Going out on a limb

Which, believe it or don't, is not where I'm usually headed.

I've been thinking too much lately. Too much, because it's gotten even more in the way of doing than usual. The part where there isn't all that much to do is entirely beside the point. Why? Because people with their own businesses always have something to do. Homemakers always have something do (the part where a home is a business is completely relevant here). Writers really do always have something to do. Artists, scientists, academics, athletes, non-profit organizers, activists and even domesticated critters always have something to do.

So the part where I just can't find the time to do the things that are around me all of the time? That's the part that involves this: the experience of actual experience, no boundaries, no bullshit, just life.

And wouldn't you know it? That's the place the heartbreak starts.

I've had a premonition of deja vu yet to come: an unsolicited daydream of a conversation completely within current parameters that has not yet happened, but that I've already dreamed, years ago.

I've had repeat deja vu before, and it's a helluva wake up call, especially to someone who is so totally convinced of her own internal locus of control. Which does seem a tad wonky in light of the whole "sometimes bits of my dreams come true in totally awesome and easily approached except in conversations ways" thing. I've never really examined that particular paradox.

I pick preparing for the GRE now, thanks.

More predictable.

Big Crazy Idea (the letters)

It is a completely normal thing to hear me to rail against most any kind of nostalgia, whether it is in my presence or just sort of out there in the world. The Good Old Days is a phrase that I loathe and would not mind seeing eradicated from the world entirely (only to see it resurface as the name for an underground waltz punk big band).

Modern medicine is good. Ibuprofen is good. Sanitation, yes. Communications technologies are impressive and wonderful. Technologies that allow us to read and understand the words and languages of the past, and therefore challenge us to reconsider our presence not as the end all be all of everything, rather as part of continuum of incredibly stupid creatures who occasionally manage to create or develop or express magnificence.

I take from much of the nostalgia that I hear that people wish for a simpler time, when there were not so many decisions to make, and children were better behaved and played outside and families congregated around dinner tables and people took care of each other. I will not explore every avenue opened by those statements, but I will tackle one: The one of extended time spent together. The one about quiet and unrushed conversations. The one that I heard quite a lot right before I moved away from Lincoln.

"Letters? I love getting letters!" "You mean, like handwritten or typed and mailed through the Post Office, letters?"

There was a conversation around a living room about getting letters that started when I explained my Big Crazy Idea (letters) to people who did not know me that well, and who have at least two decades on me. They did not seem to believe me, and I didn't pursue it because they then went on to talk about how it felt to get mail. Mail that wasn't bill, that was meant specifically for the person opening it.

The point was made that email feels ephemeral, even if you have written and sent a letter, getting it via email makes it feel somehow less permanent or meaningful, whereas even the most trite statements carry an air of importance when written on a piece of paper and stuck in the mailbox with a bribe for the postman (stamps).

I knew two years ago that I was going to leave Lincoln, and that the group of friends that I was part of would be geographically separated, probably for the rest of our lives, barring visiting people or vacations together, or those adult types of relationship maintenance. The importance of those friendships in my life for the last several years cannot be overstated, and I realized that if I did not make some action to preserve them, it was likely, however sad, that they would fade.

I love writing letters. I love getting letters and responding to them. I love the act of sitting down with a typewriter or pen or computer keyboard and thinking about one specific person for an extended period of time. And the opportunity to share that experience is part of the joy and also the gut-wrenching tension of writing and sending letters to people. It is personal and it is intended to be that way. Individual and instant.

My letters have been labeled self-indulgent. It was a fair label, coming as it did from my second husband who received letters from me almost every day one summer as I was out in the field studying thistles and learning about dehydration and exhaustion and the wonders of corn on soft tacos. I learned some years later that he had not even opened almost half of them. It makes a certain degree of sense if you know him. I do not pretend that it is okay. I choose different recipients now.

I used to have a limit to how many letters I would send to someone without getting any response at all. And then I started this project:

I write and mail letters every day. I have a schedule and a wooden recipe box full (almost) of addresses pasted to card stock. I keep track of them, and record the dates on which I sent the last letter. They go out to new acquaintances, friends both recent and long-term, and people who may as well be family for how long I've known them.

Responses are beautiful and they make me smile, but they are not required and do not change my need to stay in touch. I am a difficult person to love or to know in even the easiest circumstances. Being away from almost everyone that I love and enjoy is hardly easy. Writing is as much a habit as it is self-expression and must be maintained as such even when it seems there is little to write about.

To be honest, I have not written every single day. Up till now, I have occasionally skipped a day and then made up for it one the next, that kind of thing. And I haven't written a letter at all for a week. (It had been a difficult sort of week.)

Guilt is an emotion I reject out of hand. We do not get along and while I am mercenary in almost everything, assuaged guilt is vile and empty in my world and I would rather have chocolate or a massage or The Ink Trilogy, thank you. Therefore, everyone on the schedule for last week will be moved to this week, beginning tomorrow, and I will endeavor, at least until December 15th, to write every single day. It is not like I don't have the time right now.

I say this and then realize that I have picked a week full of long, detailed letters filled with passages copied out by hand and fiction of caves and wordal wanderings about insect wings.

The connectedness of things

I have never really experienced the world as a place that is getting smaller. To me, it is a place that is surprisingly large and entirely unconcerned with me and my actions. I have always lived in one relatively tidy community or other, with never more than four degrees of separation between me and everyone known by everyone I know. Lincoln was fantastic for that - there are about 2.5 degrees there - the .5 is the coffee shop that serves as your social network hub.

One of the things that we, as a family, did this weekend was pick up a dining room table from an antique store in Brownville. We put it up, my father polished it, and we borrowed the kitchen table chairs to sit at for dinner with a guest last evening. My parents even pulled out the Spode for flatware. It was lovely.
 

Conversation turned, as it inevitably does when dining with a family, to stories of that family's history. We talked about my father's now deceased horrifying aunts. And we talked about my youthful collisions driving my parents' boat of a car. We clarified family myth that we could not possibly be descended from Samuel Johnson, as he has no issue. Turns out the real family myth is descent from Ben Jonson. Mythical genealogy turned to more researched information including the highly suspect reality that my sister and I are very likely qualified to be members of The Daughters of the American Revolution. It is an honor I would not normally pursue, but that I have a niece, and that niece may, in fact, benefit from membership in such a weird organization. I keep hoping that we were royalists, not because I am not a patriot, but because it would save so much paperwork.

Bozo Sapiens recognizes that today is the day of The DAR's formation, and reminds readers that for all of their helmet hair and traditionalist fundamentalism, they have done important things for women. (not excluding providing yet another excellent example that sex does not determine ability to be a bone head)

When I graduated from the 8th grade, I was given an award for good citizenship from the DAR. The award was given to a boy and a girl, and the young man who received it was someone who was just a really nice person. Genuinely a nice person to be around. They didn't tell us we were to get the award, and I have no idea where it is now. I never really thought of it as legitimate, not in my case anyway - because I wasn't very popular, I didn't participate whenever I could get away with it, I never did my homework and was kind of creepy, in that way that highly (almost pathologically) individual adolescents are.

The world is not any smaller than it was before.

The Poet thinks of community

All of this talk of libraries and how important they are to the communities in which they live has taken place without ever thinking of an underlying question: I have not yet taken the time to articulate exactly how I define community. To be honest, it seems hardly appropriate to take that responsibility on myself. The world in which I live is populated and changing. I acknowledge the clade - slightly modified for a social group whose common ancestor is more likely to be Biological Sciences or The Coffee House than a trilobite. Similarity does not necessitate contact, particularly not the continued contact over time and life changes that are, to me, indicators of the presence of community. 

Indicators, oblique and suggestive as they are, do much to define an event: the health of a pasture (leadplant); the presence of a city (population, population density, architectural diversity) or an empire (colonization, mono-language). 

Thinking about what defines community and all of the communities in my world inspired me to put together a list of similar indicators:

Geography: some defined site (web or corporeal) that is shared or is, as the horrible Library 2.0-ians have it, a destination. That destination is part of the community, and occasionally defines it by name.

Characteristic: an inside joke, shared attitude toward beanie babies, common belief system.

Artifacts: pamphlets, tattoos, you could make the argument for memories, behavioral patterns, obelisks.

Self-referential definition: membership in a community defines someone as a specific kind of person; the community's members define the present and future course of that community.

I have no personal evidence to suggest that a community must only be created or must only happen "organically" (as if organic growth is not deliberate, but I digress).  Time is a factor: time to develop relationships, time to earn/gain/pick a name, time to grow into an entity, however difficult to define. And members must share in the life of the community: events must be attended, the community must be referenced and perpetually re-defined (particularly if the definition is one that isn't supposed to change), the burden of obligations to the community must be justified.

All of the indicators that I've thought of and about require involvement and time. People have to maintain communities in order for them to continue, and if they do not continue then they remain social or political or work or neighbor groups.

I live in a town that has been around for about 150 years. There are artifacts of its earliest US history on every block, and everyone goes to church. What church is almost entirely defined by family and/or profession. I could spend days talking about everything that isn't being done to provide for a sustainable future as an independent community. I could spend just as much time talking about what is being done. There are more empty store fronts than full ones on the square, more than half of the restaurants in town are franchises, and the only grocery store is a Hy-Vee.

And yet, they all know each other. There is a fairly regular system of stratification that places you first at or not at the university, and then working or not working. They all eat at the crappy food places and at all the good food places and they all know Fred at the Hy-Vee (to be fair, there are few people who spend more than a few hours in Maryville who do not know Fred at the Hy-Vee). So, it may not be a self-sustainable community right now, but that wasn't the question, was it?

And on the much less serious side: I think a real community has its own indie self-assured love song:



And also: secret twitters at the ALA Conference. I love a good professional conference.

All communities need an underground to prove that the foundation is sitting on something.


*thanks to C and to A for the brilliant links, btw*

The Love Blog for October 8

I almost wanted to call it the "Luuurve" Blog because you know how happy I get about Freakangels every week and all.

Then I remembered all of the Other stuff I've got open on my toolbar up there for sharing and thought that perhaps this is not the time to get all squishy.

I've been doing limited research on just how much it's going to cost me to get into graduate school for this mythical job that I want to make happen (and, oh, it will, believe me. (even if I hafta carve it out of some micromanager's ass)). PhD confirmed that my brain is configured for it, so really, it's just a matter of picking, right? Right?

If the book didn't have a bit of mold, this would be far more exciting news: McGraw Hill has an entire series of books on Library Education and they don't suck! The footnotes are subtle and stay at the foot of the page, and the bibliography is enough to make out with. Seriously.

I'm working back to up my 100 pages a day of not-light reading, which makes very little sense as in less than a month, NaNoWriMo begins and I've got this big crazy idea in mind that means I'll have 2 weeks to write 50K words. If the writing and the crazy did not bring absolute joy, this would not even begin to be an idea, much less an incredibly possible one.

Libraries do not exist in vacuums, they are constructed. They are, in fact, one of the few social constructs that work against the standardization of humans that so many other social constructs require and create. They are, as has been discussed frequently of late in my clade, indicators of community, of the growth and health of a city or any other more socially defined group (because I weigh economy more heavily in my understanding of 'city' than of a social group). Issues of community, its definition, difficulties and how it is perceived keep cropping up in my Google Reader. (While I do not believe it is appropriate for this to exist to the exclusion of all other feed readers, I really do love my Google Reader. I feed it good things and then they show up every day - in great numbers of braingasm!)

Anything but social network self awareness, please!!! The British Library has a fairly large number of regularly updated blogs. The map showed up on facecrack yesterday, and on this blog that I read and enjoy: Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research. The exhibit opens on October 14. So. When do we leave?

Speaking of social networks, a beloved OL friend writes a fantastic review of the NewTwitter. He is also fantastic snarky and writes a webcomic called PitchBlack. You go read now.

There will be tea and more to talk about when you get back.

You're back? Good. Because this is where it gets interesting. (-er.)(yeah, that's not a word.)(*shrug*)

Two people contemplating the same sort of solution to a jointly witnessed problem hardly defines a meme. It does, however, lead to the kind of focused thought and conversation that makes it possible to go from a texted conversation about one person not wanting to own a bookshop to the desire to go and visit private libraries in far-flung (from the middle of the US) and exotic places to writing down a big crazy idea only to find David Byrne writing my soundtrack in photographs and bicycles. 

We're going to take a moment for me to be just happy that David Byrne is in the world. And by in the world, I mean IN the world, dammit.

My idea is not the same as my friend A's idea. She would have a privately run public library. It is worth noting that both of us started thinking along these lines because we believe that our colleagues at the library and those patrons who do not wish to be customers formed a kind of community, and that group was and is being disrespected and disacknowledged. I do not know that there is something inherent in the world of library and librarians (who are different than bibliophiles and very much not the same beasts (and I do mean beasts) as bibliomaniacs) that is cohesive, or if this is an experience that is shared by members of a variety of workplaces. Libraries have been around for a few thousand years. Librarians live in their timeline.

And then, Detroit came back into the conversation.

It seems that A and I are in good company with our little ideas. The Public Professor writes about a guy who is working in Detroit (seriously, this all showed up within a week of each other) to get folks to grow gardens. Brilliant! Food and work and a sense of belonging and contribution. You really ought to read more there. Some good stuff. And more on social networks.

We must live in the 21st century or something.

Edited about an hour later: Just in case it is possible that I wasn't riding a larger wave, I hopped over to Whitechapel and found this: Detroit Lives, part 1 of 3

Yes. 200 white kids on bicycles. Sometimes it is good.

It ain't the same as walking, but...

Driving through town today, I saw that fall is really going to happen here.


Yesterday, as I walked home from the University Library (with Volume I of the 1980 BBC Version of Pride & Prejudice clutched in my hands (yee!)), I looked around. Carefully. Like I had something to see. And the world showed me beauty.

The old Wabash Train Depot, sitting abandoned just north of the Teak House (I know, there are Greek letters that designate the actual name of the fraternity, but I call it the Teak House). Boards nailed across windows, visible holes in the floor, old and new brick in narrow and wider windows become garage doors or bricked over remnants of something that used to be there, only differently. The platform is still present in the flattened earth out front of the building and the old tracks are now an 8 foot wide walk used by students and other wildlife. I am naturally terrified of everything, and although most of the time that can be avoided or even removed from the equation, I was not inclined to do much exploring without an accomplice a companion. There is an ineffective lock on one of the garage doors, and a missing board on one of the windows. Through the gap it is possible to see that there is still glass in some of the boarded up windows and there is still some woodwork and the ticket seller's window. What more is there, I do not know, but oh, what a lovely thing to think of restored, or better, re-purposed. I imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. But that is because I always imagine leaded glass windows everywhere. It is like a disease, more aptly described as a filter.

I saw a tree made of branches like impossibly jointed arms all dripping with yellow.

A squirrel and I had a silent conversation at a distance. The squirrel in the tree, me on the ground. Solemn and curious and each on our ways somewhere other.

There is a bird's nest in a lowish branch in the tree across the street. I noticed it because if you stand very still and watch very closely, and do not allow your mind to lie to your eyes, you will begin to see the leaves change color, from green to variegated yellow to fully yellow bunched around round and spiked seed pods that look like nothing so much as, well, spiky seed pods.

Driving is not a sport for leaf-watching, and it would not have been an issue had I not driven down Buchanan and seen the most beautiful tree in the county sitting innocent and glowing and brilliant and inviting right out front of the house that I adore.

The fall that I got my first divorce, I lived in an apartment in a house on a corner where four maples grew. Every leaf on those trees turned yellow, almost on the same day. They coated the yard and filled the tree, and became light bulbs on the gray rainy days of autumn in central Illinois. I would sit on the steps to the sidewalk for hours, just to stare at the dark brown bark of the tree and the golden impossible light of the leaves.

I have been waiting for this day for weeks: the day that I see that the world is changing and now I can explore its alterations and have something to see.

Also, I applied for a full-time job.
Fingers crossed.

The Cat prefers the knitted rug to the sun beams

It is a slow morning, now barely morphed into afternoon and I won't really notice the time shift until evening when the walk takes me to work again. I do not mind late nights or weird hours. They leave me a bit off-center with nothing but the number of hours between one duty and another and a list of possibilities in between to define what the day becomes.

Right now the world is silent in the house and muffled through the windows and I am jealous of its movement and crisp air and sunshine and errands. I have an errand to run and may turn it into more than one, just for the sake of the fresh and the fall.

I've been writing lots of letters and find that I crave the moments of silence and thought to think of what to say to this person or that person, to have a conversation, no matter how one sided, that is thoughtful and concise and specific, or maybe wandering and filled with words of moments long since passed.

I have been sleeping longer these last few days. Noticeably. I believe that the excitement of extended conversation with a beloved friend and the realization that I must do this more often with different people probably lead to a certain amount of that sleep. Well, that and the damn cricket that chirped all friggin' night long and inspired tremendously deep sleep the next night. Stupid loud mouth. Rather: loud legs.

Something begins to settle into the silent parts of my psyche. Deeply felt joy and self-expression, and something about Haircut Day at The Antiquarium. Of course we were there. Of course. It goes like this:

I met my friend Aubrey for the weekend in Brownville, NE. We stayed at the apartment of a mutual friend (thank you, Cin, you are awesome). We each had something very specific to talk about with the other, and we also had a (as in one) specific place in the area that we wanted to go and sightsee. There are requirements when you visit Brownville and those must be accomplished in and around all of this.

We talked libraries. We talked cave adventures. We found the graveyard and drank some wine. There was lunch and there was an apple and there were salami and cream cheese roll-ups and granola bars and fruit juice. I bought a cookbook with showy soup recipes and we sighed and gasped over the desk and the type left from the newspaper that was there when Southeast Nebraska was the place to be. We strolled. We followed a map, and stopped at the statue of Gov. Furnas and showed a bit of honor and then made the point that it may not have been the best idea to plant a bunch of trees on the prairie. Which is not a place of trees, but of scrub and yucca and wild rose and lead plant and bluestem and thistles and nighthawks and poppies and gut-sucking assassin bugs. And wind. Oh the blessed wind.

The parking area at The Antiquarium is kind of undetermined. The approach to the building allows you think that perhaps it is a lie, that it is closed, that it is really closed, that there is nothing in that almost nondescript brick face. That lasts about 5 seconds until the nose of the car reaches the top of the driveway and you see that there is, in fact, a party going on. Kind of all of the time. The cars are just lined up that way, like they are staying for a while and maybe you need to know someone to be here. And we do. They are the books.

The end of the story is a foregone conclusion: Aubrey bought a book about a library and I put on hold a book about cartographers. I will buy it next weekend when we take my niece to this place and warn her than the cat looks nice, and he is, and he bites.

The beginning of the story is a hug from the universe that we got as we walked in and looked around and saw a man sitting in a chair with a cape over his top half because another man was cutting his hair. Well, it was Haircut Day at The Antiquarium, you see. Tom's barber from Omaha comes down once a month and anyone who wants a haircut that day has to leave Omaha to get it. Nobody buys any books, but everyone gets their hair cut. Oh, and someone brought some wine. We stuck around long enough that it got opened. Shiraz. With conversation.

The cats roam around and I am soft and lightly pen-scratchy for a while longer. There are leftovers of pasta with prosciutto and books to be returned to their library from mine. Now I watch the sun beams and settle comfortably into my chair.

Stillness considered

The semantics of stillness confound and frequently frustrate me.
Calm, Still, Relaxed, Chill.
Zen and Relaxed are not the same thing.
It is possible to take life not personally while still in motion.

One friend acknowledges the undeveloped ability to stop,
another asks what I fear.
Legitimate responses, and worth considering.

My current result is this:
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to make of myself.
One day that self made herself known and made it quite clear that she had things to do.
I could stop worrying, and just be still.

I learn stillness in small increments and define it gently.
As any skill, these things take time.
Time at the whim of a feline,
Time at the side of a telephone,
Time shared in chairs reading different books in silence.
As any life skill, it changes everything subtly.

Subtlety is defined as the set of all things that are not defined as me.

It is a skill.
Fuck.
I kind of like not having that one...


(not a poem, just written with lots of space so that I see what the words say)