Keyword search: Libary

I was plowing through a list of first-time author headings in the library catalog, listening to a cover of "Moon over Marin" by the French post-punk band Les Thugs, when an entry caught my eye. "Well known woman of intrigue." That certainly beats the hell out of the listless "Anonymous." I was again struck, as the guitar chords crashed between my ears, that I love my job. You see dear reader, I like to organize stuff. Books, records, recipes, pictures, baseball cards, bookmarks, even, dare I mention it, metadata. I have always done this. It is nice to be a cataloger where I get paid to vent this compulsion of mine. It allows me to let go, just a bit, of organizing everything in my apartment. And cataloging it. Not entirely mind you. I do have lists of DVDs, CDs and LPs, sortable by title, artist or year of release. (Live albums are entered under the year of the performance.) My record albums are, as of this writing, organized chronologically. That will probably change the next time I watch High Fidelity. Back to my job. I get to organize information so that it can be useful to people. I create metadata describing archival baseball photographs and documents from university presidential papers. I catalog books, in many languages, including Russian, which was what I studied in college. I catalog maps, which is just cool. I verify the forms of authors' names so all works by a given individual index correctly. I get to go looking for problems, then fix them so it appears that they never happened. Do you have any inkling dear reader, of how many typographical errors appear in library catalogs? I really do love my job. This morning I passed by a couple of co-workers who were discussing paydays. I offered that if you really love your job, everyday is payday. Or maybe it's just the Prozac kicking in. I was politely asked to leave. Now, I'm going to publish this post, print it and put it in the binder with all the other Pedestrian Subjunctives I've posted. I'll catalog that later. Catalog it with impunity. Maybe. I don't have to.