A lesson in cynicism

Apologies for the lack of posting. There's a ton of stuff going on, and the blog just falls to the bottom of the list. Sadly, cooking has too, so I don't have any fun recipes to share. And as most of my life is right now, this post is about work, but there's more to it than just work.

One of the things I love about this job is all the different things I get to do. When I get bored of doing one thing, I have something entirely different I can do. Of course, during a week like this when I have deadlines on all of these things, it's overwhelming.

But one of my responsibilities is opinion editor. It's a very interesting role anytime because I try hard to balance viewpoints. But there's a local election coming up, and I have been flooded with letters to the editor. I've been dealing with a lot of comments and criticisms about the fact all the letters support one candidate. I know it's not personal, and I don't take offense. But on Thursday I realized it had really been building on me.

I had a long to do list and kept getting interrupted with questions about the opinion page and was quickly losing patience with the whole thing. I got another comment about the letters I had to respond to, and I had pretty much had it. Fortunately, my co-worker saved me from being too blunt in my response. But I walked out of work in quite a mood that I couldn't even describe.

I'm in a Beth Moore study on Thursday nights, and I was in such a bad mood I was talking myself out of going. But I went (about 30 minutes late), and I'm so glad I did. Beth's message was on cynicism, and that's exactly the point I had reached in all of this work stuff. Her message was exactly what I needed to hear. It's hard not to become cynical about some stuff at work, but it's a real problem when it spreads into the rest of my life. She gave five reasons not to get cynical:

1. Jesus is still flagrantly changing lives.
2. Real people are doing the real thing all over the real world.
3. The appetite to study Scripture is increasingly ravenous.
4. Some long-standing barriers are breaking down.
5. God will kick your tail.

I'm thinking this list needs to be up on the wall in my office.

And with the letters, I should be proud to live in a community where people are civic-minded and involved in the democratic process. It's a privilege to work in a job where I play a small role in allowing people to share their voice, but some days I need God to kick my tail to remind me of it.

Work, dreams, house renovations

It's a random collection of stuff today.

If I go to the gym today, I will finish week 7 of the couch to 5K program, which in the almost year since I started it has now changed its name to Run 5K. I am writing this down in hopes it will be accountability for doing it.

I caught an error in percent vs. percentage points in a story on Monday night. Before I spent two years at my job editing financial news, I never would have caught it. Now I not only catch the error, but I get to teach future copy editors to catch that error.

I'm designing pages this week, nothing very exciting, but I'm remembering the challenges of making everything fit just right.

Points two and three remind me that every job and role I've had is important to what I'm doing now. I realize this sounds like a Rascal Flatts song, though maybe only to me since this week I bought tickets to see them in January.

I posted this on Facebook, but I have to share more of the story. I was at home on Tuesday because I'm working nights this week, and there was a knock on my door. There was a guy standing there, and he asked me (1) when I moved into the house and (2) when I was moving out. Apparently, he has had his eye on this house for four years. He gave his number to the last tenants for them to call him when they moved out. Obviously, they didn't, which I'm grateful for. Anyway he told he'd come back in July since my lease is up in August. It is a wonderful house and one of a handful of rentals in this neighborhood, which is the best in town if I you're asking me, but I don't think it would have occurred to me to go knocking on the door to try and rent it. He also said he wanted to rent it and then convince the owner to sell it to him. I was thinking, "You and me both."

Continuing on that point, I have no idea what happens for me after August, and most days I'm really comfortable with that. But in the event I stayed here, I would continue to rent this house. And though I doubt I'd (1) convince my landlord to sell and (2) actually stay here long enough to make it worth the investment, on a daily basis I think about what I would do to it if I owned it. Just this week, I was debating what color I could paint the bathroom (it's currently yellow) that would still look OK with the blue tile or if I'd have to take the tile out. I've already decided on painting the cabinets an off-white or cream and changing the hardware on them, and then painting the kitchen a nice sage green after taking down the wallpaper in the kitchen for this house I'll probably never own! This is another area where pinterest isn't helping.

I had a dream the other night I went on a date (shocking!), and my entire family and current boss were all at the same place. I also woke up that morning to check to see if my car was in my driveway because in my dream it was stolen.

The pictures from my brother's wedding were posted this week, and it's making me dislike my recent haircut even more. In other words, my hair looked great in those photos, and I'm hating it now that it's short again. I guess you only luck out once with getting your hair cut at the mall.

Looking back

It's hard not to think about where I was 10 years ago when I found out about the terror attacks. We worked all week on the newspaper for Sunday, and all around me people were sharing their stories. I debated even writing about mine today, but as I started to think about my life after that day, I started to see the greater impact Sept. 11 had on the last 10 years of my life.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a senior in a high school. I had a free period first thing on Tuesdays, and I was sitting in the quad with my friends, goofing off and laughing. I went to my second period class — U.S. History. It was at least 9 a.m. by that point, and we got called to an assembly. The last time there was an unscheduled assembly, they canceled classes because a water main had broken. We went into the assembly thinking school would be called off.

I don't remember the exact words the headmaster said. I'm not sure I really believed it until I saw it on TV after the assembly. Afternoon activities were canceled, and my day was over about noon that day. I remember being hesitant to go anywhere except home. There was a fear I had never had about going about my daily life.

I went home and started watching the news coverage. I had known I wanted to be a journalist since I was 11 years old, but this event made me even more certain that this was the path I wanted to follow. Journalists run into situations when others are running away, and as I watched all the coverage and read the stories, I wanted to be in the thick of it, not watching from afar.

That weekend I was going on a college visit to a small school that until then had been my top choice and on to visit my sister at school. There had been much debate about the weekend trip since we were leaving my younger brother and sister at home, the football game that weekend was canceled and there was concern about a gas shortage. There were a number of reasons I didn't really enjoy my college visit and why that wasn't the school for me. But I also realized it wasn't going to get me that much closer to my dream.

I started the fall of 2002 at one of the top journalism schools and 3.5 years later after three internships, two reporting semesters and one semester of copy editing, I took my first job at a newspaper. But it wasn't in New York or D.C. It was in a small town in Georgia, but I was in a place where the war was real. Before then I had been pretty sheltered from what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, I followed the news, but day-to-day the war didn't impact my life.

That changed in 2006 when I moved to Georgia. I was living next door to an Army post where a brigade of soldiers was just returning from Iraq. A year and a few months later, they were deployed again. At the newspaper where I worked, we put stories about Iraq on the front page much more frequently than most newspapers around the country. We checked the casualty report every night, and all deaths of soldiers from the post went on the front page. And the war got even more personal when the soldier I had fallen for was deployed to Iraq for 15 months.

I've gotten to be in newsrooms when big things happened, none as big as Sept. 11, and each time I am re-energized as a journalist. I dive into work while everyone else pauses. I don't sit on the sidelines anymore. The decisions we make about coverage and the stories we write and edit are the first version of history.

Now that I'm back in the newsroom where I first learned to be a journalist, it's interesting to look back and realize the long-term impact Sept. 11 had on my life.

Chaos, i.e. students arrive!

So last week was my brief chance to (1) get up to speed on how things work at the paper and (2) come up with a plan for the class I teach. This week students arrived, and I suddenly became an expert and a teacher.

Here's the best description I could come up with for how things went this week:

Imagine you work with several teams of people to complete a project/task/product. Now imagine that it's the first day of work for everyone on those teams. And then imagine that this repeats itself every day of the week for a week. Of course add to that the fact that it's only your second week on the job and you can start to imagine the chaos.

Basically, as soon as I had a handle on the Monday teams, it was Tuesday and there was an entirely new crew. It also feels like as soon as I managed one crisis, I was hit with another.

While there is something energizing about working with students, especially the ones who are over-eager, I also had to realize that they are flaky 21-year-olds who are working for you for free. Of course, they have no hesitation in canceling a shift at the last minute.

All week, I've watched my days fly by and even forgotten to stop and eat. I work until the paper is done on Tuesdays, which was 12:30 a.m. this week, and even though I don't think I slept much, I was excited to get up and teach a class and be in the newsroom all day on Wednesday. I consider all of these things to be proof that this is a job I'm passionate about and that there was something missing before.

I'm still figuring out how to factor in life stuff and even a social life (when I find some friends) with all of this but that will come once I get past the craziness of the first few weeks.

Job update

I started work this week, and for now the excitement of being back in an active, loud newsroom that is familiar is outweighing the fears and anxiety over teaching a class. I've been able to jump in and actually feel productive in workflow on the first two days. Actually getting to post stories and play with the layouts isn't a lot, but I can at least point to something I did.

I honestly had no idea what this job would look like on a day-to-day basis, so it's been great to have a better idea of what the next year is going to look like. The exciting news is that I'm working day shifts with the exception of Tuesday nights (which was also my late shift at the old job).

On the dayside shift, I oversee the interactive copy desk for the website of a city newspaper. While I do some of the actual work, a lot of it is overseeing students, answering questions and challenging the students to think about how our content is presented and distributed.

When I work the late shift, I will be spending some time with the print product — coaching copy editors and helping designers — while also making sure the website is ready for the morning.

I also will teach a class on news design. I've been given a ton of resources, but I'm having to dig back to several years ago when I first learned design. It's been a few years since I actually did design work, so I'm actually going to design the front page of the paper one night this week just to remind myself of what's required.

I also get to have an office day to work on class stuff and catch up on things without being constantly interrupted. Also, for the first time in my professional career, I have an office, though I've only spent about 30 minutes total in it for the first two days.

I'm only two days in, and I haven't had to face the classroom yet, but I am so excited to be back in this environment. This week there are a bunch of graduate students in the newsroom getting their feet wet as reporters. The attitude of the newsroom here is different than probably any other newsroom in the country. These students are hungry to write and report and get their clips — not for pay but for a grade. I'm sure the complaining will come as the semester wears on, but it's fun to see people excited about journalism and looking to do more than just slide by. It's definitely a glass half-full place.

There have been so many things so far that really affirmed this job and the reasons God had me wait for it. There are still hard things to come in this transition, but things are off to a really great start.