Success in internship = boring blog posts. Also, a few more brownies and a theological discussion about fruit...

I feel a bit like a failure. Well, let me qualify that—I feel a bit like a failure in blogging after the success of my post last week announcing the publication of my very own feature article (which, Hilary said she could probably bump to seven pages—that's a lot of pages) compared to the minimal viewing of my post yesterday. And I have to admit, the one yesterday was not that exciting, although I did get more comments than usual (more meaning I got 3 whole comments), which made me very happy. But I can't blame you guys for not being enthused about yesterday's post because I wasn't even enthused about it—and I wrote it! To be honest, I was kind of struggling for things to write about, and as a result the post was also a bit short, not to mention lacking in some of the flair that my other posts have had. I was sitting on my bed tonight racking my brain about what to write about and how to make it interesting, and I was also trying to diagnose why my post yesterday left me feeling sort of flat. Then it hit me. I'm actually getting good at what I'm doing. How boring is that?

See, I'm starting to learn more and keep myself busy at the magazine, which minimizes by confusion and uncertainty about life in general. In addition, I'm also getting to know (and really like) everyone in the office, so instead of being excited about having one friend when Practical Horseman got a new intern, I have an office full of friends. Equus even got a new intern this week and I completely neglected to mention it yesterday. Just goes to show how I am no longer quite as starved for friendship and human interaction. I've also mastered eating, which may seem like a relatively simple task that I probably should have had a firm grasp on before I graduated from a high chair, but even the basics like eating lunch/dinner had been a struggle, and they no longer are for the most part. I've gotten good at packing food for the week and then I've also managed to score regular meals at times, like our end of the world lunch at work yesterday, and then tonight a friend made me dinner, which I will address shortly. But the moral of the story about my struggles with food is that while they can still be an adventure every now and then, I've mostly mastered that problem. I no longer eat in the corner at work while nobody is watching and hope they don't notice my awkwardness (although I did sneak a piece of leftover cake today). I know where virtually everything is in the office, and I've even learned to successfully fight with the copier without looking like a moron. Now when it randomly jams on me, I know how to open it up, yank out the paper, and then restart it. I'm not sure that that is the proper way to fix the problem (actually, I'm sure it isn't because I was mildly scolded by the copier-fixing man yesterday), but it gets the job done and I no longer stand there staring at it stupidly when it stops working. I even showed the other intern today how to properly make copies in color. Sweet success. So as far as fun and awkward stories, I'm starting to run low. I've even learned how to outsmart my GPS and I drove into the city tonight without having a single argument with it (I mostly just ignored it and used my own directions, but kept in on in case I missed a turn or got lost). The problem with this new level of proficiency is that I'm not that creative, and unless there are major mishaps in my day-to-day life, I'm completely at a loss on what to write about. I'm going to have to magically become more creative if I ever want to be good at this editing thing.

So today I put in a furious eight hours of work. I've been very swamped pulling together all of the pieces for my feature article, and yesterday, for the first time since I started the internship, I actually felt a little overwhelmed. Usually I can take my time and I often run out of things to do, but as of yesterday I hadn't started compiling any of my interviews and I still had several more to do. In addition to that, I had to do some office work making copies and sending articles requested by a reader and I had to do some revisions to my book review I wrote that required me to do some more reading in the book. To make time even tighter, I have less than three weeks before the internship is over and this Friday I'm going with the magazine to a show, so I thought I needed to get a lot done before I left the office today. So this morning I worked furiously, banged out the copies and the revisions to the book review first so that I could focus on my article. I actually kept up a pretty good pace, and it felt like as soon as I was finished going through one interview, I would receive a new interview in my email inbox. It was almost like clockwork. I took a break to sit in on a meeting where the editors along with some of our people from the publishers were thinking of ways to gain information about our readership so that we can start to understand our audience a little better. In magazines, it's all about the readers. The most important thing you can do is understand who picks up your magazine and reads it every month and getting this information will forever be the concern of every magazine staff. So that was an interesting learning experience for me to hear the concerns they had and how to solve them. One of the women at the meeting who was there from the publisher's remembered me as the girl who knocked over the desk and made a really loud noise a few weeks ago while the head of the company was having his yearly meeting with the Practical Horseman staff. So that was embarrassing. I will forever be the intern who knocked over a desk.

After the meeting, I continued at my furious pace. However, this plan backfired in a few different ways. Efficiency is great, but then I got done around 3:30ish and handed off what I had to Hilary for her to go over it. Then I suddenly realized I had nothing to do while she was looking over my stuff. This small panic increased when we discovered that the horse show tomorrow doesn't start until 1:00p.m. (we thought it started at 8:00 a.m.), which means that I will have to come into the office tomorrow morning and work a few hours before leaving for the show. So, because I was so efficient and prepared to have everything done by tonight because I was planning on being at a show all day tomorrow, I now have nothing to do. Well, I'm sure there will be more things that can be done tomorrow (at least I hope...). The problem is that I can't ask for too many new assignments because I'm not at the magazine much longer and I need to make sure I have time to finish my feature article. It's a very delicate balancing act.

Tonight I got to visit my good friend Nicole who just moved to DC with her husband a month ago. She is a great cook and graciously offered to have me over for dinner! And for anyone who has ever been to Tucanos, she made those cheese balls that you can get there. They were so delicious!! I offered to bring dessert, so I brought some of my crazy brownies that I had set aside from the batch I brought for the work part yesterday. They were a hit. I also brought a quart of Rita's water ice because there is one right by my office and I figured (correctly) that as newcomers to the east cost, Nicole and her husband Daniel probably had not been introduced to water ice. Water ice, and especially Rita's, is a staple of Philadelphia. Sometimes people have heard of Italian Ice, and it's the same thing, but water ice is the popular name for those "in the know," or at least in the Philadelphia area. It's basically like a really delicious slushy. And while we were enjoying our slushies, we brought up Harry and David pairs, which then launched a discussion about the fruit from the Tree of Life because I mentioned how I was convinced that the fruit on the tree were Harry and David pairs. Nicole was totally with me, but Daniel was less convinced. We then explored all the possible fruits it could have been using the details in the scriptures and then had a theological debate about how there is no way the fruit could have been a coconut. If you would like to hear more about this topic, you should keep your eyes out because I think we have to write a book about it now. It was pretty funny and I think that we decided the fruit was either a Harry and David pair or Heaven Fruit, which we are not sure exactly what it is because it's only in heaven.

Well, it's very late and I still need to go to the office tomorrow morning. I usually try to get there around 8:30, but since I'm low on things to do I think I might sneak in an extra half hour of sleep and roll in around 9. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some great pictures of me in action at this horse show for your viewing pleasure!

Fire, Brimstone, Lightening Bolts, Special Brownies, and, of course, a little bit of work

Each month, all the editors in my office (that means all the ones from Dressage Today, Practical Horseman, Equus, and the design staff) have an office lunch, and each month they pick a different theme. This month, they decided the theme would be the end of the world, in recognition of the end of the world on May 21. Now, it might seem a little bizarre to have an "end of the world" party scheduled for AFTER when the world was going to end, but the editors felt pretty confident that we would all still be around after May 21, so it was really no problem. Everyone in the office brought something that they would like to eat at the end of the world. I brought the most incredible brownies that have a bag and a half of Rolos, one cup of dark chocolate chips, and a chopped up Ghiardelli bar inside of them. And yes, when the world ends, I want those to be the last brownies I eat. We had everything from maraschino cherries to hot dogs and sauerkraut. Needless to say, it was a very interesting combination for lunch. But my favorite part was that Hilary (DT's Senior Editor) decided that she would decorate by hanging paper lightening bolts from the ceiling and taping them to the table and chairs. She chose lightening bolts because she didn't know what brimstone looked like (so we decided to Google fire and brimstone so that's the phrase that still appears in my google search bar at the top of my computer screen...). They were some pretty ghetto decorations, but they made me laugh. We had a great hour eating, chatting, and laughing. I got some especially good laughs when I said that the brownies had a TON of special things in them, which obviously translated to mean "special" brownies, not brownies with tons of chocolate (and if you don't know what I mean by "special" brownies, well, then you should probably repeat public high school).

I also made a lot of progress today on my feature article! I've been working furiously on finding people to interview and going through information from the interviews I've already completed. I spent half of my day just in my email. The rest of my time in the office was spent researching people on the internet, compiling and transcribing interviews, and discussing the direction and details of the article with Hilary. She is very good at what she does and I get a lot of ideas and information during our brainstorming sessions together. I hope to be as savvy as her someday with coming up with ideas for articles. I've been so eager to learn and master everything about working on the magazine in one fell swoop, but I'm starting to realize that even as hard as I try, it's a skill that can only learned with time and practice and a lot of mistakes. Again, this is where patience would be a very useful virtue, one that I struggle with above all else. I always want results NOW, and I'm willing to work ridiculously hard to get them. However, somethings just take time and I'm not going to be the perfect editor all at once, even if I do get pretty close... Just joking ;) I promise, I'm still far from it. I think this is one of the things that makes spanning the gap between college and the real world so difficult. See, I've mastered college. I finally understand how to be a student, I've gotten the 4.0, and I've mastered the system. As a result, I'm feeling pretty confident in my abilities. But the truth is, I know I've got to humble myself a bit if I am going to learn more and make the transition to the real world, because the real world is different and I just don't fully understand how it works yet. But I'm certainly trying to learn! And tomorrow, I'm going to keep on learning.