theology&geometry

I am burned out.

I am sick of working nights and weekends.

I never see my friends. I don’t even think they notice anymore.

I am sick of a job where I just sit on my ass and stare at a computer screen and deliver page proofs to people like some kind of copy boy.

I have grown tired of some people’s refusal to recognize me as having earned the creative freedoms I feel I’ve earned.

I am pissed at myself for deciding that my love of journalism/visual editing should trump my more practical concerns about a sustainable career that wouldn’t be gutted by short-sighted corporate overlords who only care about fattening the bottom line AKA eventually making my job redundant.

I think I am overworked and underpaid.

I figure I don’t do anything about it because I am lucky to just be employed.

I am terrified of making a radical leap but I wonder if it’s the right thing to do, given the prevailing attitudes about people with my job description, and what my corporate overlords have in store for me in the next year or two.

I am being cryptic for obvious and obviously annoying reasons.

I am positive that blogging about these things is a really bad idea but I figure I have nothing to lose.

I want nothing but the best for my employer (and therefore my community) but I feel completely hamstrung by outside forces.

… you can go damn near anywhere you please as long as you strut as hard as this fellow is strutting.

(Cue “Strut That Ass” remix.)

This time with sweet election results coding action. Which is sweet in the way that a hernia is pleasurable.

(Cross-filed in the shameless friend promotion cabinet)

Check out these sweet page designs featuring Shane McDermott’s artwork. The Facebook page is my favorite, even though Shane had to bust ass to get it done on deadline since his original sketch was lost to the ether thanks to some kind of shitty Illustrator-related technical glitch. Shane, when he reads this post, will probably leave a comment saying that he likes the Facebook illustration, just not as much as the original one he did. And then he will sigh heavily.

It’s 2:35 am. I am still at the office. The power went out shortly after 10 and we’ve just been sitting here, waiting for it to come back so we can put out the paper. MLGW has told us they have no clue what the issue is, but that substation 21 has been affected, and that means us plus The Med and Le Bonheur. Our office phones are down and our emergency lights are running on generator power.

We’ve had beer, we’ve had coffee.

It’s starting to get warm in here, and my phone is going to become as worthless as the rest of these electronics soon.

I’m beginning to think we’re going to be here for forever. Fuuuuuuu

Update, 4:26 a.m.: Power’s up, and has been for neeearly an hour now. But booting up our servers takes time and, given that some of our equipment is not, uh, equipped to ever lose power, it’s possible that we will run into some problems trying to get everything running smoothly again. So I wait. We’ve got internet now, at least, so I can do something to pass the time. But I’m starting to feel pretty loopy and my teeth hurt. I’m having company in seven hours and had planned to clean up the house tonight. Funny how that worked out, huh?

Update, 11:29 a.m. on Friday: I guess I should mention I finally got home at 7 a.m. I probably should have waited until I held an actual copy of the paper, but the presses were running and I was running out of steam. So hopefully the paper got out, just a smidge late.

I have started posting over at The Memphis Blog again.

The first thing I did when I decided to take a hiatus two months ago (prompted, mostly, by the fact that I have very little time to do blog cultivation during work hours now since the newsroom reorgnization, and I was spending a TON of hours at home doing for free what I should probably be getting paid to do) was unsubscribe from every Memphis blog feed that didn’t contribute anything meaningful to my life. That means I unsubscribed from a lot of blog feeds.

The most daunting challenge I face now is making sure I am up to the task of resubscribing and wading through all that stuff again without letting it bog down my life like it did before, when I would go to a friend’s house after work to hang out, and then end up tabbing through Google Reader and making 4 a.m. posts about local reactions to news. While that may be super useful for our readers, it burned me out and fast.

I have got to find a good way to manage my time because I refuse to devote as many home hours to the blog as I did in year one of its existence. Seriously. You have to slog through a lot of shit to get to the pearls. I hope that’s not insulting. I feel like that’s pretty much the case for the entire internet. So here’s hoping I can do a better job this time around.

If you get bored, please come visit!

The bulk of my day was spent down at Tom Lee Park covering the last day of Beale Street Music Festival. Rather than reblog about it here, let me just link to the two pieces I turned in to the paper. ONE and TWO. No, I guess it’s not Great Journalism, but it is something. I was a little thrown by not having a blog this year in which to deposit my brain droppings, so I wasn’t quite sure what sort of tone to take when sending my dispatches to the desk. Eh, I guess it worked out okay.

Now, photos. Somehow I managed only to shoot white dudes. But, while that fact disappoints me for reasons I imagine I don’t have to explain to you, nameless internet pixel person, I am happy to report that the white dudes I shot were pretty hammy and made great rock ‘n’ roll expressions. So, here are a few of my favorites from Day Three of BSMF*.

(I also tweeted like a champ. Find my tweets here.)

* I took some good pictures of Vince Neil and his band, but I signed some crap that said — I think, because I didn’t exactly have time to have my attorney interpret it for me — that they own the photos. So I won’t be posting those here. Because I can’t afford to have some fucking Mötley Crüe lawyer come after me for whatever offense that would be. I love that I was asked to sign some stupid shit signing over my photo rights while kids in the front row could snap away unabated, with no legal ramifications. Music industrial complex? You are free to die, for all I care.