Briefing

I meant to blog so much more tonight, but that's how it goes - I just wanted to make sure to touch on a few things.

So I got sick last week after a difficult week at work. Some nasty bug has been floating around our office and I picked it up big time. I was out for three days which is very uncommon of me and I still seem to be carrying something around in the back of my throat - yuck. Not only did it make me miss out on some focus groups one day, but it messed up a trip to Austin that was planned for more research. I really wanted to go because I haven't seen in-homes done up close and personal, and that's what I missed out on. Besides, it's my hometown so I had set up to see several friends and stay the weekend to see my family. I was so excited and that all just fell apart when I got sick. :(

The hard week at work was due to a lot of things, and it's hard to elaborate. It's more on the personal side of things and so is hard to talk about. I don't think I always paint the most honest picture of work here in my blog because I try to talk about specific things I did and usually it's something I was really excited to be able to do. But there are a lot of things at work I do that aren't as glamorous - not a surprise - and I just don't have a lot to write about. Or if it's something really hard or upsetting, I don't feel like taking more time to dwell over it and just bitch. Then there are things at work that are bad but I haven't figured out that balance of writing about my life, writing about work, and sharing things for all to see. It's still my job and I may affect people that I work with in my writing so I want to be sensitive to that. Just because it's a frustration of mine doesn't mean I should hurt others by being brutally honest. It's just something to keep in mind - the work is certainly not always fresh, new, and exciting.

I will say that the difficult week was ended on a particularly bad note when a bit of miscommunication made things crazy with my team again. It was somewhat similar to my frustrations from my first brief writing, and I felt it was adding on a layer of not good to what I had experienced before. Though I got my supervisor involved, she really doesn't know the whole story and so it ended up not being that helpful. Let's just say that absolute clear communication is needed from everyone so that responsibilities, limitations, and deadlines are all put on the table. A lot of the time I feel like I am reaching out enough and it ends up that there are questions I didn't ask which really would have helped. Then again, I can't anticipate every waking need or desire - I need to be met in the middle.

Grueling week, week of sickness...when I did get back to work, I needed to catch up with everyone and ended talking my voice down to a grating scraggle. It still has a hint of that which is frustrating. Frustrating - that's the word that pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings about several things going on right now and for the past several weeks.

What was a refreshing spot in all of this was last weekend (in between the hard week and the being sick week) - I had one lovely day before I fell to my sick bed. I started with a little Mary Kay action with friends from work, went to the Dallas zoo, went out with friends to a great Mexican food place Chuy's (a place I know from Austin, and apparently there's just one in Dallas), relaxed, and capped off the day with meeting my cousin at a movie. That was great times and definitely something I needed. Unfortunately, my throat had hurt since the morning and decided to turn into full blown blah by the next day.

Okay, well I guess I'm gonna go ahead and write everything out though it's late. Another frustration - not feeling like I'm getting enough done in my evenings and staying up too late.

Alright, this week meant new beginnings. My department moved into their new offices last week and I finally followed by moving away from my first real world cube home...to my second real world cube home. ;) It has been called Strategy Island, the name I like the most thus far, because it's just two cubes together surrounded by window offices. Other cubes are further away. I think I have a temporary neighbor next door but it doesn't really look like anyone's in there. That is, until we bring on a new junior which we're in the process of doing now. So it's a bit isolated in one respect but it is right next to a kitchen area so I'm kind of in the middle of everything at the same time. The reason we moved was to be with the creatives. I think that's a great idea and I like being closer to them, so I just need to settle down into my new place...and decorate a bit more so it's not so gloomy. I liked my old cube so it will be missed.

On to this week, there has been a new light. One of the planners pulled me onto a fast-moving, multidimensional project on one of our brands. Several products are planning for 2009 so it's a renewal of everything - objectives, briefs, creative ideas. On top of that, our new agency mission is coming on strong so that needs to be incorporated into everything. (As a side note, I have a new project that is solely for our agency mission and it has just bubbled up a little but will need some attention - ohhh, tomorrow! Lots going on.) So one of the planners, being stretched fairly thin on everything, brought me on to this project in a big way. He just up and handed over a whole product and I spent time (quickly!) getting acquainted with the target, wrote a creative brief, and (tadah!!) had my first BRIEFING today!! Exciting.

I was a bit nervous, and it was in and amongst a lot of other things going on - including a fun and one-day-late Cinco de Mayo festival, but I think that I spoke in an honest, clear, and knowledgeable way about my product. Oh listen to me - MY product. But it was a proud moment and one of those gleaming moments where I felt like a planner for a minute.

Those moments - feeling like a planner - are more important than ever to me right now. I want to do much much more that leads me toward feeling like a real planner. And soon, I want to BE a real planner. This is a time in my career where I'm feeling a bit of an angsty teenage struggle to be more, do more, learn more, and not necessarily be what I have been thus far to the agency. The reason there is friction is obvious - I'm wanting and acting on moving forward and the jobs I get don't always lend to that. The more cool stuff I get to work on gets challenged by some of the more basic things that I routinely need to get done. It's a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out.

But in the meantime, I am going to latch onto my assignment and go at it with full force. If it is one of the few opportunities I will get to show what I'm made of, I really want to lay it all out there on the table. It's that whole reaching straight into my chest, removing my heart, and laying it on the table. People can definitely take advantage of that and try to smash my little heart, or they can have a little respect for the fact that I'm crazy enough to do that.

We'll see what happens. ;)