Happy 6 Month Anniversary, My Job

One person at my workplace is attaching Lisa Frank gifs to reminders for this project that has nothing to do with Lisa Frank except that she decided the theme should be Lisa Frank. I receive e-mails something like this: "(Rainbow Vomit Tiger says) Don't forget that you should be drafting content like you said you would be this week!" "(Coked-out Space Unicorn says) Good job keeping the spreadsheet updated!"

These things happened

Wheat field Yo Yo Ma approves of everything you do.


Where did you park?

Aral Sea, Kazakhstan

I'm fixated on this particular disaster

MSNBC reports,

"Haiti seems especially prone to catastrophe — from natural disasters like hurricanes, storms, floods and mudslides to crushing poverty, unstable governments, poor building standards and low literacy rates."

I'm sorry, what? I'm new to this game, but I'm pretty sure you do not sweep systematic social problems with a whole history of causation including abuse by foreign powers into the same sentence as natural catastrophe, using only a flimsy "seems to be prone to" for context. And then move on to another subject sans any further elaboration.

Today was my 6 month Baraboo anniversary

This photo was taken in August of 2007, outside the Little Village Cafe, Baraboo, the former headquarters of the Baraboo News Republic. Flannes and I, enthusiastic little J-school seniors, paused to geek out after a hike at Devil's Lake.

Why yes, this would be called a funny coincidence.

Things you don't hear from Hollywood anymore

"You got a high school education, you're a smart man, you figure it out." - Panic in the Streets, circa 1950

I get literature envy.

I gotta stop reading blogs by 30-something writers and budding young creative writing professors and MFA students. All those kids ever talk about is what they're reading and what cool new book has just come out and should be read, and don't seem to have time for hourly wages because seriously, it's a new book every day and my to-read list will soon take up my entire bedroom and spill into the kitchen if I try to keep up with them.

one small step

The holidays are not stressful enough, so it looks like this move is happening in the next 2 days, because my landlord is hoping to lease vacant unit (my current unit) before Jan 1., and after Wednesday afternoon I am All Over The Place, between family and work, Madison and Baraboo.

So in the three hours since I got home from work tonight, I've already moved like, half my stuff. And made a batch of cookie dough for the upcoming office "remember the days when our company threw us a party at Kalahari and rented us a karaoke machine and gave us raises? Oh, you're too young to remember raises, Christie" potluck.

At least for the next couple days, this also means I have TWO apartments. I am sending the cats to colonize, and establishing tiny moon bases in the kitchen, bathroom. Little outposts in the closets.

THE EARTH IS POISONED, PIRATE CAT, WE MUST EVACUATE HASTILY. AND THEN SCRUB THE REFRIGERATOR.

Business time

This morning I walked into the Wisconsin Department of Revenue headquarters to file my taxes for the third time this year. The first two times, my returns disappeared and the DOR never ever could find me in their computer system, even after the Post Office confirmed that my delivery had been delivered. Do not pass go, do not collect $650 owed to you by the state of Wisconsin, do not repay your creditors.

This time, a very nice woman entered all sorts of meta data into a file devoted specially to me, stamped my paperwork, and handed me a photocopy of that stamp so I could prove that my return had been physically received by a living breathing person who knew in what hole to pigeon me.

The key to my success? I suspect BUSINESS HAT.

Caught!

A Madison poet who knew my name in high school (he judged some local contests I entered, invited me to a couple readings, was a friend of my poet English teacher) appeared unexpectedly tonight in Baraboo at a reading. I went there to photograph, I wanted to add more art to the Saturday edition. I was too shy to introduce myself before they got started, I assumed I would not be remembered, and then, as I was kneeling in front of the podium to get a dramatic upward angle on him reading, he between poems says, "There is a very good poet taking photographs in front of me. I remember her." My face like a beet and all hot too. All my many hats rolled briefly into one.

Have been either driving, working, or writing thoughtful critiques since Sunday night. Some sleep. Today, my only day off until sometime mid next week, I ran two very crowded workshops full of high school poets without hurting anyone's feelings OR rambling endlessly/unhelpfully about the shell games you can play with your readers, and then drove my ass from Whitewater to Baraboo just in time to tutor my English student, who is making awesome progress even when we meet only once per week. Blissed-out beyond belief. No longer capable of safe writing or driving. Goodnight.

RobotDanceSkill +3

I would like to thank the organizer of a recent rave at the High Noon Saloon for his generosity in giving white biosuits to funless non-ravers.

The words that have home phone

Based on the statistics which I sometimes track, I know that you can find this blog by Googling:

Hemingway look-alike
shaun macleod snake catcher south africa
craigllist

And, for some reason, the words that have home phone

Urban jungle

What if the whole reason for American overconsumption isn't actually rabid materialism, but just paranoia? I go to Walmart (that spelling is AP Style approved, folks) for a very specific item that I have so far failed to find in more socially-responsible settings, quickly determine they don't have it, and...still spend 20 minutes wandering in search of something to buy so they don't think I'm a shoplifter when I walk past the check-out counters, a little person in a big puffy merchandise-concealing coat. I mean seriously, I could hide about $300 worth of lipstick under that thing.

In addition, Walmart and its ilk have already impressed into me the fact that they possess everything a person could possibly want, and employees will think there is something wrong with a person who can leave such a store empty-handed. Or at the very least, you must be shoplifting.

I managed not to buy anything, but it was really close. Especially when I saw the $1 t-shirts. And no one accused me of shoplifting.

Baraboo's new Wisconsin Fresh Start program in action.



I met a man, he had some land and a very very very nice garden.



Our very serious newsroom. Those are clown nose flowers.

Items and activities

1. E-mail from the office oddball: "Congrats on achieving another year of wisdom. Or perhaps, it's surmounting another year in the realm of disorder." I really like this description. It followed me home. Can I keep it? Year aged, check. Disorder surmounted, check.

2. One of the things you have to do if you want to help people learn to read is sit in on other tutoring sessions. I was shadowing a session with a very advanced student today, a woman whose native language is Russian, and we were talking about various idiomic uses of the word "cat." The book she's learning from is very old. Example sentence, "Men are never called catty, and women are never called cats."

Her question - "So where does "cathouse" come from, if women are not called cats?"
Her tutor - "I have no idea! Maybe because men/cats attend them? And it is not really about the women?"
Me - "Well. I can think of one very rude possibility."
She - "I work in a prison! Continue!"
I: "Well, umyouknow, women have cats."
She - "Of course! A pussyhouse!"

My Polish grandmother will not teach me how to swear in Polish (even though she curses in English) because in Polish it's actually too filthy for her. I bet this Russian woman would help me.

3. When you work at a newspaper, you sometimes have to know more than you let on. So when you print the obituary of someone who - you know because you have a police scanner - shot themselves in the head the week before, whose house you photographed the very same day, whose sorrowing relatives you tried not to photograph...and you finally see their picture and read about how much good they had in their lives, it's kind of a head trip. I suspect we are not supposed to know this much about people we don't know at all. Being on the edge of, but not being personally involved in such a great deal of grief is awkward, uncomfortable, slightly obscene.

Showdown in the Joel's Basement Corral

You know those nights when you're exhausted from a bout of insomnia and you have the next day off and all you want to do is sleep and your good friend pulls you to a house full of gamers playing board games promising you can leave "whenever we want," and the first game of Bang! is so fun and quick (because the Sheriff got killed off fast) that you all agree to "just one more" even though everyone else is tired too, and it turns out that the second game lasts over an hour because it's one of those situations where the outlaws are picked off one by one and then no one knows who's the Deputy and who's the Renegade, and finally it's just Sheriff Robin versus Renegade Allan and they both want so badly to go home but the damn dynamite won't explode and Allan is nearly invincible but lacking offensive tactics and it's a war of slow attrition that just won't end even though neither remaining player has anything to live for and finally the dynamite explodes on Allan and he dies and Robin wins and you're all so excited to be done that you run screaming out of the house for fear of getting sucked into "just one more game"?

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

Voicemail left for me by a source, on a colleague's answering machine. Imagine the voice is about 80 years old. I kind of love this man.

"I'm looking for the young new reporter lady...this is NAME about ISSUE here...and she was writing the article and I can't find her um phone number here in News Republic, I hate these *doggone* program things that you can't get to the people when you want to talk to 'em...so I just don't have her number so I'll have to get through to her tomorrow, thank you, bye bye."

It's not that reporters love pain/suffering, it's that they know(or at least strongly suspect) there are always problems everywhere and they feel like they've done a good, thorough, useful job when they find one and can write something about it. "If it bleeds, it leads," is actually a therapy maxim for reporters who have been writing too many cheery, uncontroversial community member profiles.

Breaking action news crisis!

The Wisconsin State Journal and I both worked on the same story today. Talk about duplicating efforts. I think the only difference is that I drove to the house 3 times, took a photo (we were far too late to catch the thing in action), and talked to a lot of neighbors who saw nothing except police with rifles and megaphones.

I kind of wanted my byline in the WSJ, but it appears that will have to wait for the next police standoff to happen in Baraboo. Can cell phone numbers be listed in the phone book? I should know this already, I know. I want these 5a.m. phone calls.

HOLD IT.

But before I make a seriouspants politicalface blog (not to downplay the importance of being all seriouspants with your politicalface), I'm realizing my lifelong dream of making a bear blog with my good friend Robin, featuring bear news, bearpinions, bearditorials, bearvertising, and unexpected bear appearances ("Surprise Bears") in all aspects of life.

We have long firmly believed this to be an underserved demographic in desperate need of blog-tention, and are pleased to offer this vital public service.