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.

On Writing

I used to write all the time.  It wasn’t always about important things—though one could make a reasonable argument that recording the everyday mundane is important—but it was always.  I wrote in class (usually not what I was supposed to be writing), in school assemblies, during (shudder) pep-rallies, watching T.V., eating lunch, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and reach for journal because I’d just thought of something—some droll observation or lepid anecdote—that must be recorded before I had any hope of sleeping again.  Eventually I didn’t write as much in a paper journal, though I continued to keep copious notes about my daily thoughts and experiences on paper for later, and I had my first blog.  There was, of course, overlap, a time when I had both a paper and a virtual journal, but my journal had never been for solely private consumption anyway and keeping it online just made it easier to share.

Sometimes I go back and look at the old journals (both on the shelf and online) and wonder why I stopped.  The obvious reason is that I graduated: I’d moved from paper and pen to laptop upon graduation from high school, and then just stopped writing my blog once I finished with (what I now consider “round 1” of) graduate school.  I guess it seemed like a natural break, my blog was a student blog and I was no longer a student.  Now of course I look back and think, so what?  Yes, I talked about classes and homework, but I also talked about travel, and books, and going out with friends, and interactions with strangers at bus stops.  Looking back I think the blog was not about student life, it was about the life of a student and then I think: I didn’t stop traveling, or reading, or meeting odd strangers on public transportation, so why did I stop writing about those things?  I never seem to be able to answer myself in a satisfactory way, but I do have an answer for why I don’t writing now.  It’s not that I don’t do and think things any more, but rather that I am horribly out of practice writing all the time, and no longer posses the youthful arrogance that assumes anybody cares.  Or maybe I never had that, sure I enjoyed when people read my blog and thought it was funny, or insightful, but all the time I wrote it I wrote it for me, back then the catharsis of writing was far more important than the being read.

I suppose that didn’t change, not really anyway.  I still find myself writing on scraps of paper, or typing my thoughts on Word or Google Docs when I am at my computer, the difference now is that I don’t post it.  Usually it gets lost or recycled, and nothing remains by the feeling of having purged my thoughts onto the page.

When I started my MLIS program I thought maybe I would start writing again, after all I was a student again, falling back into all my other old habits (good and bad) so why not thing one too?  I even had a class that required me to start a blog, or at the very least write specific entries into a blog I already had.  It was perfect, I had made an attempt to start a blog while working in a bookshop to keep track of book reviews and recommendations, but had not steadily kept it up—this was my chance to revive it, to reflect on my experiences in, and while in, school the way I had though high school, undergrad, and graduate school (round 1), and to create a record of my time as MLIS student I could look back on down the road.  Obviously things didn’t quite work out that way.

***

I never exactly fancied myself a writer, but I was a person who writes.  Even now I think of myself somewhat in those terms, my internal monologue certainly sounds like I’m writing and editing it even as I think (oddly, my internal monologue often speaks in a British accent—Fife, Yorkshire, or London mostly—depending on which friends I have been emailing or which BBC shows I have been watching.  It is actually quite jarring to hear myself speak when I have been left in my own head too long.  My external accent may not have been altered by my time abroad, but the little voices in my head have never quite left the UK), but I don’t write it down anymore, and I often find that not anchoring my thoughts on the page leaves them much more scattered than they used to be.

As may, or may not, be obvious from the asides, my thoughts don’t flow in a linear pattern.  They like to jump around and writing them down grounds them, the slowing down of the thought process that is the result of writing (mostly by hand, but to some degree typing as well) forces me to pay attention to the jumps and connections and I keep track of my own train of thought better.  In short, writing helps me be a better thinker; maybe that’s why it was always important to write EVERYTHING as a student, it cleared my mind to focus on my studies.  I very well may have finally figured out the purpose behind all those free writes my junior year English teacher made us do in high school, she wanted to teach us to think by forcing us to pay attention to our thoughts.  Of course the irony is the moment she told us to free write anything in our heads was the moment my inner monologue would practice being silent.

Letters to the senators

Most days my job is pretty standard for the office wench: I scan, I photocopy, I put things in envelopes to be mailed out by other people.  Some days, however, someone comes up with a task that turns unexpectedly odd.  Unbeknownst to me, earlier in the week one of the attorneys with whom I work asked a legal secretary to find out the proper address when writing a senator; little did she know finding an answer would involve three legal secretaries, several attorneys, at least two manager managers, and me (an “office specialist 1”).  It turns out no one really knows how to address a senator in a letter, and most people don’t really know where to find that information either.  Being a good little future librarian I took the question and hand and within about five minutes had three corroborating sources in the form of two government websites and Emily Post.  Turns out for state senators you’re really supposed to use Mr or Ms in the salutation (though you do address it to the Honorable So-and-so on the envelope); this came a rather a surprise to everyone, and it was generally agreed that it was “just like the federal government to address state senators as Mr or Ms rather than Senator!”.

It may not have been the most exciting thing that ever happened, but it did emphasize the importance of knowing where to look for the information you need.  And now, if any one asks me how they address a formal letter to a rabbi I know the proper salutation depends on whether or not they have a PhD, and I can write to any bishop—be they Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, or Mormon—pharmacist, or widow safe in the knowledge my etiquette has been fully vetted by the US government.

Resolutions

It’s a new year and a new term is just around the corner; once again classes are filled with possibility and I am filled with resolve to not write my papers the day they are due.  Seriously, I am getting so much worse at this, back in my undergrad days I have a very strict the-paper-must-be-finished-no-less-that-twelve-hours-before-it’s-due rule (by second semester “finished” because “all but final read through/edits”), but I’m pretty sure this past year I was still writing the last paper for my fall class two hours before the deadline—writing, not editing or proofing or submitting WRITING.  

I’m not usually one for resolutions, but every term I seem to find myself making them knowing full well my resolve won’t last past the second happy hour invite.  The knowledge that I am a serial procrastinator and do some of my best work on too-much-caffeine/too-little-sleep plan is little comfort in heat of the stressful midnights spent drinking cold tea typing till my fingers cramp.  This year, however I am going to be better (maybe)! I am going to get my work done extra early (probably through February)! and I am absolutely, positively going to be 100% (75%-80%) finished with my homework before I binge watch the last two seasons of Breaking Bad this weekend!

Banned Books Week

Hey!  Guess what!  It was recently Banned Books Week!  In case you didn’t know.  I guess some people don’t pay attention to celebrating banned books.  Personally—probably because I pretty much only follow libraries, publishers, and authors—my Twitter feed was exploding with #bannedbooksweek and #bannedbook, and of course #MCL150 since Multnomah County Library’s sesquicentennial celebrate magically coincided with BBW.  The party for MCL was amazing—marching bands, ballet, opera, Bollywood dancing—the entertainment was top notch, and the food—Salt & Straw, Case Study Coffee (special biblio blend!), Voodoo Doughnuts—really showcased Portland’s love affair with caffeine and sweets.  And, of course, MCL’s giant library card came out.  I was pleased that the late September weather was cool enough to justify fall wear, I got to break out the cool “bookworm” socks that kinda-sorta matched my tights.  

Aside from the awesome shindig that was the MCL 150 party I (sadly) didn’t do much to celebrate BBW.  I think the books I read that week were almost all proofs, some of them may have even been too new to have been banned yet (knowing about all the crazy people out there I am sure most of them will be censored somewhere, by someone, at some point—guess I was observing BBW with future banned books).  In reality I celebrated by doing homework, more homework, and hanging out at the library; pretty much how I celebrate every week!

Vocabulary Lesson - Homophones (part 1)

Nobody is perfect.  Everyone makes mistakes when writing—typos, grammatical errors, silly misspellings, not noticing that auto correct has “fixed” your nephew’s name (Dex, with a "D" auto correct!) until after you’ve sent the text.  I myself am absolutely terrible at putting commas after prepositional phrases at the beginning of a sentence while I am typing, (most of the time it’s because I rewrite the sentence 8 times, combine with four other sentences and then move it to the opening paragraph because that’s where that idea really should be anyway) but that’s what editing is for: to catch, and fix, mistakes before it’s too late.

I don’t care about informal writing.  If it tickles your fancy in informal writing to throw in numerals, or drop vowels, or only write every third letter that’s fine by me—with the one giant caveat that you get your point across with a minimum of fuss for your intended audience.  Because communication is the point of writing.  Which brings me to my point.  WHY CAN’T PEOPLE WRITE?  I'm not talking about small children, these are college and graduate school educated people.  In my day, a missing Oxford comma was grounds for Comment (yes, with a capital C!) from the professor, and ridicule from classmate.  Then again, I was educated in Scotland where we had undergraduate gowns, and ran into the north sea at dawn on May 1, and they whacked us on the head with a bit of leather at graduation.  Perhaps an American education is less strict about punctuation. 

For most of the last two years I have been working a variety of temp jobs, I’ve been in HR in offices and universities, I’ve worked in law school admissions, and I’ve worked with college students seeking employment.  In nearly all the positions I’ve worked in the last two years, cover letters and resumes have crossed my desk on their way to hiring managers, and admissions officers.  With that many cover letters crossing my desk, I expect to see the occasional mistake, the key word there being OCCASIONAL.  The number of times I have seen the sentence “my interest was peaked…” is no longer a statistically probable typo, it’s a choice people are making.  While it is entirely possible all of those people did, in fact, mean that their interest had either reached a summit or was sickly looking, I feel the more likely scenario is that they simply don’t know the difference between “peaked” and “piqued”.  I always have a nasty little urge to write to them saying “While enjoying a delicious piquéd¹ chicken sandwich at lunch, I peeked² at your cover letter; my interest was piqued³ by your use of “peaked”⁴, is it possible you picked the wrong homophone?.”  I always imaging a confused look followed by their head exploding.  

 

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1 adj. of meat, flavored with strips of bacon, larded.
2 v. to glance at, to pry (among many other meanings)
3 adj. characterized by an arousal of a feeling, esp. curiosity or interest (among many other meanings, none synonymous with “peaked”)
4 adj. (1) having reached a peak or point, (2) sickly looking

The End of the Summer Reading

Another year of summer reading is officially over.  :(  I spent about half the summer volunteering at the Capitol Hill branch of Multnomah County Library handing out prizes as kids and teens filled in their game cards (only about half the summer because my shift was Wednesday afternoons and I got a job in late July).  I had a ton of fun as a volunteer (and got a pretty spiffy shirt!) and hopefully I can do it again next year.  The little kids were adorable when they brought up their game boards and picked their prizes, many of them seemed more excited about the free stickers than any of the coupons or books, but the parents were pretty into coupons and books for their kids.  Thursday we had an end of summer reading party with pizza and root beer floats and a big water balloon fight in the parking lot.  I suppose the only downside to summer reading was that I forgot to turn in my adult summer reading game board at MCL and only turned in about half the books I read to Lake Oswego’s Lazinfest summer reading program.  Oh well, there’s always next year I guess!

Imminent Forcible Disruption by Kittens

There are certain things I have not missed about being a student.  Well, ok, mostly just the guilt.  I have not missed that awful feeling that I really should be doing homework instead of wasting six hours every night sleeping.  I have also not really missed textbooks except as a rather effective cure for guilt inspired insomnia.

Something I’ve only just realized recently I missed is the schedule.  I know people talk about students sleeping until noon and napping in the afternoon and generally just lazing about all day, and that isn’t what I mean.  My alarm goes off about 7:45 (though I am usually allowed to hit snooze a couple times) and I have Things To Do now-a-days, being a Grown Up and all. I do Things for which polite society generally requires wearing real pants, like walk the dog or go to the store to acquire milk.  Admittedly, I do try and avoid anything that requires real pants before noon, but I hardly keep to my uni-days hours.  What I am rediscovering however, is just how much I like working at night.  There is something wonderfully peaceful about starting your work after the sun goes down, a nice cool breeze in the window and lovely quiet outside.  Mornings can be quiet too, but it’s different: early morning quiet is for sleeping, or reading, or practicing looking as though you are contemplatively staring out the window holding coffee cup while you are really sleeping with your eyes open.  

Apparently, I still do my best work between 10pm-2am, I don’t even know why I bother trying during the day.  Most of the time I spend three times longer than I should reading each article or writing anything if it’s daylight outside.  The internet is too vast with too much frivolous drivel that I MUST READ RIGHT NOW, because god knows Facebook will cease to exist if my eyes aren’t on it at least three times an hour.  Of course that doesn’t explain my crazy focus in the middle of the night, I can sit an write an essay for four solid hours in the middle of the damn night, but I literally can’t go five minutes without finding out which Doctor Who companion I am during the day.  Maybe it’s just that I get all my distractions away in one long guilt ridden Buzz Feed quiz session during the day...or maybe cute kitten videos are reverse vampires and when the sun goes down they have to go into hiding or die. 

Superfluous Verbiage

I like words, and having an interesting vocabulary means you can be more precise in communications with others; or at least it would make communication clearer and more precise if I didn’t have to stop and define half the things I say.  Sometimes it’s as simple as “yes, I did really just use ‘fortnightly’ in conversation.  No, it’s not ‘adorable’, it’s a perfectly normal word.” and other times it’s a bit more complex “Oh no, ‘zeks’ is totally legit to use on words with friends, I mean, what other word would you use for people confined to a forced labor camp in the U.S.S.R.?”  Seriously, look it up, real word.  I know this because sometimes I read the dictionary.  I love the dictionary, when I look things up (in print or online) I get to read all the words around the one I meant to look up as well.  Most of the time I don’t get to use these words, “clitic” doesn’t come up in natural conversation ever—and it’s derivatives “proclitic” and “enclitic” can really only be used in very specific grammar conversations.  Other times, however, I not only get to use the word in everyday conversation, but I can even incorporate it into a haiku-tweet!

This past month I have working on getting “obganiate” into casual conversation.  I was surprised how often opportunities presented themselves, not only were people obganiating, but it was entirely appropriate for me to discuss it (I was not the recipient of the obganiation therefore I could discuss it without becoming a nag myself).  It didn’t even take much prodding to get my hiking buddy to work it into her conversation as well!  That’s how you know you’ve succeeded, when you are no longer the only one in the conversation using the nearly obsolete word you stumbled upon while reading the dictionary.    

I’m beginning to think this might cause issues with some of my upcoming group work in a class.  Somewhere in the reading there was a suggestion we should strive to avoid our sesquipedalian tendencies.  Only the reading said it in many, many more words.  And that’s the problem: if I avoid superfluous verbiage I make myself incomprehensible, but if I don’t I can’t say a damn thing in just a few short double spaced pages.

Summer Reading

Soon I will begin volunteering at Multnomah County Library with the Summer Reading Program.  I love summer reading programs, which is why I participate in Lake Oswego’s Lazinfest every year.  In one of my classes last term we talked about reading bills of rights and things and I shared the Lazinfest Bill of Rights (below) which prompted a discussion on how there are all sorts of bills of rights out there but nothing about responsibilities.  So, naturally, I created a (boringly named) Reader’s Responsibilities list and opened it up to my classmates to add to/comment on.  I still feel like it needs work, but one classmate already said it should be posted in libraries “everywhere” so I guess it’s in a sharable state, and maybe a list like this should always be a work in progress.

Reading Responsibilities List

• You have the responsibility not to judge others based on their reading taste
• You have the responsibility to treat library books and other materials with respect so others can read/use them after you
• You have the responsibility to return materials to the library in a timely fashion so others can enjoy them as well
• You have a responsibility to respect the space of the library both in your own use of it and how your use affects others
• You have the responsibility to not give away the ending to anyone who hasn’t read it yet (unless they ask)
• You have the responsibility to respect other readers opinions, even if you think they are wrong
• You have a responsibility to be fair to authors (before bashing a book you didn’t like think about if the book really was a bad story or poorly written, or if maybe it just wasn’t the right book for you)

YOUR LAZINFEST READING BILL OF RIGHTS

• You have the right never to apologize for your reading tastes.

• You have the right to read anything you want.

• You have the right to read anywhere you want... in the bathtub, in the car, in the grocery store, under the porch, or while walking the dog.

• You have the right to read in bed. Under the covers. With a flashlight.

• You have the right to carry books in your baggage at all times.

• You have the right to read in exotic settings.

• You have the right to move your lips when you read.

• You have the right to read the good parts out loud to your nearest and dearest.

• You have the right to refuse to read the good parts out loud to your nearest and dearest.

• You have the right to read and eat at the same time. (This right, however, does not include the right to use food as a bookmark when you are reading library books. Even if it's the very best potato salad.)

• You have the right to read naked.

• You have the right to read as many books as you want at the same time.

• You have the right to throw any book on the floor and jump up and down on it (provided that you paid for it first).

• You have the right to ignore the critics at the New York Review of Books.

• More importantly, you have the right to ignore the critics in your immediate family.

• You have the right to stop reading a book whenever you decide it's not worth the effort, or that you simply don't like it.

• You have the right to refuse to read any book anyone else picks out for you. Even if it's a birthday present. (This is associated with your right to refuse to wear any necktie or perfume you receive as a gift.)

• You have the right to skip all the boring parts.

• You have the right to read the last chapter first.

• You have the right to read the last chapter first and then put the book back on the shelf.

• You have the right to refuse to read any book where you don't like the picture of the author.

FINALLY, and most important:

• If you do not have a book of your own, your tax dollars will ensure that that you have access to one through your local public library.