Archive for May, 2006

What a tangled web the web weaves (good grief)

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

I am still amazed, although I probably shouldn’t be anymore. It is so easy to get trapped in the blog world. Skipping from blog to blog, reading random people’s random thoughts and next thing you know, its midnight, you realize that you’re older than you’ve ever been and you have no idea how you got to a blog written by a crack whore (do crack whores really keep blogs, do you think?)

Actually I found a couple neat blogs. One from the YA librarian from Webster, one from a local DJ/Librarian and one from some person that “claims she’s a nice person“. Of course, sometimes I go onto myspace and whole days could go by before I realized what was happening.

One really neat blog that I’ve been trying to keep up with is my friend Clorida’s. She’s living in India for three months and trying to find some way of using her studies in social work. She’s really intelligent and easy to talk to. She gets sleepy between 8:00 – 9:00 pm. She really likes helping the less fortunate, partly because she’d been through a lot when she was a kid but mostly because she’s a really good caring person. I really can’t speak more highly of her.

I think it’s really interesting to point out that I’m also friends with her sister, and they are like night and day. They are SO completely different. There are a couple of things that are the same: 1) they are the truest friends you’ll ever have and 2) they CANNOT under any circumstances live together. We lived in a house for a year, and while for the most part it was a lot of fun, I realized that their is NO way that they should EVER live together. They got on each other’s nerves all the time. Separately, they are the most wonderful people I know, but when they get together for any length of time. Yee Gods. Trouble comes a brewing. I think that they most put off conflicting pheramones or something. I really have no idea how to explain it.

Well, its way past my bed time and Jeff wants me to move to my side of the bed. So I bid farwell to anyone that’s reading. Have a good night and don’t let the bed bugs or the head lice bite!

A dream…

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

**Update** This post was started on May 29, 2006

I really want to write. I’ve always know this. I was going to get a creative writing degree in college, and was discouraged from doing so (by my parents of course) so I went into journalism, which I didn’t like and changed to English Lit, which was equally, if not more useless. Although the English professors at Geneseo are really neat, so far, I have not had a chance to make use of my knowledge in Elizabethian and Jacobean drama. If you care, here is a list of the English courses I took while at Geneseo:

18th Century British Literature
American Voices: African-American Migration Narrative
Drama: Elizabethan & Jacobean
Exploring the Renaissance
Major Author: Momaday & Silko
Modern American Literature
The Practice of Criticism
Senior Seminar: Sentiment & Scandal
Shakespeare I

I actually have a whole list of my undergrad courses here and my grad courses here.
So far the only really useful course was the Children’s Lit course I took at MCC. Of course it was fun taking weird courses like the Sentiment and Scandal course, in which we read books like Pride and Prejudice and one of the Marquis de Sade’s books. (I’ll have to look at my books to remember which one).

**Update #2** Around here written around May 30, 2006

What renewed my interest in writing were two things:
a BBC original movie about Shakespeare
and an interview in the School Library Journal with the author Lynne Rae Perkins.

I just think that its great to have such an intensity for something. I think I’m pretty intense about being a librarian, but sometimes I don’t get much personal satisfaction from it.

**Update #3** Here is what I actually wrote today, May 31, 2006. My god, is it almost June already?

Great Honk! It’s taken me three days to write this post (I bet you can’t guess why). I have absolutely no idea how I’d write a book.

Oh well, I better just finish this thing (finally) why Jack manages to entertain himself. Damn-it! Already into stuff he should’nt be.

Okay, really quickly. One of the blogs I read, by Patty Uttaro, the director of one of our local public libraries has put forth a challenge (or rather, another librarian blog she reads has)… to read as many books between June 16 – 18 that we can. After that we talk about each one on our own blog. She calls it the 48 Hour Book Challenge. I call it well-nigh a damn miracle if I could even read one book! But anyway, I accept the challenge, and even if I read nothing but children’s books, its still more than I’ve read recently. Plus I really need to get back to reading again.

In closing, I’d better go. Somehow Jack found a tampon and decided that he should give it to me as a gift. What a sweet boy… or something. (I do love him. I just need to find that patience that seems to be missing right now.)

terrible mommy

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

I feel like a horrible mother. I don’t keep track of each time a tooth breaks through, when he starts eating a new food, when he sat up by himself or when he first laughed. I haven’t had any professional pictures taken (and he’s almost 14 months) or taken a lot of videos. I love him so much, but when he gets older, I’m sure he’ll ask why I didn’t keep track of all that information… well, on the otherhand, maybe he won’t, he is a guy after all.

Every day is a new day that is just so much fun now that he’s around. I think I look forward to getting up a lot more. I look in his face and I feel so good, like everything is at peace with the world. What a wonderful feeling.

Still. I can’t even remember if we took pictures at his first birthday, or the first time he unwrapped a present or ate a piece of chocolate cake… hmm, I’m pretty sure Jeff wouldn’t allow that. Jeff’s a little bit of a neat freak when it comes to Jack. The rest of the house could go to pot… which it does somewhat. Not totally. I’m not a complete mess, but anyone who has seen Jeff and I, knows that we aren’t Mr. and Mrs. SQUEEKY Clean. We probably are more likely to resemble… Sorta Clean Gene. Okay so I have no idea what I’m going on about, but we are not the cleanest people in the world.

One trouble with not being neurotically clean is that we have a vomitty cat who vomits in places that we can’t see. Now we have little bugs everywhere. I think that I may kill my cat… okay I probably won’t kill my cat, but I’d like to. We have her on drugs, food that costs more that the food I eat, and she drinks water out of a little fountain. And yet, still she vomits. And I want to kill her.

Ah well. What can we do.

BTW, I really wish that I had more times to read books. What good is a librarian that has no time to read books?

I NEED TO READ!

I couldn’t remember the lyrics to the Looney Tunes cartoon with the frog that was found in a box. I thought that the lyrics were something like good night or good bye, so that they would be appropriate now, but then I found out that the lyrics are HELLO. Damn. Well, I used them anyway.

Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) ma baby, Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) Ma honey, Hello! (GOOD NIGHT) ma ragtime gal.

So GOOD NIGHT!

I’m pissed.

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

My husband has a discussion board, and somehow, one thing led to another and they ended up talking salaries. Oh! I know. I think that some union employees in Delphi were complaining because the company wanted to decrease their wages (if it was me, I think I’d want to complain too) from $27 an hour to $16.50 an hour. Right now, I make about $16.50 an hour (or about $31,000 a year). I found an article that stated that in 1998, in a medium sized library, a beginning librarian made an average of 28,767 a year. That means that 8 years later, I’m only making about $3000 more a year than those librarians.

I try not to be upset about this.

I try telling myself that its only money and that when we die that we can’t take it with us.
I try reminding myself that I like working with kids and teens and the rest of the public (sometimes).
I try reminding myself that its a worthy cause to be a strong advocate on behalf of the youth in my town.
I think about when the kids are excited because I found them a book they had never heard of but were excited to read.
I think about when the kids are *so* excited to shake their wiggles out at storytime that they can’t stand still.
I think about when the kids want to give me a hug because they like having me around.

I *really* do try and remind myself of all of these things.

And then…

I think of the teens getting in my face and calling me a fucking bitch.
I think about the guy who hovers and won’t leave you alone.
I think of the old guy who leaves boogers on his books and asks you to put holds on fifty things and changes his mind a couple of days later and the stuff has already come, and he doesn’t want to pay the fees.
I think of the people that think I’m personally out to get them when I tell them:
*turn off your cell phone
*your children need to stop climbing on the shelves or running through the aisle
*you can’t use the internet and type a paper at the same time
*you have to pay for that print out even though you didn’t mean for 20 more pages to  come out of the printer (usually they run out of the library)
*I’m sorry I don’t know which book you are talking about that has the blue cover that is about this thick (shows with fingers extended) is about some kind of war and has the word “the” in the title
I  think of all the programming that I have to do because not only can’t they afford to pay me well, they can’t afford to hire another librarian to do either teens or children’s services, because I do both.
I think about how I have four story times, yet people complain because we don’t have as many story times as *that* library. Then, after preparing for those storytimes, only one person shows up, or sometimes none, and everyone who signed up doesn’t bother letting me know if they’re sick or dead.
I think about how people complain because we don’t have enough general programming, enough educational programs, or we show too many movies. Then I plan a poetry program and NO ONE shows up.
Alright, so I know that I shouldn’t be jealous of Jeff’s friends who are making $55,000 – $65,000 or more. I know that I should accept the fact the librarians are typically women, and women usually make less than men. I should be glad that in the next 20 years or so my undergrad and grad loans will finally be paid off. I should be glad to have a job at all! But that doesn’t make it any easier to know that a manager at Wilson Farms makes about $2.00 an hour more than I do. I’m greatful to have these people here, but what kind of message are people trying to send. I shouldn’t both having gotten a 6 year college degree when I can go to Wilson Farms with a high school diploma and make more money.

This F’ing SUCKS!…. Nevermind the fact that I drive past three other libraries on the way to get to my library.

I guess its just because I’m tired from working hard. I just can’t understand it.

Okay, I just found this article, that has updated median salaries.

Here are some of the results:
Librarians who do not supervise, make an average of $47,246
Beginning librarians make an average of $36,486

I’d say that I’m below that by quite a bit.

 
   

Cool quote of the year (1986 that is)

Monday, May 15th, 2006

“I can bear no longer! Goblin King! Goblin King! Wherever you may be take this child of mine far away from me! ” – Sarah
Just had to type this down somewhere. Its a quote from my favorite movie in all the world, Labyrinth.
If you haven’t seen it, you need to. David Bowie with big hair and tight tight pants… priceless!