Pagination is such a great word. It doesn't quite roll off of your tongue, but it has a sort of fantastic consonant-vowel ratio that I just can't seem to get over.
pAHgination. PAGEination. pgntin. paguhnatin.
It's been a long day, you see, and since it's almost completely over with, I find myself thinking again about how much I have to do, how much I have done, and how much I just want to win a couple of millions of dollars and just write and never work again.
Isn't it lovely to have dreams?
I did a very good job of keeping track of everything I did at work today--I hope my professor enjoys the huge pile of before-and-afters that I printed out. It was actually the first day that I really paid attention to doing that; I don't know why I didn't really do it during my preceeding weeks at the Tribune. It does take a little bit of extra work, but not too much. I did not, however, take home all the printouts that I simply copyedited. We lose track of those rather quickly, and I'd rather not force people to stop working for ten minutes just to find those six or seven pages I looked at. It seems even more useless since usually the only things wrong with the pages at that point is misplaced commas and some random misspellings.
Today I put together the Obits page, and a pseudo-business page dedicated to April 15. I had to do a LOT of story trimming for that second one, which is good, because I love actually slicing apart things and putting the puzzle together. It must be like the feeling a surgeon gets when he or she is performing a major surgery. I just don't get any blood anywhere.
Of course, when I was literally seven lines of cutting text away from finishing the jigsaw, I did something very silly. In seeing if everything would fit if I just moved the letters closer together, I highlighted the entire story, clicked in the em space box, hit some keys, pressed enter, and gasped in horror when I looked back up at my empty columns. Oops. Of course, I began to laugh. Seven lines away, and the last time I had saved, I had been about 20 lines away. The things I do to myself to make my life easier.
Luckily, I am not alone! Ryan laughed at me (ahem, with me) and talked me through going back to the original copy and finding the last time I saved the page...oy. I was able to get back to where I was, and it was beautiful. Then I waited, silently striving to disguise my concern over being congratulated or not, to get his corrections back. OK, so in reality I sort of forgot that I had given him the page because I was working on editing other things. BUT he liked the headlines that I came up with, even if one of them was a little off. That in itself makes me happy--for some reason, I am terrible at coming up with titles and headlines. It's like I read into the story so much differently than some people do, and then I also want to do something creative; and it just never goes perfectly.
So that was the day. I'm glad that the longest day of my week is over with, but I also feel a lot of tension about all the research I have to do before the end of next week. It doesn't help that the majority of people I graduated from highschool with are getting their university diplomas in a month. Of course, I do enjoy knowing that most of them are freaking out and having panic attacks and as of yet have neither job nor plan, and that makes me happy in a very sadistic sort of way.
I should be careful, though: that'll be me in November.
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