I’m going to Paris tomorrow. It’s a work trip, to be fair, but one of the beautiful things about my job is that trips to Paris are part of it. Trips where in fact the point of the trip is to stay at a no-doubt beautiful hotel and eat remarkable food and generally exist, albeit with my journalistic powers of observation and absorption switched on, for as long as I can physically stand it, or until it is time to fly home, whichever comes first.
It’s amazing to me sometimes that Writer is a real job. Even more so things like Food Writer and Travel Writer, where you receive a paycheck for doing the things that most of the world engage in for pleasure and escape. Eating dinner! Going to Paris! It’s excruciatingly difficult to talk about certain parts of my job without sounding like a tremendous ass. It’s even difficult to complain about the difficulty. I mean, yes, I go to meetings, and I think about budgets, and I use (with pleasure, as it happens, and great abandon) corporatespeak acronyms like EOD and ROI and LOE, and I draft memos exhorting people to not forget that it is never, never okay to put two spaces after a piece of terminal punctuation, not ever. But then also there are the parts where someone is like Hello! Would you like to go to Paris to check out a new hotel? And I am like Yes! Yes actually I would be pretty okay with that, thanks.
Every Day Forever 