So the awesome Jenny Zhang was in San Francisco last week, and graced the Tulathimutte/Ha apartment with her presence for a couple nights. In her wake, she left a couple of sweet-looking blank notebooks, including one for me.

But here's the question -- What heck am I going to do with the thing? It seems way too nice to waste on reporter's notes. Maybe I should go back to outlining/brainstorming short stories by hand? Or maybe I could reach even further back and use it as a sketchbook for stick-figure drawings? Hmm ...

Big congratulations to my sister Laura, a newly-minted Stanford graduate. And yes, that's the outfit she wore during commencement.

"Journalists are thought to be competitive, and sometimes they are, but their main feeling about one another is fraternal. Journalists love one another the way members of a family -- in their case, a kind of crime family -- do. In 'Democracy in America,' Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of American journalists as persons of 'low social status, [whose] education is only sketchy, and [whose] thoughts are often vulgarly expressed.' ... Over the years, the social status and the education level of journalists have risen, and some journalists write extremely well. But the profession retains its transgressiveness. Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades. Malice remains its animating impulse."

- Janet Malcolm, "Iphigenia in Forest Hills," The New Yorker, May 3, 2010