And I thought I was passionate about books…

This website is dedicated to folks who love books so much that they get tattoos of their favorite passages or illustrations.  YOUCH!

Rolling Stone magazine currently has an issue on the stands that not only features “A Conversation with Barack Obama,”  but also this most outstanding portrait on the cover:

I want to go out and buy a copy just so I’ll have this little piece of history amongst my personal possessions. The man is a powerhouse.  And I’m nervous that the upcoming election is going to make me sick and tired of politics again, but I’m really trying to hold on to my excitement.  Here’s to Hope and Here’s to Change!  Let’s get excited!  

My new job requires that I take shifts working the reference desk, which for those who don’t know, is basically the help desk.  Questions range from “Where’s the bathroom”  to “I’m writing a paper on Albanian History.”  I’m feeling a little anxious about pointing all of these graduate students toward the best resources so I’ve been mentally preparing myself for the last week or so.  Part of my preparation includes figuring out what books are in the reference section and what types of research they would be useful for. The findings are about as dry as you might have expected. Encyclopedias and dictionaries for most subjects including business, science, history, and the arts. The usual periodical indexes, gazetteers, and concordances are there. A couple of days ago I happened to come across an online review for the following title and thought it would be an exciting addition to the reference section: Dirty Words, a Literary Encyclopedia of Sex. Out of curiosity I decided to to see if any other libraries carry this title and lo and behold, 10 libraries have it proudly on their shelf.  So go ahead and order it through Interlibrary Loan if you need to brush up on some old moves or figure out what the kids are up to these days.

The New York Times featured a story today about Paul Otlet, a school librarian in Belgium during the early 1900’s who was planning to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge. (!!!!) The project is now being recognized as one of the earliest prototypes for the Internet, and is honored/archived at the Mundaneum in Mons. Read More Here.

Needless to say, I’m completely smitten with this very dead man and would like to nominate him as Librarian Hero of the year.

I’m into my third week at the new job and I must say: I really, really love it. The people are fantastic. The space is wonderful and the campus is just unspeakably attractive. The nature of the work is more or less to my liking with plenty of opportunities for moving around and physically working, as opposed to just sitting at a desk all day.

I have to admit, though, that there have been more than a handful of confusing/frustrating moments and I’m beginning to realize that the majority of my time will be spent solving little library mysteries. For instance, a lot of patrons submit requests but can’t provide much information. They might not remember the author’s name or might not know the exact title. This makes my job really challenging. Part of the problem has to do with library tools not being quite as user-friendly as say: Amazon or Google. I don’t get any help if a word is misspelled, and title indexes are pretty picky about format and word order. Fortunately, I like a challenge. I feel a small sense of defeat when I resort to Google, and a huge sense of accomplishment when I manage to locate a circulating copy of some obscure reference work.

For those who are interested, there is an online resource called WorldCat that essentially strives to be a fully functional catalog for the whole world. It is the number one resource for my work. Go to worldcat.org and enter your zip code and then search for books, CD’s, movies and more. WorldCat will show you all the libraries in the world that own those titles and how far away they are from your house. Pretty neat, huh!

I’m not sure that I’ve fully captured how big and bright this place is…  I never have to turn the lights on!

Well, I started my new job about a week ago and have found it relatively easy to settle in.  I’ve been mentally composing a blog post for several days now that would highlight some of the terrific advantages, and while I’m really excited about multiple aspects of my new job, I can’t seem to get past how great the bathrooms are here!

Now, for some context:  I had considered writing bathroom-related entries on many occasions at my previous job. They were awful. All of them.  A seven-story building with restrooms on every floor and each and every one of those restrooms had unique characterics that made them completley unpleasant and avoidable. The basement level had a nice spacious handicapped stall away from all of the others, but no hot water at the sink.  The main level was often standing-room only with women doing their hair, fixing their make-up, waiting for toilets, whatever…  And all of the bathrooms were filthy at best, low on toilet-paper, and worst of all: automatic flushers. I want to break the knee-caps of the person that invented the automatic flusher. How is that helpful?  It mis-fires all the time, causing the squatter to stand with your pants around your ankles until the flushing has ceased, or get your back-side sprayed with toilet-water.  Lovely. Really, what a terrific invention.  Cause… let’s face it:  I just can’t remember to flush that baby on my own!  Or, maybe some germaphobes are convinced that hand-washing won’t suffice after touching that cooties-infected flusher.  Please don’t cater to those people!

Anyways. The new bathrooms. Four per floor. Four private bathrooms per floor. There’s one right outside my office. Rarely used. If it is, there’s another just down the hall. Each bathroom is spacious, well-lit, and provides an extra chair with a writing surface… you know, just in case you need to proctor an exam while going to the loo. Best of all, each toilet is equipped with a traditional lever for flushing. Is that so much to ask?  Oh, and copious amounts of paper products, anti-bacterial soap that doesn’t smell wierd or self-foam, and excellent instructions for how and when to wash your hands. The coup-de-grace?  A pleasant little reminder by the door to turn off the lights so that the Florida Everglades don’t dissapper under water. (something about greenhouse gases, global warming and polar ice-caps melting?  huh, never heard of it!)

So, I’ll try to remember to talk about some of the finer points of my new job in a future post, but for now you should just know that I’m happily peeing away. Oh, and there’s a 5 foot black  snake that likes to sun itself in front of the building…  And I’m trying to be okay with that.

I mostly mean for this to be a blog related to my job and to my interest in bookbinding, but I guess it’s okay if I occasionally blather on about some other stuff, right? The only things I’m really opposed to are 1. discussing the inane details of my personal life and 2. blatant trash-talking about anyone I’m personally acquainted with.

So, with those two ground rules intact I would like to share a little bit about my experience living in Chicago for the last three years. I should preface this by openly admitting that I am probably not a city person. I really like trees and wide, umm, open spaces (Oh fine, I like the Dixie Chicks. Leave me alone!) and animals and privacy. I don’t like lots of buildings, crowds of people, or loud noises (duh, that’s why I’m a librarian). So, I’ll spare you my complaints about those things that are perfectly normal in a city but give me a perfectly awful case of anxiety and depression.

Let me begin with Things I won’t miss about Chicago when I’m gone…

The CTA- public transportation was a huge reason why I wanted to move to a city in the first place. Unfortunately, the CTA gave me more panic attacks than it’s worth. Over-crowded, unreliable, and inconvenient. And did I mention dirty? I once had to claw my way to the nearest exit on a bus so that I could throw up after discovering that the newspaper beneath my feet was providing refuge for about 15 cockroaches. Yeeesh, I feel queasy all over again.

(Do I even have to say it?) The Weather- notoriously awful. Temperatures with wind chill well below zero. Daily highs in the single digits. For weeks! And you can still have freezing cold days in May. It is nice to live in a place with some adequate snowfall but no one has the foresight to shovel their sidewalks, so it only takes an inch of snow for the entire city to become a gigantic sheet of ice that makes activities like walking to the corner-store a death-defying experience. Summer isn’t much better. June and July can have some pretty lovely days but then the daily high lingers somewhere between 90 and 100 for the rest of the season. People die in this city due to extreme temperatures, but I will no longer suffer through this unreasonable hardship.

Ice Cream trucks- I know, I know… I’m the Grinch. I don’t like ice cream trucks. But for god’s sake, they play that awful music and I once had one PARK outside my apartment for hours while I was trying to write a final paper for library school. He never turned the music off… and I can never forgive that. Plus, it just seems like there are hundreds of them in this city during the summer. That’s too many. Ever heard of the obesity epidemic? Plus it seems like a bad idea to encourage children to go running into the street. Or to take ice cream from strangers. Whatever.

Parking Tickets- FIFTY DOLLARS. Each. Forgot to feed the meter? Fifty dollars. Parked in a loading zone for 16 minutes? Fifty dollars. Didn’t see the sign about street cleaning? Fifty dollars. I have single handedly contributed hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the city of Chicago and I have no idea where that money goes. When I think about it, having a car at all is a huge drag here. Parking anywhere downtown is gonna cost you at least twelve dollars. The freeways are all ludicrously congested; you would make better time walking. Potholes range in size from 2 ft. to entire city blocks. And last but not least, you have to buy a stupid sticker every damn year just to have a car in the city and that costs seventy bucks, too! I’ve already mentioned that the CTA is lousy. A lot of my friends use bikes as their primary mode of transportation and I think that’s wonderful. Good for the environment, good exercise, cheap, and fast. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to ride a bike in this city, and with good reason as two people have been killed in the last month.

People shooting each other- seriously. It’s out of control.

And now, for some desperately needed positivity:

Things I will miss about Chicago, when I’m gone…

My friends and hanging out in unusual/inhospitable locations like rooftops, Polish dive bars, playgrounds, and alleys. One of the best days I ever had in Chicago was a month or so after I moved here. It was a nice afternoon in May and I was living with Tatjana and Jeremy. A bunch of people came over and we had a barbeque in the alley behind our house cause we were too scared to ask our Ukrainian landlords if we could use their yard. We set up this 10 dollar grill and we had a pretty decent spread but we had to keep packing it up and moving out of the way every time a car went through. Eventually the landlords found us and insisted in broken English that we use their yard (probably the only friendly exchange we ever had with them). I think that was the day that I met Dee and Bill Tanner and Angie J. I remember laying on a blanket in the yard well into the evening and staring up at the sky and watching planes traverse in and out of Midway and O’Hare and just feeling really, really happy.

The Food- There is definitely some outstanding food to be had here in the Windy City. I never really got to experience any of the high-class cuisine cause I’m just not that kind of girl, but damn is there some good cheap food to be had! Indian on Devon, falafel from Sultan’s, burritos the size of my head, breakfast at Sunrise, rotisserie chicken at Feed… I could go on and on.

Cool people doing cool stuff- I can’t stand useless hipsters, so please don’t confuse the point that I’m trying to make here, but I’m genuinely impressed by the number of people that get awesome ideas and then really bust their ass to make it happen. Want to start your own punk-rock choir? Do it! Wanna start a music festival? Do it! Wanna start your own business? Do it! Sure, some of these ideas fizzle out or get too popular and start to suck but that’s just the way it goes. Beats the hell out of some stagnant, creativity-crushing vortex city, right?

The smoking-ban- Finally, I can go to bars and clubs and breathe. I no longer come home smelling like an ashtray. I really hope that more and more cities will adopt this policy. Please!

There’s probably other stuff worth mentioning but I can’t think of it now. And I’ll probably be dumb-struck with all the stuff that I’ll miss as the moving day approaches. Drinking beer at the dog park, the peanut butter chocolate milkshakes at Choppers, bowling at Timber Lanes… but most of that stuff is really about the good people and good memories that I can take with me.  So… it’s not sad.

Well. Okay.  It’s a little sad.

I’m a bad blogger!  I’ve been too busy counting the minutes until my last day of work (may 14th!) to bother publishing any funny titles or odd cataloging practices.  Sorry.  I even had a request yesterday for an article that linked mental retardation to urinary tract infections…  and I didn’t post it?!  I’m terrible.  Just really self-centered.  And I apologize.

I’ll be starting a new Interlibrary loan job at an awesome school after Memorial Day and maybe I’ll feel so energized by the fact that I no longer work in the most soul-sucking, sexist, windowless hellhole ever that I’ll actually start posting on a regular basis again! yay!

Computational Galerkin Methods.

Erotic Art of the Kathmandu Valley.

Was Marx a Satanist?

Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security.

How to read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney comic.

Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research.