This is my new picture byline. I'm smiling. The way to make yourself smile is to take a snapshot of yourself smiling and then stare at it. Or better still, get the chief photographer to do it, only because he has no choice and the bosses are going to kill you if you use the same crappy picture for your picture byline again.
Stare at it long enough, you're bound to break into a grin.
Or record yourself laughing and play it over and over again.
What doesn't annoy you will only make you laugh.
Well, don't you look dashing! The hard-boiled, gumshoe journalist, out stalking her next big lead... =)
ReplyDeleteI can almost imagine a running, internal monologue like the kind you might get with noir fiction: "It was another moonless, monsoon night in KL and there I was, hanging out by the rear entrance to the Backyard waiting on a show girl who happened to be the mistress of one of the local heavies. Rumor had it she'd played the owner of a rival club for a fool, and made off with a truckload of aged scotch, high-caliber weapons and a priceless collection of rare, incurable diseases. I had to find out what she knew, and fast. As the bartender made last call and a final cheer rose from the crowd inside, the door slid forward on its hinges and there she was: a dame unlike any other. She caught my eye, just like one of those pointy screen door latches... I was all thumbs. I had two left feet. Clearly, the cat had my tongue and there was no way this evening could possibly go as planned..."
Lol, okay this is getting so bad I'm making myself laugh... ;-)
This is brilliant...cross between Lewis Carroll and Raymond Chandler.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could stumble on your blog and see what you write...
Should I start a blog? I've always been a random ghost in the journals of other people. If I had a blog of my own, you would certainly be the first person I'd invite over to read it! Things have been so uncertain and unhappy lately, I worry about the consequences of venting my spleen in public. Then again, I suppose no one has to know my real identity (queue suspenseful organ music). Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteYou should definitely start a blog. What are blogs for if not for spleen-venting. I'm sorry things have not been going so well for you. I thought with the new job and the new place to live, things were looking up.
ReplyDeleteIf you need to talk...(unidentified journalist nodding)
:-)
Lol, would you be my confidante? And here I was thinking that journalists are never ever to be trusted... ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe new job and permanent home base are definitely positive developments, at least from the standpoint of conventional wisdom. But my god, the job is so incredibly, unbelievably boring... And despite the ridiculous compensation, there is quite a lot of pressure to fix every little issue with extraordinary speed and correctness. Fail once, and you might not be given an opportunity to fail again. Coming from a university background, this pressure cooker environment is rather foreign to me--I mean, we always took care of business, to be sure, but the sword of Damocles was nowhere in sight. Quite another story, here. And while I know I should be grateful, esp. given the current economic climate, I find myself regularly thinking about the ways and means of making a polite exit at the very first opportunity...
Sigh. I should have become a librarian instead, I just know it. Or an entomologist. Or microbiologist. Or anything that doesn't require you to be leg-chained to a computer for thousands of hours each year. Being a bum doesn't pay well, but perhaps there are other forms of payment that have nothing at all to do with fiat currencies or precious metals. Food for thought. :)
Thought I'd leave you with this nice bit from Kurt Vonnegut:
ReplyDelete[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Yeah, you could grow what you need and then swap for everything else...barter, trade, exchange...
ReplyDelete