How I Paid for College by Marc Acito

I was talking to Walter (the Giant Storyteller) Mayes at the Otter Dinner a few weeks ago, and for some reason he mentioned his Facebook profile. I remarked that I was also on Facebook. Walter practically hopped up and down. "Friend me! Friend me! Friend me!"

As in real life, I am a bit shy when it comes to "friending" on Facebook (I fear rejection, but even more, silent ridicule). However, with such an exuberant directive from Walter, I immediately looked him up and friended him the next time I was online.

Once we were friends, the first thing I did, naturally, was see who Walter's friends were. It wasn't a huge list, and I recognized many names and faces from our little universe of children's literature: publishers, writers, illustrators. Then I noticed someone named Marc Acito. Hey!

At that very moment, disk three of How I Paid for College by Marc Acito was sitting in my car's CD player. Out of all the BILLIONS of books in the world, I was listening to one by a Facebook friend of Walter's-- and it wasn't even a children's book, nor does Marc Acito live in California (which begs the question of how the two even know each other...). But think about it-- the odds are staggering! That was a library audiobook, for pete's sake!

OK, maybe this is just a really tiny little coincidence. But I don't know why, but these things floor me every time they happen to me. They're so fun and silly, they make me happy for weeks.

[By the way, I never did finish the book. I abandoned it somewhere on disk four and returned it to the library yesterday. Today I got an email from a librarian asking very kindly if I still had disk four, since it wasn't in the case. Gah! Anyway, the book wasn't bad, it just wasn't my thing. I couldn't really relate, and it was all a little too mad-cap for me. I hope Walter, or any of his friends, don't hold it against me.]

How I Paid for College by Marc Acito

Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson

Obsession, Part IV
(See Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here)

"And there is the pleasure of obsession itself, immersion in the world of esoteric detail in spite of (or maybe because of) the derision of the patzers who just don't understand what it is to lose yourself so completely in something, and who cares, finally, what that is?"

Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson