Page 8 of Cuts like a Knife
Lex: Tonight is more for the show than for Claire. I think we save it for her birthday.
Lex: Besides, I don’t have time to finish this afternoon anyway. I’m on a deadline14.
It’s technically true. They don’t need to know that I could do this stupid vapid job in my sleep and easily finish my How They Met column in the next five minutes if I had to.
Diana: Have just confirmed the etiquette with my assistant Erin. When the invitation says no gifts, it means no gifts.
Gray: It means don’t spend any money. It doesn’t mean don’t do anything.
Bex: I trust Erin.
Gray: Have you ever met Erin?
Diana: Sorry, Gray, you are lovely, but I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. I am simply not confident in your opinion on this matter.
Diana is about ten years older than Graham. It’s hard for her not to think of him as a blurry baby person. I get it. He’s about five years younger than me and sometimes even I think of him as a blurry baby person.
He’s pretty much the nicest guy in the entire world, and we all love him15.
Gray: Lol, okay fine. I am happy to do whatever you all decide, but for the record, I have been busting to finish this video because the last time we discussed this, we did agree to give it to them tonight.
Diana: There is no record. This is not a court.
Diana is a lawyer. She’s also super literal.
Diana: For the record, that is. For the record, this is not a court. ;)
That’s Di’s idea of a joke. Pretty funny actually, in a dry and subtle sort of way. Historically, I would have said she had a huge stick up her butt, pretty much 24/7, but she’s been loosening up a bit in the last six months or so. She’s dating this guy Felix really seriously, not that I think they’ll get married or anything. (Di’s not really the marrying kind.)
Di and Felix work together and used to know each other in college or something, and he’s pretty fun. I think he’s helping her chill out. Felix has a kid — Izzy. The two of them will probably be at the shower with Di and Felix tonight because Izzy is thirteen and would probably kill her dad in his sleep in a fit of teenage rage if he made her miss a chance to (maybe possibly, just in the background) appear on Claire’s show.
Di’s law job has something to do with contracts, I think. I don’t know the nuts and bolts of it all, but her boss, Eve Wolf, is nice. And it’s a real job at least16. Nothing like what I’m doing these days.
While I’ve been thinking about all of this, the text argument between my sibs has continued. Rather than reading through it, I just look at the bottom of my screen, the final text in the stream.
Gray: I give up! No video tonight. See you all there.
Okay, with that sorted, I resolve to put my phone down again. The fluorescent-lit hellscape that is this crappy office comes back into focus, and I sigh as I pop my lone earbud back into my ear and return to transcribing the most boring interview of all time, with the biggest nobodies-who-think-they’re-somebodies in town.
“She was, like, the best looking white chick I’d ever seen in my life,” says the tinny voice on the recording. (I’m listening to and transcribing my so-called interview with the ballerina and taco dude to create the column, which is published mostly as a Q&A.)
Taco guy is a real piece of work. Also he’s white, for the record, not that that’s here nor there, but some of these quotes are giving serious WTF vibes. It’s fine. I can fix it.
I type into my QuarkXPress file. (Obsolete programming tech, but it’s what we have. And people think “the media” is so cutting edge.)
Troy: She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
I should probably clarify something about the sort of “journalism” I do and why I tend to use air quotes around the word. The subjects of the column entitled How They Met care exclusively about only two things: the first is how they look in the photograph that accompanies the piece, and the second is that they don’t sound stupid. And if I use their quotes exactly as spoken, they inevitably sound stupid17.
If I let them sound stupid in print, then they complain and it’s a whole big thing. And because this isn’t real journalism — I’m not sure real journalism even exists anymore, if it ever did — there’s no backup. Not from the bosses, not from HR (if an HR department even exists at the publication you’re at — we have one person at Citidaze and they’re actually in ad sales), nobody. Nobody is going to have my back if I mess up and piss someone off.
I learned that the hard way.
Lars, our publisher and the owner of Citidaze only cares about advertisers. You can’t say anything even remotely negative about a brand that might potentially become one of our advertisers. Or about any brand. Or any business. In any context.
You know how people in marketing sometimes say “content is king”? It’s not true.
Advertising is king. Content is filler.
