How to make a good thing better: salad for lunch edition.

1. Make sure your salad is first rate to begin with. I recommend your finer greens with a solid heap of arugula, blood oranges, fennel, celery, those sweet little Armenian cucumbers, and a blue cheese vinaigrette.

2. Make sure there's a lot of salad. Lots of it.

3. Let it sit in your office awhile. I don't know, hours.

4. Do the student consultations for two hours.

5. Go to the writing center for one hour.

6. Think about retrieving the salad from your office before you go to a meeting, but then remember: you can only slide in for about 25 minutes of the meeting, and fetching the salad will make you late. So: no salad.

7. Go teach a workshop for an hour and a half.

8. NOW fetch the salad.

9. It's four o'clock? SO WHAT. At room, which is to say office, temperature, marinating (let's be honest) in its little tupperware, this salad is going to taste like God's own culinary masterpiece.

10. Don't bother eating like a lady. You're ravenous! Fork that salad in.

11. It's the state of ravenousness--that's what makes the salad amazing. Thrilling. Spectacular!

12. Go ahead and eat the salad with a chaser of Greek yogurt. Why not?

13. The deferred salad will power you through your four o'clock meeting, although not without a small bout of despair, a tiny internal meltdown, and a miraculous recovery, all within the space of a nanosecond. Your mileage may vary--I'm just going on what happened while I ate my four o'clock salad.

14. The postponed salad, plus yogurt chaser, will power you through your second workout. That's because you are t-o-u-g-h tough.

15. And then, when you get home, sweaty and triumphant, leftover Indian food will totally seal the deal, hunger-wise.

Consultationist.

This week, I have many, many appointments with important people. Also known as "my students." We will be discussing their work at this preliminary interval in the semester, the interval known as "OMG will it never end?" My services as a consultant include

• revealing to the client (aka "student"), in a persuasive way, the extent to which s/he has or has not measured up to the nebulous standards of the course (also known as "outcomes").
• encouragement, strict talk, and the smackdown.
• foregoing lunch to speak to him/her at his/her convenience.
• gradually developing office stench (acquired from hours on end in an office chair--atmosphere is part of any good consultation).
• written comments! some of which are delivered in the outcomes grid!

I'm getting so dang good at the consultations that I thought I might offer a fuller menu of consultations, such as

• assessing whether you're working too hard (you almost certainly are).
• doing a paper audit of your life to see if you need to take a day off (you totally deserve it!).
• evaluating whether you need to go back to the store to buy that one sweater you saw yesterday (yes).
• measuring your joke against my impeccable criteria to see if it's funny (usually, it is [metric: did I laugh?]).
• assessing whether you need a cookie (you almost certainly do).

I'll be happy to give you a written estimate for any of your consultation requirements.

TAGS: consultation, assessment, measures, grid, evaluation, audit

Improve your life, immediately.

1.  Make this and eat it.  It might sound odd, but you'll have to trust me:  it is marvelous. (via Mighty Girl).  Do it today!

2.  See this.  Do not delay.  

In other news, here is the best correction I have ever read in any magazine.  This is Jason Killingsworth, Deputy Editor of Paste, on the Inbox pages of Issue 49:

I was just reading over proof pages--as I do every deadline--making sure that no embarrassing typos slip into print, and I came across this doozy of an error from Kelly Marages' review of The Killers' new album (p. 50).  In her reflections on "When You Were Young," easily one of my favorite songs of the last several years, Marages claims that "the heavy guitars and Springsteen style rang false." I immediately fact-checked this statement with Alan Greenspan, the Dalai Lama, Stephen Hawking, and Chuck Norris.  They all confirmed my belief that (a) the so-called "heavy guitars" are crunchy and epic and extremely awesome, and (b) the "Springsteen style ringing false" comment is ludicrous because there was a highly respected voodoo witch doctor in the studio helping Brandon Flowers channel Bruce's incendiary verve. I'll go ahead and mark the change here on the proof page, but I wanted you to be aware so you can make a special grouping in the editorial masthead called "Contributing Writers Who Are Mistaken," under which Marages' name will appear all by itself.

I'll tell you what this makes me want to do, and that is to go ahead and obtain the new Killers recording, that's what.