Okay, slow down…CRASH

So maybe I started a bit too big…I won’t be covering any big stories for quite a while so I might as well use this blog for what it’s good for now: reporting horribly humiliating tales of personal suffering. Woo, thanks internet.

FROM THE TRIAGE DEPT.
This past Friday I went for a swim in the Lyons Center pool. Now, my previous experience at Lyons–the gym–should have convinced me it was a bad idea. There’s nothing but bruisers with torso-thick arms and brutal babes with black-belt Pilates skills to kick your arse with only their abs, but nonetheless, I thought I’d try it again.

So anyway it was lovely and fun and my new friend Hanna from j-school went along and hooray. Oops, until I had a violent allergic reaction to the chlorine. We’re talking bloodshot zombie eyes here. Had to get out, rinsed my eyes, etc. By the time I got back to my car, my eyes were crying so uncontrollably (my eyes mind you, not me, boys don’t cry) that I couldn’t even SEE, let alone drive. So I did what any mature 24-year-old-man would do: called my mom. She said “Go see a doctor, dummy” (or words to that effect). I got out and began to walk down the stairs out of Parking Structure B. Except I couldn’t see. So I was walking with my eyes closed. You can guess what happened next.

Correct. I fell down the stairs and sprained my ankle. So there I sat, at the bottom of the stairs, blind and now lamed. So I called mom again. I kept apologizing for saying scary things like “What should I do, I’m blind!?” Eventually, I found a campus map and was able to wipe the tears out for long enough to read the location of the Student Health Center. I hobbled two blocks and the rest, as they say, is history.

Props: Officer Carolyn from the Campus Cruisers who drove me first to the pharmacy and afterwards back to my place.

Slops: the chlorine Nazi who put 40,000 gallons of toxic death into the pool in the first place.

So, that’s not news of course, but there, a real blog entry…isn’t that better?

Second Post/Better Mission Statement

Skepticism. Empiricism. Factuality. Compassion. Curiousity. Justice. Locating stories that need to be told and telling them with exacting language. Hopefully, that’s what this site will be about. But that’s one of those things that unless you do it, you’re just saying it, so I’ll shut up until there’s some real content up here.

EDIT: also, I will someday actually host www.noahbarron.com instead of childishly mirroring to a blog-by-numbers site like wordpress. You know, with all that spare time I have…

First Post/Mission Statement

Hopefully, this site will become a place where I link to my journalistic work, blog about interesting news, journalism and USC-related topics and generally create meaningful content. But that’s all a bit down the road. So until then, I don’t really know why this is here.