At Least They're Committed

Let’s do this.

Too tired.

You need to . . . you’re more fatigued than tired and this is part of the reason you’re fatigued.

I can’t, and besides I walked all day, including up and down stairs several times. My hip did great, but now I’m exhausted.

You have to do this. You can’t keep a log of every failure front and center in your brain and not acknowledge all the things you’ve accomplished.

I know, I know. You’re right but I’m too tired to think. Seriously. I will, I promise.

What about the young developmentally disabled man who was wrongfully charged with rape? You dug into the story until they let him go home.

Yeah, what about time I wrote about the Santa Fe trail only it wasn’t the Santa Fe trail?

OK, what about beating out the major dailies in New Mexico to take the state’s top features writing award?

Sure, and then there was the time I mentioned in a story that a woman who stood up and spoke against rezoning brought a Rush Limbaugh book to the school board meeting and she called me a blond bitch.

That was funny.

OK, yeah, that was. She kept talking about how the girls could get chlamydia all because of the rezoning. Weird.

See?

I got picketed.

Badge of honor.

Oh, yeah? How about the missing ‘t’ in the stroke mag? Sroke isn’t even a word!

What about you frantically cornering the editors because they had reversed Harris and Klebold in a series of photos and it had gotten past everyone else on the desk?

The boys whose brother shot them execution style. The headline said ‘bothers’ instead of ‘brothers.’

YOU DIDN’T WRITE THAT HEAD! You didn’t even see it before it went to press.

Story sucked.

Haunting.

Yes, still. . . . I missed an appreciate that was supposed to be appreciation last week.

You refused the let them publish the “Harleyquin” romance motorcycle column . . . and for that matter, the “let’s put two female sports figures into a room full of Jello and, you know, see what happens.”

Heh. OK, those were obvious.

Went right past the men.

Grand Assembly instead of General Assembly! Missing a ‘the’ in the lede of an article on prepping for the Special Olympics, restructuring Ruth’s lede so it didn’t make sense, Mancos instead of Mead . . .

The school board prez telling your boss he might worry about what came out in the papers the next day, but always knew it would be accurate. You being credited with helping to pass a bond for the schools and the very people who hated you. More recently, what about the letters from people grateful for what you’d written?

That made me happy.

Woman golfer ‘goes straight?’ That almost got out there, you just noticed it as you were walking by. The excitement from your Rocky Mountain Rescue Team story subjects, the supervisors who are your best friends because they believe in you.

Encoraged? To 300,000 people?

You gained the trust of the cops in the Heaver slashing case and the Blanton cannibalism case. You tried to help each other out.

Yeah, and got raked over the coals for the “Woman charged with having friend for dinner” headline.

What? I still think that’s funny. All right, then, what about being the only reporter that the conspiracy theorist and the woman who cut out her breast implants with a Bic razor would trust. That trust . . . it means something.

Still have a soft spot in my heart for them. They’re both dead now . . . OK. Conceding. It’s good to have my successes listed and they do outnumber the failures.

And we’ve only just begun. So, give yourself a break.

Trying.