sunday best-of blogging

best tune to stare at yourself in the mirror and swear that you'll never make that mistake again to: the piano intro to "icicle" on tori amos's under the pink, ideally isolated on a home-spun recording and leading directly into the "all the girls hate her/over it" piano suite off the "god" single from the same album.

best marketing idea: tootsie drops, the miniature version of tootsie pops. they'd be about the size of your average gumball and stick-free, so you'd get all the goodness of a tootsie pop without all the damned work. i think they'd be a tremendous success, because let's face it, folks, those lollipops are huge and impossible to enjoy while you're doing anything else. i suppose we'd have to alter the candy-to-tootsie ratio a little bit, but i think we could find a balance that would make everybody happy. well, not me, maybe, because i don't eat them, but it's not about me, it's about you—you and the millions of kids who leave saliva-drenched lollipops stuck to whatever public surface is closest at hand when they tire of their monstrous sweets. stupid stinking halloween.

best exchange overheard on a city bus: "you're gonna be toasted like a toaster strudel, gonna get scrambled like some ramen noodles…"
"man, you suck. you suck worse than scary movie 3."

best soup: imagine's organic creamy butternut squash. i've had it for lunch every day this week and i don't even like squash, that's how good this is. eat it. EAT IT!!!!!!!!

best compliment: "of course [i like you]! who wouldn't, save for someone with an ignoble heart the size of a chiclet?" hello, phila! welcome to the monkey house! i'll be your hostess. if anyone throws anything larger than a beer bottle, you come straight to me.

best search term directing a disappointed reader to this very page: heh. heh heh. the even funnier thing is that he/she followed it twice, on consecutive days. am i so forgettable? *sniff* i'm going to pretend he/she was just so bound up in the thrill of the search that names of pages got lost in the shuffle. sorry, dude. better luck next time. here, as you seem so devoted to your quest, i'll offer you a consolation prize.

best excuse for neglecting my sad, lonely blog: see next item.

best career news: this week i scored my first freelance copyediting gig for which i'm able to quote a price based on the difficulty of the document in question. the company i was working for before set a flat rate, and i could either accept it or not take the job. now i have to decide what i think i'll actually deserve, which is as daunting as it is exciting. i feel obligated to ask for less than most copy editors ask for, since i'm basically self-trained and impressively inexperienced, but the fact that this company thought me qualified before they knew my asking rates should have made me feel better about requesting a living wage. what i hope is that this experience will force me to look at my work with absolute objectivity, so i won't be afraid in the future to ask for what i've earned. it's a distressingly adult situation, and to be honest, i didn't really see it coming. my roommate thinks i might feel less uneasy about it if i put on a dress suit and did my work at a desk in the living room, instead of in my pajamas in an armchair in my bedroom. she could be right, but i think what i need more than that is a meager handful of instances where i say that i've worked this hard and should be compensated thusly, and the person who's compensating me agrees. and that, by all appearances, is precisely what i have an opportunity to provide myself with. i've knowingly lowballed on the first two jobs, but maybe i'll stand up for myself soon. that i'm even thinking about it is a giant personal step forward, so i'm applauding myself, but i'm only thinking about it, so that applause is being made surreptitiously by one hand inside my pocket.

why is this so strange? it's not as if i've never gotten the work i wanted before. when i decided that i wanted to work as a veterinary nuclear medicine technologist, well, by golly, that's what i did, even though there are only two veterinary hospitals in massachusetts that routinely provide such studies and no school anywhere that trains you specifically to perform them. i was hired a month out of school with the understanding that in no time i'd be heading and expanding the department, and i was just a baby; i hadn't even taken my licensing exam yet. but i worked for what i wanted, and i accomplished exactly what i told everyone i would. i shouldn't be shocked by a similar degree of opportunity in a different field, and yet i absolutely am. maybe it's just that i'm still a little shocked to hear myself admitting that this is what i want. i feel, for the first time, 100% in control of my own future, and it's this utterly foreign future that i had never once imagined myself in until it was waving its "welcome" sign in my boggled little face. it's weird. it's very weird. but if this is the way that turning twenty-seven is going to alter my life, i'll sure as hell take it.

best song to become suddenly certain it wasn't a mistake to: "michigan girls," califone.