October 25, 2014

I didn't sleep very well last night. No fault to the hotel. I thought I was tired when I finally went to bed but I couldn't turn my mind off. Always unwelcome. I eventually managed to fall asleep but continued to wake up throughout the night. That made today feel just a little bit longer.

Pretty much all of today was filled with group presentations. They were all really good. I had read all of the studies before and briefly thought of solutions to them when I was trying to decide which case I wanted to sign up for. In the end that didn't really matter because there was only one case left by the time I signed up. But the point I'm getting at is that the solutions the groups came up with were really well researched and thought out. As should be expected. Several groups mentioned the various forms of research they did and it made mine, contacting three librarians, seem inferior in comparison.

I'm not sure how many groups we made it through this morning, maybe four, and then we stopped for lunch. I did go with the change and went to Jimmy Johns instead of Subway. I drove my it this morning just to get a better idea of how far away it was, and it wasn't too bad, but I decided to drive anyway because I wanted to get back and finalize some presentation stuff with my partner. The staff at Jimmy Johns was friendly, much like the local one, so that must be a part of the franchise training. I found this out after I reached the restaurant. Despite knowing where it was, I ended up having to take a very roundabout route to get there. After turning on the road that should have gone right by the corner that the restaurant was on, I discovered that I couldn't cross the main road, I had to turn right, even though the restaurant was just on the other side of the street. I think maybe on the next block I couldn't turn left because it was blocked off but I could be making that up. I ended up having to go around a block or two but I finally made it. Had I been tracked by GPS my driving route would have looked ridiculous.

Before going to lunch I ended up modifying one of our slides, and I may have further tweaked it when I got back. I can't remember. Either way, when I got back I divided up the presentation. This whole project has really just been me doing stuff. I did the research and made the decision on which solution we were going to go with. I divided up the work, having my partner do the PowerPoint because it was going to be easier and assigning myself the newspaper because I knew it would be more difficult and I didn't trust my partner with it. I then asked her for just two simple article while I wrote the two main ones that formed the bulk of out paper, as well as a small third article and all the little things to fill the paper out. I edited my partner's articles so they made sense. I edited the PowerPoint presentation and added one slide plus made a significant addition to another one. And finally I decided how the presentation was going to go. I told her to cover the first half of the PowerPoint because that was all pretty basic stuff, then I took the second half of the PowerPoint, introduced the newspaper and told about the audience for the paper, passed it back to her so she could read the little section I added about the Library Bill of Rights, then I covered my two articles, let her talk about her two articles, and I ended by covering the community events and the third article I wrote.

I definitely did more of the speaking and it kind of felt like I was up there alone. When I give presentations I kind of check out and go on autopilot, and at one point I completely lost my train of thought and blanked for a second, which is a first me. I don't think I'll do that again because the awkwardness, at least in my head, was palpable. In the beginning I tried to say 'we' a lot, acting like it was a group effort, but towards the end I think maybe I switched to 'I', but again I can't be entirely certain because I am not really cognizant of what I'm saying while I present. I do know that I got a few chuckles throughout. The first while explaining the small learning curve of how to use physical newspaper. Then again when I was introducing our newspaper said I imagined out town to be like a more conservative version of Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls because with only three newspaper subscriptions in the library it had to be a pretty small community. I also got some laughs for my reference to The Golden Girls and my use of famous author names throughout the newspaper.

So all the little laughs were nice but at the end of the presentation there were crickets when I asked for questions. I can't tell if that was because our case was fairly simple in terms of ethics or if because the presentation was so awful that they were afraid to ask questions and contribute to the train wreck. There were one or two other groups that also didn't have much audience response after their presentations so at least we weren't alone. It could have also been that we were the last group and our classmates just wanted to keep things moving. I don't know. Eventually a couple people asked questions and the professor asked a couple, none of them were like the hard ones some of the other groups got, which was good. I ended up answering all of them, not even sure what I said, but I was fairly certain my partner wasn't going to jump in so I once again took the lead.

There were also a couple cases where the professor asked really tough questions to the groups. And one case where he went on his soapbox for a bit and went off on how people in poverty have a way of turning things so they aren't taking handouts but they are taking advantage of those offerings. I think I explained that poorly. In the case a large media corporation wanted to donate hardware and equipment to a library media center but the library had to put the name of the corporation on it and then there were some other stipulations. The professor said that rather than seeing it as the corporation taking advantage of the poor people, you could say that the poor people were going to pimp the corporation. They would take advantage of the things offered by the corporation but they weren't going to become a slave to the corporation. They weren't going to let it alter their view of the world. It was interesting.

All-in-all, I have no freaking clue how it went. From my point of view, it seemed fairly obvious that our presentation was not on the same level as the other groups. I would say the design of my paper was easily in the top three, maybe even top two, but content-wise it probably doesn't even come close. It didn't help that there were only two people in our group and most of the other groups had three, but even the one or two other groups of two did a much better job. I'm not sure if it came across as one person trying to carry the project or two people slacking off. I hope my effort wasn't canceled out by my partner. I also kind of wish I was in one of the other groups because how they analyzed their cases made the whole project seem a lot more interesting. I kind of got screwed but I hope that doesn't reflect in my grade. I'm not sure if we are going to get an overall group grade or if each person is going to get an individual grade.

After our presentations we watched a video about a library sit-in that happened in the South in 1939. The town had recently built a new library using taxpayer money, including black taxpayers, but it was a white-only library. Or at least it was implied to be a white-only library, even though there weren't any signs up, because black people couldn't get a library card. When they tried the library would come up with a reason why they couldn't get one. The actually interviewed the library in the eighties when this documentary was made, and her attitudes hadn't changed. She said the library wasn't very big and could only hold so many people, so that is why the black people couldn't use it. She said there were nice libraries in nearby Washington DC, so if they wanted to use a library the black people could go there. Once the town finally agreed to helped build a black-only library (only offering half of the money they offered for the white-only library) the white library said it looked like a pretty nice library, even though inside the collection was pretty poor, and the collection is kind of the most important part of the library.

Anyway, the sit-in was organized by a black lawyer who got together a group of eleven young black men, although only five showed up on the actual day. They went into the library, dressed in nice clothes, acting respectful, and took turns asking for a library card, when they were refused, the walked over to the shelves, grabbed a book, and went to sit at a table and read it. This not only confused the white people in the library, it lead to the librarian going to get the police. When the police came and asked the boys to leave they asked why they had to leave. I can't remember if the cops got around to saying it was because they were black but in the end they were all charged with disorderly conduct (which was a popular charge back in the day). When the case went to court the cops were brought on the stand and asked several questions about the boys conduct in the library. The cops replied that the boys were following all the rules of the library and weren't being disorderly. There were then asked if the boys would have been kicked out had they been white, the answer was no, and if they were only kicked out because they were black, and the answer was yes. It is hard to believe how recent this sort of stuff actually is. And how much some of those prejudices still exist today.

After the video the professor gave his ethics presentation, which he came up with to go along with our group presentations. He picked a case where a librarian overheard a couple black kids in the library making fun of another kid for “talking white”. He then showed a video of a girl saying there is no such thing as “talking white”. Speaking clearly and fluently and enunciating and whatever else were just things you should do. Speaking well wasn't a white thing, it was a thing that anyone should strive toward. The professor than gave the recent example of Iggy Azalea getting a lot of flak for appropriated black culture and their ethnolect in order to sell records and become famous, namely in her recent song “Fancy”.

The professor said that not too many years ago he would have agreed with the first girl, saying that there was no such thing as “talking white”, there was just being able to speak well. He now believes that the ethnolect of black communities is an important part of black culture and not something that should be praised above being able to speak well but also not something that should be squashed out. He said that when he was young and growing up in the rougher parts of town, he would have been called a punk and gotten beat up if he didn't adopt the way his friends and neighbors spoke to one another. But he also had to learn how to speak well because when he got into the business world he wasn't going to be able to use the same manner of speaking that he utilized in his neighborhood.

It was a really interesting presentation. I'm undecided on the Iggy Azalea thing, however. You could take the stance that she is appropriating the language in order to sell records. The vast majority of pop music is entirely engineered to be catchy and pleasing to the ear. The lyrics don't even make sense half the time but people will sing along with it anyway (like Ariana Grande's song Break Free, yikes). So it is entirely possibly that Iggy Azalea isn't authentic and has been manufactured in such a way that will garner the most radio plays and downloads. On the other side of the coin, there is the possibility that Iggy Azalea grew up listening to artists that had a certain ethnolect and she is basing her style on wanting to be like them. Like kids who grow up listening to Van Halen or Red Hot Chili Peppers and base their guitar sound on Eddie Van Halen or their bass sound on Flea. Michael Buble sounds like an old standards singer but that doesn't mean he is trying to appropriate Frank Sinatra's culture. A big thing in music is finding something you're into and copying it until you eventually develop your own style. I don't think it is too far fetched that this is what is happening with Iggy Azalea. But it is equally possible that it is all purposeful and manufactured.

After class I stopped by Spangles to get fries and a orange juice slush before heading out of town. I got a medium orange juice slush this time because the last two times I got a small and that kind of gets swallowed up by my cupholders and I struggle to pick it up. The medium worked a lot better.

The drive back was uneventful. That is good. When I got back I couldn't pull in the garage because there were some boxes, or poor attempts at boxes, leaning up against the house, partially blocking the garage. I soon found out they were my desks. This was surprising because I wasn't expecting them for another six or seven days. I was expecting boxes, however, but these were basically just large sheets of cardboard taped at both ends. This really increases the efficiency of packing a truck because they were much slimmer than they would have been had they been packed securely in a box. Tomorrow or sometime I will need to unpack them to make sure they made it in good condition. I would have been a little worried about the packing method had they been particle board or something but they are solid wood, so hopefully that is more resistant to damage when packed in such a way.

After dragging those downstairs, I had a bit of dinner, talked to my mom about the weekend, and then went downstairs to read. I made it about halfway through the chapter. It is a chapter on cockfighting in Bali. At some future date I might include a passage or some excerpts because it is pretty funny, but right now it is almost two o'clock in the morning and I am really freaking tired.

Tomorrow I need to finish reading that chapter so I can write my discussion post for my research class, which is due tomorrow. I also need to write my short reflection about the case study presentations this weekend. Not focusing on our own presentation, thankfully, but the project as a whole. I also need to start writing my annotated bibliographies because those are due next Sunday. I also think the assignment we talked about this weekend involving the information cycle is due next Sunday, so I should probably look into that. This weekend is going to be filled with so much scholarly reading. I'm not looking forward to it. Well, I'm not looking forward to the writing associated with that reading. Oh, and I really need to start writing my reflective journal entries. I've got about a month to do that and that is going to be incredibly overwhelming. Only more so the longer I put it off.