the navel times and observer

F**k you, Walt Disney

2008-06-29T12:13:00.002-04:00

And your damn television show.

So I will I admit I started very late but I've been on insane LOST benders each of the past four nights, staying up until 5 a.m. just to catch another episode because there's another cliff hanger and I just can't put it down.

I'm almost through with the second season. Thank God I've only got one more available to me and then I can give my poor body and mind a break. I love this show. I'm sorry I wasn't in on this sooner.

The sad truth

2008-06-20T01:34:00.002-04:00

Hope, while loaded with momentary thrills, is simultaneously exceptionally successful at letting you down.

My mind is apparently a bastard

2008-06-15T01:06:00.002-04:00

So in the last two nights I had two different dreams, in each dream I was dating a different girl.

Now one of those, the first if it's any matter, is someone I never had any relationship with beyond friendship and is, in fact, today a married woman. Thus it was ridiculously easy to determine that this was, in fact a dream.

Unfortunately, last night's dream was different in the fact that I was with the girl I had been dating two months ago until, as I've mentioned before, she unloaded me via an extremely irritating e-mail. It was enough that I had actually dated this girl that led me to really enjoy this dream, which involved nothing more than talking with her and, at an airport, a neon orange posterboard sign underneath a cupboard at an airport that had the top 10 numbers of days the airport had gone in a row without discovering a dead cat inside that cupboard (in retrospect, it should have been a lot easier at that point to realize I was in a dream, I guess happiness went and fucked up reason again, how many points does that make for happiness?).

And, having had time to digest that dream, brain, I think Schrodinger wants his cat back (whether it's alive or dead is a question already answered).

So anyway, this only left me waking up grumpy because despite a few (at least in dream world) hours of happiness I hadn't felt in months I still woke up as frustratingly single as I was when I went to bed.

It's not so much that I wish I had her back. As has been correctly distilled by close friends and myself the biggest thing is that for a little while I was happy, was dating someone, and now I'm just a little more miffed because while before I didn't know a difference, now I do.

Now I'm still looking, and as I suspected nothing solid has come up. But for the meanwhile I've decided the time I would be spending pondering this fact that I am depressingly single should be taken up by other pleasurable activities. I hope to do as much of this this weekend and every free hour that I can.

I'm sick of this, I really am. If anyone wants, and I may be wrong in my judgment of myself here, a fairly decent guy to date, my line is open and my inbox is clear. Until then I hope my brain will leave me alone so I can work on something else.

t'aint a happy post

2008-05-13T04:05:00.002-04:00

I've been meaning to say this for the better part of the last two months, but I think the biggest reason I'm unhappy since getting dumped in March was, for six weeks, having actually felt fully satisfied with life.

Now that doesn't mean I'm not generally happy. My job is going reasonably well, assuming that life persists along the path it has for the overwhelming majority of my life I won't have to worry about finding someone to spend the rest of my life with (after all, it doesn't seem likely to happen) and I shouldn't have trouble following my longish-term goal of returning to Missouri eventually.

But for a little while I actually felt satisfied. All feelings are I'm sure fleeting but for a little while I couldn't honestly imagine needing more out of life because I felt like the thing I had wanted for so long, someone to spend my days with.

Sadly that's gone, and it's not even so much that person but just the knowledge that when I lost that (granted by no action or inaction of my own) I probably lost my last opportunity for that for a long time. That is assuming that my life will follow the same trend as it has. SIGH...

I just hope I can find something to fill my time otherwise, it's weekend to weekend.

A brief update

2008-03-18T14:52:00.003-04:00

So it's getting to be foolish to say I keep a blog for as often as I update it, but it's also been an exceptionally busy weekend.

Pro: Lately my bathroom scale has been hovering right around 200 pounds, about 40 pounds short of where I was when I left Lebanon last August. And today I pulled out a pair of 38 waist pants from my closet and they fit just fine as far as I can tell. This is as opposed to a 42 or a 40-size waist.

Con: It would have been a pro, but sadly that changed. I dated someone for about six weeks until this weekend when I got an e-mail from her, an e-mail no less, to say she couldn't see me anymore. God it sucks, back on the unfortunate "hunt" I go.

Maybe tonight

2008-01-01T07:10:00.001-05:00

- That's right, from the Corn' Mo song, somehow you've heard of it

Tonight I got drunker than I've been in a long time, in fact, I really discovered the benefit of living within stumbling distance from a party. Really, no substitute, I ended up in the bathtub tonight after relieving myself.

Really freaking drunk.

I had a hot 23-year old's rear end in my face and did nothing about it, oh how the company's judgment regarding it's sexual harrasment policy haunts me. Alcohol is wonderful.

Where's my James Brown?

2007-10-10T01:33:00.000-04:00

Because for the first time in a while I feel good about my job.

That's because for really the first time since starting here and one of the first times in the weekends I spent designing the LDR I was out before deadline ... actually out before deadline, and even on the night I was in charge of the Sports section front and two additional pages. None of them were particularly hard to do, but this was the first time I was able to pull three out in that time.

This also marks the first time I really felt confident about my probation period ending at the end of November. I'm not so much concerned about whether I'll still want to be here at the end of November (the answer being a resounding "hell yes") as to whether or not I will have improved enough at the job for it to be worth their time to keep me, pay me benefits, possibly deem me worthy of meriting me a merit-based salary increase (not that the money I make now isn't enough for me to live on, but it's the thought that a raise is actually a possibility).

Now regarding other parts of my life:

Relationships
Yeah, sadly this hasn't moved an inch further in the course of the last, oh, maybe 6 months being generous. Yes, there are single people in the newsroom and one in particular who I've been getting to know pretty well.

Unfortunately, as has come both to me and to other people who care for me who have advised me in much the same way, even so much as asking out someone in the newsroom, particularly one who works nights almost as often as I do (and often more often, which is somewhat frightening because I'm not in the least bit on the dayside), could very possibly make that awkward.

On the other hand, were it not for those circumstances I think I have reason to believe within a reasonable doubt that I might have the off chance of getting a date. After all, and as often I can remind myself of this the better, I don't think I'm all that bad of a guy.

To rectify that situation, I think I'm going to give the online dating another shot, why not? I certainly know, especially after just introducing myself to a bunch of new people just a few weeks ago, that meeting people face to face is definitely not going to be the way I get a date. I feel like I could capture someone's interest about as well as a houseplant can that way.

So there's online, which at least introduced me to new people who I know are interested in dating and I get to introduce myself in a way other than the slow-to-act organs inhibiting my communication that I call my lips.

Cat
For those who don't know, I now have a cat, Crowley, who I believe is about seven months old and shares a few of the traits of the Good Omens character for which he is named. He also despises the collar I just put on him tonight, despite the fact that it could ensure his safe return to regular food, water and a litter box.

I have tried to explain this to him, but he seems to fail to grasp the concept. In the meanwhile, he jingles and tries to manipulate around the license tag now very involuntarily hanging from his neck.

Sabbatical

2007-09-10T15:30:00.000-04:00

You might wonder from the headline how someone who hasn't apparently "worked" on a project for about a month to take a "sabbatical" from that same project now.

The answer is simple, I make the rules. In brief, I moved to Staunton about two weeks ago. The job is going well with some stormy weather on occasion, most of those occasions being very shortly before deadline. I'm not entirely comfortable with it yet but I am unbelievably confident that this was far and away the thing to do -- Lebanon would have very clearly only gotten worse had I not taken the opportunity to leave when I did.

In the personal sense, other than Christina, there are new, single, young people here to try to get to know and hang out and hopefully form some new bonds with. It is difficult for me to open up and be myself around new people, particularly when the weak social skills I had had so long to atrophy over the course of living in Lebanon for 17 months, but I feel like I am very slowly coming back and finally once again have something to do with my free time other than spend it with that person in the mirror who has a tendency to get on my nerves.

The other nice thing about there being other single people around is the possibility that I soon may not be single. Not that I have any plans in the short- or long-term to get married, but I am ready to be part of a relationship with its advantages and, apparently inevitably, disadvantages of which I've heard so much about. I'm 25 years old, which I believe is way too old to be as utterly inexperienced in relationships with other people as I am.

My apartment is far and away better than the Lebanon shit hole I used to call home. Among other things I can actually bear the thought of having people over and not being immediately embarrassed by my living conditions. I don't plan on this changing.

Anyway, sorry for the brevity, I don't know when I'll be updating this if at all again so I would suggest that anyone call me on my cell phone.

Country roads take me far from home

2007-08-07T19:43:00.000-04:00

So I've decided to take the Staunton job, my last day in Lebanon is August 19 and I made that formal yesterday.

I've already got my bank account switched over (US Bank doesn't operate in Virginia), so that's out of the way. I'm split between doing too much on some of the issues around here to avoid getting my head caught somewhere when it's time to slow down on mmy work as I walk out the door.

And at home I have to begin the horrid task I've been dreading for almost 16 months now ... cleaning.

I'm not completely "pumped" about this job yet, all of it seems foreign. I know in my heart it's the right thing to do, though, I can't imagine any more today than I could two months ago that the sense of fulfillment I think I'm looking for is somehow just around the corner here in Lebanon if only I waited a little bit longer.

I mean I've been here 16 months and my sense of job satisfaction here has only gotten worse. I think it was largely the vacation (Alaska, it was amazing) that got me out the worsening grumpiness that defined my mood in the time up to my leaving.

People have, naturally, asked "why so far away?" Well, the short answer is I've already spent some time applying for similar positions in papers of a similar size (in fact bigger) in Missouri without success. I think design could get me further than my level of reporting ability did and this is an opportunity to do design, make more money and get a job within an organization that could propel me to almost anywhere in the country.

It does not come without its opportunity cost, though. I'm leaving Missouri after living no further than a half-hour's drive from my grandparents for 16 months. It's not as much (though it's a part of it) that I need their proximity, but I feel kind of guilty about leaving them here when they were very excited to have someone close by (more so my grandmother than my grandfather, exactly what grandfather feels I don't know because he doesn't frequently express it).

In any case that seems to be all I can put together at the moment.

A pretty dern good week

2007-07-24T20:21:00.000-04:00

Ok, so to fill everybody in ... Since March I've been filling out job applications for design/copy editing jobs in Cape Girardeau and St. Joseph. I also found out just recently that there was a job in Staunton, Va.

That was much shorter than it should have been, in any case, here goes, bullets:
— I found out about this job a few weeks ago
— I applied
— I talked to the desk editor a couple weeks ago and talked to the executive editor last week
— He put everything together regarding the flight and the car to get there (St. Louis -> Washington Dulles) for this past weekend so I could get the interview finished before the big family trip coming up to Alaska for which I leave Thursday morning (oy!)
— On Friday I get an interview pulled together for another job for this Wednesday, i.e., hours before leaving for Alaska and requiring me to leave work three hours early that day before my 10-day vacation
— I get the Staunton job at the end of the interview (very much a shock and very much a happy one)
— I plan on going to the other job interview tomorrow and plan on getting enough information there to compare that job to the one I've already been offered. At the end of which I plan on making a decision, getting in a car, driving to St. Louis, going to bed, sleeping (oh God yes, and something I may not be doing much of or at all tonight), waking up at the buttcrack of dawn, going to an airport, waiting, boarding a plane, flying across two countries and reading Harry Potter all the way (for the first time since it came out very early SATURDAY) to Alaska.

It is a good week, and it's nice to be deciding when both decisions are good news. On the one hand, MU is close to Lebanon, which is a cheaper drive. I also know people in CoMo and I'd be working for the only university I've ever been a part of doing design, writing and editing work. CoMo is also very familiar and a town I like already.

On the other hand, I started this search looking for newspaper design/copy editing work and I have right now a job that's mine to turn down to do just that in a very large company (Gannett) which will allow me to move on to other bigger papers if I succeed in Staunton. The CoMo job is also, as I understand it, not without its inherent merits, but it is broader, and, as it's been described to me, it doesn't allow an awful lot of creativity even though I would be able to learn more about designing web pages.

Though Staunton seems very willing to train its staff in technology as well. Staunton also has the disadvantage of Quark 6, which feels like pushing around boulders compared to the freeway speed of InDesign, though they are planning on expanding into InDesign next year. In short, I just don't know. And I plan on telling Staunton my decision because I'd hate to lose that opportunity.

Aw hell, who knows?

Not a good week

2007-06-22T18:02:00.000-04:00

So according to the Mayo Clinic I meet several symptoms of depression right now, which make sense. I've been pretty much depressed since last Friday when I learned that two jobs I thought I might have had a shot at turned me down.

I saw another job opening yesterday to work in the graduate school as an information specialist for MU, but I'm fence-sitting about it, in part because I think I'm in the midst of a general malaise of hopelessness, oddly, one of the symptoms.

I've also found in the last week that I've been more partial to being irritable, getting to bed earlier but finding it even harder to wake up in the morning, more fatigued at the end of the day than I'm used to feeling, even some impaired decision making and I've always felt low self-esteem.

The thing is, am I living to meet the symptoms? Or do the symptoms honestly describe me?

Great, doubt

2007-06-06T19:22:00.001-04:00

I've felt this way for a long time, but however much people seem to get the impression that I might be a bright person, I still know in my heart that the minute I'm around anyone who's the slightest bit brighter than I am, then the world will realize that there are people operating on much higher levels.

As a result, I have grown to develop this tense paranoia whenever I'm around really bright people and, in some sense I've come to avoid it.

I mean as far as winning arguments I've never been a really great debater, but just in basic knowledge, understanding and interpretation of the world I've always felt like I'm running to catch up. It's like in Toledo when I was spending time around Ivy Leaguers who were clearly operating above my level. Regardless of what I believed about myself going in, I was instantly concerned that someone would quickly see me for what I really am — full of shit.

It happened today, someone was clearly operating faster than I was, 64 bits v. a Pentium III. The paranoia that someone was clearly seeing straight through my transparent outer coating immediately made me feel very very small.

Ah well, I suppose I'll try to look for some respect elsewhere, or dig for it within myself, perhaps the well is not yet dry.

No further details

2007-05-30T23:10:00.000-04:00

Is it so bad that I still can't seem to get over her? I still wish she would have said yes, because I have trouble talking to her or seeing her face without being mesmerized and wanting some or more of her attention.

Oh well

2007-05-22T23:57:00.000-04:00

Lonely for life is such an easier option. It doesn't take any work, I'm already well on my way there, and it, by its nature, doesn't require anyone else's consent. Even on "dates," some just don't have any chemistry. it's funny to be whining about being lonely under those circumstances, but I would also hate to be with someone whom I didn't feel I should be with.

Oh well.

And it begins

2007-05-09T00:43:00.000-04:00

So, moving further into self-doubt on this whole Springfield application, I'm naturally beginning to second-guess myself on whether or not it even got considered, after all, I didn't put on the front of the envelope that I was applying for the copy editor/designer position.

Sigh, I'll call tomorrow to try to reach the editor, strike up the "hello, I've applied for your position, is there any opportunity for me to come down and visit the paper?" conversation.

I don't know if that would help my chances of getting the job, I'm not sure if anything I do would help my chances of getting the job.

I thought about getting a master's degree again today.

Beating the odds

2007-05-07T21:44:00.000-04:00

So globally, the world is about 51 percent female and only about 49 percent male.

Thus, by the fact that for most of my life, I have been unable to find anyone who'd do me the favor of giving me a first and second date, I am beating those odds, go me.

Granted those odds are tiny, but still, don't steal my thunder.

Trapped and possibly not breathing

2007-05-03T00:36:00.000-04:00

Today reality hit like a wet salmon in the face at 6 a.m. I have no money, I'm restricted to the very cheapest car I can find. I rarely find any satisfaction with my job, and I'm only at this job because I wasn't good enough at this thing I devoted about a third of my life to doing to get a job at a real newspaper (I say that after working in a newspaper that cared, but failing there).

Lazy, a slob, too dumb to make anything worthwhile of my life.

I applied to a copy editing/design job today in Springfield, I really doubt I've got the slightest chance of getting it, but if somebody's really desperate I might get an interview.

I'm gonna wait a few days to apply for the copy editor/design job in Cape Girardeau until after I get maybe an editing clip in place, and that should happen sometime soon. I'm waiting to apply to Cape Girardeau both because Springfield's deadline was sooner and I wasn't going to miss another deadline and because I think I might actually have a very very small but slightly larger chance of getting the job there.

I seriously considered alcohol tonight. I didn't partake.

Random piece of looseleaf paper with goals written on it, ca: early college

2007-04-29T14:55:00.000-04:00

Again, rummaging through old papers, I found a random list of goals from, I suspect, sometime in my freshman year.

1) Have a serious relationship: Technically, I did, though it didn't last long and there's been almost no potential of anything like that happening again since.

2) Get accepted to the MU Journalism School: I got accepted, graduated and I continue to reap the benefits.

3) To graduate with honors and with a 3.5 GPA: Eh, graduated, though with only a 3.3 GPA and no honors.

4) To find out who I am and what I want to be in the next four years: I still don't know really who I am or what I want to be and it's now been almost six years.

5) Develop a closer relationship with God: I did, actually, but in the last two years I lost touch with that relationship.

6) Take the first J-School class and graduate with the Honors College: This very clearly identifies the semester I wrote this, my first. I took that class, Principles of American Journalism, and a number of others. Though, while I didn't graduate with the Honors College, I think I graduated with about three Honors College credit hours.

Early blooper

2007-04-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

I've been rummaging through my reams of old papers and I found one of my first news stories for The Maneater. Apparently between me, my editor and the copy editors we managed to spell Lockheed Martin both correctly, Lockheed, and incorrectly, Lockhead, inside a rather short story.

18 months, two cars

2007-04-26T18:01:00.000-04:00

The Civic has been declared dead.

Monday morning I was about 20 feet from breakfast in Columbia waiting on someone to pull out of the diner parking lot, and was thus sitting in the middle of Sixth Street when someone pulled onto Sixth from Broadway behind me, was looking down instead of up and drove his front bumper into my rear bumper, causing $5,340 worth of damage.

Unfortunately, Kelley's Blue Book and the other driver's insurance company have determined the car is worth considerably less than that. As such, the insurance company, Allied, has declared it totaled.

Thus, unfortunately I have to hope whatever I can get for the damage is enough to cover the rest of my car loan, that I can get a new car loan and that it will be enough to buy a decent car. On the plus side, I'll soon be getting another car.

And the world throws another curve

2007-04-16T10:02:00.000-04:00

I don't know when I missed it, but when did Sesame Street begin getting corporate sponsors?

To fill in some background, I have Mondays off and today I felt especially ambitious and woke up early just to keep things somewhat near normal. Naturally the only TV really worth watching at 9 a.m. is on PBS, so that's where I went.

What should I find on screen? 4 or 5 advertisements in a row heralding the virtues of McDonalds, AstraZeneca (at least a Web site they've established), an organic foods company and others.

I have to say it threw me, how long as this been going on? Where are Sesame Street's normal sponsors? "A," "3," "Q," the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, viewers like me?

I mean how far does a Sesame Street corporate sponsorship go? Is there now a McDonalds on Sesame Street with a bunch of obese monster children hovering around it? Can Oscar no longer comfortably fit in his can?

Poor Mr. Hooper's gotta be spinning in his grave to see a predecessor selling only Coke in his store or promoting only Hershey candy.

Oh Telly, at least you haven't changed.

New goal

2007-03-23T21:20:00.000-04:00

I have a new goal, and while my track record for meeting goals over the last few months has been pretty dismal I figure I might as well kick myself off another. In part because I know others trying this and in part because it's gotten to be too big a part of my life lately, I'm giving up almost all television.

By that I mean not the television I watch to really enjoy, but the television I watch to fill in the hours. It's time to give it up and I've decided to try to do so for a month. I mean I have lots of music in the apartment and more books than I could read in many years on the shelves so there's really no need to fill ALL my time in with the coma-inducing idiot box.

And I won't completely give up on movies, but I imagine I'll probably limit them to 3 a week or fewer. And, since I plan on catching up on my Cardinals game watching (only three years absent save for last year's playoffs) I will cede TV I watch with other people (no FSN or cable to speak of in the apartment, though I figure the sports bar is likely to carry FSN if they hope to bring in Cards fans).

Lets hope this turns into something.

Embarrassed

2007-03-16T19:41:00.000-04:00

So, admittedly, I watch "Friends," it's syndicated, it's on, the TV's on, etcetera. And tonight at the top of the episode they were testing themselves to name all 50 states within 6 minutes.

Embarrassingly, I gave it a shot. Embarrassingly and while I remembered all 50 states, it took all but a few seconds of those six minutes. I'll have your blood, timer.

Most puzzling

2007-03-01T22:18:00.000-05:00

I don't think I'll ever understand how some women I know can say it's so hard to find a decent human being to date when I know for a fact there's a perfectly decent guy lying on my couch right now who can't get a date to save his life.

Just a little Skinnerian

2007-02-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

OK, so after the GED tutoring session this evening, where it looks like we made tremendous progress teaching my student algebra, I definitely left on a math high.

I mean, walking out of the library and if I didn't have four library books with the maximum library fines, one of which I haven't finished yet, I would have definitely been leaving with a calculus book, a trigonometry book or one on the history of pi.

It also unearthed this thought I had a couple weeks ago that if I spent a lot of time reading to and in front of my child (though at the moment I'm not close to conceiving one or being able to afford to raise one) and even going as far as practicing math problems at home in hopes that a child who models so much of their behavior on me to pick up some of that behavior.

I mean I'm even thinking as far as reading multiplication tables to a child in the womb to hopefully build a pre-nascent memory so when it learns the key it could rapidly accelerate its learning curve. I mean, ideally it would be a child that is so used to being around knowledge and getting more of it that the child would think it unusual for people not to have that perspective.

Naturally, I would hope to find a gifted program as soon as possible so the child wouldn't be alone on Olympus, but in general, I'd like a child who would just be infused with the power of knowledge. Naturally I'd also try to pass on politeness, gratefulness, the other virtues.

Ideally, I'd like for somebody who would be so confident of what they know that they feel like they could solve problems -- any problem, aside, of course, for the emotional ones, we're looking for a genius, not a robot.

But it seems like there's so much potential there for a mind unencumbered by people saying "No, you're not good enough." At least intellectually, I really can't hope to pass on any athletic ability with my sports savvy.

Anyway, I think it could be done, and even without a Skinner box!

I HATE cover letters

2007-02-23T02:04:00.000-05:00

I find it ironic that I'm trying to get a job one of the duties of which is writing when I cannot write to save my ass, at least as far as convincing someone I'd be a decent job applicant through anything I've ever written, at least as far as what I've written for cover letters.

Every attempt is just fucking boring, or useless. Oh well, still at it.

It's too darn hot

2007-02-22T23:17:00.000-05:00

So I realize that living in an apartment well insulated by other apartments above, below and behind me in two directions was fantastic in the winter when I never had to touch the heater regardless of how much ice was covering the trees outside, but really bites even when the temperature's in the 60s.

I've got the stupid thermostat set at 80 and it runs almost constantly. I mean in Joplin my landlord had the thermostats restricted to only 82 degrees, but I had 3 exterior walls and remained perfectly comfortable.

Troubled

2007-02-21T13:54:00.000-05:00

So, after improving, slowly, on my application to the Juneau paper, I went to bed with some of the following thoughts:

I'm scared. I'm still not sure if I have it in my gut to really achieve success in the world of journalism. I feel like writing in general should be brilliant, edgy, astounding, and I simply don't see any of that in anything I've ever written.

Journalism writing and reporting in particular should be especially edgy, reporters should always be looking further, transcending what they're writing on. I'm not sure I've ever approached that. I mean most of my stories are just talking to people and writing what they said but I constantly (more so here myself, in Joplin after sometimes less-than-gentle probing by editors) am finding myself looking at stories and thinking "what on Earth did I ever show anybody that they didn't know before? That would really open their minds?

Which is what concerns me about approaching another journalism job. I don't know what it is to really feel like I'm contributing great things to a newsroom instead of filling in for another cog who's moved on.

It also seems to make it more and more clear that for the time I spent in Joplin I feel less like I was a real "adult" "mature" reporter who really understands what they were doing then an overpaid intern who knows nothing.

You might say "but, Chadwick, isn't that the definition of a 'cub' reporter?" Possibly, but I won't accept that.

I've reason to believe, and it's been enforced by many people, that I'm a fairly bright person. I really want to believe that. And there are times that I do.

So I have to ask what is it about a bright person that limits him or her from succeeding in a world where so many mediocre bulbs have succeeded just fine -- some in higher up positions than I'm in.

I also need to get on my ass to run again, I've determined that an appropriate "Chadwick-weight" is about 180 pounds (I'm at about 1.36 Chadwicks now). I feel better when I'm thinner and much worse when I'm fat, and I didn't have the gall to extend myself very far even when I was thin.

Scratch that

2007-02-16T22:11:00.000-05:00

I just saw the ad up again on the journalism jobs Web site, looks like the opportunity has been revised. I plan on revising my search. Just got to take those last few steps.

Motivation

2007-02-15T22:32:00.000-05:00

I just don't feel excited about Juneau anymore, I guess the fire just left me. I'll probably find something new to get excited about sooner or later.

Honestly, and keep in mind I've been feeling under the weather for most of the last two weeks, I feel like I'm just sort of riding the waves lately.

Don't eat Peter Pan or Great Value peanut butter with a serial number beginning with 2111.

Image

2007-02-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

It's tragic, but many times I can't help but define myself other than by my weight.

rough

2007-01-22T16:01:00.000-05:00

Why are the positive steps, the one that make us better, more wholesome individuals always so much harder than backsliding?

I've gone through periods where I 'm working out sometimes even 5 days a week for weeks, yes, weeks, on end and yet I'm just as fat as I was before that period began, even fatter.

I don't have a friend in this damn town and I can't seem to find the motivation to forge a friendship.

I can't believe I've been "living" in Lebanon for nine months because while life gets better and worse from week to week or month to month, but overall I'm still complaining about the same things (true things, not as much perceived) as I was two weeks after getting here.

Movie

2007-01-08T02:23:00.000-05:00

I just saw Talladega Nights, it won't make it into to the permanent collection, but it was much better than the trailers and previews gave it credit.

Update

2006-12-20T19:14:00.000-05:00

Not that I'm alone in this, but I really hate waiting for things I'm not sure may ever come. It's all the build-up feelings toward that coming, but with nothing assured.

What is assured is even in its waning years the Simpsons is still one of the best shows of all time. So far I'm beginning to see where this show started slipping in season 9 (out on DVD Tuesday, so far I'm just one disc in), but it still has so many of those fantastic lines, like "Pray for Mojo."

Betterment?

2006-12-04T01:31:00.000-05:00

I don't have details enough to write home about, but I can feel pretty happy about life right now. Things are, honestly, at least in the short term, looking up.

I can't help but get excited, if only I can keep my imagination to a minimum I should be happier about this in the end. Here's looking toward a much brighter future.

Irony

2006-11-29T00:08:00.000-05:00

It's funny that I am miserably lonely and despise being single, but I'm also pretty convinced no sane woman with the gift of sight would want to date a little piece of shit like me.

Not so much drunk, just not so much sober

2006-11-28T23:24:00.000-05:00

Yeah, today was a day to hit up the bar, using the prior blog post as evidence, it was a bad day that unfortunately just didn't end when I tried to tell a 60-year-old been-here-forever miserable old bitch of a reporter who gave up already with me after I tried to stop him from quoting at length from Missouri state statutes.

I told him it was ridiculous to quote the statute and have it take up 6 inches of his damn story about the bloody city council meeting (and it is, after all, we're not writing legal briefs). He preceded to tell me he didn't care what changes I made to his stories and wouldn't listen to me when I asked him about the occasions where he explained he had to "explain" changes in his stories to his sources.

Which I assume means people have had disagreements with the stories I edited. Which means apparently he's not willing to listen to what I have to say or bother to talk to me about it so I told him with sarcasm dripping I was glad we could agree to butt heads on this.

Yeah it's not worth talking to the bastard. And that's what I decided not to do for the rest of the damn day.

Just another example of this decrepit hole I'm working in. I still can't believe I wasted a god-damn degree to work here and honestly it makes me depressed just to think of the fact that I'm pretty much fucked over the wall because I can't afford financially or emotionally to leave this god damn town.

It was bad enough to spend one birthday here, I hate the thought of spending two.

Which occurred to me after one drink this evening at the fabulous Applebees bar. I was feeling a little more giddy after two.

Tell me why I bothered to do anything with my life

2006-11-28T13:34:00.000-05:00

PLEASE DON'T READ THIS IF YOU CARE ABOUT ME IN ANY WAY

I came to the realization again today that I work at a job where I could have written and signed my own degree and probably could have done just as well.

I went to school two states away from my high school (and partially caused my family to move up a year later) to go to school for four years, spend a semester in DC, spend a summer in Mexico (big fat fucking waste of good money on both accounts given the result) to get a job in a little newspaper on the back side of fucking nowhere.

I deal with absolutely inept reporters who insist on long-winded stories filled to the fucking brim with reams of direct-to-print quotes at length from public officials and yet seem to believe that they know what they're doing.

If you let some asshole dictate your story you haven't fucking done your job.

I hate this. I managed to do absolutely nothing with all the time I spent in school, the work I did there and the thousands of dollars my parents absolutely fucking wasted on this little piece of shit.

I made connections, I networked, I got a fucking fantastic internship at a big fucking daily newspaper and managed to throw it away, 100 percent of my life is in the garbage because I'm working at a fucking dead end job if there ever was one and I absolutely cannot afford financially or emotionally to leave it.

I live in a town where I can't find another person like me (demographically) and I'm miserable.

Fucking miserable.

I have no one in Lebanon. No one.

I had a great internship and later got a job at a bigger city newspaper which I thought a year and a half ago would be the smallest newspaper I would ever work for for the rest of my life.

And yet, I went smaller. Because I am a good for nothing little shit worth no more than the dirt on the fucking ground and that has been proven to me countless times.

I lost a good 50, 60 pounds and managed to gain all of it back because I am just that fucking lazy. I'm not born big boned or anything. I am just fucking lazy and that is why I'm so god-awful fucking fat today.

I don't like myself and honestly I can't see why anyone else would either.

Smart? A smart person would succeed, dammit.

On the inside

2006-11-12T13:16:00.000-05:00

There are some times I just simply want to tell my employers and everyone just what I feel about myself. I want to tell people that i have no self-esteem. I want to tell people who I am sure must believe that because I constantly seem to be trying to prove to people that I'm smart that I am really that way because I don't believe I'm very bright at all.

Sometimes I just want to tell people that I don't see anything in myself but imperfections, shortfalls and failure.

There are things I've come to accept. I use to actually be concerned that I, for instance have one ear lower than the other, that one eye tends to stray in a different direction than the other when I'm tired or I have a very unusual gait. I know those things, but eventually have come to recognize them as unimportant and it's obvious that other people don't hold them against me.

There is one thing I'm not willing to accept and that is my ridiculous girth. But at that I'm in teh gym most days of the week in the hopes that with enough dogged commitment to that I will actually succeed in slimming myself.

And a complimentary high

2006-10-22T03:35:00.000-04:00

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.

Do not read below if you have positive opinions of me

2006-10-17T14:11:00.001-04:00

Contributing to the deficit

2006-10-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

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 just can't help it

2006-10-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

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.

Odd hours

2006-10-09T08:31:00.000-04:00

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.

Big fat guy's kinda out of shape

2006-10-06T22:07:00.000-04:00

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.

A puzzlement

2006-10-04T01:29:00.000-04:00

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.

So yeah

2006-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

There's been really just one memorable time that someone's told me I wasn't going to succeed and I proved them wrong (well, technically two, but then the first was said to my parents). Granted, nearly all the planet's faced more rejection than that and beat through it, so touting two times seems lame in comparison. But it's what I got, so I'm going to roll with it.

In any case in my journalism class with the "teacher" Pat Gathright in High School when she told me after spending most of the previous two years demeaning my performance at the newspaper which she hardly paid attention to that I wasn't going to make it at the University of Missouri journalism school. I mean she told me she had students go there before and tried to turn me off of the oldest journalism school in the country.

Crazy hag.

But in any case I took that on and honestly it wasn't nearly as hard as it was supposed to be to graduate from the journalism school.

And while that doesn't segue, I think that whole desire to better and motivate yourself, self-actualization and all that is just dead to me now. I have no goals, I'd like to get a date, which at 24 for as little intimacy as I've ever shared with anyone seems like I'm already screwed out of any opportunities to even have a relationship with someone.

And to that, I'm miserably out of shape. And while that is clearly from this weekend not the first thing on people's minds when they see me for the first time in several months it's definitely prominent on mine as to what a disgusting slob I've become.

Jobwise? Ha! I had one goal professionally from the 9th grade through last year: find a job in an at least medium-sized newspaper. Yeah, I had some good internships, than went to Toledo, where I found out I cave to nothing when I'm under the pressure of a big daily paper and its assignments. It was disgusting.

I went to Joplin convinced I was going to do a great job and build up a great clip package than managed to fail to meet my objectives in either my first assignment by finding anything to write about or in my second assignment in being able to put out copy that wasn't rife with errors.

Now I've got the job I took because I felt all other avenues were closed. The edge isn't in Lebanon, nobody really wants news in Lebanon. They seem to want what's lying around and put it on the front page, and that's just not like anything I've ever been taught. And I have nothing to show but long pointless stories void of any usefulness looking like the other drivel my fellow "reporters" shit out.

I just feel like I am a pathetic loser. Now granted for those three jobs I mentioned I got the first one with an interview and the second two I got with just one interview. In both cases it was the first and only job I applied for and in both cases I got them with a very well-respected reference.

Even on my other internships I got them from references for the most part in combination with a very good reference from someone with some major pull.

Yup, pretty damn low.

Another Saturday

2006-09-24T03:35:00.000-04:00

Frankly, I'm not sure how I'm going to survive these. They were going horribly all summer, than I had three fantastic weeks of ACTUALLY making my deadline, followed by the last couple months of nothing but suffering either because other than last weekend I don't think I've made deadline in in weeks.

What's worse is that was with someone else's help. Even with someone else's help I failed to meet that goal. And that sucks. It sucks like all of last fall and a large part of last spring on top of almost everything I did last summer.

Yeah, I know I'm one selfish asshole, but those are my feelings right now as they have been most Saturdays since April.

Speaking of, I'm miserably lazy and ridiculously out of shape. Really it seems like after having talked to people in town and my own observations I am of a minuscule 20-something-and-single demographic in this town. Even if women didn't avoid me like the plague I don't know that I'd be able to find a date.

Clearing the palate with some ol' fashioned fluff

2006-09-21T18:49:00.000-04:00

1. Name?
Chadwick

2. Where is your dad right now?
On his way home from work I would think.

3. What was the first thing you said when you woke up?
I don't know, something likely in response to whatever was on the news.

4. What is something you've learned about yourself recently?
I have way too much free time and far from enough to do with it.

5. What color is your watch?
Bronze with a brown leather strap, unfortunately I haven't replaced the battery in at least a year so I end up using my cell phone.

6. What do you think of when you think of Australia?
pictures of Sydney

7. When is the last time you peed outside?
A camping trip or the time I was locked out of my cousin's apartment.

9. Are you close to your mum?
yes

10. Where does your best friend work?
I can't say I could name a best friend, there are a lot of good friends.

11. What is your least favorite season?
summer

13. What color are your pants?
black

14. Do you have a roommate?
nope

15. What color is your bedroom flooring?
brown

16. Do you have a chair in your room?
no, but there are several in the apartment

17. What time of day were you born?
8:21 p.m.

18. Do you know anyone who is engaged?
yes

19. What's your favorite number?
42

20. Do you know anyone named Laurie?
Yes, my aunt

21. What color is your mom's hair?
brown

22. Do you have a dog?
nope

23. Where did you live in 1989?
St. Louis

24. What happened to you in 1993?
We moved from our home for 7 years in St. Louis to move for the forseeable future to San Antonio. Thankfully we did it at the same time as the big flood that wreaked havoc in the same area we were just leaving.

25. Does your first memory involve your dad?
No, but then I have a fairly weak grasp of my first memory

26. Do you remember singing any songs as a kid?
of course

27. When was the last time you went swimming?
the pool at the apartment complex

28. Has your luggage ever gotten lost?
nope

29. When is the last time you spoke with one of your siblings?
Lee and I talked on IM yesterday.

30. Did you ever go to camp?
yes

31. Do you play an instrument?
not at the moment, but I severely beat a cello half to death under auspices of "playing" it for about 8 years.

32. Have you ever thought it would be cool to smash a guitar?
seems like the best you'd get is a broken guitar at the end of the day, so no.

33. Do you like fire?
yes

35. Are you allergic to anything?
some Band-aids

36. When was the last time you cried?
in the midst of a heart to heart with mom

37. What kind of shampoo do you use?
a cheap one, i'm sure it's Suave

38. Have you ever been to a spa?
no

40. Did you take science all four years of high school?
Oh yes, and felt good about it.

41. Do you like butterflies?
yes

42. What is the last book you read?
It was a very thick coffee table book on Zeppelins

43. Do you like Coke or Pepsi more?
Coke

44. What is one thing you miss about your past?
less self-awareness

45. Did you ever see the school nurse?
yes

46. Have you ever wanted to be a teacher?
yes

47. What is one thing you've learned about life?
life gets harder in the real world

48. Are you jealous of anyone?
naturally

49. Is anyone jealous of you?
personally? I can't imagine who or why, but I know there's people jealous of me in the society-as-a-whole sense

50. Ever been stuck in an elevator?
no

51. What does your dad call you?
Chad

52. What does your mom call you?
Chad

53. What does your hair look like right now?
sort of an unkept vaguely sort of long buzz cut with some hair growing a little longer unfortunately in the back

54. Has a friend ever used you?
if someone has I don't remember

55. Ever been involved in a trial?
nope

56. Has anyone recently told you that they like you?
ha!

57. What have you eaten today?
a tortilla, Long John Silver's, an apple and a catered meal at the Chamber of Commerce dinner

58. Is your hair naturally curly or straight?
straight

59. Ever been called white trash?
nope

60. Who was the last person to ride in a car with you?
Lee

61. What are you looking forward to?
getting out of town this weekend

'It's just awful when another good Democrat passes on'

2006-09-15T02:11:00.000-04:00

Goodbye Ann Richards, I wish I had gotten the chance to vote for you.

For that matter, I wish more Texas voters had done so in '94 and we could have put off this phenomenon of our noble leader and his faction's reign.

I hope now that Texas will recognize that its soul is in the candidates who aren't afraid to follow their guts, put forward personalities that are really their own and winning over voters not by slimy tactics to win them over based on their feelings while screwing the pants off of them, but by talking to people honestly. In short, vote Kinky.

He's an honest guy spreading a Texan's message. He's got a little conservativism, a little liberalism and 100 percent Texas jewboy.

Brave on, Texas. Brave on.

Hurricane season

2006-09-02T01:11:00.000-04:00

Ironic that Ernesto, who we can assume by his more latin name is an illegal alien, is single-handedly flooding the southeast U.S., while the more anglican-named John, who by his more English name we can assume is just a tourist, is washing out everything in Puerto Vallarta not tied down?

Rough week

2006-08-27T02:39:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I bombed another one at the paper this week. Again, got there later than I should have to get out of the newspaper on time and as a result I didn't get to start writing my story for the newspaper until after I'd taken care of lots of smaller tasks.

This time, however, I was forced to call in a reinforcement. I hate calling others for help in this job, particularly when I am being PAID to get the newspaper out on Saturdays BY MYSELF. But I had to call, there was simply no way I was even going to get close to making deadline if I hadn't called the assistant editor in.

In the end, I was still half an hour late, which is pretty damn impressive when all I had to do after 7 p.m was write one story which turned out to be 25 inches long, place that story and three photos in the middle of a page one the editor designed, spot a few items on the rest of that page and finish designing another page. Pretty damn lowly for it to take that long, honestly.

Yup, flopped another one like another dead fish on a wharf.

The thing is, I just can't seem to shake the feeling that I am entirely incapable of doing this job I've set out to do. This is the third place in the last year where I managed to fail at my job in this profession I've decided to get in to. It's got me pretty firmly convinced there isn't any profession I'm cut out to succeed in.

I mean I managed school ok, but I never really excelled at it. I made the grade, but then the grade these days is pretty damn low. And once I left school that was it. I didn't manage to do anything right beyond that point. I got two jobs and successfully managed to lose them, not that I was fired but there was intense pressure for me to leave and one was an internship.

On top of that, honestly, I've lost motivation to do a lot of things. I go to work, I still volunteer a few hours every week, but I can't seem to get myself to go to bed until early in the morning and can't seem to convince myself to wake up until the very last possible moment. And dating, well, I was convinced a long time ago I'm just screwed for finding a date. It's fairly clear even if I were to get a date I'm just not gonna get a second date.

For the few times It seemed close to working out circumstances either directed it to go elsewhere or I just wasn't ready at that moment. Had I known those were going to be my last opportunities of finding anyone I imagine I may have behaved differently.

Not that I could afford to go on a date even if against the odds I acutally got one. I'm barely able to keep my broke fat ass in the black as it is.

But please, don't pay attention to my bullshit.

New marriage protection amendment stacks divorce court dockets; and my sister

2006-08-26T01:21:00.000-04:00

I got flooded by a Republican swamp yesterday, but it certainly swayed my opinion in the election. After hearing Talent speak (and completing another name on my politico card, so far the governor (thrice), Kit Bond (twice), Roy Blunt, Claire McCaskill, John Cornyn and a couple Texas congressmen), I know I'm voting for Claire. The only politico I definitely want to meet is Ike Skelton, my current congressman and a Democrat (thanks!). He'll be here on Monday, conveniently I won't be.

But in any case Talent was on his way through town as part of a value-touting tour and had the governor and the local state rep with him. I got to cover, it naturally, and stand out in the hot sun listening to the baby-faced kid talk about my "Missouri Values", like poking holes in the arctic wildlife refuge for six months' worth of oil, claiming that McCaskill isn't going to do her best to support biofuels or anti-meth laws and telling me my Missouri values include discriminating against millions of gay people by not letting them marry whoever the hell they want to.

I thought it was honestly a little funny, I mean personally while I don't plan on getting married I don't see how my friend marrying his boyfriend is really going to affect the sanctity of my wedlock or that of any of my siblings or cousins.

I really (really) wanted to ask Talent if he planned to enact controversial new anti-divorce laws next session, but it seemed like it'd be kinda flippant. On top of that "protection of marriage" is nothing but a politician-sponsored buzzword for "those fags want to marry in my country?" and they hardly think about it and certainly don't expect anyone else to take it seriously.

So I didn't ask him.

The question I should have asked, the pertinent one, was one I didn't think of until today, 24 hours later. Talent was spouting about the federal anti-meth law he put through which requires cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine to be stored behind the counter at the pharmacy.

The result, he said, would be to "choke off the supply" to meth cooks.

The question I should have asked is simply this. A meth cook will turn a massive profift even if he purchased his cold medicine legally. Enough, I could easily imagine, that it would be worth his while to travel to dozens of pharmacies in any given big city and buy a couple boxes of cold medicine at each one. Heck, he could even go to another slew of pharmacies the next time he's looking to cook.

It's not like he's taking a big hit driving around, and he could bypass the current federal legislation without giving it a second thought.

The question is, what's stopping the meth cook, Sen. Talent?

The other pertinent I had to ask that day was for the governor, who's broadcasted his opposition for the statewide initiative on the November ballot to raise Missouri's minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.50 per hour. I mentioned the issue and unfortunately he filled in the minute and a half I had with him talking about how he was for a federal raise but against a state raise so he would more easily bring new businesses in.

The other thing on my mind lately is my sister and her persistence in getting older.

I just realized tonight looking at Facebook that my sister is actually graduating high school in May. This scares me about as much as I was scared when she turned 16 about two years ago.

Why does this happen? My sister is the only member of my family that I don't remember always being around. Evan was born when I was just barely one and a half, Lee was born just after I turned 4.

But on the day my sister was born I remember waking up early and seeing my mom and dad leave the house. I asked htem what was happening and mom was on her way to the hospital. I even remember dad telling me who our babysitter would be. I don't remember another thing about that day, but I remember that as clearly as yesterday.

Heck, I remember visiting mom while she was still in the hospital with Kelsey. The three of us were there with dad who had brought us by. I don't remember that room at all save for mom was there, but again, it won't leave my head.

I know the stories about Evan picking Kelsey up out of her crib and I've seen several times the video tape of Kelsey being born (the only of the four of us to have that recorded) and the tape ofher first birthday party. It's strange that this person who was only entering 8th grade when we moved to Kirkwood suddenly being just nine months away from adulthood.

I mean it wasn't long enough ago five years ago that my family traveled from San Antonio up to Columbia to drop me off, the first of the four of us, for my first year of college.

There hasn't been enough time gone by for Kelsey to have written me a letter a couple months after I left to tell me how much she missed me. It just hasn't been long enough, even though Evan started college and will graduate in May five years later and Lee went off to school last year.

It just hasn't been long enough.

Ironically, on that note, Kelsey's will be the first of my siblings' high school graduations that I'll actually be able to see. I was in Mexico during Evan's and I was in Toledo when Lee graduated.

I can't help it, though, while I know and want her to go wherever she wants to for college (and I don't think i'm going too far out on a limb to say I don't think she's really too thrilled about extending her academic career, though I believe she knows how important school is), but, given that, I'd still like her to go to school somewhere in state and somewhere not too far away.

Ideally she'd go to school in Columbia, the same school Evan, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa Watters, several relatives and I went to for undergrad and Dad went to for grad school, but it's also only two hours away from me and I'll probably still go up there fairly often next year.

Now, Missouri State's only 50 minutes away, but, honestly, I just don't think the Watters brood is an MSU family.

The only school she's mentioned to me lately is Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, which is a good ways from me, but very close to several cousins already going there and only 45 minutes away from mom's hometown where our grandmother and a lot of aunts and uncles live.

I can't help it, while I'm honestly only vaguely aware of her social life (the extent of my awareness really is just asking who her beau is every few months) and am definitely not anxious to know her every move, I still want her nearby so I know at least vaguely where she is and, secondly, I'll be close by if she needs me.

Kelsey, you know we'll do anything for you.

I LOVE corporate America!

2006-08-24T00:47:00.000-04:00

Well, not completely, it's a pretty shallow sort of love.

But I did notice reading through my company (a small, one-owner company within south central Missouri) employee manual that I don't get any vacation for a whole year (yeah, i knew this) and for the first five years of my employment I get only 1 week each year.

Ironically at my last job, which, albeit, was part of a large nationwide corporation, paid me $500 less per year for simply reporting rather than photography, editing, designing and reporting, but gave me I believe nine days vacation time after just seven months of employment (it was also ironic that, while I left for a number of reasons including my inability to meet the job's requirements and frequent errors, I only became eligible for vacation days less than a week before I left).

So, while a small company has its benefits (I know the company owner by name and face, he knews me and has been in my cubicle just to talk casually), I feel like I kinda got the shaft in the terms of benefits. Ouch.

Oh well, while there's far less to do around here than there was around Joplin and while I'm not reporting for a real city as much as I am for a small town, I am actually meeting the objectives of this job, which is a significant advancement over working in Joplin.

In short, I dunno, I still wish I could say I were writing for a city of Joplin's size, even though I've managed to prove by now that I just don't meet those standards. On the other hand, I'm not putting myself under stress every day just to live (only those Saturdays where I don't come in on deadline).

To update my readers on Saturday's entry. I was pretty well calmed down by the time I finished that and actually ended up staying awake the rest of that night just because it was late enough by the time I calmed down.

I topped it off with an early-morning 7-mile walk around town. Felt good.

Damn it all

2006-08-20T04:02:00.000-04:00

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.

Bedtime

2006-08-13T04:54:00.000-04:00

How clear is it that you're really ready to go to bed after a pretty sleepless night when you find yourself imagining action movie scenarios starring Michael Landon?

Little Road House on the Prairie, anyone?

Foxhole moment

2006-08-05T00:07:00.000-04:00

Let the psychosoma-tosis begin!

So I was out on my apartment's balcony smoking a cigar (yeah, secret's out for those who didn't know, i smoke cigars and a pipe on occasion) this evening and when I came back I felt a spider web on my arm. Now sometimes, say, outdoors, in the woods, I wouldn't be that bothered so much about a spider web, but then I didn't realize there were spiders on my balcony and I've been out there many times.

So my interest was really piqued when I saw this small black spider with a huge abdomen hanging to the inside of the curtain in front of the door. I didn't see any red violin-shaped features but then I wasn't going to ask it to turn over so I could check. It was pretty damn scary.

I grabbed a whole bunch of paper towels, picked up the bug and threw it out immediately. Of course that didn't help very much.

I've been itching a lot more, especially around the scar from that bone graft on my side, but it's really all over. I pulled my shirt off once outside to shake it out (not something i typically do outside at my bulk) and another two times inside my apartment again.

Off and on I get the impression that my muscles are tightening up, but so far my throat hasn't been restricted. And with luck the foxhole prayer'll work and I'll still be here tomorrow. I hope someone would notice before they don't see their expected paper Sunday.

Really I know if anything were to have happened I'd be feeling it a lot more about an hour later. Doesn't stop me from itching a lot more than I think it should.

Maniacal cackle

2006-08-02T18:53:00.000-04:00

For anyone that's heard it, my laughter sounds like a maniacal cackle and those unnerved enough at having experienced it got to be a little unnerved this week.

So ever since March when I got a speeding ticket for hotdogging it through Osage Beach I've been indebted to the state for traffic fees. That situation wasn't much helped a month later when I got a second ticket for going 11 mph over the speed limit. The first ticket cost me about $280 but it was the second ticket I was really worried about after paying $110 for a lawyer to take care of it for me.

Having spent that much to try to avoid getting points taken off my license I figured trying to get the points taken off of two tickets might easily cost me up to $300 -- having never before tried to shake my license free of points.

It was a relief today to get a call from the lawyer's office and hear my court costs and fines -- the sum total of all the costs of this little endeavor after the lawyer's fee -- are only $155. Now, it's not like I can drop $155 anywhere and not miss it, in fact I'm pretty much dead broke every two weeks or so (like right now), but I can't afford $300 at all, so $155 isn't bad.

It was enough to get a laugh.

The time before that wasn't near as universally recognizable, it turns out a newspaper I used to work for in Stockton couldn't edit it's photos because someone was accessing the computer server at another newspaper I worked for in another town about 50 minutes away (they're part of the same company). Specifically, that person was running the one licensed copy of Photoshop for the Stockton newspaper. Stockton just had the application saved on the server, not on any of their computers.

So randomly througout the day Stockton for weeks apparently called the other paper, in Buffalo, and told them to get off the server.

In other news, I get paid Friday (hoorah!). Lets slow down the rapidly increasing debt train!

Hot damn!

2006-07-30T04:09:00.000-04:00

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.

On a lighter note

2006-07-21T01:54:00.000-04:00

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.

Stop the presses, he's being a little positive

2006-07-20T19:08:00.000-04:00

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!

Another cursed evening

2006-07-09T03:05:00.000-04:00

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.

Well, I'll take some of that back

2006-06-25T03:51:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-25T03:11:00.000-04:00

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.

Filling the editor's seat

2006-06-11T02:18:00.000-04:00

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.

AIR!

2006-06-09T18:47:00.000-04:00

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.

Update

2006-06-03T01:43:00.000-04:00

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.

My week: ups and downs

2006-05-18T22:39:00.000-04:00

It's definitely been an occupied week. Let's recap.
PLUS: I had my 24th birthday Tuesday. 24 years old -- doesn't feel all that different from 23. But, unlike 23, 24 (as Evan pointed out) is 42 backward. Which is cool. I'll have to stick to that for the next year.

MINUS: My great-grandmother died at 100 the very same day. It was not sudden, she had a stroke a week ago and as far as I know we didn't expect much for her recovery. I may not have seen her in more than a year, but now that she's gone I miss her and the sound of her voice and going over to her house. And her house in general.

At that it was probably also my loneliest birthday. Which is not to say I didn't appreciate all the phone calls and messages, thanks guys.

PLUS: About 2 more pounds between today and the last time I measured myself 2 or 3 weeks ago.

MINUS: That brings me up to a voluminous 223 pounds. I hate being fat, it just seems to do so much to aid and abet my general self image of being just fat and stupid. It's funny that nobody who cares anything about me feels that way. Apparently me and the picture I see in my mind and in the mirror are two very different things. Unfortunately I really only get to see the latter. I don't know where this switch is to get myself over this lousy hump.

MINUS: Not enough sleep this week, which is probably part of the problem.

PLUS: Actually got back on the treadmill today. It'll begin wearing on my shins again, but at least I started that again. It does get that much further toward dropping myself down to a reasonable weight.

PLUS: Tomorrow is another day.

Ohio-sick and while I normally don't mention it, my birthday

2006-04-28T20:03:00.000-04:00

Lately I've felt oddly Ohio-sick. It's strange because, after all, I've spent only a summer and, beyond that, just a few hours in Ohio in the course of my entire life.

I think I really got lucky last summer when I got a job in Toledo. I sent out 40 applications for internships last year and I got only one non-negative response. Lots of letters, but not even a phone call beyond the one where the Blade, without an interview, signed me on to a job without so much as an interview.

Really, outside of specific circumstances, I had no connection to most of the places where I had even applied. But I got lucky in the former swamplands of northwest Ohio because a very close friend lived only an hour and a half south of Toledo. And once again our close friendship got even closer. I also got to see the home of Wilson footballs, while not being a football fan, there is only one Wilson plant where they're made.

So even though my summer professionally was a wash and I realised just how remarkable my faults were (oh, and sometimes it seems are) as a journalist it was still in the end a really good summer. I made some new friends, had some amazing conversations, learned plenty. Maybe I'm a sucker for summer, so long as the weather's reasonable and not unbearably hot, but I tend to reminisce about them more often than other seasons.

To those of you who read this far I apologize, it seems again I've failed to stay on topic or even find one, what I guess I will say is the job here is going ok. My editors have been remarkably generous, particularly in the sense that my beat at the newspaper has been dry as toast lately (only three stinking bylines for the whole stinking week and while my editors have told me i'm doing fine and the newspaper doesn't keep track of bylines i still feel like the slow pony, inately setting high standards, i guess). I also prove consistently that I have reams of things to learn about designing pages, though I am learning.

On a positive note, I'm making deliberate efforts to get my butt back up on the treadmill and shed some of this miserable girth. It's also a lot healthier outlet for the anger and frustration of not meeting your own standards.

And a word those leaving for the summer and, in some cases, longer (i'll miss you) I'm coming back up to Columbia next weekend (wee hours of May 7 through May 8 or really really early morning, fivish, May 9). Call me. It is also likely to be the last time I'll see many of you before my birthday (May 16, turning 24), though I'm not sure what time there may be for a celebratory drink with finals schedules and all.

Cheers.

McCorkle for council!

2006-04-05T00:07:00.000-04:00

My man won his City Council seat against what I would have thought would have been rather long odds tonight. He was a write-in candidate, a former mayor who only served two years and he just helped to drag the whole town through the media mud by getting into a brawl with the current mayor after a city council meeting.

He writes fiery letters against the present mayor and he advocates impeaching the mayor everywhere he goes with a yard sign in the windshield of his pick up truck. He also seems to honestly want his seat of power back and I believe really feels like the mayor is ruining the city with his policies.

Is he really fit to lead? Probably not. City council members in Jasper seem to be incompetent as a rule of thumb anyway. Recent audits from the last couple years show gross violation of city codes, including allowing two council members to be paid as city employees for a full year. Granted they only earned $22,000 between them that year but it's a conflict of interest just the same. The last audit before that included dozens of bank accounts with no records and purchases people just plumb forgot about or at least didn't write into any book.

In other news, I am, despite leaving my job in three days, still anxious about failing to have gotten a story written and shipped out that the tv news technically beat us to. I learned late Friday about the result of a lawsuit between one of my towns and a couple other parties. I put it on my reporter's budget for Wednesday because I knew today was going to be largely devoted to elections and late tonight (I presume after attending the actual city council meeting) the tv news had it broadcasted about the result. So we write it a day after the news tomorrow and it will run 8 days after the damn thing was decided.

I put it on my budget, but didn't mention it today to an editor and didn't mention it before this weekend and because I wasn't here Monday I didn't mention it then either. Now we're a day late even though we knew about it almost a full week ago. Why does that still bug me???? After all what difference does it really make when I'm leaving Friday???? I don't know but I think I'm tired and just too damn tightly wound.

Anyway I have a forwarding address for Lebanon now. E-mail, call or instant message me if you want it.

The results are in: movin' on

2006-03-24T20:27:00.000-05:00

I took the job. I had a conversation this morning with my editor about leaving the Globe for the Lebanon Daily Record and she informed me that the last two error or so published in the newspaper were someone forgiven because she knew I was looking at other job opportunities. Thus the case at hand. I have two recorded reprimands, two strikes, against me which means if I get a third error published in the newspaper my ass is in the Dumpster.

My editor told me they'd rather not fire me and wasn't trying to get rid of me, which I believe, but then that same day told a friend of mine and a Globe intern that should she want to take a job full time mine was available. I felt that was more than a little uncalled for, to more or less begin divying up my posessions while not only is my corpse not yet cold, but still live and in the building!

In any case, yes. I took the job. I will be a Daily Record reporter and sometime editor beginning April 11. I'm not terribly excited about the job, but I'm looking forward to not having a job where I continually need to worry about coming in one day to find the editors giving me flowers and telling me they hate to let me go.

Thus I am a lame duck reporter. The motivation to really try to dig in and expand coverage of my beat? Gone. I mean the returns are slim to none. I'm still going to go to work every day (that is, unless I can pull off a couple vacation, personal or sick days before I go. Honestly I'd rather not try to stress the relationship I have with my editors). But in any case I wouldn't take one off until after the election on the 4th. I can't wait to cover the election.

This election, ladies and gentlemen, could determine if a former Jasper mayor, a write-in candidate for an alderman seat, could possibly get that seat despite being a write-in candidate. This, my friends, means he might possibly sit on a city council at the same table as the current mayor this guy slugged at the beginning of the month. It would be great to see how a guy does in the election when he has a court date just a week later for an assault charge against the mayor the town he's trying to represent.

It should be a good night. And I won't miss it. I might try to swing a day off afterward. I mean my editor said she needs her reporters Friday, but then I'd be leaving that same day so where's the motivation to hang around as long as it's not gonna hurt me in a future reference? Ciao.

New dateline?

2006-03-23T21:20:00.000-05:00

Today when I went ahead and called to thank the Lebanon Daily Record for their time and the interview I got a bit of a surprise: An offer.

So, for $500 more than I'm making right now I could go to Lebanon and write about, well, that has yet to be determined, and help edit and design the newspaper on Fridays and Saturdays. This would significantly adjust my weekend schedule from a Saturday-Sunday weekend to a Sunday-Monday weekend. No big loss there and my Saturday shifts start about 2 p.m., which gives me time to sleep in.

Thing is, I'm not particularly sure I want to leave Joplin. Now, if you asked me this morning what I'd like to do if given the option I'd have probably accepted. Probably for lack of sleep (I'd hate to think I'm no longer capable of faking being a morning person) I would have told you what I felt. I didn't want to go to work today and I wasn't particularly confident I would make it to the end of another work day. Well, we made it to the end of another work day, It wasn't too terrible and I finished my stories, though unfortunately two editors have since called to either add things or answer questions in the story.

But even with that last sinker of an addition the day didn't go badly. I could use more days like that and its days like that which make me think that I might actually be able to make it here at the Globe (*cue Mary Tyler Moore music). I also don't want to leave because I feel like I've been given a hell of an opportunity to really make something for myself when a professor stepped in this summer and hooked me up with the interview that got me this job.

It's an opportunity I'm not ready to just let slip away.

Which is not to say I lied when I told the Daily Record I wanted somewhere where I felt comfortable to begin building up for a bigger career. I don't feel confident at the Globe. I've called friends and loved ones in tears sometimes because I've been stressed out over small errors after being warned about my corrections. I obsess over my stories and it's no secret because most of the time I feel like I'm not far from getting thrown out on my rear. I mean the Globe's fired someone in the time I've been here, sorta casts a real dour light on things.

I'm also pretty lonely down here, I don't have friends in Joplin outside of my coworkers and I'm not very close to even them. That would be one thing nicer about Lebanon, it's half an hour from my grandparents, 50 minutes from Springfield, closer to St. Louis and only 2 hours from Columbia.

I dunno, I'm really not sure what I'm going to do but it's nice to know there's another door open, at least for the time being. I keep feeling like if I leave I'll regret something about having left Joplin. Like there was something in Joplin I just couldn't do, a goal I couldn't meet and leaving would be admitting that failure.

I mean it's not like I'd be leaving Joplin for bigger and better things. While the editing experience would be a new skill and a big step for me Lebanon is a small newspaper with a smaller market than the Globe. It's leaving an area (Joplin and its closest associated communities) of about 80,000 for a town of 12,000 people. A 7-day daily taking itself very seriously for a 6-day daily focusing intently on the local community.

Which is not to say I think Lebanon would be a permanent change. Not in the least. At the moment I still want to try to move on to bigger and more substantial papers. My aspirations do not include anything like the New York Times or the Washington Post (Lord knows I don't have a chance in hell of getting that far) but there are certainly smaller newspapers to consider that are in towns of even higher than Joplin's prominence on life's grand scale.

For all that I have in Joplin if I leave it would very likely be for good. Joplin's been good to me, it'd be absolutely miserably pitiful to have only worked anywhere only 7 months, but overall it's not a bad community. Really not a bad place to live and I'm glad I got to know it as well as I did. But it's not a market I can imagine really putting any effort into re-entering, though I feel like leaving the Globe on these terms there is a possibility that they might hire me back or at least I can count on them for recommendations.

Essentially I just don't know. My thoughts on my abilities to do this job change with the weather. Is that a way to live? Will I automatically be better when I get to Lebanon? I doubt it. How on Earth did I ever manage to convince two professional journalists to offer me jobs? Is there something else I should be doing? That thought scares me. Do I have the skills to do anything other than walk in a straight line? The thought has crossed my mind.

Ntrvu

2006-03-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

The latest: I have a job interview Monday with the Lebanon Daily Record. I'm not sure I'll even be offered the job (it involves some design/editing work and I have only very very little experience in that field). I've also had some problems with errors in the last two newspapers I've worked for. On the other hand, I've also gotten some pretty good clips from the last two newspapers I've worked for and I have experience reporting in small town southwest Missouri. I'm also willing to do anything they ask, I somewhat know my way around a camera and I'm not afraid to work the miserable pisant hours of the day (I do that already even if I don't put it on my timesheet and after all, what else am I going to do? social life? what?).

The upsides: from what I've heard from the editor the position: part education reporter, part Sunday editor, part stagecoach shotgun rider (if Lenny's sick) pays better than my wages right now, at least $500 per year more. At least for a little while I might end up living with my grandparents 30 miles away from the newspaper and I imagine at this point I'd try to find a place to live in their town largely to have loved ones nearby, that's definitely been missing from my life these last 7 months. Maybe they'd even let me help them out with housework and yardwork. And grandma's a much better cook than I.

Downsides: I'm not sure that a smaller daily would be any less stress than a bigger one. I mean the workload would probably still be there, even if the push for the bigger stories or the competition isn't. I'm not sure what difference that makes, or how much of that is the cause of so many of my stupid errors, beyond the errors that creep in when I don't adequately accuracy check my stories before shipping them off. After all, the deadline for the Daily Record simply changes from 5:30 p.m. to noon, so the pressure's still there, particularly if something were to happen at 11 and I needed to get it finished and in by noon.

I also, and I know how some of my readers feel about this, feel at some level like leaving the Globe is admitting a failure on my part to make it at the Global level. Despite my mediocre career path and only-just-above-average academic performance I don't like admitting failure. I've never dropped a class, even when I felt like I should, and I still made it through the end, even though I know for a fact I didn't deserve the inflated grade I recieved.

Even worse would be to leave daily newspapers all together or journalism. It's the one thing I've built my professional life around. I've made contacts, worked my network, went to the right school, took on the good internships, went out there to sell myself on internships (and hopefully didn't dissapoint enough to lose my chances at the San Antonio Express-News), traveled a lot farther than I actually thought I would and reaped the benefits. I also learned that I knew nothing about big-city dailies when I got my first big-city daily internship, nor my first job. It's not something I even want to consider doing.

My thoughts: Leaving a big-city for a smaller-city daily and getting the design experience might eventually make me more marketable, even if the Daily Record pays a lot more attention to the mundane bog of city politics (20 inches on the budget numbers, anyone?) and the smarmier side of the news features (with plenty of "execution at dawn" photos, none of which I want to take and would desperately try to avoid, along with the "hold that trophy, smile and pose!" pictures). I figure someone with some design, reporting and photography skills might be impressive to future employers, if only they'd be kind enough to not draw too much attention to the whopping longevity of my career at the Globe (actually of the last eight to leave the Globe I'd be fifth for career length).

On the other hand, there's lots of people who've pulled those skills together, so I doubt how remarkable that really is. What I'd really like to do (this is really hazy, I actually don't have a 5, 10 or 15 year plan) is find myself in a city of maybe 150,000 - 180,000. Quite literally I'm thinking Knoxville, Tenn. It was a nice city. Joplin is about 45,000 and Toledo was about 300,000. New York City is about 8,000,000, for comparison.

And that's about as far as I got. The interview is Monday. They may reject me flat out, which would certainly clear up some of those details. It would be nice, however, to have some option out there. I mean right now my options are a) stay at the Globe b) make use of my only other connection to find a job if there is one in weeklies or semi-weeklies c) look for another job, an option which seriously scares me or d) flag down a passing UFO and hope for a fresh start.

Here's to what the future holds. In the meanwhile, wish me luck.

Life, and me, and stuff

2006-03-16T20:32:00.000-05:00

Hello there

2006-03-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

I'm really not sure what else I should say. Quite honestly there hasn't been that dynamic of a change this week. I managed to keep my job another week, which is unfortunately more than I can say for one of my co-workers.

He had been here two months, worked himself extremely hard to pull up his production for number of stories and, admittedly, was a lot more challenging in his conversation with the editors. So after deciding he had not been producing like they were paying him too he was canned Monday morning.

My God, did that ratchet up the pressure. Personally my own production is just as piss poor if worse than his, I'm really just surving from week to week with the number of stories I put out. I need to know my towns better and make better contacts because I feel like my beat is dangerously slipping away from me. What I need is a schedule, I believe, or some confidence to begin with that I really can do the job. Whichever's easier to come by I suppose.

In other news, I'm still broke. It's ridiculous really, for not living any level of lavish lifestyle (I live in a fairly low-rent district, when I eat out it's usually cheap and I don't eat with any particular look toward class or sophistication), but I somehow manage to plow my way through every dime I'm paid and more (overdraft charges) with the bank. All the while I'm still in ridiculous debt to my parents. Yes, I'm definitely sort of gripping to the edge of "functioning human being." While it gets you out in the air the drafts are uncomfortable.

Um, good news, well, the weather's nice. Great exercise, walking, actually get out of the office while it's light out weather. Regardless of how it may completely screw up my long-term deadlines I need to spend more time outside, I've earned plenty of hours by working late Monday and Saturday and it's too nice to muggle on inside.

Sorry there's not more to say, it's been pretty cloudy here.

Lucky bovines

2006-02-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

Cows, I'm afraid, have it lucky. At the end of the worst day of a cow's life (beef or dairy cows alike) it gets a piece of metal fired through its head a high rate of speed. At the end of the most rotten, miserable, heartbreaking day of the animal's life it never has to live to see the end of it.

I mean once a cow meets its end it just becomes another slab of beef on a table. Or, in the case of gamey old cows, jerky. Yup, once this world is through the only worry for a cow is the judge in its next plane of existence: USDA grade inspector 1284.

The same is not true for the rest of us. I've spent the last two nights working late on pulling hot stories together. Two co-workers recieved reprimands today for not having the level of production the newspaper requires, though both of them put themselves under precarious levels of stress and spend all day working the only way newspaper reporters can -- by talking to people.

Unfortunately the next day is still the next day. The newspaper has to be filled every single day regardless of what did or didn't happen the day before (or, as is unfortunately sometimes the case, the week before, we are, of course, only as good as the information we're fed or that we dig up).

Which means we have to find something to write about, enough to fill up the paper for every single day. For some of us that just ain't easy. After all newspapers require change, change is expensive, and plenty of people around here are anxious for their lives to change as little as possible. My co-worker in a rural county and me when I was in Barton County suffered endlessly for an utter lack of change. Those areas aren't very dynamic, people are pretty pleased the way they are, which means curtains for the journalists interested in covering more than beauty pageants and parades.

I mean the Globe covers those events as well, but the newspaper's there for more than that.

Me? I got lucky with this beat, these little towns are under heavy dynamics because of changing traffic problems, growth, loss, dickhead ego-driven politicians and those who just can't seem to figure out this "governing" business in the post 'good ol' boys' generations.

Even so that stuff doesn't happen every day, sometimes you have to dig really hard into the mundane business to dig up all the news fit to print. Mediocrity? Mostly, but it's just good enough to be worth column inches if you can get a few "little people" (Joe and Jane Offthestreet) to comment on it.

At least I hope so. We've had the nose to the ground to look into a dog poop pick-up ordinance yesterday. For the rest of the week it's looking pretty dry if I can't scare up some life.

I will be covering the governor tomorrow, though. I just hope I can get my question in. He's touting a plan to sell only 10 percent ethanol gasoline in Missouri and I want to know exactly how much jet fuel it took to fly him and his relatively small entourage around the state to five towns in the span of 7 hours.

Update and addendum

2006-02-16T18:53:00.000-05:00

So, after yesterday's hurried post.

I spoke with an editor today, who advised me as a friend to consider another option to build up some confidence before getting back into a bigger city market. I've gotten similar advice from my parents.

Regarding the new possibility, it will be largely reporting duties with, as I understand it, some layout included as part of doing business. The Sunday editor position is apparently just sort of guarding the paper and getting anything big that should happen on a Saturday included before it is shipped out.

No, I've never expressed an interest in editing and I have very little experience with laying out pages or editing copy (though more experience editing copy than laying out pages). At this point I'm not sure what I want to do. I'd like to be happy. I want to be happy, but at this point I'm aiming for something higher than where I am, or "not sad, anxious, depressed, frightened, leaping out of my skin, spiralling toward a nervous breakdown et cetera."

I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

On the other hand, I may have (this is an outside chance because of circumstances surrounding a relatively new publication) an opportunity to stay in my current apartment (and not lose a $470 deposit), but could cost me any positive reference from my current employers.

I may also have an opportunity to take on a job in reporting/layout at one of several small weeklies in the area. I'm not anxious to get into the weekly market, though, because I feel like once I delve into that market I may never resurface, though they are much more comfortable than the daily anxiety attack. Again I don't know if there's a job in the small weeklies (haven't asked yet) but I know if there was one I could get it.

On the upside my reporting has vastly improved in my time at the Globe, if not at the pace the Globe would like to see. That's somewhat comforting. Though I still can't take a decent photo as will (if it's on-line tomorrow) should be evident on the Globe Web site.

Ciao.

Outlook:

2006-02-15T23:13:00.000-05:00

Definitely unclear.

So after being advised by an editor at the Globe (Alternating Oscillator), I recently contacted a former coworker about a possible position as a reporter/designer/editor at the Lebanon Daily Record.

It involves reporting on an education beat, designing part-time and being basically the last person to get to take care of the newspaper before it leaves by being an editor Saturday evening. There's one other person at least vying for the job, I have next to no design experience, i've proven to be correction-ridden, it will still be stressful, but it would be different than working at the Globe.

It would be about the same pay, so far as my coworker knew. I'm not sure what my odds are at getting it but I know my former coworker thinks very highly of me and circumstances would make it seem that her editor thinks very highly of her.

It would also be closer to my grandparents. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But any advice is welcome. Pass me an e-mail if you wanna. Most of my readers have that info.

Fancy that

2006-02-12T16:02:00.000-05:00

We're heading into another rough week. After getting my reprimand (always pleasant, so pleasant it makes me want to seek out a rock to hide under for a few weeks) I managed to make another error.

Somewhere yesterday while writing one of three stories I thought twice about something I wrote and made a mental note to change it before filing the story. Those mental notes, while reliable, do not always reappear when you absolutely need them, like before you file a story. A mental note, however helpful, is not helpful at 11:30 p.m. that evening when the story is being sent with the rest of the page to the printer and you're sitting at home sweating it out and hoping your editor thought it was just an extraneous detail.

He didn't. So now there's a fact out there I don't know quite how to fix yet and I'm sweating bullets until I hear otherwise. There's a correction (well, possibly, since i really have no proof right now that what i put into the paper is wrong) out there to be made and so soon after getting my ass grilled we may be looking at another unemployed American. A thought which scares the piss out of me.

Friends, thanks for the contact information, you may soon be hearing from me begging for a job and/or money to keep my butt out of the breadlines.

In the meanwhile I need to get my butt out of those boneheaded mistake business. I know I'm better than this, down, deep somewhere I know that to be true. I just have to prove it to those who don't know me so well.

On the plus side, however, it appears I made a new friend lately. That makes me happy.

Bad week

2006-02-04T14:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, real bad week. This one began with a correction Tuesday because I confused the East Ward for the West Ward in a story even though I had it dead right in my notes. Not really all that unusual for a guy who has to think about whether he's turning left or right every single time. The lesson, however, is double checking those friggin notes. It's an easy lesson to follow, really, just something I need to make into a nonstop habit. Basically I need to get on my butt to get the stupid thing done.

This was followed by a story that took three days to get out the door because I failed to get another couple pieces of information each day. It started with me being over confident that I had done all the work for the story (not a long story nor one that was worth a whole lot of time, so I thought) and ended with a shaken self confidence against an editor who definitely intimidates the piss out of me.

I get along with him fine on a personal level, at least most of the time, but he's called me out on so many things that I'm afraid to approach him when I have bad news.

So yeah, all that resulted in a verbal reprimand Thursday. A really miserable way to end a miserable week. Or so I thought.

Friday when the ATM says insufficient funds on the day my paycheck came in while I'm trying to get cash for my rent I find out that in the past week I've accumulated 7 overdraft fees from the bank, totalling $203 to really write off the whole bloody week. I hope the people around me thought I was laughing humourously while really it was hysterics as I went to two other banks, a Wal-Mart and a grocery store to get a cash advance on a credit card and a money order to cover the rent.

I ended up covering my rent and, by proxy, utilities for the next month but only with another emergency loan from my parents and now about $50 to somehow find my way to the next paycheck.

Yeah, I covered the last event for the day, a play at one of the high schools in my beat, and went home, where I sought solace in booze. Fortunately booze is pretty reliable for that.

Two martinis and almost a bottle of wine later I was screaming to my brother that "Osama bin Ladin is a woman" on the phone while wandering around my living room (which was in some context at the time but while i remember the lead in i'm not going to try to explain it sober).

It was the zenith (or the low point) for the week. At least it can't get worse? Right?

In other news my coworker met his second young single mother within about 8 weeks of moving here on a night out last night. Frankly I think my luck in that department is about as good sitting in my apartment as it is going out, as I have no interest in dating single mothers, particularly at my age. Neither does my co-worker, which is sorta funny.

Happy days

2006-01-26T23:09:00.000-05:00

Yeah right.

I hate getting in from a 11-hour day. Another 11-hour day. I hate it because every time I come home after 11 hours either in the office or at some meeting or out in the field I'm never happy about it.

After all my place is a mess, I'm as alone as I was when my last relationship ended three months ago, I've gained a lot of weight, I can't seem to do my damn job right and I'm not happy about any of it.

I just want it to fade off into some hole somewhere. Some drain. I'm sick of it.

So far this week I topped off Monday with two hours at a city council meeting, Tuesday was the better part of an hour at a school library for a story that's nowhere near done, Wednesday was staying in at the office to put together a hot story. Tonight was another late night pulling together another hot story.

I'm not alone in this. I know there are reporters, some of them I know intimately well, who put up with a lot worse shit than I do. Frankly she does it all and on top of that is a much better reporter than I could hope to be. Honestly I don' tknow how I got here and I don't know how I've managed to stay here this long unless either somebody really likes me or someone really hates me and is running me into walls like a sadistic child with a marionette. I feel like I'm held up by luck, it's the only reason I got to where I am right now.

I just hate this. I hate getting myself worked up and then getting myself worked up again the next day. I've always had this issue. It's been part of me since high school and I've never been able to shake it.

Aside from my other fantastic reporter friends I can't help but look at some of the people I talk to in my day and wonder if they're as hung up about their jobs as I am about mine.

After all I can't be alone.

Pay it forward

2006-01-12T01:35:00.000-05:00

So tonight I got to return a favor. To another person, yes, and in a different city. I still owe a lot of favors in this world, more than I can possibly repay. But I repaid one.

Where to start? A co-worker of mine got the same conversation from the metro editor today that the editor gave me about two months ago. She told my coworker that his production wasn't what the newspaper was needing out of a full-time reporter and that he had a review coming up in a few weeks where she would again look at his production and see if he was getting any better. This is the guy who broke a huge story before the competition in his second week on the job and has another big breaking story coming out Sunday. And this kid got the talk after three weeks.

Odd, it took the editor six weeks before she got fed up enough with me to give me that talk. And I wasn't doing nearly as well as my coworker. I don't know whether this is regular policy at the Globe, but it's enough to scare the piss out of any reporter, particularly a young reporter (my coworker is also 23). I responded to my conversation with screaming, crying and talking ad nauseum with my family and friends to bitch and moan about the situation (that would be to their nauseum, not mine, i was feeling mine in spades).

My coworker responded to his by calling me up tonight and asking if I wanted to get a drink (something we've done before). This was before I knew he had received that conversation, though I knew he had been talking with the editor with the door closed earlier.

My coworker got very drunk, drunk enough to try to deal with this situation and pick a fight with a 20-year old female coworker from the newsroom in the process over one of our editor's methods (the argument was in a bar, not in the newsroom).

I walked him home and listened to him and told him many times that I had been in the same place not too long before. I couldn't offer him much consolation (i've still got most of the piss scared out of me and i have trouble looking some of my editors in the eye while passing them in the halls because i think that they're ready to fire me tomorrow, after all i really haven't much improved myself, though i've worked at it).

This reminded me of a similar tale last summer. After a particularly begrudged topic of conversation came up at the table with me and my two roomates I got the impression that somehow the world would seem a little bit brighter if I had a lot more whiskey in my system.

Yadda yadda yadda by the end of the tonight my roomates were hastily helping me out the door to save me from getting into a fight with a much stronger, taller, older and male opponent than my 20-year old female coworker.

Now I am not half so easy to watch, speak with or listen to as half of one of my two young female roomates were but I was more than happy to hear out his woes. I just hope nobody asks me to save anyone from a fight.

Or that I get myself into one.

Another day employed. another paycheck in the bank.

2006-01-07T01:07:00.000-05:00

Hi there, still here, and still going to work every day.

While my prayer is always "please, please, don't screw up" I'm still there. I rolled three stories together today, at least one of them without the real sourcing I would have wanted for it (one supportive council member and a sheriff detailing the program does not a really even story make), but I've got calls out to other people there and against the odds one of them might just call me back.

Alone? yes, yes, I feel like I'm the slow horse on the team. I'm not mad about it, the only way I know to defeat this is to keep plugging constructively at the job. There are stories somewhere to piece together, I just have to find them. None of this is easy and it doesn't really help when the reporter who was last passed onto this beat tells me that he just muddled through it when he started. Thanks, Derek.

Not a lot of encouragement there. Much like advice I've given. This is miserable, and it apparently promises to be consistently miserable. At some point, some time, I hope to have established my sources. I hope that people will call me with stories, will tell me things that happen in their community. Will help me in my efforts to become part of their community. I would like to get out to my areas more often and I don't resent that I've been put in this position because honestly I don't know how I'd handle the bigger institutions right now.

In other words of introspection I've got a highly trippable ego. While I don't take compliments very well on the face (or at least try to give that impression) I'm highly susceptible to them. Part of it the amazement that accompanies a somewhat weak sense of self-esteem -- that people would have such a better opinion of myself than I do -- but it could also just be in my nature.

I'm particularly susceptible to compliments from attractive people and I encourage anyone meeting that standard to experiment frequently.

Am I a doofus? oh yes, but it only matters if I don't hide it

2006-01-05T00:52:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how to write this, or even of what I should say. I guess the best I can do is not worry about it and write it with as much a sense of "train of thought" as possible.

In any case...

It's time to grow up. I was talking with a pastor about this in reference to figuring out just how important it is to work hard as far as achieving anything. Obvious? Yes. Oh yes, obvious to many things. But frankly I don't feel like I've had to work hard for anything. School? School was easy.

The way I see it is as thus: In school 70 percent of expected is just fine. you passed. good job, at least in one of our liberal arts majors. 80 percent - better. 90 percent - great! 100 percent? good job. Exceptional!

If you make a mistake than quite honestly you didn't lose much. You maybe didn't get a great grade an an assignment but most of those assignments really didn't matter much. Even at the Missourian there were undoubtably stories to fill in the newspaper which isn't that big to begin with and there are 90 reporters to cover anything. Even if the Missourian fails to get the jump on something it's not like there was every very much riding on it. I mean people were excited when the paper got a jump on something but it was still impressive - not like people expected it to get the story first. I made a royal mistake at the Missourian by not getting a story we should have. Somehow I did just fine at the end of it.

Not so at the Globe. At the Globe I'm infinitely more important and unfortunately I'm making the same stupid, stupid, stupid mistakes. I need to figure out how to fix these. The trick, I think, is to resolve the same issue I've had for a long long time. When I come up with someone that someone should know I need to get over not feeling big enough next to my superiors and tell them when there's an error. Tell them immediately so the communication is there. Not to let something die because I didn't have the courage to go ahead and stop it ... or at least molify it.

My editor pitched a story to me today - BIG DEAL. My editor is not paid to do my job for me. Granted this particular story was something I had already covered in a brief, just not for a story. I had the event. I was there. I covered it (twice, actually, i felt it was usable twice and there was newsprint to fill). But it was my editor that found the clipping somewhere, circled it, cut it out and showed it to me. That should have been MY job. Not that my ego is bruised, far from it, but that i wasn't doing the job I was paid for.

Essentially I am not meeting the demands of this job. I am paid quite a bit of money to gather information and report on it. Information with errors is a useless piece of information. It's not valuable to anyone. It's ridiculous words on a page. No one benefits.

Thus a correction is simply UNACCEPTABLE. That's that. Period. They're not my rules.

To repeat a phrase earlier in this blog there are few jobs where people are paid to guess at things, to not deliver a solid product. I cannot hope to get a job where I'm not expected to meet the requirements of the job. It's not like High School. 70 percent just won't cut it. 100 percent is the norm.

A dream from last night

2005-12-29T01:22:00.000-05:00

I heard a news report from somewhere that Harry S. Truman had died in an accident in Iraq and was to be buried there the weekend of Christmas. Naturally, the first thought through my head was: didn’t he only suffer minor injuries in that Jeep accident?

Naturally in real life I was referring to the November accident where Ike Skelton suffered minor neck injuries when a Jeep flipped over in Iraq, but then my brain had confused the two politicians in my head and decided to go with the one more geographically prevalent.

Because this was, in my dream, the week before my Christmas holiday, I bought a ticket and hopped a flight to Iraq, only wondering after I got there and looked upon the mountainous vista which resembled mountains near Cuernavaca, Mexico, of how exactly I managed to pass through security and even get a ticket to Iraq, much less rent a car.

The funeral site was in a large atrium resembling a barrel vault ceiling with thick marble blocks resembling a Greek temple but built over a narrow canyon. This particular mausoleum had a grassy atrium many feet below and a loft where Truman was to be laid to rest.

His casket, though I didn’t see a sign or the casket itself, appeared to be buried underneath a mound of dirt with a pathway leading into one side and a backhoe sitting idle in front of the entrance.

All I did was stand there and cry for a few minutes. I didn’t realize I had quite so many pent up feelings for Truman until that moment, and I still don’t know where those came from.

After seeing the funeral I drove across this Iraqi valley near a Saddam Hussein palace and the next thing I remember was waking up in a small car in a field facing the sea, a road, some small white Mediterranean-looking buildings and a flock of gently baaing sheep.

My first thought was “this looks like Italy.” So because I wasn’t going anywhere sitting in the field I decided to drive bumping over the field to the road and bear a left away from the buildings and came to a winding highway through dense forest.

After a little while I realized I really didn’t know where I was so I should probably find that out before driving off in a random direction. I went back to the buildings and learned I was in Beirut.

This made sense.

After all, Beirut is on the Persian Gulf and much closer to Iraq than Italy. That was particularly good because it’s a much shorter drive to Baghdad from Beirut than it is from Italy and I only had so much time before my round trip flight from Baghdad was scheduled to take me home to Joplin.

Beard me

2005-12-22T20:53:00.001-05:00

I've got a beard.

Not the Paul Bunyan 40-days-in-the-wilderness-on-locusts-and-honey beard that our friend John would have had coming back home, but certainly one that grew ... on most of my face.

Which is why I paid someone money yesterday to take a stab at sculpting it into something that doesn't look quite so Ted Kazinsky-like. It's got 2 lines that stretch from my awesome sideburns down the very lower edge of my cheeks to pool together underneath my chin. Topped off with a flavor saver and a moustach and it's pretty dern' classy.

Job up-date: Still scared for my job. I make dumb errors or leave things out and get called on them later and I am -- surprise, surprise -- probably being a little hard on myself. But not unreasonably so. After all, I'm paid to do a job.

It's also very hard to find stories during the holidays. People simply aren't doing anything. Schools let out last Friday, offices just sort of mull over last year's business and clear out the inventory for next year and we're left standing out there in the cold with a newspaper we have to put out every day with at least the resemblance of local coverage. It was hard this week to put that thing together. I really don't even want to think of having to try to pull stories out of the dirt on the ground for four days next week. Sigh.

Somebody shoot somebody, anybody. Just make sure it's in my beat and between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. And call me before you do. I'll want a statement.

Mr. Smith, I presume?

2005-12-11T20:52:00.000-05:00

... Should have been the way I addressed Caleb Smith when I became, I believe, one of the very few people outside of his family to see him in person since August.

The circumstances, however, didn't provide for the historical reference, as it was about 8:30 in the morning, I was at his grandparents' house earlier than either of us expected and the first time I saw him was when he was walking down the hall way between two rooms having just showered. There wasn't much more than a "hey Caleb" and at the moment it could have been any skinny male young twentysomething. I merely inferred that he was the only one of those in his grandparents' home in Independence.

This was after I worked my connection into getting to see the inside of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. A friend of mine is traveling across the Southeast and, soon, the Southwest part of the country with a partner in the Wienermobile, making media stops and promotional events along the way, like the radio interview he did Saturday morning dressed in a very stooge-like track team windbreaker in garish colors. The car, for the record, is not that amazing. It's got seats like a mini-van spread in a vague bus-like fashion in the cabin and great views through the dog's windows.

Ironically, the car is built on a bread truck chassis, or a UPS truck chassis, but the bread truck is more ironic.

So, job: I've passed my probationary period, which means in a month I will again have health insurance which is always somewhat reassuring.

Unfortunately, however, little else in this job is reassuring. It is quite likely my belief that I should be able to do this job perfectly, without mistakes. After all, I'm a reporter, I should be able to write facts my readers can trust. If I can't make that, than why write stories for a newspaper? I'm convinced that most of the other reporters don't make these sorts of stupid mistakes I do. The editors don't seem as stressed with the other reporters as they are with me. And they seem to expect better and more work of them.

Sadly, I don't see many quick ways to rectify this situation. I've started a new beat and frankly as I see it the only way to get to know the beat is to talk to people. Talk to a lot of people. Spend a lot of time there and become acquainted through association. I had some relationships with my sources in Barton County and they didn't come immediately. People didn't recognize me two weeks after moving in.

And I have a lot of time to dwell on these complaints (which, admittedly, are common to lots of people I'd assume) because quite frankly I don't have anyone within an hour of me that I can go to to talk with about my private concerns. I have co-workers, friendly co-workers, but I don't have many opportunities to spend time with them after work and thus I still seem to be able to dwell on them and explore them to the end of the mine shaft at home.

Which is not to say I don't have friends. I talk to my friends and/or family all the time, they just don't live any closer to me than Springfield, which is a long trip to make after the work day and in time to get some sleep before another work day.

I'm still here, just many times I wish I weren't here by myself.

Leaving my Lamartians

2005-11-26T00:39:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving you. And not by my choice. I don't really have an end of thoughts on this subject, so I'll start with the story.

Earlier this week the reporter covering the suburban cities around Joplin started talking to me very softly about taking over some of his assignments. Because the newsroom's lost as of today 6 reporters the entire staff is going to be taxed for production, and I saw that coming. I really was just waiting for an order to tell me that I was going to be taking on more assignments along with my regular work in Barton County and Pittsburg (for those of you who just began reading, my beat) but no editor had told me yet what those assignments would be.

Today I got into the office late (long story, in short I need to learn to wake up in the morning, among other things) and started doing whatever I could since all the public offices and most of the businesses are closed. When I arrived the metro editor, assistant metro editor and the managing editor were all in a meeting together, even though the assistant metro editor was off today and all of this week. I knew I was part of this discussion. After all, I'm now part of a very small group of reporters, it's not like my name wouldn't come up in the conversation).

Yeah, I still didn't see this coming.

My editor told me my beat was no more. I will no longer be covering Barton County and Pittsburg and my official duties will be completely taken over by the suburban Joplin beat. This is a wee bit of a shock when 3 months ago I asked the assistant metro editor (who apparently will now be our education reporter as well) what I should consider the Globe to be for people in Barton County. He said it should be the newspaper they go to for their news, for their local Barton County news.

People have and some will probably continue have subscriptions to the Joplin Globe, I really don't think anybody bought any subscriptions specfically after I started up here but hey, they got to see their cities on the front page a couple times and that's where I felt they needed to be. Particularly after that was backed up by my editors.

Apparently that is no longer our business. After the loss of 3 other regional reporters the Globe is only doing Joplin and the immediate area. We're sinking into our hole after 3 months ago the paper was all about getting into the area, that was even the topic of gossip 2 months ago because of all the efforts the Globe was taking to try to be the newspaper for essentially everyone in its coverage area.

Now we're just covering Joplin. Granted, I don't know the town that well, but from what I've seen I don't like Joplin. It's not very clean, it looks like business loop 70 (for the Columbians in the room) everywhere in town from what I've seen. The town has some redeemable qualities, but the town's a mess. The Globe building itself is an ugly black and gray concrete and metal grate disaster. And I get to live there now.

Quit? Not really in the cards. I still owe a lot of money to my kind parents for helping me make this move and I ca't afford to make another one in the near future. That and the Globe's been infinitely patient with me while I'm learning how to be a reporter. They've given me all the time I need and I wouldn't want to leave them high and dry while they're short on reporters. Not because I have any feelings for Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., I feel abused by them because while the staff is shrinking the paper's also not allowed to hire anyone new.

Foremost I don't want to let down my fellow reporters. We will all be eating it in the next few weeks, months, because of the freeze and I couldn't afford for any of them to quit on me, I rely on all of them too much. Second are my editors, who have been so patient and have been willing to help me whenever I've needed them and to whatever degree I've needed them. They've worked hard and they're going to be worked harder like the rest of us.

So I'm sticking it out. I'm here and I'm not likely to get a reporting job that pays this well anywhere around here. I considered looking for jobs at, say, the Washington Missourian which comes at a good recomendation from a very trusted professor or the Southeast Missourian where I have a friend who's working as the education reporter and could probably help me find a job. I've also been advised by a friend at the Staunton, Va., News-Leader who has been strongly trying to persuade me to go out there that there is a job there. As stated, I can't afford a move, particularly not a move to Virginia.

The appeal of at least the Missouri papers is that they are small towns. Suburban beats, particularly when it means covering four towns, scares me now. I like my small towns, they're not complicated and everything is within a long walk of anything else at least within the city limits. There's not a bubbling source of daily news here, but there are always stories to work on and I'm just beginning to develop sources. I've put 10 weeks of my life into this town and I'm not anxious to leave it be.

I'm scared, I'm feeling a little abused by the corporation and I'm sad because I don't want to leave the sources here. I may not have any close friends that I'd hang out with outside of any professional discussion but I've gotten to know people here on the job and I don't want to leave them. I don't want to tell them I'm leaving. I only told two people so far and told them it was off the record, like that's gonna matter.

Anyway. Goodbye Lamar, I hardly knew you.

He's still alive

2005-11-22T00:06:00.000-05:00

And, um, kicking? Well, at least keeling over, I suppose that's a start.

I'm up here, plugging at it, no really amazing stories today though I did spend my afternoon moving from liquor store to liquor store down and up Pittsburg. Nope, didn't buy anything, though the Boulevard holiday gift pack does look tempting I think that could have been just a wee bit unprofessional. I still don't know how people do this job, but I guess at some point in the future I'll get the hang of it.

I do, after all, feel better about my job performance, just a little better about it. After all, the editors haven't mentioned any dirty little words like "review" "canned" "your ass" etc. I've made some blunders, like tonight when my cell phone was on vibrate and my editor couldn't reach me after turning a story in at about 9:30 p.m.

Which leads me to my real subject: thank the Lord for patient editors. Very patient editors. They have forgiven me dozens of missed deadlines, late phone calls, corrections, adjustments, leaving them alone while avoiding telling them that I have no stories for them, etc.

So thanks, Missle System, Spinal Meningitis, Crank Shaft and Aerodynamic Oscillator (sorry, Andy).

Bubs, yes the "Bubs" Hohulin

2005-11-10T20:10:00.000-05:00

Is serving me burgers.

For those who aren't "in the know" in 2001 a state representative named Martin "Bubs" Hohulin attempted in vain to remove KOMU, the Columbia NBC affiliate, from any connection with the University of Missouri after news director Stacey Woelfel ordered anyone appearing in front of the camera not to wear any sort of U.S. Flag pin or symbol when on the air. He was particularly concerned because Woelfel sent this order very shortly after Sept. 11.

In an editorial note: KOMU is the only news organization associated with the Journalism school that actually turns a profit, although it is not governed by the J-School. And does it ever profit. It's rather nice because other organizations, like the mighty Missourian (run by a seperate board) can always be counted upon to be in the red. Thus, for any money KOMU can bring to the J-School (not to mention attracting Broadcast J students, who can't get actual network reporting work within any other school) giving up that little goldmine would be stupid.

So, now that we're all caught up, I've been going to this small drive-up restaurant here in Lamar because they make a darn good burger and they're barely holding on to business anyway. Apparently it won't be open longer than January.

The reason being that Bubs, who owns the place with his wife, is now assisting state Sen. Vogel in Jefferson City and will be returning there when the General Assembly kicks off again for another couple months of legislation. That and they're going from day to day at the moment and are only open when they know they'll have business. Small restaurant goes out of business, that's a non-story. Unfortunately it does mean I'm stuck with far fewer options for a decent burger in town, and nowhere that would bother to offer anything other than American cheese. Sigh.

So today after I found out he was a former rep I asked "Bubs Hohulin, right?". He acknowledged, yes, having at that point repeated himself.

I said: "Mr. Hohulin, we have a relationship."
"How?"
"I was a freshman at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2001."
"They must have hated me over there."
"Well, there's hate and then there's disagreement and they aren't the same thing."

Oddly enough the conversation didn't go much further. He said he had gotten about 6,000 letters telling him to keep at the university and about 1,000 letters asking him to stop. One of them you can find here, along with Mr. Hohulin's condescending response. I didn't mention the letter, though I told the author, a fellow 2001 freshman, about having found Mr. Hohulin.

I told him KOMU was the only part of the J-school that actually turned a dime. He said "yes, I know, and they're semi-autonomous, but I still wanted them to lose it." And preceded to close the window. Apparently not really interested in continuing that argument.

Thanks for the burger, Bubs!

Still here, continued

2005-11-09T22:12:00.000-05:00

So after hearing about a job opening in Marshfield (weekly, circ. 5,000 in Webster County) I began to seriously consider leaving the Globe. After all, this is a constant challenge and I'm not particularly happy because I'm frustrated at my workload which is miniscule compared to my fellow reporters there. In any case I got to the weekly reporters' meeting today to discover that another reporter (the fourth in five weeks) is leaving the Globe. None of them are leaving because they were mistreated.

I, who was ready to talk to my editor about whether or not they were going to can me at the Globe and thus leave me looking for other jobs if I didn't take the Marshfield, sat there stunned. I'm sure I was pale as a ghost. I knew I was shaking. When I talked to my editor afterward I started by saying "I had a Dr Pepper today, but I wish whiskey had been an option."

My editor told me they knew when they hired me that I was going to be green. Heh, ain't that the truth. This is the biggest lesson I've ever had in journalism. Four years of journalism taught me some good tricks, ethics and theory, but it didn't do squat in teaching me about working as a daily journalist. I asked her if she were to review me today what she thought they would do with me there at the newspaper. She told me they had no intention of firing me and felt I had imnproved lately and hoped I would continue to improve. They also suspected it would take me time to get my feet wet.

So I declined the Marshfield offer. A) I can't afford to move anyway, even if it is to a temporary situation at my grandparents' house before moving into an apartment of my own B) yeah, Marshfield was definitly going to pay less C) I don't quit many challenges (the only jobs I quit I quit because they were joe jobs on the way to my reporting career) and I feel like if I left now then I would be giving up on my opportunity to really get all I could out of this beat.

Thus, defiantly and resiliently. I am still here.

God, help me

2005-11-07T19:28:00.000-05:00

I don't know how on earth people manage to do this job. There are harder jobs, absolutely, but I don't see how people manage to do this job. My day:

8:40 a.m.: in the office trying to plug through the library for a backlog of stories without having a clue how to read the filing system
9:30 a.m.: call health department, receive assignment details from editor, file one brief condensed from a press release
10:00 a.m.: healthcare insurance plan meeting - unavoidable if i want health insurance next year (that is if I'm still here)
10:20 a.m.: edit long story with editor, I guess this took about an hour
11:30 a.m.: file two more briefs based off of a press release and a calendar at a library, made one phone call to confirm some information about one brief
Noon?: continued to work on briefs, put a photo request together for a story this afternoon, confirmed that I'd be writing another feature in the office, got a telephone question answered
1 p.m.: editor mentions something about a meeting today that I knew about a week ago but didn't mention because I didn't know if it'd just be publicity for the company
1:03 p.m.: duck out of office to drive to Lamar to cover what was left of this meeting
2:00 p.m.: arrive in Lamar at the meeting
3:15 p.m.: finished observing the remainder of the meeitng and spoken with farmers and company representatives
3:15 p.m. - 4 p.m.: complete a few rounds at the police department, city hall and county offices, got an idea for one more feature story
4-5 p.m.: arrived at dance studio for a belly dancing lesson that got stalled in the middle because of two wasps hovering around the room. I killed one, the photographer and the teacher and I helped kill the other. There was much rejoicing.
5 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.: got telephone numbers from 8 underage girls and a married woman to call them back for interviews because I had to file the meeting story by 5:30
5:20 p.m.: arrived in library, called editor to ask for a 5:45 deadline so I could finish the story, pounded story out as fast as I could, didn't have time to check a third party on the company's numbers so I ended up writing a free publicity piece
6:00 p.m.: just trying to jab on one more quote, editor calls to ask where story is
6:10 p.m.: filed small brief on results of county commission meeting

Now I have to call those people from the dance class to file the story tomorrow. I have to call two representatives from two hospitals again tomorrow because they didn't bother to try to reach me today and I have to figure out where to find hunters to talk to them about youth hunting that doesn't involve standing over the gun counter at a store somewhere for hours until someone talks to me, because with at least one other project to finish because it's getting sickly late, one person i didn't get to call back friday, a new feature profile to write, and a second feature to write which I found today I simply don't have time to sit and wait at a gun counter.

I've got plenty more rounds to do tomorrow while trying to find more daily stories for the next day so hopefully (said with a smirk) I'll have another story to write tomorrow. Today my one piece will end up being about 9 inches (very small) and the other may be as long as 15 inches if I'm lucky. At least that's the length I'll write it to.

Sorry to bitch but how do people do this job???

Hypocrisy

2005-11-06T02:18:00.000-05:00

It's a dirty word. But there's a lot of times where I feel like I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth. Sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes I'd rather lie than speak what's really on my mind and eventually it's going to eat me alive.

No, it's not frequent, but I remember most sharply the times I did it.

Lately I'm worried that I gave two impressions when talking to a friend about partying. I've done my share of drinking, nothing dangerous, I don't drink with strangers. In any case I agreed with my friend that yes, sometimes losing yourself in alcohol can be fun within reasonable limits. I also agreed with her today that sometimes you need to sit back. I was in both positions, there are positives to both, but I feel like I was speaking out of two sides of my mouth.

With everything else, so it goes. I'm still trying to manage this beat.

On the plus side: went out to a symphony concert tonight, good times.

Thank you, Mr. Bush

2005-10-31T19:05:00.000-05:00

Sam Alito: representing the unrepresented Italian-Americans from the Supreme Court. Assuming, that is, that he's Conservative enough to pass the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Just so long as he keeps piano wire out of the justice industry. Sleep well, Luca Brasi.

Disclaimer

2005-10-31T18:55:00.000-05:00

Honestly I bear no ill will nor stereotype toward Italian-Americans.

I'm still here

2005-10-30T01:36:00.000-05:00

So, haven't written here in a while. Most of my writing's been in my personal paper journal, not near to the descriptive detail as I've written before, but then most of the messages here are repeating. To sum it up.

1) I need to figure this job out, I've been told that I've worked hard but just haven't gotten the number or quality of stories to make paying me full time worth their money.
2) I need to sleep more, exercise more and watch less television.
3) There ain't nobody my age and single in Lamar.

Whining? Well, yes. But then it's my journal, and the me, me, me direction is just where I tend to go in journals. You can write about yourself in yours.

So anyway I gave it my best. I went to church last Sunday and will go again tomorrow. I've now been to both bars in town (yeah, no surprises there whatsoever). My hopes went up when I saw a young bartender who I knew had to be 18 or older (or breaking ordinances somewhere). Sadly, hopes dashed. She was a man.

Just kidding. But no opportunity there.

The other bar is a tavern open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The owner, Frog, is cool, gave me a free Coke, but there ain't much happening before 6 p.m.

So, yeah. Beyond that I was in a Sonic tonight and when the waitress brought me food she said "I see you at my school all the time." This struck a brief note of fear because I'm 23 years old. Which is, I believe, old enough that I would definitely be a "creepy stalker guy" if I spent a lot of time outside High Schools.

I explained that I was a reporter and was grateful to hear that this waitress (to whom I'd spoken before) didn't have the prior assumption. I'm a bit too young to get that stalker label stuck to me in this town.

Yeah, sorry to whine like this, but I do have something light to add. On Wednesday (or Thursday, who knows?) I saw a group of high school students with a police officer, they were teaching safety lessons to elementary school students. The funny part was when one of them donned a sailor's shirt and hat next to the policeman. I had to ask. Where's the indian? Where's the construction worker?

On another note I have a scanner now in my room and 3 alarm clocks which I end up putting on snooze in sort of a staggered pattern for about an hour every morning, at least so far. The funny part is one of my alarm clocks talks to me, there's a cowboy, a Johnny Cochrane impersonator, a mafia boss impersonator and an indian accent on that machine and they all order you out of bed or just insult you out of a general habit.

So every morning I'm combining voices from two machines and trying to take notes in my half-awake state. I never really bothered to ask why the cowboy was heading to N. Pine to take care of the 1034. I just wrote (well, scribbled) it down.

Thank you, parental units

2005-10-14T19:22:00.000-04:00

I really appreciate my parents.

I mean they not only raised me to some state of adulthood, but they have been there to help me at absolutely every life obstacle I've had in front of me even after the state decided I could take care of myself.

They've co-signed lease arrangements, loaned money for moves and new jobs and, sometimes, completely financed me for unpaid jobs. They've forced me to calm down and explain my feelings when I didn't want to face them. They refuse to listen to me whine and they'll always hear me out when I'm ready to talk.

Lately my dad co-signed on my first car loan without, it seemed, even so much as a thought. I would have been without a car, and thus without a job if he hadn't.

Thanks.

Bye Bye, Baby

2005-10-12T20:01:00.000-04:00

R.I.P.
The Wondermobile (a.k.a. a 1995 green Nissan Altima XSE edition)
1995-Oct. 12, 2005

Goodnight, sweet automobile, you were far better to me than I ever was to you in return.

Oh God.

2005-10-12T03:00:00.000-04:00

I just did every dish in the house. Most of them had not seen soap in weeks. I only wish I were kidding.

My Sixth Sense (for the fourth estate)

2005-10-10T22:42:00.000-04:00

Hm, I'm not sure how to start this, lots has happened I guess. But I'm really now sure if it's rehashing all of it here. My life is fairly open, I don't have many thoughts I don't express to someone or another. If that was you, thanks, and I hope you'll still talk to me after hearing that rant.

So three (or some) weeks ago I was driving on a county road south of town and the right front wheel slipped a little off the edge of the road. Because the road slipped off into a 2-foot ditch (shoulder? ha!) my car just got sucked down in and after a lot of very frightening bumping around I had about six feet of the electric fence on the other side of the ditch stuck in and around my poor automobile. It's now got a mean tattoo of criss-crossing white scratches from the endeavor.

The guy whose fence I chewed up owns one of the oldest and most frequented restaurants in the area, the Blue Top Restaurant. I just knew at the time that I was going to do a real big piece for the newspaper and a lot of it was going to center around this man whose fence I just beat up. I mean karma, or a sixth sense, whatever. I knew something big was going to happen involving this guy.

Early this morning there was a fire at the Blue Top Restaurant because of an electrical malfunction with the dryer. I saw it, or something just as significant, coming three weeks in advance. I'm just that good. There are lots of times when I'm not sure whether this is what I'm meant to do. I mean, after all, I'm not amazing at this job. I'm slower than I should be and I still need to ask better questions. I've had some lucky breaks, but over all, I just don't know. I get by through the people who support me and frequently have a higher opinion of me than I do myself. God I hope they don't lose that idealism.

It's still fun to hear some of these stories, to be on the front line in many cases. To afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. To boldly walk up to someone's door and asking if they'd be so kind to be quoted in the newspaper. Or to call someone and definitely not expect them to call me back, but call them anyway, what the heck?

To tell the rest of the story, the Blue Top wasn't completely destroyed. The man with the fence told me it will be rebuilt within the next four or five months. He's got to figure it out, he told me, but he had unbelievable loyalty with his customers. I can't imagine him being in trouble in five months.

For me I've still got to figure out how to do this job. I've already had to tell myself I can do the job, if I can't at least state that I've lost the game. Like so many things I live on the hope that surely it has to work out. So it goes.