holy fuck, i haven't written in a long time.

an update:

two weeks ago, i finally got keys to my workplace. roughly a week ago, i got a real e-mail address (for the summer, i was intern@douglas-mcintyre....). on monday, i got an official title.

now i can introduce myself as an editorial assistant at douglas & mcintyre.

and, i'm making real money. not a lot, but i'm out of the starvation zone.

things are looking up.

***

in other news, my sweetie flew to ottawa last week to reclaim our stuff that had been growing increasingly obsolete for three years in a heated storage facility that charged us about two grand a year. he drove a u-haul cube van all the way back in three days, and up until a few days ago, there was a seven-foot cube of crap sitting in the middle of living room.

one thing about my sweetie that's generally very endearing but incredibly frustrating when it comes to discarding possessions is that he attaches sentimental value to everything he owns. he brought back about eight hundred t-shirts, all of which say something hilarious or are otherwise "cool," and even though we have zero space, he's insisting on keeping them. he's got a back-story for virtually every one of them.

~sigh~

***

i have a little over twenty pages of my internship report written. i'm not supposed to call it a thesis, but calling it an internship report seems to trivialize it some. anyway, it looks like i might have to invoke some serious triple-space action to get it to the requisite sixty pages. my days of student journalism trained me to economize words and be succinct. i just can't ramble or make my prose any more literary. as a result, the report is incredibly short and shit boring to read.

oh well.

i guess the point is just to get enough done so that i can graduate and focus on my job.

i have a job. cool.

back from a week of houseboating, where i spent every day hiking, floating around in the lake, or doing crossword puzzles. a much-needed break following a few months of frenzied hell.

it was refreshing not to have internet access, though i feel a bit out of touch now, having missed the katrina ordeal. when i saw lewis lapham speak at nash in january, i asked him if there was a sense of outrage in the US that the mainstream media was simply ignoring or if there was just no anger whatsoever. there is no outrage, he told me. the american people had gone numb.

well, there's certainly outrage now. a year too late, maybe.

on the houseboat, SW brought along a copy of the walrus, in which i noticed that one of their illustrators, sam, shared the same name as a remarkably gifted artist and genuinely awesome person i knew in high school. at the risk of feeling like a bit of a stalker, i am tempted to get in touch with him. is that weird? just a couple of weeks ago, my sweetie and i were on the bus going home from a party, when a chick approached us and started talking to us. i'd recognized her as the queen bitch from my junior high years, while my sweetie had the misfortune of going to high school with her. she talked to us like we'd always been pals.

when we got off the bus, my sweetie said, "you know, that's the first time she's ever said a word to me."

i felt indignant at her nerve to come speak to me after how mean she was to the nerdy loser girl in junior high. at the same time, i couldn't help but feel that her high school years probably were her best and she was trying to find any excuse to relive them.

anyway, point is, i don't know how a random e-mail from me to sam would be received.

***

one week before starting up again at d&m.

woot!

i wandered into my last week of my internship expecting to slip right into "what are they going to do -- fire me?" mode, but the vp operations called me into a meeting and offered me a 3-month contract to stay on, do editorial work and help set up their central database.

woohoo! i get to put off worrying about unemployment until at least the beginning of 2006. and they're paying me more than twice what i'm getting now as an intern, meaning i don't have to come home every night and do freelance work just to make ends meet. and i have the option of working just four days a week so that i can spend that extra day working on my internship report.

sweeeeeet.

wow, i haven't written in a long time.

this is perhaps because the month of july attempted to kill me.

in addition to working 8 to 4:30 at d&m, i did my ccsp indexing project for my department's anthology and edited an entire book on fluid dynamics. i sent out my invoices two days ago, and discovered that i'd done over $3000 in contract work this month.

and i almost died.

i guess i've discovered the cap on the amount of money i could make as a freelancer. i suppose $2400 a month is a comfortable enough living. also, i probably wouldn't have been in such rough shape if i didn't also have to do internship work.

my internship is coming to an end in about three weeks, which makes me sad. there's a rumour going around that d&m might be initiating a junior editor position. fingers crossed.

my sweetie's gone on a kayak trip with his lab. it's much less nerve-wracking that he's actually going with other people, as opposed to last year, when he made a solo trip to quadra island. still, though, the timing sort of sucks, because this is my first sort of free weekend in over a month.

in a couple of days, i start designing the september issue of the physics journal. i have no idea what the content is going to be like...but i've discovered that i don't really care, which i see as a healthy and overdue step away from student journalism. it'll be good to do design again, though. i've been doing so much editing, i'll need a bit of balance.

until then, though, i'm trying to cram my days with social plans so i can keep my mind off the fact that my sweetie is under constant threat of drowning.

finally.

i'd finished the newsletter redesign for the physics department over a month and a half ago and i just got paid. allegedly, the problem was that the finance department hadn't changed my address since i moved (which was almost a year ago now), and the physics department couldn't enter the data for my cheque to finance before they changed my address.

it's all bullshit, if you ask me. first of all, i moved up two floors. that's a three-digit change in my address. also, i'd filled in a change of address form last august.

i'm pretty sure that it was just a bunch of newbies in the physics department who didn't know what they were doing and lost my invoice. i had to remind them i hadn't gotten paid before they finally got off their fat asses.

why they had to go through payroll and not just pay me as a freelancer, i have no idea.

i fucking hate ubc. seriously.

so i'm home from work after three straight and solid days of indexing that have left me exhausted and broken with a brain functioning at, oh, maybe 0.4 capacity. and i'm officially scared shitless about what i'm going to do with my life in six weeks after this buffer internship's over.

sure, i feel more prepared than ever to take on the publishing industry -- i'm armed with all sorts of obscure knowledge you could only get in a classroom and a high tolerance for tedium you could only get in an internship. unfortunately, i think that having one and a half master's degrees has pretty much done nothing but boost my standards to unattainable heights. any job description i read, i say, 'oh, i don't want to do that kind of crappy entry-level work.'

i wonder how long it will take me to bite the bullet and realize that i've still got to pay my dues in the real world before i get the cred to move up in publishing. no editing for nori just yet -- no, first she has to be an assistant to some editor, filing manuscripts and fact-checking bibliographies.

sigh.

i'm so tired. i just need a real weekend off. really off, where i could sit on my ass and not do any housework or contract work. just to make ends meet and be able to make the $2000-a-term tuition i'm paying the school to work for someone, i've been working my ass off editing or indexing. in some senses, it's something i'm essentially used to, since it's kind of like doing school work. mostly, though, it's just really really exhausting.

summer hours at d&m means that i have to be at work at 8 every morning.

it's 10:47 and almost time for bed.

i am officially old.

*sob*

they've confirmed my ibook's hard drive is fucked and needs to be replaced. it'll cost $120 for the part and at least $90 for the labour. the old data might be recoverable depending on the state of the old hard drive. data recovery will be another $90 or more.

*whimper*

my poor ibook. my poor stolen computer programs...my poor stolen fonts...all of my files...

*sob*

i just won a hundred dollars!

it was for a writing competition among my classmates. i highly suspect that i won because nobody else submitted anything.

it's still a hundred bucks. i promised myself that the next hundred dollars i earned would go to unicef. that was about six months ago, so i guess this is perfect opportunity to make good on my word.

word.

the fruitfly in my room is making me crazy.

scattered ambivalent crap:

1) critical mass friday: amazing. there were over 1100 people, and we took over the lion's gate bridge. it was a pretty impressive sight.

2) sunday: catastrophic computer failure. my beautiful ibook started making this clicking noise and stalled. my attempts to reboot led to additional clickling. it's undoubtedly a hardware problem; i just hope i can recover what's on my hard disk. they say to back it up, but i don't really know anyone who does that...

3) almost one year to the day, some pigfuckers rip off my sweetie's bike again. this time, they didn't even leave the wheels -- everything's gone; it's been stripped down to the frame. what's really retarded is that they're going to take the parts home and realize they can't do a fucking thing with them; the whole chain ring was custom machined.

4) i have to edit a 239-page book on fluid dynamics for wiley, and i'm getting paid far less than what i was paid for my book for springer.

bah!

dear lord.

so one of the things i have to do for my job is compile an author handbook – something editors can give to new authors that explains the editorial process, the formatting requirements of the manuscripts, etc. to do this, i'm essentially taking a bunch of scattered papers that are used in the firm and putting it all together into a coherent document. this is an excerpt from their disk requirements document:

"Manuscripts should be submitted on 3½” disks using recent versions of IBM-compatible WordPerfect or MS Word."

also:

"Never type the letter l (“el”) when you mean the number 1; and do not interchange zero and the capital letter O."

my first thought when i read this was "is this for real?" and after i'd ascertained that it was, my second thought was "how old is this document?" that second requirement is like a throwback to the days of typewriters before they put number keys on keyboard and people had to improvise. WTF?

i asked if CDs or e-mail attachments were acceptable. i mean, i don't even have a 3.5" floppy drive on my computer. turns out they're not a big fan of CDs, apparently.

if there was ever a testament to how technophobic the publishing industry is, this is it.

if i had an indian name, i'd be called 'sandaltan.'

babies.

seems like everyone is having them. my tech instructor at school, the publisher's assistant at greystone, a dude in my sweetie's lab, a friend of a friend i ran into on the bus...

i, on the other hand, dread the thought of having babies. i can't at all understand how anyone in our financial and career situation could even contemplate having babies. it's not that i don't like babies -- although clearly, i'm less interested in them than most people seem to be. i think what really turns me off about the concept of parenting isn't the child, but the thought of being obligated to interact with other parents. people who believe they're the only ones ever to have procreated. women who preface everything they say with "well, as a mother..."

same thing with dogs. some dog people are really cool, but in my brief trip back to alberta two weeks ago, my sweetie and i took his two family dogs out to the off-leash park. i sat back and observed as dogs sniffed each another's asses and the owners were forced to make asinine small talk, which revolved largely around breeds of dogs, dog food, dog toys...

it was torturous.

ahh, the oft-neglected index.

for some unknown reason, i've found myself in the position of having to index two things at once, my previous indexing experience being precisely nothing. one is a cookbook, which should be pretty straightforward (recipes, subrecipes, ingredients, some techniques -- easy, right?), but the other is our departmental press's anthology for its tenth anniversary celebrations. i've been indexing for two nights straight, and i'm only on page 23. of 381.

i've discovered this since i first started: indexing is hard. deciding what to include, what not to include, how to define subheadings, etc.? non-trivial.

i've always had a great appreciation for good indexes -- and cursed poor ones, of course. i'm growing increasingly apprehensive that the one i'm currently constructing will be one of the latter.

***

my sweetie and i convocated yesterday. heard the president of the university give one of the most hypocritical speeches ever. everything she said, i interpreted ironically, and i was constantly wishing i'd brought a bucket of peanuts to throw at her.

but i've neatly wrapped up that chapter of my life. in addition to donning the ridiculous gown with its ridiculous hood and ridiculous mortarboard, i met up with my old supervisor and finished the training him to use the template i'd made for the redesigned departmental newsletter. now i can invoice him and put that behind me as well.

people say 'congratulations' when i tell them i've convocated, but i don't feel proud of the accomplishment at all. it's a degree i wish i'd never pursued.

books are so much nicer than lasers.

my parents arrive tomorrow morning for a week's stay chez moi. that means that tonight, i'll have to:

1) clean the bathroom hard core
2) clean the kitchen hard core
3) vacuum
4) take out the recycling
5) gather up my clothes, currently randomly strewn about the apartment
6) find something to hang over the photo of a flattened mouse that will horrify my mother -- and not in a good way
7) find a good place to keep the bone carvings of two asians having sex that will horrify my mother -- and not in a good way

tomorrow morning, i should probably get some food or something, too. i have no idea how i'll entertain my parents while they're here.

i am editing a book for the very first time.

it's a springer chemistry book about molecular orbitals and shit. it's an interesting learning experience, going through this massive manuscript. i'm getting paid 3 euros a page, and because the pages are way less dense than the papers i was editing, it's supposedly a net gain for me.

too bad this is the most boring book ever written. ever.

also, all of the authors are japanese, and their english ranges from poor to shit-poor.

i've asked my freelancing supervisor to give me next week off. my parents are going to be in town, i'll have my convocation, and i just don't want to have to come home from work and edit for three hours each night that week. it means the second half of the manuscript's going to be delayed by a week, but i don't think the world will suffer too much if this collection of papers about the DV-X(alpha) method isn't made immediately available.

***

i'd promised to write a thing or two about my internship. it's pretty good so far; i'm doing a lot of filing and photocopying, but it's pretty much what i'd expected. at least i'm still learning stuff. i've been going through the slush pile of unsolicited submissions and have come up with a system to make the process more efficient. i submitted a proposal to my supervisor about the project; if it works out, it may be a substantial part of my internship report.

otherwise, i've been doing a lot of proofreading. my supervisor's given me two proposals to review, both of which i rejected 'cause the writing was just too bad.

i might be indexing a cookbook in a couple of weeks, but this upcoming week, i'm actually covering the front desk for the receptionist. i'm terrified i'll answer the phone "dumbass and mcintyre" or hang up on someone when i transfer their call.

i can't believe i've already been working there for three weeks.

***

finally started my herb garden last week. i have basil, sage and rosemary growing, and my oregano and chive seeds are finally starting to germinate.

yum.

saw sloan last night. i'd never seen them live before...they were fun, but i was actually pretty impressed with the opener, magenta lane, a punky chick band from toronto.

***

allegedly, if you start exercising, at some point, you will find yourself more energized rather than tired. i sure hope that's going to kick in soon. i've been biking to work for the past two weeks and i'm still exhausted.

i've got stuff to write about, but i'm too incoherent at this point -- more later.

welcome back, family guy...welcome back.

gah. no post for too long.

a) my sweetie got his thesis done last friday. finally. the three days leading up to his deadline were brutal for both of us; the first night i stayed up until 3am editing his thesis, then got up at 9 to help him implement changes. the day after, i got up at 6am to do a final round of editing, while he'd stayed up all night writing. when he went to submit his thesis to the faculty of graduate studies at the eleventh hour, he found it especially nerve-wracking, as the two people in front of him were sent away because their theses didn't conform to the rather arbitrary formatting regulations. fortunately, they accepted his thesis, which means that he won't owe the university a few thousand dollars in returned scholarship money and back-tuition, and that he'll be graduating with me.

we went out with S&A that night and had a three-pound crab to celebrate, marking the beginning of a string of fine (expensive) dining.

b) i am babysitting HG's food processor for the summer while she's in montreal. i pledged to use it at least once over the next three months, but haven't really thought about it yet. we went out to dinner and saw some of my publishing friends for one last time on sunday night.

c) monday was my first day of work as an intern -- or, as it turns out, the undersecretary to the administrative assistant -- at douglas & mcintyre. the d&m sales conference is tomorrow (a sunday -- and i'm going for my own *cough* edification), and in preparation, we had to put together these massive sales kits, which meant that i got extremely well-acquainted with the office photocopier. i spent the day doing menial tasks, like putting books in the mail for review, photocopying, cleaning cardboard boxes out of the back room, photocopying, recycling old catalogues to make room for new ones, photocopying...the rest of the week was more of the same, with occasional bouts of covering at the front desk when the receptionist had to go away, sorting reviews, filing stuff...which i don't really mind; doing mindless labour is fine after eight months of school, but i wouldn't want to do this all summer. the higher-ups tell me i'll be given some more interesting stuff to do after this sales conference. we'll see.

what really blows me away, though, was that i was constantly busy while i was at work; i always had something to do. and before i'd arrived, the poor receptionist had to do all of what i did plus go through the slush pile and man the phones and deal with couriers and apply for book awards. whatever they're paying her, it's not enough.

some of the submissions they're getting in the slush pile are pretty amazing: of course, you've got to have the indignant arrogant authors who think (ahem, know) they've created the best book ever written; there is one writer who stapled a ten-dollar bill into his submission of humorous christmas stories (...yeah...), and the little old ladies who write their memoirs of growing up in buttfuck, saskatchewan and expect everyone to be fervently interested in their story. part of my project is to figure out ways the acquisitions process can be made more efficient, and i already have a few ideas...

d) i wrecked a pair of jeans and a skirt riding my bike to work this week.

e) on monday night, i saw dmac for quite possibly the last time, or at least the last time in a long while, anyway. i'd found out a couple of months back that he'd decided to go back home and not return to vancouver for school. ubc wasn't really doing him any good, and it's probably for the best that he's pursuing other interests now, but it saddens me that a good friend is leaving the city.

f) on tuesday night, my sweetie and i went out for dinner to celebrate our three-year anniversary. it was just overpriced pizza and pasta, but a nice dinner nonetheless.

g) on wednesday night, we went out to feenie's for the first time, the (arguably) more affordable bistro next to lumière. my sweetie had the $14 crab ravioli appetizer that helped feenie win on iron chef america, and i had a bite -- it was amazing. incidentally, douglas & mcintyre is putting out a new cookbook by rob feenie; his picture on the cover allegedly took two rounds of photoshopping to fix the man's lazy/wandering eye.