I have a habit of visiting a list of sites each morning before I can get anything done. This chore is just as legitimate as washing my face or drinking tea – my day cannot start before it gets accomplished. The following is a list of sites I visit. Looking through them all is my equivalent of drinking a cup of coffee: it wakes me up and gets me through my day.

• Oh No They Didn’t - Best celebrity/gossip blog ever. And it’s not just the content, it’s the comments. Example: (“She is unappealing to me in every way imaginable.” “Look at that GQ motherfucker.” “Why does it look like Nikki Reed stores chestnuts in her cheeks. she looks like a squirrel. “) And these examples aren’t even the best of the best. I feel like ONTD is the only site that gets it. You know, really gets it. You know what I’m talking about. It has provided me with so many fits of laughter and so many tears of joy. I love it with all my heart.
• Dlisted - Another gossip blog with flawless commentary from Michael K. Having a bad day? Visit Dlisted, it’s guaranteed to turn your frown upside down.
• Twitter – Join the twittolution! Twitter is an amazing social media tool that has allowed me to connect with so many journalists, writers and truly awesome people.
• Facebook – At first I was against joining Facebook, just the same way I was once against joining Myspace. I really didn’t want to have anything to do with people I knew from school, but it’s just another way to connect with people and the sooner you accept that it’s a good thing to connect with others in social networks, the sooner things will run smoothly. I like seeing what people are up to and also it gives me a chance to share info with them, whether that be a video or an article or whatnot.
• The New York Times – For me, the NY Times is the end all, be all of journalism. It has amazing articles by incredible journalists and this might sound strange, but it really is my life goal to write for them in some capacity or another. Brilliant reporting and writing.
• Dooce – Do you know Heather Armstrong? If not, you need to start reading Dooce. It’s hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, nostalgic and refreshing, and it makes you come back for more.
• Etsy - Buy and support handmade! Etsy is an amazing community of creative minds and I not only visit to seek out unique items to buy, but for inspiration.
• BBC Rss Feed – Next to the NY Times, BBC is my ideal news organization that I love. They have incredible reporting, especially if you watch BBC World News – the reporters at the BBC make you feel like they’re human and actually CARE about what they’re reporting.

Photo by hamedmasoumi

I often blame my temporary inabilities to write on my surroundings. Sometimes I can’t think when it’s too quiet and other times, I can’t concentrate if I’m anywhere but a library. Other days it has to do with the day of the week. Although I have the time on weekends, all I want to do is stay in bed and watch bad television. On the weekdays, when I’m super charged with energy, I have to concentrate on other responsibilities. It’s a lose-lose situation. When I think about the fact that I have to compromise my writing for the time or the place, I feel sad. I wish I could think of a more eloquent synonym, but it really makes me sad that that’s what it’s come to.

I often think that the only way I’ll be able to write anything worthwhile is to go hide away in a cabin for months until I come up with something that I find fairly decent. I need the quiet, the change of atmosphere, the scenery to inspire me, to make me come up with ideas that the concrete jungles of Los Angeles are  stifling.

Writing habits are an interesting topic and I’m not entirely sure if I’ve discovered mine yet. I tend to write ideas down and dwell on them for a long time. I’ll write the title of a story I want to work on and save it, or I’ll see something on the news or hear someone having a conversation and realize how great it would be to include that in a story. Mostly, I think my inspiration comes from life, from relationships, from what people say and do, to what they don’t say and do. I try to draw from reality as much as possible because for me, reality is just as entertaining, if not more, than fantasy.

I write everywhere. I write on post-it notes, notebooks that I haven’t used for years, scraps of paper, the notepad I use at work, I even take down notes on my iPhone. I’ve tried to buy fancy notebooks so I can keep my thoughts in one place, but they always seem to escape me. These days, when I do write in somewhere other than a centralized place, I take my post-it notes and my scraps and everything else and tape them in my main notebook.

I tend to write bits of ideas on paper and then expand those ideas on my computer. I like writing while I’m sitting on my bed, with a cup of tea, especially when it’s raining. My dream would be to have one of those window-sill type ledges where you pile up pillows and read or write.

I stumbled across a blog, Rodcorp, that highlighted some of the work and writing habits of some of my favorite writers and people. I echo a lot of their sentiments.

Jonathan Safran Foer, who is best known for his 2002 novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” has habits that sound like mine:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch, and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially, I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

Stephen Fry seems to have encapsulated my fears:

As a young writer–I was then contemplating how to move forward after my first effort–I felt so enthusiastically and agonizingly aware of the blank pages in front of me. How could I fill them? Did I even want to fill them? Was I becoming a writer because I wanted to become a writer or because I was becoming a writer? I stared into the empty pages day after day, looking, like Narcissus, for myself.

Virginia Woolf does what I feel I must do:

I don’t take another job. I don’t do anything. I go up to my house in the country and pull out all the plugs, virtually. I just do it nonstop until I’m finished. I envy writers who can write on planes and take a break for a week and then get back to it. I have to get into a sort of zone. [...] With writing, I don’t know what it is. I just have to get into a complete world. It has something to do with an inability to concentrate, which is the absolute bottom line of writing.

I’m hoping to get a better sense of what I’m capable of in terms of writing and also my habits this year.

Writer’s block. Pomegranate juice and cardamom tea on a Sunday afternoon. Damp weather at first, but not for long, as the sun shines through the window by midday. Liberated by the fact that I’m using a Sunday for what it’s good for: being lazy. It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to just sit down, read a good book, listen to good music and reflect. All work and no play squashes creativity. I’ve been having trouble writing here lately. So much to say, but having a hard time writing it all down, coherently. Right now, I’m thinking about this year, the year of the ox. I’m thinking about everything and nothing at the same time. I’m thinking that I miss Hugo the Maltese in London…

I feel very self-conscious when I write in this web space of mine – that might be why I’ve been avoiding it, that or because I’ve been having quite a great time posting shorter blurbs on the amazingness that is Twitter.

The truth is, is that I can’t define what this space is most useful for. Is it a personal blog with random entries about all aspects of my life? Is it about my journey into journalism? Is it something I should use for my professional career? Is it a mix of all these things? See, these are questions I don’t have answers for and perhaps it worries me when it really shouldn’t. Maybe it’s ok to not have the answers. Maybe it’s ok to write about whatever I wish, without following any specific guidelines, I’m not sure. I guess you could say what it has been for me mostly, is a place of reflection, a place where I can write about whatever I wish and look back at later, wondering what I must have been thinking or feeling. It’s a bit like a memory capsule.

A lot of what prevents me from writing in here about topics I’d like and as frequently as I’d like, is the sheer amount of energy loss I have when I actually have the time to write. An eight hour day, coupled with a three hour daily commute really makes you want to collapse by the time you get home. I hate it. It sucks. I wish traffic would die. But alas, no such thing will happen. This is Los Angeles, and traffic is the price we pay for the year round Mediterranean weather.

Still, there are other reasons I’ve been avoiding this place, like the fact that I currently don’t have a camera and hate that I can’t include photos with my posts or take pictures of the things I bake.

I’ve had quite a busy week, full of editing, writing, categorizing, movie screenings, dreams, goals and social media. I hope tomorrow and this weekend are better days for the writepudding.

Yesterday, Henry the Maltese had what is the textbook definition of a lazy Sunday. He slept and stretched and huddled into a ball, occasionally looking up if he felt the wind had blown the wrong way. He was warm, well-fed and loved, without a care in the world. While I sat by him, I began to realize how jealous I was of the fact that he didn’t have anything to worry about at all, while I spend most of my day worrying – worrying about succeeding as a journalist, about securing a writing job I love, about making a difference in this crazy world, about starting my life, about pursuing my education, about every single minute thing.

The truth is, I’m not very happy with my life at the moment. I think I’m going to adopt a policy of being brutally honest on the web space of mine, because I find that I tend to censor myself and because of that, my thoughts tend to become cannibalized.

I’m unsatisfied with both sectors of my life: professional and personal.

When I graduated in 2007, armed with a bachelor’s in journalism, I wanted to really, honest to God make a different with my writing. And I still do, that part hasn’t changed, but I feel there are so many obstacles that have prevented me from doing so, one being the current economic blunder we’re in, another being that the journalism times, they are a changin’, well they have been for quite some time, and that’s fine. I like change, especially shifts in technology, but because of this change, for better or for worse, few jobs remain for people like me. Where are all the young journalists and why wont anyone give them a job?

In addition to the current full-time position I have as a content editor, I have been writing freelance ever since I left school, and even before then, and guess what? For most of the time, I’ve been doing it for free, just to get my foot in the door.

I know I have the skills. I definitely have the passion and enthusiasm and driving force that’s needed in this business, so why wont all those struggling newspapers and magazines, hire people like me, who know how to adapt to change and make it work, instead of not giving anyone with less than 10 years of experience the time of day? It’s really disturbing.

Then, there are many moments throughout my day that I feel guilty for being unhappy. The guilt doesn’t hit my immediately. It actually builds up and hits my slowly, like a tidal wave, but when it does hit, it’s awful. I should be thankful that I have a job, at least. I should be thankful I’m not in a position that’s completely unrelated to my passions and goals in life. I should be happy I’m a content editor who manages well over 400 writers and produces content for the web.

That’s the thing though, I’m not happy. I want to do more. I want to write more. I want to write about things that matter and perhaps things that don’t, and I want to be happy when I come home, not miserable. Maybe I’m having a bad day. Maybe this will blow over, or maybe not. I do know one thing, my passion and ideas and creativity cannot be contained by a 9 to 5 job in a cubicle, it just wont happen. Journalism, don’t fail me now.

When a new year arrives, nothing cements its status better than writing the date for the first time. This year, it happened to me quite early on, since I trotted into work on January 2, after a two day binge on Disneyland and doing absolutely nothing. I sat at my desk and between dealing with writers, editing and fumbling around on Twitter, I wrote the date down for some reason or another, and for the first time as far as I can recall, I didn’t mess up. I didn’t write “1/2/08.” I didn’t have to cross it out and fill in the correct year. I simply took my pen to paper and wrote out “1/2/09.”

It might have been trivial, but it was exhilarating, knowing that I had actually implanted the seed of ‘moving forward’ in my mind, rather than staying stuck in the past, or carrying on in the present. Although I had written the date of a new year correctly on the first try, I had long resolved before 2009 actually came to make some resolutions, or solutions, or goals. Whatever you like to call them, I decided to take action and have an impact on the long and winding road that is my life.

While I write here or watch television and especially when I am driving, or rather stuck in Los Angeles traffic, I feel like my mind might some day explode, because its reached its maximum capacity of occupants, like an elevator. I feel my hopes, my goals, my ambitions, my dreams and my fears float up to the surface and then I imagine feeling so full, so up to the brim, that I do explode, and hundreds of thousands of little neuron bubbles containing my thoughts descend to the pavement and desintigrate. Poof.

It’s a very overwhelming feeling and a frightening one too, to know that there’s so much you want to do, but don’t have all the time in the world to do it in.

I’m trying to change all of this in 2009. I’m trying to regroup and reorganize my thoughts and my wants. I’m trying to isolate them so they don’t collide and spill over. I’m trying to make sense of my purpose and of my life and of my future. Sometimes, it’s harder being younger, than it is being older. Finding your ground and establishing your existence and goals, that’s the hard part. That’s the battle. Not living it. Living it is easy, but people make it hard. But trust me on the sunscreen.

In 2009, I propose to drink eight glasses of water a day. I propose to take better care of my body and my mind, to think before I eat and look after myself. I propose to apply to graduate school, to get a degree in pursuit of my two loves, journalism and English, or both if I’m lucky. I propose to further myself through continued education, through the classroom and the professors that I miss, all the while knowing that knowledge truly is power. I propose to finally start writing more, to getting published in a national magazine, to keep faith in print, to write short stories and start on a novel, to do what I love. I propose to read more, because to write, you must read. I propose to travel, to London, to Oregon, to San Francisco and perhaps Seattle. I propose to save money and not let a pair of gorgeous shoes in the window persuade me otherwise. Mostly, after six years of being so far apart from each other, me in Los Angeles and him in London, I propose to make sure that starting in 2009, we’re never apart from each other again. I don’t know where we’ll be, but I’ll know this: that we’re together. Some day, when I’m feeling particularly brave and open, I’ll share our complete story here, piece by piece. But for today, suffice it to say that someone in this world loves me very much and that I love that someone just as much. There is someone I can’t live without, even if I tried, someone who’s seen my good and my bad, who wants to spend his life with me – someone who packs my luggage and prepares my breakfast while I sleep, someone who makes me laugh beyond words, someone who was made for me, someone whom is the longing for the half of myself that I lost, when God decided to split people in two. Yea, I love him, and that love I feel for him, words can’t even do it justice. Happy New Year, here I come.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it – Oscar Wilde

As any good writer or journalist was and probably still is, I am a lover of books. I have been from a small age, where I remember gobbling up the entire “Indian in the Cupboard” series and “Diary of Anne Frank” as fast as I could. I could read during anything, even when my mom was hell bent on vacuuming the entire house, and there was no room I could run to to escape the loud, unnecessary humming sound that came from the cleaning device. For some reason, I was really into Leon Uris novels, even though they were beyond my scope and probably, my understanding. Jewish history and the Holocaust fascinated me, most likely because I could relate to it, since I grew up knowing my own tainted history of the Armenian Genocide. I think the first book I remember reading was called “Rent a Third Grader” by B.B Hiller in, you guessed it, third grade. I brought it to school with me and my teacher became so intrigued, that I think she might have recommended it to other students or teachers.

It was the story of a class of third graders who try to raise money so they could save a retired police horse name Partner from going to HappiPet Food to meet his end, and it was amazing. After that, I remember delving into “The Babysitter’s Club” of course, as well as the “Nancy Drew” series which I absolutely loved, and Judy Blume books.

Over the last couple of years, my reading has sharply declined, because well, as you know, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans, as John Lennon once said. The books I was reading were mostly for school and I only managed to read a few for pleasure including “Back roads” by Tawni O’ Dell and “Lolita” by Nabokov. However, because of a humanities class I once took, I discovered my favorite book to date, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera. If you have a reading list, or you’re looking for a book to read, I cannot stress how wonderful this book is. It will leave you breathless.

In 2008, I wanted to change my reading habits, so I started three books but never managed to finish them, including “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. It wasn’t until I started reading the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer that I remembered how much I absolutely love and adore literature and reading, which is quite ironic, because they aren’t very well written and almost quite laughable, but when you have such an intriguing and amazing story as the one that Meyer created, it’s easy to let down your guard and be consumed by the tale. Four books about Bella and Edward’s vampire-human love tryst later, I am completely enamored with books yet again and I’ve stacked about 19 books I must finish this year, that you can find the titles of below.

1. Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris
2. Slaughterhouse – Five – Kurt Vonnegut
3. Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
4. Skylark Farm – Antonia Arslan
5. Fig Eater – Jody Shields
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
7. Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
9. The Hungry Years – William Leith
10. The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
11. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Call of the Weird – Louis Theroux
13. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey
14. Immortality – Milan Kundera
15. Julie & Julia – Julie Powell
16. Beginner’s Greek – James Collins
17. The Nanny Diaries – Emma McLaughlin & Nicole Kraus
18. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
19. Difficult Loves – Italo Calvino

The year of the Ox has finally arrived. I spent the last remaining hours of 2008 cramped between strollers and over bearing people, trying to fight away the frigid air and navigate through the lands of tomorrow, fantasy, frontier and adventure. By the time I left Disneyland in the wee hours of 2009, I was tired and cold and ready to call it a day, but that will never take away the fact that I had an amazing time, even with the annoyances. It’s the best place to be for New Year’s Eve, believe me. Note to parents of kids aged five or younger: If your kid can’t walk on its own, then you have no business bringing them to Disneyland. Yes yes, I know, it’s fun, it’s meant for kids, they have a good time, yadda, yadda, yadda. But you know what? They don’t have a good time and most importantly, YOU don’t have a good time and that ultimately means that people like me don’t have a good time because of you and your backwards thinking of dragging a whiny, crying, stroller-loving child to a theme park full of people and rides and crowded streets and long lines for food. I mean, what are you thinking? Do you think that 2-year-old you are carrying even cares? Do you think he will remember this place? No, the answer is he will not, annoying and ignorant parent. He will not. But I will and you will. I will remember how long it took for me to walk a couple feet because you and your crowd of stroller pushers blocked entire walkways. You will remember that you did not have a good time because you dragged your rugrat to a crowded, cold, over-priced park, that, let’s face it, was not made for small children, and on New Year’s Eve no less! Ok, I’m done.

As you can tell by the photos above, which were all taken by Nathalie, we went a bit mental after the clock struck 12. There are many more photos from the first minutes of 2009, but the sheer craziness of our faces might frighten you. Suffice it to say, we had a more than splendid time. Here’s to the new year, to new choices, to new goals, to new solutions, resolutions, health, wealth, love and happiness. Here’s to a year of  more writing, blogging, publishing,  creative ideas, reading and reporting. Here’s to a year full of more laughter, less sadness, more walk, less talk, more beauty, less pain and everything in between.