I’m on very very strong dental-pain related medications. I’ll still use initial capitalization and attempt to punctuate and spell correctly.
This week I’ve been celebrating personal victories in learning editing (yes, I said ‘learning’), finding fashion, literature and fun places to go in my new hometown and cultivating my new family in said new hometown.
I’m reading George Orwell’s

“Homage to Catalonia”

and looking through Vanity Fair languidly.
I’m taking a drug-forced rest, and that gives me time to think about why I’m so tired. I’ve always wanted to be in the top group of whatever team or class I’m in. I have years to go before I’m in a top group in editing. It’s starting over. I know I can do it, because I am, but it’s just…scary and tiring.
I haven’t rested since maybe eighth grade, when I stopped taking ballet and going to dance competitions.
That two-year stretch was time just for me. Then I started writing at the Tulsa World and pushing to win everything in 4-H. (WHAT? I’m from OKLAHOMA. God.)
I worked like a dog for the teen page at the World because it was fun and exciting and what I wanted to do when I grew up. 4-H I just pushed for because I’m meretricious and mercenary. I still have that meretricious, mercenary ambition driving me. There’s a larger goal in front of me–I want to get a master’s degree in political science and teach political journalism, but that’s buried under my goals for right the fudge now, like winning “Best Pun of the Month” for the copy desk. I do want to teach, though. Time is running out for training people who appreciate newspapers to appreciate political reporting and good writing, too. In 10 years, will there even be anyone to teach? I should get that master’s soon. Who knows when I’ll need a backup…as tired as starting over in graduate school would make me.

Even fatigued, though…
I was in the headline contest again and got second this time! Fingers crossed that third time will be for the win!

Wire editor: “Is Madoff a headline name?”
copy chief :” Yes, and ‘scum-sucking bastard’ also works.”
Designer: “Would that be a hyphenate?”
Me: “Yes. Scum-sucking in that case would be a compound modifier.”
I was in the best of the month copy desk headline contest. I still squee when I think about it. My headline lost, of course. Mine may have been the only vote it got.
But the desk at The Oklahoman produces hundreds, possibly thousands of headlines each month, and out of that plethora of puns, straight, boring “Board disciplines medical personnel” headlines and amazing “headless body in topless bar” headlines, they choose five or six. And one of mine made it.
Or Madoff.

My beloved coworker Jennifer Wilcox (seriously, yesterday when she walked into work I had the urge to start singing “You Are My Sunshine”) told me yesterday “You should start a blog. You’d crack me up all the time.”
I’m no laugh-a-minute Fug girl and what humor I do provide is often not g-rated.
But apparently no one who can fire me or besmirch my reputation reads this. Or talks to me about it, anyway.
So from now on, this blog will have some of the wild/odd/amazing things I see on the wire or say in e-mails to coworkers who shall remain nameless— unless I get permission to paint them with the same callous, cynical copy editor-girl brush that I use on myself.
I’ll wash it first.
This is what Jen did during her free time with our id badge pictures.
I’m the one in the glasses. The rest remain unidentified for OBVIOUS reasons.

I’m interviewing at two small-town papers tomorrow. This will be my first journalism job interview in months, but it’s a better statistic than my non-journalism job interview number. That number, fellow news geeks, is abysmal.
The impending interviews got me thinking (a bit grimly) about newspaper’s immediate survival and the survival of the news providers.
Can we hack it?
There are newspapers entering hunker-down mode everywhere–changing their delivery range, sticking close to big cities, going to only-Web for certain days, cutting publication to a few days a week.
The newspeople –or former newspeople, I guess–are out freelancing and applying for anything that involves words and brawling in a new piranhaesque job environment for new journalism jobs.
Can we come back from this? Will people be loyal enough to stick to the online version of a paper until the market recovers and we can afford paper? Do readers feel they even owe their local paper loyalty anymore? I mean, if you live 10 seconds out of a big urban area, most papers aren’t delivering anymore. They aren’t loyal to their readers, in a way.
Check this out: google “death of journalism”

Results 1 – 10 of about 5,180,000 for death of journalism 2008. (0.18 seconds)

I swear to God I hadn’t read this post before I wrote mine. It’s just that frustrated minds think alike.

I’m thinking of chronicling the adventures of my alter ego, The Red Pencil, on this blog! It would take some thinking..but surely I could draw a strip and scan it in and post. I’ve been doing Xena-style comic books every once in a while since I was 9. This could be very entertaining.