heads. roll!

My Interlibrary Loan books have arrived, so I'm off to school to pick them up!

Hopefully they will still let me check them out, even though I haven't paid for classes for next semester - my library card doesn't expire for a couple of weeks. I may take one class while waiting to move, I don't know. Committing myself to being here through December is a risky proposition. I am signed up for the class but I will probably drop it.

Anyway, thank goodness for ILL saving me about $500 (the cost of these books on ABE).
Even if I have to photocopy the main one at the library, and not at Kinko's or whatever, that's still... pretty cheap.

Again, I didn't sleep well last night. But it was better than the 5-hour nights I was having last week. I think I got a whole 7 hours. (I like 9 or 10!)

library adventures

I just got home from the college library, which was about as much fun as it ever is. The college just changed ID styles, so I had to have my picture taken (so glad I bothered to dress nicely & put on a little makeup before I left; the picture came out looking decent). The old IDs didn't have pictures on them - they were just small blue cards, much abused for movie discounts.

I picked up my ILL books, and there's something weird about two out of the three. The one from 1827 was looking suspiciously... new. er. Turns out that the reason UF is one of the only libraries in the country willing to circulate this book is that, at some point in the last few decades, they had a library binding put on it. So the book looks like a tank from the outside, and then you look inside it and see this antiquated printing and foxed paper. Perfectly smooth fore-edge. It's really lovely to have.

Then there's the book from 1900 that contains a sort of précis of the 1827 book. I ordered this one on a whim from the UCF library, about an hour away, because it turned up in my book search and I thought, "Since it's available, I might as well look at it." It's a highly pretentious account of the lives of a handful of diarists and memoirists from about 1500-1800. At least, that's what I think, because (get this) - NOBODY HAS EVER READ THIS BOOK. Older books often came with the page-edges uncut (usually at top edge and foreedge, maybe bookfoole can confirm this). You would take a knife or letter-opener or similar instrument and slice along the folds to create an open page edge so that you could see all the pages. If not, you'd only be able to see every 4th page or so, and some of those only at odd angles, like peering inside a half-sealed envelope. I really don't know what I'm going to do about this one. I could send it back to the UCF library as-is, or I could do what should have been done a century ago and cut the page edges. Uncut pages are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The librarian said I looked "theatrical," which made me think I might be wearing a little too much makeup. (It's just chanel metal garnet lipstick - light red frost - and a little line of urban decay acid rain eyeshadow used as liner over my eye. my shirt has a glittery red cherry with glittery green leaves on it, so my face kinda matches my shirt. but not in a bad way.) it's probably a good thing i didn't run into her when i went to see pirates of the caribbean, huh?

oh - i also checked out two books i've been longing to read: the little friend by donna tartt and lullaby by chuck palahniuk.

& now i cannot decide whether to sit at home, or go out for coffee type stuff and sit at the coffee type stuff place all evening.