edit Q To err in writing a blathe is human. To edit before posting a blathe is divine. So, bc, you cannot ever be not worthy. 020324 ... silentbob senior year of highschool i would sit in the school's little editing room, cutting together clips of movies and putting them to music. i am so proud of that pathetic bullshit. I want to do it all again. All summer. i'd make videos for everyone. 020324 ... pilgrim Nothing worse than to see one of your favorite movies chopped to pieces to save the innocent from language that flows freely on the streets today. Television.....Bah! 020325 ... blown cherry ThanQ :) 020325 ... tender_square she sipped her coffee while they waited for their food to be brought to their table. “there’s one person i don’t think was very happy to see me return to the department today. remember that guy, brian, i told you about who manages the academic affairs office? i gave him a wave and he avoided me, as per usual. i bet he’s thinking ‘we can’t seem to get rid of this girl.’” it was her third time returning to that temporary post on campus. “what happened there again?” “when i first got introduced at the huge department meeting years ago, my boss said that i was a poet to the faculty and staff, and afterward, brian approached me to say that he was also a poet and we began talking. i shared one of my poems with him that had been published online and invited him to share some of his work after.” the waitress slid their plates in front of them. her husband dove into his turkey sandwich as he listened, while she sprinkled salt and pepper over her eggs and hash browns. “he sent me a ton of stuff. some of it was published, some of it was newly written. and the published stuff was really good, and i told him so. but one of the newly written pieces had this bit about a woman stranded at the side of the road in a desert, sweat running between her breasts while she sucked on a stone and danced on the shoulder waiting for a car to pick her up. and i told him that i thought it was a little male-gazey.” he interjected before he took another bite of his sandwich. “i don’t see how that’s fair; you asked him to share work with you and then you said that to him.” “yeah, but what he sent to me wasn’t appropriate for the situation that we’re in. he’s a much older man who is the head of a department and i’m a young temp. and while he’s not my boss, it was far too suggestive. if we had been in a workshop scenario, it would’ve been completely different, i would not have said that.” he raised his eyebrows. “and i’m pretty sure he had a crush on me.” “what makes you say that?” “because he blushed every time he talked to me.” “he could’ve just been shy.” leave it to her husband to project his own introversion onto the situation, to further illustrate how she didn’t understand him. she stopped talking, began stuffing her mouth with food to keep from saying something angry. she didn’t imagine what had happened four years ago. she was a friendly presence in the department, conversing with whomever came in as they stopped by the chair’s office for coffee. she said hi to brian for a full month; he never acknowledged her. she even said his name in her greetings, because she knew that he was an important person on the administrative side of things. he continued to ignore her. when he found out she was a poet, he came by her desk, face ruddy as he met her eyes and mentioned that he was part of a spoken-word community that met monthly outside by the light of fire. a community where, if you wanted to read, you had to have the poem you presented (either by you or a writer you admired) memorized in full—no taking pages up with you to consult. he said a documentary had recently been filmed about the group, that it was premiering at a local film festival. and while she was grateful for the conversation, to connect with a coworker who shared the same appreciation for language that she did, she couldn’t help but be left with the taste that he was using this tidbit about her as an opportunity to try and impress her. in all subsequent visits to her office, he’d beeline right for her, blushing as they talked. having gone from being ignored to suddenly seen was unnerving her. and she wondered if brian was recently divorced, it was just the sense she got from his jittery energy with her and his curmudgeonly demeanor with most everyone else. at his request, she shared the first poem she had published because it was about the city she was from, which felt safest in terms of content. other poems she had written gave too much of herself away in the process—poems about drinking, poems about sex, poems about disintegrating. it wasn’t appropriate for the work relationship they shared, and besides, she didn’t want him to know more of her in the process. in response to her work, he asked a question about the aftermath of the garbage strike the poem’s action centered around, which later allowed her to deepen the version that had been published. he asked if he could share his own work in return and she felt obligated to return the favor. brian had emailed her late at night, well beyond the confines of work hours, and wrote her a detailed message. he sent stories that were so fresh he said, “i have no idea where this is going.” she sat with his words for nearly a week before she felt prepared to write him back, trying to figure out the delicate dance they were in. she apologized to him for taking so long, mentioning that she had been editing an article her husband had written for a jungian journal. she thought it important to mention that she was married, to establish a boundary in a way that felt natural. she heaped a great deal of praise on brian’s published pieces, offering specific feedback about what moved her as a reader. but she was more constructive with the newer pieces. she didn’t understand why he would share something so nascent with her, when the work was not nearly to the level of what he’d written before, and the only thing she could surmise was that perhaps he was trying to be suggestive with her. what woman would be so hot and thirsty that she sucks a stone and dances on the side of the road to entice a man to stop for her? it was ludicrous. and why did he spend so much time describing the quality of the sweat that ran between her breasts? what exactly was the point he was hoping to land on? she asked questions about these pieces, in an effort to aid with the development of his story, saying she was putting on her editorial hat. she was aiming for the balance of being objective while also reasserting a boundary. she didn’t think that it was right for her to ignore the subject matter and act like it hadn’t happened between them. she had read a story on salon about a female editor who worked with a male client and had been writing sexually suggestive stories about her, and she didn’t know how to extricate herself from the working relationship when she was married, when she did not return his feelings, and needed the money that he was paying her for her services. at best, brian was being oblivious of the power dynamics between them: he, a long-standing employee with high seniority in the department; she, a new temporary hire with no permanent standing. at worst, he was working through some conscious or unconscious attraction to her and was exploring where it could go. she wondered if she had brought the problem on herself. and so she tried to solve it on her own, in case it escalated, in case she needed to get her boss involved who adored brian. after she sent the email response, brian never spoke to her again. brian continued avoiding her like he did in the beginning. relief came with being rendered invisible, but it also angered her. now she knew for a fact that she was being ignored. now she knew that he had done the same thing before they began conversing—he’d been waiting for an in with her since she’d been hired and had it once he knew she was a writer. and she found out later, in an overheard conversation during a department function, that he was married and that he had daughters that were close to her age. she wrote a poem about the experience that was never published, though the journal that considered it encouraged her to write about the situation from a non-fiction perspective. she thanked the editors for their feedback and moved on. 220220 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I read this yesterday, and a lightbulb went on: this is where I'm_the_same_age_as_his_daughter comes from! I think they work well as companion pieces as well as alone. On my end, I want to connect this to some things I told no_reason when I was in Toronto this summer about Concordia's creative writing department - but then I'd be here for another half hour. ... But about editing. Sometimes the diversity of things I've proofread surprises me; I get proud, but then I worry whether I've done them justice. It does take longer to edit papers on topics I'm unfamiliar with. I'm careful to look up phrases, humbled by the (apocryphal?) story of proofreader changing all instances of "iff" to "if" in a paper on logic...when "iff" means "if and only if"! Because it's hard to know when something's real. A couple of years ago, I discovered there was a kind of...protein? molecule?...named after Sonic the Hedgehog. And I'd been 99% sure that one of the researchers had put that in as a joke. 220221 what's it to you? who go blather from