Caveat Lector

The way this year has ended, there really isn’t much I can do but throw my hands up and hope with all my heart next year is better for the world than this has been.

Pity that doesn’t seem likely.

For me this year has been one to muddle through. Nothing much to complain of, nothing much to rejoice at. A holding pattern. Get through school, keep current on the bills, wait until things start happening again.

I expect this year a lot will happen. I hope I’m equal to it all.

I hope that for all of us, actually.

Three more bombs away, and one or two more lined up for processing tomorrow. Maybe I’ll hit my goal of ten without any difficulty. That would be nice.

And I informed a couple of my references that they’re my references. They knew already, but it’s only polite to let them know that bombs are dropping.

I notice that I can gauge my degree of interest in a job by how lengthy and non-boilerplate my cover letter is. I can tell that I really, really, really want this one, for instance; I had ado not to talk their ear off. My chances are probably slim, even though I’d utterly rock at the job; they’re looking for a show-horse pretty high up on the food-chain, and I’m not sure I’ve hit that elevation yet.

But the worst they can say is no, you know? And it’s such a cool job!

We got a lovely thank-you note from Lisle Library for the copy of David’s book we sent them. Apparently David’s attendance record for a library function has yet to be equaled…

WorldCat reports that fourteen participating libraries have the book in their OPACs. Given that it takes time to shove a book through library tech services, that’s pretty decent. I hope it’ll go up, though.

Can anyone tell me why these fonts won’t work on my husband’s OSX installation? They work fine in OS9, and he swears they work on the campus OSX machines.

When he opens a Word doc with these fonts, it comes up all Dreaded Little Square Boxes. When we look at the font in Font Book, nothing shows up in the usual view, but switching to Repertoire brings up actual characters. (Something weird about the codepoints? I dunno.)

I’m stumped. No idea what to try next. Anybody else know?

Three bombs dropped yesterday, plus self-insertion into ALA’s job-seeker database. (Points to OCLC’s application system for being remarkably simple. Email cover letter plus résumé, get back a link to their EEO page that also serves as acknowledgment of app receipt. Pity the link from the email redirects three times, but I’m not complaining too loudly as the redirects were actually functional.)

Print apps today, and some of those are lulus. For example. Why on $DEITY’s green earth does anyone need five professional references out of me? It’s not that I don’t have them (I’ve got more than that if I really need them), but sheesh, overkill much?

And this bit from a couple of places about “explicitly address[ing] how [my] education, relevant experience and other relevant qualifications meet the responsibilities and qualifications for this vacancy” in the cover letter frosts my britches a bit, I must say. Dudes and dudettes, isn’t that why I’m sending you a résumé? But, yeah, I’ll give ’em the bullet points, since that’s what they seem to want.

Eh, well. Nifty jobs out there, at least; there isn’t one I’m applying for that I wouldn’t be proud and happy to land. The trick, of course, is landing one.

After various and sundry mishaps, a holiday package from Li and Alisa arrived yesterday.

My present? A comfy blue-gray V-neck crew shirt with “Agent of Chaos” carefully stenciled on it by a certain Textual Deviant. At which I let out a whoop, because really, so true!

But the true magnitude of the joke did not become apparent until we looked at David’s crew, which states simply “Talk to my agent.”

So now I know. I’m married to Chaos.

(Alisa sent us a truly evil little faux-Dick-and-Jane book that purports to teach Yiddish. I am still shaking my head. The evil, the evil!)

Thanks, you two. Way better than a plush Shoggoth.

Right-ho, the master résumé is all set to go. That being after I kicked myself for forgetting to put my spring student-hourly job with these folks on there, which was really quite amazingly stupid of me as it’s the only genuine library experience I have, and librarians can be snobbish about that.

But. It’s ready. Now I’m setting myself the task of collecting all the job notices I’ve been stashing in my email inbox and on del.icio.us (sure, if you want to apply for one or all, go for it; may the best librarian win), figure out which ones accept electronic submissions, and put together cover letters and tailored résumés for those.

I’ll do the print ones tomorrow.

Feels a bit funny, all this. Some people are used to always nosing about for the next job; I’m not, despite a career that thus far feels like what my mother used to call “puddle-jumping,” back when airlines strung together a lot of short-hop flights instead of hub-and-spoking it the way they do now. I know the drill, and I’m doing my best with it. Still feels funny.

Bombs away. We’ll see how it goes.

I can’t imagine the devastation. I think I’m glad I can’t. My brain just shuts down when I try.

I have a reference point, of sorts. I was in Guadalajara for the Mexico earthquake of 1985. We weren’t even scratched, but I remember the blank and shocked faces, the whispered awe, the quiet terror of people with friends and family in Mexico City and no way to find out whether they were safe.

(Every phone line was dead, every broadcast tower down… we ended up standing in a four-hour line to send a telegram to family in the States. Which got out of Mexico within hours only to be delayed for several days in New York…)

And this quake, by all accounts, orders of magnitude worse. I don’t have room to imagine it.

I wish I knew who is providing communication, there. Human contact. It doesn’t seem as important as food and water, but I still wish I knew, and could contribute.

Looking at my to-do list, I could get to work on the résumé or I could install OS X for David.

I made the wrong choice.

Backed up his files to a partition on the other hard drive, no sweat. (Can even boot from that partition, as I learned a bit later.) Popped CD into drive. Double-clicked icon. Whir, whir, whee.

Except that for no adequately-explored reason, the machine is categorically refusing to start itself from a CD-ROM drive. Startup Disk doesn’t work. The OS X restart gizmo calls Startup Disk, which as I just mentioned, doesn’t work. Restarting and holding down C almost works—the drive whirs and I get a big gray apple on my screen—but not quite, as the big gray apple will sit there for all eternity if I let it. Using my external CD burner instead of the internal CD drive makes no difference whatever.

This? Sucks. Am reinstalling OS 9 at present, see if that fixes it.

I. Hate. Computers.

ETA: Didn’t. Help, that is. And now I’ve hosed one of his OS 9 partitions. Just as well the cats don’t understand my language; they’d pick up terrible habits.

ETA II: Aha. Back in business. But I still hate computers.

ETA III: Oh, [deleted]. The lovely video-card bug in which the Mac does not actually send any information to the monitor is back in action. I’ve never found a cure for this except forty billion restarts; after the forty-billion-and-first, the Mac suddenly realizes it has a monitor again.

Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

Living is what we do until we die. Living well is a skill. A lot of skills, actually.

Some people have native talent for it. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Insofar as I manage to live well, it’s something I’ve learnt to do.

On the whole, though, I do well enough these days that it’s gotten easy to forget how it feels looking at everything from the bottom of a deep hole. I can make myself remember it, but only from a distance, as though I weren’t the person who had felt that way.

Yet I do try to remember. It is my peculiar talent, I think, to reach people not with strength or knowledge or success, but from a stance of shared frailty, shared ignorance, shared failure and shared effort. I don’t want to forget that; it’s the most valuable thing I’ve now and again managed to share successfully.

Which isn’t to say I always get this right, either. I don’t. But now and again, I do…

… which leads me to this very kind and much-appreciated post from my friend and gaming buddy Adrian. He’s spent a lot of his year looking up from the bottom of some holes that feel pretty wretchedly familiar to me, and some other holes that I’ve never fallen into and devoutly hope I never do.

I don’t take credit for the progress he and I both know he’s been making. That’s work, that is, and none of us can do it for another, especially not from halfway around the world. But I have tried to teach him things I know, things I had to learn myself, about living well.

So right back at you, Adrian. I’m very proud of you, and I’m honored by what you say of me, and I thank you, too, for reminding me of the small craft I have, and how I came by it.