Despite what Thomas Wolfe said, I guess you can go home again. Sort of. It’s just that everything looks much different.

I spent tonight in the same building where I spent much of 1982 through 1984, in the student union at UNCG. I was attending an information session for prospective graduate students, since I’m planning to get my MLIS. (And yes, that’s an announcement of sorts.) But there’s no resemblance whatsoever between the Elliott Center of my misspent youth and today’s version.

To start with, the building is about twice as big. It now has a food court and a Barnes & Noble, not to mention an entirely new auditorium. If that weren’t enough, though, they’ve also gutted the old part of the building. Nothing I remember is there anymore. No more radio station hallway where we used to play record frisbee with Survivor albums, no more Student Government office, no more lower level men’s room where I used to, ummm, never mind…

It’s disorienting as hell to be in a building where you’ve spent literally thousands of hours and not to be able to find your way around.

After taking my first GRE practice test, I now realize that I am quite verbal, and need some quantitative review. Who didn’t see that coming?

Actually, I’m pretty math-minded as a general rule, but some of the more, ummm, obtuse concepts of geometry really tripped me up, mainly because I didn”t give a flying fuck about them in the ninth grade, and I pretty much still don’t. I find very few real life applications in my daily life. I’m surprisingly OK with much of the algebra, although I have a tendency to make stupid mistakes when I’m not paying enough attention.

Other and unrelated Wednesday stuff:

• Good news always makes me a little giddy.
• We spent the weekend in Charlotte, and the main thing I kept thinking was how much I used to love parts of my alternate hometown back when it still used to be a city. But more on that subject later.
• Rhetorical question: why do so many fundamentalist Christians believe that “religious freedom” means that they have the right to practice their own religion however they see fit, preferably with government sanction, but that no one else has any rights at all and should pretty much just “get over it”? I guess that myth of perpetual persecution helps keep the faith ever stronger, huh?
• Things I particularly hate today: pollen, Discover, and PDF documents made from scans of the document rather than source material.

Random Friday stuff:

• This is pretty telling on several levels: NBC’s Thursday night lineup was beaten by a telenovela on Univision, a Spanish-language network that doesn’t even have over the air affiliates in several large US markets.
• Had breakfast in the now smoke-free Lighthouse Grill this morning. It was really nice, but we still sat in the (former) non-smoking section, because that’s where the windows are.
• I’m now officially registered for classes in the fall. Yer Humble Host has begun the transition from part-time, amateur information geek to full-time, professional information junkie with a Master’s degree. I just hope I don’t wind up leading story time for the kiddies at some suburban branch library.

I just keep coming back like a bad penny hairstyle:

1982: I was a fresh-faced recent high school graduate. OK, my face wasn’t really all that fresh, and the photo was actually taken while I was still in high school…

1983: This is the only one that was issued to me as a continuing student. It just happened that 1983 was the year UNCG decided to redesign its ID cards.

1989: I returned to finish what I’d started in 1982. I succeeded this time.

2007: In which I am a graduate student…

Check out my dad, having an 82nd birthday dance with my mom, less than two months after his hip replacement surgery.

Before meeting up with my parents, I stopped by campus to buy my textbooks. I’m not sure what shocked me more: the price of the books or the fact that everyone on the entire campus looks about thirteen years old.

It’s very odd making my third return to UNCG. Everything is so different, but small, random things are exactly the same as they were during my first two enrollments, like the tables in the student union where they sell the very same Doors and Bob Dylan posters “art prints” they’ve been selling at the beginning of each semester since about 1968, as far as I can tell.

Am I nervous about entering a classroom for the first time in sixteen years? You betcha I am.

Reflections on my first week back in school (among other things) are yet to come, but it’s been sort of an all-around crazy week, and the weekend isn’t looking much calmer, so it may be a while.

But just so you’ll know I’m still alive, here’s a random shot of downtown Winston-Salem that has nothing much to do with anything I’ve said here.

Random snapshots from my first week as a graduate student:

• What could be more annoying than slogging your way through a dense, 20-page treatise that atempts to determine the difference between “knowledge” and “information”? Maybe its conclusion that, in the end, it doesn’t matter anyway and that the terms will be used interchangeably throughout the entire text? Aaargh…
• An urban college campus makes for a nice “feel” but also for lousy parking.
• It’s nice having access to a university library again, particularly with a good chunk of it being available from home as well. Right now I’m amused by being able to download a century’s worth of articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post for free, but my current obsession is subject to change without notice.
• I hate group projects.

I know I’ve said this before, but my apologies to everyone I’ve completely ignored for the past ten days or so. You can’t imagine how overextended I’ve been between the fact that this is the busiest time of year for pretty much all my web clients and the fact that my first two weeks back in school proved a bit more hectic than I’d envisioned. Throw in one major family gathering, one part-time job, and several assorted minor crises, and you have me, as of today.

It’ll be better in about two weeks.

If you’re starved for content, though, you can watch me being mentioned on the local morning news.

My left arm hurts like hell, the result of a tetanus shot I had to have today in order to continue with school. Seems UNCG shredded my last set of immunization records ten years after I graduated (they keep them forever now, for all the good that does me) so I had to reach back into my childhood (and my mom’s files) to piece together what I could. I would’ve needed the tetanus booster anyway, but it’s still annoying.

That said, I’m in a better frame of mind than I was three days ago. I was just a little overwhelmed that I had so much going on all of a sudden. I knew it was temporary, but that didn’t help much. When much of your income is derived working for TV stations, September is a rather hectic time to be starting anything labor-intensive. And underneath it all, I suspect I was really freaked out at the looming due date of my first paper as a graduate student.

As is the case with so many other scary processes, I really just needed to dive in and get started on the damned thing, which I finally did today once most of my paid workload had calmed down a bit. I found a good chunk of supporting research (damn, there’s a lot of information available online when you have access to a major university library), made up my outline, and finally realized late this afternoon that I would probably get through this paper with no problem and might even do a passably good job on it.

The topic, for the masochists among you, is the effect of commercial search engine technologies on the value of the information acquired through them, and related implications for information professionals. Do I know how to have a fun weekend or what?

No more 1997 road trip stuff at the top of the page. I’ll miss that. Maybe on the twentieth anniversary, I’ll actually post some of the video.

Sadly, I don’t really have anything exciting to add in my first new post in two weeks or so. Life has pretty much been about school, work, and more of both for the past few weeks. We did make it to the fair on Wednesday and to the Jewish Festival in Greensboro with my mom on Sunday. And we successfully avoided the North Carolina Identity Politics Gathering, after accidentally wandering a little too close to the South Carolina version in Columbia the week before.

This weekend, though, I have no schoolwork due, three consecutive days off work, and plans to go someplace relatively far away. Therefore, I will not be answeting the phone or checking email after Thursday night, lest these plans somehow be ruined, as so many others have recently. OK, maybe I won’t go that far, but I really do need to get away for a couple of days.

For your perusal: new photos in the Carolinas photo gallery, including shots of Columbia, Durham, Lexington, Burlington, and Kannapolis.

Good news du jour: UNCG is now offering the option of using Gmail for student email accounts rather than the suck-ass, miserable Lotus Notes/Domino web interface that was required upto this point — and that looked and acted like it dated from about 1995, and that didn’t even allow POP access. I can now use Apple Mail for all my incoming mail again, rather than having to access some stupid, cumbersome web-based program for the school-related stuff. I am very much the happy.

So whither yer humble host?

Despite the fact that I haven’t been all that talkative online lately, depsite all the stress a week or so back, despite the occasional sleepless night, I’m feeling happier and more satisfied with life than I have in years, thanks.

A lot of very positive things have happened to me in the past thirty months, leaving San Francisco and moving back to North Carolina being at the top of the list. Returning to a part of the country that just works better for me at this stage in my life, moving with Mark into out first house, being in close proximity to so many more road trip opportunities, eating barbecue again, and reconnecting with my family have all been great (although the latter has tried my patience from time to time).

Not everything has been so rosy, though. My job quest, and the subsequent realization that I’m not really qualified to do much that anyone wants to pay me for, have been a bit depressing, and have led to some periods of financial tension and general mental anguish. I’ve had a significant chunk of family health issues to contend with, and I’m nervous about what the future holds. The insurance nightmare from last December and January gave me fits. And then there was that whole cancer thing. That kind of sucked, too.

But I’m feeling pretty damned good about everything right now. I’ve lost all of the excess weight I’d put on since moving back east, and then some. I’m getting some exercise, if maybe not quite enough. I’m earning a reasonable amount of money now, if not as much as I should be. And I’m in school, preparing for a profession that fascinates me, and thinking that I finally know what I want to be when I grow up. That’s pretty exciting, and I sometimes get all tingly just thinking about it.

I have goals and plans for the future. I have items in my calendar, and things I need to do, and research I enjoy, and projects that fascinate me, even if they do cause me short-term stress. In short, I feel like I have a reason to get out of bed every morning. To be honest, that wasn’t always the case a year or so back.

Not everything is perfect, of course. I need to find more robust sources of income now, not two years from now. My parents continue to age, and I continue to worry about how I’ll deal with the inevitable problems that will become more and more a part of our lives because of it. I could still stand to lose a pound or fifty. But my outlook is positive, I’m making progress, and as I said above, I’m generally happier than I’ve been in a long time,a dn plan to stay that way.

At least as long as I never have to face another week where I have to face all of the following at the same time:

• Potential hard drive failure.
• Disappearing domains and unresponsive registars.
• Two big class projects.
• My dad having emergency surgery on his shoulder.
• My mom needing yet another explanation of how to check her email and downolad photos from her camera, while having a simultaneous emotional meltodwn because of my dad’s surgery.
• A big pile of extra, unscheduled work, half involving a new client and the other half involving major changes in a job I’ve only had for four months to begin with.

Actually, I think I’ll be OK even if I do have to face all of those at once. I’d just feel sorry for anyone who had to be round me. And glad that I had a most wonderful and supportive husband.

After tomorrow, my life becomes less stressful for five or six weeks. Until then, though, I’ll stick with the short attention span stuff:

• So it’s an A in at least one of my two classes this semester. If you’re interested in reading any of my terribly exciting papers, let me know and I’ll hook you up.
• Lately, I’ve been learning a lot more about the bowels of Mac OSX than I ever really wanted. I’m not sure why I’m having so many problems with odd file corruption issues. Tonight, it was an iCal calendar file (or three). Last week it was my email database. There was, fortunately, no data loss in either instance. I’m wondering of the problem is that so many Mac core applications are database-driven now. Or maybe that my hard drive really is dying.
• All in all, though, it’s probably still easier to fix things like this on a Mac than on a Windows machine, which would probably require reinstalling every operating system since Windows 3.1.1, in sequence, and then hand-typing some DLL file before rebooting three times while chanting “There’s no place like Redmond.” And then doing it again.
• All these really old Tonight Show episodes running during the writers’ strike are making me (a) feel old and (b) realize I didn’t watch much late night TV in 1993 and 1994. Which isn’t a surprise, actually.
• Via digitizationblog: wow, who knew there was a PDF blog?
• You know you’re really married when you have start having trouble sleeping because someone isn’t in bed with you rather than because someone is.

For the first time in recent memory, I have no papers to write, no pile of reading to do, and not even any client deadlines looming.

What exactly was it that I used to do in this situation?

Spotted this in an elevator on the way to class last night. Are professors actually advertising for advisees now? Or is it just that this Dr. Westervelt believes she’s so bloody fabulous that there will be that much competition for her services? It just struck me as rather odd.

Of course, the inappropriate “decorative quotation marks” are another story entirely.