the city’s warmer by a couple of degrees

maura @ 4:59 pm

It’s Sunday night, the last day of the holiday break, and once again I am sort of grumpy. Though once again I have no real reason for the grumpiness: the break was good, I’m looking forward to getting back to work this week, and tomorrow’s an RT day so I don’t even have to leave the house.

Our break was kind of busy but also kind of not. We all stayed up much later than we should have most nights, but we still caught up on sleep (though tomorrow morning will probably be tough). Family visited us + we visited family. Jonathan cooked a ton of delicious food, and we all ate many more sweet things than is entirely healthy. We got (and, I hope, gave) lovely gifts: not too few, not too many. It rained and all of the snow melted, then it was warm and we went to the High Line. Then it got cold again and we went to the movies. While The Princess and The Frog wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I still wish the kids were old enough that we could have left them in the theater alone and gone to see Sherlock Holmes in the theater next door.

Seems like I can’t ever leave a span of time without some small amount of regret that I didn’t DO enough, so that’s probably the cause of today’s grumps. But I did get a lot done in addition to all of the holiday stuff. I cleared out my feedreader and kept my work inbox below 20 (as a friend said, sometimes a 1 day work week is better than a no-day work week). I almost got through my New Yorker backlog (only 2 to go!). I’m 80% done with sewing my new iphone cozy. We caught up on TV and even watched a movie last night (District 9, which was good, if disturbing). I finished the videogame that I got for xmas, though there are still puzzles that I haven’t completed so it’s not totally useless yet. Good thing, too, because my very own DS will arrive sometime in the middle of this week.

The video gaming was the most surprising thing to me about this break, actually. It’s been a while since a game has grabbed onto my brain so tightly. In many ways Professor Layton is the perfect game for me: an interesting storyline/plot that’s moved forward by solving puzzles. Of course lots of other games are like that (the Zelda series, e.g.), but the puzzles are much more overt in this game. I love puzzles but a game of just puzzles is kind of boring, you know? This is actually the second Professor Layton game so I’ll probably try to pick up the first one used on ebay.

These days many newfangled videogames keep track of the amount of time you play, which is an interesting (if sometimes alarming) feature. So it was also surprising to me that I could spend as much time playing a videogame as I did: 20 hrs over the course of one week! Now, I was only at work for 1 day during that time, and with all of the family around my childcare responsibilities were pretty light. And we finished TV right before xmas (and didn’t get a new movie until after New Year’s) so televised entertainment was low. And see above about staying up too late. But it still shocks me a bit to fire up the game and see that 20 hr figure. I always tell myself that I don’t have enough time to play games these days but of course, as with any leisure activity, it’s a matter of choosing to do that over doing something else.

What I definitely did NOT do this break is write. 2 personal journal entries, 1 twitter blog entry, and that’s about it. Which should be obvious given the state of this post, sort of scattered and not very well composed. I kept thinking of stuff to write over the break, but it’s hard to find the time for sustained writing in the vacationspace. I don’t really have any official resolutions this year (trying not to make resolutions I can’t keep was one of last year’s resolutions and I was not entirely successful, unfortunately), but I do plan to get back on track with writing. Starting today, I guess, since I’ve managed to squeeze a post out of the grumpiness. Go me!

in which i write 515 words about plagiarism

maura @ 10:16 pm

Right, day 29 here and I am suffering a bit more than usual from the Sunday night gloomies. Maybe it’s a sugar crash (Jonathan made chocolate chip cookies today), or maybe a delayed tryptophan reaction. Most probably it’s the classic post-family event letdown that always hits when the chaos subsides. Silly to have gloomies tonight, anyway, since I have RT tomorrow and thus don’t even need to leave the house for 33-ish more hours.

So anyway, I have been mopey all weekend about writing my next post* for the academic library blog, which is silly, too, because it wasn’t really all that taxing. You know, finding the space + time without children playing video games at high volume, etc., etc. But tonight I finally finished it. Jonathan read it and proclaimed: “it’s dry, and you talk about nuances of academic writing,” which is pretty much spot on for my goal for that piece, so go, me!

* I don’t want the pingback, so if you want to read it click “acrlog” in the sidebar over there on the right.

because it’s the weekend…

maura @ 12:45 pm

I finally had time to finish an ACRLog post that I’ve been chewing on for more than a week and drafting for a few days. It’s 724 words, so that counts for today, right?

(Warning: not interesting unless you’re a librarian, and probably only if you’re an instruction librarian.)

i had a little trouble with the scissors

maura @ 10:58 am

Yes, it’s November, so once again it’s time for NaBloPoMo. All fall I’ve been laboring under the assumption that I wouldn’t participate this year. Just like last year, the first 3 weeks of November is the busiest time at MPOW for library instruction. I’m on more committees than last yr, too, and in the midst of a big research project.

BUT. The big but. The point of NaBloPoMo is to force gently encourage yourself to write more, and I could use a kick in the pants w/writing these days. Back in September I settled on a new writing plan: I come into work at 8am and write for an hour before work. (This year Gus rides the school bus to school as well as home, which means that he and Jonathan need to leave the house at 7:30am, which suddenly makes this plan feasible.) Mostly this writing is supposed to be scholarly, but lighter stuff like library blogging also counts.

And this all worked swimmingly until around the 2nd week in October, when I started the student interviews portion of my research project. Suddenly I needed all the time I could scrape together to manage my research; my one Reassigned Time day/week just wasn’t cutting it. So I started devoting mornings to the project too. Which is fine — it’s a great project and I’m really enjoying the work. But I miss my writing time.

Now that the data collection part of my research project is starting to slow down for this semester, it’s time to get back to that regular writing again. And I figure I’ve got a couple of posts that I already know I’ll write, between Twitter Tuesdays and the other blags I write for.

So, I’m in. 30 posts in 30 days. I’ve done it before, I can do it again, right?

and then the next thing you know

maura @ 10:16 pm

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen into that beginning-of-the-semester-hole again. I meant to blag all week, really I did, but I was just so tired at night and now that Dollhouse has gotten interesting it was much easier to watch than write.

Last Friday evening I met Jonathan and Gus at the MOMA to see Projects 90, an exhibition by the Chinese artist Song Dong. Since it was just before a holiday weekend I’d hoped the crowds wouldn’t be too bad, even though it was the free Friday night dealie. But it was packed and Gus was crabby, despite the gelato we bought him in the sculpture garden. Sigh, 3rd graders are not so easily bought off, I guess.

Still, Gus was reasonably content to sit in a corner reading while Jonathan and I took turns looking at the exhibit. It was fascinating, totally worth the grumpy kid. The story behind it is that the artist’s mother became somewhat unhinged after his father died, and she took the traditional Chinese thriftyness to a whole new level and refused to throw anything out. She packed it into their tiny house and it spilled out all over their yard. Finally the artist was able to convince his mother to move out of the house and allow him to create an exhibit of all of the stuff, which she then helped him curate.

The result: a wooden-framed house skeleton in the center of a room at MOMA surrounded by neatly arranged stuff: tied bundles of magazines, folded clothing, rows of toothbrushes, scads of plastic bottles, a stack of soap cakes, a pyramid of pill boxes and bottles, furniture, etc. Watch the installation video — it’s mesmerizing (as was the exhibit). Of course the stuff is just recognizable, normal stuff, but as Jonathan said when you actually walk around it all and see the arrangement close-up it’s almost like a model of a city. Here’s the crayons neighborhood, over there is where the shoes live. So cool. And, you know, full of implications for our modern lives and all the stuff we use and whether it’s necessary etc. etc. Sometimes I miss thinking about material culture, so I was really glad we got to see this before it closed.

And then this week, with the busy, and now it’s now. I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about writing lately and last weekend I got all fired up about setting aside time to write on a near-daily basis. But then this week was busy at work (and it was short to begin with) and I ran out of time as usual. I’ve been thinking all week about Song Dong’s mom’s house, just an empty timber frame, as a physical manifestation of my goal: one empty hour to write most days. As ever, the problem is partly my fault and partly not. Not my fault because, well, objectively, it’s busy at the beginning of the semester. But my fault because my list is too long to begin with. And my fault, too, because I tend to fall into the trap of procrastinating writing with other work. Yes, sometimes the other work seems to scream loudly: “pay attention to me!” But it’s rarely truly urgent, and certainly can wait an hour.

I was wondering today whether Anne Lamott would be disappointed in me since I didn’t meet my writing goals this week. But then I thought that she’d probably understand. And she’d probably make me a cup of tea and tell me that next week will be better.

lose yourself in the sound

maura @ 10:00 pm

This summer’s been weirdly paced, slow yet fast. It seems like it’s just begun, yet it’ll be over in a few weeks. For me, at least — Gus doesn’t start school until Sept 9 because there is a rule that public schools don’t start until after Labor Day which this year is on 9/7, as late as it can possibly be. Maybe it’s because it rained all of June (and also I was strangely busy at work until well into June). And then it was cool in July (which I loved). But now it’s August and hot and I’m sluggish. All of which contributes to the fast slowness.

There’s also the thing about not having a lot scheduled at work which can sometimes perversely make it harder to get things done. It can be nice to have a couple of meetings, classes or ref desk shifts sprinkled around the week, just to have something to hang yr schedule on. I’ve gotten a fair amount done so far this summer — had a couple of big projects planned at work — but not as much as I feel like I should have. And I am still procrastinating weeding (tho I feel like I read/hear that everyone does).

But it’s a little scary to realize that there’s only a couple of weeks left to my summer. We’ve got one more vacation coming up and then it’s orientation + first week of classes. I’d love to have one more week of summer, one week for just research/writing. I’m in the middle of an article and have a bunch of smallish things to do for this year’s big research project and have a malformed mini-draft for another article and am trying to come up with a topic for presentation at a small local conference. And I’m sorely neglecting my personal academic/library blog. And I should write another post for the official academic library blog. Last week I thought I’d write about the slow fastness of summer, but now I can’t figure out how to do it that doesn’t sound all trite + whiny (which is the raison d’etre of this blag only, not the others).

I’m thinking about that whole “get up early + write” thing, the standard advice that all the real writers dole out. I try hard to force myself to work at night but in my old age I’ve realized that I’m a morning person. Gus’s current camp is really close to our house so the mornings will be more relaxed for a little while — this is probably a good time to try it. But of course then I will need to go to bed early, too. Funny how the real writers never mention that. Don’t they need sleep?

¿se siente mal? podemus ayudarle

maura @ 12:56 pm

Woah, long time gone here. I’ve been busy — got pulled in on a big project @ work, fun but time-intensive. And then there was the sick, oh yes, the sick. Gus had the stomach flu, then I had the stomach flu, then Gus had the stomach flu again. Good times.

I’ve missed you, blag! It’s weird, I’ve really felt pangs of longing lately for some time, any time, to write. That’s positive, right? that I really want to write these days, so much so that I’m frustrated when I can’t.

Good thing, too, because I got my bloggy wish. What girl doesn’t need 3 blogs, I ask you? (I don’t want the trackbacks so I’m not going to link them — y’all can cut-n-paste ’em if you’d like.) You can find me blagging 1-2x/month about library stuff on the Association of College and Research Libraries’ blog at acrlog.org. And I made myself a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons (another project I’ve worked on this year) for general higher education and instructional technology thoughts as well as stuff specific to the CUNYverse. That one’s at msmale.commons.gc.cuny.edu.

Last week I had a meeting in Manhattan. I do love my current (walkable!) commute, but it’s fun to have the chance to ride the subway over the bridge sometimes, too. There’s always something new to see — like last spring when I kept thinking, “what the heck are they building on that pier?” and it turned out to be a waterfall.

Right now there’s this cool underground art between the DeKalb Ave stop and the Manhattan Bridge. Brightly colored images are painted on the walls and when the train goes by and you look out the window the supporting tunnel girders make it look like one of those old timey spinning wheel animation things. The internets remind me that’s a zoetrope (thank you Wikipedia!).

(Ooh, it’s called Masstransiscope, see article + video in the Times here!)

Also when I ride the subway I remember that I really want to learn Spanish. It’s so tantalizing to read all of the Spanish signs and almost understand them. Someday there’ll be time, right? I suppose I could give up some blagtime, but I think I’m more attached to blags for now. Sorry, Spanish!

shameless self-promotion

maura @ 10:25 pm

It’s National Library Week, and I’ve got a post on the Oxford Univ Press blog. Yay for libraries!

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.

wednesday’s index

maura @ 10:45 pm

Years since we last subscribed to Harper’s Magazine: 11
Days since a colleague gave me this month’s issue:* 6
Issues of The New Yorker ahead of Harper’s in the ToT** magazine queue: 3
Times I have laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker cover, by the amazing Roz Chast: at least 4
Boxes of stuff I brought from my cube to my temp office space: 1
Pairs of shoes: 2
Coat trees: 1
Hours of sleep I got last Sunday night: 5.5-ish***
Cups of coffee consumed per day on Monday and yesterday: 3 (plus 1 cup of tea on Monday)
Hours of sleep last night: 7.5-ish
Cups of coffee today: 2
Episodes of Battlestar Galactica watched in the past week: 3
Episodes remaining until we’re done with the season: 1
Days this month I’ve kept my writing pact with myself: 13****
This past week: 3
Summer Fridays I’ll be trying to devote to writing an article: 5
Summer Fridays I’ll be waiting in a long hot line for water slides and trying to avoid being hugged by Elmo at Sesame Place: 1

* She was finished with it, and we were prepping for moving day, which was today. The second floor of the library is being renovated over the summer so about half of us are temporarily displaced, split between 2 big rooms. It’s got kind of a college dorm feel. I’ll be hanging up my Joy Division and Cure posters tomorrow.

** Top of Toilet

*** Gus came in at 5:16am Monday, which is neither unusual nor typically a problem, except that he woke up the kittehs who then decided it was purr -n- playtime, bah.

**** I’m trying to write something most days recently (unless I’m crushingly tired), to prime the pump. Blag, journal, incoherent scholarly-ish ramblings: they all count. Keeping track on a calendar, because I’m a nerd like that.