Words' Myth

Still going. Spent today “cleaning up” other people’s stuff again. Really it has been over the past few days, though I have been trying to sneak in working on my own things here and there. Damn, am I having a blast…not. This making something out of nothing and fixing shit is a curse, never a blessing, and it is especially entertaining when I haven’t the slightest idea what I am writing about. Pfft. My ‘method’ is to do as much research on whatever it is in the shortest period of time possible (pull a couple things and read them as quickly as possible, all the while brainstorming to come up with something familiar this reminds me of), find something citeable somewhere, and find a way to bring it back to what I know, almost regardless of the topic--whether I have to stand atop the metaphorical suitcase and jump up and down to make it fit or not. A lot of the skill lies in liberal use of phrases like, “as is clearly shown by the example of (insert example that brings it back to AncodiaLand)…”; “most agree that X is Y; this well-established relationship makes the claim that J is K all the more obvious”, and so on. I feel as if any time I write ‘clearly’, ‘obviously’, ‘needless to say’, and so forth, that is when I am laying it on the thickest so that I can get off the crap I don’t know a damn thing about and go back to talking about the crap I *do* know about. I don’t have a narrow range of interests, but I *do* have only a few areas of actual expertise. So, as always, after I tie this and that together for everyone else, mine will sound canned, stale, and recycled…as it always does, year after freaking year.

One person emailed their “draft” (this is apparently a PC way of saying, ‘random shit I have written that means nothing which I am sending to you in the hopes that you will be so overwhelmed with corrections that you will give up and just write it all for me’) to ask me to give it a once-over and tell them what it needs. Considering that twice a year every year for the past three years this same person has done the exact same thing to me—always under the guise of being caught with their pants down and only needing help because of this unusual situation—and every time I have “fixed” it (read: written almost completely *for* them) with the warning that this is not going to happen again, this year I just hit ‘reply’ and said, “I don’t know; more cowbell?”

I know. I am a bitch.

I really had better get back to work, though; now that I have (almost) everyone else taken care of, I still have my own work to care after, in a grocer’s children way. As usual. Sigh. I am sleepy.