I met with a financial counselor this morning. I'll leave aside the specific details, but in short, it was something I needed to do. I've been living very much paycheck-to-paycheck since that whole economic downturn thing. And when I have had a few extra bucks, I have for the most part just frittered it away. It's certainly not as easy as just an hour and a half of expert advice and everything is all better (understatement of the year) but it's a real, concrete, take some responsibility step.

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Trivial Dispute was not a total wash. We were pretty mediocre across the board answer-wise (6th place out of about 17 teams) but we did win best team name and ended up with a dollar store, party favour bag of plastic, dollar-sign bling rings (to continue the theme of the day). And I won a shot question for knowing where a beer that I really can't stand is brewed.

I've got to start making some notes on my dreams again. They've been pretty interesting recently, but are mostly mist by the end of the day.

Sunday morning, sweating at home. Sunday afternoon, Pratt Library. Sunday evening, sweating at home.

And I've been listening to the This Week in Maps podcast. It's a bit geolocation and web services heavy, very little mention of anything in the way of print or even digital infographic sorts of maps, but still interesting.

Advanced cataloging class this morning. Wrapping up map and realia cataloging. Library of Congress subject headings. More interjections from me, I've definitely been the most talkative person in both of the cataloging classes that I've taken.

And can I just say, I really actually kind of love cataloging.

I did resist buying any more books on the way home.

I didn't see the girl in the orange dress, "Independent Booksellers of New York" tote bag, and librarian glasses who I bumped into (literally) last Friday morning at the LIC G/7 transfer.

A tour of the NYPL Map Division's holdings in class this morning. Then, for my final project, maps of Mysore, India; Auckland, New Zealand; Alexandria, Egypt; Kydonia, Crete; Ferro, Canary Islands; New York City; Babil, Iraq; and the coast of China. Mostly 19th century.

Can I just say, I love maps.

I was working from the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library this morning. It didn't take long for the fluorescent lights to get to me though. I did find that when I ventured outside, the shade and the (strong) breeze actually made the plaza out front very pleasant. I also found out that I had received a half dozen calls and messages about avocado being down, with what seemed to be a major hard drive crash.

The most recent backups were from a few months ago at best. And even those couldn't be gotten at with the machine offline. The techs on site were going to see what they could do, but this had the potential for being the worst server crash since we lost marsh.li.com back in 1997 or something.

The afternoon was tense. Then a call from Austin with good news. The drive won't last forever (a few months perhaps?), but they managed to get it back online. Now it's time, or in a few weeks when the summer semester is over, to really get on to moving data and services to crabapple.

Backups, backups, backups, people.

Up early for work. The project is a proposal for a wall of graphical content (corporate history, environmental policy, community responsibility, &c.) for a company's headquarters in Texas. Regarding the space, all we had to go on was some rough dimensions, "The ceiling is high, about 35 feet. The main wall is 50 or 60 feet long. And maybe the room is about 30 feet deep." And some poorly shot construction photos.

So we came up with a few designs that dealt with the ungainly height of the space, made use of the full wall width, and created a sitting alcove across from it (asked for in the RFP). And spent the better part of the last few days working on elevations and renderings of these designs in the space as we knew it.

This evening, within nearly 12 hours of the proposal's deadline (the whole thing, as these often are when dealing with layers and layers above the design team, was to be done in a super-compressed timeframe), we received the architect's plans and elevations of the space.

Turns out that the room is more of a 30 foot cube. The ceiling is vaulted and has windows along the top. The 15 feet or so of the main wall on either side of the cube are actually in a hallway, 10 feet deep at most. The seating area is (as per the architect's drawings) already mapped out and way more traditional than empty white room we though we were dealing with.

I don't know where along the way between the building architects and the interior/environmental graphic design team the drawings got held up, but they're the sort of thing that you really could have used at the start of the design process, not when you're polishing up the renderings.

So, unless someone presenting the proposal (I won't be involved) can sell it conceptually as opposed to literally, and unless the group the proposal is being presented to are at least slightly creative thinkers, I don't think that we're going to get the job. But who knows? Actually finding a way of adapting the concept to the real and very different space would probably be a fun design challenge.

Bad mood all day. Watched Punch Drunk Love, which probably didn't help all that much. I still think it's a beautiful film though.

Some work in the afternoon. Busy sometimes is the best thing.

Oh, and I can't actually speak to the emptiness in intention, only in its brevity.

The delay of crossword puzzle and coffee kept me from getting rained on on the way to the library this morning. A few hours of homework. A little time procrastinating with the first volume of the collected Sandman. A few hours of work-work. In the evening, out to Trivial Dispute.

I had pretty much every intention of not drinking. If I win a shot round question, so be it. Otherwise no. I ended up winning the two last shot questions. One outright, one was not the answer they were looking for but had to concede that my answer was correct as well. Then, as it happened, my team managed to pull off a 2nd place finish. So my third of the $15 bar tab equalled another. Then Alex wanted one last one on the way out, and handed me one as well. Four all totaled.

I made a poor tactical decision on the way home, that, alcohol-wise, only resulted in one more drink (cheap beer), but also resulted in me chain smoking what was left of the pack of cigarettes that I had. I lost count, it was more than five, less than ten.

Sunday crossword at Pillow Cafe.

Homework at, of all places, home. Moving around as little as possible so as not to overheat and begin pouring sweat from all pores. There was a nice breeze coming in the window for part of the afternoon as I sat on the couch with a glass of ice water and websites about maps.

We canceled our cable service as we were hardly watching any TV and are all relatively broke. One of the times I was watching TV was Sunday evening, when Syfy plays terrible movies. No longer able to do that, I decided to watch one of the good movies that I have on my computer.

I've converted a few to be watched on the iPad, but when I tried that with Magnolia the sound slowed down to 1/3 normal speed (while the video continued to play correctly). I tried to hook up my projector, having finally retrieved the cable attachment from a box of computer stuff the last time I was at my mom's house. But apparently there's one more piece that I still need. So I watched it shrunk down into two thirds of my laptop screen. I did manage to got both glitch bars to go dark-grey/black and turn the window frame off on the movie.

It was like watching something letterboxed on an old 13" TV. Actually, now that I think about it, that's how I used to watch movies my very first year in college. Of course those were also the days of 9,600 baud dial-up modems, and there were only a few hundred pages on the entire "world wide" web. Ah nostalgia.

Magnolia was not quite as good as I remembered it. I'm sure the non-optimal viewing had something to do with that. It might also have something to do with the fact that at the time it was released Tom Cruise was nowhere yet near the joke that he is today.

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Later, email from M wondering if I had abandoned Project Parlor completely or only during her shifts. Neither exactly, although I have been taking a bit of an intentional break. Parlor is still my local, for what it's worth, and I'm sure I'll turn up sooner or later.

So up early this morning. On the train before coffee. Then a bus, then another train. Advanced cataloguing: cataloguing maps, cataloguing microforms, cataloguing physical objects, cataloguing rare books, main and added accessmpoints. Yay for nerds.

Falafel for lunch in the middle. Quite possibly too much coffee by the end of class at 4:00.

To the Strand. Every two years give or take, since I've been in New York, so this is the third time, I make a sweep through the Strand's entire fiction section. I pull books that look interesting—I admit that this has a lot to do with cover design, though also books by authors I like that I haven't read, titles that sound interesting, books that someone may once have suggested to me—read the first colouple sentences, paragraphs, pages, and if I still think they're interesting, add them to the pile I'm carrying around.

Between the day's heat and that excess coffee I was getting lightheaded every time I stood up after squatting down to look at the lower shelves. But I pushed on. Two hours later I had made it through L, and was lugging nine books with me, four of which were i the 400-800p range. I called it a completed first half, second to be completed at a later date, deliberated, and put five books back. Only one of the long ones, but that was also the only book over $10.

One drink at 12th Street Alehouse. Chris called to givr me the details of a cocktail party a friend of Jen.C's was holding. Jen invited Chris, Chris invited me, I was a little worried about crashing but he told me that Julie, the host, knew that I was coming. I did feel a little underdressed, wearing a purple tee with a couple little holes and a smear of blue printer's ink on the stomach to a penthouse roof terrace cocktail party. But, it certainly wasn't black tie, and I don't think anyone actually took any offense, if they paid notice at all.

And it was a nice night. I hadn't seen Jen in nearly a year. I met her boyfriend for the first time and had some interesting conversations with him (we both studied architecture and then moved on to other things). Julie seemed nice, although I didn't have much of an oportunity to talk with her as she was being the busy-bee host. There was some of the inevitable drunken finger pointing between Chris and I, but I think (I hope?) we're smoothing that out some.

So I'm taking two summer classes. One is Advanced Cataloguing. Super library geek class. But I'm into it. The other is Map Collections, for which I got to go hang out in the map room at the NYPL twice a week and look at amazing maps.

That was this morning, maps. I love maps. My final project, still somewhat poorly defined, involves lighthouses and towers and mythology and places I've lived and places that maybe someday I'd like to live. Today, Centenial maps of Litchfield County, 19th Century maps of Alexandria (the one in Egypt), maps of the Canary Island El Hierro which was formerly Ferro and was the location of the Prime Meridian before Greenwich because it was the westernmost discovered land of Europe. Oh, and an incredible 1918 map of lighthouses along the coast of China.

Then lunch, and then, because of the heat and the fact that my meal schedule has been terribly erratic recently, I felt sick. Also, I think it was the beginning of a migraine. Lucky two Excedrine staved it off, which does't always work.

Now, Kate Nash's song "Pickpocket" on repeat.

Soon, bed.

Homework today, then a few beers with Chris at Macri Park.

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An open letter to the lesbian couple sitting across from me on the G train:

You two were super cute. Whatever it was that you were fighting about, talk it out and move on. I don't know anything of either of your personalities. I don't know how long you've been together or how serious you are. But I felt something when you smiled at eachother, and hope things work out.

All the best,
Bean

[Public version to follow shortly.]

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(All effects produced in-camera.)