I'm one week away from coming face to face with my classmates down in Tucson. If I said I wasn't scared, I'd be lying. I'm PETRIFIED. I remember a time when having 500 people is my class was normal. There's 75 of us in all at this thing, and I'm scared. I don't make friends easily or well, but I'll have to at least make some single serving friends so I can do the group projects-- though I feel the need to point out that the odds are in favor of knowing the people in your group in a work-related situation as opposed to them being total strangers.

I seem to have overestimated my ability to care about the work load too. I have a bunch of reading, a term paper, and an interview that I have to do. The thing with the interview is that I am shy as all get out, so it's a bit of a challenge.

Can't see the forest for the trees...

So the first full week of Master's work is done. I'm about halfway through the syllabus with a week and half, two weeks to go. I feel pretty good about the odds of getting everything done, but I can't say that I enjoy it.

I like to have things challenge me. Even in my first semester at TMC, the America semester, I was challenged. I had read almost everything on the syllabus before, so that wasn't it. It was the works themselves, the professors, the environment. It made me rethink what I had and hadn't picked up before. My current reading material? Some of it is interesting, certainly, and some of it seems to be historically inaccurate. Some of the authors could benefit from a review of vocabulary and semantics-- I find myself too often thinking "I don't think that word means what you think it means." While I appreciate that the work I'm doing is far more technical and practically oriented, that's not to say that it should be inane.

Library Science is also the last place I expected to find ideology, mainly because of my own naiveté I will own, but there it is. There is more ideology in this course then I encountered in most of my courses at Thomas More. There is an overarching "Librarian power" message that somehow we should be open to everyone but to always know that we could, in fact, take over the world. There's truth to it, I suppose: if all the libraries and archives ceased to stock certain authors or certain books, they would likely disappear from the consciousness of the people. Let that terrifying thought sink in for a moment. There's an underlying advocacy of openness to certain viewpoints more then others: that because someone has suffered censorship in the past we must overcompensate, allowing them total freedom and punishing those who censored with... something like censorship. Again, I can't say this definitively because the whole thing is so poorly written as to send my brain into caterwamps. So, where do I go from here? I don't want to be the pompous ass in class that sits there and says "I once read in (insert famous or pretentious author here)..." At the same time, I can't just sit there while they say that the Catholic Church is a giant censorship organ that doesn't like education except for the secularized Dominicans and Franciscans. For starters, no, and for second secular? Really? And they left out the Jesuits. Say what you will about present day Jesuits, when the order was founded Ignatius was very much concerned with the education of his monks, and not just in the works of the Church Fathers.

It's all rather confusing. And everything is on e-reserves, and say what you will about the wonders of technology, sometimes I'd like to read it in an actual book.

So, while I don't consider myself the biggest Wheadonite on the planet, I loved Serenity, really liked Mal and Firefly, and adore Buffy Seasons 2 and 3. So I'd say I'm a fan. Which is why I was intrigued when, way back during the writers' strike, I heard rumblings and grumblings that Joss got bored and penned a mini-epic-web-comedy-musical with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. I mention it only because today is the launch of Act One. All three parts will be streaming by the 19th, but they will disappear like a vampire in sunlight come the 20th. For the interested, the trailer is:

The streaming site (which is down at the moment, but should work internationally) is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a singing Neil Patrick Harris. What more do you want?

Another day, another dollar. Today is the first day of my independent study period. For the next year and a half, I will be attending the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science to achieve a Master's degree. Sounds all manner of fun don't it? And for those of you scratching your head saying "School to be a librarian? Huh?" Yes, that's what it is, but it's so much more!

For starts, I have a good bit of reading and thinking and learning to do. My undergraduate work is both an asset and a handicap. I'm very familiar with the Thomas More Library, but that has little to no analogue in the outside world. I'm also familiar with relying on the written and published word, on readings that are tangibly held, on BOOKS! Funnily enough, in this program, I have very few books. It's enough to make my bibliophilic heart weep. So, in honor of this very scary foray into a more typical college experience, I re-christen this blog "Once more, With Feeling!" Yes, it's a reference to Buffy, but it's also a fairly good summation of what's running through my head at the moment. School again, but I have to put more feeling into it, because goodness knows they won't. I got spoiled by my little liberal arts experience. I knew my professors very well, and they cared what I did and how I did and when I sprained my ankle. Now? I've got to put all that care and concern in myself. No one will do it for me. How can you care about students that you see for one class and never again? If you see them at all, since most classes are online.

In other news, Starbucks has a new drink launch tomorrow. Ya'll should check it out. I don't think I'm allowed to say WHAT it is, but it should make the back side of the bar just soooooo much more fun. Hopefully it's good.

What with the Fourth fast approaching, I give you... The Muppets. (sorry, won't imbed)

As for me, I will be working the Fourth. What's more American then selling people things that are slightly over priced, full of sugar and sort of like milkshakes in the middle of the summer?