Sunday, March 8, 2009

The Lenten Observatory

Entering week three: am i taking my life and the work I take money for seriously? Can I regain my boss's trust in me?

I'm going to revise my tortured little weekend blog with a little context and a simple update in week three of my Lenten observation: be more mindful, take your life/self seriously.

Taking your own life seriously means the showing yourself the same respect you show someone else.

It may be an easy matter for some people to live where they like, find the work they want to do (or at least understand the compromises they've made) and at least try to turn their dreams into a reality. It hasn't been easy for me.

My boss made a comment a few weeks ago ("I don't think you took this assignment seriously.") that's started me on a 40 day meditation to determine if I really didn't take her assignment seriously and more, if the reason I'm not where I want to be (on so many levels) has to do with not taking myself seriously. So I decided to pursue that question by becoming very mindful at work, especially in the area where I'm chronically weak: proofreading.

As the mafia man said, (www.askmen.com) when you’ve betrayed someone’s trust, you must work hard to regain it. one step is to fix the process. Proofreading does depend on process. But process must be mindful. Spell check is useful but not mindful. Reading each sentence as if it were the only one is mindful. this is what i mean by serious.

After a week of new processes, I thought I'd turn in a 0-error layout. I did not. So I sorted out the absolute errors (word that should have been plural was singular), company style errors and subjective changes. The good news is, I made no errors of fact, two errors relating to consistency and two misuses of semi-colons. I'm giving up on semi-colons. They're too tricky. One template error when I didn't catch the difference between Garamond and Garamond Pro.

A scattering of tweaks made me realize editors must edit something. they just have to and they just will.

I'm personally pretty pleased with this and can atttibute it to an unusually, and very Lenten-like, reading of the layout.

But it's not enough to win back anyone's trust. And it's only week two. Tomorrow I'll offer up another layout. Will I take myself seriously enough to offer this one the same blinding read? Someday, perhaps I won't even have to ask. For now I'll say, I hope so.







5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really wish I understood this - I guess I have not followed your previous postings sufficiently carefully. Ann from UK

Sending Pages Out to Dry said...

oh i'm just feeling sorry for myself.

anna said...

Yeah, all I got was that you're finding this boring and not challenging in the sense that you feel like you can win at it. However, let me assure you that today a career in radio is worth less than the one you have :) And maybe less secure in that their budgets are based on (mostly retail) advertising. So there. Do you get the feeling we're all stuck in the same stage of "oh, my GOD - is this all I'm getting out of this lifetime???". Crap - you do the punctuation on that one...and take it seriously, would you?

anna said...

I meant you can't win at it. I could use a good, serious editor.

Sending Pages Out to Dry said...

if i make it through my lenten promise, i will be a more serious editor, which will make me better.
you're right though. i am bored and scared to death to admit it.