Young adults

The library that I work at, like most public libraries, has a Young Adult section. This is basically a collection of books theoretically intended for patrons ages 12 to 18, although the primary audience seems to be late elementary school and middle school students. To go along with the collection, we have a Young Adult Librarian, who seems to primarily work during the day, when said Young Adults are in school. But I digress.

I work on the same floor as the Young Adult Librarian, but I do not work in that section. Last night, I was at the Fiction and AV desk with Mandy, a librarian who is about a year older than me. Near closing time, two women approached us. One asked Mandy a legitimate book-related question. The other one asked me, "Are you guys the young adult librarians?"

Not realizing that this was the setup of an elaborate and oh-so-funny joke, I answered that, in fact, the Young Adult Librarian's desk was on the other side of the stairwell, but that she did not work evenings.

The patron, who was probably in her late 40s and dressed in a thrift-store-chic-by-way-of-J.-Jill kind of way, replied, "Well, you could be! You guys are so CUTE sitting there!" and laughed and laughed.

Our desk is at the top of the stairs. Momentarily paralyzed with rage, I contemplated pushing her down them. However, before I could get off my stool to either do it or to explain to her that, in fact, the Young Adult Librarian was an actual adult, and that the Children's Librarians were, in fact, not children, Mandy finished answering her friend's question and the two were on their merry way.

Sister of the groom

So my brother and his girlfriend got engaged this weekend. The consensus so far appears to be "What the hell took them so long?" To an extent, I guess I'm guilty of that myself; I wasn't in any particular rush for them to make it official, but I've been referring to her for a year or so as my common-law sister-in-law and finding it hilarious. But my brother is only 25, and they've only been back together for a couple of years.

When she called to tell me (not my brother, but that's not really out of character for him), my brother's fiancee said "You're going to have a sister!" Which I have to say was a little bizarre. I already think of her as my sister -- I have pretty much from one of the first times I met her, when she helped me change out of my wedding dress after the event and scolded me because I had inadvertently left the price tag in the damn thing. But the phrase -- maybe because I spent my childhood secretly hoping to hear it -- made me picture the baby sister I was always holding out for.

Anyway. My brother's getting married, and my family seems to be expecting much more of a reaction from me than I've so far displayed. I wasn't expecting it, but I'm not surprised, either, and I don't think I'm really given to jumping up and down and screaming. I'm having a hard time picturing my brother proposing. I've known him since he was born, for Christ's sake, and I didn't like him for a lot of that time. I like him now, of course, but I still have a hard time imagining that someone would want to marry him.

They got engaged late Friday night, told my parents on Saturday. I didn't find out until Sunday because I missed the call from my brother's fiancee and then figured if she wanted something, she would have left a message. By the time my mom knew I knew about the whole thing and could discuss it with me, she was already all worked up about how to approach the question of contributing money for the wedding, and getting all hyper and defensive in anticipation of the conversation. I can already see the beginnings of an us-versus-them battle in my mom's mind, and I really don't want to be on the "us" side. Maybe because I've been through it, and I can see both sides. Maybe because planning my own wedding was such a miserable ordeal, in part because my mom was so completely out of her mind that just talking to her raised my blood pressure, and I don't think I can stand to do it again. I may have to move back to St. Louis to avoid the drama.

My brother proposed while they were on vacation in Key West. Her family and friends all said that this trip would be when it happened; my mom and I said no way. When I laughed about that on the phone with my mom the other day, she got all melancholy and said "We don't really know him anymore." I think that's more than a little melodramatic, especially since my brother is much closer with our family than I ever expected him to be as a 25-year-old guy -- he's usually the one who arranges birthday dinners and baseball game outings for the six of us. I feel like I know him better than I ever expected to. Sometimes his fiancee will tell me things about him that surprise me, but why shouldn't she know him better?

The funny thing is that a lot of the things she tells me, I recognize in myself. Who knew we'd turn out so much alike?

When I got married, she told me that he cried during the ceremony. I didn't believe her. I believe her now, and I know that when he meets her at the end of the aisle next August, I'll be doing the same thing.

Alternate Drafts

I am the laziest ambitious person I know.

Sounds like an oxymoron, right? But I think it's true. To me, the moment that says it all was when I read that a college classmate of mine had received a Fulbright grant. She was a fellow journalism student; I graduated at the top of our journalism class; therefore, my first thought was "Why didn't I get a Fulbright?" Um ... maybe because I didn't apply? Or, you know, come up with a plan of study, or really learn a foreign language, or do anything that in any way would result in my receiving such a grant.

I blame my elementary school teachers. They were the ones who first put into my head the idea that I was "gifted," that I had all of this potential to do great things. The combination of this kind of encouragement, coupled with the fact that I really hadn't had to do much to earn their praise (you know, like study), set me on my path to lazy ambition. When I was in sixth grade I learned that high school valedictorians had to give speeches, and I was terrified, because of course I'd have to do it, and I hated talking in front of groups. Six years of minimal effort later, I was honestly a little surprised to find myself barely cracking the top ten. Not bad by any means, but there certainly weren't any impending speeches looming.

Last week I discovered that Google is the MySpace of people who have actually achieved something. My brief flirtation with MySpace didn't yield any useful information about people I was actually interested in, but typing their names into the ubiquitous search engine pulled up all kinds of information about what they did in college and what they're doing now. (Side note: It was even more interesting to research their spouses -- apparently our valedictorian, the Maryland-based teacher with the advanced French degree, was in Chicago in the recent past because her husband was becoming an Anglican minister at the U of C divinity school.) No one seems to have left me horribly in the dust; in fact, the person that I considered my creative writing competition seems to be working as a library assistant at the U of C science library. He's probably getting a PhD there, unlike this library assistant, but at least he hasn't won any Pulitzers.

On the other hand, yesterday I read some snippet in the Tribune about a panel discussion of the Harry Potter series with some people who have well-known Potter fan sites, and one of the participants was an editor from Arthur A. Levine, the series' American publisher. She had one of the most common names ever, except that they also ran a picture, and between the two, I realized that she was one of my classmates at the Publishing Institute. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering why we were there, and how she actually went to New York to break into children's publishing while I moved to St. Louis and waited to be discovered from afar. But how dare she be so successful?

I think my problem isn't just with always seeing the rough drafts -- it's also with always looking back on the alternate drafts, the ones that I never really did much with, but that I never threw away, either. I'm not sure where I got the idea that my life was some kind of choose-your-own-adventure novel, but every time I read one of these alumni notes or hear through the grapevine about the accomplishments of someone I used to compete with (at least in theory) in elementary or high school, I mentally shuffle through these old drafts -- the one where I got my PhD, the one where I moved to New York and got a job at a major publisher -- and compare them to my real life, which always seems to come up short.

Everything is a choice, obviously, at least for those of us who are lucky enough to have supportive families and excellent educations and loads of potential just waiting to be exploited. The part that ultimately bothers me is looking back at those choose-your-own-adventure moments and revisiting my utter lack of preparation for them -- suddenly thinking, as a junior or senior in college, that maybe I should study abroad or write an honors thesis. Registering for my final semester of library school yesterday and thinking that, hey, maybe I would have benefited from actually making an appointment with my academic advisor at some point over the last two years. Finding myself eleventh in my high school class in the runup to graduation and thinking, hm, maybe I should have studied for some of those math and science classes.

Don't get me wrong -- it's not necessarily that I regret the choices that I have made, since most of those seem to have turned out okay. And who knows if those other paths would have worked out any better. The frustrating thing is realizing that ambition without effort only gets you so far, and wondering what a little extra work and preparation might have yielded.

Field-Tested Books

Another cool pairing of travel and books:

The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person's experience with both. The writing you'll find here is grounded in that idea. You won't find any book reviews here. You'll find reviews of experience.

"What's your word?"

He said, "Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn -- what is the word of the street?"

Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be -- that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.

-- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat. Pray. Love. One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

Gilbert and her friend decide that the word for Rome is SEX, the word for the Vatican is POWER, the word for New York City is ACHIEVE, and the word in Los Angeles is SUCCEED. I haven't figured out the word for Chicago yet, but I can safely say that St. Louis and I did not have the same word.

The second part of the equation, of course, is figuring out your own word, since you can't identify a match without it. I'm having an even harder time with that one. Maybe it's easier to figure it out for another person -- I think the word for my good friend Alexandre Manette, physician, is LEARN. Not just because of the whole teacher thing, although that obviously helps, but because I've never met anyone as eager to learn new things, from ice skating to foreign languages to belly dancing, as A. M. -- and not just to try them, but to master them. It's a truly inspiring quality.

The words I come up with for myself are not particularly flattering. EXHAUSTED, lately. SARCASTIC, always. I'd like to think there's something more fundamental than that.

Gilbert ends up borrowing from Sanskrit for her word. She considers SEEK (as well as HIDE), but eventually settles on ANTEVASIN, which means "one who lives at the border":

The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.

Maybe if I learn Sanskrit, I'll find one. But since I don't have much spare time, maybe I can get A. M. to learn it for me ...

Trendsetter

How ahead of the times am I? I was using "slut" and all of its varied synonyms as terms of endearment 10 years ago!

"Success" is a relative term

There's a fascinating, completely infuriating article in the weekend New York Times about the "new gender divide" in higher education -- basically, that women are outnumbering men on campus and are making disproportionately better grades and achieving more while the guys are in their rooms playing video games. (Which is pretty much what I remember about my own undergraduate experience as well.)

Cases in point:

Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.

She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.

She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire," she said.

vs.

"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."

But now a lot of schools are getting nervous about the "crisis" in men's education and worrying that the men are underserved and need special attention, and there are all kinds of new recruiting initiatives designed to recruit and retain male students. And I was actually starting to feel bad about the whole thing until I got to the end of the article:

Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.

"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said. "And maybe society holds men a little higher."

Sigh. Remind me again why I'm killing myself with all of this work and school.

Literary Guide to the World

How cool is this?

After that trip, I started thinking: Wouldn't it be cool if there was a travel guide devoted not to restaurants, hotels and museums, but to the literature of a place? Yes, it would. So here it is: Salon's Literary Guide to the World. It's a grand name, to be sure, but one that suits. From Turkey to Togo, D.C. to L.A., Rio to Russia and beyond, the Guide promises to recommend the best books -- fiction, history, memoir or otherwise -- to take with you on your travels. And if there's a place that you've always dreamed of seeing, but won't visit in the foreseeable future, the Literary Guide will point you to the books that offer the best virtual tours around.

Current destinations: Nebraska and Brooklyn.

"Vomit was his personal nemesis"

The man in charge of accepting EMT applications was in his seventies, hard-nosed and gruff. His name was Charlie. He looked at me and said, "Lady, I don't think this is for you," then went into a long soliloquy about vomit.

Vomit was his personal nemesis, the world's worst and most abhorrent thing. He looked at my silk outfit. "They'll vomit all over you," he said, trying to scare me. He did. I hated vomit too. In fact, vomit was high on my scale of things that made me panic. I was so afraid of vomiting myself that it never occurred to me that I might be the target of someone else's spew.

--Jane Stern, Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT