And as my tabula is currently pristinely rasa, I’m afraid the best I can do is offer some answers to this quizzy thing I found at the inimitable and oh-so-lovely Rachel’s journal.

THREE NAMES I GO BY:

1. Matthew (my current preferred moniker)
2. Matt (which I picked up as an undergraduate and which is still used by friends made before Phase Tuscaloosa and, increasingly, by the dear and wonderful people here)
3. Richard (my first name, and a lingering specter from my days in the bowels of Red Lobster)

THREE SCREEN NAMES I HAVE HAD:
1. mpickens (rather obvious, no?)
2. Zaphod Beeblebrox (laugh away; my first screen name, claimed at LambdaMOO back in fall of ‘92. )
3. Mattwan (thanks, ultimately, to Anna Jellinek; picked up during the glory days of the Invisilist, it resulted from my fascination with the mythical character Etoian Shrdlu).

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:

This is a toughie. Let’s see…
1. My second toes, which are longer than my big toes and therefore indicative of either lycanthropy or witchiness, depending on your folkklore
2. My soul patch, which has finally grown in
3. My eyebrows, which don’t utterly suck

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF:

Only three? Sans commentary:
1. belly
2. hair (or lack thereof in the right places and abundance thereof in the wrong)
3. eyes

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:

(genetic, not cultural)
1. Irish (predominates)
2. Choctaw (a smidge from my mother’s side)
3. Scandinavian (alleged contribution via my mum’s mum)

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU:

1. unemployment and concomitant poverty
2. pointy things in my eye
3. being perceived (rightly or wrongly) as inferior, esp. mentally and socially

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:

1. messenger bag (I was this close to saying to hell with cultural norms and buying a purse when I discovered these)
2. mp3 player
3. a timepiece, a role these days served by my cell phone

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:

1. grey boxer briefs
2. UofA T-shirt, the story behind which I will not relate at this time
3. that’s it, actually, and is representative of my typical lounging-at-home-wear

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS OR MUSICAL ARTISTS:

1. Rufus Wainwright
2. Laurie Anderson
3. increasingly, Gillian Welch

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE SONGS:

1. Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah”
2. “Sweethaven” from the Popeye soundtrack
3. Nina Simone’s cover of “I Put a Spell on You”

THREE THINGS YOU WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:

1. wild, sweaty monkey-sex
2. increasingly complex discussions of visual-art/film praxis and theory
3. an appreciation, if not necessarily embracement, of hard Leftism

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (in no particular order):

1. I think pizza may be the most perfect food in existence.
2. I never worry about being seen as pretensious.
3. Mulholland Drive is one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen, but Fire Walk with Me remains both Lynch’s masterwork and the key to understanding the bulk of his oeuvre.

THREE PHYSICAL THINGS ABOUT THE OPPOSITE SEX THAT APPEAL TO YOU:

1. curvy hips
2. mouth shapes
3. the backs of their necks

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:

1. watching audiovisual entertainments
2. analyzing audiovisual entertainments
3. discussing audiovisual entertainments

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO REALLY BADLY RIGHT NOW:

1. finish researching and write my Advanced Reference paper
2. sing, dance
3. go to Target for to buy a Frisbee or derivative flying disc

THREE CAREERS YOU’RE CONSIDERING:

1. reference librarian
2. tech guru for a library
3. stevedore

THREE PLACES YOU WANT TO GO ON VACATION:

1. Sheffield, England
2. NYC
3. New Orleans

THREE KID’S NAMES YOU LIKE:

1. Aaron
2. Emma
3. Cordelia

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:

1. write a work of fiction that does not make me cringe
2. spend a week in New York without having to worry about the expense thereof
3. learn to play guitar

THREE WAYS THAT YOU ARE STEREOTYPICALLY A BOY/GIRL:

1. I like gadgets. A lot.
2. I like porn. A lot.
3. I appreciate slovenliness as a valid lifestyle choice.

THREE CELEB CRUSHES:

1. Ashton Kutcher
2. Ryan Reynolds
3. Christopher Eccleston

THREE PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO TAKE THIS QUIZ NOW:

1. Catherine (if she’s still reading)
2. Scott (if he’s still reading)
3. Danny (if he’s still reading)

Bit of consternation, though, as the prof repeatedly insisted that all papers must be submitted directly to her hand, but when I approached the departmental secretary I was told that prof had left instructions for submissions to be made at the front desk. I half suspect some sort of ruse, and in any case will be checking back before the 17:00 deadline to make sure things are both hunky and dory.

Advanced Ref paper due next Tuesday, but tonight will be all slack and pizza and early bedtimes.

Note: Fascinating contrast on this High Spring day: Ever bow and stem is bursting into verdance, promising hope and joy and expectations generally as sunny as this gloriously blue-skied day, while a sweaty pall of desperation slicks the face of every student on the Quad, the author not excluded. This, friends, is the sick poetry of Dead Week.

This is not the first time I’ve realized this, of course, merely the latest. It’s my unfortunate combination of hard-headedness and bloody-mindedness that makes me do things like, say, hammering away at a paper topic long past the time I should’ve realized there’s insufficient literature to review. As original research on the history of the thesaurus isn’t exactly something one can do from Tuscaloosa, I really should have switched topics long ago.

Grr.

“Reference collection building” may be dry as toast, but at least it looks promising.

The world goes all Zen Master on your ass, that’s what.

I was leaving the library, thinking about a common but unnoted mistake we non-professionals tend to make when choosing paper topics, making side-notes on an essay I’ve been working over for years as The Wizard of Oz as American Ur-text, and also devoting a little energy to how I’m going to treat the subject of digitization in film archives. And then

*thunk!

I am a person of average height, a characteristic not shared by certain trees on campus. Had they been of average arboreal height, you see, their lower branches would not have been positioned to give me a nice hard crack against the forehead and I would have continued stewing and figuring and plotting until I made it home. As it was, I was shocked into an advanced state of no-mindedness, puzzled and hurting and completely bereft of cogitation.

Of course, then I probably wouldn’t have noticed the quartet of Ren-Faire costumed people on the Quad who appeared to be making some sort of video, but not the sort of video in which characters are filmed doing things. It looked like they were just sort of taking turns walking in front of the video camera, standing none-too-still for a bit, and then sitting back down. I didn’t get it, and I’m not sure I want to.

Blog summit is over, and it went well. It turned out to be more of an introduction to blogging concepts to senior faculty than a deep discussion of issues involved, but still I feel it was worthwhile and is likely leading toward even more interesting events later in the summer.

The summit was audio-recorded and will theoretically be available for public listening later on; I’ll post a link when I see such is the case. For now, I’ll just say it looks like I’m going to be involved in some very interesting work indeed before the end of the year, but I don’t think I’m at liberty to provide details at the moment.

Today, in an hour actually, I will be participating in an informal SLIS* summit on blogging, whether and why it’s a good idea and how it should be pursued in conjunction with the upcoming emphasis on distance education and so on. I’m hoping that we’ll open with the free pizza, as I think my brain will be more likely to come up with something more salient and/or sparkly than “Blog GOOD!” after a food injection.

Right now, I’m thinking my major contributions are going to be the “mother, boss, judge” law (that is, don’t publish anything online that you don’t want those three people to see) and the suggestion that perhaps robust bulletin-board software would be a better means toward the desired ends.

There will be an update this afternoon, oh yes.

*School of Library and Information Studies, my current raison d’etre. I’m not sure why we’ve gone with studies instead of science, ‘though I suspect it has something to do with a fear of Bunsen burners.

I should be asleep. I want to be asleep. I need to be asleep. But no mater how much (horribly overpriced) Orajel I swab onto my gums, the shrieking firepit of a near-empty socket just keeps throbbing, robbing me therefore of my rest.

Also, I appear to have gained a noticeable amount of weight in the month I’ve been mostly watching my diet. Grr.

(Creative title, eh wot?)

I’ve finally given up working on “A Less Perfect Union: Problems with Collective Bargaining in Academic Libraries”. It came out to spot on fifteen pages thanks to the wonder of footnotes and is, frankly, the most depressingly Frankensteinian paper I’ve ever stitched together.

I finished the primary draft at shortly after 0400 this morning and did the last of the touch-ups about half an hour ago. Thanks to sleep deprivation and general brain-addledness, I then encountered a bit of a problem with time. I’d been invited to join some friends for a picnic on the Quad (which is infested by teenagers today for some reason) at 1230, a bit of a dejeuner I very much wanted to attend but which I’d feared, due to last-minute rhetorical cosmetics, I’d be unable to make as class starts at 1300.

On wrapping up the paper, I looked at the clock and saw it was 1130. “Oh, goodie!” I thought, as three incompatible mental processes collided into a flaming wreck of incomprehensibility. BrainTrack A said, “Why, 1130 is almost the end 0f the hour!” BrainTrack Beta, meanwhile, said, “Hey, the hour after 1130 is 1200.” BrainTrack 3 muddled things by saying, “The picnic is during the 1200 hour and is at almost the end of that hour.”

Those three tracks, unfortunately, had been routed toward a single terminus at which they arrived simultaneously. So blinding was the devestation as they plowed one into the other into the other that the station manager entered a state of shock and didn’t register the heap of smoldering metal and glass as an unmitigated disaster and in fact, befuddled by the magnitude of the cock-up, actually treated the mangled steel as if it were a single passenger training running just on schedule.

So that’s how I went out at 1130 to join a 1230 picnic, hoping all the while that I’d be able to make it back for my 1300 class on time.

THREE. PAGES. SHORT

Paper is due in twelve hours and all I have is a knocked-together rough draft three pages short of the required (approximately) fifteen pages.

(Is twelve pages approximately fifteen? Somehow I think not.)

Three pages short, and I’ve run out of things to talk about. Oh, I have some more stuff, but not a lick of it will fit in the framework I’ve put together.

And to think, it was all going so well, at least for a little while.

Walking to Gorgas this morning, I saw from a distance something very uncommon indeed. One of the fraternity houses near campus had its side-yard surrounded by yellow tape, and there appeared to be several similarly-taped objects within the yard. I didn’t recall hearing the multitude of sirens that such a large and intricately detailed crime scene would have called, but then I’m a fairly sound sleeper.

As I got closer I saw that the yellow tape around the yard was not the familiar police-only DO NOT CROSS stuff but instead the less-foreboding CAUTION stuff that even us civilians can pick up at home depot. I also saw that the taped objects in the yard were bicycles–hundreds and hundreds of bicycles parked in neat rows on the lawn. Closer still, I saw that each of those bicycles was festooned with a loop of genuine POLICE - DO NOT CROSS tape.

It was beautiful and wholly inexplicable, a sight joining the horde of geriatrics I once saw wheelchairing down a non-pedestrian roadway late one morning, sun blazing off chrome and silver hair as they rounded a bend and appeared against the backdrop of a copse of trees and apparently headed for a strip mall.

(I later found out that what I thought was a frat house, for it is situated among and architecturally identical to the “Old Row” fraternity houses at the entrance to campus, is actually the campus police station; further, they apparently have an annual sale of all the bikes they’ve confiscated throughout the year. I liked it a lot better when it indicated something had gone Very Wrong Indeed with the natural order of things, but still it was a pretty striking visual.)