Proofreading Bee

Didn't get a bike ride today. Had no food or caffeine, no shower before being collected for an all-day bilingual proofreading bee. Just two and a half hours of I'm-not-yet-really-awake digging through my decades of boxes and 3-ring binders of slides and photo negs in envelopes looking for the Pacific Rim Nat Parc purple, orange, green starfish from May or June 1999. Found it and walked over with Liz to the StuporStore get an enlargement made.

Was a non-stop neurotic profridder under fluorescent lights of English and French literature: poetry and prose. I'm not qualified or even conversant in French but, as one of three (and sometimes five) proofreaders, I sure was catching more stuff even in the French texts than expected—much of it the aesthetic and/or typographer/graphic designer things: em & en dashes, double indents or tabs (on paper one can't always tell which was used), missing right indents, wrong usage of single and double quotation marks, missing texts, extra texts, wrong season on title page (this is the autumn issue, not hiver), wrongly hyphenated compound words (wellspring, prizewinner . . .), wrongly hyphenated two-word pairings, "c." instead of a © symbol on photos and all, wrong years, extra graphic lines, missing words, etc. A real crazy amount of stuff considering that this wasn't the first proofreading session.

Am I French? No, not in any real sense. Though I know that some of my family's people from Sandy Point, the up-to-a-hundred-years-ago unofficial capital of the French Shore (the South and West Coasts) of Newfoundland, were Huguenots from the Channel Islands just off the coast of France. I've seen copies or typescripts of letters co-signed by relatives that were addressed to the Governor of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (that remaining République Française bastion off the southern coast of Newfoundland). And what were the Dalton peoples in Ireland?

I'm dropped outside my place after the bee, before 7 PM. Two 'swering machine mess(ages): (1) Wiley: desperate to receive advet artwork that I thought was due next (this coming) Montag? (2) from Liz: "@ th Tap w/ Barb after another board meeting . . ."

I'm too headstupid to bike, shower, ad design, or eat right now so I spin out the front door across York Street headin' for Piper's Lane. The Black Knight and his wife are with Liz an' Barb on the middle deck. "Bitter? Joe," Sarah asks. "Yes, please." Clauedy comes by (pays up his dine'n'dash bill just before Stephan climbs the stairs—the crazy reason he'd dashed that nite—and gives the waitress a gift on top). But now there's two of them Jardines here at the same table. Must be related somehow . . . Possibly through great-grandmother Bert/Bertha on their father's side . . . Large spiders in webs strung from the roof.

Now, after 11:30 PM, Frinight, I'm burnt, or stung, by that proofreading bee . . . How can I write or type this or proofread or spell or focus on anything when my eyes won't see anything clearly? They flicker-twitch even in the larger, darker night. I am too squeezed-head sore to stay social. @ home, on autopilot, I Foreman grill a cajun-spiced salmon filet and nuke the leftover Portugese-style black bean soup (w/ sundried-tomato turkey sausages, sliced mushrooms, fresh red pepper strips, ground cilantro & jalapeño pepper) from yesterday. My first food since mag-bought lamb souvlaki plate @ Pano's for work lunch.

Daylight coming soon . . .

T-shit: Simple, "Free your mind"
Temp: 18 C
Loc: F'headtonne
Sound: Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites