Because I said so…

Came through Denver International Airport last night and was sitting on the underground train between terminals. I liked the reflection.

During my travels to and from Dallas this past week I shot a picture in between terminals A and B at the airport in Detroit.

It’s a tunnel that’s several hundred feet long; worth checking out if you’re ever there… it distracted me briefly from my long commute to reach the gate of my connecting flight back to Cedar Rapids.

As a kid I never enjoyed reading.

I had to read books to go play outside. No read, no play. Seems simple enough; get your kid reading a lot early on and he’ll enjoy reading.

Wrong. Reading to me is work. This is why I’m a photographer. This is why I spend most of my time working with my hands. That said, none of my skills are paramount to reading. And I’m glad I have the ability.

Through high school and college, I had to force myself to read. Now I’m getting back into it and I’m starting to like it. In small doses.

It’s a short 200-page book by Mitch Albom. He writes about himself - a journalist fully involved in his career as a sports writer for the Detroit Free Press. At the peak of his self-absorption, one of his favorite teachers, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), reconnected with Albom when one night he was flipping through the channels and paused on a 60 Minutes broadcast and heard the name of his teacher.

Albom is trying to share his experience with his favorite teacher so we don’t have to make the same mistakes he made. Morrie’s view of most folks goes something like this:

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life.
They seem half-asleep,
even when they’re busy doing things they think are important.
This is because they’re chasing the wrong things.
The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others,
devote yourself to your community around you,
and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning” (Albom, 41).

It’s been refreshing to hear someone who lost track of the big picture for their to-do list and career agenda. I think we all need to re-center our lives once in a while, whether it’s by finding faith, reading a book, or just spending some time thinking about the person you’re becoming and where you’re going.

As the death toll rises to almost 50 from the Feb. 5, 2008 tornadoes near my old kentucky home, I sit impatiently at the con in North Liberty, Iowa, scraping together bits and pieces of reports from NOAA, live scanner feeds, local tv and media outlets throughout Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas. I want badly to be there. Chaos is my friend and we function well together.

Thankfully, I was able to relay reports by phone to Jim & Carla Winn, Rush Jagoe and Philip Andrews. They departed from Kentucky last night in pursuit of the mess left along I-40 in Tennessee between Memphis and Gallatin.

Regardless of who I’m helping, I feel like I can do something useful. I’m a logistics guy. You need something done, tell me. If it’s possible - it’s done. So what’s the point?

When you cover any disaster, there’s certain things you just need to have.

Intel. On any team, one person has to do research and disseminate the intel to the ground troops. Without this person, you’ve got no starting point. More importantly - when the troops screw up plan a, you’ll have a plan b,c,d…z to keep them rolling.

Look at what good intel does… a year of research and thirty years of perfecting the wheel goes into this production. It is a benchmark a lot of people in media production shoot for. Throw out the intel, planning and execution and you’ll end up looking like the newspaper industry does most days, and nobody wants that.

Meanwhile, I step out my back door the morning after to find this: 

Looks like it’s going to be a good day.

Today I set out to start a blog.

What began as a simple task ended up being a mind-numbing day at Starbucks in Iowa City.

In a single day I’ve canceled and transferred web hosting, canned a blog with Google due to section 11.1 in their Terms of Use, learned about and reconfigured name servers and MX records, and swept up a pile of my own hair that’s been torn from my scalp over the last five hours.

All in all, I’d say it was worth it. Nathan Weber, you should be proud.