Dana Burland

May 2008-June 2008 I had two viable options for internships the summer after my junior year of college—one 20 minutes from my house and the other all the dang way downtown in Detroit. The drive was not my favorite, but the internship at Detroit Media Partnership —owner of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News—was well worth it. I worked on Strut Magazine , a monthly circular aimed at metro-Detroit women; it was a great fit after a year’s worth of blogging at A Sizable Apple for a similar audience. The team pulled me in to almost every meeting and I got a great feel for what’s involved in putting a monthly magazine together, but the majority of my work was handling simple web maintenance and clean up tasks. I created and populated an online calendar for readers to view local events and I launched the first blog—hey, it was 2008—for the mag, often populating it with blurbs about local shops and recipes.

You know what feels good? Full weekends. I mean full, busy-in-a-good-way, weekends. Like this weekend—packed with of good food, good laughs, deep sleeping, outdoor adventures and crisp winter running. Perfection. Friday night I took B out for a swanky dinner (actually, our mutual casino winnings took us out for dinner. Thanks Sands!) then he took me to a show. One of my "food rules" is that I won't pay for something I can cook better myself. I mean that in the least pretentious way possible; I say no to soggy broccoli and over-cooked pasta from Applebee's, but yes to the always-perfectly cut quadruple stacked BLTs from the diner off Airport Road. I'd love to learn how to cook an applewood bacon wrapped filet of salmon, and how to make lemon beurre blanc sauce. Yum, courtesy of Porter's Pub.  Taking pictures of food at a restaurant: still just as embarrassing as when my grandpa did it during a family dinner at Bucca De Beppo. But by far better than...

One of the perks of working in the journalism industry is covering the random, wacky and strange—and learning enough to spark a new interest or curiosity. Like Veronica Corningstone covering the cat fashion show in Anchor Man . Kind of. Not gonna lie, when I was trudging through the uncharted woods of the arboretum on my school’s campus (yeah, we had an arboretum—or a ‘garden of trees’) looking for a small, unmarked box, I was more irritated than intrigued. As a low-level sophomore at the school paper , I was assigned to cover geocaching on campus. I was walking with some member of the geocaching club following blips from a GPS device hunting for something we couldn’t keep. What the hell’s the point? I wrote the story, turned it in, and promptly put the experience out of mind, until the other night. Some car commercial showed a young couple driving around and geocaching.

I typically lead a pretty quiet, non-dramatic life. I go to work, I run and I try to read a few pages of a book before bed. I try to do good to others. I’m happy if at the end of the week my kitchen is clean and my DVR is moderately full. My town is quiet and so is my life. Recently though, I feel like the universe is shaking my life’s snow globe. Tremendously good, shockingly sad and mega confusing news has all come my way within the last few weeks, and I’m trying to sort through it all. A lot of it is out of my control and it very much makes me feel like I’m a little plastic figurine in a scenic globe where the snow is feverishly fluttering around me. I think I had gotten blissfully used to the flakes sitting gently on the ground—only moving slightly here and there. It’s ok, I know. Sometimes it’ll snow and sometimes it won’t; sometimes flurries will last for days and other times it will seem like it never will snow again. I’m just crossing my plastic figurine fingers that the ...

January 2008-April 2008 I had been livin’ life large, writing for my school paper with  my own column when a new opportunity came knocking. One of my professors, who was a full time employee at the local newspaper, wanted to know if I wanted in on a blogging endeavor. Oh please, like this girl wouldn’t want in on a blogging endeavor. Covering campus life for the local newspaper was a pretty cool gig. I felt like the ambassador between classless-Fridays, 10-am-is-too-early college students and the 9-5 adult readers. I wanted Grand Rapids Press readers to feel like they too were ‘in’ on some of the idiosyncrasies of Grand Valley State University life. I wanted them to feel as welcome as I did on campus, though most readers of the paper live 20 minutes east of GVSU’s cornfield surrounded main campus. With that in mind, some stories I wrote almost wrote themselves—like the post about the overly optimistic bus driver , who always left students with words of wisdom or motivatio...

On my drive home for Thanksgiving one year I extended my trip to spend a pre-holiday weekend with my good pal, Kendal . I was looking forward to quality giggle time and picking up the witty discourse I love her so much for—but when I gave her a call 45-minutes away from her house, she picked up the phone in tears. My trip was perfectly timed in the worst way; that morning she broke off her relationship with new boyfriend, Rob, and needed a weekend with a good friend more than ever. The next day we wandered to a paint-your-own-pottery place to craft and chat our hearts out. Mid-decorating on her empty ceramic bowl, Kendal started to tear up again. It was obvious my pal was more upset than your average newly single girl. Rob was very certain of their relationship already; she was just starting to open up and his confidence overwhelmed her. Listen, who knows who his “Nance” really is, I told her as we embarked on our third hour of pottery painting—hypothetically speaking of Rob La...

Using Facebook can be sneaky. One day you’re innocently passing around photos to friends and the next day your grandma’s calling you wondering what a keg stand is and why you have an entire photo album dedicated to it. The way we post to social media sites—and the way social media sites use our posts—changes all the time. I spend an above average amount of time (not including upload-obsessed college kids) keeping up with Facebook for work, and boy have I learned a thing or two in the process. Here’s how I’ve changed my personal usage to stay a step ahead of Facebook’s constant changes. Open Vault Nothing on the Internet is private, no matter how many privacy settings fool you into thinking so. Content you hide on Facebook one day can be mysteriously unlocked in the next batch of site changes. Es no bueno. Adopt the idea that your witty status updates about your ex-boyfriend and photos of you over-celebrating at a football game aren’t yours—they’re Facebook’s. When privacy, secur...