What was the last wedding you went to? Were you in the wedding?
WHY IS THIS THE LJ WRITER'S BLOCK PROMPT? WHY?
I CANNOT HANDLE ANY MORE WEDDINGS. NO MORE WEDDINGS. NONE. I HATE YOU LJ.
On Wednesday I went to the Pennsylvania Historical Society to research weddings, and I have officially declared it a worse place to do research than the New Jersey Historical Society.
You have to pay 3 dollars to get in and 50 cents for photocopies, for starters. New Jersey is free and 10 cents.
Next, the computer catalog operates like it hasn't been redesigned since, oh, the computer was invented. For example, when you do a search such as "weddings AND Pennsylvania," 150 results are returned. You go through and click on results to get more information, but whenever you click on a specific result, you lose the ability to go back to the list of all results. So you have to do the search all over again. Which is time-consuming and makes one very reluctant to click on something just because you're curious about it, which is where all good historical research starts.
Next, you can only submit 3 call slips at a time, and they will only bring you one item at a time. You may have to wait up to 30 minutes for this item to be retrieved, and you can only get the next one when you finish with the first one.
Lastly, the society has managed to lose an entire call number. I turned in a call slip that said something like CX 120.87 1999. After thirty minutes, it came back to me with a note--please check number. I checked the number. I showed the librarian the number on the computer. He said, "Yeah, there are no CX120s." I looked at my next batch of three call slips. "So this one [African American Weddings] won't be there?" "No." "And this one [The Ethnic Wedding in Philadelphia]?" "No." "And no Amish Weddings." "Probably not."
Yes--they've managed to misplace the entire call number about weddings, which contained many rare books which are only carried there or perhaps in Singapore. And I can't do anything about it, like walking through all the stacks to make sure they weren't mislabeled, because the stacks are closed and the librarians aren't going to do anything for me and I don't want to have to pay 3 dollars every time I go if I'm not getting anything out of it.
So much for this article being a breeze. Stupid history. Why are you so easy to misplace?
Today, however, I became acquainted with the miracle of wedding-inspired consumerism that is
diaper cakes, which are like wedding cakes except inedible and eventually going to get pooped all over. Why?