Quodlibets

Oh, Le Blogging

Like everyone else, I feel it is important to do a "Hooray it's over" post, and I even feel slightly tempted to use too many exclamation points.

However.  I'm not so sure I'm glad it's over, simply because I'm worried I'll never again read a blog post by my sister or dad.  I've pretty much well decided that even if I write trivial, stupid shit, I still really enjoy this.  The nice thing about this ending is that on those days when I am truly useless, I won't feel SO compelled to blog.

But I like a routine, after all, and this whole posting once a day thing became a routine, and it's going to be hard for me to just stop.  Honestly.  No matter how little I've said, I've enjoyed saying it, and I've enjoyed being tethered to something.  Dead serious.  I'm not sure about saying something profound about this, except that some days, it's really hard to write.  I've always known I wasn't really cut out to write, but now I wonder.  I did this, every day.  Maybe if I just wrote one page every day, in a year or two, I'd have a novel.  Maybe I'll test that one out.

Anyway, it's over.  Will I win a prize?  I sure hope so!!!!!!

(Okay, I needed to put those in somewhere.  I really don't care about the prizes.  I didn't do this to win a prize.  Not that I'd turn one down, but still.  I did this because it seemed like something I would like.  And I was right.)

My Job

I've generally avoided talking about my job on this blog, because I don't think it's the best policy to do so.  I'm going to try to talk about it here, but obliquely, because I'm incredibly frustrated with the way things are right now. 

I miss retail.  I miss it every day, and I miss it in almost every way possible.  I miss the speed and the constant moving.  I miss feeling challenged, because I don't feel challenged here.  I miss interacting with people who wanted to know what I thought of CDs and books, who solicited my opinion specifically for advice on what to buy.  I miss recommending things.  Mostly, though, I miss working with people whose motto could be "All for One and One for All."  I miss being part of a team.

There's no such concept at my workplace.  People are very territorial.  What's my job is my job, and what's yours is yours.  I pretty much don't care who is doing what, as long as it is getting done CORRECTLY.  But I never speak up to correct co-workers here, because I'm afraid of them.  I'm afraid that they'll interpret my desire for things to get done right as some sort of encroachment, when all it is is a desire to avoid complications later.  And I know that my fear is borne out of reality, and that it actually is this way, because in the beginning, I did say something, but it's just bitten me in the ass far too many times to be worth it now.  I honestly cannot EVER remember feeling that way when I worked in a bookstore. 

And if I needed help with something, it didn't feel weird to ask someone for it, as it does here, and if I wasn't busy, it didn't feel weird to do someone else's work, if they had too much of it.  Those kinds of things NEVER happen here.  Every man for himself.  And it's little things, too.  If the doorbell rang at the bookstore, and you were the closest one to the door, you answered it.  Here, it's one person's job, and when I answered the loading dock buzzer this morning, my co-worker got huffy about it.  I mean, I was standing RIGHT NEXT TO IT.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.

Beyond that, though, I'm one of a few people in this building who has her hands in all the pies.  I do a little bit of everything, and it doesn't bother me to do so.  I like it.  I like knowing that in a pinch, I can cover either desk--reference or circulation--and that if I really had to, I could copy catalog.  I like knowing all the circ functions, and all the cataloguing ones.  I like having my hands dirty.  But NO other person in this building (save perhaps a couple of department heads) feels the same way.  Most people look at circ with disdain; one person even said proudly that she didn't know how to check out books, and she didn't want to know.  I mean, shit.  Really? 

It's such a bad attitude.  It completely negates the idea of team, and furthermore, makes it very hard to enjoy your co-workers at all.  Maybe I expect unrealistic things from this place, because I came from a place where everyone pretty much how to do nearly everything, with some small specialties here and there.  Most people could help out in a pinch.  I liked that.  I came to depend on it.  I came to depend on my co-workers, and I liked that they could depend on me. 

The thing is, it sucks when it's one-sided.  That's one of the biggest lessons I've learned in the 11 months I've been here.

Update

Fingers crossed, it looks like all the pictures are saved.  S used something called Disk Warrior (I think, but don't quote me on that), and the program pulled all the intact files off the two drives.  He thinks everything is there.  I only talked to him briefly this morning, and I don't think he's had time to go through the files one by one and see what's going on, but he gave every indication that everything is okay.

He said it appeared that somehow, the drives had gotten out of sync, and had been out of sync since July.  Disk Warrior was only able to pull files up to July from one of the drives, but when he swept the other one, he was able to pull off the rest, which means something wasn't right with the raid set-up.  Or something had gone wrong with that, or something like that.  His theory is that because of this out-of-sync-ness, the drives finally quit mounting.  They got so out of whack, that the whole system just stopped working.

I asked him if he was going to use a RAID again, and he said no.  At least, not right now.  Because clearly something went wrong.  Later, I want to ask him if this has ever happened to anyone else in the history of RAIDS, because there was such a lack of trouble-shooting info on the internet about it that I wonder how unique this is.

Regardless, I will talk to him as soon as he wakes up (someone took a sick day today, and it's not me.), and hopefully he will be able to tell me with certainty that everything is okay.  And then I will update this entry.

Help!

Yesterday was a BAAAAAD day at Casa EfroMano.  I had stomach troubles all day (Chinese finally rearing its ugly head?), the Bears lost, and to top it all off, S is now facing the possible loss of thousands of pictures.  I'm not kidding.

He shoots with a digital camera, and all his photos from the last however long are stored on four hard drives.  They're arranged in raids (?) of two.  I'm not 100% certain what that means, except that each pair of hard drives functions together.  One of the pair is a mirror of the other in the pair.  This is supposed to stop you from losing anything if one hard drive some how corrupts.  Yesterday, at about one, his computer stopped recognizing one of the pairs of hard drives as a raid.  (arrayed?  not sure.)  This is catastrophic, because he can't get to anything on EITHER hard drive if his computers (and yes, he tried two) don't recognize the set-up.  He can't find anything online about fixing the problem, and he worked all day well into night last night on it.  He called pretty much everyone he knew who knew anything about such things, and he ended up nowhere.  At least, when I went to bed, he had gotten nowhere.

Again, this is a pretty catastrophic loss, if he can't figure out how to rescue these puppies.  We're talking about 250 somethings of pictures, I think.  I think 250 is the capacity of both drives (so 500 total).  I know I sound like an idiot, but I really don't know anything about this at all.  He explained it to me like 40 million times yesterday, and I still don't really get it.  Essentially, though, he is facing the loss of probably the last year's (at least) photos.  I'm wrecked over this, and though he seems calm, he must be insane inside.  It's just such a huge loss.

If ANY of my readers have ANY ideas, please pass them on.  Nothing is too stupid to suggest, and anything might help, because I get the sense that he's up shit creek without a paddle here.  Maybe I'm panicking more than needs be, but I don't think so this time.  Somehow, I don't think so.

Study in contrasts

I've just completed an incredibly interesting study in contrasts.  Last week, I read a book called The Notebook Girls, which if you haven't heard of it, isn't a book so much as a diary.  Four girls from Manhattan, attending the creme de la creme of Manhattan public schools kept this diary from the period from the second semester of their freshman year to the second half of their junior year.  I guess it's a true account of these girls lives, including lots and lots of pot-smoking and drinking, sex and copious use of the word cock, and the trials and tribulations of being friends with boys who act wonky.  Every other sentence is something about needing to smoke, or a reference to smoking every day during the school year, or which boy they'll hook up with next.  (Complete with arrow instead of the word up.)  This book was an exercise in shallowness.  I can't believe I finished it.  I guess I hoped that something would come out of it, but save for a few entries about the legacy of 9/11 as a student in New York, and a few on Judaism and religion, it really is all about losing your virginity and smoking tons of pot.  I can't say that I expected more from this book, because I didn't know what to think, but the fact that one of the girl's mother is Katha Pollitt left me with very mixed feelings towards Pollitt.  That may be unfair, but that she encouraged her daughter to publish this crap is sad.

By contrast, I just finished the Frontline documentary, "Country Boys", and it was incredible.  There is no better argument for the idea that there is two different Americas than partaking of these two things one right after the other.  "Country Boys" follows two boys from Appalachia, and their trials and tribulations on the way to graduating from an alternative high school.  Both of their lives are rough, and by the end, I found myself rooting for both of these boys to make it.  This wasn't shallow; it was about two boys trying to overcome horrible early lives to make something of themselves.  At the beginning, it was hard to believe that anyone could start life in such a hole, but I'm more from the sheltered Manhattan-style existence than the Appalachia world these boys are from.  But I liked them better, these boys who some days didn't make it to school, and one of whom smoked like a chimney at the age of 15.  I liked them because they were real.  When Cody said something that I considered so prejudiced it was sad, I wasn't upset.  I wasn't upset because it wasn't hateful, and it wasn't coming from a place of education.  It was purely happenstance that he grew up where he did, and learned the way he did.  (The part on evolution shocked the pants off of me too, and made me sad.  But it is what it is.)

In the special features on the DVD, Cody is interviewed, and he expresses some incredibly intelligent and sophisticated ideas.  He's grown up a bit, he's matured, he's been exposed to more.  I felt like I was watching him grow up into someone to be respected, to be admired.  I absolutely did NOT feel that way about the four girls in NY, even though there was nothing prejudicial about the book; one of the girls even has a relationship with another girl.  But their jaded sophistication is ugly to me, and I'm not sure why, because like I said, I'm more from their world than the "Country Boys" world.  I'm sure it has something to do with the gratuitous drug use, which sickens me. 

But I can't figure out what I want to say about this, other than the contrast is sad.  The kids with all the opportunity squander it on drugs and sex, and the kids with none work steadily and hard to improve their lives.  Maybe I'm just disgusted with myself.

Tree

So pretty!

Saturday night post

Tree is up.  If I can get S to take a picture of it before he leaves for this evening's festivities (a concert I'm not going to), I will post it.

After we put the tree up, and the ornaments on it, I promptly passed out on the couch.  This is happening with alarming frequency.  It happened last night at about 10:35 or so.  (I know that I heard the first few jokes of Jay's monologue before I passed out.)  I don't know if I'm just really exhausted, or if it's a symptom of that old depression rearing its ugly head.  (Though I don't feel otherwise depressed.  It might very well be some kind of seasonal thingy.)  Either way, I'm sleeping an awful lot lately.

Hopefully, picture later.

Maximum Xmas enjoyment

Did anyone see the footage (on the news, I would guess) of the incredible back-up on 88 last night?  All because the outlet malls at 88 and Farnsworth opened at midnight to offer deals.  Sam and I had wondered who in the hell would shop at midnight on Thanksgiving, and I guess the answer is, all of Chicagoland.

I don't shop on Black Friday.  I did go to the grocery store to get a roll so that I could make a turkey salad sandwich (delicious, by the way; not quite as tasty as chicken salad, but an able stand-in) and drink some D to the C, but that was the extent of my venture into the shopping world.  S works retail, and I talked to him around one.  He said the store was very, very slow; his workplace isn't in any sort of shopping district, so I can't imagine many people are flocking there.  For the three years I worked retail on Black Friday, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I almost liked it.  Retail is a pain in the ass when people are assholes and you're busy, but there is an adrenaline rush to working that kind of rush.  It is what it is.

In fact, my nod to the Xmas season is the growing pile of ornaments at my house, and the Xmas music happily playing on my car stereo.  The tree is going up this weekend (and here is where we get Maximum enjoyment--I like to have it up as LONG as possible.), and out my window I can see wonderful Christmas lights every night already. 

I shop online more and more, because I'm looking for unique things, and I find a LOT of cool stuff online.  I don't know that I would venture out to stores anymore at all if it weren't for the fact that one of the things I want to buy S is very much a tactile purchase.  I'm hoping to get that done by Tuesday morning.  In fact, I'm hoping to have all my shopping done within the next week or so.  Not sure if that's a reality, but it's a goal, anyway.  I probably won't meet it, only because of the stocking filling.  That shit is a pain in the ass.  But a fun one, I guess.

So yeah.  Turkey eaten, Xmas here.

Thanks-giving

In no particular order:

--Mom, Dad, Sis and Brother
--S
--Caffeine-free Diet Coke
--health insurance
--a steady job that I like OK
--books
--Italy
--food, in all its glory (fresh mozz., asparagus, potato filling, guac., cupcakes, etc on and on)
--kittens and puppies and all manner of baby animal
--music
--health
--being able to love people, and being loved
--living in a fantastic city
--S
--all five senses, intact
--being alive

Anti-Thanksgiving

I declare today Anti-Thanksgiving.  So, in honor of the fact that I had to work and that the turkey is tomorrow, here is a list of things I am NOT thankful for:

--chapped lips
--getting shocked by every single thing on the earth
--not being able to find a good book to read
--stupid people
--scratchy wool scarves and sweaters
--being late, or other people being late
--bananas
--my hands always being cold
--the wad of phlegm that is ever-present in your throat when you have a cold
--the fact that dishes (and clothes, for that matter) require washing
--raw onions
--my left front turn signal
--robbers
--the fact that cell phones need batteries
--eye boogers
--having to get out of bed on cold cold cold mornings
--popcorn, but only when it gets stuck in your teeth

So there.  Tomorrow I will post a list of things I am actually grateful for, and I fully anticipate two-thirds of the list being food items, with people making up the other third.