kara0ke revolution & making felt stuff

i’m a little behind. this blogging business is hard work sometimes.

so, last saturday i headed out to new library job to do some more orientation and also play videogames with the teens. the young adults. the adolescents. lately i have been having issues saying the word “teen.” it just sounds so…blech. pretty bad news considering it’s the first word in my job title. if i think of anything better i’ll let you know.

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.

on thursday

we had videogame freeplay at work. i was supposed to help my esteemed mentor with the program, but she was scheduled to do something else, so i got to take over. i decided to go really crazy and set up the snack table against a different wall. we had a good handful of dudes (only one girl!?), but that was still pretty amazing considering that the date had been changed twice and hadn’t been announced in the newsletter. (newsletter announcements for programs are surprisingly effective, because parents are constantly scanning them for something- anything- to justify scraping their teenage offspring off the mysp@ce and into a library.)

i recruited mr. e to help supervise, which sure came in handy when two dudes tried to start a rumble. “hey…” mr. e cautioned them gently. “don’t do that…” dude #1 still got a wimpy looking punch to dude #2’s arm. we had to separate them: one to super smash melee and the other to guit@r hero.

one of the other dudes, a tiny sixth-grade, offered to teach me to play melee. he was a shockingly good teacher: kept freezing frames to show me the different weapons. later he helped us clean up and told me all about his fears that the world would end as well as his theories about global warming. also his opinion that we would not be getting any snow the next day, even though half the staff was already quaking with fear and discussing possible early closure for friday.

boy was he wrong. there was snow, and lots of it. but we stayed open, drinking hot chocolate at the youth desk and over-helping the two patrons that came in all afternoon.