First

Linda Adams is retiring this year. She's the heart of the editing program, and has given me every opportunity I've had. I'm worried how the student journals will survive without her, on-campus publishing is such a net of bureaucracy and rules of thumb. This is the thing that struck me, though. So she was a genius on Quark. Startlingly so. She caught me by surprise not once formatting away on some backroom Mac, this gray-haired, scratchy-voiced old woman. It's not a thing you see every day. But she never learned InDesign. My question is, when do you decide to stop like that? Like, "I'm done learning, the cost of acquiring a new skill can no longer be paid off by using it for the rest of my life"? I had a similar impression when my step-father (not yet 60) declared that he would never read the Russians. How can you just decide? Isn't that kind of like saying, "I've got the plague and only one day to live?"