It has been a bad day, which may, or may not explain why I baked corn muffins at 1:30 in the morning, having skipped dinner. The pre-mix only required a third cup of milk and an egg, which looked pretty easy to me, but the muffins turned out to be sweet and greasy. Was it the low-fat milk? Perhaps the egg came from an obese chicken.

Lack of sleep and piles and piles of work are probably the main factors affecting my ill mood. I also had a huge quarrel with my boss, which was terribly disappointing because I had recently done prominent good work and received a lot of praise and credit for it. It is always like this with me – I work so hard to build my reputation but then knock it over, creating a mess that takes forever to clean up.

Of course, as it is with all quarrels, I was not 100% responsible for the argument, and my boss, as smart and logical as he is (on a general basis), posed some very illogical statements that I did not agree with. It was disappointing that we were working on a deadline and I did not have the time to analyze the problem and explain my case to him in a logical, analytical manner. That is the problem with our work. Sometimes we must compromise such procedures to get to the point, and it creates miscommunication. It rarely happens but when it does, it is frustrating. It is a shame that I no longer have the luxury of having days of planning and discussing for feature articles during my work hours. Which is why I have to work after hours if I want to write things like that. Like now. If you let it, work will never end and I know I have to let things go. However, this past summer I have realized that what I really love and what I want to do isn’t writing 300-word articles based on corporate press releases.

I read an article that Nieman fellows this year at Harvard University pointed out that investigative reporters did not get the time and money to do those investigative reporting . It is a shame, because if the big papers don’t do it, who will?