"Look and Feel"
I've been an absent blogger and now I'm being an irresponsible one. My parents are somewhere in the air approaching Dallas and I should be making my house parent-ready, but instead I have been shopping all day and now I am blogging. So, well, yeah, whatever.
So this last week or so I had my initiation into the world of advertising after landing a freelance copywriting gig. Yesterday marked my first official "presentation to the clients" which was stressful in preparation and exciting in execution.
During my time working on the the website, among other things, I learned how to call someone an idiot in Malay (my art director, Sok-Kien, is Malaysian), which actually translates to "stupid egg," and I learned that the phrase "look and feel" is used over and over again in the ad world. As in, "If we use stock photography, we won't have a consistent look and feel." "Basically, the whole look and feel of this concept will be intimate and warm." "What we're trying to accomplish with the look and feel..." You get the picture. Anyway, now we wait for word from the client as to which concept of the three we presented that they like best.
It's as close as I've come in a long time to a full-time job. I haven't had one of those in a crazy long time. An actual full-time job would be good for two reasons: a) steady income, and b) health insurance. The last full-ish-time job I had was my distance learning teaching gig for Keiser College. The pay could certainly be called "steady" but hardly "income." Ridiculous. Health insurance I've not had since May '02 when I landed myself in the Delray Medical Center with chest pain that was first diagnosed as a heart attack, then simply as "unexplained chest pain." My insurance paid a whopping $3,000 on my $16,000 bill, I got to fight the hospital to understand that my yearly salary as a graduate teaching assistant was less than what they wanted me to cough up, and then I lost all coverage.
Which brings me to one of my many musings of today: When is anyone going to actually do something about the health insurance crisis in our country? It's not like I'm an irresponsible person who refuses work, or purposefully remains uninsured so as to let someone else pay my way. I work; I just happen to work freelance and part-time and whatever else pays the bills at the time that allows me to write. And still I've got these cardiologists in Florida sending me $900 bills monthly (that started arriving TWO YEARS after I'd been hospitalized). The truth of the matter is this: Had I been a) uninsured or b) a single parent, my bills would have been taken care of. What kind of message does this send?
Three other short and wholly unrelated thoughts:
1) Is there any errand worse than going to the bank?
2) Isn't it weird to think there are people in the world who have this concept of Who You Are and it's actually not remotely who you are?
3) Should I be concerned that I'm drinking a glass of wine in the middle of the afternoon just so I can throw the bottle away before my parents arrive? Have I forgotten how incredibly old I am? (And, really, how can I when I spent a piece of one night this week sitting at the bar with a flawless-skinned, rosy-cheeked, early-twenty-something who manages an Abercrombie & Fitch?)
And my favorite quote of the day: "It's 900 square feet of ghetto bliss."
If only I didn't have to go unload the dishwasher and remake the bed and wash the wine glasses and put them away, I'd go back and rewrite this entire blog entry. The whole look and feel is very inconsistent.
So this last week or so I had my initiation into the world of advertising after landing a freelance copywriting gig. Yesterday marked my first official "presentation to the clients" which was stressful in preparation and exciting in execution.
During my time working on the the website, among other things, I learned how to call someone an idiot in Malay (my art director, Sok-Kien, is Malaysian), which actually translates to "stupid egg," and I learned that the phrase "look and feel" is used over and over again in the ad world. As in, "If we use stock photography, we won't have a consistent look and feel." "Basically, the whole look and feel of this concept will be intimate and warm." "What we're trying to accomplish with the look and feel..." You get the picture. Anyway, now we wait for word from the client as to which concept of the three we presented that they like best.
It's as close as I've come in a long time to a full-time job. I haven't had one of those in a crazy long time. An actual full-time job would be good for two reasons: a) steady income, and b) health insurance. The last full-ish-time job I had was my distance learning teaching gig for Keiser College. The pay could certainly be called "steady" but hardly "income." Ridiculous. Health insurance I've not had since May '02 when I landed myself in the Delray Medical Center with chest pain that was first diagnosed as a heart attack, then simply as "unexplained chest pain." My insurance paid a whopping $3,000 on my $16,000 bill, I got to fight the hospital to understand that my yearly salary as a graduate teaching assistant was less than what they wanted me to cough up, and then I lost all coverage.
Which brings me to one of my many musings of today: When is anyone going to actually do something about the health insurance crisis in our country? It's not like I'm an irresponsible person who refuses work, or purposefully remains uninsured so as to let someone else pay my way. I work; I just happen to work freelance and part-time and whatever else pays the bills at the time that allows me to write. And still I've got these cardiologists in Florida sending me $900 bills monthly (that started arriving TWO YEARS after I'd been hospitalized). The truth of the matter is this: Had I been a) uninsured or b) a single parent, my bills would have been taken care of. What kind of message does this send?
Three other short and wholly unrelated thoughts:
1) Is there any errand worse than going to the bank?
2) Isn't it weird to think there are people in the world who have this concept of Who You Are and it's actually not remotely who you are?
3) Should I be concerned that I'm drinking a glass of wine in the middle of the afternoon just so I can throw the bottle away before my parents arrive? Have I forgotten how incredibly old I am? (And, really, how can I when I spent a piece of one night this week sitting at the bar with a flawless-skinned, rosy-cheeked, early-twenty-something who manages an Abercrombie & Fitch?)
And my favorite quote of the day: "It's 900 square feet of ghetto bliss."
If only I didn't have to go unload the dishwasher and remake the bed and wash the wine glasses and put them away, I'd go back and rewrite this entire blog entry. The whole look and feel is very inconsistent.
posted by pamela at 12:22 PM
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