Why does it feel Social to complain?

Here's an interesting tidbit: for the last years of his life Casanova, the renowned Venetian lover, was a librarian. Okay, so he found it dreadfully boring, but still! Just one more reason to have a cat with the same name, though hopefully the cat gets into far less trouble and scandal than the man.

Nova is settling into the routines of apartment life. Except, between 4:30 and 6:00 every morning, he wakes up and expresses his extreme hunger and boredom by chewing on my hands and rubbing his slimy cat nose all over my face. Other than that though, good times. $300 down so far and more to go, but I don't regret bringing him home at all.

And, I'll say it for the trillionth time, I need to not procrastinate anymore, especially not on schoolwork. There's no good reason to be up at 2 anymore; it's getting as old as I am. I'll finish ranting about this later.


"Presumably the techno-peasants, to paraphrase the famous saying of Marie Antoinette, are expected to eat 'digital cake.'"
-from "The Digital Library: Myths and Challenges" by Terry Kuny and Gary Cleveland

Ready to Find It When You're Not Looking For It?

I went to Iowa this weekend to meet my cousin's husband, a nice fellow who gets up as early as she does and eats lots of avocados. And while there I was charmed by a stray kitten, which, combined with my sister's encouragement, has led me to adopt a cat. I had been holding off on cat ownership until, say, I found more permanent residence and/or employment, and I had been thinking of taking more troubled and certainly older cats from a shelter, but... I guess my cat found me instead.

He's really cute (of course he is, he's a kitten, goes without say). But he's also snuggly, has a tiny quiet meow, beautiful markings, amazingly friendly, and cooperative. Because of his charming act, we named him Casanova, Nova for short. I will say that I feel a little bad about signing up a cat named Casanova to be neutered. Right now he's in quarantine in my room until the meds the vet gave us kill off his fleas.

And school started again. I think I chose some good classes; I'm at least looking forward to them now. Ready at last to leave days of sleeping and lazing and reading and playing and gardening and traveling behind me in the days of a past summer. Ah, what a good summer.

One more note: I've started thinking of Halloween already. I wish there was a 24/7 Halloween music radio station. If we are going to be thinking of our favorite holidays ridiculously early, at least it could be to music.


Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode
Deep silence reigned, save when a gust
Went rushing down the country road,
And skeletons of leaves, and dust,
A moment quickened by its breath,
Shuddered and danced their dance of death

-from the Prelude of Tales of a Wayside Inn by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Barely Faking

Wow, been a while. Welcome back.

So I haven't chronicled a majority of my summer so far, and I'm just going to skip most of it now. I will say that I've met someone's new house, I've met someone's boyfriend (and I suppose I approve, he's nice enough), and the plants in the garden are finally starting to produce produce.

Plus, I really like Kentucky. There it is, I was impressed with it. Now on my long-term desire list===> road trip into the South, ideally with some birdwatching involved. And I wouldn't say no to a birdwatching boyfriend too, but hey, we can't have it all can we?

Um, otherwise wheels spinning, trying to catch up to-do lists etc. Watched the first two seasons of Dexter this weekend. Filled out my Fafsa (kinda late). You know, lots to do. ;)


It is not exaggerating to say that, as Aristotle is a philosopher of happiness, he is also a philosopher of leisure. Happiness can appear only in leisure. The capacity to use leisure rightly, he repeats, is the basis of the free man's whole life.
-from Of Time, Work, and Leisure by Sebastian de Grazia

I'm late, I'm late, I'm zzzZZzzz

It is now past three o clock in the morning, and I just popped open my fourth can of caffeinated nectar. I have one page written out of fifteen minimum, due tomorrow. Ready, set, start your stopwatches folks!

It's been hard for me to concentrate on final papers with a list of summer ambitions as long as my arm (and as wide as my bum). And now back to that. The homework I mean, not my ambitions. Or my bum. What were those improperly placed pronouns called?


She was to remain in mauve for the rest of her life and increasingly became the eccentric maiden aunt.

They were women who seized every opportunity life threw their way to build careers at a time when the tide had turned against them. As the new ideal of femininity became the housewife and mother, this small band of librarians insisted on the right of single women to an independent and fulfilling existence.

-both from Jim Cleary's article "Women Librarians and the Public Library of New South Wales"

People Don't Notice Who Is Not There

I'm sorry to anyone who has checked this blog repeatedly only to find the same post sitting there like a lump of coal for her effort.

Today is a good day for me to update because I am very happy today. I've been wondering why I decided I'm so dependent on sleeping in lately. I sleep in most days of the week, and even when I work I don't have to get up until 8:30. But the Powers That Be at work asked me to come in early today (well, plus they bribed me with a mocha). And I remembered that after I get past that first minute of desperately wanting to crawl back into bed, I like mornings. I can be an awfully chipper morning person. Even though I know I'll be up until the wicked crack of morning tomorrow because of this paper I have to write, I am happy I woke up early. I look forward to doing it again.

Plus I had a really nice moment sitting by the lake today, eating a burrito, feeling the sun on my back and listening to the waves at my feet, and reading an amazing little memoir-type composition by a civil war soldier I photocopied at work. He wrote about how the troops were all their own librarians. Due to their load they could only really carry one book, but they all constantly traded books with each other. To advertise they had a book to trade, they'd dangle the book from the top of their rifles as they marched.

In other news, I'm rather angry at Nexon, the company that runs the game Mabinogi. They banhammered my account for no reason I can figure out. My characters have been hauled off to some Nexon prison camp and I may never see them again. All I can do is whine on my guild's forum (wow, good use of free speech, huh?) and hope that my innocent characters aren't killed. Grrr. This role playing game at least has instilled a renewed healthy fear of strong-arm government.

And hmmm, I have decided to stop trying to guess which summer will be my last "free" summer. I don't know. I guess I'll just take as many as I can get. =) Now, who to visit...

A weasel you call me? No, I am but a humble mongoose!



The confrontation between librarians, who seek to assure the maximum use of information, and security officials, for whom the ideal state may be one in which material is destroyed before anyone can read it, is as natural and instinctive as between the mongoose and the cobra. --Herbert S. White
Taken from Refuge of a Scoundrel by Herbert Foerstel

I devised hundreds of ways to waste five minutes and I use them all.
-fellow SLIS student speaking of his study habits

Free-floating is relative, like 'wild and crazy.' 'Wild and crazy' for catalogers is like hooking all of someone's paper clips together so when they try and pull one off they get a whole chain.
-quote from Professor

No amount of postmodern pixie dust will make two plus two equal pie.
-quote from that same Professor

And the theme of a librarian's education:
"I am NOT cheating; I am making use of my resources."
-that Professor again.
[okay, this was in relation to cataloging, but still]

Now this is just getting pretentious

After an unfortunate nail-clipping incident with a bunny, I've decided I think the most disturbing thing about blood is its warmth. Not its cherry-syrup color or its ooziness, but the way it is just at body temperature, just a bit warmer than your skin so you can feel it where-ever it touches you.

Now I have a sort of poll question for all of you: do you believe in soul mates?

Because I was wondering what would happen if there are/will be an odd number of people in the universe. What then? Then multiple soul mates would have to be allowed or some one person would be left out. And how literally should we take "mates"? Can I have a soul sister instead, or soul friends? I think I have quite a few soul friends.


"There comes a time when you're losing a fight that it just doesn't make sense to keep on fighting. It's not that you're being a quitter, it's just that you've got the sense to know when enough is enough."
-from Bud, Not Buddy by Julius Lester

because awkward confessions are F.U.N. fun

I'm mostly reconciled by now to being a somewhat lazy and unsociable person, but at the same time I have a fascination with people that conflicts with this. Do you ever just sit in a room of people that you don't know really well but you know you love them? I love my library people. I love my work people. I'm starting to love my church people. But I don't have much to say to anybody. So I guess I just want this internet shout-out to claim that if I don't have beans to say to you, it's not because I'm not fascinated and interested. I just don't know what to say.

Speaking of communication, I've been thinking about how letters used to fulfill one of the (arguably) major functions of the internet--the social needs. The need people have for a buffer between their social interactions and for the ability of a person to show different facets of herself to different people. With the actual internet, it's easier for "our" generation to indulge different parts of their personalities. What part of me is on display on facebook? Who am I when I play Mabinogi? What the heck am I talking about on class discussion boards? WHOSE BLOG IS THIS?

Will the internet allow us to not conform/mature as much as our elders had to?

That's enough tom-foolery for one eve. Here's a sentence to diagram:


To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.

-The Duke's version of Hamlet's soliloquy from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain