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Exotic uses for the public library, from blizzard shelter to meal preparation and real estate research
Oh, the lengths to which someone might go to avoid a bad borrowing history!
Two DVDs needed to be returned today, at least according to the checkout receipt I was given on sunny Friday last week. Little could they have known how slowly the cleanup of the weekend blizzard would proceed, or they might have given us all four days to keep our movies. After the damage of the blizzard became clear, the university provost quoted these words of caution from County Executive Jack Johnson in his explanation of a third straight day of closed facilities.
"People are not to be on the road. The police will be turning them back. It's requiring too much of our public safety services. We want to focus on people who need to go to the hospital. People are not to leave home. No matter where they are, we are going to have them go back. The conditions are too awful."
However, having no similar assurance from the library that any materials due today would be given an extra day's grace period while cleanup crews worked to make the roads passable, I opted to make the dangerous journey to one of the area libraries. Not just any library, however, but the only one within walking distance which was reported to have on its shelves a copy of The Princess Bride, as told by William Goldman. This branch happened to be in Greenbelt, so I cheerfully set out from campus just after 9 a.m., by which point cabin fever was pressing me to go outside into the bright sun. I rushed downstairs from the third floor of the math building, hoping to catch the C2 bus when it was scheduled to pull up on the opposite side of the street at 9:11. I left in such a hurry that I neither printed out the complete bus schedule nor bothered to check the library's hours.
I found another rider waiting at the same bus stop, so I guessed that the bus was merely running a bit late. When several minutes had passed and no C2 bus was to be seen, I asked the other rider whether he had seen the C2 bus pass by before I got there. An affirmative answer, although disappointing, nevertheless motivated me to try walking the long way through the snow and slush.
Most of the trip didn't entail submerging anything above my ankles in a mountain of snow. Unfortunately, the part that did (Greenbelt Road above the train tracks) left my shoes and socks entirely soaked, an utterly uncomfortable experience for the rest of the walk.
I followed Greenbelt Road all the way to Lakecrest Drive, which connected me to Crescent Road and Roosevelt Center, home of the public library. As it turned out, the library would not open until 13:00. I now had almost two hours to kill, unless I wanted to call the trip a failure and ride the next bus home.
Luckily, the New Deal Cafe was open, so I set up camp on one of the couches there, with my shoes and socks drying in the breeze of a fan and the contents of my backpack (including two books) laid out on the table for convenient access. This time the several dozen pages of Gravity's Rainbow did not have the effect of putting me to sleep, despite an early rising today and an exhausting hike this morning.
At 12:55 I began packing up my belongings and putting on my socks (mostly dry) and shoes (still very damp). I crossed the parking lot and entered the library, whose entrance conveniently featured a rack of pocket timetables for the Metro buses servicing the area. After dropping the two DVDs into the slot at the checkout desk, I grabbed the timetable for the C2 bus and noticed a 13:11 departure leaving from Roosevelt Center. With so little time before the bus was scheduled to arrive, I made a cursory sweep of the shelves to see if The Princess Bride could be easily located. This search yielded nothing right away, but I would gladly have forgone the opportunity to consolidate two library errands if I could shed my wet footwear that much sooner.
Right across the street was a bus stop designated for the C2 route, so I waited there rather than risk getting passed by if I tried to reach the real starting point (Crescent Road and Gardenway) one block over. A C2 bus did pass shortly, but on the other side of the street! I didn't even bother trying to catch up with it, thinking that the route would take it back in the other direction after turning around at the official starting point. No such luck --- the bus moved on without doubling back. In fact, that was the last C2 bus I would see on Crescent Road for the remainder of my stay. I tried waiting the quoted twenty-seven minutes until the next scheduled bus, but 13:38 came and went with no sign of another C2.
By this point my socks were starting to absorb more moisture from my shoes, so I needed to get moving if I didn't want my feet to freeze. I ducked back into the library, improvised a drying station for my footwear next to some vents in the corner, and then walked the carpeted floors to dry off my feet and search more leisurely for The Princess Bride. A review of the online card catalog entry led me to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section, as opposed to the Young Adult section where I had originally been looking. There the book appeared (three copies, in fact!) without much trouble. I brought one copy back to my improvised drying station and started reading, after laying out the bus timetable to see which departure I should plan to catch. The 14:51 departure seemed a good compromise between longer drying time for my shoes in the library and longer recuperation time in the comfort of my home.
At 14:44 I put on my shoes (much dryer now, thanks to the warm air passing through the vents of the library, in contrast to the cool air circulated by the fan in the New Deal Cafe), brought the book to the checkout counter, and exited with satisfaction from a successful consolidation of two library errands.
I waited only until 14:55 before giving up hope of seeing a punctual C2 bus driver. Then, with mostly dry shoes on my feet, I began a slow walk back to campus, opting for a roundabout route to avoid the deep snows on the bridge over the railroad tracks. Even still, excess moisture from my shoes had made its way into my socks by the time I arrived at the math building.
I approached the first entrance I could find, which happened to be locked as a result of the university's third straight day being closed. Luckily, math instructor and long-time co-op patron Justin Wyss-Gallifent happened to be hanging out at that very entrance, and he cheerfully opened the door for me. I thanked him and rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, where I retrieved a dry pair of sandals to replace the snow-soaked hiking shoes and Terp-branded socks. Thus equipped with dry footwear, I made my way uphill to enjoy a well-earned dinner and a third straight movie night.
It was 17:00 by the time I took my first bite of the evening, exactly twelve hours since the last bite of my previous meal. In all that time, the sun had risen and set, thus demonstrating that the winter solstice is the easiest time to keep a Ramadan fast, even if you do it not by choice but due to unfortunate travel circumstances that distract you from food and drink.
Hayek and Gatto on the Rule of Law
... [T]he term laissez-faire is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based. Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery, and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws : these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favour or harm particular people.
The Rule of Law was consciously evolved only during the liberal age and is one of its greatest achievements, not only as a safeguard but as the legal embodiment of freedom. As Immanuel Kant put it (and Voltaire expressed it before him in very much the same terms), "Man is free if he needs obey no person but solely the laws". As a vague ideal it has, however, existed at least since Roman times, and during the last few centuries it has never been as seriously threatened as it is to-day.
-- Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
St. Paul's New Testament letters to the congregations (which later coalesced into the Christian movement) have something to say to us all about what needs changed in the way we school. For Paul, excessive regulation ruins the quality of life and corrupts leadership by requiring bureaucrats to enforce the rules, and more officials to regulate those officials. Ad infinitum.
In many different words, Paul repeats over and over that the new congregations won't find salvation by following the old rules. Eliminate the religious background for a minute and what Paul faced was the school problem of our own day -- the conflict between interest groups whose income and status derives from keeping things as they are, and an insurgency whose needs have been neglected by the entrenched management and which demands profound change.
Translated into contemporary idiom, Paul says make up the rules as you go along to fit individual cases. As long as the root principle of love is honored, then things will work out.
The political establishment of Paul's day was the ancient Israel of the Mishnah, a stupendous collection of rules for even the most obscure circumstances like the height from which someone should pour water on a manure pile. Like modern bureaucratic schooling, there can be little adaptation to particular cases, the system is wedded to certainty. Find a thief? Cut off his nose! Find an adultress? Stone her to death! When in doubt, don't think -- follow the rules.
The new insurgency travelled a different road. If someone steals your coat, give him your cloak, too; if someone strikes your left cheek, turn the right one to be struck, too. Unto this last: pay workmen who labor half a day the same wage as those who labor a whole day.
Rule book people find these pronouncements maddening, incomprehensible. Our forced schooling has brought back the rule-choked social environment of Paul's day, and our surveillance society has provided the technology to punish deviants which Paul's lacked. Through the three-headed rule monster of school and college, corporations, and government, American society has been radically de-individualized, one in every five American jobs is some form of oversight over the behavior of others.
It is six times more likely you will end up in jail in the United States than it is in Communist China (which now possesses the ability to ruin America economically by cashing in its loan to us). Six times more likely to rot in jail here than in China. All by itself that fact should cause you to re-evaluate the road that leadership -- of all our political parties and corporations -- has committed us to walking. It is the schools which keep us on that road.
-- John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
The authors of the two quotes above could hardly be coming from more disparate backgrounds. Friedrich Hayek experienced the emergence of socialist and collectivist sympathies in his native Germany before emigrating to the UK, where in later decades he observed a similar shift in attitudes among the people of his newly adopted country. Hayek penned The Road to Serfdom as a warning to the English-speaking world (i.e., the UK and the USA) of what might happen if we deemphasized individual freedom in favor of collectivist solutions to our economic and social troubles. John Taylor Gatto, raised in a close-knit rural Pennsylvania community that strongly valued independent learning and individual freedom, enjoyed a rich career as an educator in New York City schools. There Gatto observed first-hand the straitjacket-like forces that robbed his students of their individuality and ambition, churning out essentially identical copies of the ideal industrial worker (or post-industrial consumer), who would unquestioningly obey the demands of her job (or follow the latest trends in the marketplace). As a result of his observations, Gatto retired from teaching and started writing about the ulterior agenda behind public schools and their assembly-line methods.
There are several errands I've been putting off due to business closures and university closures over the long holiday weekend. Now that the work week has started, I have to set priorities and decide which errands shouldn't be put off any longer.
I opted to enjoy a long bike ride to Upper Marlboro, in search of the county administration building and the land records housed there. At first I was undecided about whether to bike the whole way or instead to leave my bike at New Carrollton and take the bus from there to Upper Marlboro. Although the bus fare would have amounted to only $2, I ended up biking the entire trip, which I estimated to be at least 30 miles back and forth.
My first stop in Upper Marlboro was the county administration building, where I found the land records office with little difficulty. I was helped by a kind lady who informed me that the most extensive database of street addresses was already accessible on the world wide web. If 3803 University Blvd didn't show up in my previous search, it wouldn't show up in hers, either. She then directed me to the courthouse across the street, where the department of assessment and taxation held physical maps of property, parcels and plats for the whole county.
I couldn't get past the security checkpoint at first, because I was still carrying a media player on my belt. I walked over to the public library and stashed the media player in the pages of a book in the stacks, and then I returned to the courthouse and passed through the security checkpoint.
The layout of the courthouse, with its multiple wings and connecting hallways, threw me for a loop as I tried to find the department of assessment and taxation. I finally found the right stairwell, and soon I was in the office leafing through the pages of a gigantic map. I found the site of the squat near the border between maps 25 and 33. The nearest numbered parcel, number 52 on map 25, ended up referring to the houses at 8920/8930 Azalea Lane, which belonged to the Bladen couple from 1980 until around 2001. Apparently the Bladens are now deceased, and the property is administered by a trust fund in their name. However, the area of the parcel is too small to encompass the deeper section of the woods where the squat lies. I don't remember that section of the map having very many details at all. It could very well be university property, saved from demolition thus far only because there were no plans to develop the woods yet.
On my return trip from Upper Marlboro I decided to follow the signs indicating a bike route to College Park. These signs directed me to Route 193 where it went by the name Watkins Park Drive. Soon I was in familiar territory, approaching Greenbelt from the southeast, and I decided to take a break on the swings next to the Spellman overpass. I also read a few more pages from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Then I biked to the Greenbelt BB&T branch and deposited the early birthday check that I've been carrying around for almost a week.
After the men's soccer game against Duke last night, I made the unfortunate decision of trying to fall asleep in the math lounge, where my lack of a sleeping bag really made itself felt as the temperatures dropped at 2 a.m. As a result, I found myself jolted awake by the necessity of generating body heat by moving around. I took the opportunity of such an early start to prepare some vegetable broth for the ginger pear soup that I intended to make after today's library shift. Functioning on only four hours of sleep, I found it necessary to keep shifting my position -- from chair to couch and even to the computer lab -- once the vegetable broth no longer needed my constant attention.
By 4:30 I figured the vegetables had leached enough of their flavor and nutrients into the stock, so I turned off the heat and headed back to the house for a supplementary nap. Along the way I stopped at the CSS building for a quick breakfast.
Waking up from my supplementary nap as the sunlight brightened my room, I got dressed for work and then headed back to campus. First I transferred the vegetable stock into airtight containers and cleaned up the cooking equipment in the math lounge. Then I walked to the CSS building to consolidate all the ingredients I would need for this afternoon's cooking project.
Despite having all my ingredients gathered in one building, when I packed my bags for the walk to the library I totally forgot to grab the container of minced garlic and ginger that I had chopped up yesterday morning. I arrived at the library just after 9:30, which left no time for a return trip to fetch the forgotten container. I determined that it might be feasible to start my cooking project at 15:00 instead of 14:00 and still have the kitchen cleaned up by the time the library closed at 17:00. I would just need to summon up enough energy to run to campus immediately after the end of my shift and catch the UTC bus back to the library, with the missing ingredients in hand.
Putting this plan into action, I had the opportunity to enjoy a 20-minute run in the middle of a beautiful sunny day before starting my cooking project. The base of the soup, made from ginger, pears and squash, turned out just as flavorful as I remembered from last fall. Unfortunately the split peas were still a little firm (undercooked) when it was time for me to start cleaning up. I guess I'll just have to settle for a little indigestion over the next couple days of eating leftovers. That and recovering from a disrupted sleep schedule.