... but not delivered until now: some pictures taken by beatnikside when he and I switched cameras for a couple of hours at the Happiest Place on Earth.

Clearly, that lady with the cards hyp-mo-tized me.

Progressively responsible leadership.
Marshalling resources.
Managing multiple projects.
Balancing global concerns with attention to detail.
Versatile and student-centered.
Innovative approaches to the use of technology in the classroom.
Maintaining productivity in a deadline-driven environment.
Conflict resolution skills.
Increased site traffic by a blurgazillion percent.

Thinking up this kind of crap doesn't come naturally to me at all. It's driving me just a little bit insane, especially because I'm applying for a wide variety of jobs right now.

1) Editing gigs (requires corporate-friendly resume)
2) Higher education administration gigs (requires a strange combination of corporate-friendly and academic-friendly resume; combination changes with job title)
3) Things like part-time tutoring gigs that can generate quick cash (they get a resuvita, which isn't a word, but should be)
4) Tenure-track jobs at community colleges (requires first serious revision of CV in quite some time)

That last one's newer. I wasn't considering it before, largely because I'm not sure I want to be a full-time community college instructor. But then, I started looking at jobs, and I got a sense of what's out there that I want to do, am qualified for, and would receive adequate compensation for. There isn't a whole lot, so I was indulging in some anticipatory despair.

And then, I kept coming across these job listings for full-time positions in community colleges. The college up the street is hiring—I could actually walk to work. Other nearby colleges are hiring, too; there are at least two more within ten miles of my house. The community colleges around here seem to give instructors a more reasonable load than many do. I've learned that a typical position in this area requires that you teach 3 courses per semester, not the 4 or 5 common at many junior colleges. A typical position gives you two full months off per year, plus holidays. A typical position pays somewhere in the mid-40s to start. And if I don't like it, I don't have to do it for the rest of my life. I can do, you know, something else.

I have no idea why this didn't sound good to me before, because it sounds pretty damn good now. Actually, I do know why, but it's too complicated to get into at 3 in the morning. So, yeah. I'm putting together several totally different versions of resumes and vitae and in-between-type documents, and it's time to stop now, because these things get to you after a while.

Experienced headspinner with outstanding yoga pants.

You see?

Have you seen these commercials? I was going to paraphrase them loosely, but then I found actual transcripts.

Guy #1: It's a ploy.
Guy #2: What?
Guy #1: This "Drug Money Funds Terror"; it's a ploy.
Guy #2: A ploy.
Guy #1: A — a manipulation.
Guy #2: Ploy.
Guy #1: "Drug money funds terror," I mean, why should I believe that?
Guy #2: Because it's a fact.
Guy #1: A fact.
Guy #2: F-A-C-T. Fact.
Guy #1: So you're saying that I should believe it because it's true. That's your argument.
Guy #2: It is true.

And that's it! Guy #2 wins, not because he has used anything that looks even an eensy, weensy bit like logical reasoning or evidence, but because he was that kid in elementary school who could say, "I know you are, but what am I?" 400 times and still be up for another 400. He also did just fine in spelling, which is a good thing, because as everyone knows, spelling something out makes it more true.

"Who are you?"
"I'm the mack daddy."
"You are not the mack daddy."
"Am too. M-A-C-K D-A-D-D-Y."
"Oh! I see."

If you're me at this point, you're hoping the ad was supposed to be open-ended—that they couldn't possibly show us two adults arguing at recess and expect us to be nodding our heads and thinking, "Yeah, it's true because it's true, dipshit!" But nope. There's a part II, and here's how it starts:

Guy #1: Okay, so it's true.
Guy #2: What's true?
Guy #1: Drug money funds terrorism.
Guy #2: It is true.
Guy #1: Okay!
Guy #2: Okay?

And I'm not even going to get into the rest of the commercial, because addressing what's wrong with it requires discussing a whole other set of issues about just how drug money has been linked to terrorism. They're complex issues that are worth getting into, but I don't feel like getting into them right now, because they're not my point.

So...

The bad news is not just that critical thinking is a waste of airtime; it's also obstinate and quite possibly un-American, seeing as how questioning the argument of someone who hasn't actually presented an argument can align you with terrorists so easily.

The good news is that I'm the mack daddy.

I just staged my own little Three Stooges movie. I played all three stooges. All that's left to do is poke myself in both eyes.

When I was in junior high, I was in the habit of fidgeting a greal deal while I talked on the phone. I still tend to fidget while I'm on the phone, but not nearly as much as I did then—and when I fidget now, I'm generally aware of what I'm doing. Back then, my hands just kind of fluttered around on their own, and I didn't pay much attention to what they were up to.

That's how I ended up stapling myself from time to time. I'd sit on the kitchen counter, twirling the phone cord around—phones had cords 20 years ago, whippersnappers—and when I was done twirling, I'd start playing with the Swingline. After putting a couple dozen staples into whatever was handy, I'd start air stapling, which is kind of like being in an air band, only more bureaucratic. Ch-chung! Ch-chung! Ch-chung! went the Swingline, and then fuck! I'd have a staple in my finger. I once stapled myself twice during a single phone conversation, though in my defense, it was a very long conversation. If I were on a nature show, I'd be that little calf the lions decide to isolate from the herd and rip to shreds. "Let's go for the one with all the staples in her hooves," they'd say to each other.

I think someone should start a band and call it "Tricksy Hobbitses." If you need a doo-wop girl, give me a ring.

You know, I think most men don't have any real idea of what healthy weight ranges for women are. I think that when they think of a hypothetical woman at a given height and try to come up with a number for her weight, they tend to undershoot the healthy range, often dramatically. I can't seem to find any articles on this topic, so this is just my impression, and it's quite possible that I'm wrong. Still, I keep overhearing or reading things that are way off: at one point, I overheard a guy tell his friend that a woman who's six feet tall "should" weigh around 125 (depending on frame size, an ideal weight for a woman that tall would be somewhere between 140 and 180). I remember reading about a personals site for which registrants filled out a form listing characteristics they wanted in someone they dated. The site maintainers ended up changing "desired weight range" from a numerical value to something like "thinner, average, larger, or no preference" when they found that something like 80% of the men who registered with the site wanted to date someone "under 115 pounds." 115 pounds might be a healthy weight if you're somewhere between 4'11" and 5'3". Even then, it's slender. There are more examples, but you get the idea.

I have no idea whether or not this kind of distortion, when it exists, translates to real-world rather than hypothetical examples. If what I'm talking about is, in fact, common, then you'd think that men would often underestimate the weight of women they actually know. But since most of the men I know have the good sense not to walk around guessing the weight of their female acquaintances, that's even trickier territory.

O sublime elf boy,
Fact is,
You're no good to me
Without the hair.

I have to go to LA tomorrow and take a full-length version of the SAT verbal section so that this company I'll be working for soon can confirm that I don't actually suck at taking the test. I don't suck at taking the test; I never have. But still, I'm managing to muster a fair amount of paranoia about it. It's not so much that I'm worried about doing well enough on the test for them to officially hire me; I only have to get over a 700 or so, and I can't remember the last time I scored under a 700. It's more that I'm a closet perfectionist about such things. You can miss a few questions and still get an 800, but I hate missing any of the questions. I don't want the "missed two" 800—I want the perfect score that really is a perfect score.

This kind of thing doesn't fit anywhere in the scheme of things I might identify as my intellectual value system. It's ridiculous. But it doesn't go away. I can sit around talking with friends about how I think people shouldn't obsess about grades and test scores, and I really do mean what I say. At the same time, I've never managed to break myself of my own tendency to be a score whore.

I don't usually talk about it. It feels like a dirty secret. Some people might get so wrapped up in publicly maintaining a diet that they find themselves hiding candy they intend to eat when nobody's looking. Me, I was the one who'd sneak to a phone (for the eighth time that day) and call the university's automatic reporting system until all my grades were in for a given term. When I was an undergrad, I sometimes called two or three times after that, too—grades at the UW were in numerical rather than letter form, so instead of getting a B+ in a class, you might get a 3.4. If you got a 4.0 in a class, the automatic voice on the telephone would congratulate you.

Yup, I called a machine just because I liked it when the voice said, "Four point zero. Congratulations!"

This is not to say that I wanted all my grades to be perfect. If, for example, I chose not to attend one of my classes regularly, I acknowledged the fact that I was probably going to miss some things that would end up on a test. With classes I didn't care about, I did a sort of informal cost-benefit analysis to figure out what kind of grade was worth the time I freed up. It was more that I needed to understand my instructors' rationales for giving the grades they gave, and I wasn't happy unless those grades were at or above what I thought I actually deserved (which was generally lower than the grades I got). And I always hated getting a 3.9 in a class. "Why couldn't they just bump it up a tenth of a point," I would think—to myself, because complaining about these sorts of things openly is a fabulous way to piss off your peers (yet another reason I don't usually own up to caring). "Give a girl a break. It's an A either way. Besides, you're making me cancel my 'congratulations!' date with the automatic phone man, and he was going to put out, I just know it."

So tomorrow I go do sentence completions and analogies, and I answer some reading comprehension questions. And I will not stay up extra late so that I can download another practice exam and take it, just to be sure I haven't forgotten how to do it. Because I haven't. And the exam doesn't fucking matter. The chances that I'll go blank and disqualify myself from this job are quite slim, and I already went to college. The exam doesn't matter. Right? Right.

I might just take one quick peek at that old list of word groups I put together for my students a few years ago. Just a quick one. Because it would be such a shame if I forgot what "ukase" means. Not that it matters.