Category: musings

memory, reunions, and being yourself

This weekend, I’m back in Harrisonburg, Virginia, for Homecoming weekend at my alma mater, Eastern Mennonite University. In fact, I am writing this courtesy of the as-yet-not login-required computers in the university library.

Except for the addition of a few more computers, and a small DVD collection where the reference books used to live, the library looks much like it did when I was a student here ten years ago. I think the chairs might be new. They’re more comfortable than I remember.

EMU Campus Center

Not that I remember many details of my college years. That’s the problem I’ve been noticing as I wander around, wondering if the person walking past me was a classmate or if they just look like someone I know. Even the people I’ve met who remember me are fuzzy in my mind. How did I know them then? Did we have a class together? Did we have mutual friends?

I’ve kept in touch with many of my college friends, but we were a small class, so I was acquaintances with most of the rest of them, or at the very least, I knew their name and what they looked like. And, I interacted with students in the other classes which came before and after me. All of this makes it difficult for me to remember just how I knew the people I am reconnecting with now.

In addition to all that, I’ve changed since college. Physically, I’ve put on a great deal of weight, I wear glasses, and my hair is much shorter. Socially, I’m more adept and personable (I think), and I’m less rigid in insisting that my views/philosophies are the only right ones.

I may not remember my old classmates in great detail, but I can’t assume they have as fuzzy memories of me. How do I convey who I am now when the ghost of who I was then still lingers?

Why do I feel that is important? It’s not as though we are a part of each other’s lives anymore and I need their acceptance in order to survive socially. I have gone on for 10 years without them, thankyouverymuch, and I can go on another 10 just the same. However, there is a part of me that craves acceptance, and no matter how much I grow stronger in myself, I still want everyone to like me.

*sigh*

I hope I’ll have gotten over this by our 20 year reunion, but for now, I should head over to the soccer game and see who’s there. Maybe if I show some school spirit it’ll make me seem more like one of them.

thinking like a user, not a librarian

I should have know that this would be the slippery slope that lead to… a wishlist.

I did something today that was revolutionary. Well, for me, anyway. I tagged an album on RateYourMusic that I do not own, nor have I ever owned. I tagged an album for my wishlist.

I have been treating RateYourMusic as a LibraryThing for music, which it pretty much is, without all the flair and design and integration that LT currently provides. My personal rule (a.k.a. thinking like a librarian) was that I would “catalog” what I owned, not what I wanted or had previously owned. That’s how I roll over at LT, and for my book collection, it makes a lot of sense.

My music collection, however, is much more fluid. I’m less likely to hang on to a CD once I’ve grown tired of it, so I regularly trade out “old” albums for “new” ones. A while back I started tagging albums as “used to own” rather than completely de-accessioning them. Because I’m regularly acquiring new music, I need to know what I’ve already evaluated and passed on, and this is one way to do that.

I should have know that this would be the slippery slope that lead to… a wishlist. Sure, I have wishlists all over the place, from Amazon to the various swap sites I participate in. However, RateYourMusic is supposed to be a catalog, right? And a library catalog doesn’t have wishlist items, right? (Well, unless you count those books that never show up from the publisher/jobber/vendor.)

This is the point at which I stopped thinking like a librarian and started thinking like a user. Having a wishlist mixed in with my have and use-to-have lists means it’s all in one, indexed collection. It feels freeing to let go of the “rules” that keep me from using all of the tools available to me!

twitter snobbery or basic info management?

A post by Greg Schwartz on his Open Stacks blog directed me to a post by Mitch Joel on his Six Pixels of Separation blog, and after reading it, I have to say, “Ditto.” Except for the number of followers & following, and the bit about Twitter on a Blackberry, my experience and reasoning is similar to Joel’s.

I started off on Twitter with a small handful of connections, mainly from the same organization. Their interest fizzled out quickly, but it left me poised for the Great Librarian Twitter Invasion of ’07. Soon, I was following and being followed by more and more people. When my following number hit triple digits and the rate of tweets increased to several per minute, I knew I had to do something to keep Twitter from taking over my life.

As an experiment, I went public with my tweets for Computers in Libraries, and I have left them that way ever since. Periodically, I will go through and weed out those that I follow, mainly keeping people I know in real life (or have a deeper online connection) or people I simply want to keep tabs on (mainly celebrities like Wil Wheaton and Jonathan Coulton). I still get far too many tweets per day to keep on top of everything. On the up side, anyone can follow me if they wish, and I don’t have to follow them in return.

Regarding the @ reply thing… Like Joel, I try to refrain from @-ing too often. My followers are not all from the same group of people who would care about what I’d have to @ about, and to save them the trouble of wading through irrelevant tweets, I send direct messages instead. I only wish more of the folks I follow would be as considerate, particularly when their replies make no sense out of context.

and am I born to die?*

My father recently attended the 2008 Ohio State Sacred Harp Convention. Over the past nine years or so, he’s become one of the shape note (Sacred Harp in particular) fanatics who will travel all over the region to attend big singings. He loves it, but I find those types of singings to be terrifying.

When I began to sing shape note music, it was with a small Sacred Harp group in Lexington (Kentucky) that met monthly. They were very casual and spent time learning the songs. Eventually, I ended up signing with an even more casual group that met weekly. It was fun and I became a better singer because of it.

At some point, I attended the statewide singing in Kentucky, and it was such an overwhelming and frustrating experience that I never wanted to go back to anything like that again. They sang songs I didn’t know too fast for me to even think of learning them. What kind of fun is that except for the handful of speed demons who may have known the tunes? What kind of community does that build? What kind of worship experience?

The thing is, the Sacred Harp is named thusly because all of the words are based in Biblical scripture. Shape note singing is fun, but it’s also kind of like being at church, and for a long time, it was the only place where I felt safe enough to be in the mental state of worship. No matter who you were or where you came from, if you wanted to sing with us, you could sing with us, judgment-free.

Maybe my father can experience that at the big singings because he is a shape note fanatic. He has audio files and CDs of recordings of songs, and listens to them to help learn them. He also practices at home, reading from the songbook and beating out the measures until he knows the tunes well enough to lead them.

I could do that, but frankly, I’d rather have that worshipful, musical experience with others than practicing alone. If that means I don’t do it very often, and on my own terms, then I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.

* This is the first line of Idumea, my father’s favorite tune.

celebrating the good things

Lately, I have been reveling in the awesomeness that I have been blessed with over the past couple of months, but I find it hard to blog about that since a great deal of it has to do with my (relatively) recent cross-country move. How does one write about job things without actually writing about job things? Particularly when one has not-so-nice feelings about certain job things?

It’s probably best to just write nothing at all. So I haven’t been writing. But, the down side to that is not getting to share about the awesome good things.

Things like:

  • Eating lunch in the break room nearly every day with most of my new colleagues filtering in and out over the lunch hour, and enjoying the time spent talking about whatever.
  • Asking, “Is this a resource we need?” and focusing on benefits and outcomes more than on pinching pennies.
  • Feeling like I have support to do just about anything I want or need to do professionally.
  • Figuring out how to alter my old routines to incorporate the broader social opportunities that Richmond offers.
  • …

I could go on, but that gives you an idea of some of the good things that I am blessed with these days.

Change can be scary, but sometimes it’s worth the hassle and heartache if it means that in the end you are able to thrive and grow in a way you never could have before the change. I knew that, and to a certain extent, I had lived that before, but I know it even better now. Sure, maybe in five years I’ll look back and wonder, “What was I thinking?” But, for now, I’m thinking that I made a good choice in deciding to face my fears and overcome inertia to step out into something new.

—————-
Now playing: Collective Soul – Heavy
via FoxyTunes

perception & censorship

I’ve been thinking a bit about perception recently, both in the context of starting a new job in a new town, and in the context of online personas. I am rarely truly aware of how I am perceived by others, and often I move through life oblivious to how my words or actions might come across to someone who does not know me well.

New situations make me nervous, and when I’m nervous, I often find myself babbling inanely until someone more sociable is able to skillfully maneuver the conversation to something more suitable. I’m hyper-aware of this now that nearly every day presents a new situation, which makes me even more worried that I’ll say or do something stupid.

The thing is, I’m generally a good person. I try hard to find common ground with those around me, and I’m fairly open to criticism or “learning experiences.” I can also be cranky and a bit mouthy, but usually only when I’m frustrated or pushed over my tolerance limit. Long-time readers of this blog may have picked up on all of this, but there’s no way for me to know for sure. I just have to hope that as I have grown as a person over the past five years, so has the representation of me through my writing.

This brings me to the topic of censorship. I would like to state clearly, for the record, that I do not censor comments on my blog, unless they are spam or trackbacks from splogs. Those things are evil and should be destroyed. Comments that are not spam are freely posted, regardless of their content.

One of the reasons why I moved from the MovabeType blog software to WordPress was because I was getting 50+ spam comments an hour caught in the clunky spam filter used by MT. This made it a nightmare to check, and often I just deleted them all without making sure that no legitimate comments were accidentally marked as spam. Since I rarely get comments, I wasn’t too concerned with that, anyway.

However, several people have indicated that they thought I was censoring comments on this blog because I didn’t want anyone who disagrees with me to comment here. The folks who told me this are friends whom I trust, and it surprised me that they would make that sort of assumption. Again, this is a problem with perception verses reality.

Do I come across as someone who does not want criticism? I hope not. Sure, like anyone, I prefer to have constructive criticism, but that is a difficult thing to get in the virtual world where it’s much easier to make snarky comments or flame someone than to have a real conversation where everyone feels like their perspective is heard.

All this is to say, please, do comment here. If there is an old post that you’d like to comment on and you discover that commenting has been disabled for it (an old setting I used to limit spam), send me a note and I’ll open it up.

my career has peaked

I shushed a room full of librarians. And it worked.

A couple of weeks go, I attended a short conference for academic librarians in the Pacific Northwest, which was organized and hosted by the Washington chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Until recently, I was a member-at-large on the executive board of the organization, and one of my roles at the conference was to get one of the concurrent sessions started. This meant herding everyone to their seats after a snack break, and directing their attention to the speakers.

The room we were in required the use of a microphone in order to be heard. I spoke clearly and evenly into the microphone as I tried to call the room to order, but apparently it wasn’t loud enough because someone in the first few rows said, “They can’t hear you.” And that was when I did it.

I shushed a room full of librarians.

And it worked.

compassion

There is something to be said about self-censorship. Sometimes it can be the difference between having a constructive conversation and simply pissing off the person you are trying to communicate with.

I’m a little behind on the liblog reading, as usual, so I only just came across K.G. Schneider’s redacted rant about having to write up her talk for NASIG. I happen to know a bit about the behind-the-scenes circumstances that lead to her post, and I should note that there’s a lot more to it than what her readers may think. However, that’s not the point I am going to make here.

Reading her original post, such as I could find in some serious Google archive searching, reminded me that NASIG is not always a well-oiled machine. Annual membership fees are $75 (raised from $25 two years ago — the first such increase in over a decade) and they cover things like the website hosting and listservs; we have no paid staff. Everything is done by volunteers who have full-time jobs and families and all that. So, it’s not uncommon for something to slip through the cracks, or for assumptions to be made, as in the case of Schneider’s write-up for the Proceedings.

The Proceedings editors do what they can to ensure that presenters are aware of what is expected of them, from the contract language to reminder emails to a speaker’s breakfast at the conference where it’s all reiterated. They do what they can, but sometimes it’s not enough.

How different is this from any other large organization? Even organizations with paid staff sometimes make mistakes, miscommunicate, or seem to have poorly chosen policies. I’ve been known to rant a time or two about them. However, I’m starting to step back a little and think about how it feels to be the target of a rant. I’m pretty sure that Schneider didn’t have me in mind when she wrote what she did, but as a Member-At-Large of the NASIG Executive Board, her words stung no less than if I was personally named.

Criticism is not necessarily a bad thing, but in order to be positively effective, it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t put the other in a defensive position. The anonymous commenter on Schneider’s post expressed much of what I was feeling, and I don’t blame them for choosing anonymity after such a pointed attack on their professional organization. In my not so humble opinion, Schneider could have gotten her point across about deadlines, contracts, and expectations much more effectively had she chosen to be less angry and abrasive about it.

And maybe I could do the same with my own occasional rant. There is something to be said about self-censorship. Sometimes it can be the difference between having a constructive conversation and simply pissing off the person you are trying to communicate with. The latter may win you some kudos from the angry-ranty crowd, but in the end it doesn’t help the situation.

time zone love

One of the good things about being on the West Coast is that all my colleagues east of me are anywhere from an hour to three hours ahead of me. This means that starting around 2 or 3pm, the incoming email slows down to a trickle and by 4pm is almost completely stopped. One of … Continue reading “time zone love”

One of the good things about being on the West Coast is that all my colleagues east of me are anywhere from an hour to three hours ahead of me. This means that starting around 2 or 3pm, the incoming email slows down to a trickle and by 4pm is almost completely stopped. One of the bad things is that they have a several hour head-start on me in the morning, compounded with my inability to get into the office before 8:30am on a good day (9 or 10am on bad days).

pluots

I was at the farmer’s market yesterday, listening to a talented acoustic duo perform, when I saw someone eating a piece of fruit that looked luscious and wonderful. I queried the muncher and discovered that this fascinating edible was a Pluot. I learned the location of the vendor selling this fruit and purchased one for … Continue reading “pluots”

I was at the farmer’s market yesterday, listening to a talented acoustic duo perform, when I saw someone eating a piece of fruit that looked luscious and wonderful. I queried the muncher and discovered that this fascinating edible was a Pluot. I learned the location of the vendor selling this fruit and purchased one for myself.

It was wonderful! Juicy, sweet, soft, and just a little tartness from the skin. I bought a few more to take home, but not as many as I would have liked. Mainly, I didn’t think I could eat them all before they went bad. But, I’m just about to eat my third one and now I’m wishing I had brought home more.

Yum.

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