The Lisa Chronicles – Page 13 – A Most Unreliable Narrator

circling the topic

Having a week of downtime between semesters, I opted to do some spring cleaning which meant dumping extraneous emails off of my two primary gmail accounts as well sort through papers and other stuff to prep for TheBF’s arrival soon (extended stay) and to do basic organization. I came across emails from various members of TheEx’s family on one account as well as love notes from him stashed in various papers that were tucked around willy nilly.
I was heart broken, pained and battered emotionally for about five minutes before I moved on with whatever it was that I was doing.
Since my move to RO, I’ve come across such things but not in such strength or number before and I disqualified everything as momentary lapse of reasoning. It was okay to mourn the death of something that was important to me and I felt like there was some ridiculous conspiracy to regurgitate that pain all over again every time I found something new. A flux of emotions would of course then appear only to be waylaid by reason and common sense (typically after a few beers).
No matter how awesome my life has gotten and how great the people I’ve met recently who have aspects and interests that were like his, I still mourn him and for the last year I’ve been mourning him heavily. Part of that morning means still exhibiting verbal output that I’d like to
This long, dreary, seemingly never ending winter (and semester) finally ended last week. Academically, it was one of the most challenging I’ve had in a very long time and I carry my B+ in cataloging with pride (considering I flunked the final, this is a very good thing). My cumulative GPA dipped from 4.0 to 3.88, but I’m also totally okay with that. The academic stuff will be forthcoming in another post from lib schooled. because there is a lot going on that in arena. The whole thing about world domination before I graduated? Totally happening.
I’ve been indulging in pure, unadulterated laziness this last week or so by catching up on network and series TV, pleasure reading, and basic couching. One of my girlfriend’s said recently that she felt her entire creativity get sucked away when she’s in school, hence the lack of posting on her blog and I realized that was the same for me as well — it wasn’t about time so much anymore as about energy and feeling. It feels easier to sit and internets for hours without contributing to the conversation more so than creating something to give. Contribution requires energy and brain power and a dedication that sometimes I don’t always have to give, no matter how much free time I have lallygagging about.
TheBF is coming in a few weeks for another extended stay with plans for permanent move in July sometime and marriage happening sometime after. We’re eloping, I just don’t know when or where as of yet. And we’re not technically engaged either, but I do have a few rings he’s purchased and surprised me with for “sizing” purposes. There is also apparently a “ring fund” that he’s been contributing to for this purpose of getting me my desired fat rock, but every bloody fucking cunty time someone starts talking about marrying me, shit hits the fan so I’m not holding my breath on this one until after the ring is on my finger or I’m at a JP signing my life away.
Moving right along, I’ve been going through some personal effects recently, tossing and getting rid of even more stuff before TheBF gets here. My apartment is only about 600 sqft and with two large humans (he is 6’6) and an 18lb diva pug (Ms. Wednesday herself), the apartment feels cramped. And that’s with just my stuff so to imagine his things, no matter how scant, and the apartment feels claustrophobic. We talk of nesting and of buying better things at a better time when the big girl job comes long for me after graduation next summer, but until then, we will more than likely be slumming it in RO until that time occurs.
As I was cleaning, I ran across things from TheEx that I had forgotten about – nothing spectacular, just random love notes and such that were shoved away in random and various places, I’m assuming that I shifted about for reasons that seemed logical at the time which makes no absolute sense to me at all right now.
Also what was found was a list I had started before the first break-up entitled, “How to be fabulous in 2008.” and much of what I wrote figured him prominently in the plans but what was interesting was that intermingled with that list were items that were deeply personal and independent of him (or of anyone). That to me was the most striking, that shift from coupledom to absolute autonomy. Also interestingly enough, I accomplished a lot of my goals without realizing I had done what I set out to do in those early days of 2008. I had no idea when I wrote this list we would be breaking up a few months later, but yet we did and I survived.
After seeing those notes, what I wasn’t prepared for, really, was how much my heart still pained after all of this time. Getting over people has been one of my strong suites, so much so that I’ve been called a cold-hearted bitch¹ a time or two in my life. There are men, however, who’ve gotten so ingrained in my psyche that it’s almost impossible to get them out no matter how much I tried. Alan is a good example, Ex-Fiance #1 as well as TheBF (first go around) to some extent. TheEx, obviously, is another.
Wait, am I starting on my “Top Five Most Soul Sucking Break-ups Ever”? Go away, High Fidelity! I am resisting the urge to lean out my window and start shouting out that there is no room in my top for the likes of TheEx, but of course, there is. And TheEx doesn’t drive a Saab.
When I was younger, I always imagined myself to be the “once in a lifetime” kind of girl who’d fall in love for once and forever and as 37 starts sniping its claws at me, I think it’s time to dispel that myth forever – because I’m not that girl at all. I’ve been involved with a number of men over the course of my life to dispel that overly romanticized notion. I like to believe though that at the time I really and truly felt that way and that because of that, I would never regret being with them. I love big and whole heartedly and passionately and when the relationships fell apart, I was beyond gutted.
I find myself meandering in my writing here, to and fro and I keep having to reign myself in with my point (which there never seems to be anymore).
I’ve met some wonderful people in the last year who have taken his place in some degree or another, namely my Music Boyfriend who is as passionate as myself on music, who happily engages me for hours on the topic. Other F1 and West Ham fans, TheEx was not a total special snowflake and I get that. But it was everything

1. Or serial monogamist.

Feast or Famine: back to Twitter after 40 days

Going 40 days without Twitter was an interesting experience as I’m terrible at moderation — it’s either feast or famine with me. This is one of the reasons why quitting smoking has always been so hard for me: I WANTED just one cigarette and then I would smoke 12, which meant I would have to buy a pack or bum from someone and the whole smoking process would start all over again. The only way I kicked it this time was not hang out with smokers, which is easy to do since I don’t know any smokers on the east side of the state.
However with Twitter, the problem was that just as I was weaning myself off of Twitter, everyone and their second cousin was joining Twitter. Since this was definitely not a geographic issue (like attempting to quit smoking)¹ but rather a interest issue, what was a girl to do? I decided to to go off of Twitter for 40 days not because I am religious and needed something to give up for Lent² but rather I was spending an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and not allocating that time for other, often necessary, projects. Twitter is not just about reading my public_timeline and tweeting but rather for me it is also about looking at what others are tweeting, following links, researching interests, people and things.
If someone posted a blog entry, I’d end up spending several hours on that blog and then some. I want to to know who I am interacting with, so thus, Twitter became this full-time job of me searching out and expanding my network. I’m a curious cat who needs to know how things are done! I wanted to use the time off from Twitter to do a variety of things though, things that I swore I was NOT doing because all of my time was being sucked in by Twitter.
Things such as: updating lib schooled. more often, personal research, knitting, exercise (WiiFit), homework, writing, cleaning my apartment. I suck at time management and Twitter was fast becoming another obsession that was sucking down my time and like smoking, I couldn’t find myself an easy way to quit. More succinctly, I couldn’t find myself moderating my Twitter activity to do something else.
Feast or famine.
In the Twitterverse (or really, any active online social life), 40 days is almost an entire cycle or IS an entire cycle of birth to death. Fads can come and go in 40 days or less, and with Twitter it went from bubbling under the surface of explosion to totally exploding all over the media. Every single form of media outlet was becoming Twitterized and add insult to injury, bands, authors, celebs, friends, and everyone else in between were suddenly joining the Twitter bandwagon! And I couldn’t add them or read them!
The one and only time I logged into Twitter during this period was when a co-worker asked me a question that required me to do so. But I didn’t look at my public_timeline, I swear. But other than that single instance, I refrained from reading my public_timeline, I did not log into Twitter, I did not follow Twitter links, I did not log into Twhirl or any other application, did not respond to DMs: not a damn thing. The only thing I did was check how many minions were following me because the number kept growing and it was insane! In the 40 days I was gone, the number of my followers almost doubled! Thanks to auto-tweeting on this blog, I tweeted maybe half a dozen times in the last 40 days but not the continual dozen times a day (or more!) that I was doing before.
According to TwitterCounter, the projection that I was to hit 500 minions before Easter was completely feasible — something that Chris and I had a gentlemen’s agreement on (that I would indeed hit 500 before Easter, while he did not believe it to be so). The final tally was 520. And this became the puzzlement for me: I was not tweeting with any regular basis and I was gaining new minions. Why? I came up with the following reasons:

People I knew who created Twitter accounts after my hiatus.
People who were recommended to follow me (via #followfriday or another method).
Key word/geographic search: I gained a lot of new minions because of “librarian” and “punk rock” (@pnkrcklibrarian) in my name. I also gained new minions because of where I live, as it’s listed in my bio.
Hashtag (#) via my own self-created hasltags or via key wording my bio.
Spam bots, auto/serial adders.
MLM market peeps.

Was there a lesson learned in any of this?
Probably in the end I was able to do a bit better this semester than projected because I was able to keep away from the time sucking whore that Twitter had become in my life. But other than that? I came back fast and furious to the Twitter world, as the SomeECard that Chris created for me.
P.S. As of November 2009, I’ve hit nearly 1200 minions. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

1. Yes, I’ve been smoke-free for 10 weeks now. I’ve got the 10-15lbs to prove it too!
2. While I was raised Catholic, I’ve given up all preludes of Catholicism years ago (despite the fact that I went to a Catholic college). Interestingly enough, my mother who is Christian and only practices some tenements of Catholicism (when it suites her) continually gives up men for Lent every year. You can see where my sense of humor comes from, then.

Everything you wanted to know about lisa marie rabey, but were afraid to ask.

I’ve talked, almost incessantly, over the years how keeping an online journal has influenced my life professionally and personally. ¹ And yet despite the fact at how times (and technologies) have changed in the last decade, I still get amazed when my own interests often parlay into new opportunities for myself.
For example, recently I’ve become the go-to girl for WordPress based stuff. Several librarians at the academic library I work at have started using WP for professional and personal blogs, and I just happened to have been around when one of them whipped open the WP dashboard to their site. I said something like, “Oh, hey, you’re using WP!” and conversation stemmed from there of me giving tech-tips and know-how on how to use WP, how to integrate widgets and all that brouhaha.
Several weeks later in my digital imaging class, the museum my class will be working with wants to use WP for digital curation of our project — the catch is, the museum is just getting their feet wet on how to use WP and guess who is the only person who knows how to use WP in this scenario? You’ve guessed it — me!² Because my WP dashboard is loaded to the gills with tweaks, gadgets and widgets, I showed them lib schooled. (and obvs. the dashboard) to explain some of the more robust features of WP and walk them through how things are done and what they can do with WP.
There are, almost literally, no limitations for what WP is capable of and I sing its praises loudly. But the one thing I thought was interesting about myself while I was showing colleagues and supervisors on the functionality of WP via my own site, is that it it dawned on me that I was ushering them into a vaguely private world where even a Google search for me will not bring up this site. I never meant to be completely anonymous with lib schooled. or even private, the content here was to be about my foray into obtaining my MLIS degree and boy howdy, some of the drafts in progress (like “Men I’ll never, ever date.”) having NOTHING to do with librarianship in the slightest.
Did I really feel comfortable showing this this data? Did they need to know that I have/had people calling me “god” for a variety of reasons for some time? That I have a fondness for Guinness, James Bond and Jane Austen? That I like to say “fuck” a lot? Is that information relevant?
On one hand, my line of thinking is clearly ridiculous. Since that ill fated day in 1995 when I discovered “the internet,” I’ve been obnoxiously postulating myself online in a variety of ways ranging from writing about my sex life, detailing very private information about myself to posting images of my tattoos and piercings^3. I have left a virtual breadcrumb trail⁴ of who or what I am all over the internet — it’s almost like you can’t trip without finding me attached to something, somewhere.
So why was I suddenly being Ms. Coy, 2009 about showcasing my blog, let alone a blog about library school? I’d like to blame Google, but that’s the easy way out. I’d like to think that as I’ve gotten older that I’ve become slightly more sophisticated and mature about my online dealings. As I near the end of this long, hard journey of schooling (I’ve been in classes since January of 2003, have completed two degrees and am working on my third), I know that my online presence is going is going to be more scrutinized now more than ever by future employers.
In the the book Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Bowker and Star discuss using (at the time of their writing) AltaVista for researching candidates from their application pool and questioning themselves about the moral and ethical ramifications of their actions. They deemed it like snooping in the host’s medicine cabinet while at a party — you shouldn’t do it, but yet you do it anyway because the curiosity is killing you and now you have information about your host (they, perhaps, like to use KY personal warming lubricant and Preparation H (but not at the same time)) that makes the urge to snoop almost impossible to resist.
So even, ethically and morally, having your future employer search for you online– this is not to say it hasn’t nor will it be done, you can almost guarantee yourself that somewhere, out there, grunts are doing research on your application while you wait for that call back for the desperately wanted interview.
The world has become so tech savvy that we are almost heading back to the era of chisels and stones. Bowker and Star are not the first ones to discuss snooping online nor the ramifications of your employer finding out about your online activities and squashing them, ala dooce who got canned from her job in 2002.
In the late ’90s, the idea of an employer Googling (before Googling was even a household name let alone a verb) was not necessarily an uncommon thing, as written by demonika in the ‘zine F.U.C.K.⁵Her entry is poignant — and speaks volumes. And it’s now been a decade, when are we going to realize that flashing our boobs on a camera phone is not necessarily a good thing?
Google searches for me bring up varied results depending if you use my middle initial or not. But what is telling is that you get scads of information that is slightly different enough and old enough that may not be applicable to whatever it is you are looking for about me. If you search for academichussy, you get a bit more about me way more current and even more so if you do a search for pnkrcklibrarian, which has become my new nom de plume to reflect my new obsession, you find almost up to the minute stuff. There are still people who search for me as modgirl AND lisa because they remember that at one time I owned the domain modgirl.net (which I still do indeed own and use). So what does this mean? What you find about me varies depending on what you currently know of me, how you search for it and figure out if it is relevant regardless of how dated it is.
You also have to take into consideration that you’re only getting a small percentage of the picture of who I am, what interests me in 1995 and 1996 (J.D. Salinger, IRC, R.E.M.) is different from 2002 (Aphex Twin, Tivo, Laurell K. Hamilton) which is completely different than 2009 (Elbow, Wii, Kate Atkinson). The bottom line? Employers who use data derived from interent searching are screwing with the possiblity that what they see is not necessarily all that what they get. It’s almost impossible to not be integrated somehow online without showcasing personality aspects of yourself that may not be deemed professional or appropriate. There are people, like my boyfriend, who reject social networking and web 2.0 like there is no tomorrow. Overall, I think making an employment decision based on what one finds on the internet is morally and ethically wrong — and also i think that making a personality call on someone based on what you find out on the internet is also morally wrong.
In short:

This is going to be more than likely bite me in the ass.
I am a hypocrite.
I don’t give a fuck.

1.If you’re interested in how my journaling has changed over the years, the Wayback machine has archives for simunye.org [From 1998 – 2000] and modgirl.net [From 2000 – 2005]. The entire archive should be up soon (I’ve been saying that for years) at modgirl.net. WP now has the functionality to import my LiveJournal [From 2002 – present-ish.]entries into WP, which I’d love to do on modgirl.net instead of freakin’ doing everything by hand.
2. I’m now working on a special project for this class on how to incorporate WP and other open source software into a workable, searchable archives; with the catch being geared towards small museums/libraries (primarily, where the archival/tech staff consists of 1-2 people).
3. Which seems innocent enough until you learn that some of those images are not exactly work-safe. Employers tend to frown when you’re perusing pictures of pierced nipples.
4. Amazon.com WishList | de.licio.us: modgirl | Facebook | flickr: modgirl | Goodreads | last.fm: modgirl | LibraryThing: academichussy | LiveJournal: academichussy | MySpace: modgeekgirl | Pandora: academichussy | ravelry: academichussy | /.: simunye | Twitter: pnkrcklibrarian | WiiNumber: 6103 8766 7240 5040
5. I also wrote for F.U.C.K. during the late ’90s and you can find my articles there as simunye or at modgirl.net.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

I’ve been dying, for ages actually, to do a music blog with someone. I have grandiose ideas and I knew that this would not be a one person job, that it would take time, energy and love to get it off the ground. I really am in love with the idea of taking a topic and presenting the same idea with multiple viewpoints and finding someone who would not only have the time or the energy to do this has been difficult, even though there has been interest from variety of people. Via Twitter, I met Chris when we bonded over music via another tweeter, our now mutual friend Steve. It was via Steve that Chris and I started talking about music, finally following each other and carrying on our own conversations about music. If you go back through my time line, you see a lot of @ replies to Chris and this does not include our hours long conversations over IM, mostly about music with the occasional gossip thrown in about mutual Twitter friends.
It was over our marathon conversations that the idea of a music blog was planted, according to Chris apparently by me, but what would we write about? Having an opinion about music, writing about new releases and upcoming bands and concerts is one the most predominantly favored type of blog that people write. The number of music blogs, from personal to professional has skyrocketed and you tend to trip over and wear high boots over all the opinions that are out there. What could we do that would be different from the masses, please our aesthetic souls and still touch upon music? Introducing The Brit and The Yank! TBaTY (as we affectionately call it) takes the idea of “Top Five-isms” (as seen by High Fidelity) and puts the spin on it — “Top five producers we’d love to have sex with” to “Top five Brooklyn bands who suck (or don’t suck).”
The idea is to produce a weekly column, hopefully on Wednesdays (homework permitting) where we each pick top five of X theme and write about it, include music samples and links to the artists/songs themselves. Filler will also include record reviews, band and concert reviews, song of the day reviews and other music related content. Chris has been updating like a muthafucka while I’ve only been able to produce our weekly content — but so far, we’ve started to gain a little bit of notice from others and traffic has started slowly to come in. Our recent columns have included, “Top five songs to get drunk too on St. Patty’s day” and “Top five spring fling songs.”
Come join us, we’d love to have you.

40 Days (and nights) without Twitter.

By definition, I’m an extremist. I can’t eat one cupcake, I have to eat the whole batch. I can’t watch just one episode of $Television_Show, I must watch the entire series. I can’t do things in halves or partials, I must have the whole entire wondrous, beautiful thing. Thus, anytime I need to quit or par down on something, it’s hard for me to get into the mindset that majority of the population already does this on a daily basis and that it’s totally okay to have $X in small amounts or not at all.
Temptation and gluttony be thy middle name. And usually, I’m totally okay with that until it starts running my life — like Twitter.
Let me spin it this way: When TheEx and I broke up for a second time in August ’08, I swore that I was not going to read his blog anymore. This sounds silly, yes, but after nearly two years of being together and the joining of our digital and physical lives, I did not want to know what he was doing or how he was doing in grad school. I went from checking his blog several times a day, during the entirety of our relationship, to not checking his blog at all. NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT WAS TO GO THERE! I especially did not want to find out about his love life. I’m egotistical enough to state that once you go Lisa, you never go back and I know myself well enough to know that my little heart could not bear to find out that in “3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years” he’d be dating someone else. Also finding that information would lead me to want to track the newGF down and talk sense in her before he started smacking her around (literally).
But I’m horribly digressing.
The point being is that I had to rationalize my way through of not going to his blog: What was I going to learn? How was this information going to help me? Did I or do I need know what or how he is doing? How is this going to help me in the healing process? I deleted cached information so that there would be no auto-complete when I went to the browser bar, I cleared out the cache so that it would not show up in my history. I did not want any easy way for me to stumble upon his blog, even innocuously. Melodramatic? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
Like reading TheEx’s blog, like smoking (25 days smoke-free! woot!), like most anything that has a shred of addictiveness to it – Twitter has become one of those indispensable things in my life that one wouldn’t think would make such an impression or be declared a necessity but because it has, I have to nip it in the bud before it takes over my life — which it has started to do.
I discovered Twitter in the August of 2007 via somewhere, created my account and tweeted my first tweet about procrastinating on a now-abandoned thesis. I lost interest in the technology — I knew no one really other than a handful of people on Twitter and since at the time the interaction with those people was sporadic, I too was sporadic with my tweeting. My tweeting picked up in December/January of ’08 and from June onwards, I became a tweeting fiend. I’m not sure what changed — perhaps finding out I could tweet from my cellphone via SMS was probably a huge factor, tweeting non-sequitor stuff I was thinking about while grocery shopping or what have you seemed like the bestest thing since sliced bread. Or that my own readership was growing as well as those who were following me.
Discovering that not only people but robots, news services, and whole corporate entities were on or getting on Twitter also helped further along the obsession. But what really hooked me was the immediacy of Twitter — there is no thought process or need for editing (other than “Can this fit in under 140 characters or less?”). Getting out a thought, no matter how minute or ridiculous or profound fanned the flames. According to TweetStats, I averaged 20 tweets per day for January 2009. My overall average is 10 tweets per day, which via another statistical tool (of which I can not find now, obvs.), was higher than the average tweeter who does something like 5-7 tweets per day.
Some popular tweeters get along on much less. But it isn’t about the time of writing the tweets that becomes a problem, really, it’s the auxiliary work that becomes the issue. I use auxiliary as a term for things such as reading my public tweet line (which can take time especially when reading pages upon pages after period of non-reading. Like reading what was going on in the Twitterverse while I was in bed.), finding new tweeters, researching said tweeters (yeah, like you don’t Google everyone you digitally meet), reading those tweeters back log and making decisions on whether to follow them or not.
In short, tweeting is not just about the immediacy of getting out your special snowflake thought but it is also about researching and developing relationships with those in your network, which of course takes a lot of time. So much so that everything else I am working on (such as working in a library, homework, studying, personal projects) went to the way side and I hadn’t realized to the extent of how bad this addiction of mine was getting until it dawned on me that the first thing I do when I’m at work everyday is log into Twitter — before I do anything else. My own writing for my various blogs, journals and personal use also took a huge nose dive – libschooled. alone hasn’t been properly updated in ages.
Couple this with I was beginning to write professional emails in Twit-speak, the problem had to be curtailed and soon. Several Twitterpeeps were discussing what they were giving up for Lent and while I no longer practice Catholicism, I do like a challenge. Could I go 40 days without participating in the Twitterverse? No tweets, no adding friends, no reading the public tweet lines? If I could give up smoking, which was on the one crutch that I have been trying for years to give up, surely Twitter could be no worse. So, I resolved for the next 40 days (starting today, Ash Wednesday, of course) of no personal tweeting and no reading of public time lines. Twhirl has not been removed from my computers but it has been removed from my desktop. I’m even debating on removing the Twitter SMS number from my phone.
In my little world, Twitter will not exist, at least for 40 days. But of course there are exceptions, such as libschooled. has third party software that tweets when it is updated, so that is okay. And I also believe some other software stuff I have installed on various forms also tweets when that is updated, so that is also the exception. As long as I am not personally involved in the tweeting, then I have not broken this vow of Twitter-chasity.
What I’m going to be interested in is how much the Twitterverse will have changed in 40 days — how many people have stopped following me, how many people will begin to follow me. What new, cool and useful toys will make its appearance while I’m gone and how social networking within my own Twitter group will also change and also social networking as a whole in the Twitterverse. You can get in touch with via the usual routes and I’m always on gTalk.
See you in 40 days. More or less. 😉

A recap, an update, and the like.

Right now there is a battle of noises happening between Wednesday and the radiators. Wednesday wins, hands down. For an 18lb Pug, she snores like no ones bidness. A lot has happened in the last month, way too much to document in one post, so I’ll give the run down (in no particular order):

Moved from Grand Rapids to Royal Oak on 1/11/09 and am currently enraptured with my new surroundings.
Started my new job as a reference librarian at Wayne on 1/5/09. Yes, notice the disparity in dates. For the first week, I commuted from E. Lansing to Detroit. (As I’m still in school, I am not technically a librarian, but a GSA. Technically, I’m not a GSA but a library intern. Manager refers to interns AND GSAs as “GSAs” to keep it simpler for her, and well, I’m doing reference librarian work. It’s all semantics.)
Am attempting to transfer from $corporate_bookstore in G-Rap to one that is (obvs) local to me. Downside to this development is that one of the stores in my new area closed and currently they are placing the displaced employees in local stores first before transfers. I’m not getting a paycheck BUT my bennies will hold out until the beginning of March as a last case scenario. Broke but if anything happens, I’m covered.
I got a 4.0 last semester, which is awesome (obvs). This semester the classes are more challenging and I need to get my groove on to keep up with the work. I’m taking a digital imaging archiving class, library management and cataloging. Currently, my plan of work is still to obtain the IS and Archival certification along with my MLIS but who knows how that will end up.
I’ve got a new man in my life – Justin. It’s almost like out of one of those torrid RomComs: We met, fell in love and immediately shacked up together over a decade ago and were together for a year or so while we were both living in California. We split, I moved out of state to D.C. and haven’t spoken to him in nearly a decade. He got in touch with me shortly after TheEx and I broke up last March and we became friends again. He stood by me and worked with me while going through all the residual shit from the break-up. Ideas were tossed about seeing each other again, as friends, and the idea of getting involved with anyone romantically seemed highly stupid (of me) and made me queasy. But we talked, and talked some more, and continued to talk almost every night for over eight months. Decided somewhere along the way we should reconnect physically as friends and talked about the probability of romance — but there were no guarantees that anything physical was going to happen, rather, just the excitement of seeing each other was enough. But the romance DID happen, organically, and it’s better than before. MUCH better. It’s downright awesome. Everything I liked about him is still there and everything that irritated me changed for the better and he feels the same way about me. The biggest difference is the passion is much higher and hotter and we talk – about everything, even if it means that what we are saying is not going to bode well for the other person. While a decade younger than TheEx, he handles things much more maturely and Justin gets me — he’s always gotten me. The awesome part is that this has all the sparks of something “new” while we have memories of the old. He’s a wonderful man, I’m so glad he came back into my life. He means the world to me, I’d be completely lost without him.
shesgotplans.net has garnered enough hits on the library school front to encourage me to continue to write more about my experiences, trials and tribulations of going to school and working in an academic library (and possibly holding down another part-time job). This upcoming weekend, I’m doing the final push to get everything unpacked and sorted before the semester gets into full swing so that I can concentrate more on doing updates here. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to write about here and I don’t because I didn’t make the time for it but I want to change that (for the better obvs). There is a lot going on in librarianship that is not being addressed or overlooked and that just makes the profession even farther behind in viability and interest to potential students. I feel I have a lot I can contribute to this discussion so of course I will be opening up my mouth and talking about it.

It’s late and I have a zillion things to do tomorrow before my cataloging class. Yay Dewey and LOC! Go team!

I’m leaving G-Rap – come say good-bye and give me presents.

So it’s become official — I’ve scored my first library gig (on campus, at Wayne in Detroit) and I’m blowing out of this town the first of the year. My final day at $corporate_bookstore is 1/3/2009 and I start the new gig on 1/5/2009. Officially moving the weekend of 1/10-1/11/2009
And while we have the internets to keep us connected, if you want to see me before I leave, you best make plans with me before I go. While yes, it’s only 156 miles away, I do not know how often I’ll be back in town.
You have roughly three weeks to say your good-byes. I may try to throw together a bar shin dig somewhere, before I leave but that requires energy I do not have this second.
hugs and kisses,
me

a brief and quick update

ARGHHHHHHHHH!
Had to take a deep breath there for a moment as I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO AND VERY LITTLE TIME TO DO IT! type of mood. I shouldn’t even be writing at this hour but hey, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
First up, the image is from the wonderful site indexed, which I’ve fallen in love with recently. That card is one of my favorites and also available on a t-shirt. Size men’s M if you want to get me something for the holidays.
Secondly, I’ve created another blog that will be a group collaborative thing for one of my classes. We are working on a group presentation on intellectual freedom, with my sub-topic being book censorship. This should prove to be awesome if we can get it off the ground.
Thirdly, I’ve got a wonderful set of things I want to discuss about lib school, including writing a “so you want to be a librarian” series discussing topics that I wish that I had found when I was researching lib schools. If by judging from some of the communities I read on wanna be’s and current grad school participants, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of running around with the head cut off scenerio — of which I’m gleefully one.
I’m also planning out more observations on some of the work I’ve been doing along with commentary on current attitudes towards the practice. I also have some minor research I have to do to solidify some of my opinions or to figure out some of the theory behind, for example, why librarians seem to hate people who work in bookstores. I’m not the only one who has felt this, which is interesting because we should work together in a parallel manner but we seemingly are not.
My eyes are currently glazing over, so it’s time to hit the hay.