The Pursuit of Perfection
It's been quite a packed week for me (one week being Thursday to Thursday, according to my work schedule). At this time seven days ago I was in the middle of pulling a ridiculous all-dayer/nighter/dayer at the office, factchecking this bonus (SI's term for each issue's long feature). I would eventually leave the Time-Life Building at 9 p.m. Saturday, having finally moved the story after little more than three mochas, four movies and about thirteen episodes of Made.
All of that agony, of course, wasn't necessary, nor was it efficient. But somehow last week I found myself trapped in Job Hell, where I knew I wasn't doing my best, couldn't figure out how to start doing my best and finally stopped caring about doing my best. I take my factchecking pretty seriously. It's not a glamorous job, and sometimes I feel ashamed when people ask me what I spend most of my time doing at SI, but I think it's important work. Even if my name never appears with the story, the magazine's reputation rides on its quality, and for a piece like this cover story (which I also checked), which got a lot of attention beyond the sports world, one glaring error can really ding you. And in the course of checking, a lot of times I end up interacting quite a bit with subjects, particularly the non-famous ones. Even if the average reader flips impatiently past the whole story on the way to the Inside the NFL section, and if Time Inc. will never be in danger of getting sued over whether Stanton was five or six when his dad taught him how to swim by throwing him into the pool, Stanton's family will know, and notice, if I got something wrong. And that's what matters, because this might be the best coverage he's getting in his career, and it's important that that memory be as perfect as possible.
Which brings me to last week's bonus. I also take pride in being a factchecker who does as much of my own research as possible, not simply calling up the writer first thing and merely copying his or her tracks, which defeats the purpose of factchecking, if you think about it. Things started out promisingly-I got a head start the week before, researching the sidebar (basketball connections among Obama's associates) by calling the alma maters of his cabinet appointees on my day off, figuring out who played varsity hoops back in the day. Alex FedExed his very organized, very thorough notes, which is amazing considering some writers are pretty much like, "Nope, I don't have a checking file about this story that takes place in Moscow. Good luck!"
But as Friday ticked over into Saturday somehow I fell into the rabbit hole of not putting first things first, obsessively rehashing material I already knew (the man's memoir is one of my favorite books, for goodness' sake) and chasing relatively unimportant questions (did U.N. ambassador-nominee Susan Rice play ball as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford?) the hard way (independent research) instead of just dumping a huge list of questions on the press officer of Obama's transition team and letting him sort it all out. (I still don't believe that would have been the way to go, at least not initially. Surely the communications office at change.gov has better things to respond to regarding designated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, like why he didn't pay his taxes, than how tall he is and how often he plays pickup.)
I think mounting fatigue (I'm no spring chicken!), coupled with my stubborn OCD, led to increasingly poor prioritization and decision-making as the week wore on. I left work Sunday (Monday, technically) at 4 a.m., having done-something-with all those hours in the office. There were unresolved checks in the story, and by that point it would have been a good time to dump those in an e-mail to the press officer. But for some reason I did not, maybe it didn't occur to me in my mentally addled state, and I went back to work at 2 p.m., still drained, and my editors had been on me for several hours to close the story already, so we ended up having to write around a few details (such as the exact nature of Obama's basketball involvement at Occidental) since we just couldn't get confirmation on the right information. That was bad enough, but what I felt even worse about was that later, around 5:30 p.m., when the story had already been finaled but the issue was still open (when a story is finaled, it's sent to the printer, but we have until 7 p.m. on Monday to overtake pages to make changes. It costs some money per page, but we'll do it if factual accuracy is on the line.), I got an e-mail from a subject clarifying some material we had had to write around. Usually, I would have gone back to my editor and asked for an overtake (I did that for the Vick's dogs story, delaying my editor's Christmas vacation by a few minutes just so we could put in an exact count of how many of the formerly abused dogs had received their Canine Good Citizenship certificates from the American Kennel Club). But last Monday, I just didn't want to face my editor again and have to make him open the story back up and restore whatever it was we had written around. It's not that I would have gotten yelled at; I was just tired of dealing with the story.
And that bothered me a lot, because I've never let something like that go at work before. And the fact that my laxness came during this particular story really troubled me, because if I can't manage to care enough about two of my favorite subjects in the world (Barack Obama + basketball), what hope is there for my quality of work and personal integrity in anything else?
Anyway, I was really down about this for the next two days, so much so that I actually had to turn away from Obama-related media for an excruciating 48 hours. Not that he'll ever read the story necessarily, but he deserves the best I can do (and so does Alex, who is one of my favorite writers at SI). But I think beating myself up about my failure helped because I went back to work yesterday with a renewed determination to earn my keep around the office, and I actually had a pretty good story ideas meeting in which I spoke up and hopefully contributed something of value. Either way, I came prepared and I felt that I did the best I could do, which is really all that matters to me.
(Matt also had a really good point when I told him how I felt about the story, which is that it's hard to feel completely satisfied when working on something you really care about. This makes a lot of sense, and probably also explains why it's so difficult and takes so long for me to finish a screenplay, because my personal expectations and hopes are so high that the actual result couldn't possibly live up. Also, I am maybe probably hard on myself in general.)
Anyway, the story is still very good, expertly written by one of our best writers, a guy who not only knows basketball but is also adept at drawing larger conclusions about the big picture (see his eloquent observations about the Beijing Olympics). You should read it!
Other stuff I did this week, for my personal Diary of a Mad Asian Woman purposes:
Thursday: Had dinner with anyway413 at The Redhead, an East Village bar that is turning itself into a dang fine restaurant. We both had the fried chicken, which was perfectly crispy and served with warm cornbread and sweet-and-shallot-y spinach salad so delicious that I finished the whole thing in one sitting. And if you go during wintertime, don't miss their "Car Bomb" hot chocolate, an amazing concoction of cocoa, Guiness and Jameson, topped with a Bailey's marshmallow. It's a beverage, dessert and a meal.
Friday-Monday: My aforementioned (and long-winded) dark nights of the soul.
Monday evening: Journey Worship Arts Team leaders meeting
Tuesday: Dinner at Saigon Grill with the Journey writing team, followed by free writing workshops!
Wednesday: Optometrist checkup, then I made an exception to my rule about cutting married people out of my life by enjoying a lovely afternoon and evening with my ex-roommate Bikki: sample sale shoe shopping (didn't find anything but made fun of Prada moonboots), splittng a sweet potato puff at Fay Da, followed by reading (for her), writing (for me) and Scrabble at Think. (Bikki and I are epic Scrabblers. This time she beat me 283 to 250, but only because she managed to use a "Z" on a triple word score. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
All of that agony, of course, wasn't necessary, nor was it efficient. But somehow last week I found myself trapped in Job Hell, where I knew I wasn't doing my best, couldn't figure out how to start doing my best and finally stopped caring about doing my best. I take my factchecking pretty seriously. It's not a glamorous job, and sometimes I feel ashamed when people ask me what I spend most of my time doing at SI, but I think it's important work. Even if my name never appears with the story, the magazine's reputation rides on its quality, and for a piece like this cover story (which I also checked), which got a lot of attention beyond the sports world, one glaring error can really ding you. And in the course of checking, a lot of times I end up interacting quite a bit with subjects, particularly the non-famous ones. Even if the average reader flips impatiently past the whole story on the way to the Inside the NFL section, and if Time Inc. will never be in danger of getting sued over whether Stanton was five or six when his dad taught him how to swim by throwing him into the pool, Stanton's family will know, and notice, if I got something wrong. And that's what matters, because this might be the best coverage he's getting in his career, and it's important that that memory be as perfect as possible.
Which brings me to last week's bonus. I also take pride in being a factchecker who does as much of my own research as possible, not simply calling up the writer first thing and merely copying his or her tracks, which defeats the purpose of factchecking, if you think about it. Things started out promisingly-I got a head start the week before, researching the sidebar (basketball connections among Obama's associates) by calling the alma maters of his cabinet appointees on my day off, figuring out who played varsity hoops back in the day. Alex FedExed his very organized, very thorough notes, which is amazing considering some writers are pretty much like, "Nope, I don't have a checking file about this story that takes place in Moscow. Good luck!"
But as Friday ticked over into Saturday somehow I fell into the rabbit hole of not putting first things first, obsessively rehashing material I already knew (the man's memoir is one of my favorite books, for goodness' sake) and chasing relatively unimportant questions (did U.N. ambassador-nominee Susan Rice play ball as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford?) the hard way (independent research) instead of just dumping a huge list of questions on the press officer of Obama's transition team and letting him sort it all out. (I still don't believe that would have been the way to go, at least not initially. Surely the communications office at change.gov has better things to respond to regarding designated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, like why he didn't pay his taxes, than how tall he is and how often he plays pickup.)
I think mounting fatigue (I'm no spring chicken!), coupled with my stubborn OCD, led to increasingly poor prioritization and decision-making as the week wore on. I left work Sunday (Monday, technically) at 4 a.m., having done-something-with all those hours in the office. There were unresolved checks in the story, and by that point it would have been a good time to dump those in an e-mail to the press officer. But for some reason I did not, maybe it didn't occur to me in my mentally addled state, and I went back to work at 2 p.m., still drained, and my editors had been on me for several hours to close the story already, so we ended up having to write around a few details (such as the exact nature of Obama's basketball involvement at Occidental) since we just couldn't get confirmation on the right information. That was bad enough, but what I felt even worse about was that later, around 5:30 p.m., when the story had already been finaled but the issue was still open (when a story is finaled, it's sent to the printer, but we have until 7 p.m. on Monday to overtake pages to make changes. It costs some money per page, but we'll do it if factual accuracy is on the line.), I got an e-mail from a subject clarifying some material we had had to write around. Usually, I would have gone back to my editor and asked for an overtake (I did that for the Vick's dogs story, delaying my editor's Christmas vacation by a few minutes just so we could put in an exact count of how many of the formerly abused dogs had received their Canine Good Citizenship certificates from the American Kennel Club). But last Monday, I just didn't want to face my editor again and have to make him open the story back up and restore whatever it was we had written around. It's not that I would have gotten yelled at; I was just tired of dealing with the story.
And that bothered me a lot, because I've never let something like that go at work before. And the fact that my laxness came during this particular story really troubled me, because if I can't manage to care enough about two of my favorite subjects in the world (Barack Obama + basketball), what hope is there for my quality of work and personal integrity in anything else?
Anyway, I was really down about this for the next two days, so much so that I actually had to turn away from Obama-related media for an excruciating 48 hours. Not that he'll ever read the story necessarily, but he deserves the best I can do (and so does Alex, who is one of my favorite writers at SI). But I think beating myself up about my failure helped because I went back to work yesterday with a renewed determination to earn my keep around the office, and I actually had a pretty good story ideas meeting in which I spoke up and hopefully contributed something of value. Either way, I came prepared and I felt that I did the best I could do, which is really all that matters to me.
(Matt also had a really good point when I told him how I felt about the story, which is that it's hard to feel completely satisfied when working on something you really care about. This makes a lot of sense, and probably also explains why it's so difficult and takes so long for me to finish a screenplay, because my personal expectations and hopes are so high that the actual result couldn't possibly live up. Also, I am maybe probably hard on myself in general.)
Anyway, the story is still very good, expertly written by one of our best writers, a guy who not only knows basketball but is also adept at drawing larger conclusions about the big picture (see his eloquent observations about the Beijing Olympics). You should read it!
Other stuff I did this week, for my personal Diary of a Mad Asian Woman purposes:
Thursday: Had dinner with anyway413 at The Redhead, an East Village bar that is turning itself into a dang fine restaurant. We both had the fried chicken, which was perfectly crispy and served with warm cornbread and sweet-and-shallot-y spinach salad so delicious that I finished the whole thing in one sitting. And if you go during wintertime, don't miss their "Car Bomb" hot chocolate, an amazing concoction of cocoa, Guiness and Jameson, topped with a Bailey's marshmallow. It's a beverage, dessert and a meal.
Friday-Monday: My aforementioned (and long-winded) dark nights of the soul.
Monday evening: Journey Worship Arts Team leaders meeting
Tuesday: Dinner at Saigon Grill with the Journey writing team, followed by free writing workshops!
Wednesday: Optometrist checkup, then I made an exception to my rule about cutting married people out of my life by enjoying a lovely afternoon and evening with my ex-roommate Bikki: sample sale shoe shopping (didn't find anything but made fun of Prada moonboots), splittng a sweet potato puff at Fay Da, followed by reading (for her), writing (for me) and Scrabble at Think. (Bikki and I are epic Scrabblers. This time she beat me 283 to 250, but only because she managed to use a "Z" on a triple word score. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)