What to write….

So, I’ve had several ideas for this blog. Sometimes during the day, a topic will reveal itself, and then I get home, and *poof* all ideas disappear. My brain turns to mush, and I become a potato. (This is a little know fact. After work, I become a potato, and after 10:00 pm, I become a pumkin…. what other types of fruit and vegetables can a person turn into?)

But today, you get to read about the very warm bathrooms at library at OU. If you haven’t been there, the Bizzell Library is a mish-mash of architecture, design, and remodelling efforts. The beautiful reading room with its Norman design, cathedral ceilings, wood panelling, and leaded windows is amazing, and it’s in the oldest wing of the library. My office is in the basement of that wing, and it’s home so who can complain. Plus, my office doesn’t flood like the office of a professor down the hall.

Then there’s a second wing, the decks. I have no clue when they were built, but they are from the days when the stacks are closed. It has 1930ish dumb waiters to move books, and big cages surround the bookcases. It’s the area of the library that you’re most likely to die in. Or expect to die in. (Has anybody else read the Time Traveler’s Wife? Freaky. It dispeals the myth that librarians are boring…but really freaky. Slightly wrong and freaky.)

Then there’s the new-er part of the library. It looks like a “normal” library. Plain brick walls. Plain linolium. Plain beige walls and darker, non-descript, commercial carpet. Some of this wing is in transition. The area around the reference desk and circulation is kept up to date, and there’s some pretty-sweet heavy wood furniture and museum-like displays of first edition books. The school is also remodelling a good chunk of the third floor to hold the special collections. That should be cool, but they had to move those special collections b/c the 5th floor is no longer safe from leaks in the roof. Nobody wants to see a first edition of Galileo’s work or a Guttenburg Bible getting wet!

But back to the bathrooms. The secret passages between the different wings of the library are slowly becoming new to me. I can get from the coffee shop on the second Lower Lobby of the New Building to my office in the old building by only walking through a fire door or through the dealthly cages. (By the way, if you are claustaphobic, I wouldn’t suggest going through the decks. I’ve already hit my head on the ceiling above the stairway.) Nevertheless, I still have no idea what is in the hidden corners of that library. Today, I took the “old” elevator (circa 1950? The buttons look like that evil elevator in Kerr Dorm at OBU, but it works like a “normal” elevator, but none of the buttons glow, and the buttons are round, stubby things that stick out of the wall.) in the “new” wing to the fourth floor to find a book in the “z” section.

Then the need to meet a need presented itself. I ran to the nearest bathroom and entered into 1959. It had a large mirror across one wall with a vanity underneath. A very low vanity with three stubby circular chairs. Each with three stubby little legs. The seat were made of very pink leather. Then a girl with a puddle skirts walked through… just kidding. However, when I entered into the toilet part of the restroom, I discovered that the toilet paper dated from 1959… Okay, maybe not that old, but the toilet paper was turning brown…kinda like when you leave a piece of paper on the dash-board of your car and leave it for an entire Oklahoma summer. Hmmm… When was the last time someone used that bathroom? I figure someone at least visited sometime in the 1990s b/c the white plastic soap dispencers with the bright red OU emblazend upon them looked fairly new.

But you might remember that I called the bathroom “warm.” I have yet to find a bathroom in the library that is less than 80 degrees inside. The air-conditioning seems to work well (perhaps too well) throughout the rest of the library. Did some architect or designer decide that they never wanted to sit on a cold toilet seat again? I find some comfort in a cold bathroom. Less chance germs. The bathrooms at the library scare me a little bit.

Wasn’t that deep? Aren’t you happy to hear about toilets?

(posts)

big sis Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
I see the beginnings of a somewhat strange Japser Ffordish/Douglas Adamish novel here - why NOT have a library in which by entering different wings (bathrooms even..) you actually do travel in time! And secret passages to boot! It could even be a VERY strange 3 weird sisters collaboration…. hmmmm ; D

jen_archaic Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Is the name “3 weird sisters” taken? That should be our pen name! Yay!

big sis Says:
August 29th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Isn’t the band in Harry Potter called the “weird sisters”? That could be another avocation for us — writing bizarre 3-voice novels and hitting all the future HP conventions as an all girl band a la Macbeth. I take dibs on bass guitar and the lead on Monster Mash!

JoeyGirl Says:
August 30th, 2007 at 7:54 am
I’ll do rhythm guitar/keyboard/percussion and back up vocals!

Does this bathroom sound like a fairly strange version of the “Room of Requirement”? I really like the book premise, regardless; the main character needs to be a librarian, obviously. I’m thinking horn-rimmed glasses who also happens to be proficient in JuJitsu or something…

Jen, don’t forget to visit the fourth floor bathroom in Gittinger and see the infamous “Destory the dominant paradigm” in pink bubble letters. I think it’s the first stall…or is it the fourth stall on the first floor?

Carissa Says:
September 2nd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
I’d like warm bathrooms, germs and all. I HATE being cold! LOL!

jen_archaic Says:
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:09 am
Hey Carissa,

Welcome on board! =) You like warm bathrooms, huh? Well, that’s okay we still can be friends.

Warm bathroom before a shower is one thing. Entering into a bathroom with a temp of 88 degrees and a relative humidity of 80%, you start to wonder if the OU metereorology department is using those bathrooms as experimentation for inside thunderstorms!