Sunday Miscellany
I hope you’ve all had a wonderful April. The month is nearly over, and the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge finishes up tomorrow. I have written tomorrow’s story, and it’s scheduled and ready to go. I hope you’ll like it–I actually managed to keep it to flash fiction this time. It feels good to have completed the challenge, but it’ll be nice to get back to a less hectic blog schedule.
I will be heading to Southern California for work tomorrow, and will b
e there for the week. This will be my first trip to CA, and the furthest west I’ve traveled since moving to the States. It’ll be a long trip as well, from one side of the country to the other. Anyway, I will try to keep up with blog articles as best I can while I’m away. I have some scheduled, but I can’t promise I’ll have the time to respond to comments or visit everyone on my RSS. I hope to participate in Road Trip Wednesday, but we’ll have to see. I have an iPad now (more on that in another article sometime), so hopefully that will help me stay connected.
While this trip will be interesting (I’ve wanted to visit CA), it will be bittersweet since I don’t get to take any of my family with me (boohoo), and my pre-ordered copy of INSURGENT will arrive while I’m gone. I’ll have to wait until Friday before I can read it. And jet-lag or no jet-lag, I will at least make a start on it Friday night!!
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I have a spam filter on my blog that catches spam comments. I go through that spam filter every few days to make sure no legitimate comments have been caught by accident. Most of the spam comments are computer-generated, and some of them are so strange, they’re hilarious. Take, for example, this spam comment that was posted for my “Eight English Edwards” article:
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Uhhh… what?
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Did you know that a degree in English Literature and Language is the 7th most useless major in the country? This is according to a study published in Newsweek, “based on earnings, growth projections and unemployment numbers from recent grads and experienced grads.” The list has the subject of my two degrees “Philosophy and Religious Studies” (technically I have degrees in Theology, but I assume that falls into this category) at number 6.
The flaw I see in this study is that, in my experience, most people who hold a degree in “useful” subjects learned most of what they needed to know on the job. And I’ve known plenty of people without a college degree who were more than capable of doing the same things people with college degrees in that field were doing. I believe something is seriously awry with the way college education is done in this country, and the way college degrees are viewed. It’s really a subject for another more ranty post, but I thought I’d throw it out there for you to chew on.
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Southern California? Luuuuucky! One of these days I’ll get back out to CA. Have a great trip!
Thanks, Cole. I’ll try to make the most of it, but it’s for work and I won’t have family with me, so that kinda sucks a lot of the excitement out of the trip. It will be neat to see the other side of the country, though. 🙂
Definitely! My friends and I drove from NC to CA and the change is quite impressive!
I would *love* to do that one day, with the family… take a month or so and drive cross country. That would be such fun. It would cost a lot in gasoline, hotels, food, etc., but it would be great! 🙂
Yeah, I clock in at #2 and #7 on that list, and Mr. S is at #7 and #12. Except, I teach English and Theater, and he spends all day reading, analyzing, and writing in law school, so our majors actually feel pretty spot on. But what I tell my students is what my mother (an academic advisor at a large state university) always told me: major in what interests you, so you’ll stay interested and invested. Employers just want to see that you can read, write, think, and communicate, which is what the degree symbolizes…but really, in most fields, your actual major doesn’t matter. If you want to be a doctor, you need to know science, I suppose, but I agree, Colin–usually, job skills are learned on the job. It is an eye-catching list title, though!
Have a great trip!
I think that’s my biggest beef with the list–the idea that a degree is useless because of the subject matter. Honestly, to me a useless degree is one you scraped through against your will in order to get a good job, not one you did well at because you genuinely loved the subject. A soapbox for another time, perhaps… 🙂
Thanks, Mrs. S.!
I hope you’ll get to enjoy yourself a little bit at least, in California. But I know how that goes when your’re travelling for work. 🙂
Thanks, Kimberly. I don’t do this often–in fact, this is the first time in about six years I’ve had to travel for work, and it’s certainly the furthest. I guess if-and-when I become a published writer, I might have to get used to it. We’ll see… 🙂
Have a safe trip, Colin! 😀 For the degrees, I guess it depends on what job you want to have…I really want my doctor to have studied just like I know my husband tells me he is more efficient thanks to some of the subjects he had in school 😀 I technically have two “useless” Master´s but those are the reasons I have a wonderful career 😀