inner teen.

when i was 13, i got a terrible haircut. i then spent the next 11 years with an easy and safe shoulder-length do in order to prevent it from ever happening again.

today, for research purposes, i got 5 inches cut off from someone who was not my regular hair dude. it did not come out the way i expected it to. all afternoon at work, i felt hypersensitive, like people were laughing at my hair.  even the bearded investor who almost ALWAYS comments on my appearance said nothing, probably because he was shocked by the awkwardness of my new coif.

so, my inner teen is alive and well.

on a more cheerful note, here is a tea towel i made for my mum a couple of christmases ago. design my own.

“moth burning death tornado!!”

a title i grabbed at work to see what the big deal is. yu-gi-oh! duelist vol. 1.

someone called yugi has a bunch of boring friends, and they play this card game with magical monster cards that fight each other. i guess it really is a game, so if readers actually shell out for the cards, they might have fun with the books. for me, on the other hand, it read something like this:

best program ever.

my esteemed mentor is out for a month, and on friday i did my first animanga program. i’d noticed thursday that there were still no sign ups, which is really bizarre because usually we get a handful and they wouldn’t have known that i didn’t know what i was doing. but sign-ups rarely indicate any real numbers about attendance, so i set out the pocky and fudgy koalas and popcorn and orange soda, and got the dvd projected on the wall. no one came. so i waited, outside the door of the meeting room, to entice teenagers. kind of like a hooker.

3 fourteen year olds came by, 2 girls and a dude. “hello!” i said. “are you here for the anime?”
“what?” said the dude.
clearly not.
“wanna watch a movie?” i asked.

but it turns out they did. they came in and eyed the snacks hopefully. i told them to eat.

“you can eat in the library?” the dude said.
“what are we watching?” one girl, we’ll call her n, said.
“anime! the prince of tennis.”
“…what’s that?”

they were all best friends. they hadn’t heard of anime. or manga. but they wanted to watch anyway.

“so, why’d you come to the library today?” i asked.
“MYSP@CE!!” they chorused.

“you work here?” said the other girl. we’ll call her s. “yep.”
“you look like sixteen.”
“that’s why they let me watch movies with you guys.”
“oh.”

then they all pulled chairs up, made me sit in the middle, and we watched 3 episodes of the prince of tennis. it turned out they were 3 of the most hilarious youth in all the land. it was like mystery science theater with anime.
“what are these?”
“pocky!”
“they look like chocolate covered sticks!”
“well, they kind of are…”

“man, look at their shorts.” (pointing at the tennis players on the screen).
“yeah, you wear shorts like that at our school, you gettin jumped.”
then the girls came on in their school uniforms.
“THEY FORGOT THEIR PANTS!!”
“n, i think you should wear a big bow like that.”

“do you have a boyfriend?”
“i have a husband.”
“YOU? who let you get married. you’re 16!”
“what’s it like to be in love?”
“it’s fun. i have a great husband.”
“did you move in with him yet?”
“um…yeah, we’re married.”
“oh. oh yeah. i didn’t believe you when you said you’re married.”

and the librarian dream come true part:
“i didn’t know you could do stuff like this in the library.”
“what days do you work? we’ll come back.”

after we finished the movie, they took turns standing up in front of the room telling jokes. then the dude sang us a song and we pretended to be simon, paula, and randy. (they made me be paula.)

it was the most under-attended program i’ve done, and also the most fun i have ever had at work. explain that one.

a reference rollcall from last week

we started the day off with a humdinger:

-study books for the civil service exam…on mechanical maintenance. we had no such book. a book does exist (found it on the amaz0n) but no libraries nearby owned it. a library in the state did own it, but the test was in two days. so instead we found some books on basic electronics & spatial relations.

-book called ‘cat and the golden egg.’ was actually a short story in a book called ‘newbery zoo’ which we located at the next library over.

-chocolate man came in and said his wife wanted ’shadow music’ by j. garwood. it has many requests on it but i found him a holds-exempt copy and he was even more cheerful than usual. (chocolate man is a sweet elderly gent who chucks dove pr0mises onto the reference desk every time he comes in. needless to say, i love him.)

-books on amenhotep

-little girl wanted cat stories

-1,000 splendid suns? oh, they’re all checked out? i need it for book club tomorrow. gosh, i didn’t realize it was so popular.

boy are you people in for a treat.

as most of you already know, i am embarking on a great journey in may- being a teen librarian full-time rather than a part-time intern. in preparation, i am trying to get in touch with my teen side as much as possible. tough break for my beloved, who has had to put with way too many eps of the gilmore girls lately, but he is very understanding of the fact that i need to do research.

because my journals from high school are a bit too shocking to start in on just yet, and also are not digital, i am jumping back only a few years, to age 18, when i started my first blog. i have since hidden all of the content on this blog, because most of it is reDONKulous, but there are some posts i just don’t want to forget.

krickstitch: the totes with birds on.

most of y’all know that one of my sisters is a knitter…(thanks for all the knitterly love, by the way. v. sweet!)

and that my other sister sews things. and paints. and crochets. AND raises a child. if you think this is easy, take another think. we took on little nephew e for 12 hours yesterday and then had to sleep for nearly the same amount of hours afterwards to recover.

but i turned 21 with no sign of picking up any crafty hobbies. my sisters began to worry. it really became a problem when i started bringing my beloved to family events. he and mr. rae and mr. elli would go off to play videogames. whereas i used to sometimes join them, now i was expected to stay with the womenfolk and do things with my hands. be useful. produce things.

so, for my 22nd birthday i was given an embroidery starter kit, 6 embroidery hoops, a stitch dictionary, and a whole mess of thread. happy birthday, krick!

this is the first thing i made. it is a tote bag given me by public library #1. i adapted a design i found in a book of indian embroidery at the library.

i also used it on a tea towel for my then future mummy-in-law, because it was so fun to work with all the colors. forgot to take a picture of that one, though. my darling grad school friend anne had always admired my tote, so when she moved to paris over the holidays, i whipped a similar one up to keep her company:

tah-dah. if i had known i would be starting a blog, i would have taken better photos, like anne stylishly hoisting hers over her shoulder as she runs to catch her flight, or my tote straining to hold all of my library books. maybe next time.

the white darkness- geraldine mccaughrean

“I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years.” So begins The White Darkness, this year’s recipient of the Michael L. Printz award.

Titus Oates, who joined Robert Falcon Scott’s exploration of Antarctica, has indeed been dead for ninety years, and he met his end on that very exploration. Fourteen-year-old Sym, a dork at school because of her hearing aids and obsession with the south pole, has been hearing his voice in her head (but not in an Avril way) for a couple years now. He is likely her best friend.

Sym’s adventure begins when a weekend trip to Paris with her Uncle Victor, the man responsible for Sym’s obsession with “the ice,” turns into a surprise holiday tour of the south pole. The generosity! But then everyone gets the runs, and there’s an explosion, and some mysterious Scandinavian hotties are plotting and scheming with Uncle Victor. Then the emergency phones don’t work. Then all the other tourists mysteriously fall asleep. Sym doesn’t get in on the plan until it is too late to stop Crazy Uncle V. She, Victor, and the hottes are already in perilous danger.

I love YA books that are adventuresome and have smart girls as main characters. The White Darkness is only a little funny- Sym is one odd duckie- but definitely stark and eerie in a good way.

beware!

at work we are attempting to index all of the old microfiches of the local newspaper to make them easier to find things in. we are only on 1909, which is ever so slightly discouraging, but i love reading through the news items. often they are things like:

“Miss Millie Titsbury entertained twenty ladies in her home on Thursday. A fine time was had by all.”

or

“Mrs. John Brigham of North Court has a fine recipe for Chicken Jelly that she is willing to share.”

or one time:

“Mr. and Mrs. Frank Weatherby traveled to the city in order to purchase a piano, but were obliged to return home without one due to indecision.”

But yesterday— this!

“As Mrs. George Payson was ascending the steps of a neighbor’s house on Tuesday evening, a big icicle fell from the roof of the porch, striking her on the head. She was knocked senseless and died from the effects of the injury at about midnight. It was a peculiar accident. Mrs. Payson was 60 years old and the wife of a prominent citizen.”  2.26.1909.

so be careful out there.

heavy handed lessons from a pop star (and some spoilers.)

don’t get me wrong. i love avril lavigne, or at least i like her more than is normal for a graduate student. it began in my sophomore year of college, before i had noticed that i would go on being seventeen years old while everyone around me matured and shopped for breast pumps. i became inexplicably fond of the song “Sk8er Boi” and blasted it merrily through the dorm day in and day out. i thought it provided a welcome relief from j0hn mayer and jack j0hnson. others, perhaps, did not agree.

so imagine my delight when, in my daily round of tidying the library’s manga shelves, my eyes lit upon this two volume comic set starring avril herself!!

“look what i found!” i screeched to my fellow librarian, mr. e. he ridiculed me, and i took them home and read them. the first one was ok. hana loves avril. i can understand that. she also doesn’t have any friends and imagines avril climbing out of the poster on her wall to converse with her. i can’t quite understand that. hana’s parents are fighting, and she wishes everything in her life was different. so she does what any hip teen would do: she turns to the internet. buys a mail-order wish granting service. a few days later, a cute little red demon shows up in a box, and instructs her to break off his little horns and make wishes: 5 horns, 5 wishes. of course, things don’t really go the way she thought they would, but hana learns an important lesson about being careful what you wish for. right?

WRONG. (this is volume 2 now.) the little demon grants hana’s selfish wishes in increasingly bizarre ways, and three people die in a freak boiler explosion. hana survives but feels so crummy that she dresses up like avril and jumps off a bridge. her body is never found. the end.

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?? booooo, hissy.

i should note that avril did not actually write/illustrate these comics, but presumably did agree to endorse the series. pretty heavy stuff for the singer of lyrics like “she’s like so whatever/you can do so much better.”

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian- Sherman Alexie

Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for “Young People’s Literature.” This is the story of Arnold “Junior” Spirit, who lives with his drunk father and his formerly drunk mother on the Spokane Indian Reservation. (His sister, who may or may not be drunk, lives in the basement and makes everyone nervous.) Junior’s life changes when he decides to transfer to a school off the rez and get a decent education.  His best friend Rowdy stops speaking to him, but his sister gets the courage to leave the basement and run off to Montana to get married and write romance novels. What follows is a story achieving that oft promised concept of making the reader both laugh AND cry. Highly recommended for those who liked Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne but were also ever-so grossed out by it.