Category: Random Thoughts

Today classes started. I survived, but I’m completely exhausted. All day long there was noise and bustle. In the morning I was working out the last-minute details for some student worker training I’m co-coordinating, planning library sessions, and answering emails. All afternoon I was sitting at the reference desk. And then in the evening the president of the college hosted his beginning of the year garden party, so I went there to eat shrimp and chat with people.

Now I’m lying on the couch in the gathering dusk soaking up the silence and the stillness. Even getting left-overs for dinner seems like an insurmountable challenge. I can’t bring myself to turn on a lamp, listen to music, or even turn on the TV. Instead, I’ll lie here for a while listening to my cat breathe. Only once I’m able to contemplate dinner, or a lamp, or even scratching my itchy ankle… only then will I let myself think about and prepare for tomorrow.

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Today was one of those days that defies the laws of time and space, but in a bad way. From the moment I got out of bed until now, everything’s been a struggle. Reference schedule headaches, uncomfortably close brushes with confrontation, a group of students who hadn’t read the common reading book but who needed to discuss it with me for an hour, mass emails to all my faculty (9 separate emails for 9 separate departments), long and complicated reference questions during the 2 hours when I volunteered to cover the desk while nobody else could, and 6 or 7 other mini-crises marked my day and stretched it long beyond it’s normal hours. And through it all, Twitter was down. I mean really… I’m several straws past a broken back.

So now I’m sitting on my couch, in my PJs, aimlessly poking the internet, and watching my sister cook for me. Seriously, if my sister weren’t here I think I’d have skipped the whole dinner thing. Too much effort. But luckily, she’s here, and she was also up for ice cream before dinner… which is helping. Now I just need to survive tomorrow and then I can use the weekend to catch up on all the things I couldn’t get to today. *Sigh*

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I’m sitting here staring at a screen full of stylized puffy blue clouds and a text box which reads,

“Twitter is being upgraded! It’ll have super strength and agility when it wakes up. Hang tight!”

And so I hang tight…. hitting refresh every third second or so, just in case.

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I was updating my about me page on my professional web site this morning (an activity I engage in far too rarely), when it suddenly struck me how untidy my professional self is. I don’t mean that I have a messy desk (though at the moment there are two piles of papers and journals waiting to be sorted and acted upon). I don’t even mean that I don’t have any focus in my professional activities. What I mean is that many of the groups of people I work with and many of the projects we work on are never named and defined. Half the time I don’t know if I’m on a “committee,” a “working group,” a “task force,” or just a project, duty, or standing meeting. I don’t know what my new job helping to coordinate the activities at the Research/IT desk is called. Basically, I do a lot of things with a lot of people, and we get things done, but we rarely stop to define exactly where we fit into the structure and operations of the library or the campus.

And aside from the somewhat arbitrary decisions I make when trying to tell other people what I do, I’ve decided that this state of affairs is just fine with me. I’d much rather spend the time meeting and doing rather than waiting for formal charges to committees or writing project reports. I enjoy working at a place where people say, “Sure, let’s work on that. How’s next Tuesday for everyone?” and then proceed to meet regularly for a year or so to get whatever-it-is done. I just hadn’t realized until today how few formal names I had for the groups I’m on.

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