Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Drudgery

I began my grueling work today. I mean, the official stuff that the CEO went over with me on Monday. My job is to look at blogs and invite the people who spark my interest to take a look at our site and possibly write for us. So, I went through approximately 180 links sent to me by google alerts and found nine writers I liked enough to contact.

I'm semi-used to this kind of work already, but it doesn't get much easier with time or experience. When I was a senior in high school I was Copy Editor of the yearbook and spent fifty minutes a morning staring at a computer, looking for wrong spellings of names and typos. When I'm at college I work for our literary magazine and read through hundreds of aspiring writers to find maybe a good piece every month. I guess I'm trying to say that this work isn't any different. Staring at a computer screen, looking for something good in a swamp bloggers. The work isn't bad really, just tiring and monotonous. You find some interesting stuff when you search for "stage of life."

Mostly it's articles about graduation, things about menopause, and dog food advertisements. Then, when you actually find a blog, the phrase is there because it's a quote from the Bible. I keep thinking I might be terrible for this job because I'm so biased, but then I think, "who isn't?" I'm less inclined to contact someone who focuses an entire blog, or several blogs on Christian life. It isn't that I don't like Christians, I just don't like preachers. Another bias is really liking people who talk about the arts and I'm not wholly sure the CEO is looking for poets, but he did put me in charge of this. When I look at other people's blogs I try to look at quality first. I go for subject if they pass the first test. I've been taught to do that in most situations so I guess it's a good policy here.

So, I have my worries about objectivity, but I'm pretty confident in my decisions. I found some really interesting blogs and writers today. There was a football player who wrote about travel, family and memories. He was really eloquent and it made me happy to see someone so diverse. There was a very descriptive piece about not wanting to go on; a dark subject, but why ignore something just because you might not want to admit it's true? I also read a feminist piece (there were a lot of these that were mostly crazy and nonsensical) that surprised me with it's very logical points about the unique experiences to women. And I found a poet! I'm not entirely sure how good he is, but the poem he had posted was something I liked. I'd call it a good day.

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