the navel times and observer

Yeah right.

I hate getting in from a 11-hour day. Another 11-hour day. I hate it because every time I come home after 11 hours either in the office or at some meeting or out in the field I'm never happy about it.

After all my place is a mess, I'm as alone as I was when my last relationship ended three months ago, I've gained a lot of weight, I can't seem to do my damn job right and I'm not happy about any of it.

I just want it to fade off into some hole somewhere. Some drain. I'm sick of it.

So far this week I topped off Monday with two hours at a city council meeting, Tuesday was the better part of an hour at a school library for a story that's nowhere near done, Wednesday was staying in at the office to put together a hot story. Tonight was another late night pulling together another hot story.

I'm not alone in this. I know there are reporters, some of them I know intimately well, who put up with a lot worse shit than I do. Frankly she does it all and on top of that is a much better reporter than I could hope to be. Honestly I don' tknow how I got here and I don't know how I've managed to stay here this long unless either somebody really likes me or someone really hates me and is running me into walls like a sadistic child with a marionette. I feel like I'm held up by luck, it's the only reason I got to where I am right now.

I just hate this. I hate getting myself worked up and then getting myself worked up again the next day. I've always had this issue. It's been part of me since high school and I've never been able to shake it.

Aside from my other fantastic reporter friends I can't help but look at some of the people I talk to in my day and wonder if they're as hung up about their jobs as I am about mine.

After all I can't be alone.

So tonight I got to return a favor. To another person, yes, and in a different city. I still owe a lot of favors in this world, more than I can possibly repay. But I repaid one.

Where to start? A co-worker of mine got the same conversation from the metro editor today that the editor gave me about two months ago. She told my coworker that his production wasn't what the newspaper was needing out of a full-time reporter and that he had a review coming up in a few weeks where she would again look at his production and see if he was getting any better. This is the guy who broke a huge story before the competition in his second week on the job and has another big breaking story coming out Sunday. And this kid got the talk after three weeks.

Odd, it took the editor six weeks before she got fed up enough with me to give me that talk. And I wasn't doing nearly as well as my coworker. I don't know whether this is regular policy at the Globe, but it's enough to scare the piss out of any reporter, particularly a young reporter (my coworker is also 23). I responded to my conversation with screaming, crying and talking ad nauseum with my family and friends to bitch and moan about the situation (that would be to their nauseum, not mine, i was feeling mine in spades).

My coworker responded to his by calling me up tonight and asking if I wanted to get a drink (something we've done before). This was before I knew he had received that conversation, though I knew he had been talking with the editor with the door closed earlier.

My coworker got very drunk, drunk enough to try to deal with this situation and pick a fight with a 20-year old female coworker from the newsroom in the process over one of our editor's methods (the argument was in a bar, not in the newsroom).

I walked him home and listened to him and told him many times that I had been in the same place not too long before. I couldn't offer him much consolation (i've still got most of the piss scared out of me and i have trouble looking some of my editors in the eye while passing them in the halls because i think that they're ready to fire me tomorrow, after all i really haven't much improved myself, though i've worked at it).

This reminded me of a similar tale last summer. After a particularly begrudged topic of conversation came up at the table with me and my two roomates I got the impression that somehow the world would seem a little bit brighter if I had a lot more whiskey in my system.

Yadda yadda yadda by the end of the tonight my roomates were hastily helping me out the door to save me from getting into a fight with a much stronger, taller, older and male opponent than my 20-year old female coworker.

Now I am not half so easy to watch, speak with or listen to as half of one of my two young female roomates were but I was more than happy to hear out his woes. I just hope nobody asks me to save anyone from a fight.

Or that I get myself into one.

Hi there, still here, and still going to work every day.

While my prayer is always "please, please, don't screw up" I'm still there. I rolled three stories together today, at least one of them without the real sourcing I would have wanted for it (one supportive council member and a sheriff detailing the program does not a really even story make), but I've got calls out to other people there and against the odds one of them might just call me back.

Alone? yes, yes, I feel like I'm the slow horse on the team. I'm not mad about it, the only way I know to defeat this is to keep plugging constructively at the job. There are stories somewhere to piece together, I just have to find them. None of this is easy and it doesn't really help when the reporter who was last passed onto this beat tells me that he just muddled through it when he started. Thanks, Derek.

Not a lot of encouragement there. Much like advice I've given. This is miserable, and it apparently promises to be consistently miserable. At some point, some time, I hope to have established my sources. I hope that people will call me with stories, will tell me things that happen in their community. Will help me in my efforts to become part of their community. I would like to get out to my areas more often and I don't resent that I've been put in this position because honestly I don't know how I'd handle the bigger institutions right now.

In other words of introspection I've got a highly trippable ego. While I don't take compliments very well on the face (or at least try to give that impression) I'm highly susceptible to them. Part of it the amazement that accompanies a somewhat weak sense of self-esteem -- that people would have such a better opinion of myself than I do -- but it could also just be in my nature.

I'm particularly susceptible to compliments from attractive people and I encourage anyone meeting that standard to experiment frequently.

I'm not sure how to write this, or even of what I should say. I guess the best I can do is not worry about it and write it with as much a sense of "train of thought" as possible.

In any case...

It's time to grow up. I was talking with a pastor about this in reference to figuring out just how important it is to work hard as far as achieving anything. Obvious? Yes. Oh yes, obvious to many things. But frankly I don't feel like I've had to work hard for anything. School? School was easy.

The way I see it is as thus: In school 70 percent of expected is just fine. you passed. good job, at least in one of our liberal arts majors. 80 percent - better. 90 percent - great! 100 percent? good job. Exceptional!

If you make a mistake than quite honestly you didn't lose much. You maybe didn't get a great grade an an assignment but most of those assignments really didn't matter much. Even at the Missourian there were undoubtably stories to fill in the newspaper which isn't that big to begin with and there are 90 reporters to cover anything. Even if the Missourian fails to get the jump on something it's not like there was every very much riding on it. I mean people were excited when the paper got a jump on something but it was still impressive - not like people expected it to get the story first. I made a royal mistake at the Missourian by not getting a story we should have. Somehow I did just fine at the end of it.

Not so at the Globe. At the Globe I'm infinitely more important and unfortunately I'm making the same stupid, stupid, stupid mistakes. I need to figure out how to fix these. The trick, I think, is to resolve the same issue I've had for a long long time. When I come up with someone that someone should know I need to get over not feeling big enough next to my superiors and tell them when there's an error. Tell them immediately so the communication is there. Not to let something die because I didn't have the courage to go ahead and stop it ... or at least molify it.

My editor pitched a story to me today - BIG DEAL. My editor is not paid to do my job for me. Granted this particular story was something I had already covered in a brief, just not for a story. I had the event. I was there. I covered it (twice, actually, i felt it was usable twice and there was newsprint to fill). But it was my editor that found the clipping somewhere, circled it, cut it out and showed it to me. That should have been MY job. Not that my ego is bruised, far from it, but that i wasn't doing the job I was paid for.

Essentially I am not meeting the demands of this job. I am paid quite a bit of money to gather information and report on it. Information with errors is a useless piece of information. It's not valuable to anyone. It's ridiculous words on a page. No one benefits.

Thus a correction is simply UNACCEPTABLE. That's that. Period. They're not my rules.

To repeat a phrase earlier in this blog there are few jobs where people are paid to guess at things, to not deliver a solid product. I cannot hope to get a job where I'm not expected to meet the requirements of the job. It's not like High School. 70 percent just won't cut it. 100 percent is the norm.