Yahoo.com/s/afp/20050513/od_afp/afpentertainmentchina_050513172212">"Let's look at how it's doing ... it is okay!"
"Presenting News You May Have Missed," c. Ryan Rhodes, May 12, 2005
It is the job of today's mainstream media to bring you, the media
consuming public, the important news stories about current events that
could drastically affect your lives.
For example, over the past few weeks, we've learned all about a
runaway bride who faked her own disappearance due to cold feet about
her upcoming wedding. This was drastically important news that had
people glued to their televisions, and required the national terror
alert level to be elevated to red.
Also in the news recently was the nail-biting story of the woman who
put a severed human finger into her Wendy's chili and then tried to
turn around and sue Wendy's for allowing a human finger to make its
way into her chili. This story kept me up nights, let me tell you. And
still, after all the news coverage of this groundbreaking story, we
still don't know where the heck the woman got that finger in the first
place, so I'm still having a tough time sleeping at night.
Alas, in the midst of such important and compelling news, other
smaller, toddler-sized news stories get lost in the shuffle. That's
where I come in. As your marginally-humorous weekly columnist, I
believe it's my duty to bring to you, my valued only reader, the news
items that just fell short of national attention. That, and I'm having
a bout of writer's block, so I'll just shamelessly quote from news
articles.
According to a May 9, wftv.com story originating out of Orange County,
Fla., where the motto is "Whoops!:"
An undercover Orange County deputy says he went to Florida Hospital
for a shot of pain medication, but instead the syringe was filled with
glitter, the kind used in makeup.
We've all had that kind of day, haven't we? You're tired, the boss
yelled at you a couple of times, and it's close to 5 p.m. on a Friday,
so you're ready to get out of the office. So, you take a couple of
shortcuts. It's understandable and. . . okay, it's not. It was
glitter. How do you confuse Demerol with glitter?
"There was a lot of pain. I complained several times that something
was wrong in my buttock, hip, in the area I got the shot," said the
deputy.
Three months later, he had a four-inch by four-inch mass near the
injection site. It took another surgery to remove it. An analysis
determined there was "green and red sparkling material" around the
mass. In other words, glitter.
I would just like to say here that "A Hipful of Glitter" would make a
great Country Western song. I'm not particularly musically inclined,
but I can still write the first few lyrics for those of you who may
want to take a crack at a longer version.
So I'm in my 18-wheeler, goin' down I-35
With Willie Nelson singin' to me from the dashboard tape drive
His words they come and soothe me, and make me feel less bitter
About that doctor who done injected me with a hipful of glitter
Oh, a hipful of glitter! Oh, a hipful of glitter!
Now it hurts to hit the john and sit down on the. . .
Well, I couldn't think of another word that rhymes with glitter. Writer's block, you know.
To break this writer's block, I think I need a news story with a
flatulence angle that I can sink my teeth into, er, figuratively
speaking.
According to a May 12 Associated Press report out of Clear Lake, Iowa,
"lightning hit some Alliant Energy equipment and created a stink
strong enough to wake up some residents. The rotten-egg smell was
caused early Wednesday when lightning hit an odorizer, a device that
mixes a chemical with a foul odor into the natural gas system,
officials said."
After having lived on this planet now for 30 years, I can only recall
having been woken up by an odor once, and that was when my childhood
pet dog, Ray, who was extremely ill, presumably because he ate some
roadkill, let loose his sickened bowels on my bedroom carpet. It was
one of the most foul-smelling concoctions every created by man or
beast.
So, the idea that a rotten egg smell could be bad enough to wake up
several people in a community tells me that the odorizing chemical
used by Alliant Energy is some seriously knock out stuff. And I want
some! Because, man, the pranks I could play with something like that!
Well, join me next week, when I'll hopefully have broken through this
accursed case of writer's block, because I know you, my valued only
reader, have come to expect more from me than glitter-injected hips
and potty talk. Then again, maybe that's exactly what you've come to
expect from me.
So, I dial this company today to get some information, and I'm quickly routed to their automatic answering system, when the following sentence greets me:
"Thank you for calling pfastship; for quality purposes, we randomly record all incoming calls. . ."
It's random, but thorough!
Sometime during my fourth year of college, I came to the realization that my pursuit of a teaching/English degree just wasn't my bag.
The English part was my bag, mind you; I've always just had an innate grasp of English, probably because my mother is an English teacher, so I was brought up in a household that tut-tutted me whenever I said "can I" when I should have said "may I," and the word "ain't" was frowned upon like dog poop on new carpet.
It was the teaching angle that I couldn't accept. I entered college with a nebulous idea of what I wanted to be, so I just kind of glommed onto the career my parents had chosen. Then, one day, as I sat in class and gave a smarmy response to a professor, it dawned on me: I don't want to teach entire classes filled with students who are exactly like myself.
So, in the early months of my fourth year of college, I switched gears and started to pursue a degree that best matched up with the credits I had already earned. As luck would have it, that degree was mass communications/journalism.
I always had an ability to write, a skill I learned to hate during high school, because everyone kept asking me to write papers and book reports for them. It wasn't until college, when I realized I could charge $20 or so per paper, that I started to understand that being able to write could actually earn me money.
So, journalism and I just kind of found each other by accident. I had English and writing strengths, and those happened to be core components of journalism. Go figure. Sure, it meant a fifth year of college, but whatever.
As if by fate, during the early winter months of my fifth year of college, one of my roommates started banging a news editor of the local daily newspaper, the Winona Daily News. Come November, she mentioned to me that the paper was looking for a newbie reporter to write obituaries, police reports and other menial reporting duties. It was a three day a week job, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., at $5.25 an hour.
Since then, I've been a writer. I write copy. It's what I'm good at. It's what I'm comfortable with. I research, I interview, and I write. I'm not particularly organized, and I'm terrible at managing people. I've traditionally been a loner going all the way back to high school. When I had to work in a group in college, I'd often tell the other group members that I'd do everything, because I was the only one I trusted to get things done. Not surprisingly, they were fine with that.
Now, suddenly, I find myself in this managing editor position, a position that simply doesn't play to any of my strengths and exposes all of my weaknesses. I'm supposed to manage people I've never met, and keep on them about getting me articles. I'm supposed to plan magazine content, and stay meticulously organized along the way. In other words, I'm completely out of my element here, and there's apparently nothing I can do about it.
In short, I'm stressed the fuck out.
Not that anyone really should care about any of this. I'm just sayin'.
