the navel times and observer

Good week, or at least the end of the week was good.

I not only made deadline tonight getting the newspaper out the door, I beat the deadline! By a solid 35 minutes! Yessir, bit of a natural high there. I just gotta figure out how I did it.

Granted, I started out with not having anything more than a reasonably brief up and down story to write and polished that easily inside an hour, then there were really only a few briefs, press releases and obituaries to write up, and somehow the pages themselves just sorta shot through without too much trouble.

It's almost got me a little concerned that there was some inherent mistake in the newspaper tomorrow, hopefully nothing particularly libelous. It almost seems like the way it came together would seem to dictate some elusive error is gonna get published 4,500 times. But then perhaps I'm wrong and it's all gonna work out just fine.

I mean granted, I have been trying to build up these skills since I got here and that's also got something to do with making deadline, I also didn't have to go cover anything (curse you, county fair!) in the midst of my busiest hours. Nor did I really have to write very much. Either way, it's gotta build up some encouragement for next week. After all, I might just be capable of doing this job.

It's not how I felt at the beginning of the week, I missed quite a few deadlines then. Dunno, certainly feels a lot better having met that objective, hoping to meet it again next week.

I also had my first session with my GED student Thursday. It went well, I hope I'm not coming across as over anxious or simply nervous or outright unfamiliar with the class material because she is very nervous about all this and I don't want to turn anyone away, particularly when it's taken this long (her last year of high school, 10th grade, was in 1969) to finish up her diploma.

Two things I've been missing within the last year or so: having a cat around and readily available washer and dryer. Blissfully both are only 30 minutes away at the cost of that distance in gas.

I also get the company of my grandparents when they're home and occasionally, when they're home, a free meal. It's a pretty dern sweet deal.

Heard something unusual today, at least in comparison to the things I've been telling myself lately. Last weekend I signed up to be a literacy tutor to help teach people how to read or better their reading and some related programs. I hadn't been contacted this week about taking on a student and today the director of the organization, the Laclede Literacy Council, told me she was looking for a GED student for me to help.

This lady, an extremely nice old lady, thinks the world of me, and that's not being modest, because I wrote two things for the literacy council in the newspaper. She called me today to invite me to join the Kiwanis Club (honestly not something I would have ever considered but apparently around here everybody's involved in something and I wouldn't mind some involvement, maybe even some friends) and told me she wanted to reserve me for a GED student because she sends those to the smartest tutors.

That struck me, I don't consider myself very bright, or don't allow myself to think so. It's a status I wish were reserved for truly intelligent people and not thrown about to anybody who can express themselves using almost proper grammar. But people have applied that term to me, and it still astounds me how they reach that conclusion -- perhaps because I feel like I'm woefully inadequate to do most day to day tasks, frequently find my foot in my mouth, get that deer in the headlights (in the what-were-you-thinking? way) look from people when I do open my mouth, hearing most frequently the "d" word, like, duh, frankly and provocatively stating the obvious, frequently forget things, appear lost, feel incapabable of expressing myself most of the time. The words simply aren't there or the knowledge is just flat out lost.

I'm sort of anxious about being responsible for teaching someone else something. I've had a couple opportunities irregularly and had some success there, but I can't help but worry about knowing enough about any subject to actually teach it to someone else. So often am I sort of pulling information together and coming up with conclusions on the spot without being an expert in anything whatsoever.

In other news I'm a little concerned about my relatives' survival instincts.

My father, aunt and uncle went to a baseball game yesterday in St. Louis and walking to the stadium could not stand up and in fact had to lean into the close to 80 mph winds blowing in from the east (as opposed to from the west which is where all of the non-fluke winds come from in St. Louis). They sat down, or tried to, in a stadium in the midst of a horrendous storm that ended up flooding the lower levels. Then, while the storm damage was bad enough to knock a plate glass window off of the press booth and onto about 30 fans (none of them related), my relatives, my role models, waited in the interior of the stadium for two hours to wait until the field was ready for play and the storm went away.

They then sat through seven innings of the game and left at 11. Cards beat Braves, 8-3. The question unasked while battling apocalyptic winds: And why are we going to a baseball game in this?

With that strong survival instinct I can't help but think our species would have been among those holding their arms and freezing in the open while other species evolved endothermic bodies, fur and live births 65 million years ago after that nasty rock hit us.

I mean after all, it's not like it was a football game. Baseball and its fans I thought were at least blessed with enough common sense to know when to get out of the stadium, you'd think the glass ( or Plexiglas, what do I know?) falling would have been a sign to write it off as a loss. One of those games that unfortunately didn't end in a rain out because even then the sensible people could have least seen a game played.

I dunno if I'm going to be able to pull this together, but nothing wrong with giving it a shot, why not?

On top of that, we got PAID today! That means not only can I afford gas to drive to places, like Marshfield, St. Louis, etc., but I can actually pay my bills!

There is a part of me, it seems an ever decreasing thought before about midnight on Saturdays, that knows that rationally, logically, I will not be a great designer, or even a competent designer with a total of maybe 11 nights spent working on the Sunday paper (I've been there actually about three months now, started April 11 and my probation period ends Tuesday).

I know, for instance, that I really have had only about 11 nights to practice the skills needed to get that newspaper together quickly efficiently. I know, logically, that regardless of experience everyone really does make mistakes and when you're there working alone nobody's looking over your shoulder to correct them immediately.

I know, logically, that there's plenty of steps in putting that newspaper together and, given my experience, I can't be expected to master or, in some cases, even know what those steps are. Some things are learned with experience.

I know, and my editor knows, and my editor confirmed that he knows Friday that I had extremely little design experience with any sort of design before getting here (having watched my friend design pages for the most part in high school and having designed all of one page for my copyediting/design class in college). I knew, logically, that there would be a lot to learn when I accepted this job and I certainly acknowledged those when I was considering taking the job and blogging about it months ago.

I know, rationally, that there must be some glimmer of intellingence in this dim, incompetent, boring, dry asshole that I get to see in the mirror every morning and spend most of my nights and weekends with. For that matter there's gotta be some kindness and a sense of humor and, in an extremely limited group of women (for extremely limited times at that), someone someone could see as, at the very least, a nice date.

However, in another, far more accessible and wholly different part of my mind I am just another moron ridiculously exhausting the resources of this little planet.

That's the part of mind that takes over on Saturday nights when I'm late for deadline regardless of most of the newspaper already being written and all but two pages already designed for me. I still manage to get the damn paper out late and get it to the plant late and every other step after that is just ridiculously late.

It's those last minutes as I finish designing the last page and get them sent over to the press plant computer that I spend alone in the newsroom screaming curses at myself over my vast incompetence at doing this little job (which, in the great grand scheme of things is fantastically easy).

I hate being stupid, I hate being stupid and somehow it's almost a comfort to be mad at myself for being incomplete. I've always drawn a lot of energy from self-flagellation (in the verbal sense only and just enough energy to finish the project before the act of grilling myself saps the rest of it). It makes a lot more sense in my dim little mind than rewarding myself with confidence and it feels an awful lot more real than being self-assured.

I am a pretty pathetic creature and it seems like I'm the first person to realize it. At the same time I have flaws that, as much as I hate them, are flaws that almost everyone on the planet shares.

I just don't accept them with a lot of grace.

Ciao.