My Top 3 Future Husbands

Dear Internet,
Things are getting a little deep around here, so it’s time to lighten things up, even just for a moment. If you have ever spent any amount of time in my company, you may be aware that I keep a rotating list of my future husbands, which while they may seem to come and go with the times, is actually pretty steady. But before I go forward on that list, I should pay homage to the man who started it all:

Shaun Cassidy
Shaun Cassidy

I don’t remember when I first gazed my youthful eyes his way, but I do remember making massive bargains in my youth with my mother to skip the Sunday night church services to watch The Hardy Boys Mysteries. Thank the gods Catholics are obsessed with multiple weekend services or else I would have never met the man of my five-year old dreams. I also remember that same holiday season, I got a 6′ poster of my beloved which was pinned to the back of my bedroom door for years. I was also a heavy collector of his work, and while I have lost my original copy of his seminal album, Shaun Cassidy, I was able to replace it later on.
Runners up: Rick(y) Schroeder and River Phoenix pretty much defined my post Shaun Cassidy teen years.
Before I begin, I need to clarify the difference between a “future husband” and a crush. A crush is someone like Travis Fimmel who plays Ragnar Lothbrook in the History Channel’s Vikings, someone I am partially familiar with and not currently building a shrine in their honor.

A “future husband” is someone whom I probably follow their career to some extent, probably keep tabs on their love life to file away for a later date, and some whom I’d probably would leave my husband for, no questions asked. (Just kidding. Maybe.)
james-mcavoy-filth
James McAvoy in Filth.

James McAvoy
When Benedict Cumberbatch wants to tap that ass, you know it’s legit.
I first came across McAvoy in a 2004 film, Rory O’Shea Was Here. The film wasn’t distributed in the US, but showed up in my Netflix recommendations sometime around 2005. While I’ve seen McAvoy in his earlier works, THIS would be the film that set the course for my one true love.
What I adore about him is in interviews, he’s goofy. Smart. Witty. In his work, he plays such a wide range and breadth of characters, time periods, and stories that it sometimes takes my breath away. I have yet to see McAvoy as a terrible actor in anything he does. The films may be shit, but McAvoy always gives it his all.  I also love that he has no pretensions of himself, he can go from brooding heart throb to psycho maniac in the blink of an eye.
My little Scottish imp also has a thing for the old broads – his wife is the same age as me.
Interesting fact: McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch were in Starter for 10 together, which also turned out to be my first exposure to Cumberbatch. Who knew!
henryrollings
Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins
This one should not be a huge surprise – Henry ticks off all the major boxes for me. He’s wicked smart, he’s complex, he’s got tattoos, and he’s heavily ambitious. Rollins lives the kind of life that I always try to aspire to live: balls to the wall, try anything once, no holds barred, let us go!
I got into Rollins after Black Flag broke up, so I’m not terribly sure where he kind of fell into my lap. I do know that I catch his speaking tours any chance I get, watch his stand up, and check out a book or two of his when I can. Rollins is dangerous not because he’s a bad boy and knows it kind of way, but in the he’s just such the complete package coupled with the damned charm, turning him down for anything would be the biggest mistake of my life.
Alexander Skarsgård
Alexander Skarsgård

Alexander Skarsgård
When your own husband tells you he’d leave you for this man, then you know it’s true love.
Like most of America, I got introduced to Skarsgård via True Blood and like most of America, was getting into pissing contests with their BFFs over who was the hottest vamp or shifter we’d not kick out of bed for eating crackers.
(For my birthday, a girlfriend made me a wallpaper for my iPad of this image with “Happy Birthday Lisa” on it. Done and done.)
Ridiculously tall, especially after the shortness of Rollins and McAvoy, Skarsgård just oozes sex even when he’s playing a doofus. In addition to the amazing body that makes my ovaries kick into overtime, he’s got a biting and dirty sense of humour that plays well with my intellectual side. Every interview I caught him in, I think I’ve squealed a million times over because his mouth and mind are so damn filthy. At this point in True Blood, he is the only thing that is keeps me watching. If he gets killed off for the next season, I am done.
Runners up: Richard Armitage, Michael Fassbender, Guy Garvey, Monica BelluciChiwetel Ejiofor, Cillian Murphy
It’s interesting because when a Benedict Cumberbatch thing happens, or Tom Hiddleston thing happens or someone of that ilk, people send it my way thinking they too are on part of my oeuvre. While these men are fine actors and pleasing to the eye, there is nothing about them that calls to my soul like the above three.
Over the years I’ve kept a similar list rotating in and out of my head, and while some tastes have changed, what hasn’t changed is what I look for in a man. I need the brain and the beauty, having a lovely piece of fluff is not going to do it for me. I also, apparently, get hives around nice men. When I found out Ian Somerhalder, who plays Damone Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, was the complete opposite of his conniving, manipulating ways on the show, I lost interest.
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2010, 2010

To collect or not to collect, that is the question: part i

Backstory

First, I must reveal a secret to you: I have had no formal training or have taken classes in collection development.  So my methods of selection and purchasing may be a bit more erratic than others in my position.
Now the next thing I’m going to tell you is that I worked at a book store for five years and one of my primary responsibilities was ordering in new titles, weeding out unpurchased titles, and general section maintenance.  I was in charge of one of the largest sections in the store which comprised of fiction, poetry, SF/F, romance, mythology, manga, graphic novels, and gaming books. This is my education.
The blasphemy: To me, collection development in a library and maintaining a section in a bookstore are strikingly close to being the same process.
Some librarians, when I’ve postulated this hypothesis, have argued with me that there was NOTHING remotely similar between the two functions. I disagree. Are we both collecting for the community? Yes. Are we being mindful of what we’re collecting? Yes. Are we promoting our collections via various means? Yes. Are we purchasing titles on recommendations? Yes. Do we accept donations? Bookstore: To an extent, if they have used book section. Libraries: Typically, yes.
How are these not similar?
When my friend Carolyn started her new gig as an academic librarian recently, she approached myself and a few other  mutual academic librarian friends for advice on collection development in an academic environment.
As I had been thinking about this very topic for some time given my own unorthodox background, I thought this was a perfect time to write something up.

Collection Policy

GRCC Library’s multipage collection policy can be best summed up as thus:

The library collects to support the curriculum in any capacity. We also collect titles by authors that are connected to the city or state in some fashion. In addition, we will collect for professional development if the titles are applicable across a fairly broad spectrum.

I should mention what we purchase, we are mindful we’re purchasing for an area that is incredibly narrow: community college. Not quite high school, not quite four year universities so purchasing items can be a bit tricky.  While we have a fiction collection, we’re less likely to purchase fiction titles since we’re a block from GRPL. The exceptions to this is if the title is by a Michigan author or an instructor is teaching a class with a specific title, in which we’ll then have copies available. We also collect to support events on or connected to campus if the person has a book, journal, or other out in publication.
I sometimes stretch the boundaries a bit and will purchase items that are not only not in our collection but are also not easily available to obtain from the state consortium.  An example of this is Henry Rollins, writer, poet, spoken word and general renaissance man, who tours a lot to support his work. He’s been attached to various larger universities in the state for his performances and yet, the availability of most of his work is incredibly limited to get  from our state consortium.  I took this opportunity to change that by buying all of his available print work for our collection.  In so far as I know, we’re the only library in the state with a large catalog of his available print works.
The library is structured as follows: there are five full time librarians and two adjunct librarians who share liaison duties. Each librarian is a liaison to numerous departments and as liaisons, one of our jobs is to buy materials to support that departments curriculum needs.  My departments are:

Now items that cross departments (a title that could be in either one or the other OR something we’ve seen and think the college should own) or reference based, are purchased via mutual agreement between the fulltime librarians. We have a set budget that is divided across the departments and how much each department gets fluctuates every year. For example, I have one department I cannot spend all their allocated sources no matter how much I try, so this year I’ll put the surplus back in the pool to reallocate to another department for next year.
Our collection development budget is for print, ebooks, video, periodicals. Databases are reoccurring costs are not included in this line item .
We have to spend the cash within our fiscal year (July 1 to June 30).
This is all pretty straight forward and easy to follow.  I have the policy in hand, a list of my departments, and a budget to spend.  So now what?

Part ii: The Slings and Arrows

Conference Summary: Punk Rock Librarianship at ACRL

In April, I drove down with a colleague to Indianapolis for ACRL, the biennial national academic librarian conference. While not as large as ALA, it was definitely as overwhelming.  Since this was my first ACRL, I put together my schedule for the conference online to keep me in check and because the official mobile app was terrible.
At conferences like this, I do a lot of my best learning, sharing, and connecting while networking in social and impromptu situations over sitting in conference rooms listening to a presenter drone on.  Because there is so much over simulation, I’m going to wrap-up a few key pieces for me.

Session: Planning Programs for Bridging Cultures: Muslim Journeys Bookshelf

GRCC Library is a proud recipient of the MJB grant and by the time the conference was approaching, we already had one event planned, Muslim Journeys Poetry Night, which turned out to be a huge success. The MJB round table was the chance to connect with other institutions who were also awarded the grant and find out what they were doing for MJB, how they are doing it, how they were marketing/promoting it, as well as outreach, and everything else in between.  I got a lot out of this round table, and also a  lot of great resources to use for future planning of events for the rest of the academic career.

Keynote: Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins is a punk rock icon, writer, publisher, traveler, musician, actor, and activist. And that does not even cover half of his interests. Rollins was selected as one of the primary keynotes for ACRL 2013, and he is the main reason I decided to attend. Henry’s passion for protection, curation, and preserving information is contagious. He spent his much of his keynote regaling the audience with stories of his own preservation works, starting when he was younger by collecting flyers and promotions for bands he knew, saw, or played in and his love for and about archives and librarianship. Rollins’ is immensely quotable, but one of his most accurate statements in this keynote is, “Life is short. Show up and do stuff.”

Session: THATCamp ACRL

The Humanities and Technology (THATCamp) is an all day (sometimes multiple days) unconference in which the sessions are collaborative, participatory, and most importantly, small. Having attended other unconferences in the past, this type of learning and sharing is definitely on par with my literacy style over say a structured lecture or something else along those lines. Since everyone in the unconference is participating, almost everyone involved is passionate about the topic, which makes sharing of ideas much more fun. The informality of the conference allows for flexibility and spontaneity that one normally wouldn’t find at a regular conference session, which also helps stimulate the projects and allows for growth that wouldn’t necessarily come.
I participated in the MOOC sessions, which was a small (less than a dozen people) group. The idea was to create an information literacy MOOC that would or could be dropped into instructors sessions and could be completely modular. So instead of creating a MOOC that is geared for say one class or say one college, this would be a general enough MOOC that could be dropped in a community college in Vermont or a big state college in California. While we were not able to complete the MOOC by the end of the day, there was a lot of interest to continue the work long after ACRL was finished.
Below is links to tweets, Google docs, and other materials for the MOOC as well as other links of interest for ACRL.
Interesting links of note about ACRL 2013

  • Twitter search #ACRL2013
  • THATCamp ACRL 2013
  • ACRL 2013: a first timer’s review in five words
  • Crowdsourcing an information literacy MOOC: a twitter story
  • Librarians Are Punks Too
  • Storify: Henry Rollins Keynote
  • Storify: Henry Rollins Keynote
  • Open Educational Resources
  • #ilmooc
  • GoogleDoc: ACRL THATCamp MOOC

Library smut

STIFTSBIBLIOTHEKST.GALLEN I found the Hot Library Smut page again recently and couldn’t resist posting an image and a link back to the source.
I’ve wanted this book for ages and now that I’m officially in MLIS school, the time seems right. Amazon.com has it on sale, currently, for 37% off and if I can hold out until “employee appreciation days” at $corporate_bookstore, I can get it for 40% off. Yes, I know, 3 whole percent but hey, when you are a starving graduate student, 3% is a a gallon of gas (roughly).
Henry Rollins, as part of his schitck, talks about leaving libraries and bookstores angrier then when he walks in. The reason? All that human knowledge accessible to him and he will never, ever be able to contain or grasp it all. He, as he is wont to do, flips off the store/library on his way out in a double barreled salute because of said frustration of not being able to obtain that knowledge. This is the reason why Hank is one of my future husbands and I kinda miss having his glare burn into me when I wake up in the morning.1
I’ve seen Hank perform his spoken word a number of times, the last time having grabbed an autographed poster of Hank, barefoot and in a tux (and of course, flipping off the world). The poster was framed and hung directly across from my bed so that literally the first thing I’d see in the morning would be Hank’s snarling face. While I’m in temporary digs, the artwork and such are in storage, hence why I miss Hank’s snarling face every time I wake up.

talk dirty to me

I should be writing my midterm, which is half-finished and due tomorrow.
I should be doing a lot of things, but i’m not. heh.
Alright, so I’m checking email for the fiftieth time today and I get the following spam:
I would never have believed that my husband of 4 years would cheat on me.
And he didn’t even tell me – I saw his email was full of messages from girls at XXXDate.com who wanted to fuck him! He had a whole folder full of email from women who had already gone to bed with him and had the nerve to thank him for a great time!
These girls sound like total sluts who will fuck anything with a dick. My husband isn’t even good looking he’s overweight and losing his hair and still these girls are all over him.
XXXdate has turned his life into one big sex-capade and I’m mad as hell! So I joined XXXdate just to show him I can fuck more than he can!

And I’m sitting there kind of dumbstruck. Not that it’s spam but it’s just, the content. I am no prude, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s the current climate of women that are sort of bugging me? I can’t really explain it, it’s like, I’ve never really found it difficult to get a man (yes, i know you’ve heard me bitch about getting laid etc but let me finish here) but it’s the QUALITY of MEN i’m looking at discussing.
Keth and I had this conversation the other night when she called me to tell me she got accepted to UCSC and we ended up chatting for a few hours. The conversation kind rounded around men and our current lack thereof. Now, me personally, I do have crushes on people and some I would say were not crushes and probably some sort of “liking” going on (haha, this is so jr high) but, the crushes cannot be realised (you know, I TALK about henry rollins being my third husband but you know he isn’t going to be — really. maybe.)

save me the waltz

I had just finished, not more than moments ago, Zelda: The Biography and am happy for doing so. Finally, after starting it all those months ago when Justin came into town, I had finally gotten to the bibliography page. I was both disappointed and exalted at the end of the book.
I was disappointed due to the fact that the author would do pages and pages of literary criticism on Zelda’s work, which if I wanted to read, I would have bought such. But no — pages and pages of worthless crap attempting to intone how Zelda’s work mimics her own life. Well duh. A writer who writes about what he doesn’t know is a fool.
So many things in my mind tonight. Freaking figures. An hour ago I was lying in bed, could not sleep for the life of me, and now I am tired and yawning. I must sleep soon for else my next few days are going to be fucked up like a bitch. Thursday is the day from hell with midterms and I teach Interweb 101 that night. I need my beauty sleep. But I keep working strange hours and thus don’t get the sleep. Working is the schtick. I keep playing freaking spades with Shelly and Dave all the damn time. 🙂 Not this is necessarily a bad thing — gives me more time to flirt with Dave. *suggestive*
However, the rant this evening isn’t about spades, my new PHAT pipe to the Interweb (i just got 56k — woo!) or the fact that I’m really obsessing about Henry Rollins right now. Nope, not even about the fact I’m going to bare his love child. Uh nope.
In all honesty, tonights rant is about high school. For many of you (us/them), either you’re in it or just gotten out of it. My little foray into high school ended nearly nine years ago (yes — I’m old. Shoot me.) Now that it seems so far distant — my question is this: WHY AM I STILL LETTING THE STUPID POPULAR PEOPLE IN HIGH SCHOOL RUN MY FREAKING LIFE?
There. Now i feel better.
Let me begin by explaining:
Earlier today, a fine lass named Jessica from a mailing list I’m on, had emailed in about the old saying “high school is the best time of your life” and proceeded to prove to us, in her opinion why it was not. I had followed up with this tasty bite:

My freshman year of high school, I got tested for an IQ test because my MEAP test was really high.  They wanted to put me in an high school that _geared_ for placing students into college. They taught Latin, Greek, were socially conscious -- not these see jack run public school classes. I was accepted and refused to go. I wanted to stay with my "friends". Big mistake.
Later on that year, our AP Biology class went to Kentucky to go see Mammoth Caves. One night, I got pulled into a room with the jr varsity swim team. I knew most of these guys -- I was friends with most of them from classes and socially. One of them pushed me down onto the floor and attempted to fuck me in front of his team mates.  I pushed him off of me, went screaming into the bathroom, locked myself into the bathroom and started yelling out of the window (the window was only about 1 foot high and 18 inches wide). My cabin mates came and forced the "boys" to open the door and let me out.  Not one adult was told.
That Monday, rumours spread around the school (1500+ students) that not only did i fuck him! i gave head to every guy (about nine) in that room. No one said a thing, my parents were never told and I soon forgot about it. However, the impact of that was amazing.  I went from being 5'10 and 140lbs to 5'10 and 200+ lbs. During my sophomore year -- most of the time when i did get asked out, it was because of those rumors.  Funny that, the most I had ever done until that time was kiss one boy.  never even felt a penis until much later on. In my jr year, it was under the advice that I drop out.  Actually, I instigated it.  I was clinically depressed, had already attempted suicide (and that rumor was spread like crazy).  I had gained a lot of weight, was smoking, and had also was on my way of becoming an alcoholic.
When I went back that fall to re-do my jr year, I got taunted and teased by my classmates (and upperclassman, whom would have been my class).  I got mocked by people in the middle of the mall (an open area that adjoined the two buildings).  Teachers had very little apathy or hell, even empathy for me.  By the end of THAT jr year, I had made the decision to go live with my dad in Toronto. When I came back a year later, I got notified that I was short ONE credit from YMI  system to graduate.  I took my GEDs in November of 1991 and scored in the top 3%.  The instructor looked at me incredulously, because:
a. i completed them in 1/3 the time
b. i completed the whole series of tests within 1/2 the time
c. i had scored the highest that he had ever seen.
However, the stigma and shame I still feel 8 years later from having a HUGELY crappy high school experience (include psychopathic mother and her
string of BFs), I won't claim a GED -- but that I graduated from York Memorial Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Ontario.
And ya know what?
Not one person had ever caught me professionally for "lying".
High school sucked the big one.

I had been thinking about this recently and Jessica’s query and a nice little piece in the SF Chronicle about people bitching about TOO MUCH homework got me depressed. and angry. and furious.
Several weeks ago, since I’m still under the impression that these nitwits DO run my life and I am nothing more than a puppet on strings, I got on altavista the other day and searched for the people i went to school with. And you know what? I couldn’t remember /but/ three names! and of those names — I couldn’t find /anything/ about them on the internet. Strange. The internet has been my whole world for the last four years — and by now, if i can’t find something about someone — they must not exist.
strange to think that i had let this whole group, nee’ this fantasy, foible of sorts and nothing.
one day, I’ll write more and rid myself free of these demons.
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