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!

Observations ....

... upon returning to New Orleans:

Wow, people dress freaky down here. I'd forgotten. You couldn't get away with that in Baton Rouge.

Ugh, giant roaches. My apartment in BR was incredibly buggy -- spiders, ants, and wasps -- but at least I didn't have to any of those damn things. No No Kitty, don't bring it in the house! Damn!

Hispanic laborers hanging out in front of a Home Depot. Heard of that, never seen it before. They wave to me now when I walk to work.

We made like six brand new library cards at our branch last week. For people who had never had a New Orleans Public Library card before -- people wh's driver's licenses said "California" or "Michigan." People are moving to New Orleans -- from away! This, I never imagined. Why do they? What jobs are they doing? What do they hope to find? Not that I begrudge them. But I'm very curious. What brings them to this hellhole now? It boggles me.

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.

Taqueria Trucks

This article from the Times-Picayune is about Jefferson Parish banning the operation of mobile taqueria trucks that serve hot lunches to the huge population of construction workers still rebuilding the region. The taco trucks followed the vast migrartion of Hispanic workers who flooded in post-K to commence the rebuilding.

The comments on the story mostly go back and forth about whether the ban is racist or not, whether the taco trucks are enabling illegal immigration.

Not being on the ground, I can't comment on the true purpoise of the ban, but I have nothing against teh taqueria trucks. This was, in fact, the only major thought I had about the influx of Hispanic workers during the rebuilding:

Better Mexican food.

Some of these people will like the New orleans region, and stay, and some of them will open up restaurants, melding their cuisine with the local cuisine, using fresh local ingedients. Jamabalaya with chorizo! Crawfish-stuffed chile rejillenos! Yay!

This is what New Orleans does. It is syncretistic. It takes people in, absorbs them -- eats them if you will, subsumes them, and they become part of the delicious melange, the gumbo of New Orleans. If New Orleans culture could survive the annexing by the United States, it can certainly survive this, and will be the richer for it. Remember, this was a Spanish city once, after all. We already have Vietnamese Pho houses and Salvadoran papusarias. So why not taco trucks?

It's all good. When I get home I look forward to eating my first meal from a taqueria truck.

news @ nature.com - Plants can tell who's who - It's not just animals that can tell siblings from strangers.

Now this is coll. This is the kind of cool thing you can find on the Net:

news @ nature.com - Plants can tell who's who - It's not just animals that can tell siblings from strangers.

Plants -- plants! -- can recognize their own relatives. In experiments, they grow and compete for nutrients more agressively when they are potted with non-relatives than when with theie leafy kin.

Awesome! It is a mystery how they do this. Perhaps some kind of chemical signature? Plant pheromones?

Plants are far more aware of their environments than is generally known. They can infer the presence and the abundance of neighboring plants by their own experience of nutrient and water levels in their soil, and act accordingly. I like what one of the scientists in the story said, "plants have a secret social life."

I took Botany for my life science as an undergrad, and I'm really glad I did, because it have me a different view of life, of the nature and processes of life. I learned the basics of biology -- mitosis/miosis, genetics, cellular metabolism, the Krebs cycle. But from a different viewpoint, vegetative instead of animalistic.

Plants are for more complex organisms than people generally realize. A flowering angiosperm like a rose bush or an apple tree is a highly complex lifeform, as complex in its way as a mammal, but we think it less because it is so different from us. Vegetative. They seem less alive to us because they don't move and react like animals. Well, actually, they do, but we can't see it because it is on a slower scale -- hours and days instead of moments.

And now we see that they are more aware, more alive, yet.

This is one of the things I love about libraianship -- the ability, the need, to always learn new things.

My Facebook

So my former classmates (wow, it feels weird to say that) keep telling me to get onto Facebook so that we can stay in touch. So, I did. Here's my profile:

http://www.facebook.com/p/Kirsten_M_Corby/548301382

I can see how people get obsessed with this, adding pictures, tracking their friends, writing on walls. But personally I prefer blogging.

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!

Bad Mojo

The first resume I send out comes back marked "Undeliverable."

Mike the Tiger dies on Commencement Day.

First day of hurricane season, there's a storm in the Gulf.

The bad omens keep piling up. I'm getting kind of freaked.

Now this ...

I did not know. Wild boars have infested City Park.

Wow! It's a whole new world down there!

Heads-up to Jeffrey as uaual for the link.

Wahoo!

I graduated today! I'm done with school! I have a master's degree! I never thought I would do that!

It's quite amazing to me. When I got my BA I never thought I would ever go back to school. I had some issues about going back -- my track record with higher education is ... not the best. I was quite anxious a lot of the time.

Yet here I am, with my hood and everything:



AWESOME!

Greensburg

I really feel for those people in Greensburg, Kansas. I know exactly what they are going through. To have your town, your home, your livelihood wiped away in an instant. To not know if your house is intact or destroyed. If your friends and neighbors are living or dead.

FEMA trailers. Insurance adjusters crawling around. The Red Cross. Meals Ready to Eat.

Welcome to the Long Road Home, Greensburg.

Finito!

12:28 AM. I just uploaded my final project for my final class to BlackBoard. I give a presentation tomorrow, and then I am DONE! Done with school! It feels unreal. It's been a long year. I never thought this day would come.

"It is Hypnotic to be part of this Lunacy"

Read this. It is amazing. It is about working on contract in Iraq.

Not safe if you are a loyal Bushie.

Here's a quote:

So many people know how to correct the world, and they feel like they
contributed when the office pooled $2,000 for the Tsunami. They feel like they are humanitarians, and that their hearts are so big. Yet even the relief campaigns and the Red Cross are constantly embroiled in scams and rip-off plans. While twenty-one-year-old soldiers from Hanksack, Nebraska are dying. And children are losing their legs. So the real question is: when are we going to get some motherfucking Starbucks up in here?

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.

I'll just BET there were!

Take a look at this from AL Direct:

The father of two teenage boys has asked city officials to fine the
Bentonville (Ark.) Public Library for keeping The Whole Lesbian Sex
Book by Felice Newman on the open shelves where his sons could find it. Earl Adams said his 14- and 16-year-old sons discovered the book in January while browsing for literature on military academies and were “greatly disturbed,” causing “many sleepless nights in our house.”

BWA-HA-HA-HAHA!!!! You think??? Sleepless nights when two teenage boys get their sweaty hands on a lesbian sex manual??? You think???

**Gasp!!!** I'm sorry, I shouldn't be so heartless. Obviously this guy is upset, and certainly he has every right to monitor what his kids read. It was just the unfortunate phrasing of the orignal AL Online post that had me laughing out loud at the reference desk.

Well So Much for That!

So much for Thirty in Thirty! I definitely dropped off a cliff there after taking Comps. Or into a black hole, as it were. Comps themselves were not actually that hard, intellectually, yet I still found them emotionally exhausting. Because they have been drumming into us CopmsCompsComps since before we even got here. SLIS tries so hard to make it seem like this big rite of passage, which it is in a way, but as an actual academic exercise it's not actually that grueling.

The soul-crushing load of homework I have had since then has not helped. I thought this, my final semester, would be a cakewalk. But it has turned out to be my hardest by far.

Hey, if I post ... 26 posts in the next ten hours, I could still make 30 in 30! Heh! Likely? Not.

I may have to go back and add some things, backdated, make myself seem less lame. So if you see me rewriting history, remember, history is written by the victors. And it's my blog, so that means me. :-)

When Will It End?

It just tore me up to see the memorial ceremonies attending the resumption of classes at Virginia Tech yesterday. It just all seems so tragic and -- and futile. These things, these school and workplace shootings just keep happening and happening, and no one seems to learn anything. Nothing changes. How long is America going to be willing to bear this cost? The cost of all this gun violence? What is it going to take?

There's another thing, too -- a thing I hate to mention because it seems so cold. But it has to be said. Last week, while we were stunned and grieving VT, suicide and other bombings in Iraq killed 183 people! That's like a Virginia Tech massacre every day! I read in Newsweek a while back that over 3,000 civilians in Iraq are killed every month. That's as many as were killed in 9/11! How many 9/11s have happened in Iraq since "Mission Accomplished?"

I don't begrudge anyone's mourning over VT -- far from it. It is only human nature to be more concerned about your own people, your own country, than strangers far away. But if we can't grieve for the Iraqis that way, let us at least be mindful. Be mindful of the death and the destruction, which we began. We have to ask, how long are we willing to bear that cost, too? What's it going to take?

Yay!

The Dean of my library school called me herself today, to let me know that I passed my comprehensive exams with distinction! Yaaaayyy! She said it was unanimous, too -- that all three faculty members on my review committee agreed that my responses were of superior quality.

Oh, I was the only one who passed with distinction, too. The first one in several semesters, apparently, so it's a really big deal. Wow!

(Actually, that feels a little weird. Being the only one. I wish someone else had made it, too. I enjoy being one of a select few. But being singled out like that, being primus inter pares if you will, makes me a little uncomfortable. It fires up my shyness.)

I don't think most people are interested in gaining distinction. "I just want to pass," my classmates say.

But distinction was something I wanted to do. I thought it was within my grasp, so I went for it, and got it. I wanted to prove to myself that I have mastered the material. And so I have.

I don't think "Graduating with Distinction" shows up on my diploma -- but by gosh it's going on my resume!