All My Gettings

One of the other cyncial and none too enthused students here refers to our little section of libraryland as Nerd Kingdom. Let me just say that, were we to hold some sort of ceremony in which the nerdiest of us got the title Despot, I would win hands down. In the course of one day, I uttered the following things, and not in any sort of joking manner:

"What chat client do they use?" (asked of a friend recently hired to do chat reference for another university)

"My favorite library system would have to be pre-merger Dynix. Oh, and I really hate Sirsi." (when the person who came up with the term Nerd Kingdom was joking about being asked in an interview what her favourite library system is.)

"You should have used Cutter numbers." (Response upon hearing that a fellow student's summer job in cataloguing had run into a tight spot by not expanding Library of Congress Classification widely enough.)

Yes, I am feeling like both a total loser and really, really grateful to be in a situation in which others at least know what I'm talking about, regardless of their opinions on my eagerness to discuss these items. I'd really be hating myself if I had not, just this semester heard profs say:

"Making eye contact is like giving someone the gift of your company."

"You can choose any of the topics from this list or something else. Like, if you're intensely interested in lighting that could be an option." (she was serious. it's for a 10-12 page paper.)

"One of the most exciting changes in technology from last year is the pic mute button for the projector. Now, I can mute the picture....with abandon!"

I get to nerd it up for at least eight more months. I really should soak it in while I get the chance. That, or just give in and go get the PhD so such quirks can really flourish. But that's a lot of work just to be able to idly discuss library trivia. I'll just keep on doing what I've always done: tell these sorts of stories to people who have no idea what I'm talking about and expecting them to find as much humor in them as I do.

So, as I drove in my rented Toyota Yaris towards the little basement cell I call home here in Wild Rose Country, I had various thoughts, which can be broken down as follows:

1. "Oh, prairies. Eight more months of flat!" (Edmonton International is about 30 km from downtown and so you get some prime grassland viewin' on the way in).

2. "Wow, the architecture isn't any better than I remember it."

3. "There's the raw sewage smell that really makes the City of Champions feel like home."

4. "Huh, the area of town I live in is a bit dodgy after all." (I don't often get to see the boarded up butcher shops and still open peep shows-cum-adult supercenters that line the streets near my house).

5. "This apartment is smaller and much darker than I recalled." (this was momentary only).

And running through out all of these was the constant refrain: Eight More Months! Eight More Months!

I think I'll make it.

When I was quite young, my family lived in Troon, Scotland. Now, I don't remember much about the whole experience, but I do remember watching and adoring Postman Pat. I cannot tell you why I liked it so much but I was a fiend for him and his black and white cat. For those unfamiliar, the series takes place in Greendale, a village that boasts one of all the essentials of life: one church (CoE, natch), one handyman (Ted Glen), one school, one mobile shop driver, one set of twins (Katy and Tom),and, of course, one postman (Pat).

I remember watching this show daily. We even had some tapes of it until our PAL-format tv gave out and we got rid of them. The animation is stop motion, and leaves a bit to be desired in these days of Pixar and whatnot. Oh, and the episodes are something around 11 minutes long. But the show still has a very special place in my heart.

Or rather did until I happened to catch a newer episode while visiting my brother in the land of the Five C's (Cattle, Citrus, Cotton, Copper, Climate). HBO imports it, apparently. I am told (both by Wikipedia and IMDb that the show has been in a continual run since I watched it back in the mid-80s (this must make it one of the all-time longest running British series ever. At least for kids. [I just discovered that Coronation Street has been running for 46 years! And that Grange Hill has PP beat by 3 years.But still.]). However, if it's really been running without hiatus what in the world went wrong?

In the newer episodes Pat is married, and has a last name (Clifton) and a child. Now, I'd never go so far as to claim that I thought Pat was gay, but surely he was a bachelor before. I mean, given the rigor of his post route and all the personal problems he solves for Greendalians, how did he find time to marry, let along sire a child? This was the first problem I stumbled across. The second was that his child's name is Julian. Now, that's not really a problem as much as it is funny. How British is that?

So the second problem (or change, if you want to be more neutral) was that the train station is run by a family of Indian extraction. Ok, I'm cool with curry, Bollywood, and devanagari script but why the random insertion into Greendale? The villagers seem very friendly to them, but surely this is just a weak attempt as multiculturalism. I understand the cultural milleu of England and the large Indian population, but in a village where it's questionable if they've ever seen a Frechman, it raises eyebrows. How did this family end in the quiet glen? What is their backstory? Being a children's program, Postman Pat does not need to answer these questions. But the inclusion of Ajay et al really puzzles me.

Lastly, and perhaps most galling of the major changes, is the switch to a new theme song. The old one was catchy, peppy and optimistic (I mean, it may really be knock, ring, letters through your door). Now, the song is much softer. It sounds more like something that old people want piped into their elevators rather than a rousing intro to the not-so-wacky adventures of a small town postman.

So I'm left to lament the continued assault on all things my pre-kindergarten self held dear. I should mention that, while the show itself has become corrupted, the animation is worlds ahead these days (the characters can move their mouths, eg). I guess I should just cherish my memories, buy the dvds of the mid-80s version and count my lucky stars that the same folks who suggested the minority station master didn't demand a switch to Postperson Pat.

1. we put a lot of trust in our fourteen year-olds

2. while the JetStar II can fit three people in the middle car, this presupposes one is Ms. Lohan in the height of her Skeletor phase, or at the very least, a consumptive in the final throes

3. #2 is really an extension of the fact that, if you ever want to feel out of place, you should visit an amusement park in an odd-numbered group

4. people actually do throw up on rides (and it takes longer than you'd think to cleanit up)

5. not only do people spend money on midway games, one staffer has seen a man spend fifty dollars on a toss game before giving up

6. the Icee costs less than the Frozen lemonade, and is essentially the same thing

I recently discovered that I have, once again, failed to correctly parse something in my native language. It's the hymn "There is a Green Hill Far Away". In it, the third verse reads:

There was no other good enough enough to pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in

I have always understood this to mean something along the lines that even Jesus could not cover our sins but merely create the tools that we needed in order to work out our own salvation (I believe in nothing if not salvation by work. Really hard work.) Apparently, the majority of people disagree with me and frankly think I'm a bit touched to read it this way. They see it to mean that Jesus was the only one good enough to have wrought what he did. One more proof that English, while native to me, does not always think like I do.

My reading makes so much more sense, though, doctrinally, doesn't it? I mean, we don't believe in salvation by grace alone, which the standard reading seems to imply. So I did a bit of poking around. The solution lies in the fact that, barring postmortal acceptance, Cecil Frances Alexander is no Mormon. She (that's right, a woman named Cecil!) was a British Protestant who wrote songs for her Sunday School class. So, she's all about sola gratia.

I appreciated this quote from Karen Lynn Davidson's Our Latter-day Hymns:

Mrs. Alexander did not ever travel in the Holy Land. Those who have been to Judea will have noted the absence of anything like the "green hill" of the hymn's first line; such hills are more typical of Mrs. Alexander's native Ireland. But the doctrinal truths of the hymn are more important than its correlation with geographical reality.

Right. No need to be accurate or anything. It's not like the Bible is the inerrant word or God for her. Oh, wait. Sola scriptura. Oh well. A for effort.

I think I'll just stick to my parsing though. It reminds me of the just how far I'll fall short of salvation.

One of my favorite bits of librarianship is the waiting. Not that I'm just an incredible patient person who adores doing nothing, but librarian waiting (wouldn't it be lovely if we were German and could use "Bibliothekarwartend"?) isn't really doing nothing. It's a fine balance between doing a nothing-something so your boss thinks you're hard at work, doing a something-something so your work gets done and doing a nothing-nothing so that patrons feel comfortable approaching you. After a good three years of desk work, I think I'm just starting to get this the whole thing down.

Surfing is probably the best way to wait. However, there is simply not enough interesting content added to the internet daily to allow for four of five hours of browsing. Or maybe there is, but you run into some problems: a. finding it, b. ensuring it's appropriate for viewing at work (nothing says "do not approach me" like a librarian checking out the new Bel Ami line at the desk), and c. keeping from laughing so hard you cry. I ran afoul of this last problem earlier today.

I was sitting at the phones on the reference desk. This means minimal patron contact, but still a very visible pressence. I decided to catch up on what used to be my religious reading of Go fug yourself , a blog whose writers are cattier than a gay bar on Oscar night. It's a delightful little piece of internet brilliance, and is very funny. Personally, I find it very difficult not to break into peals of raucous, completely inappropriate guffawing.

Now, a smart person at this point would turn to something else, but not me. I decided to keep going. Which I did, and ended up with tears running down my face and a lip that was quite well-chewed.

Another good use of time, of course, is to read a book. People think this is what librarians do all day. That is simply not true. Sometimes we read about a book. Sometimes it's an article (thanks in no small part to full-text databases). Occasionally, we may even read a newspaper. But, surely we do not spend our days reading books. The main problem here is that reading non-computerized stuff runs counter to our three-fold plan. It looks to your boss like you're slacking off (you are), it makes patrons think you don't want them to approach (you don't), and, the books you want to read are rarely the ones that you aresupposed to read (thus, not getting work done).

So that's out. There are other options: staring off into space, twiddling your thumbs, imagining scenarios in which particularly annoying patrons get their cumeupance, more useful tasks like familiarizing yourself with the reference collection and policies of your library, or, obviously, helping to create meaningless internet content through your blog.

I like this waiting because I'm not particularly accountable for my time and, being the new guy, I can look and act helpless and not be shamed for being lazy or clueless. But it does take some time to figure out how to wait effectively. I think we need a course in this at library schools. We can even give it a boring title and make it official sounding. LIS 539: Time Management for the Information Professional.

A couple days back, I was looking up the mottoes of various universities. All of this came about because of an idea for a t-shirt. I want a shirt that reads “the glory of God is intelligence”. Not only is the idea really neat, but it’s also the motto of BYU, my alma mater. But BYU has two other mottoes (Enter to learn, go forth to serve and The world is our campus). None of these are in Latin, the common trend for mottoes (though the University of Calgary has a Scots Gaelic motto--a translation of a Psalm). This t-shirt would help me complete my “university motto” collection. I have a Lux et Veritas from Yale and a Vox Clamantis in Deserto (a voice crying in the wilderness) from Dartmouth. I’ll need to track down a Quaecumque Vera (whatsoever things are true) before I leave U. of Alberta.

Some other institutions have great mottoes. USC can stand for University of Southern California or University of South Carolina. Both are great. The one in CA has Palmam qui meruit ferat (Let whoever earns the palm bear it). What does that mean? Do their graduates get their diplomata printed on palm fronds? The Gamecock of U. of South Carolina have Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros (Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel). Why not? What’s the point of a university degree if not to lord it over your lessers and treat them poorly?

I like Cambridge’s Hinc lucem et pocula sacra (From here, light and sacred draughts), though the same prepositional phrase opens the much more humourous U. of Idaho statement: From here you can go anywhere! (that exclamation point actually appears as part of the motto). They’ve actually built in the “get out of here” into their motto, that’s nice.

The University of Arizona scoffs the need for Latinate phrases and lofty wisdom with the homey “Bear Down!” the official battlecry of a former quarterback. And the University of British Columbia instills a nice sense of entitlement with Tuum est (it is yours). I’m not entirely sure what is being described about the University of South Dakota with its one word motto “Extraordinary!”. And University of Washington goes even a step further from the familiar Let there be light to “Lux sit” (let light exist).

The proverbial cake, however, is taken by the University of Kansas. Every time their seal is used, we get an image of Moses before the burning bush and read outside it Videbo visionem hanc magnam quare non comburatur rubus (I will see this great vision in which the bush does not burn). UofK, by the way, is a land-grant institution funded heavily by state and federal taxes. Brilliant, really.