In Which I Inch Towards a Distant Goal

I just finished Week Four of my 10-week fitness program. Thus far, I have lost 4.37 pounds of fat, I’ve gained 3.37 pounds of muscle, my body fat percentage is inching downwards, and I’m starting to see results, which is heartening. Having to account to my trainer every week for my eating and exercising has helped me stay on track, but it makes me wonder: what will happen when I done with the program, and don’t have someone holding my hand anymore?

In Which I Gets a New Ride

I bought myself a used bike a few weeks ago from the Salt Lake City Bike Collective. It was more or less my size, it more or less worked, and it was only fifty bucks. A steal! Unfortunately, it was heavy, and the gears ground, and the brakes were soft, and it was a huge pain to ride a lot of the time. But I was stuck with it for the next while. OR SO I THOUGHT.

Today my coworker brought in her new bike, and it looked beautiful and functional, and the price she quoted seemed reasonable (more the $50, but still within my price range), and I experienced total bike lust. So after work I went out and impulse-bought a second bike. Here it is:

I am hoping it will prove to have been a wise decision. But when you are as fickle and wasteful as I am, it’s never safe to bet on that.

In Which a Crisis Is Narrowly Averted and Is Replaced with a Smaller Crisis

I am a bad student—even a very bad student—and I have any number of professors, teachers, teaching assistants and classmates who could provide testimony to that effect. I hate studying, rarely turn in assignments that are complete or on time, procrastinate constantly and lack any discernible motivation. Despite these deep character flaws, I managed to coast along for several years as an undergraduate, getting mostly A’s and A-’s, regularly appearing on the Dean’s list, repeatedly receiving full-tuition scholarships and, I need hardly add, earning the hatred and contempt of harder-working students everywhere.

The tide began to turn in graduate school. Coasting along now got me B’s and C’s, and I began to struggle to understand the simplest concepts in the courses I was taking (I am still embarrassed that it took me three tries to understand rational and Jordan canonical form, not to mention the fact that tensors still escape me). But instead of changing my ways, buckling down and putting my shoulder to the wheel, I became even more apathetic. “I didn’t like that class anyway,” became my refrain. “If I had really tried, it would have been cake—so it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t respect the professor, and I can’t apply myself for someone I don’t respect. I’m an unfunded graduate student, and no one pays any attention to me. I AM MAGIC AND THE RULES DO NOT APPLY TO ME.”

I got my master’s in math by the skin of my teeth and moved on to bigger and better things, i.e., a library science program, which I figured would be stupid and easy enough for me to just sail through, after the utter hell that was mathematics. In a fit of brilliance (cleverly disguised as temporary madness/idiocy) I signed up for a program that began two weeks after my last math class ended, thus ensuring that I would be thoroughly burned out right from the beginning. And thus indeed it proved: in the first semester, the classes were incredibly easy—insultingly so—and yet I failed to excel, receiving B’s in both of them. Again: “They were so stupid that it wasn’t worth trying. If they challenged me, I would do better.”

This last January, I enrolled in two classes. One, a database class, actually seemed interesting; there were only two assignments the entire semester, and the main one involved creating a fictional library, designing a database to manage it and cataloging ten items in the collection. The professor seemed intelligent enough, and he and I got on fairly well during the face-to-face class time in Vegas (read: I argued with him constantly, contradicted him openly and generally annoyed the crap out of all the other students in the class). On the whole, the course promised to be time-consuming but possibly rewarding.

The second, a course on library management, seemed simple—too simple. The only homework worth mentioning was a weekly discussion on an online message board, coupled with a few minutes—nay, seconds—of research to back up our opinions. Naturally, as this was, without doubt, the easiest class I had ever taken in my college career, this would be the first class I would fail, the first F I would ever receive in my life. Because the course was so far beneath my notice, I didn’t bother even ordering the textbook until the second week of class, and while I was waiting for it I blew off a couple of assignments (which later turned out to be worth one-third of my grade). Once I had the book I participated in the discussions, but only sporadically. By the end of the semester I was barely getting a B in the database course, and I was well on my way to getting an F in Intro to Management.

Five days ago (two days before the end of the semester) the instructor of the management course sent me an email, informing me that I was failing and asking if I wanted to make up part of the work I had missed (work she had previously told me was un-make-up-able). I’m sure you understand that I had to think long and hard about this. On the one hand, if I made up the work I wouldn’t fail, I might be able to stay in the program, and I might keep my scholarship. On the other hand, I would get a C in the course, and I already had plenty of C’s. Did I really want to give up the experience of getting my very first F, just so I wouldn’t fail out of graduate school?

In the end, I decided that I still had a year and a half of the program to bag my trophy F (maybe next semester??!), and I scraped together the required work at the last minute and submitted it just under the wire. It’s official: I passed both of my classes this semester, I’m taking the summer off, and I may just run off to Europe and never come back.

[To the scholarship committee (Hi, Jeanine!): this is all a HUGE joke. I'm an awesome student, I love the program and I got A's in both classes, no matter what my transcript says.]

In Which I Spend Time with an Old Friend

I needed a long book to keep me company at the coffeeshop the other day, so I naturally picked up the longest novel I own – a novel whose praises I have sung unceasingly for the past three years – a novel I re-read at least once a year, if not more: Susanna Clarke’s tour-de-force Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Of course, as is the case with wonderful books, once I had picked it up I could not put it down, so I have spent the past three days with this seven-hundred-and-eighty-two-page brick constantly in my hand, with no notion of where I was or where I was going.

Not two minutes ago, it was with deep sadness that I read the last line, perused the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, the NOTE ON THE AUTHOR and the NOTE ON THE TYPE and, finally, closed the book. I guess this is by way of announcement: I’m back in 21st-century America after a three-day sojourn in 19th-century England in the company of Fairies, Magicians, Rogues, Politicians & various notable historical Personages. Be extra-nice to me and I might stick around for a few months before I go gallivanting off again with Messrs STRANGE & NORRELL.

Lesbians, Rhodesians, Malawians and My Mother

I was reading a post on my friend David’s blog about the the current legal controversy in Greece over the use of the word “Lesbian” in the name of gay rights group Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece (OLKE). After discussing the implications of the injunction the Lesbians are seeking against the lesbians, David ends with this delightful quote from the Guardian article:

“Thank God Sappho was born on Lesbos, not Rhodes,” says Sandra, on holiday from Leeds with a group of friends to celebrate her 60th birthday. “Or we would be stuck being known as Rhodesians.”

This led me quite naturally to thoughts of my mother.

While she is neither lesbian, a Lesbian or a Rhodesian, she did live in Malawi, a former British colony greatly affected by Cecil Rhodes and his imperialistic ambitions. Her friend Cheryl moved there with her family for a few years so Cheryl’s father could help set up a system of standardized tests to replace the old, culturally biased exams imported from Britain. Afraid of being “the only white girl in Malawi,” Cheryl asked my mother to keep her company, which my mom was only too happy to do.

I grew up hearing stories about the expatriate high school they attended, the friends they made, the servants they had and the food they ate. She took the British O-Levels and failed most of them (as she had had only a few months to prepare), but she was the only female to pass the physics and chemistry O-Levels in Malawi that year, and she achieved the highest score in the country on the maths. She went on to complete a year of college at the University of Malawi.

My mom, circa 1973

We were talking about her experiences in Malawi just last week, when my parents and sister came up for my graduation, and for the first time I realized that she had lived twice in a military police state: first in Malawi under the reign of “His Excellency the Life President Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda” and then on her Mormon mission to Uruguay in 1973, during Juan María Bordaberry’s military dictatorship. In Banda’s repressive régime, women were required to wear skirts (no pants!) that covered their knees, an experience that probably prepared her her time at BYU during the reigns of Ernest L. Wilkinson (motto: “To the knees, please! And purge the gays!”) and Dallin H. Oaks (motto: “Love the gays! But also purge them.”).

Preparation Day Is a Special Day

Wednesday is apparently “Preparation Day” for the Mormon missionaries in Salt Lake, which means it’s the one day every week out of their regimented existence that they can rest, play sports, check email and think impure thoughts*. Every Wednesday they descend on the library to check and write email, their baggy suits, bad haircuts and broken-in shoes making them immediately identifiable even without the inevitable black nametag. And every Wednesday, without fail, one of them wanders away from the pack and goes to check his email alone on my level.

What kind of loose ship are they running in Salt Lake? The cardinal rule of the mission is NEVER LEAVE YOUR COMPANION ALONE. Films such as Latter Days teach us that leaving your companion alone is a sure-fire way to get involved in a clichéd homosexual affair. The gays are just waiting for that weak missionary to wander away from the flock before they close in for the kill.

Of course, missionaries are fairly safe from me. I’m not interested in a sexually repressed, self-loathing twenty-year-old lover with bad hair and weird underwear. But when I see these young men wander around my domain, joking stupidly with each other, carrying scriptures and Deseret Book bags** and pushing boundaries by wandering off alone, it makes me almost nostalgic for my mission. Except there was no amazing library to take refuge in one day a week, with free internet access. And if there had been, I would never have wandered off on my own. (The gays were everywhere, plotting my downfall, even then.)

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* Just kidding! Missionaries are never allowed to think impure thoughts, on pain of crippling guilt and self-hatred. [back]

** Deseret Book is a Mormon-church-owned bookstore that lurks in every mall in Utah. It is boring and it sells safe, boring books, suitable only for Mormon housewives and missionaries. [back]

New Domain! (with a Side of Quinoa and Honey)

You may notice that the blog’s address has changed. DO NOT BE ALARMED. For the foreseeable future, Alone and Unobserved will have two domains: the WordPress subdomain, aloneandunobserved.wordpress.com, and my own domain, aloneandunobserved.com. Use whichever one you like! Here at Alone and Unobserved, we are all about YOUR CONVENIENCE.

Another thing we are all about here at Alone and Unobserved are delicious recipes. I’ve posted a few more in my “Cookbook” section, but there are tons more posted by Heidi Swanson at her recipe blog, 101 Cookbooks, which I am now following. As of today, the most recent recipe, “Warm and Nutty Cinnamon Quinoa,” is also what I had for breakfast yesterday—except, true to form, I left out the milk and cinnamon and substituted honey for the agave nectar, almonds for the pecans, strawberries for the blackberries and white quinoa for the red quinoa pictured in the recipe. But it was delizioso, and may very well become one of my breakfast staples. Right up there with mocha lattes and cheese Danishes.

In Which My Mormon Upbringing Is Both a Blessing and a CURSE

As a rule I stay as far away from Temple Square and environs as possible (I no longer feel comfortable surrounded by Mormons), but yesterday the power of my scholarship compelled me to spend a total of eight hours in the Mormon Family History Library, the largest genealogical research library in the world—according to Wikipedia, at least—and a veritable hotbed of the Mormoniest of Mormons.

I and my fellow scholarship recipients were hosted in a small, wood-paneled room (“the largest classroom in the Library,” we were told) and sat through eight presentations on the Family History Library, genealogy, technology and archiving. Despite the subjects, only one of the eight presentations our group of scholarship recipients attended was actively boring, and fortunately I was able to sleep through it without much problem.

It is always endlessly strange to find myself in a position where I am both the insider and outsider when it comes to Mormonism, even though it happens fairly often in Utah, but I don’t usually have to endure such situations for eight hours at a stretch. On the one hand, whenever our guide talked about being “prompted” to do something, or tried to explain why Mormons are so big on genealogy, I understood what she meant. On the other hand, the Mormon obsession with genealogy has never sounded as nutty, or Mormon theology as weird. I wonder what impression my non-Mormon classmates took away with them.

All that classroom time wore me out, and I was so tired this morning that I skipped swimming. What with the past few days of crazy eating and crazy not-eating, I am not doing too well in my personal fitness plan at the moment. But I have faith that this will change.

Bewitched, Be-lei’d and Bewildered

I had my master’s commencement and convocation today (for the degree I received last August), and my parents came up from California to attend. When I met my mom in the parking lot where the graduates were lining up, she immediately said, “Oh, wait, there’s something—” and tried to flick the piercing off my lip, before she realized what it was. (Maybe I should have told her about it in advance?) Once that was cleared up, she bestowed two shell-and-nut leis on me, along with an awesome bone fishhook necklace.

The commencement speech was given by U of U Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology and 2007 Nobel laureate Mario Capecchi (read his early life story—it’s a trip and a half), who spent about half his time urging the graduating class to get off their asses and stop global warming, which was a surprising but not unwelcome topic.

The college convocation was in the afternoon, and Governer Jon Huntsman, Jr. gave the keynote address. Like Dr. Capecchi, he spent a great deal of his time on global warming, this time within the general framework of exhorting us to change the world. And yet he was not booed for unoriginality. I guess being governor has its perks.

My sister came up from BYU—braving damnation by setting foot on the unhallowed ground of the Devil’s University—and took several photos of the convocation, including the hooding ceremony. Then we walked home, and my mom took pictures of the master’s hood in its correct position (i.e. hanging down in back) as well as up over my head as if it were an actual, functioning hood, instead of the bizarre, vestigial appendix it is. Maybe you would like to look at these pictures? If so, click below.

In Which I Am an Expert on Blogging

At the request of my friend and coworker Tania, this morning I taught an hour-long workshop on Blogging in Libraries to about ten librarians from all over the country.

Let’s be honest. I’ve kept this personal blog for three years now, but I’ve never written professionally and I certainly haven’t ever taken part of an official library blog. The library I work for, Salt Lake City Public, doesn’t even have any blogs (yet), aside from the staff “Library 2.0″ training blog that was set up this year. Due to the underlying database construction, our website doesn’t have any place a blog could be hosted.

And yet, I taught a roomful of people how useful blogs are to libraries. I debated the merits of self-hosted WordPress vs. self-hosted Drupal (neither of which I’ve ever used) and talked about using a blog to add instant RSS/Atom feed functionality to a library webpage. And I think it went okay. Some of the participants were disappointed, I think, that I focused more on online blogging services like Blogger and WordPress.com (we spent half of the hour setting up our own WordPress accounts, creating a personal blog, writing a blog post and commenting on someone else’s post) than on fancy, customized, seamlessly integrated, self-hosted options. But I was told to gear the presentation towards people who had never blogged before, and I don’t think there’s any question about it: online blogging is the right first step for a beginner. Besides, I don’t think the library IT department would have been amused if I had tried to demonstrate installing Drupal on the library computers.

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If you want to see a truly amazing library website, check out the page for the Topeka & Shawnee County Library. It’s basically a series of interconnected blogs, heavily updated, on all kinds of topics. Teen services, events, new acquisitions . . . it’s pretty cool.

You can view the presentation I used—along with the speaker’s notes, if you have a Google Account—on Google Docs. Thanks to Tania for inviting me to do this! Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve decided I enjoyed myself.