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March 20, 2005

An Evening of Library Science

We're visiting my parents this week, which meant a startlingly long conversation this evening on the subject of creating bibliographic records and authority records. I'm fairly certain most people would find this an unbelievably boring conversation, but it was interesting and stimulating, if only because my mother clearly enjoys it so much.

We've had a couple of days of sitting around the house doing nothing apart from chatting and preparing for a dinner party, and tomorrow my parents actually have to work so we're possibly going to actually leave the house and go visit some Upstate New York wineries. I hear the German-style whites are particularly strong around here, which makes sense when you consider the climate.

It's odd being back in Ithaca, which is much like it was when I last lived here, and yet very different, because I could easily walk around town and not see anybody I know. I know college towns are like that, with a population that disperses to the ends of the world regularly, but it's not how I think of Ithaca. Visits back to Northampton might have been similar, except that they've all been for reunions, so of course everybody I'm likely to know is in town then, too, also visiting their old haunts, so of course I'm constantly running into people I know.

There are all sorts of new stores, chains mostly, which have been filling the shopping areas and choking business out of the downtown. This is much more corporate and mass cultural than the area has ever been before. It was always amazing to me that there were two huge grocery stores with wide selections of international foods, but now there are numerous discount stores, chain specialty stores, and the like. I guess college students do spend lots of money, because I can't imagine the local citizenry supporting these places. The end result is that downtown is dead, and the old mall is not doing so great, either. Downtown has been dying slowly all my life, but the mall's fading didn't have to happen the way it did, if the management had been handled better and more of those stores down on Route 13 had been lured into filling the storefronts. With a series of failed strip malls as well, Ithaca has turned into a sort of giant retail graveyard of failed shopping areas. It does make you wonder what the city planners have been thinking.

But Ithaca has never, frankly, been about shopping to me. I like the scenery, as dismal as it is now at the end of the winter, the fresh smell of the waking earth, the crisp cold air. March is not Ithaca's most attractive month, but it is when you start to get the sense that winter is almost over, and we're about to have one of the four totally wonderful days that Ithaca gets each year. Living in California, where about a quarter of the days are totally perfect and they're mixed in with the too-hot or too-cold or too-windy days, I've lost that keen sense of anticipation of rare perfection. You get four perfect days in Ithaca, so you wait for them all winter or summer long. It's like a present to have one of them. Then maybe you get a second, and then it's six months until the mugginess subsides and you get a couple more, followed by endless months of cold, slushy, grey days.

Either you learn to love the slush or the heat, or you go crazy.

The huge difference between here and home is in network connectivity. I've gotten spoiled over the last several years by ubiquitous high-bandwidth connections. While it's true that in my studio I am essentially shut off from the rest of the world most of the time thanks to an utterly useless wireless network (it only works OUTSIDE), at home and at my apartment I have scads of bandwidth waiting around to be used as much as I like.

At my parents' house there's dialup. And scrounging for an open wireless network with maybe one or two bars of signal, obtained only by holding the laptop three feet above the floor and at a slight angle. This is not the standard of connectivity to which I have grown accustomed. People who don't live and die on the net don't tend to think of wireless routers and DSL as necessary expenses, as astonishing as that seems to me.

Posted by ayse on 03/20/05 at 11:14 PM