Sunday, June 25, 2006

Well, I'll take some of that back

I just found a Web site with miserable tales of unwanted children, dead children, ruined lives and poverty.

Once again, and I've said this before. I bitch, I moan and I'm fucking miserable, but I've got a hell of a lot going for me. Friends and family I can rely on.

Another long night

So tonight I was all alone after about 7? It took me until almost 1:30 a.m. to design three pages (and write most of them at that) and thus kept the press folks up for another couple hours, and the delivery folks for a couple hours.

I'm really glad nobody was in the office tonight. Because they would have politely had me committed for screaming curses at myself, the computer, photographs, words, lotto numbers, the air duct (the damn thing makes a bunch of weak noises that sound like somebody's on the wooden floors) and the sound of this damn Mylar balloon that lightly taps against the wall.

Sounds like somebody's always creeping up on you and I'm on my nerves to begin with.

So after writing all those damn stories, some of them, were I not in a miserable state of mind (after all I was pretty much at a point at the beginning in which if i were writing a term paper i would have cashed in and gone to bed to finish it in the morning).

So in the end we met objective 1: there will be newspapers on doorsteps tomorrow morning, and objective 2: there are no blank pages. 3, even though I beat myself half to hell I finished most of those damn three pages by myself and I didn't call anybody up out of bed to come to the office.

So yeah, pretty much convinced that there's no reason on the face of this whole damn planet why anyone would be ridiculous enough to hire me to do a job. I feel like I barely can manage to tie my shoes in the morning.

But then again who's to say I shouldn't be committed to the looney bin? I mean honestly I feel more natural being miserable than I do feeling good about anything I've ever done -- and all that can be piled up on the head of a pin with room to spare.

And with the piss work of trying to learn design and how to write and design at the same time is just enough to turn an otherwise nice job with relatively few demands after the 11 a.m. deadline into miserable fucking Saturday nights.

Bennett Spring State Park was nice today, if it were worth reading I'd suggest trying to find the story I wrote about it.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Filling the editor's seat

First night with full control over at least five pages of the newspaper -- I suppose I could have fucked it up worse.

After all people will find a paper on their doorstep tomorrow, it has all of the pages it's supposed to have. None of them will be blank, none will have any inherent "free-style drawing" pages for our readers to return to us.

So because I can' t get my ass in gear soon enough to get the job done right I put off designing the last four pages, including page 1, until well into the latter part of the night (9 p.m.-ish?) after putting off writing my own 25-inch piece until just about as late that evening. Poor choices on my part.

I fouled up in sending some pages to the print plant early and wasted a good amount of aluminum. And, unrelated to anything I did or could have done, a drain backed up and flooded a good part of the printing plant. Good times for the guys over at the plant.

I had to call my editor in and ask him to design three of those pages, if he hadn't been willing to come up and do that for me I would have easily been there another hour beyond having finished page 1 at 11:45.

Maybe I'm hard on myself, but maybe I got paid to do a damn job and I've been here two months and I should probably be able to do that job, dammit.

Have I ever been a designer before coming here? no. Did I have any design experience beyond the few weeks in basic copyediting we devoted to the subject? no.

Did I fuck up this evening? Yes. Did I make mistakes, frequent, frequent mistakes? Yes. Did I ask at large for some nice person to have the decency to drive a bolt through my head? Yes.

Am I glad no one did so? Yes, that would have been messy.

Do I have every intention of being here tomorrow and every day afterward so long as I'm given to live my life? Yes.

It's way too damn easy to be miserable, it's so hard to bother with actually changing. Hell, I am trying to change, I was in the gym almost 6 hours this week, and it's doing shit good so far.

I'm out.

Friday, June 09, 2006

AIR!

So a couple days ago I walked my front door and was confronted by a fantastic surprise: air conditioning!

For the last couple weeks I've been sweltering in here through some miserable miserably June days without a choice over whether to pop on the fan and get some fresh air in here. Yeah, that sucks. Or sucked.

It felt good. And I think there's more than one person around here who wonders what kind of freak I am because I literally left my apartment at least once the other day almost singing because of how glad I was that I could finally relax without sweating.

Which is good, because despite working out nearly every day in the damn gym I'm still fucking enormous. I've got folds of fat thicker than dictionaries and I think my spare tire went flat months ago and just started flapping over my belt.

I need to get out of this place, out of this entire state of mind, I've always lacked self confidence and easily got down on myself. I just need to get out. Hell the gym may be the doorway out of this miserable mindset, but that's a looong way out.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Update

It's been a little more positive lately, honestly.

This week I firmly carted my butt off the couch and into the gym for an hour a day, I'm even back to lifting weights, it's been very good. So far I've lost only about 5 pounds since I really got going at the gym, and I don't suspect my physical appearance will change much for at least a couple months, but at least I've started down that trail.

So, I'm working on this whole self-image thing from the inside. It feels good to be a gym junkie again even if I don't think it's going to do much to improve anyone's impression of my physical appearance.

With luck there may be a few other events coming up that will feel even better. If/when/as I get more accustomed to this community I'm hoping that I will gradually build a friend base. As such that time not spent at work or in the gym has been pretty darn boring.

Cheers.

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