Do I hear a C? A B? How about an A?

I've been spending a lot of time on craigslist lately, searching the "writing gigs" and "writing and editing" job listings.
It's actually gotten me a few jobs, but nothing long-term.
I've learned a lot, though.
For instance, college costs are higher than any of us would suspect. I know, I know, you think you've kept up with local tuition rates in your neck of the woods, if only because your newspaper and radio blat about them a lot.
But, I doubt you've factored in the costs buried deep in the underbelly of higher ed.
There are students out there -- I'm not even going to guess how many -- working their way to a diploma the new-fashioned way. (Old-fashioned is actually working, or buying the completed assignment in person -- from the trench-coat guy skulking on the quad.)
These days, the way to do it is to type up a craigslist ad -- good English not required -- and find someone to complete the assignment for you. If it weren't for the ethics of it (and the fact that I never liked writing college papers, either) I could make a bundle this time of year.
The going rate seems to be $20, or a per-page fee; both are higher than what many commercial employers' ads offer.
Unless it's porn site work. Then you're really in the money.
One co-ed's ad that just caught my eye comes to us from the Miami area, where a student needs a paper on: "ANTI-TUMOR ACTIVITY OF RESVERATOL BY INHIBITING COX 1 topic of your choice it's 11-13 pgs completed by the 25th."
Ok, so I don't even know what that means. (Believe it or not, it wasn't the word resveratol that confused me. It's a phytoalaxen, everybody knows that.)
What I don't get is how the paper can be "on" the all-caps title, but also on a topic of my own choice. Tumors would never be my own choice.
What I find most troubling, though, is the possibility that this student is in med school.
If this is how future doctors are getting "educated," we're going to be in a world of hurt, the kind that nobody's health care bill could help.
Right above that ad was another that time means nothing if karma's on your side. Or if you just think it is.
The ad was posted at 7:33 a.m. by someone who needed a report finished an hour later.
I have to wonder what students like those two were thinking. Why didn't they plan ahead? I'm not talking about study habits that involve time management. The boat has sailed on that one. I'm saying that if they'd thought about these papers earlier, maybe over the December holiday break, they could have done what another student did.
They could have advertised for someone to take the class for them, as a San Diego student did this week. Why waste time attending (or logging in to or whatever) when a little green will do the trick?
By the way, if anyone you know is thinking about taking the latter route, remind them to specify the grade they need. Might as well get their money's worth. San Diego Student wanted a B.
Maybe As cost too much?
I'll never know. The ad had been flagged and pulled before I went back to check.
Wonder why.

too much STUFF

This isn't meant to be a downer.
Think "Bucket List," and you'll be in the right frame of mind.
I'm sitting on the living room floor, writing, sorting and watching bits of Ainsley Hayes' introduction to "West Wing." I just glanced to my left and saw the book I'd been using as a lap-table to write some cards an hour ago.
It's Ansel Adams' "Yosemite and the Range of Light."
We love his work, it's a great book to own, I'm sure the pictures are breath-taking. It's Ansel Adams, after all.
But, I doubt I've ever even opened it.
That none-too-surprising realization got me thinking about everything in this house that I've never used, read or made sense out of owning.
The smidge of guilt that induced caused my mind to leap frog to thinking: "What if I found I only had X amount of time to live? Would I use it to make sure none of this excess went to waste (instead of doing something really interesting)? If so, what would that Bucket List of justification look like?"
Well, here's a sampling:
1. Open every coffee table book we own and look at half or more of the pictures. Including the ones in boxes in the attic.
2. Discard all the newspapers on the coffee table, so there's room for those books.
3. Learn how to use all of the electronic equipment we own. Especially the stuff I "just had to have." Scanner. Laser printer. Digital recorder. Toaster oven. DVD player. (After six years or so, I still can't operate it on my own.) You get the idea.
4. Download all the software that goes into those things. The software that I "had to have" to do all sorts of things. Like scanning newspaper articles and recipes, so they are editable.
5. Watch all the DVDs.
6. Lift all those hand weights. The red ones, the purple ones, the orange ones, the white ones. At least once. Preferably in the right order, which I believe is red, white, orange, purple ... owned, in the same order, by Emily, Mom, Dad and TJ.
7. Try all those crafts I own instructions for: Rock painting, drawing, scherenschnitte, upholstering and more.
8. Look up scherenschnitte since it's showing up with a red line under it right now, triggering a bit of AR in me (not guilt).
8. Take hikes to some of those places in some of those outdoor books.
As much fun as all that sounds, I think some of that time might be better spent giving some of that stuff away to someone who might not wait until they're under the gun to use it.
How about you?
What have you got that's had you wondering why or feeling guilty about?
Would it make it onto your Bucket "To Use" List or your "Bucket "To Get Rid Of" List?

Here we go again ...

I haven't quite figured out what drives this cycle, but I'm in the middle of it again.
Book reading.
I go weeks, sometimes months, without even picking one up. Then I devour a whole one, maybe two, and gradually start hearing about another, then another and another that I just have to read.
So, I start them. One by one. Without finishing any of them.
That's where I am now. In the last several weeks, I've started:
"The Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks
"The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" by Alice Schroeder
"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett
"Loving Frank: A Novel" by Nancy Horan
And those are just the ones that I really want to finish.
The book that got things rolling was "The Associate," a John Grisham that I missed when it was initially released.
Then a friend recommended three books. I started with "The Widow" and was enjoying it until something distracted me. Probably an editing job.
Then, before long, I'd won the Buffett book by adding a comment to a Vibrant Nation blog. Can't say it's anything I'd ever have planned to read. I just like winning.
But, when it arrived, it was clean and shiny, with that new-book smell. So, I started it, quickly becoming that odd brand of hooked where my brain wants to keep going but not enough to tell my arms to pick it up again ... immediately.
After that, I worked at the Geneva Public Library book sale on opening night. Wouldn't you know it? The last dealer to pay he had THE ONE book I'd hope to find for myself: The Help.
I swooned.
The dealer hesitated.
I explained.
He told me to take it.
I balked ... in that semi-sincere way that only a scavenger can.
He said it again.
I accepted.
He said he'd only lose six bucks by not having it to sell.
I pretended that was random information, not something contrived to guilt me into declining the offer. Or, worse, paying him the $6.
I thanked him again.
I started reading it a few days later. Gee, it's good.
Then, an Amazon box arrived.
Some people at Rotary had recently been talking about "Loving Frank," which piqued my interest. It's about Frank Lloyd Wright, and a Chicagoan I know had given me the cook's tour of his city two years ago, including some FLW homes.
So, when my son's birthday present fell short of Amazon's $25 needed for free shipping, I tossed Frank into my shopping cart.
I started it this afternoon. Another good read.
If personal history is any judge, I'm not going to be able to go back and forth among them all for much longer, if at all.
That means I should commit to one of them. But which?
The pressure's killing me.
Any advice?

But, it's always been around ...

I just caught an AOL headline saying that the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List is now 60 years old.
Wow, it's one of those things I thought had been around forever, like the Post Office. I don't remember a time when there was no list; although. I don't remember a time when the Olean Post Office actually hung those pictures up, either.
But, I do remember really, really well (from one of the more disturbing aspects of my childhood) that one denizen of the list was featured each Sunday night after the TV show "The FBI," with Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
(For the youngsters among you, he was handsome in the 1950s and '60s the way his daughter, Stephanie's, Remington Steele costar, Pierce Brosnan, was in the '80s, 90s, 00s and probably always will be.)
It's hard to say when I realized that there really weren't just 10 people on that list; but, I'm willing to bet that it was long before I started hearing people talk about how much of what we were taught in religion was just stories to make a point.
I don't know about you, but I could accept that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny weren't real. I got it. But, the church stuff just kind of annoys me. Whoosh ... there goes that rug under your feet.
Anyway, back to that list. The only name or face I remember from all those scary Sundays is that of Angela Davis. I do remember the sense of relief whenever they announced they'd caught one of the ... um ... well, however many there were, if there was really a list and all ...

Being picky takes time

To twist a phrase a little harder than is probably wise: If it's true that "children say the darndest things" — and it is — there's no reason to doubt me when I tell you "editors learn the darndest things."
That's what hit me a few weeks ago while editing a memoir for a new client.
I got the assignment around dinnertime Tuesday and the deadline was noon Saturday.
I found myself looking up words I'd never given a second thought. Usually, it was for how they're written, not what they mean. Particularly odd to me was looking up "god-damn," one of many sailor-esque phrases the author's mom was fond of. (His comparison, not mine.)
Sorry, but I don't even say it, it came as no surprise that how to write it eluded me.
Capitalization and hyphenation were up for grabs, but tense turned out to be the bigger question. Think about it. Wouldn't it make sense that it would be past tense, if it's literal and someone were meaning that something was damned by God? With that logic, I changed the guy's present tense to past.
But, I added it to a list of things to run through the Chicago Manual of Style before I sent the manuscript back.
Hmmm ... Seems present tense was correct. Or might be.
I was surprised to discover that Chicago style is more wishywashy than others I've used. So I switched to another rule of editing: Don't change it if you don't have to.
As I was going along, through 86,000 words, I also learned about awhile and a while. What's the difference? Well, it seems that the one-word version is never preceded by a preposition; and the two-word version can be.
Why?
No time to find out. I had a deadline.
I also found myself on a word search, of sorts; 86,000 words seemed like a lot, so I checked to see how many are in "War and Peace." Okay, not so bad. Tolstoy took more than 560,000 to get the job done. And the Bible? 181,253.
Then there was shut-eye. My sense that it needed a hyphen sent me online and landed me in wiki-land.
Looking for the shut-eye that means "nap,"I found its other meaning: "In the lingo of stage magicians, illusionists, and mentalists, a shut eye is a performer who becomes so adept at the illusion of mind reading that the performer comes to believe that he or she actua... " I read no further. I had a deadline to meet.
And that I did, by several hours.
Maybe now I should go back and really learn some new things.

72,435 things that will really help —

I read a while back that people are drawn to lists, especially ones that might tell them something about themselves. It's why you see so many lifestyle magazines with numbers on their covers. 61 ways to tell if someone dislikes you more than spinach, 92 ways to reuse that butter wrapper ... you know what I mean.

The list I was drawn to last night offered 7 things about blogs. Unfortunately, when I went looking for it this morning, I found that there are apparently 7 x 70 things we need to know about blogs, all broken up among various people with their own opinions. So, I'll be sharing what I remember of the first 7.

Let's see ... there was advice about putting pictures with posts (I tried that two weeks ago, so I get 1/40 of a point) Videos are good, too. Another said create your own attractive, compelling layout instead of using a template. (I get, maybe, 1/82 of a point for at least not using Wordpress, which is the one they dissed in the column.) Don't write about yourself; nobody wants to hear about it. Even though I get that, I obviously get zippo, nada, nothing in the way of points.

However, in my defense, I'm not plummeting into negative numbers, a scale I wouldn't have thought existed until last night when I checked out a blog that a craigslist poster wanted help editing. Not only was it first-person (with no paragraph breaks) she immediately launched into a diatribe about the married man she's having an affair with.

That's right. I don't care.

Part two of that advice: You're supposed to try to use the blog to tell people about something they might not otherwise know. I think I'll try that next time out. Won't those things be hard to come by, though? Wait, I guess not. I just this minute went back to the search results and noticed one blogger's answer to the problem: "7 creative uses for poop."

Finally (if you're counting, this is only 4): Try to post regularly.

Hmm ... I'll have to work on that one, too.