little victories

today at a meeting of the THREE librarians at my branch, i was able to convince my manager that we should allow the kids to play games on the computer as long as they are quiet. this is of course on a trial basis, but still it is a step in the right direction. woohoo!

happy halloween! now shut up and be quiet

happy halloween! today i am dressed as hell's librarian. i am wearing a black dress with black & grey striped knee highs and glittery devil horns. you see, hell's librarian is very unhelpful. dare i say, she is one of satan's minions. anyhoo, she does not help people find things or do their homework. if anything, when you ask her a question she most likely will either laugh in your face or give you total mis-information. for instance, if you were to enter a libray in hell and ask for a cookbook, hell's librarian would totally tell you it was in the 200s. ha, joke's on you! they're really in the 640s. or are they?
okay ... must continue setting up for our halloween party.

suffering from lead poisoning and being a minor celebrity

today i went to a meeting. a woman was there to talk to us about the dangers of lead poisoning. she was very thorough. i am now thoroughly convinced that i have been exposed to a variety of toxins and am most likely suffering from lead poisoning myself. right about now you are probably thinking i am a hypochondriac. well, the woman sitting next to me ALSO became convinced she too had lead poisoning. so its not just me.
oh, and i am on the cover of "library matters," a library magazine about queens library. everyone who is everyone has seen it.

where is the love?

you probably thought i forgot about you. well, i didn't. i could go into the long list of excuses as to why i have not posted lately, but i won't. so there!

anyway, there has been an interesting turn of events here ... we now have a assistant manager, and ABM if you will, because librarians love acronyms (assistant branch manager). so this abm has noticed that i am a good librarian. imagine that! he says stuff like, "you're a really good librarian." and "the kids really respond to you. you're very good with them" and my favorite, "you're a very good children's librarian." go figure.

but even though the abm is now my immediate supervisor, i still do not have to option of changing stupid archaic rules like 'no game playing on the computer' and 'only 4 people to a table' and 'no moving the miniscule chairs.'

did i tell you? they replaced about half the miniscule chairs with normal sized chairs. of course, they didn't bother to count how many chairs we actually needed. so every night when the pages try to put the chairs back neatly they fight amongst themselves about where the miniscule chairs go versus where the regular chairs go. i have tried to explain to them that this is an exercise in fruitlessness since no matter what there will be miniscule chairs where regular sized chairs go. but they don't listen to me.

a tirade on the usage of possesives

mine

eg: those books are mine

the word is already in a possesive tense.

you don't need to add an 's'

eg: oh yeah, that book, that's mines

THIS IS INCORRECT

just say MINE

do you know what 'mines' means?

mines: places where minerals may be obtained, either by excavation or by washing the soil.

see the difference?

my new favorite subject heading

okay, sometimes people ask me "what kinds of stuff did you learn in library school?" they usually ask this with disdain, not understanding that there is a subtle science behind organization. when i am asked this i of course have trouble coming up with any sort of concrete answer. so let me bust out my knowledge of subject headings for you all. trust me, it will be funny in the end. i swear. when have i ever led you astray?

every item in the library is assigned at least one subject heading (usually several). subject headings are created by library of congress and other big organizing organizations. subject headings are TOTALLY different than keywords. a keyword is just a word in the title or description of a book. whereas, the subject heading is concrete and exact. for instance all books on american civil war battles would have the following subject heading:


United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Battlefields


if a book didn't have the word battlefields or civil war in the title, we would still be able to find it. this is our secret. subject headings. who would have thunk it?


ANYWAY, while trying to see how many books on ballerinas we have here in the library, i came across what is now my favoritest subject heading ever:


Ballerinas -- Crimes against

disclaimer: the author of this blog does not condone crimes and/or violent acts against ballerinas or any other types of dancers or performers. except maybe mimes. mimes really burn me up.

some days you just need to hang out with your mom

i am unwell. that is all i can say.

today when i tried to button a pair of my dress pants and found them too constricting i decided i could not bring myself to go to work. whatever. what has work ever done for me?

then i decided that the best course of action was to call my mother. the conversation went something like this:
me: i don't want to go to work
mom (fellow librarian): then don't go
me: are you sure? is that okay?
mom: yes
me: do you want to have lunch later?
mom: of course

and that is how i came to be spending my "sick" day out on long island hanging out in my mom's library. its SO nice here. no hobos or anything.

hobo=crackhead

i have a little helper. his name is O. he likes to organize the pencils on my desk. he is an obsessive compulsive in the making. he just came out of the bathroom holding a paper towel. he told me he has the paper towel because he does not like to touch the bathroom door with his bare hands, since the "hoboes" touch it. the hoboes are dirty, he explained, then crinkled up his nose in disgust.

one of the other kids overheard him and asked, "a hobo? what's that?"

then a third kid piped in and explained, "you know, like a crackhead."

"oh," he says, finally understanding, "a crackhead. why didn't you say so?"

allergy sufferer or drug addict .... you decide

so i have hay fever. all the time. constant hay fever. i am always sniffling and sneezing. i am now on singulair which is a huge improvement, but i will never actually breathe freely. its okay. i'm used to it. its like plato's allegory of the cave. i don't even know what true breathing is because i have never experienced it. anyhoo, so i was in the bathroom sniffling and snorting loudly (i try to contain this to the bathroom) and i kind of flung the door open as i was leaving with a bit too much gusto ... simultaneously, i was also snorting loudy and wiping and grabing at the tip of my nose. not unlike the posteurs of someone who has just inhaled a large amount of cocaine. (but i WAS NOT inhaling cocaine! not even small amounts) so when one of my coworkers saw me leaving the bathroom this way she gave me quite a strange look. it was a look of, "damned, that white girl they hired as the children's librarian is a god damned junkie." but i stand firm that i am not a coke-head ... just an allergy sufferer.

who is sleeping in the library

so amid the chaos the other day, while i am trying to help many children at once, a kid comes up to me and says, "excuse me, but there's a crackhead sleeping in the library."
i look over to where he is pointing and sure enough there is a white-lipped woman with her head down on one of our tables.
"well," i say, completely overwhelmed. "she isn't bothering anyone."
"but she's a crackhead!"
"look," i tell him, "i need to focus on the children's room."
he walks off muttering about crackheads and how it isn't right.
i agree, crackheads shouldn't be sleeping in the library. but i have bigger problems.
just an aside: i don't think i could have correctly identified a crackhead at the age of 8. that's a little disturbing.

things i am now allowed to do at work

BLOG! i am now part of a project where i am learning to blog. thank goodness. i would have been totally lost otherwise! i'm sure you guys will appreciate all my new skillz.

look, i made a librarian trading card. i know you're jealous. you can make one too! http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php

before i get pissed off

today we had a trivia tournament. we had 16 kids and they were fairly well-behaved, a little loud, but pretty good. they may have even learned some stuff.

where not to keep your library card

in your shoe! do not ask me to reserve books for you and then pull your library card out of your shoe (while NOT wearing socks) and then hand it to me. that is SO gross.
after i grabbed the card by the corners and reserved a book for her, i found her with a small dog by the computers. the dog was escaping from her purse which was on the floor. i told her there are no dogs allowed in the library and she explained, "oh no, he's just in my purse."

magically annoying

today we had a magician come in. he was actually really good and we had 40+ kids show up and they were all very well behaved. but as soon as he left all hell broke loose again.
i had to kick out a table of kids who were being too noisy. then they complained "oh its not fair!" "ooh it wasn't me" even though i had given them many warnings.
then a morbidly obese man yelled at me because we don't have many computer books. i told him that sadly we don't have many people looking for books. he told me i should encourage people to read. really? encourage people to read? what the hell have i been doing?! encouraging book burning and illiteracy?! then he said that in white libraries they have lots of computer books. well, this may be true. but that's not because those people are white. its because those people ask for books. our people ask for dvds. we have lots of dvds. he said he is going to complain to the manager. more power to you.

philly here i come!

i just got approved to go to ALA midwinter in sunny philadelphia! and they are going to give me SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS! i just hope i'm still around to collect my check.

dinosaur stick puppet

this is going to be the next craze ... i can tell. remember, you saw it here first.

please notice how fetching the googley eye is. and if you look closely, you will see that i gave this t-rex a mani/pedi. stunning.

googley eyes make all the difference

i am purposefully writing this before the rush of mad school children come in at 3pm and ruin my day ... this morning i had 22 5-year olds from a local day care center come in for a story time. this was really my first story time ever. and i must say i did a damned fine job. i read the following books:
if you give a pig a pancake
don't let pigeon drive the bus
five little monkeys jumping on the bed
-break for stretching-
how do dinosaurs get well soon
it looked like spilt milk
then, as if this wasn't enough, i let the children in a craft in which they made dinosaur stick puppets. now, i had to pre-cut 40 dinosaur shapes and then 40 dinosaur backgrounds and then the children colored in the dinosaur amd glued the dinosaur to the backgroung paper, with a popsicle stick in bewteen. this looks a little cheezy on its own, but when you add a googley eye to it ... voila! you have an amazing dinosaur stick puppet. mine looked SO good i decided i should take a picture of it for you fine people, and that is when i learned that my camera no longer works. grrrrr. so i took a picture with my phone, but i don't know how to get the picture from my phone onto the computer. anyone? anyone? the other day i learned about quick text and that my phone will actually try to insert the words i am trying to write whilst i am txting. amazing, no?

yesterday

had another class visit, which was awesome. we had about 22 kids and they were very well-behaved. a little more difficult to deal with because of how many there were, but they were still very good.
but then we get to the part where its time for them to go to the check-out counter and check out all their books and the other 3 employees of the library have mysteriously disappeared. so here is little old me and 22 kids trying to check out all their books. and of course i don't really know the ins and outs of the check out system, so when our new high tech self-checkout machines malfunctioned, i didn't really know what to do. but luckily, all the other library employees emerged once the class left. so that was helpful. go team!
then T, my troubled mentally disabled 10 year old, started a fight with another kid. i mean pushing and punching fight. so i actually jump between two kids and push them apart and tell T he cannot return to the library without a parent.
does anyone say, "good job" or "way to break up a fight, i bet you were never trained to do that and look at you, you did it anyway?" no, no one said that.
then i had to kick out a table full of kids who were misbehaving, even though one of the kids was a "good kid." then good kid starts crying and says, "no one every yelled at me before i starting coming to the library. i'm a nice boy." so i let him stay and we had a thoughful discussion about controlling our emotions and how sometimes you have to just cry.
then i helped kids do their homework in between yelling at other kids.
so today, no one tells me what a good job i am doing. instead, the branch manager spoke to me about how i need to discipline more, and give less homework help. you see, helping children achieve at school is getting in the way of my yelling time. yell more! help less! i told her i felt helping kids read and do their homework was more important than yelling at kids for having two at a computer. luckily, she corrected me. yelling is more important.
today ... i loathe it here.