There’s this current debacle going on at home involving us and
the hospital
and the
insurance company
. The insurance company, after happily processing all submitted bills related to maternity care, suddenly, when faced with The Whopper (i.e. hospitalization and the actual delivery and birth) said, “hold on, we think this is pre-existing. If it’s pre-existing, we don’t have to pay.” And we looked at the portion they said we’d have to pay and I had to put my head between my knees and breathe into a paper bag. There have been phone calls to the insurance company and to the hospital and conference calls and more breathing into paper bags, and looking at the Unpaid Total and wanting to weep.

And so in despair I flipped open
the local newspaper
to the classifieds and saw, lit with a celestial glow, an ad for…A WRITER. Full time. With benefits. Hello. I’m a writer. Okay, my last journalism experience happened in high school and they probably would want me to report on the Wooden Boat Festival without adding colorful alien invasions or Bigfoot sightings to make things more interesting. But it’s an actual job I’m almost sort of qualified for. With benefits. As long as hard-hitting journalism consisting of “why does the border patrol care about the Port Angeles Farmer’s Market? Obama loves organic vegetables,”doesn’t make the editor weep and say I’m not supposed to be writing opinion pieces. Or fiction.

See, as soon as I thought about it, I thought about how I would actually do this job, and really, I had to ask: would I hire me? Because these are the things I think about the local news: that sea lion on Highway 101, was it drunk at the time it decided to go for a walk and then resist arrest? The salal harvest permit number, was it arrived at after taking environmental impact factors into consideration, and by that I mean, the possibility of loss of habitat for Bigfoot resulting in more Jefferson County Bigfoot sightings?

Honestly, I’m not sure I’d hire me. But I’m really entertaining myself thinking about what I could bring to local journalism.