paper chase is on

maura @ 9:11 pm

Happy New Year, interwebs!

We here at mauraweb! are back from our holiday adventures, which were busy but quite fun. We kicked it Santa-style at home in Brooklyn on Christmas morning, then met up with Grandma and Grandpa and hopped on a plane Xmas evening bound for the UK. We spent the next several days in London riding the tube + double-decker buses, tramping around castles, catching a glimpse of the Rosetta Stone (which is much smaller than I thought it would be), and hanging out at an awesome playground. Gus + his grandparents also went up in the London Eye and to see a play: a modern-yet-Grimm’s Cinderella. Tasty treats were had by all: meat pies, fish + chips and ale at various pubs, noodles from Wagamama, cookies + cakes + sausages + rashers (not all at the same time!) from Tesco.

Gus had a good time on his first foray to a foreign land, though in some respects we wonder how different it seemed to him. After all, we were in a city, going to museums + playgrounds, riding public transportation — lots of things we do here. Of course, here it’s not all Mary Poppins flats + chimneys when we look out the windows, nor are there palaces in the parks. While walking by Kensington Palace we were talking about what happens if a baby or kid is next in line for the throne. And he said: “Wait! I have a question: wouldn’t the children make foolish decisions?” Which still makes me giggle.

But enough about my Xmas vacation, I know you’re all wondering how my interwebs vacation went. We’d thought we’d have wifi in the flat but then we didn’t and for some reason my phone had no service the whole time, so it ended up being more of an enforced than voluntary break. And it was pleasantly refreshing! I did glance at my email once or twice, just to be sure our neighbor wasn’t trying to contact us with catsitting issues, but that was it.

The unplugging was nice, actually. Took me back to those pre-cellphone days of traveling with only the Lonely Planet to guide you. We had the TV for weather + news (mostly the sad Gaza news, made closer by the fact that the Israeli embassy was close to our flat and the site of protesters many days). I didn’t feel particularly deprived, either, though the same may not be said for all members of our party.

I’m letting myself ignore everything that happened on my various infostreams while I was gone, too, which has been quite a relief as I spend these last few vacation days trying to kick the jet lag (and the head cold that came back with a vengeance while we were away) and get ready to head back to work on Monday. This week I’ll be trying to start fresh and come up with a reasonable plan for keeping up that doesn’t take too much time or make me feel bad if I drop behind. I’m thinking that setting aside a certain amount of time (30-60 min/day or so) and using a three-tiered system (must read, good to read, leisure read) may be the way to go. We’ll see how it works.

olden times and ancient rhymes

maura @ 7:01 pm

I am not very good at relaxing, in general. This basic physiomental (yay for new words!) fact + my eXtreme <3 of my job = I have been pretty obsessive with the interwebs this semester.

But! Now I’m on winter break. Break! Hope it doesn’t break me. And I thought I’d try a little experiment:

No interwebs from tomorrow afternoon through New Year’s Day. No email, no twitter, no facebook, no New York Times, no desperately trying to keep up with the 101 library/tech/higher ed blags in my igoogle. None. I’m not quite going to kick it danah boyd-style, but I am going to take that giant matrix plug out of the back of my head, just for a few days, just to see how it feels.

Hope your holidays are happy! Catch you in the New Year.

green and breathing

maura @ 11:40 pm

Lots of ink has been spilled about kids today and their use of social networks, but what about us grown-ups? Of course the way we oldsters kick it online is hardly as important for the future as it is with the kids. But in many ways our negotiation of these spaces is much more varied + complex. When I have the time I like to read about this stuff — sociologist Eszter Hargittai @ Northwestern (+ her lab) has done lots of work on this. But I’m more familiar with what’s been done re: kids-college students than adults.

Recently I realized that DUH, it’s all about social identity construction! Kids (teens thru college) have had limited time (and need) for multiple social identities. I mean, how many kids really have a secret life (other than the one that all kids have running inside their heads)? For most people college provides the first real opportunity to begin building a new identity.

But by the time we reach adulthood we’ve necessarily constructed many social identities. There’s the person that you were in high school, the person that you were in college, your career persona (which can splinter even further for those with multiple careers, the archaeologistwebproducerlibrarians among us, e.g.), and your parenting persona (if you have kids), just to name a few. Through it all there’s your native family persona as well, the you that your nuclear + extended family knows.

These multiple social identities are often kept separate, either purposefully or for time/space reasons, i.e. my mom doesn’t know my library colleagues because she lives in a different place than I do, and I haven’t been a librarian for long enough for her to have had the opportunity to meet them.

So, I’m having some small twitterbook issues lately. And what’s kind of funny is that the issues are reversed for each online entity. In facebook: it’s all about the personal confronting the professional, and for twitter: strike that, reverse it.

I’ve mentioned before that I joined facebook to see what libraries were doing there. But, you know, you’re there, you have friends, they have friends, etc. And I don’t do any of the games or apps, but I do like the status updates + seeing friends’ status updates.

Recently there has been a huge influx of fb action from folks I knew in high school, and I’ve found myself a bit uncomfortable in that space. It’s not like I have anything against my high school or the people I went to school with — really, they’re all lovely (and if any are reading this, hi! You’re lovely!). I guess it’s more that, well, high school is kind of a yucky time, emotionally. For me it was all the standard teen drama (nothing THAT dramatic — really I am totally boring), plus my parents’ marriage was starting to break up (also not too horrendous, but not balloons + cupcakes, either). It’s not really a mental space that I like to inhabit much, as lovely as the people are, hence the discomfort.

I’m sure I’ll get over it, because really facebook is a social space, and is really far less professional than other places online. Plus, as I mentioned before, I am boring — the only real risk is that I will post something silly. Which is more a guarantee than a risk!

(Also, I’m hardly anonymous on the internets anyway, thanks to my weird name.)

Twitter is the exact opposite. I joined because Jonathan made me (lots of software developers use it) but so far I have only been using it in essentially the same way as facebook status updates — mostly frivolous. I do follow some librarians + library things (as well as famous people [Kristin Hersh and Felicia Day] and the AMNH!), but they’re in the minority on my following list.

Except that I went to a conference a few weeks ago and followed the live twits (still have a hard time saying “tweets” — too precious) in progress. And ever since then I’ve been chewing over whether to follow those twitterers. Because that will make twitter a more professional space than I’ve been using it for, and can it be both? Yes, I could create another profile, but really, who has the time?

Today I finally stopped hemming and hawing and jumped into the twitter followers pool. Twitter really is a better space for professional-type stuff, anyway. And I keep hearing about people who get good answers to questions via the twitterverse — maybe I can get some answers to my questions, too. Like does anyone know if there’s a concise, college-level summary of “Suzanne Briet’s What Is Documentation?“?

could be a tweet, but it ain’t

maura @ 7:26 pm

Today I got spam from Sookoo Waffle. Best. Spam name. Ever.

hey, kid, secret history

maura @ 7:31 pm

Last week I started walking to work again (yay for anti-inflammatories!), which means that I had lots of time to think in the morning. So I thought a lot about my complicated feelings about Christmas. And I believe that I came to some sort of understanding about it all (though I don’t know that I can translate that into any kind of action).

It’s duh to even say this, but Christmas is fun + exciting when you’re a kid. When I was little, our Christmases went something like this: Decorate the tree on Christmas Eve. (Sometimes my maternal grandmother would be there, sometimes she’d be at my aunt’s house.) Presents + breakfast in the morning, not terribly rushed. Around lunchtime (after lunch?) we’d pile in the car and drive an hour or so to my paternal grandparents’ house. I can’t remember if we saw cousins then or not, but my dad’s brothers + parents all lived in the same town. Dinner there, then home.

But that was then; things are more complicated in our modern era. I have 2 siblings (and Gus has 5 cousins), my parents are divorced, Jonathan’s parents are divorced, and everyone lives in a different state. Before Gus was born we did a pretty strict every-other-year thing, but of course with all those constituencies there’s no way to avoid multiple locations + celebrations.

Once Gus came along we started trying to have Christmas morning here in Brooklyn (yo), though we haven’t always. Grandparents usually visit, but we’re not really on any kind of schedule these days. We try to arrange things on Christmas-adjacent weekends with whomever we don’t see on Christmas. And Gus’s birthday is at the beginning of December, so it often seems like a month o’ presents.

Add to that mix my increasing stinky hippieness over the past 5 yrs or so and my general dislike of (most) shopping, and it’s hard not to feel like Charlie Brown complaining about Christmas commercialism. I’ve taken some steps to try and deal with it: spending less $, doing the handmade thing when possible, and wrapping gifts in cloth rather than paper. But I still find myself thinking about big pink aluminum trees when the end of the year is nigh.

Part of it is certainly everything there is to DO. We bake cookies as gifts for extended family members, which takes a ton of (mostly Jonathan’s) time. Then there’s the gifts, the tree, decorating, wrapping, mailing, etc. There are things we could do that would take less time, but they would compromise my stingy + crunchy principles.

So what’s the solution? I don’t rightly know. The multiple extended Christmases are probably the heart of the issue for me, and the anti-consumerist hoo-ha the icing on the cake. I wish there were some way we could spend actual Christmas and the few days around it with some family each year, but maybe not run from place to place over the course of a month. And maybe that might mean not seeing some other family members right around Christmas that year, but maybe we could see them at other times? Maybe if we travelled less, the rest of the craziness wouldn’t seem quite so crazy.

But, but, but…I like seeing family at Christmas, even if it’s not on Christmas day. And I like Gus to see family too, esp. since we don’t see everyone all that often.

Maybe EVERYONE should just come to our house. 1300 square feet is plenty of room, right?

like a stone thrown across the water

maura @ 10:58 pm

Guess what I learned today? You can make DIY shrinky dinks out of #6 plastic! While I have not yet tried this myself, apparently you just:

1. Get some #6 plastic (which you should really be boycotting if you can, because it is evil and not recyclable while so many others are).

2. Decorate with sharpies. What, you don’t have many colors of sharpies? What’s wrong with you?

3. Cut out the designs.

4. Bake in a 250-degree toaster oven for about 30 seconds. Watch the magic happen through the window!

I’ll let you know when we try it. Stupid lettuce growers always use #6 in their packaging, bah.

(Yes, I had a Food Coop meeting tonight, can you tell?)

let me try to pull you free

maura @ 9:28 pm

Interwebs! I’ve missed you, with your daily forced blag of months past. How the heck are ya? I’m still pretty busy. I keep thinking things will slow down any day now, then things pop up. Such is the downward slide til the end of the year. I’m chewing over a big post deconstructing what has of late become my dread of the Christmas season (complete with highfalutin’ references to anthropological essays!), but don’t have the gumption for it tonight. And maybe dread is too strong a word, anyway. Something like annoyance + unease + fatigue + nostalgia is probably better. Is there a word for that?

I was going to do “what we’re reading,” but I have not had time to read much of anything lately, either for fun or for work (my infostreams are neglected + unruly, sigh). Gus, on the other hand, has been a reading fiend. Apparently the trick is to tell him he can read before bed — it makes him think we’re letting him stay up later (which of course we are not).

I am not at all a reading snob when it comes to kids books. Honestly, he can read whatever Star Wars Spongebob Lego Captain Underpants Pokemon crap he wants to, as long as he’s reading. I do, however, prefer to reserve the ca$h money for purchasing books that he’s likely to read more than once (and that will take him longer than an hour to read, too). These are the suggested house rules for everyone, actually.

So we hauled off to the library one recent weekend morning and picked up a pile of paperbacks for him. While scanning the shelves I found a craptastic series called Beast Quest. You know the kind — there are 8 bazillion books in the series and they’ve all been published in the past year and their names are all formatted like so: <Crazy Fake Mythological-sounding Name> the <Weather/Elemental Attribute or Scary Thing> <Kind of Beast>. Plus cheesy cover art.

Well, he ripped through Zepha the Monster Squid in like 2 days, and similarly Tartok the Ice Beast (who is, apparently, a girl, I’ll have you know). These were middle books in the series so I requested the first 3 from the library. But then I started to feel bad that he’d have to wait for them, and yesterday was his birthday, so I headed out on my lunch hour on Monday + bought them for him.

And I have to say, they do work like magic. He’s been most excited about his new Nintendo DS, but he did pick up Ferno the Fire Dragon (Beast Quest book 1) today. I probably have about a week, tops, to order up books 4 through 8 bazillion from the library, so I’d better get on that.

sputtering to a stop

maura @ 9:24 pm

Well, that’s it, this NaBloPoMo thing has ended for this year. I feel a bit blah about it compared to years past. I did blag every day, it’s true, but it doesn’t seem like I really gave it my all. There were a few meaty posts, but mostly they were short + very picturey.

Ah well, that’s the way it goes. I guess with the superbusy class time of the semester in the first half of this month, my energies were not as available for writing. Maybe next year I’ll have figured out how to devote more time to writing even during the teaching crush.

Or maybe I’ll just prewrite a bunch of blags before I get too busy, and post them sneakily each day, as if they were written fresh + new! Except that I’ve just blown my cover, dang.

wizard needs food badly

maura @ 10:27 pm

Nothing like spending 5 hrs on the NJ Turnpike to make you realize that the future looks awfully much like the past. I mean, honestly, it could have been 30 yrs ago and our drive would have been almost exactly the same as today. Probably less traffic, but the roads are certainly the same. The infrastructure is identical.

In some ways we’ve achieved the dream of the 1950s: everyone cruises around in their own personal climate controlled bubble, listening to music, watching TV, eating and drinking whenever they feel like it. It’s car as living room, as Jonathan said earlier.

I don’t know. It’s not that I’m not grateful for all of the cool future stuff that we do have. This video (which Jonathan sent me from bing bong, I believe) is a hilarious reminder of that. And we certainly took advantage of the advances this afternoon + evening, when Gus watched Castle in the Sky three (3!) times while we were stuck in horrible traffic.

BUT. But, but, but. It’s hard to believe that we couldn’t have used all of our fantastic futurizing powers to do something better. Superfast trains that don’t pollute the way cars do (and are cheaper to run, too). Eco-energy, from cleaner power plants to better ways of moving electricity over long distances (though I do like the aesthetics of those giant electrical towers — they look like robots).

I don’t know, it’s just disappointing, I guess. Cars are stupid. And I’d even give up my iphone for a better train system. Though if I did, what would I use to read my web stories en route?

but the very next day you gave it away

maura @ 8:14 pm

Why is the lame Wham Christmas song in my head? A friend asked for fave xmas songs on facebook, and I said “Christmas in Hollis” and the entire Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. But someone else said Wham. I mentioned this to Jonathan yesterday and he claims to have no recollection of the Wham song at all, even after I made him watch the video on YouTube. Which I guess makes sense, because he was never a 15 yr old girl.

I was telling my sister about this yesterday and she brought up Music and Lyrics, the movie I’ve been trying to forget for ages. And now the songs are right back in my head again, dammit.

Have I said this before? Since we don’t have cable (and don’t watch live TV because the rabbit ears aren’t very good), we don’t really get to see commercials much. And apparently I’ve completely lost the ability to tune them out. Seriously, it took me like 10 minutes to write this blag, because my brother in law is channel surfing on the sofa next to me.