Why does a person do a Google search for cake pony, and then link to my blog from the results, despite the fact that my blog is something like the 54th item on the list? Is my cake pony reference somehow better than everyone else’s cake pony references? Have I definatively defined the cake pony blogging experience?
Somehow I doubt it. Sadly, it will likely always remain a mystery.
I’m doing my best to become a scotch snob. I’ve experienced some setbacks. Mainly the high price of good scotch. I’m a poor university student, so buying a $70+ bottle at any regular interval is well-beyond my means if I have any inclination to eat. I bought one nice bottle, $70, of Dalwhinnie 15-year single malt. I drank it reverantly, sparingly, mainly because of the price, though also because it deserves to be savored. The amount of time it lasted, at the price it cost, actually seemed fairly reasonable.
The other day, I bought a sub-$30 bottle of Ballantine’s Finest. I suppose the simple fact that it was palatable makes me a very poor scotch-snob indeed. It’s a blend of over 40 malts. I drank the bottle over the course of the past three days. We value the things that cost us dearly, more than those we come by easily. I guess that holds true with scotch as well. No reveration was required. No savoring, nor sparsity, nor even common sense was used. Some weekends you just want to get drunk. Those weekends are rare for me, but I enjoyed the lightly buoyant feeling as I plugged away at my database project.
Now the bottle’s gone, and since I’m rabidly aware of the dangers of over-consumption, it will be some time before I acquire any more scotch. Probably not until the new year, at least.
One of these days I’ll become a scotch snob. Once I can afford it, that is, and they’ve invented artificial livers.
Happy to say that I’ve used them all. Of the 10, I think the Laptop Gun from Perfect Dark is my fave. Nothing else has been quite so fun in FPS multiplayer. (via Fark)
procrastination:
to put off cataloguing,
i write a haiku.
*sigh*
and off to work i go …
the project: pick three old-ass books from some boxes provided,
find said books in three different online library catalogs,
make my own records for the books, in both isbd and marc format,
write about the experience, the joys, and the tribulations.
verily, i tribulate. wish me luck.
Batten the hatches! Self-Destruct! Hit the big red button!
Some of my classmates have found this blog. Obviously, I must now destroy it.
…
Actually, I don’t really mind. I’ve long since come to terms with the idea of this blog being “found”. By anyone. For the most part, I wouldn’t write it if I cared who read it. So, welcome. I doubt anyone would find this blog particularly interesting on its own merit (i.e. out of context, i.e. if you don’t know me), as I’m fully aware the writing is not of a particularly entertaining sort. Sure, I’m charming and funny in person, but I do my best to avoid those things in my written works. I find that if you set a precedent, people will come to expect wit and charm, and then there’s just too much pressure to perform.
In short, new readers, welcome to this ridiculous exercise in verbal exposition.
I had a conversation with Abigail the other night about this blog, in which I admitted that I actually don’t particularly enjoy blogging. In fact, I find it something of a chore. On the other hand, I do feel like it’s a good practice, and I do enjoy being able to look back on it and see what I was doing, what thoughts I had, when. The other reason I do it is simply to keep certain people up to date on certain things in my life, should they choose to come by here and look (which, I think, most of them do not). I remember that I used to enjoy blogging, back in the day when I first started and I was all artsy and stuff. In my old age I’m becoming less creative and more discursive, much to my chagrin. Perhaps one day I’ll turn it back around.
Actually, I am pretty excited about a creative project I have brewing. I’ve even started some research on it. But for now it’s all top secret, so you’ll just have to simmer in your own anticipation. I hear that expectation cooks in its own sauce….
One thing I’ve begun to notice about graduate school is that it isn’t a Monday thru Friday sort of deal. Or, at least, it isn’t for me. I set my alarm this morning the same I do during the week, and it’s irrelevent that I slept through it and, subsequently, somehow turned it off. The point is that though I didn’t wake up until nearly 10, I meant to wake up at 7 or so. In either case, I woke up, showered, dressed, and walked to school on a cold, rainy, windy Saturday morning. Chances are that I’ll be here all day, working on a project.
The project itself is a case study of an (imaginary) public library (except I think that they call them municipal libraries around here). This library has a crapload of things wrong with it, mostly due to the old management, Jerry, who is now out the door. The new management, George, has just received a crapload of money (why is a mystery), from the municipal officials, and know he has to come up with a battle plan for making the library not suck. But him, I mean that we do, and it isn’t particularly difficult except that the professor has a tendancy to be vague about what EXACTLY she wants you to turn in, until you’ve turned it in, and then she’s VERY exact about what she wants. Which is frustrating, to say the least. The last assignment we turned into her was a beautiful work of art, a diagram of how information flows through a library, complete with little people, flipbooks, and I even think it showed a full, synthesized understanding of the ways in which information flow happens. Turns out that she didn’t want synthesized anything, she wanted her buzzwords, verbatim, explicitly listed on the diagram. I’m not bitter, really….
Marianne Bailey, one of my favorite professors from Evergreen, once told me that graduate school was, more or less, nothing but a series of hoops that you have to jump through in order to get your degree. For the most part, I’ve found my experience so far to be much more fulfilling than that, except for this one class, which is characterized perfectly by her analogy. The jumping part isn’t even hard, by itself. Finding out where the hoop is, how high and how wide, and whether or not it’s on fire or coated with acid; that’s the tricky bit. But even if graduate school were just a series of hoops eventually leading to a degree, I’d still be here, though with substantially more gritting of the teeth. Fact is, I’m tired of correcting people when they call me a librarian. Sure, maybe I’m here for other reasons too: education, personal growth, etc. But the name thing, that’s definately the big one.