The Way I Feel -- Kerry

Despite the current financial world market crisis, there is one thing we as humans all have in copious commodities that we own outright: our feelings. Whether we choose to ignore them, which may be a relevant subject in relationship to Jennie's manhood blog, or indulge in them, as I do when I have PMS and eat chocolate to soothe myself, somehow we're all stuck having to express them in someway. Perhaps that's what makes some of us writers.

My first official writing "job" was as an intern for the Portland Business Journal between my junior and senior year at University of Oregon. Flushed with an idealistic bent to express my true journalist self, I grandly showed up for work with big hair and a suit with huge shoulder pads, ready to write the lead stories for the day. The editor very politely sat me down in front of a computer the size of a twenty-four inch television screen and explained what my job entailed: editing the real estate classifieds in the back of the newspaper.

I ran to the nearest phone booth downstairs, called my mother, and cried.

The first week I misspelled the prestigious realty firm Coldwell-Banker" as "Coldwell - Baker" and made several typos. The company called to complain. My journalism career was not getting off to a good start.

So I walked into the editors office and told him "how I felt."

Amazingly, he didn't can me, I wasn't getting paid anyway. He assigned me the "funky story" on the front page, I think more out of pity and maybe out of curiosity. I stayed up for forty-eight hours straight to write and edit like a maniac on a typewriter. The editor published it, and eight more articles that summer.

Expressing my feelings actually worked better than say, other ways of expressing them, like drinking beer or driving too fast.

I diligently read "The Way I Feel" by Janan Cain, to my three children. They reward me not by telling me that I'm making them discover their personal power, but by announcing at inconvenient times, "I feel annoyed with you."

On the upside, they also know how to say "I love you."