I got an out-of-office reply from some guy in Copenhagen: "I'm away from the office until 25 of Marts..."

25 OF MARTS.

That is the name of my new band. We are Swedish/American indiepop living in L.A.

1. What do you see when you are looking out of the window closest to you?
A bunch of windows on the other side of Park Ave.

2. Who was the last person coming into your room?
I don't have a room, I have a cubicle; several of us have been walking in and out with color proofs. During close, like 85% of my job is walking around with large sheets of paper.

3. What is the most predominant colour around you?
Gray.

4. What is right behind you?
About five other fact-checkers.

5. What is on today's calendar sheet?
Nicole Richie.

Editor 1: "Hey, what's the atomic number of oxygen on your periodic table over there?"
Editor 2: (looks at periodic table)
Intern: "I think it's eight."
Me: "Google says eight."
Editor 2: (still looking at periodic table)
Editor 1: "Epic fail! Pwned by your own technology!"

Co-Worker: "So how does that work?"
Me: "Well, the enzyme is like, 'Oh, I need to bond with that DNA!' And then if it goes to the wrong spot, it's like (mimes running headfirst into something). 'Oh, shit! Water!' and then it goes to the right spot."
Co-Worker: "Oh my God."
Me: "What?
Co-Worker: "When we get the website up, we need to include videos of you explaining things."
Me: "Thanks a lot."

I spent approximately 300 hours in AP US History. I'm pretty sure they were the best 300 hours of my life, and they started with a lesson on propaganda. It's served me well, both as a reader and a writer, and my favorite part of it -- the part I always remember -- is "glittering generalities." Which is why I can't believe I didn't think of this myself:

I still can't quite get over how creepy the w.ill.i.am* (or however you "spell" it) video for Barack Obama is. (I've embedded it below after the jump.) Aside from utilizing a lot of empty-headed celebrities, it also does a stellar job of using the techniques of propaganda, including: the bandwagon call, the use of beautiful people, euphoria, glittering generalities, intentional vagueness, repetition, slogans, virtue words and gratuitous use of Scarlett Johansson. In other words, it's almost the perfect ad.

That's what it is. I haven't been able to put my finger on what, exactly, makes me so angry about the Obama campaign, but that's what it is. Glittering generalities. I have heard more words -- more undeniably beautiful words -- from Barack Obama than from any other candidate. And yet, until I went and read his plan, I had no idea what he wants to do. The fact that I can spend so much time listening to him and hear absolutely nothing is problematic; the fact that so many people don't find this problematic is distressing.

Of course, the writer goes on to undercut himself by getting all "Kids today! They can't spell!" a full three times about will.i.am (thereby establishing Hillary as the candidate for geezers and Obama as the candidate for change) and floating some doofus idea about Scientology (because when you have a good point, the best thing to do is totally bury it).

A headline from Reuters news: "And wait'll you see all the closet space!"

So, that guy who had to call his mom to ask how to fill out his tax paperwork? Also keeps his ringtone on during the day and is incredibly loud on the phone, even when having non-work-related conversations ("I know, dude, but he's your roommate too"). Maybe he hasn't had a job before? But I swear to God, he looks at least my age.

I'm not sure yet what bothers me so much about this piece on Amy Winehouse from the New York Times. Perhaps it's the assertion that, were he alive today, bloggers would have branded Kurt Cobain "krazy Kurt." Oh. No. Give 'em some credit, come on. They could do better than that. But I see what you did there! Oh, those krazy kids on the Internet, with their snarky nicknames and wacky spellings! Lollerskates!11!!

Or maybe it's the utter retardedness of this: "Addiction might start with experiments by performers so young they feel invulnerable; it might seem to be, at first, a way to ease the stress of a peculiar job. It might be a way to act out the old Romantic image of the artist as daredevil." Thanks for the insight.

It's at least a little bit the stupid idea that if you are concerned about a celebrity having her problems splashed across the mass media, the best thing to do is write about her problems in the mass media -- which, admittedly, is not unique to the Times, but combined with the house style of addressing subjects by a title and last name, it seems doubly condescending and hypocritical, like she's getting scolded by a particularly obnoxious headmistress: "In the era of total exposure Ms. Winehouse would serve herself and her listeners best by working behind closed doors."

It's partially the name-checking of Facebook to suggest that ours is becoming a surveillance culture -- a suggestion which is promptly not followed up at all.

But it is definitely, definitiely the fact that we a get a full five paragraphs re-stating the same fact: back then, celebrities did their dying in private; now, because of the Internet, we see it in real time. Five paragraphs! Of the same thing! That's space you could have used to talk about surveillance culture! How we are rejecting, or at least re-defining, the notion of privacy! How maybe the reason we are so obsessed with posting our lives on the Internet is because we have seen celebrities' lives posted on the Internet, and the boundaries between celebrity and civilian are blurred, and like nine million things more interesting than five paragraphs of the same goddamn sentence! Did somebody drop an ad or something? Why were you so desperate to fill this white space? What is fucking wrong with you? What is fucking wrong with me, that you have to write this way?

Remember the '90s, when everybody cared about the environment in a non-political way, and children in Keds and brightly colored sweatshirts would go to the UN and make-guilt trip speeches asking why adults were ruining the planet for us? Stop polluting journalism! Fuck! Jesus!

I started reading Gawker in 2005, about a month after I started my internship at CosmoGIRL. It was mostly out of necessity: I was commuting out of Jersey with no prior internships, the other girls in my cubicle were in the NYU journalism program, and Gawker was a crash course -- no, an entire crash degree -- in the world of New York media. I was genuinely fond of the Gawker Stalker, though -- and, maybe not coincidentally, I finally stopped reading when they rolled out the Gawker Stalker Map, which promised concise, realtime updates of stars' whereabouts, as opposed to a lengthy, end-of-the-week compendium of snapshot nonfiction.

For all the complaints about the map, nobody mentioned the real problem, which was that it missed the fucking point: the pleasure of the Gawker Stalker was the meta double voyeurism -- watching people watching themselves watching people -- the prose and the thought, not the stargazing itself. Nobody reading Gawker (media folk in Midtown offices) was going to get up and go down to SoHo to try and catch a glimpse of Claire Danes eating a taco, especially since Gawker was all about how we didn't want to do that, anyway. How we were too good for fame, how we hated the people who thought it mattered, how we were hilariously ashamed of ourselves when we found ourselves staring at Uma Thurman in Whole Foods. And it ended up not being realtime anyway, or even particularly useful (thanks for showing me where 23rd and Broadway is, Gawker, because I totally forgot) and the whole thing was just the beginning of Gawker's downhill slide into being hostile and hypocritical and tail-eating above all else.

So maybe it was my kneejerk reaction to Gawker Media that made me hate Idolator. (Although I was still reading Defamer on and off -- probably because they still stalk celebrities in periodic digest format.) Maybe it wasn't as pompous and one-note as I thought. Or maybe it was terrible and I had good reason to stop reading. (I've also started re-reading Gawker, and they are just as awful as I thought back then, despite good coverage of the MTV permalancers scuffle and that Army Times piece.) Whichever it was, at some point while I was passionately hating them, they stopped sucking and started being pretty fantastic, and someone, I think it was koganbot, shut me up and alerted me to this fact, and this morning when Jess made a post about blogging unbathed at 10:30am and watching ER reruns, I thought, "I want to work at Idolator." And when I came across this article about Nick Denton possibly wanting to sell it off, my heart gave a panicked flutter of "oh God, no!"

None of which stops me from mispronouncing their name.

Sometimes, Gawker comes through. See their gorgeous write-up of an already-gorgeous piece on an Army unit stationed in Adhamiyah. Read both.

That's journalism.

I get to cross another thing off my list of Trivial Things to Do Before I Die!

See, I got this freelance fact-checking gig, and I didn't want to wear jeans on my first day, but it was supposed to be freezing, so I didn't want to wear a dress without tights. But the only tights I have are black, so I couldn't wear my navy or red dresses, and I had already worn my white sweater dress, and it would be really dreary if I wore black tights with my black dress, and I was kind of at a loss. I tried to make something work with this shirtdress, but (a) it needs to be tailored, and (b) it really only looked good with my Michael Kors Buckle Shoes of Death, and I didn't want to wear them, because they're suede and it was supposed to snow. So, whatever, I decided to suck it up and wear my black dress without any tights at all, and just freeze for four blocks before I got to the office. And then I remembered. I OWN LEGWARMERS.

And that, my friends, is how I finally accomplished my goal of wearing legwarmers in public.

A while back, I bought a pack of Eclipse Lemon Ice gum, and it turned out to be the best gum in the entire universe.

You'd put it in your mouth, and at first it was kind of minty, and then the lemon joined in, and then it became this full-on lemon/mint experience, which was perfect because ever since the Altoid craze of '98 or whatever, "mint" has become a code word for "burns your fucking tongue off and also makes your sinuses hurt," but the lemon flavor kind of tempered the mint, and the mint made it less apparent that "lemon flavor" tastes like Pledge, and behold: a gum that freshened my breath without fucking torturing me, and was also tasty enough that I could chew it for a few hours after lunch. And so Eclipse Lemon Ice became a part of my life. This was back when I was working at Hairstyles of the Rich & Famous, or rather, "working" at Hairstyles of the Rich & Famous, and the highlights of my day were as follows: breakfast, lunch, Eclipse Lemon Ice. If I ran out of Eclipse Lemon Ice, I would go immediately to the deli down the street and buy more Eclipse Lemon Ice. If I had to do a phone interview while I was chewing Eclipse Lemon Ice, I would stick it in the cap of my water bottle until I could go back to chewing Eclipse Lemon Ice. I was like fucking Violet Beauregarde with my Eclipse Lemon Ice. I don't even like gum, but I loved Eclipse Lemon Ice.

And then they stopped selling it. It was still listed on the Wrigley's website and everything, but nobody carried it anymore. I tried various other fruit-plus-mint gums: something by Orbit, that weird Trident leaky gum, but nothing was the same. And then there was this thing called Eclipse Lemon Burst, which was just plain lemon, but you could tell they were trying to trick you into thinking it was Eclipse Lemon Ice, because they used the same yellow-plus-green color scheme.

So finally I wrote to Wrigley's all, "Hey, does Eclipse Lemon Ice still exist?" and they wrote back: "Eclipse Lemon Ice is now known as Eclipse Lemon Burst."

NO. NO. THAT IS NOT TRUE. YOU ARE FUCKING LIARS. ADDITIONALLY, YOU STILL LIST LEMON ICE AS A FLAVOR ON YOUR WEBSITE. WHAT THE HELL?

I miss Eclipse Lemon Ice.

The North Denver News published a bit of "social satire" as a news article, except it wasn't particularly clever, or incisive, and so nobody got that it was "social satire."

The graceful thing to do here would be to publish an editor's note stating that the piece was meant to be satirical, but the joke, alas, did not work as well as they had hoped.

Instead, the editors of the News spewed forth this bunch of sour grapes, in which they stomp around pointing out that it was supposed to be funny, of course, duh, and maybe you would have noticed that it was a joke if you hadn't been so busy pointing out how the joke didn't make sense, whatever, and furthermore they are a big publication, in case you haven't noticed, and maybe you were just too stupid to get the joke, because it was full of references to Paris Hilton, and American media consumption, and Fox News, or "Faux News" as they call it in the newsroom (inside joke! high five!), and by the way, they know the Latin word for thumb--do you???--even if they still haven't noticed that their headline is kind of grammatically nonsensical, and you know who would have found this joke totally funny? Franz Kafka. They are just like Franz Kafka. Except not dead. You probably don't even know who Franz Kafka is. So there.

("Beautiful Liar" is the gayest song ever written. Just make out already!)

I'm working with this woman who is like Maura Tierney if Maura Tierney were less Irish and more...partially Asian, and every day I heart her a little more. I have such a sexless, fifth-grade crush on her. I just want her to find me really charming, and invite me to sleepovers where we'll eat cookie dough and play with our Breyer horses, the end.

Which is why I've been hardcore reminded that when I'm being "likeable," I'm essentially being nine. We have these really cushy cubicles that are nearly as tall as I am, and when I have to talk to her, I go stand on the other side of her wall and prop my chin on the ledge and wait, totally teacher's pet, and then when she notices me I get up on tiptoe and talk to her over the wall, because that is like one step away from writing her a note and folding it into a triangle. I do it outside of work, too, and previously I was like, "I really need to work on that," because my identity cannot be based on "young and precocious" all my life. Like, someday someone will be younger than me. And then what? At a certain point, cute is not cute anymore, right? But, like, twenty-four seems like it should be way past that point, and yet cute is cute. So if it works for me, and people do find it charming, then do I need to work on that? Maybe it's not a problem so much as a personality.

I love how everybody lately is like, "Fuck interviews." Because it's not like they accomplished anything anyway--every single interview is like, "And now I will describe the job to you. Sound good?" In the past two weeks, my job search has looked like this:

Interviews: 0. Job Offers: 3.

The other day I responded to a posting for a freelance photo editor at Hearst, and then I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back there was a voicemail from this Hearst lady like, "Yeah, you sound cool. When can you start?" Which started off this domino effect of hiring: she needed someone to start Monday, and I was committed to fact-checking till Tuesday, and she forwarded my resume to the woman in charge of Hearst web hiring, and the woman in charge of Hearst web hiring was like "Yeah, you sound cool. Want to do some Photoshopping?" So on Friday afternoon, I left the web hiring woman a voicemail saying I would love to, and she should get in touch with me on Monday with all the details. And the details are this: 2-3 weeks (at least!) of cropping and optimizing, 8 hours a day, 20 dollars an hour. She was like, "Are you comfortable cropping with Photoshop? We'll walk you through it." I was like, "Uh...lady?" I crop for fun! Icons of Kara handcuffed to herself don't just happen!

How wrong would it be for me to just flake out on this job if it goes past Friday? (Well, Thursday. I think we're closed on Friday.) On one hand, I don't want to be That Girl Who Flaked Out, Let's Never Hire Her Again. On the other hand, I'm making crap money and I'm pretty sure I never want to work for these people again.

But then, the ad said ten days at most, and Tuesday is ten days (counting Friday since I didn't know we were off when I committed to this). And really it might not be so bad next week, because I'll have had a three-day weekend, and I'll be back home and sleeping through the night, and I will have bus time before I get to work.

I totally need dinner now.

At left: behold the mating ritual of the common UPS truck.

Anyway, I'll be doing some fact-checking for not very much money in the Village next week. Would anyone like to go to dinner and/or let me sleep over for a few days? I will seriously pay you. (For sleeping over, not dinner.) I just don't want to have to get up at six in the morning for a full week. I also got a tiny check today from the Utne Reader, which reprinted something I had published last year in a magazine which shall remain nameless even though they are totally Commie pinko tree-hugging bastards. Which means that the Utne Reader was able to read it, republish it, and send me my check and my complimentary issue before the original publisher ever paid me for my work.

This is the first time I've listened to Make Believe straight through. It gets way modern toward the end, like John Shanks tripped and fell through a rip in the space-time continuum, and ended up producing this song when he was five years old.

And then the Boss came in and was like, "PS - The Big Boss would like you to leave by three," and acted like I should be happy to get two hours to pack up, since, "most places just escort you to the door." Um, yeah, if you murdered somebody.

So, the reason I was all alone last Friday was that one of my officemates' moms died. I can't make it to the wake tonight, so I sent flowers instead, and the arrangement I chose from 1-800-FLOWERS was entitled "Basket Full of Daisies for Sympathy." Which, there's a good name for an emo band in there somewhere. Daisies for Sympathy? Perhaps even Basket Full of Sympathy? Or maybe just the full-on Basket Full of Daisies for Sympathy. Why mess with a good thing?

Anyway, the point is, if I ever die, I want Basket Full of Daisies for Sympathy to play at my funeral. (And maybe an actual Basket Full of Daisies for Sympathy as well. It would be good ammo for the inevitable flower battle.)

Oh! YES! The Flower Battle is definitely the name of the first album by Daisies for Sympathy!