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- Investigate whether I have actually missed the deadline for the ALA Conference presentation submission. If not, put together a proposal.
- Get into the code of the catalog and start to figure out this RefWorks nonsense. (Personally, I don't understand why we can't just allow downloads of Firefox and push Zotero, but hey, what do I know? :P)
- Update xmas list with purchases of last night. Yay productivity!
- Drink orange juice. Citrus and lots of rest seem to be keeping whatever this is at bay. Yay preventative measures!
- Drop off VPAA letter and COMECC stuff to HR. Yay acronyms!
- Stop fucking around and really get a yoga class/language lesson/something on my calendar. It's time to get back to doing things I like. Busy hands are happy hands.
- Find a recipe of something to bake this weekend.
- Update C's application stuff for Burlington.
- Order several gifts online so they get here in time to return if they're not what I was thinking.
I cannot tell if what the world considers 'happiness' is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
Bonus: Before the rain really moved in this morning there was a large, crystal-clear full-arc rainbow as I was driving in. I can see why early peoples thought they were a sign from the heavens. Wow.
I was supposed to have dinner with an old colleague tonight who bailed, so I'm thinking of hitting the mall to do some xmas shopping since I was already expecting to be home late and have NOTHING done, and realized tomorrow is December. :P
Also: Someone keeps posting Anais Nin quotes over on
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literaryquotes , and my first instinct is always to bookmark them, so I really should just go read the diaries, I think. However, I just got Theophilus North in inter-library loan, and am only halfway through A Room with a View (which is utterly charming, there's really no other word for it) so Nin will have to wait a bit.I am copying this though, because, awesome:
Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.
-Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway
Pronunciation: \ä-ˈklä-krə-sē\
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek & Middle French; Middle French ochlocratie, from Greek ochlokratia, from ochlos mob + -kratia -cracy
Date: 1584
: government by the mob : mob rule
Synonyms: the internet; Fox News; the Republican Party; the future of the United States*
(*note: synonyms mine)
So, my list. For today. I think it's not a bad idea to post gratitude for smaller things often. Maybe I'll start doing that.
BUT - these are the big things I am truly and deeply thankful for:
My mom. My wonderful, irritating, neurotic, tenacious, deluded and effervescent mom. Every minute with her even though there should have been more, and even when she drove me batshit crazy or she wasn't herself.
My brothers & SIL.
C&J.
Mo.
All the other people, live and virtual, who kept me from jumping off a ledge this year. I started to write a list but you all know who you are and I am a lucky lucky girl.
Family, in all its incarnations.
That I am smart.
That I am not so smart that I can't recognize that I have a lot to learn, and I'm often quite stupid.
That I am healthy.
That I have a pretty secure job that I love doing.
My cats (even Paladin).
That the houses sold, even though I sometimes miss mine a little.
Also - got the super-duper formal letter from the VP of Academic Affairs saying I've been officially reappointed for AY 2010-11. So unless we undergo massive downsizing, I have a job until then. Not that I thought I wouldn't be, but the letter puts all this nonsense to rest for another 10 months.
Yays!
I resubscribed to Daily Zen which was smart. There's a great little meditation trick I've been using to quiet my mind when things get raucous in there and I need to calm down mentally - it's just stopping and counting my breaths, one on the inhale, two on the exhale and so on until 10 and then starting over. And damn if it doesn't work. It's very calming and focusing and usually gets me to a positive mindful kind of place. Those zen guys really know their stuff. :)
Words I like today: gallivant, meander, fathom
To gaze upon a drop of water is to behold the nature of all the waters of the universe.
- Mood:
calm
New Kandinsky favorites from the Guggenheim exhibit:
There was one more I really loved, but I can't seem to find the image anywhere, and very Kandinsky-like, I think it was titled something like "Composition XG". =7 Surprisingly (or not), I found really liked the pieces from his early work the best, when he was all vibrant and expressionist, versus his Bauhaus geometric stuff.
The Art of the Samurai exhibit was AMAZING as well. If you are anywhere near New York between now and January, and have any interest in history, culture, clothes or weaponry, it is an unbelievable exhibit.
I'm tired now though. Yesterday on my feet all day ended up rough - I should have remembered to throw some juice or water in a bag. Reminds me of the time I went hiking on an unfamiliar trail with no water, map, or anyone knowing where I was. Unprepared much? =7
Looking forward to a nice quiet weekend after Thanksgiving though - time to wind down before the holidays get into gear. Holy crap I need to start shopping.
- Mood:happily tired
It has been pointed out to me (quite accurately, I admit) that I tend to like melancholy books movies and whatnot, and while I struggled with that idea for awhile it is definitely true, but because frankly, I think tragedy makes for a better/more interesting story, much of the time. I have no patience for fluffy little stories that say nothing about the human condition, and a I think a huge number of the "great" stories center around tragedy or adversity for this reason.
This can be a problem for someone like me, though, who throws themselves into things, and allows themselves to be overwhelmed with feeling, because then I set myself in a certain frame of mind through what I read/watch/listen to.
So today I went on a hunt for good literature ("good" is a tricky term in itself, but that's another post) that was uplifting and happy, but not sappy, trite or shallow. (Tall order, I know.) Luckily, I found this list, which has some great suggestions on it.
What about you, my dear reader friends - best books that are fun, upbeat, or uplifting, AND well-written??
Hee.
Also funny, this:
This is particularly funny since C. keeps trying to stack things on Paladin. Which is hilarious. If he sits still long enough I need to get a picture.
- Mood: cheerful
Co-irkers facebook post this AM: (Co-irker) Swears she is not sitting at the reference desk, playing on facebook and writing her novel. She is working and you can't prove otherwise.... oh wait.
Granted I am posting on LJ, so not exactly working at the moment myself, but still. Entertaining. :)
Taught my last class of the semester yesterday, committee meeting later today, reference shifts in between. An uninspiring day.
So, some inspiration from
literaryquotes :When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. –Don Quixote, The Man of La Mancha
Also inspiring, my brother's photography is going to be on the cover of the Winter issue of North American Birds. He's an avid birder and nature photographer and this is a pretty freaking prestigious journal in this field. I am RIDICULOUSLY proud of him. :D
Our head of tech services had to cover the desk before I came on this morning, and when I came out she was entirely frustrated with an IM question from a student who, shockingly enough, wanted our help not just researching their topic, but choosing it as well. "It's like they want us to do all their work for them! I don't know how you guys do it out here." Heh. Yes, students do generally want us to do their work for them, but spending ALL day back in tech services also sounds like sheer purgatory to me. One half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other! :)
Also, Incredibly Awkward Geeky Student comes up to the reference desk. In requesting the "paperwork to download mobile printing" (um, it's mobile so this is all online) IAGS manages to reference 1. Ghostbusters ("that would be worse than crossing the streams") 2. DOS operating system ("I hope I'm not dating myself here") and 3. Sneakernet ("I might be dating myself again here, taking a disk from one computer to another.") Considering the geekiness I am still a little floored he requested paperwork to download something. Whaaa?
That was a LOT of geekery in one dose.
Speaking of film, The Watchmen kicked all kinds of ass. I didn't think they'd be able to do it properly (again - books to movies) but I was really impressed. I am always amused that the bad guy generally wears purple. (This was how I was able to tell Mr. Glass was the villain in Unbreakable.) I'm by no means a true comics geek, but I'm having a hard time coming up with heroes that wear purple, but it seems to be a very popular color for villains. I wonder why - what is it with purple?
I'm not a homebody, but there is a deep satisfaction sometimes to being domestic - I spent a lot of time this weekend shopping, cooking, doing laundry, and I feel very settled and accomplished in a simple sort of way as a result. Tonight's domesticities: ironing, budget spreadsheet, painting my toenails.
I am sneezing my head off this morning. No idea why. And now I need to remember to bring a new box of kleenex into work tomorrow.
Words I like today: appetite, grandiosity, skulduggery
Funny what's there when you let yourself see it.
literaryquotes .Clarissa has always been the most hard-hearted, and the one most prone to romance. She's endured teasing on the subject for more than thirty years; she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous, undisciplined responses, which, as Richard put it, tend to be as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating, precocious child. She knows that a poet like Richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental ugliness along with incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the Episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his Jack Russell terrier (these are suddenly ubiquitous along Fifth Avenue, these feisty, bowlegged little dogs), while she, Clarissa, simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It's childish, she knows. It lacks edge. If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who've agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. Still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but it simply the sight and the feel of the thing itself.
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
But I find that even in my adult life, I am always seeking that - that abandon - that surrender to a feeling to the point of a loss of self-consciousness. Finding something that moves you to a place - happiness, sadness, whatever - that the lines and boxes of propriety don't matter, only the feeling matters. Art makes me feel this way. Music does too a lot. So does running. It seems to me that most people don't look for this, though, that they spend their time putting things in neat piles instead.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they don't, and underneath the civilized front we all have in adult society, we're all just looking to careen wildly happily through the woods, just because we can and it's the greatest thing ever.
Hrm.
Edited to add: OH! Veteran's Day! I'll figure out something around that! Duh.
So it's set - a short weekend in NYC to see this and this. OMG it's like candy. We're staying closer to the Upper East Side since museums are the order of the day - anyone know any great restaurants in that area - I think our hotel is somewhere around 64th? I'm not sure anything could have kept me away from these exhibits, honestly. I haven't made it to a museum in FAR too long. In fact, I think that's what I will do with some of my time off around Christmas - maybe a trip to the MFA, and I still haven't been to the ICA or the Gardner.
Today I must:
- come up with some random goals for work
- submit my time off requests for Tgiving and end of the year (3 weeks off - here I come! Holy pete what will I do with myself?)
- update the library blog
- submit some book orders to tech
- iron
- wash my bedsheets
- figure out who wants to participate in this book exchange (BTW any takers? I got one of those - send a book to the person on the back of this letter, and then send six letters with your address to other peeps - like a recipe exchange but with books. Theoretically if the chain goes unbroken you'll get like 35 books for just mailing one. If you're interested just post and we'll exchange info off-LJ)
- remember to get the house paperwork out so I can copy it for D.
So I taught my back to back classes in heels that were too high, so now my feet kind of hurt, and went straight to the desk until 1, so I am also starving, and I teach section #3 of this class at 2. *head_desk*
BUT - Steelers tonight, trucking right along in Her Fearful Symmetry (which I am LOVING), sunny day outside, and possible/probable short trip to NYC next weekend to see some fantastic exhibits. Not too shabby, big-picture-wise.
I had some weird thoughts re: mom this weekend. We were out to dinner to celebrate J.'s birthday with the families and I was telling this story about a faceoff mom and I had over eating spinach when I was little. And the thing is, I don't really remember the incident, I just remember mom's story of the incident. (Sadly, this is fairly common of my memory in general. A ridiculous amount of meaningless trivia is at my beck and call, but I have zero memory of a lot of events that happened in my life. I am often surprised when someone tells a story and I am like, really, I was there for that? WHY don't I remember this?) Regardless of my memory problems, though, mom was/proved herself to be a pretty unreliable source of information over time - she constantly embellished stories, if not outright made them up. This became glaringly apparent during her illness, but we always noticed it. So this made me wonder - what of my history, these stories of myself - what is really true? Did we ever have this infamous spinach face-off? What about the day I was born, did she really walk to the Dr.'s office from shopping? The ice-cream story? The binoculars? If I don't remember it directly, did it really happen?
Does it matter?
