Love and heartbreaks

I never thought that I would have a job I wouldn't mind doing--I just thought adulthood was about doing things I had to do. I may have found a loophole, and it's a fantastic feeling.

Love isn't perfect, though. It comes with heartbreaks and frustrations. My heartbreak is leaving work and waiting two days to get back to it. My other heartbreak is not being able to edit as much as I would like to (if I overedit, I may insult the client). My frustration is non compliant people, e.g. trying to get information from the Johns Hopkins interns and JHU Media Relations.

It was understandable at first: both girls were going through orientation, learning about their roles at JHCC, and getting settled in to their responsibilities. This game that one of the girls is playing--the "I'm too busy to set aside ten minutes for something I agreed to" game-- is silly. I'm not taking it personally, but I am also very busy with rush, classes, work, internship, and personal stuff; and when I agree to do something, you can be sure that I will commit myself to finishing the job. Is it so hard to take ten minutes out of a one hour lunch break just to chat?

On the brighter side of things, It has been a joy and a challenge to do the Ogonna Nnamani and the Vicki Hall stories. I arranged an interview with Ogonna's dad to get the other half of the story--coming from Nigeria to the US and watching Ogonna grow-- which I think will make this a full, beautiful, warm, and inspiring story.

Vicki Hall's story is coming out quite well. I just passed it over to Susan to look at, so hopefully we can get it over to design sometime soon.

I've got another story in the mix, which features what students are passionate about ISU. It isn't surprising, but a lot of people I spoke with said their favorite thing about the University was either a) the warmth and camaraderie you feel when you're on campus b) the quality of the professors/ classes here and c) the number of opportunities you have to grow and succeed. I've got the warm fuzzies, oh yes I do.

Steve has also been giving me stories and documents to copy edit. I just finished a ten page document yesterday that I had to hand edit about four times to make it "acceptable". The thing was loaded with grammatical errors, inconsistencies in pacing and register, unnecessary sentences/ spaces, and other forms of "editor candy". It was a challenging document to work with, but I need a challenge (how else will I be able to improve?). I hope the client understands my corrections, changes, and suggestions.

Writing/ editing makes my heart pound (in a good way). I love the pressure/ rush of a deadline, the self expression, communicating with people, and working with a team to deliver one final and tangible goal: the publication.