Sara's X10 Blog

On my mind today:

Envy: As of right now, I have two friends who are in New York to attend the VMA's. This is not because I hang out with rockstars (which isn't to say I don't hang out with rockstars), but through a series of unrelated events that led to them both having the opportunity. I predict Thursday evening will be a fit of text messages and seething jealousy. Well, probably not seething. Maybe simmering gently until it evaporates. At least I'll get to find out what really happens before everything is edited down for television.

Pluto: Haha, owned.

Geography: I have no concept of space. America is the thing between Washington state and New York. As far as I know Middle America contains like, cornfields. And Republicans. Possibly cowboys. It's all the land in the way that means it takes me an eternity to get from one end of the country to the other.

I'm mulling this over not only because I'll be taking that flight on Friday (and then Tuesday), but because I'm also going to Chicago in September and for some reason I didn't realize Illinois was so far away. In my head it was a two hour flight; in fact, it's more like four. One day I will master this whole "time zones" thing. I'm feeling slightly less outraged by the high prices of flights and slightly more stupid at my apparent inability to recall fifth-grade geography.

Cookies: Mike brought cookies! Mike wins at today.

My Inevitable Terrible Revenge: In other news, I appear to have possibly taken down Marko with my long-running plague death virus. Next on my To Destroy list: Owen. I will then proceed to spin around in my desk chair, listen to my iPod, and surf cuteoverload.com all day.

Another Excuse To Blog: We're starting to work on a new website, which is exciting. That should be live in a couple of weeks. This new product has the capability to record video, and one thing you can do with that is, of course, video blog. (Of course. Obviously.) I find this prospect hideously attractive, as what I really need is one more opportunity to plaster myself all over the internet lke a particularly affectionate face-sucker. Not that I would video blog here, but I'm amenable to the idea of videoing myself talking about my day and my obsessions and forcibly snuggling my cat on camera and then posting it on the internet so all my friends can see how fabulous my life really is. That's all for my other blog, which I will never, ever link here.

Copy: Today I'm aiming for a tone which is "exuberantly salesy". Tomorrow's predicted tone: coolly detached with a side of vaguely suspicious. Oh, not for copy. Just for me.

Posted by Sara at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you were wondering, here are the current scores re:

Sara vs. Excel
Excel: 1
Sara: 0
Like everyone in my generation, I had to take typing/computer classes in high school. (Fun fact: I still can't really type numbers with any sort of speed, I always have to check and see what I'm typing. I also have the worst number memory of anyone ever, my brain takes in numbers and just doesn't care. They're gone in an instant, replaced by thoughts of tiny fluffy kittens tumbling in a field, or Ryan Ross, or the sudden urgent need for a bottle of Mountain Dew.) I didn't actually learn to type with any sort of speed until I started using the internet on a regular basis, and I'm pretty sure everything I learned about Excel left the minute I walked out the classroom door. You say spreadsheets and I think of making the bed, or cookies, or making the bed and then eating cookies in it.

Mike suggested I put all my brilliant suggestions for the community blog site in a spreadsheet for easy access instead of Skyping him every five minutes to be like "WE NEED A BLOG TEMPLATE WITH KITTENS" (not an exact quote), and though I offered him a shiny Word .doc with fuschia font and Webdings, he insisted on a spreadsheet. I have thus been wrestling Excel into submission...all day. So far it is winning.

Justin Timberlake vs. The Decemberists
Justin: .5?
Decemberists: .5?
My scoring system is falling apart already. Both Justin and Colin Meloy & co. have new albums out, and I have been listening to both in the last few days and being generally puzzled. I'm still in the early "This is...different" stage of listening, and mostly it has sent me scurrying back to the familiar. This is complicated by the fact that I have mostly been listening to Panic! At The Disco lately (by lately I mean: every freaking day), and they don't sound anything like Justin or the Decemberists and the more I listen to Panic! the more I just want to...listen to Panic! (and see them in concert, um, seven times. Haha oh god is it November yet?) so it's already serious aural dissonance; on top of that, The Crane Wife is a pretty major departure from earlier Decemberists records and there hasn't been a new Justin record in four years, so that's pretty different.

Anyway, so far I'm really liking LoveStoned/I Think She Knows Interlude from FutureSex/LoveSounds; it's seven minutes long, and goes from a kicky dance number about a girl he likes to, in the last two minutes, a sort of pathetic love song, only using the exact same lyrics. Neat trick, Timberlake. In a similar I'm confused but I can't stop listening fashion, When The War Came, off The Crane Wife, is a political rock song from a band mostly known for singing sea chanties and songs about eighteenth-century prostitutes, and I keep listening to it and being puzzled and then listening to it again, so I guess that's pretty effective, as songs go.

Sara vs. This Week
Sara: so far victorious
Last week dragged in a big way, but as of right now I am not as soul-crushingly tired as I was last week, plus I only have a four day week, as I'm taking Friday off to spend the day on a plane which will eventually make its way to New York. I'm going to visit for the weekend and see all my friends; on Saturday we'll be roadtripping down to Pennsylvania to see My Chemical Romance at the state fair in Allentown. There will be a petting zoo. Please don't try to compete with the awesomeness of my upcoming weekend. You will lose.

Also, the MTV Video Music Awards are on this Thursday, and I am really looking forward to them in a way that I can't recall ever having looked forward to the VMAs before. Surprisingly to no one at all, I am mostly looking forward to them because Panic! At The Disco will be performing. The lead singer, Brendon, promises that they will be "flamboyant." I love them with something like seventy-five percent of my soul. (NB: I only actually have seventy-five percent of a soul, the rest is in hock.) I am hoping for a performance to rival Britney and Madonna, if you know what I mean and I think you do, but either way I'm sure they will be ridiculously awesome and I'll spend the duration shrieking to my friends on the phone about it, and also possibly the following day, in which I may just accost random passengers on the plane to inquire as to whether they saw what Spencer was wearing, and oh my GOD, could you even believe that performance? What? Stop talking to you? Okay.

Yeah, this'll be an okay week.

Posted by Sara at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In news of Yay! Life!: fall tour dates have been announced for Panic! At The Disco, my very favorite band.

Dates I plan to see them:
11/9: Atlanta, Georgia
11/10: Charlotte, North Carolina
12/1: Portland, Oregon
12/2: Vancouver, B.C.
12/3: Everett, Washington
12/8: Las Vegas, Nevada
12/9: San Diego, California

Crazy feels good - kinda tingly. (And no, Owen, you can't come along, stop asking.)

My life otherwise has been SEO pages and a lack of sleep, so it's nice to have something to look forward to. Other than the weekend, of course, which I will spend sleeping and not writing SEO pages.

Until next time!

Posted by Sara at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

11:00 a.m.: According to Marko, my assignment today is "copy copy copy copy copy," which is weird because usually it's like "copy copy tapdance copy luau ratcatching copy bothering Owen copy copy" and it'll be sort of boring without all those things to break it up. I'm dead tired today so I'm slouched in my chair with my hood up listening to Portishead and working on more SEO pages and sort of halfheartedly eating an apple. Eating always feels like such a commitment in the summer for some reason. And it's cold in here.

12:30 p.m.: Coffee, Saves The Day, ranch Corn Nuts. Copy copy copy copy copy.

2:05 p.m.: Back from lunch with Owen. We're both pretty quiet people, so when we go out with Marko he gets all nervous because we aren't talking; when it's just us lunches are fairly low-key affairs and it's nice. Take his word for it on Idiot Ghost. Reminds me of Iron & Wine, who I'm listening to right now. At this very moment: The Trapeze Swinger, the nine and a half minute aural equivalent of lying on your back in the grass on a perfect fall day next to someone that makes you happy. I'm finishing my Coke and feeling sleepily alright.

Oh hey, I have an idea - maybe I'll go write some more copy (copy copy copy copy).

3:00 p.m.: A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love. (Since when is spam profound?)

4:00 p.m.: I think I'm killing all effects of caffeine by listening to the Shins.

6:00 p.m.: Having sent off fifteen pages of copy (copy copy copy copy) at the last possible minute, I can now go home, without even having falling asleep at the keyboard once. (Probably because I napped on break.)

Stay tuned for the next thrilling update, coming tomorrow to a blog near you! No, not that near. Slightly to the left, there you go.

Posted by Sara at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I had an enjoyable lunch with Marko and Owen in which the virtues of high-strung women were expounded upon. I mostly just sat there and laughed. I can't date high-maintenance people, seriously. My life is exciting enough what with all the going to work and surfing the internet all night, I wouldn't want to overextend myself. The infatuation is fun at first but then it's all, you know. Tempestuous women are too much trouble and boys get all needy and try to put names on things. I don't get it, man. I want a relationship (or...whatever), not Wuthering Heights.

I did get a chocolate frosty at Wendy's, though, so that was a highlight.

I got to write a brief script (type thing) for a new video campaign (...thing. Give me a break, it's so Friday right now.) we're doing, so that was fun. I had a Creative Writing instructor who made us do half a semester of screenwriting, and it was nice to do something sort of vaguely like that again. I think we're going to do some more of those, and by 'we' of course I mean Marko and Owen and then I'll write stuff. Which is what I do. Because I'm the copywriter. (In fact, I'm the very same copywriter mentioned in Mike's interview with Marko. That's what they call me: The Copywriter. It's like a code name, like 007 only with fewer women and fancy girly martinis instead of the regular kind. And I don't drive an Aston Martin. Downgrade.)

I'm going to set up my Video Sender this weekend. If all goes according to plan, I will be watching Lolita (or possibly The Office [UK]. Decisions! Or decision, actually.) from the comfort of my living room couch this evening. Other evening plans: Ben&Jerry's Phish Food, writing things which are not copy, trying to catch my cat in one of her affectionate moods, which unfortunately only tend to happen at eight thirty in the morning when I'm trying to get ready for work and she's dead set on curling up in my lap. Cats.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Posted by Sara at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's events of note:

1. Woke up to a swollen lip after going to bed looking almost like a normal human being again. Decided to call the doctor on the way to work and they were all, "Um, yeah, come in so we can make sure you're not gonna die?" Did so, was poked, prodded, eyed suspiciously. Conclusion: apparently being stung with venom will make you swell up. (Really?) But not just after you're stung, oh no; you might swell up randomly when your body is like, oh hey venom you're still here? I'll puff up, then! Like a scared kitty, only instead of sort of adorable I look like a duck. Thanks, body. That's a big help.

2. Went to Claim Jumpers for lunch with the marketing team. Claim Jumpers is really the mecca of chain restaurants: a monument to suburban excess, from the oversized portions to the strange decor to the parking lot full of SUVs. The menu is wildly American and the interior design attempts to be every comforting design cliche at once, with honey hardwood walls, chandeliers of antlers, Home Depot deco lamps, appeals to the Old West aesthetic (rivers! trappers! woods!), chairs with faux log legs, everything suggesting familiarity and history without being so bold as to carve out some sort of independent identity. (Although, granted? The food is tasty, and you can't really argue with that.)

The insincerity was so excessive that it actually became sincere; that's how it goes when you give people what they want. It's excess without luxury, a lot of something good instead of a little of something great. There'll always be a market for that. The familiar will always outweigh the allure of something different.

I never appreciated irony until I left the suburbs. (I never really felt it until I came back.)

3. I did some work on the Knowledge Base, which is a pretty great resource. The Wiki software is pretty awesome in general. I'm a big fan of WikiQuote in particular. Ahh, one click access to a database of quotes from The Office, just what I never knew my life had been missing. (I didn't need the one for quotes from Army of Darkness since I can recite that movie in my sleep, but still. I'm glad it's on the internet, you know?)

4. Posted this blog entry. Oh, the feeling of personal triumph.

Posted by Sara at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to school in New York. This is an experience I would recommend to anyone (though with the caveat that you should also have either a. parents willing to pay for your schooling, or b. you should not go to NYU), because then you can get the "Oh, like Felicity!" comments I endured for years. Yes, I model my life after my favorite shows. This is why I'm also a teen detective, a space cowboy, an office drone (wait) and a vampire slayer (I'm not going to link to that one- that'd just be insulting). I lived there for awhile after I graduated, but now I'm back here in Washington where I grew up.

I'm going back to New York to visit the first weekend in September, and as with anything I'm not giving sufficient conscious thought to, the visit is starting to pop up in my dreams.

The New York of my dreams is a fascinating place. More often then not, I'm lost there, wandering from place to place making note of where I want to revisit; it's always a little disappointing to wake up and remember I can't. I sort of do, though - there are towns that I keep coming back to when I dream, places I've never been in real life, towns on hills that I've constructed from fragments of imagination, places I keep going back to when I close my eyes - I keep going back to the New York of my dreams.

Last night I dreamed about being way uptown. Not the Bronx, but what my mind has made up of the northern tip of Manhattan. It's vividly sunny and there are empty lots of sand, chain-link fenced in, free-standing brick buildings and the Hudson not too far away, visible in the spaces between. I'd been there before in dreams, at some tea shop (that was also...a teen community center? there was a cafeteria, and some places the ceilings were so low I had to duck), and in this dream I was aware of being not too far from the place, just a few blocks over really, walking down the street in sandals and those enormous scene girl glasses I really can't pull off. I was tromping around with some of my friends, and later there were five of us stuffed in a cab and my friend Katie and I were passing notes to each other.

This is only a part of town I've visited recently in dreams; I used to dream of the southern edge of the island more often than not, from fireworks displays in the financial district to the dusty streets and alleys I imagined downtown. I don't think I ever dreamed of places where I'd lived, not Brooklyn or the Village or Chinatown; just the less familiar neighborhoods I only passed through underground between. When I finally saw below Houston I liked it better in dreams. There were no cobblestones and alleys and the streets didn't twist, they weren't geometric and sepia-toned, there were no butchers or dressmakers or men in aprons or Russian tea shops half-underground. Possibly my downtown dreams took place in a different century.

In other news of My Life Is Awesome and You Should Be Jealous, today on the first minute of my first break I went outside, sat down at the picnic table, and was promptly stung on the lip by a wasp. Twice. (In related news: OW.) So I'm swollen up like a circus freak (when I look down, I can actually see my top lip, that's how huge it is), and Becky the receptionist came to my rescue with an ice pack and laughter. Presumably because laughter is the best medicine. On a brighter note, I now know that lip collagen would not be the right choice for me. I look young and tragic and really, really weird.

WebMD tells me that wasps and bees are attracted to food and pastel colors, so it probably didn't help that I was sitting down outside to eat an apple while wearing a lavender hoodie. I'm sure the wasp was really amped to be landing on a really large flower and was just as startled as I was when I went all "!!!!!!!!!1" [EDIT, 3:14: Sitting down outside at a table with a wasp's nest under it. Okay! Fair enough, wasp, fair enough, I wouldn't want you hanging around my house either.] [EDIT 2: Although seriously, wasps, what's your problem? I don't like flies landing on me either but they don't get all stingy about it when I brush them off. Although one time a horsefly did sting me (through my pants!) and I still have a scar on my thigh. Moral: insects are malevolent creatures of doom.]

Conclusion: My lip hurts.

[Of note: this entry was originally titled "I wanna see movies of my dreams," a line from Car, by Built To Spill, but in light of the fact that my upper lip now has it's own ZIP CODE I decided the Dane Cook quote was more apt. It least it wasn't a tire, right?]

Posted by Sara at 04:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello world. I spent a good deal of last night in the grips of some mania, first yowling at my housemates about...something, I actually can't remember what, but it involved a lot of gesturing and pacing around the living after which I demanded that someone play videogames with me. I lasted one off-road ATV race before slumping back on the couch and then stumbling back to my room to intermittently lie around and terrify my friends for the next few hours.

I had a hideous headache and was too awake to sleep yet too tired to lift my arms and type properly; guess which thing I let stop me. Mostly I sent hilariously typo-ridden IMs to my friends, with occasional breaks to collapse onto the bed and stare disconsolately at the bedspread. I levelled off around midnight, after most of my friends had gone to bed thinking I was insane, and so sent a host of text messages this morning before work assuring people that I had not succumbed to eternal rest with my last words to them having been: "srrry li;slhddwwn ilu snkakesonaplnae." It's been coming and going in the last twenty-four hours. When I got back from the clinic I sort of wanted to die but then I spent my last break taking a fifteen-minute nap on the grass outside (the glamorous life of a copywriter) and that helped make me feel less like my brain was going to leap out of my skull and do an interpretive dance.

So yes, today I skipped lunch and went to the doctor instead. (Conclusion from that experience: Lunch > waiting for an hour in a lobby with Dr. Doolittle on loud in the background and only one copy of Seattle Metropolitan to read when I could be bothered to remain upright.)

I've been diagnosed with a sinal bronchial infection, which is far less romantic than consumption. Thumbs down. It's sort of anticlimactic, actually; after a month and a half of illness and last night's descent into darkness I woke up half-convinced I had SARS or a brain tumor, possibly both. "But what will X10 do without me?" I thought feverishly to myself. "Who will eat all the beef jerky out of the vending machines? Someone has to be around to take all the good candy from the receptionist's desk and blame Owen for everything!" It was a worrisome few hours in which I roamed WebMD, tripping through its unnavigable landscape (why should the search engines ever bring up what you're searching for? what would be the fun in that?) in between intense sessions of writing stuff and poking Dreamweaver with a stick.

(Sidenote: right now people are talking about getting Mexican food for dinner, which is making me seethe with jealousy because before my body aggressively rebelled I had planned on hitting Taco Del Mar for lunch, and the brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts I had at my desk at three o'clock instead were just not the same. Depressing.)

In other news, for those of you that want quick access to all new entries from our X10 blog community, I made a Kinja so I could more easily harrass my coworkers with inane comments keep track of what everyone is saying. Check it out here if you're so inclined, or just access the blogs with the prettiest pictures via the X10 Community page. Isn't it nice to have choices? I choose life. And Coke. (Except for the brief period in which Britney Spears was young and attractive and intent on selling me Pepsi products. Look, I only have limited stores of willpower, you know.)

Posted by Sara at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Friday! Wow, do I ever mean that.

Lately, I've been learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is one of those things where I feel like you can take a whole course on it in business school and yet learn just as much by actually doing it. Summary: If people can't find your page they won't visit it, so make sure your page keywords match your content and you'll get the visitors you need. A+. Seminar over. Thank me later. (Or thank me now! I like it when people say nice things to me.)

Spent today writing up more SEO pages for the Sentinel site, learning all about microwave interference, among other things. I have learned more random science in my month here at X10 than I think I managed to in the entirety of my schooling career. I was never too fond of textbooks (although I'd recommend The Double Helix, by James Watson, as a good read to anyone. It's about the discovery of the structure of DNA, and along with The Origin of Species, is one of the only science books that's ever been compellingly written enough to hold my interest), as I have little head for facts that don't interest me.

Sure, I'm a walking IMDb when it comes to the late nineties teen movie genre (why can I name so many Chris Klein movies off the top of my head? Why?), but I'm at approximately the same level mathematically that I was at in the fourth grade. I made it to AP Calculus by my senior year of high school, and even managed to not fail Statistics in college, but as of right now I could probably manage multiplication and anything more than that would require that I whip out the calculator. I have no head for numbers. What's the fun of questions with only one answer?

I'm looking forward to the weekend (commencing very, very soon), although I'll probably break out my usual Friday evening entertainment of stumbling through dinner and then falling asleep before midnight. Hold me back. Seriously. Actually I plan to get a lot of writing done this weekend; I feared when I started this job that writing all day would burn me out, but it turns out it just makes me even more eager to make stuff up. Then again, I don't think I've ever really had a job that killed my creativity. Even the most boring jobs would just lead to me running through song lyrics in my head all day and thinking about imaginary people doing more interesting things than, say, tagging and boxing sunglasses. Oh yeah, that was a real fun summer.

Someone asked me the other day what I was doing this summer, and it was a bit sobering to answer that I was working for the summer. And the fall. And the winter. And the spring. And then the next summer. I used to sink into despair every summer that I was working; nine-to-fiving it killed me, same thing day in day out until the weekend, and then you start it all over again. It's amazing the routines that we put up with as human beings.

It helps to have a job you actually like, though. I think this is the first job I've had where I liked most everything about it, rather than hating the work and liking the office, or liking the work and hating the hours, or liking the money and hating everything else about it. It's refreshing! Jobs you like: I recommend them.

Weekends: I recommend those also. Hope you all have a great one!

Posted by Sara at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Important life update: I just saw a snake outside, of the garter variety (or maybe it was just a really tiny python; my knowledge of the reptilian world begins and ends with YAAGH GET IT AWAY FROM ME). I didn't shriek like a girl, but mostly because the X10 offices are in the middle of the Washington wilderness, so I wasn't exactly surprised. I've seen bunnies in the bushes before, and today there were a bunch of birds hanging out in the tree near the corner of the building, like birds sometimes do. There's a little nature trail out back, where people walk and jog and, I don't know, maybe skip merrily about, I don't really pay attention. We have a couple of picnic tables out there, so I usually eat lunch there on the days I don't drive to the mall and hit the food court. Man, the suburbs? Thrilling. Yesterday I had lunch at Safeway; y'all, somebody hold me back.

Now I think I'm going to talk about writing copy.

If you want to be a copywriter, you should go to college. I went for an English major, which is helpful because it teaches you how to write about things you don't care about at all. I liked writing essays about books I enjoyed, and I liked writing essays about books I hated, because then I could get all righteously angry, but it's the ones in between where you lack any emotional investment at all that are really trying. Unless you're lucky like me, you might end up in a job writing about things you just don't care about at all, because unfortunately there's not much demand for copy about glitter and kittens (because, honestly? glitter and kittens sell themselves, man). At the end of the day, if writing is what you want to do I think you'll like it just on principle, because it's pretty neat to get paid for what you have the ability to do and what you enjoy doing.

College is also helpful because it makes you think you know something about everything. It's much easier to be convincing when you genuinely believe you're not faking it. I honestly think I enjoy thinking analytically and having critical discussions with my friends now way more than I did in seminar classes in college. Of course, it's a lot more fun to discuss ingrained behavioral patterns and conditioning in context of The Hills Have Eyes than, you know, Heart of Darkness. One of the best parts about going to college is that you're forced to think differently about things, remove them from context and find out what they are, really, by looking at them from different points of view and seeing what else you can learn. Then, one day, you too can write vaguely pretentious blog posts where you wander aimlessly from topic to topic under the pretense of pseudo-academic rambling. Stay in school, kids!

I did a creative writing minor and I think that helps, what with all the writing workshops and learning to take criticism and revise your work and all that. The more criticism you get, the less it feels like being beaten with reeds, until by the time you graduate you can recognize that sometimes people have wise things to say. Well, probably.

Other things you will learn in college writing workshops:
1. Some people can get through an entire lifetime of schooling and still not have any idea of how to punctuate a sentence properly.
2. That will never, ever get less annoying.
3. And seriously, you will harp on it for years.
4. And when you try and think of what you learned in college writing workshops, that's all you'll be able to think of.
5. Sigh.

Today we're working on a pretty awesome project that'll make the X10 Community even more interactive. Michael's been talking about it a lot lately, and I'm excited; I adore the blog community structure, and I think it'll be a lot of fun to hear from our users as well as various members of the X10 team. I'll be sure to update here when it goes live. That's right, another opportunity be exposed to even more of my chattering - try and stifle your ecstatic applause, folks, you don't want to attract too much attention, now.

Posted by Sara at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good afternoon. Marko and Owen are out of the office, which means I've spent a lot of time forlornly listening to Death Cab For Cutie and, you know, doing my job. But with a slightly melancholy air about me. It's hard to be too sad when you're wearing bright pink sneakers, however (which I am, if that wasn't, er, implied), although I seem to be coming down with the sniffles, so that's awesome, thanks immune system.

You'd think writers wouldn't be sick very often, since all we ever do is sit there and type and brood and occasionally moodily complain about our art, or whatever, but something about the temperament makes us all supremely prone to illness. Just think about the great writers of the past - they're all dead, right? See. (Don't argue with my logic, I went to school for this.) It doesn't help that we often invite it by overindulging in vices. We're like rock stars, only without all the money and women and recognition and hotel room trashing and money, and money, and also money.

Of course, I don't smoke, and I feel it would be somewhat tacky to imbibe at work. Besides, it's so cliche to go for liquor and insanity - I prefer to get really old school. Why emulate Thompson and Ginsberg when you can kick it like Shelley and Keats? Consumption, that's where it's at. I look better pale anyway.

[Sidebar: I'm currently drinking a bottle of Snapple Raspberry White Tea. It's pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately, now that I write copy for a living, I can't help but notice ad copy everywhere I go, which makes sense as we live in a commodified world where everything has a price - including my soul! I mean, just kidding. The copy on this bottle of Snapple declaims its use of white tea leaves, picked when they're young for better flavor. Unfortunately, the copy ends with "So drink up, but quietly. The baby tea leaves are sleeping." Snapple, that's creepy. The baby tea leaves aren't sleeping. They've been crushed to death so we can drink their tasty juices. Please stop anthropomorphizing them, thank you.]

I've spent most of the afternoon working on a letter to our X10 Community members, because we think they are groovy and want them to come hang out with us more. So if you're a member, go visit! I promise it's neat. And pretty. (The email was somewhat different in phrasing there.)

Mid-afternoon delirium may have taken the form of me queueing up Pour Some Sugar On Me on my iPod, but you can't prove anything. It's also possible I was just going through the D's, and thus followed Def Leppard with Depeche Mode and then Destiny's Child (this after a morning of Death Cab and The Decemberists).

Continuing adventures in spam: Gamble For Fun! Really? Because usually I gamble for nourishment. Note to self: start eating lunch instead.

Speaking of which, hey, food. I should go find some of that.

Posted by Sara at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So you may be asking yourself, what does a copywriter do exactly? A copywriter writes copy. Man, I'm glad we got that out of the way.

Apparently websites don't just appear out of thin air (I know, I was surprised too); there's all this stuff that has to happen first like designing and writing and coding and possibly electronic sacrifices to the technology gods - I don't want to get too much into it. Most of the words on http://www.x10sentinel.com/ come from me, except for the ones that don't. I haven't been here for very long, so some of the copy is old and dusty from before my arrival. If you read something particularly inspiring and insightful, though - totally me. If you're wondering who puts together the shiny pictures, that's Owen. If you're wondering who puts the site on the internet for you to poke around, that's Marko. If wish you had a candy bar, that makes two of us. (If you'd settle for an apple, maybe, I really think you should have a better handle on your goals. Don't give up, tiger!)

I spend my days writing copy, and sometimes changing copy I've already written, and sometimes learning about the things I'm supposed to be writing copy about (which, helpful!), and sometimes bothering Owen with insignificant questions over IM even though he sits five feet away from me. I'm currently embroiled in an ongoing sci-fi saga taking place in a series of spam emails I keep getting. They were quoting Lord of the Rings for awhile, and that was a good time.

Okay, back to doing the thing I'm meant to be doing. I just can't stop talking about the X10 Sentinel PTZ Camera, and only partially because if I did stop they'd get annoyed with me and tell me to get back to work. Until next time!

Posted by Sara at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)