TGI Friday Five day! This little game is the salvation of many a weary blogger.
1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? I am the manager of public relations at this university. The job has been particularly trying this week because of this report, released Tuesday. I did not choose this career path, but things fell into place. It's a good job. I'm not one of the 50 percent of Americans who are disgruntled employees. Not most of the time, anyway. Sure, I gripe about the job on occasion. But I have a lot of freedom from interference, get to write about things that interest me (and a few things that don't), and am free to screw up and assume all responsibility when I do. As for why I didn't plan to be here, it's because when I graduated from J-School I assumed I'd be headed straight for journalistic stardom. I should have had at least one Pulitzer by now.
3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices? My father was a shoe stylist who got his start in his career by bluffing. He claimed to know how to design shoes when he didn't know the first thing about it. But he got a shot at it, and succeeded. Similarly, I bluffed my way into the study of journalism.
4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family? No.
5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why? The easiest job in the world is the job that you're good at and that makes you happy. The hardest job in the world is the job you cannot do proficiently and that keeps you from jumping out of bed in the morning.
blog[hyphen]osphere. The blog-osphere (not blogosphere, sans hyphen) is the topic of this Newsweek piece. In it, Steven Levy attempts to scratch beneath the surface of the A-list bloggers to describe what the rest of us are blogging about. He writes:
So what kind of Weblogs live in the dark matter? There are endless personal journals like Zack’s, exposing thoughts and experiences that range from the somewhat profound to the stultifyingly banal. There are collectively millions of links to obscure items tucked in dusty recesses of the Web. There are blogs devoted to cats, blogs about knitting, blogs about 802.11 wireless standards, blogs about “The Golden Girls” TV show, blogs about baseball, blogs about sex (hey, it is the Internet). One blog is written in the voice of Julius Caesar, tracking the Roman’s progress as he takes on Gaul. There are blog short stories and a blog novel in progress.
Fun, yes, but will it go over in Catholic church game rooms? If you're familiar with buzzword bingo, an amusement for boring boardroom meetings, then you're sure to love televangelist bingo. Link courtesy of Backup Brain.
Prayer request. Something weird happened in my last post. I tried to post a prayer request for a minister friend of Stephen Shields. But I apparently did something wrong, and now Blogger is being unforgiving and uncooperative, not allowing me to edit the entry below. Anyway, please pray for Stephen Shields' friend Chris Temple, who is hospitalized with leukemia, and for his family and his church. Check Stephen Shields' blog for updates. I apologize for my blogging incompetence.