Brain wrap, with dressing on the side

I could not for all I tried, get the song out of my head. "I just can't be happy today," by The Damned. Lovely, melodic, inapplicable. I am certainly anything but unhappy. I ordered it at the good ol' House of Records on Monday and it arrived Thursday. As I was walking up 13th to pick up the 2CD anthology "Smash it up," I thought about cataloging my new music. I thought about the little stack of CDs, both music and photo, the DVDs, the individual PEZ dispensers, and the collector's box set of Disney Princesses, all sitting near my computer. Patiently waiting to be described. To be cataloged. Questions arose. Without opening the Princesses' box, how would I see where each one was manufactured? The Chinese music did have English titles in addition to the vernacular, but would a simple note be enough? For me that is. Those questions could wait. First things first, else they not be first things. And could there even be more than one first thing? Upon returning to my work terminal, I greedily unwrapped the new CDs and proceeded to rip them onto my hard drive. Read from remote CDDB. I wouldn't explain if I could. First, "Smash It Up Anthology (Disc One)" and then "Smash It Up Anthology 1976-1987 (CD2)." What?!?! This just pisses me off. A bit. Why can't the metadata be consistent? Why?!? Tell me! Please. If I open The Damned folder, disc two indexes first. I tell myself that no one will ever know. But I know. And now so do you Dear Reader. Maybe there is some lesson in spiritual growth to be learned here. But I doubt it. Back to my budding backlog of things awaiting cataloging. The thought struck me that I might need a tloc for uncatalogued materials. Brief records holding places in the queue. Should I create a metadata schema to describe my other metadata schema? What would THAT look like? CDs, LPs, DVDs, photo discs, PEZ dispensers, books. What purpose would it serve? Who would it serve? It was clear to me that I needed to re-ground myself in the comfort of the black and the white. A first-time author headings list. Yes! "Davis, Angela Y. |q (Angela Yvonne), |d 1944-" Wait a minute. At least wait a second. I will be with you shortly. There is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that Angela Davis, THE Angela Davis, could be making an inaugural foray into the catalog. Something had to be amiss. Perhaps askew. Awry even. Obliquely so. Indeed, the heading had changed. It was "Davis, Angela Yvonne, |d 1944-" But why had it been changed? I exported the authority record and updated the existing headings. Blindly. Obediently. I should just accept it, should I not? But to me, nothing smacks of "establishment" quite like a subfield Q. And that Dear Reader, will never be acceptable to me.