Category: personal

Categories
art personal

Impending move, cool art

Impending move, in many senses.

In one, the summer has flown by,
too fast,
and I’m left anticipating that too-soon departure;
again into that impenetrable wilderness.

In another, less frightening way,
I may transport this bloggy realm;
ineffective though it may be,
over to precision effect.
Ineffective more speedily.

As for cool art,
I highly recommend checking out
the art of Barnaby Ward.
His sloppy lines,
tough (if skinny) women,
and long-limbed robot monsters,
make for a winning combination (plus he has an alice gallery).

Categories
personal poetic

DYDRMR

Once laid out on that distant shoreline
sand wiggled between toes.

One unending summer,
I’ll dream you a name for every cloud that passes.

Categories
love personal poetic

Disparation

As if the things that bothered us
really mattered anyhow.

We were clenched so tight,
knuckles white,
someone had snuck through in the night and
monkey-wrenched our stomachs.

Why’d the blue skies turn gray, anyway?

It’s easy to play like
there’s no such place as far away,
like distance can drop
like a pin when you call.

Even though the voices penetrate
sometimes the closeness gets lost in the signal.

But it’s not the far away that matters,
but the mutters in our memories,
the murk of missing you that
blends your face into the trees of Mont-Royal.

And there was freezing rain, too.

I came back, expectations akimbo and
high as a kite flown over at least
eight states and two provinces but
not dinged up in the least.

Expectations perform tricks in the slightest breeze.

Fuck freezing rain, anyway.

It nearly took until July before
a heat wave melted those thin ice blankets,
those preconcexpectations that,
like veils,
obfuscate everything.

As if the things that mattered
ever really bothered us anyhow.

At least

I can say that now.

06 July 2007 –Ahniwa Ferrari

Categories
love personal

Limber

It seems to me that, in order to get by gracefully in this world, the most important skill that one can possess is being able to adapt easily to change. There is no stasis in this world. As much as we might feel it, there is actually little entropy for anyone who lives life with, at the least, two legs and eyes in the front of their heads. Even small changes: a friend gets a haircut, your poker night switches houses, you start going to bed at 11:30 instead of 11:00; even these little things can have a great effect on your life, and if you’re not adaptive, not willing to say to yourself “Okay, this is how this is now and I’ll just have to get used to it,” then even these tiny details can be grating, difficult, and ultimately destructive.

And when it comes to relationships, change is the dealbreaker. Or the dealmaker. My brother had to make a fairly large change before he could marry the woman he loved, but he did so, and gracefully, and so was able to move on with a happy and fruitful existence. My own relationship has gone through so much change of late — engagement, my moving to Montreal, my coming back from Montreal, building rooms, visiting friends, and starting new jobs — that sometimes I feel like I hardly even know which way is up anymore, and at times I just wish it would all stop. Where is that moment when, returning from Montreal, I finally get to rest, bask for a moment in my own happiness and fulfillment, and take a nice, long, deep breath? Where my deep, deep relaxation? As I’ve sought it out, I’ve come to a rather painful realization concerning my ability to adapt well to changes.

I don’t.

How did that happen? I always thought I did great. I always thought that I was the zen master of living a simple and uncomplicated life where the events of the world did not have the ability to affect my tranquil and positive state of being. Evidently, not so much.

But I’ve still got hope for myself. The next fourteen – sixteen months will provide me more than enough opportunities to, hopefully, get over myself and, in doing so, find myself again. I sound like a fortune cookie, even to me, but I know that there’s that core there, somewhere inside me, that remains unflappable. Perhaps I’ll find it. Alternately, maybe I’ll come to realize that being unflappable? Not so great after all. It’s the people that flap, that are sensitive and emotional, that live with great passion, that burn and seethe and cry out in the night their joys and heartaches. I’ve envied these people for years, but somehow I just don’t think that it’s the way I was built to be.

Either way: change? Yeah, I’m gonna learn how to deal with it and maybe, one day, to even enjoy it.

Categories
humor personal webcomics

Webcomic QotD

“Order is illegal! It goes against the laws of thermodynamics.”

“Anarchists educated in entropy? The epitome of irony!”

dieselsweeties.com

Categories
personal

A year older …

… if only a day. It wasn’t the best of birthdays.

My only real wish is that I make it through the next couple weeks without dying from this palpable ball of stress that has taken up habitation just below my sternum. Should I live, there will be driving, companionship, homecoming, and deep, deep relaxation.

Yea, those are the things from which a birthday should be made.

Categories
personal poetic webcomics

A Paragon of Productivity

Due to my complete and utter lack of drawing skill (except for when I was in Paris and became, inexplicably, endowed with the spirit of Henri Rousseau), I’m always looking for some way to create a webcomic that doesn’t involve my creating images. Okay, so this is no great artistic ideal, but I’m quite taken with the medium, and want to find some way in which I can contribute. I thought about becoming a critic, but I found that that was already something that Websnark was doing incredibly well and that Fleen was doing incredibly in bulk. Disappointing.

Anyway. Yesterday I came up with an idea for a webcomic that I could create that would match three of my (currently) major interests. Libraries, World of Warcraft, and … webcomics. Okay, so maybe the third one is redundant. Drawing or no, creating a webcomic requires a large committment of both time and energy, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up that such a thing will actually be created. I was just excited about the idea. Who knows, maybe I’ll become endowed with the spirit of Alexandre Dumas and become a paragon of productivity.

As if.

Note: Alexandre Dumas’ collected works fill 277 volumes, and he claims to have written 1,200 volumes, though that was in the day of multi-volume novels. (from Trivia Library)

Categories
personal school

On the snow-slick precipice of April.

The past couple weeks have been spontaneously draining and invigorating. The same could be said for any particularly busy, productive period, I imagine, so long as the work is rewarding in some way. That hasn’t always been the case, unfortunately, and I’ve spent nights awake, fingers to keys, really annoyed and frustrated with each moment of productivity. Inevitably, by the time I’ve finished, I feel at least reasonably satisfied, either with the process, the creation of something from my mind and through my body, or, occasionally, with the final product itself. For instance, I wrote a killer strategic plan.

April approaches and marks, among other things: the end of the term; the return home; and yet another year of life in my increasingly impressive resume (I’ve almost collected 27 of them!). Sure, I’m average among my age group, but I’m exceptional when compared with those younger than me. It’s been a fine collection, so far. Sure, some years are a little shabbier than others. Looking at them, it’s obvious that some have been through the proverbial ringer. No amount of polish can make those years shine, but they have a certain, grizzled charm to them, nonetheless. Though I do admit a certain bias; it’s my collection, after all.

This year, when hung up and compared with the others, has been exceptional. There’s no doubt of that. It’s got adventure written all over it; a few major decisions etched indelibly into its surface; the fulfillment of one dream and the birth of many more. It’s had its grey days, certainly. It’s had it sunny days as well. It’s even had a few fairly large blizzards. But when all is said and done, it’s been a year; it’s been three hundred and sixty-five days; it’s been one more eventful trip around the sun.

And just like every year that’s preceded it, it’s been my favorite year to date.

Categories
montreal personal

Sometimes I forget …

Sometimes I forget the events that led to my being here. Sometimes I forget the days before the voyage, the glimmer of an idea of a thought, a glint of the mind, sent out so far to the east that it seemed more fantasy than possibility.

The first time I mentioned Montreal was in November of 2004. Politically motivated, I was determined to abandon the festering conservative madhouse that I felt the United States had somehow become. At the end of my rant, a brief remark: “Well, I’m off to explore the web, and see if I can find any viable ways to move to Montreal.” By the next day, I had found McGill, and my “escape route” was all planned.

Sometimes I forget the tribulations that followed;
relationships ended for my imagined lover,
a city that I’d never met.

“I’ve been thinking about Montreal. If I end up going, I have to go alone. I need to leave my attachments and start fresh, to seewho I am.”

I remember clearly reading the first letter from McGill,
“We’re sorry, better luck next time”,
and my first conversations with the administration that,
then chimaera, invisible roadblocks in my path,
are now just another everyday
part of my existence.

I continued my illicit love affair regardless,
my obsessive stalking;
I knew what Montreal was doing as I
peeked through the windows into its secret mechanisms.
I lifted up its skirts and found an impenetrable wilderness:

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. / It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will / bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish / the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again.

– from ‘Montreal’, by Leonard Cohen

Sometimes I forget this path that led me here.

Now I’m here. All that build-up and anticipation,
and now I’m here, wondering what to do with it all.
There’s magic here, absolutely,
loneliness too, as I wander through this wilderness;
remembering, and
waiting for the Brightness to manifest again.

Categories
libraries love personal

Je devins une biblioteque fabuleuse

No matter the facts of our past, it seems that every memory carries a hint of melancholy. What are these days we’ve put behind us, what bonds were forged then broken? What then do we become, we strongly forged yet pulled asunder chains? Are these chinks in our armor, then, from gnashing together, from pulling apart, from trying to find that place where we could link together like a magic trick?

When it comes to separation, I’ve never been very proficient. One lucid moment of deja vu and deep inside I’m sure that all of this happens simultaneously. But we organize, we pull things apart here, put them together over there, arrange them by genre and color and place, until the synchronicity is all gone and we’re left with neat little piles, each one tagged and indexed and we wonder why we feel sad when we look upon our great achievement.

It’s natural, maybe inevitable. There’s no reconciliation. Once we’ve made our piles, we’ll never again find their homes, never again be able to separate them out and recreate the synchronous, chaotic jumble that we somehow tumbled out of.

It’s okay. We’ve arranged ourselves into vast libraries, now we get to be librarians: we provide access to some, deny it to others; we give out parts of ourselves and then, almost inevitably, demand them back; we reclassify certain parts as our standards change; and maybe, if we’re very lucky, we find a quiet moment when, alone and lost in the stacks, rustling through pages of memories, we rediscover some beautiful treasure that we had long since forgotten.

Maybe that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

That is over. Now I know how to salute beauty.
– A. Rimbaud (tr. by Louise Varèse)

Categories
personal school wordpress

What you see …

WYSIWYG editors are just plain annoying. They load slow and they try to do everything for you, but they do it wrong. I mean, haven’t these people learned anything from MS Word!? The default editor has a handy link button, and will even do bold and italics for me if I become too lazy to bracket my b’s and i’s, and really, that’s all I need.

At the moment I’m hanging out, slightly buzzed off a Canadian table wine called “Cochon Mignon” (cute pig), which is actually quite good, and thinking about doing my homework for tomorrow (which I imagine I really should). Next week we have our first set of due dates, as far as assignments go. I’m not quite stressed … yet. I work best under pressure.

The new site loads much faster than the old one. I attribute part of that to the shiny new underbelly of WordPress 2.1, and some of it to my having somehow broken my old install with random plugin installations and too many bells and whistles. This install I will keep clean and limber, because I like it that it loads much faster than it used to. And really, what is a blog besides a place to put words? Of all the communication mediums, words have always been my favorite anyway, so even in this age of fancy podcasts and youtubisms, I figure they’re what I’ll stick with. I have some fun plans for some other projects, though who knows if I’ll ever follow through on them. Mostly I just get excited about having plans, so much so that I really don’t feel like doing anything about them would contribute to my excitement. I’d much rather just plan things. One of the things I always forget when moving urls around is that it breaks referral links. Mostly, this means that the handy links I got from the Librarian Avengers “Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian” link won’t give me all the fancy hits that it used to. Rather, it will just direct to my boring, empty (but very speedy), portal page.

Speaking of which, my portal page uses Drupal, which is itself kind of fun. It’s nice to get out there and try out some new software every now and again. I even installed it manually, since Dreamhost doesn’t have a Drupal one-click install (yes, I really am that lazy most of the time). It kind of makes me wish I was in the web design course this term, but I am glad to be getting my requirements out of the way so that I can have fun next year (I think). I also, from time to time, mourn the fact than I’m not in McNally’s history of libraries class, but I guess it’s too late to do anything about that now. I’m excited about taking his history of books and print course next year, so at least that’s something.

Alright, back to the wine, and maybe even some studying….

Categories
personal

Ten minutes before midnight

There’s a certain point in any foreign experience when a person hits a certain peak. The awkwardness of the new situation has worn off, for the most part, and while things are still new, they’ve also reached a point of comfort where you feel like you can be yourself. You, in turn, are a new experience to the other people involved in this foreign environment, which can in turn itself be kind of eye-opening.

This is the point I remember feeling, at one point in France. This is the feeling I had freshman year at Evergreen. It’s even the feeling I had when I came back to Olympia, both times, from France and Ohio, though in those cases there was an interesting blend of newness and familiarity. It’s the point that, in no small part, drove me to Montreal. It’s a point of self-discovery, or maybe of re-discovery of those parts of yourself that you love best. When we exist in an environment that is used to us, it’s inevitable that it will start to take us for granted, and that we in turn will take ourselves for granted. In a new environment, we’re fresh; we’re seen through new eyes and can therefore see ourselves through new eyes.

In these brief flashes of insight I’m a poet in love with the world; I want to dance at midnight, drink coffee ’til dawn; I want to improvise pirate stories by flashlight around a bottle of whiskey. I want to smile, I want to cry, and I want to laugh out loud at the complicated, perfect beauty of the world.

Categories
dance personal

Blog-a-day, blog away!

Every once in awhile I tell myself, “Self, today is the day that I’m going to start blogging on a daily basis.”

My self usually responds by saying, “Do I even know you?”, and goes to sit on the other side of the bus.

Regardless of my split personality problems, I really do intend to create florid, captivating windows into which one might peer into my life. That is my intention. But, I suppose like all intentions, good and otherwise, it ain’t haulin’ water. Or, bizarre analogies aside, intentions and actions are different beasts. In any case, I’m on day two of such a spurt, however brief it may end up lasting. Hopefully, by day three, or four, or eventually, one hopes, I’ll stop starting said blog entries by talking about how I hope to blog more. I don’t really care what you think of it, but it bores me to tears.

So far, today’s been a long day of reading, class, conversation, studies, a lecture, a group discussion, and for lunch: some tasty salami. Now I’ve got rice on the stove and swing classes in about an hour. I have two classes on Wednesday nights, Lindy [Hop] 3 and Blues. This is week 3, and so far the lindy class is quite easy, though a nice review, and the blues class is kicking my ass. I knew it would. Blues, or at least blues lindy, is to me what the dance is all about. Or perhaps it just emphasizes those things that I think dancing should be all about from the get-go. It focuses on the music, it stresses mood and emotive dancing, and it makes you move your ass. That last one is very important. Unfortunately, it’s also my biggest problem at the moment. Body isolation is tough for me, and while I can do a certain amount, even with my hips (and ass), really getting into it, pushing down, committing entirely to it, is really tough for me.

I know I’m there to learn, but with how long I’ve been dancing, I always feel like I should learn things naturally, that I should be able to pick new things up quickly and move on. I tend to get down on myself, but in a way it’s also kind of invigorating to really have to work to understand what I’m doing, what I’m doing wrong, and what I can do to improve. I’ll keep going until I figure it out. At least, that’s the vow I made to myself, but then you know how well he and I get along.

Categories
personal

For those of you …

… who really, really want to get me something shiny for Christmas, but have no idea what such a thing might be, I’ve created my annual x-mas wishlist, linked over there on the right. It comes with the usual disclaimer: I don’t need any presents, and I don’t need these presents, but if you must, and if you don’t know … well, I like to be helpful.

In other x-mas-ey news, I’m making a Christmas mix CD to give to people. If you’d like a copy, let me know. 🙂

Peace to your ‘nog, -A

Categories
montreal personal

Goddam it’s cold!

I think that may be the first time in my life that as soon as I got home I felt I had to peel off all my clothes and immediately take a warm shower. It’s below freezing outside, it’s windy, and it’s raining. What the hell kind of weather is that!?

On the plus side, it’s neat when every branch of a tree looks like it’s been attentively wrapped in a little, clear blanket of ice.

Categories
personal

I have homework on my mind, and scotch on my liver.

dalwhinnieI’m doing my best to become a scotch snob. I’ve experienced some setbacks. Mainly the high price of good scotch. I’m a poor university student, so buying a $70+ bottle at any regular interval is well-beyond my means if I have any inclination to eat. I bought one nice bottle, $70, of Dalwhinnie 15-year single malt. I drank it reverantly, sparingly, mainly because of the price, though also because it deserves to be savored. The amount of time it lasted, at the price it cost, actually seemed fairly reasonable.

The other day, I bought a sub-$30 bottle of Ballantine’s Finest. I suppose the simple fact that it was palatable makes me a very poor scotch-snob indeed. It’s a blend of over 40 malts. I drank the bottle over the course of the past three days. We value the things that cost us dearly, more than those we come by easily. I guess that holds true with scotch as well. No reveration was required. No savoring, nor sparsity, nor even common sense was used. Some weekends you just want to get drunk. Those weekends are rare for me, but I enjoyed the lightly buoyant feeling as I plugged away at my database project.

Now the bottle’s gone, and since I’m rabidly aware of the dangers of over-consumption, it will be some time before I acquire any more scotch. Probably not until the new year, at least.

One of these days I’ll become a scotch snob. Once I can afford it, that is, and they’ve invented artificial livers.

Categories
personal school

I’ve been compromised!

Batten the hatches! Self-Destruct! Hit the big red button!

Some of my classmates have found this blog. Obviously, I must now destroy it.

…

Actually, I don’t really mind. I’ve long since come to terms with the idea of this blog being “found”. By anyone. For the most part, I wouldn’t write it if I cared who read it. So, welcome. I doubt anyone would find this blog particularly interesting on its own merit (i.e. out of context, i.e. if you don’t know me), as I’m fully aware the writing is not of a particularly entertaining sort. Sure, I’m charming and funny in person, but I do my best to avoid those things in my written works. I find that if you set a precedent, people will come to expect wit and charm, and then there’s just too much pressure to perform.

In short, new readers, welcome to this ridiculous exercise in verbal exposition.

I had a conversation with Abigail the other night about this blog, in which I admitted that I actually don’t particularly enjoy blogging. In fact, I find it something of a chore. On the other hand, I do feel like it’s a good practice, and I do enjoy being able to look back on it and see what I was doing, what thoughts I had, when. The other reason I do it is simply to keep certain people up to date on certain things in my life, should they choose to come by here and look (which, I think, most of them do not). I remember that I used to enjoy blogging, back in the day when I first started and I was all artsy and stuff. In my old age I’m becoming less creative and more discursive, much to my chagrin. Perhaps one day I’ll turn it back around.

Actually, I am pretty excited about a creative project I have brewing. I’ve even started some research on it. But for now it’s all top secret, so you’ll just have to simmer in your own anticipation. I hear that expectation cooks in its own sauce….

Categories
libraries personal school

Saturday: it’s not just for sleeping in anymore.

One thing I’ve begun to notice about graduate school is that it isn’t a Monday thru Friday sort of deal. Or, at least, it isn’t for me. I set my alarm this morning the same I do during the week, and it’s irrelevent that I slept through it and, subsequently, somehow turned it off. The point is that though I didn’t wake up until nearly 10, I meant to wake up at 7 or so. In either case, I woke up, showered, dressed, and walked to school on a cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning. Chances are that I’ll be here all day, working on a project.

The project itself is a case study of an (imaginary) public library (except I think that they call them municipal libraries around here). This library has a crapload of things wrong with it, mostly due to the old management, Jerry, who is now out the door. The new management, George, has just received a crapload of money (why is a mystery), from the municipal officials, and know he has to come up with a battle plan for making the library not suck. But him, I mean that we do, and it isn’t particularly difficult except that the professor has a tendancy to be vague about what EXACTLY she wants you to turn in, until you’ve turned it in, and then she’s VERY exact about what she wants. Which is frustrating, to say the least. The last assignment we turned into her was a beautiful work of art, a diagram of how information flows through a library, complete with little people, flipbooks, and I even think it showed a full, synthesized understanding of the ways in which information flow happens. Turns out that she didn’t want synthesized anything, she wanted her buzzwords, verbatim, explicitly listed on the diagram. I’m not bitter, really….

Marianne Bailey, one of my favorite professors from Evergreen, once told me that graduate school was, more or less, nothing but a series of hoops that you have to jump through in order to get your degree. For the most part, I’ve found my experience so far to be much more fulfilling than that, except for this one class, which is characterized perfectly by her analogy. The jumping part isn’t even hard, by itself. Finding out where the hoop is, how high and how wide, and whether or not it’s on fire or coated with acid; that’s the tricky bit. But even if graduate school were just a series of hoops eventually leading to a degree, I’d still be here, though with substantially more gritting of the teeth. Fact is, I’m tired of correcting people when they call me a librarian. Sure, maybe I’m here for other reasons too: education, personal growth, etc. But the name thing, that’s definately the big one.

Categories
personal school

I have a blog?

Or is it a website? That’s the problem, really, with moving to your own domain thingy. You begin to experience an identity crisis. Granted I never knew what I was doing on blogspot or LJ either, but I was the most prolific when I was just blogging, before I felt like “just blogging” was somehow cliche or trite, or god forbid, completely self-obsessed.

That all said, I’ve ceased to care, for this very particular instant, what anyone who reads this and doesn’t know me might think of me. Because honestly, if people read random blurbs of inane information concerning my personal life, and they know me, they’ll have a context, find it interesting maybe, or at the least, feel in the loop. And if they don’t know me, and don’t have a context, well then I don’t know why they’re here anyway. At one point I know I was hoping to have a “popular” website. Something topical and interesting and poignant to its field, like an LIS blog or something. I had all these great plans to blog about library school, but honestly it’s just not that exciting. Maybe I’m just a crappy storyteller. Who knows. Excuses aside, let the inanity commence.

Today I had my first quiz in a long, long time, and now it feels like my brain wants to explode. I imagine it would help if I went and drank some wine and ate some food, but I guess I’d rather relax and type out these thoughts. Huh.

Jeph released his “She blinded me with library science” tees for preorder, so if you’re interested you should swing over to questionablecontent.net and put in your order. They’re sexy AND clever. But then that’s QC for you.

I spent a week in Olympia, and it was nice to see everyone again, though I admit that the week was a bit more hectic than I might have liked. Now I just have to trudge through six more weeks of school until Christmas break, and three weeks off. Hopefully I can make it seem like I’m NOT trudging, but then that’s the trick, isn’t it.

So back to my quiz. We had to write correct authority headings for some entries, and then we had to write out cross-reference cards indicated by various authority files. After that we had to create a main entry unit card based off a MARC record, and then create a level 2 ISBD description based off the title page and some listed information of a book. Finally, we got to explain the four uses of uniform titles, using specific examples, and furthermore explain how each use might be effective in different types of libraries. It’s been a long time since I ran out of time on a test, and I did finish, but I was rushing a lot near the end, on the essay, and I didn’t finish insofar as I could have easily written a lot more to make my essay answer completely satisfactory. But then I didn’t much care for the question, as far as something that we have to analyze and think about rather than just regurgitate the rules and uses of uniform titles, so I didn’t particularly feel like putting an enormous amount of energy into it anyway.

After the quiz, in a flash of halloween wickedness, we had a manic thirty-minute lecture on LC subject headings, and how to assign them, which was subsequently the topic of our lab. It’s been a long day, and I’m tired and hungry, and I’m now one-eighth of the way done with my degree and that, at least, is a little bit exciting.

Happy Halloween! I’m off to eat some food and watch some more of season six of Buffy. I’m almost done! I was thinking about being Giles for Halloween, but then I realized that my accent just plain sucks.

Categories
libraries love montreal personal tech

Unconnected ramblings…

pistedusinge

With a title like that, I’m sure you’re excited to read on.

My Sony Dream System ™ arrived, and as I had feared it doesn’t have a digital audio connection. Also, it has an integrated dvd-player. WTF!? Okay, so I ordered it and I should have known. But I had thought to myself “NO WAY does a decent receiver in this day and age NOT have an optical port!” Well, I guess you showed me, Sony. FutureShop, for their part, were annoyingly vague in their description of available ports, and had no pictures on the website of the back of the receiver, which you’d think would be the most informative part to show prospective buyers. I thought that true DTS support required a digital audio connection, but somehow mine is still working through my handy red and white connectors. Perhaps my presumptions all this time have been wrong, in which case I blame Theo. Also possible is that the receiver is faking the DTS connection, but I don’t know how that would work exactly, either. In any case, my apartment is tiny and it actually sounds pretty good, so I decided to keep the damn thing, though I’ll try to sell it before I move for the summer. I’ll take a loss, that’s fine. No optical as a temporary situation is okay, but in the long term I simply can’t exist in such a state of squalor.

Did I mention that FutureShop has listed, as a recommended accessory, an optical cable? That’s just tricky, that is. The bastards. Oh yeah, and as a dvd-player it doesn’t have an hdmi port, which seems ludicrous what with television going digital and all. Here’s a link to the system, if you wanna see.

Some guy in Lawrence, Kansas wrote an op-ed piece essentially positing that libraries are worthless and obsolete. The write-up itself is incredibly annoying, but the responses to it have been really interesting. I forwarded the story on to my classmates, since it’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to stand up against soon enough, and we may as well start now. To briefly outline my description here, libraries are NOT worthless and are, in fact, AWESOME. These are facts, and therefore undeniable. So there, Mr Hirschey of Lawrence. I wrote a more eloquent proclamation (if you can imagine such a thing), in the comments proper. I encourage everyone to go and have their say. Lawrence could be a masthead for the library advocacy movement, if enough people took notice. Michael Stephens and the Librarian in Black have both posted verbose rebuttals, which is a start, but I think we really need to steamroll this issue. Their posts are worth reading, in any case.

My trip to New Jersey to see Abigail was fantastic. It was a slice of heaven, spread over a little less than two days, and that’s even considering the fact that I was suffering from some flu symptoms. Ain’t no disease was gonna get me down! The wedding itself was very sweet, and got us talking about how we want to do OUR wedding, which was fun in itself. If you’d told me a year ago that I would be making wedding plans in Jersey, I’d have given you my quizzical eyebrow look. Now it makes all the sense in the world, except for the Jersey part, of course. We’re looking at July of 2008, which will be right around our second anniversary, so it seems like a good time. Mark your calendars, etc.

I just finished watching season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took me all of … oh, three days to get through. Maybe two. Much to my homework’s chagrin. But hey, once you start watching Buffy, it’s all over. I was powerless to resist its spell. It’s my first time through the series, as well, and a journey I began with Tim back when we were living together in Olympia. I’ll get through the rest of the series before the end of the year, and will finally be able to call myself a fulfilled and cultured individual. Until then, I have seasons 1 and 2 of Deadwood to keep me occupied, as well as, oh yeah, schoolwork.

Go figure. On one last note, the Pharmaprix up the street has Orangina for sale for $1.99 CAD per 1.75L, which makes me the happiest and orangest guy in the province, at least until Oct 13th or so, or until they run out. I bought four, which wasn’t nearly enough, but a guy only has so many arms. Until later, then: stake em if you got em.