Category: Writing
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“Your House” Is a Crime Scene: A Forensic, Feminist, and Unhinged Analysis of Alanis Morissette’s Creepiest Track
Summer 2026. I’ve been revisiting my college days, watching Reality Bites, listening to Sheryl Crow, and thinking about my days at San Francisco State University, staying up with a printer that wouldn’t print my work that’s due in class the next morning. Of course, Alanis Morissette’s breakthrough album is the crowning jewel. It most certainly…
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The Faculty Governance Gala: Where the Cricket Chorus Performs Their Greatest Hits
In the hallowed, slightly drafty halls of Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library, “Governance” isn’t just a series of meetings—it’s a performance. And once a year, when the budget cycles align and the institutional mediation is at its peak, we host the Faculty Governance Gala. The gala is the only time the Cricket Chorus leaves the…
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The Great Cataloging Glitch of ’24: When the Sloth Accidentally Moved the Entire Fiction Section into “Applied Sciences”
In Biblios Heights, we try to keep the chaos organized, but some days the infrastructure just decides to take a nap. And in the library world, there is no nap more dangerous than the one taken by the Slow Processor Sloth. It was a Tuesday (traditionally a day for “Optimistic Metadata”) when the progress bar…
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The Inter-Library Loan Abyss: A Biblios Heights Stacks Thriller
The coffee crisis of last week had settled into a fragile peace, but in Biblios Heights Academic Library, “peace” is just the quiet before the metadata hits the fan. My duties as Melissa the Metadata- Wrangler (or Librarian Cardenas–I answer to both names), a subject librarian, sometimes requires me to hunt for specific books that…
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The Mystery of the Silent Steamer: A Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library Noir
The rain in Biblios Heights was coming down in cold, gray sheets, the kind of drizzle that turns the Social Science stacks into a labyrinth of shadows and damp wool. I was at my desk, navigating the precarious centrality of my own dissertation, when the silence hit me. It wasn’t the “shhh” of a student…
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The Official Wild Stacks Survival Guide: How to Handle the Silence Behaviors in the Stacks of Your Academic Library
Welcome, fellow academic library explorers! Have you ever noticed that a university library isn’t just a quiet place for study? It’s a dense, thriving ecosystem of institutional logic and relational labor! And like any wild habitat, it has its distinct, and often amusingly predictable, inhabitants. Today, we’re going to help you identify and manage the…
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Bureaucratic Aggro
Magistrix Clarienne <Guardian of Process> Administrative Wing Delve Encounter Log filed by Linnarra, Sentinel Scout of Darkshore I’ve just cleared the last of the Email Wraiths and Calendar Elementals. The corridor finally falls quiet. I take the opportunity to rest for a moment. Thunder settles beside me while I build a small fire and pull…
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Don’t Call It a Comebeck. I’ve Been Here For Years.
Roughly twelve years ago, I wrote this post. The links are now broken. And the context is lost to me. One thing I do remember: I didn’t understand why the phrase “don’t call it a comeback” lodged itself so deeply in me. I still don’t. The post was about the television show, Revenge, which I…
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Reclaiming the Parts I Thought I Had to Leave Behind
A few times lately, I had been asked how my dissertation writing is going. Not even that long ago, that question made me groan. Not theatrically. Just… honestly. Dissertation work felt overwhelming, insurmountable. Like a mountain I had agreed to climb without oxygen. What was I thinking?! Sure, I was surviving. Hiding from the work…
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The Robots Think I’m a Robot
I did what any responsible, well-adjusted academic would do when Grammarly’s AI detector told me my writing was probably written by AI. I panicked. Okay, I’ll be honest. I spiraled into despair, then I panicked. After I got the self-flagellation out of the way, I did the most reasonable thing available to me in the…