While this creates all kinds of fun for me (like teaching new writers about why they should learn AP style, why we use just a single space after periods, etc.), it also sets me up for some unplanned exposure to information that can really make a movie (or TV show) not as enjoyable as it should be when I finally make it to the theater. Sometimes it’s a writer’s first time crafting a review, and one of the most common traps that new writers fall into, especially those without much to actually say about the film, is to just write a synopsis of the plot, which is a real downer for the people reading it who want to be surprised by all the twists and turns.

So, it raises a bit of a conundrum, especially considering I’m Blast’s only copy editor. If I have to edit a piece that will unintentionally spoil a movie, TV show, book, etc., what recourse do I have, especially in the age of digital media and a news cycle that doesn’t sleep? Waiting until after I’ve seen it doesn’t always work, as I’m usually the last person to catch a film in theater before it goes into that waiting period to appear on DVD. Personally, I just bite the bullet, edit it, and try to teach the writer to be a little less revealing next time around — with an ever-changing staff, it doesn’t always last, but that’s just the nature of the job, I suppose.

So, what do you do when you have to copy edit spoiler-filled material? Do you grit your teeth and plow through? Do you make a colleague who doesn’t care, or who you don’t care for, edit it instead? Do you wait until you’ve seen it for yourself and let the glaring typos and grammatical errors sit there for all to see until you get around to it?

Specifically, I finally graduated, and now I’m getting ready to embark on a more serious career, which is actually what sparked my interest in firing up WordPress again and putting down my thoughts. (Hi, HR people!) I won’t name names of places I’m applying for now, for various reasons, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the responses I’ve received, and the salary offerings so far — as a journalism major, I thought my life path was pretty well set: do what I love, but be broke as hell doing it. I will say that there are specific areas I’m interested in (Boston, NYC, Seattle), and the most promising responses are out of Boston and NYC so far. No matter what career path I choose, I feel a bit like I’m delaying our dreams of making it to France eventually (which I think I mentioned in my last post), but I’m excited to take my first steps toward a meaningful career, and I think for now the benefits outweigh the negatives.

Last October, Ivona and I were on our honeymoon in Antalya, Turkey, sitting in a faux Parisian café in our resort, and we made the decision to move to France. We busted out the laptop, spent hours looking into everything from the cost of housing in Aix-en-Provence (the city I used to live in) to claiming my French citizenship. We had just had our second wedding in Bulgaria, and our first honeymoon now that we could finally afford one, and it seemed fitting that we made the decision to go there together, something we had talked about as early as our first date. It was a definite motivator to finish up this year and get my degree, and it was one of the things keeping me from shooting myself at the though of another 80-100 hours a week driving a cab this summer, but as we got closer to leaving Northampton to head to the Vineyard, and looked at the costs of going to France, I realized that working another menial labor job for three intense months with no semblance of a life was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Besides, with the US immigration process being the beast that it is, things will be easier later on for us anyway.

We’re coming up on our two year anniversary, which means that aside from the horrors of just dating me, she’s endured two years of matrimonial unbliss, including my video gaming habit and constant dick jokes (not really — I’m highbrow! No, really). I know everyone says it, but I really can’t believe it has been this long. Luckily for us, we still have the same opinion of marriage that we started out with: our relationship really hasn’t changed because of the rings on our fingers, and we don’t “feel” any more married than when it first happened — which is to say we still think getting married makes more of a difference to everyone around us than it does to us. Hell, we still sometimes feel weird referring to “my wife,” or “my husband.”

Anyway, sorry to make such a rambling, newsy update with not much substance, but I had to break back into it and I’m sure some family and friends who read this will want to get an update on what’s going on. Hopefully I’ll be back on a more regular update schedule, so keep checking.

We looked at the wrong camera

On account of posting three times yesterday and that it’s almost midnight on Sunday and I have a crazy day tomorrow, I’m going to do a real short post just to throw up a picture I found while looking around on Facebook today. I haven’t posted a single picture before now, which is sort of sad, and in the coming days I’ll post more. Ultimately, I want to get a really nice camera (I know, mom, you bought me one a couple years ago but it has a problem with the lens that might be more expensive than it’s worth to fix) and start teaching myself a bit more about being a good photographer. Then I’ll do a daily photo or something.

Anyway, this is a picture from a New Year’s Eve party a few years ago… maybe sophomore year of college? I guess it’s fitting to post this since I’m posting writing from around that time. It also happens to be a picture of me that I like, which is pretty hard to find. These are all people I went to high school with, most notably my friend David Linfield, who I later visited in Scotland and who remains a good friend. The best part is that there were two people taking pictures and we looked at the wrong camera, but I think it turned out better that way. I’m the guy on the right, for those who don’t know, wearing the black fleece with the Heineken in my hand.

When I go out to write or read,
The corner-of-the-coffee-shop girl
Becomes
Center-of-my-mind girl
And
Waiting-in-the-rain-for-a-bus girl
Becomes
Saturday-morning-reason-to-not-get-out-of-bed-because-she’s-in-it girl
(And some of you may have noticed by now and I’m sorry
but I won’t hold it against you when you walk out of my life
without a word so we’ll call it even)
The day when singing-to-herself-while-she-walks-ahead-of-me-and-doesn’t-think-anyone-can-hear-her girl
Stops singing to me
Will be very sad indeed.

When people ask me about driving a garbage truck, I usually tell them it’s as bad as it sounds, only worse, and then I pause for a minute as if to think reflectively and tell them “well, once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad.” Maybe I’m just a fake motherfucker, but I get sick of answering the same questions all the time, so I at least have fun trying to perfect the same responses, or make up ridiculous answers (“No man, I loved that job! I found so many cool things in the trash, and I never had to bring my own lunch, if you know what I mean!”). For the first week, I was miserable and convinced I would quit. During training I was riding around in a residential truck with a Brazilian kid named Ramon who drove like a psychopath and would pretend to be a stupid, uneducated foreigner when dealing with some of the customers (“Yes boss! Sorry boss! Next time better boss!”) while I tried to hold back laughter (he and I had actually gone to high school together and his English was pretty good).

Anyway, between the smell and mess that came with the job, I was sure I wasn’t going to last, but I managed to deal with it. When people say “Oh, man, that must have been terrible,” I often just shrug and say “Yeah, but it was great writing material,” which is largely true, but I never really did anything with it. I do have some notes and images I jotted down while I worked there that I’m particularly fond of that I’ve always wanted to turn into something worthwhile, so in the next few days or weeks I’ll turn those into little vignettes to be posted here, so at least I have them in one place. Some of the characters I worked with there are too good and three-dimensional not to write about, and I had some pretty scary and life-changing experiences as well that warrant attention.

The most prominent image I have of that time and the one I tell most people about is picking up the dumpster of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It was one of the most depressing experiences of my life, repeated every other week.

The first week, I didn’t realize what the ashes were. The next, the cremator came out with his big gloves and tongs carrying a plastic bag. He had a look about him as of pure misery that made me not feel so bad about my limited contact with the co-mingled remains of Spike and Mittens.

On a rainy day, the ashes became wet and sludgy, like a kitty-ash Slushy. It would slide down the metal sides of the dumpster and slop into the soup that had been building up in the hopper.

On windy days, it was like that scene in The Big Lebowski, when they’re spreading the ashes on the cliff and they all blow into his face. After blowing my nose into the shop towels in the truck, I wondered if I could figure out what part of Fluffy I had just gotten a little more intimate than I ever would have liked to with.

As bad as those were, probably the worst was when a corner of the dumpster, which was a small little two-yarder (it was right next to a veterinary clinic I also picked up on alternate weeks – one week was cat and dog shit from the vet clinic, the other the ashes from the MSPCA) got caught on a tree branch when I wasn’t paying attention and dumped ashes all over the ground. The shovel that was pinned to the side of the truck had been broken for a long time, since a dumpster had been knocked out of the truck and almost killed me when it hit the side and shattered it, so I had to scoop up the ashes by hand and put them into the truck.

And that’s when I decided to go back to college!

Stay in school, kids.

(Oh, I remembered just now in my last post I promised kittens and rainbows. Well, I got the kittens, but I owe you some rainbows. My bad.)

The theme of this semester seems to be centered on objectivity and subjectivity. These are ideas I’ve dealt with a lot as a journalist, but lately I’ve really been thinking about it a lot. As I wrote in one of my papers for Covering Race lately, as a journalism student I’ve been told that objectivity is the highest ideal. I’ve pursued it, trying to keep my personal beliefs and opinions out of the discussion. I always had the feeling that perfect objectivity was unnattainable, but lately I’m feeling like even imperfect objectivity doesn’t even exist.

It’s hard to deny that all actions and all speech and writing are political. For some of you Americans, you may need to broaden your perspective on what the word “political” means. What I mean is that just about everything anyone does has an agenda. I know this isn’t some crazy new idea, but my point is that as a journalist and writer, it’s something I need to reconcile on a philosophical level. If nothing else, I want to maintain my integrity and feel like what I do in the world has a purpose and goal. If I’m told throughout all these years that writing objectivity is how I do that most effectively, what does it say about my world view if I’ve suddenly decided it’s impossible to do so?

This is a much abbreviated version of the post I want to make about this, and I’ll expand on it more and more as I figure it out in my own head. But for now the conclusion I’ve come to, as to how I can rationalize calling myself a journalist while knowing that objectivity is impossible, is that I need to change my definition of goals. Instead of trying to be objective, honesty and integrity need to be the mainstays of my profession.

These days, mainstream media is a joke, and I don’t fancy the idea of being a cog in that machine. That’s part of why I wanted to start my own blog: freedom of choice and speech. Here I can really be honest and maintain my integrity to myself. True, I’m not going to make a living at it, and I haven’t really started writing journalistically here. But at least here I can say “this is what I stand for and believe in, and here’s how I see the world.”

I think subconsciously, when I realized objectivity was an illusion, which is a conclusion I came upon a few years ago, I was disillusioned by the profession in its entirety. My faith in it is coming back; driving a garbage truck all last winter and listening to NPR for several hours a day helped that. More than anything, though, I’m coming to terms with how to cope in a subjective world. If nothing else, I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not to sell my stories. Hell, I could give up my morals for plenty of other jobs and make better money if I wanted to.

Anyway, this is sort of a rough sketch of my ideas on objectivity and subjectivity. I may come back and edit this, or post a more polished version later on, or some of the papers I’m working on that expand on it. In the meantime, if you have thoughts about what objectivity and subjectivity mean to you, I’d be happy to hear them and maybe gain some insight.

I’d put this together a little more, but that mouth problem I mentioned earlier has gotten considerably worse. It’s infected now and the infection is spreading to the ear, and it’s pretty damn painful and getting worse. Oddly enough, it even hurts on the right side of my scalp, and I get shooting pains through my ear and up to the top of my head. Ugh. Depending on my state of affairs in the morning I’ll be going to the doctor to get some antibiotics and, hopefully, some painkillers that’ll knock me out for a couple of days. It couldn’t be shittier timing; I have two presentations and a paper due tomorrow, all of which I worked my ass off today to do a good job on, and oddly enough I was actually looking forward to giving them. Shocker, I know. When the hell did I become a good student again?