[I gave up Twitter during Lent earlier this year and wrote my "return to" when Lent was done and never posted it. Why? I have no effing idea why this was not posted, other than clearly I was hitting the crack pipe. - Lisa 11/20/09]

Going 40 days without Twitter was an interesting experience as I’m terrible at moderation — it’s either feast or famine with me. This is one of the reasons why quitting smoking has always been so hard for me: I WANTED just one cigarette and then I would smoke 12, which meant I would have to buy a pack or bum from someone and the whole smoking process would start all over again. The only way I kicked it this time was not hang out with smokers, which is easy to do since I don’t know any smokers on the east side of the state.

However with Twitter, the problem was that just as I was weaning myself off of Twitter, everyone and their second cousin was joiningTwitter. Since this was definitely not a geographic issue (like attempting to quit smoking)¹ but rather a interest issue, what was a girl to do?

I decided to to go off of Twitter for 40 days not because I am religious and needed something to give up for Lent² but rather I was spending an inordinate amount of time on Twitter and not allocating that time for other, often necessary, projects. Twitter is not just about reading my public_timeline and tweeting but rather for me it is also about looking at what others are tweeting, following links, researching interests, people and things. If someone posted a blog entry, I’d end up spending several hours on that blog and then some. I want to to know who I am interacting with, so thus, Twitter became this full-time job of me searching out and expanding my network. I’m a curious cat who needs to know how things are done!

I wanted to use the time off from Twitter to do a variety of things though, things that I swore I was NOT doing because all of my time was being sucked in by Twitter. Things such as: updating lib schooled. more often, personal research, knitting, exercise (WiiFit), homework, writing, cleaning my apartment. I suck at time management and Twitter was fast becoming another obsession that was sucking down my time and like smoking, I couldn’t find myself an easy way to quit. More succinctly, I couldn’t find myself moderating my Twitter activity to do something else. Feast or famine.

In the Twitterverse (or really, any active online social life), 40 days is almost an entire cycle or IS an entire cycle of birth to death. Fads can come and go in 40 days or less, and with Twitter it went from bubbling under the surface of explosion to totally exploding all over the media. Every single form of media outlet was becoming Twitterized and add insult to injury, bands, authors, celebs, friends and everyone else in between were suddenly joining the Twitter bandwagon! And I couldn’t add them or read them! The one and only time I logged into Twitter during this period was when a co-worker asked me a question that required me to do so. But I didn’t look at my public_timeline, I swear. But other than that single instance, I refrained from reading my public_timeline, I did not log into Twitter, I did not follow Twitter links, I did not log into Twhirl or any other application, did not respond to DMs: not a damn thing.

The only thing I did was check how many minions were following me because the number kept growing and it was insane! In the 40 days I was gone, the number of my followers almost doubled! Thanks to auto-tweeting on this blog, I tweeted maybe half a dozen times in the last 40 days but not the continual dozen times a day (or more!) that I was doing before. According to TwitterCounter, the projection that I was to hit 500 minions before Easter was completely feasible — something that Chris and I had a gentlemen’s agreement on (that I would indeed hit 500 before Easter, while he did not believe it to be so). The final tally was 520 before i

And this became the puzzlement for me: I was not tweeting with any regular basis and I was gaining new minions. Why? I came up with the following reasons:
1. People I knew who created Twitter accounts after my hiatus.
2. People who were recommended to follow me (via #followfriday or another method).
3. Key word/geographic search: I gained a lot of new minions because of “librarian” and “punk rock” (@pnkrcklibrarian) in my name. I also gained new minions because of where I live, as it’s listed in my bio.
4. Hashtag (#) via my own self-created hasltags or via key wording my bio.
5. Spam bots, auto/serial adders.
6. MLM market peeps.

Was there a lesson learned in any of this? Probably in the end I was able to do a bit better this semester than projected because I was able to keep away from the time sucking whore that Twitter had become in my life. But other than that? I came back fast and furious to the Twitter world, as the SomeECard that Chris created for me.

P.S. As of November 2009, I’ve hit nearly 1200 minions. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

1. Yes, I’ve been smoke-free for 10 weeks now. I’ve got the 10-15lbs to prove it too!
2. While I was raised Catholic, I’ve given up all preludes of Catholicism years ago (despite the fact that I went to a Catholic college). Interestingly enough, my mother who is Christian and only practices some tenements of Catholicism (when it suites her) continually gives up men for Lent every year. You can see where my sense of humor comes from, then.

Back in July, a slew of librarians wrote about their experiences covering one day (or some cases, several days) of their day to day life as a librarian. And by slew, I mean dozens and judging by the PbWorks page, maybe hundreds? Not only were the blogs collected into PbWorks, but they were also tweeted and reshared on Twitter with the hashtag, #librarydayinthelife.

The point of this exercise was to illustrate how wildly different the tasks and jobs were from a plethora of librarians and library staff, clearly showing that while the MLIS degree to some extent can be pretty generic, what is expected of us really varies on the location and job title we are given. And if this little exercise doesn’t showcase that we as a profession are beyond the bun-glasses-orthopedic shoes stereotype and the flexibility of the job really IS there, then I don’t know if anything really will.

With all of that being said, I wanted to desperately put my two cents in but at the time, didn’t think my life as a grad student then would prove to be that totally useful. Since the fall semester has started (and erm, is actually almost ending), I thought that now would be a good time to contribute.

My background:
I don’t think I’m a typical student in that I’m also involved with lots of extracurricular activities outside of my classwork, with some of it mostly relating to my job and some do not. I’m currently taking a full load of classes, work 20 hours a week at the graduate library reference desk, work part-time for a professor as her social media specialist (hours vary), am involved in several organizations, also sit on a committee, and am working on my archival practicum. I live about 15 miles away from school, which also throws upto 30 minutes each way of travel time.

Also, my weeks tend to fluctuate: Either I have all meetings and stuff inbetween work and classes or it is empty for me to do homework in. Sometimes there is a nice balance, but not always.

Tuesday, November 17
07:15 – 08:15 AM: Up, mainlining coffee and getting stuff together for the day. Leave the house at about 8:15ish to stop and get my daily Slurpee and drive down Woodward to Wayne State.
9:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Reference desk. What I can get done during this time period varies depending on how many questions are coming at me per hour. Today was an especially busy day with averages of about 10 questions per hour, nearly double of previous weeks averages for this time frame. I do face to face and telephone reference, most of it quick or ready-reference, with the occassional extended reference thrown in. Reference questions tend to be directional (aka quick), computer help, book search, or being asked for help on writing papers. I’m also typically logged in online via gTalk and Twitter and do homework when it’s really slow.
01:00 – 02:00 PM: Lunch break, read homework while I ate.
02:00 – 3:00 PM: Meeting with a professor about an upcoming large project that is due in December. I researching a local historical society and why (or why not) they are important not only to the community but to the archival profession. After that was done, we spent the rest of the time gossiping about music and MLIS accreditation.
03:00 – 04:30 PM: Virtual reference committee bi-weekly meeting. One of the senior librarians put together a staff meeting committee, with me being the only grad student, to research and explore alternatives to our existing VR software, Docutek. I was tasked with looking at IM alternatives, testing Trillian Astra and looking to the power of Twitter and GoogleWave to finding out what other people are using. I reported back and based upon my research, they will be testing out LibraryH3lp.
04:30 – 05:30 PM: Coffee with my friend Lauren. Lauren applied for an on-campus GSA position (graduate student assistant, a position I currently hold) and we were dissecting the interview before we headed to class.
05:30 – 8:15 PM: Intro to archives class, held every Tuesday. We had a speaker on Records Management come in and spoke for the entire class period.
09:15 – 12:00 AM: Went home and did several errands on my way home. Once I got home and out of my “oppressive clothes”₁, posted weekly discussion summary to Blackboard for my online class, discussed the VR meeting with my fiance and then settled on the couch for a few hours with dinner, House and The Big Bang Theory.

Wednesday, November 18
07:15 – 08:15 AM: Same as the day before: mainlining coffee, showering and getting dressed to head out. I get to leave a few minutes early, which is always a bonus.
09:00 AM – 03:30 PM: My long day for reference desk pimping. Spent most of my downtime trying to hack stuff together for lib schooled., which was failing. The relief librarians were nearly 30 minutes late (I was to leave at 3pm). Only planned on spending a few hours working on my website but ended up getting sucked into spending most of my time at the desk on it. I caught up on some email, prepped stuff for the student chapter Progressive Librarians’ Guild meeting scheduled for tonight.
03:30 – 05:45 PM: Planned on working on homework for the week but wanted to finish this entry. Continued to do prep work for the PLG meeting tonight. Did some quality web browsing. Caught up on more emails.
06:00 – 07:00 PM: Meeting with my advisor on course selection for next semester.
07:00 – 09:00 PM: PLG student monthly meeting. I’m the v-p and with the president having been MIA (deservedly so) due to her recent marriage, things have been a tad crazy.
09:00 PM – 12:00 AM: Head home, decompress from another 12+ hour day, get out of my oppressive clothes¹ and sleep. Only to start over all again tomorrow.

1. Meaning I got into yoga pants and a tshirt.

The other morning while getting ready for work, I was thinking about the beginnings of this entry which originally started out with, “Recently, I went to my first conference…” which was not necessarily correct as I went to a student journalism conference back in the mid-’90s in D.C. and did the LinuxCon circuit across the US (San Jose -> Atlanta -> New York) in the late ’90s and early ’00s. So no, this was not my first conference. But it IS my first conference as a librarian, so we’ll begin with that.

On May 15th, Heidi¹ and I went to Tech Camp unConference at Michigan State as it was local-ish, free and the content was right up my alley. After dithering about what to bring with me and getting that all sorted, Heidi and I piled into my car and drove the 1.25 hours to E. Lansing.

Why this conference rocked:

• The Tech unCamp was a wonderful mixture of students, new grads and established librarians who had at least one thing in common: They were all passionate about technologies and or bringing emerging and new technologies to their library. With the experience level running from neophyte to supreme geek being, the range of experience was wide open and I learned a lot.
• Libraries should look to Ann Arbor District² (also shout outs to Grand Rapids Public ³) on how public libraries are using existing and emerging technologies in order to do outreach and further along interaction with patrons and staff. Peeps should also look to Lawrence Tech in the academic vein about how academic libraries are using social networking and web 2.0 to the benefit of students, patrons and staff.
• Drupal v. Joomla v. WordPress as CMS: Drupal for large enterprise sites with Joomla as it’s redheaded stepchild brother and WP coming up fast and furious on the backend as the Open Source CMS. I participated heavily in this discussion, discussing my work with Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History Archives where I helped launch their WP site and how they used it. This discussion also really helped clarify why libraries are using certain technologies over others, especially why the big push towards Drupal.
• Web 2.0: Natalie Zebula, the tech librarian at LTU, led the discussion on using Web2.0 in libraries (I was the mad secretary, partially fueled by large amounts of caffeine) where in this discussion group we talked about all things web and tech related from dragging staff and patrons into the 21st century by introducing new teaching methodologies and services to how to do outreach in the 21st century world.
• Talks on using social web, information architecture and how to do social outreach: the final event of the day was the panel hosted by peeps in variety of capacities from social network and research to IA to using social networks in the real world. The IA stuff was huge draw for me because I started taking an IA class this summer, Heidi is also into IA (and she’s been a great resource in filling in things I’m missing tech wise) and it seems to also offer up a lot of stuff I’m heavily interested in — stuff that I did not know even had a name and now I know it does, which just proves I’m not even remotely insane! Heidi and I talked to Dan, the IA dude, after the camp for a bit in the parking lot and discovered that Dan and I moved in similar circles socially back in G-Rap in our younger years (and that he’s also nine days older than me). The world IS incredibly small.

Overall, this was a great introduction to conferencing for the newly inclined (such as myself) and was also highly informative. Not only were the discussions about the use of real world technologies in the library setting but also in other professional and personal settings. Personal experiences with social networking and web 2.0isms carried over in a lot of the talk that was going on, which isn’t surprising when you think about it. Much of what drives a lot of these technologies IS people’s curiosity and whether or not they work for them.

This explains, I think, how technology evangelism begins: All it takes is at least one person who is passionate about X, whatever X may be before it starts spreading to their circles (and so forth and so on). ExFiance #2 and I got on the TiVo bandwagon back in 2000 when his aunt and uncle had one of the first beta TiVos. The ability to PAUSE LIVE TV and the ability to record and hold hours and hours of shows for long periods of time sold us on this new fangled gadget. We were busy “young professionals” and missed a lot of what was on because we were out being busy! With TiVo, that changed the way we saw and viewed television. Within a year, most of our local social network owned a TiVo once they saw not only how useful but also how incredibly geeky it was. Why plan your lives around a television show, TiVo tells us, when you can plan your shows around your lives. Now a decade later with knock-offs offered by cable/satellite companies, it’s almost hard to imagine a household without a DVR in some form or another.

But stance on the technology revolution is for another day.

1.We met on Twitter, realized we had many of the same interests as well as we both attend Wayne State for lib school AND we both worked on campus. Tis a small world, indeed! Also, Heidi graduated from the program! Woot!
2. Eli provided his slides from the conference but part of what makes it interesting is also his speech!
3. I did various interviews months ago with peeps at GRPL and I knew that they were getting on or were driving the bandwagon with emerging tech THEN as they were one of the first libraries I knew who are active on Twitter. GRPL also blogs, games and uses emerging tech for outreach to their patrons. Word to my old home library!

My birthday is in 12.5 days in which I will be turning 29 for the ninth time (37), which is in spitting distance of 40 which is close to death.

What an auspicious way to being an entry, eh? But, I figured it was the right time to sit down and do half-year updat. Because interestingly enough I find myself at a cross-roads, one of my own choosing, A decision doesn’t have to be made this second, but, I need to write it out at the very least to sort it out.

Academically, the school year has been amazing. Going to library school has to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I ended the first full year with a overall GPA of 3.88 (B+ in cataloging, of which I proudly wear), I won the Graduate Student Assistant job at the library, which means that my tuition is now paid for AND I have a job manning the reference desk at the graduate library. For one of my classes, I ended up helping design and implement WordPress for a local Detroit museum and will more than likely end up doing my archival practicum there as the archivist loves me. (She’s also pretty awesome as well!) One of my professors has tapped me to work for her company part-time, making really good money, as a web2.0 consultant of sorts which could possibly land me as a full-time gig when I graduate if it works out. I won a scholarship and am also being pushed to fine tune some of my student papers to publishing worth materials and submitting them to appropriate journals.

Several of my classmates and I are founding a new student organization (a student chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild) and I’ve been tapped to take over presidential responsibilities of the local student chapter of ASIS&T. I’ve also been blogging over at Tech-Ink: A Librarian Collective about digital issues. I’m also the communications chair for the Graduate Student Union in my spare time.

Academically and professionally, everything is starting to fall into place.

Personally, things have been going on a more even keel. Lily and Pugsley (of ThePugKids) were surrendered to Ohio Pug Rescue when their temporary foster home fell through and I couldn’t take them with me nor could I find them a place temporarily until I could move into a place that would take more than one pet. This was heartbreaking for me, but, it was the right decision as their happiness and stability was my utmost concern over my own selfish need to make sure I kept alll three of the pug kids together. I still have Wednesday (who has her own Twitter account) and not once has she shown any signs of “abandonment” by her siblings and seems pretty happy being the only pug in the household. I’ve ditched caging her at night (like I used to do when I had all three) and she sleeps with me on “pillow mountain” next to me and has also taken it upon herself to wake me up every morning between 7-8am. Justin has taken a deep liking to her because “she’s lazy and I can respect that” but other than that, she turns 9 in July and she is still as cantankerous as ever. I love her even more so.

Life in Royal Oak has turned out to be pretty good to me and I’ve met a lot of awesome people. One of my girlfriends and I have started meeting every Tuesday for knitting night (and yet I’m still no closer to finishing any of my projects) and I hang out with a few other people as well. Most of the time though I spend at home solo as this past semester was really academically stimulating and I now love nothing more than doing nothing.

Justin and I are still going at it pretty strong as he’s been out to see me several times since I’ve moved for extended periods. It helps that he telecommutes for his job so he’s been able to work from the apartment while I go about my merry little way. The apartment is a little over 600sqft which is fine for one person and a pug but when he moves in in July, it will be a bit cramped. Graduation is set forth for end of August or December of 2010 depending on how I get those final classes laid out. And after that? Who knows? Justin and I have a zillion different life styles planned out for us that take us from living in a small English village to a condo in Chicago. Trips are being planned for far off exotic locales such as Florida (well, Key West) and beyond during our vacation times. A proposal and a wedding are sure to follow at some point. I just don’t know when.

So over all, life is good.

I’m finding my way around Detroit and I’m fairly comfortable with the city. There are some parts, architecturally, that are so beautiful that it is heartbreaking and simultaneously so desolated and run down, it is also equally heartbreaking. I haven’t done as much exploring as I would have liked, considering that we’ve had such a rough and long winter (snows until end of April) that the idea of exploring just wasn’t palpable. But now that the glorious spring days are here, I’m totally up for it.

I do miss watching my daffodils sprout and strut at Wilcox Park.

The cross-roads is that last summer I started a writing project of which I only completed one piece of flash fiction, submitted it to several websites for consideration only to find that the databases took a dump shortly after I did the submission and thus lost my work. By the time I found out, I was gutted and also too busy to re-submit and start over. So that project was shelved for the time being.

Justin has always been my biggest supporter when it came to my writing and while he’s not the first person to suggest I could make a living at it, he’s been the most vocal and the most pushy about it. For Single Awarness Day this year the only thing he wanted from me was a short story of which I never wrote. I had ideas™ but nothing ever really came to fruition.

Lately, more so then ever, I’ve become envious of people I know who are living the writerly life. It seems that I keep running into people or meeting them digitally who create these fantastic worlds around their writing and the tentacles of their work stretch far and wide. Writing was always the one thing I thought I was quite good at, something I really, really wanted to do and it seems however that the more involved I become with this new profession of mine, the more intense and time-suckage it becomes, the least likely I’ll make a living as a writer – and not just a writer, but an author. So even though I’m heading on this really great career path that I’m passionate about, there is still this niggling feeling that I need to stop absorbing other people’s work and create my own.

This is not to say that I want to give up doing what I’m doing – not by a long shot, but I really need to figure out how how to make the two worlds converge. Lessening up my activity on Twitter might be a good start as well as starting to plot out what it is I want to write.

Justin has always said that I could be a really great writer if I start actually writing again, doing something more than dropping non-sequitors in Twitter or writing provocative posts on my blog or other places. The talent is there but it’s waning and it needs to be fed. I met a friend of mine for breakfast meeting the other day and as it usually is with me, we ended up spending 3.5 hours talking about everything. We both remarked that the tables around us have all turned over at least thrice since we sat down and the lunch crowd was starting to thin out. Much of what I told her about my life seemed incredulous such as the ex-highschool boyfriend who stalked me from Facebook last winter or the reigniting of the relationship with Justin again. Even I admitted wholeheartedly that if I didn’t know it was true myself (and had blog posts, friends and other methods of documentation at hand to prove it), I would have thought I was a total bullshitter. Katishna has always said that I don’t create the drama but that drama followed me where I went. My life, in a lot of ways, is pretty extraordinary in a Lifetime movie kind of way.

Cathrynne wrote of much of what I was feeling recently, about the confessional side of writing. Since 1996, I’ve been pouring out my heart and soul, laying bare everything that I was for the world to see and not giving a damn who saw it. Age, perhaps, has dampened that need for dissipation of the soul. There are some horrors in my life that I’m not sure I want to revisit quite so soon. The relationship fall-out with TheEx, for example, still reverberates in ways I never expected. Steph, my expert on all things with crazy men, said that it’s almost impossible to think I would be completely healed in such a short amount of time considering the intensity and brevity of the relationship itself. I know she’s right, but me being me wants the fall-out to be over.

Before the winter semester ended, I spoke to one of my professors about going on for my PhD (which she does fully support) but I was worried that I would not bring anything new to the table of research. The best advice she gave was that one can always bring something new to the table, even in academia when it looks like everything has been researched to death, one can always bring a new or fresh perspective on an issue.

I think writing is a lot like that – the basics of writing have been done to death, we know this. It’s the original voices and their perspectives that make all the difference. I admire a lot of writers in a variety of genres, so I know it’s possible to do this. I just now have to figure out how and that will start with the short story for Justin, because he asked.

I’ve talked, almost incessantly, over the years how keeping an online journal has influenced my life professionally and personally. ¹ And yet despite the fact at how times (and technologies) have changed in the last decade, I still get amazed when my own interests often parlay into new opportunities for myself.

For example, recently I’ve become the go-to girl for WordPressbased stuff. Several librarians at the academic library I work at have started using WP for professional and personal blogs, and I just happened to have been around when one of them whipped open the WP dashboard to their site. I said something like, “Oh, hey, you’re using WP!” and conversation stemmed from there of me giving tech-tips and know-how on how to use WP, how to integrate widgets and all that brouhaha.

Several weeks later in my digital imaging class, the museum that my class will be working with wants to use WP for digital curation of our project — the catch is, the museum is just getting their feet wet on how to use WP and guess who is the only person who knows how to use WP in this scenario? You’ve guessed it — me!²

Because my WP dashboard is loaded to the gills with tweaks, gadgets and widgets, I showed them lib schooled. (and obvs. the dashboard) to explain some of the more robust features of WP and walk them through how things are done and what they can do with WP. There are, almost literally, no limitations for what WP is capable of and I sing its praises loudly.

But the one thing I thought was interesting about myself while I was showing colleagues and supervisors on the functionality of WP via my own site, is that it it dawned on me that I was ushering them into a vaguely private world where even a Google search for me will not bring up this site. I never meant to be completely anonymous with lib schooled. or even private, the content here was to be about my foray into obtaining my MLIS degree and boy howdy, some of the drafts in progress (like “Men I’ll never, ever date.”) having NOTHING to do with librarianship in the slightest. Did I really feel comfortable showing this this data? Did they need to know that I have/had people calling me “god” for a variety of reasons for some time? That I have a fondness for Guinness, James Bond and Jane Austen? That I like to say “fuck” a lot? Is that information relevant?

On one hand, my line of thinking is clearly ridiculous. Since that ill fated day in 1995 when I discovered “the internet,” I’ve been obnoxiously postulating myself online in a variety of ways ranging from writing about my sex life, detailing very private information about myself to posting images of my tattoos and piercings^3. I have left a virtual breadcrumb trail⁴ of who or what I am all over the internet — it’s almost like you can’t trip without finding me attached to something, somewhere. So why was I suddenly being Ms. Coy, 2009 about showcasing my blog, let alone a blog about library school?

I’d like to blame Google, but that’s the easy way out. I’d like to think that as I’ve gotten older that I’ve become slightly more sophisticated and mature about my online dealings. As I near the end of this long, hard journey of schooling (I’ve been in classes since January of 2003, have completed two degrees and am working on my third), I know that my online presence is going is going to be more scrutinized now more than ever by future employers. In the the book Sorting Things Out, Bowker and Star discuss using (at the time of their writing) AltaVista for researching candidates from their application pool and questioning themselves about the moral and ethical ramifications of their actions. They deemed it like snooping in the host’s medicine cabinet while at a party — you shouldn’t do it, but yet you do it anyway because the curiosity is killing you and now you have information about your host (they, perhaps, like to use KY personal warming lubricant and Preparation H (but not at the same time)) that makes the urge to snoop almost impossible to resist.

So even, ethically and morally, having your future employer search for you online– this is not to say it hasn’t nor will it be done, you can almost guarantee yourself that somewhere, out there, grunts are doing research on your application while you wait for that call back for the desperately wanted interview. The world has become so tech savvy that we are almost heading back to the era of chisels and stones.

Bowker and Star are not the first ones to discuss snooping online nor the ramifications of your employer finding out about your online activities and squashing them, ala dooce who got canned from her job in 2002. In the late ’90s, the idea of an employer Googling (before Googling was even a household name let alone a verb) was not necessarily an uncommon thing, as written by demonika in the ‘zine F.U.C.K.⁵. Her entry is poignant — and speaks volumes. And it’s now been a decade, when are we going to realize that flashing our boobs on a camera phone is not necessarily a good thing?

Google searches for me bring up varied results depending if you use my middle initial or not. But what is telling is that you get scads of information that is slightly different enough and old enough that may not be applicable to whatever it is you are looking for about me. If you search for academichussy, you get a bit more about me way more current and even more so if you do a search for pnkrcklibrarian, which has become my new nom de plume to reflect my new obsession, you find almost up to the minute stuff. There are still people who search for me as modgirl AND lisa because they remember that at one time I owned the domain modgirl.net (which I still do indeed own and use).

So what does this mean? What you find about me varies depending on what you currently know of me, how you search for it and figure out if it is relevant regardless of how dated it is. You also have to take into consideration that you’re only getting a small percentage of the picture of who I am, what interests me in 1995 and 1996 (J.D. Salinger, IRC, R.E.M.) is different from 2002 (Aphex Twin, Tivo, Laurell K. Hamilton) which is completely different than 2009 (Elbow, Wii, Kate Atkinson).

The bottom line? Employers who use data derived from interent searching are screwing with the possiblity that what they see is not necessarily all that what they get. It’s almost impossible to not be integrated somehow online without showcasing personality aspects of yourself that may not be deemed professional or appropriate. There are people, like my boyfriend, who reject social networking and web 2.0 like there is no tomorrow. Overall, I think making an employment decision based on what one finds on the internet is morally and ethically wrong — and also i think that making a personality call on someone based on what you find out on the internet is also morally wrong.

In short:
1. This is going to be more than likely bite me in the ass.
2. I am a hypocrite.
3. I don’t give a fuck.

1. If you’re interested in how my journaling has changed over the years, the Wayback machine has archives for simunye.org [From 1998 - 2000] and modgirl.net [From 2000 - 2005]. The entire archive should be up soon (I’ve been saying that for years) at modgirl.net. WP now has the functionality to import my LiveJournal [From 2002 - present-ish.]entries into WP, which I’d love to do on modgirl.net instead of freakin’ doing everything by hand.
2. I’m now working on a special project for this class on how to incorporate WP and other open source software into a workable, searchable archives; with the catch being geared towards small museums/libraries (primarily, where the archival/tech staff consists of 1-2 people).
3. Which seems innocent enough until you learn that some of those images are not exactly work-safe. Employers tend to frown when you’re perusing pictures of pierced nipples.
4. Amazon.com WishList | de.licio.us: modgirl | Facebook | flickr: modgirl | Goodreads | last.fm: modgirl | LibraryThing: academichussy | LiveJournal: academichussy | MySpace: modgeekgirl | Pandora: academichussy | ravelry: academichussy | /.: simunye | Twitter: pnkrcklibrarian | WiiNumber: 6103 8766 7240 5040
5. I also wrote for F.U.C.K. during the late ’90s and you can find my articles there as simunye or at modgirl.net.

By definition, I’m an extremist. I can’t eat one cupcake, I have to eat the whole batch. I can’t watch just one episode of $Television_Show, I must watch the entire series. I can’t do things in halves or partials, I must have the whole entire wondrous, beautiful thing. Thus, anytime I need to quit or par down on something, it’s hard for me to get into the mindset that majority of the population already does this on a daily basis and that it’s totally okay to have $X in small amounts or not at all.

Temptation and gluttony be thy middle name. And usually, I’m totally okay with that until it starts running my life — like Twitter.

Let me spin it this way: When TheEX and I “broke up” for a second time in August ’08, I swore that I was not going to read his blog anymore. This sounds silly, yes, but after nearly two years of being together and the joining of our digital and physical lives, I did not want to know what he was doing or how he was doing in grad school. I went from checking his blog several times a day, during the entirety of our relationship, to not checking his blog at all. NO MATTER HOW TEMPTING IT WAS TO GO THERE! I especially did not want to find out about his love life. I’m egotistical enough to state that once you go Lisa, you never go back and I know myself well enough to know that my little heart could not bear to find out that in “3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years” he’d be dating someone else. Also finding that information would lead me to want to track the newGF down and talk sense in her before he started smacking her around (literally). But I’m horribly digressing.

The point being is that I had to rationalize my way through of not going to his blog: What was I going to learn? How was this information going to help me? Did I or do I need know what or how he is doing? How is this going to help me in the healing process? I deleted cached information so that there would be no auto-complete when I went to the browser bar, I cleared out the cache so that it would not show up in my history. I did not want any easy way for me to stumble upon his blog, even innocuously.

Melodramatic? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.

Like reading TheEx’s blog, like smoking (25 days smoke-free! woot!), like most anything that has a shred of addictiveness to it – Twitter has become one of those indispensable things in my life that one wouldn’t think would make such an impression or be declared a necessity but because it has, I have to nip it in the bud before it takes over my life — which it has started to do.

I discovered Twitter in the August of 2007 via somewhere, created my account and tweeted my first tweet about procrastinating on a now-abandoned thesis. I lost interest in the technology — I knew no one really other than a handful of people on Twitter and since at the time the interaction with those people was sporadic, I too was sporadic with my tweeting. My tweeting picked up in December/January of ’08 and from June onwards, I became a tweeting fiend.

I’m not sure what changed — perhaps finding out I could tweet from my cellphone via SMS was probably a huge factor, tweeting non-sequitor stuff I was thinking about while grocery shopping or what have you seemed like the bestest thing since sliced bread. Or that my own readership was growing as well as those who were following me. Discovering that not only people but robots, news services, and whole corporate entities were on or getting on Twitter also helped further along the obsession.

But what really hooked me was the immediacy of Twitter — there is no thought process or need for editing (other than “Can this fit in under 140 characters or less?”). Getting out a thought, no matter how minute or ridiculous or profound fanned the flames. According to TweetStats, I averaged 20 tweets per day for January 2009. My overall average is 10 tweets per day, which via another statistical tool (of which I can not find now, obvs.), was higher than the average tweeter who does something like 5-7 tweets per day. Some popular tweeters get along on much less.

But it isn’t about the time of writing the tweets that becomes a problem, really, it’s the auxiliary work that becomes the issue. I use auxiliary as a term for things such as reading my public tweet line (which can take time especially when reading pages upon pages after period of non-reading. Like reading what was going on in the Twitterverse while I was in bed.), finding new tweeters, researching said tweeters (yeah, like you don’t Google everyone you digitally meet), reading those tweeters back log and making decisions on whether to follow them or not. In short, tweeting is not just about the immediacy of getting out your special snowflake thought but it is also about researching and developing relationships with those in your network, which of course takes a lot of time.

So much so that everything else I am working on (such as working in a library, homework, studying, personal projects) went to the way side and I hadn’t realized to the extent of how bad this addiction of mine was getting until it dawned on me that the first thing I do when I’m at work everyday is log into Twitter — before I do anything else. My own writing for my various blogs, journals and personal use also took a huge nose dive – libschooled. alone hasn’t been properly updated in ages. Couple this with I was beginning to write professional emails in Twit-speak, the problem had to be curtailed and soon.

Several Twitterpeeps were discussing what they were giving up for Lent and while I no longer practice Catholicism, I do like a challenge. Could I go 40 days without participating in the Twitterverse? No tweets, no adding friends, no reading the public tweet lines? If I could give up smoking, which was on the one crutch that I have been trying for years to give up, surely Twitter could be no worse.

So, I resolved for the next 40 days (starting today, Ash Wednesday, of course) of no personal tweeting and no reading of public time lines. Twhirl has not been removed from my computers but it has been removed from my desktop. I’m even debating on removing the Twitter SMS number from my phone. In my little world, Twitter will not exist, at least for 40 days. But of course there are exceptions, such as libschooled. has third party software that tweets when it is updated, so that is okay. And I also believe some other software stuff I have installed on various forms also tweets when that is updated, so that is also the exception. As long as I am not personally involved in the tweeting, then I have not broken this vow of Twitter-chasity.

What I’m going to be interested in is how much the Twitterverse will have changed in 40 days — how many people have stopped following me, how many people will begin to follow me. What new, cool and useful toys will make its appearance while I’m gone and how social networking within my own Twitter group will also change and also social networking as a whole in the Twitterverse.

You can get in touch with via the usual routes and I’m always on gTalk. See you in 40 days. More or less.

Everytime I post on lib schooled., my blog automagically updates my Twitter and my LJ with the entry. This always makes me giddy for some reason, I have no idea why.

When my twitter updated with this entry, pandora_radio on Twitter caught it and broadcast it to the masses. I was talking with Lucia, the CM and she told me that a lot of people seemingly liked the station I created. I also found out that she, too, is a librarian!

I am currently getting ready to leave to drive to A2 for Erika’s wedding. 006 is going to be my date and we’re also going to be looking around A2 and Ypsilanti for apartments for me on Sunday. I’ll be home sometime Sunday afternoon, in which the new season of Mad Men begins. I’m so terribly excited about the new season, you have NO idea.

Consequently, you can follow me on Twitter as we dance and drink the night away.

I’ve been writing online since the mid ’90s. Sometime in 2001, when LiveJournal was still accessible only by invite codes, I snagged a code from someone (unintentionally stealing it from the person it was meant for — not my fault that the originator posted it PUBLICLY!) and started using LiveJournal. For a long time, up until 2004 or 2005, I would cross reference entries between my own domain over to LiveJournal. The writing on my own domain slowly petered out and I started using LiveJournal for all of my “blogging” needs.

But I’m a voracious blogger, as it were, known for indepth analysis of the human condition (that sounded totally Pretentious Fucktwattedness, henceforth known as PFT, but I’m okay with that) and short non-sequitors that were mostly one or two lines of text. Stream of consciousness thinking, as it were, are my calling cards. I could start out a post about the joys of doing laundry only to end up discussing the rituals 006 and I used to share. There was never any “thought” process to my writing, it is what it is.

I’ve owned my own domain since the mid-’90s when one could buy them ONLY from Network Solutions (then Internic) and pay exorbitant amount of cold hard cash for the said privileged. I knew friends who ran their own servers, never paid for my own web hosting up until recently and for the most part, maintained (in the blogosphere) at least some sense of anonymity.

For the last couple of years, I’ve felt disjointed on how to combine my “internets” life with my public and personal ones. I’ve had exes who attempted to sue me for libel and slander, ex-employers who found my website and kept tabs on me after I left the company (even after I’ve left on my own accord and I was not dooced) and a local (state) family farm who claimed that my using their family name in the title of a piece was ruining their business. I’m everywhere and nowhere and the projects that I started, always seem to fall to pieces while modgirl.net languishes in disarray from terrible lack of upkeep. So thus began the great “re-organizational plan.”

• Finish the archives for modgirl.net and never touch that website again.
• Start updating She’s Got Plans and cross-reference to LiveJournal.
• Keep small non-sequitor stuff to Twitter.
• I’ve been asked about the Podcasting plugin that is showcasing on the bottom of this page, here is the scoop: I have over 700 CDs and close to 70 gigs of music, most of which I’ll probably never listen to. I thought it would be great to create a podcast, called AutoMusicBiographically. Each episode, starting with the beginning of the alphabet, I’ll showcase a particular band and discuss how they are relevant to me and to music in general while showcasing a few of their hits. I’m pretty excited about this new project, just need to get other stuff done before I get going on that one. I do, however, have a friend who does audio production work so this should
  far easier to get accomplished.

And so, what can you expect on She’s Got Plans?

• Music, book, television, and general pop culture reviews.
• Library school (and grad school) bru-haha.
• General commentary on the absurdity of the human populace.
• Project updates, including but not limited to: Knitting, cooking (because I’m relatively new to this whole “cooking” thing), writing (I’m working on flash fiction pieces to be compiled for an anthology), exercise and diet shit (gluten intolerance, like everyone else on the planet). The usual project and entertainment crap.
• Team Sassy updates. Steph and I are walking 50 miles in October to help combat MS. Cross-referencing both websites with updates.
• AutoMusicBiographically. I’m so excited for this project to begin!
• Photos. There will be lots of photos.
• And whatever else I can think of.

I’ll be tweaking the front end for a bit while I discover new plugins and widgets and of course, start driving users to the website, etc.

That’s it for me, for now. I need to get to bed.
Good night internets, sleep well and don’t hog the bed.