05 January 2012

Adventure: Boston

Seeing as I've been totally remiss in posting in the last year, it is entirely possible that you have no idea that I ever left Provo. Well, I did. I graduated, got a job, and moved to DC all at the beginning of 2011 (end of 2010). That said, I have since left my job, and am about to move to Boston. I have nothing against all those millions of people world-wide who got degrees and got jobs and started being real grown-up people. In fact, I admire them for it.  Nevertheless, I'm not ready to be a real adult yet, so I'm going back to school.

I'm going to be attending Simmons College. It's a small private women's university near Fenway Park (where oddly enough my program is co-ed).  I've been accepted to their Graduate School of Library and Information Science and I will spend the next two years working on my masters. More specifically, I'll be working on my MLIS with a specialty in Archival Management. In other words, I get to play with books everyday, OLD BOOKS. I can't think of anything better than to spend my life with books. I do love books. In fact, I love books so much that I want to tell you about the awesome purchase that I made a couple days ago.

I had taken some old books (read: out of date GRE manual and 6th edition MLA style guide) to a used bookstore to see if they might buy them. They didn't. They don't want them for the same reason I don't. They're out of date. But as if to try and appease me the man behind the counter invited me to browse the store and maybe purchase something instead (good salesman.) So I wandered around for a bit. It is a giant warehouse of a bookstore and the organization leaves your head spinning. There certainly was organization, but it wasn't intuitive, but it worked for the store because it put random books in your path you would never even think to look for. So I was wandering down some aisle looking for a book on book mending when I stumbled into the section with books on polar exploration (like I said, the organization made no sense).

Now, those of you who know me well, know that I have a soft spot in my heart for Antarctic explorers and that if I could have dinner with a famous person I'd eat with Sir Ernest Shackleton. So I was pretty excited about these polar books. Of course, I'd read several of them, and own a few, but I thought that the time was right to expand my knowledge base and so I picked up a book on Captain Scott's Last Expedition. And it was only $4. Yeah! And then, I spied something even better: The Crossing of Antarctica by Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to summit Mount Everest). The part that made this book even cooler than it merely being about the first successful trans-antarctic crossing were the two little words penciled in next to the price "1st ed". Of course I checked the copyright page, it's true. It's a first edition, though admittedly a first American edition, which implies that it was published in England first--which would make sense. Still. And it has it's dust jacket!! Maybe one day it'll be worth more than the $8.50 that it was priced at, or the $4.25 that I paid for it. (I spent ages trying to decide which book to get, and after I had decided I had to have them both and didn't care that I really shouldn't get either, I was pleased to discover that the bookstore was having a 50% off sale and so I only ended up spending about $6 on both books. Which made me feel much better.) I love Antarctica, and one day I will go there.

I guess now that I have rambled on about how excited I am to read new books about Antarctic exploration I will leave you and go pack some boxes for my impending move. I'm leaving in about 36 hours and have packed exactly 2/3 of one suitcase.

Reading Room at Boston Public Library

1 comment:

Jen said...

what the, awesome!!! congratulations! that's great that you're going back to school!