Have you missed me? Is anyone still there? I’m pondering something new.
Hey
29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in28 Monday Aug 2017
Posted Announcements, crafting, Thoughts
inWhen I was fifteen, a friend came out to me as a lesbian. Being able to talk to me and, I think, a few of our other friends gave her a sort of pressure release valve. She was afraid to tell her parents, you see. At first I was rather pleased to be the recipient of such important confidences, but over the months of that year, the stories started to unsettle me. My friend told me she was engaged in what sounded to me like a completely dysfunctional online relationship (how much was true or not is increasingly unclear with the passage of time, but I have no real reason to suspect falsehood). She had a password-protected blog that I had access to, and she described this relationship and a growing habit of drinking and smoking. Then one day she showed up to school with cuts all over her hands. When asked what had happened, she simply said she’d been trying to take a razor apart, and then changed the subject.
That’s when I panicked. I may have been only fifteen, and an innocent fifteen at that, but I could only think of one reason to take a razor apart. I’d been growing more and more uneasy about the things she’d been telling me for some time, but the razor incident sent me into a complete terrified tailspin.
I went to a teacher I trusted, as well as contacting someone I knew at a community-wide program providing counseling services at the local schools. On their recommendation, I went to one of the school counselors and ended up spilling everything I knew.
I lost the friendship, and if I were to be faced with a similar situation now I might handle it differently, but I still believe I did the right thing overall.
This isn’t a story I tell in detail much, and there are a lot of details I’ve omitted here as well. I bring it up now because after a conversation with a different friend recently, I have decided that a portion of the proceeds from all of my Etsy sales between now and the end of 2017 will go to the Trevor Project. I believe in the mission of this project. They provide services to LGBTQ+ teens in crisis, including chat sessions, phone sessions, and suicide hotlines. If my high school friend had had a place like that to turn when things were getting so intense and strange all those years ago, maybe she wouldn’t have been drinking, or getting so thin, or trying to take a razor apart. If she’d had a place like that to turn, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up taking action that lost her trust in the short term and my own in the long term. If I’d had a place like the Trevor Project to turn for guidance in how best to offer my friend help and support, I might have done things differently. I grieve for both of those girls, caught up in an emotional maelstrom and not sure where to turn for some kind of anchor.
So I’m making crafts, beaded ornaments and other things, many of which are inspired by the pride flags of different queer and trans identities. And it’s a fascinating challenge. Like the words I’m writing, every color choice and every organization of color has layers of meaning. It’s not just about indulging my own aesthetic whimsy anymore. I’m in the middle of making what I’m calling a “double rainbow” set of 1-inch ornaments – the ornaments themselves are a rainbow, and each is decorated with rainbow stripes of shining seed beads. I have enough ornaments in all the required colors to make two of these sets, and I’m going to vary the pattern slightly between them. The stripes must be joined together, and I usually use a contrasting bead for that. In my exploration of different pride flags, I’ve noticed variations intended to point out the presence of people of color. For example, the trans flag comes in two iterations, from what I’ve found. One has a white stripe in the middle, and one has a black stripe. One of the double rainbow sets will reflect this line of thought.
I admit that as a straight, white, cisgender woman, speaking about all of this is potentially problematic, since I don’t know much of anything about the experience of coming out or realizing you are in some way or another outside the “mainstream” in sexual and gender identities. Every word feels loaded with layers of meaning that I don’t even realize I’m not seeing.
I struggle with the shifting sands of the vocabulary preferred by the queer and trans populations, and I apologize profusely if I’ve gotten something wrong in this post. I recognize that it’s not your job to educate me on vocabulary or concepts, but I hope you will help me out if I really screw up. After all, who better to ask than the people living these experiences? I want to get it right and you know it better than I do. I know there are many elements I’ll never fully understand at anything deeper than the intellectual level, because I’m not living them. The best I can hope for is secondhand knowledge.
So… yeah. If you like my ornaments and you want to support a worthy cause, go to my store and buy. If you don’t want ornaments, I encourage you to support the Trevor Project outright.
23 Wednesday Dec 2015
Posted Announcements, Archives and Libraries
inHere we are again. December 23rd. Nearly the 24th, but we’ll see how long it takes me to hit the “post” button.
Last year, I posted this holiday plea on behalf of the long-term unemployed or underemployed population. I asked that the people I encountered inquire about the work I was doing, rather than the status of my job-search.
My suggestions in that post still hold true, but for me personally, well, ask about my job search all you want this year.
On December first, I interviewed for the position of Librarian and Archivist at the American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco. On December fourth, I received an offer for that position. On December fifteenth, I started work.
The dust from that particular whirlwind is still settling, but it seems to be a pretty good fit. It’s more than a little nerve-wracking, going from student and freelance positions to effectively being head librarian and head archivist (okay, so there’s nobody under me except the occasional volunteer, but that doesn’t make my position any less “head”). Apparently in the library world these kinds of positions are called “lone ranger” librarians. Clearly I need some kind of Old West hat to go with the term.
There are some things I miss about freelancing already – not the least of which are sleeping and having free time – but it’s so nice to have coworkers and people to talk to during the day, as well as people to bounce ideas off. One of the things about the freelancing jobs I’ve had in the past two years that I really didn’t like was how lonely it always was.
This is a huge adjustment for me on every level. Nerve-wracking though the professional steps up may be, the puzzles and challenges presented to me so far have my brain buzzing with ideas, and my new colleagues are supportive and understanding about my anxieties about the size of what I’ve taken on. The puzzles will sort themselves out with time, patience, and care, much like the challenge of picking apart a huge mass of knotted threads. One of the things that’s really hard for me at the moment, though, is finding a new balance to my day. At the moment, I’ve got little time or energy for much other than work (and the associated commute, which turns work into a 12-hour day, thanks to the peculiar quirks of Caltrain’s schedule), meals, and going to bed so I can get up and do it all again. I do need to find a way to work in a necessarily small but regular dose of my meditation/anxiety management techniques, by which I mean my crafting.
I don’t anticipate writing about the job much here, as I have no intention of running the risk of doocing myself, but yeah. I got a formal library job at last!
So yeah. American Bookbinders Museum. Check it out. And come visit!
19 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted ALA, Announcements, Archives and Libraries
inTags
ALA, ALA Midwinter, announcements, Break Room Chats, comfort zone, exciting, leadership, LLAMA, New Professionals Section, podcasts, scary
I’ve been going back and forth on whether to post about this for some time. The only arguments against it are really my own internal neuroses saying HIDE HIDE HIDE HIDE. So I’m going to try and ignore them and engage in a little shameless self-promotion. Well, myself and two others. I’m part of a team, after all.
I have posted about attending American Library Association conferences, and I think I even posted once or twice about my more specific association involvement. I am a member of a division of ALA known as LLAMA, an amusing metaphor which stands for Library Leadership and Management Association. Initially, I hesitated to join LLAMA because I thought it was only for established professionals already in management positions, which I am not.
But at Midwinter 2014 in Philadelphia, I went to the initial public meeting of a brand-new section of LLAMA called the New Professionals Section. And that’s when I realized that LLAMA could have a place for me – specifically in the idea that they’re nurturing future managers and leaders. I’m not in management yet, but I hope I will get there someday. And working on leadership is not a bad thing. It’s pushing my comfort zone, but in a good way. As I recently described myself, I’m not the kid who sits in the front row of the class, and I’m not the one who sits in back – I’m the one who sits in the second row: willing, even eager to participate, but not one to lead the charge.
So I’m pushing myself a bit, which leads me back to the shameless self-promotion. I’ll get there in a minute.
LLAMA and ALA in general seem to have a lot of conversations at conferences that focus on attracting new membership, and getting new blood into active committee involvement/leadership. At one conference, I heard a person describe her committee as being a bit like the Mad Tea Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – every year, everyone stands up and moves one seat to the left, cycling through the same positions over and over.
I’ve been turning this over in my mind since joining NPS. At first I tried focusing on outreach to library schools, trying to help students bridge the gap between student chapter and larger association involvement. I got frustrated with that, though, and started looking at other ideas.
ALA and LLAMA love webinars, but there’s a problem with those – they’re preaching to the choir. You only hear about them if you’re already involved, and you only take part in them if you a) hear about them and b) have the money and c) have the time. This does not seem to me to be a good way to get new blood.
So this year at Midwinter in Chicago, I started agitating for a podcast. It’s free, it’s accessible outside of the ALA website labyrinth, and you can listen any time. And thus I find myself at the head of a three-person team.
I am happy to announce that Break Room Chats, the podcast of the New Professionals Section, is up and running. We have two episodes up – it’s a monthly thing at the moment – and don’t be scared, episode two is abnormally long (but it’s FUN, if I do say so myself.)
Please check it out. I think there are insights and tips relevant to all careers, not just librarianship. We talk about what we like in our supervisors and mentors and how we try to apply those things in our management/leadership styles. We talk about the things that are frightening and exciting about starting something new or taking on new responsibilities.
And I’m pushing myself WAY outside my comfort zone in doing this. Yes, I’ve been a blogger for years, but this is my actual voice going out there. It’s scary, but it feels like the good kind of scary. I have to say, even as my stomach registers the stress-butterflies, I’m very proud of myself for doing this, and I am so proud of and grateful to my two colleagues, Elizabeth Davidson and Heather James. And I’m also deeply indebted for Tyler Dzuba, our initial and outgoing NPS Chair, for being endlessly supportive and encouraging of this idea.
We can be found on iTunes (search Break Room Chats) and on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/llama_nps.
20 Saturday Dec 2014
Posted Announcements, Bloggy Book Club
inTags
allie brosh, books, dooce, heather armstrong, history, holidays, hyperbole and a half, in brief, Michael Palin, reading, reading for fun, Robert Darnton, Sarah Vowell, tired, unfamiliar fishes
I’m not doing so well with the post-once-a-week goal this month, am I? Between the holidays, technological difficulties (my laptop died and now I’m still trying to acclimate to Windows 8.1 and a new physical laptop layout), and literature-related struggles… well, you get the point.
So here’s the thing. I started to read Dan Jones’ book The Wars of the Roses, and it had the same issues as his previous book, The Plantagenets. It’s a solid enough survey, but his attention is, shall we say, uneven. He can pass over a decade in a paragraph, but then he’ll spend pages and pages going over a single battle in excruciating detail. After about 150 pages, I declared myself bored and returned it to the library.
The next book I checked out was one that I was excited about, the eminent cultural and literary historian Robert Darnton’s new work on censorship. It looks really interesting, and I do plan to go back to it, but I came up against a difficulty.
I love nonfiction. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who knows me or reads these posts (and if anyone out there reads this who doesn’t actually know me in person or online, please let me know – I’d like to hear from you!).
But sometimes I forget that I’m not in school anymore, and don’t have to finish the book if I don’t want to. Sometimes I forget that I don’t always have to challenge myself. Every so often, maybe three or four times a year on average, my brain revolts. It says it’s tired and refuses to engage with the challenging fare I set before it – and Robert Darnton, brilliant though he is, does not write easy reads. His work is always dense and challenging and incredibly insightful. So I’ll go back to the censorship book, and possibly also the one he wrote on slander, another time. For now I’m taking a break to read some things that are a little easier.
I’ve spent the last two weeks re-reading some of my favorites, from Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half, to Heather Armstrong’s It Sucked and Then I Cried, to Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes. I’m working on that last one right now, though I’m debating putting it down in favor of the one I just checked out of the library, the second volume of Michael Palin’s published diaries. This one focuses on 1980-1988, which means it covers his main stint in films, including Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, The Missionary, Brazil, and Time Bandits. I enjoyed his first volume, which covered the 1970s and the rise of the Pythons, so I’m looking forward to it.
I’m thinking after that I might tackle one or two of the novels on my want-to-read list. I’ve been pondering Brideshead Revisited since seeing the 1980s miniseries starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews for the first time this year. I’m also always a fan of Dickens, and there are plenty of his novels I haven’t read yet.
Anyone have a suggestion?
03 Wednesday Dec 2014
Posted Announcements, Archives and Libraries
inTags
announcements, anxiety, archives, holidays, in brief, job search, libraries, stress, work
I recently posted this to a couple of places on social media:
a tip for dealing with the long-term unemployed or underemployed for this holiday season: Don’t ask me what the status of my job search is. If there was anything to report, you’d have heard. Instead, ask me about what I AM actually doing. I know you mean well, so trust me – I’m having to answer those same questions every time I see someone I haven’t seen for more than a week, and it’s making me very unhappy. Ask me about what I’m doing, not what I hope to do.
This isn’t meant as a passive-aggressive shot at anyone with whom I’ve had this conversation of late (and I have it a lot at this time of year). Consider it a plea from me, someone who’s been unemployed or underemployed since graduating a year and a half ago.
No, I can’t explain why I’m still not in a full-time job at a university or similar established institution.
And quite frankly, I don’t really want to talk about it. I apologize if that sounds rude.
I know you mean well. I know you ask because you care. I get that, I really do.
But take a moment to think about it from my perspective. This isn’t what I had planned for my twenties. I didn’t plan to be living with my parents at 28. I didn’t plan to be a year and a half into a job search with over 150 applications submitted and less than six interviews to show for it.
The conversation about my job search always goes the same way. The person asks how it’s going, I say it’s not really going anywhere. They ask me some question that boils down to where am I looking/have I considered looking outside California. I tell them I’m looking all over the country. They then ask about the volume of jobs posted, and I reply with my practiced speech about the supply-and-demand problem in the library and archives job world right now. It always ends there. They don’t ever ask about what I’m doing in the meantime.
I know you care. But asking me about this, especially in social situations that are meant to be celebratory, is not particularly kind. It makes me very upset. You can continue to enjoy the gathering as it ebbs and flows, but I’m stuck trying to quash the voices inside my head that whisper about self-doubt, insecurity, failure, and all the ways in which I’m not following the path I’m “supposed” to follow. I’m confused and struggling with a lot of things right now. Please help me rebuild my self-confidence by asking about other aspects of my professional life.
The thing is, I may not be employed full-time at an established institution, but I am working. Ask me about it – it’s interesting and different, and I’m starting to consider ways of following this path for a while, because it’s bearing a little fruit and the other isn’t.
Help me to enjoy the holidays – and help you enjoy yours more – by asking about positive things, not the things that make me want to hide in a corner and worry.
Please, ask me about my work. That conversation will leave both of us happier than the other one will.
24 Friday Oct 2014
Posted Announcements, movies
inTags
Bernadette Peters, cinderella, entertainment, fairy tales, in the news, into the woods, Johnny Depp, meryl streep, movies, musical, Red Riding Hood, Sondheim
So as it turns out, Worlds of Arthur was about as exciting as reading a poorly annotated bibliography, so I ditched it after 80 pages and I’m working on Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort right now. More on that another time, when I’ve read more than one chapter.
In other news, there’s been some discontent expressed online with the release of images of Johnny Depp in character as the Wolf in the upcoming film version of “Into the Woods.”
It’s not how I’d have designed the character, but I didn’t exactly expect them to recreate the Anatomically Explicit Wolf costume from the stage play. And yes, it’s meant to be skeevy that he’s hitting on a teenage girl. That’s the whole point of the scene, not to mention the Red Riding Hood story. In its existence from the Grimm brothers onward it’s not exactly subtle as a morality story about female virtue.
But in general, my reaction to the hullabaloo about the design of the Wolf for the film is “Really? THAT’s what you have a problem with?”
The makers of the film are reportedly being so squeamish about the darker aspects of the story that they’re taking all the bite out of it. The whole point of the story is what happens AFTER happily ever after, and the consequences of events put in motion – no story actually ends with happily ever after.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that they’ve decided to delete the “Moments in the Woods” scene between the Baker’s Wife and Cinderella’s Prince, and that the whole thing with Rapunzel being stepped on by a nearsighted giantess has also been omitted. The latter is mostly twisted humor, but it plays into why the Witch snaps – for all her questionable parenting decisions, she adores Rapunzel.
The omission of the “Moments in the Woods” is more upsetting. It’s not an easy scene, and over fifteen years after I first saw the play, I’m still working on understanding it and its consequences. I mean, I know what happens onstage and offstage within the story there, but I’m working on understanding it more deeply. And it sets up the Baker’s Wife’s end, as well as the climax of the whole storyline. It’s the Baker’s Wife we’ve followed and empathized most with throughout the story, after all. Sondheim and Lapine direct our attention to her, and it’s her determination and mind that drive the quest which weaves all the tangential stories together.
Going off the articles I’ve seen on the subject, here are the major changes from stage to screen.
1. The relationship between the Wolf and Red Riding Hood is completely nonsexual (by which I think they mean the Wolf’s costume does not involve visible genitalia, because in the stage version it’s all suggested rather than acted upon. It’s SUPPOSED to be seduction!).
2. Rapunzel doesn’t die.
3. The Baker’s Wife does not have a “moment in the woods” with Cinderella’s Prince.
Since those have been announced, further statements say it’s a faithful adaptation, the affair is back in, “Any Moment” is still in, Rapunzel’s end is “different” but still “dark,” and the act 2 opener, “Ever After” is now instrumental (stupid choice, it sets things up, but whatever).
So the moral of the story is, I’m confused and feel yanked around by entertainment reporters. And I’m still a little disappointed that they aren’t double-casting Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf or the Narrator and the Mysterious Man (Narrator’s been completely cut, it seems). It’s Symbolism! Stop wrecking the Symbolism, producers!
Also, Meryl Streep is all kinds of awesome, but nobody can beat Bernadette Peters as the Witch.
25 Wednesday Jun 2014
Posted Announcements, Bloggy Book Club, books, writing
inTags
announcements, audiobooks, blog project, bloggy book club, books, elspeth huxley, post-college recovery, reading, the flame trees of thika, thinking, whimsy, writing
A blog project is coming to its end!
To my great relief, my attempt at a year in photos has only one week left. I admit, I’ve fudged dates a bit here and there, but it has always been at least seven photos a week, even if I sometimes missed a few days. And it’s nearly over. Huzzah!
But then, of course, I’m going to need a new project. If I don’t have something focusing my thoughts, I forget to post.
I’ve done the Best Picture Project. I’ve done week-in-photos (the final week will feature photographs from the ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, for which I leave tomorrow morning). What to do next?
In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of time to listen to audiobooks while working or while chasing squirrels away from the apricot tree – the latter is a WHOLE other tangent I’m not going to follow right now – and I found a lecture series at the library that was quite interesting.
Created by The Teaching Company, the 84 lectures of “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition” start with the epic of Gilgamesh and end with “Waiting for Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. The professors delivering the lectures place the authors and the literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, examining elements of a master-work by the author, and showing how it fits into the Western literary tradition. They’re half-hour lectures, so it’s not like these are definitive, and it’s only about 80 authors over a few thousand years, so many are left out.
But it was interesting to me and it got me thinking – why not make a concerted effort to write about reading over the next year?
As soon as I learned to read, I was one of those kids who would devour books. I read the Harry Potter books the first day they came out, often within the first 24 hours. I couldn’t get enough. In college and grad school, so much of my schoolwork involved reading, hours upon hours of reading, that in my down time I couldn’t face the prospect of more printed text. I started watching more videos, listening to more audiobooks, and so on.
While I have no intention of ceasing to watch videos or listen to audiobooks, I am a year out of
grad school and I am working on trying to reincorporate leisure reading into my daily life.
So this year, I’m setting myself a blog project of writing about reading. There will be at least one book per month that I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t read yet. There may be a few that I’m re-reading for the first time in a while. And I’ll write about it. I doubt I’ll go deep into literary or historical analysis (though there may be a little – after eight years of college-level education, I can’t give up ALL my academic leanings). I expect I’ll write more about my reactions to the books, and my thoughts on the experience.
Before I start each new book, I’ll make sure to announce it, in case you’d like to read along with it. Indeed, I hope you do, and post your thoughts in the comments here. It could be like a bloggy book club. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The first book will be Elspeth Huxley’s memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. It was a BBC adaptation of this book, back in the 1980s, that provided my parents with my name.
20 Thursday Feb 2014
Posted Announcements, Best Picture Project
inTags
academy awards, american film history, cavalcade, drama, entertainment, history, in brief, libraries, nerds, oscars, procrastination
I HAVE LOCATED A COPY OF CAVALCADE.
Maybe the Academy heard about my project – CAVALCADE, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1933, was finally released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2013! I’m third in line for it at the public library, so hopefully I’ll have it within the month, and then I will enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from having completed the set so far.
I have to admit, I’m kind of hoping that AMERICAN HUSTLE wins at the Oscars ceremony in a few weeks, if only because I think I’d rather watch that than what seems like the likely winner, TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE. On the other hand, THE HURT LOCKER won over AVATAR, so you never know what might happen.
24 Saturday Nov 2012
Posted Announcements, Miscellaneous
inTags
I’m approaching my 100th post. I’d like to know if anyone out there (*peers around the seemingly empty, echoing silence of the interwebs* hello-o-o-?) has a suggestion, question, or opinion they’d like to see me address in a 100th post.
Anyone? Bueller?