Tag: care
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Utang Sa Loob: On What Made Me
The Occasion In the summer of 2017, a magazine story circulated about a Filipino family and the katulong who had lived and worked with them for fifty-six years. She had started as a young child, gone to the United States with the family, cared for their home and their children. She never married. Never had…
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You Can’t Take the Sky From Me
This Firefly poster has been hanging on my office wall since 2018. I’ve been seeing it almost everyday since. But today, it’s as if I’d just laid eyes on it for the first time. The quote at the bottom feels like it just found me. Today. Right now. It did in that way certain lines…
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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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Et tu?
Being harmed by someone who knows exactly what harm feels like is not the same as being harmed by someone cruel, or careless, or ignorant. Injury is produced in those sorts of situations. Harm caused by one who knows how it feels to be harmed in the exact same way is different. It’s a particular…
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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 Rubber-Meets-the-Road Test
Critical librarianship is everywhere. The reading lists, the conference panels, the bios. Nobody is against it. The profession has learned to wear the critique like a lanyard. Sara Ahmed, writing about institutional diversity work, calls it “doing the document.” The report that stands in for the action, the statement that substitutes for the risk. The…
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The Current Doesn’t Know Your Name
Earlier today, I was watching a movie. It was one of those feel-good things that just hit the right spot. I needed to feel good. Then, it said what they always say — it’s never too late. Instead of feeling good, I felt something tighten. I followed that feeling back, the way you sometimes do,…
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The Knowing: Sylvanas Windrunner and the Politics of the Threshold
There is a moment in Warcraft lore that the game never quite lets you stand inside long enough. The Battle of Silvermoon, the city’s last hours before the Scourge poured through the gates that someone had already opened from the inside. And Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Silvermoon, holding the line at the wall while the…
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The Crack in the Throne and the Banshee’s Cry
There is a moment in the lore of World of Warcraft that has been rattling around in my brain lately, vibrating at the same frequency as my research and other conceptual work. It’s the moment Sylvanas Windrunner breaks free from the Lich King. It was an infrastructure failure. The Frozen Throne, the literal seat of…