About book collecting
Mar. 10th, 2006 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynSo, I haven't done this in a while, so I figured I'm about due for another one of these lessons from my life-considering how bored I am, explaining that it's wise never to get into the habit of pursuing material wealth of any sort, even if it's just collecting books. Especially if said books have anything to do with interdimensional travelers-that's almost always trouble.
I collect books.
This is extremely fortunate, because people keep giving me books, or giving me books to buy. Sometimes they are forgetful old people with the communications ability of an African elephant on speed, who press on me lists of books I should buy along with a number that has five digits, a single period, and a $ in front of it. I call these people professors.
Sometimes they are also old ladies who stand on the side of the sidewalk at the university and pass out tracts with titles on them such as “Do You Want to Find Meaning In Your Life?” or “How to Find True Happiness”. These nice old ladies not only give me colorful pieces of paper (which make great confetti by the way) but they also sometimes tell me to read the Good Book, which I have never located in the Dewey Decimal System.
Recently I've been having other problems though. Women, usually in long flowing white dresses with long flowing tresses, elaborately braided, and long flowing sleeves and who would be, if any more flowing in general, washing me out to sea, tend to give me books. Usually the woman in question has a completely unpronounceable name, is strikingly beautiful, and seems moved to tears.
This happened today.
I was sitting there, fixing problems with Python code by putting the problem into Google, and then finding the most ridiculous solution possible, when I suddenly became aware that a woman in a long, flowing, white dress was standing beside me. That description was an understatement: her dress was flowing like the Mississippi. I was half tempted to look around the hem to see if I could find the bodies of any ladies-in-waiting who might have been swamped with the tide. She was also classically beautiful, pale, well-chisled face, slender arms, long brown hair. She was holding a thick, heavy book in one arm.
“Not this again,” I murmured, but she had already started on the speech.
“Pray noble sir, I know not your name, but I come to you in an hour of need. I have crossed many worlds to come here and now my time is brief. In my arms I hold the legendary tome, the Book of Ages which contains spells of great power. It must be held safe for its power is sought by the Dark Lord Firkansis. If he gains possession of this tome, it will spell great disaster for our people. You are my only hope. You must keep it safe from him.”
With that she thrust the book into my arms, which I grabbed reluctantly. Then she slowly faded away, but not before a few pleading tears ran down her cheeks.
“Damn it,” I said as she vanished into nothingness. I turned to Jim who has a desk in the same office I do. “Jim, do you remember who I'm supposed to protect this from?”
“I try not to pay attention when those sorts of things happen,” Jim remarked, bending all his attention on making a pair of T-shapes make a trio of rows in Tetris.
“Damn,” I murmured again, reaching into my desk where I knew I could find a package of post-it notes, unfortunately colored a fluorescent green. Picking up my pen I hastily wrote down:
Protect from Dark Lord Fir-whatsits
Then I carefully and reverently placed it on a shelf in my office next to my other nine copies of the Book of Ages.
“Are those all the same?” Raven asked, leaning against a doorpost. I gave her a suspicious look; despite what happened the first time she tried to steal one of those books she is continually possessed of the desire to crack open the next set. This is why I keep them in a stainless steel cabinet, of the kind usually employed to store explosives.
“Not really,” I told her, “the first one sometimes turns you into a chicken if you open it. Number seven turns you into a pig. The others tend to have similar effects. That's about all I know.”
“Oh,” Raven looked longingly in that direction as I closed the door and locked it, but she did not make a grab for them. I know her mother's phone number.
It was not until over two hours later that the two visitors came to my desk. They were an odd pair, as if one man had been reflected in two different carnival mirrors, one fat and short, one tall and thin, both stretched and squeezed beyond the limits of the human form, but being in essence so similar that, despite their physical dissimilarities they seemed to be one and the same. They were also wearing a wardrobe of such consistency of color that I was surprised they had not painted their faces black as well.
“We are looking for the book,” they said simultaneously.
“The book?” I asked, for some reason not connecting this with the earlier visit.
“Yes, the book,” they repeated.
“Have you tried the library?” I asked, feeling a bit annoyed that some idiots were coming around here, asking for books.
“The library?” they asked.
“Do you do that echo thing all the time or are you just trying to annoy me?” I snapped.
“Echo?”
“Never mind. But yes, the Library you twits. Right there,” I pointed out the window where the nearest outpost of the campus library was housed, under a door that said “Library”.
“Ah, the Library,” they turned to each other as if communicating silently for a second, and then said, “We shall look in this library. And, should we not find it, we shall return to you.”
Two minutes later I looked up and out the window just in time to see the sinister pair enter the door that I had pointed them to. “Oops,” I said, in a My Bad tone of voice. Nobody enters the library through those doors, because it leads to the rooms where they store the journals on Literary Theory. It used to be a nice part of the west campus library when they first moved the journals there; I remember because I once sat there and read a few pages out of context and found them hilarious.
However, not long after Literary Theory got moved, a group of English Lit students were locked in, studying so long and hard and continually reading circular arguments about the merits of Post-Modernism that they eventually went crazy, formed a tribal society, and degenerated into canniablism. Since then they have thrived by hiding behind the shelves holding Contemporary Literary Criticism, creeping across the top of bookcases in the night, and surviving off of the occasional freshman who is desperately trying to find an English reference.
Oh well, sometimes shit happens, and sometimes you send people to horrible screaming doom as their remains are roasted above bunsen burners looted from the Chemistry lab. Everybody makes mistakes.
I did not think much more of this until about two, when I was coming back from a late lunch. The path back from the main student center slopes gently upward to get to the physical sciences region, and it is lined with terraces. Since this is a University of California, the terraces are basically concrete building blocks strong enough to support people, but they do have a view of the ocean. If you jump.
Anyway I was walking with Jim, Raven, and Donovan when suddenly a concrete wall next to the pathway exploded open. When the dust cleared, theatrically as always, there was a bulky man covered in black tattoos standing in a huge whole that had been blasted in the wall. His right fist was coated in burning red flames, smouldering from where he had apparently wrecked the wall. All of us watched this with some perplexity, except for Donovan, who I think had been playing Halo 2 continuously since the previous day at lunch and probably saw nothing strange about this.
“You!” the man cried, pointing at me, “I do not know how you defeated the Shadow Twins, but I, Corax the Destroyer will not be so uneasily undone. Now, tell me where the book is!”
“Shadow twins?” Jim asked, “Is that like the Wonder Twins?”
“Or the Bobsy Twins?” Raven put in.
“Silence!” Corax the Destroyer bellowed. “Now where is the book?”
“What book?” I asked.
“Don't play games with me boy! The Book of Ages!”
“Oh, that book,” I said, making the connection at last. I was having a bad day, all right? “Why didn't you just say so?”
“Very amusing,” Corax's lip curled, “How long do you think you can keep this banter up?”
“Considering that you're standing in a hole you punched in a load-bearing wall, about two more seconds,” I responded.
He was still thinking up a feisty remark to that comment when he was hit in the back of the head by thirty tons of reinforced concrete. I winced. Not in sympathy, because anybody who calls themselves Corax the Destroyer probably deserves that kind of impact, but in anticipation of the future. I was peripherally involved the last time this terrace collapsed, a year ago during the middle of an invasion of Ann Coulter clones sprouting from the bioengineering labs, and I had a sudden premonition that the Chemistry department was going to be gunning for me. Let them. It serves them right for blowing up their own damn laboratory wing every other week.
But now I had cottoned on to what was going on, so I was totally unsurprised when, as I was preparing to go home, a tall man wearing black robes that were, in fact, not flowing, popped into existence in a burst of fire next to my desk. I knew immediately that he was an evil villain, most because of the absurd goatee that he was wearing.
“I had not wished to take this step but it appears that my other attempts have failed. I am the Dark Lord Firkansis, and I have come for the Book of Ages.”
“Oh, it's in the cabinet, next to the others,” I said, waving my hand. I was in the middle of trying to compile the damn C++ plot drawer one last time, and was too involved to be bothered by some Dark Lord of Kansas, or whatever the hell he had said he was.
There was a metallic click as he opened the cabinet, and then a gasp. “You have more than one copy? And look, you have The Naming of Names and even a copy of The Power of Dark!”
“Wait, don't open that!” I cried, but to late. There was an explosion of light and sound, a series of magical fireworks and a lot of colored streamers racing around the room. When the smoke and dust cleared, and I emerged from beneath my desk, the office was mostly in one piece, except for Jim's stapler, which had morphed into a chinchilla that was now trying to get off his desk. Jim gave me a look which I returned. It isn't as though his problems have not caused trouble for me in the past.
“Er, sorry about that,” Dark Lord whatshisname said after a moment, his face comically blackened in the traditional style of a Warner Brothers cartoon character who has looked into his own gun barrel.
“How about you just take your book and go?” I snapped at him, trying to figure out who had inserted a Segmentation Fault in my code.
“Uh yes, but which book is my book?” he looked at the various copies of the Book of Ages in confusion.
I stared at him for a moment, and then remembered that I was not supposed to give the book I had been given this morning to him. I had not answered whatever-her-name was, but silence implies consent, and I had taken the book. Well, he would just have to get another copy. I pointed at one, “Just take that one!”
“Unlimited power, all mine,” he chortled, pulling the book out of the shelf, “mine, mine, mine!”
But in my haste, I had forgotten that I now had ten copies instead of nine, so instead of pointing at number eight, I had actually pointed him at number nine.
“No wait!” I called.
But he had already opened the book. There was a loud bang, a flash of smoke, and a very loud thump. After a few moments, Jim came around his desk and looked at the result.
“Well, that was unexpected,” he said.
“I hate it when this happens,” I groaned.
“Mooooo,” said the Dark Lord, rolling his head to look at the two of us.
“So what do we do now?” Jim asked.
“Same thing we do every other time this happens,” I grumbled, which was how I spent the next hour and a half at the lab.
On a more lighthearted note, there will be a department barbecue tomorrow if anyone wants to drop by on a Saturday. Bring your own beer, but we'll be bringing along beef ribs, beef steaks, hamburger, and 100% pure beef hotdogs.
I collect books.
This is extremely fortunate, because people keep giving me books, or giving me books to buy. Sometimes they are forgetful old people with the communications ability of an African elephant on speed, who press on me lists of books I should buy along with a number that has five digits, a single period, and a $ in front of it. I call these people professors.
Sometimes they are also old ladies who stand on the side of the sidewalk at the university and pass out tracts with titles on them such as “Do You Want to Find Meaning In Your Life?” or “How to Find True Happiness”. These nice old ladies not only give me colorful pieces of paper (which make great confetti by the way) but they also sometimes tell me to read the Good Book, which I have never located in the Dewey Decimal System.
Recently I've been having other problems though. Women, usually in long flowing white dresses with long flowing tresses, elaborately braided, and long flowing sleeves and who would be, if any more flowing in general, washing me out to sea, tend to give me books. Usually the woman in question has a completely unpronounceable name, is strikingly beautiful, and seems moved to tears.
This happened today.
I was sitting there, fixing problems with Python code by putting the problem into Google, and then finding the most ridiculous solution possible, when I suddenly became aware that a woman in a long, flowing, white dress was standing beside me. That description was an understatement: her dress was flowing like the Mississippi. I was half tempted to look around the hem to see if I could find the bodies of any ladies-in-waiting who might have been swamped with the tide. She was also classically beautiful, pale, well-chisled face, slender arms, long brown hair. She was holding a thick, heavy book in one arm.
“Not this again,” I murmured, but she had already started on the speech.
“Pray noble sir, I know not your name, but I come to you in an hour of need. I have crossed many worlds to come here and now my time is brief. In my arms I hold the legendary tome, the Book of Ages which contains spells of great power. It must be held safe for its power is sought by the Dark Lord Firkansis. If he gains possession of this tome, it will spell great disaster for our people. You are my only hope. You must keep it safe from him.”
With that she thrust the book into my arms, which I grabbed reluctantly. Then she slowly faded away, but not before a few pleading tears ran down her cheeks.
“Damn it,” I said as she vanished into nothingness. I turned to Jim who has a desk in the same office I do. “Jim, do you remember who I'm supposed to protect this from?”
“I try not to pay attention when those sorts of things happen,” Jim remarked, bending all his attention on making a pair of T-shapes make a trio of rows in Tetris.
“Damn,” I murmured again, reaching into my desk where I knew I could find a package of post-it notes, unfortunately colored a fluorescent green. Picking up my pen I hastily wrote down:
Then I carefully and reverently placed it on a shelf in my office next to my other nine copies of the Book of Ages.
“Are those all the same?” Raven asked, leaning against a doorpost. I gave her a suspicious look; despite what happened the first time she tried to steal one of those books she is continually possessed of the desire to crack open the next set. This is why I keep them in a stainless steel cabinet, of the kind usually employed to store explosives.
“Not really,” I told her, “the first one sometimes turns you into a chicken if you open it. Number seven turns you into a pig. The others tend to have similar effects. That's about all I know.”
“Oh,” Raven looked longingly in that direction as I closed the door and locked it, but she did not make a grab for them. I know her mother's phone number.
It was not until over two hours later that the two visitors came to my desk. They were an odd pair, as if one man had been reflected in two different carnival mirrors, one fat and short, one tall and thin, both stretched and squeezed beyond the limits of the human form, but being in essence so similar that, despite their physical dissimilarities they seemed to be one and the same. They were also wearing a wardrobe of such consistency of color that I was surprised they had not painted their faces black as well.
“We are looking for the book,” they said simultaneously.
“The book?” I asked, for some reason not connecting this with the earlier visit.
“Yes, the book,” they repeated.
“Have you tried the library?” I asked, feeling a bit annoyed that some idiots were coming around here, asking for books.
“The library?” they asked.
“Do you do that echo thing all the time or are you just trying to annoy me?” I snapped.
“Echo?”
“Never mind. But yes, the Library you twits. Right there,” I pointed out the window where the nearest outpost of the campus library was housed, under a door that said “Library”.
“Ah, the Library,” they turned to each other as if communicating silently for a second, and then said, “We shall look in this library. And, should we not find it, we shall return to you.”
Two minutes later I looked up and out the window just in time to see the sinister pair enter the door that I had pointed them to. “Oops,” I said, in a My Bad tone of voice. Nobody enters the library through those doors, because it leads to the rooms where they store the journals on Literary Theory. It used to be a nice part of the west campus library when they first moved the journals there; I remember because I once sat there and read a few pages out of context and found them hilarious.
However, not long after Literary Theory got moved, a group of English Lit students were locked in, studying so long and hard and continually reading circular arguments about the merits of Post-Modernism that they eventually went crazy, formed a tribal society, and degenerated into canniablism. Since then they have thrived by hiding behind the shelves holding Contemporary Literary Criticism, creeping across the top of bookcases in the night, and surviving off of the occasional freshman who is desperately trying to find an English reference.
Oh well, sometimes shit happens, and sometimes you send people to horrible screaming doom as their remains are roasted above bunsen burners looted from the Chemistry lab. Everybody makes mistakes.
I did not think much more of this until about two, when I was coming back from a late lunch. The path back from the main student center slopes gently upward to get to the physical sciences region, and it is lined with terraces. Since this is a University of California, the terraces are basically concrete building blocks strong enough to support people, but they do have a view of the ocean. If you jump.
Anyway I was walking with Jim, Raven, and Donovan when suddenly a concrete wall next to the pathway exploded open. When the dust cleared, theatrically as always, there was a bulky man covered in black tattoos standing in a huge whole that had been blasted in the wall. His right fist was coated in burning red flames, smouldering from where he had apparently wrecked the wall. All of us watched this with some perplexity, except for Donovan, who I think had been playing Halo 2 continuously since the previous day at lunch and probably saw nothing strange about this.
“You!” the man cried, pointing at me, “I do not know how you defeated the Shadow Twins, but I, Corax the Destroyer will not be so uneasily undone. Now, tell me where the book is!”
“Shadow twins?” Jim asked, “Is that like the Wonder Twins?”
“Or the Bobsy Twins?” Raven put in.
“Silence!” Corax the Destroyer bellowed. “Now where is the book?”
“What book?” I asked.
“Don't play games with me boy! The Book of Ages!”
“Oh, that book,” I said, making the connection at last. I was having a bad day, all right? “Why didn't you just say so?”
“Very amusing,” Corax's lip curled, “How long do you think you can keep this banter up?”
“Considering that you're standing in a hole you punched in a load-bearing wall, about two more seconds,” I responded.
He was still thinking up a feisty remark to that comment when he was hit in the back of the head by thirty tons of reinforced concrete. I winced. Not in sympathy, because anybody who calls themselves Corax the Destroyer probably deserves that kind of impact, but in anticipation of the future. I was peripherally involved the last time this terrace collapsed, a year ago during the middle of an invasion of Ann Coulter clones sprouting from the bioengineering labs, and I had a sudden premonition that the Chemistry department was going to be gunning for me. Let them. It serves them right for blowing up their own damn laboratory wing every other week.
But now I had cottoned on to what was going on, so I was totally unsurprised when, as I was preparing to go home, a tall man wearing black robes that were, in fact, not flowing, popped into existence in a burst of fire next to my desk. I knew immediately that he was an evil villain, most because of the absurd goatee that he was wearing.
“I had not wished to take this step but it appears that my other attempts have failed. I am the Dark Lord Firkansis, and I have come for the Book of Ages.”
“Oh, it's in the cabinet, next to the others,” I said, waving my hand. I was in the middle of trying to compile the damn C++ plot drawer one last time, and was too involved to be bothered by some Dark Lord of Kansas, or whatever the hell he had said he was.
There was a metallic click as he opened the cabinet, and then a gasp. “You have more than one copy? And look, you have The Naming of Names and even a copy of The Power of Dark!”
“Wait, don't open that!” I cried, but to late. There was an explosion of light and sound, a series of magical fireworks and a lot of colored streamers racing around the room. When the smoke and dust cleared, and I emerged from beneath my desk, the office was mostly in one piece, except for Jim's stapler, which had morphed into a chinchilla that was now trying to get off his desk. Jim gave me a look which I returned. It isn't as though his problems have not caused trouble for me in the past.
“Er, sorry about that,” Dark Lord whatshisname said after a moment, his face comically blackened in the traditional style of a Warner Brothers cartoon character who has looked into his own gun barrel.
“How about you just take your book and go?” I snapped at him, trying to figure out who had inserted a Segmentation Fault in my code.
“Uh yes, but which book is my book?” he looked at the various copies of the Book of Ages in confusion.
I stared at him for a moment, and then remembered that I was not supposed to give the book I had been given this morning to him. I had not answered whatever-her-name was, but silence implies consent, and I had taken the book. Well, he would just have to get another copy. I pointed at one, “Just take that one!”
“Unlimited power, all mine,” he chortled, pulling the book out of the shelf, “mine, mine, mine!”
But in my haste, I had forgotten that I now had ten copies instead of nine, so instead of pointing at number eight, I had actually pointed him at number nine.
“No wait!” I called.
But he had already opened the book. There was a loud bang, a flash of smoke, and a very loud thump. After a few moments, Jim came around his desk and looked at the result.
“Well, that was unexpected,” he said.
“I hate it when this happens,” I groaned.
“Mooooo,” said the Dark Lord, rolling his head to look at the two of us.
“So what do we do now?” Jim asked.
“Same thing we do every other time this happens,” I grumbled, which was how I spent the next hour and a half at the lab.
On a more lighthearted note, there will be a department barbecue tomorrow if anyone wants to drop by on a Saturday. Bring your own beer, but we'll be bringing along beef ribs, beef steaks, hamburger, and 100% pure beef hotdogs.