23 posts from February 2007

Who was your first celebrity crush?
Submitted by Glory.

I'm not sure I've ever had a "celebrity crush" - my crushes are generally on fictional characters. Usually, if I've fallen in love with a fictional character who is played by a particular actor, I find I have no attraction at all to the actor if he's in another role or being interviewed as himself.

My first crush like this that I can recall came when I was in fourth grade or so. I remember it was fourth grade because I clearly remember gazing out the window and coming up with stories in my head about me interacting with this particular character, and that window was definitely in my fourth grade classroom. I have to confess that as a fourth grader I was deeply in love with Barnabas Collins, from Dark Shadows.

I don't understand it one little bit. It's just not right. I never told anyone - all the other little girls gushed about cute-boy pop stars, but who did I want? The creepy old vampire dude. I pretended to appreciate the cute-boys, because it was expected of me (I did that often as a child, about many things), but I never really did. It was Barnabas for me.

Barnabas

This evening concludes a one-week internet fast. Last weekend, I went deep into meditation, traveled into the Otherworld, and met with the wise old crone who is one of my spiritual guides. I said, "Help me, please, I feel tired and stuck, and my spiritual practice is beginning to feel hollow. What should I do? Help me, O wise one."

She said, "Stay off the Internet for a week. You spend too much time on that damn machine."

I said, "But... but... I use it for work. And what about my email?"

"You can do what you have to for your work and you can check your email, but only once a day."

"But... but... but..."

"Do what you want, but don't come asking for any more advice until you've done this. One week."

So, I did it. I also have no TV, so what this meant was that for an entire week, I had no access to any form of electronic pap. None at all. I got lots of reading done, worked on my crochet project, and did more meditating than usual, and here, a week later, I feel much more focused and like I have better direction. Ta-da!

I also found what I really missed was not the games or the casual surfing that I can waste so much time on, but the stuff like this blog here. I wanted to read what other people were saying and say my own stuff, and the time spent not doing that was missed. The other stuff? Meh.

    I didn't get to start college until I was 25. For some reason, before the age of 25 if you are not married or a parent, you are considered dependent upon your parents for the purposed of educational financial aid. This means that at the very least, you need a parental signature and financial information on the forms to get any kind of grants or loans. I hope this has changed since then. During those years, neither parent was willing to do so - dad was still in and out of rehab and mom was, apparently, on another planet. I left home when I was 15 and supported myself by shoveling horse poo for ten years (not nearly as bad as it sounds - I was up to stable manager after a few years, which means less poo-shoveling, and those kinds of jobs come with housing, and - whee, ponies! - but the pay is awful and it's a dead end.) When I turned 25 I moved to the city and signed up for college classes right after my 25th birthday.
        For most of my life, work was where I went to get enough money to continue surviving, and more recently to survive and pay for books and for the next class. It hasn't always been easy, but simple survival is no longer such an issue. I'm not rich by any means but I have learned my way around the world well enough that I find I have the luxury of thinking about doing what I want to do rather than doing what I have to do.
    After finishing undergrad I signed up right away for an MLIS  - Master's in Library and Information Science. I thought I wanted to be a librarian. I had good reasons for thinking so - I like books, I like libraries, I have a passion for putting things in neat order, and hey, I already have the wardrobe. My closet if full of cardigans, all my shoes are sensible,  and I totally rock a bun.
    In the meantime, one of those survival jobs I took on in college suddenly transformed into an actual career. The little company I was freelance copyediting for didn't have quite enough for me to do, so the nice lady I worked for recommended me for a Real Job on the staff of a medical series put out by a Major Publishing Corporation. I now have my very own cubicle, a decent salary, and for the first time ever, fabulous medical and dental coverage. I get paid sickdays and holidays. I have a 401(k) and a Roth IRA. I'm practically a grownup. The people I work with are pleasant but not bothersomely friendly (yeah, I'm not a people person). I adore my boss. Nobody cares what I do with my time as long as all the work gets done. But the work... the work is mind-numbingly dull. I look at medical journal articles all day. Sometimes something entertaining comes along, like the issue we did by a bunch of Brazilian plastic surgeons on the subject of cosmetic butt implants. Mostly, though, it's just dull.
    So what about the librarian thing? I haven't taken a class towards my degree in six months. I haven't decided what I want to do with it. I already make more money in publishing than many people with years of experience in library work get, and I'm on the low end for salary in my field. And, to be honest, I didn't like much of what I found in library school. I loved the research techniques classes, and technical services classes, and anything to do with the nuts-and-bolts of library work. What I couldn't stand was the "careerist" speeches all my teachers gave. Apparently, librarians are a ferociously insecure lot. It's not all about cardigans and shushing people, they said, librarians can be hip and young, too! So hip and young that they can talk endlessly about how misunderstood they are as a profession, and how underpaid, and how unappreciated their work is, how librarians have an image problem... really, bitter and unpleasant stuff.
    Well, I like the cardigans, and I was looking forward to shushing people, and I am neither hip nor young. I am also not bitter and unpleasant most of the time.  In publishing, I work around cheerful, comeptent, hardworking people. We might be underappreciated and I have no idea what our professional image is, but we don't actually care, because we get paid instead. I think that we don't have a professional image because there is no journal out there dedicated to journal publishing.  No one pretends that this is an academic discipline, and we're all just fine with that.
     However - I like library work. I got to do some technical services work in school, and I loved it. I also got to work in a museum archive and would happily go live there if I could - provide me with food, housing and medical care and I would sign myself over as a slave . It feeds my soul in a way that my current career does not.  The idea of doing what I do now for the rest of my life feels wretched.

My real goal in life is to get out of the city and back where I belong. I belong in the middle of nowhere, with a flock of sheep and some horses and a few big woofy dogs and a garden. Library jobs are scarce in those places. Publishing work can be done from any place with a live Internet connection. I tell myself that from every practical perspective, publishing is the right choice and it would be a waste of a LOT of money to finish the library degree. This is what I tell myself. Repeatedly.

If I had two lives, though, in one of them I would get my MLIS, get a job at Penn and work towards my PhD in Classics while working in Van Pelt library. I would then be set as a subject specialist bibliographer, and could find work in a quiet academic setting handling a serious research collection on the ancient world. Meanwhile, the other me would move to a big spread in New England, raise Icelandic sheep and ride her horse while reaching new heights of genius in composting and self-sufficiency. Which me is me?
 

What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.

I do not have a favorite poem - it would be like having a favorite food; so many are luscious and wonderful, how could anyone pick just one? Below is one that I love, and one that I remembered after hearing recently of the death of another famous blonde.

I have come to claim Marilyn Monroe's body

http://www.pangaia.com/Fiction.htm

How have people mispronounced your name?  How is it supposed to sound? 
Submitted by Lorie.   

My name is hard to mispronounce. I don't think it's ever happened before. It is one of those androgynous names, though, and the spelling gives no clue to gender. There are people that I communicate with regularly through email, in a professional context, who address me as "Mr." I don't correct them because I don't know how, and it doesn't seem to make any difference - I communicate in email business-speak with these people and it would look odd to suddenly interject a personal note about my name. My gender is meaningless in this context. One person has been calling me "Mr." for almost two years now and I wonder what will happen if he ever has to contact me by phone.

I could solve the problem by including a "Ms." in my email signature. but I don't like how that looks. None of the available titles seem right - "Miss" is too cutesy and young, "Mrs.", though technically correct, feels inappropriate because I don't use my husband's last name. "Ms." is what I use when I have to use something, but I don't like it. It's an abbreviation that's short for nothing, and it's more irritating to me than being occasionally called "Mr."

The only solution is for me to get my PhD and become "Dr." It wouldn't clear up the gender confusion but it would look very satisfying in front of my name.

What method do you use to prepare your coffee or tea? 
Submitted by AgentBouche.

Coffee gets ground and made in a drip coffee maker. Tea - well, it depends on the tea. I have a nice Swiss gold filter that fits into the top of the teapot, and my habit is to fill the filter with whatever I currently want in my tea. I always have many different herbs on hand and make various blends based on need and my taste at the moment. Black tea comes from Chinatown - I've been getting into trying different varieties. I have a ceramic mug with an insert and a lid for brewing black tea. At work, I keep a box of TJ's green tea, bagged, to sip on during the day.

I drink lots of tea.

If you were stranded on a desert island, what five people would you eat first?
Submitted by James Poling.

Some of these QotD's have been good, some have been kind of dumb, but this one wins the prize for dumb questions. There isn't enough information in the question to give an answer. What is this scenario where I get to pick and choose who gets eaten? If there are a large group of people and we're all trapped, the one that gets eaten is the first one to die. How would I know which five to eat first? I don't even know who is on the island with me.
If the scenario is that I get to pick and choose who I'm stranded with, well, then I'm stranded with a large flock of chickens and a ruggedly handsome desert-island-survival expert. The first five to get eaten are the five hens who lay the fewest eggs. We all live happily ever after, the end.