When I’m golfing and I line up the shot, make sure my stance and grip are all correct, swing carefully and precisely, and completely and totally miss the ball and instead get a huge chunk of air. I just have to laugh.
Late at night when I can’t sleep and I’m desperate for something on TV to distract my churning brain but there is nothing on TV except for Billy Mays infomercials. It seems OxiClean really is the answer to all my troubles, and I’m so glad Mr. Mays took the time to shout it to me. He is definitely missed.
Pulling an all-nighter to do homework because I have procrastinated the work and now it’s due in 5 hours, as soon as I get to class. Something about producing good work when I’m on a ridiculously tight deadline feels so much more satisfying than getting it done boringly ahead of time.
Being stressed for time at work and being pulled four different directions by eight different people as I’m working to meet looming deadlines. I’m sure it’ll get old eventually, but having a job where what I do makes a difference and people rely on me is refreshing after the dead-end gigs I pulled for several years.
Talking about other people’s misfortunes and drama is usually frowned on as something no polite person does, I know, but other people just make their misfortunes and drama so darn interesting that I have to gossip about it.
When my brothers and I are all hanging out and someone brings up a touchy or sensitive subject, I love pushing buttons and getting a sibling or two all red faced and worked up. Using my life-long knowledge of what makes them tick is just too much fun to pass up, and familial discord is always good for a laugh.
Crappy hostess doughnuts – the kind with powdered sugar on the outside and “raspberry” filling in the middle. I know they are horrible for me and chock-full of chemicals, but I love them. Tasty, tasty preservative goodness.
When I’ve got a captive audience of small children, usually relatives, I will tell them things that aren’t, in the strictest sense of the word, true. I wouldn’t make things up about anything important, just silly stories that take advantage of their gullibility. Is it so wrong to abuse the trust of the innocents in order to get some giggles? Well, when I put it that way I have to say yes, it is wrong, but it’s still fun.
When I’m done eating and I still have food on my plate, I will play with it until it becomes a big, smooshy mess. Then I’ll create art and fantastical sculptures with said smooshy mess. I know this is the kind of thing I should have outgrown about 20 years ago, but I’m not quite ready to give up the creative outlet.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Library school is fun!
When I got my bachelor's degree, I decided for some reason that studying English history and Latin, with a bit of English lit thrown in for good measure, sounded like a good idea. I did have fun studying those things, and I learned a lot, too. And some of the things I learned, like the writing skills developed over three years of producing papers for demanding professors, have even proved helpful to me in my post-college existence. What it hasn't been helpful with, though, has been getting a job. For some strange reason, there's just not much call for conjugating irregular Latin verbs in the workforce, and prospective employers seem unimpressed with a degree that focused mainly on things that happened a thousand years ago or more. Weird, right???
Well, after a few uninspiring and less than satisfying jobs (including a delightful bout of unemployment), I finally got myself enrolled in a masters program in library science this past January. It's something I'd been meaning to do for a while, and I was looking forward to having some education on my resume that would help me get a job that I want. What I wasn't looking forward to, however, was the actual going to school part. In college, I loved listening to lectures and learning and forming friendships with my fellow students, but I (like every other student in the world, I'm sure) hated doing my homework. As I looked forward to two years of a distance, mostly-online masters program, it seemed to me it would be a big on work, and short on the fun parts of school. And I wasn't even taking interesting classes like history or English lit to make up for it.
Imagine my excitement, then, this last weekend when I realized that I was actually having a blast with all my classes. Yes, they are a lot of work, and yes, I still tend to procrastinate enough that I have to pull the occasional all-nighter, but despite all that, I'm having lots of fun. The courses are actually interesting, my fellow students are the smartest group of people I've been around in a long time, and my professors are (there's no other way to put this) awesome.
It all started to fall into place when I was finishing up a paper the night before class. I realized that the things I was writing about actually had some bearing on reality, and that all those theories and abstract concepts I'd been forcing myself to read translated into real-world, practical usefulness. The epiphanies continued throughout the class weekend, and by the end of the day, I was actually feeling excited to finish up my assignments for the semester, because the material was so interesting. And only some of the giddiness was due to sleep deprivation!
This state of excitement was admittedly a bit short lived -- it lasted right up until I started working on the pile of things I have left to do this week -- but it was great while it lasted. And the best part of all of it is that I'm not looking at the next two years as a joyless slog anymore. Maybe I'm not giddy and excited for everything that's coming, but I know it will be interesting at the very least, and I'm more motivated to get what I can out of it than I was a few weeks ago. That's progress, and I'll take it.
Well, after a few uninspiring and less than satisfying jobs (including a delightful bout of unemployment), I finally got myself enrolled in a masters program in library science this past January. It's something I'd been meaning to do for a while, and I was looking forward to having some education on my resume that would help me get a job that I want. What I wasn't looking forward to, however, was the actual going to school part. In college, I loved listening to lectures and learning and forming friendships with my fellow students, but I (like every other student in the world, I'm sure) hated doing my homework. As I looked forward to two years of a distance, mostly-online masters program, it seemed to me it would be a big on work, and short on the fun parts of school. And I wasn't even taking interesting classes like history or English lit to make up for it.
Imagine my excitement, then, this last weekend when I realized that I was actually having a blast with all my classes. Yes, they are a lot of work, and yes, I still tend to procrastinate enough that I have to pull the occasional all-nighter, but despite all that, I'm having lots of fun. The courses are actually interesting, my fellow students are the smartest group of people I've been around in a long time, and my professors are (there's no other way to put this) awesome.
It all started to fall into place when I was finishing up a paper the night before class. I realized that the things I was writing about actually had some bearing on reality, and that all those theories and abstract concepts I'd been forcing myself to read translated into real-world, practical usefulness. The epiphanies continued throughout the class weekend, and by the end of the day, I was actually feeling excited to finish up my assignments for the semester, because the material was so interesting. And only some of the giddiness was due to sleep deprivation!
This state of excitement was admittedly a bit short lived -- it lasted right up until I started working on the pile of things I have left to do this week -- but it was great while it lasted. And the best part of all of it is that I'm not looking at the next two years as a joyless slog anymore. Maybe I'm not giddy and excited for everything that's coming, but I know it will be interesting at the very least, and I'm more motivated to get what I can out of it than I was a few weeks ago. That's progress, and I'll take it.
Friday, February 26, 2010
E-Readers & Libraries
Full disclosure: this is an assigned topic. I'm in a master's program to get a degree in library science -- there really is more to it than just alphabetizing books -- and one of my assignments is to create a blog and post an entry with my thoughts on how e-readers will affect libraries. I was already half way there because I just happened to have created this blog about a month ago, and it was so kind of my professor to gift wrap the topic for me because being assigned doesn't mean it's boring. And so, on to libraries and e-readers.
Libraries are always expanding and chronically short on space for their collections. Take the public library I used growing up, for example. It had started in an old, pioneer era building that had been added on to and haphazardly modernized over the last fifty or so years. It was stuffed to the gills with towering, nearly full bookshelves, and there were hardly any reading areas and no room for expansion. When the city finally built a new, larger library, the thing that struck me most was all the empty shelf space. Having been filled to capacity for years, the librarians made sure that they had plenty of room for the collection to grow when they moved to the new space, and a huge portion of the available shelves sat empty, patiently waiting future need. This is the cycle you see in any type of library, and it is a cycle that e-readers have the potential to completely change or even do away with. Obviously, electronic media don't need vast amounts of shelf space (for example the automated retrieval barns found in many academic libraries) and this could open up huge opportunities for libraries that have always been constrained by the physical space available to store their collections.
On the other hand, e-readers and electronic sources of information have the potential to completely bypass the library on the book/information's path from source to consumer. If a person can purchase and download any book instantly from an online source, why would the library need to be in the picture at all? The opportunity I see for libraries is that they can become the the source to which the consumer goes to download that e-book. Just like with paper copies of the books, people will want to borrow, not permanently buy, many of the books they read, and that is where your friendly public library will step in. By providing access to huge electronic collections, they can reinstate themselves in the information loop. I know there are problems with the current method of delivery for e-books. The licensing of the materials and the ways that they can be used by libraries are limited, but progress is being made in making it easier for libraries to purchase multiple licenses and share the media with multiple patrons, and once that is all ironed out, huge possibilities open up.
And, as a final note, one definite plus about e-books rather than paper ones is that you can be sure another person hasn't read it in the bathroom. It's a silly thing I know, but one that might add to a lot of people's peace of mind when patronizing the public library.
Libraries are always expanding and chronically short on space for their collections. Take the public library I used growing up, for example. It had started in an old, pioneer era building that had been added on to and haphazardly modernized over the last fifty or so years. It was stuffed to the gills with towering, nearly full bookshelves, and there were hardly any reading areas and no room for expansion. When the city finally built a new, larger library, the thing that struck me most was all the empty shelf space. Having been filled to capacity for years, the librarians made sure that they had plenty of room for the collection to grow when they moved to the new space, and a huge portion of the available shelves sat empty, patiently waiting future need. This is the cycle you see in any type of library, and it is a cycle that e-readers have the potential to completely change or even do away with. Obviously, electronic media don't need vast amounts of shelf space (for example the automated retrieval barns found in many academic libraries) and this could open up huge opportunities for libraries that have always been constrained by the physical space available to store their collections.
On the other hand, e-readers and electronic sources of information have the potential to completely bypass the library on the book/information's path from source to consumer. If a person can purchase and download any book instantly from an online source, why would the library need to be in the picture at all? The opportunity I see for libraries is that they can become the the source to which the consumer goes to download that e-book. Just like with paper copies of the books, people will want to borrow, not permanently buy, many of the books they read, and that is where your friendly public library will step in. By providing access to huge electronic collections, they can reinstate themselves in the information loop. I know there are problems with the current method of delivery for e-books. The licensing of the materials and the ways that they can be used by libraries are limited, but progress is being made in making it easier for libraries to purchase multiple licenses and share the media with multiple patrons, and once that is all ironed out, huge possibilities open up.
And, as a final note, one definite plus about e-books rather than paper ones is that you can be sure another person hasn't read it in the bathroom. It's a silly thing I know, but one that might add to a lot of people's peace of mind when patronizing the public library.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Fevers and Chick Flicks
I have been fighting a cold for about the last two weeks. The part where I actually felt sick went away pretty quickly, but the rest of the symptoms -- the cough, runny nose, a nearly complete loss of my voice -- hung around for the above mentioned two weeks. So I was pretty excited a few days ago when I was feeling healthy again. Until last night, that is, when I came down with a bad fever and chills. Because of that, for the last 24 hours, I've been staying in bed, trying to keep warm and sane.
Which brings me to the chick flicks. I was lounging on the couch, because it makes a nice change from lounging in bed, and one of my favorite chick flicks was on TV. Of course I watched it, and as the amazingly random happenstances unfolded, I realized that these kinds of movies are way better when one is in a fevered haze. I don't know if it's the fever or the cold medicine, but it all seemed so fresh and funny and romantic. This is a movie I've watched probably a hundred times and I can almost quote, but I enjoyed it like it was, say, only my tenth viewing.
This led me to think that perhaps a fevered haze is the optimum state for watching silly, contrived chick flicks. We all know that objectively these movies are bad, but we have so much fun watching them. We love getting caught up in the story, wondering if deeply flawed yet charming leading man and the plucky blond heroine will ever work it out. The escapist nature of these movies is what makes them fun, even though they are sappy, predictable and usually poorly written. However, when one is slightly loopy from the combined effects of a fever and cold medicine, the bad writing and cliched situations are just that much better. You quit nit-picking details and just sit back and enjoy the silliness of it all.
I have decided from now on that I plan on saving the chick flicks in my DVD collection for sick days. Why watch them on days when I'm sound in mind and body and will not enjoy them properly? It's a much better idea to partake of the genre when I can most benefit: when I'm loopy, drugged up and so bored that anything even mildly entertaining seems like a good idea.
Which brings me to the chick flicks. I was lounging on the couch, because it makes a nice change from lounging in bed, and one of my favorite chick flicks was on TV. Of course I watched it, and as the amazingly random happenstances unfolded, I realized that these kinds of movies are way better when one is in a fevered haze. I don't know if it's the fever or the cold medicine, but it all seemed so fresh and funny and romantic. This is a movie I've watched probably a hundred times and I can almost quote, but I enjoyed it like it was, say, only my tenth viewing.
This led me to think that perhaps a fevered haze is the optimum state for watching silly, contrived chick flicks. We all know that objectively these movies are bad, but we have so much fun watching them. We love getting caught up in the story, wondering if deeply flawed yet charming leading man and the plucky blond heroine will ever work it out. The escapist nature of these movies is what makes them fun, even though they are sappy, predictable and usually poorly written. However, when one is slightly loopy from the combined effects of a fever and cold medicine, the bad writing and cliched situations are just that much better. You quit nit-picking details and just sit back and enjoy the silliness of it all.
I have decided from now on that I plan on saving the chick flicks in my DVD collection for sick days. Why watch them on days when I'm sound in mind and body and will not enjoy them properly? It's a much better idea to partake of the genre when I can most benefit: when I'm loopy, drugged up and so bored that anything even mildly entertaining seems like a good idea.
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