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.

James Munkers Super Freak by Lindsey Little

It’s always exciting when a friend gets a book published; it’s even more exciting when the book is actually really good.  Sometimes a friend gives you something to read and all you can say “well, ahhhhh...I really liked that bit right at the end!” (you know, that bit where the drivel finally stopped).  But then sometimes a friend gives you something to read and it’s rivetingly-un-put-downably-can’t-wait-for-the-sequel good.  Happily, the latter was the case with my good friend’s soon to be published book, James Munkers Super Freak, and all I can say is thank Bragi for that!  

I got to read about James last November when I was visiting my lovely friends for their wedding in Tasmania.  I’d been pestering James’s author for quite some time to let me read the book—after all, I worked in children’s books for a long time so I could give a professional opinion.  Finally she relented and handed over her computer: all it took was a flight to rural Australia, a not-exactly-hostile honeymoon takeover (with help from other friends!), and couple demands that bordered on hysterical.  Easy peasy.  

Within 24 hours I’d read James 1½ times.  I eventually had to stop reading and be “social” with my friends.  I’d been hearing about this book and about James for so long long I was worried that finally reading it would be a letdown after all the anticipation.  But—O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!—all that waiting and pestering was worth it!  James is funny, and smart, and engaging, and perhaps just a bit mad, exactly as a 15 year old reluctant hero should be.  The writing is excellent (I know I’m biased, but I’m also a bit of an expert in the field so I think my opinion can be trusted), and James’s voice is just so engaging I wish we could have been friends when I was in high school.  I read the whole thing in one day, I wanted to really savor it but once I started it several hours passed very quickly and I’d suddenly run out of story to read.  I guess I shall just have to savor it the next time.

While I can’t guarantee that everyone’s first reading of James will be as memorable as mine, I should note that after the first read through two whales appeared and started frolicking right in front of our rental and if that’s not magical I just don’t know what is.  Alas, there were no more whales while I was reading it though again, but I can’t really blame James I suppose, he did have rather a lot to do in the story without breaking through from the world of fiction to fetch me more whales.  

Recommended: emphatically 
Published by IP Kidz
 

Asynchronous Frustration

Being a student again is...weird.  I have to participate in discussions, which is really really hard.  Normally when I am in school, I do the reading, go to class, and am relatively quiet.  It’s not that I don’t participate or prepare, it’s just that I’ve just never been one of those students who always has to be at the centre of every week’s discussion.  If I have something to add that isn’t just reiterating everyone else I will add it, otherwise I am probably going to pretty much stay quiet.  I don’t really like discussions where everyone just says the same things over and over.  I think that’s why this whole online discussion thing is so damn hard; I, and everyone else is my class, types out our discussion contributions before sending them off into the void of the internet to wait until someone deigns to read and respond.  It feels as though everyone is screaming their opinions at everyone else without listening to most of what is being said.  When I read the “responses” to posts I’ve made most of the time they aren’t really responding to what I’m saying, and when they do respond there is little more than “I agree!”.  That’s not to say I’m not totally guiltless in this, part of our grade is based on contributing to discussions so I’ve been just as guilty as everyone else of posting not to further discussion but to just get something out there for the week.  And then of course there is the fact it’s all asynchronous, nothing flows because it could be hours or days between the initial post and the response.  I’m trying to get used to it, and I try to make sure I respond (really respond, not just saying “I agree!” or hitting “reply” and saying something that has nothing to do with the post to which I am ostensibly replying) to at least one post a week, but sometimes it is just too hard to add to the noise knowing that whatever I say is just going to be drowned out by everyone else trying to make sure they meet the participation requirement.  It’s a frustrating system, metaphorically screaming my opinions into the silence and hoping to get an answer from someone in the void, but at least if my best ideas about the reading come to me in the middle of the night I don’t have to try and remember them until the next time the class meets!