The past three days have been a rush, not just because of the amount of schoolwork (the semester’s coming to an end, finally!) but because a video I made over a month ago for a project somehow went viral. It went on New York magazine, the Gothamist (twice, even), Buzzfeed, and the front page of AOL, among others. I’m amazed by how much buzz it got; New York Post did a follow-up article on Tracks, the 25-year-old candy seller who was the subject of the video, and did a short interview with me in the video that accompanied their article.

It’s interesting to be on the other side of the fence in terms of press coverage; I’ve seen bad examples of aggregation on sites that failed to credit me for the video and simply put screen shots, such as The Daily Mail. But then again, I’m not surprised. I also saw how the press tends to milk the most they could out of a story like that. I also encountered journalists who put extreme pressure on me to give them the number of my source so they could meet a deadline, and got very sulky when I couldn’t respond right away or gave it to their competitors first. I couldn’t exactly explain to an impatient journalist that no, I couldn’t get out of my media law class to talk. I hope to not repeat their mistakes when I’m working again.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but hope that my video could help me score a good internship (or job, why not) after grad school. I’m really excited to dive into more multimedia storytelling next semester; that video I did with Tracks was actually the first one I produced on my own, so I got very, very lucky. Being in the J-School is such a rich learning experience, I’m almost afraid for it to end.

Did I ever mention that I have a food-related group blog with some friends? No? Well, here it is.

I did a turkey dinner for some friends last Thanksgiving. Photos up in a couple of days! My apologies for flaking out on this blog again—the J-School is as hectic as the stories say, and more.

When I was 15, I thought I’d be married by 27.

I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I assumed I’d be stable, married (or at least engaged), with a fulfilling job I could do for the rest of my life. No kids yet, because the thought of having a child scares me and I can’t imagine taking care of my own at this age. (Even at 15, I knew I didn’t want to have them at 27).

Reality: At 27, I’m a grad student, living in a shared apartment with three people I met on Craigslist, and spending Saturday night at the J-School because it’s too snowy to head back home. But somehow things feel right, and I’m in the right place at the right time. I’m glad that I didn’t get to choose the direction of my life as a teen, because I’d have missed out on a lot of heartbreaking, but necessary, experiences.

Sometimes I wonder about the choices I made; should I have stayed in a particular relationship? Should I have gone to grad school in Europe? Should I have just stayed home, stuck it out, and gotten promoted to a higher position? I don’t know, but I no longer spend angsty hours stressing about the direction of my life because I know that somehow, I’ll be fine (at least I hope I will).

I’m not giving up this blog anytime soon, but I feel that I’m nearing the end of my quarter-life crisis, and “twenteensomething” no longer seems to fit the bill entirely. Even the design isn’t me anymore (except as a broke grad student, I’m not shelling out for a web designer, and I don’t have the necessary CSS skills to overhaul it just yet). Nonetheless, I feel drawn to blogging again, primarily because I’ve been going through so many things here in New York, and I want to record and share them somehow. So the blog will live until next year at least, but probably not for much longer.

And I’m glad I’m not yet married.

It’s been a while since I last birthday-blogged for Ryan; the last one, I believe, was in 2006. He was still in New York then, and I was still giving him birthday calls at the crack of dawn. Our situations are in reverse now; he’s in Manila, I’m studying in NYC, and when I turned 27 a few weeks ago, he rang me at 4.30am just to remember those days of bleary “Er, thanks for the greeting, but we’re 12 hours apart” calls.

He's a great photog who has used my shoulder as a tripod on several occasions.

Happy birthday to one of the wittiest, most talented, and best people I know. Come back to your birthplace, Ryan! New York awaits once more.

I miss the green scent of his cologne.

And how holding his hand makes my own feel small and delicate.

I miss the comfortable silences on long car rides, and marathon snacking sessions over movies. I miss being able to call him anytime I want to. I miss poking his nose.

I even miss arguing with him sometimes, because it would mean that we’re running at a normal pace again, instead of tiptoeing on eggshells in a long distance relationship that needs to be handled with care. When you’re thousands of miles away, there are no impulsive house visits with a boxful of pastries—just emails, Blackberry messages, and occasional video chats. I love New York and can’t bear to leave it anytime soon, but I do miss my boyfriend.

The last time I found myself crying inside a bus in the line of work was on a rainy night in the summer of 2004, when I was working as an intern for Seventeen magazine. I wasn’t doing it for school (I just wanted work experience), but I was coming home late every night, and struggling to maintain an honors standing in school. That summer was also the time I learned how to commute on my own, and having been brought up in a private subdivision and driven to school every day, the experience proved to be a huge culture shock that overwhelmed me at times.

Looking back, those were some of the most character-building times of my life, and proved to be more useful for my career than my college degree in journalism probably did (don’t get me wrong; I learned a lot from school, but the years I spent as an informal intern did a lot more in introducing me to the industry). I pulled out clothes from stores and styled shoots, checked pages, went to events, met people, and most importantly, got articles published on a regular basis. I wrote my first magazine cover story that year. Sure, I wasn’t getting paid for most of my first year in the industry, but I skipped the entry-level positions when I graduated from school and worked for a magazine back home. I enjoyed it, but after a few years, restlessness and disillusionment with fashion magazines set in, and I hied off to grad school.

This was me at 19. I did a fashion ed for YStyle which featured me as a journalism student from UP, back in ye olden days when I thought I wanted to model. I feel old now.

Now, I’m 27 years old and not as energetic as I was when I started working at 19, but certainly in the same position as I was in on that rainy evening seven years ago. I had spent several hours running around in the Bronx, was late for a meeting, and frustrated by my inability to produce stories for my reporting and writing class for the J-School. Then I realized that I had missed my stop, and the express bus was coasting down a dark highway. So right there, in the middle of a bus bathed in fluorescent light, I burst into tears.

I was still puffy-eyed when I arrived at the meeting, but the attendees graciously ignored my “allergies” while I took notes. In the middle of the discussion, my reporting and writing class professor emailed me her midterm evaluation, which turned out to be a lot better than I hoped. She called me out on spending too much time on certain stories and getting discouraged when they didn’t pan out (guilty as charged), and that I needed to discipline myself in writing news stories, but tucked in between the stern lectures were glimmers of praise and hope. At the end of the 700-word evaluation, she said: “Bianca has all the raw talent, and the desire to do this well.”

At that point, my pretend allergies were at a fever pitch, and I batted my eyes repeatedly to prevent the tears from falling and embarrassing me further. Never mind that at 27, with a few years of editorial work under my belt, I’m still considered a “raw talent” in this part of the world. That professor’s assessment of my skills was honest, a little brutal, encouraging, and at the end of the day, hopeful. She was rooting for me, and I never needed someone to believe in me so badly.

Absorbed in my thoughts on the train ride back home, I initially didn’t pay attention to the subway musician strumming on a guitar and singing in Spanish. It took a minute or two for me to realize he was a possible source for a story I wanted to work on; had I seen him three hours earlier, while I was drowning in self-pity, I might not have noticed him at all. But bolstered by hope, I went up to him, smiled, and introduced myself as a journalist.

I’ve been in NYC for almost three months now, and the summer-green leaves are just starting to turn yellow around the edges. The city feels like home now, but I still find myself staring at people and places with wide-eyed wonder. I haven’t been taking the city (or even the school, for that matter) by storm, so I’m trying to figure out what I can do to change that. It’s a Sunday night, but I’ve been in the school for the past eight hours, writing articles and editing videos.

Last week, I turned 27. I didn’t celebrate with a bang; I visited the MoMa and had some birthday cake and Korean chicken. The lack of fanfare (didn’t even get to talk to James, he was off on a flight) made me realize just how much I’ve grown up, maybe in ways I don’t always welcome. Being in the J-School has been nothing but an extremely humbling experience so far, with my years of work experience proving to be more of a liability than an asset in a city full of young, hungry upstarts. Many of the people in school are younger than 25, unsure of themselves, dipping their toes in professional journalism for the first time in their lives. The late Steve Jobs said that the key to success was to stay hungry, and to stay foolish. I’ve been a little too cautious and wary, and that’s something I’ll need to shed.

For some reason, luck hasn’t been on my side lately. I’ve been heading to my beat, looking for stories, with little to show for it so far. Yesterday, a long visit to the Bronx (one that involved going from house to house, talking to locals) got me one precious bit of wisdom that I’m not quite sure what to do with: prostitutes and raccoons are some of the biggest problems in Fordham. Some batch mates have been covering the Occupy Wall Street protests and gaining hundreds of followers in the process; I’ve gained some too, but I’ve also lost a lot for tweeting stuff irrelevant to Philippine followers. I’m caught between two places, and belong to neither.

I feel a little cheated that I’m limited to a certain neighborhood in the Bronx. I know, I know—I can always head out and do my own coverage, even if it weren’t for class. And I’ve tried my best; when Steve Jobs died, I went to the Apple flagship store to take photos and videos.  But then I get home and look at the stack of work I still have to do for other classes, and the meager handful of Bronx-related news I’ve covered so far, and die a little every day.

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t discovered the kind of journalist that I want to be just yet. When I encounter fellow students in the corridors, I wonder if they’ve got it all figured out. At 21, I thought I knew who I was, and who I wanted to be. At 27, I’m a lot less self-assured, but I’ve also learned to be patient, especially in the last couple of years. Three months is a huge chunk of a 10-month grad school program, but again, it’s also just three months. I know that somewhere in there, I have a lot more to give than what I’ve shown so far, and I’m not going to let that remain buried deep.

As a grad school student in New York, one of the priciest cities in the world, I’m always pinching pennies. At the same time, family and friends warned me against stuffing myself with cheap, unhealthy junk food (check out this video on Bronx bodegas, where the “food” is dirt cheap and probably just as unhealthy as that), so I make an effort to get my fill of fruit and vegetables every week. Whole Foods? Forget it. I get my goods at Trader Joe’s and farmer’s markets in the Bronx, where I’m assigned to report.

But again, as a grad student, time is just as scarce as money, so I can’t keep making meals and snacks from scratch every day. When I find pockets of time, I cook in big batches to spread out for several meals. Over the weekend, I made a chicken potpie topped with Southern biscuits; today, I made homemade salsa with juicy red tomatoes and plenty of cilantro to use as stuffing for chicken-hummus whole grain wraps. I’ve already made balsamic adobo twice, and I’m proud to say my cooking skills have greatly improved.

However, I’ve a big problem with snacking—I end up writing a lot of papers well into the night, and I need brain food to keep going. Unfortunately, my soft spot for Oreos and milk isn’t doing my sugar levels any favors, so I had to come up with munchies to help me get through those nights (and long days in the classroom).

I love Seneca apple chips; who doesn’t? But they’re pretty pricey, and after discovering that they were actually fried and not baked, I swore to make my own. I already owned a dehydrator (a spinoff of a previous project on fruit leathers—more on that in another entry), so making these were a cinch.

Slice apples thinly to get a crispy chip

You can core the apples or leave that pretty star-shaped center

Soak the apples in lemon water to prevent them from browning quickly

Sprinkle with cinnamon

And set them in your dehydrator (if you have one) for 4-8 hours, depending on the temperature. Don't have a dehydrator? Use an oven set at 250 C, and bake for 10 minutes or so. Keep checking!

Add more cinnamon if you want to. Voila! A healthy, inexpensive snack.

I apologize for not blogging more. The J-School is a lot tougher than any of us expected, and these photos are actually from a project (to illustrate a process) I used for a class. Still, I’ll make a point to swing by and say something once in a while.