o.O

My long-undead ipod just fixed itself. I was setting it out on the table and opening up a knife to dissect it one last time and try some business card trick I learned on the interwebs when I saw it turn on and give me neither a sad ipod face or an ohnoesfolder! icon, but my library, complete and unharmed from the day that it died. I don't know what to think...

It's hooked up to my computer now, and they're recognizing each other and playing nicely.

Those of you who know my ipod know that this is as felicitous and unexpected as John McCain standing up and announcing the removal of Sarah Palin from his ticket and denouncing racism and ignorance in America.

I'm going to restore the hard drive just in case, but...wow. Just wow.

Fall is a strange sort of patchwork here. It descends in bubbles, quietly enveloping a branch here, a bush there, an entire tree when you're not looking so that you find yourself crunching blissfully under naked limbs surrounded on every side by luscious, defiant, oh-so-coy green.

Internet, I must pick your brain later. Academics here are...not so good right now.

nonononono.

Do Not Want.

I hate art sometimes.

I'm going to Portugal in January! To present. At a conference.

Or I am if GSLIS provides funding, which it should, and may do again next August for IFLA in Italy should the chance arise.

Pardon me while I go cackle madly, hair frizzled, glasses askew, cricket paddle still tightly clutched, precarious atop a mound of slain academia.


bwa.

ha.



HA.




edit: Now to harass Cody for emergency Portugeuse learning.

For it's tenth birthday (awww), Google released its 2001 index of the internet, complete with retro Google interface.

In class, we naturally and quickly progressed from comparing interfaces and content to playing with political history.

Go here: http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Search for "Barack Obama". Note number of results.

Now, search for "Sarah Palin". Do likewise.

It's certainly not news that she's scarily inexperienced, but tis a fun illustration nonetheless. Oh, seven years, what a difference you really, really don't make when something as critical as national office is apparently concerned.

Seriously though, am I the only bothered that our potential vice president didn't exist on the internet seven years ago?

The Telegraph's statement on Obama's debate performance during the primary seems just as accurate now.

"He looked cool as a cucumber: a highly alert cucumber, but not one which was frightened of being sliced up and turned into sandwiches."

owowowowowowblistersowonmyfeetowowonthebloodysolesoweverywhereowow.

My neck muscles hurt. Apparently these really are full body workouts.

Mates of State and Thao with the Get Down Stay Down make a wonderful running-in-the-rain soundtrack. Other things might have been better, but I think I was mostly just happy to be running in the rain. Illinois has been pretending to be Southern California of late, and it's refreshing to have a bit of Northern England (or maybe Seattle) to break the sky and whet our soil.

I saw a man watering a fountain earlier this week.

Classes are good.

I just managed to mis-schedule an interview, then forget the time it was re-scheduled to, leading me to show up 17 minutes late for what turned out to include both the head of the program and the dean of students at GSLIS. I feel like more of an ass-hat than Bottom. And yet...considering all the mishaps leading up to it, it went reasonably well. Lord, do I ever need this. If I eat one more bowl of ramen my body will revolt and leave me crumpled and craving vegetables on the Unitarian Universalist Chapel floor during our next class.

Bike! I found a bike! For $10! At a garage sale! It's hideous and turquoise and 80s and rusty and I love it. I just wish I hadn't broken it even more while trying to replace a tube on it. Why have I so failed at accumulating practical mechanical knowledge in my life? And where are the boys I could usually get to do this sort of thing for free?

Yesterday was painting, and a sweet corn festival that somehow had no sweet corn (but did include fried candy bars, tacos in bags, and all manner of midwestern carny heart-stopping goodness). People-watching here is fascinating - I know there's a word for what I keep seeing, and one of these days I'll figure out what it is. Something to combine looming fate, homesteading, neo-hippies, football, occasional over-education, and orange.

Just to test lj's scrapbooking, I now offer you my latest cheesecake (chocolate peanut butter), Otto looking like a depression awareness ad, and Gabriel with mitosis kitties.

...Jiggity jig. Except that home is now Urbana, this familiar-but-alien Midwestern denizen of agriculture and higher education, preferably in the same go. Oldest experimental corn plot in the nation, baby. They built the undergraduate library underground to avoid shading the crop too much.

Orientation starts Friday, classes Monday, job Thursday. I'm working with the Midwest Book and Manuscript Studies program, doing something hopefully worthwhile to the realm of Special Collections - it's all a bit vague, since my job hasn't existed before this year. Not even as someone else's job.

Classes at the moment are Information Organization and Access, Intro to Network Systems, The Digital Divide (dealing specifically with Africa, looks like), and Global Perspectives in Library and Information Science. Networks takes field trips to St. Louis, yet I'm still most looking forward to Digital Divide as something that will tell practically whether this whole Peace Corps plan after the MS is bloody silly or actually a nifty and practical thing I can do for The Good Of The World And All That.

I was going to have something mopey about long distance being hard, but decided to forego the obvious. Talking to Akshay was a brilliant balm, and a good reminder that while coming home to a too large, too empty room is lonely and waking up alone hurts every time, I'm not worried about us: we both value the other enough to get through this grand undetermined time apart just fine, and whatever happens after that will be just...fantastic. A David-Tennant-happy-doctor-face kind of fantastic.

The BA is done and can be found, for those interested, here: webshare.uchicago.edu/users/merfle/Public/BA Final Draft.doc

It's not the magnum opus I had naively hoped it would be, but it is something I'm proud to have finished and remains a project I could return to for potential graduate school applications.

Now for showering, Peter Pan, skirts and sunflowers.

24 hours, 20 minutes until BA. GYUH.

I have the requisite 30 pages, which is more than I expected to be done with at this point. Fuck, it even has an introduction. Now I just needs me some transitions and a conclusion.

See? I don't procrastinate at all. Not. at. all.

It has come to my attention that I am, for certain circles, occasionally disappear-ed and ought to possibly post something indicating life, and maybe even insight into what that life is right now. So:

I have less hair. Much less hair. And it may be blonde, brown, strawberry, or mouse, depending on the observer.

I'm writing a BA paper (due in 6 days) on Columbus's millennialism. It's the largest piece of scholarly work I've ever created, and I very much look forward to not feeling like burning it at the end.

I'm in love, more than less. Same guy from the drama last year, but replace drama with devotion and pie. We've been happily together for over a year now - a definite hope-inducing record for me. Sadly, he wants to disappear into the wilderness for five years after college, so our dreams for the future are somewhat incompatible, but...man, we would make beautiful babies. And I love him. And the now is good.

I'm going to University of Illinois's Graduate School of Library and Information Science next year. I have mixed feelings on this, but they're a mix of things like giddy info-science nerd excitement and guilt that I really don't intend to stay in the field, so it's not really a bad sort of mix.

I'm omnivorous again, but lackadaisically so.

I have a niece and a godson. Together they stave off my baby-lust a bit longer.

I've been cooking and baking a lot, and am approaching formidable competence in the narrow categories of soup, pie, and cheesecake.

I'm surprisingly amenable to graduating in a few months.

I'm busy.

I'm happy.

The now is good.

And even when I'm not posting for years on end, I still read lj to keep up with you all, and you are far from forgotten.

I'm entering the last hour of the graveyard shift at work. I haven't passed out - yet.


How does USA Today manage to make every crossword a letdown? I mean, their puzzle section is about on par with my coffee-numb mental faculties right now, but still - crosswords shouldn't be able to make me feel that dissatisfied. At least with the Red Eye there's some healthy disdain and horror in the mix, as well as the always exciting mis-printing of the grid. This is just...meh.

I think the moral of the story is that I should try neither writing nor having thoughts when it's 6 am and I've been up all night at a hotel so close to quiet I keep expecting to turn around and find myself in the sort of horror movie that takes place in precisely this foggy a night at precisely this empty a hotel.

42 more minutes. I can make this. 41 and 1/2 more minutes.

Muzac. I can imagine perfectly the person who thought muzac was a good invention. He's tiny, and well-meaning, and silent waits make him uncomfortable - waits in line at fast food joints, waits up and down elevators, waits in hotel lobbies during check-in, waits between bites of burger. So he makes this noise, and that noise proliferates to no end, and he's nothing but happiness (or at least a lack of discomfort) from then on until he dies someday in a twin bed alone and smiling quietly (but not silently) to himself. My question is this: if he hears muzac in the afterlife, is he in heaven or hell?

Also, anyone in the Dubuque-ish or Galena-ish area want to see either No Country for Old Men or I Am Legend this week or (of course) Sweeney Todd after Friday? I'm full up of feel good family flicks after a weekend with my mother and need some violence to even myself out.

I feel horrifyingly productive. I've asked three people for recommendations for my library science application (two librarians and one tenured history professor - wrong ratio? Meh.), written to schedule an interview with someone at the Newberry Library, have been formulating intelligent and well-informed questions about the future of library science for said interview, started on the application itself, bought plane tickets to New York City for the end of break (squee!), wrote to the people at the Columbus Chapel in Pennsylvania to see about a tour on the way back from New York (and already got a positive response), called Singer to find out about the antique machine in my mom's basement (turns out it's a Model 66 that shipped out of Elizabeth, New Jersey on March 13, 1923), was able to order a new treadle belt for it (11.95 with shipping and handling - whee!), found out where I can buy sewing machine oil in Dubuque for the rest of the repairs, am finally learning how to restring my violin so I can start playing again, cooked absurd amounts this week, decorated with my mother for Christmas, fixed my car, read copiously, and am going to visit my godson in an hour.

::slow, sly smile::

World? You? Yeah, you. You're mine, bitch. I shall shake my tiny, tiny fists in triumph at your icy, icy visage and laugh! LAUGH!!!

Course, not much of this productivity has gone into my BA, but...triumphant laughter anyway. The BA will come later. Like today. Right? Right. And the Columbus Chapel is like research! Just...research in a fun, museumy, not-going-to-be-used-in-my-paper way.

I appreciate the Oxford Comma as much as the next fan of a well-ordered list, but Oxford fellows Lang and Butcher repetitively rape the poor little punctuation mark in the introduction to their Odyssey rendition:

"Homer has no ideas which cannot be expressed in words that are 'old and plain,' and to words that are old and plain, and, as a rule, to such terms as, being used by the Translators of the Bible, are still not unfamiliar, we have tried to restrict ourselves."

Ow. Owowowowowow. Bloody late nineteenth-century punctuation.

Right then. Rant over.




(And who does the Odyssey in prose?)

</annoyance>

Today was cats doubled in size due to winter furriness, a surplus of tea, pear gruyere pie for breakfast, and Jasper Fforde. Later will be winter driving and family and dubious dinner material, but now: now is an incredibly good end to a quarter that was...marvelous. Absolutely, stupendously, unabashedly marvelous. Minimum drama for once, and that makes all the difference, especially when it's replaced with a stable, delicious, functioning, happy relationship. Who knew?

Once again, livejournal falls by the wayside of happiness. Yet lately I grow so tired of academic writing and want to wiggle some leisure-writing fingers. Besides, I have a good while before people start to trickle from their various new homes and back to the old, and while I should perhaps definitely be writing a BA during that time, other words call to me now. I feel stories percolating, and public-consumption writing.

Updates, maybe. Bloggy type entries, perhaps. For now, it's back to tea and cats and Thursday Next.

The is a plug to www.freerice.com, a simple site that's immediately earned my love. You answer multiple choice vocabulary questions (like the SATs, for those of you who like vocab testing, and like...things not like the SATs, for those of you to whom standardized tests are the devil), and for every word you get correct their sponsors donate 10 grains of rice, which are then distributed via the United Nations to people who might otherwise die from extreme poverty.

Go learn! Save lives!

This week I...
-won at Triona. We still speak each other's language, and it was unspeakably good to see her again, fuzzy unicorn earrings and all. ^.^
-made more cobbler than any five apartments could possibly need, and have been passing it out to whomever I can lay some off on. Cursed berry sales...
-touched the first ever printings of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Jane Eyre, and Villette. Felt a little bit of residual sanctity for the rest of the day and loved my job once again.
-almost failed to see Cody when I got on the wrong BNSF train (why can't they just all make the same stops? Or be a bit more clear on which ones they'll not stop at so I'm not left staring plaintively out the window at Brookfield as we zoom by, only to stop five minutes later due to live wires across the tracks. It was two hours before they let us backtrack to a stop where I very happily met my former Galenians in a rain-drenched, thunder-spattered train station. Then there was much reminiscing and talk followed by a very lonely walk through 1 am Chicago. I don't know if it was the rain or that part of downtown, but wherever people go at night, it certainly isn't the south loop.
-bought my perfect sundress
-did a lot of BA research and feel slightly less guilty about where it is right now
-had a singularly unhelpful meeting with CAPS, in which I learned that it is nigh impossible for me to attend grad school anywhere in the UK and that CAPS knows nothing about any of the subjects I'm interested in and gave me the thoroughly original advice of "go talk to people in your field!"
-made fish 'n chips with Sean and ate them, dripping with malt vinegar, over a proper Irish ale and some Doctor Who. 'Twas beautifully British.