This one's going to be a doozy

So...a LOT has happened over a very short period of time, and I think it's about time I get it all down somewhere. Gird your loins, my friends - this is going to be a pretty long update post.

In my last post, I dropped my "I'm going to move to San Francisco come hell or high water!" bomb. This, as so many "sure" things in life do, has changed. San Francisco is still on the menu for me down the road, but a really fantastic, enlightening experience I had at the end of February made me think a little harder about that decision.

Bursting with enthusiasm at my new decision to pack up my entire life and head 800 miles south to the Bay Area, I applied for a couple jobs and promptly got extremely busy with school and other side projects. A couple weeks went by without applying for anything else, then out of the blue, I got a request for a phone interview for the first position - a Social Media and Marketing position with WibiData, a super cool big data start-up located in the Mission.

After bouncing off the walls with excitement for a few days, I snuck into a conference room at work for what felt like the worst phone interview I have ever given in my entire life. I tend to hate talking on the phone no matter who it's with, and adding the pressure of a job interview in an entirely different state for a position I had little to no relevant experience with definitely didn't help that any. After feeling kind of terrible about how I'd done for a couple hours, I threw it to the back of my mind and resolved I'd do better next time, and it was a great learning experience in the meantime. A few days later, to my eternal shock, I got an email from Wibi asking me to come down to SF for a day of in-person interviews with the team.

Even though I obviously was woefully underqualified for the position, and am pretty thankful they saw the same and decided to spare me that particular trial by fire, I can't say enough good things about this whole experience from beginning to end. Everyone at WibiData was so kind to me the entire day - I interviewed with six or seven different people, including their CEO, and I've never felt more challenged and intrigued by a company in my life. As silly as this may sound, the sense I got from everyone there was that they were all at least 3-4 years smarter than I currently am, and rather than coming home super discouraged by that fact, all that experience did was motivate me to give myself the kind of experience I will need to work with people that intelligent in the future. And getting to spend a long weekend in SF (ironically enough, I interviewed on my one-year anniversary with Google) with one of my best friends was a hell of a lot of fun as well.

After I got the phone call saying I might not quite be ready for that kind of position yet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and started brainstorming how I could give myself the kind of experience employers like WibiData and other tech start-ups would be looking for in team candidates. I remembered completely randomly one day that I'd seen a friend from high school posting about her boyfriend's new brewery on Facebook, so I did a little digging and found the name of the brewery. Googling brought up their website, and when I saw its initial state, I decided to email my friend and ask if the brewery could use any help getting their site and social media into better shape. And thus, my involvement with Seapine Brewing Company was born!

I've had an absolute blast helping out with the brewery so far. I got my Class 12 so I could pour at summer brewfest events, as well as in their taproom when it finally opens on June 15th. With a ton of help from a friend, I migrated the entire site away from GoDaddy to a better hosting provider after the site started experiencing significant server-side lag issues. I've cleaned up the site a bunch from its original state, and although it still looks pretty amateur, I'm looking forward to having some time this summer to teach myself how to do a lot more with it than what I'm currently capable of. In addition to the site, I've taken over all social media channels for the brewery - they had a Facebook page already, but I set them up on Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr as well. Finding ways to grow their following on those pages while not being super established throughout the city just yet has been a really interesting challenge, and one that I'll be carrying on for another company soon, because...

I was just offered a new position last week as the Sales and Marketing Coordinator at Spectrum Networks! Their situation is so strangely parallel to where Seapine was at when I came on board that I'm still a little shocked at how perfect the timing for all of this has been. I have a friend who works at CondoInternet (Spectrum is the more business-centric parent company of CondoInternet, which focuses on gigabit internet in residential buildings), and her and I worked really well together while we were both at Google, so I'm very optimistic as to how things will go with our teamwork at Spectrum. My job will be two-fold - I'll be helping organize their back-end operations, and will be helping them develop their industry presence and reputation through various social media and other marketing outlets.

Basically, this job promises to be the first job I've held as an adult where I'll actually be trusted with things of greater importance. My first "grown-up job", if you will. Working at the firm taught me a lot in the way of navigating office politics and not only holding down a professional position, but doing it very well, and moving upwards in terms of trust and responsibility. My position at Google started well - for the first 8 or 9 months, I was writing policy and procedure, sandboxing new workflows, offering recommendations for future provider/Google interactions, training and mentoring people on my team, and basically buzzing around in a happy, frenetic flurry of activity. For the last 5 or 6 months, however, the team hasn't needed someone who can wear a lot of different hats. My ability to have any kind of dramatic impact on what the team is doing has shrunk down to arguing policy minutiae, and my days have filled up with drone work even more mindless than most of the basic filing and data entry I did at the firm. If I'm not continually engaged with what I'm doing for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, I tend to sink into a pretty unhappy apathy, and spending the last several months in such a state made my experiences with WibiData and Seapine have been incredible for my sanity.

And so, as I sit here in Zoka in Greenlake typing away, facing my last week of work at Google, my new start at Spectrum, and only one quarter (this fall) to go before I'm finally holding my master's degree, I think things are finally starting to really look bright in my future. Next time I post it probably won't be as full of feelings as this one, but for now, all these feelings are more than okay with me.

New Directions

As I write this, I'm occupying a spare desk in the offices of Artfire.com in Tucson, drinking french press and contemplating how to begin to describe the past year or so of my life. Most of this blog so far has been about the trials and tribulations of a library school student whose perceptions of the library world have undergone significant change since the beginning of my time at the iSchool. This change kicked into high gear over the last year as I began working for Google, escaping a stagnant position and moving to one that couldn't possibly be more opposite dynamically, and as a result, this last year turned into the major crisis of identity and purpose that I've been expecting since my first day of classes. I'm happy to report I'm on much more solid ground nowadays in terms of what I actually want to be doing with my life, and while I've still got a lot to figure out, here's what I've discovered so far!

Firstly, and most importantly, while I still very much subscribe to the idealistic view of the future of libraries I discussed in the post I wrote almost 2 years ago now (What Being a Librarianarchist Means to Me), I've come to realize that this future won't be in place for a very long time, and it's going to be an uphill battle all the way. There has been some incredible innovation in libraries over the last few years, and I'm still optimistic that they will eventually evolve into these "local nerve centers for information" discussed by Godin in his article, but I've realized that for me personally, my interests now lie somewhere outside of fighting this good fight.

One of the most alienating things about my degree experience has been that the vast majority of my classmates are looking forward to inhabiting existing roles in the library sphere. While this is a perfectly understandable and normal direction to take, I find I'm less and less interested in walking into a job where I'd have to operate within the rigid confines of a long-established job description. My job at Google has completely opened my eyes to how much more satisfied I feel with my work when I'm working on multiple projects/products at once in every possible capacity -- I've had days where I'm pulled aside for 2-3 completely separate projects in the span of 8 hours. I've grown to love and embrace variety, and people demanding things of me that I've never done before in a professional capacity. I like walking into the office and not knowing what I'll wind up doing by the end of the day. This is not something I'd be able to do in the library sphere, at least not until I've "done my time" working low-level, static jobs in places I don't want to live for a couple decades and crossing my fingers that the Great Librarian Retirement that was promised to us all when we started our degrees back in 2010 will someday come to pass.

This has been the main impetus for my professional interests swinging firmly into the tech start-up camp, and I don't see them changing anytime soon. I made the decision to move to San Francisco months ago, and my move date (come employment or a leap of faith) is rapidly approaching. Seattle has been a wonderful place to live, and it will always be home base for me, but it's time for something different. Something bigger, and something more risky. The more job announcements I see for tech start-ups in the Bay Area, the more excited I get that I've finally found the work environment I've so desperately been searching for. These jobs demand that you wear many different hats every single day -- you are expected to learn on the job to fill existing gaps, and to learn quickly and well. Much of the time I've spent at Google has been doing exactly this, and it's hard not to go into gush mode whenever I try and describe how liberating and enlightening that experience has been for me. I can't wait to continue it in the more intimate atmosphere of a start-up, as working for a company whose name has become one of the most commonly used verbs in modern times understandably has its limitations.

Since this is already getting pretty long, I'll just call this Part One of my giant update and save the rest for another post down the road! Feels great to be writing again. :)

A Quick Hello!

Hey everybody! It's definitely been quite a while since I've posted anything in this blog, but I'm hoping now that the mid-degree crisis is over and I'm a bit more refocused, I'll find the time to write a bit more on the new direction things will be taking for me. Both career-wise, and personally. :) Tonight's going to be dedicated to homework and recovering from the brutality I visited on my hands and forearms at Stone Gardens earlier, but I'll be writing again soon! Promise!

The Anatomy of my Viral Video

A few days ago, I was sitting at my desk when my roommate, Scott, got my attention. I turned around to see that one of my cats, Sophie, had climbed up under her own steam and perched rather adorably on top of his head and was watching what he was doing on his computer. I, of course, thought this was hilarious, and managed to whip out my phone in time to capture a 1:15 long video clip of her sitting there and readjusting herself into a more comfy position.

I posted it on Facebook initially, then when people seemed to like it on there, thought I'd give posting it on reddit a shot. Reddit is one of my favorite websites and a pretty great online community, and until recently I'd just been a lurker (i.e. someone who views and upvotes/downvotes posts without contributing any content or comments of their own), but had recently been looking to change that. I posted it in a popular sub-reddit - /r/videos - and gave it an upvote boost by logging into a couple novelty/secondary accounts I've created, then sat back and estimated it'd probably get around 20-25 total upvotes. Boy was I wrong.

I posted it to /r/videos on Friday afternoon around 4:30pm, and by the end of that evening, I'd made the reddit front page. For those of you who aren't redditors, making front page is kind of a big deal on the site because of what it takes to get there. Your net upvotes (i.e. your total number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes people give you as well), on average, to make front page must be in the hundreds at least, and usually there's a pretty robust comment section accompanying these posts. What I think must have happened next - no actual data on this all-important bit - is that a redditor who thought the video was cute/funny/whatever tweeted the Youtube link to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing fame. Xeni then posted the link to Boing Boing for their weekly Caturday post, people started viewing, retweeting, posting to their Tumblrs, and more, and everything kind of exploded from there.

I woke up the next morning to find that overnight, the video had become significantly more popular. If Youtube Analytics is to be believed (and I have some reservations about that, but more on that in a later post, probably), by midnight that night, it had gone from maybe a couple thousand views to almost 60,000, and was still climbing fast. I woke up to two rather remarkable emails – one from ABC News requesting permission to post the video on the Good Morning America website and asking for any editorial details I could provide, and one from a viral marketing group called Viral Spiral who were interested in helping me license and manage the video. To the former, I enthusiastically gave permission, and to the latter, I asked for more information out of sheer curiosity. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the thought of making money in this kind of way, so while their array of clients was actually pretty impressive (they currently help manage viral videos like Charlie Bit My Finger and that sneezing panda one), I never really had any intention of enlisting their services.

Over the next couple of days, I’ve watched my view count steadily rocket upwards as more and more sites linked to the video and as more and more people shared it on their FB pages, Twitter feeds, Tumblrs, blogs, or emails to friends. The video made the Yahoo homepage for a while earlier today, as this screenshot that redditor PDXracer messaged to me earlier shows. It has been posted everywhere from Digg to Laughing Squid to Kotaku, and I’ve seen it pop up on quite a few news and radio station websites. As I’m typing this, the latest numbers I have from Youtube are 894,576 views, with over 6,200 “likes” and only a little over 100 “dislikes” from the soulless troll section of Youtube users. My video is the most popular with males aged 25-34, and is most popular in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It has been watched in countries all over the world, from France to South Africa to Poland to Iceland to Russia, and of the 1,200+ comments on the video on Youtube, a good chunk of them are from people outside of the US. I suspect it’ll reach 1,000,000 views quite soon, if it hasn’t already.

I am so completely fascinated by this whole process it’s hard to even articulate exactly how and why. Everyone has, at some point, seen a viral video – a video that you tell your friends about only to hear “Oh yeah, I saw that the other day. It was hilarious/awesome/scary/(insert adjective here)!” I’ve seen quite a few myself, some when they’ve gone fully viral, and others in the initial stages, but never in a million years would I have believed that a 1:15 video of my cat sitting on my roommate’s head that I posted to one website would have joined the viral video ranks.

I’m not pretending that the video is going to have any kind of lasting impact whatsoever. That’s the nature of most viral videos – they explode in popularity and make people laugh for a short period of time, then something else comes up to supplant them. Sophie perching up on top of Scott’s head might not have any kind of major social impact, or make any kind of statement about society as a whole, but honestly, I’m just really glad that she could make so many thousands of people smile. :)

Sleeping with my windows open tonight \o/

Today was the kind of day I've been wanting to have for a very long time. Woke up relatively early after some crazy dream involving old people, car crashes, gun fights, and trains, dawdled around on the computer for a few minutes, then shut it off and headed out the door for some adventuring!

My wanderings took me first to grab some food along 45th, after which I walked through some really cute, quiet Wallingford neighborhoods down to Gasworks Park. It's almost impossible for me to do anything productive at Gasworks thanks to the amazing assortment of people parading around, and today was no exception. Highlights included watching a toddler meet her first golden retriever, seeing some kid totally eat it while running down the hill with a kite (he was fine...just a little grass-stained), watching about a million duck boats full of embarrassed tourists sail by, and nearly falling asleep in the warm grass only to get jolted awake by the sound of a full-size steamboat chugging about 30 yards offshore.

After a couple hours trying and failing to read, I decided to head to the UW and see if the libraries had anything interesting to take home, so off I went down the Burke-Gilman. Made a quick stop at the Wall of Death (yes, this is a real thing with some pretty funny Yelp reviews), then headed to Odegaard to find that almost everything I'm currently interested in reading had already been checked out. I've been wanting to get back on a China Mieville kick ever since I went to the reading/Mieville-lovefest that went down last weekend at Chop Suey, but I think I'll have to wait until my SPL holds come through. Boo.

After a quick dinner, I snagged some milk tea and headed back to Volunteer Park to wind down my day atop the water tower. The observation deck has some of the prettiest views of Seattle I've seen yet, and either no one knows about it or I've just managed to hit it at low-traffic times because it's almost always empty while I'm up there. There are three or four pretty comfy benches up there, so I commandeered one and settled in to watch the sun set over the city.

It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes I really wish I could press pause and just linger where I'm at for a while. Sitting in one of my favorite spots with a good book, feeling the slightest hint of a warm breeze swirl through the gated windows at the top of the tower, nice cold bubble tea within easy reach, no sound but the wind, birds, and panting of the crazy dude that ran up and down the stairs of the tower what must have been 7 or 8 times. It felt incredibly serene - I do love spending time with my friends on weekends, but there are some days where it's nice to not have to hold a conversation with someone, or worry about whether they're really truly okay with Thai food instead of Mexican, or inwardly lament the amount of money you're spending on alcohol because after you turn 21 that becomes the primary weekend social activity. I came down from the tower because I knew it'd be getting colder out as the sun fell below the horizon, but the whole way home, I wished I could just push that pause button and walk in the glow of the sunset through the streets of the city I love forever.

Oh yeah, and today I successfully finished my first year of graduate school. Almost forgot about that.

Move Accomplished!

It's finally over! The move I've been anticipating/dreading/stressing out about for months is finally over. I'm now the proud resident of a beautiful studio on the corner of Boren & Union in downtown Seattle, and I couldn't be more happy about it. I walked to the grocery store and back last night (something I'll probably repeat almost daily), I walked to and from the office yesterday, and I've been getting an extra hour of sleep per night, which has made an enormous difference in how I feel during the day. I think I could get used to this. :)

School, once again, took a backseat during this period of dramatic change in my personal life, so I know I've got some catching up to do. Thankfully the readings and lectures this module seem to be a little less intense - trying to wrap my mind around the intricacies of metadata structure and the history/future of copyright during the same week on top of couch-surfing and preparing to move was a little too much to handle. I also failed to turn in an assignment, which I've never done before. It was just a quick exercise that wasn't worth a lot of points, but I still feel pretty terrible about it.

Speaking of class stress, I made the decision this weekend to not register for summer courses. I'd been contemplating taking Archival & Manuscript Services and Government Publications, both of which were being offered online, but after a lot of consideration, I decided I need a break. I don't want to burn myself out, and I can always take these classes later when they're offered again. Plus, I've got a lot of little side projects I've been wanting to work on, but haven't had the time, and taking the summer off would give me the opportunity to focus on something fun and creative for a while!

Okay, off to work. I'll try to keep a diary going of all the craziness I'm sure I'll run into living downtown, so look forward to those posts. Oh! And I also wrote another post for Hack Library School that should be up on Wednesday, so look forward to that too! The topic of choice this time around was LIS Overload (appropriately enough), and while I didn't get as in-depth as I'd have liked with the post, I'm hoping it'll be a good conversation starter on the site. I'll probably expand on my thoughts later in this blog.

Wait, I have time to blog?

As of three days ago, I'm officially homeless! Well, technically it's only for two weeks until my new lease kicks in on April 16th, but I'll be couch-hopping for a week until my folks go out of town next Monday. Then I'll have a giant house all to myself for five glorious days. Cable TV, a fully stocked kitchen, four beds to choose from...bliss. ^_^

School's been going pretty well so far this quarter. I didn't feel ready to start back up at all, which made for a scary first couple of days. I'm determined to not fall so far behind this time. It definitely helps that I'm really starting to feel personally engaged in the material consistently instead of sporadically - something I really had issues with last quarter.

At the moment we're talking about the Semantic Web and ontologies in Organization of Information and Resources (basically Cataloging 101), and in Information in a Social Context we're starting up discussion on Sociotechnical Perspectives in the Information Society and starting to form up groups for our quarter-long project. The way this project works, we've been asked to research an information issue in a local institution and report our findings at the end of the quarter in both paper and presentation format. I decided I wanted to target DRM, since it's popped up so often recently (the Google Books settlement, Amazon and Lendle, etc.). Got a great lead on a possible topic within the UW itself, so I'm hoping I can get my group on board with that one! Many of the institutions directly involved in these debates are local, so hopefully I'll be able to have some direct contact with them over the course of the project. Getting information directly from an involved party will definitely give an oomph to our findings.

Other than moving and school, there isn't much going on. Sakuracon is coming up in a couple weeks, which is going to be a complete blast. I know quite a few more people who are going/volunteering this year, and somehow I think living a few blocks from the convention center (and nearby bars) will be nice. :3 Oh! And I'll also be writing another guest post for Hack Library School in early May! It's going to be on LIS overload, appropriately enough, so if any of you MLISers have something you'd like to contribute (or that you'd like me to address), just let me know!

Je suis inquiet

As of 3:30pm today, my closet and dresser hold exactly half the clothes they used to, my massive stack of important papers has been sorted and stored, and a snowboard I didn't own yesterday is leaning against my wall. Not bad for one day. And my new camera battery finally came, so prepare for a ton of photo posts in the coming weeks. :3

I'm finding that the fewer things I own, the more comfortable I am. Sounds a little backwards, I know, but honestly one of the weirdest days of my life was when I realized I couldn't fit everything I owned into my car anymore. As nice as it is to have my own bed, dresser, desk, and other pieces of furniture, I'm finding that I don't particularly like owning them. And nothing, nothing feels better than tossing out old stuff in preparation for new and exciting people and places in the near future.

I'm not one to hang onto much from my past. Some people scrapbook, some people just shove everything into boxes and periodically go through them. I toss almost everything. I rarely go through the stuff from my past, and usually when I do, it turns out to be more emotionally stressful than pleasantly nostalgic. Not that I've had a bad life at all. I've had it pretty great so far! I just don't particularly enjoy reminiscing about the person I used to be. I tend to keep the really important memories and people from my past in my present (and hopefully in my future). I don't need or want to go through old diaries to dredge up things I left in the past - they were left behind for a reason.

I've been talking for a long time about leaving Seattle, and I think it might be time to finally do so. I'm about to sign a six month lease to live downtown, and while I'm definitely excited to spend the summer and early autumn living in one of my favorite places, it feels less like the fulfillment of a long-held goal and more like an appropriate farewell to a city that I love but need to leave as soon as possible.

There's a time for settling down and seeking out a comfortable constancy in life, but I'm too young for that shit.

Odds and Ends

Given that I just finished up my last assignment for winter quarter on Sunday, now would be an appropriate time to reflect on how the quarter went. What I did right, what I did wrong, and what I plan to change. Lucky for all of you, though, I'm not one for long-winded reflection. :)

This quarter was not my best for several reasons. That's okay. Next quarter will be different. That's pretty much all I've got to say about it, soooo on to other things!

The admissions committee meeting went pretty well, but it was definitely different than what I'd expected. Going into it, I'd been prepared to fight tooth and nail for the people I'd ranked highly and against the people I didn't think would be good additions to the cohort, but the high and low rankings were fairly consistent between readers, so we spent very little time reflecting on the ends of the applicant spectrum. When it came to debating the middle ground though, voices got raised, people got frustrated, and tempers were lost at a couple points, but in the end I think we turned out a stellar group of future iSchoolers.

I feel like I should say a little something about my guest post on volunteering in the Hack Library School blog, but I think the comments that came out of it speak more eloquently than I can. Volunteering has had good and bad experiences, and I appreciated everyone's opinions as expressed in the comments. One point that came up in a comment was the possibility that by writing on a negative experience, I might be implicating someone that could potentially be a reference for me someday and thus shooting myself in the foot. Let me say this to that:

If refusing to censor my experiences in a library, be they good or bad, results in me inadvertently closing a door job-wise in the field, then so be it. I've had to tiptoe around the sensibilities of other people my entire working life, and I'm sick of playing the game. If it's in a field I couldn't care less about, fine. I'll keep my head down to keep my position. But if it's about something I care about, then I can deal with ruffling the feathers of a few librarians who might be less open to criticism. Sharing my experiences in an open, honest way is to me much more valuable and worthwhile to myself and others than sugar-coating them. LIS as a field needs this kind of honesty and openness, and I'm happy to contribute and respectfully hear the opinions of others, even if they differ from mine. If this is a naive or idealistic point of view, fine. I've already experienced plenty in the LIS job market to jade me appropriately, but I'm still optimistic, and I prefer to keep my outlook that way.

That being said...

Reading List for Break!

- Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks
- A Passage to India, by E.M. Forester
- A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr.
- The Long Ships, by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson
- World Without End, by Ken Follett

And IF the library gets them to me in time:

- Charles Jessold: Considered as a Murderer, by Wesley Stace
- Sex at Dawn: the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, by Christopher Ryan
- Hating God: the Untold Story of Misotheism, by Bernard Schweizer

Not a bad list, in my opinion! I only hope I can get to them all - my break to-do list rivals the ones I wrote for myself during the quarter. I'm also re-watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, so that's going to suck up some time. I'd highly recommend this series to anyone who's interested in anime but perhaps a little intimidated by the vast spectrum to choose from. It's quite gory, but I completely love it - the storyline is extremely well-crafted, rarely has an animated series made me crack up so frequently, and it's easy to get really invested in the characters.

And with that, I'll close with my random overheard of the day:

"South Kirkland park and ride - the place where dreams come true."

Back in Black

Okay. Mild freak-out over. Life exploded a little bit on me over these past couple weeks, and school regrettably took a backseat while I sorted things out, but I'm starting to get back on track. I know this quarter won't be my best, which is okay, but I'm still going to do the best I can to finish out strong. :)

In other exciting news, I finally got my wing tattoo finished last night! It hurt WAY more during this sitting than my first, but I'm attributing that to a couple things that were different this time.

1) My first sitting was at the tattoo convention last August, so the adrenaline rush of having work done in front of hundreds of people definitely helped keep my pain level down. No such rush in studio this time. The endorphins kicked in for a while, but they only stuck around for about 20 minutes, so there was a lot more ouch this time around.

2) The amazing art and interesting people that surrounded me the whole time were great distractions. There's a lot of great art in the studio, but being face down on a table kind of prevents you from looking at it.

3) I wasn't expecting to have to get so much touch-up on the wing that was already colored, so that was a bit of a surprise. Kind of like going in for a cavity filling and being told you need a root canal.

EDIT: Here's a picture! Don't know why I forgot to upload one in the first place. *facepalm*

Pain (and subsequent soreness) aside though, I'm really happy to have them done. I'm not lop-sided anymore! And it'll all be healed up when sun dress time arrives in a couple months. Which I am starting to get really excited for, thanks to the sunshine I've been seeing the past few days. I might have even trained myself to like IPAs by then too (my current beer-related project)!

Alright, time to wrap up my volunteer shift and head out for some coffee/food and study time. I'd like to do some more application reviews, but I've been having issues logging into the Sharepoint. I think it might have something to do with an unsecured wireless connection vs a secured connection. *shrug* Ta ta for now!

Ready or not...

Sometimes I really miss the games I used to play when I was a kid. I grew up in a house with a huge front yard, complete with a perfectly manicured lawn lined by a rock wall, and a good sized patch of forest surrounding the house on three sides. I was lucky enough to live close by a couple families with kids roughly the same ages as me and my siblings, and since dial-up and DOS games just didn't cut it for entertainment most afternoons after school or during summer break, the neighbor kids would come over and we'd play outside.

As a kid I was shrimpy but fast, so I was definitely a fan of any game where speed over brawn was necessary to win. Tag, freeze tag, TV tag, toilet tag (don't judge...it was way fun), Fire in the Jungle...any game I could use to lord my superior running abilities over the rest of the people playing, I was in. Games of stealth and trickery were no different: hide 'n seek, sardines, kick the can, capture the flag, or even just a good squirt gun fight all topped my list too.

P.E. in elementary school and junior high was just as fun. Even though I couldn't throw a red rubber ball to save my life, I soon proved to be nearly impossible to hit, and I vividly remember games of Elimination where I'd be sprinting laps around the gym while balls and muffled curses thudded into the walls right behind me. At my elementary school, once a year, they'd set the gym up like an obstacle course, stick empty pop cans on all the obstacles, turn the lights off, and have you crawl around the course trying not to make any noise lest they nail you with the start-over spotlight. And don't even get me started on Field Day. Best damn day of the entire school year.

Why did we ever stop playing those games? All the games we grew into as adults are governed by so many rules. As kids, breaking the rules of the game or adapting them on the fly usually wound up being the fun part, but as adults, breaking the rules destroys the fun and starts the shouting matches. No one ever gets together just to play a game of freeze tag anymore, and the people that do see it as a novelty, not a normality.

Right now, I'm sitting at my desk finishing out my day at work before heading to a pub for some catch-up time with a friend followed by listening to some lectures for grad school and probably going to bed early. But sometimes, especially on days full of adult-ness like this one, I kinda wish I could be playing hide and seek instead.

Happy Katie is happy

Just a quick post tonight - Steam is having a completely ridiculous sale, so I'm about 3 minutes away from some serious gaming bliss. Downloading Portal (finally), Trine, Braid, Super Meat Boy, and all three Winter Voices games. Yay.

I've got to say, now that grades are all in for all three classes, I am pretty damn pleased with how my first quarter of grad school has gone. As stressful and overwhelming everything was at times, coming out of it with much better grades than I was expecting gives me a lot more confidence going forward. Now that I've got a good baseline established for what's expected of me, I can finally start to up the ante and really push myself.

I'm pretty excited for next quarter to start up too. I'll be taking LIS 520 (Information Resources, Services and Collections) and LIS 560 (Instructional and Training Strategies for Info Professionals), and on top of that, I'll be reading and evaluating what will probably be a mountain of applications for admission to the MLIS program next year. I'm so ready for it all, though. I'll take the stress of school over the stress that comes with putting off Christmas shopping until the last second any day. Whoops. O_o

In between now and January 4th is going to be a ton of fun though, so while my brain's ready to get another pounding, I think my liver's first in line. Christmas weekend followed immediately by an epic cabin trip with some friends and a NYE bacchanalia to finish it all off? Yes. Please.

Hope all you MLIS folks are having a fantastic break thus far, and congrats to all of us on successfully navigating our first quarter of graduate school! In a lot of ways, this will probably go down as one of the most difficult quarters we'll face, and I really couldn't have asked for a better group of classmates and colleagues to tackle the rest of them with. :)

HELL yeah!

3.85 out of 4 on my first grad school midterm.

...bitches.


:D

Seriously EXCITING news :D

I just got word tonight that my application for the MLIS Admissions Committee for next year was accepted! Meaning I will be serving as one of four student representatives on the committee that selects next year's group of residential and online MLISers!

I could not be more excited, honestly. I'll be reading close to 50 applications, and fully participating in the work and deliberation carried out by the other members of the committee (i.e. iSchool faculty, staff, and administration). It's going to be a metric fuckton of work on top of the pile I already have for school, but to be in a position to help give a new group of students the chance to begin what I've started with the iSchool is such an amazing thing to be involved with, and I'm very honored.

Maybe eventually I'll have the time to sit down and write a proper entry, but for now, I like the brief entries. Keeps me from procrastinating if I don't have to write an essay every time. :)