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Resumés: What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?

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Over at LinkedIn, a member of an editors’ group posted this link to a very entertaining rant by ghostwriter Jeff Haden. I used to teach resumé-writing and, as a business owner and as the head of an editorial office at the Great Desert University, discovered all that canned resumé advice, straight out of the textbook, came back to haunt.

How many times have you told some prospective employer how “unique” you are? How superlatively unique!

And how could you fail to tell the hiring committee of your “goal-oriented” nature? Your “world-class” administrative assistant skills? Your “creative,” “dynamic,” and “results-oriented” personality?

But did you happen to provide a concrete example to prove any of these steamy claims?

Come on! All I want is someone to do the filing, answer the phone, and learn the university’s involved purchasing software so we can order some paper now and then. Do I need a “world-class” administrative assistant for these Herculean tasks? Especially one who doesn’t know “world-class,” “goal-oriented,” and “results-oriented” are hyphenated?

When I look at a resumé, I hope to see what specifically the applicant has done somewhere else that a) indicates what he can accomplish on the job and b) tells me how she can bring the skills required to bear on the tasks that my organization needs to have done.

It comes right back to the oldest chestnut of advice to budding writers: Show, don’t tell.

Show an example of what you can do. And try to provide specifics, preferably with figures, that bear on the work you’ll be doing in job you’re trying to land.

If you must use a vague term like “creative” because you figure your resumé is being sorted by a computer searching for keywords, list accomplishments that prove you’re creative:

• Established and oversaw two new departments for Arizona Highways, “Hike of the Month” and “Mileposts”
• Created and taught the College of Arts and Sciences’ first fully online course

You’re “goal-oriented”? Prove it:

• Wrote four feature-length articles a month plus several shorter pieces for regional and national magazines
• Obtained a contract for and completed a fourth book

“Results-oriented”? Show what results you obtained:

• Co-wrote national bestseller for William Morrow that returned $1.5 million in revenues during its first year and $1 million the second year
• Redesigned research newsletter, turning it into a “magaletter” that became the basis of its current magazine format

You say you’re a “team player”? Whose team did you play on?

• Established and developed office and designed all management policies. Developed and regularly updated strategic plan.
• Initiated collaboration with Scholarly Publishing Program and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
• Coordinated management of unit with office of the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
• Consulted with faculty editors and Dean’s Office on publishing matters.
• Mentored graduate students in Scholarly Publishing Program.

If you’re feeding bloviated terms from a job description back to the employer, remember that the person doing the hiring wants to know what you can do for the company, not what you think of yourself — even if you think your qualifications exactly match the hot air in the job ad.

Find out something about the employer. Then massage your resumé so it highlights past accomplishments or training that bears directly on the kind of work you will be doing in the coveted new job. It’s all very nice that you did x or y for some other outfit. But what can you do for me? In your cover letter, show how that will come to pass.

The cover letter, in particular, should explicitly show that you understand something about the hiring company or agency and explain what, exactly, you can do for it. Don’t talk about your needs, for heaven’s sake. Talk about what you can do for the employer.

One of the funniest application letters that ever crossed my desk came from a guy whose cover letter went on and on about why he was applying to my company. He explained in great detail how he had moved to Florida in search of a better life. He decided he didn’t like the weather there and so he was moving to Arizona and wished to come to work for me.

Second runner-up: an application from a newly minted J-school graduate who couldn’t spell and didn’t recognize the comma splices with which she had salted her cover letter.

😆 🙄 😆

Sure: it’s all about you. But your task is to make it look like you’re all about the employer. And prove it.

Beautiful Soup!

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Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Beau – ootiful Soo – oop!
Soo – oop of the e – e – evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

To beguile away the hours while alternately freezing and heating the crippled back, I pulled some of my favorite cookbooks off the bookshelves. Gosh! there are some great recipes in there! Trouble with knowing how to cook is you tend to forget about following recipes.

cucinarusticaCucina Rustica, an alluring book of rustic Italian recipes collected by Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman, has a passel of soup recipes, just what I’ve been craving. Among them is a pretty amazing fennel and tomato soup. Hm.

I was gonna pick up fennel on the last trip to Sprouts, but instead decided to get leeks. I love leeks. But then, I love fennel. Why didn’t I get both? Probably an innate response to the cheap gene.

So decided to substitute leek for fennel and fines herbes for the fresh basil (although basil may go in near the end of this process, possibly in the form of pesto), and add a few carrots (nutrition!!). Here’s how it fell out:

Get yourself…

P1020447• an onion, coarsely chopped
• olive oil
• 2 to 5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
• a couple of leeks, coarsely chopped
• a stalk or two of celery, chopped
• a couple of carrots, coarsely chopped
• a can of tomatoes (mine is unsalted and only 14.5 oz — the largest I could find in the low-sodium variant)
• a dash of red or white wine (probably  optional)
• some tasty herbs (I used dried fines herbes & probably will add a little fresh basil, thinly sliced, whenever I get around to it)
• chicken broth (preferably low-salt or home-made salt-free); or beef broth; or vegetable broth; or water
• a dash of cumin or home-made curry powder (optional)
• a squeeze of fresh lemon or orange juice (optional)
• a little more wine or sherry (to taste; optional)

Skim the bottom of a nice, big soup pot with a little olive oil. Heat over medium-high heat for a couple of minutes. Add the onion and turn the heat down to a fast “medium” level. Allow the onion to cook, stirring occasionally, until it’s getting transparent. Then add the leeks and the herbs. Stir well. Allow to cook a few more minutes. As the leek turns bright green and starts to soften, add the garlic. Stir well.

Cook gently until the onion starts to brown. You’d like it to just be starting to caramelize. Resist getting carried away.

Right around in here, add some cumin or some home-made (or salt-free) curry powder. Take it easy with this. I used about a teaspoon. You can always add more if cumin lights your gustatory fire.

Stir well and cook until the carrots are tender all the way through.

P1020450Now add the liquid: that would be the canned tomatoes and juice and the chicken stock. Add enough to fully cover all the veggies and then some. It’s supposed to be soup, after all. If you have some wine laying around, add a splash of that — I tossed in about 1/4 cup of Rotgut Red.

Turn up the heat until the pot comes to a very slow boil. Promptly turn the heat back down to medium-low and maintain it at a slow simmer.

Go away. Write a blog post or whatever you do to keep yourself amused. After about half an hour or forty-five minutes, return to the kitchen.

Taste the broth. (Don’t be an idiot about this. It’s freaking hot! Blow on a spoonful until you can taste it without inflicting third-degree burns on your tongue). Add whatever you think you would like to round out the flavor: a little wine, some sliced-up basil leaves, a squeeze of lemon juice, more wine or sherry — whatEVER. Soups are amazingly forgiving, so fool with it as you please.

Once you’re done with this magnum opus of the culinary art, run the stuff through a blender (or whack it up with a mini-blender, or use a food press). You should now have an extraordinarily delicious purée that you can advertise as soup.

If you are not on a diet, THE way to serve this amazing concoction is by placing a slice of delicious Italian or French bread (it can be a whisper on the stale side) in the bottom of a bowl and ladling the soup into the bowl, to fill.

If, on the other hand, you’re trying to be saintly about carbs, simply dish up a serving in a bowl.

Either way, sprinkle a little Parmesan or feta over the top.

Very little. Aged cheeses are highly salted. Just take it easy with that stuff and if you use it, don’t add salt to the soup.

P1020452

Good. Very, very good.

Finishing touches:

Dietetic

• Squeeze of lemon, lime, or orange juice
• Dollop of fat-free yogurt
•  Very small amount of Parmesan or feta cheese

Forget the Dietetic

• Another splash of wine, sherry, or brandy
• Salt to taste
• Swirl of heavy cream
• Real yogurt
• Real sour cream

How to Make a Stay-Cool Cold Pack

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So you pulled a muscle or put your back out and you think you’re gunna die of massive excruciating pain, and the doc or physical therapist tells you to use cold packs on it. Trouble with cold packs? They melt.

A favorite way to make a cold pack is to use a bag of frozen peas or corn. This is great, but a) peas and corn melt down into slush pretty quickly, and b) oh horror of frugal horrors, it wastes food!

I’ve been folding up a washcloth or several paper towels placing them flat inside a baggie, and sticking that in the freezer. This solves the food waste issue, but when you first take them out, they’re board-hard. After a few minutes the cloth or paper toweling will defrost enough to mold around the sore spot, and that is extremely nice…for about five minutes.

P1020446

The frozen washcloth gambit

Shortly, these gadgets warm right up to body temperature. Annoying.

Try this instead: dried beans. Get some bulk dried beans, such as pinto beans or peruanos — very cheap at any good ethnic store or even at Costco — put two or three cups into a ziplock bag, and freeze. The longer the better.

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Bean baggie!

After a few hours, apply the frozen beanbags to your aches and pains, in the usual mode.

Dried beans take longer to defrost than frozen peas or corn, and they also can be molded around a sore joint or limb. Lentils would work, too.

Remember to wear a T-shirt or wrap the bag in a kitchen towel to protect your skin from the cold. Don’t apply any extremely cold pack directly to your skin.

 

A Distraction…Make that Two Distractions

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books2So I’ve spent the past two or three days working on a prospectus for the adjunct teaching rant book and this morning sent it off to the acquisitions editor at the desired press. Soon we should be hearing peals of laughter from the direction of Maryland echoing merrily across the land.

LOL! I’ll be surprised if this guy goes for it. But strange things happen. Occasionally.

The project morphed into a fair amount of work. I reworked and added to the introduction; rewrote some of the Adjunctorium material and added a bunch of essays to the recycled posts, bringing the number of entries to 45. Planned additions and revisions to the afterword. Wrote a proposal, table of contents, and chapter outline, put them together with the spiffed-up introduction and a short-form CV, and made the introduction’s citation & documentation conform to Chicago 16’s author-date format. Converted this mound of paper into a PDF and shipped it off, under an e-cover letter.

This little chore has been a mighty distraction from the dieting and exercising enterprise.

But then along came another, much more onerous, distraction: more pain!

The back was feeling more or less better — sometimes down as low as a .25 on a scale of 10. But over the past several days the pain gauge has risen to a definite 7. Down the tailbone and into the hip: my god it hurts!

I can barely walk around the house — it feels, weirdly, like one leg is somehow longer than the other, creating a bizarre limp — and really shouldn’t be driving the car, because I’m having a hard time lifting my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.

Obviously, this brought a screeching halt to the weight-loss scheme. Actually, it was in hiatus, anyway: after 12½ pounds, I hit a plateau, so over the past four or five days haven’t been losing weight. But when the fat was burning away, what was working was 3½ miles of brisk walking and a half-mile of swimming. Right now just kicking my legs in the pool hurts.

That’s kaput. I can barely crawl from the back of the house to the kitchen, though I was able to bicycle the 3 1/2 miles this morning.

Had to bring the bike in the house so Gerardo could blower out the garage, and by the time all that was done there was no way I could roll the thing back out there. {sigh}

Decided to try a glass of wine, since alcohol often dulls the back pain. Naturally, this required a steak and potatoes, eh?

Naturally, the grill wouldn’t come on. So instead of roasting the potatoes and grilling the meat over the fire, I had to sauté them in butter. Very thinnening.

Didn’t work. Tasted good, though.

An hour or so ago, it dawned on me that since this pain is radically different from the usual aches and pains, maybe it is different. What if instead of a pinched nerve, it’s a real, actual muscle spasm?

Hm.

So I dropped one of the generic Flexerils that came my way when the Mayo guy speculated the back, hip, and foot pain were caused by some sort of chronic muscle spasm.

Stuff didn’t work on that, but in the hour or two since I took the thing this afternoon, the hip feels a little better. Not so’s I can walk around. But better.

Shit. This getting old business is for the birds.

Oh well. The question is, what will I do with this manuscript after the guy in Maryland rejects it?

Not, I expect, sink $1200 into graphic design and e-book conversion. A friend has recently started converting Word files to Kindle format. He’s only charging $250 or so, and he does a good job.

So I’ll need to decide whether to try another scholarly or mainline publisher or to just go ahead and peddle it myself on Amazon.

Don’t know. We’ll just have to see what kind of response it gets.

Image: Books. Johannes Jansson/Norden.org. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Denmark license.

Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?

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Well! Here’s a clarion bell announcing good news: from PBS NewsHour‘s Business Desk comes “Why the US Sits at the Brink of a New Boom.”

Let’s hope Mr. Morris has got it right this time, as he apparently did when the prognosticated a major crash. Think of what it would mean:

  • The US deficit would shrink some more.
  • Private industry and government jobs would bloom in gay profusion.
  • The increased tax revenues from all that employment would revive Social Security, Medicare, and a wide variety of other key public programs.
  • Our homes might increase in value to what we paid for them — for those of us who have managed to cling to our homes, that is.
  • Most important: Our young people would have a shot at jobs that pay well enough to get them out from under the saddle of their college loans. They might even be in a position to save for their retirement and to help their own kids get through school without outrageous debt.

Speaking of “wouldn’t it be loverly,” we have that e-book I mentioned a couple of days ago. In a je ne sais quoi moment, I followed an impulse to run the manuscript past an old friend who happens to be a fairly big cheese in academic publishing. To my astonishment, she liked it.

A lot.

Enough to suggest I send it to a friend of hers at a very prominent academic press, with a recommendation from her.

Can you imagine?

Well, I think it’s a pretty long shot. But since cover design, page layout, and e-book formatting for print and electronic versions would set me back almost $1,200, I would be very pleased to get someone else to foot the bill for production, printing, warehousing, and fulfillment.

If a miracle happens and this publisher accepts the book, it will have to go through peer review, revision, and then design and production. So it’ll be a year or so before it sees print. But WTF? The interim will give me time to put together the three cookbooks I want to publish, which will be easy and relatively inexpensive to put together as e-books. 🙂

Diet News, E-book News

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So I’ve diddled away the whole day in front of the computer. Not quite the whole day, actually: feeling poorly after another five-hour night, I went back to bed following a short exercise junket and slept until almost 10 a.m. Then it was back to the office to work on the new e-book, whose manuscript I just finished and sent off for a designer’s review. The working title is Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education. And I’m feeling mighty smug about it.

Watch this space! As soon as it’s published, I’ll run a give-away, so you’ll have a chance to grab it for free before the ravening hordes descend on Amazon. 😉

After this one is launched, I intend to do two e-cookbooks. One will present some of the surprisingly delicious low-fat, low salt, sugar-free diet recipes I’ve concocted over the past month. And another will be a collection of the recipes I’ve published over the years at Funny about Money, plus quite a few others.

The diet is going surprisingly well.

This morning I was down 11.8 pounds(!!) from my ponderous starting weight of a month ago.

Wow! That leaves only 9.5 pounds of flab to kill off before I reach my goal!

I can’t believe this. Already I look only two months pregnant instead of three — the toxic belly fat seems to be what’s coming off the fastest.

It’s astonishing to see the fat melt away this fast. Really, I think I’m losing faster than I did on the Atkins diet. But then I didn’t make the effort to put in all that exercise — my car was parked a mile from the office and up three flights of steps, and I had to walk up another two flights to get into our building, so I figured enough was enough.

It looks like what’s doing the trick is three and a half miles of brisk walking or jogging plus a half-mile of swimming. To get those street miles in before one is likely to expire of heat exhaustion, I have to start exactly at dawn. Any later than the first graying of the sky and by the time the jaunt ends it will be so ungodly hot as to be downright homicidal. But the swimming in the evening is refreshing and a nice way to end the day.

The quasi-vegetarian diet is probably helping to peel off the pounds, but I can’t imagine it provides adequate nutrition. Lately I’ve been feeling a little green around the gills: fatigued all day and kind of weak in the knees.

Saturday M’hijito, bless his heart, came over with Charley the Golden Retriever to hang out and prime the pool’s filter with dog hair. Since he was still here at dinnertime, I broke out a couple of steaks and we had a decent dinner of beef, corn, salad, and the two spectacular artichokes he brought with him.

Truly I felt awful on Friday and Saturday, but after a decent meal and a halfway decent night’s sleep, on Sunday I felt great again.

So I concluded that I probably need not cut the meat almost completely out of the diet. Sliced up the leftover steak and stir-fried that with some greens and curry, which stretched it out a long way and has provided a couple of meals (with one to go!) since then.

At any rate, clearly the big challenge will not be to lose the next nine and a half pounds but to find a way to keep all 22 pounds off permanently.

The exercise is making me feel so much better that now I can’t imagine doing without it. Though…hmmm… I’d sure like to find some more interesting places to perform these tricks. Walking around and around the park gets pretty boring, no matter how entertaining the local fauna.

Same is true of trotting up and down the mountain park trails, although at some times of year, especially the spring, it’s a little more interesting than the neighborhood. The canals go a very, very long way — in theory I could walk or bicycle all the way to Tempe and almost out to Sun City from here. On the other hand, the canals are probably not very safe — a few years ago, a serial killer nabbed a woman who was in the habit of bicycling along the canal. Beheaded her and threw her headless body in the water. So…that does give one pause.

There’s one of those Baptist megachurches on Central. It has a huge interior track where people can walk or run, plus a lot of other workout equipment. However, you have to buy a membership, and…well, I do object to helping fund (however indirectly) the Baptist church’s political agenda, which IMHO runs directly counter to the interests of women’s rights. No offense, dear Baptist readers…but you kind of have to be in Arizona to appreciate some of this stuff. 🙄

A couple of air-conditioned shopping centers open early so people can walk around and around inside the malls. But that also strikes me as mind-numbing boring. Why drive so you can walk around a boring track when you can walk around a perfectly fine park just a few yards down the streets?

One way or another, assuming I can keep up this level of exercising from now until I topple over into the grave, the other question is…how much and what can I eat to level off at the desired weight but not gain more weight back?

And how will I bear that?

I’ve cut out my very favorite food, pasta. And also bread. And also potatoes. Now, I could surely do without bread, which while pleasurable is not the center of my life. Potatoes I enjoy but don’t overindulge — and could cheerfully trade them in exchange for a flat belly.

Red_Wine_GlassBut no more spaghetti? No more penne? No more casarecce, no more gemilli, no more fettucine? Really???? THAT seems pretty extreme. And wine…will I have to do without the daily swiggle forever? Five ounces of wine packs a punch of calories. What else will I have to give up if I choose to go back to the supposedly healthful benefits of the daily glass of wine?

We do know that red meat jacks up the blood pressure (supposedly). So I’ll substitute salmon, tuna, ono, and other wild-caught fish for most the volumes of beef and pork I’ve been in the habit of scarfing up. And buy unadulterated chicken at Trader’s, Sprouts, and Whole Paycheck instead of the salt-soaked, antibiotic-laced flesh of tormented and mutilated birds available at other markets.

But it still looks like the landing-strip menu is going to have to comprise a lot more veggies and a lot  less starches and meats than I’ve been accustomed to eating.

Well. I’ll figure that out when I get there. Meanwhile, there’s almost ten more pounds to get rid of. Wouldn’t it be cool to be free of them by the end of the summer?

🙂