Caveat Lector

The closest I ever come to the mind-freedom of meditation is during travel. While Sita Dulip’s Method comes highly recommended, I have never tried it; I don’t know that I even need it. I’ve gotten very good at letting go frustration in one long sigh and reminding myself that I get there when I get there, not one moment sooner.

I’m the traveller angry passengers hate and airline agents love, the one who can walk up to the counter after the flight-cancellation announcement, smile calmly, and say sincere thanks when the interaction is over, even when the result is an extra night away from home (as it all too often is; some day I will break myself of the habit of booking the last flight out, but that day is not this).

Today I got to the Madison airport far earlier than I needed to, which gave me leisure to grin when a security agent recognized the Silver Surfer logo taped to the Silver Surfer’s silvery surface. (Say that three times fast.) I re-buckled my shoes, settled into a seat with Midori Snyder’s Innamorati (highly recommended; I must read more by this woman) and let the time take care of itself.

(In passing—and I am certainly in passing, typing this 35,000 feet above ground and hurtling toward Montreal at some hideous rate of speed—I wonder if anyone has named the fantasy subgenre that essentially consists of reinventing existing semi-historical, semi-literary genres? Innamorati is a fine example of the type, part commedia, part Boccaccio, part straight-up Italy; and so are Kij Johnson’s brilliantly-revamped Japanese pillow-books. I find that I love these dearly and want to read more of them. If I got ambitious, I’d even write one, set of course in Spain, the country that is still the imaginative terrain of my heart despite everything graduate school did to me. But the Spain of brave wandering Egeria? Or the Arcipreste de Hita? The Cid? Or the doomed Spain breathing through the Abencerraje? I don’t know. Such gorgeous Spains they all are.)

My flight to Chicago, as you might have gathered from all this prating about patience, was late.

Air travel shares one trait with investing: sometimes keeping too-close track of things creates nothing more than pointless frustration. I wasn’t sure what time my flight to Montreal left, only that I had a fairly hefty layover, so I simply didn’t worry. I even laughed when the flight attendant announced my connecting gate and I realized I’d have to walk most of the length and breadth of Terminal 3. I did, however, grimace a bit (even my travel-hardened patience has limits) walking off the plane, when I checked the departure screens to find that my flight left at 5:36 and was listed as on-time. My faithful clip-watch said 5:01, you see, and I really needed to stop at the little artisans’ room.

Nothing to do but hoof it, so I did, weaving past janitors with a creaky-wheeled dumpster, oblivious knee-high children, and the usual raft of people grafted to cell phones. I arrived panting at the gate to see the door still open, but nothing showing on the announcement screen save the name and number of the flight. Bad sign.

The gate agent’s time was taken up with some yahoo (see, patience worn thin) who needed to be at another gate entirely, but still insisted on finding out why his plane wasn’t departing on time. “I’m guessing I’m late,” I said ruefully when he finally left, sliding my boarding pass across the counter.

She glanced at it. “No, you’re fine,” she said, though it was five-twenty-something by then. “We’ll start boarding in about twenty minutes.” Never been so glad to hear a plane was late, I tell you what.

When I flew into Montreal last August for Extreme Markup, customs was an unbelievable four-hour nightmare ordeal, something about a work slowdown by customs officials. I’ve no notion whether that’s been resolved.

I’m not worrying about it, though. I get there when I get there.

Back in the day, when I was a wee typesetter and SGML jockey, we had a visit from a NetLibrary muckety-muck (this was some time before the OCLC takeover), returning a visit I had made to him the previous winter. I’ll never forget the look of politely-restrained consternation on his face when he saw that I worked in a cubicle. A cubicle.

Because he had an Office, you see, a big, bright, airy office with glossy wood-enhanced furniture and all the trimmings. I’m guessing he was thinking I deserved better than a cubicle. I hope he was also feeling guilty about the veal-farm–style cubicles on NetLibrary’s dark, uncarpeted concrete production floor, where the people who did the actual work turned over their cramped ugly gunmetal desks to the second shift at the end of the day.

What he had no way to know was that my cubicle, itself far nicer than any cube at NetLibrary, was a pretty impressive step up from the space I had previously inhabited—a small desk in a crowded room with no file space whatever. I quite liked that cubicle. It held everything I needed, had plenty of desk space, and was easy even for packrat-me to keep neat.

And even the desk I had before I had the cubicle was a step up from TAing, during which endeavor I shared a desk in an even more crowded and noisy room. Let’s just say that I’m well-used to less-than-theoretically-ideal working conditions. I’ve learned to cope.

During one job interview, I was briefly shown into a white-painted office with two desks in it. “This will go to the person who gets the position,” I was told. Oh, I thought. I’ll have one of the desks. Okay.

Except I was wrong. Whoever takes the job, my guide clarified a moment later, would get the whole office. “You mean these two people are going to be displaced?” I blurted, doubtless sounding like a priceless ass. Oh, well, there’s going to be some wholesale remodeling of the staff space, they said, so these folks would probably move anyway. But yes, if you are offered and accept the job it’ll be your office.

My. Office. That just sounded strange, and vaguely wrong.

I also got the vague impression that some more or less unhappy politicking had gone into the office assignment. Office space is such a status symbol, it seems. The new hire was getting some primo space. I shouldn’t wonder if somebody thought maybe it wasn’t entirely deserved.

Which isn’t to say that the place was a backstabber’s paradise or anything like that; I haven’t often seen a group of people better able to deal productively and respectfully with ordinary workplace tsuris. It’s just that office space is that emotionally charged.

I have to say, I prefer egalitarianism in my office space, even if that’s only because I haven’t yet tasted the seductive pleasures of having my own office (with a door, an actual door). The setup I witnessed at NetLibrary was sad, disgusting, and to my mind thoroughly unethical, somewhat analogous to salaries at the top being obscene multiples of salaries at the bottom.

And although the working space at the place I’m thinking of was orders of magnitude better for everyone than NetLibrary’s, I confess I still felt unhappy at the thought of the overt contrast between me and the others. Whatever my rank, I’d rather not mark it so openly with privilege.

A number—a rather large number, actually—of my friends-and-relations are expert in one topic or another. The precise degree of expertise varies, of course, as these things will. Be that as it may, though, I’ve seen infinite variations on the “Will you do my homework for me?” email.

I’ve even gotten a few such myself, which is beyond odd, as I am a born jack-of-all-trades and claim mastery in nothing whatever.

The usual response to this behavior from concerned teachers and parents is to call it plagiarism and impose huge penalties on it. To my mind, though, that is only one part of the correct response.

The problem with condemning expert consultation wholesale is that it’s a perfectly viable information-gathering strategy. Do I look for a book or a website when I’ve got a networking problem? No, actually, I mostly don’t, because my friend Adrian has forgotten more about networking than I’ll ever know; if he’s on IM, I ask him my question and get an immediate, accurate, complete answer. If he’s got a CSS issue, he bugs me and I (usually) solve it.

So if we smack these kids on the nose merely for consulting experts in vivo rather than in print or pixels, we’re putting them at a disadvantage in the wider world. Which is not to say that “do my homework for me!” isn’t a poor approach; of course it is! I just think we need to deal with it as an etiquette problem, a social problem, rather than strictly an information problem.

Etiquette issue one is that experts don’t exist to answer the same question fifty million times for fifty million people, or to answer introductory questions in their area of particular expertise. It is a waste of time for them, pure and simple. Ergo, it is pretty flagrantly rude to ask such questions of experts, especially without having done research in ex vivo sources first.

This problem is connected with the problem of celebrity email: fifty million people asking “just one quick question, please!” of one poor beleaguered soul, never considering the other forty-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine questions pouring in. There’s a substantial set of people—not just children—who simply do not understand this problem, though children do tend to be most self-centeredly rude about it. I don’t think it’s coincidence that—Neil Gaiman perhaps aside, and even he is starting to sound tired—the experts I know despise “do my homework!” emails because they invariably come from the rudest subset of students imaginable.

Librarians have a big “in” here, because we’re the ones who find ex vivo expertise fast and accurately, and we never turn questions away because they’re somehow “too simple.”

Etiquette issue two is that experts don’t exist to cover for one’s own lack of preparation. Every reference librarian I know dreads the “find me everything on X—in fifteen minutes!” questioner who pops up by the truckload right before finals. Respect for expertise includes giving said expertise time to function.

Etiquette issue three is the inverse correlation between one’s distance from a given person and the amount of work one can expect that person to do for one. If Adrian asks me a complicated CSS question, I’ll go the extra mile to find an answer, because Adrian’s my buddy. I’m far less likely to do that for J. Random Emailer. That’s life in the social world; it pays to pick one’s experts from one’s circle of friends-and-relations when at all possible… and when it’s not, to go to a reference librarian.

We’re perhaps not very good at inculcating information etiquette… but any bibliographic instruction class I ever teach is going to at least mention it.

Well, I’m through all of next week’s homework except for a quick library-consult that I’ll handle on Monday, and I’ve written up my talk notes for Ruritania. Written them all the way out, actually. I don’t normally do this because I prefer to speak semi-extempore, but I’ve got so little time this time that I thought I needed to. The blog has given me plenty of practice in writing (more or less) how I speak, so I shouldn’t sound too horribly canned.

The blog, ah yes, the blog. The Ruritanians have been giving CavLec a pretty thorough going-over, judging (again) from my server logs. Though it wasn’t a Ruritanian who searched today for “career development” and nearly gave me a laughter-induced hernia.

Career development? Me? Honey, are you ever in the wrong place for that. I’m doing this all wrong, you see. This isn’t how a job hunt is supposed to go at all.

Because what I’m supposed to do is duck into the nearest phone booth and turn into Perfect Plastic Person. I then appear before the Ruritanians, who search me obsessively for flaws that (as Perfect Plastic Person) I gamely try to pretend I don’t possess. The Ruritanians aren’t supposed to see my warts until they’re stuck with ’em, because who hires a person with warts?

Obviously I’m not playing this that way. I mean, I’ve gone and nicknamed my potential future employers and colleagues as a nonexistent European country notable mostly for swashbuckling and all. And if the Ruritanians hadn’t found CavLec themselves, I’d have told them about it during my visit and invited them to take a look.

Because when you get right down to it, I don’t believe in employment surprises any more. I’d far rather build job relationships based on real knowledge. Here are my warts (I’m human, so I have ’em), say I, and oh, that’s all right, we think we can live with that, say they. (Or in an ideal world I don’t ever expect to find, they say, warts? What warts? We didn’t see any warts.)

Call it an acid test, if you will. Anybody who can look past CavLec and still hire me is likely to be good for me, and I for them. Anybody who likes CavLec—well, how can they not be my kind of people?

Anybody who gets antsy about CavLec, worried I’ll say or do Bad Things with it, or that it will Reflect Badly on them… probably needs to look at hiring somebody else. I’d rather work for someone who trusts me not to be a jerk or an idiot for the most part, not to mention someone willing to forgive me on the (reasonably rare) occasions that I am. In return, I can serve up a mildly self-deprecating, humor-laced straightforwardness that Perfect Plastic Person will never offer.

It’s about fit, really. A good employment relationship is about fit, rather than either employer or employee bending all out of shape to accommodate the other. CavLec is definitely an acid test of fit, because I’m pretty much all here. This is me. This is what you’re getting if you hire me. No surprises.

If I were the employer, I think I’d find that reassuring… but with weblogs so new-and-all, I don’t know how many employers think that way.

I’ll be finding out soon, though.

Owing to ridiculously balmy February temperatures, yesterday’s Kites on Ice more resembled Adventures in Slush. My husband is like a cat as regards wet feet, so we didn’t do much adventuring onto the lake.

We did come back after dinner, however, to watch the night-kites—stunt kites with LED lights rigged on their edges chasing each other about, ghostly white kites drifting in and out of floodlights, one curious squiddy sort of kite with three red lights on its head and a single red light bobbing on its tail. A fine fireworks display and some fairly silly music put great grins on both our faces.

“I’m glad we did this,” said David. I am too, love; I am too—the more so because we don’t get another chance.

I am slowly becoming accustomed to the idea that we’re going to be leaving soon, leaving for good, because Madison doesn’t have room for another geek librarian. I’m making distressingly long mental lists of all the expensive and annoying things that have to be done to groom our house for sale. I can’t look at a piece of furniture without estimating how much it’ll cost to ship it, and wouldn’t it be better to leave it here and get another. (So much of our furniture was acquired via Psychic Shopping Network that shipping genuinely does become a dubious proposition. Wherever we end up, I daresay there’ll be a PSN.)

I’m not exactly happy about going. When I crashed out of graduate school, David and I made the explicit decision to stay in Madison, though we could have gone anywhere. When I bought this house, I thought it would be ours ’till death did us part, despite Madison’s grotesque property taxes.

But slowly, slowly, I’m reconciling myself. We trotted up and down State Street yesterday, between the afternoon’s kites and the evening’s kites. State Street is vastly less interesting than it was when we came here. Of our five fave secondhand bookstores, but two are left. The best gaming store moved out to the far-west side. Most of the cute little curio shops have gone, replaced by gaudy, shoddy junk or yet another boutique catering to the anorexia sufferer and no one else. Good restaurants there certainly are still, which is a blessing, but the chains are muscling in with a vengeance, so how much longer will that be true?

The restaurant where David proposed to me? Gone. Elephants at the zoo? Enjoying retirement on a farm somewhere. The first Indian, Mexican, and vegetarian restaurants we came to love? Long, long gone. The mayor-for-life? Hawking investments, or insurance, or something.

Maybe it’s time to set a new benchmark somewhere else. Maybe we’ve gotten a bit too comfortable here. Maybe I ought to be listening harder to my uneasy sense that Madison has gotten too sprawly big for us. Maybe it’s time.

Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t jump at a good job here if it opened, because I am a humdrum creature of habit and I hate the thought of moving, all the logistics and disruption and uncertainty of it. But if we do have to go and we’re lucky, we’ll end up someplace as good to us as Madison has been, and perhaps even a little better than it’s treating us now.

At least we saw the night-kites first.

An old book, a modest old book, warped red cloth covers curving protectively around the brittle pages, with a retiring polka-dotted border and no title, no external identification at all save for the stickers added to the spine by a librarian or archivist:

I was careful with it, when it was handed me by the Digital Content Group man; he watched me rather narrowly at first, but seemed satisfied by the way I treated it. I have been around old books since I was a child, borrowed them, bought them, read them. I know how to handle them. I respect those unadorned covers with the fraying corners. They have done their work well.

But the book is old, published in 1882. The verso of the title page proclaims in purple dye-stamped lettering that the Wisconsin Historical Society received the book December 17, 1895. Its pages were cut fairly neatly, which is a blessing, since not all books were so kindly treated. Even so, the pages are grey, and their top edges are starting to ravel and crumble.

Ireland under the Land Act proclaims the title page in a well-spaced all-caps serif, the rest of the page in restrained, modest variants on all-caps and small-caps, save for the regal touch of “London” in faux-blackletter, and the brief, mild italic copyright statement. The printer’s mark, in contrast, is a wild, whimsical W-shaped flower-ark built on a serif C, presumably for the publisher Chatto & Windus.

Law books are given to these weird little touches, I have found. When I was proofreading the Hispanic Seminary’s transcription of an old Aragonese fuero years ago, I was captivated by the bizarre cartoons in the margins, of people and beasts and half-people-half-beasts shooting arrows and throwing stones at each other. Scribes get bored, and doodle. I expect some of my old DTDs or (horrors!) SGML instances hold some less-than-wholly-temperate comments relating to problems with the data modeling or the transcription.

Someone with more sensitive fingers than I have might be able to read this book blindfolded, the printing has so dented the pages. Not smooth, these pages, not at all, not around the edges and not on the printed surface. Do people who whinge about the “feel of the paper book” have any idea about this? I doubt it.

My job? Proofreading the OCR and sharpening up the existing TEI markup for the electronic edition of this book. Not a difficult job; it’s got some tables (including one gigantic one that will take me some hours to capture correctly), but it’s nothing I didn’t do for Liberty Fund, a few jobs back. (I can browse their library and see my own work there—not directly, more’s the pity, but transformed into HTML. It’s my work, though. I like seeing my own work.)

I’m rescuing this book. I’m renewing it. Materially, it is a modest thing; it exists for the sake of the words, and the words are what I am recasting anew. So the old red covers don’t have to endure the touch of many hands, and the pages don’t have to risk crumbling altogether as they are turned. I preserve the words, and the intent of the artisans who put the words on the pages, as best I know how. This is, stripped to its essentials, what I do. I rescue the souls of modest old books for new readers and new uses.

And it irks the life out of me, turns me purple and speechless with fury, when people (more often than not, librarians!) loftily proclaim that I do this because I have no respect for the physical codex.

Respect goes two ways.

My dad was always convinced he was gonna show ’em. Those nincompoops in his department who were keeping him down, not giving him graduate students, not funding him, making him teach crap intro courses. He’d show ’em. Someday, he’d show ’em.

He didn’t even particularly care, I don’t think, about having his own research agenda vindicated, as long as he could prove to his own satisfaction that his department were a bunch of evil know-nothing blowhards. He used to put his clueless undergrads through exercises designed solely to Show ’Em. ’Em, of course, not being the undergrads, but the department.

Everything the department did in his general vicinity got filtered through his bitterness. Everything. Any positive gesture he called insincere or forced; anything that affected him negatively he considered to be aimed at him personally. Any disagreement with him, no matter how minor or well-justified, was an attack. Nothing was neutral. Nothing happened, nothing could happen that didn’t involve him, that wasn’t aimed at keeping him down.

But someday he’d show ’em. He’d show ’em!

What I don’t understand is what he thought his department was supposed to do about this. Or even objectively, leaving him out of it, what they ought to have done. What could they have done to defuse his hatred? He hadn’t left them anything to do but be evil, even if they didn’t care to be.

I ask these questions, of course, because I and mine are on the receiving end of a few of these vendettas (never mind the obvious application to the current US political situation), and I have yet to figure out how to deal with them myself. Once you’re wearing demon’s horns, how do you cut them off? Where’s the win, being open to people who only know how to hate you?

Go along to get along, was the life and citizenship model I grew up with. One votes because it is one’s duty; one accepts yard signs from the candidates of one’s choice. One fulminates loudly about the political issues of the day; the less impact one can actually have on the issue, the more loudly one fulminates. One trumpets the lifestyle choices one has made that affirm one’s political stance, while ignoring those that do not.

One does not put oneself out in any way to further one’s political desires. Because that’s for fanatics, and it’s costly, and sometimes it’s even dangerous. Nor does one question too loudly, or march, or write letters; acting political is unsafe. Volunteering, when done at all, is done on behalf of socially respectable or at least innocuous organizations, organizations that never require one to question one’s own life or identify solidly with another’s.

One keeps one’s head down. One doesn’t pay too much attention. One hopes to get by.

I’m ashamed, now, of not having questioned the model before, not breaking it sooner. I’ve broken a few less than wholly apposite habits and beliefs I grew up with, but not this one, not yet. I’m 32, and I haven’t learned to be a practicing, responsible citizen yet. Shameful. Really, I’m starting to think I deserve whatever the hell I get, the next few years.

I suppose it’s not surprising that both civic and religious education in this country has been so hamstrung that civic participation has been reduced to voting, and charitable actions to meaningless minor rituals. (Two quarters every Sunday for trees in Israel, the sum total of tzedakah? It seems ridiculous now, but no one questioned it when I was a child, save when occasionally one of my parents expressed irritation at having to produce the two quarters.) Not surprising, but certainly disturbing.

Because I can’t be the only 32-year-old in this country waking up, rubbing her eyes, and realizing she doesn’t know how to break out of apathy, doesn’t know how to pitch in, doesn’t know the most elementary things about political action. Little Dutch child staring at the dam with no idea where to stick a finger. Not that a finger will do anything much, at this point; we’re so terribly far beyond that.

Doesn’t matter, though, because a finger in the dam is practice. Practically nobody learns to be an effective, involved political actor overnight, I should think. It’s a little like what I’m told about soldiering (despite having no actual experience therein): you practice until the right thing happens under fire without your having to will it to.

We’re under fire now, a lot of us, and the sense I have is that we’re floundering, even those of us no longer content with “go along to get along.” Goodness knows I am. We didn’t practice, and now we don’t have the right thing to do embedded in our bones. It feels so terribly pointless to start now with the little things, as I am trying to do—will there even be time for a genuine impact?—and yet the big things overwhelm.

And the spectre I can’t escape, of serious sacrifice and stark survival choices—how can I possibly think I will do the ethical thing and damn the consequences? I haven’t yet, not really. Turned down a few jobs when I needed them because I didn’t like the ethics of the company in question, oriented myself at a socially-useful (and governmentally-beleaguered) profession; that’s about it. And that’s not much.

If not me, who? I don’t have children to hide behind. Though, to be fair, for every parent who says “Family first, world be damned!” there’s another who says “I want to work for a world worth leaving to my children.” I don’t have economic survival to hide behind. No excuses at all, really. Just ignorance and laziness.

This well-earned shame, I expect to be living with it a long while, unless I’m right about this country becoming a fever-dream out of the Latin American post-boom and they kill me first. I don’t want to be told I’m okay just because I dream of social justice. I don’t want to be coddled any more. I would like (and if it takes the rest of my life, so be it; just now it hardly seems enough) to redeem myself. Just a little. If I can.

Whatever the prevailing opinion about a person in my general orbit is, I can practically guarantee you I don’t know it. I don’t know if it’s a holdover from my socially-impoverished childhood or what, but the “everybody knows” tidbits pass me right on by.

Much of the time this is a good thing, because what “everybody knows” is false or pointlessly mean-spirited or both. I heard some stuff at orientation that I wish I hadn’t (and certainly shan’t pass along). There’s plenty enough mean in the world that I don’t need to bathe in more of it.

Probably just as well I’m none too cognizant of my own reputation in a few circles, for that matter. The same people purveying the petty meannesses I’m keeping to myself doubtless have me pegged as “annoying but harmless loudmouth, nowhere near as smart as she thinks she is.”

On the whole, I’m not sorry that I mostly form my own opinions of people without benefit (using the term loosely) of gossip. I keep more doors open that way, come into new situations without jaundice—and as jaundiced as I am, that’s a not inconsiderable good.

Every once in a while, though, I lose out. At orientation, I ran into a new SLISter who is also a current denizen of the Department from Hell. “I wish I could just bring them all down here to see what orientation ought to be like!” she said to me.

“They’re more than welcome,” I grinned, “but somehow I don’t think it likely they’d show.”

Naturally we got to swapping stories. Some things are changing over there, terribly slowly; at the very least, the dog-eat-dogness amongst the students is fading into a more cooperative atmosphere. (I appear to have started it, at least in part. The little mini-library I left for future master’s students is still in place and expanding, I’m told. Well, go me and go them.) Trying to place me in the department’s history, she asked who my adviser had been, and who was running the department at the time. “Dr. B, at least to start,” I answered to both questions. “He never did learn my name.”

She nodded wisely. “He never learns women’s names,” she said.

Oh. Um, how did I miss that bit? Because, man, a lot of things about that department suddenly clicked right into place, not least some mildly grunchy things from other professors that a department chair committed to a friendly environment wouldn’t have allowed. (Nothing like these horror stories, thank heaven, but nothing good, either.) Miss it I did, however, no credit to my good sense.

Sometimes it just takes me too long to come to the same negative opinion of someone that everybody else has always had; I won’t do it until I’m flattened outright into a corner with nothing to do but lash out. Such was my history with Neurotic Ex-Boss. Everybody but me, it seems, knew trouble was in the offing when he got promoted to management. A coworker driving me home from a work event soon afterward delicately tried to extract my opinion; I was as happy and optimistic as I could be. In hindsight, I quite see how dubious she was about the whole thing.

Eh, well, long story short, she was right (as was popular opinion) and I was wrong and I didn’t realize it until Neurotic Ex-Boss had driven me right ’round the bend. Ironic, that. The one person genuinely happy for him, ready and willing to support him, was the first person he trained his sights on.

There’s got to be a happy medium in here somewhere, between wilful cluelessness and caving to random gossip, but I confess I haven’t found it yet.

(I fear and loathe Nike for more reasons than one, but a not inconsiderable one is their unstoppable cooptation of the highly useful phrase “Just do it.” Too late to salvage it now; I shall simply have to express myself in another fashion.)

I read with interest Caterina Fake’s advice on misbehaving.net about how to speak in public, and earn more public-speaking gigs. At roughly the same time, I got a horrified email from a friend of mine in response to my brief hey-I-want-this-job post to the effect of “Are you sure that one’s techie enough?”

I have in some circles a couple of truly fearsome reputations, as techie and as wholly unflappable public persona. Anybody who’s read CavLec for a while knows both that I’m not all that techie (sorry, J.M. Tyree, it’s true) and that I am in fact quite easily flapped. So how’d I get these reputations, not to mention the skills (such as they are) underlying them? I do things anyway. Sheer bloodymindedness. Really as simple as that.

You want reputations like mine? Read on, and I’ll tell you how I got them, because I’m like that.

Caterina expressed one part of my personal creed very well: “Becoming a confident speaker is not about eliminating mistakes and nervousness but about recovering gracefully from inevitable mistakes and nervousness.” I would add that the grace of the recovery isn’t necessarily overly salient. What matters is the fact of the recovery. Sure, go hide in a corner and whimper a bit if you need to—but come out of that corner swinging, not cringing.

For instance, when I was giving my tutorial in Montreal, for some not-adequately-explored reason I couldn’t come up with the phrase “MARC indicator.” Knew what it was, explained it just fine, couldn’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was called. Felt like an idiot. Didn’t let it stop me. (And surely won’t forget again!)

Because, honestly, not a big deal. The folks at my tutorial will run into the phrase at some time or another, and thanks to me will understand quite quickly what it refers to. Certainly my inability to recall one phrase detracts very little from the overall quality and usefulness of that tutorial. So why worry? Especially why let it stop me from getting back out there?

On the techie side, I do stupid things like letting overzealous PHP error-reporting stand for weeks because I can’t remember setting things up that way. But, come on, people who never do things like that do everything on their desktop machines in Linux without ever leaving the command line—and who the heck does that and why should we take her as a role model?

Yes, when you start out doing something unfamiliar you will suck at it. You may, in fact, continue to suck at it; no guarantees in this world. Nobody would hire me as a production Python programmer, because four years or so of writing Python and let me tell you I still suck at it. I suck less than I did four years ago, certainly, but that doesn’t erase the fact of my basic suckitude.

CSS? I know my way around the spec, but nobody would hire me to design a site, because I suck at site design. Guess what? I still teach CSS to people. I shouldn’t wonder if some of the people I teach turn out to be better than I am, eventually.

Here’s the thing, though: you don’t have to be wildly good at something to be useful at it. Am I the world’s greatest public speaker? No, but I don’t have to be. Am I the world’s greatest markup-language expert? Hell no; I didn’t even know about SGML CONCUR until Extreme. But I can still make myself useful with the little I do know. Am I the world’s greatest librarian? Leaving aside that I’m not a librarian yet, no, and I doubt I ever will be. If I thought that mattered, I’d not be eighteen credits away from an MLS.

Here’s the other thing: Somebody out there is always worse at what you do than you are. Somebody else is better. You’re always going to hear comparisons in both directions. Don’t let them go to your head either way. One way, you get arrogant. The other way, you get scared. Learn from the substantive feedback; leave the ratings be. (Likert has a lot to answer for, in my blatantly biased opinion.)

Whatever it is, if it needs to be done and is worth doing, do it. Never mind if you’re inefficient or not the world’s best, or you screw it up the first time. Do it anyway. It’s not just the only way to learn; I think it’s the only way to live, myself.