I am late, and I am ironing a skirt. I am ironing a skirt on a stack of magazines. It is not going well.
The hard part seems to be because my ironing board is 8 ½ by 11, and the skirt is not. And if I press too hard, or ratchet up the heat too high, the greatest names in American journalism will be indelibly seared into my skirt seat.
Having never purchased an ironing board-you just never get around to some things-I reach for magazines because they are the biggest, flattest objects I have in my room. They are also the most abundant, outnumbering even socks. I have piles of Vogue, Vanity Fair, Esquire and (ahem) Teen Vogue, old SELFs and Shapes for gym flippage, and dozens of Economists I will get around to, I swear. Marissa Miller's 36-24-36 greets me every morning from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition on my floor, not far from the New Yorkers filched from my roommate, two issues of Washingtonian (word up D.C.), a Glamour I borrowed from Brodie and a smattering of Newsweeks, Rolling Stones and Harper's Bazaars.
I am a junkie. Welcome to my den.
This addiction defies all market research into the 18-to-24s. We scroll, baby-flipping through dead-tree pages is as passé as POGs. Sure, I do my fair share of staring into the tanning-bed backlight of my Mac, but glossy paper-oh beloved, increasingly costly paper-how I love you.
This love for magazines and the process of journalism started long before I got to Duke. It started in earnest at age seven, when I decided my future was in zookeeping. I called my grandmother for a ride to the library, hoping to pick up a few titles relevant to my field.
"You know you'll have to pick up elephant poo-poo," she told me on the ride there.
"I know," I said.
"And mash up fish and feed them to the penguins," she said.
"I know," I said.
"And you'll never make very much money," she added.
I paused. Being seven, I had never given income much thought.
She pressed on.
"You like to read and you're always a snoop," she said, crushing my dream. "You should be a journalist."
The regimen of "Murphy Brown" and "Mystery!" that followed every time I visited her was probably coincidental.
Proselytized or not, I took her advice. Eleven years later, I lugged far too much stuff into GA and waltzed with far too much ambition into 301 Flowers, determined to squeeze everything I could out of these newsprint pages.
I could not have imagined the rest. Crying in that GA bedroom after writing a story that caused a rogue band of DSG operatives to dump all that days' Chronicles into the trash. Roving the streets of London, reporting on terrorism, Keira Knightley's slight frame and an alarming spate of small primate thefts. Learning the Carolina shag as a Senate press intern from retired reporter Joan McKinney, the reason they installed a women's bathroom into the Capitol's press chambers. Furrowing my brow with friends over a spread of 10 small brownie chunks, taste-testing them on Washingtonian's expense account for a hard-hitting piece on fudgiest local offerings. Sleeping in 301 Flowers most nights in those black spring months of 2006, manning the phones while my fellow editors were camped out in front of the Durham courthouse.
It has been a wild and fulfilling ride.
Still, with the gloom-and-doom forecasts of the print media's relevance, I've been sincerely warned of the turbulence ahead. When I was in his opinion-writing class, Professor William Raspberry wondered in one of his Washington Post columns if, by training his students to become opinion writers for print, he was making us into "buggy-whip makers-skilled craftsmen with no demand for their work."
When YouTube's "Sneezing Panda" attracts 12 million viewers, compared to the lowly four Diggs for Esquire's 17,000-word Iraq-war elegy "The Things That Carried Him," I can see his point.
But some of us still buy buggy whips in spades, recycling them for ironing boards. Some of us still think that lengthy, well-reported and serious prose can find a home on these Interwebs, and can be adapted to be even better online. And if printed magazines die, I'll still write. It's my unscratchable itch.
Today, I can almost taste it. I am nearly out there, a Real Live Journalist. I know it will take a lifetime before I'm sending my dear friends and family a postcard from the Pinnacle of Success. But I am thrilled to start the journey to Base Camp 1.
Sarah Ball is a Trinity senior. She is the co-editor of Towerview and the former editorial page editor and features editor of The Chronicle.
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