A pair of poems (new).

i think i'd like to check myself out from the library
'cause i never return my books.
so, if i have a barcode and a beep and a due date,
i can return myself whenever i want, and
i can renew myself infinitely,
and if someone else wants to get a hold of me,
they can just recall me online, and poof,
i'll be delivered to their door,
or held at the circulation desk of their choosing.

but if i don't turn myself back in when
someone else recalls me,
i'll have to pay a fine--the cost of replacement.
and then where would i be?
i'd have to figure out
how much money i'm worth
to someone else
for the purpose of
redistributing the knowledge
i have to offer
forever,
or until my pages fall out and
my spine is broken
and i can't (be) rebound anymore.

and how much money could that possibly be?
more than i can afford, i'm sure.
and if i could afford to replace myself,
i could by a me of my own,
and i wouldn't need to check myself out from the library at all.
but i might want to anyway.

and, plus, at the library, they have perfect temperature control,
to keep mold from growing inside me
(i'm allergic to mold),
and if there's a new edition of me, they can replace the circulating me
with a fresh new introduction and cover,
at no cost to the me who borrows.

-+-

what if i'm a serial, with new issues every season,
and the skin i shed isn't dead at all,
but crumpled-up content for the cover art?
can i read my back issues? does Ulrich's index me?
i hope i show progression of thought.
and that i have good underwriting.
and cpoy-editng.

A peek into my long-term plans

I tend to forget to keep people outside of school in the loop on my career plans, or, what I'm actually going to do with my life. I just came across this bit that I wrote in an application essay to be a teaching assistant for next fall, and I think it's a nice bite-size encapsulation of why I'm here and what I'm doing. I thought I'd share it with you.

Intentions, information, and action: these three elements are all necessary in any effort toward social justice and sustainable change. In my experiences as a community organizer, educator, and activist, I have found this to be true time and again. Too often, well intentioned people take action on an issue of injustice, but lack the necessary type or degree of information to ensure success. In some cases, the gap between success and failure is a matter of misunderstanding the social or historical context around the issue; in others, a lack of access to the best available data. In either case, the gap between success and failure is also a gap between mapping one's intentions to "make things better" onto appropriate action to enact change. To bridge these gaps, we need better information.

It is with this understanding that I am pursuing a degree in Library and Information Services, as well as a Certificate in LGBTQ Studies. Librarianship lines every path toward social justice: encouraging critical thinking and information literacy, supporting individuals' and communities' desires and needs to absorb information about their lives, fostering a positive environment for learning, promoting creativity and problem solving skills, and on and on.

It goes on from there to talk about connections to teaching and why I'd be a good GSI (graduate student instructor), but that bit up there is the real kernel of my opus magnum. You'll get to hear more about the practical side of it soon, when I write up the proposal for my thesis research. Stay tuned!

Dude, You Guys, Hey.

Information literacy is super important. From the BBC:

A top doctor has admitted her part in hoodwinking a leading medical journal after inventing a medical condition called "cello scrotum".

Elaine Murphy - now Baroness Murphy - dreamt up the painful complaint in the 1970s, sending a report to the British Medical Journal.

She came clean when the hoax resurfaced in the 2008 Christmas edition [when another researcher cited the condition in their own paper].

A BMJ spokesman said the inclusion and subsequent debunking of "cello scrotum" had "added to the gaiety of life".

Full article here.