miles of aisles

at this very moment, i am experiencing my first visit to my new library. a university library. upon entering, my sense of smellmemory overtook me. smells just like the newer library at my undergrad alma mater (unfortunately, nothing can compare or come close to the olfactory overload one experiences in the hundred year old library at lehigh). i've yet to wander through the stacks here, but my visit with fishfry yesterday has me psyched. soon, i too will be able to check out a fat pile of books just like hers upon her return from the first day of school.

i did wander through the basement of the campus bookstore right now. many of the shelves are still empty, with only little orange placeholders to announce the impending paper chase. but by the divine/libraryine intervention, just the right ones were there. and so my recent freakout of not finding any graduate classes interesting in the course catalog is now solved - all it took was a stroll through the aisles, and some books sang out to me: Living with the Earth; City Builders: Property, Politics and Planning; Great Thirst: Californians and Water, A History. Each of these books for a different class - epidemology, sociology, and that subject i apparently cannot escape, civil engineering. so the solution arrives in book form, huzzah.

in my present location, and after reading with reckless abandon this summer, and the second to last book i finished being focused on books (the name of the rose), i am now wondering in a psuedo academic, pre-re-entry into school sort of way, about how i am bound to books. the books themselves, not just their contents. sure, there's the smells and the touch of an embossed cover and that joyous greedy hoarding feeling, but there's more. for it's not only the answer of what classes to take that they offer me. but they provide also, i am discovering, an amorous keystone. and, as i have known since childhood, a natural laxative. ahh, if u.c. were not about to overtake c.u., this would be a study for the fall semester of my own personal curriculum, indeed.