| an evening out with the boys. |
[Feb. 18th, 2007|02:34 am] |
Carin and I went up to the university this afternoon and evening to meet up with Rick and Dain. I was going to do another reference interview, perhaps trying to find out who that pre-20th century artist was who painted people made out of fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, the reference desk is closed early on Saturday as opposed to Sunday, and so I had no reference interview. Either I'll go up again tomorrow (unlikely) or I'll write about my last visit again--more likely, but I'm unsure how I can make it sound fresh and not entirely like last week's.
Excellent evening out. After I spent some time at the library looking up science fiction encyclopedias and fixing one, count it, one Wikipedia entry which had an incorrect birth date for the author (it had just been added there almost two years ago, and no one had checked it--the sort of inaccuracy that's now spread across a hojillion mirrors), Carin and I met up with Rick and Dain, and we went out for some delightfully strange Chinese food. It's Chinese New Year's Eve, so we got to try out some delightfully weird cookie-like items. We also started on the fifth season of Babylon 5, after a considerable hiatus.
Carin's design class has already taught her one thing; she's started shading her drawings. She's had very skilled line work for some time, but she's taken to shading quite well. I'd thought that a design course would be like cross-training for art, but she's getting some solid drawing skills in. I'm very impressed, and eagerly await her upcoming shaded drawings. No, her pencil drawings don't look like those photorealistic ones in art magazines, but they sure look like the sort of thing that, given years of grueling practice, will become those.
As much as I like being writing again, there's a snag. There's a considerable backlog of posts that I have here and there, but a great deal of it comes down to navel-gazing and complaining about how badly things were going between me and Carin. I'm biased about the particulars, but then again, I'm not writing from a neutral point of view. But even bringing up that I'm writing again is a point of contention, because I have an audience, and there's considerable potential for abuse there, even if I'm not trying for it. Even if I'm using it as my personal vent space, it's not personal. But I don't want to compromise on the sort of openness I've managed to maintain... but it's not really open; I present myself as I want to be seen, even if I have a policy of not deleting comments that reflect a somewhat different perspective. It's not the same, and it's certainly something to think about.
I started this thing for me, and left it unlocked out of a vague sense of openness. Now most of the people I know in my personal life (though not my professional life) read or have read it, for better or for worse, and I no longer live as an island; my situation is considerably different from when I started this. The worms do not go back into the can. I cannot and should not pretend that when I write about my day now, it's no different from when I wrote about my day five years ago, with my profusion of quotes, my self-conscious puns and in-jokes, and my cloying need to seem clever. (I may still have the last one, but at least I'm subtler about it now.)
Did You Know that nearly every year since 1878, the Department of Commerce--more specifically, the Census Bureau--has published the Statistical Abstract of the United States, current editions of which weigh in at around 1300 pages, and all of which are available free of copyright as works of the federal government? It was referred to as a source in one of my homework assignments, but it's fascinating in its own right. You can answer all sorts of demographic questions, like "where does suicide rank as a cause of death for the over-85 set?", which was Rick's idea. (He's morbid like that, I guess. The answer is that suicide is responsible for roughly one out of a thousand deaths in that group, or was as of 2003.)
Today's comments: Pharyngula 1 2 |
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