I need to start writing about things I hate.

I knew this, in the pit of my heart. When there started to be trouble with the Dance Dance Revolution article I did for the Village Voice -- when it was put off for a few weeks, when the ber-editor killed it behind my immediate editor's back -- I started feeling uncomfortable with the way I'd written the piece. I told my immediate editor I could rewrite it, if they didn't like it. I didn't like it. Over email I could sense her draw herself up. I expect my writers to do their best work for me, she said, bristling at the implication I'd turned anything second-rate in to her.

Tell her it's a matter of the passage of time, Mom said when I told her about it. You know, you grow up, you look back at something you've done, you know you could have done better.

Today I talked to the editor about the possibility of pitching it elsewhere. (One of these days I'll write something up about editors who have been truly wonderful to me. This one is definitely up there.) I don't know why the big boss didn't like it, she told me again. And then, gently and simply: I think you needed to maybe be more dispassionate about it.You were too into it, and you came off as a little naive.

I don't write well about things I love. My Division Three and the crown jewel piece I wrote for Lesy's class -- a piece about the stables at Smith College, which I later took to Bread Loaf -- felt great at the time, but going back over them now evokes the kind of queasiness you get from reading love letters from someone you broke up with in high school. I get much more satisfaction in going back over pieces I wrote about people who I thought were unacceptably prideful, or the video clips I shot of women in fur coats saying "Welfare sucks."

It's hard. I cringe when I think I might have to view things with more irony. I went out last night with an embittered friend who's breaking into the comedy scene, and I found myself almost not speaking at all, because he was so sarcastic I never knew when to take what he was saying at face value. I've distanced myself from a lot of my pinko-fellow-travellers, because they talk about going to protests like going to cocktail parties -- whether the affair was a crashing bore or not. They lose the element of hope.

I don't think I want to view things more scientifically, either. I mean in the way that journalism and social sciences so often aspire to being scientific. I don't think a person can transcend the limitations of human ability to collect and process knowledge. Social sciences do better than journalism at that, anyway. The omniscient tone of traditional journalism is so hopelessly bankrupt. I can't believe it's still such a fixture even despite the New Journalists.

Was I wounded by the editor telling me I was naive? Maybe that's what this is all about.

Maybe I need to go back to working in schools. Kids, at least, maintain hope. Maybe I should go work for the forest service, and not think about irony for a while.