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Alex's Journal  I have a feeling, and a rather prevalent one these days, that I'm both busy and bored at the same time. It's like there isn't enough time in the day to do everything that needs to be done, yet at home, during the evening, I find myself staring blankly at screens for hours on end seemingly bereft of anything to do. Maybe it's a psychological reaction to the holidays and their attendant business. It comes as a bit of a shock that I never summed up my NaNoWriMo experience in these pages; I'll do so now. I ended the month at 60,468 words, over 10,000 in excess of what I needed. I count that as both a success and a failure in equal measure: success because I had a week and a half to spare after hitting 50k, failure because the story remains unfinished. The joy of updating my word count, and watching the wordcounts of my friends, was a big part of what was motivating me and with that gone my inspiration has dried up. I haven't written so much as a word in a week, and I need to finish the tale. Not only because it's the longest thing that I've ever written, but becuase the story needs closure and I have other projects I'd like to work on without an unfinished Book of Damocles hanging over my head. Even though it's 10,000 words longer than my 2007 and 2008 entrants, "Tunguska Butterfly" is far more incomplete at the end of the month than they were. I just hope I have the fortitude to push it through to 80k, 90k, or 100k+ --wherever the story finishes.I know substantial revision will be needed, and I need a finished book to percolate on the shelf for a few months before that task can begin. Nano and its leftovers aside, I've been doing a little Christmassing. I actually got a tree this year, albeit one that's fake and a bargain at $7.99 from Hobby Lobby. At least fake trees are a tradition in the family, with the assembly of the full-scale model in Reed City a perennial event. I bought two strings of lights, one for the tree and one for the window, but no ornaments. Instead, I bought a basketful of ornament-making supplies and resolved to create my own. My mom does this every year, cranking out dozens of homemade ornaments forged from craft foam for friends and relatives (a tradition dating back to 1980), and used to make a full second set of coyote ornaments for our schoolteachers. With the same kind of foam and tools, I wanted to see what I could craft for myself. Mostly, I've managed to create a lot of respect for her dilligence in ornament crafting. Even using hot glue instead of handicraft glue, the process is long and involved per ornament even when I was working with found materials like a VW hubcap badge or "A" shaped post-it notes. The more elaborate ornaments I made, including one with a dangling peace dove, took hours to complete from conception to completion. A cat ornament I made as a gift for my neighbor took even longer, involving patterns, permanent markers, and acrylic paint. I don't think I'll be able to make more than a half-dozen or so, but at least the tree is decorated (a few of my Easter egg "ornaments" from Easter 2008 at Ole Mich have been pressed into ornament service as well). I've also been doing the gift-buying thing, of course. I can't say what lest curious eyes upon these pages ruin the surprise, but it's been an interesting process. I can't get anything too big, since it all has to be lugged back to Michigan next week. Anything mail-ordered has to be delivered to my Reed City estate rather than here, and I'm relying on my parents to do a bit of (fully-reimbursed) shopping for me so that everyhting will be ready for the first gift-giving on the weekend of the 18th. I also find myself with fewer requests and an intense feeling of guilt for the ones I do make; the time of Christmas as an innocent exercise of consumerism has long since passed. At least I have uncomplicated tastes, generally speaking, but I do find myself fretting more and more over the appropriateness of my selections and leaning ever-harder on the cop-outs of college apparel and gift cards. Current mood:  weird.Current music: Back to the Future (score) - Alan Silvestri. With the families I traditionally Thanksgive with way up north around the Tattered Mitten, it was either fly up there or stay home. Last year my finances weren't in good enough shape to make the trip; this year they were, so I bought a ticket to a 5-day vacation. Inspired by my experience in September, I packed super-light, with only one backpack holding everything I'd need for the full trip, an achievement I'm very proud of. I flew into Detroit, which saved my $200 though it made the commute a bit of a pain for my parents, who had to drive from RC to Detroit and then from there to Highland in Indiana. The length of the drive meant that we got exactly one full day there--Turkey Day itself. I used to really enjoy family Thanksgivings in Highland, but they're a bit of a shell of what they used to be. Everyone is busy and scattered, which means attendance is spotty at best. There was no Scott this year, for lack of money, and no Aunt Kathleen for lack of the will to leave Florida, and people had to work as well meaning that those who did show up could only stay rather briefly. The feast was sweetened by the addition of ribs, though the fact that there isn't a table large enough for everyone still bugs me, since it means some of us (always the boys, regardless of age) get ghettoized to a smaller table, like we're six years old. There was an ugly confrontation about that; the ghetto table didn't even have proper chairs (it's about a foot higher than an average table) so in addition to being treated as unworthy of sitting with the "adults" I was supposed to sit on a cushion or a stack of phonebooks to reach proper eating height--insult to injury. Black Friday was low-key, since none of us felt like braving the insane hordes fueled by turkey and out for blood. Instead we thrift shopped, hitting two thrift stores, an antique store, and two used record stores. In addition to being cheaper, they were deserted--no one thought to shop at a place like that when there were so many "bargains" to be had at name brand stores. We also visited an Indiana "welcome center" that had a Christmas Story display, complete with animatronic scenes and, of course, a gift shop. In addition to Lifebuoy soap bars and genuine Red Ryder BB guns with compasses in the stocks and things that tell time, they also had elf hats from the Santa sequence of the movie. They were actually handmade and signed by the actress who played the head elf, and Mom bought one for use in a Christmas Story theme party next month. There was just enough time for all of that and some White Castle (with its seasonal sweet potato fries a cut above the kind you can get even here in the deep South). Then it was off to Phil n' Jill's, 4 hours away. Just like the family in Highland seems like it's thinning out and dispersing, the one in Michigan is growing. Gentry and Gaia are almost exactly 3 months old, and they've doubled in weight since we saw them last. The differences in temperament I noticed when they were newborns seem to have continued: Gentry is always feeling and grabbing with his hands, while Gaia is content to lie still or kick. He cries more often, and longer, than she does, while she seems very mellow and laid back for a baby. Of course the usual collection of babyburps, babyfarts, and poopy eruptions were present and accounted for, but the kids did at least deign to be photographed with us without fussing too much. Gaia in particular seemed to get a kick out of all the attention. I spent most of my time there playing with big brother Greyson, who has predictably been acting out a bit now that he has to compete for attention. I played Pokemon cards with him, which no one else has the patience to do--it's really not that tough. Greyson is an advanced reader but he doesn't understand the rules of the game, so he makes them up as he goes based on what he reads on the cards. I just do the same thing! He also had me play him in Monopoly. He has an astounding grasp of the game for a six year old but also cheats like hell--in clever ways. In addition to making up rules on the spot--landing on Free Parking gets you a pot of $500, you get to choose a few starting properties at the beginning of the game (and he of course "randomly" picked Boardwalk)--he would often deliberately miscount his moves to land on better spaces. You'd expect a six year old to have trouble with that, but it's an act in this case: when I counted along with him, he always got it right. We also kicked an old dodgeball around the backyard (one of the games was "how far can you throw it when standing on a big rock?") and I took him for a bike ride with me running alongside his training rig. We found some "treasures" in the roadside ditch while he told me about Talk Like a Pirate Day. This was all a valuable service, keeping the kid out of everyone's hair while Dad and Phil cleaned the garage and Mom and Jill tended to the babies and did a little shopping. Big Bro had to pull another all nighter Friday, cutting together a TV commercial (!) to match a radio spot that he didn't design. I have the distinct impression that his bosses are taking advantage of his creativity, since an average TV ad costs $10,000 and I'm pretty sure there are no $10,000 bonus checks on the way. The ads were really good--I got to see him make them as well as some finished examples--but doing the work and ironing out technical kinks had him in in bed at 9am on Saturday. We were able to get in some good old-fashioned co-op video game time in, though. It was the first time either of us has fired up a video game all month. Throughout, the weather was terrific--sunny and 40's or 50's in Michigan, when it just as easily could have been snowing. In fact, the only adverse weather was waiting for me in Mississippi, where a torrential downpour brought visibility to nearly nil on the drive home from the airport, tacking 30 minutes onto the drive. Current mood:  tired.Current music: Back to the Future - Alan Silvestri. My preoccupation with using every spare bit of free time for my National Novel Writing Month book has kept me from updating until now. I plan to work on it some more tonight, and things are going really well. I'm at 13,054 words as of right now, well above the 8,335 minimum needed to keep up--and bear in mind those are all brand new words written since midnight on Nov. 1! This past weekend was, of course, Halloween. I really got into pumpkin carving this year in a big way, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. But I devoted two whole days to carefully carving three pumpkins, even going so far as to buy special carving implements and acrylic paint! My original plan was to buy a small "pie pumpkin" and just carve it, but the pumpkin I bought turned out to have a bad fungal infection, which quickly spread from one tiny spot to nearly half of the pumpkin. I carved away the rotten parts and was left with a gigantic hole and very little orange matter left to carve. My solution was to take the black stereo wire I've been using for craft projects and fashion it into a jack o'lantern face and then jamming the raw ends of the wires into the pumpkin's flesh to make it look like a jack o'lantern face hovering in midair--or a reverse jack o'lantern, if you will. That bit of creativity got me in the mood for more, and I set out to find additional pumpkins to carve. But everybody was out--of pie pumpkins, regular pumpkins, even those dinky tabletop sized ones. I was about ready to carve a squash or, God forbid, a watermelon, when I found some on sale at Kroger. The catch was that they were albino pumpkins, white on the outside with green innards. Undaunted, I bought two and conceived perfect appearances for each. One I have the traditional jack o'lantern face, but also a pair of eyeglasses made from that same stereo wire. The deathly pallor and specs made it the perfect self portrait pumpkin. I bought the paint for the other gourd--the white surface is far better for true-color painting than orange--and did a combination paint-carve of Strong Bad. Most of the red paint got used up painting the entire surface, and I carved out the eyes and mouth, and the resulting creation looked cool in daylight and positively demonic lit up in the dark. I got one trick or treater this year, a 100% increase over last year, probably because I had the jack o'lanterns out. Rather than staying cloistered inside like a loser, I went to the one party to which I'd been invited. It was held by a group of faculty, whose social events I occasionally attend, though I was enough of a stranger to still feel super-awkward. Still, the party went well enough, and I was able to lead my team to victory in Halloween trivia by correctly identifying the author of "The Halloween Tree" as Ray Bradbury (thanks, Mrs. Jacobs' 6th grade class!) and Stephen King's only movie as director, Maximum Overdrive. Everyone there was over 40 or there with someone over 40 so there wasn't much chance of scoring, but I'm glad I went. I recycled my Indiana Jones costume, as my other two options (Union soldier and sheik) had a pretty decent chance of offending somebody. My big Halloween scare came from an unorthodox source: locking my keys in my car. Normally I'd be able to feel that they weren't in my pocket, but my Halloween costume nixed that. So I got to sit around for an hour and a half waiting for a tow truck in the abandoned parking lot of an accountants' firm. Luckily my costume was warm and the night was mild, but there wasn't a whole lot to do. I wound up counting the cars as they went by, allowing myself to look at the time on my cell phone after every 100 cars passed. The fact that 247 cars passed during that time says a lot about how much free brainpower I had to devote to counting them. It took another 30 minutes to get into my car once the tow guy arrived. Last time I did this, in 2004, the driver has a 'slim jim' that unlocked the door in 30 seconds. This driver didn't have one, and the tools he did have (a wedge, a metal rod, and an air bladder) were designed to work with sophisticated cars that had power locks and such. But to his credit he did eventually get me in, and I was home in time to start NaNo. Current mood:  calm.Current music: Twin Peaks - Angelo Badalamenti. The Blog-a-thon ended rather well, considering the fact that it was conceived and organized in 3 days less than 2 weeks before the deadline. In the end there were 75 official participants, of whom 50 wrote something or other. I'm sure there's a nice juicy article to be wrung out of the experience, but for now I'm glad it's over. The last day coincided with the National Day on Writing, which I was surprised to discover is a new event for this year, possibly the only good idea the Obama administration has had so far. The campus liaison for the writing project held an event on the NDoW which some of our bloggers attended; I brought some of their writing for them to read and had to opportunity to read some of my own--not to mention meeting a few people in the wider campus who are interested in writing as a whole, including a student who participates in Nanowrimo. That encounter inspired me to look into the Nano events going on this year. There are always write-ins and brainstorming sessions that participants and various regional liaisons hold, but I didn't go to any during Nano '07 or '08 for some reason or other. I decided to go this time, since I had what I think is a really cool story idea and it seemed like a good way to meet some other adults. The meeting was in Tupelo, an hour away, and a football game that Saturday meant I had to leave crazy early (around 11) to avoid the traffic, so I just made a day of it. Tupelo is, frankly, a bit of a dump with a few shops in its mall district as the only real draw. Its thrift stores are some of the most poorly stocked I have ever seen--not to mention the giant railroad with no barriers that cuts thru downtown. I had a hell of a time finding the Books-a-Million store where the meeting was to take place, and it was sparsely attended--only 4 attendees. But that was fine; it made for a more intimate meeting, and the other Nanoers seemed like a fun bunch. They ranged in age from 18 to 40 and all came with their own stories to tell and shape. Mostly fantastic stories with a sci-fi or fantasy edge (a trend I've noticed is prevalent), told by well-educated and imaginative people. Mine was neither the most grounded in reality nor the most farfetched, though everyone seemed to think it was a neat idea and it fit neatly in with the vividly realized fantasy world, the post-apocalyptic character study, and the near-future technological fable. I'll try to attend more such get-togethers as Nano '09 gets underway. I've been developing a tradition over the past few weeks of catching a matinée showing at the local grindhouse at 1 on Sundays. It's worked out very well and I've gone each of the past 3 weeks, picking up "9," "where the Wild Things Are," and now "Paranormal Activity." I think having the Amp gone has made me appreciate the experience more than I used to, because I have the urge to see movies a lot more than I used to. "9" was sparsely attended and imaginative in rendering if not execution. "Wild Things" was strange but genuine and managed to shut up a theater full of rugrats, a rare feat. "Paranormal" was intensely terrifying despite its low budget, not in the least because it takes place in a home and bedroom eerily like my own. The audience was horrible, too, talking thru the entire thing, but I Was too riveted to leave (complaining did net me a free ticket though). Current mood: calm.Current music: House of Cards - James Horner. As I said before, October tends to be my busiest time for giving library instruction sessions, and--as often happens--I had a whole lot of them accumulate during one week. Or three days, to be more accurate. Since Monday morning at 8am I've taught 10 1-hour classes, which is about as much teaching as I would have done in five weeks back at Western. A month plus of teaching in three days--not bad! Of course it is rather stressful, and I have the same worries about engaging the kids and presenting the material in a way that they'll care about it, but I also only have to do it one per class. Otherwise it's all one on one, wher eI feel that I'm more effective. Since I've had 8am classes every day going straight through 'til 2:00, I took steps to minimize my stress. That meant clearing my calendar of anything else I had to do, packing nice extra-large lunches, and leaving early (well, since I've been coming in around the 7:00 hour when I usually clock in at 9:00, leaving at 4:00 is still more than a full day's work). I also rewarded myself after Monday and Wednesday's classes by slipping over to the theater across the street and catching a matinee. Oddly, once the Amp closed, the Malco suddenly picked up a basket of movies I never thought it would carry, some that had been out for weeks, and even including "9," which I had tried and failed to see in Tupelo some weeks back. Three movies in 4 days is a lot more than I usually watch, but it's also unusual that there are so many I want to see at once, and the Amp's slow descent into oblivion has shown me that I really need to get to the multiplex more often--and sure enough, "9," "Surrogates," and "Zombieland" were more than enough to take the edge off really rough days. On Tuesday night I had a faculty senate meeting. I was elected as one of the library's three senators earlier this year, and I agreed to serve since it will let me network a bit and look good on my CV. My dad always took a dim view of faculty senates, something that I share. They're not much more than self-important debating societies with little real power. Like the Roman senate during the imperial era, we exist at the sufferance of the autocrat in charge and he isn't accountable to us. This was abundantly clear when the new chancellor addressed us last night. He talked a good talk, but made it clear that he would raise tuition, raise enrollment, halt construction, eliminate programs, and fire faculty as he saw fit. That's the 13th of the month for you I suppose. Current mood:  exhausted.
One thing that hasn't changed from Ole Mich to Ole Miss is that football day still gums up the town's arteries like a triple Big Mac. Football fever is as strong as ever despite the team getting creamed 22-3 yesterday. I like the general attitude here better, though; the team is more accessible, the tailgating is more of a family affair than a 20-something pukefest, and even though Ole Miss will never have the budget to compete in the football arms race, it still puts on a good show. I can't say I'm interested in the sport any more than I was before, but at least I haven't actively turned against it. This week has been rather crazy, with next week representing the absolute busiest I get. Most of the librarians have their work front-loaded, and teach the most classes and generally find themselves the busiest at the very start of the semester. The humanities are different, though, since often there's a gap of a month or more before a major research paper is due. That means I tend to get slammed in mid-October and mid-March, and that's the case this semester as well, with 10 classes to teach over 4 days next week. I don't doubt my ability to perform, but I'd be lying if I said I was looking forward to it. A lot of my time this week was taken up with organizing an event for the 2009 National Day on Writing. The education librarian and I decided to put together an event for it, but the lack of time (it's on October 20) means that we were limited in what we could attempt. After some brainstorming we hit on the idea of a "blog-a-thon," which would let participants write electronically while saving us thr trouble of throwing something together in such limited time. The original thought was to have a Wordpress or Blogspot blog that our participants could have access to, but Ole Miss internet policy forbids that--stuff with the university's name on it has to be hosted locally and moderated. So instead we made it in Blackboard, with a promise to post a full-blown blog with the results on Oct. 20. It's a bit of a stopgap, but some people have already written in, and I have high hopes for the project. It'll look good on my faculty activity report if nothing else, and I had a lot of fun designing little pictures for the participants to use in their posts (maybe I missed my calling as a graphic designer!). All this business has meant that other projects have been sidelined a bit. I'm still working on my Africa book; it's at about 45,000 words right now but is proceeding at a snail's pace. I think it will wind up taking a lot longer than I originally projected, but I still plan to see it through. I've also been trying to do research, which is the one thing really missing from my portfolio right now, but that has been slow as well. The data is gathered, and I've starting writing an article, but doing supplementary research for my lit review is taking forever, and it's been really easy to push it to the back burner so far despite the fact that it's super-important. Current mood: weird.
It's like somebody's thrown a switch: October comes and suddenly it's crisp autumn with all the heat and steam let out of the South. It's not as cool as up north, of course, but we will get a few weeks of temperate 70 and 60 degree weather before things winter up. Buildings get a certain smell when they're heated for the first time in months, and that smell always sends me rocketing back to grade school, hunched over a desk some long-ago September and mourning the summer vacation that's come and gone. My work of late has been mostly occupied with meeting my purchasing benchmarks. Each librarian gets a certain amount of money to spend on new books in their subject areas, and we have to have spent a certain percentage of that money by October 1 or it will reflect poorly on our evaluations come March. This year they're trying to front-load the ordering process so that we buy more sooner, since it's rumored that there'll be a mid-year budget cut. That would mean we'd lose the money we haven't spent yet, which--in a perverse sort of way--encourages us to be wasteful with our spending. Normally I browse the list of new titles each week and buy the books that seem to mesh well with Ole Miss. In theory, this should be supplemented with requests from faculty, but I've had a hard time getting them to request anything this year so far. That means there's a shortfall, which I have to make up by researching new titles that aren't new but we should own, which is a time-consuming process. Everyone in the office was ordering up a storm this past week to meet their benchmarks, since it seems October 1 caught us all by surprise (in my defense I somehow thought that it was October 31, not October 1--talk about a scare!). Luckily, during the ordering freeze from March thru July, I had kept reviewing the new title list and socking interesting books away. I had planned to dribble those back in week by week, but wound up largely forgetting about them until I needed to order a lot of books in a hurry and then bought most of them whole hog. The real trouble was Classics, which I have temporarily taken over. No one has requested anything from it, and I lack familiarity with the discipline. Luckily their books cost upwards of $150 apiece, so I was able to meet my benchmark by ordering only 18 new books. An internet outage coincided with my heaviest ordering on Friday, which meant that I had to work from home to finish up my ordering. Exciting stuff, I know. The system does seem a little perverse to me: with shelf space at a premium and nobody really asking for books, are we justified in spending so much on them? I have enough expertise to choose books that ought to benefit the collection, but if no one ever reads them it's a bit of a waste. For example, I taught two library instruction classes for LIBA 102: Zombies and Literature today. It's a great class, with World War Z as a textbook and 28 Days Later as required viewing, and I've been buying some zombie books to support it. The only problem is the instructor had no idea they were there even though they were all from January or earlier. This despite the monthly newsletter and new book list I send out! On the plus side, I did get a chat reference question from Auckland, New Zealand tonight. It was a librarian wanting to update an old broken link to our site, but she turned out to be far more interested in, and enthusiastic about, our chat reference system, which she said would get recommended for adoption down there! Funny how connected the world has become these days, innit? Current mood:  thoughtful.Current music: Cloud - Vincent Diamente. "It's not my fault that it failed," the cinema manager said as I came out of the restroom. "I've been set up as the fall guy because I was the public face of the theater." When someone said they were sorry to see the place close, he served up their popcorn himself. "So am I. I bet everything on this place! Moved here all the way from Florida to manage it." The Amp was Oxford's indie theater, and the wrapping was barely off the place when it went under--all told, it's been open for less than a year, not even long enough to see the film festival held there. It's obvious enough why the place had to close, and I'm frankly surprised it lasted as long as it did. But that doesn't make me any happier to see it go. It seemed tailor-made for a college town, a state-of-the-art cinema showing second-run blockbusters and indie films for $5 a pop, with stadium seating and tables in the theaters and a full-bore restaurant kitchen and winery to whip up eats that were a cut above the usual theater fare. Ever since I learned about it in March I've been going when I can, hoping to keep the place propped up a little longer. I ordered drinks I didn't want and snacks when I wasn't hungry hoping to make that bottom line a little less red. And word of mouth did seem to be spreading the whole time. There was potential there: everyone I knew liked the place. My parents liked the place. But it wasn't enough. The location was horrible, at the end of a purpose-built street across from the convention center, far off the highway and screened from all the local roads by a veneer of trees. I got lost twice trying to find it the first time--not the sort of place you'd stumble upon, unlike the Malco which is prominently displayed on Oxford's main drag. The advertising stank; a place that remote needed to get the word out, and a single anemic coupon in the student paper isn't enough. There should have been a full-blown marketing campaign, maybe even a little funding from the chamber of commerce if the Amp had become the permanent home of the Oxford Film Festival. Hell, even the closing was poorly advertised: I wouldn't have known about it if not for a listserv email today, giving two days' notice. That means a lot of long drives are in my future to see what won't fit on the Malco's 8 screens. Given my experience the other weekend, when an hourlong drive to Tupelo for a showing of "9" turned out to be a complete bust since their theater wasn't showing the movie due to a "broken projector." It also means a smaller pool of movies for future dates--significant, since the Malco only tends to show the most nauseating Sandra Bullock/Jennifer Aniston romcoms. I suppose it's fitting that just about the last movie I'll ever see at the Amp was also one of the best and most bittersweet: 500 Days of Summer. Like a modern Annie Hall without the pedophilic subtext, it showed the life cycle of a relationship from birth to death in a way that's far more honest and true to my own experience than the syrup the average romcom, even the indie ones, spoon up. Even though it's funny, and ultimately positive, the movie acknowledged some sad things I've long known to be true: relationships can be for more devastating for one person than the other when they fizzle, and there's a naive sort of eternal hope even after things have cooled to ashes. Like I said, appropriate. I'll miss our local grindhouse. Current mood:  depressed.
Well things took a turn for the better after Tuesday. The dealership was able to deliver on their promise and fixed the car for free; I'm still never going there again for any reasn if I can possibly help it, but at least I have a functional car after it all. They said that the frozen automatic transmission was caused by a sticky residue, like old pop, the first time and water the second. Since my windshield has been leaking a little I thought that might have somehow filled the transmission up, but on further consideration that was ludicrous--it was only a droplet at a time, not enough to make anything seize. And the implication that pop had caused automatic transmission failure...well, I hardly ever drink in my car, and when I do I' very careful. Judging from the lack of stains, the previous owners were too. I called Dad up and he confirmed what I thought: the mechanic's explanation was gibberish, probably to cover up some incompetence on their part. The shifter seems to work find now, but I've noticed that it sticks more going from park to drive than any other gear, so I've been leaving it in neutral and using the parking brake instead, which I hope will mean less chance of sticking in the future and an easier tow if it does. I bought some sillicone sealant to take care of the windshield leak, but closely inspecting my car has made me realize that the old girl is slowly but steadily spiraling downwards. Every major body panel has rust and/or bubbling paint, and the undercarriage as well. The crack in the windshield is only getting bigger. I've decided to try and string her along for one more year and then try to find a decent used car that I can buy with cash (preferably a Focus). That's been a bit of a weight off; I've started checking listings and comparing prices, and making a repair by myself--even a small and sloppy one like sealing the windshield--makes me feel like I'm doing something rather than throwing money at the problem. Work has been busy this week, no surprise since people's first assignments are coming due, and I've had plenty to do both at the reference desk and in the classroom. I like to think that both skillsets are coming along nicely; I try to be energetic and helpful, and people seem to have responded unusually well this week. I taught an older student some simple tricks for mining a bibliography for sources and using Worldcat, and he seemed so excited and grateful...something I see surprisingly little despite the nature of my work. And when I showed a class how to use the library website and the professional IM I maintain, some of them sent me encouraging IM messages I saw when I got back to my desk. The article I chose for your biweekly staff meeting generated a lot of discussion, and my research has been going well. The plagiarism tutorial that I co-wrote, co-produced, and acted in is about ready to drop too. So I guess all I needed was a little perspective. Current mood: calm.
I was a bit reluctant to make an entry about this, but then I thought: if I can't use my journal for the occasional kvetch session, why did I even begin one? Tuesdays are my early days; I have to be on the reference desk by 8am, an hour earlier than I usually arrive. I had a hard time sleeping yesterday night, which meant I wound up sleeping in and skipping a lot of my morning routine to make it out the door in time. By the time I was ready I was due on the desk in 15 minutes, so I decided to drive. Lo and behold, my engine started but my automatic transmission was frozen in park—the EXACT SAME problem it had just spent three weeks in the shop for. When I opened up the transmission panel, I found that the manual override was still missing and I could see scratches from where I had rooted around with a screwdriver weeks ago. In other words, despite three weeks of mostly "waiting for parts," that part clearly hadn't been replaced! There was no way I could get to work in time on foot, so I was forced to cold dial every phone in Reference hoping someone was there early and could fill in for me. Luckily, our business librarian was, and he agreed to fill in while I made the hike to campus. In the meantime, I called the mechanic at the Ford dealership and demanded to know what was wrong. I was livid and a little abusive—as you might imagine—but when he pointed that fact out, I apologized. He responded by hanging up on me. Now, I've been in jobs that deal with customers for many years; while angry, I was nowhere near as angry as I could get and not even tickling the lowest registers of the Caller from Hell. So hanging up on me was not only incredibly unhelpful in resolving my situation, it was extraordinarily unprofessional. That only made me angrier, of course. Racewalking to work over muddy ground in the rain only made things worse. So I rang up the dealer again, and this time demanded my money back for the repairs—the mechanic had made me willing to write off the entire enterprise and find a competent person anywhere else. The highest ranking person around didn't have the authority to do that, promising only that one of the owners would call me "later." After my shift—to which I was 35 minutes late—I learned that the library had received a large donation of L. Ron Hubbard pulp books from his days as a hack writer. As the English guy, the lavish set—in duplicate—was my problem. I'd rushed out of the house without packing a lunch, so I went to the student union to eat at its food court. My bank's ATM was out of service for no reason, and the other ATM wouldn't accept my card—meaning I had to use my backup and incur a $3 processing fee on a $5 withdrawal! Worse, the lunchlady decided that this was a good time to give me the business about my order, demanding to know why I had taken more than one plate for my meal. The fact that I had to carry heavy, greasy food across campus apparently wasn't a good reason, and I had to throw a styrofoam dish at her before the self-appointed Plate Nazi would even let me pay for my food. The dealership did eventually call me back, though instead of an owner it was the head of their service department. He offered to have my car towed back to the dealership for evaluation, but wouldn't refund my money when I told him that I'd lost all confidence in his establishment and its staff. Given the choice between a $450 loss and giving my car back over to those jokers, I went with the latter—maybe foolishly, I guess time will tell. I had to leave work early to meet the towtruck, at which time the light rain had become a downpour. The rain ended just in time for me to see my car winched up for the second time in a month and driven off. They say a rational person is only three really bad days away from snapping into psychopathy. All I can say is I hope today goes well after all that. Current mood:  angry.
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