Bunnies (Not of the Playboy Variety)

Side note: I always do this, I ALWAYS finish my coffee before Stat starts. So now I have nothing to do all through class but finish an internship grant and read Vogue, God damnit.

Despite recent Bwog comments and despite, I'm sure, some statistical data that confirms that Avery is the hottest (but, really, coldest) place on campus and despite everything this blog stands for, there is an, dare I say, unsexy element of the library that principally only the employees have to deal with: we call it "dust."

Reason number one Avery is a red zone: it is prone to rats (there, I said it), and reason number two is the obvious: these books are old. Very old. Even if they are new, they are obscure, so no one will look at them, so they will become old quite quickly. You can discern popular thesis and dissertation topics based on areas of dust accumulation: the Cassatts, the Velazquezes, the Picassos, the Stokstad shelf, and obviously, all of ND623 L33 (Da Vinci), are just never going to be that dusty. Everyone loves them, everyone is going to constantly keep them off the shelves and curl up with them in their little nooks with their hidden travel mugs and Chewy granola bars and just devour them. Some areas are not as cuddled: all of those crumbling "such and such housing data from Lawrence, KS in 1919" documents that have not moved in so long that they cannot move on their shelves; the entire NE section; Met museum catalogues from the early ages. And then, of course, the books on the shelves in the balconies that the step ladders cannot reach (and I am sure they are mere decoration), and the Eakins section. No one likes Eakins anymore. Anytime I'm reshelving the Cassatts I pass the Eakins, neglected, messy, upside down...I don't do anything about it, but I acknowledge that it looks bad.

The dust became an issue today when someone messed up my schedule and I had to shelve for three hours. I felt like the bulk of what I was shelving were various garden designs and books on Cool Hotels (I think that really was the Taschen title), and they had clearly just returned from a semester untouched in a professor's office. I'm already coming down with a cold and this was slightly torturous and choke-inducing. But here's the real problem: I had just showered. I had gone to Italian, gone to the gym, taken a shower, PUT ON NEW PERFUME, half-assed blown my hair dry, and put on a shirt that isn't my usual American Apparel tee with the coffee stain. In other words I MADE an effort to live up to Avery's expectations, and then Avery got me all dirty.

Was that the point? Is one supposed to get dirty, in any sense of the phrase, at Avery? It's an interesting juxtaposition, between those working up a dusty sweat shelving books and the dainty, disheveled-but-just-so, collared-shirt, leather boots, mountains of scarves set that only studies there.

No one terribly exciting today, but I flirted (said "Hi") to the new kid, Brunette Michael Cera (BMC). I think he is a sophomore and now that I am 22, I am very interested in becoming a cougar. Will have to check the master schedule to see when we work together next.

Next topic: optometry.