21 May 1999: Admiring Minds

Goodness me. I've been added to Columbine's ring saga. Look at that sentence, would you? It's all about me, baby, and I, unthinking, wrote that sentence in the passive so I could be the subject. Columbine added me to Nibelung. Goodness me.

This is as good an opportunity as ever to say that while I crave to know about hits and such, I figure I would obsess on the numbers good or bad and think it best simply to avoid the issue. If you wondered, all you who came from Columbine's entry.

This is later an opportunity than I should have taken to explain the "Knowledge is Wealth" thing that's on every page. I don't mean I think I am so very knowledgable and seek to sprinkle the minds of everyone around me with the amazing amount of trivia I know. I mean, for once, something less egocentric than that.

Sometime in grad school I ran into ALN on the patio of the UConn Co-op--oh, damn, now I've got all distracted trying to remember when I first met her, but anyway--and it had to be outside, not inside, because we both had our backpacks. Mine, by that point, had shed most of its pins, although I still sported some pro-choice ones and maybe my Zen one (a blank white circle). After seeing her, I removed mine: hers had been their Chinese rejection letter. Hers were so cool that mine were pointless, and the crowning one was "Knowledge is Wealth. Share it."

Perfect. Knowledge is wealth, knowledge should be shared, wealth should be shared. Those two sentences form the single guiding principle in my life, which is why I'm a teacher and librarian, just as I've wanted to be since about first grade. Right.

AAC said, rightly enough, that I wouldn't make a good teacher because I have favorites. She knew that was true with her three children--although I no longer have a favorite among them, I did at the time--and knew I would be worse with a classful. I still want to be Phoebe's children's librarian, though. Probably I should just be a cataloger though. Nothing to get impatient about there, impatience being the other impediment to my serving others as a teacher and librarian ought.

Anyway. ALN is now a teacher, as are most of my friends. They teach language, including ESL; and jollyology, teamwork, and the kinds of stuff you'd learn at NOLS; and elementary grades; and college freshling English; and more advanced college English; and write dissertations on artificial intelligence and the Faerie Queen and the neurobiology of sea slugs (though not all at once); and when they don't teach, they run medical clinics for the indigent or write dictionaries and annotated bibliographies or practice non-Western medicine or edit at publishing houses or run computer systems at college libraries or direct small-town libraries.

Or they're support staff at research and information organizations and continue not to get their MLSs, if they're me.

So I don't have a lot of knowledge and while my job is a worthwhile one, what I disseminate is other people's knowledge, not my own.

Back to ALN and when I met her. This is the kind of thing that drives CLH crazy. When I went to San Francisco in September, which I never wrote about here oops, we rented a car and drove to Big Sur and listened to the tapes I'd brought on the plane. I'd forced myself to bring music other than my standard air chestnuts. I brought the tape highlighting my favorite bands that I made for Ulla, which I never gave her because it's got big crunchy noises between tracks, and Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time, and a Joni Mitchell mix, and Innocence Mission, and another that I thought had the last Eurythmics album, Savage, backed with Annie Lennox's first solo, Diva. Playing it, it turned out not to be Diva but her second solo, Medusa. This made me crazy as I could not remember whence I'd got the disc. CLH launched into this brilliant monologue about how I bought this tape on this day of the week on this date on this year in this store on this street in this city for this much that I earned with this job and I was wearing this outfit and I was with this person which is important to know because of this other thing and I nearly peed with embarrassed laughter, because she was exactly right.

So I can't talk about ALN's pin that I saw that day because I can't remember if I got to be friends with her indeed because I did grab her and demand a conversation about the philosophy behind that thought. I met her through KRE, and they met because they were both RAs. KRE was my RA, poor thing.

I arrived at 8:00 a.m., the earliest possible time, on the first possible day--just as I had every September. I was in a pissy mood for a number of reasons: One, it was my ninth and, I knew, last semester of school. My fifth move-in reminded me of my first, giddy one, my second, hysterical one , my third, timid one (having a roommate), my fourth, tremulous one (returning to my single but with lots of emotional baggage), but most of all reminded me of the corresponding four move-outs and how depressingly final the fifth move-out would be. Two, my mother was with me. Three, we'd driven up in Fugly, whose odometer registered 99,993.2, and not only had my mother refused to waste her time driving extra so I could be with Fugly, could be driving her, when she rolled over, I knew my mother wouldn't even give the poor car a nice pat on the dashboard or a biscuit or anything when she did roll. Four, and the last straw, was that the electricity in my room didn't work. That's where KRE came in.

Poor thing. I rather flew off the handle.

Anyway. After BJW left, my spirits lifted, and I remembered to apologize to KRE. We got to be friends, especially I dropped by one evening while she was hosting a study group for a class and lo and behold, Carla was there, Carla whom I hadn't seen since freshling year. We squealed. We leapt for each other and hugged. Carla still remembered the hilarious letters I'd written to her over freshling Christmas break. KRE realized that however unreasonable I had been at the start, if Carla still loved me 3.5 years later, maybe I wasn't so bad.

So the RAs had all their RA stuff to do together, and that's how she met ALN. I first heard about ALN when KRE told me she'd gone to a high school dance chaperoned by a man she was interested in, and brought ALN, and she and ALN put on a lesbian act to freak out the high schoolers (who, given that they went to school next to a college campus, coudn't've been too freaked) and to embarrass the teacher-half and tantalize the man-half of her love interest.

But I didn't meet ALN until later. She was a University Scholar, double-majoring in Spanish and Italian (or French, I forget) and earning her master's in Latin American Studies simultaneously. That put her in touch with JUMB. Anyway, we met, before the button day.

In 1992, JCC and MEM (another RA) broke up, and JCC went to Arcata to earn his master's in creative writing, and I started to know RDC, whom I'd met in class and afterward when ABW started working in Homer's Copy Services, which RDC ran. RDC, looking at my pictures, saw one of KRE and exclaimed "I knew her!" from such and such a class. I asked if he'd known JCC too, who'd also taken that class. It turned out he hadn't been in that class, but RDC knew whom I meant. He said, "Are you kidding, I lived with him for a year and half, we were like brothers!" So I knew I could trust RDC, and we started to go out.

JCC knew RDC when he was a freshling and me when he was a senior, and when I wrote him that we were going out, "surprise" is too mild a word for JCC's reaction. Staggering shock, except he was happy. He visited us the following summer (1993), and he asked for ALN's address. So they started writing, and came together to our wedding in 1995, and in 1996 were married.

They are a beautiful couple in mind and body.

You can't ask CLH if you don't believe me, but I can vouch for her telling you that's the shortest how-I-met-X story I've ever told. And I mentioned only as many non-central as central people!

I wish I kept copies of my letters back when I wrote to Carla though.

My job. Recently promoted, more recently regaining my equilibrium after a bit of boat-rocking. "Support staff at a research and information organization," as I said above. Ordinarily I like my job, I like my coworkers and the place and the point of it all (and there is one) and everything. Occasionally the Fact that I am Wasting My Potential bubbles up from the different places I try to quash it. Like yesterday, when I got a flyer from the Denver Public Library Development Foundation about the Western History Collection's historic photographs.

That was my job.

In the fall of 1995 upon my arrival in Denver, I applied for every job, which is how I wound up at Hateful Inc. I was temping at an advertising agency that I liked, that I thought liked me, when I was offered an interview at the Western History Collection. They wanted someone to write copy for their photographs. I have a dual BA, the first nine semesters for a double major in history and English and another two later bringing in Women's Studies: just what a curator or cataloger should have to write thoughtful, well-written, political correct descriptions. I wake up at night beating myself up for canceling that interview, which I thought I should do since I'd've'd to ask for and take a long lunch hour from the temping job, since the job was slated for only one year without benefits, since I thought I had a chance at the ad agency, and since Hateful Inc. had made an offer. Even though it was the library.