I received a letter from Bogusia and Lydka (last year’s IIIB) — all in Polish, but I’m grateful nonetheless. They didn’t tell me much about school except to say they’re busy. No mention of Adam. In many ways I think that’s best because I don’t really want to get upset after reading a letter. And any time I hear about Adam or think about him, I want to strangle him. A perfect stranger.

Things at DLG are getting annoying. In a sense, anyway. Rob is incredibly opinionated, and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s grating on my nerves simply because he’s to the point that he sees many of his pronouncements as fact. He read over an “Overview” that someone (Jim, I think) had written and said it was simply awful: bad idea, bad writing, bad everything. And he was a little vocal about it — embarrassingly so. Since he’s writing the overviews, I’ll tell him he should just discuss it with Kali.

And that’s another issue altogether as well. She’s just as opinionated, I think, and that can be a pain in the ass as well. Not too bad — she’s not as bad as Rob. Or even Adam — though Adam does listen to your point of view a bit more willingly in a sense. Back to Kali — she wasn’t pleased with the work that Peter did on the linking tool because it doesn’t spit out gloss and bio lists. That’s easily enough solved, and to be honest, I did describe that in my initial proposal to/discussion with Peter. He was talking to me about it, somewhat perturbed for having spent time on it that could have been spent on the professors’ site. Oh well — such is life. Miscommunication.

Anyway, I guess I’m discovering the nature of what Dad was always complaining about when he came home from work: stupid work-place bureaucracy. Everything is discussed, discussed, discussed — until I’m not sure I can talk about it anymore. Today, for example, in the editors’ meeting I didn’t say much of anything until we were discussing the biography issue. And that was settled with merciful ease: we’re going to rename it “important figures” and then we can dump anyone in there.

I can just hear Rob talking about how awful “important figures” sounds. “That’s so bad. It’s vague. It’s just vague.” If he says something, I’ll just tell him, “Rob, I’m not the one with whom you should be arguing your case — talk to Kali about it.” He is just really critical of almost everything. But, to his credit, a lot of the things he says are quite pertinent. It’s just his method that’s a little askew at times. At least that’s what often puts me off.