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Category: Random Thoughts

Three Inches To The Left

Three Inches To The Left

Published by Iris on Friday, September 26th, 2008


There is a very industrious spider that has made her web across my patio door. She started it in July, and very carefully stretched it from a couple of inches into the screen of the door to a couple of inches into the brick of the wall.

Unfortunately for her, I have to open that door nearly every day to water the plants, or sit on the porch, or pick up the porch chair the blows over in storms. So nearly every day I’d split her admittedly rather shabby web in half. And nearly every day she’d repair it. And after the first couple of weeks we both stopped caring too much about the process. I no longer thought twice about opening the door, and she no longer freaked out or waited very long to get back to the business of building her web. She never seemed to care that if she’d moved the entire operation three inches to the left, her life would have been so much less tiring.

All this has set me to thinking. What are the things that I could shift three inches to the left in my life? Are there things in the library that we don’t feel we have control over, but that we actually do control, and that we could shift ever so slightly?

For me, for today, it means not getting too emotionally involved in stuff, and taking a walk over my lunch break, and sending off an email I’ve been dreading for no good reason.

Picture originally uploaded to flickr by Swaminathan.

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Things I Will Probably Never Understand

Published by Iris on Monday, September 22nd, 2008
  • The Minnesota State Fair
  • “Counsel” vs. “council” or, for that matter, “hermeneutics” … I have to look them up every time
  • Fall Term, just generally
  • Anything poached
  • eHRAF
  • why bad things happen to people I like
  • CSS
  • post-structuralism
  • why I don’t listen to more music
  • napping
  • gini coefficients
  • my relationship with the fact that I lived in Dorchester
  • cats
  • SciFinder Scholar
  • did I mention Fall Term yet?
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What I Learned about Libraries from Football

Published by Iris on Monday, September 15th, 2008

Not understanding football frequently makes casual conversation difficult, especially on Sundays during the football season. Hanging out in the LSW Meebo room yesterday and watching people talk about the various games they were watching, I thought I should do something to rectify this obvious gap in my cultural literacy. I had no idea there were so many games on TV on a Sunday. Mostly at random, I settled on a match between Indianapolis and Minnesota (though why it’s a city against a state I don’t quite understand) and settled in to watch my first football game…

…And I think I learned an awful lot about what it might be like to navigate an academic library for the first time.

It’s been a while since I was faced with a thing of great complexity and too little context to see patterns in the details. Most of the time, I couldn’t even figure out if what I’d just seen was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing in football. But, undaunted, I used my librarianish skills to find the NFL page on Wikipedia and follow the links from there to a glossary and set of rules. Yay, right?

Not right. Here’s the definition of that mysterious thing called a “down”: The period of action that starts when the ball is put in play and ends when it is dead. If you don’t quite know if you understand “put in play” and “dead,” this isn’t all that helpful. And besides, downs get counted up… why? and how far? and what’s the significance of that anyway? But there was no way I’d answer those questions by poking around on the NFL site.

Thankfully, the people in the LSW room very patiently explained these basics to me, and they didn’t laugh at me quite as hard as they had when I first thought that the football team here was the Twins… or maybe that was the basketball team… (I kid you not. And I am ashamed.) But you know what? It took me 20 minutes to figure out enough to even know if I was asking them answerable questions.

I wonder now if my library’s physical and online presence is as impenetrable to the uninitiated as this game and reference source were to me.

(By the way, by luck I watched a game that got pretty exciting near the end.)

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Shifting Patterns

Published by Iris on Friday, September 12th, 2008

I realized this evening, as I checked my mailbox on the way back home, that communication patterns have really shifted. At least, they have for me. There was a time when I’d open mail addressed to me as soon as it was delivered, but I’d only check email once or twice a week. Now I check email multiple times per day, but I only open my accumulated snail mail about once a week.

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