Just like Monica Lewinsky

Only, you know, minus the fellatio.

Sorry for the silence recently. I swear I'm going to make an effort to keep this thing going. I've just been busy lately.

I'm about a quarter of the way through my internship now. It's going pretty well, I'm interning on the Opinions page at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. It's a pretty standard, garden variety, suburban newspaper. My coworkers are great though. It's nice working with people who actually have an opinion and who are well informed on things. A lot of the talk around the office is San Gabriel Valley-specific, and I live a bit of a drive away from there, so a lot of the names go over my head. But I do enjoy talking and debating substantive issues.

My only complaint so far is I don't quite have enough to do. Most of my work has been choosing which letters to the editor get published and editing them, coming up with editorial ideas, researching for editorials and even writing my own editorials. But there's a lot of downtime while I wait for my boss to give me new assignments. It's really great actually being published though. So many internships involve gofer work or copying and faxing or other things that teach you to be a temp rather than a journalist. This one I'm actually getting experience and building my portfolio.

Speaking of which, here are the two editorials I've written so far:

• My first one was based on an Expedia.com survey I tracked down showing that Americans aren't taking their vacation days. I wasn't totally enthralled with the subject and it was heavily edited, a good chunk of the end was sliced off. So, I'm not totally proud of this. It is the first thing I've ever written to be published outside of the school newspaper though, so that's something.
• The second, just published today, was a subject I found more interesting. Driven crazy by high gas prices some SUV owners were resorting to arson to collect the insurance money. From there it goes into ways you can save gas and money without resorting to such drastic means

So, if I'm a bit quiet for the next few weeks it's because I already spend all day writing and dealing with words. I'll try and squeeze more blogging in, though.