contents of the shark capsules

First Shark Capsule: Found at Superior Fish

Coral Sea, 1942, 6/11

A sailor’s cap, part of a raft (bitten off, I assume), a canister with two matches in it and a photograph of a lady, a sexy lady picture, a postcard from the victim sent to his parents back home, a piece of metal with a shark tooth attached.  The photograph in the canister had the phrase “With you, wherever you are” on the back.  The postcard reads:

Dear Mom, Dad, Jimmy,  Greg and Cass.

This is where I’m going to be spending a few days before we set sail.  Beautiful, isn’t it?  Dad, hope the job isn’t keeping you from Mom’s fantastic dinners; they’re what I miss the most.

Love always,

Jake

The front of the postcard was a picture of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Australia.

Second shark capsule: Found at Heritage Antiques II

Asbury Park, 1916, 4/11

A journal page, part of a dog leash, part of a sweater (mildly ripped apart), a piece of metal with a shark tooth attached, and a newspaper clipping.  The journal entry reads:

June 22, 1916

Went down to the shore again today.  Glory and I love the sounds of the seagull’s squawking and the waves rolling in.  On our way, each hiss of the train’s brakes brings Glory’s head up off the floor, wondering, “Is this the stop?”

At Asbury Park, Fourth Avenue beach, it is.

The beach is all ours in the early morning and today it was bliss.  The sun had already warmed up the sand and the ocean was plenty cool rushing between my toes.

My swimming is far from adequate, but is much better than the wading women and most of the men.  Some day soon I’ll venture out beyond the soggy ropes.  Glory, an expert paddler, is always next to me, cheering me on.

The article mentions that the man was injured by a fish but was not killed.

Properly aged.

Inner seal.

Poor dog!

Sexy lady!

A real shark tooth.

BITTEN RAFT!

Adventures in shark capsules

From Superior Fish

Shark Week on the Discovery channel starts next month.  I think I have tapes of shark week going back to 1989.  Last year is missing and unless I can bribe someone to record it for me, so will this year’s.  About a month ago, I came across this site: frenziedwaters.com.  I can’t remember how I found it; I think it was posted by one of the sharks I follow on Twitter.  If you go to the site, it’s not to content-heavy.  Just a few jars bobbing up and down in the water.  Each jar has its own story.

I started following the site on Twitter so I could figure out what was going on.  I wasn’t too sure if this had to do with Shark Week or not but since I love sharks, it didn’t really matter too much.  Last week, there was a tweet about unearthing capsules in cities all over the country at certain locations.  I stumbled on the coordinates and there were two located in Detroit (actually, Royal Oak, but who’s counting?).  The locations were pretty close to my apartment and I needed to find them.  It was my own personal mission.

Me Triumphant

Monday night, I mentioned the idea to Eric and we decided to go look for one of them right then.  At 2 a.m.  So we went and found the coordinates matched up with a place called Superior Fish.  We wandered around the building, looking under bushes and in windows to try to find it.  We even tried calling my friend Lisa and my sister to help us with the coordinates.  My sister was the one that answered, which was kind of nice because I didn’t have to explain much to her, just that I was looking for shark capsules.  Ultimately we couldn’t find anything and thought we would go back the next day.

When we got home, I noticed that FrenziedWaters had updated their Twitter account and mentioned looking inside an appropriate place.  The next morning, we casually strolled into Superior Fish and looked around for a shark capsule.  I wasn’t too sure what they looked like but I knew I would know it when I saw it.  The girl working there asked what we were doing and Eric said, “Well, this is going to sound really strange, but….” and told her the story.  She pointed to a case with fish fillets in it and in the middle of everything was A SHARK CAPSULE!  Then the girl went back and talked to the owner and said that he would be right out to help us.  Superior Fish made a huge deal out of it and it was awesome.  They took pictures with the capsule, outside the store, in front of a shark week sign they had, and of the contents of the jar.  The Dean brothers were so awesome about the whole thing that we were so excited to find the next one.

Eric is holding his jar triumphantly.

The other coordinates lined up with an antique store a couple blocks up from the fish place.  We walked inside and someone called out “We’re closed!”  So we turned around and stood outside for a while.  Eric thought we should at least ask so he went back inside while I checked out the perimeter and any clues.  I finally wondered what was taking him so long when he came out holding a jar.  The women took his name and number but did not take pictures with it at all.  Eric asked them if they wanted to see what was inside but they just said, “No, just take it.  We don’t want it.”  So we felt really let down because the first place was so awesome and this place just didn’t seem to care.  We took a picture with it and then opened it up when one of the ladies came out.  We asked if she wanted to see the contents.  Her reply was, “No.  I see all kinds of crazy shit brought in here all day and I don’t want to see any gross shit.”  We tried to tell her that it wouldn’t be gross, it was a mystery!  She finally came over and looked at it with us as we’re babbling on and on about the whole thing.  The other woman came over and took a look and said that it looked “cute.”  I guess this just means that some people are jerks.  Especially when it comes to mysterious shark jars.

Fish PSA

Hi.

For those who don’t know or forgot, I am really passionate about ocean preservation.  It’s not something I go about wearing on my sleeve because I don’t want to be mistaken for a radical activist but I hold a lot of those ideas personally.  For me, it began with a love for sharks and expanded into loving anything in the water.  Although I’ve gone through phases of vegetarianism and omnivore, I always try to be conscious about what kind of fish I eat, where it has grown up, and how it was caught.  A couple of years ago, there was an amazing documentary called Sharkwater that described the awful shark overfishing that has happened.  The entire film is available on YouTube and I highly recommend it.  This year, there is a new documentary that illustrates how badly our oceans need our help.  It’s called End of the Line.  Please, please, please watch this trailer.  It’s a British documentary and there will be a limited release in the US in the coming months.  If there’s one thing I ask all of you to do for me, it’s to think about this issue.

Thanks.

I’m writing about this because I can’t think about it right now.

Some things about graduate school and me: it makes me so happy and at the same time so depressed and stressed out that I’ve been known to use drinking as an escape.  This is mostly a result of busting my ass in class so much only to have other students in the same classes breeze through on magic wings or something.  I’m also frustrated by my job at a local library because old librarians are rude.  And lazy.  I do want to stress that I love my graduate program and everything that has to do with my “escapism” is my fault.  I know this.  I have never felt at home in a place as I do here at Wayne State.  I know I don’t want to live in Michigan forever but I’m finally growing into myself over here with Eric.  So the drinking is counterproductive.  I’m smart enough to realize that one or two drinks are ok and I need to not step over the threshold of drinking.  I’ve put a few changes in place in my life to assure that this stays the case for now and forever.  I owe it to myself and to the future of Eric and Lauren and the cats.  This is, after all, the first time I’ve felt truly myself and I don’t want to ruin it.

What got me thinking about this over the weekend was a phone call.  For brevity, I dropped a lot of things in Kalamazoo because I needed to for my sanity.  So the phone call kind of jolted me out of my Kalamazoo-less life and made me realize that things never really stay dead.  I know someone who is battling the worst case of alcoholism anyone that hears her story has heard about.  Her mother died about a year ago of cancer and that’s a tragedy, yes.  I cannot comprehend what it would be like to lose a parent, especially at this point in my life where I have become incredibly grateful for my parents’ existence.  I understand grief and vices and excuses for both.  I wish I could help my friend, I really do, but she needs to want the help and not just claim to want it.  Dropping someone off at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting sober and picking them up completely wasted is a problem.  I don’t know what else to say to her except “get help.”  What’s frustrating is that there is a community of people willing to help, wanting to help and waiting to help her and not knowing where she is, who she’s with or what she’s doing.  For a brief moment, after the phone call, I wanted to drive back to try and find her on the streets.  But I didn’t.  And I can’t.  This isn’t about me not helping her or about person X not helping her or about her father not helping her.  This is about being in a bad way and having people step back because of how bad things have gotten.  I will always be there for her, I will always love her.  I just can’t feel like a failure because I’m not there.

I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of this graduate school thing.

This past week has been sort of hard on me school-wise.  I didn’t get any scholarships and although I’m signed up for classes in the spring/summer, I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay for them.  I kind of freaked out.

After visiting with financial aid, I found out that I was approved for a loan to cover spring classes.  I’m extremely relieved but I wish the financial aid office told me that before I started a nervous break down.  I was also frustrated with my “plan of work” and the offered classes not lining up with my paper.  I talked to my advisor and she said it was possible to take three classes over the summer and then continue that trend so I could graduate a semester early.  This appealed to me because I will be planning a wedding soon and for the next year or so; I thought by getting my schooling out of the way, it would make that easier.  Again, things have changed.

After a talk with a professor, and after a lot of thinking when I should have been paying attention in class, I’m going to go with my original plan: two classes this summer, three in the fall, three next winter, then my practicum.  I’ve also been having problems deciding if I want to get on the faculty’s good side or focus more on making friends in my program/field.  I’m horribly bad at playing the networking game and I don’t want professors to think I’m a slacker.  I do have a couple friends in the program but sometimes I either want more friends or am happy with the way things are.  These feelings are a residual of  what’s happened to me on the friend front over the last few years anyway, so I’m not as focused on that problem.

I’ve also decided not to pursue any jobs or internships for a while.  Mainly because I have other projects I want to work on in my personal life that I think will benefit my future professional life.  When I talked to my professor, she said that no matter what kind of job one has, if it’s in a library, it will be easy to spin that into relevant job experience.  Regardless of what kind of library (or in my case, archives) a person wants to have a career in.  That made me feel immensely better about my situation.  The lighter work load will also mean that Eric and I can possibly take a small trip together this summer and spend more time together planning and thinking about our wedding/future.

I feel really good about this plan today.

Hello world!

After a bit of deliberation, I decided to move my blog to WordPress.  I’ve been interested in learning more HTML and CSS than Blogger has and I think that this site is more in-line with my life right now.  I’m still playing around with style and things but I’m hoping this, combined with my all-knowing iPhone will allow me to update more.

Trying out a new layout

I’m making a pact with myself that I will blog more often. Mostly because I always think of things to write and never do because I’m away from my computer. The acquiring of an iPhone has helped immensely in that department. And I’ve figured out how to add posts from my phone to the blog! Hurray! I’m still in the testing it out phase but I’m hoping it will increase my frequency of writing.

The newest news is that Boyfriend and I are engaged! So I guess he will be Fiancé from now on. We’re not really planning the wedding until I’m done with this semester but I have some really great friends helping me out with it. I also lost one of my jobs but I’m collecting unemployment. I did this mainly because it will give me a chance to focus on school without worrying about money too much. Because I’d been working so much, I think I let some of my school focus slip a little but I’m dead set on correcting that. Here’s to trying harder at everything!

In which I get all girly and talk about hair and shoes. Sorry dudes!

I’ve been looking for nice fashion-type boots for a while. I originally thought I wanted cowboy boots although when I was younger, I made fun of my friend Amy for wearing them. She was too cool for me then, I think. I went to the mall looking for a spring jacket, regretting not buying that one from H&M. I walked into every store and didn’t find anything I liked. Until, Anthropologie. I love this store. Which is unfortunate because everything is way, way too expensive for me. I mainly go in the store for masochistic reasons and dream about how I want my house to look and how I could totally make a lot of their clothes but am too lazy.

My search for a spring jacket led me to the sale room because, who am I kidding: $68 for this? Do you know how many fruits and vegetables that could buy?! About a million. What I did find in the sale room were these boots:

These were exactly what I was looking for. The appropriate color, tallness, bootyness (not to be confused with bootyliciousness), etc. One of the biggest problems facing me and boot wearing is my calf muscles. They. Are. Huge. My legs look like drumsticks. Seriously. But these boots were a size 10! And they fit over my calf perfectly! They were just a little too big in the toe area but I knew that I had some shoe repair items from my time at the shoe repair. Now, the boots fit well! And I can wear them with my super cool vintage dress and all my great skirts in the summer. If only Michigan would cooperate and stop being cold and stupid.

I also got a new haircut. It’s not drastically different from how I looked recently but there are more layers and cuter bangage. I reluctantly have to blow dry my hair in the morning but I’m getting better at it and my hair looks vaguely similar to how the hairdresser did it. Which is good, because I was afraid I would never be able to shower again. Here is the new hair:

I’m not sure why I look so green in the smiling one. Probably because I was experimenting without the flash. This concludes the girly entry. I’ll try to come up with something super non-girly for my next post.

Tales from the library! And library-esque tales!

I recently sat down with an advisor and made a plan of work to get me through school. The LIS program recommends students do this after completing their first semester, which I think is a bit unfair. I can’t decide what I want to do! I have to follow rules, though. I was assigned an advisor who was on sabbatical last semester so I took it upon myself to switch advisors and I picked a professor that I had a class with, assuming I would feel more comfortable with her because I knew her.

We had to reschedule the appointment two times because one of us was not feeling well each time. Luckily, this gave me extra time to come up with a more coherant plan than “I dunno… I just want to touch books.” I hadn’t really thought about my experiences at the Opera House as something I would want to do for real but the whole time I was scanning things I kept thinking that there had to be better methods to doing this. I have very minimal scanning experience and even less experience with photo software (like Photoshop or the like). On a whim, (well, a friend said I should take this class with her) I enrolled in a Digital Imaging class for the winter semester. It’s only offered every other year and I’d heard awesome things about the professor. This is my favorite class I’ve taken in the program so far. We’re learning all kinds of information about proper scanning techniques and about the retention schedule of digital files. Our group project this semester is working with the Charles Wright African American History Museum. We’re helping them digitize some of their random collections for a future web collection.

So I’m officially going into Digital Archiving. This means that I’ll be focusing on technology and building web collections for things. I’m really excited about this. I think that this will really help me after I graduate. I’m hoping that I can work for the Library of Congress doing something similar to the Flickr project they have. I also came across a job posting for the CIA that needed archiving experience.

The other news is that I’m going to be given more responsibilities at the public library I work at. I mentioned to my boss how I liked my cataloging class because to me, it’s about fitting data into a puzzle and formatting things the right way. She decided that she wants me to learn how to process new books and do minor repairs. I’ve been feeling annoyed at that job because I don’t have anything to do except help people at the circulation desk, so I’m glad that she’s giving me a project. I have realized that I’m not sure I could ever work at a reference desk in a public library. I would really love to make the library I work at better but the director is super back-in-the-past and doesn’t care about improvements. The reference librarians are all older and seem to like the job stability the most. There are also some annoying patrons I can’t stand. I’m fine with chit-chatting and there are som patrons that I absolutely love, but I could really stand not to hear about which pet food is the best and did you know that Obama wants abortions for the whole world? It’s totally true, the internet told me. I did manage to create a piece of art based on a patron’s hair. He was an older gentleman but was going for that Bob Dylan-my-hair-is-its-own-entity thing. Here is what I produced in MS Paint:

I obviously need to learn Photoshop.

I love making inside joke T-shirts!

A while ago, Boyfriend and I were looking up Darkwing Duck on Wikipedia (what? No one else does this?!). In the Wiki entry, it listed many ways to say his famous catch phrase, “Let’s get dangerous!” in different languages. I found the Finnish translation of the phrase and used it in my next e-mail to my friend Laura, who is Finnish and taught me how to say the only phrase I know in Finnish: Olen ötökkä. This of course means “I am a bug.” So when she pointed out that the phrase “Let’s get dangerous!” in Finnish can combine with the only other phrase I know, I decided to make a T-shirt. Because I’m in graduate school and apparently can’t be bothered to do my homework. I apparently love making T-shirts. So, for your viewing pleasure, here’s my T-shirt. The shirt reads, “Olen ötökkä. Ollaan vaarallisia!” The translation of this is, “I am a bug. We’re dangerous!” So true, so true. Also note my bangification. I opted to get bangs because I was bored with my hair. I like it. Even though the camera used a flash, I really am still that pale.