Here's to the New Year

I've decided to shift gears on a number of fronts, to fix some issues, both chronic and recent.

It occurs to me that I haven't posted her in a long while. This isn't because I haven't written anything. I have! You should see the list of my unpublished and incomplete blog posts in my queue. But I have been working on the assumption that anything I post needs to be substantial and complete. The result is that I write a fair bit, but haven't gotten to the point I wanted to make about some random subject that has been sitting on my mind, and I'm out of time, so I'll get back to it later. By the time I'm ready to work on the post again all of the information on what is happening in my life is out of date, and it's time to start over.

So I am going to try to be less of a perfectionist in all of this and not wring my hands if a post doesn't yet feel like a complete "article" to me.

Of course I expect this one to be big, because so much writing is overdue. Did I just break my resolution two seconds after I stated it?

I'm also changing my perspective on my education, which I hope will save me from an aneurysm. My philosophy towards education has been, "Get through it so you can start doing real work," since high school, which means I have a tendency to overload on course work and aim for early graduations. In undergrad I was working on my studies at double speed, and graduated in four years with credits to spare. I wonder to this day if the velocity at which I hit my Japanese studies doesn't have something to do with the burnout that followed.

But I digress. I can't rush through the fast track anymore, for a variety of reasons that I might expound upon later but won't mention now because of resolution 1. The ultimate result is that I'm slowing down. I am no longer looking at the standard graduation time of two years as a sort of deadline, and I am no longer taking classes on the basis of what will get me out of here faster.

The benefits to this are twofold. When you have the mentality that you have to get something done, and then you can start on what's important, you'll likely never get to what's important. So I am turning that upside down and will focus on what's important, while fitting the other stuff in.

This means that I am making my education outside of the program my priority. I'm going to work at the Norlin archives, and will fit things around it. I applied for the LRS fellowship position, and will lower my coursework load to adjust. I'm only going to take classes that focus on archives and special collections, even if there are only two of those courses offered in a quarter. Three thousand dollars is too much to spend on a class because nothing that was on my course plan was actually available.

This means it may be an extra year before I graduate, but when I graduate I will be much better prepared to do that "important work." In fact, I will have already done it.

I have some other simple resolutions that I still think I could pull off but have been failing at. One book and an hour of language study a week, five hundred words a day (got that one today!), 50 dollars worth of expendable income a month.

The first week of January I blew $130 on a book on Japanese architecture, which was under market price but still places this as the most expensive rare book purchase I have ever made. In penance I won't be spending money on anything but food and the occasional museum entry fee for the next three months, which I have stuck to so far. Every time I see something I want (A CD of the 10th anniversary Les Mis performance) I tell myself I have to wait till April, and if I still want it then I can buy it. Likely I will no longer want it.

It's internship application time. A lot of deadlines have already passed, and a lot of opportunities I've ruled out because they aren't feasible for one reason or another. The stuff I am interested in looks highly competitive, and it's difficult to sell yourself when you are in a mindset that is frustrated with your education and skeptical about your own qualifications. Two nights ago I was lying in bed, mind racing nowhere as usual, until I had finally had enough and said to myself, "Stop thinking, just do it."

I tell myself that all the time and it usually doesn't stick, but the next day I sat down and wrote an application to the LRS Fellowship, and today I'm finally getting one of these posts complete. Something has shifted in my head and the difference is palpable. I just don't know what it is.

It might be that yesterday I enjoyed a brief moment of catharsis. Library Science and the library field in general is driving me nuts. Again, I'll leave the details for later or this will never be done. I had reached a point where my annoyance was was like a snowball at the top of a mountain, and was gaining some serious momentum.

I spent the day yesterday with a good friend. We cooked, ate, bought a lot of Chinese snacks, and chatted later that night with her fiance and his coworker about our respective programs. My friend is in LibSci too, so she gets what I am saying when I make my complaints, and no one was telling me to shut up, so I went at it, full speed. At one point one of them said I looked like I was about to strangle someone. If I could have strangled an entire profession at that moment I probably would have.

All this may give the impression that I no longer like, maybe even hate, LibSci, full stop, but that isn't true. The frustration comes from loving it and wanting it to be better. Bitching, even when it is called critique, isn't always the best way to make it better, but sometimes you just have to let out the steam.

So now I am at the point where I am thinking, everything I am worried about may be valid, but it doesn't even matter. I'll focus on myself, do what I need to do on the individual level, and let everyone else wring their hands over the mess that is libraries in the 21st century. Otherwise I am going to die of agida.

This post is already huge and I haven't even started. A second post may be coming soon.

I thought this would be a smoother quarter than those from last year, and then I had to go and take four classes instead of three, and end up president of a student group somehow. (I don't know how to say no. Really need to work on that.)

Needless to say, a lot has been going on, and I have been remiss in taking note of it. Not a day after I complained about the messy pile of books on my floor I went out and got myself a little bookshelf, which is already full, so there's one improvement.

This past weekend is I was up in Boulder for a SRMA event hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder. Lots of talks from interesting archivists in the area, and we went on a spitfire tour of Norlin library's conservation, archives, and special collections department. We got to see a Mein Kampf signed by Hitler, flip through (yes, touch) an incunable from France, and got to see the university's presses and such for repairs. 

This coming weekend is the CAL Conference, which I will admit I'm only mildly interested in. My focus has properly solidified towards archives and special collections, and CAL is all about public librarianship, with maybe a few exceptions. But I will be seeing some people there that I haven't seen since the last conference, so it will be nice to meet up and mingle and all of that. 

On top of that I'm thinking of getting a friend for my rat. They're social creatures, and although I play with her all the time, I think she could use a friend. We've both been sniffling though, so I'll have to see about whether or not it's appropriate to bring an animal into a sick house.

Summer left with this weekend. After weeks and weeks of record heat, October dropped the temperature by ten degrees, and so it has stayed. I'm breaking out all the sweaters and so on, and expect to remain bundled up until April.

Checking In

Yesterday I broke into a car to turn off the headlights. Lots of beeping and blaring ensued, and it took me a good two minutes to find the controls, because they were not standard, but no one paid me any mind.

There was a lot of nice stuff in that car. =s

Anyway, I have been busy with four classes (3 is too much) and will hopefully find time to put my thoughts down beyond some inane observation on the effectiveness of car alarms (useless) in the near future.

Smatterings

• I had my first job interview upon coming back home yesterday, and my first rejection this morning. It was a case of other applicants having more experience specific to the job than I did. 
• I think I should drop some money for a bookshelf, but I don't know how I'd get it back to the apartment. May have to talk to the roommate about this.

This just isn't cutting it anymore.

• I think that this quarter, academically speaking, is going to be awesome. I'm finally taking archival classes for one, and will have an independent study in which I do nothing but study historic book making processes.
• I had my first encounter with with bookless library here on campus yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised at its efficiency. Sure, there is no browsing, but books requested actually do end up on hold within two hours, and I ended up biking home with a book bag so full my back was rather angry at me.
• There is still a lot I have to write about concerning my time at the Murie Center, but it will likely take a while for me to sit down a process. For now, here area few lingering photographs.

 One of my last projects involved assessing the condition of the film in the studio. We had about 16 reels, all in surprisingly good condition.

 Finally got a decent shot of a ground squirrel, since by the end of my time on the ranch they had become fat and lazy, and didn't mind being a foot away.

A box I found in Mardy's cabin turned out to be a portable film projector. It was a lot of fun to disassemble and to figure out what all of the little knobs and such did.

Welp

Today is the day I should have been driving home, but I'm still in Wyoming. Oh well!

Two days ago I woke up to a strange sound in my room that I immediately assumed was the army of mice inside the walls breaking through and preparing for their final offensive. It was this rapid pattering sound that kept whizzing by my head the way you might expect a mosquito buzz to. I could hear it pretty much everywhere, so when I crawled out of bed in the pitch blackness I was prepared to see mice swarming over everything. I'd already found the occasional present left by them, so if the sound of them working away at the walls wasn't enough I had firm evidence of their invasion plans.

But there were no mice when I turned on the light. Instead there was a bat in the room about the size of my hand, fluttering about in confused circles. I have no idea how it got in. None whatsoever. And apparently neither did it, because it certainly had no idea how to get out. It was actually kind of cute, and I didn't have my glasses on so all I really saw was a palm sized fuzz fluttering around, but I'm sure it would have been adorable if it had just stopped flying around like a bat out of... well... and settled down.

I tried the bee trick of turning the light back off and opening the door. It's not like there was much light outside for a bat to be attracted to, but the stars were enough I guess, because after a few more frustrating laps the bat figured it out and escaped to freedom.

I am so glad it wasn't the mice.

Crash!

I have not had a car since I crashed it, two months ago. The hope was that I would have it on time to drive back home, but that's in a week and just the other day I was informed that the shop I left it at is still waiting for a part. I was planning on going to some major events in Denver, one of which I had already paid for, so I was feeling bummed enough to give into my co-worker's constant offers to put the pressure on the shop and get er done.

So my boss gets on the line, makes the lady cry because he's insisting on results and she's going on about a funeral, and then he gets hung up on.

=s

I don't know enough to determine if I'm getting strung along here or if 2 months is a legitimate amount of time to be waiting for parts in the middle of nowhere, but the stress of it all is finally starting to annoy me. I'm finding it easier to just assume my plans are bust and carry on from there than to try to struggle to make shit happen, but everyone around me is insisting that Something Be Done.

All I know is that after all this I am no longer sitting pretty on savings. If I were rich I would take the one hour flight back down to Denver and just throw another 300+ bucks at the problem that way, but I haven't made a monthly profit since I started this little grad school adventure, and now I can feel the walls closing in. It seems like a good time to cut my losses and just enjoy a little extended time here. I donno.

The Good Old Days

While compiling a catalog of the books here in the archives I ran across this interesting excerpt from a book called "Naturalist's South Pacific Expedition: Fiji"

Ordonez and I were about to enter the rest house when Mr. Stanley, who is familiar with the ways of the colony, tactfully suggested I go alone to arrange about our quarters. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Miss Lorna Reay, in charge of the rest house, post office and just about everything for which efficiency and dispatch are required, wished to accommodate me and my Filipino assistant. Yet, because a number of white guests were lodged in the building, she was not sure how they might react to the unprecedented situation of living under the same roof with a colored person. I consulted the highest authority in charge, the "D.C.," about it. He explained that it were best not to start a troublesome precedent, no matter how well educated the Filipino might be. He could not live in the rest house, but he could live in the native servants' quarters, eat his meals in the rest house kitchen, join me in the rest house to help me with my work, but not use the main entrance which was reserved for guests.

And later on, after the author is furious at the terrible treatment provided to his assistant, he rents out a house and he, Ordonez, and Mr. Stanley move in together.

There, the general public would never know that Mr. Stanley, Ordonez and I, all three of us, lived in perfect harmony and actually ate together at table as real human beings. I have always admired Mr. Stanley, a man of education, for waiving a custom prevalent in Fiji as well as in benighted and bigoted sections of the southern United States.

 The year was 1940.