Everything's Work

Going to work today I stopped by to get gas. Mid-grade with Ethanol was $2.51. I great bargin considering other parts of the state are paying much closer to $3. I felt good about the getting gas, until I drove home. $2.48 a gallon. While I honestly don't care much about gas prices...because really, I have to buy gas. I'm not going to boycott gas. It's much better than living on either coast or overseas, it's just the principle. I have lost my touch. I used to have the gas price radar. I would get gas the night before the price shot up, or would decide to hold off a day before the price dropped. Now it's a constant series of wrong decisions. It never bothered me before, because I didn't use to live where I would drive by a gas station, now the sign is blaring at me no matter where I am headed. The past several times I have filled up, the price has dropped by the time I come home from work. I even tried not filling up with a cheap price once, thinking it would get even better the next day...I was wrong, it went up.

This discussion brings me to a new point...everything is work. Normal people can talk about gas prices, to me it's work. I'm in news, talking about the weather means talking about work. Whenever I go out with friends, we always talk about work...(granted almost all my friends are from work). Even when we make the "no work talk" rule, we end up talking about work. Why? Because when you work in news, everything has to do with work. It is something that does take a little while to get used to. For examle this past April I went to Easter Sunday services with the family of a girl I was seeing. They took me out for lunch with the family. It was nice and they were all facinated with what I did. I was equally fascinated with all the the jobs they did (they all got actual lunch breaks and only worked 8 hour days). We were in the middle of lunch when I got a call from work. They were having difficulty tuning in a satellite feed from our Governor's visit to Iraq/Afghanistan. I walked them through it, gave them some numbers to call for help from NBC...and told them to make sure they listened to my phone interview with the governor from the day before (I came in on my day off to do the interview). When I hung up, I apologized for having to take the call, and realized perhaps it's not normal for people to have to deal with the gov's office on a daily basis. After this call they started talking about something that was going on in the news, and I had to sneak writing a story idea onto a napkin. Work never ends.

Yet this is what I like about my job. My family lives far away and I don't really have any serious relationships (that Easter girl didn't work out...at all). So all I really have is work. It may sound depressing, but I don't mind. I'm at a good age where I am able to work those 10-12 hour days. And when I'm not at work, I'm reading the paper or listening to people in the "real world" talk about news stories. It's sometimes hard not to butt into other people's conversations when I hear them talking about a news story and they have some facts wrong, or I know something that hasn't been reported yet.

Well those are my thoughts for today. I plan to sleep this weekend. By sleep I mean, sleep a lot. My body hasn't quite adjusted to a dayside schedule, so I am almost always exhausted. Sleep here I come.

mE