the navel times and observer

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.