Caveat Lector

Last week’s brief annoyed expostulation gave me to think about the kinds of things it is possible to say in academic research vis-a-vis the kinds of things I need to say when I write for the profession.

Take Roach Motel. It’s not research. I would be laughed out of the room, and rightly so, if I tried to present it as such. It’s not based on experimental methodology, qualitative or quantitative; it doesn’t ask a question and try to answer it. Roach Motel is a polemic, supported by an odd assortment of anecdote, observation, ad-hoc systems analysis, and other people’s research. Why? Because that’s what I needed to write, and what I thought other people needed to read. I’ll take my lumps when I’ve been sloppy—in fact, I already have. But I’m not sorry for what Roach Motel is; even before publication, it has been reshaping the conversation around institutional repositories in ways that I think are healthy and necessary. It’s not research, but it’s useful writing nonetheless.

In other words, not all human progress cometh from the research enterprise. Problem is, “research” is the only thing the academy respects. I’m a pretty good polemicist, if I do say so myself. I could train myself to be an adequate researcher, but in the process I’d lose what little claim I have to being an effective writer, an effective actor in the professional world.

Frankly, the research straitjacket constrains too many researchers into asking completely uninteresting and unimportant questions, because those are the only questions that proper “research” can answer. There are a lot of examples of this in repository-related research. If we sat around waiting for the researchers to tell us how to run repositories, we’d be waiting for one hell of a long time… and the answers we’d get would be tangential at best and useless at worst. To answer this question, we need a community of practice communicating honestly within itself, and the occasional polemicist to cut through accreted layers of conventional wisdom and kick-start discussions.

So, you know, I am what I am. I answer the questions I can answer. I write what seems useful to me to write. I don’t do research; that’s just not my idiom (in the Pythonesque sense). This means that I really just don’t belong in the academy.

The one postcard I desperately wanted is the one photograph nobody seems to have taken, possibly because it’s difficult to find a good vantage from which to take it: Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags taken from the vicinity of the Edinburgh First dormitories, where they really do outline a lion crouched over Edinburgh, looking over Holyrood Palace toward the Firth of Forth and downtown.

If anybody has that picture, I would cheerfully pay for a good print.

Edinburgh is a city I can imagine falling in love with, just as I fell hard for Holyrood Park the day I got here. It’s a city built on a human scale: walkable (even the hills), courteous, inviting, with a welcome sense of long history that never becomes stifling or snobbish. Though it’s currently jam-packed with tourists owing to the Fringe and sundry allied festivals, it isn’t hard to see the quieter workaday town underneath. The person most responsible for inviting me here, Robin Rice, graduated from UW-SLIS and worked in Madison for a time afterwards; she went to some trouble to move to Edinburgh, and I can completely understand why.

It does rain here and it does blow, so an umbrella is better than nothing and rain gear is better than an umbrella. It doesn’t do all-day rains, though; half an hour and the rain is over, or so it’s been since I’ve been here.

This morning, after another excellent breakfast from the kindly and hospitable staff of my hotel, I set out a-wandering through the Old Town. I got slightly lost, but happily so, as I wandered past the imposing Herriot School and the marvelous view from Keir Street behind it. I landed at the Grassmarket at last, which was set up for a half-art-fair, half-flea-market; I found a little something-something there I think David will like.

Edinburgh Castle is an immense old pile, on an even immenser cliff. It’s all done up with a makeshift stadium for the Tattoo, so I decided to pass on touring it and make my way down the Royal Mile instead. This is… well, tourist kitsch is what it is, I’m afraid, but there are tidbits of interest here and there, notably St. Giles’s Cathedral (which, like Edinburgh itself, is humane rather than imposing) and a kirk halfway down with a rather remarkable graveyard in back.

I detoured up the North and South Bridge (such views!) to New Town, taking in the Sir Walter Scott memorial (pretty good for a novelist, I thought!); I elected not to climb it, as I knew I’d be coming back Holyrood Park way. I dallied through the Princes Street gardens and some of the side streets, managing to locate a Sainsbury’s for a quick and cheap lunch to take back to the gardens.

Reaching the bottom of the Royal Mile at length, I decided to tour Holyrood Palace and its ruined abbey and its gardens, which are honestly worth the rather steep admission fee. Mary Queen of Scots, James VI/I, Charles II, Bonnie Prince Charlie and his sad death, and any number of other royals have set their marks on the place. (Also, a plaster cast of the skull of Robert the Bruce has grisly pride of place in a display of curiosities.) Magnificent tapestries are everywhere, and although they are clearly partly there for pure convenience (they keep out cold), that doesn’t stop them being beautifully woven. The gardens are sedate, well-tended, green as green. I do hope Their Royal Highnesses enjoy the place; it deserves to be enjoyed.

The remarkable display of Italian Renaissance art in the Queen’s Gallery is a testament to the treasures piled up by the crown. You wouldn’t believe how many da Vinci cartoons it is claimed belong to the monarchy if I told you. I quite liked a Pallas Athene (not by da Vinci) with brooding dark eyes in a luminous face.

I could have just walked around the Queen’s Walk back to my hotel, but Holyrood Park was calling, and despite my sore feet, I could only answer it. I didn’t climb anything this time, as I hadn’t the shoes for it; just walked on the path through the valley between the Crags and the Seat, listening to bees and birds and delighting in the beauty around me.

And now, exhausted but perfectly content, I’m sitting and blogging and thinking about packing for the trip home. I missed out on quite a few things I’d have liked to see, but really, I think that’s only right. One ought to leave a city as fine as Edinburgh feeling as though it had more to offer.

Meredith wrote quite a thoughtful post about rockstardom and how to achieve it. This post of mine? Is probably going to be labeled “sour grapes.” Well, so be it. I think there’s more to the story.

I am not a rock star in librarianship. Meredith and I both have second master’s, graduated at the same time, got jobs at the same time, blogged about getting jobs at the same time, got interested in social software at the same time (well, okay, I started blogging first, but that’s irrelevant)—and she’s a rock star and I’m not. Let’s pick through that a moment.

First of all, everything in Meredith’s post is absolutely true. Fill a need. Be passionate. Spend your own time and money. Make it about something besides you. Grow some guts. Network. Don’t let geographic barriers bar you from the opportunities available via web contacts. Self-promote. Second of all, I don’t think Meredith and I are all that far apart in raw talent. (If you disagree, leave me to my happy illusions, please!) Third of all, I’ve done nearly everything Meredith mentions. (Including spend money, gah. Like water sometimes.) Nobody’s ever accused me of a lack of passion!

But for me, that didn’t turn out to be enough. Hmmmm.

Let’s be frank. Some of it is right-place-right-time-right-topic caprice. The spotlight hit wikis just as Meredith did. She didn’t plan that; she couldn’t have. Some people do try to plan it, try to make spotlights that they can then inhabit. Sometimes it even works… but honestly, I think rockstars are different from attention-mongers, and I definitely have an internal classifier; don’t you? As for me, institutional repositories don’t have a spotlight, and very likely never will. So I could make all the right moves (not that I have; just sayin’) and still never be a rockstar. Nota bene, this is not an argument about who “deserves” rockstardom, not least because I find such arguments virulently poisonous; it’s an argument about who gets it, and a plea to people not to beat themselves up if they don’t. Sometimes it’s really, truly not you.

Some of the rockstar machine is inextricably tied up with societal appearance norms that privilege certain looks over others. This is an unpopular thing for me to say, but so be it; it’s true. Meredith comes one hell of a lot closer to this society’s standard for attractiveness than I do. There’s a bloody good reason I keep pictures of myself off the web; it’s far better for me if the Internet doesn’t know I’m a dog. Again, this is not an argument about just deserts—well, okay, to some extent it is; appearance ought to be largely irrelevant, but it’s not, and that has some evil, evil knock-on effects. People of color don’t get a fair shake in this or any field, and yes, the markedness of their appearance compared to the white-bread norm is partly why. Women don’t get a fair shake in tech for similar reasons; we’re capital-D Different. What I’m saying is, if rockstardom is your goal, it’s worth thinking about where you are with regard to appearance. You can be plain, even as mud-fence ugly a woman as I am (note that ugly doesn’t matter as much for men as for women), and still do fine; it’s a disadvantage that may, however, disqualify you from actual rockstardom. Life isn’t fair.

Certain demeanor expectations also operate in the rockstar realm. Library rockstars are, logically enough, what we think librarians ought to be: genial, fun, optimistic, helpful, gregarious, pleasant people—but not too in-your-face about anything (again, especially for women; men have more leeway here), and certainly not deeply anti-establishment (for several possible values of “establishment”), because that’s intimidating. Think about the library rockstars you know, and see if I’m not mostly right. Now me, I violate these norms regularly onblog, on-mailing-list, and in my speaking and writing (Roach Motel was one gigantic exercise in norm violation in the IR subfield; it shocked one of its reviewers!). I don’t see how there can be any doubt in this world that it’s made me an unlikely candidate for rockstardom.

I’m not alone. I have good friends in librarianship who are just that leetle bit too iconoclastic to be rockstars; I adduce Bob “boats against the current” Molyneux as a good example, since he’s gone more or less public about it. They find their places, most of them, as I’ve found mine; sometimes very high places (you know who you are, person I have in mind!). More power to ’em; sometimes a damn good hole-poking skeptic is worth a dozen rockstars. But sometimes they chafe. Sometimes I chafe. Rockstars tend to keep their chafing to themselves, or to a tight circle of friends. Not an absolute rule, just a tendency.

Ah, me. Discouraging the young again. I should be ashamed, I suppose.

Look, folks, rockstardom isn’t the only face of success. In spite of my bulldog’s face, in spite of my snark, in spite of everything, I am quite as successful as I need or want to be. I found work in my heart’s home. When I need to say something serious about what I do, I can get it said and hearkened to, here or even (to my own surprise) in The Literature. (I could do considerably more, even, if I were a more fluent writer than I am.) In spite of the people I’ve alienated (and they are not few), I have my own network of well-loved colleagues and friends; I’ve never been lonely in this marvelous profession. If rockstardom got dumped in my lap, I’m honestly not entirely sure what I would do, but I lean toward “running and hiding,” because I have serious being-around-hordes and travel-hassle limits, and rockstardom would stomp all over them.

(I have an evil brain. It is now projecting images of 1984’s Room 101, with me shackled to the chair and rockstardom lurking and lashing its tail behind the little grate, with me screaming, “Do it to Sarah! Not me! Sarah!” Yeah. Evil. Um, sorry, Sarah.)

Most of all, I have the luxury of defining success for myself. I fully and freely acknowledge that non-tenure-track academic librarianship has its discontents, but they pale to insignificance beside the phenomenal freedom of picking my own goalposts. Rockstardom, even in easygoing librarianship, has been known to turn into the Russian’s plaint in Chess:

Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all!
Running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say he always knew I’d fall.

No, thanks. That’s not a life I’d even want to risk having. See my sidebar! And think good and hard about your own goalposts, please, before you set your sights on rockstardom.

(This is in answer to the blogging prompt I gave my class this week, in case anyone is wondering why it seems out of left field.)

My dad, like most dads, took me to the office every once in a while, with all due stern caution about Sitting Quietly and Being Good. I believe it was on one of those visits that I saw my first acoustic coupler. Handset modem. You know what I mean (or maybe you don’t). Stick the telephone handset in the vinyl sockets. Earsplitting screeches ensue.

I may be one of the last people on this earth to have learned to type on a manual typewriter.

That was in the eighth grade, in Mexico. I didn’t actually type on a computer until a few months later, when our martinet history teacher back in the States demanded a letter-perfect typewritten double-spaced final paper. My dad sighed and took me to the office, where he introduced me to a Commodore 64 and something that might or might not have been WordStar.

Honestly, I can’t say I liked the thing very much. It wanted me to type weird two-letter commands starting with colons. Instead of black ink on white paper, I had to learn to get used to green phosphors on black. And it’s hard to get anything done when you’ve been adjured time and time again Not To Break The Expensive Equipment.

Times do indeed change. I make my living working with the equipment. I’m not afraid of it any more (… usually; kernel panics are legitimately scary). And I’ve become dependent on it to a substantial degree.

Dependent? But we’re not supposed to be dependent on technology!

Please. Go find a cave and live in it. If you can’t live without books, you’re dependent on technology. Can we get over the mistaken notion that technology is novelty and move on? Thanks.

Most of what I read these days, and nearly everything profession-related that I read, I read from a screen. Honestly, if ebooks weren’t DRMed up the wazoo, I’d read my pleasure reading that way too. With two cross-country moves in three years, never mind the trail of broken bookcases I’ve left in my wake over the years, I’m coming to the conclusion that the boxes of paper are more ruddy trouble than they’re worth. (But DRM is worse, so this is me not taking the plunge. Yet.)

Quite a few of my friends live online. My old college buddies. My roleplaying buddies. Friends I haven’t met yet. Just a moment ago a friend I haven’t met yet IMed to cheer me up because I have had a remarkably pointless and frustrating day. You know what? It worked.

Want a cliché? Here’s a cliché. I met my husband online. It’s the honest truth.

I keep coming back to Andy Clark. Buffle the MacBook, Nova the PowerBook G4, the Silver Surfer, they’re part of my brain. Without them, I am not whole; I could learn to live without them, but I would have to learn. Retrain my thought processes. Remember how to remember. Reclaim my handwriting, even. It’s a scary prospect.

That eighth-grader? She could never have imagined.

I am not the best at everything I do. I am not even the best at most things I do. In all likelihood, I’m not the best at anything I do. (I might make a case for “best repository-rat blogger,” but mention would have to be made of the diminutive size of the field.)

This does not bother me. Being “the best” is not something I need.

It once was, I grant you, when I had nothing better to found my self-image upon. I allowed the pursuit of what others called excellence to lead me about by the nose. I did not think to question it; I never asked what I myself thought was worthwhile, never even thought about the yardsticks that were my life—until those yardsticks tried to kill me, and I hadn’t any choice but to back slowly and then quickly away from them. That broke my life.

(In passing: very little makes me angrier than being characterized like this: “emigrants from academia, under this schema, are well-adjusted people who recognized a malign institution and departed from it rather than adjusting to its abusive-family cycle of psychic violence.” Hogwash. Dismissive hogwash that completely ignores that the whole process broke my life. I was not well-adjusted at the time, not in the slightest; I was broken. I had one serious lot of adjusting to do, and a lot of processing before I realized what a dysfunctional environment I had departed. I only wish I had recognized its malignity up-front. I was too damn dumb to.)

Once I glued together the pieces, I learned that failure has its contentments, there’s room in the world for fools and clowns as well as Renaissance folk, and sometimes reaching for the brass ring results in nothing better or more useful than a brass ring. (What use is a brass ring, anyhow? I’ve never been quite sure.)

I also learned that the constant competition involved in “gotta be the best” and “gotta give 110% all the time every time” is both wearing and unproductive. Wearing, I should think, goes without saying. Unproductive requires explanation.

Opportunity cost is part of the problem. Real excellence requires time and effort, and returns do diminish after a certain point. Every moment spent pursuing the mountain peak is a moment that might be otherwise spent. Is the return worth it? Sometimes, perhaps. Always? Not a chance. The world and its tasks are too varied.

Best is often the enemy of good-enough, or even of improvement itself. Consider, for example, the perfectionism of the library world vis-a-vis its computer systems, and ask whether time and effort might have been better spent on less jawboning and more actual experimentation. That experimentation is now happening, mind you—it’s just mostly happening outside the library world, and who is to blame for that if not us?

Perfectionism walks hand-in-hand with overcaution, with unnecessary fear. Will you so much as try something that you’re not sure you’ll be the best at? That you’re not sure you care to give your little all to? Shame, if not; some things are fun and worthwhile even when there’s a sharp limit to what one can achieve. I’ve made this point with regard to writing, but I think perhaps music is the more salient example from my own life. I am not a terribly good singer. I will never be one, no matter how much effort I put into it. There are simply limits to the sounds my physical configuration can produce, and limits to what my cognitive capacity can do with a sheet of music. (C-clefs, ugh.)

Yet what a horrible waste, not to have sung with Fairfax Choral Society and the excellent Doug Mears, just because I am not and shall never be the best singer ever!

The largest difficulty with the inexorable call to personal achievement is simply that it is personal, and the world is larger than one person. I face this dilemma daily in my worklife. Institutional repositories are not a terribly sensible niche for the ambitious librarian; by almost any measure (never mind Les Carr’s), they have been an abject failure. If all I had to be concerned about were my own career, my own self-importance, I’d have been gone long since.

I’m still here. Still reminding myself, if truth be told, that a project neglected for nearly a year isn’t going to have turned around in five months. Why am I still here? Because open access is more important than I am.

Funny thing is, I’ve seen people make their careers all about them. My dad did it. It didn’t lead to fantastic achievements for him. It led to petty feuds, bitter anger, pathetic hidden fears, and what has always looked to me like less measurable progress than he might have managed otherwise. Not for me, thanks. I’d rather be a small fish in a more important pond—which is, of course, precisely what I am.

If brass rings are your thing, by all means collect ’em. Just let’s recognize their real worth, hm?

I said my say, rather obliquely, on what happened to Kathy Sierra, and I’d planned to leave it there, because this sort of thing raises my blood pressure. (If it had happened to a friend, instead of someone whose blog I occasionally look in on, I’d be leading the perps to my personal private guillotine right about now, because I overreact that way. As it is, I don’t have any kind of status to pull stunts, so I’m trying not to.)

Over at Meredith’s, a couple-three men are saying how much the episode sickens them, and how helpless they feel to do anything about it. This post is for them, and folks like them. I don’t actually think there’s nothing they can do. I do think that what they can do is non-obvious, difficult, slow, laborious, frustrating, and courage-sapping, though.

My sense of what can be done to stop specifically misogynistic bullying depends on what I hinted at in my earlier post: it’s a broken-windows problem. (Yes, I know the sociologists debunked the broken-windows hypothesis long ago. I still find it a convenient analogy.) I don’t think the hateful language or the rape ’shop jobs or the threats could go nearly as far as they have (and still do) were it not for a widespread and unchallenged culture on the internet that insults, demeans, and irrelevantly sexualizes women millions of times on millions of websites every single day.

It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in geekland. There’s a strong (but by no means 1.0) positive correlation between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland. (It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague term “geekland.” Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same story. Also, my remarks may extend to homophobia, which is likewise endemic in geekland, but I welcome refutation from people closer to that problem than I am.)

It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that” (hit, equating sex to aggression, that, reducing a human being to a thing), the “I bet she’s hot,” the “I bet she’s a fat whore,” the “I did your mom” one-offs. Everything about a woman, any woman, reduces to sex and sexual attractiveness. Even compliments are invariably phrased in terms of sexual attractiveness; geekland doesn’t know how else to compliment a woman.

All this is deeply ingrained in geekland culture, so deeply that if your connections to geekland are strong enough, it is inescapable… so inescapable that perhaps you’re already accustomed to it. Me, I have never gotten accustomed to it—call me sheltered, but I honestly didn’t ever run into people who thought and talked that way until I joined geekland, sometime after graduate school—and so I get angry about it and people hate and fear my anger, and try to delegitimize it.

It’s out of this earth that attacks like the one against Kathy Sierra grow. I firmly believe this. If you don’t, then click away; there’s not much point in reading further.

I can’t do anything about these particular broken windows. I’ve proven that the hard way—by trying repeatedly and failing repeatedly—and believe me, I hate my helplessness. My sense is that geekland culture only listens to women when they behave like honorary guys, which means silently accepting the prevailing misogyny (because after all, the guys do). Long ago, I tried to fix a broken window in my corner of the blogosphere. I failed, failed abjectly, and I came within an inch of leaving blogging because of it; if you want the gory details, hop all the way back to the beginning of my “Grunchy stuff” category. More recently, I tried to fix a broken window in the code4lib IRC channel. I failed, failed abjectly, though I hear others have picked up tools and are perhaps making progress with them.

I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact. It’d be nice, but geekland culture has got a cozy little cycle going: demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here; the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest? And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?

No, a Kathy Sierra debacle won’t happen in every community whose norms allow sex jokes. But I will venture to say that every community with those norms has driven women out of it, mostly but not always silently. Argue with me about that. I dare you. I’ve been that woman too often.

But the cycle can be broken. It just has to be broken by men. And, I believe, it needs to be broken as early as possible in the cycle, while the norms of a particular community are still forming. Once they’ve crystallized such that pr0n jokes and “I’d hit that” are acceptable, the battle is lost. That community is inevitably going to drive away some woman sometime, and probably a lot of them. Moreover, I have yet to see such a community reform itself.

So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say, “Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.” You say, “Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it.” You say to the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever, “Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really bothers me.”

The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say the words “sexist” or “sexism,” much less “feminism,” and avoid “woman” and “women” whenever you can. If you say “that kind of talk,” trust me, they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.

And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say “Why?” (Or, less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough or good enough or “tough enough” to be. The last-mentioned, of course, is code for “honorary guy.”) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.

In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask “Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong?” and like that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)

I reiterate: You must say that “that kind of talk” bothers you personally, and you must not get drawn into fruitless arguments about why you are bothered. That’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.

Sounds easy. Isn’t. It’s no good to do this in safe spaces, like the comment section of a female (much less feminist) blogger. You have to do it in spaces where you will not feel welcome or possibly even safe in saying it. And you will have to repeat yourself until you are blue in the face, this happens so often. Welcome to my world.

You will be told you’re overreacting. You will be told nobody means any harm. You will be ordered to lay off. You will be asked why you care, why you don’t have anything more important to worry about, why you’re ruining the great social environment. You will be shunned. You will be hassled. You may even be told to get the hell out. You will be called a feminazi, very possibly to your face. You will be told you’re pussywhipped, because in geekland, women are properly subordinate to men and nobody better damn well forget it. You will even be called a pussy or a cunt, because in geekland, nothing is worse than being compared to a woman, and her genitalia specifically.

Not easy. Not easy at all. It will take astonishing amounts of courage and persistence, in fact. But aside from getting in early and setting norms up front, nothing else works that I’ve ever seen. Think you’ve got the guts? Step up and prove it. Sing with the chorus.

And for those of you who already do—thank you. Thank you, Walt and Roy and Brad and Kevin, just to name four. Thank you very much.

This is my contribution to Stop Cyberbullying Day. I don’t do tags on CavLec (no philosophical objection, just haven’t bothered), but this post can be appropriately tagged on del.icio.us or elsewhere.

When I was 16, I took my very first paid job, first busboy and then stockroom attendant at K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village in Raleigh. Some days people would be absent and the cafeteria line understaffed; I was now and then sent out to lend a hand.

One such day, I dropped a spoonful of mashed potatoes while the line was at its longest. I hastily and sketchily cleaned up the worst of it, then went on serving so as not to hold up the line. A minute or two later, the oldest and most irascible of the regular servers returned, took one look, and shrilly demanded, “Who made this mess?!”

Uh-oh. Was I ever in for it. This woman could do ten-minute tirades that flayed flesh from bone. “Um, I did,” I said meekly, “and I’m sorry. Here, let me finish cleaning it up—it just got busy all of a sudden.”

She looked at me for a moment, baffled at my confession. “Naw, now you give me that,” she said gruffly, taking away the damp cloth I’d just picked up. “I’ll take care of it, hon. You just get along back to the back room.”

Better than half my lifetime ago, and I still haven’t forgotten that.

Early in CavLec’s existence, I became acquainted with another feminist tech blogger. Without fully acquainting myself with the history of her blog, I started backing her up on CavLec, and we became friends. We aren’t any longer. I eventually found out that the on-blog battles she was fighting got meaner and less contained off-blog. I also found out that active participation in both on-blog and off-blog struggles was more or less the price of her friendship; non-participation, or the least hint to her that perhaps angry confrontation was not always the best course of action, brought immediate accusations (mostly off-blog, but occasionally on-) of betrayal of friendship and conduct unbecoming a feminist.

Now, as we all know, I am something of a chameleon; I take on the characteristics of the people I hang out with, for better or for worse. I’m also an arrant coward; confrontation scares me and hurts me and if extended, threatens to drag me into depression. I lost stomach for her fights pretty quickly, and I didn’t have the guts to take her on (nor did I think it would make any difference if I did). The whole thing ended badly. I’d heard she was ill and in trouble, and was making arrangements to go visit and see what I could do when an angry, accusatory email landed in my inbox.

And I said no, no, I can’t do this, I probably should be able to, but I can’t, it’s only going to mess me up worse without helping her… and there things sit to this day, not patched up.

Not long afterward, I got into a role-playing game played by web bulletin board, a game with a fascinating setting and a GM with a deft turn of phrase and an excellent talent for surprising his players. Things were going swimmingly (ugh, wrong word, but never mind) until a typical CavLec rant about an ill-behaved child in a restaurant offended him. He posted a return rant on his own blog, casting specific, detailed, and caustic aspersions on my personal character. I withdrew from the game. The other players understood.

I got an email shortly thereafter from someone who told me that this was a pattern of behavior with this particular individual. She predicted that he would shortly destroy his website and pop up in another guise, with another site name and URL, and that he would never admit to his previous history except with paranoid assertions that various people were out to get him. She was right on all counts, and the pattern has persisted to this day; he’s even using pseudonyms now, and “out to get him” has escalated to “cyberstalking” and nebulous unsubstantiated threats to his family.

Not long ago, I connected the dots between him and his latest pseudonymous venture in public, because the cycle had recycled and he’d abused some more people, and I thought those people (and the people who followed, since more will follow; this cycle has gone on for years and at least four iterations that I know of, and appears unbreakable) should know who he was. Even less long ago, I got a complaint in email about it from his wife, wanting to know why I hadn’t let it drop, trying to make me feel bad about what I had done, again adducing threats to the family (which in all honesty, I don’t believe a word of). I didn’t answer. But I thought about it for several days, because really, what was I up to? Due warning, or cheap revenge?

I’m not above the latter. I know myself better than that. When I feel wronged (or worse, when someone I care about has been wronged), I get self-righteously mean and petty. Some of the time, I manage to throw a rope around it before much harm is done; I actually lost my temper good and hard with Meredith during Five Weeks and the Akismet problem, but I don’t know that she realized it, because I knew my inner reactions were ridiculous and therefore kept my outer reactions in check. But sometimes the rope misses its hold.

At my best, I’m not a bad egg. I know that. But I’m also well aware that I’m not always at my best. Meredith has reason to say nice things about me in connection with Five Weeks. The crew at Open Access Research has entirely legitimate reason to hold a different opinion, because I’ve been slacking badly with them—forgetting to return emails, not doing some design work I signed up for, and generally putting them on the back burner. Ugh. Bad me. And not the only ball I’ve dropped lately, either.

(Don’t panic, Jen. I’m working on the book. I really am! And don’t you panic either, Necia. Some things I’ve still got under control here.)

The point of all this being, the divide between what I am and a net.kook or a snake in the grass or a welcher or a messy pile of grinding rust-toothed grudges is sometimes shockingly narrow. Ask code4lib if you don’t believe me. Or consider my reputation in the biblioblogosphere, which surprises me unpleasantly on a regular basis—scared of me? People are scared of me? For heaven’s sake. But then again, “sometimes… just plain cranky and wrong” is a fair assessment, perhaps even a generous one.

(Though I do think two other things are happening: one, people remember my rants more than my other blogging, because rants are colorful and galvanizing; and two, I’m a woman not blogging like a lady, and that’s still a salient thing in today’s world.)

I don’t run myself down because I’m overly modest. I do it because I’d be a very monster of pride if I let myself. (And also, I think, because I don’t care to become jaded.) I don’t downplay my accomplishments because I’m humble. I do it partly because I’m uncomfortably aware that my accomplishments aren’t the whole story… and partly because if I rest on my laurels, which is sometimes tempting, I’ll start breaking more promises, letting more people down, and passing up chances to learn out of the arrogant and erroneous belief I’ve nothing left to learn. I don’t apologize publicly for my screwups because I’m a supremely reasonable human being. I do it because I’m quite the opposite—and I learned when I was sixteen that sincere apologies deflect a lot of ugly consequences, and I’ve learned since then that not apologizing when an apology is due creates even uglier consequences than the original sin.

Look, I can’t rely on beauty or charm; I haven’t got either. I can’t rely on a faultless history; mine is full of pitfalls and wrong turns. Brilliance? Nuh-uh. I’m smart enough, but plenty are smarter. Talent? Nothing earthshaking, and nothing especially focused. Agreeableness? Not natively, as the blogosphere is well aware, though I do okay when I work at it. So what’s left?

Relentless self-awareness and self-questioning, that’s what, along with a willingness to accept and (when I’m really ticking over properly) confront my own weaknesses and errors. It’s not the most enjoyable tool in the toolbox, I assure you, but it’s done better by me than any other.

You know how on takeoff, an airplane bumps and jolts and veers and careers and generally does stomach-turning stunts until it gets through the cloud layer and hits clear air?

Yeah. Welcome to my 2006. I knew it would be like this; the takeoff-phase of a new career can’t not be. Doesn’t soften the bumps, not really.

From a strict career-advancement point of view, tearing up my Honorary Guy membership card was pretty stupid; I threw away a lot of opportunity. From an accidental-techie point of view, it was even stupider; prompt, knowledgeable tech support is to be prized above rubies. From an inveterate-feminist point of view, who knows? I might well have made more of a difference if I hadn’t taken my toys and gone home.

But ulcers are not a career tool, and I proved to my own satisfaction some time before I became a librarian that I need to hang with people I trust to respect me. Not everybody needs that, and more power to the ones who don’t because they change the world, but I do need it. So, regrettably, the membership card had to go.

I wrote a fair bit this year (outside CavLec, which is more of the nature of a habit—take that however you please—than a professional duty). None of it was earthshaking. Some of it was competent professional writing. What’s clear from this year’s output is that I write too slowly to distinguish myself by the sheer quantity of my writing, and I write too poorly to distinguish myself by its quality or impact. This is an unhappy conundrum. I need to do better.

I also need to wake up and smell the rooibos: a podcast and two presentations did far more for me this year than all the writing I forced myself to do put together. I’m a solid speechifier already, and only getting better from observing extremely talented presenters like Jonathan Zittrain or the Adaptive Path crew. Next year, more talk proposals are in order.

There’s a conundrum there, too, though, because I have a curiously split reputation. At MPOW, I am regarded as uber-techie; some of my colleagues don’t believe I talk about anything else. The truth is, of course, that I rarely give techie-talks these days—the real truth is that I hardly ever have. The one I did do this year alongside Tim Donohue turned out quite well, and I’ve no objection to more tutorials and training sessions along those lines, but unfortunately DSpace-geekery is a fairly limited market, as is XML-document geekery, and the social-software beat (which is the other geekspace I can reasonably authoritatively inhabit) is quite full up.

Repository-rat space doesn’t need me either, which is a pity, but it’s the truth. I am going to Open Repositories 2007, and I did think about what I could possibly submit as a talk proposal, but I came up completely empty. I’m a decent rat. I do my job. I just don’t do it any differently from the other rats I know. I don’t have any particularly incisive technical or management or metadata or preservation insights. (Dublin Core sucks. We knew that already.) I have some moderately original suspicions about the social milieu IRs exist in, but I can’t support them (even anecdotally) well enough to hang a talk on them.

What that leaves, and where my real successes both written and spoken are pointing me, is big-picture crystal-ballism of various sorts. You have no idea how this irks me! I am a rat. I am a peasant. I properly ought to have my feet on the ground and my eyes on my feet. Landscape surveying, predictions, how-did-we-get-here, where-are-we-now, and where-are-we-going, that’s not for rats.

But I’m good at it. No two ways about it. I’m good at it. Good enough that I can pull it off outside my obvious area of expertise. Good enough that I can explain my area of expertise and its significance to those who don’t share it. Good enough that it’s what people are coming to me and asking for (hello, TLA ’07!). Good enough that when I see other people who are good at it, they remind me of, well, me.

So, hell, what can I do but play to my apparent strengths?

I didn’t just do worky-things this year. I got New Librarian out of her pity-party parade and into a job, and she’s doing just fine, and I’m proud of that. I got back into music, and I’ve remembered just how hard it is for me to sing well—good musical performance is an endless constellation of tiny pinprick details that have to be brought together all at once, and I’m really quite bad at getting them all correct because very few of them are as automatic for me as they ought to be—but I’m better than I was when I started, and I’m proud of that.

David’s deep in dissertation-funk, and it’s been a hard year on both of us because of that, but we’re still together in spite of it, and given what’s been happening in my circle of friends this year (as well as what I’ve seen dissertation-funk do to other marriages) I’m both proud and relieved. We’ll get through this. Do your worst, academia; you can’t break this pairing.

For next year… I’d like to find some clear air, if that’s not too much to ask.

Online friends versus real friends. Online life versus real life. All these briar-fences and hedges we construct when we speak so that we don’t admit the possibility that people we meet online are, you know, people, meaning as much to us as people we meet elsewhere.

I don’t want to hear that nonsense any more, and in fact I intend to laugh loudly and point a derisive finger whenever I do hear it. Much of my London trip was shaped by friends I’d originally met online, and I am simply bowled over by their generosity and trust.

Geoffrey Bilder became acquainted with my writing even before CavLec; he read “A Tale of Two Conversion Houses” (which I really need to get back up in some form) and has been following CavLec itself for ages. On the strength of that plus a brief phone call or two, he put me on the slate for the STM Innovations Seminar, staking some part of his own professional reputation that I wouldn’t turn out a fool, a lout, or a crashing bore. That’s how I got to go to London at all.

Quite some trust, there. I certainly hope I lived up to it!

A LiveJournal friend and occasional play-by-email GM, resident of Oxford, invited David and me on a day-trip to that paragon of college towns. She planned our activities, spent the entire day shepherding us around, wouldn’t let us so much as reach for a credit card, and had gifts for us (gifts! as though the day hadn’t been gift enough!) before we hopped back on the bus to London. The trip was a jewel, a real joy and privilege, and I can’t thank her enough.

Another LiveJournal friend who works at the Wellcome Trust Library invited me to her workplace and introduced me to a professionally-relevant colleague—again, trusting that I wouldn’t damage her standing in her workplace! She also took us for an absolutely lovely lunch, and kindly didn’t mind that I was limping like a limpet, having fallen that morning.

Friends are friends. I met some of my friends online. Anyone who can’t accept that my friends are my friends and I don’t draw a distinction between friends met online and friends met offline—probably isn’t my friend.

My father’s father died long before I was born; I know no more of him than his name (which would have been mine if I hadn’t inconveniently been born the wrong gender) and the story of Grandma’s diamond which I now have and wear.

My other three grandparents are all gone now. I was only on the fringe of the ends of their lives.

In my grandfather’s case, that was really because I wasn’t needed. Grandpa had prostate cancer, chose not to treat it aggressively, lived quietly among his books and his genealogies and his investments (he was a county treasurer and freelance investment manager most of his career), went into hospice when he needed to, and was lucid to the day he died. I talked to him on the phone in hospice a few times. He was laconic about the state of his health. “Good days and bad days,” he said, and that was all he would say, having other things he preferred to talk about.

When he died, I felt that dying wasn’t so bad if one could manage it the way he did. He was never anything less than himself. I didn’t go to his funeral, though. I wanted to, but my mother said I shouldn’t in the tone of an Imperial Command. I felt strongly that wrangling over it would betray him and the way his death had decently and with dignity closed off his life, so I shut up and stayed away.

My father’s mother was overtaken by diabetes. She pleaded with her sons to live out her life in her own home, the home she’d lived in some fifty years. Her sons fought like gladiators over what to do with her—the option she actually asked for was never on the table—and she died in a nursing home, blind, confused, and helpless.

There were certainly discussions to be had about how best to care for her; I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But I was in on the email exchanges for a while, and let’s be clear that Grandma’s wishes were at the bottom of the concern pile for everyone. (”It would shorten her life,” they said of her express desire to stay at home. “It would be too expensive, poor value for money,” they said.) Grandma was a trophy, and the field of battle was who could most loudly and dramatically proclaim concern for her. It was a disgusting display of chest-pounding oneupsmanship, and when I visited Grandma in the place she eventually died in, she surely didn’t look any the better for their vaunted solicitude.

My mother’s mother, who died a week and a half ago, sank into one of the nastier sorts of dementia after a series of mini-strokes, her temper turning white-hot vicious. To make a long story short, my aunt cared for her after Grandpa’s death until Grandma’s temper escalating to physical abuse wore my aunt down enough to heed Grandma’s repeated requests to be institutionalized. (“She only says that because she thinks she’ll die,” my mother told me mournfully on several occasions. Well, and so? I thought.)

The change, it turns out, was not good for Grandma, who bit and kicked and spat at staff at the home until they had to sedate her for their own safety. She died in the body a few days later. If you ask me, which you didn’t, her mind and her self had died long before that. Grandma was the properest, most gracious lady you can imagine; she tried and failed to teach me manners and sewing throughout my childhood. She was also the paradigmatic church lady, generous with her time and effort, invariably kind to children, a credit and a help to her community.

Whatever was kicking and biting wasn’t my grandmother. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t understand why changeling fairy tales are all about babes-in-arms; I think it more horrible that so many changelings are elders, that a solid and stable personality can not only vanish, but turn inside-out just in time for that to be the last memory that friends and children are left with.

My mother’s family is rather less contentious than my father’s, so I expected Grandma’s funeral to go smoothly. It didn’t. Whether because she felt that her siblings had deserted her with Grandma’s changeling, or out of plain ordinary vanity, my aunt shut my mother and my uncle out of the arrangements altogether, and my mother nearly came to (non-metaphorical) blows with her over it.

The most I can do, sitting here appalled and afraid, is try not to repeat the mistakes my parents and uncles and aunts made. I will listen to what my parents say they want, and let them govern their fate as much as I possibly can. I will take seriously Andy Clark’s contention that our physical surroundings are our cognitive scaffolding, and so I will think very hard before I change them for my parents. I will not force my parents to trade dignity and quality of life for mere quantity. I will do my level best to solve problems instead of creating them. I will remember that my parents quite properly reside at the center of their own lives; I will not relegate them to mere symbols in my own psychodrama.

I do not expect this to be straightforward.

Me, I am afraid again. Perhaps the reason my grandfather managed his own death while both my grandmothers could not is the gender difference. Men are permitted autonomy and self-direction, but everyone expects to take over for women. Men’s voices are heard and heeded; women are thought not to know what is best for them, are not trusted to make their own independent decisions about themselves. I hope this isn’t true, but it surely sounds plausible. I’m afraid to search the sociology literature, lest I find out I’m right.

I’m afraid of having my wishes disregarded and my dignity violated. I’m afraid of being robbed of my identity, becoming a changeling, losing the habits and abilities of mind that make me myself—and I’m even more afraid of being forced to live on as not-me. Hell doesn’t need an afterlife; plenty of scope in this one.

One small crumb of consolation is that I won’t have children to fight over me, smother me with misplaced kindness, and bungle my disposal. What I want is simple: recycle whatever’s recyclable—I am an organ donor, so all that’s in order—cremate the rest, and scatter it wherever because I’m past caring. And don’t spend a penny more than absolutely required. Money is for the living, not the dead.

My second grad-school advisor, who treated his grad students like the dirt under his fingernails, nonetheless managed the end of an emeritus professor’s life with true kindness and complete respect. The old man came in to do work whenever he wanted to. My advisor looked after his finances and got him to the doctor when he needed to go. Like my grandfather, the old man died lucidly and quietly, and had a quiet, dignified memorial.

Finding someone to do for me what my advisor did for him is all my hope for the end of my life.