Massiel Bobadilla

For some people, loading Pet Society is like diving head-first into the world of your dreams. You can be anything. You can do anything. Limitless possibility lies at your fingertips. And what's more, you can do it all dressed as your favorite imaginary little beast.

The web-based game first launched over a year ago on Facebook, and since then, has boomed to boast over a million users worldwide, and branched out to several other social networking platforms like MySpace and Bebo.

Yet on Facebook alone, there are 21,444,338 "active monthly" users- a statistic relevant as of the date I wrote this, but likely headed toward obsolescence in weeks to come.

According to Playfish, the game's developer, Pet Society is a means through which people can explore 'friendship, love, fun, and self-expression.'

Yet Pet Society is hardly the only computerized outlet for people to indulge in. But perhaps it is one of a small few to do so with cute, cuddly ambigu-animals.

I'm willing to admit that, like most people out there, my general knowledge of nuns stemmed from many childhood -and adult- afternoons in front of the TV watching "Sister Act" (Thank God, I was too young to have grown up in the era of "The Flying Nun).

However, I let that deficiency be my guide, as I sought to edify myself as to what the life of one of these women was really like, and to see how they were reconciling themselves with an increasingly secular society.

A quick Google search for "nuns" and "Los Angeles" led me to the Monastery of the Angels, a small Dominican cloister tucked between the tourist traps of Hollywood Blvd. and the hidden histories of the Hollywood hills.

Therein was Sister Mary Pia, and therein was her account of the life she has chosen to lead.

Meeting Sister Mary Pia was something like meeting a walking, talking contradiction. Her watery-blue eyes had all the calming sagacity of a woman in her early eighties, coupled with the sweet innocence of a five-year-old girl.

Sister Mary Pia first took her vows at the age of 17, during a time when America was still reeling from the turmoil of the Second World War, and she was struggling to find a place for herself in an increasingly complicated world.

In some respects, being a nun in Hollywood might hearken some associations to Sister Mary Clarence, that now famous singing Carmelite sister who took Reno by storm. But for Sister Mary Pia, service to the world, service to much-afflicted Hollywood, and service to God comes in an altogether different form.

Some people -and I'll be up front about saying that I was one of them- have trouble reconciling how such a hyper-traditional, almost archaic religious tradition manages to survive in the world today. I didn't know any people who still actively sought the guidance of nuns. But as Sister Mary Pia told me, the only reason why people wouldn't know something is because they haven't taken the time to ask yet.

According to her, the general public has actually become more vocal, more eager, in reaching out to nuns recently, with the stress and struggles of the economic downturn motivating many to seek guidance in a reliable constant.

'Jose Miguel' is a young man who has recently begun seeking nuns' guidance when the stresses of life began weighing down on him. Though he chose to keep his last name private, Jose Miguel asserted that there will always be a place for nuns in the world.

"There's just something about the way they listen," he said, when asked what the appeal was in seeking the advice of a nun. "Its not the same as going to confession. It doesn't have the same feeling of going through a routine. It's like talking to your mother. You know their understanding is unconditional, so you're not afraid to let them see a part of you you wouldn't normally let out." 

If nuns do, in fact, have an air of calm and understanding about them, it certainly started working its wonders on me while I busily scribbled notes. Once the interview ended and I stopped my voice recorder, I stopped being Massiel the journalist, and started being Massiel the exhausted 23-year-old grad student, and in no time, I tearfully began laying before Sister Mary Pia an account of the passing of my grandmother, my concerns for my mother's peace of mind, and my girlish wishes that my boyfriend not be so stressed out with work.

To all this, Sister Mary Pia listened and knowingly smiled, and promised to keep me and my loved ones in her prayers. Whether she did or not -or whether her prayers will bear any fruit- I nevertheless felt some of the emotional weights I've been carrying around for weeks start to lift off my shoulders.

And for those of you who just can't get "Sister Act" out of your head, I leave you with this little token of musical love.

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NOTE: Because the Monastery of the Angels is a Dominican cloister, I was not granted access behind the cloister walls, nor were the sisters allowed to be photographed or filmed. I was, however, allowed the virtues of my voice recorder, and in a side room with an elaborate metal grill seperating us, Sister Mary Pia sat down to talk to me one Thursday morning.

(Photos courtesy of the Monastery of the Angels web site)

Click below to see other article about the Monastery of the Angels, including one by the L.A. Times from this past April

Supporters band together to save Hollywood convent famous for pumpkin bread

A 'Monastery of the Angels'? Only in Hollywood

For the past two weeks, some of you may have noticed that I've been MIA by Annenberg standards. I assure you, though, that life has been ticking along for me, and I now plan on shedding some light as to where I've been, what I've been doing, and what I've been thinking during my brief scholarly hiatus.

This one is dedicated to my dear abuelita, Martina Ramírez Lepe de Chávez, who left us for another place, for another form, on October 19, 2009.

With my second weekend at the Nogales Swap Meet came my attempt to breathe more life into the stories there. How? People. And one very frustrated dog. (Photo at right: Lupe, your friendly neighborhood produce vendor, who ends every sale with a smile and a "Thank You to You")

Over the many years that my mother, my sister, my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, and (a very recent and pleasantly surprising development) my boyfriend have frequented the swap meet, they've been met with more than just apples the size of grapefruits and brand name clothes at 75% discounts. They -and I- have fostered surrogate family ties with the various vendors there.

Thus, in this most recent trip, I've tried to highlight that funny little facet of swap meet life. However, this will surely be an ongoing project as my camera and I (and the vendors) gradually become more journalistically bold.

Lupe in action, bagging tomatoes while conversing with her husband (out of frame). He lures customers in with his ear-busting calls while she does the face-to-face interaction.

Above, my mother, browsing through the various clothing stands, meticulously checking to see if the vast display of garments before her contain any unseen gems.

I caught this whiny little dog hanging out the window of one of the vendor's cars. With his car parked behind his clothing stand, he would go about his business helping customers and organizing his wares. But for this, his dog was less than understanding. Every few seconds, a desperate whine would escape his throat before finally, defeated, he resigned himself to whistfully staring off at his owner, hoping to catch a stray caress.

For as long as I've been alive, for as long as my mother has been my mother, for as long as fruits have grown and overstocked items have made their way to discount bins, the Nogales Swap Meet has convened to offer the world to anyone willing to wander its twisting, tantalizing, trusted alleyways. (Photo at Right: Detail shot of goods at the Nogales Swap Meet)

The Nogales Swap Meet, run by the Nogales High School Band and Football Boosters, springs up every Saturday and Sunday, and swallows the entire expanse of the school parking lot.

There, vendors and patrons from all over the San Gabriel Valley (my first love and old stomping ground) convene to sample, haggle, and stock up on everything from vegetables, exotic plants, and deodorant, to designer handbags, vintage records, and full-body girdles.

I have been accompanying my mother to the swap meet for as long as I have had the ability to walk while carrying shopping bags. There, I saw my mother's skill at unearthing buried treasure. (Photo at Right: a tangled maze of $1 belts)

Soaps, foods, clothes that haven't even made it to stores are lying there, waiting for someone with an exacting eye and other-worldly patience to excavate them from their unassuming 2-for-1 box....waiting for someone like my mother to scurry home with glee at her latest prize. My mother says going to the swap meet is her therapy. I can see why. It's easy to forget your everyday stress when everything you need and everything you never knew you wanted is lying sprawled out before you. 

So much is the swap meet an intricate facet of my community, that the vendors have come to know my mother on a first-name basis. Some ask her for advice on their kids (as my mother, not only a mother of two overly-articulate daughters, has also been an elementary school teacher for the past twenty-seven years). Some offer their prayers and support whenever calamity should strike my family. One vendor, Richard (pictured, far right), has become such good friends with my mother, that he has invited our entire family to come see his jazz band perform. (Just a footnote, we actually went to see Richard at Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen in Downtown Disney and, as a thank-you, were treated to a deliciously flammable Banana's Foster. To see more of Richard and his group, click here) 

Below is a photo chronicle of my most recent trip to the swap meet. Unfortunately, there was so much that I could not capture with my trusty Sony Cybershot. For example, no where in here will there be an adequate means through which I could present you with the tempting smells of a fat, juicy hot dog, lovingly (and perhaps suicidally...depending on who you ask) with a thick, crispy strip of bacon. No where in here will there be the sounds of vendors shouting at the top of their lungs in almost every language imaginable, trying to tempt potential customers with their low, low prices. No where is there the three-minute long dance I saw a little girl doing while spinning and twirling beneath the products of a bubble-making machine.

All the same, I did my best to capture, at the very least, the visuals of the swap meet, in all their colorful, unusual, and comforting glory. (If you'd like to keep an eye out for the unusual, please note the ceramic tiger head I found, being sold alongside a pair of men's diving shoes as casually as one would find an apple being sold next to a pear).
 

I first met Aura Bogado as the friend of a friend of a friend of my sister's about three years ago, when she came to deliver a commencement speech for high school students who had graduated from MALDEF's "CREATE!" program.

About a year and a half later, I met Aura again, this time as my internship supervisor at KPFK 90.7 FM, where I worked for about three months shadowing her while she worked as a producer for Free Speech Radio News.

The view from my desk allowed me a new view of Aura; one that involved her fielding call after call for acquiring interviews and other such work responsibilities, all the while calmly, cooly, methodically sipping mate from her trusty silver straw. However, whether because of my usual sense of excessive modesty or whether Aura was just not the type to ramble off into a lavish diatribe about her journalistic resume, what knowledge I did have of her was restricted to that which I was only able to meet at face value.

Of course, that's not to say that I knew nothing about the woman I was working with. I knew she had a resume that included work all over the world, with stories and features about some of modern history's biggest names. But why she did what she did -and which stories she chose to pursue- was something I still had yet to find out.

There was often talk of some of the work Aura had done, however I was often only able to catch snippets of it as people walked through the halls or passed by the office door. Even then, what minuscule morsels I did manage to catch hold of were things uttered with an almost reverent tone, leading me to believe that people just knew the things Aura had done, and that they weren't really the things people asked about.

Thus I came to conclude that, with the current proliferation of digital everything (footprints, romances, revolutions, etc.), the hidden elements of Aura lay just a mouse-click away, though rest assured that such a quest would -and did- leave me feeling a little bit like a 'digital' voyeur.

Here is what I found:
I finally learned, in intricate detail, the circumstances surrounding her 2004 one-woman battle with Larry Flynt --something I had often heard discussed, but usually in those "everyone must already know this" tones I mentioned earlier. (See Aura's full series, "Hustling the Left")

I found verification of that which first floored me with admiration, back when I met Aura three years ago --a photo and full transcript from her exclusive interview with the Zapatista's enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos.

Digging deeper, I found Aura's Facebook, where the formidable reporter I had in my mind gave way to a young woman who lovingly posted pictures from her trips back home to Argentina, interspersed with family and friends almost everywhere else in the world.

I found links to her other pieces, including some on someone's enthusiastically titled page, "Aura Bogado is Fucking Awesome," which features a compilation of the pieces she did for Free Speech Radio News.

I found Aura's mercilessly poignant verbal blitz against graphic artist Shepard Fairey after the latter used an encounter with Aura to tell the story of how he schooled "some Mexican girl" on the iconography of Che Guevara (see right). However, unlike her Flynt story, Aura's battle with the Fairey was not a lengthy radio feature, but instead, came by way of a simple comment, posted on a web page featuring an interview he gave to Mother Jones.

Unfortunately for the owner of the 'fucking awesome' Aura love site, I found that Aura is no longer at FSRN. Fortunately, for those who love higher education, the reasoning for that switch came as the result of her decision to go back and finish her degree at Yale, as I discovered via Facebook.

More unfortunate, perhaps for some, was the fact that I  did not find any of the usual details your average digi-voyeur is likely to search for (I didn't find Aura's current address, her blood type, social security number, bank account, or bra size...sorry).

Instead, I found an Aura who has fostered in me one incomparable jealousy, and an unwavering admiration. Within the past week, I suffered a somewhat moderate emotional crisis, which involved me tearfully wondering if I had made the right decision in coming to graduate school, stressing that I might not be able to overcome my profound fear of talking to strangers, thus rendering me a rather inept journalist.

Luckily, I remembered Aura, and how lucky I would consider myself if I could be half the journalist she is, thinking about how the battles she fights with her words aren't just things she does for work, but rather battles she would fight under any other circumstance, simply because they are things she believes are worth standing up for. (See "Golden Cages: Wealth and Misery in Peru's Highlands")


Sure, being a journalist is a job. But I never thought of it as a nine-to-five desk job that I would mentally check out of at the end of the day. Like Aura, and like the man who she interviewed shortly after my leaving KPFK --the unbelievably eloquent Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano-- I found that fusing my personal interests, hopes, and ideals with my talents as a writer can ultimately produce works that make me feel like my job is worthwhile.

I don't think functioning under such a model would produce inherently biased work. Instead, with transparency and full honesty, it would paint stories with personality, stories worth remembering.

And although I still haven't quite managed to shake my fear of strangers, and the blasted nerves that come from trying to to talk to new people, I hope that embracing what I am and what I do will allow me the courage needed to pursue that which I have always dreamed of doing. (Photo source: Top and Right via Facebook)

This week, blogging comes with a grain of salt and a touch of Twitter cynicism. Proceed with caution:

The death of Yale researcher Annie Le undoubtedly hit a nerve in any 20-something graduate student with hopes of finding a beautiful middle ground between love, work, and independence. (Photo Source: Flickr)

The 24-year-old grad student from California was found in the basement lab of the research building she worked in, on the day she was set to be married to her long-time boyfriend.

Perhaps its just the circle I run in, or the prerogative I maintain as a graduate student not much younger than Le, with a boyfriend that was also my undergrad college sweetheart, and hopes to one day be able to research, love, and marry in peace...perhaps it was all of it, but something unbelievably tragic hit me in an unexpected way, and what's more, it hit the Twittersphere too.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time a young woman was slain in the prime of her life. Just over a month ago, the murder of L.A. native Lily Burk startled the country with its seeming random ferocity and senselessness...not that there's ever much sense when young girls are murdered.

Nevertheless, something about the specific circumstances of Annie Le's life -that she was a graduate student engaged to be married- seemed to resonate with people. In nearly all the news reports about her murder, the human interest of her tragic engagement seemed to make its way to the top of almost every news report's nut graph. Why? Maybe there are more romantics out there than we would have guessed.

Therefore, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Annie Le's unfinished hopes for a happy ending would find sympathetic ears in Tweeters struck by the situation.

@CJ_Ways: let's mourn over a Annie Le's death, she was killed just the day before she was to be married

@RoyalsBlog: Slain Yale student Annie Le's body returned to her Calif. home on what would have been her honeymoon

@dragtotop: Yale Bride Annie Le

Though there are countless angles through which to interpret the murder and its coverage by the media (the police handling of Clark and the evidence, media stereotyping of Asian women, the "workplace violence" theory and its pitfalls, etc.) the notion of Le as a would-be bride was perhaps harped on, or even exploited to some extent, as a means through which to provoke public reaction. 

However, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that some of the Twitter crowd has a palate for tragic love stories. Angsty teens in search of a voice are almost put on this Earth for the sole purpose of griping about it. (Photo Source: Flickr)

@chinasaurusrex: you cannot love strong without hating strong

@anaelenalr: I told that girl and she just said: "OK,but I love him and we wont break up" Girls who are in love can be TOTALLY stupid

@anajay_:no love no pain

In a larger sense, painting Le as a blushing bride about to have it all (love, career, happiness) may make interpretations about a motive (some sources are claiming that Raymond J. Clark III, the accused murderer, lashed out at Le over an "unrequited love") that much easier to grasp.

Whatever the motive, whatever the truth may have really been, understanding and reporting on murder -be it blogging, Tweeting, or otherwise- inherently comes with an unavoidable touch of melancholy.