-Arete, Arete-

Outside the Union, a small number of students crouched in metal cages, earnestly protesting University policy regarding the treatment of animal test subjects. Arguing with one of them is an easy, if unsatisfying task. I asked any number of pertinent questions:
Do you know the state of the monkeys after the research? Might they pose a danger to the populace if they're put on a preserve of some kind?

To her credit, the organizer was content to trade ideas with me. To a point. Than she not-so-subtly extended her hand, palm up, to receive the three paper-weights (ossage oranges) that I had been juggling the entire time.

Inside, sorority sisters and fraternity brothers flounced about like naughty children while harried blood drive staffers collected pints of their feeble blood. These greeks ignored the staffers, and me, too, since I clearly had no affiliation with any organization. I was (god forbid) only there because I wanted to give blood.

It's just another competition/social event for the kiddies - and while I know I'm being unfair, I also know I'd been treated poorly. My gripe for myself is nothing compared to my gripe for the staff, toiling endlessly with good cheer with not a kind word for the efforts; not even when they revive, hover, and dote on a tiny girl who probably lied about her weight (for once toward the heavy side).

Obviously the girl is too dazed to be faulted for not thanking them. Her attendant friends should have, but they would not deign to speak to the help. These are the same students who will go outside to chat up the early-twenties punk trio with the dog. They laugh at the cardboard "Beer Money" sign, and throw disgraceful amounts into the aluminum can. One block away, the actual homeless are shaking within their nightmares and waking deliriums.

"Discuss," I think, but it might well be "disgust."

-Vainglorious Girl-



"Do you know anything about Greek Mythology?" she asked.
Perhaps the only test I ever aced without studying was on Greek and Roman Mythology in back in High School. So I tried to sound neutral, if not humble, when I said I knew a lot about the subject. She had a followup:

"Who's an interesting woman [in Greek Mythology]?"

Athena is always my first choice in these unlikely situations in which someone asks me to name an interesting mythical deity. Wisdom personified - she's the classical smart woman who doesn't hide her brain or her power. Artemis hold a similar appeal, but she's ultimately aloof, a huntress who doesn't care to share any knowledge she's gained.

Choosing a godess seemed wrong somehow, and I pressed for more details: "Should it be a mortal or immortal woman?" After the answer came back that either would be acceptable, she finally explained herself. It seems the girl has a project where she must chose a figure from Greek Mythology to be the subject of a 2-3 minute dance.

Immediately I switched gears and focused on mortal women, judging the extended careers of the deities to be too much material for a short performance. There's still so many options, though Persephone (she of the abduction by Hades, six pomegranate seeds eaten, Demeter's seasonal motherhood allegory) was already taken.

Acting out the beauty that kills - as in Helen of Troy and Pandora - did not occur to me at the time.

Back to Athena. She has some interesting mortal encounters. Take Arachne, for example. Arachne boasts of her skill at the loom, A disguised Athena sees it for herself, hears more boasts, reveals herself, and challenges the girl to a contest. Technically, both tapestries are flawless. But Athena finds Arachne's chosen subject matter blasphemous, depicting Zeus's sexual misadventurers and rapes.

We get our term "arachnid" because of what happened next.

Before I'd finished relating the story to my young friend, she was enthusiastically on board.
"Oh, I want to play a spider!" she gushed.

So maybe my reference abilities have been used for good today. I'm not really sure.

-Oh, the Proximity-

The Post Gazette ran the story on the font page. "Kofi to Chide U.S. [at Heinz Fellowship lecture series]."

One might have thought Annan's visit would bring the protestors and extra security personnel out in force. In reality, we're looking at two pamphleteers and big galoot in a leather jacket who would not have looked out of place telling people to "keep their hands off the girls."

Culled from the nationality room tours at the University of Pittsburgh's cathedral of learning, each usher wore a shaky version of a different country's nationality garb.

Just before the first twenty-minute round of introductions began, the volunteer ushers formed two lines and walked up to the front of the chamber. Once they had stretched to fill the front row, they paused as a group, assumedly waiting for the applause that followed. Some waved.

The exercise was silly, and they knew it. But they have too much invested in the mentors that organized this activity to do anything other than smile weakly and accept the blow to self-esteem.

Next, twenty to thirty minutes of choral arrangements. Filler, to keep the late-arriving Annan from seeming late, saving him audience ire.

They should not have bothered. After that, it was another thirty minutes of preamble, self-congratulation, and Ketchup commercial before the great man speaks.

In a way, I felt for the Chancellor, if only in that particular moment where his tone became obsequious with Ketchup metaphors. The Heinz flag was always a part of the projector screen, topped only by the university flag, and that of the UN.

Since peace was a major topic, perhaps it's only natural that Ketchup "containing natural mellowing agents" would play a role.

There were no surprises from Annan. He didn't take any chances, as I suppose secretaries-general are not wont to do. The only thing I'll remember about his speech in a few hours is the part about the doomed delegation the UN sent to Baghdad. He spoke slowly about the need to 'protect his people' with the air of one who takes the catastrophe as a learning experience.

It was here that I wanted to rise to me feet and turn this into Q and A. "We know why they hate us, Secretary-General. Why do they hate you?"

The rest made my eye-lids heavy. I'm in a non-charitable mood.

Which is why I attended a peace corp recruitment session with the express purpose of gathering more do-gooder information. My feelings on this issue (and I, a lifelong volunteer) need to be sorted out before I help anyone else, and before anyone else (like Kofi Annan) demands my help.

-A Bit Dodgy-

TONIGHT I will tell you of the GROUP PROJECT and numerous OBSTACLES faced, and, if not OVERCOME, sidestepped in a DESPERATE, last-minute photo FINISH...


...Provided the printers finish all 100+ pages in the next 15 minutes.

-First Desk-

This weekend I set a laptop down on my childhood desk, a desk that predated the first computer my family ever had, 1984's Apple IIE. To procrastinate on a paper that isn’t gelling in the slightest, I began pulling open the shelves in search of old pictures, still usable stationary, or any other odds and ends triggering old memories. It was, in retrospect, a foolish exercise.

We’ll return to the pictures in a moment.

First we should note the magic of the cassette player and the two batteries. How often, after all, does one resurrect an old electronic device with older batteries? This walkman must be over ten years old, and I was fairly certain it has ceased to work sometime in the previous decade. I’d stopped using the earplug headphones for lack of a device in which to plug them. The tape is Morrison Hotel by The Doors. It was obviously stowed there by an older sibling, I could not have been cool enough to listen to that at the age when I last used this desk. And the batteries, loose batteries, only two, in the bottom of the drawer.

“Best if used before 1999”, suggests the manufacturers.

But it works. Not without some problems, I’ll admit. You can only move forward, not rewind, and pushing stop no longer flips the unit open the way it used to. Opening the deck to get at the tape requires a fingernail. When I do advance the tape in a speed faster then play, the motor moves in short, tired bursts, as if laboring under the weight of Jim Morrison’s handlers.

In play mode, Roadhouse Blues sounds as good as I’ve ever heard it.

Aside from some dry markers and leadless pencils (there’s quite a lot), I’m encountering uncapped hotel pens that probably predate the Apple IIE – and they still write. Lucky finds like this wouldn’t last; I found a disk which claimed to house materials from my senior year of high school. Sadly, the Performa it was written on – using Clarisworks – is long gone.

And then I found the pictures.

Some of them are just what I’d expected, and in fact, wanted, pictures of European tours; Greece, Turkey, Germany, the Czech Republic, and so on.

And some of them are just wrong, causing me to clutch my stomach in physical pain. They’re college pictures. Pretty, picturesque photos of the campus interspersed with photos of people I used to call friends. The sight of them (there’s quite a lot) all beam back at the camera as if they had no knowledge that we would eventually insult each other in some way, after which I would withdraw in simmering resentment, and they would poison my name in every circle in which they came back in contact. I’m positive they knew it all along, you can see it in the pictures.

End of tape.

-Mandatory County Law Library-

Take the wrong elevator, and it's the firefighters' retirement fund office for you. The harried woman behind the desk will hand you a slip of paper with instructions.

"Go down to the 1st floor and over to the other bank of elevators, the ones closest to the snack shop and adjacent to the metal detectors you passed through before. Only these two elevators go to the Law area on the 9th floor.
Love,
Harried woman behind desk."

You get into the elevator, and a pair of mascots and their entourage of city employees step in with you. As the doors close, you look longing over their harried perms at the Marriage License offices. You didn't see them before because a local high school is touring the facilities, and adolescent angst irks you all the more when you're taken as one of them.

One of the mascots is a Dalmatian with a fireman's hat and matching red suspenders. He sees your slip of paper through his mesh mouth and chortles deep within his felt skull. The frog - no, insect - is green, shorter, and with half-a-dozen appendages. Later you would remember this represents the anti-litter campaign.

"Time for me to behead myself," says the Dalmatian, and the head beneath grins through a gray mustachio, and grayer, furrier eyebrows. The bug attempts to raise her headpiece, and does so just enough for you to see the wearer's short blond hair, the strands at the nape of the neck reflecting clean dew.

All of them exit on two, and the pair of mascots plunk down their Exo-skeleton heads at the sounds of children nearby.

You continue to nine, where you are struck by your own attention to all details, major and minor. The heaters are running noisily, powerfully. To put your hands on one for more than a few seconds is to redden your flesh. The windows are one-quarter of the way open; evidently the temperature dropped enough to warrant the use of the heaters without the consistent coldness this level of heat counters.

It's nice inside the library itself, though. This law library is quieter than you're used to, and the patrons are, to a man, dressed in business attire, even though all are welcome who can find it.

"To a man" because there are not any women in attendance today. You stay and browse the stacks for awhile, but find little inspiration you haven't already known.

Before you leave, you have a look at the some of the finding aids to see if you can spot any series you haven't seen before. Sure enough, you find several state-specific resources you can refer your patrons to in the future.

You exit. The sidewalk is blocked near your bus stop by an unorganized knot of people, some wielding oversized cameras. A loud and serious woman with thick glasses and a clipboard commands you to get out of the way. It is pleasing, then, when the bus arrives at that moment, opens its doors, and appears to swallow you in response.

-Taking my time, and possibly much of yours, as well-

When there’s a large project hanging over you, never do things by halves. Either finish it three weeks before the due date, or three minutes. One’s as good as the other, provided you’re equally unenthusiastic about the project. Consider the six hardbound volumes rising off the reference desk, all of them sources for famous quotations. It would be a simple matter to peruse them and doing so, to complete some of the reference questions. Too bad for the forces of productivity, then, that my mind is a fen of stagnant waters.

Last night I stared at the ceiling, filling my inner ears with potential dialogue with friends and acquaintances. Thinking, editing, thinking again, using this sleepless time between 2 A.M. and dawn to reconstruct the conversations of the previous day, and to listen to the cat’s hunting dreams.

Her jaws twitch, and she makes soft growling sounds, so I assume that’s what it is. Maybe she’s doing the same thing I am, but in a feline manner. Perhaps, she imagines the interior of our apartment to be a fen, a habitat teeming with vermin. It isn’t, but I suspect she might enjoy a niche where the toilet paper rolls take on a sinister cast, and where Venetian blinds are capable of hurt.

-How to find lost things-

I've been a fan of Michael Barrish (he of the Oblivio Oatmeal Clip) for some time, and I thought I should share this one with you:

The Plight of the Orange Juice Container

It's all about losing something within a definite area, and driving yourself crazy when the object fails to appear after a frenzied search.

The frenzy and agitation he is suggesting sounds similar to the experience of drowning. The panic opens the mouth and the arms flail in a very unhelpful way, even as the nerves send a confused storm of information to the brain, removing even the knowledge of which way is up after we sink. It's a situation where the survival instinct fails.

The process of finding lost things is also not an instinct. If you have any investment in the objects recovery, you are likely to become stressed, irrational, and impractical. That's why other people's assistance tends to produce the objects we're looking for, even when we know the territory better than they do. Less invested, they act as a calming influence able to look in the same places in a new way.

A few days ago, I tore my apartment to pieces looking for a phone cord I knew was in one of three places. It turned out it was in a paper bag in my closet with several unused extension cords and minor electronics. This was the mostly likely place for it to be, but I didn't find it until the third time I checked, when I stopped "looking" into the bag, and started feeling about inside it with my hands, emptying the bag as each item was identified. I have 20/20 vision, just not in the head.