Raw Feed

OK, I have read one too many articles recently about all the things women shouldn’t do when they’re pregnant.  (Don’t get all excited, this is not some weird way of breaking dramatic news.) The one I read yesterday was about things you shouldn’t do around the house once you’re knocked up.  (Seattle Times, DIGS, “Pregnant? How to Safely Prepare Your Nest“)

Now, admittedly, I’m not much inclined to disagree with any article that tells me I can’t change the kitty litter (twist my arm!) if I’m pregnant, even though that warning is based on having an outdoor cat and our cat is indoor only (the risk factor is a certain bacteria only found in soil).

But I start losing it when someone tells me that at any point in my life I need to be careful not to use craft glue or bleach.

Yes, really.

People, if I want to make some frickin’ handmade cards while I’m pregnant, ain’t nobody gonna stop me.  I’m going to use the glue to make things stick together, not huff it, for heaven’s sake.

In fact, I may even be so radical and baby-hating as to have a beer every once in a while.  Especially since you’re all well aware that 3/4 of a beer is about my limit unless I want to make the transition from giggly blonde (that starts at 1/4 of the beer) to totally asleep.

And for sure no one is going to put me in some bubble so I don’t Damage! Our! Unborn! Child!

Frankly, in my most irritated moments, I think all of these “helpful” articles about what we potential Vessels of Human Life should and shouldn’t do while vesseling are all about control.  Control of women.  Yeah, that again.  No, we didn’t solve it in the 60s.

But a little common sense intervenes at this point.  I think it’s also about fear.  Our country was attacked, more terrorist plots are being discovered, fairly large chunks of the world hate us, and some of us believe our administration is actually making it all considerably worse.  Meanwhile there’s antibiotic-resistant bacteria, school shootings, the big bad booga booga internet gonna pervert your children’s minds, etc.  The only safe place is the womb.  Only the women in charge had damn well better make sure it stays safe.  So we need many, many fearmongering articles to keep us in line, to keep that last safe place truly safe.

Of course, the problem is that, being told to be afraid of everything, I am inclined to sneer cynically at all the warnings.  This same article that told me not to use glue told me that pregnant women need to be careful climbing ladders because their center of gravity has shifted.  Notice: it did NOT say that pregnant women shouldn’t climb ladders, just that they should be careful.  This is actually very good advice.  Mixed in with bad or hysterical (hmm, nice pun) advice, however, it makes me want to throw the — oh, Lord, rescue me from that cliche! — whole article out.

The whole “you are your womb” attitude toward pregnant women scares me.  I see it happen to obviously pregnant women, and to fight it, I do my best to still talk to them like women with brains and other interests than one particular organ.  I just hope that, if I’m ever in the same boat, others will do the same for me.

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.