the navel times and observer

I thought I was through with this bullshit.

So, albeit, I started late today. I woke up late, I ended up reading too long after waking up late and I made it to work ... late as all fuck, like two hours late past my deadline. It actually feels worse than the entire rest of the summer where I managed to fail terribly at getting anything worthwhile done at this miserable fucking job.

I started at 3 p.m. with a story left to write that ended up being at least 35 inches (God, I hope it came out all right because when I finish my stories at 11 p.m. i surely don't have a whole lot of time to go about proofreading my own work because, after all, this newspaper isn't going to pay two people to work on the news side on a Saturday evening). There was a couple here who adopted a black girl three years ago and became part of a New York Times story Thursday as a result.

So, the father, an attorney, told my publisher about this and I got the story and took the picture (a very adorable kid, it might be on the Web site here Monday). Unfortunately my fat lazy ass didn't begin writing the damn thing until after I'd gotten several things done on a day that didn't start until at least 3 p.m.

It's not a bad story, the newspaper took on an actual issue in a story -- race -- we spend far too little time on those. And I feel like given the circumstances I didn't do a terrble job.

In any case, it was 11 when I finish that God forsaken thing and only at that time (remember, deadline for the whole shitter is 11:30 p.m.) did I get around to starting to design page 1. Now, 3 and 4 are someone else's department, as are pages 6 and 7. My coworker and I finished pages 5, 8, 9, 10 and 11 Friday and page 12 is a full-page ad. I finished designing page 2 before finishing the page (one of those tasks i had finished before finishing my story). So at the end of the night I just had 1, 13 and 14 to finish up and I was done.

Well, to have those all done in about two hours on top of screaming curses at myself could possibly be considered something. Unfortunately this asshole started that all so damn late.

So I felt like the absolute piece of shit I am when I walked into the printing press at around 1:40 a.m., a good 2 hours after deadline, and waited there until I had finished proofing the finished product. For the last 15 minutes of that time the staff which folds the paper and puts the inserts in stood behind me, yeah, that felt terrible.

Now positives, there are few of them. For the first time I "worked" a photograph. I don't know what this means, but I believe it's essentially adjusting the densities of each of the four colored inks on the page (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) so that your picture looks like it's of people who actually look like people and not like blueberries or look like they're either blushing brighter than a tomato or suffering from some overwhelming rash.

In any case I worked my first two photographs by myself today and they didn't seem to come out all that badly. They also took up a good twenty minutes each because I wasn't used to taking a shot at working a photo and having it actually turn out how remotely near what I'd planned.

But in the end, it was an utter failure and after all of I feel like an utter failure.