Rack, Shack, and Benny don't even know

I just ate an entire giant chocolate bunny. For the moment, I'm blaming it on getting dumped this weekend (yeah, so leave me alone) but really, it only has to do with the fact that I felt like eating it, so I did. It wasn't one of those bullshit hollow ones either, this was like a big honkin' solid monster bunny.



That's me on the left, I'm wearing a disguise so I don't get beat up by ugly, dykey, gay-bashing bitches at Coyote Ugly ever again like this weekend. I would have blogged about it, but it was all too painful.

So basically I negated going to the gym this morning. And now I'm staying up late to type this asinine blog entry about eating a chocolate bunny so I'm not going to get up to go to the gym tomorrow either. I chose the word asinine because it has ass in it, and that's where the bunny will be tomorrow.

I also met a red-headed Irish guy in Central Park today because I was lost and apparently I was going in circles, and he knew I was lost, so he told me where south was. Anyway, he was on his bike and he had a little hat on and with his red hair and beard and accent, he looked just like a stereotype and so we can't be friends because I don't date leprechauns.

Scary-an the Librarian

Holy shit! So I'm sitting here quietly cataloging the a book of John Hammond songs (with such homoerotic masterpieces as "Going Down Slow", "Down in the Bottom", "Crawling King Snake", and "Back Door Man") and listening to a corny tour being given below:

The number one question I get at the reference desk: "Where's the bathroom?" The number two question: "Where are all the books? If this is a library, where are the books at?" Well, they're under...

If you're a librarian, you know why that's corny, but it always makes tourists laugh. Anyway, the tour passes, it's rather peaceful in here when all of a sudden this horrific, shrill, blood-curdling voice screams "I CAN'T FUCKING TAKE IT! SHUT UP ALREADY, PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO WORK UP HERE!"

Jesus Christ! She sounded like The Wicked Witch of the West if the witch were insane, in withdrawl, PMSing, and being brutally tortured all at once.

It scared the hell out of me. I turned around to see what was going on, and nothing was out of the ordinary. Nobody was standing up seething with rage like I expected. Nobody was even whispering "What the fuck was that?" to anyone. It was as if things like that happen all the time around here like "Oh, that's just Crazy Martha. Don't worry, she only sounds like a ravenous, soul-sucking banshee. Really, she just has a lot of feelings."

No, these were not feelings. Happiness is a feeling. Anger is a feeling. This was an episode.

I asked a coworker later what on earth had happened, and she told me this woman just does that every now and then. But she assured me I had nothing to worry about because the woman is small, and if I felt threatened, I could just knock her on the head and she'd fall over. We laughed at this for a moment, and then I walked by the woman's desk to see what she looked like. I had never seen her before, and she looked as you'd expect from hearing such an outburst: dirty, unbrushed hair, pale skin, crazy eyes... she was a crazy straight out of a cartoon or a Dilbert comic strip. So if one day I don't come home from work, it's because I've been taken hostage by a raving office stereotype and the only one who can save me is Scott Adams.

What happened to classic "Shhhh, this is a library?" Maybe this woman is the next generation.

Woe, as I say, and betide

Yeah, I deleted the last entry. Bad form, I know, ok, get over it.

Yesterday I was awoken at 6 by the neighbor's dog, kept up by the recycling guy dumping bottles, tortured by no hot water in the shower, and annoyed when not one, not two, but three subway trains passed me by because there were so many people waiting. I was dehydrated, tired, and unable to focus. But my day turned around when I took an hour-long nap after lunch in the "Quiet Room", my new favorite staff area.

But apparently one aggravating morning wasn't enough. Oh no. Not if you get a nap, you have to get another crappy morning so we can have another go at screwing up a whole day! So I woke up well because I set my alarm to my new KT Tunstall album, so I was like singing from the second note in, which was nice. And then I screwed around for a while and showered and was like "Ooh, I totally get to be on time today!" But I get to the subway station, and there's this announcement that's all "Oops, yeah, we fucked everything up. The six train's all broke, so we put a 4 train or two on the local tracks. They're at 126th St. Thanks for being patient." Yeah, you're welcome, except I'm NOT being patient. After maybe 15 minutes, the first train comes, but there are SO many people on it. One old guy tried to get on like an idiot. He was standing half on the platform and then he's all surprised when the door starts closing on him. What a maroon. I made a mental note to displace him when the next train came.

Unfortunately, that wasn't for another 15 to 20 minutes. However, thoughts of him were discarded when the door stopped directly in front of me. There was room for one skinny person with a shoulder bag. Serendipity at last! But again, I was reminded the dismal state of human intelligence when about 6 tried to fit in after me. I stood my ground (not that I could move anywhere if I wanted to.) A women behind me was like "Do you think you people could move in a little? I know there's room, I can see it." Now this was ridiculous because the woman was about 5 and a half feet tall and couldn't see over my shoulder if she jumped. I remained silent until she pushed me, at which point I had reached my limit of Her-Being-a-Bitch. I pushed back, and I turned around to her and said "I can see over everyone's head. There is NO room to move or we would." And she opened her mouth to argue when the doors started closing on her and she too was forced back. Victory! I smiled with satisfaction, and I'm sure she saw.

At the next stop, I found my way into a corner so I could ride the rest of the way relatively undisturbed. Things got better from there until I realized how behind I was. So I finally get to work and looked at my cell phone clock: 9:40. Impossible! Forty minutes late when I was supposed to be on time! Early even! Rage!

Whatever.

So I get to my big old work area and turn on my computer and wait for it to power up when I notice something is wrong. It's so quiet. Oh, so quiet. So I looked around to realize that I was totally alone. My entire office of like 20 people was completely deserted. The tumbleweed blew silently by as I thought "What in the hell is going on?" So I look around. The fast cataloging unit is empty too. "What day is it? Is it Saturday?" But I realized it couldn't be or I'd have woken up with the guy I'm seeing. (This was seriously my rationale.) Finally I ran into Nancy, who works in neither unit, but in the area of both. I said to her "Where did the library go?" Apparently there was a meeting I was never told about because I am not on some special listserv that I should have automatically been put on. The entire professional and support staff (including Nancy) knew about it. But by this point it was 9:50. The meeting ended at 10:30. I wasn't about to show up halfway through, even if I knew where in the hell the auditorium was. Oooh, I was aggravated. Nancy assured me that the meeting was optional and showed me the itenerary that was e-mailed to everyone (else) and I just thought "This looks like a waste of time, if this were really optional, nobody would go. I'm probably required to be there and will get fired." Still, I opted out. Oh well.

So I'm here at my desk in my lonely office. I have cataloged one thing and spent the rest of the time writing this, which was first an e-mail to that guy I'm seeing, now adapted for the big screen in this blog entry. This morning sucks.

Oh, and speaking of rage, I want to share a poem that I find to be a masterpiece of the written word. It was written by a composer after a movement of a piece. The movement was called 'Rage.' So is the poem. I think it speaks for itself:

Rage

No more sweet songs for me.
You cut the tree that held my nest-
You burned the brush that fed my young-
Your metal monsters killed my mate,
smashing her to the street,
chasing me when I tried to fly to her, to comfort...
No more sweet songs for me.
I'm small and weak,
but not my rage.
Ruin the world!
Destroy yourselves!
No more sweet songs for me!
Listen each night as you try to sleep
and hear my new song:
damn you humans, damn you.
Damn you. Damn you. DAMN YOU!

David L. Adams - Judith's Dream

My favorite part is when the bird screams "Damn you!" The part where the bird is run over by a truck is pretty good too. I think we should all be nicer to birds and nature.

This probably makes no sense, ignore it, it's stupid anyway

Today there was a disconnect. The cognitive dissonance to end all cognitive dissonances. More of a cognitive cacaphony, really... a sort of aleatoric nightmare symphony of 1,000 transistor radios turned to satellite stations from around the globe.

I am having a great day, though all of the events and portents I have experienced suggest that I should not. I woke up late and did not realize it so that after I showered, I had 10 minutes to get to work. It took 30. I did not care.

Before leaving the house, I noticed my cat had peed on my clean laundry. "Silly kitty," I thought as I smiled and patted her head.

The woman training me to catalog scores showed me a record I had made and was particularly proud of. The piece was called "Don't Let That Horse". The black ink in which my record had printed was drowning in a turgid sea of red pencil markings detailing why this was the worst job I had ever done.

Lunch was dank. Yes, dank. Don't ask.

I was having a crappy day... and I was in a great mood.

OCLC was down, rendering my job impossible to perform. (For the uninitiated, OCLC is a lot of things to us librarians, but for the purposes of this essay, it is the thing I use to search for, create, and edit catalog records.) I couldn't even search the database to pull up a record. Nevertheless, I sat there obsessively clicking "Search" like a maniacal Minesweeper junkie, over and over receiving the message

An error has occured with your search. Please try again.
An error has occured with your search. Please try again.
An error has occured with your search. Please try again.

I felt cold in my workplace, the first pangs of professional zombie-ism eeking into my passionate young mind. What am I doing with myself?

An error has occured with your life. You've blown your only shot.

An emotion (the first of the day) started forming in the howling void of my psyche, and yet it was held back from becoming a true thoughtform by that strange, stupid-happy feeling that won't leave.

I left my desk for an early and extended break.

As I entered the same bookstore/cafe I patronize during every break, I thought "I wonder if there is anything to the fact that I work in a library around books all day and the only place I can think of to go on break is a bookstore (filled with books) whose window presents a spectacular view of... my library. Am I doomed? This feels doomy."

As if in response, the bakery case went dark, the flourescent light extinguished in an undeniable message regarding the state of me. And I just smiled, bemused at the sign that something horrible is about to happen, a nagging feeling I have always nursed no matter how satisfied I feel.

The darkness in that display case spoke to me in a hollow voice: "You're a 9-to-5er. You're going to lose your soul. Look at your crappy day. Every day is going to be like this until your skin turns grey and you lose your free will. OooOOoooOoooOOh!" Basically, my fear of becoming bored and boring was sneaking up again.

And yet I felt right as rain! Inexplicable! Why am I not in a mood? Why don't I feel the way my crappy morning should make me feel? Am I already so detached? No... contentment is not a detached emotion because... well, it's an emotion.

That's when I realized that my strange happiness today was not inexplicable, detached, or otherwise faux or alien or any of the various words I had thought of for it. Bad things happening, forboding thought surfacing... I wasn't happy because I was detached. In fact, the reason I am happy (perpetually happy, even) is because these things happen. These's a subtle distinction here that I'm having trouble articulating.

I realized the day was regular. Bad things happen to me all the time. Every day, I have a million things I can complaing about, and today was like any other. I was just super aware of it for some reason.

I'm not happy because I ignore these things or just don't feel them. I am happy because I can ignore these things though I'm aware of them. Get it? Every unpleasant experience in my life is another chance to say "Ha! Look how everything sucks and I can remain unaffected in the grander sense." It's a decisiveness that's key here... a decisiveness that had become second nature, though I not remember the days when it wasn't. I specifically remember making the turnaround when I was 14 or 15. It gave me a feeling of control over my life, which was both comforting and empowering.

There ended the disconnect. The radios were all tuned to the same station. I was ready to return to work, and OCLC (the client for which is appropriately called Connexion) would probably be working, ready to let me finish my work day smoothly and stress free, though honestly, I kind of hoped that it wouldn't.