Lots of friends and relative strangers have been asking after me in the past month. It’s nice to feel supported, but it’s pretty tough to answer the question “How are you?” since I don’t really know myself. My best answer is “cautiously optimistic.” I think the question people are really asking is “Are you taking care of yourself?” but without seeing someone face to face, it’s hard to gauge that sort of thing, and people often misreport. With my friends who have cats, it’s simple: if the litterbox is clean, they are probably doing okay. Scary litterbox = worried mind. So, this is the post where I tell you how I’m doing, in an oblique way by… um… showing you my litterbox?

I got my car fixed. My mechanic thinks that the guys in Brooklyn didn’t see the brake line problems because they didn’t want to see them. It’s a nasty job, apparently and I can attest to this because I hung out with my mechanic as he banged and clanged underneath my car replacing brake lines only to find that he had created a fuel leak. Without all this extra work/time, I never would have known that his wife used to work in the law school library, or that he was something of a GIS specialist before deciding to open his own business.

I went to the dentist. My big tooth problems are mostly a thing of the past. Once you know that it’s stress that is causing you to grind your teeth, it’s a manageable proposition to deal with it. I was just in for a cleaning, which went fine. I was told to come back in six months which I see as some sort of a victory.

I’m back in the pool. Not that I was out for any reason of my own, but there have been personnel shake-ups at the pool leading to hit-or-miss staffing, meaning you’d get up there and at least sometimes no one would be there and there would be a note flapping in the breeze “pool closed, no lifeguard.” Irritating after a 25 minute drive. Mostly now resolved. I’ve swum over a mile since Sunday.

I’m going to Hawai’i. Close readers may know that this is the last state in the U.S. that I have yet to visit. I was invited there for a library conference in November. I’m also going to Australia in March. I was going to go with Greg, but now I’m going with Kate, my sister and travelling companion extrordinaire. Now that she’s quit smoking, a 12 hour plane ride is no big deal! I’ve got enough going on here that I’m not threatening to stay there, but it will be really nice to be there again.

Otherwise, it’s the same old keeping busy, trying not to spend too much time just sitting and typing, and scheming with Ola about what the next few years in this house are going to be like. Not bad. Clean litter.

The pool was closed for days and I thought my life had suddenly and coincidentally gotten much worse, until I went today and swam over half a mile and came home with a rosy outlook. Sometimes the solutions to your problems are obvious. I have been doing a lot of writing (typing really) on a book chapter that is long overdue and will be finished before I go to sleep tonight even if by “tonight” I mean sometime Monday morning. Here are a few things I’ve read lately that were interesting to me.

My author bio
Unlike most bios which I make as short as humanly possibly, this one had a low-end word limit of 100 words. It’s hard for me to drag out 100 words about myself in this setting even though I’ll happily prattle on and on about myself here. Anyhow, this is what I wound up with.

“Jessamyn West is a community technology educator in central Vermont, where she works with public librarians and seniors, helping them use technology to solve problems. her first technology education position was in 1994, training journalists in Bucharest, Romania how to use pine and gopher. She started her website www.jessamyn.com in 1995; she is also the editor of the weblog librarian.net, where she examines the intersection of libraries, technology, and politics. She is a moderator of the online community metafilter.com. She can teach anyone how to use a computer, and still types letters to friends on an Underwood-Olivetti Lettera 22. She will send you a letter if you send her a postcard.” [note: postcard deal still good, let me know if you’d like a reply: po box 81 bethel vt 05032]

Firebirds Rising
My friend Sharyn is a very good editor and has edited this anthology. I liked this story by Kelly Link, specifically because it reminds me of Barthelme’s story The Zombies.

“Everyone knows that there are wizard bones under the marsh mud and that the fish and the birds that live in the marsh are strange creatures. They have got magic in them. Children dare each other to go in to the marsh and catch fish. Sometimes when a brave child catches a fish in the murky, muddy marsh pools, the fish will call the child by name and beg to be released. And if you don’t let that fish go, it will tell you, gasping for air, when and how you will die. And if you cook the fish and eat it, you will dream wizard dreams. But if you let your fish go, it will tell you a secret.
This is what the people of Perfil say about the wizards of Perfil.”

About Indie
Just a comment from a MetaFilter thread about a unflattering review of Sufjan Stevens that helped sort of coalesce some ideas I’d been having about why so much of the indie rock leaves me not just flat but actually annoyed.

“Jonathan Lethem wrote this great essay … about artists he grew up reading, watching, listening to. Among the many he talks about, Philip K. Dick, Bob Dylan, (and a few others I can’t remember) were the ones he would always eventually return to, the ones who always remained after he was disappointed with the others. It had to do with a lack of posturing and a need to ask questions. It wasn’t that the artists wanted to *tell you* something, it was that they wanted to *know*, and they were always going to try and figure it out, through their art, and you could join up and watch, participate, whatever. And that was the most fulfilling – because it wasn’t pandering, it wasn’t telling you what to feel or trying to manipulate you.”

I got back from Brooklyn and have been mostly enjoying being in Bethel for more than a day or two in a row. My car still has a mystery ailment, but it’s being attended to. The rains are unyielding and yesterday we saw a family of skunks walk through the backyard.

The big news here is this: Ola, my landlady who I live with, decided not to sell the house. Instead, she’s going to go to the Peace Corps in the South Pacific, assuming they accept her application which is preliminarily accepted, and then she’s going to rent the house out. How this affects me is that I get to stay, live with a law student, manage the place and NOT MOVE. This is sort of big news. Back in November when Ola told me she was selling the house, when Greg was still living here, we went through a lot of talking about moving immediately, doing something different, something, but we stayed, then I stayed.

I hate to be all “things happen for a REASON” which just seems like so much after-the-fact rationalization, but staying here strikes me as the right thing to do and I’m glad circumstances aligned to let me do that.

I’ve been hanging out in Brooklyn for a lot of this week. My apologies if I didn’t get in touch with you, I didn’t get in touch with anyone except my friends who were getting married [the occasion for this trip] and my friends who had a baby on the 28th, the excuse for staying longer. My friends who had a baby also had friends who were out of town (yes, in the Hamptons) leaving their house empty and free for all the baby well-wishers to camp out in, leaving the parents a little more free to sit around in their underwear for more of the day. This suited me perfectly and I also got to meet my friend’s Mom.

As another result, I’ve also spent an incredible amount of time alone, though I’m not sure if you’re ever alone when you’ve got the Internet and books about bees to keep you company. I got out to see the fireworks, and to deliver some sidewalk chalk to the new big sister and play hopscotch, and to take my car to a mechanic to see why it seemed to be having brake fluid issues (uncertain, but it only cost me $25 to have someone look it over and assure me that there was nothing obvious wrong with my car). I got caught in a massive rainstorm. I wrote a few postcards. I listened to that thing my voice does when I haven’t been talking to people in a long time, when I’ve been relatively relaxed and well-rested. There’s an absence of something, bite, edge, attack, I don’t know. It seems like it’s a good way to start a long drive, a long drive home.

I’m on the plane coming home from ALA. There are three other librarian Councilors on this plane and we had a fun time comparing notes about the Council meetings while we waited at the airport. I’m having a hard time getting my head around the fact that I no longer have obligations to the American Library Association, and any further association with them on my part will be purely voluntary. Of course, everything in my life seems to be a metaphor for dissolution and renewal lately, and I’m happy to have a bunch of handy parables that let me think big ideas about the topic without all the tiny personal details that bog me down and make me sad.

When I’m not thinking about that, I think about escape. It’s always been true that one of my favorite activities has been messing about in a new and unfamiliar place with a backpack and maybe a guide book or a list of phone numbers. It’s also true that I’ve really fallen for my small town and the work I do there. It’s possible that these two conflicting desires have some sort of an equilibrium point that I may be approaching. All I know is that it’s odd to live in a place you love, but also to be as equally happy to leave it as to come home.

I’ve heard that one of the strongest motivators — in a sort of rat-in-a-maze variety — isn’t sex, or food, it’s anticipation; the “what’s behind that door?” or “what happens next?” feeling. I think this easily explains the fascinating and addictive quality of the Internet. It’s not the humor value of any particular ORLY owl, it’s tuning in to see what they’ll think of next. I sometimes feel that this is an edge I walk sometimes that propels me forward. What’s next? What’s next?

It’s not that everything is better, but dwelling on things makes me crazy and there has been a lot going on this week that’s not all in my own head.

First, from the mailbag:

I wrote a short play (partly inspired by your awesomeness) called “Kickass Librarian” which was selected for the Boston Theater Marathon and even got a positive note in the Boston Globe. So thank you for the inspiration

Second, New Orleans. Wow. The first thing you notice when you start landing at the airport is the tarps. Lots of tarps, over roofs everyplace. The downtown core is a little ragged, but you don’t notice it until you start to leave the Convention Center and French Quarter area and go just a mile or two out. There, it’s really ragged. Sporadic trash pickup, most businesses are closed, lots of storefronts are totally empty. There’s a hubub of clean-up activity [and all the public transportation is free, allowing me this trip to noplace] but you can tell the city is really empty, and it’s hard to tell how and when it’s going to really come back.

I’ve been doing my typical spare-bed-surfing routine which means a lot of time walking around with my luggage and a lot of downtime to read, look out the window, or walk around. The Council meetings are a little bittersweet because I know they’re my last, for a while anyhow. I watch with one eye and realize that if there’s going to be a graduated dues structure it will happen after I leave. I see ALA commit to providing free wifi at conferences and have to think if I’ll be going to another one. I enjoy the professional development and extreme socializing that surrounds the conferences. If someone asked “Would you pay $400 to be able to hang out and catch up with 20-30 of your friends and countless acquaintances for a few days?” I’d likely say yes. On the other hand, big city conferences are the anti-Vermont and I miss the river and the silence and the dark.

I had beignets and strong coffee with my good friends from Alabama this afternoon and hit the sun and socializing wall. I came back and lay in an chilled empty room and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep. I’m sure there will be a time in the future where my free time and empty spaces may not feel inviting and gratifying, but that time isn’t now, not yet.