I did the entire local section myself today. It was my first time. I almost freaked but then I remembered that I have been a journalist for nearly six years, I have been doing pages for two years and I’ve studied design for many fives of years. (Fact: I sketched out a newspaper with a friend in fifth grade.)
It’s my Friday night. I’ll have weekend duty for a while, especially since I’m the newest, for a months. I was told that they’ll work around any obligations I have on weekends, which is good. I have at least one wedding, a double date, a road trip and my birthday between now and August let alone trips to visit Renée in our compromise city of D.C.
New York City is about 10 hours from Jacksonville. I drove for a total of 26 hours this weekend. I finished the last stretch directly before going to work because, at about 11 p.m., something told me to stop driving and go to my mom’s house. It’ll take us around the same amount of time to get to Washington and, when the time comes, it is our first choice for home.
I have a bed now. Sorta. My mom bought me a cot. I can’t afford to buy a mattress until the end of next week because I had expected three unemployment checks but I got two. I also find it amazing that I left Hopewell literally two weeks before they owed me two weeks of vacation. I’m sure they had that planned. I would have fought it but I literally moved on to bigger and better things. This month is just going to be awkward and everything will be fine by Feb. 1. It just sucks because it’s only Jan. 18 right now. But I’ll be fine. I’ve been through worse. There was a point in 2006 when I only ate once a day and made three pounds of chicken stretch about a week because my beat was a 504-square-mile county when gas skyrocketed the first time, I was only getting paid 24 cents a mile, I had just started car payments, I lost my savings from having to chip in over $400 for the fuel bill at my fraternity house and from not having a job for three months and having no concept of unemployment at that time.
I’m not bragging but I’ve had it rough before and I got through it. This is nothing. This is why I don’t freak out about problems anymore. It freaked Katy out that I wasn’t freaked out when I suddenly didn’t have a job in December. Two people at work today apologized for things that were going on and it took a lot to not explain how their issues were nothing compared to what I have seen beyond saying that I’ve been through worse. I would say that I’m just lucky that everything has worked out so far but it’s not luck. It’s to the point where it seems like I’m being pointed toward something. I don’t believe in that destiny crap beyond figures of speech but let’s see: If I wound up at the Daily Press like I had hoped, I probably would have been caught up in that Tribune bloodbath by now or would be worked like a government mule right now. The publication I shot for that the Virginian-Pilot owned folded. Media General has had some issues. I left just before layoffs started at the Progress-Index and there was a point where it was costing me more money to go to work in Dinwiddie than what I was making. Deep down, I’ll always resent how things went down in Hopewell but I’ll be vindicated and I have something extremely nice to put on my résumé now called a local family of daily papers with a sizable circulation. The next step is either me swelling with pride and screwing myself or leaving things at this extremely long paragraph and moving forward.
It’s just tempting. I want to brag and I feel bad about the little things I’ve said up until this point. I regret the previous two paragraphs but I had to get something out. Although this blog doesn’t have the widest viewership, I hate how the Internet has taken off. I can’t vent here with reckless abandon like I could 1400 entries ago. I may have to go back to scribbling things in notebooks and destroying them later. (Fact: I’ve destroyed all traces of my first novel and I still don’t know what to do with the second. The one I talk about now is my third.)
Next Thursday marks my first new normal work schedule. In about a month, I’m being switched to another daily newspaper (currently, I’m paginating and editing the largest daily). The new one has an earlier deadline so my schedule would be somewhere around 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. instead of my current 3 to 11. I won’t know for certain until we get to that point. My weekends may shift again at that point. I was told Tuesday-Saturday when I was offered the job and, next week it’s Thursday-Monday. I don’t mind because my second nearest close friend has odd rotating schedules and, much like many of the Marines here, I’m a geographic bachelor. This means that, this weekend, I get shown a Sunday paper. I’m slightly freaking out about that because I’ve never had to paginate a definite bread and butter edition. Although the new Hopewell publisher didn’t want it that way, as far as content and extras, as far as the newsroom was concerned, our Thursday edition had to be our biggest in the T-Th-Sa publishing schedule. It wasn’t marketed as such. Now that I’m back in the dailies, I have to think about presenting the crowning edition of the week. For a paper the next paper size down from the current broadsheet. Although it probably will happen, I hope all dailies don’t go down to this size. It’s OK but the more oblong paper size allows for more creativity. I have my fake double truck as my desktop background at work to remind myself of what is possible with more real estate. But I look at it this way: along with being well versed in two types of pagination software, I also can say I know how to lay out a sexy page in two different sizes. I’m wandering into bragging again. Stop it.
I had a reason for this entry about three hours ago but I had to stop and I felt obligated to make a post anyway since the last one was on the 12th and I’ve really slacked off in updating in the past year or so. I’m just going to end it now where it’s all good and awkward and I’ll also choose to not tag this at all so it can eventually disappear like so many of the initial entries.
The only problem with that is, since my frequency has gone down so much, this will be on page 1 until at least Feb. 20.
