Where the day takes you

As I was driving through Birmingham today, or as I like to call it, the Seattle of the South, on the 14th day of afternoon torrential downpours, I started giggling. I think I have a rare form of ADD, not one that requires medication or anything, but the kind that causes random songs to come into my head and therefore, out loud, and produce the most random thoughts possible.

I used to work at a newspaper; I worked there in total about 5 years, actually, and sometimes I miss it a lot. If you've never worked in news, either at a paper or a radio/TV station, it's not something I can explain. You work constantly, as the news never stops, you develop a camaraderie with some people and an intense annoyance and dislike for others (they know who they are). You also get silly a lot.

We used to constantly make fun of another local paper that apparently had illiterate 5-year-olds writing stories and editing copy. You could get wasted playing a drinking game if you drank every time a word was misspelled or there was a grammatical error, and the stories were almost all cheesy human interest with a handful of actual news stories.

What made me laugh this afternoon was this: We were reading over that paper's latest gem, a story about an old house that had been restored, but the lede (for non-news folks, the beginning sentence of the story) was "If this house had a face, it would be smiling from ear to ear." Seriously, that was the lede. What ensued was the following:

"If houses had faces and mouths, they'd say 'why did you paint me this color'?"
"If houses had faces, the house eats you when you enter."
"If you see faces on houses, you've got issues."
"If houses had faces, this one looks like Picasso created it."

You get the idea. There were more, but they either weren't as funny, or I just plain can't remember, but it made me laugh because even parts of that job were cruel and unusual punishment, parts of it were awesome, and I laughed and had more "work friends" than any other job I've ever had.

There was the day I proofread a story about an escaped criminal and the headline read "Convict on the lamb" with no hint of irony until I returned it to the writer with a picture of a lamb taped to the bottom of the mug shot we had. I had to have an ethical conversation with an employee who didn't want her divorce printed as part of legal information about how we didn't get to omit our embarrassing information and print everyone else's, and somebody removed her divorce listing anyway, and I made sure it was included in the next week's paper...can't imagine why she and I were never close...good times.

On a final note, through recent experience, I've discovered that "sexy talk" and the art of seduction should probably not involve two things I may or may not have done recently:

1. Compared one's self to "the kid from 'Mask,'" to refresh your memory, the '80s movie with Eric Stoltz based on the kid who had lionitis, the disease that made his head enormous and the bones in his face all mixed about...
2. Laughing so hard that you either spit....or snort....I'm told this is not sexy.


"The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
Robert Frost