Daily Newsie

I saved the final installment of Tales from the Snooze for the final day of NaBloPoMo because I figured that going out with a bang would be better than another of the the short, disjointed posts I’ve been making lately. A fellow reporter always says that Snooze leadership will stab their newsroom staff in the back without a second thought, and this story lends credence to that thought. This is actually the reason I left, although I couldn’t tell it at the time because I still worked there.

It was May 2007, and word was getting around that The Boyfriend had gotten a job in Cincinnati. He was living in Ohio during the week and driving home on the weekends, so I was laying low at the Snooze until we were ready to move. My editor called me into his office one day, wanting to know if the rumor was true, and I admitted that it was. I wasn’t ready to leave yet and I told him so, but he said he had received a resume from someone who looked like a good replacement for me and wanted to interview her before she decided to go elsewhere. Somewhat under duress, I pulled out my calendar and chose a date at the end of May, then turned in my notice letter to him a short time later.

Not two days later, I got a phone call from The Boyfriend saying that he’d been let go. Sick to my stomach, I mustered the courage to approach my boss, who had interviewed my potential replacement the day before, to ask for my job back. He agreed, since the interviewee apparently left much to be desired, and I made sure he knew I meant that I needed my job back indefinitely. He nodded, saying that he would much rather keep a good reporter than take a chance on a new one, and I thanked him.

Life proceeded normally for a while, until a coworker let me know that my job was listed on a journalism networking site. One day in June I got a phone message from someone seeking my position, but by July my editors were telling nervous sources that I was sticking around. Even though I know how things go around there, I figured my editor had made a mistake by keeping my posting up — after all, I had told him I needed to stay there indefinitely. Then, sometime in August or September, my editor called me into his office again. He had someone else who wanted my position, she was really, really good, and she had applied to another newspaper as well and he was afraid she would go there instead, so could I please leave? Mouth agape, I could do nothing but splutter until I turned on my heel and walked out, crying.

A few days later, I stormed back into his office, having spent the weekend sobbing and, eventually, getting angry. I confronted him and told him that I didn’t appreciate him handing my job out from under me, and he folded like a deck of cards. In a most infuriating, ingratiating voice, he informed me that I was making things up, he never told me that I had to leave, et cetera. Aggravated, I left his office, only to return a few days later to hand in my resignation. He had the nerve to give me a hard time about it, but by that point I didn’t care anymore. I was finished. I shook his hand on my way out the door — after he got in one last jab about how unwise it was to give up a career to be a full-time student — and thanked my lucky stars I escaped.

Now, more than a year later, I stand on the brink of great things. In six months I’ll have my graduate degree, and then who knows? One thing’s for sure, myself and all Snooze alumni will always, always, win “bad boss” contests.

From where I sit in the parking lot of a McDonald’s somewhere in northern Kentucky, it’s already Sunday. However, my blog is based in the Central time zone, which has roughly three minutes left until it’s Sunday. So ha! I very nearly crashed and burned on the penultimate day of NaBlo — no thanks to certain other locales, which required registration and/or payment for their WiFi — but was saved by some stranger’s free WiFi. Thank you, random stranger.

Back to sleep now. I’ll catch up with y’all tomorrow, which is already today in northern Kentucky, but not yet in southcentral Kentucky. Sweet dreams!

The Best Friend and I entered the unassuming shop hopefully, eyeing the bare shelves. The storekeeper approached, asked us what we wanted, then pointed us to a large white bag near the dingy windows. I picked it up, turned it over in my hands, felt the solid heft of the familiar powder I knew was inside.

“I have more in the back,” the guy volunteered, disappearing into a doorway only to re-emerge with a taped-up box. He deftly slit it open and handed over two more bags, then ran my credit card and sent us out the door with a smile.

And, just like that, Spatini re-entered my life. I am now in possession of two 15-ounce bags (I gave the third to my father) of the stuff, which we’ve used for as long as I can remember to flavor spaghetti sauce. I’m not really sure what’s in it or when it came into existence, but it’s been a part of our family for a very, very long time. For some reason I could never find it in Ohio or Kentucky, so my father kept me in boxes of it — three packets to a box, and I only ever used half a packet to make sure I wouldn’t ever be without it. Daddy called one day to tell me that a stocker at the local grocery store told him Spatini was discontinued, and I was, for a brief time, inconsolable. A strongly-worded letter did no good, so I used my last packet and resigned myself to life without Spatini.

Until — until! — The Best Friend and I were driving through the town where she lives, and I saw a marquee: “We have Spatini.” We had to stop. The store owner told us that Lawry’s no longer makes individual packets but still manufactures ginormous bags of the stuff, so I stocked up and kept the receipt so I can find the place again. My father likened receiving his pack of Spatini to Christmas morning, and I can hardly wait to get home and make some spaghetti.

So far today, I have eaten the following:

* A slice of Entenmann’s raspberry cheese danish
* Three servings each of stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, baked corn and green bean casserole
* A slice of pumpkin cheesecake
* A slice of apple pie
* Various and sundry snacky-type vegetables
* One forkful of shoo-fly pie, which I did not like
* Three bowls of popcorn while watching Wall-E at my brother’s house

My poor stomach is groaning at me while I write this, because it knows that as soon as I figure out where my father hid the leftovers I’m going to eat one more time before bed. I seem to have developed a head cold over the past few days, and am doing a serious scientific study to see if the “feed a cold” maxim is really true. OK, I just made that up. I really do have a head cold, but I’m just a pig who likes to eat a lot.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! More tomorrow.

EDIT: I almost forgot – a few colleagues and I submitted a panel to the Central States Communication Association on family communication, and it was accepted! I’m going to St. Louis after all! It’s not until April, so my thesis will be written and I’ll be the world’s foremost expert on family communication and cancer, and hopefully I won’t make an idiot out of myself. Whoo!

It’s approaching 5 a.m. EST and we’re sitting in a Denny’s somewhere in snowy Ohio, a mere 250-ish miles away from our destination. (Thank you, Quality Inn, for your unsecured WiFi network.) Having lived in both states, I’d forgotten how bitterly cold it gets in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It’s like they enjoy watching their residents scurry around bundled up to the hilt. Kentucky, on the other hand, doesn’t get cold until it absolutely has to, and then it’s rather apologetic about it — It’s winter, see, so I have to get cold, but, tell you what, I’ll throw in some 70-degree January days and you’ll forget all about it.

Thanks to Dramamine — which I fully believe combats motion sickness by putting you to sleep — I slept through most of Kentucky and nearly all of Ohio. I’m not really missing anything, because I don’t like Ohio. You’d think that a state that has had highways for half a century would have figured out by now how to keep snow from sticking to the exit signs so that you can’t see anything except the bottom right corner, but apparently they had better things to do. Like make sure all their rest stops smell like homeless people.

Ah, Ohio, I’m mostly kidding. After all, we are very much enjoying our breakfast here in Liberty, which our server tells us is about 15 minutes from the Keystone State. Last time we stopped at a Denny’s in Ohio we were treated to a table full of drunken rednecks. Best of all, we were seated in between the revelers and the parents of one of the revelers, so Hoss kept stumbling past our table to his parents’ table while his poor mother pleaded with him to quit acting like a jackaninny.

We’ll be back in the road in about a half-hour or so, recharged and ready for the sun to come up. We should reach The Best Friend’s place by midmorning, then tonight we’re headed to my family’s house to stay for a few days. I hope all of you have safe travels this Thanksgiving!

Blogfriends, tonight I am leaving the Bluegrass State for the frozen tundra of Pennsylvania. It’s not nearly as interesting as absconding to the Riviera, but you take what you can get. Since I’m fairly certain I won’t be able to update while we’re on the road — I tend to sleep through the boring parts, aka Ohio and most of the Keystone State — I offer you these early-morning morsels of potentially embarrassing facts about yours truly:

* When I first heard Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” I couldn’t understand what it was about. Why would there be a man in the mirror? And why in the world would Michael Jackson be singing to him? Did he look in the mirror and see someone else there? Why wasn’t he creeped out? Wikipedia tells me it was released in 1988, so there — my excuse is that I was seven years old and apparently incredibly dense.

* I used to think “fl. oz.” on a bottle of soda meant “floral ounces” instead of “fluid ounces.” Don’t ask me why. My mother nearly collapsed from laughing when she found out.

* I never made it past level one of gymnastics. I failed most unceremoniously when it became apparent I couldn’t do a chin-up pullover on the uneven bars. I will remember the name of that stupid move until the day I die.

* When I was small, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and be halfway through getting ready for school before I realized it was still dark outside.

* I love to grocery shop. I can spend hours in Kroger, inspecting produce and debating the merits of ground turkey versus ground chicken.

* TV shows on my DVR include America’s Next Top Model, The Amazing Race, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and How I Met Your Mother. I’ve also been known to watch The Next Food Network Star, reruns of Fresh Prince and the Golden Girls, and The Lawrence Welk Show (hush up, it reminds me of my grandmother).

* I know the words to the Pennsylvania Polka.

* I routinely forget how to do the most mundane things. One morning earlier this month, I twirled the spigot that turns the shower on (as opposed to the one that turns the water on), and couldn’t figure out why nothing was coming out. I was halfway to the phone to call apartment maintenance when it dawned on me.

Now spill!

I used to love doing First Person stories. Predictably, they involved doing something cool and then writing about it in the first person, and I loved them because they let me be funny and personable. I wrote one on a ride-along I did for the local police department and a woman e-mailed to me it was the first time she’d ever turned to the jump page from the front — she usually just read until the jump, then put the newspaper down. It was obviously something I was good at, which of course meant that my editors wouldn’t let me do it.

After the city police ride-along, the chief of another local force contacted me to ask if I would do a similar story for their department. I waited for a few months — much as I love them, First Person stories are not an everyday occurrence in newspapers — and approached my editor, who gave me the go-ahead to do a ride-along and write a First Person about it. An officer picked me up at the office that evening and we spent his entire shift together, solving crime on the mean streets of southcentral Kentucky and swapping stories over Whoppers on his dinner break. We had a great time, and I picked up plenty of interesting details for my First Person.

As I left my apartment the next morning, my editor called. They changed their minds, see — I wasn’t going to write a First Person after all. I argued that I hadn’t interviewed anyone else, so it couldn’t be a story (stories, as a rule, need at least two sources). The editor returned that I could write it like a First Person, just not in the first person. So, basically, the story was going to read like a tabloid interview with no real point. If I had interviewed some others, I could have at least turned it into a story about this police department … but now it was going to seem like I was fawning over this guy for no reason.

I went into the office and wrote the First-Person-but-not-really, submitted it, and went on with my day. The police officer I shadowed asked for a copy of the article when it came out, so when that day’s paper hit my desk I picked it up along with a pair of scissors … and gaped at the page. My article was nearly unrecognizable, and definitely sounded as though I was some sort of magazine writer giggling over a famous actor.

“Oh, (Managing Editor) didn’t like your lead. He said you took too long to get to the point,” my editor said when I asked her about the changes. (I was tempted to rejoin that there wasn’t a point in writing a First Person without writing it in first person, but I bit my tongue.)

Apparently, this transgression didn’t warrant anyone actually telling me that they didn’t like my lead; rather, they chose to mangle the story and run it. I was humiliated, and I still had to drop off a copy at the police department for this officer. I did the only thing I could do — paper-clipped an apology to the article, stuck it in an envelope, and handed it over. The officer later contacted me to tell me that he liked the story, but I knew better.

One would think it’s not common to have one’s work mangled without notice, but it’s really not. That was one of the most aggravating things about being a reporter, because you were the one left to explain to your sources why your article sucked and it sounds like a cop-out to blame your editor. Luckily, most people in this town know how it goes, but my cheeks still burn when I think of that story.

Thank you all for being so kind to The Husband yesterday — he was very pleased that his guest post was so well-received. I was just happy not to be called out and publicly shamed by Mickey for skipping out on a post this month. I would like to point out that I was on my way to Louisville to celebrate a friend’s birthday when it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my NaBloPoMo obligations, and that thought concerned me so much that I immediately called The Husband and asked him to fill in — and he did admirably. I should get some sort of extra credit for caring about NaBlo when a party was imminent, is all I’m saying.

Since he did such a good job yesterday, I feel it’s acceptable for me to put forth little effort in today’s post. The quick recap of last night and today is this: We drank, danced, drank some more, went to bed obscenely late, had lunch at Buca di Beppo this afternoon, drove around affluent neighborhoods gawking at the million-dollar homes, then came home to catch up on schoolwork. Now all of a sudden it’s my bedtime, so I bid you goodnight with a promise to be more interesting tomorrow. If I think about it long enough, I’m sure I can dredge up another ridiculous Snooze story to make up for today.

It’s not often that one gets the opportunity to be a guest columnist here at Daily Newsie. Sadly, my writing skills are far beneath those you’ve come to expect, but today we encountered a posting dilemma. Newsie is out of town for the evening, and doesn’t have the laptop with her. So in order to maintain the posting requirement for NaBloPoMo, I’m filling in for this one day.

Yesterday’s post made me think of all the things one of my brothers and I used to do when we were young. Every time my family gets together, we usually have a lot of conversations started along the lines of “Remember when we lived in [insert state here], when…” Though in our case, the stories always end with something more akin to “… and we’re lucky Mom didn’t kill us.”

Some highlights of The Husband’s childhood:

• Living in California, we somehow discovered that the bars on the fence surrounding the apartment complex pool area were rusted enough at the welds that we could pull them apart, sometimes even detaching them. This discovery ended up yielding a $300-$400 bill for my parents. Timeframe: Grade 4, I believe.

• Also in California, we discovered the “Muppet Joke Line” - essentially a “Joke A Day” service, with per-call fees that ran up an exorbitant phone bill. Timeframe: Grade 5

• Little Creek, Virgina – After my mother had just finished cleaning our apartment prior to moving out, she made a store run. My brother and I got into some sort of argument that somehow escalated to me chasing him through the apartment. Rather than chase him up the stairs, I grabbed the nearest item available, a bottle of Children’s Tylenol (liquid), and threw it at him. I missed him, but discovered that such a small bottle can produce a LARGE red stain on the wall. So large that it ended all thoughts of whatever we’d been arguing about, and only left thoughts of our doom. Timeframe: Grade 6

There are plenty of others, but they’ll have to remain untold (at least in print form) for now.

Thanks for stopping by!  Newsie will be back with posts of her own tomorrow.

Staff Photo

The Husband should not be mistaken for an actual writer… nor illustrator of awesome staff photos.

Mickey’s post about the Wet Banana — which I didn’t even know existed, but apparently it does and is quite superior to the Slip’n'Slide — got me thinking about the ridiculous things we did as children to amuse ourselves. My older brother J is two years older than me, I’m in the middle, and the baby of the family, N, is five years younger than me. (Yes, we told him he was a mistake, and yes, it turns out that I was actually the mistake. Best mistake ever, is all I have to say.) We lived in town until I was about seven, when we moved to the scary farmhouse with a broken toilet and a nest of fire ants in my closet, so up until then my playtime activities were pretty normal — biking to the park with friends, playing in the sandbox, swinging hard enough so the swingset legs came out of the ground, and so on.

Then we moved to a place so remote that it didn’t even have a street address, and suddenly my brothers and I had to find ways to amuse ourselves. One of our favorite activities was riding J’s blue plastic skateboard down the hill next to our house, leaving twin wheel-tracks in the grass. This pastime filled many happy hours until my mother noticed the stripe of dead grass and made us stop. She also vetoed exploding creamer cups and ketchup packets with a hammer on the sidewalk to the house, which really sucked because that was awesome, and I seem to recall she was none too happy about our attempt to ride the laundry basket down the stairs.

(Over the years, we’ve noticed that most of our good stories end with slumped shoulders and the phrase, “… and then Mom made us stop.” It was always Mom, since she had the pleasure of staying home with us all day long.)

So J and I shifted our focus to outside activities. We built a lean-to with branches, empty feed bags, and fallen leaves, where we would spend nights waiting for my father to try to scare us (he always did, and I always pretended not to be scared). After listening to Bill Cosby’s go-kart sketch, we took the wheels off of the lawn mower and built a crude go-kart out of two-by-fours to ride down the hill next to the pasture (Mom didn’t care if we tore up that one). Dad actually made us stop that time, because he needed to mow the lawn. In the wintertime, J and I would build igloos and giant ramps that would launch us and our sleds high into the air before we came crashing down on the other side — or got clotheslined by the wire stretching between the trees.

Now, the only reason I’m going to mention this next bit is because my father will call me out in the comments if I don’t. My older brother and I loved to ride our bikes, and would spend hours biking from our house to the tiny hamlet of Orangeville to get some ice cream at the Nor’ Pole. (That place was awesome, by the way.) We thought we were the cat’s pajamas with our mean cycling skillz, so we formed a daredevil group called “The Trixter Blixters” and would stage dramatic talent shows for our parents in which we would — gasp! — steer with one hand or — zounds! — stand up on the seat while riding. To their credit, my parents always acted suitably impressed at our prowess. Until, that is, the day when J was trying to torment me by dragging a rake behind him as he rode across our rock driveway (I hatethe sound of a rake scraping rocks) and wound up crashing head-on into our new mini-van. We decided not to tell anyone what happened, but apparently it was pretty obvious.

And then Mom made us stop.