I hate the US Census. I love Don Cheadle.

Today... sucked.  A lot.  I have slacked off for a number of weeks on my research for my Louisiana French and Bilingualism class, and the chickens are coming to roost.  Today, I went to the basement of the Middleton Library, where they keep the government documents.  Today, I looked at a microfilm of the 1810 census of Lafourche Parish.  Today, I peered at poorly transferred handwritten documents on negative microfilm.  Today, I looked over my glasses at the scratchy plastic projection screen of the microfilm reader/printer trying against all odds to figure out what the hell that jackass census taker wrote on that line.  Today, I set my computer in my lap and entered my interpretation of the chicken scratch into a spreadsheet so I'd never have to look at that shit again.  My eyes hurt, my back hurt, I began to despair.  And then I got to the end of the record for the parish.  Joy!  Happiness!  And lingering pain because I still have the 1820, 1830, 1840, 1850, and 1860 censuses to do.  That's alright, I'll be looking at "annotated" censuses... I can only hope this means typed.  Oh God, let this mean typed.  Please Jesus.

In other news, congratulations to Jamie Foxx on his Oscar win for his portrayal of Ray Charles.  It was amazing work by an actor who is obviously very talented, and he deserved it.  That having been said, in my heart the winners of the award for Best Actor and Best Picture are, respectively, Don Cheadle and Hotel Rwanda.  I ran into Carla at the coffeeshop on Saturday, and we decided that after we'd each finished our work, we should go see a movie, settling on Hotel Rwanda.  That film was... astounding.  We often hear about the Rwandan civil war obliquely, in passing.  I now feel as if I I've been there, as if I understand.  And how do I feel? ... I feel sick.  I feel dirty.  I feel ashamed.  How could my nation, my society, my people not take action?  How can we accept things like this?  How can we have sat on our collective ass for so long in Rwanda?  In Sudan?  I tend to be ambivalent about the US Armed Forces acting as a global police force, having all sorts of ideological viewpoints fighting in my head... but sometimes you get pulled out of your shell of thought.  It's not good to make decisions based solely on emotion, but it's hugely important to be made to confront the emotional level.

I don't feel like I'm really doing justice here.  Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, the entire cast of Hotel Rwanda, director Terry George, and the entire crew of Hotel Rwanda have made a beautiful tale out of a tragic, heroic real-life event.  I laughed.  I cried.  I marveled at the uncrushable humanity of people placed in situations I cannot comprehend.  You owe it to yourself to see the film.  You owe it to yourself, to Paul Rusesabegina, to those who lived, and those who died.

Good night.

Decision making is bizarre

Throughout all my life, I have gone largely with my gut in making decisions.  That's not to say it trumps; if logic dictates a decision counter to my instinct, instinct has to go by the wayside.  But if the two (or however many) options are within spitting distance of each other, I'll tend to go with the one that 'feels' right.  This has in general served me well in the past; I went to Ohio State because it called to me, I chose an undergrad thesis because a random idea seized me (and luckily it turned out to be tenable), I applied to the slate of grad schools I did because I impulsively chose to base my selections on a certain reference work that felt 'good'.

The danger, however, is that I get lashed to the wheel of whim.  "I'll go to grad school in French," I say.  But then later the winds of caprice change, and I think "I'll open a restaurant," or"I'll major in creative writing somewhere else," or "I'll move to Spain," or "I'll join up with other people and start a traveling madrigal performance group," or "I'll learn guitar and become a musician -- maybe at a faire" [none of these are fictional].  I have enough latent spirituality left in me that I do, honestly, think that there is a certain amount of direction/inspiration/will/whatever guiding me, but I don't think it guarantees that my every thought is a divine revelation -- far from it!  The difficulty becomes, then, in determining what is a good hunch, and what is just grasping at straws.  When I see lyceum_arabica's grudgingly optimistic post about IU and then check out their Creative Writing program for shits and giggles, is that feeling I get a real, useful affirmation, or is it just my acquisitive brain flailing about?  Etc etc. 

Eye R teh Census sLaY3R </snark>

I've still got work to do on the Census thing, but I win at least a little bit.  Rather than transcribing endlessly from poor and incomplete sources, I am bending Ancestry.com to my will.  I'm twisting their census databases around my sticky, grabby, little fingers, extracting the data from their HTML returns, and outputting it into spreadsheets.  I cannot express how joyful it is not to sit in the South Reading Room of the Hill Memorial Library, with their draconian rules, craning my neck and back to do data-entry from sources that have to be treated with kid gloves despite having been published only twenty years ago, and probably touched by as many people since.  I cannot express how happy I am that if I have to look at the wretched microforms again, it will be only to decipher numerals, not to disentangle the henscratch of 150-200 years ago.

Only catch?  I have to be done with the Ancestry.com stuff before my 7-day trial runs out, otherwise they'll charge my card for a $99.95 annual subscription.  Shouldn't be a problem (and if I need another trial period or 2 I'll use the parents' info), but these sorts of things always fill me with trepidation.  Like... if I should forget, I'll be out $100 and all I'll have to show for it is the privilege of looking at scans of federal census population schedules 1790-somewhere in the mid 20th century.  Whoo!!!