A certain kind of symmetry
So in the end of things, it took me two months to the day between coming back to New York and actually going to work for the first time. Based on what my boss and I had talked about, there would be irony aplenty - what I would actually be doing would be the single most mechanical, mindless, hell, pre-industrial thing possible (making boxes, then filling them with books and taking the things downstairs to the loading dock) - and I would be making the most I ever have in an hourly job. More than when I was standing on a DC streetcorner, shivering my ass off, and giving out free copies of a paper that then barely lasted a couple of months anyways. More than when I wrote a daily news brief on terrorist activities that would go out to subscribers worldwide. Hell, more than I when I ended up as the English dub voice of the Russian minister of atomic energy...
...Except, I walk into the office, feeling like these last five months didn't exist and I was actually just *in* the office the day before, say hi to Alicia and Karen, hang up my coat - and two minutes later, turns out, there's an urgent research project that needs to be taken care of *now*, and everything else can wait.
The project is the kind that twenty years from now, will take all of a half-hour playing around with whatever Google Books evolves into. But right now, when an attorney wants to look at the abortion laws of about twenty different states, as they looked on December 31, 1969, and then exactly a year later, it's entirely doable, and not particularly difficult - but time-consuming like whoa, and with no way around it. Since even for a single state, this requires going upstairs, finding a 1960's-dated index for that state's laws (a decade earlier, before that, most likely, there wasn't a specific abortion law, and a decade later, there's a good chance their entire numbering has been reworked), then hoping that the needed volume is a) on the shelf to begin with and b) that it was kept updated with pocket parts, and not stand-alone pamphlets...and then doing it all over for the next state, and the next, and the next eighteen. Oh, and of course, then there is that whole 'volumes not being in any particular order' thing: the California statues take up something like ten shelves, but within those ten shelves, hoping for individual books to actually follow each other the way they are supposed to is being way too optimistic...
...can you see I'm already loving this, and totally (back) where I want to be?
---
Tomorrow morning, Chinatown by 6:30, the first bus and so DC by 11-ish, the hotel by midday, and then, let's have fun. See some of you all there; I'll probably be in Registration 90% of the time, in my room and dead to the world most of the remaining ten, and if in neither of those two places, then hey, that the bar is right across the hallway from where registration will be set up has got to be a sign of *some* kind!
...Except, I walk into the office, feeling like these last five months didn't exist and I was actually just *in* the office the day before, say hi to Alicia and Karen, hang up my coat - and two minutes later, turns out, there's an urgent research project that needs to be taken care of *now*, and everything else can wait.
The project is the kind that twenty years from now, will take all of a half-hour playing around with whatever Google Books evolves into. But right now, when an attorney wants to look at the abortion laws of about twenty different states, as they looked on December 31, 1969, and then exactly a year later, it's entirely doable, and not particularly difficult - but time-consuming like whoa, and with no way around it. Since even for a single state, this requires going upstairs, finding a 1960's-dated index for that state's laws (a decade earlier, before that, most likely, there wasn't a specific abortion law, and a decade later, there's a good chance their entire numbering has been reworked), then hoping that the needed volume is a) on the shelf to begin with and b) that it was kept updated with pocket parts, and not stand-alone pamphlets...and then doing it all over for the next state, and the next, and the next eighteen. Oh, and of course, then there is that whole 'volumes not being in any particular order' thing: the California statues take up something like ten shelves, but within those ten shelves, hoping for individual books to actually follow each other the way they are supposed to is being way too optimistic...
...can you see I'm already loving this, and totally (back) where I want to be?
---
Tomorrow morning, Chinatown by 6:30, the first bus and so DC by 11-ish, the hotel by midday, and then, let's have fun. See some of you all there; I'll probably be in Registration 90% of the time, in my room and dead to the world most of the remaining ten, and if in neither of those two places, then hey, that the bar is right across the hallway from where registration will be set up has got to be a sign of *some* kind!