Victorianitas

The politics of sharing a desk, one moment among many:

"Have you got the bottom drawer? What's in the bottom drawer?"
"Scissors."
"Middle drawer?"
"The other scissors."
"Top drawer?"
"Stolen stuff and crisps."

In the library, we are moving boxes of books. Heavy boxes of books. Seventy-nine heavy boxes of books. In the world below stairs, a strange land of Escher-like corridors stacked with faded posters, ancient dust-covered boxes of type, and something we think is a machine for binding books, I'm both the only woman and the only person under five foot nine. My colleagues have mastered the art of saying in a very gallant way "Oh, you shouldn't be carrying that! That's heavy!" as they neatly sidestep out of the way of me and the painfully heavy box of books I'm juuuuuuuust about balancing.

My forearms are bruised from carrying the damn things, and my forearms are not looking wonderful anyway after the bad sunburn I got a couple of weeks ago. Still pink, especially under the library lights, and still peeling off in little flakes of gruesome. It's gone beyond "ouch!" to "ew" to "Wasn't that an X Files episode once?"

In better news, I now have 1,624 words of the article I put on hiatus in spring while I was finishing some other stuff. At least 75% of them are good words. I feel very productive.

(I should add that the stolen stuff in the conversation above referred to stuff sneaked from the stationary cupboard, not, you know, actually stolen stuff. I firmly believe that most office-based work is one long drawn-out episode of stealth warfare over the good stuff in the stationary cupboard.)