Your Unemployed Daughter

Glorious midtown, 6:15 pm

This marks my second day in the NYC office of TK publishers, where I have a 3-week freelance copy editing assignment.

Yesterday not much was ready for me, and the blessed saint who hired me allowed me to go home early after a quick perusal of the word list and style guide. I thankfully agreed and departed by 3 to hit the gym and then nurse my wounds from Sunday night.

Today, there was work to be done, and, as expected, YUD was diligent. She copy-edited several chapters of a book for TK Co. The manuscript includes such obvious tips as: “What we eat should enhance health, not undermine it,” “avoid excessive Dorito and PBR consumption,” and “get off your ass every once in a while, popcorn ball!”

There’s also some more complicated thinking.

Did you know, for example, that if you are an obese woman on the pill you have a 7 percent chance of getting knocked up, while skinny biotches have just a 1 percent chance? Apparently this is metabolism-related, or may be because the hormonal dosages are not adjusted to larger ladies. They’re not quite sure. You also have a greater chance of losing the baby once the bun’s ovenified. How unfair!

I also found this bit highly intriguing, and totally weird:

“Are you saying that an old rat, originally born to a choline-fed mother, would be smarter than a young rat whose mother had been deprived of choline?”

Now, I don’t know exactly what that means, but it seems rather Benjamin Button meets Ratatouille on the way to Nimh. And I liked it.

I also enjoyed my tuna salad sandwich from Devon & Blakely.

What did I not like? Well … the lights just went out on me. And i saw a mousetrap in the kitchen. And the water cooler does not work.

In fact, there’s a recession vibe in this place that didn’t exist a couple years ago when, as I’ve mentioned, the chips were free and plentiful. Back then, there were yoga classes too. Now I daren’t ask.

There is an entry-way painting of a Colonel Sanders lookalike who must have been a formative player in the early days of magazines, and some mean handwritten signs warning folks not to take books ’cause they ain’t for the taking, and lots of prison artwork, and dirty dishes in the sink, and an array of nursing home furniture and empty offices.

I sit in a big room with my fellow freelancers, and they seem a bit downtrodden, concerned about things like broccoli sprouts vs. adult broccoli, why “Tina” and “Lars” have such ‘tude, and who stole whose umbrella.

I haven’t missed that in the last 7 weeks.

But like the employed who can’t complain because they have jobs, I can’t really complain either. At least I have a view of the MetLife Building, and I can take the bus to work, and it’s not raining…

Oh yeah, it is raining.