Dear Chronic: I know I haven't written in a while, but...

Dear Chronic,

I need to let you know that our relationship is going to be a little different this time around.

This time last year, I was checking my email constantly in case Mike or Trent had sent another story I could do and get paid $20. I remember how accomplished I felt the first time I did three stories in one day. On the outside, I was pretending to be deep in thought, since that's what journalists do, but inside I was just beaming with self pride.

I was a jackass.

Maybe the politics beat really did burn me out (Senator McGee, where are the donuts?). Or maybe I finally got over working in my noble profession long enough to see that I was just buying into the idea that the mass media companies of the 1800s weren't outdated and inevitably doomed.

Newspapers are like cars before the catalytic converter: inconvenient in modern society. You could try to find places that still sell leaded gas.

Or maybe it was just seeing Ty back in the Chrony office after losing his foot in the door because of a 50 percent company layoff. Yeah, that definitely, at the least, solidified my approach to journalism for my foreseeable future.

My college major is going to be something I got paid to do while attending college.

I'm not going to hop aboard any newspaper and be stuck in some shit job to work my way up when the truth is I'm most likely going to be the first group targeted for the never-ending layoffs. I did the Jr. Monopoly version of that at the Chrony last year and I'm not all that eager to move up to the real Atlantic City.

So, Chronic, while you've seen me in only a year change from eager beaver to glass case of existentialism, I don't think that it's such a negative thing. I'm also pretty sure God never said "Nietzsche is dead."

My life has been way too stable for someone working for an "independent" paper (the biggest lie in media, btw). I needed to have my security shaken. I needed to realize how outdated and irrelevant our product has become. We're handing out Seer's sage and pretending it's DMT.

I think the most interesting thing that will come of this will be to see what we journalists do instead of report for the media.

There's a reason Mass Comm majors are laughed about privately: we're possibly the least skilled collective group of individuals among any major at the U.

Even Asher Roth's set of sweet skills surpasses that of the average journalist.

There is one thing we all do know, though: Always check to see if "the" is capitalized. Like in "the Chrony."

And as you can see, I don't even adhere to that rule anymore. I'm like Sarah Palin: a maverick for ignorance.

If Angry Editor and his band-aid* was still in charge, he'd probably make a joke about my lack of ethics.

This isn't a joke, apparently after a kids movie, tying ties and kissing, gaining the ability to actually destroy angels is Google's fourth guess. That and "cutting mangos" are apparently man's two biggest guilty pleasures. This is bad news for one Mike, who will be saddened to learn he isn't the only one, and great news for another Mike because...well...you know.

And where would journalists be without ethics?

My guess is flopping right next to the fish that lost his bicycle—what would we do with ethics anyway?

Love,

Butte