blogging in Dallas ------ Saturday 29 January

I'm in Dallas now, sitting on the bed in the guestroom at Randy and Leslie's house, blogging away on Randy's laptop that he so kindly set up in here for me. It's a much calmer Saturday morning than I had thought it would be. My friend Lauren and her friend Brian flew down from Tulsa earlier today, and they're tooling around the museum district right now. We had discussed meeting for lunch, but they ate a late breakfast, and I've got a final rehearsal at 2:00 this afternoon, so I won't see them till tonight. Andrew was going to come down from Oklahoma City, but he's feeling puny and may not be able to make it. So I'm free to spend my morning here, relaxing and learning about CSS from Randy. The craziness starts later. Around 2:00. Half the band has been sick (Andrew, who plays lead guitar, rehearsed last night with a fleecy hat pulled down over his ears and a scarf wrapped around his neck and over his chin, terrified he was going to catch someone's cold), and this is a big night for them all, so I'll be the sane one tonight. And I'll be performing! I'm very, very excited about that. Music is intended to be shared, and it's difficult to keep playing if no one's ever listening.

Randy just set up a corner of his webspace for me to use until I can get my own, so as soon as I get my domain name set up-- probably the inevitable www.sar5ah.net-- I can get started on my wiki. If you still don't know what wiki is, and you're curious about why I keep harping on it, check out Wikipedia.org for a glimpse at what hypertext can be. I'm going to develop a site that's basically a sar5ahpedia-- which will grow and grow and grow in all directions. The internet is a multi-dimensional web, not a linear construct, and the chronological confines of my blog were distressing me. As anyone acquainted with me well knows, I don't like being limited.

In keeping with all this craze over webpages and internet ideas, I've been seriously considering eventually getting a masters in library and information science. I've been doing some reading on careers for "foreign-language aficionados" (as one book calls us), and LIS career paths are highly recommended. It encompasses many of my interests too, since it would combine both the academic and the computer design aspects of my background. And I could choose to emphasize one or the other, without making a major life-altering epiphanic decision to cut loose and run in another direction. Built-in change seems to be a good idea for me. And really, one could say that LIS potentially encompasses all of my interests. Everything these days is connected somehow.

So that's been the thought lately, as I've been looking for library jobs (in addition to some other areas) and sporadically thinking about the future. The University of Texas at Austin has a wonderful LIS program that I've seriously looked at in the past, and my new and evolving Texas residency would still help out with that. In the meantime, I'm going to start applying at Starbucks locations as soon as I get back to Houston. I figure I could get into a lot of random conversations with people that way. And get a great discount on my beloved Sumatra coffee.