Mentored for the morning

Yesterday morning I attended a "flash mentoring" session at the office of my local library system. The event was billed as kind of a speed-dating approach to mentoring, in that we were matched up and spent a relatively short period of time together (2 hours) with no further commitment.

I was a little skeptical going in because I was matched with a corporate librarian working in an industrial setting, despite the fact that I loaded the questionnaire I filled out with references to teaching and academia. To be honest, though, I think she and I were the only non public librarians there, so I guess I was lucky there was anyone to match me with at all.

Regardless, she turned out to be a great "date"--very enthusiastic and with lots of great advice and some very relevant experience. She started her library from scratch and built it into a multi-campus department with a staff of 5 or 6 and some really innovative programs and services. She also does quite a bit of training that's really not all that different than what I do with the students and faculty.

She gave me some good suggestions about professional organizations to join and opportunities for writing and speaking. She said I seemed like a real "go getter" and that she could see a lot of areas where I could be innovative and make big changes where I'm at, rather than thinking of it as a bit of a dead-end job (since there really isn't any way for me to move "up" in the sense of promotions or that sort of thing).

I left feeling excited about my job again, which was nice, since I've been very discouraged lately. I was looking forward to the slow pace of summer, but in practice, it's not much fun. It's really hard to be motivated when there's no one around and no looming deadlines. I'm ready for things to be busy and hectic again, even if it means dealing with small-scale copier-induced mutinies.

My mentor-for-the-day also gave me a few pieces of advice of the cliched-but-true variety. One was to not be intimidated by my administration--that no one else there has my expertise. The other was that "it's easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission." Both struck a chord with me because my institution is so micromanaged that I feel like I have to have my boss sign off on the smallest changes I make, despite the fact that anyone above me really pays that much attention to what I do.

Case in point: when I did a library satisfaction survey at the end of the spring semester, I was amazed at how many students requested more leisure reading materials (eg, fiction, graphic novels). One of the quirks of our collection is that we already have a disproportionate amount of that stuff because people have donated it (the accounting assistant brings me romance novels and mysteries when she's done with them so she doesn't have to lug them home on the train). But because of the way our collection is arranged, no one knows they're there. I proposed moving them to a separate section and creating a popular reading collection--and I'm still waiting for an OK. But do I really need one? Will my boss even notice? Since it won't cost the school a dime and won't affect the curriculum at all, I might as well find out.

I still haven't heard anything about whether I'll be allowed to teach a section of the freshman seminar, and some pretty dramatic changes in the course schedule for this fall are putting my book club and library skills workshop plans in doubt. I've got a month to kill before classes officially begin again, so I guess I might as well be a little subversive and see what happens. I doubt they'll fire me for rearranging some books.

Latest sign of the impending apocalypse

What the fucking hell?

I am beyond disgusted--I'm truly offended.

Milestone

I just ate my first (full) carton of yogurt. French vanilla, with many blueberries added. And it didn't kill me, or even make me gag. I feel like I'm growing as a person.

New library mascot

This morning at work I was making my usual rounds, turning on the computers, when I noticed something odd-looking next to one of the student workstations. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a giant cockroach. (Well, actually, it appeared to be a giant cockroach, but since I had actually never been that close to giant cockroaches in my sheltered suburban life, I had to check Google Images to confirm that it was, in fact, a giant cockroach.)

I went to whack it with a big, heavy book from my discard pile, but it scooted behind the computer. I went to regroup and put my lunch in the refrigerator, and when I came back, it was gone. After a minute or two of timid inspection, I discovered it on the ceiling, in the far corner. Apparently it was a giant flying cockroach.

So I kicked off my high heels, dragged over a chair, grabbed my book, and thought, I don't get paid enough for this. So I left the facilities manager a message and the cockroach hung out on the ceiling for an hour and a half until someone arrived to retrieve him. Luckily he wasn't in the same area of the library as my desk. I debated mentioning him to the students who came in, but decided not to. They didn't seem to bother each other.

Eventually someone from the building came and retrieved him. After the fact I found out that one of the painting instructors collects them. He keeps them in an aquarium on his desk until they die, and then he pins them to his bulletin board. And makes little outfits for them.

Oh, and apparently there are tons of them in our building--particularly in the student lounge and locker areas (big shock). I've just never encountered one until now. Good to know.

Quote for the day

In the pup's final hour, Trudy whispered to it about the black seed inside her as though it might somehow understand. She stroked the fuzz on its chest as it turned its eyes to her, and in the dark they made a bargain that one of them would go and one would stay.

--from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

I'm only in the first chapter, but I'm in love with this book already. It's probably a good thing that this book is 562 pages and too heavy to carry on the train. I have a feeling it's going to move me to tears more than once.

2 Days in Paris

I finally got around to watching Julie Delpy's latest film the other night. Fairly or unfairly to her, I was envisioning an offshoot of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, perhaps from a more French perspective. I guess you could say it resembled those movies, if Jesse was a neurotic, whiny asshole and Celine was a promiscuous psychopath. And instead of solitary walks through the streets of Vienna/Paris, you put them in the middle of a rotating cast of completely repulsive characters. Oh, and gave it a nihilistic, pointless ending. Then I guess they'd be somewhat similar.

When it showers, it pours

In today's mail I found an invitation to the wedding shower of a former coworker/friend who I haven't spoken to in at least a year, probably more. In fact, the only reason I even know she's engaged is because a mutual friend, who I still see frequently, told me the news. Am I just overly cynical, or is this a bit tacky? I was especially turned off by the fact that the "X and Y are registered at..." cards were the first thing I pulled out of the envelope.

These marrying people just seem to keep coming out of the woodwork. At least I'm reasonably sure I won't have to pull bridesmaid duty for this one. Luckily for me we're going to be out of town the weekend of the shower, and with luck, the wedding will coincide with another of the many we have schedule, since there are only so many weekends in October.

Last weekend was the "interactive" bride's shower, and it went surprisingly smoothly. I would even say that I'd recommend wine tasting as an activity at any such party--it pretty much ran itself, leaving the matron-of-honor/master of ceremonies and I to do the behind the scenes stuff without feeling as though we were neglecting the guests.

She and I got along famously as well, owing to an epiphany that I'd had the day before. Thinking back, I remembered my initial offer to "help" with the shower. Somehow I'd recast my role in my own mind as that of co-planner--and then proceeded to get irritated when she didn't give me more to do, even though I really didn't want to do any of it. Saturday I gave myself a good smack in the head and settled gratefully into my supporting role, and it was great. No need to drive myself crazy or write a big check for stuff I had no say in. I made bruschetta, helped set up and clean up, and made the bow bouquet. The matron-of-honor and resident type A personality did the rest, and did it beautifully, I must say. I may have to try suppressing my inner control freak more often. It was a nice change.

Unpacking

My brother moved to Atlanta last Monday. His wife is moving there tomorrow. Conventional wisdom would dictate that they would move together, but she had a trip planned with some friends and then spent the weekend with her family before heading out.

I had an e-mail this morning from my brother in which he mentioned that he'd spent the last week working 12-hour days and then unpacking until midnight every night. The movers arrived the same day he did, and his goal, he says, is to have everything unpacked before my sister-in-law arrives tomorrow night--so that it'll feel more like home for her.

I, of all people, should be more sympathetic to her. In spite of the mental image I had of myself as an uncomplaining martyr I spent a fair amount of time complaining about having moved to St. Louis. It's difficult to move so far away when you're doing it primarily for someone else. But blood is always thicker than water (marriage?), I guess, because my foremost feeling is irritation at her for leaving him not only to unpack, but also to create the idea of "home." I guess I feel a little sorry for him, too, because they're both going to discover what I did in my own imagined exile--ultimately, no one can create a sense of home for you. You have to do it yourself.

Fun with words

I love the English language.

Today at work I assigned myself another mindless task in order to pass the time--cleaning up the subject headings in our crappy library catalog. Sounds technical but basically just means entering subjects for the books we own, so that on the happy day when someone other than me actually searches for a book, they might conceivably find something.

Anyway, one of the books in our odd collection is called The F-Word, and apparently is about exactly that. The first subject heading listed is "Fuck (The English word)." Call me a librarian, but that made my morning.

This afternoon I came home and was reading the paper and came upon this little gem:

OneNewsNow.com, a Mississippi-based Web site committed to delivering "news from a Christian perspective," has a strict policy to replace certain words deemed offensive. So imagine the surprise when readers learned Sunday that Tyson Homosexual — not Tyson Gay — had run the world's fastest 100-meter dash. The site ran the following altered Associated Press recap of Gay's 9.68-second sprint:

"Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has. ... Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team." "It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Homosexual said. "I'm glad my body could do it."

Awesome.

Still more quotes

At least it's a new source: an interesting article on the implications of Michelle Obama's new "makeover."

The "makeover tour" is not about making Michelle Obama seem nice, it's about making her seem more "womanly" (or, really, wifely). And you can bet this has more to do with how men perceive Senator Obama than how women view Michelle Obama.

More quotes

As predicted, I read the Patchett book again this morning. (Seriously, it's 100 pages, huge type, big margins, tons of stock photos of crossroads and intersections; it took me 20 minutes max.)

A few more passages that I decided I couldn't live without writing down before I returned the book to the library. I hope I'm not violating the percentage part of the fair use exemption by posting them here!

Writing is good for a many things, but curing loneliness isn’t one of them.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined. … And sometimes, we don’t realize what we’ve learned until we’ve already known it for a very long time.

And the most awesome analogy for writing ever:

I came to understand that fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stay behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself. This is not to say you are passive. You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens. You have to write the story you find in the circumstances you’ve created, because more often than not the ducks don’t show up. The hunters in the next blind begin to argue and you realize they’re in love. You see a snake swimming in your direction. Your dog begins to shiver and whine, and you start to think about this gun that belonged to your father. By the time you get out of the marsh you have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.

It's the thought that counts

I feel like I've been very down on M. Defarge lately, in this space, but also in real life. I've been thinking in such abstract and academic terms about this whole division of labor thing that I sometimes forget that I'd be having the kid with him, specifically, and not some generic representative of his gender. So this is my clumsy attempt at acknowledging that there are other facets to his personality than just the side that doesn't feel any need to attend to the dishes immediately after dinner is done.

Various eBay-generated packages started appearing on our doorstep last week, with book rate postage and literary return addresses. My birthday isn't until next week, but the other night he couldn't stand it anymore and came into the kitchen in a state of great excitement, handed me a battered copy of Little Women, and told me to turn to a specific page.

I've always wanted a copy of the exact edition I had when I read that book for the very first time, a good 20 years ago. I couldn't tell you who published it, or when, but I know I'll know it by a specific illustration.

This wasn't it, and neither was the other one he'd ordered. But the fact that he not only knew the book, but remembered that specific detail, made me think that, yeah, I could do worse than to have a kid that's half him.

I also love Ann Patchett

(But I don't think she'll be posting comments on my blog, offering to do embroidery for me.)

Anything new by Ann Patchett automatically goes to the top of my reading list. (Yeah, that was co-opted wholesale from my Goodreads review. Do you think I have to cite myself?) I don't think I've ever read anything by her that I didn't love. So of course I rushed straight to the library for her new book, even though it's a printed (and apparently slightly expanded) version of a commencement speech she gave at her alma mater. And of course I adored it and will probably read it again tomorrow on the train back downtown. When I read books about writing that talk about developing your own, distinctive voice, I think of her. Maybe it's partly because I listened to her read the audiobook version of Truth and Beauty, but when I read her work, I feel like I'm hearing her speak.

Some of my favorite lines:

Receiving an education is a little bit like a garden snake swallowing a chicken egg: it's in you but it takes a while to digest.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I'd planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

There's a time in our life when we crave all the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what's coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.

Okay, that last one winds up sounding a little cliched. But especially in the last few years, when I've felt so constantly pressured to make Big Life Decisions that I find myself wishing I'd wake up 60 years old, so that everything would be kind of settled, it's kind of comforting to think of these choices as opportunities rather than pass/fail tests.

Blueberries for ... me

Can I just say how much I love the state of Michigan right now? Cherries arrived in our local farmer's markets two weeks ago, and blueberries showed up on Saturday. That plus the homemade doughnuts that they sell every week but that we only splurge on for special occasions like visiting relatives (because there is just not enough yoga offered at my gym to offset four months of homemade doughnuts) made a weekend with the in-laws bearable, even pleasant in spots.

Strawberry season is almost over, so I'm going to stock up this weekend and attempt some jam. And pretty soon the vegetables should start piling up. I planted quite a few this year, but we'll see what we end up with after the squirrels have their way. Last year they ate everything but the jalapenos.

I love farmer's market season! Especially now that the growing season has begun in earnest. I remember how mystified I was when I went in late May a few years ago and there was hardly anything to buy. Now at least I grasp the concept that not everything is available year-round. And I eat as much of it as I possibly can while it lasts.

One more wallop for that dead horse

Not to keep hammering away at the same topic, but this weekend M. Defarge's parents and his future sister-in-law were in town (we were shopping for a mother-of-the-bride dress) and she and I somehow got into a discussion about the division of labor thing. (I also somehow got into a similar discussion when I went out for a drink with a coworker on Friday, which leads me to think I may be obsessing just a wee bit.) Anyway, her take on the topic was that splitting everything down the middle isn't a realistic or even necessarily a desirable goal--she said she thinks the focus should be on "minimizing resentment" in the relationship. I'm not 100 percent sure I agree with her, but the phrase has stuck in my head.

Of course, she also said that her parents' example has led her to conclude that men "just don't have the stamina" to work a full day and then come home and deal with housework and children. To which I say, fuck that. I don't currently have the stamina to run a marathon (or even a 5K), but that doesn't automatically disqualify me for the training program.