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You know what this blog needs? More pictures.

Unfortunately, I haven’t taken any good ones lately. And not for lack of trying. This is a little disconcerting as my new job contains a photojournalistic component.

Instead, I offer you an image you will find at the top of the results of a Google search of my name.

It was taken in March 2005 at the Albuquerque airport. I am eating an orange. I remember thinking, “Certainly he’s not taking a picture of me, I have a section of orange in my mouth.”

I look nothing like this anymore. My hair is much longer, I have bangs and I snapped those glasses in two about a year ago while trying to clean them with my shirt at LAX.

I miss those glasses. And those boots. Why, Payless, why are there no manmade, comfortable boots in stores this season?

Big Fish

I dare say that I think I’ve grown at this job these past 10 months.

I’ve always been the type to get frustrated when other people’s inadequacies slowed me down. I do my best work when allowed to do so independently. Reporting seemed a good fit, because not only did I get to do my own research and writing, but I also had the freedom to leave the office whenever I wanted to without necessarily having to tell anyone where I was going.

But newspapers are a screwy business anyway, and reporters tend to be managed by editors. I found it supremely frustrating to have my work adversely affected by the inadequacies of my superior(s).

So I went into public relations, and it’s been so much fun reporting and writing little stories and not having to worry about whether I’m meeting some newfangled reader initiative, or even, like, getting a second source. Instead, my concerns are: “Is this interesting?” and “Who might cover it?”

Here’s where the growth happened. I’m in a small office, receiving orders from one supervisor, who’s very into considering everybody’s opinions about everything.

Should our press releases be single-spaced? Never one to make a decision unilaterally, he’ll cc us underlings to make sure everyone has a chance to weigh in. We’re still 1.5-spacing them, btw.

Today I decided to pitch a story to Good Morning America, so I did. Who knows if they’ll bite, but I do have contacts there from an earlier story. Which I got a lot of credit for, even though the reporter/anchor called me first.

As much as I talk about surfing the Internet most of the day, all it takes is one Good Morning America story, and the bosses think I’m Moses.

I don’t know why I consider this a sign of maturity, except that I really know what my job is and how to do it, and I’ve been allowed to do it, unfettered. Also, I have interns to boss around.

Next week, I’ll start a new job where, as impossible as it sounds, I will have even less supervision. Either I’m ready for it, or else I’ll be fired for online shopping and fiction writing on the clock.

…Seriously, I don’t think I can even get fired for that. Wonder if anyone will care if I have a TV in my office…or bring a puppy to work.

The new exclamation point?

My relative emotional stability at this job has backfired. I seem to have a lot of repressed irritation. Now that I am on my way out the door and nothing matters anyway, I am exploding with rage at every single little thing that could possibly annoy a person. And some things that really shouldn’t annoy anyone. This workplace has been far too pleasant for far too long.

The latest irritant is a dude, who, I’ll admit, has annoyed me from the beginning. He has the nerve to call me within seconds of receiving an e-mail from me. Hey, fella, I don’t actually want to speak to you. That’s why I sent an e-mail.

Today I was forwarded some information he sent my boss for a press release. The dude so far has failed to send me any information, despite the fact that I am the one writing said release. Does he think he’s gone over my head by sending it to my boss?

For some reason, his e-mail emphasized certain words with the asterisk, which, let’s be honest, is a pretty overused piece of punctuation anyway. Doesn’t even have an entry in the AP Stylebook. I’ll admit to using it in e-mails in lieu of italics or all caps, but this is a trifle excessive:

*Event*
**9-11 a.m.
*Program*
…featuring presenters from
**State** **University**
**City** **Community** **College**
**Esteemed** **Private** **University**

Although I have substituted the names of the parties involved, I exaggerate not the ridiculous use of the asterisk. Between the words in a proper name? What the hell?

Call me Grace

A few weeks ago, Rob handed me a $10 bill while I was behind the wheel in the drive-thru line. I thought it would be funny to pretend to eat the money, so I crumpled it up and pantomimed putting it in my mouth, secretly putting it next to my face on the left side. In doing so, I actually scratched the side of my face. Not a paper cut, but a facial laceration. Caused by money.

On Tuesday, I picked up the door to Stew’s habitat. It is plexiglass with a thick wood frame and it pulls out completely. I bonked my nose on it, and was reminded of the sensation I had a week earlier, when Rob used me as a grappling dummy in class and his leg grazed my nose. That time, I was genuinely concerned that my nose would start bleeding and wouldn’t that be awkward. My nose didn’t bleed either time, but I succeeded in embarrassing myself anyway by saying aloud in front of all those grapplers, “Is my nose bleeding?”

While the innards of my nose remained unharmed, Stew’s door did scratch my nose on the outside, leaving a horizontal mark reminiscent of a white line I used to get across my nose. (What was that, a sun-reaction pigmentation thing?) The whole nose was sort of pink from the trauma, so the scratch wasn’t too noticeable on Tuesday, but it seems to be getting more prominent by the day. This morning after my shower, it bled for the first time. Two days later?

Let’s see, what else weird happened on Tuesday … Oh yeah, my jumprope broke, spewing cylindrical plastic beads all over the studio. A classmate asked me if I was OK, and I realized only later that he must have thought the nose scratch was caused by a jumprope bead smacking me in the face.

I ask you, who else does this crap happen to? Remember when I whacked my head on the wall while moving out of my apartment?

Iguana thieves

Terrible story out of Seattle. Pet store burglarized, small animals tromped and iguanas stolen.

I news-googled “stolen iguanas” and found another story about a pet store owner whose stolen iguana was later recovered.

When the owner of Paradise Pets arrived at work Tuesday morning to find that someone had broken in and stolen his five-foot-long iguana, Dude, he was devastated.

It took me a few minutes to figure out that Dude was the iguana’s name.

Dude, I would be devastated too!

I quit

New job starts Oct. 25. Here’s hoping I hold this one for at least an entire calendar year.

For some reason, Yahoo is not updating my avatar. I had a sari on in a nightclub all weekend, and now I’m wearing a superhero’s outfit before a fiery pit. And yet, this blog would have you think I’m still wearing a sleek coat and enjoying the fall colors.

Bloody murder

Last night, I had a nightmare that caused me to cry out and wake up Rob. It was a mournful wail: “Noooooooo.”

Because Halloween is coming up, I’ll share the terrifying tale. Here’s what 31-year-old women have nightmares about…

My sixth-grade English teacher returned some papers to me with horrible grades. D- and F, and the like. I was ashamed, but I didn’t want to read her comments in class because I didn’t want anyone to look over my shoulder and see how badly I’d done.

I wasn’t in the sixth grade, though, because I’d already been working for a while. I wanted to tell her, “Lady, I’ve been a paid writer for several years now.”

The dream had the character of one of my recurring dreams. That I’d never finished high school and had to go back in order for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees to count. In this case, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I thought the papers were good. But both the teacher and my mother (whom the teacher had called, even though I’m 31 years old) thought I must have blown off the assignment.

I returned to my room, and tried to shut the door, but two kids from my junior high burst in. (Mischa and David. They went through a goth/punk phase in 9th grade and my friend Barbara used to draw caricatures of them saying, “Fuck da world.” “Yeah, fuck da world.”)

They started rifling through my stuff, looking for the English papers, which they were then going to show everyone in the class.

This is when I cried out “Noooooo,” waking up Rob and myself.

Maybe the dream was inspired by the birthday candles Rob got me: A 3 and a 1. I flipped them around and said I’d much rather be 31 than 13 again. Nine though 15 were pretty rough.

Counting my free-range chickens

Jeez, I’ve only been blogging about once a week. Maybe this will change when I start my new job. I haven’t actually been hired yet, but I have a second interview tomorrow.

Amusingly enough, the interview tomorrow is in the city where I lived before I moved up here to live with Rob. Also known as the state capital. And the job is in the city where I worked when I met Rob. So I’m having a kind of “this is your life” of jobs that have led me to this point.

I have this sweater set that I bought at an Ann Taylor outlet store in Nov. 2000 that I consider my “job interview” sweater set. It’s black and off-white and has sort of a stripey pattern across the chest, but is black closer to the waist. I like it because women in my field (in my region) don’t tend to wear suits and men even look a little silly (to me) when they show up for interviews in jackets and ties. Better than being underdressed, I guess. I think the silk sweater set with black pants is just the right degree of dressy, so I look professional, but not like I’m trying too hard. Also it’s more comfortable than a suit. Also I don’t even have a suit.

To tell the truth, I wore something else to two of the interviews for jobs I have accepted during the past six years, because the weather was warm. But, even though I didn’t wear it to either day of the two-day interview at my last newspaper, I did wear it to meet with a recruiter for that newspaper chain in early 2001. It was a practice interview in my grad school newsroom, and had nothing to do with my later employment, and frankly, at the time I couldn’t imagine working for that chain at all.

That practice interview was the first time I wore it to an interview (and I worried that I was underdressed because everyone else had on suits). The next time I wore it for an interview wasn’t until I came back from Prague (it was June when I interviewed at RFE). I wore it to City News in Los Angeles. Worked there for a few months. Wore it to the first day of my two-day interview at the SVH, but not to my interview at the next paper, as I said.

Wore it to my interview here, and wore it Monday to my interview for my next job. I did have an interview here on campus for another job last spring, and I didn’t wear the sweater set and I didn’t get the job either. That’s the only interview I can think of where I didn’t get the job. Pretty good, considering I didn’t get any of the jobs I interviewed (aka auditioned) for when I was pursuing acting. Oh wait, I did bulldoze my way into an interview at a paper in Southern Cal in February 2004. I didn’t get it, but I did wear the sweater set. I did not wear the sweater set to the job fair in San Diego the following May. Didn’t get any job offers either.

‘Course, the real question is what the hell am I going to wear for my second interview tomorrow…