Yo Mama

For the better part of a decade I was a very small part of a Very Large Company, which did some things quite well, and also reported the news.

Like many Very Big Companies, it started out by only reporting the news. But after a long time being very good at reporting the news, that stopped being good enough.

When I started out, I was often called 'a rising star.' Except, to be perfectly honest, I never quite shot across the sky in the way my first really wonderful bosses hoped I might.

I'm not so much ready to name names (bit cowardly, I'll say it first), so for now we'll just call the company I worked for 'Yo Mama, Inc'. Could have been The Yo Mama Post Gazette, W-Y-M-E Poughkeepsie, or The Yo Mama Nightly News anchored by--you guessed it--Yo Mama.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the real name was, because it really was just an Inc. And not so long ago, they Inc.-ed me right out.

That sounds bitter; I should clarify.

When I got the news, just before Christmas, the woman who got stuck performing the 'sacking' didn't get past the first sentence (something about 'parting ways') before my mind started to whir.

"This means I get Christmas!"

"I could go home and see my family..."

"Hey wait...I can take Christmas AND New Years!"

I kept a solemn face throughout the brief meeting. After all, I was being canned. And I was in shock the rest of the day: I recall a certain buzzing noise. I fixated on writing a kick-ass 'goodbye note'. I even got a little misty packing my boxes, especially when colleagues appeared in my doorway, a little misty themselves. We all realized that 'It Could Never Happen Here' was officially toast, and soon there would probably be 'More To Come.'

And of course there was.

And Was.

And Was.

In fact, Yo Mama was in some pretty good company.

At the end of my brief meeting during which I was severed from the only news outlet I'd ever worked for, I hugged the person who had just fired me. Because after all, she still had to work there.

And I became a freelance journalist, the only job I've ever that contains the word 'free.'

Free to pay a fortune for health care? Yes.

Free to get taxed twice for the same money? You betcha. (What the hell is a business license tax, anyway?)

But also, free to make choices.

(The choice to totally not work not being one of them.)

Free to say, "Looks like no one's calling to hire me today...let's go see 'Shoot 'em Up' ...



...again.

Free not to care when a sports flak is yelling at you for breaking some beat writer rule you didn't know existed because you'd never covered, say, Arena Football before.

(I haven't actually covered Arena Football, but I'd like to keep covering what I cover!)

Free not to care about the latest Presidential Contender Gaffe, because we haven't even had a damn primary yet.

Free to learn how to think for myself.

And most of all, free to tell really tasteless jokes about Yo Mama.