News Flash!

A mixed bag of news and observations for you:

1. My thesis advisor said I have “a lovely project.” Since I’m taking two semesters to do it, my due date is now September 17. Which is also my mom’s birthday---this makes it easy to figure out a present—her greatest wish is to see me finally out of school, and completing my thesis is a big step towards graduation in December.

2. I had a week of vacation earlier this month, and spent three days in Kansas City. The time spent there was wonderful, and Abby and Izzy are a delight, but the traveling itself wasn’t great. First, why does the handsoap in airports in Texas always suck? I’ve flown through Dallas multiple times, Houston once or twice, and since I’m a borderline compulsive hand-washer, this is what I always notice.

3. While in Kansas City, I got to visit this museum, which was really cool. The above-ground buildings act as lenses to focus light into the below ground galleries. And the grounds have really cool sculptures—such as giant badminton birdies on the lawn.

4. I had class last night, and there’s a woman in there who, I think, has the perfect Southern gothic novel name. Her first name is Ruby, but I won’t mention her last name to protect her privacy. If I ever write a novel I may have to name a character after her.

5. I’ve been ordering supplies at work for the last several weeks, and yesterday a big shipment arrived. Problem is, we’d already received a shipment exactly like that one two weeks ago. Come to find out that the state duplicated the purchase order by mistake--$2700 mistake. I was just happy to discover, after many phone calls, that the mistake wasn’t mine.

6. Some very dear friends of mine were supposed to get married on September 29, but I found out last night that they moved it to Sept. 1, and now I can’t go! I’m already registered and have a plane ticket for the Society of American Archivists conference in Chicago that week. I can’t believe I’m going to miss it. I’m very sad about it.

That’s all I got for now. Next time I’ll tell you about my boyfriend’s (I originally misplaced that apostrophe and got boyfriends’ –wow, those pesky apostrophes can cause all sorts of relationship problems!) odd attachment to graphing.

I don't really have anything to post, J in just playing around with my mom's new tablet computer. I wrote this whole post out in longhand and the program converted it to type! I want one of these!

'Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love - either with another human person or with God.'

- Thomas Merton
"Love and Living"

Thesisizing*

As the title of this post suggests, I've finally started writing my thesis. Deep sighs regularly escape my cubicle** at work, and my coworkers know that when they get really close together, such as two or more every five minutes, its time to throw a piece of hard candy my way and perhaps send me on an errand to the front office to stop the noise. I'm a loud sigh-er.

So, yeah, right. I've begun. This means there will probably be more frequent blog entries in the next several months, because my favorite method of procrastination is to write in my blog instead of my appointed task. Because, hey, who needs to write about archival method when I can write a post about...um...the mysterious smell that has emanated from my freezer since Katrina, or the faces that Bret's cat makes when she sees me? (disdainful, the faces are. pure contempt)

My first thesis idea was rejected, because my advisor told me it was too ambitious for a thesis--more a two year project than a two semester project. And also, coincidentally, that LSU had just been awarded a big grant to study that very thing! Apparently my ideas are very in vogue. So now I'm processing a collection of WWI and WWII scrapbooks here at the museum, which will include a study of the ways the museum can implement EAD (Encoded Archival Description) into its finding aids. Sounds kind of boring, i guess, but its doable, and that's one of the most important criteria for me. I know there's an end to it somewhere, I can see what the conclusion will be and I'll know when I arrive at that point. Being able to see the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" does a lot for my morale. And maybe that's what I need to remember when I start the sighing.

*Thesisizing: a term coined by a coworker to describe my current mental state. Applicable not only to the writing of the thesis, but the overall state of mind one enters when undertaking such a task.

**Its not really a cubicle, its more like a big concrete room with a divider thrown up here and there.