we want to meet the slacker...

That was a direct quote from a couple coming into the duck for brunch on saturday.

Some of you have been asking about why I was in the weekend globe so from the top...

about 3 months ago a received an e-mail with the tagline "help a struggling reporter... " since I am a good person who likes to help people I opened the e-mail and the first line was this....

"hey luke I found your blog on the internet and I think that you would be perfect for an article I am writing..."

I had just woke up so I was like "cool maybe they are doing a feature on the most awesome blogs on the internet" which doesn't make sense considering my blog kind of sucks and nobody reads it and in fact the next line in the reporters e-mail was

"I am writing a feature on interesting 20somethings and early 30somethings who are smart (yes!!!) but aren't starting traditional careers (oh)"

ok this is kind of interesting in the maybe the article will be about how I have bravely rejected societies conventions to forge ahead with my own rebel bohemian existence flying far above the chains of career and marriage as an inspiration to those who have never dreamed way....
except none of that really makes sense so it is more likely that the feature would be about aging losers....

i called anyway and she really didn't clarify one way or another but did ask tons of questions some of which even allowed me to take cheap shots at my old media job so that was cool. It was less cool that she wanted to talk to my mother but reporters do need to be thorough.
that night the reporter came to trivia and talked to my friends and that was all I heard for a week.

One week later I was talking to my mother and she let it drop that she had just had two 20 minute conversations with a reporter about me which is about 38 redundant minutes if you are fishing for a crazy quote from my mother so now I am a little scared. As a side note through this whole thing I was never really concerned because I am just a person. If I was a public figure of any capacity I guess I would probably be constantly worried about people writing bad things about me but generally reporters don't bother digging random people out of obscurity in order to write bad things about them in fact if you are seeing a random person in the media in Toronto they have probably been crusading for sidewalk reform or something else soft newslike ( or have been shot for no reason).

speaking of shot for no reason I was talking to someone loosely involved with the Jane Creba boxing day shooting trial and he says the crazy thing is that this wasn't a premeditated gunfight but something that just happened amongst two groups of boxing day shoppers meaning that these guys came to the Eaton center not to find someone and shoot them but to take advantage of boxing day deals meaning that at least 2 separate groups of 10 people decided to bring their guns to boxing day shopping except that these are the two groups of 10 that happened to get in a couple smaller scuffles and then ran into each other later and you know the rest so conceivably there could have been hundreds more heavily armed shoppers who didn't shoot anyone and went about buying their discounted items without incident. Parents I am not advocating violating your child's privacy if you are searching for pot or porn but if your child seems high risk for shooting someone (poor, has a scarface poster, etc) you should probably give his room a quick once over for firearms


Time (like 2 months) passes and no article. I am assuming that it has been pulled and maybe with good reason. I mean after her questioning and the fact that via my mother I am assuming some kind of generational twist I am wondering if we are bordering on her dusting off some kind of gen X slacker thing which would be fine if we weren't riding through one of the biggest job booms in recent history. I was kind of glad the article wasn't going ahead because at that point the pros- publicity for trivia, picture in paper, were kind of even with the potential cons- sounding stupid, picture in paper looks fat.

I was forced to change my opinion to "article is likely to go foreword" when the photographer came to trivia to take my picture but it was still a month between that time and last Saturday when I woke up with two dozen messages on my phone.

I am going to go ahead and give the article a B-.

Things I liked about the article

1. Picture was ok by my standards of taking horrible pictures
2. Picture was on front of Focus section one of the more high profile sections in weekend globe
3. Compared by proxy to Punk Rocker (proxy is not the right word)
4. My mother didn't sound crazy and in fact kind of had the thesis for the whole article. Someone suggested that my mother might have been misquoted but I assure you I could almost hear her voice when I was reading it (only my mother would use Canada's national newspaper as a vehicle to take passive aggressive shots at ben and I)

Things I didn't like about the article

1. The way I am paraphrased kind of makes me sound like a jerk esp the part about aging and tips.. anyone who knows me could tell it is clearly a joke but it comes across like I am serious.
2. It isn't really clear what the 4 or 5 featured people have in common leading us to...
3. You could easily assume reading the article that I live at home with my parents or...
4. I am broke or....
5. I am unhappy with my life situation. I mean I am but nothing really to do with whatever is mentioned in the article which brings us to...
6. what happened to interesting or smart? I thought she might say nice things about us or at least plug trivia but instead I am summed up as a bartender with a university degree like this is some kind of craziness. Pretty much all of the bartenders I know are well educated or in school and I am probably below the median level of education for the people I have worked with at the duke specifically. Of course I am most sensitive to myself but I see similar problems with the way some of the other's were cut as well for instance...
7. the punk rocker who is angry and doesn't have a conventional job ummm aren't they supposed to be like that? Wherever did they find this anti-establishment punk rocker?
8. the 21 year old who isn't sure what he wants to do yet..... Wow this kid should really get moving before it is too late... COME SEE ME IN 10 YEARS AND WE CAN TALK UNTIL THEN GET OUT OF MY LOSER ARTICLE

Beyond all this the article just seemed to lack a theme and certainly lacked the kind of detail that would have interested me were I just a casual reader.
I am hesitant to blame the author and not just because I met her and she is pretty but more because I know she did her homework. I mean we talked for a long time and she talked to my mother for a long time but none of it really got into the article which I am guessing means she started out by submitting a monster article to her editors which likely would have been chopped beyond recognition or not, I don't know.

I guess at I am fine with it and the whole thing will be done by next week but first
I have to go to trivia tonight and answer 1 million questions about the article.