The happiest life?

Right before I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I had a conversation with one of the poets on the faculty about life after college. She explained her path after graduation with a quote that I believe she attributed to Simone Weil: “The happiest life is the one with no choices.” (Fortunately for her, having no choices meant that she only got into Iowa… a no choice I think most of us would be happy to have!)

That thought has stuck with me, not as a kind of guiding principle or anything, but as a check to my constant urge to keep my options open, even though there are costs to doing so.

Turns out, I am not alone. See John Tierney’s Findings for today: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors:

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

That’s right, no retreat for that army, you have no ships. You must go forward. The piece goes on to explain that behavior researchers have found that people are kind of pathological about keeping doors open, even when there is no rational reason to do so. Dan Ariely, the author of the book Tierney is drawing this from, has his own story of useless door opening:

When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.

Ah that’s so familiar! Well, not the MIT and Stanford part, but I remember agonizing over my first job after college. I had to choose between two, and there were no clear reasons why one or the other would be best (they both had major drawbacks). I literally made myself ill in the course of a day from worrying about it too much. Of late, the main agony has been, stick with the professional path I’m on or make a drastic change… and I do have to say that in the last month or so, as I’ve become more focused on taking the next step in the path I’m on I’ve felt less need to worry about the paths I’m not on. And it’s felt good.

Of course, it’s hard to tell the difference between obsessive door opening and genuine questions about what the best choice is. I’m not opposed to making a commitment, I don’t think. I just have no idea which would be the right one to make, or if there even is a “right” one, and the pressure to at least try before I get too entrenched in one at times feels overwhelming. On the other hand, it’s a lot of wasted energy that could have gotten me well down any one of them if I had just let the others go.

Hmmm.

Well, I did play the game. The first time, I opened 14 doors and scored about 1600 points. The second time, I opened 4 doors and scored almost twice as many.

“Make art, make art!”

Oh, staying up to watch the Oscars just got completely worthwhile. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova just won best song for “Falling” from Once. Like I said earlier, I have had a cynical, pragmatic hangover since 2004 and that song and that movie still charmed me to tears. Oh! It just got better–Marketa got cut off by the orchestra, and Jon Stewart just brought her back out to give her an uninterupted chance to say her thank-you’s. “Enjoy your moment,” he said. Good advice.

At least I’m in good company

If, as Brian suggested, I am doomed to lose the good fight over the correct use of “enormity,” I am not without company, as Boswell informs us:

 He found fault with me for using the phrase to make money. ‘Don’t you see (said he,) the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it: you should say get money.’ The phrase, however, is, I think, pretty current. But Johnson was at all times jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms… He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind.”

Uh yeah, clearly… or not so clearly anymore. And have any of us ever given it a second thought?

Nah, let’s not let the market learn from its mistakes

This NYT story is not happy news for those of us who have sat out the housing market b/c we refuse to pay too much money using risky loans for a home in an overpriced area of the country:

Elizabeth and Ben Kilgore are back in the real estate market. All it took was a little-publicized section of the economic stimulus package President Bush signed into law last week that lowered the borrowing cost of buying a more expensive home.

And if the limit on loans backed by a government-backed housing finance entity like Fannie Mae is raised from $417,000 to the full $729,750 she has been hearing about, Ms. Kilgore said, “we will be able to get a 30-year fixed mortgage for less than what we’re paying now plus our homeowner’s dues.”

Okay, do I get this right? The stimulus package is going to help our economy because it will allow people w/ 700k houses to obtain nice, normal mortgages.  Were they really the ones who needed our help?

700k, the article goes on to explain, is really just a number. It sounds outrageous to me and others who live in cheap-old southeast Florida, but the median price of a home in San Francisco, for example, is about 777k. So really, this change in jumbo loan backing is geared toward helping average people who live in the most exorbitantly priced places in the country.

No wait, I still don’t get it. It seems like those ordinary people would have been helped more by what the market is actually doing right now (unless it causes them to lose their jobs), which is falling in real terms. Housing prices in the SF bay area have fallen close to 20% in the last year, as they should when the market is flooded and has been overvalued. Hmmm, would I rather pay 777k or 650k for my house, let me see… They’ve started to fall here too, which could eventually help people like me… if it were allowed to continue. But it looks as though one of the package’s main goals is to prevent that from happening, favoring some of the very people who got us into this mess and some people who just plain don’t need help, people who could either afford very expensive homes in the first place and people who took on loans they couldn’t handle. Oh yeah, and only people who live on the coasts:

In areas where median prices do not exceed $271,050, such as the entire state of Alabama, the basic loan limit will be $271,050.

The economic stimulus package of 2008: some states left behind. Again, this seems to be exactly the kind of short-sighted, instant gratification-oriented thinking that got us (all of us, even those of us who tried to spend responsibly and not take on more mortgage than we could afford) into this situation. Either housing prices should fall and let waiting buyers back into the market, or they should rise naturally and encourage people to flow elsewhere. I know the jobs have to flow elsewhere first, and they would be more likely to do so if the there were not unnatural subsidies for being located in an expensive place to do business.

Oh well. I didn’t really want to own a home in Florida anyway, so at least this could help keep me motivated to move along.

Friday Red: At last

Wow, I think it’s been a month of Friday’s since I last got to keep my favorite tradition of red wine + free time. It’s been a hectic few weeks in which my last remaining uncommitted brain cells have been invaded by the word “job.” Which is more than a little futile, seeing as I won’t have my library degree until August and most search committees won’t look at my app until I have it in hand. But some will, and I am slowly discovering them.

The last time I blogged, I would not have predicted that I would feel so unconflicted about this. I think economy woes + nearing graduation + meeting a few more really cool librarians made me wake up and say, you know, I do enjoy this job, and I want to give it shot, and heck, I will actually be qualified for it without another 5-8 years of school unlike my other two fantasy jobs of late. No more self-created inferiority complex. And having said that to myself, all of a sudden the future looks a little more promising. Like, it won’t be the end of the world if I just go with what comes my way.

Other than that, not much to report. Currently reading: Joy Kagawa’s Obasan, Carlyle on Boswell,  and a bunch of articles about standards in medical information and ontologies for clinical research (and a vast yawn echoes through the blogosphere, but really, it’s fascinating, I promise!)

D got a bike. He’s in love with it. I’m just trying to make sure he practices protected biking. For me the answer to “Would it be okay if I just rode along A1A w/o a helmet?” is always NO.

Last week I took my second canoe trip along the Peace River in central Florida. Last year, the whole drive there through dark cane fields on two lane roads felt like an epic of stress, but this year the drive just flew by. Why is that? Why does Clewiston no longer scare me?

And now, I think I am going to focus on the perfect beverage in my glass and the perfect weather on my patio. Sometimes it really does pay to live in Florida.

Good reads via Seacoast

It takes a lot to make SJ smile on a day in which she experienced what she calls a “Double Shot of Adulthood”–1k in dental bills predicted for hubby and a check engine light in the new (!?!) car. Fortunately, there’s good semi-colon news today, and Emily totally scooped me on that story, and pointed me toward a good piece on American aspirations and the phenomenon of workplace and school shootings. So do check it out, if you haven’t given this blog up for dead.

Oh snap: poetry version

George Saunders explains why “poetry is not only transcendent, it’s super-easy. ” Don’t forget to check back next week, when “we’ll look at some other poetic forms, such as the rondo, the villanelle, and even the Pig Latin.”

If a faculty member says the same things librarians say

People listen, at last. In which I read between the lines of this NYT article on the Harvard arts & sciences faculty’s vote on open access, institutional repository publishing of completed articles.

The idea:

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs…. Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

Reading this is kind of an open access librarian’s dream come true. A lot of them (I won’t quite count myself among this crowd yet b/c I’m not an actual librarian) have been working overtime to alert anyone who will listen to the fact that the current publishing model requires scholars to turn their contributions to human knowledge over to people whose raison d’etre is to make a buck. You get tenure, and your article begins to disappear. (Of course, good articles will be cited and anthologized and possibly live on past its journal publication, but the vast majority of articles eventually end up trapped in some publisher’s copyright vault.) Of course, nobody listens to librarians, but that’s why this vote has two pieces of good news 1) faculty are doing it and 2) the faculty are at Harvard. You know, once the uber-cool kids start doing it, the other kids will catch on.

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model.

YES. Exactly. It’s not a business model at this point, it’s a parasite. It deserves to be wrecked. But of course, the publishers want to capitalize on the fear that lurks at the heart of all faculty facing tenure, who really don’t need the rules of the game to change right when they have to play:

Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.

That simply does not have to be true. It’s utterly misleading to say that self-archiving articles is or has to be the equivalent of putting a goofy video of your cat on YouTube. If scholars agree to support open access publishing, slightly modified peer review procedures will follow suit. Scholars and their departments already make no money off their journal publishing–most of the intellectual labor is volunteer slave labor anyway. There are multiple open access, peer-review journals already working. If departments need to begin counting self-archived publications in the tenure process, they’ll find a way to hash it out. It will eventually be impossible to avoid seeing that this is necessary, either b/c library budgets for humanities publications will become so slashed as to no longer support third party humanities publishing–

Supporters of open access say that the current system creates a different set of problems for academics. Expensive journals cut into a library’s budget for scholarly books and monographs, which hurts academic publishers, which hurts the coming generation of scholars who must publish to gain tenure.

–or b/c one of these days government funding is going to depend on making the newly-minted knowledge publicly available, as it already does for many scientific researchers. Now “eventually” could still be a long time, but one hopes, you know?

I hope Harvard prof’s do the right thing, although if they don’t I’ll at least partially understand why. Change is scary. But just having a vote is a start.

UPDATE: They voted yes! Maybe those hummingbirds are really going to meet.

Discovery v. selection

This Library of Congress news release about finding three genuine photos of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration sent a couple of chills down my spine. The addition of these three brings the total to four.

It also got me thinking about how much has changed in 143 years. As we library students are repeatedly reminded, the problem for future researchers investigating W’s second inauguration isn’t going to be a lack of visual resources but rather a flood of images that would need to be filtered and read for unique information.  Between now and then, those of us who curate information in some way are going to have to make choices about which images get preserved so we will try to guess what will be important to them, but regardless, there still aren’t going to be a grand total of four images available. Probably.

Librarian thoughts aside, there is something incredible about seeing unstaged photos from an event that was so important to our country’s history. I look at these photos and it’s like I can almost feel the drizzle, the cold, the expectations and hopes and energies of the people (many of them soldiers) gathering to see the president  who has led them into a war for the future of the country.
And seriously, I never get tired of reading the second inaugural address that these photos preface.

Martin Luther said, “Who fears hell runs toward it.”

It’s so beautiful outside today.

Last night, during a phone conversation with my sister on her cellphone headset as she made her two hour evening commute home from West Palm to Miami, I learned the friend from Battle Creek that I referred to in my earlier exhortations to donate to the leukemia and lymphoma society passed away. She had not been sick very long. I expected to hear that she was going through treatment and that things were uncertain. I had—forgotten is the wrong word, because it is something more willful than that–refused to consider that cancer is sometimes an illness that doesn’t give always people a year or two years to fight. She was 26.

We went to different schools, so I knew her mostly from our mid-teens, when we would sometimes end up shuffled together for some county-wide purpose or other. She had a goofy sense of humor that she was confident enough to let show at an age when most of us were busy hiding ourselves. She was a generous person even then, and incredibly intelligent.

We weren’t close, but I suppose I see enough of myself in her to have her death stop me utterly in my tracks, which too often of late have been going around and around in circles of second-guessing and self-imposed regret.

So, I don’t mean to be a downer on a Friday, but right at this moment I am feeling more than ever the need to remind myself (more than anyone who might read this, although I don’t know, maybe it will speak to you too) that there is an end to opportunity. There is an end to opportunity, and it isn’t getting the wrong degree, taking the wrong job, moving to the wrong city, getting a rejection letter, or screwing up a big project at work. It isn’t any of those things. None of those things are the end of anything, not while you are still lucky enough to breathe.

A moratorium on cranky Tuesday’s that last all week, tears over spilt milk on the roads not taken, hating Florida, thinly and not so thinly veiled forms of self-pity, complaining about getting a year older every year. I won’t always be happy, but I will no longer let myself be the cause of my own suffering if I can physically help it. I just won’t. I can’t do anything for Carol, anymore, but she, amazingly, is still doing something to help me.