I woke up yesterday at 5 am to finish up an essay that had been haunting me for about a month. The overdue library book piled in my room spoke of my lack of motivation and aversion to sitting down and banging out the last 1,200 words required to bring the essay home. However with the final yesterday, I could not put off the essay any longer.
After hitting the five minute snooze option on my BlackBerry 6 times it was 5:30 and I was ready to hit the keyboard. I finished the essay up at about 10 am, and after a bit of work with my iDisk trying to easily transfer the Word file to my iMac for printing, I finally loaded it onto my iPod shuffle and walked it across the house for printing.
Then I set about studying for the exam which was at 1 pm.
The exam was where I redeemed myself for being a terrible student. I have always done well on history exams that are heavily focused on essays. I might not be able to find Tokyo on a blank map of Japan but ask me to write an essay on how the Japanese military gained such influence within the Japanese government during the the 1930s or about the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and I'll be smiling. I felt good, one more class down and two to go to finish the degree from Hell.
Then, on my way out, I picked picked up a copy of the Phoenix on my way out and the post-exam glow faded right quick. I had thought something was up with this issue of the paper since talking to Melissa the other day. She mentioned an article about me and not knowing that there would be an article about me I just assumed she meant one of the articles by me. But no, there was an article about me.
The article can be summed up as the theme, "Jeff has been here a long time. He's a loser." They quoted, or fake quoted, people like the student union president calling me a sad sack and pathetic. They also, and I think overall this annoys me as much as the content of the article or even more, ran a very unflattering picture of me beside the article. Previous to this I had made it clear that I did not want my picture in the paper. This had come up when there was going to be a feature asking for people to apply for editorial positions by having pictures of us current editors and descriptions of what our jobs were. I had said that I did not want my picture in the paper and when it was clear that they didn't really give a shit what I wanted I essentially said I would quit if they did since I was mainly hanging around to help the paper out. They ran a picture anyway, but it was cropped so only my eyes were showing so rather than be a prick and make a fuss about it I ignored it.
So ignoring the fact that I didn't want my picture in the paper, since I'm feeling really shitty about my appearance due to the post-Atkins weight gain that's occured since September, and then taking a chance to slam me they also didn't feel the need to let me know that the article was going in. Which of course they don't need to do, but since I'm an editor I thought maybe consulting with me would have at least been polite.
So I managed to go from being pretty pleased with myself to being pretty pissed off at the Phoenix. There was some post-publishing year training to be done, helping the new people learn the ropes, but I'll need to cool down a bit before I even consider helping them again.
All of which I'm sure makes me sound like I take myself too seriously, which I probably do. To be fair to them I've said worse stuff about myself in the paper, but most of that is premptive. If you make fun of yourself for something you worry people will make fun of you about it stops them from doing it. It sometimes hurts less to mock yourself then have someone else do it. So when they took that as a cue to attack me, well it's a good kick in the balls to end the year.
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