Sunday 28 October 2007

My Place in This (Magazine) World

I’ve been insecure about my writing all my life. Even though it’s something I do for a living – or used to do for a living, since I’m not sure the Mad Lib type stuff I do these days qualifies – I constantly feel like an imposter.

Friday I got found out.

My annual review – done by a senior editor who is a self-described hard grader (just my luck, when everyone else in my office got the easy A’s) – marked my writing as below par. Based on two stories, one of which was less than 200 words and both of which were last-minute fires I was the only one around to put out.

I nearly burst into tears. It had been a crappy week for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, and I’d had to sit around until 8 p.m. on Friday night waiting for this editor, who’d rescheduled my review six times in four days and had stood me up earlier in the day.

I hate this job. I hate this place. The review didn’t make me want to work harder. It just made me wonder – as I have for years – what the hell I’m doing there. It made me want to attempt to coast in London for the next year until I can get my indefinite leave to remain, instead of busting ass in LA. Well, coast in London and find other places to write for on the side (or better yet, working on some personal writing projects of my own), instead of having zero time in LA.

How can I be so angry when I was just being told what is, perhaps, the truth? I won’t get into the Kremlinology of my magazine, but it has to do with how I was assigned the person who did my review and what it says about the type of assignments I’m going to be given this year. Sigh. When I saw a very old friend in NYC last month – also a journalist – he said: “Hey, Beth, have you come up with new careers for us?”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” I said. Pause. “Housewife.”

“Are you close to that?” he asked. (We have a complicated history.)

“No, but if you know any cute investment bankers who will let me stay home and only have to accept writing assignments I like, I might even cook dinner every once in a while.”

He laughed. “You’d never do that.”

“Try me,” I said.

* * *

Last night I went for dinner at friends I like to call my big brother and sister in London -- the nicest people in the world. Our (unwritten) deal is that they feed me a dinner that involves lots of vegetables and I tell them ridiculous stories about the single life.

They've been trying to have a baby for the past two and a half years -- she's tried all kinds of diets (she's a tiny little thing; these are for her blood sugar and insulin levels) and fertility treatments. It's been painful to watch, because they'd be the best parents anyone could ask for. Anyway, she's three months pregnant and I'm thrilled for them both. But when I got home I couldn't help thinking: She started trying at the age I am now.

* * *

Sometimes a laugh arrives when you so desperately need it.

I e-mailed my friend O. to tell him the other night I’d pulled a Kiwi rugby player-turned-investment-banker (no, not from any plot to make the above scenario happen). How on earth, I wondered to O., did this guy get to be 34 years old and think it was OK to kiss like someone taking a lollipop and ramming it at your gums? (Rugby Dude mentioned an ex-girlfriend of two years; is she now perhaps toothless?)

O. responded that he remembered the days of pulling – that people were celebrating the end of the Falklands War, and maybe even were still travelling by horseback. “What I wouldn’t give for a lollipop to the gums, or anywhere else,” he wrote. “Or something more straight-sounding.”

2 comments:

  1. keep your chin up! Writing is probably the hardest job to do EVER because it is purely based on people's weird opinions. By the way you wrote on here, I think you are a great writer. Tell that editor to suck it. :-)

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  2. Coasting in London sounds really good.

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