A Case of the Stormy Mondays

Today is a bad day. I am completely disgusted and affronted that I have to come into work today. That I have to deal with my coworkers. To put covers on books. Check my email. That I have to go home and cook dinner from scratch, because my husband got so spoiled living with my folks while I was in graduate school that he can't even boil water anymore. That I have to clean up, because people are coming over tomorrow night. That I have to feed the cats, brush my teeth, do anything at all. A day like today is only worth crawling back into bed and spending the day dozing, reading, and occasionally drinking tea -- which someone brings me. Getting up to go to work while it's pouring rain and the sky is still black as night is just torture. It's just not right.

A patron just asked me if we were closing early because of the bad weather. I wish.

UPDATE: I see on WWLTV.com reports of major street flooding at Carrollton and Banks St., which is only a few blocks from my library branch. And schools around town are closing, including I see, Tulane and Loyola. So, maybe.

Hard Day's Day

Well I just had a hell of a day at work. Now I remember what's sucky about public library service -- crazy patrons and crazy coworkers. Put them together and you have an explosive combination.

Upon graduation, one of my professors told me I would not find the public library "challlenging enough." Well, it may not be intellectually challenging, but it is certainly emotionally challenging. There were several times today when there were four or more people at the desk, all clamoring for my attention, the phone ringing, and I was just going, What? What? You want what from me?? Ahhgh, overstimulation! Couple that with riding constant herd on an erratic new employee and you have the makings of a very long and tiring day.

I need a drink!

Working

I am sitting at my new library branch, typing this after hours. It has been a heckuva two weeks. I've already been on TV to represent the library, talking about the summer reading club.

So far, I like working at a branch. It is a very different feel from working at the main library. Cozier. More families, less crazy street people. It's nice. I have learned things I never knew at Main -- how to check books in and out, how to collect fines, make new library cards. Our new branch has its Grand Opening this week.

Weekend before last we moved our household down to NOLA, in the pouring rain. It was brutal. But it's done. Our new apartment is significantly smaller than the one in BR, so the DH and I are having some ... discussions about what to do with the excess stuff. I was truly amazed, nay, appalled! at the amount of stuff we have accumulated, a mere two years after losing everything to Katrina.

So. Here we are. Hubby and I in the same house again, living together, no more commuting. We turned in the keys to our Baton Rouge apartment. It's done.

In New Orleans. Part of me is really happy. Part of me is thinking, What the hell am I doing here?

We'll have to see.

Back to Work!

Well I have finally landed a job, and it is with my old employer, the New Orleans Public Library. But the thing is, I have to start Monday! Yikes!

But it's OK. We were able to push up, the move-in date on our new apartment, so we will move ourselves, the cats, and some necessities down and kind of "camp out" in the new place until we can effect the full-scale move the next weekend.

I will start at the new Mid-City Branch and train in Branch Operations, and as the other new temporary libraries created by a huge SOLINET/Gates Foundation grant, I will be put in charge of one.

In my previous career I spent all my time at the Mian Library, so I am now ready to experience the branch side of things, and take my place as a full-fledged LIBRARIAN!

I am ready to get back to work. I've been bored just sitting at home.

Kudos for Me :-)

Hey, check it out, Jeffrey over at Library Chronicles gives me some love.

WE have had our differences, but he is still a fellow NOPL staffer and therefore one of my peeps. Awright!

What Comes After

I can't believe in less than two weeks I will be done with all this.

I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom last night, and on the way back saw my empty bed, my empty lonely bed, and the thought came to my mind, I'm almost done with this, and I think that was the first time that I realized, really realized, that school is all but over and this phase of my life will soon be done.

Part of me is sad, sad that my grad school experience is almost over, sad to leave the campus and lose access to the resources of a major research university. But the larger part of me, drained by the soul-crushing load of homework in the last third of this semester, just really, really wants to be done with it.

Even so, next Wednesday, when the last of my classes and projects is behind me, I think I will plunge into an abyss of despair the likes of which I have seldom known. I won't even know what to do with myself. I have been so focussed on school, on getting through this, on buckling down and dealing, post-Katrina, learning to live more or less on my own, which I've never done -- so focussed on the day to day that I haven't given a thought to what comes after.

What the hell do I do then?

Get a job, everyone says. Well, yes. But what kind of job? Where? Here? There? Elsewhere? I have yet to confront what any of those choices would mean. Moving -- packing -- I shudder to contemplate it, even what little we have. 4 moves in 2 years, courtesy of Hurricane Katrina. That's not even bad for Katrina fugees, but still. It's tiring.

I'm just confused and startled at the end of it all. I've been so focussed on getting the degree, I never thought about what I would do with it once I had it.

I'm working the closing shift at the library. The GAs always have to work it, becuase obviously nobody else wants to.

I was hoping to finish two last articles for my literature review in Human-Computer Interation class, but they are putting me to sleep! If I keep reading I'm going to fall out of my chair.

OK, so, to make that last post less ... worthless ... let me reiterate that every library patron has the right to request that materiials be removed from the collection as inappropriate. Those materials won't often be removed, because the Library Bill of Rights holds that libraries collects materials representing thr full range of experiences and viewpoints, but the right to review is there.

In fact I covered this on my Comps exam. One of the questions was to "discuss an ethical challenge," and so I wrote about challenged materials in the public library. I wish I had the essay to show you, but they won't let us have them back. In fact I believe they have been destroyed. Anyway, the proper way to handle this is to have a formal "Challenged materials" form for the aggreived patron to fill out, and a formal review process for the book in question. Which it seems the library in question has done. So it's all good.


I still think it's funny, though.

The Librarian: Quest for the Degree

Today two undergraduates told me they had never come into the library before because they were "afraid of it."

Don't be afraid of the library!" I exclaimed. They just stared at me with big googly eyes, shaking their heads. "It's so big!" one of them whispered.

I don't think I was very successful at assuaging their fears. I just couldn't relate. I loved the library as an undergraduate; I would hang out there for fun. I would randomly search the OPAC, which back then was called LISA or maybe ALIS, looking up forbidden terms like "drugs" and "magic," just to see what I would get. (What I got was a book on the shamanistic use of the psilocybe mexicana mushroom in Central America, which I used to write a paper for Botany class.) I would look up notorious books like Mein Kampf and Tropic of Cancer, and then go look at them on the shelves, just to see them. I browsed the shelves on history, science and religion, marvelling at the wealth of books that had never been available to me before -- serious books, rare books -- grown-up books.

And yet if was almost ten years after I graduated that I finally ended up in a library, and found work I loved to do. In retrospect, maybe I should have realized my destiny sooner.

I daresay those undergraduates aren't going to grow up to become librarians. Poor things.