Librarian Avengers

I’ve been feeling kind of down lately. Maybe it’s the almost daily rain. Maybe it’s the sun setting at 4:30 every day. Or maybe it’s my To Do list:

– Call insurance company about bill

– Deposit checks at bank

– Pull file cabinet out of closet & transfer files

– Mail receipts for health care savings account

Yes, these are all indicators of a successful life. Health care, income, organization. Still, looking at this list makes me want to travel back to a few years ago when I solved beaurocratic problems by ignoring them, and all my important papers were stored in a pile under a copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

So, yesterday was fun. Didn’t you have fun? I sure did.

Work was a funeral yesterday. Everyone trudged around with these 1000-mile stares. A couple of us went to the gym at lunch to work off some anger. Surprisingly, it worked. After the first ten minutes the endorphins kicked in, and my feelings of suicidal angst toned down to a mild incapacitating depression.

Today I’m feeling better. We had the first frost of the year, and the walk to work was enchanting. A pond filled with frost-tipped cattails is a good tool to restore calm. Like most blue state Americans today, I’m going to get on with my life, do my job, and live the way I want to live. That’ll piss ’em off.

I set all of my clocks back an hour last night, which was fine, but I forgot to reset the cat. He woke me up this morning at 6am by doing an extemporaneous tap dance on my head.

Tap!

Tap tap!

Tapetty tap tap POUNCE!

Purr, purr, shuffle-toe, purr purr POUNCE!

The other cat, by the way, the rescued-from-a-tree one, was given the boot after a short incident where he violently reconfigured my hand. Since the last potential owner fell through, we decided to put the thug outside, hopefully to return to whence he came.

I’m going to be an election inspector tomorrow. That means I’ll be one of the people who checks off your name in the book and gives you the little “I voted” sticker. There will be no spurious vote challenges on my watch. Grr, I say! Grr. F334 my l33t voter-facillitation skillz!

Actually, the whole thing is rather librarianish. I got this nice reference packet during my training, that explains the whole process. I get to inform voters of their rights, handle long lines, and if someone is in the wrong polling place, I research where they should go. It’s going to be a 16-hour shift, but it’ll keep me from frantically checking the internet all day, and I’ll actually be doing something to help make sure this all goes right.

What has happened to big numbers? Units aside, a sizable amount of something used to be counted in the hundreds. One thousand was Grand. Tens of thousands were quite enough.

The digital age has brought about a curious sort of obsolescence for formerly large numbers. Googol (the number) became popular around the 1980’s, with its goofy appeal and almost inconceivable size. As processing power increased, Megs shifted to Gigs, and on to Terras. Goofy googol became a simple search engine, billion is a household word, and nobody is very impressed by millions anymore. What’s next? What gigantic sum will satisfy our ever-hungry minds? Must we begin speaking in scientific notation? Will the cockroaches that inherit the earth discuss infinities of infinities over their radioactive lunches?

It’s too much to think about. I’m going back to preschool, where a hundred still means something.