Roger Green: a librarian's life, deconstructed.
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THE MOST EGREGIOUS ERROR I believe I have EVER made in this blog is in a post three months ago.
My cousin Lisa was one of the grandkids of my late great-aunt Charlotte and great-uncle Ernie Yates. Since I had no aunts, uncles, or first cousins, my closest relatives were the children of my mother’s first cousins, the eldest of whom are Anne and Lisa, Frances’s kids.
(BTW, Fran recently had her 75th birthday; belated happy birthday to her!) Anne and Lisa are about a decade younger than my sister Leslie and I.
Lisa had been living and working in the Washington, DC area for a number of years. She came to my mother’s funeral in February 2011. When Anne had Thanksgiving dinner at her house just north of New York City in 2013, which my family attended, Lisa was there as well.
At the end of 2014, Lisa quit her long-term job in the DC area and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. She is blogging about her experiences. Anne’s job has taken her to France as well, so they get to see each other more often than they did in the US. Incidentally, they were both born in France.
But recently, Lisa wrote: “One of my closest and oldest friends, someone I love very much, suffered a massive stroke that has left her hospitalized and her survival, according to the Dr’s, unlikely. I’m devastated and frantic because I can’t get information as it develops. If I was home, I’d be at her side, but I’m not, because I’m here and I can’t leave.”
Wondering what I could do for Lisa an ocean away, I asked Arthur the AmeriNZ from Chicago, who has lived in New Zealand for a couple of decades, to write to her, and he did, which she found helpful. And I would not have been able to suggest that had I not been reading his blog regularly for the last seven or eight years, learning his journey, knowing that he’s thought about those issues of being far away from America, even though he’s quite content with his life in Kiwiland.
Dustbury quoted James Lileks, who noted: “Andrew Sullivan announced he was retiring from blogging today, and given his longevity, this was seen by some as one of the great tent poles of the Golden Age of Blogging toppling over.”
But Lileks continues: “The notion of individual sites with individual voices has been replaced by aggregators and listicles and Gawker subsites with their stables of edgy youth things… But there will always be a place on the internet for individual sites like this one because there is nothing from stopping all the rampant egotists from braying bytes over this matter or that. I’ve always been a diarist, and this iteration happens to be public.”
Dustbury has been blogging for about 18 years, Jacquandor started in 2002, SamuraiFrog’s hit his tenth anniversary of blogging. None of them seem to be ready to retire.
And neither am I, even when I make mistakes. And THE MOST EGREGIOUS ERROR I believe I have EVER made in this blog is in a post three months ago, when I celebrated 8.5 years of blogging; it SHOULD have been NINE AND A HALF. This means it’s now about nine and three-quarters years.
One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined.
The blogger fillyjonk wrote on December 15: ” I dunno. Locally and globally, sad and difficult stuff.” She was SO right.
*Her post began: “Someone took hostages in Sydney. In a Lindt chocolate shop.” Unfortunately, that ended with two of the hostages being killed, along with the gunman.
*About the same time, I’m listening to this story of a guy killing his ex-wife and five of his ex-in-laws at three different places in Montgomery County, PA, just north of Philadelphia, before turning the gun on himself. Worst of all, I awaken the next morning to the news of 140+ people murdered by the Taliban in western Pakistan, most of them children.
*Locally, and more recently, there was an Amber alert for a five-year-old boy near around here, then canceled 10 hours later when the boy’s body was discovered. The abduction story was a crock; his 19 y.o. cousin has been arrested. Meanwhile, eight children were slaughtered in Cairns, Australia.
*The Daughter complained of sharp pain on her left side, and we went to the ER at Albany Med on Saturday night, December 13. We were there from 8:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., and bed after 3 a.m. I SO don’t do 3 a.m. well anymore. Then I went to church in the morning. I’ve been on fumes all week.
*She has some infection in or around her kidneys, and she has to take an antibiotic. But halfway through the regimen, the hospital calls to say that the type of infection she has is resistant to the antibiotic she has been taking, so she needs to take a DIFFERENT one and start the regimen all over.
*The illness meant that I missed two days of work, one full day, and two half days, which feels actually worse than two full days because my work rhythm is off. I was going to go to a luncheon to honor people at SUNY Central who had reached milestone anniversaries. (Because we were switched to SUNY Albany for a time, both a colleague and I missed both our 15th and 20th-anniversary luncheons.) But I missed it, seeing my boss, a former colleague, and two long-time friends get awarded. Worse, the ticket I bought ($30) went to waste because we were so shorthanded. Because…
*Our office secretary left on November 5, so we – well mostly a library colleague and I – have been answering the main phones. One of our library colleagues, Amelia, had a baby at the end of November, which is lovely, of course, but she’s out on maternity leave until late February. So when one (OR MORE) of the five, currently four, librarians is out, it becomes a strain on the system. There were just two of us two Thursdays ago (snow and the flu kept the other two at home), and two on the day of the luncheon.
We usually have a week’s turnaround on the reference queue but, currently, it’s about 10 days. This will EVENTUALLY rectify itself as the demand slackens during the holidays, but looking at the list of questions undone is depressing and frustrating. And one of the librarians will be away for a week around Christmas.
*One of our choir members has been away much of the year getting treatment for cancer in Arizona. My mother’s first cousin Robert is now on dialysis. And while I didn’t know them, I mourn the loss of my friend Steve Bissette’s parents, his father in late October, and his mother in mid-December.
*We have lost our custodian at church a few weeks ago. The Wife chairs the Administration Committee until the end of the year, so this is a task that involves meetings, et al.
*All this busyness has made it difficult to concentrate on Christmas shopping. One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined; what I didn’t notice in the pile of mail unread is that the bank had pulled one card as compromised and replaced it with another.
*Of course, it’s been havoc on blogging. I have a daily blog and write one post every two days. It’s not a lack of topics, it’s a lack of time. This will explain, in part, an increase in typos.
*I’ve had a deficit in not only sleep but good dietary habits and housecleaning effort. The house is messier than even my relatively low standards can bear. Where IS my cellphone? It’s in the bedroom, SOMEWHERE.
So, happy holidays, everyone. I’m told it gets better; sure hope so.
If this blog has at all a conversational tone, and I hope it does, it’s because I’m often having a debate with myself exactly what I feel about a given topic.
This being my 8.5th anniversary, or 17th semi-anniversary, of blogging, I thought I’d praise the rightness of Anil Dash’s 15 lessons from 15 years of blogging.
1. Typos in posts don’t reveal themselves until you’ve published.
This is SO true. There’s a coterie of bloggers who will e-mail me with corrections, and I for them – you know who you are – because a self-edited blog will inevitably have typos. There are errors that I KNOW are wrong, such as your instead of you’re, that I’ve made myself. Worse, though, is when I’ve decided to link to a previous blog post, and only then do I see the typo that’s been out there for months or YEARS. Oh, the horror.
2. Link to everything you create elsewhere on the web.
This is one of the reasons why I created my shadow blog, which, I should note, I’ve not always been so thorough in correcting the aforementioned typos, even when I fix them here.
3. Always write with the idea that what you’re sharing will live for months and years and decades.
There’s a tendency for me to want to write on topical subjects, in order to appear zeitgeisty.
4. Always write for the moment you’re in.
But my greater instinct is to write what I want, and that’s the stuff I tend to be most pleased with.
5. The scroll is your friend.
Occasionally, when I’ve written something here I like, and it gets NO reaction here, I might post it elsewhere. But truth is, I don’t worry overly much, because the daily blogger with a job and a wife and a daughter and other obligations can’t be overly concerned about these things.
6. Your blog can change your life in a month.
While I won’t write about ANYTHING every day, I do note that I’ve written a LOT about racism, and some about sexism, in the past few months. I think that some people know how they feel about something before they write, but my thought process often evolves as I am writing. If this blog has at all a conversational tone, and I hope it does, it’s because I’m often having a debate with myself about exactly what I feel about a given topic.
7. There is absolutely no pattern to which blog posts people will like.
Ain’t THAT the truth! One week, my Times Union blogging buddy Chuck Miller listed my blog post about hedgehogs as one of the best of the week on that platform. Really? OK.
8. The personal blog is an important, under-respected art form.
Well, yes. What I’ve learned about the politics of New Zealand, or struggles with depression, or trying to write a novel or the love of one’s grandchildren, or selling used stuff, just to pick a few, has enriched my life.
9. Meta-writing about a blog is generally super boring. (That probably includes this post.)
I do agree with the notion that “sorry I haven’t written in a while” posts are generally less interesting. Fortunately, because I never had the sense to leave, I’ve never written one, yet.
10. The tools for blogging have been extraordinarily stagnant.
This may be. ONE element that has evolved on the blogs themselves is the ability to write now, post later. I do appreciate the line of products I can post my blog to Facebook and Twitter without actually going there, such as Hootsuite. And I do like Bloglovin, where I put a bunch of blogs I want to visit, to see if/when they’ve last posted.
11. If your comments are full of assholes, it’s your fault.
That’s almost never been true here, though it has on the TU site, which is why I tend to write less there.
12. The most meaningful feedback happens in a very slow timeframe.
This is SO true. Things I’ve written about Raoul Vezina and FantaCo; or my grandfather working at then WNBF, Channel 12 in Binghamton; or my father, who people knew from 30 years ago; or my grief process regarding my mother’s passing, will generate comments two, three, FIVE years later. These tend to be quite meaningful.
13. It’s still early.
Dash writes: “Particularly as the idea of personal blogging has fallen out of fashion or even come to seem sort of old-fashioned online, there’s never been a better time to start.” EVERYONE was doing it, and now NO ONE is doing it because it’s not flashy, or brief, enough. Reason for me to continue.
14. Leave them wanting more.
He notes: “One sure way to trigger writer’s block when blogging is to think, ‘I have to capture all my thoughts on this idea and write it about it definitively once and for all.'” Fortunately, I DON’T think that I even KNOW what my definite thoughts on hardly anything is. I keep evolving.
I’ve changed the passwords on my blogs.
From Yahoo:
You can use a site called, appropriately enough, “Is my email leaked?” if you’d like to check the status of your Gmail, Yandex, or Mail.ru account. The site itself is safe, and you can even give a shortened version of your email address with asterisks if you’re concerned.
So I checked out my Gmail address. The password was one I used to have on that account, though I had changed it after some previous widespread security breach. But it still was the password for both my primary blog and my TU blog.
I’m afraid of being THIS guy:
Yeah, yeah, I know the poor password mantras; bad on me, though the current advice is more nuanced. In any case, I’ve changed the passwords.
***
Just this week, we got a form from the Daughter’s school asking if she wanted to participate in some dental program, which we declined because we have dental insurance. The form asked for her Social Security Number, which we declined to provide. since it is in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule.