On the morning of my 15th birthday, St. Patrick”s Day in 2000, I saw the stash of my wrapped presents and was disappointed. High school was a dream that day with friends writing nice notes to me across a whiteboard in science class. That night, my mom was taking the pasties, an Irish meat, potato and vegetable concoction wrapped in dough, out of the oven and got a short phone call from her brother Tim, who never calls. “Sal, Dad was sitting down for dinner today and he keeled over and died,” he said. I came around the corner and saw my mom hugging her mother-in-law, which also never happens. I learned how selfish I was for wanting more gifts but not for crying like a baby to my mother and aunt when they too would never see him again. I didn”t blow out candles that year.
In 2003, the year I graduated from Galt High School, the United States was set to invade the sovereign nation of Iraq on my 18th birthday. I complained to some of my classmates saying that I didn”t want America to unjustly invade a country, killing innocent civilians on my birthday, or at all. Someone asked me why and said my complaint was stupid. And for the first time I can remember, a friend of mine defended me. Quite a cute friend actually, Chris Clare. “It makes sense,” he said. “She doesn”t want America to start a war on her birthday.” I was always the person who defended my friends and the underdog in school. Forever I will appreciate him for making me feel like someone supported me and my passionate opinions. The U.S. invaded three days after my birthday.
I chose to go to Chico State in 2003 in part because I had family there and because my ”71 Volkswagen Super Beetle could make the two and a half hour trip from Galt better than over the Grapevine to San Diego. My dad and I, mostly my dad, took the rusty banana-colored Super Beetle and turned it into the cutest clown car I”ve ever seen. We sanded and stripped the paint like an Everlasting Gobstopper, then had it painted tomato red with white door panels. Something broke on that car every week, but I loved it anyway. As in the movie “Riding in Cars with Boys,” I had life changing conversations and decisions in and because of cars. I would have a different life had my dad bought me a new car and if I chose to go to college elsewhere.
My family has a habit of sourceless ranting, something I used to do. Through a mean boyfriend and college classroom discussions, I learned not to spread information I heard from a friend and make points based on fact and logic rather than pure emotion.
As a sophomore in college I didn”t know what I wanted to major in and was running out of general education classes. I flipped through the paper catalog, which is now online, and came across journalism. After taking two classes, I knew I was meant to be a reporter.
From that mean boyfriend, I learned I deserved better in 2006.
While I was studying abroad in Granada, Spain I was disconnected from family, friends and the news ? learning about the Virginia Tech massacre more than a day after it happened. I passed by a newspaper stand April 17, 2007 thinking I might get a free paper at school but El Pa?s didn”t have a table on campus. Hours later my friends told me the day before a student killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech. In some friends” class, a professor made a joke about Americans shooting each other. My friend Jake Shebitz walked out of the room. I told him I was proud of him.
From friends being diagnosed with lifelong sexually transmitted infections, people getting cancer and becoming a journalist where I have to talk to families and friends of people who died, I”m learning to deal with hardship and move on.
Before 2000 I wouldn”t have known what to say.
The week I graduated from Chico State in May voters defeated a package of budget-balancing ballot measures leaving California with a $24 billion deficit in the worst recession in my lifetime. About a week before graduation, I heard a show on National Public Radio talking about the Curse of the Class of 2009 ? that graduates picked the worst time to leave school and were doomed to unemployment. I shook the dean”s hand May 23 and skipped down the stage to the grassy stadium happy and hopeful, but I left college not knowing whether I”d be able to find any job in the recession.
My first day reporting for the Lake County Record-Bee I got to cover one of the most controversial court cases in county history, the prosecution of Bismarck Dinius for charges of boating under the influence. Writing that story and others for the Record-Bee as a staff reporter makes me feel like despite my issues, I accomplished many of the things I wanted in the past 10 years.
Katy Sweeny is a staff reporter for the Record-Bee. She can be reached at ksweeny@record-bee.com or 263-5636, ext. 37.
