x1: Lost and tired on a dusty road

What keeps biting me?! Honestly! I keep getting these - I assume mosquito - bites, and it's just, obviously , irritating.

It's been an odd couple of days. On perhaps in ways never yet discussed on this blog. Prepare for a long one. Go get a snack.

Ready? Okay. We begin near the end, in the newsroom, where I arrive and happen upon Andrew and Perrin snickering over some mound of papers. I inquire and find that our preview sheets - printed out and taped to the outside window for people to observe and correct - have been marked up by some strange presence in the night. He began the tirade of red ink with a hostile letter indicating that he was appalled at the lack of quality in our layout, wondering if we "even have a layout?" (yes, he underlined.) He then went on to confess that he spent three hours going over the paper scrawling these notes all over them. Of course, given that the paper was printed by the time we got this, perhaps his "suggestions" were doomed to go unheeded, but needless to say, reactions ranged from amused, to offended, to somewhat scared, to plainly indifferent.

Andrew had actually been in the newsroom at 10:00 last night and saw nothing of the fellow. Which he arrived sometime after ten, and no less than three hours later returned the pages (perhaps early this morning.)

I understand people wanting to take an interest in the quality of the paper. That's a pretty decent thought. But I don't really appreciate mysterious criticisms from a person identifying himself as the "phantom proofreader." It began to get ridiculous how frequently scrawled all over the sheets was the word PICA. I've actually played this guy's game before -- show them you "know what you're talking about" by using jargon like pica, stet, and "butting headlines."

Is the paper perfect? Hell no. Lord knows I have had my fair share of bones to pick with it, but it's usually really obvious stuff like getting the date wrong (this actually happened on two pages of an issue a few weeks back,) and typos and crap.

Roy dismissed the guy quite handily. And since Roy is the one with thirty years experience, I'd have to defer to him on this matter. It's just a little unnerving that some guy swooped down in the middle of the night, slapped red ink all over the paper, and didn't leave his name. It's like it was Batman or something. I just don't think Batman would ever be this big of an asshole.

It's the type of thing I could carp on for hours, and will probably not be able to get out of my head for weeks.

For the record, not many of the complaints were legitimate. every now and again he'd catch a typo, but failing to see the distinction between the Editorial section (where the staff column goes) and the Alternative Voices section (where he found a letter to the Editor and claimed it should go in Editorials,) is kind of something you laugh about when it comes from someone who seems to fancy himself a messianic proofreader. As Bugs Bunny might've said, whatta maroon.

For the record, I'm not even on newspaper layout right now, having long since moved on to webpage layout - I'm just amused and slightly annoyed.

I had a dentist's appointment yesterday. I was fretting it because, hey, I hate the dentist and I doubt they're too fond of my dietary habits. They have a tendancy to be smug and also a little liberal when it comes to jabbing you in the mouth with metal implements. So in preparation, I brushed and flossed and used mouthwash and did everything I could. But I knew that would just provide a good presentation. The real story is told by cavities. And after all the scraping and rinsing and fluoriding, my cavity count came in at... zero. That's right, the guy who drinks as much as three cans of pop on a given day (and iced tea, which is apparently also bad,) is devoid of cavities, and can remain so if he keeps up with the occasional flossing. Flossing I can get behind. It's slight pain now to avoid major pain later.

Ever since getting my front teeth done in grade 9, I've been a fanatical brusher. I had enamel put in to correct the unsightliness caused by something called hypoplasia, which made my front teeth look blotchy (through no fault of my own!) Also, I didn't brush often. Once they were put in, I realized I'd been given a second chance and resolved to take as good of care of these "new teeth" as possible.

I went to bed on Monday night with a pounding headache, as though victim of a rapid assault by sledgehammer. I woke up even worse and, as mentioned on this blog, popped ibuprofen throughout the day.

Yesterday it was still pretty bad, but I learned a vital lesson: never discuss headaches with a woman. I don't know what it is about women but they seem to experience headaches with greater frequency and worse pain. I learned this by inadvertantly setting a table full of girls - Amanda, Melissa W. and Khadija I believe - on what seemed like a 20 minute tangent about headaches. And with a headache myself, maybe I wasn't in a mood for it, haha.

I'm still a little under the weather but on the mend. Like, I'm still feeling flashes of headachiness for moments at a time - and even seemingly transferred my illness to Eric - but I think by Saturday I'll be at least to 90%.

And here endeth the long, unfocussed rant. More some other day. Need rest now.

Keep on rockin'
-El Scotto