The Human Library

Once upon a time when I was in library school, I had to do a blog for a class on Digital Collections I was taking. It's still up over at wordpress, and at some point I might move it over here, but it's not really one of my favorite works. 

Anyways, our teacher had assigned this project to previous classes and some students stuck with it. She gave us links to them as examples. While I was reading one of them I came across this http://humanlibrary.org/ which still seems like such a neat idea. 

Basically the idea is to help break down prejudices by letting people get to know and ask questions of someone in a group they know little about. Volunteers are recruited as the "books" and people can come to events as "readers" to check them out. 

One of the reasons I love libraries and decided that's where I wanted to work is that they are (or at any rate should be) supportive of people learning anything they want. This to me includes learning about other people in an open environment.

Ironically I've got hypergraphia

I love language and words. I started out as an English major, but I realized that while I love reading and to a certain extent writing, I was more interested in the processes behind them. And that's when I also fell in love with psychology. To be precise, psycholinguistics. Psychology courses tend to draw a variety of types of people, I met people who wanted to do pure research, people who wanted to be counsel, people who wanted to understand their own issues, and people who wanted to do profiling for the FBI among others. There is a certain stereotype of psych majors as all having major issues themselves, but that's no more true than any other stereotype, for example one of my friends was a girl in the theater department I met in a Shakespeare class. She was nice and calm and never wore even a little eyeliner.
Anyways. So while people in Psychology are not necessarily any more prone to issues than any other major we do tend to be prone to noticing traits in others and diagnosing them out of context. This is along similar lines as First Year Med Student Syndrome. Most people exhibit some traits of mental illness, as many things in this category are normal behavior patterns taken to extremes. People also tend to have coping mechanisms that they use in times of stress that can become dangerous to them, especially if they only have one response.
To use a personal example, I tend towards hypergraphia and hyperlexia.
The hypergraphia does not mean that things I write make sense, more that when presented with a blank piece of paper I tend to fill it. The margins of all my school papers are full of doodles (I'm terrible at drawing, but I persist), repetitions of alphabets including mirror writing and left handed practice (this was slightly helpful when I started learning Japanese), bits of music (I never do get the treble clef right though), and random things I've remembered like poems or lines in plays. So, I'm not actually writing lots of things that are useful for blog posts, and typing holds less interest for me either way. I inherited this one from my mom who likes to do alphabets while talking on the phone, and trace letters on things with calligraphy. Mostly it was not a problem, although some teachers got angry about the mess this made of my papers. I learned to bring in extra papers to write on in those classes.
The hyperlexia was more of an issue. Parents tend to wish their kids read more. Mine took away my books when I got in trouble, and usually what I got into trouble for was reading when I should have been doing something else. Another thing that usually goes with hyperlexia is speech issues. I have always talked too fast and not quite clearly enough, but my brother and sister ended up with more problems in that arena than me and had to go to speech, I had to wait for them often, and I distinctly remember wishing I could be in with them since they got candy while I got stuck in the waiting room reading outdated Highlights for children (I still despise that magazine and can only assume I had my books taken as a punishment when I was driven to read it).

My issues are almost entirely of the innate, that's just how my brain works, type rather than the trauma type. They also tend to be rather scarily along the line of autism spectrum disorders. ( This does, however, reinforce that point almost all of my psych teachers brought up at some time, that all symptoms and disorders are a matter of degree. For example, while both of these have impacted me, they never got so bad that they interfered with being able to live my life and interact with other people.  There is a really good book on hypergraphia I read once called The Midnight Disease which is by a Neuropsychiatrist who was actually institutionalized when her hypergraphia got really severe.
Most people have a tendency to something, and under severe enough stress (which can also vary greatly by individual) often fall back on that behavior as a comfort. So while psychology students may be overprompt with a diagnosis, it can partly be considered as what path a person might be most likely to go down given enough pressure. Rather like it can be predicted that coal under enough pressure becomes diamonds, although admittedly without that level of accuracy.

How doth the little busy bee...

Pretty good, considering the busyness. That's not quite a nonsense poem, but I borrowed it from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which along with Through the Looking Glass is full of nonsense poetry. When I was little they were my absolute favorite parts of the books. Lewis Carroll (or Charles Dodgson, your preference) also wrote a bunch of poetry where you have to solve math problems to understand them, and a long poem called The Hunting of the Snark, which is odd and lovely at the same time. I still love nonsense poems and silly poems. More than I like serious poetry, really. This did not help me while I was trying for an English degree. On the other hand it has helped enormously when kids come in to the library asking for poems to do class projects. Shel Silverstein's books are always good (although The Giving Tree makes me sad, and he wrote some stuff for grown ups in Playboy which I think was recently released as a book), I especially liked the one about the little girl who wanted a pony and died when she didn't get it. I memorized that one as a kid and recited it to my parents when I wanted something.  Edward Lear is nice, and was my first introduction to limerick rhythms when I was little.














While most of the nonsense and silly poetry I like was written for children (largely because I spent more time reading poetry as a child I suspect) there are quite a few funny and clever poets I've read that write primarily for adults. Dorothy Parker's poetry tends to be funny, for example, although it's more mixed. I also enjoy Edgar Allan Poe (funny may be overstating this, but certainly fun) although not The Bells. Since, as much as I enjoy the word tintinnabulation, I tend to get annoyed by the repetition when reading it aloud.I'm not quite sure why I group Poe in with the silly poems, possibly it's the rhymes, talking birds, and numerous parodies.  I group The Canterbury Tales in with poetry I like (really good web page too, fyi), and they tend to be funny, although not always. I also really like Robert Burns, partly in the same way as I like ballads in general, and partly because I love dialects. I have big chunks of poetry that I've got memorized because I enjoy it, which includes most of these poets.
The only poem that's perpetually stuck in my memory that I wish weren't there is Robert Frost's Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same, which I had to do for an English class. I'm not a fan of Robert Frost really, although apparently almost everyone I know has been forced to memorize at least one of his poems (I can also do chunks of The Road Not Taken and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, but other people I know are stuck with the whole things so could be worse I suppose). I really don't know why I dislike his poetry so much, but they always make me feel cranky when I have to do anything with them, so I won't.
I'm leaving out quite a few poems and poets here, so there may be another poetry post in the future.

Busy, Busy

Skipped a couple days since I was sick Friday and wingeing about my tummy didn't seem like a good post. So I spent the day watching QI and trying to figure out what to get for a Mother's Day present*. I work on the weekends usually so I'm probably never going to post much then. *In case anyone is dying of curiosity I got her one of those pandora bracelets because she mentioned liking them a couple months ago and I couldn't remember anything else she wanted.
Anyways, on to the actual post.
So, my sister is having her first year of med school finals this week, and I'm trying to set up little surprises to make it slightly better. The main constraints being that she will not leave the house, eat, or sleep more than 2 hours at a time for the whole week. I have some ideas, such as bubble baths and fancy soaps (she likes to study in the bath), peachy o's (her favorite candy), and if I can get them tickets to see Conan (for the last day as a reward). I'm also thinking of making her some playlists for studying and putting them on her ipod, and sending her links to short happy things. I'm also trying to think of what to do for my little brother since he's headed off to Houston next week to spend the whole summer at an internship. I'm thinking a surprise party on Friday after my sister finishes finals and before he heads off which is a limited window of opportunity, but hopefully I can pull it off. Another busy week for me.
I really do like throwing parties and planning presents for events. Especially if I can somehow incorporate a treasure hunt which I might do for both of them. One day I will have either very happy or very annoyed children.

Sidebar on ads.

I get the RSS feed of this to make sure that it's working that way, and for some reason the Amazon link + image for the Carl books isn't working for the book post, but everything else is, weird. Also the ads for the Sweet or Creepy post on my feed are one for kids socks, and one for mail order brides. I'm not quite sure how that post pulled those two, the toys one pulled much better adds, Starzbunnies, American Girl Dolls (I still have my Samantha and Felicity and my sister has Addy. We like to tease my little cousin because hers are Mattel and ours are originals.), A dollhouse store (which is neat but not really related to my childhood experiences unless you count digital dollhouses, which I had a couple of different computer programs for making and playing with them), and for a site called pornokitsch which is about sci fic and not porn so actually appropriate to the topic.

Most of the other ads were at least related, for example the Kelly/Astaire post got ads on dancing lessons, and the book post got ads on writing, but most of those weren't particularly interesting to me so no post for them.  

Fun Words for Scrabble

Words beginning with q, no u, are difficult so here are some of those.
Qat
Qi
qawwali and qoff are nice, but depend on how strict your interpretation of the rules is.
I also love the word Tmesis, mostly as a trap for non English majors. Yay! for double turns.
Scrabble was the one board game I always won at as a child. I'm also fond of shiritori which helped me remember random Japanese words, although I am losing tons of vocabulary due to disuse.
I heard recently that the new Edition of Scrabble is going to allow proper names, and frankly, no. It must be stopped. That would make it much, much too easy. No proper names and you choose one language and stick with it are the only rules in my house. (Well, and no playing newcomers or children for cash) Preferably a language both players know. Possibly this would be a good excuse/way to learn Esperanto. Anyways, much as I love scrabble I tend to get frustrated with digital versions, as they never accept perfectly legitimate words as being real. I have tried a whole variety of them and they all have this issue. I would quite like the Oxford English Dictionary to make a digital scrabble game, possibly as an iphone app. I'd be on that in a second. Just a thought OED people.  (P.S. to the OED people. I'm sorry I had to weed the 20 volume set from my library's collection, but we're merging reference and non-fiction and I don't have the space. We do still have the condensed though, and I am trying to convince them to get an online subscription...Maybe if you made that app they'd go for it? No pressure though :)


     (Isn't it odd how many different versions there are of this game considering what a simple concept it is.)

Dr. Who Girl

My geek training began young, one of my first memories is of being evacuated from a hotel due to a smoke bomb and standing around the pool with all the Klingons there for the Star Trek convention. I knew what they were though because I watched Star Trek at home with my dad and had a huge crush on Jordy (he was also on Reading Rainbow <3). We had X-Men cartoons on VHS and used to watch them on Friday nights. I had an Ewok treehouse, an iceman doll (which was awesome, he had a tray you put water in and then stuck in the freezer, and then you could skate him around on tiles. My mom hated him because of those little water trails, and my brother eventually broke his head off), and once I begged some scraps of faux fur off my mom to make myself a set of tribbles. I had more usual toys too, but those are some that I played with the most.

While I may have initially been started on this path by my dad, I continued because I love this stuff. Admittedly, there are some areas I don't really embrace, for example, my video game love ends at Wii and DS (Mine's pink and if my mom asks I got it for the Japanese-English dictionary) with the occasional attempt to finish off the Kingdom Hearts series on PS2. I also prefer graphic novels to comic books, mostly because I can't be bothered to keep publication dates sorted, or for that matter house all those loose comics, and while I still have a soft spot for X-Men I much prefer Castle Waiting.
On the other hand I spent a considerable amount of time in college watching Star Trek, Firefly, and various animes with friends, and while I was in Ireland developed a love of Doctor Who which is still with me. A lot of people still think that being a geek is a bad thing, but I don't understand why. A slight tendency to get overexcited about things like Terry Pratchett references has helped me make friends and have really interesting conversations with people I might otherwise not have gotten to know.

Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire

I love them both, but not quite equally. My dad is on the Gene Kelly side, and in our occasional debates I'm more for Fred Astaire. Admittedly my basis of preference is more along the lines of who I would rather dance with (if I actually could dance outside of my imagination that is) and while Gene Kelly does those neat lifts, I really don't think I'd like being thrown around that much as I tend to bruise easily and have no pain threshold. Plus I'm watching these movies on TV and I think Astaire movies work a little better on the small screen. Plus Astaire did more dancing solo and got better songs.

With the exception of Singing in the Rain which I do love (especially the dance up the wall, I wanted to learn how to do that so much as a kid).


And of course there's Ginger Rogers who I love even outside of her partnership with Fred Astaire although of course them together is pretty awesome. (Plus she had the coolest clothes.)

Books That Changed My Life: Part 1, The Picture Books

I've always been a reader, the other day a little girl came into my library and told me that she was a reader too. It made me really happy because books can change your life. There are a lot of books that have helped shape who I am. Especially when I was young, reading helped me deal with problems, like not quite fitting in, and introducing me to new ideas and activities.

The books I remember most from my childhood, are the ones that were a little different. My mom got my sister and I books by Robert Kraus that where signed with a cartoon, she got Where Are You Going Little Mouse and I got Whose Mouse Are You? which we both still have.

Another book I still remember is The Jolly Postman. This is the most awesome book. It has postcards that you can pull out and really detailed pictures with subtle jokes and references to literature and fairy tales that you can read and appreciate even when you get older. It's actually a series with two other books in it, The Jolly Pocket Postman and The Jolly Christmas Postman. Really, any of the books by the Ahlbergs are good.

  

My sister's favorite books when we were little were the Carl books by Alexandra Day*, they only have words at the beginning and end, the rest are pictures. My sister used to tell the stories in them to me and my brother.   

   












One of my boyfriends once told me that he had never had a Dr. Seuss book read to him as a child, this struck me as terribly sad.  We had a pretty complete set, and I had several favorites. I loved There's a Wocket in My Pocket the most for the nookgase and the zillow. I also loved Hop on Pop which my sister and I turned into a game. My aunt and uncle got me a copy of My Book About Me, which I filled out when I was 4 and still have. We didn't have a copy of The Lorax, but it makes a pretty good Earth Day story for the slightly older set.

    

I really liked the artwork in Where the Wild Things Are and when Mummy?(Mommy? for the American edition, but I like the pun) came out I bought a copy because pop up books are really cool, and this one was especially so.

  

My brother liked the Alexander books because that's his name too. He especially like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and went around telling people that was what he was having. 

 

* Note: I do not advocate leaving small children alone with a rotteweiler as a baby sitter ;)