The Wide Angle: Journalism’s bad boy and the quest for clean windows – Austin Daily Herald

By now, you’re familiar with the bad-boy side of Eric Johnson, your editor.

The James Dean of Journalism

The Marlon Brando of Media

The… you know, it’s really hard to find comparisons between bad guys and journalism. Maybe that says something about this profession.

Anyway, I guess you know that side of me, but today I’m not here to talk about professional exploits like hanging precariously from a helicopter to take a photo of a bean drop. Walking on top of a wind tower. Enter a burning building with the firemen.

All of this is noteworthy, but for the sake of your blood pressure I’ll talk about window cleaning.

It’s probably not as exciting as the wind through your hair at the top of that wind tower, but to be completely honest… I don’t have anything else this week. It’s been a little slow lately, unless we’re talking about my first attempt at making purple cabbage kimchi.

If I have anyone of Korean descent among my 52 readers, my apologies for what is inevitably an offense to your culinary history.

In any case, there is a time and a place for the mundane parts of our lives and seeing as I went through that with window washing on Saturday, I’ll have you read about it then.

Of course, you can always put down the paper or scroll past this article during your morning reading, but I hope you’ll stick around.

Otherwise, I’ve wasted 10 minutes of hard work writing this.

Carl Bernstein, I’m not.

Apart from the general requirements of even the smallest household maintenance, I decided that the time was right to clean the windows based on two things: first, I was tired of seeing the world through the film with grunge paint that covered our large window. and secondly, I couldn’t remember the last time I washed the window.

An indictment of my laziness, I’m sure.

Speaking towards the first point, I was sitting in the living room around 2:30 in the morning, at night productively without sleep and watching once again as the world slowly passed and passed by my window. As I mentioned before, the search light that is the security light outside of IJ Holton Middle School was showing loud and clear that my windows were indeed, dirty.

I think that’s a professional description, but you’d have to ask someone who actually washes windows for a living to confirm.

Saturday morning rolled around and I finally managed to get out of bed. I did a few chores around the house before going to Runnings to get a mop with a sponge so I could do a thorough job.

If I’m perfectly honest, I probably spent too much time checking one squeegee against another, but I spent my hard-earned $8 and went home to prepare the soapy water for my 30 minutes of window washing.

still with me I wasn’t sure. You yawned a couple of times and I don’t want to lose you.

We don’t have many windows in the house and in full disclosure, laziness still got the best of me because I avoided the upstairs windows for now.

Besides, a much more fun activity awaited me at home. Tasting a batch of hard cider that needed to be brewed again. Remind me to explain this to you sometime because I used real apples this time.

It’s just a little more exciting than this tale.

Long story short, it didn’t take me long to wrap the windows, but somehow I was more embarrassed than when I found out how dirty the windows were.

Sitting down to lunch a little later allowed me a chance to look through the clear glass and discover the world, and like myself it’s quite colorful and not just coated in a brownish gray film.

How bad and lazy am I that there would be such a difference between clean and dirty?

Don’t answer this. I just learned more about myself that I really wanted to know and I really don’t need an honest assessment of my life right now.