There are many things in life that I don’t understand.
For instance, why are we the only creatures in the universe that wear clothing? Even the people who have been abducted and probed by aliens have not reported any of them in attire, fashionable or not. Animals, even the most intelligent dolphins and chimps, feel no inclination to cover their body with fabric. Now, I’m not saying that people should run around naked! But I just don’t understand why we don’t.
Also, where do all my socks go? I have an entire drawer full of socks without a match because I’m afraid that if I throw them out, the counterpart will show up and I’ll have essentially ruined a perfectly good pair of socks. But where is the counterpart right now? We may live in and acknowledge three dimensions, but there must be a sock dimension that we cannot comprehend, where they exist when they don’t come out of the dryer with their twin.
However, what’s bothering me lately is why do libraries teach computer classes? Libraries pick this one technological advance in society and feel compelled to give organized instruction in using it, which is utterly unprecedented. I understand that the bulk of their questions have, for quite a few years, revolved around how to use a computer and it was sensible to do something about that, but I still don’t get why we have bitten off this societal responsibility for ourselves. We are a gateway to knowledge, not a choreographer of the social misfits with two mental left feet.
We have not offered classes about programming your VCR, how to drive, or even the applicable library skills like literacy and using the less-than-forthright catalog to find something on your own. Nope. Occasionally we’ve offered programs where we paid a speaker to teach about gardening concepts, genealogy, specific cooking techniques or financial planning, but because the public never showed up, these programs didn’t repeat. Why did we bite off the responsibility to give technophobes computer instruction from the very rudimentary tasks of what a mouse is, right on up to two-part classes on individual Office programs? Why? And if you take a look around at other libraries, they’re all offering these classes, yet many (if not most) are bringing in outside instructors for these classes. What makes us so stupid?
Perhaps I could get behind it if what we offered was useful and I believed the people who took the classes were going to use what they learned, but time and time again people feel overwhelmed by what there is to learn, how little time we have allotted to teach them, and they give up. We give them 90 minutes to learn what we have to teach about the Internet or Word. Of course, we emphasize that practice is essential, but more people disappear and surrender to a computerless existence than actually pursuing improving on what we offer. We have certain patrons who take the classes over and over and over, but nothing sinks in. We’ve had people who show up drunk, people who have mental disabilities and aren’t capable of learning what we have to teach, and others who are staunchly against computers. These are the unteachable members of our community, and yet we put an extraordinary amount of time and effort into offering them classes that I don’t think we have any business offering, repeatedly.
My suggestions fall on deaf ears. I have tried to teach more advanced classes about using particular websites or particular web utilities, hoping that the people who register for my classes would actually care and practice what I was teaching because they already know how to turn on a computer and where to put a CD. Largely, the results have been favorable and many of my students have come to me later to proudly say that they have continued with what I taught them, which is what I think we should be striving for. Yet, not many people take the classes. I also suggested we invest in take-home computer instruction software, of which we have next to nothing in our collection. No one thinks this will work. I suggested we set up one or two workstations specifically designated as computer practice terminals, with the software already installed so we can get them started and they can follow along. This, also, received almost no acknowledgement.
And I go in to work now and discuss with my department how we’re going to organize the classes in the fall, right back to the same old thing we’ve always done, which leads to negligible student advancement.
Much of library work is like shooting yourself in the foot. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the collection, and I’d venture a guess that half of what we purchase is dead weight and uninteresting to our patron base. We put up displays that no one pays attention to. We offer programs that no one attends. So much of our effort is for naught, but at least we try new things. Not so with computer classes. We teach the same crude things over and over, with most of the registered students blowing off the class, and the rest being unteachable, so sitting around and trying to plan out the identical classes we’ve always offered leave me feeling angered. Why can we not just let go of the computer classes and focus more on books that our patrons won’t read, which will save time and money?
When did libraries become the cornerstone of offering free computer classes to people who think “computer” is a bad word?
We are true gluttons for punishment.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Saturday Morning Breath
Her breath smelled like diarrhea.
More precisely, it was like bad morning breath and sour coffee mixed with stomach acid, which made sense because she burped about every 10 seconds, and each belch brought the pungent odor up and out of her, aimed directly at my nose as she conversed with me. Each time she burped I had to hold my breath, and I found myself ready to pass out rather quickly because she was burping often.
I’m guessing she had reflux, but I’d just like to rent a billboard and make a gigantic sign that asks people with heartburn to chew gum, suck on mints, or brush their teeth more frequently, because I really don’t want to smell what they had for their last meal, mixed with bile and rotting cells from their esophagus. As someone who has had heartburn in my life, I have been inordinately conscientious about making sure my agony isn’t shared with others. Has no one else’s face ever melted when she speaks to them? I cannot be the first.
Of course, she had a very detailed project she and her husband were working on, so I had to spend an enormous amount of time with them. Taking steps back just caused them to take steps forward. Short of asking her not to speak (or burp) in my direction, there wasn’t much more I could do to thwart the odor from invading my vulnerable olfactory neurons. It’s times like these that make me believe I short-change some of our patrons because I just cannot tolerate their smell. I soul-searched after I sent them away empty-handed, wondering if her breath had been less offensive, would I have given her different service. Hopefully not, but I know for a fact that I was desperate to get away from her. How much hot diarrhea breath being burped up multiple times a minute can one person be expected to take?
There are times when I think Michael Jackson’s public masks aren’t quite as foolish as I once thought.
Why do people skip brushing their teeth if they drink coffee in the morning? Coffee is not a substitute for scrubbing the old food and bacteria from your mouth. This is a frequent occurrence on Saturday mornings. It’s as if they need their coffee first thing, and then decide that the hot acidic drink has flushed the foulness from their mouth. Nay! It has not! Coffee only cooks the bad stuff and makes it riper!
Another billboard I need to make: Coffee doesn’t cure your bad breath – it ripens it.
Do you think people know this and do it purposefully?
More precisely, it was like bad morning breath and sour coffee mixed with stomach acid, which made sense because she burped about every 10 seconds, and each belch brought the pungent odor up and out of her, aimed directly at my nose as she conversed with me. Each time she burped I had to hold my breath, and I found myself ready to pass out rather quickly because she was burping often.
I’m guessing she had reflux, but I’d just like to rent a billboard and make a gigantic sign that asks people with heartburn to chew gum, suck on mints, or brush their teeth more frequently, because I really don’t want to smell what they had for their last meal, mixed with bile and rotting cells from their esophagus. As someone who has had heartburn in my life, I have been inordinately conscientious about making sure my agony isn’t shared with others. Has no one else’s face ever melted when she speaks to them? I cannot be the first.
Of course, she had a very detailed project she and her husband were working on, so I had to spend an enormous amount of time with them. Taking steps back just caused them to take steps forward. Short of asking her not to speak (or burp) in my direction, there wasn’t much more I could do to thwart the odor from invading my vulnerable olfactory neurons. It’s times like these that make me believe I short-change some of our patrons because I just cannot tolerate their smell. I soul-searched after I sent them away empty-handed, wondering if her breath had been less offensive, would I have given her different service. Hopefully not, but I know for a fact that I was desperate to get away from her. How much hot diarrhea breath being burped up multiple times a minute can one person be expected to take?
There are times when I think Michael Jackson’s public masks aren’t quite as foolish as I once thought.
Why do people skip brushing their teeth if they drink coffee in the morning? Coffee is not a substitute for scrubbing the old food and bacteria from your mouth. This is a frequent occurrence on Saturday mornings. It’s as if they need their coffee first thing, and then decide that the hot acidic drink has flushed the foulness from their mouth. Nay! It has not! Coffee only cooks the bad stuff and makes it riper!
Another billboard I need to make: Coffee doesn’t cure your bad breath – it ripens it.
Do you think people know this and do it purposefully?
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
**Warning: This Blog Has Been Hijacked!**
Hi.
I am a frequent patron of the liberry, and I have hijacked this blog to get a message to all you liberrians out there who make it so hard for patrons to use the liberry. Your service is so poor that you can’t possibly be aware that you suck so much. I’m here to tell you what you need to do to make the liberry better.
First, the liberry needs software that will tell me what movie I’m thinking of when I don’t know the title, don’t know what it’s about, don’t know any of the actors in it, don’t know when it was made, and don’t know where I heard about it. You should be able to search for stuff with nothing to go on. Someone needs to make computers to help me when I’m looking for something like this. You’re all computer-y people. Why can’t you do this?
If I call the reference desk during a moment of sobriety between my lengthy fugue states (as Dr. Lang likes to call them) and ask you to hold that movie I finally remembered, holding it for only three days for me is not long enough. There’s no telling how long it will be before I’ll remember to come to the liberry, and then I won’t remember why, so until I can remember how to get to the library, what I need from it, and if I have some kind of I.D. with me when I get there, you should have that movie waiting for me. Even if it’s been three years. It’s not like you have other patrons who might want it, and even if you do, I’m more important.
There should be some kind of list you can print out of all the items I’ve checked out. This should be available so that I can consult my records and figure out if I’m checking out an item I have already checked out before. Do you have any idea how irritating it is to drive all the way to the library, search the shelves without any clue as to what I’m looking for, guess, check it out for free, drive all the way home, and then realize this is a book I’ve read before? It pisses me off! I am willing to admit that there isn’t a good way for the library to know if I actually read the book that I checked out, but for now, just handing me a list of all my checkouts each time I enter would be great.
Without having a printout of all the items I’ve ever checked out (throughout my life, I should add), you should at least provide some kind of list for me to check off the items I’ve already had. A list of books and a list of movies would be great. I realize you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of movies, and that list would be really long, but if you could separate it by types of movies I like, that is what I really want. Basically, if you could make a list of what each of your patrons likes so that they know what to look for when they come in, that would make me happy.
These are things you need to work on.
But I know change is difficult. I bet some of your staff might not want to provide all of this service. But you need to look long and hard at these liberrians, like the one who looked at me like I’d lost my mother-fucking-mind when I suggested these things. Her attitude was not open as it should be. Telling me it’s my responsibility to keep track of items I checked out, if that’s important to me, is mean. She did not need to laugh at my ideas, tell me that I was wrong for expecting you to read minds, and walk away when I told her that my demands weren’t that hard if she was interested in providing good customer service. She should attend some kind of seminar that teaches the American value system of the Customer is Always Right.
Another of your librarians treated me with a little more manners when she asked me not to shout my demands across the building while I was sitting in one of your comfortable chairs and didn’t want to get up to ask her to find things for me. I realize that barking at people 50 feet away is not polite, but if you’re going to make the furniture comfortable, it should have wheels so that I can slide over to her and talk quieter. That’s another good idea you should work on.
And while I’m at it, why can’t you just deliver all of this to my house so that I don’t have to carry it all to my car? Do you know how heavy books can be? Do you know how much gas costs? You shouldn’t make me drive five whole blocks to the building so that I can get reading material for my children. I see you all sitting at your desks, typing at your computers, and I know you’re not doing anything important. You should be delivering my books. Or you should be putting wheels on the chairs and couches. Or you should be making computers to do all of the things I want it to do.
Please get to work on this. I pay a ton of money in taxes and I’d really like to see my tax dollars going to a better cause than a building full of stuff that I don’t know if I’ve checked out before or not.
Thank you.
I return this blog to its usual writer, who I did not deal with on my recent visit, but I’m sure she’s just as lame as her coworkers.
I am a frequent patron of the liberry, and I have hijacked this blog to get a message to all you liberrians out there who make it so hard for patrons to use the liberry. Your service is so poor that you can’t possibly be aware that you suck so much. I’m here to tell you what you need to do to make the liberry better.
First, the liberry needs software that will tell me what movie I’m thinking of when I don’t know the title, don’t know what it’s about, don’t know any of the actors in it, don’t know when it was made, and don’t know where I heard about it. You should be able to search for stuff with nothing to go on. Someone needs to make computers to help me when I’m looking for something like this. You’re all computer-y people. Why can’t you do this?
If I call the reference desk during a moment of sobriety between my lengthy fugue states (as Dr. Lang likes to call them) and ask you to hold that movie I finally remembered, holding it for only three days for me is not long enough. There’s no telling how long it will be before I’ll remember to come to the liberry, and then I won’t remember why, so until I can remember how to get to the library, what I need from it, and if I have some kind of I.D. with me when I get there, you should have that movie waiting for me. Even if it’s been three years. It’s not like you have other patrons who might want it, and even if you do, I’m more important.
There should be some kind of list you can print out of all the items I’ve checked out. This should be available so that I can consult my records and figure out if I’m checking out an item I have already checked out before. Do you have any idea how irritating it is to drive all the way to the library, search the shelves without any clue as to what I’m looking for, guess, check it out for free, drive all the way home, and then realize this is a book I’ve read before? It pisses me off! I am willing to admit that there isn’t a good way for the library to know if I actually read the book that I checked out, but for now, just handing me a list of all my checkouts each time I enter would be great.
Without having a printout of all the items I’ve ever checked out (throughout my life, I should add), you should at least provide some kind of list for me to check off the items I’ve already had. A list of books and a list of movies would be great. I realize you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of movies, and that list would be really long, but if you could separate it by types of movies I like, that is what I really want. Basically, if you could make a list of what each of your patrons likes so that they know what to look for when they come in, that would make me happy.
These are things you need to work on.
But I know change is difficult. I bet some of your staff might not want to provide all of this service. But you need to look long and hard at these liberrians, like the one who looked at me like I’d lost my mother-fucking-mind when I suggested these things. Her attitude was not open as it should be. Telling me it’s my responsibility to keep track of items I checked out, if that’s important to me, is mean. She did not need to laugh at my ideas, tell me that I was wrong for expecting you to read minds, and walk away when I told her that my demands weren’t that hard if she was interested in providing good customer service. She should attend some kind of seminar that teaches the American value system of the Customer is Always Right.
Another of your librarians treated me with a little more manners when she asked me not to shout my demands across the building while I was sitting in one of your comfortable chairs and didn’t want to get up to ask her to find things for me. I realize that barking at people 50 feet away is not polite, but if you’re going to make the furniture comfortable, it should have wheels so that I can slide over to her and talk quieter. That’s another good idea you should work on.
And while I’m at it, why can’t you just deliver all of this to my house so that I don’t have to carry it all to my car? Do you know how heavy books can be? Do you know how much gas costs? You shouldn’t make me drive five whole blocks to the building so that I can get reading material for my children. I see you all sitting at your desks, typing at your computers, and I know you’re not doing anything important. You should be delivering my books. Or you should be putting wheels on the chairs and couches. Or you should be making computers to do all of the things I want it to do.
Please get to work on this. I pay a ton of money in taxes and I’d really like to see my tax dollars going to a better cause than a building full of stuff that I don’t know if I’ve checked out before or not.
Thank you.
I return this blog to its usual writer, who I did not deal with on my recent visit, but I’m sure she’s just as lame as her coworkers.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
"Best" Friends vs. True Friends
Friday night is Girls Night Out for my coworkers and me. Well, you know, the cool ones. The unmarried, no-kids girls who still keep Friday nights open to go out drinking and having fun, despite the fact that most of us work Saturday morning. Of course, we’re female librarians and we’re the unmarried ones without kids, so we get the shitty shifts. What else is new? But we still make it work because Girls Night Out is important. It reconnects us.
Of course, these wild, anti-stereotype librarians are only going to Baker’s Square, but that’s beside the point. We’re librarians, so we’re a bunch of broke-ass bitches who can’t usually afford alcohol unless it’s a special occasion, and we’d much rather fill our bellies with food and pie while spending hours talking and giggling and having a good time.
On Friday afternoon, I’m going to have my hair redone in that awesome color that my best friend disapproves of so strongly, which I’ve come to realize makes it a little more endearing to me. Why I like her disapproval was a bit elusive to me until tonight during a phone conversation.
First she gave me a hard time for my hair color, comparing it with little old ladies and telling me that all I needed was an up-do and a housedress and I was officially ancient. I bit my tongue and forced a laugh, insisting that I’d yet to see a little old lady with hair like mine. She insisted that having a stripe of an unnatural color wasn’t even a fad in our youth, and she had no idea why I was reaching back further into the annals of fashion history to do this to my head. She just couldn’t understand the desire to be a little different.
Then she started laughing at our Girls Night Out at Baker’s Square, which didn’t make logical sense to her because Baker’s Square is a restaurant she doesn’t go to anymore now that she’s a grown up, and here we were planning a get together around it. Hardy-har-har, what a bunch of silly girls who refuse to accept their age and upgrade their taste and priorities. I was grinding my teeth by the time she finished.
When she asked me about work, I gave her a vague answer that it was okay, but I’m not sure I finished my reply before she started complaining about the library where I work and how much she hates it. Twice she’s called and been hung up on, twice they’ve screwed up her reservation for a private meeting room which she needs to do her contract work in, and she just cannot deal with the fact that she can’t trust anyone to do their jobs properly and not make her job harder. I agreed, suggested she speak with someone’s manager, even gave a name and extension number, but she refused to call because she said it wouldn’t change anything. She was much more content just hating the library and condemning it at every opportunity, as well as all the people who work there. I could not help but wonder how much of her rant was exaggerated.
She calls my friends The Scooby Gang, and though she hasn’t said it outright, I suspect, based on her attitude, that it’s because we all seem so juvenile to her.
No, we don’t make $150K per year, even if you added up all our salaries combined. No, we don’t think about installing track lighting throughout our homes to emphasize the artwork featured on the walls of our living room and hallways. No, we don’t record every Oprah show to watch over and over for all the excellent recommendations each show contains. No, we don’t have stock portfolios and mutual funds and our retirement funds are laughable because we will likely be even poorer when we retire than we are now.
So, no, she and I don’t pretend to understand one another anymore, but I always expect there to be a little consideration and respect, if not support. And lately, I can’t even get that.
This was when I thought that though we came from the same place in our youth, we ended up on opposite sides of the world but only 10 minutes away from one another. How could she have gotten to be so snotty and suburbanized in such a short amount of time? If she wasn’t in a teaching field and a minority race, I’d be waiting for the day she joined the Republican Party.
Then she told me she’s joined a group of canasta players in her neighborhood. I almost choked. Was she serious? Was she actually part of a club of parlor game players? Who is this woman and what happened to my best friend??!
Oh yes, canasta is all the rage in her subdivision, and the monthly parties are quite elaborate. The last party had a Hawaiian theme, and people came in grass skirts and leis were handed out to each lady in attendance. An elaborate buffet of foods made from scratch was available, and it was as much to show off baking skills as it was for culinary enjoyment. The women were all a bit older than her, having kids in high school and beyond, and right away I thought to myself that it was because my best friend is unusually wealthy and successful for her age, with a house worth about $400,000, yet she’s barely 34 years old. While that’s probably something I should be proud of her for accomplishing, it’s still a huge wedge between us because she cannot understand my lack of financial security, which she attributes to a lack of ambition. If I wanted a $400K house, I’d have one if I just had the drive. Anyway, she sees these canasta women as her equals and since the canasta game was a lot of fun, she intends to stick with this group of women and their “parties”. It’s a great form of entertainment and an opportunity to socialize. I suppose in her own way she’s doing the same as me with the Girls Night Out, just in a different universe.
We talked about the canasta because she said that coming from a middle-class white family, she expected me to have all kinds of canasta experience in my family tree. Um, no. I wasn’t even sure that it was played with cards until she told me. And for that matter, only by warped, college financial aid standards did my family qualify as middle-class when I was a kid, because we barely scraped by, had no money for new clothes, and ate a lot of junk food like spam and mac & cheese because they were cheap, but my dad’s income was more than $20,000 per year (though not by much), so I didn’t qualify for financial aid going to college. Middle-class my ass! We were poor. Maybe not homeless poor, but I spent my childhood being morbidly embarrassed about how poor my family was. Canasta was like something from another planet.
So, given how brutal she had been with me earlier, I lit into her about canasta. I told her it was very white-picket-fence-like to be a part of a neighborhood canasta group, and she had truly become a part of suburban Americana now. Jokingly, I asked if she even knew what Guitar Hero is, but didn’t give her a chance to answer. Congratulations followed, with a reminder that it was a straight trip to the retirement home and games of bingo and bridge would quickly follow. She laughed, but I could tell it was as strained as the one I’d given her just a half-hour before. She tried to regain some ground and say the canasta parties reminded her of a backroom scene of a bunch of mobsters sitting around tables gambling, but that’s when my genuine laugh came out a little too loud and a little too strong. It wasn’t long before she was telling me that this is a group that does many types of parties, not just canasta, and she had recently attended a candle party as well.
I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that the whole concept of candle parties being called a “party” was ludicrous. Who has a “party” where you all sit around handling products available for purchase, with inflated prices and questionable quality, and are then pressured into buying? Who considers this a “party”? And even more coercion is used to get you to have a “party” of your own! These are not “parties”, people! These are in-home infomercials. Anyone who thinks of them as parties is unclear on the concept! I don’t care if the topic is sex toys or Tupperware – that is not a party!
So, here I have my best friend, who is a housewife with a part-time job, PTA-member, classroom volunteer, Oprah-worshipping, canasta-playing, suburbanite woman, amassing a collection of cookie-cutter friends and she doesn’t remotely resemble the person I knew 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. She thinks my job is a joke. She thinks my life is a joke. She even thinks I look like a joke. And she has no qualms about telling me as much. She’s not a competitive person, and I myself have absolutely no competitive spirit in me, but she looks down on me, and that I don’t like. While I feel like I try to understand her, I try to be a part of her world, it’s been over 10 years since she’s been to my house, and it’s even rarer for her leave the comfort of her own home to go have dinner with me or watch a movie. I make an effort to talk to her and she insults me, trying to inspire me to aim higher in my life, but her point is often lost in the critique of who I am and what I do. We have both lost touch with each other, even though we communicate frequently. I love her, I really do, and I wish we could be as close as we once were, but I don’t fit into her eerily nondescript life. Truthfully, I suspect she’s miserable, but she would never admit it to me.
And then I think about my fellow librarians. I think about The Girls and our Girls Night Out events, and I’m grateful to have people in my life who understand me, who don’t judge me, who don’t insult me, and who would never ever ask me to join a canasta group, watch Oprah with them, or tell me that I need to do something more with my life because what I’ve done isn’t good enough. The Girls, they’re all very different, too. We have a devout Catholic who attends Mass almost daily, an agnostic, an atheist, a Catholic who doesn’t attend church at all, and another who is undefined. We have one vegetarian and one recovering anorexic. Although we’re all practicing heterosexuals, we also have a former girl-kisser. We have three living at home with their parents still, four in long-term relationships, two in their thirties and three in their twenties, and our hair colors and styles range from tame to fairly wild. We all look like polar opposites and have incredibly differing personalities and tastes. But our differences don’t matter because there is a common denominator of love and respect. I find this a rare commodity among friends these days.
What cracks me up a little is that another close friend in a distant state started a conversation with me today by asking what was the kinkiest thing I’d ever done. That’s funny, and I’d much rather talk about that kind of stuff than what Dr. Phil said on this show today. I don’t fear her judgment and I answered her honestly. For a moment I thought about the day many years ago when I sat around a dinner table with my best friend, her husband, and a couple who are mutual friends of ours, and someone asked me who I was currently dating. Before I could answer, my best friend’s husband got preachy and started lecturing me about not giving away the milk for free, or no one would want to buy the cow. Seriously, these are the words he used. The discussion wasn’t about whom I was sleeping with or how many men were in my life. Simply, I was asked who, if anyone, was I interested in because I was the only unmarried person in the room, and the only one without even a boyfriend to bring to the gathering. Yet I was subjected to a male-delivered speech about promiscuity and my inability to see this as a guarantee of life as a spinster. Because I was 28 and I was not a virgin. Oh, the scandal! Fast-forward to today, and much relief is found in the giggling and revealing conversation two friends have about one another’s history and sexuality, with mutual acceptance and a lack of judgment. Sometimes it’s not your “best” friend who is truly among the best friends in your life.
I can’t help but wonder if librarians are better people than the rest of the world.
Certainly the ones I surround myself by are superior.
Of course, these wild, anti-stereotype librarians are only going to Baker’s Square, but that’s beside the point. We’re librarians, so we’re a bunch of broke-ass bitches who can’t usually afford alcohol unless it’s a special occasion, and we’d much rather fill our bellies with food and pie while spending hours talking and giggling and having a good time.
On Friday afternoon, I’m going to have my hair redone in that awesome color that my best friend disapproves of so strongly, which I’ve come to realize makes it a little more endearing to me. Why I like her disapproval was a bit elusive to me until tonight during a phone conversation.
First she gave me a hard time for my hair color, comparing it with little old ladies and telling me that all I needed was an up-do and a housedress and I was officially ancient. I bit my tongue and forced a laugh, insisting that I’d yet to see a little old lady with hair like mine. She insisted that having a stripe of an unnatural color wasn’t even a fad in our youth, and she had no idea why I was reaching back further into the annals of fashion history to do this to my head. She just couldn’t understand the desire to be a little different.
Then she started laughing at our Girls Night Out at Baker’s Square, which didn’t make logical sense to her because Baker’s Square is a restaurant she doesn’t go to anymore now that she’s a grown up, and here we were planning a get together around it. Hardy-har-har, what a bunch of silly girls who refuse to accept their age and upgrade their taste and priorities. I was grinding my teeth by the time she finished.
When she asked me about work, I gave her a vague answer that it was okay, but I’m not sure I finished my reply before she started complaining about the library where I work and how much she hates it. Twice she’s called and been hung up on, twice they’ve screwed up her reservation for a private meeting room which she needs to do her contract work in, and she just cannot deal with the fact that she can’t trust anyone to do their jobs properly and not make her job harder. I agreed, suggested she speak with someone’s manager, even gave a name and extension number, but she refused to call because she said it wouldn’t change anything. She was much more content just hating the library and condemning it at every opportunity, as well as all the people who work there. I could not help but wonder how much of her rant was exaggerated.
She calls my friends The Scooby Gang, and though she hasn’t said it outright, I suspect, based on her attitude, that it’s because we all seem so juvenile to her.
No, we don’t make $150K per year, even if you added up all our salaries combined. No, we don’t think about installing track lighting throughout our homes to emphasize the artwork featured on the walls of our living room and hallways. No, we don’t record every Oprah show to watch over and over for all the excellent recommendations each show contains. No, we don’t have stock portfolios and mutual funds and our retirement funds are laughable because we will likely be even poorer when we retire than we are now.
So, no, she and I don’t pretend to understand one another anymore, but I always expect there to be a little consideration and respect, if not support. And lately, I can’t even get that.
This was when I thought that though we came from the same place in our youth, we ended up on opposite sides of the world but only 10 minutes away from one another. How could she have gotten to be so snotty and suburbanized in such a short amount of time? If she wasn’t in a teaching field and a minority race, I’d be waiting for the day she joined the Republican Party.
Then she told me she’s joined a group of canasta players in her neighborhood. I almost choked. Was she serious? Was she actually part of a club of parlor game players? Who is this woman and what happened to my best friend??!
Oh yes, canasta is all the rage in her subdivision, and the monthly parties are quite elaborate. The last party had a Hawaiian theme, and people came in grass skirts and leis were handed out to each lady in attendance. An elaborate buffet of foods made from scratch was available, and it was as much to show off baking skills as it was for culinary enjoyment. The women were all a bit older than her, having kids in high school and beyond, and right away I thought to myself that it was because my best friend is unusually wealthy and successful for her age, with a house worth about $400,000, yet she’s barely 34 years old. While that’s probably something I should be proud of her for accomplishing, it’s still a huge wedge between us because she cannot understand my lack of financial security, which she attributes to a lack of ambition. If I wanted a $400K house, I’d have one if I just had the drive. Anyway, she sees these canasta women as her equals and since the canasta game was a lot of fun, she intends to stick with this group of women and their “parties”. It’s a great form of entertainment and an opportunity to socialize. I suppose in her own way she’s doing the same as me with the Girls Night Out, just in a different universe.
We talked about the canasta because she said that coming from a middle-class white family, she expected me to have all kinds of canasta experience in my family tree. Um, no. I wasn’t even sure that it was played with cards until she told me. And for that matter, only by warped, college financial aid standards did my family qualify as middle-class when I was a kid, because we barely scraped by, had no money for new clothes, and ate a lot of junk food like spam and mac & cheese because they were cheap, but my dad’s income was more than $20,000 per year (though not by much), so I didn’t qualify for financial aid going to college. Middle-class my ass! We were poor. Maybe not homeless poor, but I spent my childhood being morbidly embarrassed about how poor my family was. Canasta was like something from another planet.
So, given how brutal she had been with me earlier, I lit into her about canasta. I told her it was very white-picket-fence-like to be a part of a neighborhood canasta group, and she had truly become a part of suburban Americana now. Jokingly, I asked if she even knew what Guitar Hero is, but didn’t give her a chance to answer. Congratulations followed, with a reminder that it was a straight trip to the retirement home and games of bingo and bridge would quickly follow. She laughed, but I could tell it was as strained as the one I’d given her just a half-hour before. She tried to regain some ground and say the canasta parties reminded her of a backroom scene of a bunch of mobsters sitting around tables gambling, but that’s when my genuine laugh came out a little too loud and a little too strong. It wasn’t long before she was telling me that this is a group that does many types of parties, not just canasta, and she had recently attended a candle party as well.
I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that the whole concept of candle parties being called a “party” was ludicrous. Who has a “party” where you all sit around handling products available for purchase, with inflated prices and questionable quality, and are then pressured into buying? Who considers this a “party”? And even more coercion is used to get you to have a “party” of your own! These are not “parties”, people! These are in-home infomercials. Anyone who thinks of them as parties is unclear on the concept! I don’t care if the topic is sex toys or Tupperware – that is not a party!
So, here I have my best friend, who is a housewife with a part-time job, PTA-member, classroom volunteer, Oprah-worshipping, canasta-playing, suburbanite woman, amassing a collection of cookie-cutter friends and she doesn’t remotely resemble the person I knew 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago. She thinks my job is a joke. She thinks my life is a joke. She even thinks I look like a joke. And she has no qualms about telling me as much. She’s not a competitive person, and I myself have absolutely no competitive spirit in me, but she looks down on me, and that I don’t like. While I feel like I try to understand her, I try to be a part of her world, it’s been over 10 years since she’s been to my house, and it’s even rarer for her leave the comfort of her own home to go have dinner with me or watch a movie. I make an effort to talk to her and she insults me, trying to inspire me to aim higher in my life, but her point is often lost in the critique of who I am and what I do. We have both lost touch with each other, even though we communicate frequently. I love her, I really do, and I wish we could be as close as we once were, but I don’t fit into her eerily nondescript life. Truthfully, I suspect she’s miserable, but she would never admit it to me.
And then I think about my fellow librarians. I think about The Girls and our Girls Night Out events, and I’m grateful to have people in my life who understand me, who don’t judge me, who don’t insult me, and who would never ever ask me to join a canasta group, watch Oprah with them, or tell me that I need to do something more with my life because what I’ve done isn’t good enough. The Girls, they’re all very different, too. We have a devout Catholic who attends Mass almost daily, an agnostic, an atheist, a Catholic who doesn’t attend church at all, and another who is undefined. We have one vegetarian and one recovering anorexic. Although we’re all practicing heterosexuals, we also have a former girl-kisser. We have three living at home with their parents still, four in long-term relationships, two in their thirties and three in their twenties, and our hair colors and styles range from tame to fairly wild. We all look like polar opposites and have incredibly differing personalities and tastes. But our differences don’t matter because there is a common denominator of love and respect. I find this a rare commodity among friends these days.
What cracks me up a little is that another close friend in a distant state started a conversation with me today by asking what was the kinkiest thing I’d ever done. That’s funny, and I’d much rather talk about that kind of stuff than what Dr. Phil said on this show today. I don’t fear her judgment and I answered her honestly. For a moment I thought about the day many years ago when I sat around a dinner table with my best friend, her husband, and a couple who are mutual friends of ours, and someone asked me who I was currently dating. Before I could answer, my best friend’s husband got preachy and started lecturing me about not giving away the milk for free, or no one would want to buy the cow. Seriously, these are the words he used. The discussion wasn’t about whom I was sleeping with or how many men were in my life. Simply, I was asked who, if anyone, was I interested in because I was the only unmarried person in the room, and the only one without even a boyfriend to bring to the gathering. Yet I was subjected to a male-delivered speech about promiscuity and my inability to see this as a guarantee of life as a spinster. Because I was 28 and I was not a virgin. Oh, the scandal! Fast-forward to today, and much relief is found in the giggling and revealing conversation two friends have about one another’s history and sexuality, with mutual acceptance and a lack of judgment. Sometimes it’s not your “best” friend who is truly among the best friends in your life.
I can’t help but wonder if librarians are better people than the rest of the world.
Certainly the ones I surround myself by are superior.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Toilet Training My Community
Someone pooped. Someone pooped on the floor. It was a big poop. It didn’t seem to have come from a child, but who are we to judge just how much poop can come out of a child with a great, big push?
Did anyone confess to making such a big poop? Did anyone offer to help clean it up? Did anyone even offer up a suspect whose anus was likely still recovering from such an exodus?
No. No. And no.
There was only one child of diaper age present, and that child sat with his mother at a computer, making the rest of the staff eye him suspiciously in case he was the pooper and he had more in him. Since everyone just stood around watching the staff clean up the semi-soft poop, it could’ve been any of them.
Sincerely, if you work at my library long enough, you start looking at every patron as a possible suspect of depositing poop in inappropriate places.
Is he someone who would poop in the middle of the computer area? Could that lady pinch a loaf over in the romance books and just walk away? What about the teenager who is apprehensively pacing in the Anime collection – is he trying to spread his diarrhea all around?
I know that everyone poops because I read about it, but why do they keep pooping all over my library?
Did anyone confess to making such a big poop? Did anyone offer to help clean it up? Did anyone even offer up a suspect whose anus was likely still recovering from such an exodus?
No. No. And no.
There was only one child of diaper age present, and that child sat with his mother at a computer, making the rest of the staff eye him suspiciously in case he was the pooper and he had more in him. Since everyone just stood around watching the staff clean up the semi-soft poop, it could’ve been any of them.
Sincerely, if you work at my library long enough, you start looking at every patron as a possible suspect of depositing poop in inappropriate places.
Is he someone who would poop in the middle of the computer area? Could that lady pinch a loaf over in the romance books and just walk away? What about the teenager who is apprehensively pacing in the Anime collection – is he trying to spread his diarrhea all around?
I know that everyone poops because I read about it, but why do they keep pooping all over my library?
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