verbatim

A Cell in Hell

The other night we tried to watch "The Cell" but threw up our remotes in disgust about halfway through. The premise is very interesting: Someone invents a contraption that allows one person to enter another's mind and interact there. One social worker in particular (Jennifer Lopez) is unusually skilled at connecting with these otherwise unreachable mental patients. She agrees to try to get into the mind of a catatonic serial killer in order to find his last victim, who might still be alive.

Listen, you know I can do gore and violence, but this was way beyond the pale. I really don't need to watch yet another sicko serial killer torture and kill young women. Furthermore, J. Lo does nothing for me, so there wasn't even the appeal of watching someone I like. Andy, on the other hand, finds her very easy on the eye, and even he couldn't stand to watch one more minute.

Oh yeah, and not for nothing, but Vince Vaughn as an FBI agent? I don't think so.

Roger Ebert claims this was one of the best movies of 2000. I don't disagree that it's an intriguing, clever story; I just could not take the sick, twisted horrors I was forced to endure along the way. Your mileage may vary.

Wiki Wednesday

Time to learn something!

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Click on "Random article" in the left-hand sidebar box.
3. Post it!

Tune your dial to:

WEBN (102.7 FM) is an American radio station in Cincinnati, Ohio. The station plays a rock format, and pioneered the concept of "album-oriented rock" or AOR. WEBN is now the longest running album oriented rock formatted station in the United States, first airing this format in 1967. The station is owned and operated by Clear Channel Communications. It broadcasts with an effective radiated power of 16,000 watts. Its transmitter is located in Cincinnati.

With an HD Radio capable receiver, WEBN-HD2, a digital sub channel of WEBN, plays New Alternative music. The HD1 channel is the analog channel converted into a digital format.

WEBN is known for its irreverent attitude, with such shows as "The Dawn Patrol," "Lunchmania" and "The Rubber Room." The station plays a mix of old and new rock, focusing on the more hard and metal rock than many "oldies" stations.

Rock on, dude!

Why I Love Working at Home

Jalapeno Mama asks, "Why do you love working at home?" I'll follow her lead and start with the backstory on how I got here:

May 1984: I graduate from Wesleyan—yet another English major on the loose! Look out, job market! I decide to play all summer, waitressing up in New Hampshire.

September 1984: Back to reality (which, as you will soon discover, was very much an '80s reality). One Sunday I open up the Boston Globe (yes, the print version—which is a retronym if ever I heard one) to the Jobs section. I circle one blind ad for an "Editorial Assistant." I type up one résumé (Word processor? What the heck's a word processor?). I buy one suit (with shoulder pads, of course!). I have one interview. I am hired by the now-defunct textbook publisher D. C. Heath & Co., in the College Division. I am really just an administrative assistant, but I get to touch manuscripts! I am learning how books get made! I want to make books! (Meanwhile, have you ever heard of anyone who had an easier time finding their first job out of college? Talk about lucky!)

[Month?] 1987: I am promoted to Associate Editor. I am finally making books! Heaven!

[Month?] 1988: I am promoted to full Editor. I am still making books! I love making books!

[Month?] 1990: I am promoted to Senior Editor. I continue to make books! I also supervise other Editors and Associate Editors as they make books. I even have an Editorial Assistant of my own. I love my job.

October 1995: D. C. Heath is sold to Houghton Mifflin! I am offered a comparable position there, but I decide to take my severance pay and start up my own freelance service instead. Many of my colleagues go to Houghton, but the rest scatter to the winds, so I end up with contacts everywhere.

November 1995: I put up my shingle and start working. I find that I love working for myself. I can pick and choose the projects I want. I can work in my jammies. I can even work in my maternity jammies, because....

December 1996: Stephanie is born! And that's where I'll stop the timeline.

I worked a bit after Steph was born, but I really wanted to take care of her myself—and, frankly, educational publishing doesn't pay a heck of a lot more than babysitting, so it didn't make sense to hire someone to watch her while I worked. But I didn't want to get rusty, so I took on a few projects here and there. Then Pete came along in 1999, and I worked even less. And then Julie in 2001, which pretty much was the end of that for a while. But then ... the kids starting getting older. They even started going to school, leaving me alone for hours at a time! So I cranked up the old editorial gears again, calling old contacts and making new ones.

Each year since, I've worked a little more than the last. I still am not working anywhere close to full-time, but that's by my choice. I want to volunteer at the school library and chaperone the field trips and make lunch on early-release days. I feel very lucky that I don't have to work full-time in order to make ends meet, and I know that soon enough, the kids won't need me anymore and I'll be able to work as much as I want. So for now, part-time suits me just fine.

I don't know too many other people who honestly love their work. I'm that rare bird who can't imagine doing anything else but copyedit book manuscripts. And now that I've branched out into cookbooks, it's almost like gilding the lily. I couldn't stop grinning the whole time I was editing that first one.

So, to recap: I work from home because I can. Other perks: Although you don't have to get dressed up to work at a publishing company anyhow (I never wore that interview suit again!), you don't even have to get dressed period when you're just in your own house. I can keep the house running while I'm working (throw in a load of laundry here, preheat the oven there). I can work in the evening if I have something more interesting to do during the day. But, most importantly, I'm available for my kids, while they're still young enough to need it and appreciate it.

How about you?

Tweet, Tweet!

I've been using Twitter for over a month now, and I'm really loving it. The bloom is still very much on the rose; indeed, I think I like it even more now than when I started. It's definitely filling that need for me to occasionally have bright, interesting grownups to chat with, since most of my days are spent working at home all alone and/or taking care of my kids. And, even better than real-life office chatter, you can tune out whenever you want to, either by unfollowing someone who no longer interests you or by just going off Twitter entirely while you get some work done. Some people refer to it as mini-blogging, but I think it's more like IMing, just in a much more public way.

In the last two weeks, Twitter has had a number of serious outage problems, with no service available for hours on end. While this obviously isn't as dire as, say, losing your email, and I can't really be angry about a free service that I use just for fun, it was maddening all the same. (As one Twitterer quipped after a long down-time, "The worst thing about Twitter being down is that we can't Twitter about it!") One interesting result of the long service outages is that for a while we were unable to go back and read the tweets we'd missed. I tend to be anal about everything, so every morning I have to see what I missed while I slept, or every afternoon if I've been out of the house. But for a few days I had to use it only in real-time, which is probably the way it's meant to be used best. I'm having trouble breaking the "gotta catch up" habit, though. I'm the same way with my RSS feeds and my New Yorker magazines.

So, what do I actually use Twitter for? Here's a sampling:

• I throw out one-liners that are too short to craft an entire blog post around but too clever not to share. For instance, today I mused that if I ever do something really great, wouldn't it be just my luck if Dave Davies is sitting in for Terry Gross the week of my Fresh Air interview! (Well, I thought it was funny....)
• I ask for info and advice—what we Twitterers call "the Lazy Web." For instance, last week Andy's bookkeeper emailed me some detailed notes about what I'll need to do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, but she sent them as those god-forsaken .docx files, which I couldn't open with Word 2004 for the Mac. Several Twitterers came to my rescue and pointed me to a free Microsoft download that did the trick.
• I meet people—and not just local people whom I can try to meet in real life, but also like-minded people from all over whose interesting blogs and insights and recommendations I might never have found.

If you're not using Twitter yet, give it a try. Go ahead, follow me. I mostly use Twhirl, an Adobe AIR–based app just for Twitter. (I still keep calling it "T-whirl" in my head for some reason. I guess I just can't bring myself to pronounce it "Twirl" because it isn't spelled right.) Here are some things I like about Twhirl as opposed to the Twitter web page:

• It automatically refreshes itself.
• There are buttons that make it easy to do replies, direct messages, and retweets.
• Replies and direct messages are color-coded for easy spotting, and you can also have an audible alert for when they come in.
• There's a button for shortening URLs so as not to use up any more characters than necessary  (remember, you're limited to 140 characters per tweet). However, neither Twitter nor Twhirl lets you hover your mouse over these tinyURLs so you can see where they go to before going there. That would be handy, since sometimes it's a site I've already seen or know I don't want to see. 

Now that's I've blogged about Twitter, I have to go tweet about this blog post. See you there!

A Bout of Weltschmerz

Do you ever go to bed worrying about something, and then when you wake up in the morning (assuming you were able to get to sleep at all), you're still worried—but for a groggy half-second you can't recall why? Oh. Me neither. Never mind.

For no really good reason, I woke up this morning with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I mean, I have a few smallish or mediumish things to fret about for real, but otherwise I couldn't quite put my finger on the problem. I spent the whole day in a bit of a funk, feeling more like I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic than actually getting anything done. There was the usual mix of good and bad and boring and fun that make up most of my days—nothing earth-shattering in either direction—but I just couldn't get my groove on. Here's hoping I'll wake up tomorrow just as inexplicably sunny and light-hearted.

New and Old Work

Here's a very interesting little twist in my life: I will soon be the part-time bookkeeper for Andy's company! His long-time bookkeeper is leaving, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity for me to become a part of this family business. No, I don't know anything about accounting, but I'm learning. And although I'm very much a word person, you might be surprised to learn that I am a number person as well. I'm one of those people who can't rest if my checkbook register doesn't jibe with my bank statement, who loves to solve number puzzles, and who really just gets math.

I bought myself a basic accounting book and have been fiddling around with the company's accounting software. More importantly, I've been going into Charlestown (each time by an inadvertently different route, unfortunately) once a week to work with the outgoing bookkeeper and learn the ropes as best I can before she leaves. There's a lot more going on than I'm used to for our home finances, but I think I'm catching on.

In the meantime, I'm also working on the first of those two cookbooks I'm copyediting this spring/summer. The author is very old-school and would prefer that I work in colored pencil on hard copy, so I'm in heaven. I'll eventually have to transfer all my edits to the electronic version of the manuscript, but I'm not going to think about that now.

And, last but not least, I finally gave the boot to a client that I've disliked for a long while now. The work was boring, the pay low, and my contact at the company more than a little annoying. I submitted my last invoice and am now free of them! It wasn't a huge amount of work anyhow, and I still have several other semi-regular clients to pick up the slack.

I'll Take Potpourri for $500, Alex

1. I woke up yesterday with "Build Me Up, Buttercup" stuck in my head, so I finally decided to just download it and be done with it already. You got a problem with that song?
2. Pete learned Friday night that every baseball game ends with someone throwing the game-losing pitch. Yes, he was that someone. Poor little guy.
3. Steph took a tumble off her new bike on Wednesday (we forgot to remind her that she has only hand-brakes now) and is positively covered with blue-purple-black-red bruises all over her, um, nether region. I can barely look at it without wincing and squirming.
4. Today was Grandma's unveiling; it was neither as sad as I feared nor as un-sad as I had convinced myself it might be. Then we all went out for lunch.
5. I put in a solid 4 hours this afternoon on the latest cookbook I'm copyediting. The best news ever: Author is rather old-school and would prefer that I edit on hard copy. I love Author so much.
6. When all else fails, watch this video of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Name someone who's not in it—go ahead, just try. (Scroll down to the comments for the whole list of artists involved.)
7. If none of this is as interesting as you hoped it might be, may I direct you to the responses to my recent call for questions? (Feel free to join in; I'm game.)