piecrust promises: Worst blogger ever...

Yeah...that would be me.

Lemme tell ya'll...this new job is kicking my ass. KICKING MY ASS!

I don't think I have ever sucked at anything so bad in my entire life...and that includes the time my mom made me do gymnastics...even though I was the fattest eight year old in a leotard ever...so fat that my mom had to make said leotard. You would think that it would be easier for someone so round to tumble...but it just wasn't so.

So anyways...this new job. And don't tell anybody...but...well...I kind of hate it...and I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about work...something I was avoiding.

I’m a fake graphic designer. Well I was a fake graphic designer...but more on that later. So what exactly makes a graphic designer fake? Well I don’t get to do awesome ad campaigns or create excellent packaging for new products.

Oh no...I get to decide between Times New Roman or Arial for the title of reports. I suffer over the perfect shade of navy and which version of beige, sand, or tan I should use as the accent color. I mull over aerial maps and determine if all the major roadways should be 2 or 3 points wide. I shift around mathematically determined blobs that represent wetlands, future development, current development, property boundaries, county boundaries, city boundaries, and a million other statistics that are simplified and shown in a range of neon colors. I fashion page long legends and scale bars of all sizes. I choose from thousands of photos of people walking, people in cities, people bicycling, people at work, people at play, people living. Happy people...or unhappy people....it depends on the project. And that’s what graphic design really is...a million insignificant decisions....decisions that don’t matter much on their own...but decisions that make a giant impact when grouped together...at least if you do it right.

So when people ask what I do...I just say that I’m a graphic designer...which I suppose is mostly true. But it’s not the type of designer that I had envisioned being back in art school. But it pays the bills and gives me a place to go all day...so who can really complain?

But like I was saying...I was a graphic designer. Now because of some company shifts and a troubled economy...I’ve got shifted around and my job got split in half...and now I have double the work, triple the responsibilities, quadruple the headaches. The powers that be gave me a “choice” as to whether or not to take on an entirely new position on top of my old one...but after having witnessed a few too many layoffs...there really was no “choice” in the matter.

So now I am sort of an administrative assistant on crack. I’m now the property of one person instead of a whole group of people. He travels constantly and does workshops and lectures and makes decisions all over the country...and all over the world every now and then. So I’ll be his graphic designer, his admin, his travel agent, his marketing department, his report maker, his contract negotiator, his everything...his...his...well...his bitch.

That's what this comes down to...I'm someone's bitch. No one thought it was humorous when I asked to get that put on my business card.

So all of these new responsibilities are seriously cutting into my blogging time. I mean, seriously. Doesn't work know that I've got three readers who really need new material?! Geesh.

So stay with me here while I figure out how to deal. It's not like when I was 23 and could just quit whatever job I had and just say fuck it. Now things are different...now I've got two mortgages and a baby that really likes to eat.

Life's hard...wear a helmet.