Teaching Cats Skills

The cats in this house are not pulling their weight, and that is why, sometimes, when AJ's not home, the cats and I have special Skill School. Max likes to sit very close to me when I'm on the floor. I was lying face down on the carpet recently, while Max was sitting next to my head, completely unconcerned with my prone position, and I decided Max needed to be taught to fetch help if he found me in this position again because I had collapsed. Max is already great at crying, so he just needs to learn to operate my cell phone or to open the front door and rouse the neighbors. So far, he's very bad at both skills. Sasha may have to be the brains of the operation.

My other task is to teach Max to be a courier. I think he could easily be outfitted with saddlebags and then, for example, if I was in the living room and AJ was in her bedroom, I could tuck a note into Max's saddlebags and send him off to AJ, and then AJ would know that I wanted her to come watch MI-5 and I could stay on the couch eating toast.

Good plans, yeah?

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

My Cute Single Co-Worker and I saw Fiddler on the Roof while we were in Cedar City this past weekend, and the play made me contemplate what an excellent matchmaker I have been in the past (there are some little children who owe me a thank you note for their existence) and how it's a shame that I can't get a job as a professional matchmaker and have people pay me to boss them around about their social lives. I haven't done any matchmaking recently because I know approximately 50 billion amazing single women and, like, 1 1/2 single men. And the men have cooties.

Today in a meeting, though, I made a flip remark about librarians getting asked out at work (which is an actual occupational hazard), and after the meeting, one of the young men in attendance at my meeting started chatting with me about dating and librarians.

Young Man in Attendance at My Meeting: You know, there is a really cute librarian you work with.

MBC: My Cute Single Co-Worker? The one with red hair?

YMiAaMM: How did you know that's who I meant?!

MBC (in head): Never underestimate librarians. They know all.

MBC (out loud): Because she's adorable. Everyone thinks she cute and wants to pick her up and put her in their pocket.

YMiAaMM: Well, she's probably dating someone then, huh?

MBC: She is not.

YMiAaMM: Blushing

MBC: I could ask her how she feels about being set up.

YMiAaMM (trying to suppress a grin): Well, don't pressure her.

I will not. I will just tell her (right now, because I haven't talked to her in person about this yet) that I'm about to bring love into her life. I just can't guarantee that she'll be the one feeling the love.

Alternate Plans

I was reading through old emails this weekend, which is creepy and makes me feel weird. I don't like seeing all those intimate notes from people I'm no longer in contact with. However, there's also a lot of fascinating information in the email remnants of my past life. AND reading the messages I sent to other people confirms that my current phase is one that I enter every blessed year. Namely, each spring I consider quitting my job (or schooling) to do one of the following:

a) Join the Peace Corps
b) Buy a mobile home and be a professional Dar Williams groupie
c) Buy a mobile home and start a Pie Mobile
d) Become a dilettante
e) Become a recluse in the English Lake District
f) Become the mistress of Pemberley (I'd forgotten about this one, until I found this email to my roommate Emily one summer:
Have I mentioned that I don't want to be mild-mannered MBC, the library science student; I want to be the mistress of Pemberley? If not, I do. If so, it is still the case.
g) Become a migrant worker (I'd also forgotten about this one, but I mentioned it frequently in college. From an email to Kenneth:
I think I should just forget about graduate school and become a migrant worker. I'm an excellent strawberry picker and I'm also becoming excellent at not fixing my hair.)

So far I've never actually acted on these impulses. Probably because I'm scared to drive a mobile home. One of these days, though, I'm gonna live the dream.

Some People Are Nice (Not Me)

I was feeling cranky today, and none of our patrons were doing their part to make the case for humanity. They were all aggravating and belligerent. I was pretty sure I was going to have to build myself a castle on a mountaintop away from society and protected by guard dogs and trained monkeys with tiny pistols and a moat full of boiling oil and sharks (sharks resistant to boiling oil) and accessible only by a secret cable car used to transport delicious cheeses and good reading material to me, where I would build a giant magnifying glass-type apparatus to destroy segments of the population when they bothered me, when in walked our old custodian. He no longer works for us, because the Library hired a new cleaning company, but he'd returned to visit. I've mentioned him before and the fact that we're friends even though his English is limited and my Spanish is almost nonexistent. He approached the reference desk, chatted with me for a minute (we really only have 3-4 conversations that we recycle), and told me that he had a box for me. He went out to his car and came back with a large, white bakery box full of pastries oozing dulce de leche. He handed it to me and said something long in Spanish. I shook my head to indicate that I didn't understand. He thought for a minute and said, "Because you are so beautiful." Then he told me to share with my friends and left to find the Spanish librarians. Well, shoot, that'll take the fire and vinegar right out of you. Sooo, I reckon I won't wipe out humanity today.

Hibernation: Pros and Cons

So, hibernation. I'm a fan. I'm not saying people should actually sleep through the winter. I just think more things should be optional in the winter. Like my job. My preferred library winter hours would be M-TH 10-3. Other establishments should also be open during those hours. Establishments where I can purchase winter squashes to eat while I'm hunkered down in my house reading. Businesses that will take me to the airport so I can escape to tropical locations. Airports. Hospitals. Post offices. This form of hibernation would benefit the entire community, because fewer people would be wandering around outside getting into car accidents.

Hibernation Pros
1. Fewer car accidents.
2. Fewer illnesses. (Yesterday a woman came to the reference desk, coughed all over herself, me, the desk, and some small children wandering by, and then asked me to come help with her computer, also now covered in her germs. If you're sick, stay home! You're just giving other people your cooties.)
3. More happiness.
4. People I love would actually receive Christmas presents, because I'd have time to stay home and finish making the gifts I started working on in March and have suddenly realized should be done by now but aren't because all my time is spent scraping off my car and looking for my scarf.

Hibernation Cons
There are no cons. This is a brilliant plan. If you're some kind of weird, masochistic, winter-lover, you're still welcome to go outside and work and slide around in the snow and get colds. I'll be inside baking bread and learning to play the harmonica.

The Month of BALANCE

I celebrate each month with a theme. It started in graduate school because of some dumb boy and then ended and then resumed two years ago and now can't be stopped because too many people know about it and depend upon it and ask about it. This past year, I've chosen all the month themes. The Ceramic Genius chose the theme one month, and it went terribly, which is how we discovered that choosing the months is my special calling in life.

These have been my favorite themes:

Train Safety Month - Emily adapted a song to the theme and if you caught her in the right mood, she would sing it.

Fire Safety Month - Get up in the morning. Stop. Drop. Roll. (We were very safety conscious in Indiana.)

The Month of True Confessions - Found out all kinds of FASCINATING things about people. It's remarkable what people will tell you, if you let them know that it's a necessary part of your monthly celebration for them to divulge their secrets. People are so obliging sometimes.

The Month of Living in the Moment - Actually, this one was really hard. My roommates and I lived in a house with a giant wipe board that year, though, and every night we listed the things from the day that had made us happy or that we appreciated from the day. Cheesy but nice. Also, the board fascinated and entertained guests, and we do try to accommodate the needs of guests.

This month it took forever (until today) for the theme to come to me. November is the month of BALANCE. Take that as you will. If you've been checking websites to recognize the symptoms of an aneurysm because you're not entirely convinced you're not going to end up in the hospital from one because you're feeling AWFULLY stressed this month even if your sister doesn't believe you, you should maybe take a day off and treat yourself to some relaxing spa services. If you are my friend and you recently found out that someone stupid you were dating just got engaged to someone he was dating when he was only supposed to be dating you, you should maybe balance out the bad news with some good news. Like, good news! I just bought myself a sheep dog! Or you could decide to eat more balanced meals. Or spend more time on part of your life that usually gets neglected. Or you could take up tightrope walking or other activities that require balance. (Does the trapeze require balance, Amy?) Or you could go visit my friend Chou's blog, which is titled Balance. Or you could ignore the month completely, which I sometimes do even though I'm the one who names them.

Being Friends with Shakespeare

I buy the 800s (mostly literature not housed in the fiction collection) at work. In our library, the 800s are like the mistreated step-children of the Dewey Decimal System. The budget for the 800s is very small, because no one in our town reads poetry, plays, or literary criticism at the public library. So, I choose a different section of the collection to address each year, and the rest of the section gets neglected until it becomes the lucky winner for fix-up another year, when I have a new budget.

The last couple of years I've been adding mostly to the writing section, because everyone in town is writing a novel. I know this, not only because of the circulation statistics, but also because the would-be authors ask me how to contact J.K. Rowling so they can chat with her about having her ghost write their work. (I DO give them the contact info and then I send out a little silent Sorry into the universe for J.K.)

This year, I decided it's time to bulk up our Shakespeare collection and replace our battered copies of plays that were purchased in the 1960s. While I was going through the list of Shakespeare's plays, I realized that I'm REALLY close to having seen all of his plays. I've already seen some of the snoozers (I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare's historical plays, except for the version of Richard III set in Nazi Germany that I saw back in the day at the International Cinema) and the creepy ones like Titus Andronicus, so it seems logical to just go ahead and finish watching the rest. (Knowing almost nothing about science, math, and geography, it seems wise to become as proficient as possible in some area of study.) I dragged home Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Cymbeline from the library last week, and I've finished the first two (seems I left the plays with the most lechery for last).

In preparation for finishing the historical plays, I picked up The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Kings and Queens of Britain, which is a BEAUTIFUL book, broken up with each ruler receiving a two-page, well-illustrated treatment. It's wonderful if you need to know that Eleanor of Acquitaine is the mother of both King John and Richard the Lionheart or that William the Conqueror was so obese at the time of his death that he came spilling out of his coffin or if you happen to be morbidly fascinated by Richard III's murdered nephews who were found (scientists believe) buried in the Tower of London (and I AM).

Now go to your libraries and check out as many books from the 800s as you can carry, so you stop causing your librarians to despair. And if you live in my town, check out Henry IV, Part I. The version from the Marlowe Society hasn't checked out since 1995.

Choctoberfest

Last night was Choctoberfest (a holiday that a friend found on another blog--the same friend introduced me to Julymas; she's such a giver). Our Choctoberfest consisted of pumpkin carving and chocolate eating. I considered a more elaborate celebration, but I was too tired. You really can't go wrong with any activity that you refer to as Choctoberfest, though. It's all about the name. If blood drive organizers knew this, blood donation would increase. Come participate in our quarterly Transylvania Heritage Service Project. Or leave out the term service project and just call it a festival. Transylvaniafest. Instead of serving Lorna Doone cookies, the organizers could distribute sugar cookies shaped like bats or Count Chocula cereal. And instead of a t-shirt, participants would receive fake vampire fangs. Everyone who gave blood would be entered into a drawing for Twilight or Blood and Chocolate or The Historian. There you go. I'll be solving the rest of the world's problems with snappy programming ideas later tody.

Pumpkin carving is not one of my strengths.

Toe Blog

Right after I started this blog, I went with my parents to Cedar City. My mom hurt her toe and all through the trip she was very fond of updating us on her toe situtation. She told me that if she had a blog, it would be about her toe, and she started referring to her verbal updates as her toe blog. I'd get up in the morning and she'd say, "Toe blog: my toe looks black and blue, but I don't think the toenail will fall off" or "Toe blog: I wrapped my toe back up and I think I can wear tennis shoes today."

So, last night I had my own toe blog experience. I was getting ready to go out, and I was just about to put on my boot when two of my toes cramped up. They were not in normal toe positions. Very unpleasant. Very painful. I sat down on the floor and I explained to my toes that we were a team and needed to work together and that I didn't relish being lame at the age of 29.

I considered the treatment options available in the four minutes I had available before my ride arrived. I remembered that foot cramps come from a Vitamin E deficiency sometimes. Or was it Vitamin D? Potassium? I couldn't remember, but I hobbled into my kitchen and dug out the mulitvitamins I've ignored for the last year and took one, hoping that the appropriate vitamin would be immediately dispatched to my toes. (I knew that ice cream and hash browns for dinnner was a bad idea!) Then I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the healthiest looking thing I could find--a red pepper. Lots of vitamins, yes? I ate it.

And then I had a sudden, miraculous recovery. The Miracle of Science. I'm going to write to the Mayo Clinic and tell them all about it. Those multivitamins are amazing.

Toe blog: all toes are functioning properly.

Call Fox Network. I've Got a Winner!

Because I'm a city employee, I'm allowed to use the city gym (where the police officers and fire fighters train) for free. It's a pretty nice facility and sometimes I get to watch the police officers practice using tasers on one another. The only real drawback is that the police have TERRIBLE taste in television, and if they're already in the gym exercising when I come in, I have to watch COPS while I work out.

Now before I comment on COPS, let me just say that I appreciate the hard work of police departments across the country and I'm grateful that they do their jobs. Okay, PoliceBrother? Now then, the TV show COPS? TOTAL propaganda. I've been to Russian museums filled with Soviet propaganda from WWII, I've watched the 1950s hygiene videos (But Jimmy, if you don't wash your hands, the Communists have won already. In your HEART.), and I was raised by a mother who's an expert at brainwashing little children. I know my propaganda.

(This is actually a 1931 ad from the New York Times accessed through Ad*Access, but it feels like the 1950s hygiene films to me.)

The thing that really pushes COPS over the edge, propagandawise, is the narrator. He has a very grave voice like the narrators from National Geographic specials. There'll be some high speed chase and the police will pull over and arrest someone, and then the narrator says, "Finally, justice prevails! The criminal has no respect for the law, for fellow drivers, for the Constitution, for the American flag, for veterans of foreign wars, for the last unicorn on earth who he callously ran over with his truck, or for YOU viewers. He kicks puppies and tells old ladies their shoes are ugly. Fortunately, the quick-thinking Officer X, with his speed like a cheetah and wisdom like Yoda, gives that criminal just what he deserves. Now one more criminal is behind bars!"

A really great companion show to COPS would be LIBRARIANS. All the other helping professions have shows--doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers. We could get the same narrator from COPS and he would say things like, "Another ignorant patron is enlightened thanks to the quick thinking of Librarian X with her snarky sense of humor and amazing research skills!"

You'd watch, right?