Ickbensen, non-Armenian speakers! Culture is not a biologically generated trait. That , my friends, is pulled from a promotion package sent to theSTATE newspaper by a stock photography company. It rallied the downward sloping inertia of my bloodsugar four hours into a seven hour job shadowing installment on the first day of my spring vacation. About being an understudy: I signed in the office headquarters at 9:14, very proudly may i add, and waited in the lobby until the assistant features editor gestured for me to 'suivez-elle' to the newsroom where I joined a morning meeting of page designers, feature writers, entertainment editors, and zee big cheese editor from the Windy City (I hope you're American if you plan to understand any of this for how many cliches and allusions I have used). One guy who had returned from a week long assignment in the Keys seasoned our tastebuds with keylime cookies. If I had not desired to make a professional impression, I would have grabbed a handful with cookie monster precision. But, this was the newsroom, a stiff high collared organism with a roosting right of its own. Meetings, meetings, and...more meetings. Office life is a viscious cycle for editors, but one crucial to successful output. I sat in on a critique and tossup forum with the bigwhig officianados of sports. life, weekend, business, metro, and politics who confer around an oblong table, serve sizing strengths and weaknesses of the previous days paper posted on the opposite wall. Each editor makes an argument for why their article should be a front page story. My shadowee, with the composure of a nineteenth century duchess, stated her section's coverage of the Somali Bantu arrival as a major headliner becuase of its streamlined presentation. Basically, when writers begin to weave info together, frequently they misconstrue fact with feeling. So, to avoid driving into cliche land, each week the writer brings out 'love, perseverance, hope, etc' in the daily life of Bantu second class citizenship. After my quick glimpse into tweaked brow editing, I just as quickly stooped to the daunting position of page designer. Noses of a high altitude, that bunch.