Sunday, October 22, 2006
And a complimentary high
So work tonight was great, I walked in with all of the newspaper written and I had a leisurely time designing the front, jump and page 2, which even included a long dinner break and a lunch break in that time.
I mean the newspaper was essentially ready to go by 8 p.m. save for adding the pending Cardinals score and Powerball numbers.
At about 10:30 everything was finally put together and shipped over to the print plant. Well, almost.
I got a call about the same time to say that there was a problem in the machine which prints the images of the pages onto the aluminum plates. Part of the machine was broken and stacking up plates.
Two hours later we printed out the first good prints that weren't going to get gummed up by a chemical in the process.
Yeah, 2 hours spent in a small room with very little ventilation with lots of mind-altering chemicals.
That's right, a free high on the boss's dime. I hear there are places where you have to pay for that sort of fun.
I didn't actually realize just how high I was until I was in my weekly post-newspaper call with Caleb and was trying to relate what parts of the Cardinals game I got to see and the phone call I made to the biggest Detroit fan I know (to sympathise, naturally, since all teams are bound to choke at the series sometimes. sometimes they just have to wait longer to come back for another World Series. for some it's 2 years, for others, 38). In short, I hope they do the best they can. And I hope we win.
In any case in trying to explain all this I found myself giggling (yes, giggling) aimlessly and that's when I realized just how altered my mind was.
Unfortunately, over the course of that discussion I sobered up just enough to take the thrill of making phone calls to other friends while high.
But in the meanwhile I still have my key to the print plant. After all, if you're going to develop a habit, you might as well develop a free one.
I mean the newspaper was essentially ready to go by 8 p.m. save for adding the pending Cardinals score and Powerball numbers.
At about 10:30 everything was finally put together and shipped over to the print plant. Well, almost.
I got a call about the same time to say that there was a problem in the machine which prints the images of the pages onto the aluminum plates. Part of the machine was broken and stacking up plates.
Two hours later we printed out the first good prints that weren't going to get gummed up by a chemical in the process.
Yeah, 2 hours spent in a small room with very little ventilation with lots of mind-altering chemicals.
That's right, a free high on the boss's dime. I hear there are places where you have to pay for that sort of fun.
I didn't actually realize just how high I was until I was in my weekly post-newspaper call with Caleb and was trying to relate what parts of the Cardinals game I got to see and the phone call I made to the biggest Detroit fan I know (to sympathise, naturally, since all teams are bound to choke at the series sometimes. sometimes they just have to wait longer to come back for another World Series. for some it's 2 years, for others, 38). In short, I hope they do the best they can. And I hope we win.
In any case in trying to explain all this I found myself giggling (yes, giggling) aimlessly and that's when I realized just how altered my mind was.
Unfortunately, over the course of that discussion I sobered up just enough to take the thrill of making phone calls to other friends while high.
But in the meanwhile I still have my key to the print plant. After all, if you're going to develop a habit, you might as well develop a free one.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Do not read below if you have positive opinions of me
Contributing to the deficit
What is the point in living? In breathing? In converting precious O2 to propel one's own tiny existence?
I propose that it is to contribute. Not that everyone should be expected to make a gigantic contribution (after all, if everyone were simultaneously capable of proposing that matter moving at a certain speed actually replicated the wave-motion of light, why would anyone bother to hold the e=mc3 equation in such high regard?), but everyone should be expected to make some contribution, some positive impact on the overall universe either physically, intellectually or emotionally.
Which is not to imply that anyone is perfect, of course not. Everyone draws resources from the overall matrix (afterall, Edison devoted years and resources producing 200 light bulbs before he came upon the one that worked), but in theory their contributions should outweigh their deficit in the theoretical summation of all their deeds after their death.
Unfortunately, in some cases, a life contributes wholly to the deficit (this is abstract, not energy or mass).
Some creatures, it seems, only draw resources. Whether they be physical like using up oxygen, gasoline, eating, electricity, water, hell any form of energy you'd like; emotional, like only asking other people to pay attention to your piddling problems without engaging them and talking to them or helping them with their own with everyone you ever meet or in the intellectual sense, when people spend their worthwhile time trying to educate you to eventually better society only to see that effort wasted when the subject either does not use it out of insolence or is too far lacking in his or her intellectual capabilities to make any contribution.
From this sign of the negative sign, I'm saying "hello".
I propose that it is to contribute. Not that everyone should be expected to make a gigantic contribution (after all, if everyone were simultaneously capable of proposing that matter moving at a certain speed actually replicated the wave-motion of light, why would anyone bother to hold the e=mc3 equation in such high regard?), but everyone should be expected to make some contribution, some positive impact on the overall universe either physically, intellectually or emotionally.
Which is not to imply that anyone is perfect, of course not. Everyone draws resources from the overall matrix (afterall, Edison devoted years and resources producing 200 light bulbs before he came upon the one that worked), but in theory their contributions should outweigh their deficit in the theoretical summation of all their deeds after their death.
Unfortunately, in some cases, a life contributes wholly to the deficit (this is abstract, not energy or mass).
Some creatures, it seems, only draw resources. Whether they be physical like using up oxygen, gasoline, eating, electricity, water, hell any form of energy you'd like; emotional, like only asking other people to pay attention to your piddling problems without engaging them and talking to them or helping them with their own with everyone you ever meet or in the intellectual sense, when people spend their worthwhile time trying to educate you to eventually better society only to see that effort wasted when the subject either does not use it out of insolence or is too far lacking in his or her intellectual capabilities to make any contribution.
From this sign of the negative sign, I'm saying "hello".
I just can't help it
I can't believe I devoted so much time and energy to improving myself and whatever fucking skills I might think that I have into my job.
I went to school for four fucking years, I made business contacts very early on (first semester) and even applied for an internship at a newspaper serving a 1.5 million population my freshman year.
I went to DC, I worked a decent internship my junior year and utterly fucking failed at a great internship opportunity my senior year. I royally fucked up every single opportunity of working in a respectable, professional newspaper between May 2005 and April 2006 by screwing up opportunities in Toledo and Joplin.
And this the reward!
My newspaper printed two stories today about government meetings that looked like junior high school students had written them.
A 60-year-old reporter with more experience than I have years on my age wrote a lede that managed to undermine the whole fucking issue, and it was completely in passive voice!
He actually quoted the mayor telling council members to do what they had come there to do.
I can't believe this is the ONLY JOB i seem to be able to do. Work at a fucking little newspaper which doesn't take itself seriously enough to write stories so someone could even read (forget writing stories someone would actually WANT to read).
What does that spell in regard to this asshole? F-A-I-L-U-R-E. That's what I am.
I need counseling.
I went to school for four fucking years, I made business contacts very early on (first semester) and even applied for an internship at a newspaper serving a 1.5 million population my freshman year.
I went to DC, I worked a decent internship my junior year and utterly fucking failed at a great internship opportunity my senior year. I royally fucked up every single opportunity of working in a respectable, professional newspaper between May 2005 and April 2006 by screwing up opportunities in Toledo and Joplin.
And this the reward!
My newspaper printed two stories today about government meetings that looked like junior high school students had written them.
A 60-year-old reporter with more experience than I have years on my age wrote a lede that managed to undermine the whole fucking issue, and it was completely in passive voice!
He actually quoted the mayor telling council members to do what they had come there to do.
I can't believe this is the ONLY JOB i seem to be able to do. Work at a fucking little newspaper which doesn't take itself seriously enough to write stories so someone could even read (forget writing stories someone would actually WANT to read).
What does that spell in regard to this asshole? F-A-I-L-U-R-E. That's what I am.
I need counseling.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Odd hours
If there's one thing I've noticed since, well, at least the latter part of college, I keep some really strange hours on my off-time when I don't have any people around (waking up, going to sleep, eating, etc. autonomously and thus by that atmosphere encouraging me to do the same) to help sort of structure my schedule.
I mean every weekend here in Lebanon follows the same basic plot, I'll be up late Saturday finishing that cursed paper and usually by the time I come home from that it's at midnight at the earliest and sometimes as late as 2 and some change in the morning. By that time I've spent the better part of 12 hours working, sucking down caffeine to keep me working and generally getting myself extremely worked up increasingly as the clock gets closer and closer to deadline (granted, odds are the caffeine I've been drinking all day probably makes me just that much edgier).
It gets to the point where every Saturday night it will take several hours for me to calm myself down and diffuse all the caffeine out of my system enough to go to sleep, which I'll regularly do from about 4 a.m. to noon if at all.
From that point on my weekend lacks any sort of structure. After all, it's not like I make plans beforehand with anybody here in town to meet them or anything. And if I go to St. Louis, Springfield, Columbia or Marshfield it's usually a trip made as part of one of those sleepless nights or it's something I'll decide to do more or less on the spur of the moment late on the same afternoon as my leaving. So basically I consider all my weekends to be my own, since even going to one of those towns I can usually find at least someone to spend time with.
Unlike some people, I have no shortage of "time to myself".
On the other hand it also gives me an awful lot of time for contemplation and introspection -- not always the mentally healthiest activities for someone prone to self-deprecation, a low sense of self-esteem and a deep-rooted habit of using both of those against himself.
I also find myself reminiscing a lot for other periods of time, mostly because of the people I was around at the time.
Which seems like an awful long build-up to what I'm about to say, which is that I was at the Waffle House here in town and really couldn't help but recall Toledo -- the last time I worked with people I ended up spending time with regularly (I say "ended up" as if it were coincidence when in actuality four of us lived together).
One of the things we did in groups of two at a time (and this happened just a couple times) was eat after coming out of an evening shift at the Blade at close to midnight.
Because Toledo remains distinctly inhospitable to night owls (I mean even the IHOP closed at some time before midnight), the only restaurant near the apartment that was open at that hour was the Waffle House. Thus, that's just gonna be on my mind when I'm there at 4:30 in the morning.
Ahem, like I said, big build up, small return.
In other news, Saturday I was paying for my breakfast when somebody actually recognized me from the mugshot that appears in my largely regular movie review in the Sunday paper. That was the first time.
I generally try to make the review into not only a commentary on the movie I saw, but generally try to infuse some of my vocabulary into it and generally adapt a somewhat educated perspective. At the same time I realize I don't have quite the experience or knowledge to truly provide an educated opinion, but at least I can fake it and honestly from the reviews we publish from book readers who volunteer their thoughts to the paper the Daily Record needs somebody who can actually express themselves in their opinions.
I also try to make those columns witty, or as witty as I'm capable of writing. Because that's definitely lacking in the submitted reviews. For that reason it was nice to hear somebody actually read it to the end and enjoyed it, though it seemed like my response in the restaurant fired a little over his head when I said "we like try to add a little levity to the paper sometimes," (maybe he completely understood me, but he didn't make any reaction whatsoever to my response, so who knows?).
I'm also debating going ahead and buying a good bike, because the graciously donated bike from Liz and Evan has a seat that's about 3 inches wide (just wide enough to support maybe my tailbone and cause everything else to ache). It's also attached there in a way that the wider, cushioned seat I bought isn't going to go on in any way I can figure.
On top of that, if I'm going to be riding a bike regularly I think I should at the very least be able to stand to sit on it. I also get a free classified item in the newspaper (employee perk!), so maybe I can recoup a little of the money I've already poured into the first machine, after all I can sell it for a lot less than the original retail price and I can confidently advertise that is has just been retuned.
Yeah, forgive me for the haphazard writing here, I haven't seen a wink of sleep since 11:30 p.m. when I woke up after an unexpected 3-hour nap to see that my Cards were on their way to a pennant race -- a nice surprise.
I mean every weekend here in Lebanon follows the same basic plot, I'll be up late Saturday finishing that cursed paper and usually by the time I come home from that it's at midnight at the earliest and sometimes as late as 2 and some change in the morning. By that time I've spent the better part of 12 hours working, sucking down caffeine to keep me working and generally getting myself extremely worked up increasingly as the clock gets closer and closer to deadline (granted, odds are the caffeine I've been drinking all day probably makes me just that much edgier).
It gets to the point where every Saturday night it will take several hours for me to calm myself down and diffuse all the caffeine out of my system enough to go to sleep, which I'll regularly do from about 4 a.m. to noon if at all.
From that point on my weekend lacks any sort of structure. After all, it's not like I make plans beforehand with anybody here in town to meet them or anything. And if I go to St. Louis, Springfield, Columbia or Marshfield it's usually a trip made as part of one of those sleepless nights or it's something I'll decide to do more or less on the spur of the moment late on the same afternoon as my leaving. So basically I consider all my weekends to be my own, since even going to one of those towns I can usually find at least someone to spend time with.
Unlike some people, I have no shortage of "time to myself".
On the other hand it also gives me an awful lot of time for contemplation and introspection -- not always the mentally healthiest activities for someone prone to self-deprecation, a low sense of self-esteem and a deep-rooted habit of using both of those against himself.
I also find myself reminiscing a lot for other periods of time, mostly because of the people I was around at the time.
Which seems like an awful long build-up to what I'm about to say, which is that I was at the Waffle House here in town and really couldn't help but recall Toledo -- the last time I worked with people I ended up spending time with regularly (I say "ended up" as if it were coincidence when in actuality four of us lived together).
One of the things we did in groups of two at a time (and this happened just a couple times) was eat after coming out of an evening shift at the Blade at close to midnight.
Because Toledo remains distinctly inhospitable to night owls (I mean even the IHOP closed at some time before midnight), the only restaurant near the apartment that was open at that hour was the Waffle House. Thus, that's just gonna be on my mind when I'm there at 4:30 in the morning.
Ahem, like I said, big build up, small return.
In other news, Saturday I was paying for my breakfast when somebody actually recognized me from the mugshot that appears in my largely regular movie review in the Sunday paper. That was the first time.
I generally try to make the review into not only a commentary on the movie I saw, but generally try to infuse some of my vocabulary into it and generally adapt a somewhat educated perspective. At the same time I realize I don't have quite the experience or knowledge to truly provide an educated opinion, but at least I can fake it and honestly from the reviews we publish from book readers who volunteer their thoughts to the paper the Daily Record needs somebody who can actually express themselves in their opinions.
I also try to make those columns witty, or as witty as I'm capable of writing. Because that's definitely lacking in the submitted reviews. For that reason it was nice to hear somebody actually read it to the end and enjoyed it, though it seemed like my response in the restaurant fired a little over his head when I said "we like try to add a little levity to the paper sometimes," (maybe he completely understood me, but he didn't make any reaction whatsoever to my response, so who knows?).
I'm also debating going ahead and buying a good bike, because the graciously donated bike from Liz and Evan has a seat that's about 3 inches wide (just wide enough to support maybe my tailbone and cause everything else to ache). It's also attached there in a way that the wider, cushioned seat I bought isn't going to go on in any way I can figure.
On top of that, if I'm going to be riding a bike regularly I think I should at the very least be able to stand to sit on it. I also get a free classified item in the newspaper (employee perk!), so maybe I can recoup a little of the money I've already poured into the first machine, after all I can sell it for a lot less than the original retail price and I can confidently advertise that is has just been retuned.
Yeah, forgive me for the haphazard writing here, I haven't seen a wink of sleep since 11:30 p.m. when I woke up after an unexpected 3-hour nap to see that my Cards were on their way to a pennant race -- a nice surprise.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Big fat guy's kinda out of shape
So I'm thinking after, say, at least four months of very little exercise (if at all, and nothing like an actual exercise routine) and some really miserably bad eating, that it's more of less proven that I'm ridiculously out of shape.
I proved it once a couple weeks ago when something came up at the print plant and I had to quickly go back to the newsroom (a distance of about 2 blocks) to get to the computer to print another plate.
Yeah, for someone that was running 27-30 blocks or so at a time at least 3 days a week 2 years ago I was still recovering from a two-block run an hour later.
Yes, that was proven again just tonight, I inherited a bike from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style creepy basement of my cousin and brother's house in Columbia and gave it to the bike shop here in town. I got it back today with a favor -- apparently cheap ass Wal-Mart bikes with really complicated and near worthless construction -- and the bike shop owner actually worked on the bike and gave me a $10 discount on the retuning.
So I got it back today and rode it for the first time, yeah, a mile and a quarter maybe from the office home really winded me and actually left me sore, particularly with the seat shaped like a torture device. It's a really skinny and absurdly hard seat that I believe was designed solely to severely damage your tail end.
Hopefully with making a bike ride to and from work (which happens to be where my car is now) and keeping a closer eye on my intake I might be eventually down to a not so fat guy, or maybe even skinny again.
Not that I think that's going to happen as quickly as it took to get the skinny guy fat again. Heck, I was only about 180 maybe at the end of the summer last year, I'm definitely 220+ now.
I proved it once a couple weeks ago when something came up at the print plant and I had to quickly go back to the newsroom (a distance of about 2 blocks) to get to the computer to print another plate.
Yeah, for someone that was running 27-30 blocks or so at a time at least 3 days a week 2 years ago I was still recovering from a two-block run an hour later.
Yes, that was proven again just tonight, I inherited a bike from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style creepy basement of my cousin and brother's house in Columbia and gave it to the bike shop here in town. I got it back today with a favor -- apparently cheap ass Wal-Mart bikes with really complicated and near worthless construction -- and the bike shop owner actually worked on the bike and gave me a $10 discount on the retuning.
So I got it back today and rode it for the first time, yeah, a mile and a quarter maybe from the office home really winded me and actually left me sore, particularly with the seat shaped like a torture device. It's a really skinny and absurdly hard seat that I believe was designed solely to severely damage your tail end.
Hopefully with making a bike ride to and from work (which happens to be where my car is now) and keeping a closer eye on my intake I might be eventually down to a not so fat guy, or maybe even skinny again.
Not that I think that's going to happen as quickly as it took to get the skinny guy fat again. Heck, I was only about 180 maybe at the end of the summer last year, I'm definitely 220+ now.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
A puzzlement
As I was laying in bed just now I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that for all the cognizance, insight and quite frankly numerous forms of expression it seems from experience that I have at my disposal I cannot be as stupid as my current professional position would place me given the steps I underwent in my education to get me to where I am now.
To note, the fact that I am the third-highest authority in the newsroom of the 4,500-circulation Daily Record and am calling myself stupid for having been thrown into that spot is not to degrade any of the perfectly intelligent people working at that newspaper. For the most part, however, they are working there because they have grown up in the area or they really do want to be there.
I am not of that class. I am here because I have fucked up every single opportunity either presented to me or invented by me with the assistance of contacts I've had the gumption to make.
When I graduated college I had an internship with a very prestigious newspaper. Now, granted, I got that internship largely because of the school I attended and the fact that the Blade generally kept an internship berth open to a Mizzou grad. However, I purposefully went to the University of Missouri and its journalism school because, among other reasons, I was very aware of its reputation by the time I started attending classes there. It was the place to be to know the people I needed to know to get where I wanted to be -- employed in a respectable-sized newspaper as a reporter upon graduating or shortly thereafter.
OK, now upon getting to the level of an actual large metropolitan big city daily I absolutely, completely, totally fucking froze. I made stupid mistake after stupid mistake after stupid mistake. I wore out the patience of every editor because of those God-damned mistakes and eventually was at a point where I was assigned long stories (which, because it was just easier, I made more time-intensive) specifically so my editor could scrutinize the final result.
Granted, both of those stories were published, but I was told by my editor in person and on paper that the only reasons why I wasn't fired from that job was because I was an intern to start with and because I was polite and responded to criticism which is to say I gave the impression I was willing to learn and improve myself.
My editor, who is, albeit, not the "teddy bear" type of supervisor, told me he had never seen that kind of work from a Mizzou student before. Yeah, the next year, no Missouri student was on the internship program. Piece that one together and yes, I'm still kicking myself over what seems like my accomplishment in besmirching the reputation of my J-school.
OK, flushed that opportunity down the fucking toilet.
So, by contact with my very friendly and hugely experienced J-school professor (who, for that matter, was once head of the editorial department), I got a job interview (from three states away, thank you) with the Joplin Globe, which flew me out from Toledo and back the next day on a Friday (busy day for daily newspaper journalists with three newspapers to plan) for an interview almost entirely because of my J-school professor's recommendation.
I was overjoyed to get the job, even though it was cheap-ass wages, because it was a job and I figured if I did a good job there I might have a decent chance of building up a great clip portfolio to apply to getting even bigger and better jobs.
Yeah, my first assignment was to dig up news in a tiny small-town-attitude-every-fucking-where county where, at least at the Globe level of activity, very little ever fucking happened (this has been verified by the wise old reporter who covered that same county for decades -- and HE grew up there). So for almost three months every weekday I had to call my editors and tell them almost consistently that even though they were paying me full-time wages for whatever the fuck I was doing up there I had no stories to pitch to them for the next day's newspaper. Yeah, and this is the newspaper that fired a reporter later for "lack of production", I think we'll hurt ourselves if we try to dissect that decision.
So, because of huge cuts by attrition in the newsroom staff I got switched from my first beat to covering suburban Joplin. Now, despite a very rocky head start (it was the winter holidays, very little daily news ever happens during the winter holidays), I actually had a beat with some news, things were happening and I had people in the newsroom I could ask immediately for help with stories I was working on.
Unfortunately the fact I am a huge fucking fuck-up caught up to me when I started getting errors in the newspaper and didn't seem to be able to stop the God-damned habit. I mean I had maybe a couple errors on my first Globe assignment, but nothing like this.
I mean essentially I had to leave to take the Lebanon job because it was my only offer (granted, my job search didn't go further than the Daily Record, but I was extremely convinced that my history of constant fucking errors was going to blackmail me forever from other journalism work) and because my editor (the one who had hired me 8 months earlier) told me the only reason she hadn't already canned my ass was because she knew I had the other job option available.
Yup, so despite pouring every single moment I had ever spent concerning my professional life into the journalism occupation, I managed to turn a solid-gold degree and a fantastic first big city daily internship into a 4,500-circulation small town daily in a fucking little burg where there's not a soul who's unmarried and in their twenties in the whole fucking town.
Intelligent? Bright? I've been called that most of my life and honestly I am overwhelmingly blessed by that. I cannot complain that I never received any sort of encouragement, I have received it in spades and I can't thank everyone who's offered it enough. But for all that supposed mental ability I'm still in a fucking dead end job in what is for me a fucking dead end town.
Not because circumstances beyond my control slammed me here, but because I fucking failed to live up to all the great things I had built up for myself when I graduated college.
To note, the fact that I am the third-highest authority in the newsroom of the 4,500-circulation Daily Record and am calling myself stupid for having been thrown into that spot is not to degrade any of the perfectly intelligent people working at that newspaper. For the most part, however, they are working there because they have grown up in the area or they really do want to be there.
I am not of that class. I am here because I have fucked up every single opportunity either presented to me or invented by me with the assistance of contacts I've had the gumption to make.
When I graduated college I had an internship with a very prestigious newspaper. Now, granted, I got that internship largely because of the school I attended and the fact that the Blade generally kept an internship berth open to a Mizzou grad. However, I purposefully went to the University of Missouri and its journalism school because, among other reasons, I was very aware of its reputation by the time I started attending classes there. It was the place to be to know the people I needed to know to get where I wanted to be -- employed in a respectable-sized newspaper as a reporter upon graduating or shortly thereafter.
OK, now upon getting to the level of an actual large metropolitan big city daily I absolutely, completely, totally fucking froze. I made stupid mistake after stupid mistake after stupid mistake. I wore out the patience of every editor because of those God-damned mistakes and eventually was at a point where I was assigned long stories (which, because it was just easier, I made more time-intensive) specifically so my editor could scrutinize the final result.
Granted, both of those stories were published, but I was told by my editor in person and on paper that the only reasons why I wasn't fired from that job was because I was an intern to start with and because I was polite and responded to criticism which is to say I gave the impression I was willing to learn and improve myself.
My editor, who is, albeit, not the "teddy bear" type of supervisor, told me he had never seen that kind of work from a Mizzou student before. Yeah, the next year, no Missouri student was on the internship program. Piece that one together and yes, I'm still kicking myself over what seems like my accomplishment in besmirching the reputation of my J-school.
OK, flushed that opportunity down the fucking toilet.
So, by contact with my very friendly and hugely experienced J-school professor (who, for that matter, was once head of the editorial department), I got a job interview (from three states away, thank you) with the Joplin Globe, which flew me out from Toledo and back the next day on a Friday (busy day for daily newspaper journalists with three newspapers to plan) for an interview almost entirely because of my J-school professor's recommendation.
I was overjoyed to get the job, even though it was cheap-ass wages, because it was a job and I figured if I did a good job there I might have a decent chance of building up a great clip portfolio to apply to getting even bigger and better jobs.
Yeah, my first assignment was to dig up news in a tiny small-town-attitude-every-fucking-where county where, at least at the Globe level of activity, very little ever fucking happened (this has been verified by the wise old reporter who covered that same county for decades -- and HE grew up there). So for almost three months every weekday I had to call my editors and tell them almost consistently that even though they were paying me full-time wages for whatever the fuck I was doing up there I had no stories to pitch to them for the next day's newspaper. Yeah, and this is the newspaper that fired a reporter later for "lack of production", I think we'll hurt ourselves if we try to dissect that decision.
So, because of huge cuts by attrition in the newsroom staff I got switched from my first beat to covering suburban Joplin. Now, despite a very rocky head start (it was the winter holidays, very little daily news ever happens during the winter holidays), I actually had a beat with some news, things were happening and I had people in the newsroom I could ask immediately for help with stories I was working on.
Unfortunately the fact I am a huge fucking fuck-up caught up to me when I started getting errors in the newspaper and didn't seem to be able to stop the God-damned habit. I mean I had maybe a couple errors on my first Globe assignment, but nothing like this.
I mean essentially I had to leave to take the Lebanon job because it was my only offer (granted, my job search didn't go further than the Daily Record, but I was extremely convinced that my history of constant fucking errors was going to blackmail me forever from other journalism work) and because my editor (the one who had hired me 8 months earlier) told me the only reason she hadn't already canned my ass was because she knew I had the other job option available.
Yup, so despite pouring every single moment I had ever spent concerning my professional life into the journalism occupation, I managed to turn a solid-gold degree and a fantastic first big city daily internship into a 4,500-circulation small town daily in a fucking little burg where there's not a soul who's unmarried and in their twenties in the whole fucking town.
Intelligent? Bright? I've been called that most of my life and honestly I am overwhelmingly blessed by that. I cannot complain that I never received any sort of encouragement, I have received it in spades and I can't thank everyone who's offered it enough. But for all that supposed mental ability I'm still in a fucking dead end job in what is for me a fucking dead end town.
Not because circumstances beyond my control slammed me here, but because I fucking failed to live up to all the great things I had built up for myself when I graduated college.
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