A Little Bitching and More

Second day at work: more extremes than the first. On one hand, during the second half of the day I became slightly more talkative and social, so perhaps I'm beginning to break the "mute, personality-less girl" thing I had going for the first day and a half. On the other hand, I feel fairly incompetent. I was given an article topic today and spent so much time frittering away, doing background research, that I didn't email or call any of the researchers involved until around 3:30 in the afternoon...far too late to expect a response. My real reason for not calling earlier was that I was too afraid to cold call people, as I didn't know that was done, too afraid to leave messages, because I didn't know if that was a good idea, and too afraid to ask my boss what to do, because I'd rather not seem clueless. But of course I wound up asking later in the day, and yes, I cold call, yes, I leave messages and follow those up with emails. Makes tons of sense. Just asking makes even more sense. I'm slowly getting the sense that my boss is disappointed in me already. I don't have great ideas for how to slant articles...they ask me "so what would your take be?" as if I've ever figured out how to angle a topic. I haven't. Ever. The YDN articles were always assigned to me and I'm too chicken-shit to write op-eds. But apparently I'm going to start angling them now. And how.

On the first hand, again, my two article topics thus far are pretty cool. People who are frequent users of drugs tend to have physical responses when they enter the location where they usually use. This is why people overdose in foreign places...it takes more to get them high in their usual locale, so they use their habitual dosage elsewhere, and it's too much. A few researchers found a way to stop this environmental memory-making in cocaine-using rats. That's the first cool article. As for the second article....I CAN'T TELL YOU! Na na n'naa na! It's embargoed until next Monday, when it will appear on the brand-spanking-new Seed site in all of its embargo-lifted glory.

But right now I'm feeling really nervous. I didn't get enough done today, I haven't had much of a social life these past few weeks. I even interrupted vaughan's reading at slave to talk to him, which I very rarely do, because I've been so socially deprived and seeing a friend without the mind-numbing schlepp to the city or farther was about the most exciting thing that's happened in a long time. I'm not sure about this work, and I hate feeling like a disappointment. I don't feel really invested yet...hopefully when I'm producing, and that work is going up onto a website, I'll naturally take more pride in my work. But right now I'm feeling negative emotions that haven't cropped up in the past year or two.

Also, I've begun to realize one luxury I had this summer (aside from the general vast amounts of free time). I was able to take a step back and prioritize according to what I believe is important, not what the world believes is important. And since I had been in that state of prioritizing goodness, security in oneself and intellectual curiosity for so many months, I forgot that what the world prioritizes is quality of output. And not overall quality of output: quality of output in projects that specifically affect them. You are valued if you do what you do well. This is something I've never valued in people. I mean, I love excellent work. I laud awesome novels, movies, songs, performances, businesses, etc. I trash things, generally, because I hate them...not because they're of poor quality. And I always, in some way, admire things I hate. I'm more likely to be extremely dismissive of genres, not specific works. Hearing the other young editorial folk talk about how bad different articles are is a huge shock back into reality. Then there's the dorky editorial assistant who seems ever so slightly ostracized because his comments are sometimes out of place and overly exuberant. Thus far, props to him.