hit some pretty rundown areas. All of that has pretty much been gentrified now, but back then…
Two of my more vivid memories of 1993-94 were two students at my elementary school being busted for smoking and dealing pot the day of our 6th-grade promotion, and a boy I liked in 7th grade being arrested and sent to juvie for dealing crack — which I didn’t know he did until AFTER his arrest.

Gangs were rampant throughout Orange County, often satellites of established L.A. ones. We had regular assemblies about gangs, drugs, and drinking, and baggy clothes were banned from school. California was building more jails, police departments were increasing officer numbers, and the area was getting dirtier and grittier with the addition of the school district filing for bankruptcy.
But, well, we were the nerdy kids. We were encouraged to read and study and do creative hobbies, and were a bit sheltered from some of this other world that existed around us.
Except for twins Felix and Bryan.
The had two older brothers and parents who owned a small business, so were constantly working, and thus leaving the boys unsupervised.

(One result of knowing each other so well: Having frank discussions about wet dreams in 6th grade after an incident at Outdoor Ed, one of my best guy friends telling me about receiving his first blow job, knowing at what age every girl started her period, and a friend getting pregnant and dropping out of school in 8th grade. It’s a wonder why I came up with the idea to start a sex-centric magazine, yes?)

(To be continued in Part 2 tomorrow!)

I know everyone gets nervous. I know this, and yet, I always get an irrational fear that I’ll spectacularly fail at something, just because I’ve somehow managed to psyche myself out of it.

I’m moderating a panel Saturday for a regional journalism conference. I’ve been excited about this event since I went to its inaugural launch in 2009, and have been telling the organizer since then that I want to get more involved in the planning.

One person who was more involved, emailed me a good 9 months ago about being on this panel myself, but I knew I wouldn’t have Sexistential running yet. (Yes, I’ve delayed launch for quite a long time, while talking myself into writing and researching more, so I would feel more ready before showing it to more people, or, *gasp*, pitching it to an advertiser or investor.)

Instead, I agreed to moderate the panel instead — which has since been named “Goodbye day job: Lessons from three startup founders” — featuring local media entrepreneurs.

There are three white men on this panel. They are all great, and have such different personalities and interests, but, well, I have to point this out. I am a multiethnic woman in journalism, and we’re unfortunately fairly rare these days. I have lots of female editors and reporters I call colleagues, but since meeting my fellow Chips Quinn scholars back in 2004, I haven’t encountered very many ethnic women in the industry.
When I do — like the editor of El Sol in Salinas — I have to ask the question I am often contemplating about my own career path: How much harder is this for you? As a woman, I keep getting the feeling that I need to prove myself so much more than male colleagues — I have to be more knowledgeable about more subjects, as well as being skilled at software and code, and be able to look and act more professional at all times.

As part of my role of Chef liaison for Vegan Iron Chef, a photographer and I have been visiting each of the three contestants at their businesses, taking pictures of their “game face,” and getting some shots of them smiling for the event program.

Between shots, I ask the chefs and their assistants questions. Trying to get to know someone in about a 20-minute window of time. Getting a feel for their cooking style, attitude toward business, competitive nature, passions, drives, and inspirations.

It’s coincidental that I volunteered for this role; I have been doing something similar to prepare for Digital Journalism Camp.

I’ve had this idea for over a year now. Since just before Valentine’s Day 2010, to be slightly more accurate. An online publication focusing on the political, monetary, cultural, sociological, and psychological aspects of sex and the sex industry.

The first month will focus on “Power.”

**more to come. tired.*

Score of 9 correct out of 10 on the Program Language Inventor or Serial Killer quiz.

I sometimes wonder what kind of psychological damage I’m doing to myself by going through arrest records nearly every day. At least I can strangely identify serial killers with near-accuracy.

I totally admit to being addicted to webcomics. And by addicted, I mean reading roughly 20 on a weekly basis, while going through the archives of dozens more when I have time.

Here’s a few of my favorites:

Love love love these the most for strong female main characters:

Octopus Pie, Girls With Slingshots, Girl Genius, Wapsi Square.

Funny and nerdy:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, XKCD, Cat and Girl, Hark! A Vagrant.

Make you think (and are beautiful to look at):

A Softer World, Dresden Codak, Exploding Dog, Family Man (by the author of Bite Me!).

Can’t stop reading, though a bit more ridiculous:

Questionable Content, All New Issues, Dumbing of Age, Vampire Cheerleaders, Penny & Aggie, Scary Go Round (and the new Bad Machinery).

NSFW (and I totally mean it!):

Chester 5000 XYV, Brightest, Bucko (DAR! was often NSFW, this is more tame), Starfighter, Curvy, Menage A 3, Get A Roomie, Oglaf.

Adobe’s InDesign has been industry standard for the last 4-5 years, being updated with a new release every two years or so. Before that, it was Quark, and before that,PageMaker (also by Adobe) reigned supreme.

I hate relying on InDesign and Adobe for expensive software and licensing. Really hate it. So I started using Scribus, which is open source desktop publishing software, for basic design concepts a little more than a year ago. Using it actually led me to start volunteering with Open Source Bridge, actually, because I wanted to discuss design software with others.

I first learned PageMaker back in the early-90s, and was one of the only incoming freshmen on my high school’s newspaper staff who knew anything about design. I was more interested in editing and layout than writing — still am, actually — and became a copy editor right away.

I was a prolific reporter in college, but still enjoyed copy editing more, and working with layout designers for ideas for photo spreads, features, special themed issues, and redesigns of the paper and entertainment guide each year. I got to direct that change when I became editor of my college’s daily paper my senior year.

I have a friend who I love dearly. Her family is so welcoming, and they all treat me as though I’m related to them — an adopted member of their clan. So, if she ever needs something from me, I drop what I’m doing and am there for her within the hour.

The last few months, this has meant helping her with school work, so that she could finish the last few credits she needed to graduate from college. I remember having a horrible case of senioritis for my entire last semester; barely attending one class, needing to ask for an extension on essays, and never quite finishing the reading material. Of course all those affected my American Studies major; for Journalism, I was editor of the university’s daily newspaper, attending national conferences, winning awards for past coverage, and landing a pretty well-known scholarship internship for minority journalists. (I’ll totally stop talking about me soon, I swear.) I was so incredibly stressed out from the pull of both majors, excited about finally finishing school and getting to start the internship, and completing my senior project for the Honors Program — after Spring Break, I’d just stopped caring about doing beyond the bare minimum.

Back to my friend. I didn’t want her to experience the same rejection of the education system that resulted from my college years. She’s just been so idealistic, and I wanted her to stay that way! Of course that hasn’t happened.

Her internship led her to be resolved to always work for herself (not hard, since she already managers her family’s business and will be expanding it now that she’s out of school) and to not so easily trust coworkers. For school itself, she can better tell the difference between good and bad teaching methods, which professors will give out grades based on students’ personality rather than quality of work, and a whole lot more. I know some of my stories of school have affected this change, and I know it needed to happen, but I still oddly feel bad about it.