Librarians and interstate commerce. Tweets from Seattle, day 2.

• 8:28 AM PT: ...and I? I'm the dork who can't sleep in while on vacation.
• 3:43 PM PT: At World Spice, buying about $150 of spice requests for friends. Shop clerks just called me a pack mule...
• 9:25 PM PT: I am a good fit for this grad school. Alternately excited and utterly terrified.
• 10:24 PM PT: Watching World Spice folks create a spice order for Salumi. 15 POUNDS of paprika!
• 10:26 PM PT: Attempting to drive the Fail Whale Jeep out of metro Seattle. Expect hilarity.
• 10:40 PM PT: At Carmelita, waiting for Michael Porter. Restaurant menu inspiring drool.
• 10:41 PM PT: @canspice You gonna have blogging withdrawal after OSCON?

This entry is partly to test a code fix and partly to grin at the results of this morning's photography.

BJ is a favorite and consistent photo subject of mine. I got an excellent headshot of her for a print piece I worked on a couple of months ago, but I had to cut her photo out of the finished piece due to space constraints. It made me sad, because her photo was excellent; it was just trumped by two better photos.

This morning, she saw my camera bag and said, "Think you'll need another shot of me sometime soon?" I told her that I might, but that it would be for a very different project.

This New York Times article has been making the rounds at work: 'A Hipper Crowd of Shushers'

"How did such a nerdy profession become cool — aside from the fact that a certain amount of nerdiness is now cool? Many young librarians and library professors said that the work is no longer just about books but also about organizing and connecting people with information, including music and movies."

In the guise of aliveness, I present two things:THING THE FIRST: should you wish to continue the harmless cycle of attention-whoreness that Valentine's Day perpetuates, consider doing Valentines online. If for no other reason that if I see my friends doing this online, I'll feel less guilty about not sitting down and actually designing/printing/mailing actual creative/funny/amusing/thoughtful/touching/smarmy Vallies on my own.

It's been a long week.Without lapsing into a sea of complaints, I'll say this: right now, I'm overwhelmed and mentally exhausted. I knew going in to this job that there would be periods in which I simply wouldn't be able to cope with the tide of work, no matter how intelligently I planned my time or how many hours of overtime I put in. I'm sliding—fast—into one of those periods. I guessed rightly that it would be coming at the end of January, but I misjudged its strength and ferocity.

I think I understand why people stay, even though the pay's never going to be great and sometimes dealing with the public can really get to you. One of the last real conversations I had with Stephanie, months ago, touched on a subject that comes up in the lives of Engineers' Wives, and it hinged on a very simple idea: for most people, a job is just employment. There aren't many real, consuming professions left these days.