Besties,
It’s been a while since I last wrote. I know this. I’m only too aware of the fact that my public (read: that girl who keeps calling me) is clamoring for more Ober and Out. I hear you. Or rather, I can see you looking in the window of my apartment when I’m about to go to bed. Oh, and my dog sees you, too. And she’s not into you. Fair warning.
It’s tough being a newspaper reporter kum blogger. (Our blog software also doubles as a censoring machine, so I have to use the phonetic version. Snicker.) I can’t keep all the things straight that I want to write about, so I end up writing about nothing. Or I write nothing. It’s pretty much the same thing. But honestly, writing is hard work. You know what else is hard work? Photocopying. Anyone who has ever tried to make double-sided, collated, stapled copies from a book can feel me on this one.
What a perfect segue into what I planned to write about. Ok, there’s no real planning that goes into this. It’s free-form. But not in the annoying way that Jack Kerouac was free-form.This isn’t the eighth day of a two-week bender and I’m not penning one gigantic sentence sans punctuation or capital letters on one long continuous piece of paper. Anyway, back to photocopying.
So I’m planning a silent auction, which has flip all to do with work, but I think the organizational aspect is something most of you fair readers can relate to. Before we can auction the stuff and before I can pocket all the cash, I had to come up with some paper collateral in the form of auction guides and bid sheets. How hard could it be, I thought, as I strode down to FedEx/Kinko’s earlier today? Well, by the looks of things at my workstation, you’d think I was making prepping for the final exam in my advanced origami class.
There were scraps of paper everywhere and for some reason, I needed to use tape and scissors as well. I was supposed to just be making copies- doublesided, nothing too complicated. Instead, I felt like I was scrapbooking or making some sort of school project. All I needed was a glue stick, some sequins, a box of popsicle sticks and perhaps some rubber cement with which to make some glue boogies. I asked for help and received in return a blank stare from the fellow behind the counter. His eyes said “You are an idiot of the highest order. You do not deserve to walk amongst us.” Ok, Justin, I get the point. I’ll crawl back to the hole from whence I came.
I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my photocopying (I realize it feels like that’s what I’ve been doing), but I will say that 688 copies later, I left with the 150 sheets of paper intended to copy. And I have to say, that after all that cutting and taping and cursing and spitting, I’m quite pleased with the end product. There’s something thrilling about doing for yourself. I like the DIY aesthetic. I like that nobody in the service industry actually helps you anymore. I like that I no longer have to intereact with actual humans in order to get my stuff done. But now, if I find any spelling errors, who am I going to flip out at? Who am I going to threaten to get fired? Who am I going to unleash all my pent-up rage on?
