True Confessions

1. I don't really know how to cook chicken.  We don't eat a ton of meat and when we do, we usually throw it in the crockpot or chop it up and put it in a casserole or something, so when a recipe tells me (as the one for dinner tonight is) to season chicken and cook until done, I honestly feel a bit nervous.
2. I'm not a Downton Abbey fan.  I know I should love it but I don't.  I didn't watch the last few episodes of the first season and I completely skipped the second season and the Christmas special.

Rage Against the (Corporate) Machine

I finished my bookshop job last week. It was a temporary position for the holidays and I did not take up the shop's offer to continue working in January. I've never worked in retail before and I hope to never work in retail again. After only 2 days, I came home and announced to Steve that I felt oppressed by the corporate machine. Did you know that the corporate office dictates which books face out on the shelves? For some reason that strikes me in exactly the wrong way. It makes my skin itch. It makes my skin itch even more than the fact that employees are trained in the correct way to make small talk with customers, a way that encourages the buying of books.

I prefer libraries to bookshops. When I heard customers speak to co-workers about e-books and how much it would cost to download titles, I wanted to hustle the customers outside into a side alley and whisper to them that they should go download the books for free at their local libraries. And while libraries are always making noises about going to a more bookstore-like system of shelving books, I must confess that I find the bookstore system to be rubbish. No one knows exactly where the books are at any time. They could be in so many places. I was shelving books one night and asked what I should do when there's no room on the shelf. Another bookseller who was also struggling to fit a title in the most logical place said, "I don't know. Just give up and go home." I actually needed an answer but no one was forthcoming, so I figured that was close enough to saying, "Just stick it anywhere," which I did. Under a display table of a different topic. I actually missed the Dewey Decimal System in that moment. And having pages to shelve books for me.

Keep your fingers crossed that my next job in Scotland will be better.

My Mother is Full of Surprises

One night last week after my sister's kids had been put to bed, my mom, my sister, and I were up talking (and busting out the treats, which I always KNEW happened after I went to bed as a child). My sister was saying how it would have been impossible for her to marry someone whose favorite movie was something like Legally Blonde.

MBC: Yeah, well, you have to cut people slack on things like that, though, because we all have our guilty media pleasures. Like, you know, maybe some of us find ourselves unexpectedly fond of, you know, maybe, The O.C.

Mom: That's right. Or Judge Judy.

MBC and Sister: the sound of heads whipping around to stare

MBC: You watch Judge Judy?

Sister: You like Judge Judy?

Mom: I want to be Judge Judy.

MBC and Sister: open-mouthed staring

Mom: Yep, Judge Judy just lays down the law. Tells it like it is. Sets everybody straight.

Wow. True confession.

Dem Bones Dem Bones

Last week I read Laurie Halse Anderson's new book Wintergirls. Anderson's book Speak is one of my favorite books of all time, and I think Wintergirls is the best thing she's written in the intervening 10 years. HOWEVER, Wintergirls is about anorexia and anorexia creeps. me. out. If I think too hard about elbows or ankles (they're so boney), it reminds me of anorexia, and I feel disturbed. In college I took a yoga class, and when we had to lie on our backs with our hands on our stomachs and relax, sometimes I couldn't, because my elbows were touching the mat and making me think about teenagers starving themselves to death. Even writing about elbows right now is distressing me. Ever since reading Wintergirls, I've had difficulty falling asleep at night. I'm very aware of my bones. Usually if I can't sleep, I lie on my stomach and scoot down until I can hook my feet over the end of the bed, but now when I do that, I feel all of my ribs touching the mattress. The other night I was trying to distract myself from bone thoughts, and told myself, Sing a song, sing a song and what did my enterprising little mind come up with? The toe bone's connected to the foot bone, the foot bone's connected to the ankle bone . . .

[Late additon: I just read this poem by Laurie Halse Anderson about Speak in VOYA, a ya review source. This video is Anderson reading it.]

Sometimes I'm a Bad Librarian

Today a little boy (maybe 8-years-old) came to the reference desk and asked for Star Wars Something. He had a speech impediment, so he couldn't pronounce the letter R and I could NOT understand the last word he was saying. After asking him to repeat himself a couple of times, I told him that I wasn't certain what he needed and asked him to describe it (I was hoping more words would equal more comprehension). He did not feel inclined to acquiesce to my request. He left the desk a little huffily and I heard him tell the kid he was with, YOU ask her.

This reminded me of a time when I was a very bad librarian. Very bad. A man with many disabilities came to the desk to ask about some materials. Because of his disabilities, the man was almost impossible to understand. He asked me about two books. One was a religious book and one was something that sounded to me like Happy Birthday Four. I had to ask the man to repeat himself several times before I realized what the first book was and when I found it in the catalog, the book was checked out. I offered to place a hold on the book, but the man declined my offer. Then he asked me again about Happy Birthday Four. I really had no idea what he was requesting and I didn't want to keep asking him to repeat himself, so, true confession, I told the man that we owned the book but it was checked out. I was counting on him to say that he didn't want to place a hold, because that's what he'd done with the previous book. But, no! My plan failed. He wanted to hold Happy Birthday Four. So I pretended to reserve it for him. I. Pretended. To Reserve It For Him. That's pretty bad service, my friends. EXCEPT that I spent the next half hour racking my brain for a book that might sound like Happy Birthday Four and finally came up with Harry Potter 4. And I placed the man on hold for Harry Potter 4. And I hope that's what he wanted. And if it wasn't, someone else dealt with it, because the man and I never spoke again. True Story.

True Confession

When I was growing up, the TV show Beverly Hills 90210 was hugely popular. I never saw a single episode. It's not really my thing. The high drama of beautiful, rich, alcoholic teenagers (portrayed by 20-somethings) doesn't interest me. (Ugly teenagers are a different matter entirely.) I've also never seen episodes of Dawson's Creek, The O.C., or Party of Five. Or at least I hadn't until Friday. Someone donated seasons of The O.C. and Dawson's Creek to the Library, and my co-worker who does our A/V collection development offered to send me home with them, because, well, I'm not sure why she offered them to me. She usually places literary adaptations, foreign films, and romantic comedies set in London in my hands. I accepted her offer of The O.C., though, because Adam Brody reminds me of Dexter in Sarah Dessen's novel This Lullaby, and Dexter is one of my favorite fictional characters.

It was my weekend to supervise the library, so I got home on Friday night around 9:30 and needed to be back at work in less than 12 hours. Closing the library is always a little stressful, because no one wants to leave. (When I'm really stressed out--about anything, not just work--I dream that I'm trying to close the library, but the patrons won't leave and people keep entering the building and the phones are disconnected so I can't call for help.) By the time I get home, I'm usually a little grumpy, because I've practically had to wrench magazines out of patrons' hands or drag them from their computer terminals and personally escort them out the door while they call out, Hey, are those tax forms? Do you have any movies set in China? I just remembered I need to grab a book for my wife. I just need to check one quick thing in the atlas. Don't make me gooooo! The public displeases me when the library is closing. So, I'm saying that when I got home I needed to unwind a little.

So I watched The O.C. Until 3:00 a.m. At first I disliked it. I kept thinking that in all my years working with the incarcerated (over 5), I've never seen such an attractive and polite and well-spoken juvenile offender as Ryan Atwood (played by Ben McKenzie). But Ben McKenzie's actually a good actor. And kind of dreamy (he's so totally making the imaginary boyfriend list). And Adam Brody still reminds me of Dexter. And (I'm so embarrassed) I started to be deeply interested in the plot.

I feel like I need to go read some Foucault or Nietzsche to counteract the pejorative effects of immersing myself in pretty people programming. But first I have to finish watching every. single. episode. And the commentaries. And all the bonus features. It's like a sickness.