Raw Feed

It’s pretty sad and ironic that the last post before the hell-in-a-handbasket one was about my 1001 ideas for posts — and was followed by exactly 3 weeks of silence.

Yes, I know maybe everyone feels this way, but it’s really staring me in the face — I feel like I have 26 hours of stuff every day that I’m trying to shoehorn into 24.  I feel like I have to fail at something every week just to get even half of everything else I want to get done, done badly.  In other words, the laundry isn’t all done, my house is dirtier than I like, I see some of my friends almost frequently and others barely or not at all, I’m scrambling to keep up in my job and constantly feel stupider and less informed than I want or need to be, I eat in restaurants too much and cook barely at all, I don’t always call my parents as much as I’d like, I constantly wish I had more time to spend with Aaron, I miss my hobbies, I need more sleep, and I don’t write in my blog as much as I want to.

And I don’t even have a kid.

I did get a taste of boredom this week at work — just a taste.  My boss was away and I got lonely and bored and then I realized — I like being a little too busy, feeling a little too challenged, pushed past what I’m comfortable with, constantly out of my depth and needing to learn more.  I whine and moan terribly, but I’ve had life without it before I got this job and it’s so much worse.  Actually being able to do everything required of me is a bleak, bleak existence.

But that’s hard to remember.

Other days I wake up clenching my jaw hard enough to give me toothaches, or headaches.  I feel stressed and secretly pity myself a lot.  I don’t take care of little things, like dry cleaning or shining my shoes.  I start to eat too many cookies and I look worried a lot.

Clearly my standards are too high — part of me liked my life attainable, controllable, close to perfect, even though, as a wise woman once told me, “You’re only perfect when you’re dead.”  I’m constantly torn between hating the chaos and secretly loving it, craving more, feeling more alive when I’m riding the wave of not knowing what will come next.  How do I plan without controlling?  How do I organize and then let go?  How do I work hard and then drop the harness and go do something totally different, just for me?

It’s Zen, or something.  I am so not there.  In a spare moment on the bus, when I remember, sometimes I close my eyes and check in with God and get the sense that, yes, I am really doing OK.  (I’m pretty sure it’s God because sometimes I learn things I didn’t really want to hear, but it always seems to produce good results when I listen.)  I don’t do that enough either, says the voice in my head with the high standards.  But maybe my life is like an Impressionist painting, and right now my nose is just 2 inches away from a really unexpected glob of yellow that doesn’t look like it belongs in the middle of a lake.  But when I can stand back — and how long will it be before I can stand back and look at this part of my life? — maybe it will amount to something kind of cool.

Isn’t that a delightfully grumpy and fuddy-duddy title?

Although I’ll be repeating myself to most of the friends of mine who care the most about this issue, I’m going to post the text of an email I sent out in response to an article my father sent me.

The article, rather irrelevantly called “Calling Melvil Dewey,” from Inside Higher Ed, is about upcoming efforts to “simplify catalog systems at the Library of Congress” by ending the creation of serial authority records.

Some of you may know that one of my favorite things about the various jobs I had at Stanford while I was going to library school was handling serials (magazines and newspapers) and monographic series (groups of individual books in the same series).  This makes me quite a sick puppy.  Most people loathe the complicated nature of figuring out when a government document is a serial (one title with many issues) and when it’s a series (many titles under one umbrella).

By deciding to stop creating series authority records, “[i]n effect, catalog records for new books will no longer indicate if they belong to a series.”  This is a huge blow to making sense out of government documents, maps, even fiction titles that are related to one another.

So here was my response:

After reading this, I feel a little like someone I know and respect in the field has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

But I also feel like we should all have seen this coming.  More and more institutions have come to depend completely on LC cataloging—because they can’t justify the expense of their own catalogs in the face of fewer and fewer patrons understanding the difference between a library catalog and the internet or Amazon.com.  That’s partly because librarians can’t sell themselves or their services well, partly because there has not been enough emphasis on serving the user and making catalogs and catalog data usable, and partly because of… factors completely outside our control.  

We’re in an era where people choose the free or cheap over the good and authoritative.  And we’re in an era where a distributed contribution model is considered better than an expert one.  Will enough monkeys and enough typewriters produce something rivaling Shakespeare?  Well, no, but will it be good enough, and will it have other advantages the classic model doesn’t?  Is there a way to combine the two models and reap the best of both?  The jury’s still out on that one. 

I do wonder if the pendulum will ever swing the other way again.  I feel like a dying breed: people who respect authority, instead of thinking that everyone being equal means that we’re all equally qualified to do everything…. 

That was waaaay more philosophical than I usually get, and way more conservative, too.  But then, I love serial and series cataloging, and I don’t want to watch it die.  And Amazon, even though it hires tons of librarians, is still crap in comparison to any library catalog.

Sadly yours,
Vera Shanti

I have 1001 ideas for blog posts, and yet none of them are getting written right now.  This weekend was all about enjoying my weekend of puttering and crafty time while Aaron was in what I’ll call Nerdvana — a video arcade game conference called California Extreme that he goes to in San Jose.

And now I need to go to bed.  So many ideas, so little time!

You guys seen this yet?  This looks like a cool website to refer to if I ever end up writing another article for library lit:

The Researching Librarian: Web resources helpful for librarians doing research

If you have already, sorry to be behind the times.

“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” says the back cover.  This book was a fun read on an airplane.  I like pop sociology/psychology, apparently.

Especially fascinating was the chapter on what makes Blue’s Clues an even more enticing program for kids than Sesame Street, even though Blue’s Clues is a LOT more boring for adults to watch.  Kids don’t think like adults–we know that.  But Blue’s Clues is a great demonstration of how what adults would see as monotony and repetition translate to kids as reliability and comfort.  Basically the chapter is about the usability of TV shows for kids–no wonder I enjoyed it.

Sadder was a chapter that shows through statistics that a sensational death will prompt copycat suicides or murders among similar people.  It’s another demonstration of “social evidence”–when we see some people like us doing something, we’re more likely to do it ourselves.  Likewise, when we see a number of people ignoring someone in distress, we’re more likely to ignore that person as well (ex. the guy asleep in the doorway–drunk? stroke victim?).  It isn’t that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t know what to do.

By the way, the way to counteract this if you need help is to appeal to one individual at a time, rather than saying, “Somebody help me!” And the way to overcome a group’s inertia when you’re in a group and worried about something is to realize that everyone’s waiting for a cue from someone else and create your own cue.  One person really can make a difference.  Perhaps this is why I’m so successful at directing a whole group of people to a specific restaurant for dinner.  We’re all too polite, or confused, to suggest a place to eat, so I speak up, suggest something, but also make it clear that others can feel free to object.  More often than not, that’s where we end up, and I think everyone’s relieved that we’ve made a decision.  If not, hey, time to comment on this blog entry and complain about my restaurant tyranny!

(Aside: Aaron ends up suggesting the restaurants when it’s just the two of us, and then I shoot about 3 down before agreeing to one.  I am reaaaally surprised the man is still married to me sometimes.)

Why did I find this book fun?  Because it’s fascinating to me to get clues about why people do what they do.  It’s a wonder, really, that I didn’t major in psychology or sociology in college, except that I was too young to know that it fascinated me yet and I wanted something obvious and marketable. (French literature?! Yeah, well, I repeat, I was young–only 16 when I went to college.) But the fun part now is that I get to read whatever I want on the plane, and then blog about it here!