Va-cay

Today at work we all found ourselves with five unpaid personal days that have to be taken by April 30.

Holla atcha three-day weekends!

I guess it's a good thing if it means not laying people off. On the other hand, it's sort of a pain, since it's unpaid, but I guess it would completely defeat the point if they just gave us another five days off. Less productivity, being paid the same, the company doesn't gain anything.

The first thing I thought when I heard this was, Dude, I can sleep in and ride Topper in the daylight on a week day. Sweet! Then I thought that I should take off my birthday, which is on a Wednesday this year. (My birthday was so much better when I was in school, when it was always during spring break.) Not only is it on a Wednesday, which is usually spent frantically trying to track down the fuckers who won't call me back, but it's for a health care focused issue, so I can't take off the whole day because it's an issue where I'm kind of necessary.

So I took off that afternoon, and hopefully this will motivate me to get my shit in line and work ahead. I already have one of the stories for that week, and I can do it at any point, and hopefully I can nail another two like that.

This week was a shitstorm when it came to people calling me back. I wrote two stories where I only got one real source and had to pull from studies and press releases to round them out. It was stupid. One of them was this story I was really enthusiastic about, one that I believed in, and one I actually worked on for two weeks. Unfortunately, one company had a national meeting one week and then everyone was catching up on work the next, so they didn't get back to me. Another company (thankfully) got back to me with nice, complete answers. The third company has a media guy who won't even return my phone calls or e-mails. I must have left him at least a half dozen voice mails, and in one I even asked him to please let me know if the company just didn't want to participate and I wouldn't leave him any more messages, but NOTHING. The guy sucks at life, and I can't tell him.

Sometimes I hate trying to be objective.

One thing that did make me feel better today, while I was stressed out and had high blood pressure, was listening to the White Stripes that I had on my iPod while driving to yet another interview in Arlington. My favorite song is "Ball and Biscuit," which is this brilliant (long) blues song with kind of nutty lyrics and this loud screeching guitar. Love the screech. It's from their 2003 album Elephant, and there's something intensely gratifying to me about loud guitars. Dan doesn't really get it, I don't think. He probably thinks it's just noise, and more than once I've picked him up and he immediately turns down my car radio.

Tomorrow at story meeting I'm giving a sort of presentation about blogs and what they could do for our paper. I got this task because I'm persistently asking to have a science and health care blog, and it's something I mentioned in my job interview almost two years ago. (Almost two years. I've now been at the paper as long as I was in grad school. Craziness.) I think it's the best thing for us, and I think all the reporters are enthusiastic. Cross your fingers I can convince the editors and administration, too.

Tomorrow is also Friday, and I plan on getting pretty intoxicated. It's been that kind of week.