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.



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 You should see the list of my unpublished and incomplete blog posts in my queue.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 By the time I'm ready to work on the post again all of the information on what is happening in my life is out of date, and it's time to start over.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.