Match game

Find your Dead Celebrity Soulmate. (Mine were Poe, Van Gogh, and Rudolph Valentino. Not sure if I should be flattered or nervous.)

Line for the resume (or maybe a T-shirt!)

Copy editors do the line editing and Dummifying.

(Not technically, I guess, since the above comes from a New York Times Book Review essay on the loathsome "For Dummies" series. But I think it'd be entertaining nonetheless.)

I knew it

There are no songs with my name in them.

Patrons from another planet

A patron came up to the reference desk this evening, stood in front of me with his eyes closed, and said "My altitude-challenged colonial friends tell me it's another beautiful day in Williamsburg."

I don't even know where to begin with that one. Or am I missing some kind of hilarious cultural reference?

I think it was still less creepy than last Friday afternoon, when a not-at-all-attractive patron came over, leaned on the desk in front of me, and said, "So, are you a volunteer here?" I know I work in a library, but come up with a better pickup line than that. He followed that gem up with "So, did you study libraries in college?" Jesus.

In other, less annoying library news, I get to teach a handful of information literacy sessions at my internship next month. They're for an education class on integrating technology into the curriculum, and the assignment I'm working with them on is creating a wiki to be used to share a literacy unit. They're using (and I'm going to be demonstrating) PB Wiki. I was playing around with it a little tonight at work and I think it's going to be fun.

Familiar assignment

Next week in my humanities reference class we each have to give a five-minute presentation on a religion that is not our own. Totally up my alley, yet I was stumped in trying to come up with something. Tonight at work I busted out the Encyclopedia of World Religions and eventually settled on Shinto. Other than the fact that it's a Japanese religion I know basically nothing about it, but a coworker of mine was telling me last week that she had a professor in college who was way into it, so we'll see how it goes.

Older by the day

On the first day of my internship, my supervisor walked me around and introduced me to a few people who I'll be working with or job shadowing during my time at the library. One of them, who works behind the circulation desk and whose name I can never remember, but who, I was told, has nine children, greeted me with "She's a cute little intern -- look at her cute hair!" -- which was horrifying.

Perhaps even worse, though, the following week I ended up sitting next to her at the wedding shower. She must have noticed the ring on my finger, because she asked if I was engaged. When I said, no, actually I've been married for just about five years, she looked me in the face and said, "You're not that young!"

No. No, I'm not. And I'm going through one of those phases where I feel just ancient. Besides being the disappointingly old intern, I am several years older than the new librarian who is starting this month at my reference job. As an old married person, I also find myself mentally referring to my brother and his fiancee as "the kids," even though they are barely two years younger than me.*

And I'm not the only one in the household going through an early midlife crisis. M. Defarge starts his graduate classes today. Last week the program had some sort of meet-and-greet at a local bar. He came home subdued. Not only were the majority of the attendees already partway through the program, but they were primarily members of the under-25 set as well. "I'm a nontraditional student," he moaned.

I guess we both are. Thankfully, I'll be done long before my 30th birthday, though. He's 30 and just starting; by the time the three years are up, he'll probably be in the midst of a real midlife crisis.

--
* Wedding update: I am officially a bridesmaid. My mother is extremely relieved. Crisis averted!

Patriotism in action

New rule: Bad presidents happen to good people. Amid all the 9/11 anniversary talk about what will keep us safe, let me suggest that in a world turned hostile to America, the smartest message we can send to those beyond our shores is, "We're not with stupid." Therefore, I contend -- with all seriousness -- that ridiculing this president is now the most patriotic thing you can do.

-- Bill Maher, in Salon (it's so worth it to sit through the mini-commercial in order to read the whole thing)

Potential long-lost relatives and other stories

I need to see if I can find a picture of him online, but my humanities reference instructor appears to me to be M. Manette in 25 years or so. It's uncanny. The more I obsess about it in lieu of paying attention in class (which thus far hasn't been overly excting), the greater the resemblance. Was M. Manette adopted from these parts? My prof has this sort of Madonna-fake British accent thing going on, but he did his undergrad at Bradley U and his library degree at Indiana, so I think he's from this country. Because, honestly, who comes to the U.S. to go to school in Peoria?

Besides starting my FINAL library school class, I've also completed my first week of internship in academic library-land. I don't want to rush to judgment, since my first official day yesterday was spent decorating for and attending a wedding shower for one of the librarians, but so far all of the "reference" questions I've been present for have involved loading paper in the printer or reviving frozen computers. Crap. I'm beginning to think I could have saved myself 20 grand and taken one of those Microsoft certification courses.

That's overstating it a bit, of course. Today I spent part of the morning hanging out with one of the librarians while she prepped for an information literacy session. This place is all about the teaching, which is one of the reasons I chose them. Information literacy = showing people how to do things for themselves, and I am a huge proponent of that. I even tried to put Dead Celebrity Guy on a computer and show him how to look stuff up on IMDB a while back, although that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped (he left very quickly, but he came back shortly thereafter and asked about more possibly dead people -- so much for self-sufficiency).

Because of the wonderful Labor Day holiday I haven't been at that job in almost a week, so I've had a nice, long respite from the world of 1960s sitcoms. I can't overstate how welcome that was. In fact, because of the holiday, I had two consecutive days off in a row (both libraries were closed Sunday AND Monday). And this weekend is my weekend off for September. I don't know if I will be able to handle all the free time -- I'm on my way to being spoiled!