I believe in defying expectations.
This year, I celebrated my 25th birthday. I can almost hear what’s running through your head when you take in that statement—she’s a member of a lazy, coddled generation, glued to her cell phone and computer, updating her MySpace page five times a day instead of working at an actual job. Believe me, I’ve heard a number of your kind tell me so. And while some of that is true—I’m writing this essay on my laptop at a local café—the rest gives me a headache on a daily basis.
My parents—my mother especially—raised me to think for myself. After all, they were the same way. They graduated from high school in 1967, at the beginning of the Summer of Love. They weren’t hippies or protesters; they went to school and worked hard to make the world and their families better in their own way. My mother has spent the majority of the last 30 years as a resource specialist, a teacher who helps special needs and second-language students.
It was their mindset that prompted me to get started on my own story early. I worked semi-professional jobs as early as high school, when I was a gopher for a local architectural firm. That phase passed pretty quickly, and I ended up writing and interning for magazines while I was out of college for the summer. While my peers were happy partying every weekend, it was my responsibility to earn my own spending money, so I worked hard for it—and was loath to spend it.
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Allison, November 4th 2009 |
Tags: ageism, career, family, personal, school, spec, stereotypes, travel
Posted in Old Stories
How a Hollywood cynic began to believe that dreams really do come true [sic]
When it comes to the hordes who pack up their cars and move to Los Angele
s, I like to think that I don’t fit the cliché. A year ago, I decided to make a change and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area—and my parents’ comfortable suburban home. L.A. offered the same good food, the weather, the politics that I couldn’t stand to leave. Best of all, I didn’t have to change my license plates.
Really, it was just an exercise in laziness.
I carried the typical NorCal resident’s cynicism for anything Hollywood, and I came here with no desire to see my name in lights. I don’t have a screenplay to sell. Getting into the hottest club isn’t my ultimate goal in life. Somehow, I thought this would be evident soon enough; that I’d get a steady job and join the throngs of regular people sitting on the freeway on our ways to work. I’d put the same amount of thought into a place to live—after all, I’m the type who drives my car down Rodeo Drive even though it rattles and is missing a side mirror. Something nice and comfortable, no matter the ZIP code, would suit me just fine.
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Allison, October 28th 2009 |
Tags: bay area, los angeles, personal, ponderings, spec, stereotypes
Posted in Newer Essays
They said that it couldn’t be done. Or, rather, that it shouldn’t.
When my friend and I announced our plans to take a two-week trip to Rome and Cairo, the concerned voices of friends and family across the country all chimed in with opinions.
“You’re two young women traveling by yourselves. Two young American women,” they would say. “How on earth will you be safe over there?”
We weren’t worried. The friends we would be staying with in both locales were young American women themselves, each of whom had been studying in their respective cities for at least nine months. They knew how to conduct themselves; we figured we’d just follow their cues.
“But the Italian men will prey on you, and the Egyptians will just hate you,” the voices continued to say. We were instructed to learn the phrase “No, I will not marry you, and please take your hands off my behind” in Italian, and “I am a Canadian” in Arabic.
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Allison, October 21st 2009 |
Tags: cairo, personal, rome, spec, travel
Posted in Newer Essays
I’d always known that at least on a relative scale, my family was doing all right. My parents came from different economic backgrounds—my mother was the only daughter of a wealthy small-town doctor while my dad was one of five kids in a working-class neighborhood—but both were college graduates who worked hard to create the suburban enclave where my brother and I grew up. Those varied backgrounds sometimes clashed when it came to relatively small matters like after-school jobs, but we were never overly indulged. In contrast to some of my peers, I got a hand-me-down minivan when I turned 16 instead of a souped-up sports car, and my parents only grudgingly allowed me my own phone in my teenage years while friends of mine had their own home entertainment centers.
We also lived in a school district where the tax base made sending us to public school an easy decision. But when it mattered, my parents anted up. I decided late in my high school career that 18 years in Californian suburbia was enough for me. So, I applied to out-of-state public schools, and even though we didn’t qualify for financial aid, my parents managed to pay for every cent of tuition, housing, books—you name it. Thus, my protective bubble followed me to college, where I had everything taken care of for me. If I was hungry, I just went to the dining hall and my student ID would grant me entrance to the buffet lines. Plane tickets would arrive in the mail just when I needed them. And when the foreign experience of East Coast weather threatened my campus with its hurricane watches and empty grocery stores, I just snuggled closer to the cinder blocks that comprised the 10 floors of my freshman dorm.
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Allison, October 15th 2009 |
Tags: class issues, personal, political, ponderings, the south
Posted in Old Stories
Cupcake mania is sweeping the big city. But is it happening for the right reasons?
There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.
And I, for one, could not be more thrilled. A native Californian, the closest I can claim Southern heritage is through my mother, a Tar Heel born and bred in a rural mill town outside Charlotte, N.C. I also spent four years in North Carolina while I was in college. But the closest I ever came to reclaiming that heritage was through the dozens of church cookbooks my mother had collected from her hometown. When I was in high school and antsy to leave California, I’d flip through them, imagining the miraculous tastes I’d come to associate with the two weeks we spent in North Carolina every summer. Eventually, red velvet became my specialty.
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Allison, October 8th 2009 |
Tags: food, los angeles, the south
Posted in Newer Essays
I
t only seems appropriate to kick off our spate of ancient articles with the one that started it all: my audition piece for The Daily Tar Heel. While I wrote this as an example of my ability (or, more accurately, willingness to learn how) to put together a hard news story, it’s obvious that I was going for a bit of humor as well.
Or, at least, I hope it’s obvious.
All I’ve changed since the file was last saved on August 26, 1999, are some basic copyediting things. And of course, the quotes and the incident itself are all made up. But the name of the dorm, the student body president, the general sentiment — all accurate.
Maybe this explains why I ended up on the arts and entertainment desk for four years.
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Allison, September 30th 2009 |
Tags: daily tar heel, DTH, humor
Posted in Old Stories
Though I’ve been blogging through various mediums over the past decade, it seemed like it was about time to set one up that’s all about Allison Rost, the professional. (Or, as you can see on the front page of my Web site, the editor/writer/professional goofball.) So if you clicked over here expecting to see my thoughts on health-care reform or cheap dining in Los Angeles, this isn’t that kind of blog. (But believe me, I have them!)
No, this is a place where I’m going to liberate old essays that I’ve written in my off-time…and maybe publish some stuff that I put together as we go along. My training as a newspaper reporter has been tough to shake, so a lot of what you’ll see are more personal-type writings, done in the first person, that I’ve started to test out the form. But I’ve also found plenty of amusing/interesting documents in my personal archives that have made me laugh, so some of those may be making appearances as well.
If you’re more interested in my off-the-cuff writings and updates, check my Twitter and (if you know me well!) Facebook pages.
And…here we go!
Allison, September 28th 2009 |
Tags: introduction, mission statement
Posted in Uncategorized
