From April 11th to the 17th

Tuesday 4/11/06
Because the Dean is a big fan of baseball, the library has implemented a yearly baseball party on opening day of the the local team's home game. We serve hot dogs, chips, popcorn, beer, lemonade and ice cream sandwiches. There are prize giveaways, as well. I worked the prize table with T. We pimped pocket calendars and some guy’s baseball journal.
I’m having a bad day here. I find the people in the office confusing and distant. There’s all of this bad emotional baggage from years gone by and I really feel like I don’t fit in with most of them. Sometimes I think my personality just doesn’t mesh here. It drives me bonkers.
Counting the minutes today. Working on school laws, which are even more repetitive than constitutions, if you can believe that. I have a big stack of publication patterns on my desk, and I dread doing them. They confuse me and I feel like I’m going to screw up the acquisitions side of things.
Lamest subtitle today: School laws of Iowa : from the code of 1897, the supplement to the code, 1913, and the supplemental supplement, 1915. Ah yes, the supplemental supplement.

Friday 4/14/06
We’ve been having a heatwave here. Last night, at 7 pm, it was 81 degrees! In April!
I left work this afternoon to see a movie. It was called Searching for Angela Shelton. The documentary director looked up every woman in America with her name. Of 88, 40 responded. Of 40, 28 were either raped, beaten or molested. She traveled around the country, interviewing them, as she came to terms with her own childhood abuse at the hands of her father, stepmother and brother. The movie was good, but frustrating, and since I’m not a victim of abuse, there were parts I just don’t understand. If your father abused you for five years, why do you have to have a relationship with him? Why would you ever want to see him again?
Then I came back to catalog Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century. I found these statistics deeply depressing:
The World Health Organization estimates that in 2002, approximately nine males were killed in armed conflicts around the world for every female.
The reported global rape rate has more than doubled between 1977 and 2001.
“Children are recruited [as soldiers] because they are plentiful, cheap, malleable, and expendable—and because light and deadly weapons more than offset a child’s lack of physical strength.”
Burma is the world’s most conflict prone country. It is estimated that there are more than 75,000 child soldiers in Burma, one of the highest in any country in the world.
Sub-Saharan Africa is at the epicenter of the child soldier phenomenon, especially Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Uganda.

Monday 4/17/06
Jeremy was so sweet yesterday. He woke up early to hide the 10 eggs we had in the fridge and made me breakfast while I looked for them. It was so unexpected—no one has ever done that for me before! We went to his mom's and made food, got overwhelmed by the squawling, screeching B brood, and ate way too much damn food.
I’m cataloging Reproductive Technologies and the Law by Judith Daar. Among childless women [in the U.S.] ages 35 to 44, 21 percent had received infertility services at some time in their lives.
Infertility is higher among married couples where the wife is non-white. Infertility rates rise with age. The incidence of infertility is 4.4% among women 15-24 years, 6.6% among women 25-34 years and 8.0% among women 35-44.
It deals with all sorts of interesting topics from gender selection, in vitro fertilization and the rights of the parents, postmortem reproductions assisted reproductive technologies (egg or sperm retrieval after death) and the questions of inheritance laws and legal rights, embryonic stem cell research and cloning.
“It is estimated that there are nearly 400,000 embryos in the United States. Approximately 4% of these embryos, or 16,000, remain in storage because the facility lacks specific instructions from the progenitors as to their disposition.”
I also learned that the ads that I see in the paper for lucrative sperm donations is a big ole myth. “Donors are paid around $75 per specimen, up to a maximum of $900 per month. Donors are asked to provide an average of 2 to 3 specimens per week for a period of 12 to 18 months. Donors must abstain from sex for 48 hours prior to the time of donation. Donors must undergo quarterly blood draws to be tested for various infectious diseases. Money earned via sperm donation is reported to the IRS.” Also, “California Cryobank reports that only about 5% of the men who apply to become sperm donors are ultimately accepted into the program. The screening process includes laboratory analysis of the applicant’s sperm and blood, an extensive review of family and medical history, genetic screening, physical examination, and the completion of a donor profile for prospective recipients to review. Applicants are rejected for a host of reasons, including a family history of diabetes, current use of certain anti-depression medications, and height (generally donors must be at least 5’9” to qualify).”