This article is wonderful for anyone who often finds themself in a teaching / training position. Oh, if only more faculty would follow these wonderful guidelines.
Category: school
Cumulative GPA: 3.96
It was the first term did me in, and in particularly, one horrible partner. Oh well, them’s the breaks. I don’t think school grades are any indication at all of how intelligent someone is or how successful they’ll be, but gosh darn it I just spent two years and lots of moneys to get that degree and I want to brag a little bit!
Also it means I can disregard those horrible dreams I’d been having about completely messing up a final assignment, or missing some sneaky assignment entirely. That will be nice. The best reward, of course, is simply being done with school.
City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.
Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.
The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.
Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.
And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,
how I long to miss you.
In the grand tradition.
There once was a library lad
who wanted to graduate, bad.
He wrote every essay,
but oh what a mess, eh?
There always were more to be had.
It’s not entirely accurate because at this point the end is certainly in sight (I’ll be HOME in about a month), but there is still plenty of residual “this-will-never-end” feeling to last me for awhile.
On the upswing, things are going well with my application process, and I have a videoconference interview coming up … on my birthday. After the phone interview, this is another first for me, so it’s exciting but I’m a little nervous about it as well. Maybe one day they’ll even want to meet me.
To wrap up, I’d like to drop in part of what I wrote over at La Casa today, because sometimes even I can appreciate my own writing, and because where I stand on creating comics is also where I stand on creating any content; perhaps most topically, it’s where I stand on self-creation, on developing one’s self as a human being, as an artist (of any kind), as a friend, as a lover, and as a professional. The idea is that we create something of worth and offer it to the world; ideally, something unique that we’ve learned, through introspection and hard work, how to offer.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of comic I want to create. La Casa has been a journey – no, an experiment, really. It’s been a ride. It’s been something, anyway, but a lot of times I don’t know where to go with it, and I don’t know if it’s the story that I want to tell. There are thousands of comics out there, all of them telling stories, all of them with their own worth and audience and humor, and I’m happy that ours has been one of them, but at the same time I somehow want to find a way to make our comic different. I want to find the story that will be our comic, the characters that will drive the story, the merge between art and writing that will, at the very least, be uniquely ours. I’m really not talking about popularity, just the idea that in creating content and putting it out there for people to see, one has a responsibility to make that content … worth something. To somebody.
We start with a dream, and one by one pluck down the stars to light our path.
We start with a dream …
Graham over at The Inspired Library School Student asked me to write a guest post for him about how student associations at library schools can help to keep LIS students interested and inspired throughout their studies. It’s my first guest post, so that’s exciting, and I actually managed to get it to him fairly quickly.
I don’t know who decided that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phrase in the English language, but I have to say that I don’t agree. Not even a little bit. I find it to be a somewhat ugly, clumsy phrase, with little lyrical quality and, visually, with too much slant to the right. I think about these sorts of things too much, I agree.
Every once in a while, I write a combination of words with which I become quite pleased, and, as I glance about the room, I silently preen for a few moments before I move on with my writing. No one ever notices, sure, but little literaku moments such as these sometimes make my whole day worthwhile.
Just now in an essay on censorship in Ancien Regime France, I wrote: curtailing scurrilous printing. You can leave the printing out, it’s the combination of curtailing and scurrilous that I quite like, and that will make today worthwhile.
Assuming I finish this paper soon.
two weeks
it’s like a whisper
it’s less than
it may never come
it certainly can’t arrive soon enough
two weeks
and this world forgotten
this world of the grind
of hybrid solutions to indelible problems
of trying to bury myself between the lines
two weeks
for two weeks i will
rise above this endlessness
i will learn again
to speak without whispering
ahniwa ferrari — 05 february 2008
Maybe even overwhelmed. There is, without doubt, a lot of whelm going on over here. Fuck you, whelm.
Seriously, I don’t know why I keep telling myself that I enjoy school. There must be something wrong with me.
Oh, oh! But concerning much more exciting, interesting, and funny enterprises …
… wait for it …
La Casa Comics is back! With a vengeance! With multiple, confluent vengeances! Theo is responsible for the revitalization, having recently sent me a couple comics out of the blue. But I’m determined to be a contributing member as well.
You know … because maybe I just don’t have enough whelm in my life after all.
Endless winter days;
five reference assignments:
too much for too little.
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.
This week was my first week of assignments being due. The opening weeks of a term always seem a bit lazy; it’s easy to keep up with the reading (most of the time), but difficult to visualize where it’s all going. What it lack in actual workload, it makes up for in the absolute tedium of theory.
Monday, my group turned in our documentation of the presentation we did last week on collection development issues in public libraries. We talked about collection issues involving serials, government documents, electronic materials, and finished with some discussion on particular issues found in bilingual or francophone libraries. The presentation was fun enough, but I’m just glad to have it finished.
On Tuesday, Maya and I handed in an evaluation of a research article. Within our evaluation we had to answer four questions; involving previous research, statements of hypotheses, organization and communication, and problems within the research, including possible solutions. The research article was on transformed gaze conditions in a Collaborative Virtual Environment, particularly focusing on augmented gaze. If that doesn’t mean anything to you … well, you might be better off.
Wednesday I handed in a user needs assessment based upon an interview I did over the weekend. I had to pick someone who represented a user community, and based upon my interview, determine what sorts of information needs that community might have, what information seeking behaviors it exhibited, and possible obstacles the community faced. The interview was fun, and the write-up, once I figured out how to turn an interview into a needs assessment, went pretty smoothly.
Now I’m full swing into the term, with something new due every single week, it seems. It’s nice to have things spaced out a bit, though it means that there’s always a deadline looming, and that I have to stay on top of my work, i.e. I have to try and suppress my procrastinative nature as best I can. I have to prepare a strategic plan for next Friday. After that, we have a week off, and Abigail is coming to visit, so chances are I won’t be very productive. The following week I have a midterm, and then a couple weeks after that the next big collection development and information services and users projects are due.
It’s fun times, for me, despite my occasional proclivity to get involved in hallway conspiracies. But that’s an issue for another day. Things can always be better, but honestly I enjoy the things we’re doing, the multiple aspects of the field I’m in, and the direction I feel like this education is taking me. I admit I may be a bit of an optimist at times, but like Poe said: Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Categories
Death by Powerpoint
I wish someone would show this to my professors.
It’s not that they don’t have interesting things to say … but my god, I just get SO DAMN TIRED OF POWERPOINT. Granted, this would still be powerpoint, but at least it would be more interesting.
On the other hand, would these ideas work in an educational, weekly-powerpoint kind of setting? We have to give a presentation near the end of March, so maybe we’ll give it a shot.
According to this librarian’s story, it may be becoming one:
I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. “A lot out there is conspiring to distract you,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s your opinion about books. It doesn’t make it true.” To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.
On the one hand, I appreciate librarians using things like DDR to connect with teens, but I’m anxious that with more “engaging” (i.e. distracting) pursuits, reading will continue to be set aside, to our (as a society) long-term detriment.
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….
And in writing, for that matter. But I’d like you to know that even though I haven’t blogged much lately, i.e. lately in the last two years except for in spurts and I’m very aware of it, that I DID have a conversation about blogging today with someone in my class, and that that has to count for something.
So as to not just blog about blogging, which is what bloggers do when they start to feel bad about not blogging because they feel like something is better than nothing even if it is just autoreflective and uninteresting tripe (something I do try to avoid, dear readers) — I’ve begun to play World of Warcraft again and I’m having a grand old time. Sure, it can be difficult to juggle WoW time with, oh, let’s say, homework time, but I’ve actually found a very simple compromise. Just don’t do your homework. I find that by avoiding the conflict altogether I not only save time by not doing homework, but I also save time by not even feeling conflicted! How cool is that!
No, really though, I’ve actually been both keeping up on my work (which is so far just a lot lot lot of reading), and rapidly gaining levels in WoW. My goal is to catch up with my friends who play, which means just a few levels to go, and then I can adjust myself to a more leisurely playing schedule (note that I say that as though I can control my gaming proclivities, hah!).
Oh, right, and I’ve also been swing dancing a lot, so go me! Last but not least, here is a goose:
procrastination:
to put off cataloguing,
i write a haiku.
*sigh*
and off to work i go …
the project: pick three old-ass books from some boxes provided,
find said books in three different online library catalogs,
make my own records for the books, in both isbd and marc format,
write about the experience, the joys, and the tribulations.
verily, i tribulate. wish me luck.
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….
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.
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.