It is important to keep things in perspective.

Today I got to go on a tour of my university's book bindery (is that what it's called in English?) which made me realize that I might just try to get a job there instead of being a librarian or whatever.  I say "whatever" because it is basically impossible to get a job as a librarian here.  Anyways, it was SOOOOO completely awesome.  About 10 years ago I had a great short term job in the art department for Colorbok, making prototypes for the stationary and little bookies and funny little things there.  This type of work is like, the less silly and more official version of that, so I would love to work as I book binderer.  Bindist?
Next up, a really interesting lecture about the evolution of preserved writing/press/books, where we got to look at old ass books from the 1400s to the 1800s.  Including a Gustav Vasa Bible (above), which was the first version of the bible in Swedish.  Even my heathen and generally bible-hating heart can appreciate the word of god in this form (I mean, I do love books).  Apparently this thing cost about 7 horses when new!  We also got to look at several other books, including a little mini book about 5x3x0.5 inches in size, (or maybe smaller), about Cicero, from the 1700s - one of the first "pocket books" made in Sweden and another book worth about 200,000 dollars, made in pre-chapter and pre-paragraph indentation times... some time in the 1400s.  The man who donated it to the library bought it for about 50 dollars sometime in the 1940s, and it was by far in the best condition of all the books we looked at.  I got to feel the paper, and it was so sturdy and... fresh looking.  The print job and the paper combined looked like something bought from a really expensive paper shop nowadays.  It was fantastically made and preserved.

The lecture ended with the following piece of work - a job announcement from the University of Göttingen, 1748.  I'll try my best at translation.

Competency requirements under the hand-press era could be very high, which Matthias Gessner, a librarian at the University of Göttningen in 1748, gave expression for:
"He (the librarian) must have a noble and generous heart, which can overcome his avarice, and who is able to put the library's interest above his own.  He shall have a kind attitude towards library borrowers/patrons and the ability to give them good service.  He shall also have a feeling for beauty, accuracy and cleanliness.


He must have mastery of Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English, Spanish as well as the other biblical languages.  He must be able to understand the nordic languages and be able to work with documents in German dialects, middle-ages Latin and the Slavic languages.  Yet, most important are  abilities/understanding of the history of learning.  The librarian shall not merely know author's names and titles of representative work, and know which editions are best:  he shall also be able to show that he has knowledge within all branches of science.

Beauty Saturday

Warning!  This post has to do with my skin.

This is take-two after the first picture I placed here was a bit ghost-facey.  But look at my hair!  Although it looks lightened, this is really just a product of two things.  First, the shitty light sensor in my webcam, and second, a cheap beauty product diy bender.

Let me explain.  Every once in a while I read about all the toxic chemicals in beauty products these days and some of those times, I feel determined to take matters into my own hands.  I never do it, that is, until today when I checked the health rating of my face lotion here.  This prompted me into a google chain-search from home made face lotion to "the oil cleansing method" to castor oil for keratosis pilaris, a skin condition I have.   So out I went into the world, to buy a bottle of castor oil and a jar of coconut oil (my new remedy for my skin condition), and the ingredients to wash my face with oil - the "oil cleansing method."  Health toxicity craziness aside (I really tend to not give a shit after the first 5 minutes of thinking about this stuff. I mean, while I don't want my future kids to develop a third eye from too much ingestion of whatever, trying to live without absorbing crazy chemicals is completely futile), while a good chunk of my practical behavior would seem to say that I don't care or don't like to take the time to care about how I look, there is a good 35% of me that wants to try to care.  And I would also like to try to care in the cheapest way possible.  This led to:

Regimen


Oil swishing of teeth with sunflower oil - is backed by research actually using the scientific method!  I read several pieces of source material this morning, but I mostly wanted to try it because it seemed so weird.  I did, however, gag and almost throw-up approximately 6 times.

Oil wash of face with olive oil - meh

Oil wash of face with mix of coconut oil and castor oil - very sticky

Hair wash with only cider vinegar and baking soda (bikarbonat) - like washing with sand!

Lotioning myself with coconut oil/castor oil mix - almost painfully sticky

Results

Can't really say anything about the bacteria count in my mouth, so I'll hop over the oil swishing.

Oil wash with olive oil - I didn't really do this right, so I was naturally a little underwhelmed.

Oil wash with coconut oil and castor oil - actually pretty amazing because my face feels clean and not dried out, but doesn't feel greasy at all.  I even put on a light patting of the mix on my face after I showered, as my face felt a little dry after wiping away with a towel (google "oil cleansing method"). No visible blackheads on my nose (where I usually see them), and no shininess where I am usually shiny from oil production after washing with soap.  TMI?  Sorry.

Hair wash with vinegar and baking soda - see above picture!  I had been wanting to do this for awhile mostly just to see but also because all the harsh sulfates in shampoo make me itch like crazy (i use very simple soap without lathering sulfates for this reason - although I have a few shower gels I really like and use occasionally for their smell).  SO, my hair feels all light and fluffy in a good way, and is not at all dried out even though it sort of looks like it in the picture, and most importantly, it is not greasy or dirty feeling in any way.  It basically feels great.

Lotioning - this was rather difficult.  It felt like I was trying to pull my skin off because the castor oil is so thick it creates a load of weird friction.  But the oil soaked in rather well, I'm not greasy, and I assume it will take some time to help with the keratosis pilaris, so I'll have to get back about that later.  I did rub pure castor oil into a scar I have on my shin, which is about a year old.   Maybe I should take before and after shots to see if the scar really does fade over time.  The most important thing is: I am not itchy!  I am usually always itchy after showering from getting dried out, even after putting on regular lotion.

Conclusions 


While I'm down a lot of money from recently buying a new jar of regular face lotion on top of today's purchases, today's purchases were still cheaper than the regular face lotion and will probably last 3 times as long.  I am super happy that I do not feel greasy or itchy, but this whole process took more than an hour, which is a lot to ask of someone who only can seem to care about 35% of the time.

Don't ask me for a definition of "the time."

UPDATE:  I really feel like I should add that I was particularly not-clean before all this.  I hadn't washed my hair in maybe 4 or 5 days (whereas I usually wash it every 3 days at the most) and had also sprayed in dry shampoo earlier in the morning before I went out to buy this stuff.  My dry shampoo, although it works, tends to make the hair feel dirtier, with a coating of weird chemicals, even though it looks better.  I also hadn't washed my face with soap in probably 2.5 days, although I do frequently wash with just water and a wash cloth.

These dudes

First Laugh of the Day

Old times, same genes.

My grandparents are the two on the far left of each row.  I didn't really know them at all, as Grandpa Paul (Cool Hand Luke, there) died when I was 4 and Grandma Velma (originally Wilma!) wasn't really so interested in me - which also really didn't bother me so much, I guess.  I hadn't seen her or spoken to her in years before she died and the last communication we had was about her recipe for chicken paprikash; it was also nice to speak with her.  I can't say I mourn the lost relationship so much as I am curious about our similarities, which may or may not exist.  I also have the world's most cutest and kindest Grandma Madeline that ever existed, so that helps, too.

Yet can we not agree that we are physically similar, despite of course, my roundness?  I have spent my entire life laboring under this annoying fallacy that I am a carbon copy of my mother, from the shape of our feet to our entire "constitution" to our brain chemistry.  This sort of belief itself is of course the kind that comes along with jargon like "constitution."  To proverbially beat the dead horse, yes, I just threw up in my mouth (it used to be such a good expression, but I read it left and right on various blogs that it just aint so special anymore, thus the proverbial beating and not the beating of the proverbial dead horse).  However, I see so much of myself in my grandmother - in the shape of her forearms, her shoulders, her neck, and really, her entire face.

My mother was adopted and I have virtually no knowledge of my father's family.  In a way, I realize this doesn't matter so incredibly much, but I am curious.  Who are my ancestors beyond my grandparents and what did they work as?  What did they find joy or turmoil in?  What was their middle ground, average everyday existence like, and where specifically did they come from?  Did they believe in god or were they secularized?  I know my great Aunt Margaret (grandma's sis?) was a lawyer.  Even that knowledge, the fact that I had a female relative who was a lawyer - back in those days - and the fact that she and her husband were disbarred is a shimmering jewel of delight in my brain.  I'd be interested to know if they ever thought that their great niece, in 2011, would find humor, much less delight in that.

These two bachelors were my great uncles (dad's dad's side).  What were they up to?

I'd like to have something to offer my future kids in the form of a little family history, at least.  Not that I want to or even can compete with my ol' man: shit, he can trace his family back to the 1500s.

Wheektor, Curator at the Nilssonian Institute of Flies

October 4th is the birthday of my oldest friend, Adam.  When I say that he was my oldest friend, I mean that in the most precise method of hippy time measurement:  I was at his birth (along with probably 20 other friends of his parents, their babies, a midwife and probably a doctor).  His siblings were likewise present at my birth, at my parents' home in the student family housing campus at a certain midwestern university.

While I still see Adam occasionally at family/holiday events (he wasn't technically "family" until the union of the parents of my nephew, but for all intents and purposes, we are cousins), my time is more recently spent with a certain friend born on October 4th, some 2 or 3 years later: Viktor "Wheeektorious" Nilsson.

The above picture of Viktor in an attitude reminiscent of french neoclassical portraiture, is surely appropriate for placement within the Nilssonian movement, that is to say, it captures the essence of what it means to be a person whose abilities encompass the ideals inherent in scientific thought, processes and inquisitiveness, as well as kindness and humor.  While style is not de facto it certainly transforms this specimen into type material, sui generis.

As for what he is doing here, I wish I could explain more, but instead of fully listening I was caught in raptures by the lighting arrangement.  Basically, this is his food chamber, where he grows and harvests plankton for his juvenile damselflies.

Viktor is also the genius ornithologist who makes music videos with birds (see below a few posts) possible.  On my one and only trip to the island in the Baltic where all this magic happens, I was perusing various ornithological journals with him and began to notice all the Professional Hating (Academic Deathmatch?) going on within articles, aimed at defending previous works, but mostly with the intention of being able to talk shit in an official arena.  I'm not really sure how this rampant lambasting willy-nillying makes it passed peer review, but in any case, I am highly thankful to Viktor for opening my eyes to the unbelievably entertaining facet of human interaction called "academic discourse."

A recent example, found within my own field:

Case Study

Marcia J. Bates vs. Birger Hjørland

• Bates writes a critique of Hjørland's critique of her own "efforts in defining and conceptualizing information as a core concept in information science (Bates, 2005, 2006)."
• A quotation which represents significant ire, notwithstanding the move to invalidate Hjørland's academic mien:                                                                                                                             "There is a standard of coherence, consistency, and logic that is expected of an argument presented in a scientific journal. In discussing my ideas, Hjørland so severely misrepresents what I say that the reader would think that I am developing a totally different set of ideas than, in fact, I do. A fundamental premise of scientific discourse is that one should argue against what the other person actually says, not against a misrepresentation of what the other says. It should not be necessary to state something this obvious but, apparently, in this case it is."   (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• Oh, another quote!  Here, Bates proclaims that Hjørland not only sees the metaphorical "man on the moon" but proclaims he exists.  Well, sort of... and if you think this analogy goes overboard, she continues in the next paragraph by pulling Pangea and the relative placement of North and South America out of her hat.  This is a favorite personality type of mine to talk shit about too, so I can't really blame her.  I frequently say about someone with close familial ties: "if a tree fell in the woods and _____ didn't see it, did it really fall?"                                                                                                                                          "Hjørland seems unwilling to countenance the possibility, expounded in my articles, that information, differences, in the universe can exist in some objective sense while at the same time, we humans observe those differences according to our own subjective perspective, whether that of an individual with numerous idiosyncracies or as a member of an intellectual community that approaches those differences out of a specific conceptual paradigm. The patterns of organization we observe are, in many respects, constructed by us. We see the “face” of the “man in the moon.” There is, of course, no man in the moon, but our imagining of a face in the moon is not baseless—there are mountains and craters that create a pattern on the surface of the moon that allows us to see that pattern as a face."  (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• And a few choice sentence fragments:  "The overriding impression he leaves is one of incoherence and fragmentation," "Familiar as I am with my own articles, I find it very hard to recognize my work in Professor Hjørland's description,"  and "My own argument is considerably subtler and more interesting than this simplistic description."  (Bates, 2008.  See above link)
• Thankfully, in contrast to the abstract, where Bates refers to herself in the third person, the article proper takes use of the much less ridiculous first person personal pronouns (singular, not plural!).  I can only assume this is a method de jure, although I would seriously love to read a full he-said-she-said article in the third person.

Plenty more extreme examples can surely be found out there, and this one was only special because I found it while researching for my presentation last week.  In another vein, Viktor is also the proud owner of this book:

The Hazards of Butterfly Collecting reads like a self-aggrandizing memoir of the Indiana Jones of bugs.  Highly entertaining!  Which makes me wonder if anyone has done a study of the archetypes within academia and/or infighting?

So, Wheeek, tack för att du finns.  Thank you for being you, and thanks for your friendship.  And thanks for introducing me to these subtexts within research.

Yelp

Okay, so today is the big day!  I'm going to stand up (with a group) and try to sound like I know what I am talking about in Swedish.  All other times don't really count compared to this one, cause it's a real presentation.

So, in the words of my favorite senior citizen ex-coworker:

"Buck up or Fuck up"

A bad-ass named Sara Grimes

http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/

Nerd heaven.  And she's hot.

If you need a control for who I consider a bad-ass, examine the following:

This is Ms. C. Martin.  She didn't practice Muay Thai or sport bruises on her face when we lived together in Brooklyn/Queens, but she was just as scary.

This here is Ms. Rinjee.  She already had a black belt when we met as teenagers, but the skull tatts came later.

Sara Grimes' status as a fighter is unknown to me, but there are in fact several qualifications for being a bad-ass when last I counted.

Mental Health Breaks aka Why Blog?

I had to take a mental health break from blogging after a manic week.  It lead to quite a few good things:

1.  Going to the ice rink with a new friend to teach her how to skate in the hopes of us both joining a hockey team in the near future.  This really wasn't a function of me not blogging, just one of getting out of the apartment.
2.  Skipping doing any work for my group project that will be presented on Friday.  This in itself was maybe not so good, but it lead to me rapidly searching through the faculty list at the University of Toronto iSchool this morning when our group met to plan.  That lead me to one lecturer's personal blog, to another lecturer's professional blog (from Vladivostok!), to his personal blog, to THIS.  Which I am currently enjoying so much that I propose:  Why read anything else or write anything with more than a blush of real information or ideas?

Here is a visual from the link that makes this post more purdy.

For a more hands on web experience, click here.
My score was 7 and it took me approx. 5 minutes.

AND if you click on this link you get taken to all the May 2010 posts from XKCD (see first link in this post) wherein you will find some simply amazing links to fan-analyses of the information contained in the first link.  And you will also read a post dedicated to sex/gender questions with regard to above link, which I found particularly interesting to read, in terms of the thought process, etc.

Coldest day of this half of the year, so far.  Gonna go check on my pumpkins, and then cuddle up in my blankets and read a book make a spreadsheet for comparing different LIS programs (Royal School of LIS in Denmark, University of Western Cape, and University of Toronto) for a presentation next week.

I guess I can't really complain.

A New Normal

UPDATE:  After seeing the IRL response to this post on Saturday by someone who is extremely clever and a genius and and and really gets a lot of my jokes/sarcasms in English, I feel the need to elaborate.  Baconnaise in no way qualifies as a normal addition to the often sorry world of consumer goods.  To eat what I'm trying to serve here, simply put a question mark at the end of the post title.

Dinner for one.

My ol' man is at a hockey game.  So this is how I'm doing Wednesday evening:

• Chick peas (again) cooked in my own spice blend of allspice, cinnamon, cayenne, garlic and sumac, and a lil water and olive oil.
• Haintari - a yogurt dip with lemon juice and carrots sautéed with garlic, parsley and dill.
• With ww pita and veggies.

This really looks like quite the hippy feast.  What goes around comes around, I guess.  I did do a search for "time lapse mushrooms" after the last post.  This is what I found:

Happy Equinox

I love autumn the most.  The first picture was taken yesterday on my way to the grocery store, the other two from previous years, although that mushy is a late august mushy, but that is basically fall here.

twyns

Ha.  No, we aren't twins, we just have the same initials!  We do look quite alike though, for an aunt and nephew.  This is us:

And here is lil hombre one month later:

Now he is almost 10 months old and weighs 25 lbs.  Yes, he is a giant and he gets to wear a helmet.  Lucky, huh?  I think this is a picture with some kind of therapist or doctor, or whoever outfitted him with that helmet.  He has to wear it 23 hours a day, for 3 months.  So I suppose that means I won't see him with it on ever, which is slightly disappointing.

Lil hombre is one reason I would move back.

Speaking of twins though, I once saw a documentary about twins/birth/life or something Discovery Health-ish (An old hobby.  Half-ton Man? Seen it.  The Girl with Two Heads? Not sure if that was the title, but I saw it.  Okay, I can't actually remember all the names of the crazy shit I used to watch, but if you look at the Discovery Health Channel's website, you get a pretty good idea.  If you don't care to look yourself, some choice titles on this week's schedule are The Boy Who Bit Himself, The Tiniest Girl in the World, and Is That a Baby in Your Pants?).  Now I know this is not unfathomable in these times, but this documentary about twins showed twins that were born years apart.  As in, some people saved the fertilized in vitro egg turned blastocyst.... oh wait, now I am totally confused about the nature of human reproduction.  Okay, so identical twins exist in this world, and they were born years apart.  So, lil petri dish fertilized eggy divided in it's glass and they saved one of the things for later.  Don't they usually harvest multiple eggs?  This must have been a conscious choice, as in "let's have twins but have them in different years."  I can't see how saving other embryos for later implantation would have been more difficult, unless of course, they had a crazy Octomom doctor who had no squabbles/squibbles (you know, those ideas we have called ethics) and went right ahead and implanted all of them.  Except the twin.

So lonely.

It sort of takes the twin out of being a twin.  I mean, shared genes are shared genes, but missing the shared developmental experience when you are twins just sort of blows my mind.  Not necessarily in a bad way, but it is blowing in here.

Triplets, on the other hand, are totally creepy.  Anything upwards in count, I mean, any group of more than three monozygotic siblings who are also human beings, are just too incomprehensible to me, so their creepiness is nullified.  Anyways, I met triplets once.  Three tall extremely blonde dudes, like white blonde.  We hung out with my friend Tim who had the hots for all three of them.  I think one of them left soon after I arrived, so I was really just hanging out with two of them, and it just felt so strange the whole time that there was a third one walking around somewhere in the world.  Maybe if he was there I would have gotten used to him?

UPDATE: redheaded sperm is banned

UPDATE dos: only a ginger can call another ginger "ginger"

Old time's sake

Helloooo, having a new blog is so much fun, but I have so much work to do today.  I have to:  clean up this disaster of an apartment; read about library design, the future of libraries and the functional divisions of libraries; prepare notes about librarianship as a vocation so I can speak at length about it in Swedish. And it's almost noon!  And it's sunny outside!

This post might not be wholly appreciated by all parties involved, but I just have to post this for old time's sake.  Or is it "old times' sake"?  I mean, for the sake of old times, because this makes me really happy.

Amerikuhh

There are a lot of times I wish I would just move home to the United States and give up on this pipe dream.  There are also a lot of times I am so thankful I live in Sweden.  Which are sort of like the times that I realize how much harder my life would be if I moved home:

http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779

http://gawker.com/5840024/ron-pauls-campaign-manager-died-of-pneumonia-penniless-and-uninsured

Now that I'm all forward-thinking 'n stuff, I think about having kids.  A lot.  A lot more than my anti-marriage, anti-reproduction self of the past would think possible.  So, how could I consider leaving the relative safety of this place for the possibility of not have health insurance for my kids over there?

Not gonna do it.  Above all, the message that I like to send home, with a mischievous and cynical twinkle in my eye, is that living here is easy.  It's efficient, and without paperwork, comparatively.  Welfare states are good for lazy people.  You just show up to the emergency room, or call and make an appointment.  It frees up your time so you can be more creative and start things like Spotify or The Pirate Bay.  Or be ABBA or The Knife or Lykke Li.  Or my acquaintance Lovisa and her brother Jakob:

Freedom is:  having nothing left to lose?  just being able to show up?  making music videos on islands in the Baltic Sea?

One pot chick pea quinoa goodness

There's something really beautiful about one pot meals.  I love the efficiency, and I love being able to make something so easy-feeling taste so damn good.  Or maybe I just love being lazy.

This chick pea quinoa pot is something I made a lot last winter, on days I was off of work (which was typically a weekday.  I worked a lot of weekends, and weekends are always a good time to put more energy into the basics).  Anyways, I plan to make this a lot this winter too, especially since I am back in school now, as it's a perfect lunch box meal.  It's also vegan.

• one can of chick peas, drained and washed
• one cup (or two dL) white quinoa (i like white because of the yellow color)
• coarse salt and peppar
• juice of half a lemon
• turmeric
• ground cumin
• green onions

Put everything in a pot, except for the green onions, add ratio of water for cooking the quinoa, bring to a boil, then simmer with a lid on till the quinoa is done.  Toss in the green onions and let rest a few minutes.  You can make this with or without olive oil.  Sometimes I like to drizzle the oil on afterwords, as I love the taste of uncooked olive oil.  It's probably good with butter too.

When I make this, I usually just eyeball the spices, so I'll have to update this post later on with the measurements next time I make it.  Also, it might be a lot of lemon juice for most people.  In my world, almost everything tastes better with lemon juice in it.

UPDATE: I think most people don't include a used spoon in pictures of food they post, but that's what you get here.

hehehe. hehehe. redux

This makes me happier to be alive, and not because I think I'm cooler than they are.

besides not appropriating native culture, this tumblr sort of makes me ask myself what the fuck I've been doing lately.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/spirithood?before=1315365930

Look at this new picture I got at a second hand store.  I love it.  I stared at it for maybe 10 minutes before I decided if I was really going to buy it or not.  Even though it looks good to me, it makes me a little sad.  For reasons too convoluted to explain in words, (but more likely just something about birds and flocks and feathers - although my interpretation hasn’t much to do with outward appearances)  it reminds me of how lonely I have been these last few years.  Having moved far, far away, I had to make new friends; anyone that I hang out with now is a new friend.  I live too far away to see anyone from my previous life regularly.   Of course that does have advantages as well as disadvantages.

The loneliness I feel here goes in cycles of pain and relief.  There is also resentment.  I feel irrational a lot.  I cannot just plug new people into empty slots, yet sometimes, that is what I need.  The empty spaces have to be filled, and I think that takes years.  

I want to be included and I want to include others.  I want to depend on my new friends and I want to be dependable.  To not have philia here is what I lament.

Winter is coming.

Seriously though, where I live, winter lasts almost 8 months, and just a few days into September you can feel that the man who lives in the sky and controls everything has flipped the switch.

The phrase “winter is coming” is also the motto of the House of Stark, the family of Winterfell, for those who do not yet know the craziness that is Game of Thrones.  I say that with a touch of sarcasm, I do.  I am an avid fantasy/sci-fi reader, and although I like GofT, and am amused by it, it doesn’t have the depth of character analysis that I prefer.  On the other hand, although the characters are all quite thinly described, they are done so in a rather defined way.  There is an economy to Martin’s writing that is pointed and which moves swiftly along, but somehow still seems to be… thorough?? I guess I have a hard time describing what I mean… it is an effective style, that does not feel empty, despite it’s thinness.  Maybe that is why he is so popular?  

After the big hubbub caused by What’s Her Name, from the NYTimes, (aka Ginia Bellafante) who wrote a universally-accepted-as-lazy/stupid review of GofT, (the tv show), I was found myself in a long discussion with a man in my town known as “The Bull.”  He hadn’t seen the show or read the books, and I was trying to express the big deal-ness of it, and of What’s Her Name’s comments about the sex scenes in the show and how they are only there to draw in female viewers (and how no women she knows read or watch fantasy/sci-fi).  I, of course, was miffed by that summation, being a female, and being attracted to fantasy/sci-fi for reasons other than sex (although of course, I’ll take anything with a dash of sex on it, or in it).  SO, in a grand gesture for the whole of this weird northern city, which is stuck in an eddy of prudish sex-negative pseudo-radical feminism (imho), The Bull asked:  ”are the sex scenes feminist sex scenes?  like feminist porn?”

LOL.  

Beginnings!

Yesterday I packaged seeds from some heirloom tomatoes.  Tomato seeds have to be fermented first to get rid of the gel sack surrounding them. 

Likewise, my own gel sack of nervousness must be done away with because today is the first day of school!  I have already been to school though, 7 on-and-off years of it, much of which I made a royal mess of.  So now is my chance to do things right.  The end goal: to be a librarian or archivist, and to have been a damn good student during the process.  I’m 30 years old and finally ready to own my decisions.  No parent or other sort of bully has forced me into this education, I did it on my own.

(That sounded like more of a condemnation than it was.  Truth is, I’ve always been a bit of a pushover, letting the desires of others dictate my decisions.  I’ve swallowed their wills, tried to incorporate them as my own, and thus neither succeeded very well or formed much of a will of my own.  And… my history also comes with some very strong-willed characters.)

A parallel metamorphosis to grabbing life by the balls has also shown itself to be a 180 degree shift in time perspective.  I’ve focused so much on the past, almost only on the past, and now I find myself looking forward.  I’m interested in creating, as well as is possible (which maybe isn’t very well) life experiences that are to come.  

The timeframe for all this is a little unclear, but it sure is serendipitous, what with starting school over again, wanting to have kids etc.   Or wait, maybe that’s just part of growing up.  I’ve already noticed I am miraculously slow at that; I even look a lot younger than my age.  ANYWAYS, although the time frame is unclear, I know exactly when I was conscious of this change in perspective, and that was on August 30th, sometime in the morning, when I saw this lil ditty: 

In other news, last night me and my man were talking about the dent that some people have above their ass crack.  We discovered that it is called the coccyx, and when doing an image search (uhhh, yes, i wanted to see pictures of other people’s coccyxi.  Or cocci?) the only real picture of a coccyx was on a cadaver.  In fact, it was on the cadaver of an adult male with the knees pulled up so the body was closest to, let’s say: a diaper changing position.  

With all respect to the kind and rational man who decided to donate his body to science after death, I am really glad I am not a doctor.  I wonder if that donation also included a provision which allowed photos of his cadaver to be google-able?  I guess there probably is a wide world of cadaver pictures to be found from the comfort of one’s home, now that I think about it, but I don’t think I will ever EVER get that image out of my head.