Magic & People Who Care

     I’d been out of school just long enough before starting my MLIS that I was starting to fall asleep without jolting awake thinking “PAPERS! PAPERS! OH GOD THEY’RE DUE!”.  I probably should be better about diligently doing my homework over the whole week if I want to avoid panic, but it’s just so easy to get distracted by, well, everything.  Even when I am interested in the topic I get distracted: sometimes it’s something as simple as getting caught up in an article only vaguely related to whatever topic I’m researching, other times I just have to spend half an hour shaping my fingernails.  Seriously, if they aren’t just right I might catch them on something and break them painfully.  My fingernails and eyebrows are never so well shaped as when I have a massive term paper looming.

     No matter how much I avoid the paper, or the discussion post however, it will always get written.  Usually by the time I finish writing I feel like I’ve just completed a great feat of athletic prowess and my brain must disengage from the world around it immediately to recover; once I even got stuck under a chair I was still technically sitting on (my hair somehow got under the wheels) after a fit of unbridled post-paper-pandiculation caused me loose my balance and my brain was too tired to figure out what was happening until I was staring at the underside of a dorm room desk chair.  I stopped locking my door while studying after than, just in case I ever found myself in need of rescue from the furniture again.

     Granted, this term the bulk of my writing projects are a bit shorter than MA thesis, but some of them aren’t really papers at all, these days I have to websites and videos, and write quizzes, and even occasionally EXAMS!  At least my my MA thesis I got to pick the topic.  Yes, my adviser made me completely rewrite chapter one and then later decided she liked the old way better and why wasn’t chapter two polished I only had to rewrite not re-research, what on earth was I doing with my time (watching Buffy), but at least I picked the topic.  These days I have to write about things like the relationships between Related Terms in an index, or review the online access of an archive.  Incidentally, it is not okay to say to the terms are related “because”, and the archive’s online presence is “pretty good, ‘nuff said”.  I know these things are important for me to know about, but frankly as far as I am concerned the indexes are created by magic and people who care.  I love the fact that there are people who care about creating indexes, and I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am not really one of them.  I care about not letting my team down for the group project, but I just don’t care what type of relationships we mean when we say terms are related.  
     Everything that I don’t care about for this semester is being made ten times more difficult to face by the fact I’ve signed up for classes for next term.  It’s almost here, I’ve paid for it, I can taste it, THE PENULTIMATE TERM!  And it should be fun.  Like really fun.  I’m taking medieval manuscripts paleography and codicology.  I know right?  So exciting you could just...well, maybe not you normal person, but I could.  I will also be doing an internship, so that is exciting.  The internship will be entirely remote work (my friend Adam says it sounds stupid if I say “virtual” and it’s better to call it “remote”, whatever Adam).  I’m pretty excited about that too, I think I wrote in my learning objectives something about using the skills I learned in the classroom in a non-traditional setting.  I have some experience as a marketing and publicity intern; this time however, it will be librarian things rather than publishing things, so it will be new and exciting.  But that is all later, for now I still have to deal with indexes and archives.  So it is back to scope notes and finding aids for the next month before the fun really begins.