Tag: Amy Fiscus

Back To The … Country Kitchen

Posted on by Elise
Blast from my past. This was taken on a disposable film camera because yes those existed.

In May I will be the commencement speaker for the Class of 2019 graduation ceremony at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism. This is such a special honor because the Mizzou J-School is c’mon, the best, and it’s also my alma mater.

At my own graduation ceremony, the commencement speaker was so breathtakingly bad that my professor Stacey later told me that he saw a department head, who was sitting on stage, driving his thumb into the opposite hand’s nail bed so hard that he started bleeding. All I remember about the speech’s content was that at one point the old-white-dude-in-the-advertising-biz told us to exercise and eat right. Can’t make this up.

My low bar goal is to outperform him. In preparation I need to draw on specific memories and experiences. The problem is, my brain does not work like Jim Comey’s, who remembers everything linearly and with high specificity. My brain seems to remember the past only in general feelings or vibes I had rather than a tick-tock of how things went down and who said what. For example, I still love and have nothing but warm feelings for Mr. Coates from AP Macro and Micro Econ in high school but I don’t remember anything he taught me except the Laffer Curve and how Arthur Laffer had a problematic theory. (BUT WHAT WAS THAT THEORY!?) To remember a tidbit, it has to be super random and often requires some jogging-of-my-memory to access, like looking at whatever I wrote down at that time.

With roomie Fiscus in our halcyon days of youth. I think this was 2005. Also shot on film.

That was a long windup to say that to write this speech, I downloaded MY OLD XANGA BLOG from my senior year of college and imported the posts here to HeyElise!

When I went down the 2002-2003 rabbit hole, I realized a lot of things, like just how much we went to Country Kitchen to “study,” how awful I was at going to class and how my education in that last year consisted of shooting a lot of television news stories about the 2002 Senate race, to the exclusion of everything else, like a solid liberal arts education.

Also I spent a heavy amount of time watching football, some of my time going to an ab workout class, and a stupid amount of time following around a dude named Ryan, which is regrettable, and WHERE WAS MY ROOMMATE AMY FISCUS TO STOP ME?! FISCUS I AM LOOKING AT YOU.

In other ways, I realized some things have never changed: pop culture-laden snark, going on random last minute trips with whomever, being the biggest fangirl of Brad Hawkins.

Anyway my archives are in the footer of this blog and you, too, can do the time warp! But maybe don’t, because I am going to mine this material for the A+ stuff so it can subtly make appearances in that Class of 2019 commencement speech. As I used to say in 2002, “More to come.”

Let’s Blog Again, Like We Did 15 Years Ago

Posted on by Elise

Remember when everyone blogged? Here’s what I remember about it: I thought the audiences for these things were limited to the people who I personally told about them, so that was approximately 14 people. Things got out of hand during my early 2002 intern stint at The Taipei Times, where I reviewed nightclubs while underaged and more comically, when my LiveJournal was secretly being read by all my Canadian, British and American expat colleagues, who I was totally blogging about. I had a crazy crush on one of those colleagues because he was a brooding-yet-brilliant asshole. I never named said crush and instead just relentlessly wrote about being in lust with him. Unbeknownst to me, the men in the office started a pool over who it was. One night, while stoned at a party, one of these guys decided he wanted to end the office pool so he told me about it. I was so humiliated I didn’t go to work for a week. They never figured out who the dude was. I wonder what he’s doing. Probably being brooding/brilliant.

My college roomie Amy ran a blog called “Unsolicited Advice” and I checked it all the time even though we were always like, sitting right next to each other. I don’t think any irreverent person in the Missouri Journalism program lacked a blog, actually. Everyone seemed to write under pseudonyms (a sign of those times) and I chose “Jack Foley” after the George Clooney bank robber character in Out of Sight. I named my blog after a line from a different movie — Waiting for Guffman. Inside the crop circle in the film, it was weirdly always 67 Degrees with a 40% Chance of Rain, so that was what I called ye olde blog. Those were the days. Those blogs felt realer, maybe because we had more characters to use and fewer image filters to choose from. The internet wasn’t feudal and algorithms didn’t decide as much about which friends you kept up with and which ones you never read about.

That was a long windup to a point, which is that confronted with Facebook feeds and Tweetdeck barrages and Instagram and Snapchat and whatever the kids use these days, some people are returning to the old-school style of blogging. Mainly it’s the internet dude Dave Winer, and my friend Jenny (who I wanted to BE in 8th grade). And I think I want to try and do it more, too. As Winer notes, “Out here on the open web, as long as you stay away from the BigCo silos, there is no algorithm. Just people. No one but us people.”