The Aerie

Highlights Magazine

Hi, me again. It's been a long couple of weeks. Last week I was putting in pretty regular 12 hour days, which I resented a bit until I realized that I'll be taking not one but two days off this week. Now a five day weekend is all well-and-good, but I'm paid by the hour, so actually the long days are useful to restore what will otherwise be a large hole in the budget.

My big accomplishment for the day was getting on the Stephanie Miller radio show twice in half an hour. It wasn't deliberate. Well, once was.

A Shar-Pei

Brit Hume

I was driving in to work in the morning listening in my car when they made a joke about Fox's Brit Hume. Unless you listen to the show yourself the joke is too obscure to explain - it has to do with an oft-repeated public service announcement about a man getting his head stuck in a vase, and a running joke referring to Brit Hume as a 'human Shar-Pei.' Anyway I phoned in to explain that Brit Hume has his head stuck in his own fleshy face.

I disconnected, got out of my car, went up to my desk, and plugged into the program's live audio stream (8-11 a.m. M-F), only to hear my own e-mail from yesterday being read on the air. I'd forgotten I sent it in! I was objecting to the show's host describing that after long illness her "Little Friend" had returned on Saturday afternoon. Too much information!! Unfortunately, my own complaint featured too much information...

So that was the highlight of my day, two appearances on an obscure radio program in twenty minutes.

Okay, no, it wasn't quite - the ACTUAL highlight of my day was that I badgered the consulting firm with whom I am working into paying me two weeks sooner than they wanted to. I started working on October 1st of this year, and haven't yet seen a paycheck. When I called to ask, they told me I wasn't going to be paid until December 17th! That's eleven weeks after I started earning them money.

Well if I'd settled for that, we would have been about $5000 in the whole by the time the paycheck came in, one week before Christmas. Now, my financial situation on December 18th will be the same as it would have otherwise, but at least I the first two weeks of the month won't be spent fielding phone calls from the mortgage company.

Fortunately a stern letter yielded a promise to pay on December 3rd. A promise isn't worth much til it's fulfilled, but I'll be staying home playing Xbox on December 4th if I this promise isn't fulfilled.

Okay, no, THAT wasn't the actual highlight, either. The ACTUAL highlight was when someone described one of my posts on Salon as "beautifully written, thoroughly intelligent and deeply humane." Whoa!! I'm gonna need a fork-lift for my ego! Okay, ANOTHER fork-lift.

Unfortunately my post was a response to some knucklehead who published a three-part treatise on why Asian people are smarter than everybody. How people get jobs like these I don't know, but it's regrettable that it took something so ugly to produce a response so, so very lovely *sniff* that I want to cry *sob* ... even though I wrote it! Oh I'm just so wonderful... *sniffle*

So I can't complain, it's been a day full of highlights!

Oh who am I kidding, I can always complain...

Posted by Albatross at November 20, 2007 4:32 PM | TrackBack