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I recently attended a networking event in Los Angeles for future magazine editors. Seeing as I still don’t have a job, a month after returning from a press trip to Jordan and a little over a month out of college, I have literally nothing better to do than to sit around and apply for jobs and, of course, network the hell out of myself.

The event took place at a dubious looking bar in Culver City called “Saints and Sinners.” A fellow attendee noted its appearance, “When I drove up, I thought it was a strip club.” The place, however, turned out to be quite hip and popular among the LA crowd. Needless to say, everyone at the event fell into the category of “saints.” Kind, well-dressed, well-behaved, and most likely unemployed…saints. Sure, we were all drinking and talking ourselves up, but there was nothing sinful about it.

Soon, we realized that we were all, unfortunately, in the same boat. It was like the blind leading the blind. We all showed up, hoping to meet someone who would, through someone else they knew, get us some sort of job somewhere. No can do.

The evening’s exchange usually went something like this:

- Hello, how are you? My name is Olga. I just graduated from BU, what do you do?

- I am…well, I used to be…I guess I’m a freelance journalist.

- Oh wow, how interesting…

The freelance journalist line is something I got quite a bit that night. I guess I could also call myself a freelance journalist, with more emphasis on the “free” part of that title. We were all there to network to get a job from someone; someone who unfortunately wasn’t actually there.

The event reminded me a bit of an article by Louis Menand, titled “Show or Tell,” which I recently read in The New Yorker. The piece was about the effectiveness of creative writing courses and he starts it by saying, “Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.”

The networking event presented a similar dilemma. The theory, here, however, was that we would be able to help one another find our way out of the black hole that the journalism job market is today. Unfortunately, no one brought their flashlight this time and we are still mostly stuck in the dark.

My hope, however, is that all of my arrogant and cynical brouhaha will dissipate into nothingness and that one day, the kind, smart, and, yes, unemployed, people I met at this event will all become successful colleagues of mine…and we will all live happily ever after.

But, for now, I’ll continue ranting about it, as I find it mildly entertaining to myself, and hopefully to others.

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According to The State, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been completely MIA since Thursday, leaving his security detail and family wondering where he is.

An official reported that foul play is most definitely not involved and that the governor occasionally makes odd trips like this to work on legislation.

I understand that being governor is a lot of work and a high stress level job, but it is not cool for any public offical to just peace out and basically go into hiding for no apparent reason.

Who is running his office when he is gone? The Constitution says that would be lieutenant governor, but even the lieutenant governor says he has not been put in charge.

What if some sort of disaster or tragedy happened? He wouldn’t be there to help the residents of his state to get through it because he is pretty much missing.

Is it fair for the residents of South Carolina to have their public official missing, with his cell phone turned off in an unknown location? That’s not fair at all. Nobody else with a career can randomly decide to take off and cut off all communication with the outside world. Even our presidents can’t even do this. Someone has tabs on them at all times, even if they are in an undisclosed location.

During this time of economic troubles and budget cuts, the people of South Carolina need their governor to be there working selflessly to help fix the problem. Somehow, I don’t think lying low during a time of great need is the best decision in the world.

-Information from The State

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With today’s heightened interest in fashion (TV shows like Project Runway, the devotion of museums like NYC-based International Center of Photography to fashion exhibits, celebrity forays into fashion design… the list could go on for days), it is no surprise that street style blogs are a popular, growing type of blog. Such blogs, epitomized by the granddaddy of them all, The Sartorialist, combine the current fashion obsession and today’s preferred mode of online expression. Unlike much of the user-generated content on the Internet, street style blogs are pleasantly entertaining, inspiring and even uplifting in their simple, unadorned presentation of what people are wearing.

Most street style blogs seem to channel The Sartorialist in format, if not content. The Sartorialist is the baby of Scott Schuman, formerly of the fashion industry and now a full-time photographer and documenter of international street fashion. Since September 2005, Schuman has been snapping digital photos of stylish individuals who catch his eye and uploading them, usually sans captions, to his Sartorialist blog. Having drawn the attention of the fashion world, Schuman now travels in service to Style.com (the online home of Vogue) to fashion capitals such as Milan, Paris and London (plus Stockholm, Florence, New Dehli, Ivy League campuses, etc) in addition to his beloved New York to document high and low fashion as seen on the world’s pavement. The point is and always has been, as Schuman writes, to share photos of people “that I thought looked great.” Schuman says, “My only strategy when I began The Sartorialist was to try and shoot style in a way that I knew most designers hunted for inspiration.”

His site has been inspiring, not only for designers but for budding fashion photographers- and straight-up people watchers- around the world. One can find a street style blog for nearly every major city: Tel Aviv, Tokyo, LA, even Montreal. Other blogs are organized by themes, such as Advanced Style which features pics of old people, or Altamira which differentiates itself by ironically returning to the root of fashion photography: snapping models. Indeed, there are so many street style sites that there exist, for your convenience, websites that simply consolidate the best content of other street style blogs for your viewing pleasure.

The potential glut of street style could be bemoaned for the sites' amateur approach or, more extremely, for “fast-tracking the death of any sartorial subcultures or actual attempts at rebellion — the cost of the internet age — [by] ironically undermining the true point of eccentric fashion - in defiance of expectation,” as the acid-tongues over at Jezebel so cynically declared.

Yet I prefer to see the positive side of things, and in this case, street style blogs capture weird, elegant, inventive, and altogether unexpected fashion from across the globe. As Virgina Heffernan wrote in her excellent New York Times article on the topic, “A friend of mine won’t look at Garance Doré [fashion blogger] because he says it fills him with longing he can’t bear. I feel nearly the same way, though I don’t stay away; I’m pleasurably overwhelmed.” Similarly, I initially felt depressed viewing the amazingly effortless style boasted by some of the chicest people I’d ever seen- why couldn’t I look so fabulous? But, as I was encouraged to see (by my father!), better to view such imaginative sartorial statements as motivating and creativity-sparking. After all, fashion is about finding inspiration anywhere and everywhere to create something new and different. If that is the point of fashion, then we can never have too much inspiration- and indeed, never too much street style.

Overwhelmed by choice? To start, click here for (of all people) Justin Timberlake's digest of hot street style sites- naturally, this rising fashion star has compiled an excellent list.