Yesterday was the best day I've had in a while. Today was a total flop.
Let's start from the top.
The Penrose Library is in the midst of renovation, and invited the campus to come to a "chair tasting," in which we sit in a few dozen chairs and tell them how we feel about them. I was on campus for something else, so I figured I'd stop by and see this silliness. I ended up spending an hour sitting in various chairs and scoring them on comfortableness, aesthetics, and durability, and at the end of it I got a voucher for coffee.
That was the start of the weirdness.
After that, I decided I wanted ramen. The craving for ramen can develop into an obsession, and with only one semi-decent ramen house to be found in the city, it's also a bit of a rare treat. So I go driving off to get ramen. I end up stuck behind a vehicle doing fifteen under the speed limit half a mile by my exit, and since I'm already in a cloud of wanderlust and cabin fever from the weekend blizzard, I decide I will try passing, and if I miss the exit I will keep driving. I miss the exit, so I keep driving.
I get off a couple stops after, am vaguely lost, and drive around until I see an sign for a Korean BBQ place. Well, I haven't been to a Korean restaurant since I got to Denver, so I figure, why not? The only problem is that the turn in is behind me. So I keep going, and turn into the next parking lot, which happens to have an antique mall in it. It's around three thirty by this point, not really supper time yet, so I figure, what the hell, I'll browse.
The mall is set up as a series of displays owned by sellers who probably rent the space. Along the wall there are a few separate rooms, one of which is nothing but watches and cameras. I figure it's lucky that the pocket watch I was looking at was over a hundred bucks, or I might have tricked myself into thinking I could afford it.
After trawling around for possible book finds (lots of books, all of them worthless), I stepped out, prepared to have something to eat. Only, just then I noticed a "deli" in the same complex as the antique mall. It was a Russian market, and since I was already there and out of the car, I decided to go inside. Ended up with a bunch of preserved fish and a real hankering for deli meats, but my mind was still on Korean.
So now I think I'm going to get to the restaurant. Only, when I drive into the strip mall I find myself parked in front of an English tea house, advertising food and gifts along with sit down dining. So I go in there too. One of my classmates used to bring in a box of PG Tips last quarter, and lo and behold, there was a bunch of that in stock, so I figured, well, I just ran out of black tea, and this stuff doesn't show up at safeway, so I'll grab it.
As I'm walking to the restaurant I pass an African Market, so I go in there too. Lots of grains and spices in that one, and a hair salon in back. I was almost tempted to get one of the many DVD stacked up front, just to see what Congolese cinema was like, but I have enough crap in my room right now, so I passed on that.
So after a stroll around Russia, a stop in England, and a quick detour to Africa, I finally made it to Korea.
And man. That food was GOOD. Korean is hot in a strange way that is comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. I don't tend to like spicy food. I don't like spicy Thai, and I hate spicy Mexican, but there's something about spicy Korean that I am willing to suffer through. It helps that I made an excellent menu decision. It was hard to make, considering all the soups, noddles, and grilled selections looked equally mouthwatering, but I finally went with a beef, dumpling, and rice cake soup, partially because it looked less dangerously orange in the picture.
It was a good thing I chose that too, because it unexpectedly came with 7 sides, all of which were amazing. Banchan is one of the most marvelous culinary inventions of all time. Multiple sauces and textures of varying heat, all in little portions so you can eat a lot of different stuff and still get full. They're all extremely simple, but perfect together. A few use this thick sauce that is sweet when you first eat it and then becomes surprisingly hot after the first few seconds. They put it on veggies, seaweed and broccoli. SO GOOD. And when my tongue started aching all I had to do was drink more soup, which was not spicy at all, and reset my palate perfectly. I ate more in that sitting than I had in a single meal for weeks.
And when I was done I was given a complimentary desert drink, a sort of barley tea that was ultrasweet. The gross mouth feeling you get when you've eaten a lot of hot food was instantly gone.
And all of this for 11 bucks.
This couldn't have come at a better time. The day before I had tried chicken fried steak at a local diner and hated it. It tasted like I was eating oil and batter and gravy and nothing else. A few days before that I had gone out with a friend to a Japanese restaurant, and took a risk on their ramen. That was also almost inedible, and again tasted like eating oil.
So I was so happy that I had found a place that was not only relatively cheap, but was really, really good.
Today was almost the opposite of that experience. Again I had to go driving somewhere, but this time I had a definite destination and a time limit. There was an SLA meeting at the Denver Tech Center, which is basically this huge chunk of the city where massive office buildings are surrounded by massive car parks. In other words, it represents everything I hate about car culture.
The DTC is only 15 minutes away, but once I got there I spent 45 minutes driving in circles, trying to find the building the event was supposed to be in. Eventually I decided the effort wasn't worth the gas and drove back home to "attend" the event online. Unfortunate, considering I had registered and paid, and had a meal waiting for me at the building that I could not find because the roads were not designed to make sense and the buildings were not designed to be easily accessible. And it was ironic too, since the speaker for the evening was a gentleman who was all about sustainability and the alteration of our social structures to better support our core values.
If I ruled the world, you can bet the first alteration I would make would be in bulldozing that entire god-forsaken zone down and replacing it with something that made sense.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
I'm a sucker
Cats are ridiculous. They are supposed to be easy to care for, until they are impossible. You put water down, and food, and do your thing, and the cat does his thing, and that's that. And then something goes wrong and nothing you do is right. You want me in a cat carrier? Yeah right. Here, let me yawl at you in a pitiful manner so you don't know if I'm dying or if I'm pissed.
Long story short, Rufus and I had an interesting evening tonight. I had to pop and allergy pill down his throat, which meant I had to sneak up to him, brace him between my legs, stick the pill in his mouth, and wait for him to swallow. He was not happy. He expressed his displeasure by barfing on the carpet multiple times, refusing to move unless prodded and then crawling a few inches forward to lie down again, and looking sick in general.
He has no idea how close he was to getting shoved into a cat carrier and driven through the freezing night to some animal hospital. After about half an hour he started walking around again, and now he's filling his belly with cat food, likely so he can puke it at me later.
He also yowls at me every five minutes or so. So, I get up and make sure nothing is wrong and he's sitting with his cat toy, looking up at me expectantly. I think he knows I feel guilty for shoving the pill down his throat and is milking it. My guess is that he was used to me being the pushover, and so my manhandling him for the first time ever was so offensive he had himself a little fit.
He's back to normal now, but I'm going to be jumping at every little thing for him for the rest of the weekend. Here's hoping he doesn't take too much advantage of that.
Long story short, Rufus and I had an interesting evening tonight. I had to pop and allergy pill down his throat, which meant I had to sneak up to him, brace him between my legs, stick the pill in his mouth, and wait for him to swallow. He was not happy. He expressed his displeasure by barfing on the carpet multiple times, refusing to move unless prodded and then crawling a few inches forward to lie down again, and looking sick in general.
He has no idea how close he was to getting shoved into a cat carrier and driven through the freezing night to some animal hospital. After about half an hour he started walking around again, and now he's filling his belly with cat food, likely so he can puke it at me later.
He also yowls at me every five minutes or so. So, I get up and make sure nothing is wrong and he's sitting with his cat toy, looking up at me expectantly. I think he knows I feel guilty for shoving the pill down his throat and is milking it. My guess is that he was used to me being the pushover, and so my manhandling him for the first time ever was so offensive he had himself a little fit.
He's back to normal now, but I'm going to be jumping at every little thing for him for the rest of the weekend. Here's hoping he doesn't take too much advantage of that.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, October 10, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
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.
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.
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