the point of copyediting is to keep people from sounding stupid. there are some people whose stupidity i am tired of concealing from the world.

this article makes me want to cry. it's one of those life-is-shit-but-so-and-so-overcame gigs. but it's so true! life is shit! i am lucky to have what i have, but i have nothing if i am shitty to myself all day, which is harder to avoid doing than it sounds.

do we need the possibility for advancement and future comort for happiness? for acceptance of the shit we are doing in the present? e.g., can communism work for regular people, not just monks (who are capitalists anyway because they brew beer)?

ok, everyone go read the article mr. fridrik posted in the comments to my entry on 7.14. it's about the wars on obesity. normally i pity the pro-fat wing of opinionators as both misguided AND unstylish a la the ugliness-as-conscientious-dissent soapbox occupied by BUST, bitch, and other dubiously feminist publications whose editors make a profession of marginalizing themselves, but this article makes some sense in concept, even if some of its numbers aren't so credible (an 80 pound range of 'healthy weight' for anyone, no matter how big-boned or hairy, seems unreasonable).

last night dorothy said on the phone (best read in dreamy dorothy drawl): 'i've been having fantasies about going grocery shopping with my mom, where i pick out things i want and she pays for them, and she picks out things that i wouldn't have thought of.'

my goals for the weekend are to heal from my various injuries, buy a new glug-glug jug of tangueray, read more book than news, and see the metallica movie. and maybe write a long soulful email to my brother, king of the long (and short) soulful email, and a long intelligent email to the only contact i have in the world of Jobs I Want.

don't wake that life

last night i fell asleep to waking life, which, now that i've seen it semisober, i've decided really is best watched stoned. lots of half- (or totally) baked ideas from philosophy one-oh-point-five. ed and i decided that an animation overlay of one of dr. robb's classes would be much better, and his sweaters would look faaaahbulous.

iron-maidenform girdle?

man, i can understand how people get fat working these desk jobs. food is about all you can look forward to in the course of the day, especially when svelte coworkers abandon delicious chocolate cheesecakes in the fridge in effort to offset the caloric danger to themselves and their own. the cheesecake was lunch yesterday, and i have just eaten a banana on the verge of overripeness to prevent the cheesecake from being breakfast too. also, i am trying to avoid learning too much about the scrumptious and expensive offerings of 52nd street, because lately i have been venturing out to get black coffee and just happening to run into other delectables in the process. like the $1.75 oily kindergarten-birthday-style cupcakes in a deli just a few doors down and the chocolate-covered grahams in the starbucks housed protectively by the financial center across the street. if i try the $3 pizza-by-the-slice from global kitchen, i'm afraid i will find myself living on (and for) it for the next month. i am, however, particularly thankful for the proximity of midtown's best gyro cart on hangover days.

boring old job and exciting new knee condition!

everyone i talked to this weekend about feeling restless in my job said i should get out before too long to avoid being pidgeonholed as a copyeditor. i feel like i'm starting all over again, like last summer, and i've just managed to keep myself taken care of for the past year, though that counts as a worthy goal in itself. it's tough. it's tough to think of giving up health coverage and working for free at harper's or the voice just so i can have a gamble at doing the thing i want to do. but that's why i'm here living in this expensive supercili-city to begin with. if i wanted to just support myself, i could do a much better job of that somewhere else, like, while frying fish on the beach.

tentative plan: stay at work and in apartment through christmas and have surgery on the company plan; apply for grad school for next fall and internships for this spring; consider moving to brooklyn once off crutches and if an ok situation comes along.

state of knee tendonitis: bearable and improving. the weather is too nice to miss running outside. the plan for today is walk-run intervals followed by the rolly thing (i am obsessed with this, my hard-foam cylindrical physical therapy device--much easier to manage than sitting on a tennis ball, miss kt!) some knee exercises with ankle weights, and ice & ibuprofen.

had some wacky dreams this weekend. they rely on aural puns, tho, so i'll refrain here. if you want to witness the verbal stretches my sleeping mind finds hi-larious (thomas ward would be proud), the phone will have to be your medium.

it's one of those 'what do i do with my life?' days. it started as a busier-than-usual day at work, the drudgery levels of which are usually manageable, if not nearly suppressable, but then it came roaring to the surface when an all-staff email was sent out about the open position for a curatorial assistant. i read the description with a clenched stomach, hoping hoping hoping that it's low-level enough not to require a master's degree (it doesn't), desperately wanting to surround myself with interesting people thinking about ideas, which would be a nourishing environment for my brain, as opposed to interesting people keeping track of facts and versions of pieces of paper, which seems harmless on the surface but is mentally debilitating when you really think about it. but then there's the whole politics of even asking to change departments within the museum, of abandoning the people who so carefully taught me their...paper-shuffling techniques (ok) and who generally are charitable enough to ignore the way i slink into work late in the mornings and even later after a mysteriously long lunch. all this got me curious about what jobs are available outside the museum, which, by the way, is a very efficient way to further torture someone already deep into the let's-throw-my-whole-life-into-doubt game. i really didn't want to know that i could make $16 an hour freelance editing tv trivia questions until as late as 1 a.m. on weeknights and work weekends too, even on top of my current job; or that the magazine looking for a copyeditor whom they insist shouldn't harbor affection for the serial comma (wtf?) is, as revealed by some web investigation, an 'uplifting' christian magazine with sayings of the day and drop-down prayer menus; or that martha stewart magazine wants a copyeditor and pays much better than i currently make but still probably not enough to make it worth working there. or maybe not. does it matter, really, when the people at the top of my workplace are just as crooked and fake and vain and clueless as i imagine the people at the top of martha stewart co. are? and it's not like i'm at my job to get better at the job itself. i'm there because it's a particularly low-pain version of a profession i'm good at but not much interested in. and because it sounds much cooler than it is and could get me in the door somewhere else that's actually cooler. not so with uplifting christian mag, tv trivia, or martha stewart.

so where am i trying to go? what to do with this restless engergy?

well, for now, the answer is run. run run run, tendonitis or no.