When I tell people that I work at a library, or that I want to be a librarian, I tend to get comments about how calm and quiet my work environment must be.  Many are even under the impression that I get to do my homework while I’m there.

I wish all those lovely people could have been at work with me tonight.

It was Monday night, and our understaffed circulation crew was desperately trying (and failing) to keep up with the influx of materials being returned.  This is largely due to the fact that our library has no limit on the amount of DVDs you can take out at any one time.  There were also two bins of books to be discharged.  So we were up to our eyeballs in materials and patrons for most of the night.
At some point in the melee, this shady-looking guy came up to the desk looking to sign up to use the computer (doing this is free, you simply need a valid county library card.)  But apparently something was wrong– I’m not quite sure what, I wasn’t waiting on him, thank God– and all of a sudden he’s yelling quite loudly at one of our desk staff.  She calls over another clerk, who apparently agreed with the first woman’s concerns, and the man continued to yell, drawing the stares of nearby patrons.  I’m not quite sure what happened after that, but not a half an hour later, a patron reported that the front door of our library, which is completely made of glass, had been smashed.  It was still intact, but there was a lovely spiderweb pattern decorating a large portion of it.

Were the two events related?  Possibly. I’ll say no more, other than who on earth breaks the door of a public library? And how did NOBODY see or hear this happen?

I’ve wanted to be a public librarian since I was 16, but nights like this make me wonder if that’s really what I want to do. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be the librarian on desk tonight. The librarian working was our branch manager, who is a man, and I can’t help thinking about what the situation would have been like if I, a young female librarian, had been forced to confront an irate shady-looking male patron. Occurences like this are blessedly rare, though less rare than you might think, but it makes me wonder if I’ve got the chops to make it in the “real world.” Could I stand up for myself in situations like that and be respected and get results? How many patrons would try to hit on me or make inappropriate remarks to me? (I know librarians that this happens to.) I guess I never thought a lot about it before tonight, but now it’s weighing on me. Will I get taken advantage of and harassed if I get my dream job? Maybe I’m being too dramatic, going all damsel-in-distress like this. But suddenly School Media is starting to draw my interest a little more…

“The problem with writing a story based on a pre-existing unsolved murder is, quite obviously, that the real murder has not been solved. Therefore, the author has to be not only brilliant enough to create a character that can solve mysteries, but brilliant enough to create a character that can solve mysteries that real people can’t.”

~An outtake from the first paper I’ve ever had to cut down to fit a page requirement, “A Modern Day Holmes”

I have gotten a tentative offer to do some work (for those of you who don’t know, “work” means “storytimes”) at another public library in our county system this summer.

People want me!!!!!!!

This came on the heels of a very fun albeit small pajama storytime tonight where I let my little kids strum my guitar and they payed attention very nicely and colored their alphabet sheets afterwards very intently for quite some time.  I am really surprised at how much the adults get into storytime too.  I have a ton of dads come with their kids, especially their boys (is this unusual or does this happen elsewhere with frequency too?), and two grandmas who come along with their daughter and granddaughter and always actively participate and tell me how much they love it.  So I’ve got 18months-60s covered) :-)

This is all a tad overwhelming and exciting and scary, but I know that there is nothing else I could ever imagine myself doing with my life, so I just keep trucking along through this strange multiple-personality life I will continue to live until May, when I can devote all of my time and energy to becoming the coolest purple-guitar-toting children’s librarian on the planet.

For those of you who are not cool and don’t already know this, Sara Ryan is the author of my favorite book, Empress of the World, and her new book, The Rules for Hearts, is coming out soon.  Go check out her website (sararyan.com), which is located under Blogroll on the right hand side of this blog, and check out all the exciting things she is doing to promote her new book!!  I personally am very excited about this, and she is an author worth checking out.  So click that mouse kids, and head over to her website!

I live on the campus of a very large public university in upstate/western New York with an enrollment of over 27,000 students.  The larger of the two campuses has, among other things, its own Starbucks and Burger King, 7 apartment complexes and 2 dorm conglomerations, and our own power grid and chilled water plant.  The point of these last couple of things is so that when the rest of the “city” (city my ass) of Amherst loses power, we won’t.  This proved very useful in the gigantic OctoberSnow of 2006, where we were the only people within a 20 mile radius with power.

 However, last night at around 10:30pm, the entire campus went pitch black.  Dorms, apartments, academic buildings, stoplights at the entrances to campus, everything went dark.  The weather was not particularly inclement (other than February-in-New York-cold), but the fact remained that the private power generator that was supposed to keep us toasty and well-lit while the rest of the world suffered had played a cruel trick on us, and now we were the only ones within a 20 mile radius who DIDN’T have power. 

In the words of my friend Matt, “at least you are able to appreciate the irony of it.”
Yes, yes I am.

Many blankets and a trip to Wegmans at 12:30am later, I was ready to hunker down in my increasingly chilly apartment for the night when low and behold, the power came back on.

No word yet, official or otherwise, what caused this little freakout of our power system, but that was one hell of a night that I don’t really want to repeat.  At least I’d had the presence of mind to charge my cell phone earlier that morning.

My default webpage when I open my browser is CNN, because I’d never know what was going on in the world if I wasn’t forced to look at it at least once a day.  I tried having Google as my default for a couple weeks as a freshmen, and found that I had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world.  So, back to CNN I went.

 Earlier this week as I skimmed the latest developments in the “OMG Astronauts are Humans too” scandal, (this was right before the OMG Anna Nicole Smith died scandal) I happened upon a *gasp* political post.  I am about the least political person you will ever meet, but it had the word “Catholic” in the title, so I had to click the link.  Because I don’t know how long this link will work, I am copying the article below for your consideration:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

“John Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots,” Donohue wrote in a statement. “He has no choice but to fire them immediately.”

The Edwards campaign declined to comment. McEwan and Marcotte did not respond to e-mails requesting a response.

Donohue cited posts that the women made on blogs in the past several months in which they criticized the pope and the church for its opposition to homosexuality, abortion and contraception, sometimes using profanity.

“The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics,” Marcotte wrote on the blog Pandagon on December 26, in an excerpt cited by Donohue.

Among the McEwan posts that Donohue listed was one she posted on February 21, 2006, on her site, Shakespeare’s Sister. She questioned what religious conservatives don’t understand about “keeping your noses out of our britches, our beds and our families?”

Edwards put both bloggers on his payroll last week as part of his outreach to liberal voters and activists on the Internet. Their decision to work for Edwards is part of a broader move among prominent bloggers to jobs with political campaigns and progressive organizations.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/02/07/edwards.bloggers.ap/index.html

Now, I’m as Catholic as the next guy, and probably even more so, but even I found this a tad ridic (my catchphrase for ridiculous.)  I’ll admit that I’m none too happy about what these women wrote, but where does the Catholic League get the power to censor it?  Is the Vatican funding Edwards’ campaign?  I may not like what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

 I could get into the whole “Christian America” thing more, but I don’t think now is the time.  I have a paper to work on about how Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle influenced Law and Order: Criminal Intent

I had a meeting with the School Media Department of the Library School yesterday.  I hadn’t been in this lady’s office for more than 5 minutes when, after a flurry of printing and writing and counting, she looked at me and said:

“When you are done with your MLS and your pedagogy requirements, you could be state-certified to teach music.”

 Excuse me??

That blindsided me in spectacular fashion and I was off my game for the rest of the 40 minutes I was in her office.  I could feel my eyes glazing over as I tried to stay focused.  I know I have a minor in Music Performance, but really.  NYS has a good reputation for its education.  How the hell is it that I can get certified to teach music by getting my MLS????

But hey, if its gonna be that easy, I’ll do it.  That’d be the icing on the cake. 

Obviously if I didn’t love little children I wouldn’t be wanting to spend the rest of my life working with them.  But I also do it without getting paid too.  At my local church I volunteer doing the Children’s Liturgy, which is where parents send their kids out of the main church during mass to go to a different room to learn about God and the like in a more age-appropriate way.  The hope is that they might actually understand something back with us.  Not surprisingly, I find I also understand more back with the 4-year-olds.

However, a diverse group of youngsters talking about God invariably leads to absolutely pricessless comments.  In the past I’ve gotten such ones as:

 Me: What are some differences between kids and adults?
Little Boy: Kids have hair and adults don’t!

This week led to a little gem about fear:

Me: Issiah must have been scared when the building started to shake
Little Boy: I’m not scared of anything!!
Little Girl: I’m not afraid of anything except fire-breathing dragons!

Those weren’t in the story, but that’s always good to know.

I’ll admit, I’ve never been an Angelina Jolie fan.  It wasn’t that I hated her, I just didn’t have much feeling about her one way or the other.  She had a tendency to be portrayed as “evil” in the media, particularly after the whole Brad Pitt thing, and I sort of accepted that stereotype of her without giving it much thought.

 Until this morning.

 I happened upon “Inside the Actors’ Studio” on Bravo this morning while I was channel surfing during a commerical break in my normal Sunday morning “While You Were Out” marathon.  I didn’t know what it was at first, other than it was Angelina Jolie sitting on a stage with this old guy, so I watched a bit of it.  And it completely changed my view of her.  She is very articulate and comes off as very intelligent (I don’t know her personally, so I can’t say for sure that she is smart, but). She is very much her own person, and doesn’t understand why people make as much of a deal about things in her life as they do.  I found myself very easily able to relate her when she was talking.  It was especially touching to watch her talk about Maddox, and her original fears about being a mother.

 The two things I really liked hearing her talk about were self-injury and sexuality.  It turns out that she was a cutter when she was younger, like myself.  The host guy approached the subject very carefully, but when Angelina figured out where he was headed with it, she said “Do you really want me to get into this?  Because I can.” in a very straightforward way.  The host replied “I think our students would like to hear about it,” and Angelina went into the topic very gracefully and spoke about it very objectively.  I was impressed, because the way that she handled it is the way that more people need to approach such subjects.  She also fielded the questions about her sexuality and her relationship with Foxfire co-star Jenny Shimizu gracefully and very frankly.  Again, if only everyone could treat such subjects with such class and respect, the world would be a wonderful place. 

 Overall, it was a wonderful experience to watch this show and I now have a whole new perspective on Angelina Jolie and would like to follow her career a little more closely.

And that’s that :-)

I did it, I did it, I did it.

I joined wordpress.

The peer pressure to be cool like the people at WPL is unbelievable.