Ballistics Experts

"There's all this stuff on the floor!" Julie Powell [sprawled on the kitchen floor, crying, next to a turkey carcass], Julie & Julia.

Sometimes, I walk into my boss's office, and she'll clearly have been working on a physical manuscript, before being interrupted by an email. Pages slumped on lap, shoulders hunched, there she frenetically types away, pen or pencil clenched between teeth. The image strikes me because it represents, to my mind, such an utter and unremitting urge to keep writing: she has to write the email, but refuses to stop working on the book. Like she can't decide between the two technologies. Like words just cannot possibly get out of her fast enough.

I have never thought of myself as a particularly relaxed or dignified person, but in moments like these, it gives one pause to stop and consider. Is this what the future looks like?

When my youngest brother Bruce was about 10 years old, he was bemused to learn the meaning of the phrase "going ballistic." (My personal favorite illustration of the subject comes from the John Hughes' classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off: for fans of the film, please recall the scene in which the disaffected younger sister, played by Jennifer Grey, drop kicks Principal Rooney to the face and runs screaming up the stairs.) Bruce learned the term from our next-door neighbor Sina, who was using it in reference to his mother. Mothers, I allow, are experts in the field of "going ballistic." Ballistic, as any good English major can tell you, comes from the root word for the science of guns and explosions. The association, I think, is a great one, and it's a great turn of phrase. And, as Miss Grey and mothers bring into the mix, I think it's a particularly apt descriptor of hysterical women.

Which brings us back to the romcom genre. In every romcom there has to be a reason why a perfectly attractive and successful girl is single, right? Hence the character type: the uptight single girl. She works in writing or editorial, she's hyper organized, she flosses a lot, she hasn't been on a date in a really long time, etc. And her easily-tripped threshold of uptightness provides the writer and director with plenty of options to have her "go ballistic" in any number of sitcom scenarios.

All further proof that I was destined to be a romcom heroine. As a professional editor, I get paid to be anal retentive. Which is why I feel so terrifically lucky to have a job that I really enjoy. I've started recreationally proofing menus at restaurants, and pretty much any advertisement I read, I rewrite the tag line over and over again in my head until I'm happy with it. I make my boyfriend endure all sorts of hysterical fits, such as, say, bursting into tears over a failed chicken pot pie (they were very expensive wild mushrooms, for the record), or accidentally lighting one's own cookbook on fire. And I'm not particularly proud to admit that I've started down the path of compulsive cleaning. Which is just a tad disturbingly similar to my mother, enthusiastic organizer of sock drawers.

Next thing you know, I'll be hunched amid piles and piles of papers and words, pencil clenched in teeth, maniacally typing away. I'm not arguing that this is healthy. I'm just saying, well, first of all, it's inevitable, and second of all, isn't it just a tad... romantic? In the really uptight, but still adorable kind of way?

Thriving on the perfection of the details: it may seem like minutiae to the rest of you, but rest assured, for us lowly assistant editors and aspiring romantic stereotypes, well! I dare say it's a lifelong passion.