Peripatetic

Well, phooey. I went to the IA Summit, met some amazing people, had some inspiring conversations, saw some excellent presentations (along with, admittedly, a few fairly mundane ones), and came back feeling revitalized and glad to be doing what I do for a living, which was especially refreshing after the spate of “Information Architecture Is Dead” posts in recent months. But then I came back and found that there are more cranky IA Is Imperiled posts floating around, and reading them took away my enthusiasm for blogging about the Summit. It didn’t take away the sense of renewed energy that I’m still feeling, nor is my overwhelmingly positive impression of the event itself diminished, but I’m going to need to take a little extra time to marshal my thoughts and write something about the experience.

A few quick thoughts, though:

1. The trading cards were incredibly cool. Seriously, best ice-breaker/conversation starter ever, and as a bonus, they’ll be a great quick way to educate account and client teams. The NForm folks deserve tremendous credit for coming up with them.
2. Some sort of organized newbie event would have been nice. The first-timers table at the Saturday lunch was a good idea, but one table wasn’t adequate, and since I arrived late to lunch that day, I couldn’t even get near the table. Of course, newbies need to take initiative and meet people on their own, and I did, but a dinner or a reception or even something less formal would have been welcome, especially because there were (I think) an unusual number of first-timers this year. (Then again, next year I won’t be a first-timer, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about it!)
3. I would like to respectfully ask ASIS&T and the Summit committee to never, ever have the conference in Las Vegas again. No one I spoke to was happy about it being in Vegas, and the, er, charms of the city and the Vegas experience seemed mostly lost on the attendees. Plus the hotel, with its absurdly inflated prices and its appalling lack of reliable Net access, was a real disappointment.

Okay, now it sounds like I’m griping, and really I’m not. As I said, the experience was amazingly positive. I was so impressed by the energy and creativity and intelligence of everyone I met, and I learned more than I would have expected to. It was a true pleasure to meet so many people whose blogs I read regularly* and find that they were down-to-earth and approachable and more than willing to share ideas and experiences—even the big names in the field. Despite joking with a fellow IA Institute member about IA rock stars and the cult of personality, I was genuinely impressed with the fact that those “rock stars” sat and listened to other people’s presentations and came to the lunches and just generally didn’t act like they were above it all. I’m not at all sure that that’s the case in a lot of other professions.

And in case it’s not clear, I really, really didn’t like Las Vegas. This surprised me a little, because I have no moral or philosophical issues with gambling,** and though I am very much not into kitsch (I’ll save that particular rant for another day), I thought I might half-enjoy the over-the-topness of the place. But no. As soon as the overpriced airport shuttle (with GRATUITIES NOT INCLUDED printed in large type at the bottom of the ticket) hit the Strip, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy Vegas. I knew everything would be tacky and ephemeral-looking, but I didn’t know it would all be that tacky. “New York, New York” didn’t impress me at all; it looked like it would topple over if you sneezed on it. Ditto the “Eiffel Tower” at the Paris. (Okay, I’ll grant that the Pyramid at the Luxor was sort of cool. Sort of.) And the larger-than-life scantily clad Toni Braxton that covered the façade of the conference hotel was not an encouraging greeting. I will not be going back. But hey, at least the weather was nice.

*(I’m disappointed, though, that I didn’t work up the nerve to talk to Lou Rosenfeld and didn’t even see Peter Morville. Both were extremely gracious and helpful to me via e-mail when I was applying to LEEP, and both are (along with my friend Sarah) the main reasons I got into IA in the first place. Maybe next year.)

**To state that more precisely, I have no problem with the act of gambling. I’m not exactly a fan of the gaming industry, though I’m also not convinced that it’s inherently worse than other money-hungry industries, just more blatantly sleazy, I guess. And I think our (the US’s, that is) collective ambivalence about gambling is goofy, much like our ambivalence and double-talk about sex. But I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally immoral about betting on stuff. Plus I like to play slot machines every once in a great while, even if I do quit as soon as I lose $5.00.)

…to Russ Feingold for his success in Congress today. Good news out of Washington has become so infrequent that I was slightly stunned—happily so, but stunned nonetheless—that Bill the Cat Killer Frist and friends weren’t able to block the threatened filibuster on the Patriot Act (or as I like to call it, the “Real Patriots Don’t Care about Civil Liberties” Act). This means that the sun will, fortunately, set on some of the more odious provisions of the act, including the library provisions that are, of course, the ones that I have paid the most attention to.

It’s just a small toast, because I’m not an unequivocal fan of Feingold.* I was, early in his career, when he seemed like an almost miraculous combination of sincerely held lib-dem views and genuine willingness to work with the opposition on issues of bipartisan concern, without compromising his beliefs. But some peculiar—and distasteful—positions he’s taken, such as his enthusiastic endorsement of John “Spawn of Satan” Ashcroft for Attorney General, his vote to impeach Clinton, and his rather zealous support of John Roberts for Chief Justice, have put me off him in a big way. On this issue, though, he was outspoken (and many of his fellow Dems, including some who would likely place themselves to the left of Feingold on the political spectrum, should be ashamed that they didn’t join him, the wimps) and unwavering in his opposition to the most invasive provisions of the act. (It’s also worth remembering that he was the only United States senator to vote against the Patriot Act in the first place). And for that, he has my gratitude. He probably won’t have my vote, should he decide to run in the Dem primaries in ‘08, though then again I don’t know that the weakass, hapless Dems are going to put up anyone I’d be more inclined to vote for. But he does have my gratitude, and, I hope, the gratitude of everyone who is horrified by the steady, stealthy erosion of our civil liberties at the hands of the Bushies…which should include pretty much everyone in the US.

(And yeah, I’ll grudingly also give credit to the few Repubs who were brave enough to cross the aisle on this issue, notably Larry Craig of Idaho, about whom I admit I know nothing, but also Chuck Hagel and Ben Nelson, both of whom are slowly earning my…not admiration, I can’t admire Repubs under any circumstances, really, but something close to it, for their willingness to break ranks. I would like to reiterate, however, that this credit is given grudgingly. I wasn’t raised to give credit to Republicans for anything, and it makes my teeth hurt a little to do so.)

And related to that, as if those of us who fear that our civil liberties are being steadily taken away needed any more evidence that this is true, I hope everyone saw today’s New York Times article revealing that the Bushies quietly—and illegally—allowed the NSA to spy on “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of people within the United States, without first obtaining the court orders required to do so. (The fact that the Times apparently sat on the story for something like a year is another matter, and a question that needs to be answered quickly, because it’s tied to the fundamental question of whether we can even claim to have a free press anymore.) It’s sort of horrifying that I’m not even really shocked by this latest demonstration of the arrogance, cynicism, and basic disregard for anything resembling democracy exhibited by this administration, but I don’t know if anything they do can shock me anymore. (Though every time I say that, they turn around and do something even worse. Did anyone hear Rumsfeld being interviewed by Melissa Block on “All Things Considered” this evening? And if you did, can you believe the tone that bastard took? There really is no end to their lies, self-justifications, lies, flagrant cynicism, and lies.)

*I will say, though, that I sort of get a kick out of the fact that the junior senator from Wisconsin, that rolling green (and blonde) emblem of goyishness, is Jewish. Yeah, I know, Madison and Milwaukee have reasonably large Jewish populations. But still.

this is me:

http://www.overduemedia.com/archive.aspx?strip=20051026

(It’s true—despite my love for my job, not to mention its salary and benefits, there’s a little part of me that wishes I were a cataloger in a public library. But it’s a very little part.)

I like making lists. There’s an old (and not particularly memorable) Go-Go’s song called “Girl of 100 Lists,” and I always related to it (although it applies even more to my friend Vicki, the Queen of Listmaking). I don’t make written lists quite so often as I used to, because in my current job I’m usually focused on a single task at a time, so to-do lists aren’t as important as they once were. I do, however, just as an example, carry around index cards with lists of books that I want to get at the library on them. These are mostly gleaned from the appropriately named Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine devoted to book reviews. It’s insanely expensive, over $75 for a year’s subscription, but I got so used to having company subscriptions to it when I worked in publishing, and I missed it so much after I left, that as soon as I could afford it, I started subscribing again. It’s one of several little annual presents that I allow myself. Plus the reviews are geared toward librarians, with the goal of helping them determine whether to order a given book for their library, and since I’m a librarian who has never worked in a library—sort of a library wannabe, I guess—it lets me sort of almost pretend that I work in collection development in a large public library.

Not that I would actually want to work in collection development, given my druthers. It would probably be my second choice if I were to work in a library, but my first choice is cataloging. Which ties in to my love of listmaking, I think, as well as to my actual life as an information architect. (And I miss cataloging, much as I love being an IA.) Cataloging doesn’t actually involve making lists, but it, and IA, involve imposing a structure on disordered information, among other things. And I love that. I’m not sure why, because my own life is utterly disordered (I’m one of those people who occasionally buys CDs I already own either because I don’t know I have them or because I can’t find them—and I take books out of the library that I’ve read already, too), and I’ve coped okay with that for 44 years. But one of the things I love about cataloging is that it is extremely rule-governed, and I like rules. I like order. I like structure. It’s why I’m obsessive about obeying traffic laws and stuff like that (although I’ve been known to flout certain laws…but that’s not relevant here), and why it drives me crazy when other people don’t—I can’t stand people who think the rules don’t apply to them.

And rules aren’t that different from lists, I guess. Except that lists are way more fun. So I’m going to try to start a tradition of listmaking here on the blog.

(Geez, it took me a long time to get to the point there—even by my already windy standards.)

Today’s list, which is a preliminary one, is the Songs That Make Me Cry list. There are several subsets of this list that I’ll explore later on, such as the Songs I Can’t Sing All the Way Through Without Choking Up list, and the Songs That Make Me Cry Out of Sheer Joy list, and the Songs That Shouldn’t Make Anybody Cry But Have Such Powerful Associations for Me That They Make Me Cry list (that one may consist of only one song, though: “Let’s Go” by the Cars makes me cry. I can sort of explain why, but won’t right now, because it’s…just an odd story).

But this list is just songs that make me cry. Some songs on thist list are also on one or more of the sublists, and this is definitely just a preliminary list, but I’ve been meaning to start compiling it for a while and was reminded of that fact by the first song on the list—it came on while I was at the gym last week, and I had to skip it, because crying on the elliptical trainer would be weird. And yes, now I am just typing to take up more space before I get to the actual list, because it amuses me. I crack me up. Someone has to, after all.

1. Iris DeMent, “My Life”
2. Iris DeMent, “Our Town”
3. Iris DeMent, “Mama’s Opry”
(Okay, so there’s actually a significant percentage of Iris’s catalog that makes me cry, and I’m thinking a whole Iris post is going to be needed soon…but those are the top 3. I think.)
4. Patty Griffin, “Useless Desires”
5. Townes Van Zandt, “Tecumseh Valley”
(His hokiest song, in a way, and yeah, I have a problem with the resolution of the story, but it still makes me cry)
6. Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”
7. Sandy Denny, “The Pond and the Stream”
8. Nick Drake, “Northern Sky”
9. Nick Drake, “Hazy Jane I”
(And oddly, I’m not sure any other Nick Drake songs make me cry consistently, even though if there were a soundtrack to my depression, it would be the work of Nick Drake, boy howdy. Some of them give me chills, and some of them move me beyond belief, but those two are the only ones that always get to me. I can’t sing “One of These Things First” without choking up, but that’s another list for another day, as previously noted.)
10. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, “Perfect Blue”
11. Keith Whitley, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain”
(Actually, if that song doesn’t make you cry, I recommend checking yourself for a pulse. There’s a Keith Whitley post in the offing somewhere too, I think.)
12. Soul Asylum, “Ain’t That Tough”
13. Soul Asylum, “Closer to the Stars”
(Most Soul Asylum songs make me cry since Karl died, actually…but those two always got to me, long before Karl got sick. Soul Asylum were touring when Husker Du’s manager, David Savoy, killed himself, and they played a version of “Ain’t That Tough” on stage that night (in Boston, I think) that was as blistering and furious as anything I’ve ever heard—I wasn’t there, I was in Minneapolis in a state of shock over David’s suicide, but I heard a recording of it later. And never forgot it.)
14. John Prine, “Hello In There”
15. Lucinda Williams, “Sweet Old World”
16. Richard Thompson, “Small Town Romance”
17. Richard Thompson, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (which really belongs on a list of its own: the first time I ever heard it was right before “Rumor and Sigh” came out, at an RT show at the Guthrie Theater in Mpls. in 1991, and before I’d even heard all the lyrics, the sheer beauty of the guitar-picking made me cry)
18. Dale Ann Bradley, “East Kentucky Morning”
19. Rosanne Cash, “The Real Me”
20. Elliot Smith, “Miss Misery”
(Totally because of the movie, which also makes me cry. It’s a flawed movie, but it still gets to me, and has continued to do so each of the 75 times or so that I’ve seen it.)
21. Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes”
(Speaking of “because of the movie”…)
22. The V-Roys, “Goodnight Loser”
(I do just fine until Scott gets to the “Ain’t she the sweetest thing?” part, and then I’m lost)
23. The Replacements, “I Will Dare”
(”Answering Machine” used to be the one song by any artist that absolutely without fail made me cry, but somewhere along the line, all the heart-grabbing Mats songs—”Within Your Reach,” “Unsatisfied,” even “Hold My Life,” which comes closest to still getting to me— became so familiar to me that they no longer choked me up. “I Will Dare” makes me cry in a happy/sad way because it is, quite literally, the song that changed my life, more than any other single song ever.)
24. 10,000 Maniacs, “Back of the Moon” (mock if you will, but that’s the best song on by far their best album. It’s also #1 on the list of songs I can’t sing without choking up—it’s among my favorite songs in the world to sing, and I’ve sung it literally hundreds of times, and I still choke up every damn time.)
25. Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going”
(See notes on 10,000 Maniacs song, but multiply the number of times I’ve sung it by at least 10. And it’s a good one to end tonight’s list on, because the weather is finally supposed to turn sharply colder overnight—the mere phrase “turning sharply colder” in a weather forecast can make me happy, especially this time of year—and I’ll probably be singing it in the car tomorrow. And choking up, right around the part about “See the geese in chevron flight.”)

Comments noting songs that make you cry are especially welcome.

Yeah, so much for pride in my work. Just got feedback from the client, who a) doesn’t seem to have read a word of my notes explaining the reasoning behind my decisions, and b) seems to have had a completely different understanding from mine of what we were going to provide. I guess this is the other side of being new in my field: on the one hand, I’m new enough to still be really excited about what I do, but on the other hand, I’m new enough that I lack the confidence to say, “No, I’m right, and you’re wrong, and here’s why.” And complicating that, of course, is the fact that we’re an agency and they’re the client, and ultimately, they’re right even when they’re not.

Sure feels like a Monday all of a sudden. Blech.

It’s been, I realize, an alarmingly long time since I was actually proud of anything I’d done at work. I haven’t been ashamed of the work I’ve been doing since I started my current job, by any means; I’ve worked hard at everything that’s come my way, and more gratifyingly, I’ve thought hard about all of it—and enjoyed doing so. And believe me, I know full well what a blessing it is to get to feel that way. But I haven’t had all that much opportunity yet to do the best that I think I’m capable of, particularly in my narrow little area of specialization in my still relatively obscure field. A couple of weeks ago, though, I picked up a project that I could really get my teeth into. It occupied my thoughts even when I was nowhere near the office, but not in a bad way: it was a good challenge, and one that I was more than a little nervous about my ability to meet. It’s a project that I was sharing with a more experienced co-worker, but he’s got so much on his plate that he had to limit the amount of time he could put into this one, and he ended up being a project manager more than an IA on it. I like him and respect him, and there was some added pressure because this was our first time collaborating, and I didn’t want him to think I was a complete idiot.

The first full week was spent just understanding the site, the product, and especially, why the navigation wasn’t working as well as it could. Navigation is my thing, after all, and as I declared aloud to no one in particular during a particularly frustrating hour of working with this one, bad navigation makes my teeth hurt. It’s kind of a complex product, at least for me, because my small area of geek knowledge doesn’t encompass this particular type of product, so it really did take a while for me to get my head around it. But gradually, with much effort and occasional insights at odd times (in the shower, among other places), a concept began to come together.

I started sketching it out this week, did a lot of trying out ideas and discarding them, and wasn’t feeling particularly frustrated—even though the project was due today—until I woke up on Tuesday with the flu and a complete inability to think. I thought I would actually have a productive day that day, because I was going to work at home, where I sometimes get more done…but instead, I spent almost the entire day asleep. (I e-mailed the relevant folks at work at 7:45 a.m. to tell them I was going to go back to sleep for a little while and then work at home, and “a little while” turned out to be five hours; I woke up six minutes before the scheduled conference call with the client, which fortunately was exactly enough time for me to force myself into a simulated state of coherence.) Wednesday was pretty productive, good progress was made, and I started the final nav structure that afternoon. Worked on it some more on Thursday morning, then had a small “eureka!” moment, where I hit on a structure that was new, logical, and even sort of streamlined. (Streamlined isn’t my strong suit; I strive for concision in navigation, but I’m naturally prolix, and sometimes it trickles into my work in spite of my best efforts.)

Unfortunately, the network at the satellite office where I work is vaguely glitchy. It isn’t always, but we’ll have whole weeks when there will be random network dropouts for about twenty or thirty seconds, and then before we’ve even really noticed, we’ll get one of those annoying “you have been reconnected to [network name here]. Offline files are available for synchronization.” Thursday was one of those days, but the weird thing is that the first dropout didn’t happen until right after I had dutifully saved my most recent, post-eureka-moment file with an updated name so I would know it was the latest version. Then we had the network glitch, and Visio crashed. When I brought it back up, it recovered…the other file, the earlier one with the earlier name, and didn’t show the newly saved file in the recovery pane at all. So I tried to open the file from its folder, and got a “this is either not a Visio file or it’s been corrupted” message. It was almost 4:00 p.m., and I had lost, I think, about four hours worth of work.

In the greater scheme of things, this was utterly trivial. For one thing, although it was kind of tired right then, my brain was still inside my skull, and the prospect of recreating the work was daunting but not actually unimaginable. For another, with all the bad news that’s been battering the world, and especially the Gulf Coast, recently, it’s just really hard to feel too tragic about losing a stupid Visio file. And a co-worker and friend had received some really horrible news that day. So I was able to keep things pretty well in perspective, I’m happy to say. I made some fussy noises and wrote a comical e-mail about it to a couple of co-workers and whimpered softly to the heroic and very sympathetic tech support guy who did his best to help me/gently inform me that I was SOL. Then I stepped away from the project for a while, did some other little administrative-y things that needed to be done, went home, relaxed a while, and reconstructed the work until about 1:00 a.m. I didn’t get that far, but just getting it back on track made me feel better…even though I was convinced that the reconstructed version wouldn’t be nearly as good as the original.

Today, I got all the way back into it, finished reconstructing the nav sketches, and started doing the detail work. It took longer than I’d hoped, but I actually improved it by putting in the extra time. And by 5:00 p.m. almost exactly, I sent it off to my co-worker so he could look it over before sending it off to the client. Then I sat at work for half an hour (he was up at our other office) and waited for him to call me and tell me it was unusable and just how had I managed to get hired for this job, anyway? No such call came, fortunately, but when I checked e-mail at home after dinner, there was his note to the client, praising my work and giving the bulk of the credit to me (unnecessarily, since his contribution was beyond essential). And you know what? I’m not going to take the bulk of the credit, but I think I did pretty damn well. It’s a fairly original approach, it follows sound principles without adhering to them as though they were unbreakable laws, and most important, I think it represents an improvement over the current system. So I’m actually proud of myself.

It’s all proprietary and top secret and so forth, so I can’t even say what the site is, much less post the URL when/if it launches, the way I’d like to, so for all anyone reading this knows, I’m lying and the whole thing sucks. But I don’t think so, for once. I think I did a pretty decent job doing what I love to do, and I really can’t ask for much more than that.

…but today I must echo her in singing, “I’m the happiest girl in the whole USA.”

That’s because today was my last day at my job. I’ve been bitching and venting about how belittling and soul-destroying and just plain damaging my job was for years now—heck, practically since I started there—but I don’t think I really knew just how bad the job was for me until I walked out of there for the last time today. Driving home, I felt literally like a different person: a person with hope, energy, enthusiasm. (Despite my inescapable optimism, these are not feelings that I’m accustomed to even in good times, because of my ever-present depression—even when it’s at a very low level as it is now, it’s always with me, and energy in particular is something I very rarely feel.) It was as though I had had a makeover and been to a spa and gotten a decade’s worth of birthday presents all in one day. More than anything,what was gone was a pervasive sense of dread that I’m not even sure I was aware of before.

And now that there’s no more jinxing that can be done—at least I hope not!—I can talk a little bit about the new job. (Not too much, because I am the very soul of discretion and I don’t like revealing too many personal details anyway, even though the people who read this blog are all friends of mine as far as I know.) In brief, I’ll be an “experience architect” at an advertising/marketing/branding agency; in my particular case, the work I’ll be doing will be on the information architecture side of things, with a lot of specialization in my favorite parts of IA: what the experts call “little IA,” which is the library-science-based stuff such as taxonomy and metadata creation.

This is exactly what I went to grad school to do, and to get to do it for a successful company fresh out of grad school (or not even—I’ve still got a few weeks to go) is an opportunity that I couldn’t even have dreamed of. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged, especially because I’m already crazy about my boss, and I’ll be working with a former co-worker who’s a great person and a friend (and was instrumental in my getting the job—I’ll be buying her lunch every day for, I dunno, ten years or so), and though I’ve heard stories about super long weeks and crazy schedules, I like everything I’ve heard and observed about the company so far. The benefits are great, the salary is fine, and I never object to working hard and putting in long hours when I’m doing work that interests and challenges me. It’s an incredible opportunity, and I can’t wait to get started (although I wish I’d been able to take a few days off between jobs, but somehow I never seem to get to do that, and it’s really no big deal).

A funny thing happened to me while I was in school: I fell in love with cataloging, somewhat but not entirely to my surprise. It appeals to the same part of my brain that doing crossword puzzles and learning foreign languages do, and those are two of my few genuine talents. I had begun to think seriously about pursuing a job as a cataloger in a public library (an academic library would have been okay too, but I’m a huge fan of public libraries and would have preferred to work in that atmosphere than in the ivy tower), and there’s a tiny little part of me that’s disappointed that I won’t be going in that direction after all. But cataloging is a threatened profession—not by any means a dying one, but one that’s threatened by the ignorance of library administrators and local governments who think that now that we have Google, we don’t need library cataloging anymore. (Don’t even get me started…) And IA is in many ways like cataloging: both are related to the organization of information, which turns out to be my true passion in life. I’m a naturally disorganized person, at least in the visible ways—my house is a mess, I’m drowning in clutter, and some days it’s all I can do to remember where my head is. (It’s that big redheaded blob attached to my shoulders, I think.) But that doesn’t mean I have a disorganized mind, I guess, and for whatever reasons, I love making order out of chaos. So I think my new line of work will suit me well. It will be the first time since 1988 that editing and writing won’t be major parts of my job description, which will be weird, but in a good way.

And with that, I’m officially putting the blog on hiatus for a few weeks, while I attempt to finish my classes and graduate. I might sneak in an entry here or there, but it’s been unofficially on hiatus during the insanity of the last few weeks (illness, schoolwork, and doing almost the equivalent of two full-time jobs because I was consulting for my new employer), and now I’m making it official. I’ll be back in May—master’s degree in hand, I hope.

Yeah, I know, I haven’t been posting much, and I’m behind on my reasons to be cheerful,* which I had hoped to do weekly. Didn’t have that many as of Friday, though; it was a tough week at work and an unproductive week at home. My head is better overall—a lot better, really—but my energy level is so low that I can’t seem to do anything. I actually nodded off at work this morning, though fortunately it was right after I got here (at 7 friggin’ AM), so I don’t think anyone noticed.

Anyway…it was a pretty great Valentine’s Day nonetheless, and I can scrape up a few RTBC.

1. Bill, after swearing up and down that he wasn’t getting me flowers for Valentine’s Day, sent me a bouquet of 40(!) gorgeous little roses (they’re not the miniature kind, but they’re not full-sized either) in various colors. They’re from the competition (even though I told him that I’d give him my employee discount code if he wanted to buy from my company), but they’re still pretty spectacular, and they were a big surprise. Not quite as much of a surprise as my other gift from him, though. We’re both huge fans of the brilliant (and possibly canceled) HBO show “The Wire,” which ranks among the best things I’ve ever seen on TV, and we both have a soft spot for the character of Omar, who robs drug dealers for a living and carries a sawed-off shotgun that he’s never shy about using, but also has a strong moral code of his own; for example, he never robs or shoots “civilians,” and he doesn’t swear. You can tell that the show’s creator, David Simon (who also created “Homicide,” another brilliant and long since canceled show), has a soft spot for Omar too; otherwise, he wouldn’t have made him such a compelling character (though I guess Omar is based partly on a couple of real Baltimore criminals whom Simon has encountered). And Michael K. Williams, a young actor who hasn’t done much else other than some guest appearances on various TV shows and some off-Broadway theater, does an extraordinary job bringing Omar to life.

   Anyway, the Baltimore alt weekly, City Paper, did a story on the show and its future recently, and Bill liked the illustration that went with it, which was a sort of free-form study of Omar, showing him with his trademark shotgun, money sticking out of his jacket pocket, and a TV remote in his hand. So—here’s the amazing part—Bill contacted the paper, who forwarded his e-mail to the artist, and he arranged to buy the original artwork. Then he hand-framed it for me. “Speechless” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction (though I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t recognize the illustration right away); I’ve never received a more creative gift or one that had so much thought put into it. “Stunned” would be closer to the mark. I Am a Lucky Girl.

   That alone would be enough for this week’s RTBC, but I’ve got some others.

2. We had our Valentine’s Day dinner on Saturday night, since I knew I’d be studying on the actual night, and going out on Monday nights isn’t very appealing anyway, and decided to try out a newish Japanese place that’s closer to our house than the excellent place that we usually visit for our periodic sushi indulgences. (Whenever we eat sushi lately, we keep having people in the restaurants marvel at our capacity for it—but when you only eat it a few times a year, it’s hard not to splurge.) It wasn’t as good as our usual place, or even as good as the place way far away from our house that we went to with friends a while back, but it was quite good nonetheless, and the atmosphere of the place was a lot of fun. We sat at the sushi bar and listened to the head sushi chef bantering with the regulars. It was also cheaper than our usual place, so I have a feeling we’ll go back. I have mixed feelings about eating fish, since I’d prefer to be a real vegetarian, and I go back and forth about whether I eat it or not (currently I don’t), but somehow I’ve always been able to make an exception/justification for sushi. Actually, “justification” isn’t the right word, because I can’t think of any reason that it’s acceptable under my moral standards to eat fish—hell, I don’t even wear leather. I’m just powerless to resist the occasional urge for sushi.
3. I got my proposal for the term paper for my advanced cataloging class done in time, and I think it even sort of made sense; more important, I think I’ve actually got a handle on the topic, which I was having trouble pinning down. It’s going to be (nonlibrarians may take a brief nap now) a look at how Dublin Core metadata might either replace or supplement MARC21 in the library catalog—not only for cataloging digital resources, but also for plain old bibliographic cataloging. I came to cataloging bass-ackwards, after a metadata class that was hands down the best class I’ve ever taken in any phase of my education, and I was smitten with Dublin Core and deeply suspicious of and baffled by MARC when I took the intro cataloging class. Now I’m more aware of the limitations of Dublin Core (though I still love it for its ease of use and its “flexibility and extensibility,” to use those tired buzzwords) and more aware of the advantages of MARC…though I’m ambivalent about MARC; on the one hand, the linguist part of me is drawn to the idea of librarians having their own secret, arcane language, especially now that I’ve learned to speak it on a basic level, but on the other hand, I think that arcane aspect of it is what’s going to doom it to some extent in this digital age. Anyway, the proposal is done, and the paper doesn’t seem insurmountable. (On the down side, I’m behind in the reading for my IA class and I’ve done absolutely nothing on my independent study project, but hey, this post is supposed to be upbeat and positive.)
4. My copy of “Dap-Dippin’…with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings” finally showed up yesterday. It took forever to get here—I get tired of buying stuff from Amazon, and my favorite online retailer didn’t have it, but I don’t think I’ll be buying again from the legendary indie retailer from which I ended up purchasing it any time soon—but it got here, and I’m listening to it now and it’s just knocking me flat. I love the retro packaging, and more important, I love the way Ms. Jones and band manage to make their vintage soul influences clear without sounding self-consciously retro. The lyrics, production, and overall style are thoroughly up-to-date…though if you close your eyes and pretend you’re not listening on a computer, you can sort of imagine you’re listening to a late 1960s/early 1970s Detroit soul record. Killer stuff, and I’m kicking myself now for not driving to Lawrence on Friday night to see her.
5. Without going into any details that might get me in trouble, I’ll just say that I’m finally going to get a legitimate chance to work on something at work that will make actual use of the skills I’ve been spending the last couple of years (and thousands of dollars in student loans) acquiring. I’m not sure where to start with it—details will become clearer next week—but I’m as excited about it as I’ve been about anything job-related since I left the Wonderful World of Children’s Publishing.

OK, I think that’s enough for this week. I’ve got a bunch of assignments due this week, so it may not be much of a week for blogging, but I still have a post brewing in my head about traditional Celtic and British Isles music (I’m thinking of making a comp called “A Decade or So of Celtic Music That Doesn’t Suck,” but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get any takers for that one.), and maybe I’ll manage that on Thursday or so.

*In case anyone is curious about where the phrase “Reasons to Be Cheerful” comes from or why it will always be “part 3,” it’s from a very wonderful song by the late great Ian Dury. The closest approximation I could find to what I think the real lyrics are is here; unfortunately, it’s a site with popups, but the usual big lyric aggregator sites got the first line wrong, so I didn’t bother with them after that.

At least there’s a teensy bit of good news today….
CNN.com - Judge: Evolution stickers unconstitutional - Jan 13, 2005

…though call me cynical, but somehow I have a feeling this will be overturned on appeal.