a little ranty

maura @ 9:45 pm

It’s my blag, I can rant if I want to! Today I had to take the subway both ways to work because of the rain and some big deadlines. Dear fellow straphangers, here are the inconsideratenessess (is that a word?) from today’s commute, please refrain from them in the future:

In the morning I stepped onto the platform just as a train was coming in, which is lovely. But then I walked onto the train right after two very tall men who walked onto the train and just stood by the door, all but blocking additional entry (I squeaked by with an excuse me and minimal touching, go me!). Now I’m as big a fan as any of the standing in the doorway subway strategy, esp. on shorter trips — it fits with my whole standing desk ethos. But people, if you want to stand by the door you should be the *last* person to get on the train, otherwise you’re just blockage.

This evening I got down to the platform only to hear the dreaded message “because of a stalled train at …” I waited 15 minutes and by the time the train came the platform and subway cars were packed. After waiting patiently for the car to disgorge its passengers I hopped on the train and tried to eke out a bit of personal space. I ended up getting a seat next to a rude person, yay! The kind of person who has a seat next to the door and a free seat next to themself and doesn’t scootch over to make it easier for someone to sit in the available seat, which means that everyone just sort of stands around and looks at the seat until someone finally climbs over and through everyone’s legs and backpacks to sit in the seat, thereby giving everyone a bit more room. You’re welcome.

And the final blow: when the subway pulled into my station I nearly didn’t make it off the train in time because someone was holding onto the horizontal bar over my head and would not let go as I struggled to move past him and under his arm. The train was stopped! No bracing with grab bars required! Sigh.

At least today didn’t feature my #1 top rude subway behavior: standing in front of the turnstiles while digging through a bag or pockets to pull out a Metrocard while others pile up in a line behind you, Metrocards at the ready. Seriously, please stop it.

i don’t even like talking on the phone

maura @ 10:55 pm

Phoning it in again tonight. I’m tired, we have to leave for familiness tomorrow earlyish, and there’s a heck of a lot of TV to watch. So here are some random thoughts/observations:

- I taught two classes this week. I miss teaching classes.

- I’m trying to use the inbox zero email management system. Maybe I’ll write a whole post on that soon — it’s proving trickier than I’d anticipated, but also has some benefits I didn’t anticipate.

- So rainy and hot this week. I am tired of being rainy and hot.

- How do things get so dirty? Seriously, I cleaned the kitchen today and it’s fairly incredible how dirty our clean house can get. I know it’s the city and the cats, but I wish it weren’t because I love those things.

- I hate to drive in Manhattan and it makes me a little sad that highways ring the edges, but the upside is you get the gorgeous views of the city while you’re driving, which never fail to make me a bit tingly.

- Fun thing that came through my email recently: the information literacy playlist, inaugurated when someone on the ACRL information literacy instruction listserv (ILI-L) who does a college radio show asked for suggestions. (This is a repeat if you follow me on twitter, sorry!)

- Tonight Jonathan made sticky toffee pudding, which was incredibly delicious and makes up for all of the pie I won’t eat over the next few days because I don’t really like pie.

a list

maura @ 9:15 pm

I keep thinking that I want less clutter less stuff less space, but then I can’t resist the college dorm room look of stuff taped on the walls everywhere. Above my desk at home is a small corkboard where I’ve tried to corral those impulses. Of course it’s full.

What’s there? Glad you asked! From the top:

- Handmade gift certificate for a $50 donation to Cashmusic.org from Jonathan from a couple of Xmases ago.

- Index card, a bit brown around the edges, with a note on it (in faded ink) that Jonathan put in my lunchbox the day I defended my dissertation, which reads “I am very proud of you!”

- Keychain with Gus’s first ever school picture in it. He was almost 3 yrs old and I’ve always been amazed that they were able to get him to smile. The keychain is cheesy, but it came free as part of the photo package.

- Half-used sheet of photobooth stickers of Jonathan and Gus (age 1.5 or so) from the not-very-mall-like mall. Gus is not smiling, but Jonathan is.

- “We are all Wisconsin” sticker from the faculty union I belong to from earlier this year.

- “Proud to be Shelfish” button from donating to the public library a couple of years ago.

- Fortune cookie fortune: “Knowledge is power.” It’s recent and from what I recall the food wasn’t all that good, and I’m not sure I believe it anyway.

- Note from Gus that festooned a birthday present of mine last year: “Magician gave this to you!! Don’t ask.”

- My ALA (American Library Association) membership card, because sometimes you need your member # to login to the website.

- Picture of Gus (maybe about 2?) taken with the Hello Kitty Polaroid Izone camera I used to have. It’s a sticker, too!

- NYPL library card, backside visible so I can see the barcode # in case I want to login to their databases.

- Business card (vertical orientation) for the CUNY Academic Commons.

- Business card (horizontal orientation) for Mud Flap Grrrl Designs, from which Jonathan bought me some rad embroidered handkerchiefs a couple of Xmases ago.

- My Inbox Zero Nerd Merit Badge. Still a challenging feat!

- Classic 4-photo black and white photobooth strip of me + Jonathan making silly faces.

- Poem that Gus wrote in 2nd grade.

- ID card from when I was an adjunct at Brooklyn College. The picture is so much better than on my current City Tech ID, wish I could have kept it.

- Gus’s extra passport photo from when we had to get him a passport to go to London.

- EFF Fair Use sticker that was on my old phone. When I peeled it off the stickiness was all used up, sad to say.

- This cartoon from the New Yorker

- Bookmark w/contact info from one of my professors in my graduate library program.

- Small piece of neon orange embossed label tape on which Gus printed “MOM”

don’t know about you

maura @ 9:23 pm

Everyone is greedy for something, and I am greedy for time. It’s just dawned on me recently, like most self-realizations do, probably because I’m getting older and time is much less elastic than it used to be. I need sleep, I like to spend time with family and friends, I have chores. I used to have hobbies. I can’t work all the time. I don’t want to work all the time.

I do want to work all the time. Or, more accurately, there are too many things that I want to do and not enough time to do them. This is a good situation to be in, I realize. It would suck to have a job that didn’t make me want to do all the things. I spent so long trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, dancing around higher education, technology, and research, trying to fit them all together into something with a job title and a steady salary. It’s still a rush to have that now.

It’s a struggle to stop adding things to my plate, to say no to interesting opportunities because I just don’t have the time in my days. Looking at my long list of projects, committees, and tasks (thank you, promotion application, for making me all reflective), there’s remarkably little there that I would jettison. I love my library work, I love my work on the big college grant, and I love my research and writing projects. I could do each of those things 100% of the time. But no one has 300% of the time.

I am having trouble squishing 100% down to 33.3%. I keep joking recently that I have 3 full-time jobs because that’s the amount of headspace that each of my 3 worklives seems to occupy, even if that’s not technically true in the meatspace. I worry about the other worklives when I’m focusing on 1 of them, wondering whether I’m ignoring the other(s) too much. I know that this is partly a result of settling into things: my newly-expanded role on the grant, my main research project heading into coding and analysis and writing up mode.

I know it will get easier to balance these 3 things, but I don’t know that I’ll ever get over feeling a bit sad that there’s not enough time in the day for all the stuff I want to work on. Greedy, greedy, greedy.

once more, with feeling

maura @ 10:00 pm

Yeah, I know I did the self evaluation as a word cloud thing before. But I turned in my application for promotion today and I thought it would be interesting to see the differences between what I wrote last spring (which covered just last year) and now (which covers the entire time I’ve been at my job). Nice to see the words “collaboration,” “open,” “scholarly,” and “course” so close together.

I’m utterly exhausted — catch you tomorrow.

things i am apparently bad at

maura @ 9:42 pm

Among the things I’ve not ever thought of until today is twitter self-promotion. I’ve been library blogging over at ACRLog for nearly 2 yrs (!) now, and it’s only just occurred to me tonight that I should be retweeting the autotweets that go out whenever a new post goes live. Go me!

tucky says

maura @ 4:25 pm

When we first moved to NYC we lived in Manhattan. Coming straight here from Chicago we couldn’t quite believe how expensive the rents were. But we wanted to be able to walk everywhere so it never even occurred to us to live in Brooklyn or somewhere else. High rents + paltry grad student stipends = roommates, so we teamed up with two friends from college to find a place. I still laugh when I think of the reasonably-sized 3BR with exposed brick that we rejected because it was a 4th floor walkup and on a street in Soho that seemed dodgy at the time and is now so posh we can’t even afford to walk down it.

In retrospect we did get lucky and ended up in a 3BR duplex on Elizabeth St. between Houston and Prince with all the mod cons: laundry in the basement, a dishwasher (critical with 4 people), and air conditioning. Of course there were some small annoyances about that place, when is there ever not? During San Gennaro the neighborhood was insanely crowded and the sidewalks were gross the next day. But really there wasn’t much to complain about: the location was fantastic. The old Knitting Factory was right around the corner and we could walk to almost anyplace we ever wanted to go. It was literally ages before I rode the subway north of 14th St.

We lived on the 3rd floor (I think) and at first there was a big empty lot on the south side of Houston between Mott and Elizabeth. Our apartment had a greenhouse-style window at the back of the living room where we put the TV, stereo, and video games, so we spent lots of time looking out of those windows. Just across Houston St. was a building with an enormous painted advertisement for Tuck-It-Away storage. It looked kind of like this:

That crazy squirrel used to completely crack me up: his cart reads “u store it, u lock it, u keep key.” We never knew Tuck-It-Away’s location was because there wasn’t an address on the ad (this isn’t the actual billboard from Houston St., it’s a similar ad that’s apparently in Harlem). I couldn’t imagine where in Manhattan there would even be space for a building devoted entirely to storage.

We lived on Elizabeth for two years and sometime in the second year construction started on a huge apartment building on that empty lot just north of us. It was a sad sad day when the building rose high enough that we could no longer sit on our sofa and see Tucky and his cart encouraging us to store our stuff. The structure with Tucky painted on it was itself next to an empty lot, and later still (I think after we’d left Elizabeth St.) yet another new building went up on that lot, and Tucky was gone.

This past academic year I’ve been doing fieldwork for my research project at City College up in northern Manhattan. I hadn’t thought about Tucky in years, probably almost a decade. But as the photo shows there’s a big Tuck-It-Away facility on Broadway and 131st St. The 1 train does a curious thing and pops aboveground at 116th St., heading back underground by 137th St. where I get off to go to City College. One day as I was getting myself together before my stop I looked out the window and there it was, in all of it’s orange glory: the home of Tucky. And now I know.

Photo by Julia Manzerova

thru the flowers

maura @ 8:27 am

It’s a curious thing, this quitting Facebook. Not that I was ever a heavy (or unconflicted) fb user, but I definitely miss it for all the reasons I thought I would: it was nice to have the opportunity to keep up with folks I don’t see often, and now I don’t get to see pictures of everyone’s kids. Lots of people are on Twitter, but not everyone. And of course there are those blasted private fb links that sometimes get sent around, the very existence of which presumes that the entire world is on fb (and why wouldn’t they be?).

Last Friday was my birthday so of course I also missed seeing those HBD messages come rolling in throughout the day. I moped about it a bit, though not too much since I was at a scholarly communications workshop all day, which was a fun + nerdy way to spend my birthday. I also had a moment of panic when I realized that there are lots of folks whose birthdays I don’t know but wish I did, and I’m annoyed that I outsourced that part of my brain to fb. I remembered to ask a few people when their birthdays are though I need to ask still more.

at home he’s a tourist

maura @ 9:15 pm

Last month during Spring Break we spent a few days in Philadelphia. The public school break is during Easter/Passover and the university’s break is tied to the public school break, which means that the time off was really, really late in the semester this year. Everyone was kind of strung out by the time break rolled around. I had originally wanted to just take a couple of days off and stay home, but Jonathan convinced me that it’d be better if we left town. I’m glad he did, since it turns out that we really needed that time away.

I always tell people that I grew up in Philadelphia, which is mostly true: we lived in the city until I was about 9, and then in one of the very close suburbs until I was 12. We did a lot in the city even then — we had memberships to the zoo and Franklin Institute, spent time in Fairmount Park, etc. One of my favorite photos of me as a little kid is in the Azaela Garden in 1973 — my flowered bellbottoms are teh awesome. My mom grew up in Northeast Philly and my grandmother lived there (in the same row house) almost until she died in the late ’90s. We moved away when I was in junior high but then moved back East, to Delaware, which is where I went to high school. Delaware is boring so I often went up to Philadelphia on the weekends with my friends.

I was actually in Philly twice last month: at the beginning of the month for the national academic librarianship conference (I gave a poster!), then later for break. It’s very strange to go to Philadelphia now, esp. as a tourist. I have more or less accurate memories of much of the geography and architecture, and Center City is a big grid, even easier to navigate than Manhattan. But things have changed in the past 2+ decades of course: there are lots of newer, bigger buildings, Wanamaker’s is now Macy’s, etc. Some things are not where I remember them: I thought that the Academy of Music, where my paternal grandmother, mother, and I would go see the Nutcracker every year, was much further north, closer to City Hall.

For our minivacation we stayed in a hotel in Society Hill, just one block from the arty movie theater where I saw Last Temptation of Christ (complete with picketers!). Just north of that part of town is the formerly run-down now newly hip + arty Old City, where I don’t think I’ve ever spent much time. My memories of the historic areas around Independence Mall are most hazy — I remember countless school trips, but not really any specifics. As it happened Independence Hall is currently shrouded in scaffolding for renovations, but the two blocks to the east have lots of pretty colonial buildings and open green spaces that were lovely to walk through.

Despite staying in a hotel only a few blocks north, we did not spend any time on South Street, probably the site of my clearest memories (along with the art museum). When I thought I was all cool and arty in high school I spent lots of time wandering up and down South Street, looking at punk clothes I was too chicken to buy at Zipperhead, browsing for records and used books. I saw Athens, GA: Inside/Out at TLA in high school when it was still a movie theater, and the Sugarcubes there in college when it turned into a concert venue. Probably best that we didn’t stroll down there last month: everything changes, and a quick look w/Google street view confirms my suspicions of chain stores and new construction. Which is neither unusual (I’m looking at you, East Village) nor bad, necessarily.

I do regret not going down to Jim’s for a cheesesteak, though. And at least in 2009 when the Google streetview cars took pictures, the ants and zipper were still visible on the old Zipperhead building across the street, which I’m sure Gus would have thought was cool.

words for evaluating

maura @ 9:39 pm

Tonight I finally finished my self evaluation for work. We’re using a new form this year so this is the first time I’ve had to write a narrative rather than just a bulleted list. It took much longer than I thought it would, in part because I kept gravitating toward the same words over and over again and having to pause to reword (thank you, thesaurus!).

Anyway, I got to wondering what my self evaluation would look like as a word cloud. So here it is:

In some ways it’s a bit surprising (also? really?). But library, information literacy, students, faculty, research, work, City Tech, and CUNY are biggest, which seems pretty dead on to me.