My Midtown view.

I stand there and almost have to pinch myself to know that it’s real.

Ten years ago this summer I was freshly graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Central Washington University, a small state college in a town that boasts the “horsiest parade around,” but I had no idea what it meant to really be a journalist. I knew the AP stylebook cover-to-cover, how to write a decent lede, fine-tune a nut graph and craft stories into inverted pyramid style exactly like the countless students who’d come before me. I pored over Tim Harrower’s venerable newspaper design book. I was taught the strict ethics of journalism — only to see them fall by the wayside during my first daily newspaper job. I read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” highlighting passages but failed to truly understand it, and gulped down Walter Cronkite’s “A Reporter’s Life.”

I was told that in journalism, you start at the bottom and pay your dues. Through hard work, dogged reporting and several regional SPJ awards, you work your way up out of the trenches of small-town news to the big-city metro.

It sounds so bleak now, but at the time I was ecstatic. It seemed so romantic. But as anyone who’s actually had to yell, “Stop the presses!” — which I actually had to do once because of a glaring mistake — it’s not at all like the movies.

I spent more days crying in the bathroom than taking a lunch break at my first daily newspaper job. I often refer to it as “journalism boot-camp.” At the 10,000-circulation afternoon paper in rural Eastern Oregon I wrote stories, edited stories (sometimes editing my own stories), shot photos, typed up obits, paginated pages and counseled couples on which engagement photo would be best to run in the Lifestyles section. I worked 12-hour days, making sure to punch out after eight. I was told to write stories about advertisers and to take free meals.

I lived on Wal-Mart tuna helper and malt liquor. I couldn’t afford heat. I lived in a neighborhood where two dudes tried to break into my house at 8 a.m. on Saturday. I was in my early 20s and treated for high blood pressure (which might have had to do with the tuna helper and malt liquor as much as the stress). And I sacrificed a wonderful two-year relationship to follow my dream.

It was a dark time, but I learned a hell of a lot about myself: the kind of journalist I wanted to be and the kind of place I never wanted to work at again.

One day, I looked at the $100 I had to my name and decided it was enough to move my meager belongings back to my parents’ house and try again. I wasn’t ready to give up on journalism, just on this place.

That same day the Yakima Herald-Republic, at which I had been interviewing for a job as the arts writer, called and offered me the position. Owned by The Seattle Times, the Herald-Republic is a 38,000-circulation paper (40,000 back when I started) dedicated to being fiercely independent and to watchdog reporting. I was ecstatic and for the first time in a year and a half I cried out of happiness and relief.

At the Herald-Republic I got to be the journalist I had always hoped to be, thanks in large part to my editor John Taylor. He’s the kind of editor you hope to get at least once in your life — a brilliant writer in his own right who never edits over you but helps you find your voice — and I was lucky to have him as a young journalist.

It was sort of an accident the way I found newspapers, and that’s how I thought of it, as newspapers and journalism as some interchangeable word that meant the same thing. Here was a career with a strict set of ethics at its core, a rich legacy of democracy, the power to give voice to the voiceless and to hold the powerful accountable. And they were going to let me into the club. I was a journalist. It said so on my degree. I had a notebook. I had a beat. I had a byline. I worked at a newspaper.

I thought I would work at newspapers, climbing my way up to a big city metro, for the rest of my life. I’d found my calling.

That’s why it was so hard for me to let go of newspapers — or, to clarify, to let go of thinking of newspapers as synonymous with journalism. After six years at the Herald-Republic, during which I watched the newspaper business model torn to pieces, I did finally let go of print newspapers and went back to school.

This past spring I graduated with my master’s in online journalism from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which, to my knowledge, does not boast anything about the amount of horses in its parades.

In grad school I’d been writing snarky blog posts about the demise of legacy media for a good year and a half when The New York Times called to say I’d been accepted as its summer Web intern. I had applied in the fall (yes, yes, an entirely hypocritical move, I know) and then promptly forgot about it because, you know, it’s The New York Times, an institution that wasn’t even on my aspirations radar because it seemed like such an unobtainable goal.

I think in that brief one-minute phone call I experienced confusion/trepidation/panic/excitement and again confusion when I hung up the phone. Did that really happen? Also, there was a bit of sheepishness over all my anti-legacy media posturing, but that didn’t stop me from taking celebratory tequila shots that night.

Today is my last day with The Times. I like to call the experience “Web journalism fantasy camp,” which it has been. I was present when Jill Abramson was named the first woman executive editor and I watched “Page One” with the cast. I covered a baby red-tailed hawk’s first flight, attended a wizard rock house party and interviewed young adults about the legalization of gay marriage. I helped put the online pieces together for some incredibly fun and beautiful New York Times Magazine packages. Brian Stelter tweeted me a happy birthday message and Bill Cunningham once said to me, “good morning young lady.” And like with all camp experiences, I made some great friends (sadly minus the woven friendship bracelets) that I hope I’ll stay in touch with forever.

With the NYT Magazine softball team.

Mostly, I’ve had a glimpse of what it’s like to work at The Times, a place that is certainly legacy media and proud of it, but more importantly is a media company constantly re-inventing the way it reports and disseminates news online. The people that work on the backend — the programmers and self-described hacks — are mind-blowing geniuses.

So three months later I, and my snarky blog posts, stand corrected. The amount I have learned here is something I will be forever grateful for and has shaped the way I think about online journalism.

Not to say everyday was a joy. Even as an intern, working at The Times is a hard, stressful job. Somedays I wondered if it was just too big of a place for me, too many cooks in the kitchen. But the truly amazing thing about having all those skilled and relentlessly dedicated cooks is that at The Times no one ever says, “no, it can’t be done.” Maybe they say it can’t (or shouldn’t) be done that way, and then they find another, better, smarter way to make it happen. I’m ridiculously proud to have my name in some small way associated with the work here.

And I never once cried in the bathroom.

[Oh, and what's next? On Tuesday I start as online producer at WQXR.]

“Nobody can kick you off the Internet, not even Arianna Huffington. If you want to keep doing your thing, then you keep doing it. Don’t let anything stop you.”

— Lisa Williams

Last week, I watched him do it again in front of a half-empty hotel ballroom in downtown Vancouver, Wash., my hometown. Pulver (@jeffpulver), founder of the 140 Character Conferences, which are emerging as the social media little brother to the TED talks, told the crowd, many from emergency and social services, about how in Twitter he saw “serendipity, humanity and love.”

***

Twitter may have been founded in the summer of 2006 in San Francisco, but it had its major coming out party at the 2007 South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX. During the interactive portion of the event, Twitter usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000, according to Gawker.

It’s perhaps no coincidence then, that when Pulver talks about Twitter, I can’t help but think of Austin native and indie filmmaker Richard Linklater, whose films often marvel at the mundane and celebrate the simple serendipity of life.

His 1991 cult favorite “Slacker” has no beginning and no end, but instead is a series of ricocheting interactions over the course of the day in the lives of 20-something Gen-Xers as they discuss conspiracy theories and self-indulgent philosophies.

With the lackadaisical fluidity of a summer afternoon, Linklater abandons traditional narrative for a story that’s more about the true brevity of often superficial, but sometimes-heartfelt, interactions in life.

The film opens with a shaggy haired 20-something getting off a Greyhound bus and into a cab. The guy, played by Linklater, talks non-stop to the non-interested cab driver. In this first piece of rambling dialogue, Linklater’s character tells the driver about his latest weird dream — and sets up the premise for the film:

“Instead of anything bizarre going on, there was nothing going on,” he says.

There are 97 characters in “Slacker,” as Owen Gleiberman points out in his Entertainment Weekly review of the film, “each of whom arrives on-screen for a brief scene, spins out some pet idea, obsession, or philosophy, and then leaves …

My notes on 'Slacker.'

“After a while, we begin to realize that we’re never going to ‘know’ these people,” writes Gleiberman. “Yet in a sense, just by hearing each character’s unique style of prattling on, we know them completely — and the more we listen to them, the more they sound a lot like you and me.”

The same could be said for a robust Twitter feed.

Several years later, Linklater takes a different look at random relationships in “Before Sunrise” where, conversely, the two main characters Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Deply) are at the center of a serendipitous universe where their random-scatter ideas and philosophies bounce off each other free and easy.

Jesse: And I have this idea for this show that would last 24-hours-a-day for a year straight. What you do, is you get 365 people from cities all over the world to do these 24-hour documents of real-time, right, capturing life as it’s lived. It would start with a guy waking up in the morning and, you know, taking the long shower, eating a little breakfast, making a little coffee, you know, and reading the paper …

Céline: Wait, wait. All those mundane, boring things everybody has to do everyday of their fucking life?

Jesse: I was going to say the poetry of day-to-day life, but you know, you say the way you say it, I’ll say it the way I say it.

Céline: Who’s gonna want to watch this?

Jesse: Well, think about it like this: Why is it that a dog sleeping in the sun is so beautiful, you know, it is, it’s beautiful. But a guy standing at a bank machine, trying to take some money out, looks like a complete moron?

Céline: So, it’s like a National Geographic program, but on people?

Jesse: Yeah. What do you think?

Céline: Yeah, I can see it. Like 24 boring hours, sorry, and like a three-minute sex scene, where he falls asleep right after, no?

Jesse: Yeah, you know, I mean that would be a great episode. People would talk about that episode.

The two are entranced with each other and instead of exploring a multitude of interactions, Linklater follows through on this one chance meeting until the dawn breaks.

Looking back from where we are now, it’s interesting to note Linklater’s curiosity with how people who perceive themselves as very disconnected actually make up a very intertwined world.

Released in the early- and mid-’90s, “Slacker” and “Before Sunrise,” respectively, came along a decade and a half before online “social networking.” But the generation those films encapsulate, as well as the slightly younger audience members who watched the movies repeatedly on VHS, would be the ones who would come to define way the Web works today.

Is it any wonder that in his 1991 Rolling Stone review of “Slacker,” Peter Travers summed up the film thusly: “What Linklater has captured is a generation of bristling minds unable to turn their thoughts into action.”

Nearly 20 years later, wouldn’t social science contrarian Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” make the same argument when talking about the “weak ties” networks on Facebook and Twitter and their inability to “lead to high-risk activism”?

Or when Entertainment Weekly’s Gleiberman points out: “The movie (‘Slacker’) is a kind of metaphysical comedy about an era in which people, more and more, are living inside their own heads.

“Whether we’re listening to a Kennedy-assassination conspiracy buff, a woman who claims to be the proud owner of a Madonna Pap smear, or two homegrown intellectuals exchanging perfectly serious sociological theories about the Smurfs, the movie never loses its affectionate, shaggy-dog sense of America as a place in which people, by now, have almost too much freedom on their hands.”

Here, Gleiberman is giving an almost rosy-colored hue to the slacker mentality (or perceived mentality). But two decades later, these are the same arguments made by people who bash the banality of Facebook’s self-indulgent narcissism or Twitter’s 140-characters of what-I-ate-for-breakfast updates.

However, there are plenty of people, like those that love the subtlety of Linklater’s work, that do see the poetry of day-to-day life and think in the bigger picture of what all this interconnectedness means.

Pulver is one of them.

When he tweets, people listen, and then tweet back, and retweet — and on it goes, with those thoughts ricocheting out into the world. Friendships and alliances are instantly born. Perhaps that’s why Pulver believes that at the heart of Twitter is the power to listen, connect, share and engage.

Those are also the philosophies behind Pulver’s 140 Character Conferences. The conferences, which go by the Twitter hashtag #140Conf and are named for the number of characters you can have in an individual tweet, are held in big and now small cities across the world.

The speakers are a mix of media thinkers and doers, brand marketers, dot-com developers, celebrities, activists, entrepreneurs — and, in the case of last week’s #140ConfNW, an impressive amount of emergency and social services that are now using Twitter as a platform for quickly getting information out and also combating misinformation that can spread like wildfire across social networking sites.

“When I was 9-years-old, I was pretty damn lonely,” Pulver tells the early morning audience at the begging of the #140ConfNW. His uncle was a ham radio operator and Pulver quickly took up the hobby, too.

“I could hear the roar of voices reaching out to my uncle,” he remembers. “At 12-and-a-half-years-old I got my license and I haven’t shut up since.”

Before founding the 140 Character Conferences, the 40-something Pulver was well known by those in the telecommunications business as a pioneer in the VoIP (Internet calling) industry as a founder of Vonage. He’s a multifaceted entrepreneur with passions that include online video, music production and now social media.

Pulver’s also a guy that tweets out daily affirmations such as: “Looking for something to do? Rediscover a past passion. You may end up surprising yourself and rediscovering something totally amazing.”

It is social media evangelism that can border on the saccharin. It’s most certainly something Gladwell would scoff at.

In his 2010 New Yorker piece “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” Gladwell notes that there is, admittedly, strength in weak ties, in the thousands of acquaintances you have on Facebook or your carefully categorized Twitter lists.

“Our acquaintances — not our friends — are our greatest source of new ideas and information,” writes Gladwell. “The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency.”

However, his argument is that these weak ties only work if you don’t ask too much of them.

“In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice,” Gladwell writes. “We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.”

Almost exactly a year before Gladwell’s New Yorker article — and then Egypt’s uprising, fueled in part by Facebook, which came to contradict it — I watched Pulver introduce the first Los Angeles 140 Character Conference from the Kodak Theatre stage.

This was then only the second of Pulver’s 140 Character Conferences. The first had been in New York City several months earlier, around the same time as Iran’s so-called “Twitter revolution.”

I went to last week’s #140ConfNW mostly because I was curious to see two years later if Pulver was any less earnest about his conviction that Twitter can bring together common knowledge and effect real change.

He’s not.

And two years later, I heard coming from the mouths of small town fire chiefs and rural community 911 operators the same thing I heard in Los Angeles: That Twitter (and the #140Confs) isn’t about jumping on the latest social media bandwagon to sell your brand or garner more readers, let alone start a revolution. It is more about, as speaker after speaker would say, being human and engaging with other human beings.

Portland mayor Sam Adams (@MayorSamAdams) is well known for his hands-on approach to Twitter. Instead of his staff, “almost all (tweets) are done by me, which is why there are misspellings and poor grammar,” says Adams. “Frankly, it’s not that hard. And it’s got to be authentic.”

Small talk and also saying something with substance are important. And while right now Twitter is the easiest representation of the real-time Web, that doesn’t mean it will be in 10 years.

“We’re living in a time where the state of now is changing everything,” says Pulver.

Ethan Hawke’s character saw it coming in “Before Sunrise.” And while in the film Céline mocks his real-time, dog-sleeping-in-the-sun idea at first, later she also makes it clear that we all long for simple connectedness.

“If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something,” she says. “I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed, but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

That attempt, Gladwell would say, is not enough.

Pulver, though, as he tweeted on April 25, says: “Each day we have another chance to make a difference.”