#135: time let me hail and climb

I call this one "Print Journalism in a world that has forgotten how to make paper". That's the working title until I find something even more esoteric.

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There is a part of me that really misses college at 5:49 p.m. today. Remember when I lived in a garret room filled with animals, both living and dead? And how at 7 each morning the squirrel family would scamper overhead and through the walls and wake me up on days when, ordinarily, I could have slept in? Although, granted, those days were few. Remember the quality of the light through a northeast window and putting my hair up in front of the mirror, footsteps in the narrow hall behind me meant someone stooping through the tiny door to come in and talk for a bit or for an hour? Going to classes. The tetris game of setting up my schedule so that I could work my jobs and get the classes I needed and go to bed at a reasonable time but instead I went to bed at unreasonable times and woke up five minutes to five most mornings until it became such a habit I'm still doing it to this day. Mostly I miss being around people I know and mostly I miss the grace of small mistakes. I feel like every mistake now is enormous.

So I'm trying to figure out if the awful feeling I get when I screw up at work outweighs the joy of being a reporter.

I've made this vow before, but I will make it again: When I am old and I have the kind of voice that makes children cringe, I will not go out of my way to make the youth feel stupid, especially if those youth are writers because heaven knows writers are already neurotic enough without someone spitting at them over the phone in the most condescending of whines. That TONE. That tone makes me want to crawl into a closet and die. And not a nice closet. Some musty tomb full of lye and bleach and highly-chemical, fraught-with-death glass cleaner. The kind of closet where janitors have abandoned old towels, now molding, and old shoes infested with spiders--where the cocoons of unspeakable insects (the kind with impossible number of legs and bodies not to be believed and antennae shooting out of every pore) lie waiting for sunlight that will never come.

Anger and embarrassment is mingling with a Cheshire cat grin of well-being because, darn it, I was productive today and I could have stayed at the office longer and been perfectly happy to do so. But I made myself come home so that I eat dinner and go to bed early so I can get up early tomorrow refreshed and alive. Also, to listen to "Skinny Love" a million times (oh hush) until the feeling of failure passes entirely into a feeling of well-being. No more flip-flop--give me one straight emotion, no ice, no lemon twist, no soda.

I've been dealing in dead elk today and I will for the rest of the week it seems. A new theme perhaps? Dead elk and crime? Winning combination, I think.

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Jesse was oh so very kind and set up a www.rabbitsinwalls.com for me, but I'm not sure if I want to move the blog because enough people have told me they read it here and I don't want to be confusing. Maybe I'll use it as a photo site? That might be a good idea. I need to work on my photographing skills.

I will ponder on it.

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I love The New Yorker and I really like this writer. Mostly because S. F-J. interviewed Johnny Greenwood about audio integrity and I got to be a real-live nerdy fangirl for ten minutes. Whenever I get stuck on a story at work, I pull up The New Yorker's website and read a story or two (as long as they're not 20-page epics...oh my heart, can you imagine?! 20 pages is infinity in the newspaper world).

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On the reading list:

1. "My Traitor's Heart" by Rian Malan. This is another "Dispatches" for me, I guess. So rending and I can't stop reading it and I know it's going to put me in a funk full of idealism and the impotency of idealism.

2. Still hacking away at "Silent Spring" I can't seem to get into it.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, because I never have and it shocks me that I never have. I slap my face.

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Well whaddayaknow, soup and rice time.