my sandbox

So my summer internship is over and it’s back to California tomorrow.  I’m excited to get back to Victor, and Arty, and California friends.  And I’m excited to start my new job at Berkeley’s bioscience library.  I like work, and I’m going to be doing some challenging stuff and, doubtlessly, learning a lot.  But I’m reluctant to re-assume all the trappings of working life.

Travis and I were just talking about this when I was visiting him over this past weekend.  One of the nice things about this summer internship was the fact that I had work, without all the trappings of work.  I could show up to work smelling like fish cause I’d just helped to pick gillnets, and that was cool with everyone cause they smelled like fish too.  There was certainly no expectation of looking nice, or having showered, or any of that.  Commuting consisted of walking across the street from the chicken coop to the office, although sometimes I did have to walk across the street in the rain.  I could work extra hours on four days to scamper off early for the weekend on Friday.

So even though I’m excited to start work at Berkeley, I’m mentally rebelling against the need to dress (and smell) nice again, to commute again, to adhere to a schedule again.  I’m particularly unexcited about the commute - I’ll be taking BART, which is nice cause I’ll be able to read on the train, but it’s going to be around an hour in each direction, all told.  That bumps my workweek from 40 hrs to 50 hrs, right there.

So all this is making me feel particularly determined to find a close-to-ideal situation when I’m done with school next May.  I doubt I’ll be able to find a job that allows me to show up smelling like fish (and I guess I can live with that).  But I want to be picky about where the job is located (Victor and I want to move back east to be close to our families), and where we live in relation to the job, and the character of the town that we live in, whether it holds opportunities for Victor as well as myself, whether it’s a place where we’ll want to spend some time.  Hopefully there will be enough opportunities when I graduate that I’ll be able to exercise some amount of pickiness - maybe my resolutions will melt away in the light of the reality of the situation.  Victor and I have both made a few sacrifices for the sake of library school and my fledgling career (thank you, Victor); nothing major, but we’ve still made some decisions that have steered our lives away from how we’d ideally like to live.  I’m hoping that with my first professional job, we’ll be able to re-adjust our priorities back to be more in line with our ideals.

Sometimes you read things that interest you because they introduce you to things you’ve never thought about before.

Sometimes you read things that interest you because, though they discuss topics you thought about before, they announce a finding, result, or opinion that runs contrary to your expectations and may cause you to tweak your worldview.

Sometimes you read things that are interest you simply because they help to confirm your previously held general impressions of “how things are,” like this finding from the Pew Research Center:

Most Americans (62%) disagree with the idea that success is mostly determined by forces outside a person’s control, but 34% agree with this sentiment; in 2003, the public dismissed the idea that success is largely outside of one’s control by a slightly wider margin (67%-30%). Stark racial differences exist on this question as blacks continue to feel less empowered than whites. About half of African Americans (48%) say success in life is largely determined by forces outside of one’s control, compared with 31% of whites. A decade ago, the racial differences in views of personal empowerment were much narrower. Fewer than four-in-ten African Americans (38%) and 31% of whites said that success was mostly the result of outside forces. But since then, higher percentages of blacks have agreed with this statement. In 2002, 49% said that success was largely determined by outside forces; that number fell to 43% in 2003, and rose to 48% in the current survey.

Interesting that the gap in outlooks between black and white folks narrows during the mid-late 90s or so, and is wider during the 2000s and the late 80s/early 90s.  I wonder if this fluctuation has to do with black people being actually financially better off during the late 90s boomtime, or if it has to do with the fact that there was a Democrat in the White House.

I’m a cynical hater.

But I’m also friendly, helpful, well-mannered, and, on occasion, even chatty with strangers.

I suppose all this really means is that, when I hold the door open for someone and they breeze on past in a Queen-Elizabeth-passing-the-doorman-like fashion, I mentally heap upon them a larger than usual stream of bitter invective. If I’m feeling very much a hater, I may even deliver a freezing stare at their back.

So perhaps I’m not really as complex as I like to think.

Today is my last day of a 3 week span of freedom.

Tomorrow I start my summer semester. I’m taking a PHP/MySQL class.

On Friday I will start a new job. It’s in addition to my current job, but should only occupy about 10 hours per week. I will be working largely from home: my primary responsibility will be to maintain a blog for the School of Library Science’s internship program.

To prepare myself physically and spiritually for these transitions, I underwent a cleansing ritual. There were no sweatlodges, psychotropic substances, or emetics involved, though. I just cleaned my desk.

I filed last semester’s notes and papers. I organized my texbooks. I rearranged my plants.

I am pleased.

I don’t really mind reading from screens. The main thing I don’t like is the necessity of holding myself upright while I read. And, I don’t really romanticize books as objects (which I gather is unusual for incipient librarians). So I’d probably be ok with an electronic reader.

I’m not a napper but I’m increasingly of the opinion that most others are. It has only recently begun to dawn on me that this may be the case.

Nappers, of course, can’t say enough good things about napping. I think that napping is fine, but it’s just not for me. Midday naps leave me feeling disoriented and cranky. However, lately I’ve begun to feel pressure to nap. It may be because I’ve recently changed jobs, and most of my co-workers seem to nap, often during lunch. In a new environment, it can be difficult to find one’s place, and the temptation to succumb to habits that one wouldn’t normally adopt in order to fit in can be somewhat overwhelming. Will it take me longer to be accepted by my co-workers, because I don’t nap?

During a lunchtime conversation one of my coworkers alluded to a study linking napping with longer life spans. At the time I assumed that this must undoubtedly be a correlative rather than a causative relationship, since napping generally goes along with doing things like taking long strolls in the countryside and sipping a glass of red wine most days, and that this more laid-back approach to existence was the overall cause of the longer life span. However, a cursory glance over some web pages of varying authoritativeness (I won’t bother to cite them here, so as to perpetuate the dubiousness) indicate that napping per se may lead to longer life. There seemed to be something about natural dips in our brain functioning in the afternoon, and 20 minutes of sleep at that time being more efficacious than, say, sleeping 20 minutes later in the morning. This is probably common knowledge, since it’s one of those factoids that encourages us to do things that most already want to do, like eat chocolate. Or drink red wine, for that matter. Since I don’t watch the evening news, I’m often slower to pick up on these things than most.