September 2004 Archives
P.S. Terri -- Stop barking at me like that. I miss you too! Now you two go have fun!
Ummm...It'll be quiet around here for a few days. My computer is sick and had to go into the shop. It has at least one virus -- and apparently drinking the beer I gave it the other night didn't help its short-term memory either. Sooooo...I'll see you in or around a week and a half. (I could just keep using this computer -- but I need some time away anyhoo.)
Then again, I'm already experiencing forms of withdrawal, so no promises. I can't believe my computer is being fondled by another pair of hands...Why? Why did I ever let her get so sick?
Looks like I'm not the only Toshiba owner experiencing problems these days. Although I'm probably the most at fault here - not having virus protection and all, and trying to force my computer to drink.
Lately I've been feeling this incredible resurgence of a want. Perhaps that isn't the proper noun. (By proper noun I mean a noun that is appropriate, not noun that refers to person place or thing. Well, actually, I guess it does refer to a thing as well, since a want is a thing. Isn't it? So maybe I should capitalize it in this scenario.) This particular Want is bordering on becoming a need. Yet this Want is one I haven't experienced in many a day - so this Want has become somewhat unfamiliar.
I want to write. Then again, maybe it isn't so specific. I want to create. I want to do something to seperate myself from this god-awful feeling that I am still not getting anything done. There is a pile of invisible tasks that I can randomly sort through in my head, ambiguously prioritize, and shift back and forth. It's like I'm playing 52 card pick-up ad infinitum. It's like being a freshman in High School and having some big Senior knock your books outta your hands. It's like, um, really annoying.
I think this Want is a big ugly beast and I wish it would leave me alone. It follows me around all day whispering into my ear pulling my thoughts from the task at hand and stretching out the span of time before me until everything is distorted into some perversion of my...
Wait a minute...
I was just hungry.
"Klytus, I'm Boorrrrrrrred." [trailer]
All courtesy of Flash Gordon Movie HQ
Are you bored as well?
Is there any precedent for walking out of the U.N. General Assembly during an address from a U.S. President? Any history of any other disruption during an address - or is the process mostly civil? Not counting "axis of evil" countries, or what is left of the axis, should we expect any acts of condemnation from other representatives? There is a lot about the U.N. that I don't understand. Perhaps by actually asking aloud some questions I can manage to find some time to answer these.
Why exactly is Bush addressing them next week? Is this an annual thing done by each leader, or is this something different?
At the beginning of each regular session, the Assembly holds a general debate, often addressed by heads of state and government, in which Member States express their views on the most presssing international issues.
(But then that leads me to wonder which countries are allowed to have speakers? What is the procedure?)
In light of Kofi's questioning the legality of the invasion of Iraq (not that anyone's taking that seriously, perhaps the answer to many of these questions, including the next one), why is he (Bush) even being allowed to address a congregation he has no faith in? Is it a call and response situation or will the words likely ring hollow in a hall of bemused attendees? How can anybody in that situation sit comfortably and listen to a man who refused to listen to them? How likely is it that either party involved is going to check their pride and come to some sort of solution? Why do I bother imagining these questions when I am so irrelevant to the entire chain of events? Is there a degree of Kevin Bacon that leads me into that Assembly? Shouldn't I be doing something more productive - like finishing this chapter on the evolution of the database? Is it weird that I perceive the sentence "And this property of the relational data model, explored in depth in the next chapter, became the source of a real database revolution." to be extremely profound? That it makes me want to get to the next chapter so that I, too, can become a part of this revolution? I must. I must continue to turn the pages of history so that I myself may learn from it, compiling the raw facts and processing them into information --- as better data leads to better information which leads to better decisions. That, my friends, is what the revolution is all about. Needless to say - it will not be televised.
Related: General Assembly FAQs
UofM's Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library
Documents Center - A UN Depository Library - scroll down to UN
Disclaimer: This has been a post and edit production. All statements and their containing paragraphs are not considered concrete until exploration has either been exhausted or exhausted me. Please keep your arms and legs inside the blog at all times. Thank you and please continue to enjoy your stay at Yezbick.com.
I had my Info Sys class this morning and experienced two noteworthy moments.
To be filed under Modern Love: a compulsive text-messaging classmate answering his cellphone before class starts:
That's not what I'm mad about.
No.
No, that's not what I'm mad about.
Read your messages.
No! Just read 'em.
Glances around...
I gotta go.
Communication is an integral part of any healthy relationship.
An interesting part of the lecture:
Teach: Do you ever get into a conversation with someone, and you realize they're highly opinionated about a subject but they don't really have all the facts?
Student: You mean, like, Republicans?
<Laughter>
GRUNT. I feel like Ashcroft.
I've been accepted as a volunteer in the interlibrary loan department of the local library. I'll be working with the OCLC, which also has a blog, of course, or at least an associated one. But that will have little to do with anything I'll be working on...
I imagine I'll be doing grunt cataloguing work -- which is great. That's exactly what I've been talking about the past few days. GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT! It's a tiny first step, but one I am quite enthusiastic about -- as it will give me something I have long craved - experience.
Suddenly the days are starting to get filled with little parcels of meaning.
I also received an email today from the Wayne State LIS listserv that alerted me to a three hour discussion panel being held on the 28th: National Security and Academic Freedom: The Impact of the USA Patriot Act on the University. That should be interesting.
Tomorrow I'm going on a golf outing. Bizarre. I suppose that's the best way to spend tomorrow -- with family.
I never got around to that stream of consciousness thing - but I can make some sort of concerted effort here...
I went back to the library the other day and returned all the programming books I had checked out. I needed to get all distractions out of the way. I then promptly checked out a DVD on Wassily Kandinsky, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, a book entitled Nonverbal behavior : perspectives, applications, intercultural insights from CJ Hogrefe - and Donald Asher's Graduate Admissions Essays: Write Your Way Into the Graduate School of Your Choice, which is what I had set out for in the first place.
These are all in addition to the first edition of George M. Eberhart's fine series: The Whole Libary Handbook. I've made it up to the chapter on the ISBN coding - and I must say it has opened up quite a few hidden treasures. Add to that Herbert S. White's collection of papers Librarians and the Awakening from Innocence and Redesigning Library Services, A Manifesto from Michael Buckland and you can imagine how much dustier that old copy of Proust is getting by the bedside.
Then there's the two classes I'm taking at the community college. But I don't want to get into those here. I think they may be on to me. Shhh.
So this whole Personal Statement thing I've been struggling with. Well. For some reason or another, I've been finding it rather difficult to just sit down and write something out. The whole process is reminiscent of my knack for sweatin' deadlines. Philosophy papers used to love to milk my brain. Those topics would mull around in my head, points of an outline would gather themselves around the bedroom on sticky notes for days on end, all of a sudden - WHAM - paper's due tomorrow. The papers all worked out -- it was just my method then -- but this is a little different. This is about me. This is difficult.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and get a jump start on what I plan to begin using a portion of this site for in the future. I'm gonna turn my blog into my personal notebook. Eventually -- when I get that letter of acceptance in the mail and my stress level momentarily dips - I'll build a blog around the entire school experience. I haven't quite figured out how to implement all the tools around this notion yet - but it's pretty clear that a printable format is around the bend and that the categories on the new section likely will not be closely related to Beers in Me. Those have pretty much died off anyways. Don't worry. You won't have to see any of it. It'll have it's own folder and cozy little hideaway. Of course, you never have to see any of this. You can just walk away.
If, however, this kinda thing gets you going -- or you yourself are wondering how in the heck other people have gone about this process, then might I suggest you
Going through my log files I've noticed an uptick in the amount of people getting here via the audio/video search engine Singing Fish.com. My guess, based on the relevant statistics, is that many are finding their way here because of a reference I made to Munch's painting a while back - before it was stolen the second time. Today I decided to go ahead and play around a lil bit and see what kind of goodies I could excavate - and to my delight I fell right into the biggest pile of mp3's I think I have ever seen. Better yet, however, was coming across a video (unfortunately using Realplayer) of a lecture given by Clay Redding in what was part of (or at least to my ears sounded like) the LATC seminar series entitled: What is Metadata (and what does the Metadata Librararian do)?
For me this was a 50 minute confirmation of my chosen career path. Everything Mr. Redding discussed manifested my inner geek - and that, my friends, is a wonderful feeling. When he started talking about validation -- it was like, "oh my god! Validation! Like - fer sure!" -- only, it wasn't really like that at all. I'm beginning to question the direction of my personal statement - and wondering whether or not I should simply talk about how this creation called Yezbick.com has led me to my interest in the field of LIS. True - the higher calling was one of service in some sort of fashion - pooling my talents and exercising them in a manner which benefits the greatest number. True as well is the knowledge that I have long been a research junkie, always craving the building blocks of even the tiniest of morsels of info (highlighted yesterday where I drew the comparison between turning over a rock and discovering hidden treasures and the internet paths I've taken). Yet it was this website that gathered together these interests and pointed me to similar tastes across the web. In the majority of those that shared them one was likely to find yet another common link - librarianship. Is that a bad idea to bring up a blog in this undertaking? Would the admissions crew look at it and say to themselves, "This guy is actually talking about his website - what a maroon!" Or would they find it of genuine interest? Answers? Anyone? I wanted to have this thing done 4 days ago but have been stuck sweating words in the head for nearly two weeks now.
What is simply frightening to me is the mass of relative knowledge I seem to lack in comparison. I look over some of these resumes of people my age who are working towards their MLIS and then I have to check myself when I hold my own. Sure, they may have coded an entire site for IBM when they were 16, but do they know how to tell the difference between Medium Rare and Medium?
In Mr. Redding's seminar he talked about what, as a metadata librarian, it is that he does. Everything was gold until he began discussing the authoring of scripts. I have yet to learn the rudiments of any programming language -- and the course I was planning on taking to learn just the basics of the forsaken Java wasn't being offered this fall. I did manage to sign up for the intro to information systems -- although I was really hoping to get into the database class, which had closed by the time I managed to get into late registration. It has been much easier to teach myself HTML, XHTML and CSS over the course of two years -- but scripts still look pretty much foreign to me. I can read over them and see what they are doing, but to write fluently from scratch would be impossible. It is something I'd like to incorporate in a structured environment.
If you have a high speed connection you can check out the lecture and see just what it is that makes me tick of late - what kind of aspirations I have and why I have checked out 6 O'Reilly books from the library and have them scattered about my desk in the basement right now. If not, I feel your pain.
This afternoon I pulled myself by my toesy-woesies and headed up the street a stretch to the Star Theater Complex on 12 mile road. I felt a little cheated that Ariel had managed to see Garden State before me -- and started to wonder if I was suffering from a serious defiency in hipness. I also thought it would be a fine opportunity to enliven my creative juices which seem to be struggling to churn out even a brief 250 word essay. Well, I discovered two things in the process.
First - I am definitely suffering from a hipness defiency. Tonight was the first that I had heard about this new flick from David O. Russel, I ♥ Huckabees, an existential comedy. I know I'm a lil late on the scene because there's nearly 2000 pages that have referenced the film already. This, of course, shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. Indeed, just the opposite, as there is now a relatively small pile of sites to sort through in the context of the Internet. In relativity terms -- this is a good handful of sites, the majority of which, if not for curiousity -- I would never have happened upon. Two in particular are more likely to draw me back - 3 legged armadillo and justinsomnia (justin is a student in the Library Information Science program at UNC Chapel Hill).
It's a path I have taken several times to weed through the undergrowth that lines this digital forest. It's tough to find the healthy trees and sometimes it can be easy to mistake a weed for a flower. I like this organic internet. You see a pretty stone on the forest floor, pry it from it's bed and watch as hundreds of tiny creatures flee into the soggy earth below. Then you shrink yourself down and follow after them - at each turn finding a new jigsaw of caverns to travel along. Sometimes it's tough to find a way out.
Second -- it has not helped with the creative process at all. I'm not quite sure what that movie did to me today. The storyline certainly did not proceed as I had expected. It did leave me with a comfortable dryness as I left the theater. I felt unstitched. Removed from everything around me and void of any internal conversation. Apparently it was too much for some of the older patrons, who after having talked loud enough for me to hear them six rows back, were shocked to find a sex scene in an R-rated film. They just up and left, and had no qualms about other people noticing.
I'm gonna wanna see this one again. Not because I was so overwhelmed at its yummy goodness, but rather because I am a little dismayed at how smooth I coasted through it. I'm also surprised that I didn't walk outta that theater today with a mini-crush on Natalie Portman. Usually with movies of this type I wind up falling for the female lead just a tad. Perhaps I'm still harboring bitterness over Queen Amidala, or perhaps it's just the fact that her character played a role that had that one character trait capable of disgusting me. That move where someone says something and almost immediately apologizes with, "I'm sorry, I'm so stupid. Why'd I say that? I can't believe I said that. You must think I'm so weird. I'm sorry." They then sheepishly hang their head or look into the other direction until they have managed to coax an unwitting compliment out of you when you respond with, "Oh, don't say that. You're not stupid. I don't think you're stupid," etc. Then again, it may be that I was so turned off by the preview of Natalie's next movie, Closer (trailer), which seemed to me to come awfully close to tearing her character straight from Kate Winslett's in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (script)(Looking back I see that I've said similar things about these two movies. Similar - not same. I'll have to try to think more precisely about my description because these were two similar films that left me with two distinct feelings on leaving them.) Ultimately, I'd like to go back when the theater's a lil less crowded, and I can merge into the screen.
So here I am, detached. I woke up this morning with the aim of hammering out a personal statement. I managed to churn out a few sentences before I panicked and tried to find a way out. I guess it's alright. I need something to do tomorrow anyways. I'm just gonna pound these keys with reckless abandon -- go at it the old stream of consciousness way and see what comes out pre-edit.
