Books, Books, Books! [2011/07/16]

Hello, all! On Monday I will be leaving for Peru, crazily enough (NINE HOUR FLIGHT WHOO), but while I'm still in the US and attached to my beloved computer, I figured I might as well try to explain what I was doing for the first eight weeks of the summer.

I think I might have mentioned that I worked at the Library of Congress this summer, down in the Preservation Directorate. The LC is made up of three buildings; I was working in the Madison Building, which was built the latest and is considered the ugliest of the three.

This is the oldest, and nicest building, the Jefferson. If you take a tour of the LC, this is the building you'll be touring, since it's really beautifully decorated. (Sadly, the tour does not let you actually read any of the books, but I think it's worth seeing anyway.)



Awesomely enough, the three buildings of the LC (Jefferson, Adams, Madison) are actually connected by an elaborate tunnel system. It makes getting lost a little easier, admittedly, but still. Tunnels! Tunnels are cool! You're walking dozens of feet underneath pavement and tourists and speeding cars, and they never know you're there!

Sightseeing aside, I <em>was</em> actually legitimately occupied this summer, working in Preservation. I'm going to have a lot of pictures in this explanation, so for the sake of your bandwidth (for those of you still using bandwidth) I'm going to put the entire explanation under a cut.

The In-Between [2011/07/03]

Note: This post was almost not brought to you today, courtesy of cakewrecks — because who really needs to be productive when you can just look at pictures of hideously decorated cakes for hours on end?

It begins at the door. You’ve been up for half an hour already, getting dressed and brushing your teeth and packing your lunch and eating breakfast, the lynchpins in your daily attempt to convince yourself that you don’t just want to fall back into bed and sleep until normal people are finishing lunch — you’ve been up, but until you reach the door you are still definitively home.

Once you get out the door, though, no matter how many times you stop and turn and run back into the house for something you’ve forgotten — sunglasses, phone, lunch — you’re no longer home. There’s no going back. You are officially en route, in transit, in the midst of getting from one place to another place that will help you get to another place.

Out the door and down the street, fumbling to put on your sunglasses because it may be an ungodly hour of the morning but it’s already bright, the sun high and shining and getting ready to call down the full intensity of its sweltering wrath. There’s a reason sane people aren’t supposed to build cities on swamps.

Four blocks away, and if you’re lucky you swing up to the bus stop a minute before the bus makes a wide turn and swings clumsily around the corner. If you’re unlucky you wait, shifting from one foot to another, glancing up hopefully every time you think you hear the distinctive rumble of the engine. (Garbage trucks are similar enough to confuse you, all whirs and rumbles and the occasional chirping stop, but most sedans sound like a wave just before it crashes; they don’t fool you into fumbling for your bus fare.)

Leaving the house three minutes earlier can mean the difference between a one minute wait and a ten minute wait. It took you four weeks to get the timing down and even then, the bus is still late on Fridays.

The vinyl seat sticks to your skin when you sit down; your shorts only cover approximately one-fifth of the surface area of your thighs, which probably makes them inappropriate for work but you’re engaged in a delicate balancing act, here. Business Casual vs Summerwear, Propriety warring with Weather; too little clothing and you risk the disapproval of your supervisor, but too much and the fabric will end up stuck, sodden, to your skin. When you’re not kidding yourself, you know which has won; your coworkers wear jeans and t-shirts and your supervisor comes in once a week, if that, and you’re only temporary, anyway.

Really, they should count themselves lucky you haven’t shown up in gym clothes. Humidity is an unfair opponent.

Work: A Glossary of Related Terms [2011/06/20]

A note before reading: I am quite fond of my internship. The people are fantastic; my coworkers W and B are well-versed in sci-fi and YA fiction, my coworker JM speaks like, as B put it, "the verbal equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting," and N and M can go from N's sex life to quoting Cinderella in a single conversation. (They're not perfect, of course — I brought in homemade donuts and only half of them had been eaten by the end of the day. Who does that?)

Also, I love what I do. I'm not sure if I can explain how satisfying it can feel to strip a book of its cover, clean it, sew on new endsheets, make a new spine, and adhere the textblock back into the case, but it's definitely more fun than data entry.

(Plus, one lazy Friday afternoon left me with a new game: putting on the Glee channel on Pandora, and then matching songs to plotlines and characters. Note: only play this game when far, far away from people who won't mock you horribly for your knowledge.)

However, my sudden induction into the world of 9-to-5 and actual careers, coupled with my re-induction into the world of internships, has reminded me that no amount of enjoyment can stop me from poking fun at something, especially when it causes as many frustrations as work can. I just didn't want anyone to start thinking that I wasn't having a good time this summer.

Work: A Glossary of Related Terms

9-to-5: A curious phenomena of the working world, the 9-to-5 schedule seems designed to make the average worker slightly desperate to get home by the end of the day, and to drive said worker absolutely insane by the end of the week, when the tick of the clock signifying that you can go home sounds akin to a bell pealing the chimes of freedom.

However, if you're behind on a project, there will suddenly no longer be nearly enough hours in the day to complete said project – not, of course, that this is likely to keep a worker in the building any longer than absolutely necessary.

Commute: Hell. Guaranteed to make you wish that teleportation would spontaneously become possible, or, barring that, that everyone else in the world would simply cease to exist for approximately an hour. However, if you take public transportation, it can be an excellent time to to catch up on all the reading you had planned to do at the beginning of the summer, but which you haven't done since you keep wasting all your summer free time on your laptop. (Or is that just me?)

It is a well-known fact that as a species, we spend approximately a third of our lives asleep. To me, this is far less horrifying than the fact that I spend about one-twelfth of my day commuting, and will probably have spent $500 on the Metro by the time my internship comes to an end.

My day, in color.

Data Entry: Possibly the most boring task anyone can ever be assigned to do, ever. Avoid at all costs, unless you enjoy spending hours of your day hunched over a computer, typing in words and numbers that will eventually lose all meaning to you. (Luckily, I don't have to do any of that.)

Intern: Someone who is paid little/not at all, generally for doing the tasks that actual employees don’t really want to do.

Internship: The strange, nebulous space between being an employee and not working, in which you should always be aware that you are a temporary blip and that those around you will still be there after you are gone. This can make bonding with one’s coworkers an interesting experience. Not impossible, of course; I got along so well with the people at my last internship that I have a standing invitation to come visit, but it's very odd, trying to figure out how you fit into a dynamic that was established long before they had any idea that you existed.

Interning: The process of pretending that you are an employable human being, all for the sake of gaining job experience. [SEE: “job experience”.]

Job Experience: Things that will look impressive on your resume, so you can start the whole process over again in the hopes of actually stumbling across something to do for the rest of your life.

What a way to make a living [2011/06/02]

Yesterday, I told a former quasi-employer of mine that I was working nine-to-five. Her immediate reaction? "Oh god, no. Not yet! Don't do it! You're too young!"

Bear in mind that this is a woman who not only works nine-to-five, but also has a night job because she likes to keep busy. She's in her late twenties, gainfully employed, married... and she still finds it absurd that she goes to bed at 10:30 pm so she can wake up and commute.

I myself have been going to sleep at 11 and waking up at 7, which is really funny, because I don't think I've gone to sleep before midnight since I've been at college. And then, of course, there's the hour-long commute (bus, Metro, Metro) followed by so many hours of work, and then another hour spent in transit before I finally get home, collapse on the couch with my laptop, eat dinner, spend more time on the internet or watching something with my mom, and then go to sleep.

I never really realized how soul-draining a nine-to-five job is until now. Granted, the job itself is fairly spectacular, so I guess it all balances out.

[Under the cut: Positivity, preservation, payment, pictures, and plays! Also other stuff which doesn't begin with p.]

Part of That World [2011/05/15]

So I missed an entry last week because I was spending so much time frantically trying to finish all my work. What with Into The Woods, etc., I hadn't been able to do as much work ahead of time as I had really wanted to, and also I'm a procrastinator by nature, which meant that this week was pretty much a Week of Death for me.

...I should have done more work last week, but classes were finishing, and then I had work (paying work, that is, which is the best kind of work), and then there was Spring Fling, which I attended for about an hour before going to make cupcakes for a class picnic I went to on Friday, and. And.

It may not have helped that I went to see Rent three times this weekend, but that was a totally legitimate choice, okay. I went the first time my roommate and another of my friends were in it, the second time because I love the show, and the third time because I really like it when things go in threes. Or, if you prefer, I went the second night because the first night had had a few sound issues and I was interested to see how they reworked the choreography for the Memorial Chapel (on Friday it was on the South College fire escape, but they had to move locations due to rain); I went the third night because the audience hadn't had much energy on Saturday and I wanted to close it out with a bang.

Whatever. I'm not too ashamed of being slightly obsessive about the things I like.

Anyway, I don't regret the triple viewing experience, but it did take up time when I should have been working, unfortunately.(Homework stuff, internships, and The Little Mermaid below the cut)

Life, the Universe, and SPRING [2011/05/02]

Don't get me wrong, I love winter. I love snow, I love warm sweaters, I love ice skating, I love going from the bite of the winter winds into my warm, comfy bedroom. Preferably with a mug of tea or hot chocolate.

Due to this chilly love, I invariably forget how desperate I become by, say, February/March, when the lovely parts of winter have been replaced by freezing winds and rain, the heating in your building may or may not be working, and walking outside feels like subjecting yourself to the cruelest torture imaginable. At that point, any hint of sunshine seems like a malicious joke of the universe, dooming me to hope frantically for the temperature to rise to a point where I can rid myself of my bulky winter layers. (Overlarge sweaters don't count. Overlarge sweaters are always appropriate, no matter the weather.) All I want is to be able to linger a little outside without feeling like the warmth is being beaten out of me, okay? It was even worse because I was in Florida for part of Spring Break, and in Florida I could wear shorts. It was like a religious experience.

And then, spring! Which, as I am informed is typical for New England, begins with a full two weeks (at least) of mud, before finally getting into the beautiful days of sun-soaked, breezy warmth.

[BENEATH THE CUT: more spring stuff, a vague recap of my week, pie, and the Old Spice Man.]

INTO THE WOODS [2011/04/22]

So as I type this, I'm sitting in the green room of the '92 Theater, waiting for Into The Woods to start! (...I am obviously not in the first scene, or I would have a very big problem.)

I've mentioned ITW in a few of my previous posts, since it's been taking up a lot of my time recently. In fact, it's taken up the vast majority of my non-class time this week. Whoo, tech week! (Otherwise affectionately known as Hell Week, which tends to be an accurate description.)

This is really less of a post than a shill to tell everyone that if you happen at Wesleyan this weekend, you should definitely come see Into The Woods! We opened last night, and obviously you won't be able to make it for tonight's performance, but we have a matinee at 2 tomorrow and then an evening show at 7. (Just get to the box office early to make sure you get a ticket!) I'm totally not biased at all when I say it's awesome. Seriously.

Poster created by our lovely director, Jenna. Isn't it fantastic?