I don’t usually get to talk about myself, or what I do with my time (the standard answer to “Do you have a job down there at UCLA?” is a super-enthusiastic “Yeah, sort of”), or the people I work with, who are quite nice for a bunch of ““ and I say this with the highest regard to all of them, of course ““ insomniacs, brainiacs, manic-depressives, alcoholics, narcissists, favoritists and nepotists (in a word, journalists); in fact, the occasions upon which I am allowed to speak about such things comes up so rarely that I hardly know where to begin, other than to say that my tenure at the Daily Bruin has been too long and too short, in that I have spent far more hours here editing the paper when I should be writing my own papers ““ you know, the ones that are graded ““ and have come nowhere near close enough to writing a body of journalistic work I’m particularly proud of; my articles number exactly three, and the editorials I wrote probably push my written material total to the near-double digits ““ hardly a number to celebrate in an office where even the least spunky of interns will tackle 10 stories in a quarter ““ but I have a reason for my low article count: I have spent so much time working with other people’s words that I have been alternatively disgusted by the written word and then later brought back to word worship by a sentence ““ just one sentence, or perhaps a clause or simply a phrase ““ that was so grammatically correct that I had to marvel in it and resign myself to simply dream of placing words in so perfect an order, rarely deigning to try it for myself for fear of garnering mixed reviews from my own worst critic: me, the guy who reads newspapers and magazines and books voraciously, but not in the way that people like to say the way they read, with all the glowing self-praise about being so dedicated that they can finish four books in a week; I am a reader who will savor a short story or long article for two hours or a novel over the course of a month, often starting way more than I can finish ““ the stack of things I am “currently reading” growing far faster than I can shrink it ““ because I am in no rush to get to the end of anything.
Endings suck.
O’Connor was the 2007-2008 Copy chief, but he wishes he had edited the crossword instead; all those errant e-mails about puzzle problems made him long to major in enigmatology and start stalking Will Shortz, but that would mean he would have to move to New York, which was a real deal-breaker because he hears it’s crowded there, and he hasn’t been too fond of the enochlophobia he’s picked up in Los Angeles.