I had to delete the Year Ago posting, never to use again, when I realized that my database password was being exposed at the main Burningbird page. I have so many little tech tricks at all my various sites that I lose track of them, and then I end up creating new technology in one place that’s incompatible in another. Thankfully I don’t publish excerpts from my postings, or my database password would have gone out to aggregators all over the world.
I guess we’ll do without a “On Hiatus” page, and just write when I’m here, not write when I’m not.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon among the rocks and boulders at Johnson Shut-Ins, trying to get a decent photo of this site that’s supposedly so photographic. However, none of my digital shots would have worked for the publication looking for this picture, and I don’t expect my film shots to fare any better. I don’t know what it is about the site but it didn’t grab me. The water was low so the falls weren’t in full swoosh, but that wasn’t it. It’s as if there were one of those Kodak “Photographic Moment” signs in front of the thing, and nothing turns me off more than a picture being ‘handed’ to me, rather than me finding one.
I also had some problems climbing around the rocks, trapping my foot between two at one point and falling into a boulder. You should have heard me cuss. Boy did I cuss. Kicked the rocks, too, when I freed my foot, as if half-ton rocks that have been around forever are going to worry about the kick of a tennis-shoe clad foot attached to a cranky, middle-aged woman.
I wasn’t hurt, but I was disappointed at being so out of shape that I couldn’t scramble about like I wanted; freer movement, which may have given me opportunities for better pictures. Damn this aging, undependable body.
This morning the Wired article I mentioned yesterday was published, and I was also disappointed to see that what I wrote didn’t make the cut into the final article. I imagine it was cut for length and my stuff ended up in the trash. This wouldn’t be so bad but this was the third time I’ve been interviewed by Wired for one reason or another and then not quoted in the finished work. Add this to two times for New York Times, once for news.com/cnet, and a couple of other odds and ends publications, and you can see why I might feel a tab bit rejected at this point. Either what I write is imminently not quotable, or I don’t have the juice, the buzz, or the rank behind the quotes to make the final cuts.
My first reaction was to feel hurt, rejected, to withdraw; to run into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and ask, “What’s wrong with this woman?” What looked back at me was a person who isn’t famous, rich, or beautiful – but definitely not a person with something globally ‘wrong’ with them, other than none of us are perfect and we all have room for improvement. The ‘rejection’ if rejection it really was, was nothing personal. It’s just the way things are. Like the rocks, and getting older.
