Real world Mack trucks

This portfolio scares me a little bit.

Actually, there's nothing really R-rated or doomsday about it, it's just it scares me because it's obvious that woman is very very very very very good at her job, and I wish I were that good at my job.

(Note: before, I've just looked at her blog. Today I was poking through her resume and experience, and it makes me feel just a little bit better that she has her Masters — mind you, I've worked for other people with Masters and they're definitely not very good at their job.)

I read bits and pieces of her blog in different chunks of time and usually skim a bit; there's only so much I can read before I get overwhelmed.

Tonight, I found this post, and I love it, maybe partially because I can totally relate to the post-conference hangover.

When the Reflector staff returned from Louisville, Kentucky, last year, we had all these ideas that we immediately wanted to put into action. That was in October, and the managing editor talked us into waiting until the new year, instead of instituting things pell-mell. (So I didn't really get to be a part of any of it, since I decided to go and do this thing called graduate in December. Oh well.)

The line that I love, however, is when she writes "…only to get slammed with…'a Mack truck' upon returning to the real world."

I don't get to go to Kentucky anymore (actually, this year the ACP is in Orlando), but one of my favourite things to do – usually it happens when I go home, since most of my school friends are still in Calgary – is go for coffee with j-friends and deconstruct papers. It can be the papers we're working for, it can be the paper sitting on the table in front of us that we have no connection to whatsoever. It's the exchange of ideas that I love. A friend and I went out to Vermilion last week, and for three hours (or more) we sat in a coffee shop, discussing grammar and copy editing, with a couple of editions of the Vermilion papers in front of us. I can only imagine what the teenager working behind the counter thought of us.

I love it. The part I hate is the Mack truck, because it's true. You get run over by it, in the form of just day-to-day deadlines and work, you don't usually have the extra time to cultivate the exciting things that you have all the time in the world to dream about other times.

I don't realize how much I go back to the Big Cities until I quit going back. I haven't been back to Calgary or Edmonton since the beginning of September, and while that doesn't sound like a long time, it is for me, considering how this year has gone.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about lately is how much I want to go for coffee with some j-friends and just talk.

Until then, I'm just going to keep reading this blog.

Wanted: an attention span

For anyone following me on Twitter, I'd like to offer a half-apology, half-warning: please don't look at my favourites list.

Presumably, people use "favourites" for tweets they really like, and want to make sure people can access long after the tweet is no longer being retweeted and shared.

I use it as a means to come back to things I mean to read later. Since I run Tweetdeck on my computer at work, I use favourites to bookmark anything I don't have time for at the moment but want to come back to later, including videos, long profile pieces, even short articles I'll put aside for later; it depends what I'm doing. I also have Twitter on my phone so if I skim through tweets while waiting for a friend or something, I'll add favourites then too.

And they just keep piling up. Recently, I started going through them, hoping to clean some out (if I start reading the link and it isn't what I thought it was, or if it's something I can read and forget, then I unfavourite. Other stuff I will read and leave on there, because I know I want to keep it for a bit, but I'm not sure what to do with it). Other than that, the only time I've sat down to go through my favourite list was when I was stranded in a Second Cup in Leduc and waiting for the AMA guy to rescue my keys out of my locked car.

The problem is, I don't seem to have the attention span for it. I want to go check Facebook, I want to go play with my Wii, maybe go read a couple chapters of my book.

I'm looking into Read It Later right now, which lets you save things for offline reading and between devices (so I can access the same list on both my computer and phone) so we'll see how that goes.

I find that I'm a bit more successful reading .pdfs than I am reading directly online — I've realized this because in addition to Twitter-gathered links, I also read pieces nominated for magazine awards. (Also check out Western Magazine Awards, but not sure if you can see the actual piece.) Some are nominated/awarded for layout and photos, others for their writing, so if you're looking for something specific (usually I'm looking for writing, but all of it is interesting), pay attention to the category when you're clicking an interesting title. The links I gather from Twitter include Longreads, which, while I'm not crazy about all of the pieces and it takes some digging to find the good ones, I still love the site and Twitter page. I wish I'd known about the profile-pieces aggregation when I took a profile writing class in university and had to find profile pieces to discuss in class.

And after I'm done with Read It Later, I also want to find the application that this guy talks about.

It might eliminate my ridiculously long favourites list, but I make no promises.