Hello.

Journalists (well, most of them anyway) tend to shy away from any type of self-exposure, including myself. It’s about the STORY, not about YOU - that’s what we’ve been told over and over again by journalism professors and editors and publishers, and rightfully so. It’s not about us, it’s about those we report on.
So you can understand the hesitation and anxiousness I felt when I decided to post the above photo of (gasp!) myself, but I’ve grown tired of feeling that way.
I have been wondering what to make of this blog ever since I started writing in it. I’ve written about baking bowling ball cakes and print newspaper consumption in Europe and my love of kitsch, not fit for consumption movies like “Love is All There Is,” and why I hate and love Los Angeles all at the same time.
I’ve described how I must be the only person on the face of the Earth who can’t have a blood test because of impossible to find veins and how I wanted to crawl into a hole and die when I found my first white hair and documented Henry the Maltese’s entire knee surgery (the one section of my site I get the most emails about).
I’ve agonized over the very thing all young writers agonize about - having a career doing what they love and at the same time felt like all my journalism dreams were coming true.
I have complained, whined, explained how beautifully baking calms me down, highlighted some of the articles I’ve worked on over the last year and also probably talked a lot of crap.
I’ve done all this while wondering - what the hell am I writing about?
I always feel like I’m all over the place when I write here, which I guess is an accurate reflection of my life at the moment.
I want everything at once. And as such, I want to write about everything at once. And that’s why if you browse through the posts on these pages, you’ll find everything from pumpkin muffins to musings on the 2008 presidential election and recaps of Bollywood films.
For a very long time, I’ve wrestled with what to write here - the self-loathing and criticism that comes with being a writer is no exaggeration, believe me. I have stared at so many blank posts, only to write a few lines and delete the entire thing. I wasn’t wasting any paper, but it still felt like a waste.
And so, I was driving (more like standing still) on the traffic infested freeways of Los Angeles when it finally occurred to me what this blog was and should be about: The Human Journalist.
You might be thinking, huh? what exactly is a journalist if not human? Well, according to this UK poll, being a journalist was recently regarded as the third most untrustworthy profession - so to some, I’m sure “journalist” is synonymous with Beelzebub.
Many people tend to think of journalists as soul-less leeching creatures who are always on the chase for their next story, no matter what the cost. And while I haven’t run across this too often in my career, there are times when I’ve felt the deep-seeded hate.
Today was one of those days.
I called a source to fact-check a few paragraphs of information and within the first few seconds of speaking to him, I knew he was going to lash out at me.
“Is that how you people operate?” he said to me in a condescending tone. “Is that how you work?”
Uncalled for kind sir, uncalled for.
A few months ago I was on a phone with a woman, trying to explain that I was in search of some information for a story and she cut me off and started explaining that the way I had approached her on the phone was all wrong.
“Don’t they teach you how to properly talk in journalism school?”
She went on and on, belittling me, refusing to answer questions, but I carried on and finally got what I needed out of her, while dreaming of ramming the phone all the way through the line and up her nose and then going across the street to the bar to get a shot of tequila and cry. And I don’t even drink.
I guess what I’m trying to say, in the most roundabout way, is that my entire life I’ve been trying to find the central part of what ties all the other parts of me together. It would be easy and almost lazy,and not even entirely true to say that it’s my ethnicity that’s at the core of my being. Being Armenian is a huge part of who I am, but it would be unfair to say that it is the one thing that completely effects all other areas of my life.
But what does effect and infects its tentacles into all parts of my being, is journalism. It has always been my core, the one thing that I remained certain about above all others, throughout adolescence and high school and college and ‘the real world.’
It makes me feel alive.
And so in an effort to finally unify this blog under one concept, put a soul behind the third most untrustworthy profession and use this truly as a comfortable space to not only express my ideas, and half-ideas, but to connect with others, I’m now The Human Journalist. I write, I bake, I dream about seeing my byline in the L.A. Times and NY Times, I love kitsch, awesomely bad movies that would make any film critic lose respect for me. I love Los Angeles, but I’m not afraid to say I hate it too. I want to write about the problems this sprawling landscape has, and meet some amazing people in the process. I want to craft words together for my stories as beautifully as my grandmother strings together the thinnest of yarns for the winter cardigans she makes. I want journalists to be respected and acknowledged and not underpaid. I want to write feature stories that have the potential to make someone stop and think, “Huh. That was interesting.” I want to see all the hard work I put into an investigative story and say - I really made some kind of dent in the world. I want to be able to make other people feel the way I feel when I read stories from my favorite writers.
I want to feel (virtually) alive. And I want to bake some amazing desserts to reward myself with.
So here I go. This is an experiment into the human side of a journalist - about her wants and dreams, about her likes and dislikes, some of which have nothing to do with journalism at all and about discovering herself on this torturous yet rewarding path that only a crazy person would purposefully choose.
This is place where I’ll probably do a lot of what I was doing before, but without any fear or anxiety - and for a writer, to write without either the former or the latter is complete and utter peace.
I am intrepid, see me write. And of course, welcome.
























