reamplified to rock

Perspective.

Tim and I just got back from the grocery store. I was bitching about how much I hate New Year’s Eve and how depressing I find it, and Tim was doing his usual “don’t be sad” that he always does whenever I am sad about something. (It is very nice and thoughtful but it usually doesn’t work.)

Then I saw a middle-aged (read: much older than me, probably around 50) woman with a case of Natty Light in her cart, and I felt a whole lot better. 2009 hasn’t exactly been an awesome year, but at least I’m not spending New Year’s Eve drinking shitty beer.

Based on the things people were buying, I’m glad I’m not going to a party. The woman ahead of us in the checkout line had six bags of Tostitos and a package of Azteca flour tortillas. The woman behind us had some cheap champagne, ice, and “Stoned Wheat Crackers.” We had:

• toilet paper
• cream cheese
• four cans condensed cream of chicken soup
• organic milk
• heat and eat cheese fondue
• fancypants sourdough bread
• crescent rolls
• green grapes
• two heads of garlic
• a candy thermometer
• flour
• sugar

NOW WHICH PARTY WOULD YOU WANT TO GO TO? Either we’re going to be doing some weird shit with food, or we’re having cheese fondue for dinner tonight and then Tim is making chicken roll-ups tomorrow night.

—

In completely unrelated news, I’ve decided that I’m going to write more in 2010. I will probably not be posting the things I write here. The things I write will probably be at sticksandtomes.com. I know it says that it is a knitting blog, but it won’t be, I promise. (Although there may be some knitting content here and there.)

Who died?

My reaction to hearing multiple songs in a row on classic rock stations is, inevitably, “who died?” This reaction does not apply to Led Zeppelin songs (since many classic rock stations like to do a “Get the Led Out” block at some point during the day) or on three-day weekends like Memorial Day or Labor Day, which are always set aside for either “Rock Blocks” or some kind of all-time Top 500 countdown of the most rockingest rock songs ever.

Also, Twitter is down, so I’m wondering what crisis has befallen the planet to cause “too many tweets!” Did someone die? Did something tragic happen? The only thing going on here in my office is that the sun is reflecting off the windows of the Huntington Towers and RIGHT INTO MY EYES, and I am too lazy to get up and close the blinds.

Beardy McWeirdy.

I’m really glad that I was born in 1974 and not 1984, because the grizzly Mountain Man beard trend that seems to be all the rage among young hipster males thoroughly disgusts me. If I had been born in 1984, I would have ended up dating frat boys-turned-accountants, or becoming some kind of asexual secular nun or something, because the thought of putting my face near one of those nasty, pube-like masses of ungroomed face-fur makes me want to hurl.

Is the ungroomed, nasty 70s look some kind of response to emo overgrooming? Were the hipsters of today greatly inspired by Roald Dahl’s children’s book The Twits? (Thanks to that book, I can’t look at a grizzled beard without imagining all manner of filth caught in it. Moldy cheese ahoy!)

I am not saying that I never dated men with unfortunate facial hair. The 1990s were full of unfortunate facial hair. But at least they kept it short enough that food wouldn’t get caught in it, and their wardrobe didn’t consist of an amalgam of the most awful fashion trends of the last thirty-five years.

Here is an example of what I am talking about: [gross Parisian hipster knitter].

Folks, this shit was ugly the first time around. There’s nothing interesting about purposely looking as hideous as possible. Put down the 80s-inspired giant plastic-framed sunglasses and pick up a damn razor.

Also, get off my lawn.

A day in the life of a librarian.

An asshole that I once dated used to tell me, “you have to make your own fun.” Usually he would trot that one out when I was hanging around with his douchenozzle friends, who were inevitably playing darts or snorting coke—two pasttimes that are not high on my list of enjoyable things to do. You can hurt someone playing darts, and coke is for skinny girls with shiny, cameltoe-inducing  leggings, bad skin, and cold sores. But in my advanced age, thirteen years later, I realize that maybe there’s something there, and I now make my own fun while at work in the following ways:

1. Mocking the head of maintenance’s love of the Chicago Cubs. Wait until September? Yeah, I’m sure they will blow their lead by then. CUBS does stand for Completely Useless By September. GOAT! GOAT! GOAT!

2. Mocking people who make stupid errors in OCLC WorldCat records. It’s so easy when you can just hover your mouse pointer over the 040 field and see who’s who. This is one of the choicest bits of wisdom I pass on to my cataloging students every semester: how to mock people for making nasty cataloging errors.

I edited a record on OCLC this morning and replaced it, due to a note that said “Illustration is an advertisment.” FYI, library with OCLC symbol ON8, per AACR 2.5C1, you should “disregard illustrated title pages and minor illustrations.” That means advertisements. Don’t make me drive up there to Joliet and smack you with my LCRI binder (or ask you, in the rudest possible way, “WHO TAUGHT YOU CATALOGING, ANYWAY? AND DID YOU LEARN ANYTHING?”).

3. Making sure that any hot tickets that I send to Technology or Maintenance are amusing. Ex:

customer reporter a mold smell in the lobby. I cannot smell it, but someone with better knowledge of mold smells than myself might want to come over and take a whiff.

I didn’t smell mold that day, only burnt bagels from the cafe.

Wow, that’s ludicrous.

I just returned from a lunch celebrating a library employee’s 40th anniversary of employment, which was lovely. Not so lovely was being told by another library employee that there is some chatter somewhere online (I don’t know where) that I am the Annoyed Librarian.

Let me make this abundantly clear: while the “twopointopian” crowd irritates me at times, I own my opinions about them and all other library-related topics, even when it gets me in trouble. (Which it has.) In case you have forgotten, I work at a public library. Also, I am a better writer than the Annoyed Librarian, I wouldn’t put up with the morons who comment on her blog regularly, I have much less of a drinking problem, and I’d much rather have a Manhattan than a martini. So if you see a cranky-yet-well-written blog by a public librarian named Nanette who likes Manhattans, you can be assured that it is written by ME.

The only anonymous/pseudonymous blog I have considered starting is called “Scholarly Communications is Boring,” and I made up that title to taunt my husband, who works for an institutional repository. However, I am too bored by scholarly communications to bother blogging about how boring it is. If you would like to use that title, by all means, go right ahead.

If you know where this chatter is going on, please let me know so I can virtually smack the shit out of people. Or cut them.

My automatic response to any service that claims to provide people with a Netflix-style book rental service is to make fun of it. Unless you don’t have a public library in your area, why would you subscribe to something like this? It also amuses me that the URL is “booksfree.com,” yet you’re PAYING for the service, which means that, uh, it’s not free.

Anyhow, I was looking at their “Compare our Value!” page, and I found a few things that really entertained me. Yes, there’s stuff that this service has that libraries do not have. I can’t think of a public library that has found a viable model for mailing books to patrons, and home delivery tends to be restricted to the homebound. We can’t guarantee that any book you might ever want is in stock at the exact moment that you want it, but I think the rise of electronic resources could change that over the next several years. Also, we don’t offer gift cards, but folks, it’s a public library, so you kind of prepaid for the service with your tax dollars, no?

My favorites, though are the following:

Booksfree insists that they are the only outlet for books that won’t guilt-trip you for not finishing a book. Seriously. It says “No Guilt for not Finishing Books You did not Like” (capitalization theirs). Last time I checked, we weren’t in the habit of guilt-tripping anyone over a book they didn’t finish. Maybe I should start on my next Welcome Desk shift. Here are some sample scripts that you could use in your own library:

• “What do you mean, you couldn’t finish that James Patterson book? Shame on you! This means that you cannot check out any of the six new books that he plans on releasing this month!”
• “You didn’t make it to the end of Infinte Jest? Hand over your intellectual hipster credentials, posthaste! No irony for you!”
• “I cannot accept that you think [insert book title here] sucked. Finish it, or you’re grounded for a week!”

They also state that libraries do not have a “Large Selection of Out-of-Print Titles.” Yes, because we immediately discard everything in our collections that is out of print! That is why our collections are so tiny. We also don’t offer “Personalized Recommendations.” I guess this is because library staff are too busy guilt-tripping all those people who didn’t finish the books they checked out. Libraries also are not an “Interactive Community of Avid Readers.” We’re working on that. I think we’re pretty good with community, and avid readers tend to like us a lot.

I’m fine with for-profit companies who want to compete with public libraries. I think it makes us better. It keeps us on our toes. It reminds us that we’re still relevant, because if we were irrelevant, why would someone try to make money doing what we do? But Booksfree, if you want to compete with us and win, you need to get your facts straight. And by the way, touting your gigantic selection of bestsellers and popular titles when you only circulate paperback books is no way to compete with the mighty public library. We have the newest books by David Baldacci, Stephenie Meyer, and Jodi Picoult; you don’t.

Dung beetles.

I am listening to a podcast of Fresh Air that is all about dung beetles. This reminds me of a story:

My mother did not like her mother-in-law, for reasons too complex, personal, and chock-full-o’-longstanding family drama to go into here. So when the U.S. Postal Service, as part of their stamp series on habitats of the U.S., released a stamp featuring a dung beetle, my mother stockpiled them and put them on EVERY CARD she sent to my grandma over a period of about four years.

Christmas? Festive dung beetle.

Birthday? Festive dung beetle.

Mother’s Day? Festive dung beetle.

A dung beetle is festive for all occasions!

Who’s missing from your public library?

Sometime today, a co-worker is planning to stop by my office to talk to me about using technology to bring teens into the library, particularly Facebook and Twitter. I will be completely honest here: I don’t know the first thing about teens and/or what technology they use. I generally try to avoid teens. I’m glad there are people who work in libraries who are interested in and enthusiastic about working with teens. We need them. But I am not one of them.

I admit, I don’t see a lot of teens going crazy over Facebook. These days, it seems to be adults who are spending hours of their time oversharing the gory details of their personal lives. While I always love a good trainwreck, it seems like there are some folks on Facebook (mainly people I vaguely knew in high school who friended me, most likely out of morbid curiosity) who are unaware of personal boundaries. The whole “Facebook-as-support-system” phenomenon is starting to creep me out. Also, I cannot think of very many 38-year-olds, male or female, whose provocatively-posed photographs I wish to see on a social networking website. CUT IT OUT. And put those away!

As for Twitter, I’m an unrepentant addict, and while I won’t overshare the details of my personal life or my food choices (other than my love for Taco Loco and the occasional description of a cooking coup or two) I do crack wise and discuss work on occasion. But I don’t see a lot of teens hanging out on Twitter. Part of that is certainly my personal network—as an adult in my mid-30s, I don’t have any reason to be following teens or to have teens following me—but I have a feeling that Twitter appeals more to older oversharers rather than the younger set.

One thing that bothers me about the constant courting of teens in the library is that there are other audiences who are not using public libraries. Ever. I see teens in here all the time. This place is crawling with them on any school day between 2:30 and 5. They’re here on the weekends. There was a group of homeschoolers here the other morning. They have their own room, their own collections, their own programming. And I agree that these things are necessary and important, and I’m not knocking it, but do we really need yet another sparkly new initiative to bring them into the library? I’m not so sure about that.

Teens are frequently described as “our future voters and library supporters,” which is true, but there are current voters and potential library supporters who don’t use the library. The particular group I’m thinking of is adults in their 20s and 30s who do not have children. Children tend to bring people back to the library. We have storytimes and summer reading and all kinds of programming for them. Your average toddler (or even your above- or below-average toddler) can’t bring himself in to the library on his own. Parental intervention is required, and this brings parents back in to the library. But what about those of us who do not have children? Most “adult” library programming is aimed at senior citizens. Book discussion groups tend to attract women in their 40s and beyond. The lectures we have here, while interesting, don’t seem to attract the non-AARP crowd.

These adults are ALREADY able to vote. They ALREADY have a voice in our communities. Many of them are dynamic and are contributing great things to our local cultures. Why aren’t we doing more to attract them to our public libraries?

Here’s my story: I grew up in public libraries. Literally. My mom was on the local library board until she got a job at the library. I did summer reading. I went to storytime. I read voraciously. I volunteered at the library, then got a summer job at the library. I worked at my university library.

Then, when I was in my early 20s, I stopped using the library. My mom still worked there, I still visited her at work, but I didn’t USE the library. I didn’t check out materials. I went to bookstores instead. My overstuffed bookshelves demonstrate how little I used the library for a period of about ten years. Yes, my hometown library was small, but I could have easily acquired just about anything I wanted to read, watch, or listen to via interlibrary loan. But I didn’t, and it’s because I wasn’t sure what was there for me.

If someone like me, who grew up in libraries, can lose interest in public libraries, then there are many, many others as well. And most of them do not come back to public libraries like I did. Most of them continue assuming that public libraries are Not For Them, that public libraries are for toddlers and senior citizens and teens and people without computers and high-speed internet in their homes, but Not For Them.

I truly believe that this is our great untapped audience, yet very few libraries are making concerted efforts to bring them back into the library. Oak Park Public Library has the popular Genre X group (and Mandy and Monica are doing a fantastic job with it). But what else is out there? What are you doing? Do you think we’re dropping the ball with this audience as well?

(I assure you, this isn’t going to turn into some overearnest library blog, but sometimes I’ve just got to let it blurt, y’know? Now back to our regulary-scheduled pettiness, snarkiness, and making fun of stuff.)

The Maltese Cow!

So my workplace is having a “Big Read” program, and The Maltese Falcon is the chosen book. I read The Maltese Falcon in college and didn’t much like it, but I don’t like detective fiction in general. I can never manage to solve the mystery before the detective, and that makes me feel like I don’t pay enough attention when I’m reading.

Anyhow, The Maltese Falcon always reminds me of a book-and-cassette that my younger brother had when he was young. It was called The Maltese Cow, and it was an A-Team read-along storybook and cassette. We listened to it nonstop. Apparently, it was based on an episode of The A-Team, a fact that I had never realized since the only person in our household who really watched The A-Team was my dad. The rest of us just thought Mr. T was really cool and funny.

The lines I remember from The Maltese Cow are from the ending. I apologize for the spoiler, but there’s just no way around it:

Murdock: The Maltese Cow! I knew it! Just like in my fantasy!

B. A. Baracas (known to all as Mr. T): I gotta have a crazy man with me who talks about cows!