"Vocationalism is an educational system whose purposes are dominated by preparation for primarily economic roles and where there is adequate access so that many could reasonably expect additional schooling."

This is a typical sentence in the dissertation I'm editing right now. "Just edit for punctuation and formatting," he says. Don't they always?

I am sad.

Not depressed, not actively unhappy, just sad. I'm sad because I'm stuck at home on the hump night of a long weekend, slogging through an editing assignment that holds my interest not a whit. I'm sad because I'm beginning a long stretch of time in which I'll have almost no relief from work or school. I'm sad because those circumstances will in turn give me almost no time to reconfigure my mindset before I hop a plane to Cuba, which means I'll still be decompressing at the beginning of a once in a lifetime travel experience.

I'm also sad because my husband would rather be anywhere than here right now, and I don't really blame him--I'm cranky, I'm phlegmy, I'm preoccupied.... I'm no fun. But these things perpetuate themselves, don't they? I'm no fun in part because my husband doesn't want to be around me. It's a lousy experience, knowing your spouse is off with a friend kvetching about your unfunness, while you're stuck at home working on an endless freelance assignment that you're only doing for the money.

I'm a'wishin' some nice email would spring out of the ether right now. That would cheer me. But I may have to go shopping for organic skin products instead. The cranky, overworked, money-driven professional drowning her sorrows in a sustainably produced jar of organic brown sugar body scrub -- if that doesn't encapsulate my muddled East Coast/West Coast mindframe these days, I don't know what does.

I love Amazon deliveries. They always cheer me. Today's haul:

The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. Am I the last person on earth not to have read this book? Possibly.

In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton. Feeding my natural- and man-made-disaster festish, a book about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the survivors' efforts to, well, survive some more. Lots of shark attacks in this one, so you know I'm on board.

Activism Inc. by Dana R. Fisher. You know those folks who come to your door asking for money to support their urgent urgent URGENT cause? This book is about them. Which is to say, it's about me. Not only was I one of those folks for a summer, but for a year and a half following I was one of the folks who manage the offices that send out those folks. One of my largest regrets from that era is that I didn't keep copious notes during the experience; it really does lend itself either to a research project or a roman a clef. Sounds like the author went with the first approach, although in the preface she mentions that she canvassed herself for a little bit. This one I'll be reading first. A full report will follow, involving lots of comparing and contrasting.

Eh, you know, actually, I've decided to turn this into an ancillary blog -- one of those run-of-the-mill, "here's what I did with my day and here's what I think of it" type blogs. Why not? I always enjoy reading those too, and this will get me writing a bit more.

So today I went apple picking with the hubby and friends j. and n. And Watson the Dog. This was one of our first true experiments as dog owners: treating the dog as a necessary apendage as we went about our weekend. And it went pretty well -- one of us would run all around the apple orchards with Watson while the others picked apples with this weird milk carton-attached-to-a-broomstick tool (quite effective too, although I did unintentionally kill many apples on the way to picking a bushel). But when the cider house got going, Watson was done. The noise scared him senseless and he spent the rest of the visit slunking about in a state of shivery despair.

Also, he peed on a beet garden and a raspberry bush, but no one saw, so all was well.

Tonight is beer and baseball. I love beer and baseball.

Hello. This is an alternate blog created by someone who has another fairly entrenched blog with a fairly entrenched (albeit fairly small) readership. Lately I've been feeling the need for an anonymous confessional outlet, one that allows me to vent about pedantic friends and self-worshipping acquaintances and, occasionally, my blogging husband, who tends to suck away a lot of the blogging energy from our shared household. So here you go.

And lest you've stumbled upon this looking for Replacements lyrics, I'm sorry to disappoint. But I hope you stay.