Playin' Hookey

Well, not really. I do have some sort of food-borne illness, for which I refuse to go to the doctor, because I frown on the dignity quotient of pooping in a cup within the sanitary, weird-smelling walls of a doctor's office bathroom.

So I took today off, which is rare, because I woke up with a horrifying backache that felt as though someone had set fire to my spine. A valid reason: spine fire.

I have a lot to do before Monday. This..."Job" fell into my lap a few weeks ago as the entertainment editor/staff writer for a new magazine called "Dig". It started on Craigslist. As a freelancer, I am doomed to haunt the Craigslist job listings every day, for all of days. So I found a listing asking for people who wanted to write REAL journalism.

Now, REAL journalism is a childhood dream of mine. A dream that dissolved under the unbridled lunacy of today's "branded" journalism. I gave up on it a long time ago, when I started reading (well, really when I started watching) the news. I wanted to be a muckraker, a digger, a revealer of dirty secrets. A world-changer. When I realized I'd have to overhaul the entire industry to write what I wanted to, I gave up. Prematurely, too easily, and without any sort of fight. That's a bad habit of mine.

I didn't know there were others braver than me. I didn't bother searching them out, because I'm a coward, and when left to my own devices (or at least, in that period of my life), I'll just scrape by so I can fart around in all my free time.

So I met up with the editor a few weeks ago, at Perk's, and he got me very, very excited. I felt these childhood yearnings sparking inside of me for the first time in a decade. Taking a shot at Baton Rouge. Cease feeding them the fodder they want, and start forcing down some truth. This city needs to be changed, and this new magazine is setting out to do it. Right off the top of my head, I made a list of things I could write about. All these injustices people bitch about all the time, but never do anything about. Kickbacks, dirty politics, racism. It's all here, festering in the basements, waiting to be aired.

And, uh, this editor was impressed by my overzealous enthusiasm, probably because it was real and unfiltered (I was saying things like "OMG, THIS THIS AND THIS! YUEAHHH!). When he found out he had money in the budget for salaried full-timers, he called me. Annnnnd I signed a contract. He gave me homework--"The New Journalists" and things of that sort--and I start Monday. So he basically hired me solely based on enthusiasm, because all I've got on my resume' are a few shitty articles that I didn't really care about, and I've never held an editing position.

Whatever. I'll take it.