Flonk

I have been in something of a flonk lately. It's not a funk, it's not sadness, turmoil, etc. So I invented a word for it. Flonk.

Flonk: noun. State of mind in which a person so strongly feels they will fail, that they consider not trying any harder to prevent said failure.

At the office, I continue to think of playing in dirt, writing short fiction and watching things grow. As I edit, I have to think of a million things at once: word limits, order, flow, art, fact-checking. No room for daydreams, really. Somehow, I fit it in.

My brain is torn in so many directions, I forget things. So in my spare time, I end up making lists. The second I sit down to write something for me, I feel guilty because there is so much to do. I've exhausted almost every organizational method I have; I take home that giant desk calendar every weekend and try to come up with alternate methods of dealing with this mass of information. Nothing sticks.

I half want to push myself harder, to prove to myself and whoever else is in the newsroom, that I can beat the shit out of this job. That's the part of me who wants to get better at whatever endeavor I come across; the go-getter. The other half of me sees my lonely cat and my lonely counterpart, my dirty living room (a specific kind of non-mess that comes from never being home), and thinks that I don't exactly have the 100% to give to this job.

I never come home with the feeling that I've done a good job, or the best that I could do. I simply don't know enough about the format or the business to know if my judgement is valid. Does it REALLY look good? It can never look good enough. Compliments make no difference.

Even Though I Haven't Seen You In Years

It's occurred to me that I've somewhat accomplished what this blog was created to do. I still wanna write in it, because it seems to have helped.

I could always use help.

Tendencies

Run around with a dog, who just wants to run, and there's this urge to let your tongue flap out in the wind to drool everywhere with a stupid, happy grin on your fuzzy dog face. True story.

As I willingly sacrificed my Friday night after a long, long workweek to cover a fundraiser at an art gallery, knowing I had to go home and write a last-minute on it, I realized something.

I take that back. All of it.

I love this job. I've never worked this hard for something so satisfying.

Spent

Two days into it, and I can already tell this is going to be that period of my life where I actualized how much, and to what depths, that I hate myself.

Between adapting to normal-people office hours and being a salaried employee, I am feeling the plug that held everything in my heart dissolving. I may sound like a big baby, and I probably am a big baby, but again, I've pushed myself out of my comfort zone. I might as well have moved to Egypt. All of a sudden, I don't keep the same hours as my friends, and my evenings will be spent working on tedious drink special spreads and scrambling to fill white space. And if I'm lucky and plan well, which might take awhile, that white space might eventually have actual content.

But until then, the heart's dissolving. Broke for 3 weeks, and working non-stop until then. This always happens with a job change, and most people have savings for that sort of thing. I don't. I suppose as long as I can pay my rent, I'll be fine. I'd like electricity, but I'm not picky. I'd like some food, but I suppose I can deal. Done it before, but with each two-month period I live stressed for basic needs like this, it gets a little less fun.

However, the one amusing factoid about this job is that, no matter how many times they drag me into the office at 9am, I'm still writing everything when I get home. I can't write in an office. I tried; does not work. As soon as I get home, I make a pot of coffee and get to work like I've always done. Work and writing cannot be cross-bred, else I develop a burning hatred for the trade.

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.

There's Always Time

...to get salmonella. But that trip was awesome. Happy 2011.