Day 41: Catching Fire

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.  ISBN: 9780439023498.

I had to rewrite this post, I tried writing it once when I finally got to the public library in Tennessee.  By that point I had been awake for over 12 hours (most of which were spent driving in the rain), and it showed.  So hopefully this post will be a little more, um, coherent and a lot less rambly.

During the first novel, Katniss pretends to be in love with Peeta, the other tribute from her district.  Later we discover that it's genuine on Peeta's part.  Katniss continues the charade until the Games are over because it gains her sponsors (people who would send needed supplies into the arena).  Because she and Peeta become national celebrities, they have to pretend to be in love again anytime there is a new Games.  I'd give you more details as to why, but that would give away more plot than I'm willing to; besides, this isn't a review.

Of course, Peeta and Katniss's relationship makes me wonder under what circumstances would I be willing to feign love or romantic/sexual interest in someone.  We'll go ahead and assume that in order to save my life I would be willing to play the part, but there are so many other circumstances where a relationship could put you into a better situation than you're currently in.

In my case, I think I would be willing to marry someone for financial comfort/luxury (this is assuming that I hadn't met my fiance yet, etc., etc.).  I am not going to lie to you or myself: if I could still maintain some level of freedom and individuality, I would be okay with marrying someone I was not in love with.  Now, I would have to find them at least reasonably interesting and be capable of maintaining a conversation with them, but as far as everything else goes it wouldn't really matter to me.  I would still have a life outside of the marriage, and giving up on the possibility of love isn't really a new idea for me.

Maybe this sounds cruel, and a little bit gold-diggerish, but it's actually a more traditional sense of marriage, except there's no male hand in it besides the one I theoretically choose.  Ultimately, marriage is a contract between two consenting adults to live their lives together and share their households.  If both parties profit, one receiving financial comfort and the other receiving physical affection, sexual satisfaction, and companionship, I don't actually see anything morally wrong with this.  Ideally, both parties would be aware of what the other party is about and gracefully step down if and when the opportunity for real love shows up, but in the end what real business is it if someone does marry for financial comfort?  There are so many reasons to be in a relationship, I can certainly think of worse reasons to marry someone.

Having said that, I do think there at least needs to be a level of compassion and comraderie.  I would never marry someone I hated; hell, I avoid spending even five minutes with people I hate.  Life is too short for that.  But there have been men, and even women, in my life whose company I've enjoyed enough that if they told me they wanted to take care of me for the rest of my life and all I had to do was marry them, I would be lying if I said I wouldn't at least think about it.

Whoops, I hit publish too early.  Feel free to ignore this one if it showed up on your readers twice.

Day 40: Catching Fire

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.  ISBN: 9780439023498.

First of all, I would like to apologize for the recent slew of guest posts.  For those of you who read regularly/know me personally, you know I was in Tennessee for a job interview, and, well, I ended up staying an extra day.  You know that flood in Nashville?  Yeah, I got caught in that.  Luckily I was in no direct danger, but I was not actually able to get to the university's campus, so we ended up having my interview in the hotel lobby.  If I get the job, I will have a great story.  If I don't get the job, I am going to bitch about it forever.  Or at least until I get hired somewhere else.

So what does all of this have to do with Catching Fire?  I can't help but feel like I'm going through some of the same things that the tributes of the Hunger Games went through.  I'm obviously not being thrown in with a bunch of other candidates and fighting them to the death, but in some ways the situation feels just as dire.  The person who doesn't get the job is much poorer for it, despite the fact that they may be an excellent candidate who just had a really bad interview, or didn't write an outstanding cover letter.  You're facing people who are trying to find things they don't like about you so they can eliminate you from the pool of applicants.

And in some ways the kids in the Hunger Games have it a little easier, because they know who they're facing.  I have no idea who the other candidates are, where they come from, what their background is, or what their skills are.  I have a fairly beefy resume for someone so young, but I can't compete with someone who's been in a cataloging position for 10 years...except that it'd be cheaper to hire me.

The interview process itself reminds me a lot of the preliminary bullshit the tributes have to go through for the Hunger Games.  There's the total makeovers, where their bodies are stripped of hair and their nails are redone and hair cuts and new clothes, etc.  Here are just a few of the things I did for the interview that I don't normally do: wore a skirt; bought and wore panty hose; shaved my legs more than once a week (I wear pants, why would I shave my legs more than I have to?); painted my nails with clear nail polish; wore a full face of makeup (if I want to look nice at work I'll usually just do my eyes); and woke up before 7AM.  Not to mention there's that urge to act like the person the search committee is looking for rather than acting like myself.  For the most part I have tried to be myself through the entire interview process.  I am as honest with my answers as possible, even against the advice of the many, many online resources that tell you not to do certain things.

For instance, during my interview there was a portion where I had to review a catalog record for mistakes.  I said, "Wow, it's been so long and I'm not quite sure, but I think this is what's wrong."  The director of the library actually told me that he was glad I said I wasn't sure, because he'd rather have someone who would look it up rather than plowing through and making mistakes in the catalog (which can royally mess things up).  It's funny, because I don't think he was supposed to say things like that.  Normally in an interview you'll have no idea how the search committee feels about you one way or the other, but since we happened to have the interview off campus it seems that maybe they were a little more lax with me.  But there is always a question of how much of yourself do you present to the search committee.  Do you tell them what they want to hear and hope they don't know you're lying through your teeth?

As hard as it is, I think it's better to be honest and lose a potential job than get a job that you hate.  After interviewing with the university in Tennessee (I'll tell you the name if/when I get hired), I am more confident about the position than before.  I think this is a very good sign both for myself and the university if they hire me.  I think we'll both be happy together, and to be honest that means more to me than how much they're going to pay me.  I love that I got along so well with the search committee, I love what little I was able to see of the university before the bridge leading into that side of town flooded, and I especially love that they were willing to come meet me in a hotel lobby despite the fact that work had been cancelled for them and they very well could have asked me to come back later.

So now comes the part where I'm actually in the arena, so to speak.  Somewhere there's another candidate or two trying to "kill me" and get "my" job.  In some ways I will feel bad if I get the job, because for all I know the person I'm taking it from has three kids they have to feed, whereas I'll only have myself and my fiance.  But then if I don't get this job I'll starve.  Maybe not literally, but my life is poorer without work; in fact I'm almost loathe to call it much of a life at all, because it is missing that key element which will make it complete for me.

Day 39: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.  ISBN: 9780060850524.

A few months ago, I kick-started my current rush through my ages-old book list with back-to-back readings of 1984 and Brave New World.  And while I liked the former for its alternate history and linguistic efforts, Brave New World was the novel that really got me thinking.

In some hidden corner in the interwebs, I while away the hours reviewing music albums.  Music is really my "thing"; I spend a lot of time keeping up with who's doing what, and I listen to everything I can, from all over the world.  I have lots of opinions on music in general, and of course I have some pet peeves, one of the biggest being "indie music".

What started as a general movement away from large record companies (independent music) has metamorphosed into what I consider to be a free-for-all of total expression with no direction (indie music).  Indie music today is a mishmash of offkey singing and cacophonous orchestras, of screechy guitar solos and highly pretentious, poetic lyrics that make little sense.  And this bothers me.  I don't understand it, and for the most part, I don't like it.  I detest the jarring music, I mock singers who seem unable to sing, and I resent the pretention with a passion bordering on a blood feud.

But whether I like indie music or not, after reading Brave New World, I have to admit that the experimental and the artistic have their place in the world.  I could almost say that they're the most important art forms we have right now.  Pop music is catchy and accessible, and therein lies the problem.  Placating simple tastes with jangly hooks buries intellectualism and mutes experience.  People need to be made to think about what it is they encounter.  They can't be allowed to wallow in the mentally unstimulating surface pleasantries, or we risk developing a Brave New World, where art is produced by machine for easy consumption and no one is expected to think about anything.

This novel really made me question my opinions on music.  I mean, I love fiction that goes beyond standard boundaries, and the same can be said about my thoughts on visual art, but why put music on a pedestal?  So rather than railing against indie music and all of its shrieky, offkey, pretentious badness, I've had to step back, look at what's really important, and say, "Thank you, indie music, for keeping us from the Brave New World."

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.

Day 38: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born by Stephen King, Peter David, Robin Furth, and Jason Lee (Illustrator).  ISBN: 9780785121442.

Having been sick this passed weekend, I was not up for reading anything that had more paragraphs than pictures or more figurative language than thought balloons, so I figured a graphic novel was my best bet. I saved the Dark Tower comics for when I finished the epic seven-tome series, because I assumed - especially with a title like Gunslinger Born - that the comics would not follow the books’ chronology. Before I digress into bigger-picture stuff, I just have to criticize this book a bit, because it’s only fair to those who may really be looking forward to it, or, worse, planning to skip the two thousand or so pages of the novels and only catch the story in graphic novel form.

Number one, way too much narration! Who the heck is the narrator? Shut up already! Number two, even though Roland’s origin is technically “the beginning,” our introduction to his story shouldn’t start here because it’s harder to care about Roland the Boy before we’ve known Roland the Man. Number three, the artist can’t or won’t draw backgrounds. I feel like I’m looking at stills from a no-budget play. Lastly, you definitely won’t understand the richness of the world or the characters if you read this first (or only). It definitely feels like they wrote it knowing only die-hard Tower fans would pick it up.

What was I saying about the big picture? Oh yes. So this book is rated for mature audiences because of cartoon breasts and many, many, many innuendos and allusions to women being raped/used and men attacking things with their penises. . . I mean guns . . . No, wait, I mean penises. An actual quote: “…to be truly a man, one must learn to wield all weapons of manhood, including the weapon that God gives men at birth.”

I understand all the male characters in this book are juiced up on testosterone and the women - even the ones intended to be strong - are little more than sex objects (or at the very least, have no real agency without the love of a good man behind them - even Eddie and Susannah fall into this), but I don’t think it’s far off base to wonder if real-life dudes really think about their penises this way. Certainly, men see women as something to be conquered. Our very language is built upon this concept, for example, the Random House Dictionary definition of “deflower” is “to deprive (a woman) of virginity; to despoil of beauty, freshness, sanctity, etc.”  And how does one usually go about conquering something? Oh, yes. With weapons. Weaponized penises. Penisized weapons? (Is this blog rated PG?* I want to draw a picture of this. No? Okay…)

As not only a woman, but also a lesbian, I can’t very well make the blanket statement that “men are more obsessed with their own penises than any woman ever will be,” but, come on, men are more obsessed with their own penises more than any woman ever will be. On the flip side, I am quite fond and protective of my vagina. (Weaponized vagina? Can I draw that? Please?) I like my vagina more than I like anyone else’s vagina (but I am single right now). Still, I don’t want to conquer other vaginas with my vagina, and if I were straight, I don’t think I’d want to conquer penises either. But maybe that’s what men are afraid of (vagina dentata, anyone?), so rather than admit to being able to be conquered, they go on the offensive and play the aggressor.

I don’t know. I just want to draw an epic battle of weaponized genitals. (Please?)

Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime.


*For those of you wondering, no this blog is not rated PG.  I did mark it has having "adult themes."  I don't care if you read it and you're underaged, but you should at least know what you're getting into.

Day 37: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

Naked Moon by Domenic Stansberry.  ISBN: 9780312364540.

Working at the bookstore, I always see these people coming in and buying stacks and stacks of clearance mystery/thriller paperbacks, and I envy them. Those books look so fun, and gosh it must be nice to have the time to read so many each week, which I assume they do as they are in here often enough for me to know them by name.  Granted, I also buy stacks and stacks of books that I’ve yet to read, but they’re mostly Joyce Carol Oates novels or short story collections I intend to someday not only read but learn from. To me, a one-dollar paperback mystery novel is not anything I can learn from; it’s sheer leisure-reading, which I just don’t have time for these days.

That’s why I was excited to be assigned Stansberry’s Naked Moon this week in the Writers on Writing class I’m TA-ing. Not only is it a mystery novel, it’s a noir, which apparently has its own set of traditions (some might say “clichés”). This particular story (the fourth and final in the series) takes place in North Beach, San Francisco's predominantly Italian-American neighborhood, and focuses on ex-cop Dante Mancuso (a very noir-ish name) as he struggles to escape the shadowy underground agency he used to be part of.

Sometimes I like stories that are predictable. I like to take a break from endless character development and fancy prose stylin’s and get lost in a twisty plot and hardboiled, bare-knuckled dialogue. I remember reading my dad’s Spencer novels (R.I.P. Robert B. Parker) when I was a kid and marveling that entire pages would shoot by in streams of tagless back-and-forth, one-liner dialogue that often made absolutely no sense to my young brain. I remember needing to get my parents to sign some form at the library granting me permission to read “adult” books, like Parker or Stephen King, because I was under thirteen. The first novel I read (Goosebumps and Fear Street books aside) was Dean Koontz’s Intensity, and I remember being just so absolutely riveted. Recently I reread it and realized just how extremely lacking it is in literary grace, but there is no denying that the concept - the plot and character ideas - was captivatingly original.

I can’t say I had a lot of fun with Naked Moon, though. The dialogue wasn’t as snappy as, evidently, I prefer my mystery parlance to be. It was cool to read about a semi-fictionalized San Francisco that I’m still taking baby steps in exploring, and it was clear that the history of the city is very important and inspiring to the author. Stansberry did win an Edgar Award, so he’s doing something right for fans of the genre. As part of the class, I also got to meet him and hear him talk about the traditions of the genre and the blurred lines of genre fiction and literary fiction. I am encouraged by this idea of blended genres; my writing seems to be edging more and more into realms of this so-called magical realism with elements of horror and I’d like to think there is some space out there in the publishing universe in which it can fit. Time will tell.


Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime.

Day 36: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

White Oleander by Janet Fitch.  ISBN 978-0316284950.

The thing I love about book-into-movie adaptations is that, without them, I never would have read this book. I remember seeing all the pretty people in the trailer for this movie in 1999, and thinking, “Maybe I should read the book first.” And I’m grateful I did, because the movie is forgettable, but the book….oh, the book.

I reread it about once a year. Once, I went through and read it with pencil in hand and made a bunch of comments in the margins simply exclaiming over the lyrical prose or depths of complexity in this passage or that. And I never write in my books, even when I’m reading something for class (that’s what post-its are for). It’s the first book I recommend to anyone who asks, and it’s the last book I’ll ever lend out to anyone again after my original copy was never returned (even though you can buy them for a dollar on clearance at Half Priced Books, but that’s not the point!).

Five years later, when I was 19 and on my first co-op in a new city surrounded by new people and new experiences, I decided to get a tattoo. This tattoo would not only mark this particularly exciting time in my life but also hold great and potent meaning for all of time. I decided on an oleander, orange flames licking up from its center. Because goddamn that book has just burrowed into one of my heart valves and pitched camp. I really don’t know what it is; yes Fitch’s prose is beautiful, her characters are strong and flawed and ugly and gorgeously dispossessed, but that’s not just it either. Maybe it’s because, at 14, when I was swimming in a sea of Stephen King and Dean Koontz-infested literary waters, and my school was having us read such classic, award-winning tales as Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, and maybe feeling a little dispossessed myself, I grabbed a hold of this emotionally raw, character-rich life-raft and just let it needed it to take me someplace else.

White Oleander didn’t inspire me to want to be a writer.  Heck, I’d already written one staggeringly insightful, Goosebumps-esque novel entitled My Bro is a Psycho, but the reaction it incited in me sparked my aspirations to someday,  maybe, if I’m lucky and good enough, write something that will incite the same sort of reaction in someone else.

This is really a thank-you letter to Janet Fitch. But, then again, I thank her with every word I lay down on the page. Or, at least, I hope I do.


Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime. 

Day 35: Watership Down

Watership Down by Richard Adams.  ISBN: 978-0380002931.

"To feel the end of a time of anxiety and fear!  To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse - the cloud that dulled the heart and made  happiness no more than a memory!  This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature."  Page 72.

My friends, I am currently living in a time of anxiety and fear, that I hope will soon be lifted.  I have less than a day until I head down to Tennessee for my first in-person job interview since, uh, November?!  I feel that I've been pretty successful at getting interviews, having one almost every month since October or November, but it has not been easy.  I have had days where I've looked at the list of jobs I need to apply to, thrown up my hands, and grabbed the nearest pint of ice cream to shove in my face.

I feel like I'm closer to getting this job than any that's come before, with the exception of that public library job in Georgia.  This job is closer to what I want, and despite the fact that it's not ideal, I think I will be happy there and the people seem pretty nice.  I'm also getting that weird feeling of, "I've had my life on hold for so long I don't know if I'm capable of just living it again."  Honestly, I've been unemployed for so long now I almost don't want a job.  Most of this is because it comes at a time when I've finally found a project to keep me occupied (my blog) and I'm doing some freelance work as a personal assistant/organizer for a professor from Bowling Green State University.  These are things that make unemployment feel like more of a vacation, and I'm not just sitting there watching my bank account dwindle.  It's not growing, but at least cash isn't being sucked out of it at an astonishing rate.

But I know - I know, know, know - that once I get this job I will feel so much better about my life and my situation, and I will finally be able to remember what it feels like to walk by without that cloud of doom over my head. And to celebrate, I'm going to get married.  As much as I would love to have the planned wedding and reception for my first wedding, I think I'm just going to leap in and do the courthouse wedding instead.  Don't worry, we'll still have a ceremony and reception later, maybe for our anniversary, but getting married once I have a job just makes sense from the legal/financial/health insurance point of view.  And I feel like I've done enough waiting to start my life over the past 9 months.

Day 34: Watership Down

Watership Down by Richard Adams.  ISBN: 978-0380002931.

I love watching Hazel develop from an outsider in his warren into a leader of his own group of misfit rabbits. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't get the chance to really develop leadership skills or act as leaders within their area of expertise.  This is a damn shame because it makes you grow as a person and realize what your limitations are.  Everyone has some limited leadership skills based on what they're naturally good at, it's only a matter of speaking up when those abilities are needed for the task at hand.  It's just that many of us don't get to use these abilities or we speak up about them because there are so damned many of us, and therefore someone is bound to be better at something than we are.  Or at least that's we think.

Hazel probably wouldn't have done much of anything in his original warren.  He is obviously capable of making good decisions for his small clan, but without the opportunity to lead he likely would have been just another rabbit in the hole.

I sort of felt like just another rabbit at Antioch until I was asked by a couple of friends to run as coordinator of Dialogia (philosophy club).  I had no intention of running philosophy club, and I didn't think I would be good at it for several reasons. Namely, I don't have a background in philosophy at all and while I had taken a few classes here and there, my understanding of some of the core ideas was rudimentary at best.  However, I am a master at planning and I can clean the hell out of a room and keep it clean (if I don't have to live in it).  So I took up the challenge and I had a great time doing it.

There were fights of course, mostly with other political bodies on campus.  For some reason everyone on one of the councils had issues with giving us funding, despite the fact we had already been voted in as an Independent Group and had a right to that funding.  It was also very difficult to balance my two jobs on campus (as library assistant and art model), my three to four classes, and doing research for my senior project and eventually writing the damn thing.  But I work extremely well under pressure, especially for the first year or so.  I just wish that everyone had had the opportunity to feel how I felt watching Dialogia grow from one of the more obscure groups on campus to one of the most vocal and active.  I wish I could do it all over again.


Richard Adams will be celebrating his 90th birthday on May 9th, 2010.  The reading of Watership Down was not planned to coincide, but I thought I would mention it since it was so close.  Let's send the man birthday cards!  Address provided below:

Richard Adams
c/o Author mail, 7th Floor
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
(212) 207-7000

Day 33: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

The Elvenbane by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey.  ISBN: 9780312851064.

My journey into the world of the Elvenbane started, where else, at the library.  I was holding a copy of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, when my fiancée went, "Here, read this," and stuck this other book into my hand.  Needless to say, I was just a little resentful (I started a list of books to read while working at the college bookstore back in the early '00's, I'm just now getting around to them, and I was really looking forward to reading Left Hand), but I gave it a shot.  I almost put it down after the first two chapters -- in fact, I would have, if I didn't feel the need to at least humor her -- but I'm glad I didn't.  Four chapters of dense introduction later, I found myself engaged by the deep characters and gritty, realistic relationships between them.  I'm currently on chapter two of the second book in the series, if that's any indicator.

Elvenbane got me thinking about the role of fantasy in my life.  I'm a huge geek.  I've done my time as a LARPer and in the pits of tabletop gaming.  I used to obsess over dragons when I was in high school.  "Sci-fi and fantasy" is my response when I'm asked what my favorite genres of fiction are.  I've lately fallen out of the fantasy geek lifestyle, setting aside my nights of gaming until 3 AM for schooling and handheld video games.  So in many ways, Elvenbane was a reintroduction to "real", or, as I put it, "serious" fantasy once more.

See, the fantasy series I'm currently reading (waiting for the next book, as a matter of fact) is Jim Butcher's fantastic Dresden Files series.  But that's urban fantasy, and the main characters are cynical modern era snarkfests.  Before that, I was heavily mixed up in the Xanth and Redwall series, the former using puns and comedy as driving forces for the plot, and the latter a much lighter fare aimed at young adults.  (Coincidentally, I fell out of reading both those series for more or less the same reason: I realized they were falling into formulaic collages of repeating tropes.  Brian Jacques has been writing the same novel for at least the last decade, while Piers Anthony is a perverted old bigot who lets his fans dictate far too much of his writing.)

So this leaves me at the Dragonriders of Pern, my first real love as fantasy series go.  I received a three-volume set of the first three books for Christmas when I was sixteen or so and spent the next two years engrossed in the stories.  The books taught me to love and respect dragons as amazing mythical creatures of grace, power, and beauty...  And therein lay some of the problem.  See, Pern is what I would consider the epitome of "serious fantasy": the novels are written with an eye towards romance and escapism, and any suggestion that there might be something inherently overblown about the whole thing will usually be met with derision, if not by the author then certainly by her leagues of rabid fans.  As a side note, I haven't read a Pern book in at least eight years.  I'm terrified of returning to the series and realizing that my childhood love wasn't as well written as I thought it was, or of making some other earth-shattering discovery.

Back to Elvenbane.  While the initial setup reminded me of this sort of highbrow, self-infatuated sort of fantasy writing, the novel really works to break the romanticism down.  You've got the high courts of the elven lords, and the magical realms of the dragons, but both of these worlds are presented as stagnant and hidebound.  The Elvenbane is the chaotic element, challenging traditions, breaking down barriers, and making those set in their ways more than a little uncomfortable.  Even better, I'm fairly certain that one scene in particular is a direct jab at Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders.  (She and Mercedes Lackey have written together, so it may very well be in good fun.)  Valyn, the young elven lord, is riding on the back of a dragon, trying to get help for their band, and, having an awful time of it with all the bouncing and heights and whatnot, reflects on the romantic stories he'd been told in his youth of people riding dragons, and just what hogwash it all was.

I could probably turn this into a lengthy literary analysis, but I think the conclusions should be obvious at this point.  I'm thankful to my fiancée for introducing me to this book, because if nothing else, it's reminded me what fantasy is meant for: helping us to think about the world in novel ways.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.

*This post was originally written April 25, 2010 and saved as an emergency post to give the regular author a freakin' break.  Also, this isn't quite in-line for my project, but it's close enough I'm willing to let it through.  Nepotism is awesome.

Day 32: Rx

Rx by Tracy Lynn.  ISBN: 9781416911555.

College applications.  I can't even remember my college applications or what essay they asked me.  I think Antioch's had something to do with, "How do you define community?" or some granola crap like that.  In Rx, Thyme (the main character) gets asked to "write your own question and answer it."  I don't really know how useful that essay topic would be to the college since if it was me I'd probably copy-pasta an essay I had to write for a different application and change details as necessary.

But it got me to thinking about how...useful college application questions might be when not used as an anxiety-inducing, potentially life-altering exercise.  Which is kind of funny since I don't remember any of my essay questions.  Somewhere out there I bet someone has a blog that does nothing but answer college application essays, and if not, I want there to be one; the snarkier the better, graphics a definite plus. Especially with graphics.

Oh yeah, and I love off-the-wall essay questions like the ones the University of Chicago has.  I think this is a great way to get freshman to talk to each other because it immediately gives them a shared topic, and one that is probably going to be pretty safe.  Just look at one of their essay questions, 

"If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net.)"

Seriously?  This is kind of an awesome question.  First of all, the question does not assume your competency at tightrope walking.  So those who boldly state that they would walk over lava might not be the best candidates for your college, because they don't know to prepare for that kind of walk.  On the other hand, if they can write a fabulous essay about how well they can tightrope walk and it would be the most daring walk of all time, it might be a good risk because they're aware of the work it would take and they also have a sense of adventure.  Someone who would only walk over water, etc. might not be adventurous enough.

Here's an interesting one: if you were a college admissions counselor what kind of question would you want applicants to answer?*

*Hey, if you ask them in the comments, I might just give you an answer.  So comment already.