Thursday

I returned home yesterday from Lib Con 08. It may take me a few days to tell about everything that happened. The flight was uneventful (always a good thing) and we arrived at our hotel in Orlando on Thursday afternoon. That evening we (meaning Mr. Phillips, Vivian, Monica, and myself) attended the opening meeting of the conference, which entailed sitting through some rather pointless speeches, followed by an informal meet-and-greet. Monica and I spotted Ivan Large among the crowd and, after waiting a few minutes while he was occupied talking to other people, we introduced ourselves. He's a really friendly guy, not standoffish at all, and he was surprisingly easy and fun to talk to. He didn't act the least bit like a self-worshiping celebrity, but just like an ordinary person. Strangely enough, we hit it off so well with Ivan that the three of us went out for coffee afterward. During the course of our conversation, the topic of the classification contest came up, and at one point I mentioned that I had thought about entering my own idea into the contest. Monica and Ivan were both very curious as to what my idea was, so I told them.

"It's silly," I said.

"Tell us!" they said.

"All right. You have to understand, I'm half-joking. But only half."

"Are you gonna tell us, or not?"

"Okay. My system is exceedingly simple, but it's based on a lot of thought. Here it is: Everything... is unclassifiable."

Ivan regarded me with a frown of deep perplexity.

"I told you it's silly," I said.

"No, not at all!" said Ivan. "This is very intriguing! Please, tell me more... Why is everything unclassifiable?"

"Because everything exists with many different relations to many different things, making a specific classification impossible. So you can only classify things in the most superficial way. When you go deeper, you encounter this incredibly tangled web of relationships that prevents you from ever being able to fully describe how any two things, let alone everything in the world, is related to each other. Therefore, everything in my system can only be classified as X."

Ivan stared at me as though he were in shock. "Curtis!" he said at last. "You... are a genius!"

I snickered. "A genius? Come on."

"I'm serious! That is the most brilliant thing I have ever heard!"

"You really think so?"

"Absolutely! And you say you're not even a librarian?"

"No, just an apprentice, supposedly."

"Well, guess what, kid, I'm getting you into that contest."

"I don't know... I'd feel like I was betraying Mr. Phillips."

"Well, if his system really is as perfect as he thinks it is, then he has no reason to worry. Your idea deserves to be heard."

And so Ivan Large decided that he would persuade the judges to allow my crazy idea into the contest. When I went to bed in my hotel room that evening I felt a mixture of nervousness about what Mr. Phillips would think and excitement.