the thing about newspapers (last update: 5:38 p.m.)
wednesday, february 27, 2002
see, it doesn't matter if you're just a student reporter at a tiny newspaper that publish every three weeks. you'll still end up in insane last-minute crunches.
we've been working on a 4 page special insert for the issue that goes to print sometime wednesday morning, dedicated to the CIAA basketball tournament. we've packed it with great, large photo's and stuff about our teams--i got to pick out the font for the front page (woo! geeky fun!)..
and then, the night of going to press, a phonecall can nearly ruin it. a simple phone call to tell us that the wonderful ladies basketball team is seemingly losing their first game and will be out of the tournament.
what do you do? scrap the whole special issue? rewrite it with a little "unfortunately.." downer for the end? pretend nothing happened? decisions, decisions, decisions.
lucky for us, the team pulled it off at the last minute, winning the game after all. we're keeping the special. phew. heh. a bit too close for our fragile little hearts.
i'm crap lately, anyway, with projects coming out of my ears. finished my one-page theater spread. woo! happy. ego dancing, and all that. still have to help get the other 17 (!) pages ready for print tonight.
not to mention i may or may not have my first radio show tomorrow night. and my therapist appointment at 2:30. and i have to actually get the 18-page paper online as quick as possible. heh.
i'm half-through working on an article on the juarez killings for the tori amos fanzine (she once did a song about the situation). it's draining to intensely submerge yourself in one story scarier and more repulsive than the other of mutilated women found in the desert, or at least it is for me.
must prepare for 10 am mid-term on the general prologue of the canterbury tales. it's not that difficult of a task, except i know my professor plans to snare us all by asking us to i.d. characters by mere descriptions of their appearance. who was meeke as is a maide? (the knight) who had a brown visage? (the yeoman) .. fun stuff, though. :)
so i'm saving any correspondence that's piling up for later. i want to mean what i write to people, and as it is now, my head is spinning too much with words for this and that to do that. so.
oddly enough, my confidence and self esteem is higher than it has been in a long time. i don't know what the hell is causing it, but i will not complain. day after day i wake up with a great attitude and high energy and i eagerly jump into everything i need to do.
knowing my usual lame-ass self, i can't help but wonder what's going on, but as i said--will not complain. it feels pretty cool to wake up, realize i have two giant red blemishes on my face (one on each side of the chin, total freaky symmetry! if i was in the canterbury tales' prologue, my class would surely know i was doomed to go to hell based on the blemishes alone) and not give a shit.
because i feel fabulous. fabulous, i tell you! heh! i know. i'm sick, i need help! hee. dudes, i gotta go type in one of my other 6 windows now. cin cin. �� 12:43 a.m.
...
things have been positively poisonous tonight. all day long, mike the editor has been telling me that he doesn't want to be the editor anymore. i'm hoping he's just in a tired phase. as much as we fight, i think mike has stepped into the role of editor with great energy, and the newspaper is in the best shape ever.
and yet, on the night of what should be our best issue ever, we're here with a boss that repeatedly has left the office and washed his hands of us this issue (as much as he does, it always amazes me when he suddenly has hissy fits over something and stomps off, often on the very night of printing). i'm not sure what he's pissed about--we're too busy trying to make things work without him.
the campus network has been crap all day long, causing our print jobs to completely stagnate. when you have to print out pages in sections of 2-3 pieces and paste together, this is a BAD, BAD thing. each page takes around 40 minutes to print. 40!
so they've decided to go to kinko's. kinko's! ha ha! so now begins the head ache of making sure every single quark file, and especially every single photo and graphic are put on one zip disk to bring in, or that plans completely shot.
it's 3:39 am and things are decidedly shaky in our little newspaper office. whatever. i am sooo leaving. peace. cin cin. �� 3:40 a.m.
...
so i stumble home around 4 am and pass into sleep. wake up at 9 am, shower, go to the office to get ready for the canterbury tales is. except.. there's danny. uh-oh.
turns out he was on the phone with our printer and they told him he could bring in all the files on a zip. except.. danny gets there and oops, don't have all the fonts, plus they are (of course) using macs.
i ran off to my quiz and finished it within 2 minutes and then ran back to the office where danny had to leave. dentist appointment. so it's just me. me and the printer man are calling back and forth--i was able to find one of the fonts as a free download, so that's one thing taken care of.
the printer has literally taken over an hour to print out two sheets of paper. do you understand the agony?? it's just me, and i've got 14-16 sheets of papers that need to print, and it's just nooooooot happening, plus i have to field bizarre techno questions from the printers, plus direct the usual phone calls.
i called boss to tell him what was up--i waited to call until almost noon and he STILL responded with a sigh. i am NOT up for that--i know he's gonna come in soon, and then rant and rave for forever about this stuff, and i just don't have the energy to deal with that.
things crapped out on us. we made some bad decisions. okay, i get it! let's just move on and salvage and then take a sigh of relief when we actually see the paper in print. bad energy just stinks up this place, and i just don't want to hear it. sigh. it's sooo sad, too--this was supposed to be such a triumph. sigh. cin cin. �� 12:29 p.m.
...
okay.. it's 5 hours later.. and guess what we're doing.. heheh. waiting for the farking pages to print! we thought we caught a break when a guy popped by to place an ad and expressed that he knew how to install a local printer route, cable and all.. yippie...
i swear, i was so thrilled i almost hugged the complete stranger.. but it's been 45 minutes and.. hrm.. they're still working on it. here's hoping. this sucks. i'm hating this. this crap needs to be over and done with already.
not only has the printer been fucking everything up (we just waited OVER AND HOUR for a sheet of paper. when it came it, we found out the very, very hard way that we had forgotten to print in landscape mode.. !), and fonts been missing.. our photography has sucked as quality wise.
the guys who designed the layouts for the special insert essentially enlarged the photo's way the hell too much, causing them to look grainy as shit when printed. great. re-scan? sure.. except the front page photo was a digital photo, no alternate shots available.. arf!!
so i had to emergency re-design the entire front page. i don't design front pages! wah! i put together something crappy in 10 minutes and then washed my hands of it. it'll work. i guess. sigh.
say, jennie, you've been working non-stop with this crap since 10 am, and it's almost 6 p.m... things all done now?
um, NO. now i can finally devote time to the juarez article until about 7.45 p.m. when, d'oh, i'm airing my radio show for the first time. yes, it seems to be happening this time. heh.
the funny thing is, at least with being so outrageously exhausted might actually work in my favor. for the first time, i'm not the least bit nervous. i could care less about whatever the fuck happens on the air. i'm not even against speaking on air right now--because who cares, right?
no one's listening anyway, so fuck being nervous. i haven't even slaved over a setlist, i just put a chunk of the songs from the other two setlists onto zip drives, wrote out titles and run times and that's that. i haven't even put them in a real order, just whatever order i thought of them. because who cares, right? right.
SETLIST Feb. 27
Bel Canto: Spiderdust : 3:58
Sinead O Connor: Last day of...: 4:40
Cranberries: Linger : 4:34
Heather Nova: Glow Stars : 3:07
Tori Amos: Juarez : 3:48
Tanya Donnelly: Goat Girl : 2:16
Muse: Unintended : 3:57
Fiona Apple: Get Gone : 4:10
Juliette Lewis: Hardly Wait : 3:20
PJ Harvey: This is Love : 3:48
Tanya Donnelly: Manna : 5:28
Concrete Blonde: When U Smile : 4:21
The Cure: Burn : 6:39
Lush: Ladykillers : 3:13
Morrissey: Every day is like.. : 3:32
Nirvana: Man who sold the world: 4:20
Titiyo: Come Along : 3:14
A Camp: Bluest Eyes in Texas : 5:04
Throwing Muses: Vicky's box : 5:08
Wolfsheim: Heroin, She Said : 4:59
Broder Daniel: Our Name.. : 2:35
Kate Bush: Hounds of Love : 3:08
Kristin Hersh: Stained + Shake : 5:40
PJ Harvey: This wicked tongue : 3:42
Rasputina: Diamond Mind : 1:10
Smashing Pumpkins: By Starlight: 4:48
ALTERNATES:
Portishead: Sour Times : 4:11
Rancid: Time Bomb : 2:24
Shakira: Ojos Asi : 3:58
and that's that. now onto juarez i go. cin fucking cin. heh. �� 5:38 p.m.
