Just Do It?

Who knew that a dinner could provide so many opportunities for introspection?

But then again, leave it to me to wax introspective on just about anything.

The other night, I got to enjoy one of the little benefits of working at the Library. We've got a fair amount of very generous donors and Friends, and the Friends decided to hold an "Evening with Books" activity. Men and women all over the valley opened up their very nice homes to paying guests and provided a literary-themed dinner; there was also an author guest of honor at each of the dinners. The Friends very generously gave the Library some tickets, so I was able to attend (for free!) one of the dinners. It was a tango theme.

Now, those of you who know me know that I am hell on wheels--I am my own fatal pre-existing condition. I am simply that clumsy, and so much worse. There was no tangoing for Mel. But I do love watching people dance, and so I still had a lovely time.

Every aspect of it was lovely--our hostess was a total sweetheart, very kind and real and accessible and not at all hoity-toity. She made all the food, and it wasn't just homemade--it was gourmet homemade. And to hear the other guests talk of her, tango was her life, her passion. She certainly danced like it.

I have to say, I got a little envious. I don't think I have found my life's passion yet. There's a lot that interests me, sure, but nothing about which I am a die-hard, hard-core afficianado. Will I ever get that passion?

And on that similar vein, is passion enough? Does passion ensure proficiency? What if you are passionate about something, but completely suck at it? Is that okay? Is it even possible?

Like my sister, maybe even both my sisters, there's a lot I want to try, but I am unwilling to go through the learning period. I don't want to do something until I can do it perfectly. It makes no sense, but that's how I am. And since instantly-achieved perfection is not possible, why, I just don't do it. It's sad.

Maybe I should suck it up and just do it? Let the passion carry me through? Or at least let the passion try to develop?

The Power of Words

Every weekend, I join my boyfriend, and he watches in me in semi-annoyed bemusement as I plow my way through another book. Usually around mid-day on Sunday, I will close the book with a final thunk, and announce, "Done!" And Arash will just shake his head.

Yes, I'm an obsessive, voracious reader. And a fairly fast reader, too. It's more acceptable now, when I am 27, than it was when I was 11 and had no friends. I have lots of reader friends now, and even my non-reader friends don't mind that I am a bookworm. I think they tend to be slightly amused at my verbosity and eloquence.

But sometimes I wonder...am I reading too much? Or, rather, am I reading too fast? Sometimes it feels like I am not really absorbing the words, the stories, the characters, the emotions as much as I should be. Books and stories are meant to move us, to connect with us...and if I cannot even retain the information, am I only being entertained? Entertainment is all good and well, but I want to be moved, stimulated, provoked; I want to think and feel and really connect more with the human experience.

These are the thoughts that have been with me lately. And then last night, I read a book called Before I Die. In it, a 16-year-old girl is very sick with cancer, and then learns that it has progressed very rapidly, so rapidly that the doctor tells her that there is so little time left that "I would encourage you to do the things you want to do." And so the girl gets together a list of the things she wants to do before dying: sex, drugs, love, saying yes for a whole day, get her parents back together. All sorts of things. But as she does all of the things on her list, she always thinks of more things, more items to add to the list, more reasons that life is beautiful...daffodils, hearing your lover snore beside you for years and years, ice cream, fluffy clouds, traffic jams...and so the list becomes to us, the readers, this very sad list of all the things in life that we take for granted and consider mundane (if we even consider it at all), but that a dying person finds terribly dear. And the girl's youth makes it all the more heart-rending.

I read it just before crawling into bed last night. And as I went to bed, I asked myself, "What would be on my list?" And that is what I went to bed thinking about. Seeing the Northern Lights...dancing...having a dinner party for all my dear friends...spending a day in a pool with a swim-up pool bar...reading, reading, reading...

And wouldn't you know, while I was asleep I had this terribly vivid dream in which I had cancer, and only a few months to live, and I still hadn't told my sisters. And I had so much to do.

I know I felt like I needed to internalize my reading materials more, but maybe this is a little much! Perhaps it is better to go back to the assembly-line of reading approach.

Who Says You Can't Go Home?

After a very unpleasant day, two years ago, in which every cherished dream I had looked like it was turning to dust, I've been a little more cautious in how I approach things. I look forward to things now, but with a certain jaded lack of excitement. It's actually a pretty bitter pill to swallow, not being able or willing to anticipate things as I did in another lifetime.

Lately, that's changed a little. Because there is something that is provoking a huge wave of eagerness and excitement within me: soon I will be moving to Palm Springs. Not sure why I am excited--maybe the fact that my commute won't be nearly as brutal? Or that I will be able to find an apartment with central air-conditioning--that isn't in the ghetto? Or that I will be closer to a Target, a good sports park, more educated people in my age group, more culture, more things to do? But for whatever the reason, the fact remains that for the first time that I have moved to the Armpit of America, I am excited about where I will be living. I moved to Hemet because I had to move to California. I moved to Sunnydale because I needed to, not because there were great options for me here. But my next move? I have several choices of cities, for once, and Palm Springs is there, beckoning. And I can't wait. It's been so long that I have been eager and hopeful and excited about something, it's a strange feeling.

I'm not quite sure what to do with it.

No One Gets Out Alive

My sister has done her own blog about grief, sorrow, losing someone close to you. I just read it, and it brought a burning lump into my throat and nasty, stinging tears into my eyes. But it doesn't bring me any closer to really grappling with it myself, or writing anything emotional (as opposed to matter-of-fact), or really even acknowledging it.

Our grandmother, our Mawga is not well. It's been a long time since I gave up on the idea of her getting better, the pain in her knees going away, of a miraculous recovery restoring her to her former, more energetic, mobile self. At 80-something, you just don't get better. I accept that. But what I haven't accepted, what I don't really like to think about, is her getting worse.

But my Mawga, my grandmother, my first friend in life, is getting worse.

When I was still very, very young--six, seven, eight, nine, ten--I would get very scared of Mawga dying, especially in her sleep. Before falling asleep at night, I would say to her "See you in the morning!" and wait for her to say yes, she would, as if somehow, this mundane exchange would make it true. Sometimes I would cry myself to sleep at night, thinking about Mawga not being there. Sometimes, I would have dreams where she had died, and in my dreams, I would sense the finality, the hollowness of a world with no Mawga.

If, at six, I could know that Mawga would be in my life for many, many years, I imagine my anxieties and premature grief would have been assauged. If I had known that I would have spent so many of those years growing away from Mawga, taking her for granted, and generally just being a shitty granddaughter, I imagine--I hope--that I probably would have wept with shame.

Mawga's not gone yet. She's very sick, I think, and a part of me--a tiny, little-girl part of me--is scared. The majority of me is detached, operating on an intellectual level, perhaps just acknowledging that none of us get out alive, but not yet feeling how that affects me.
I'll be going home this coming weekend to spend a tiny, tiny period of time with my grandparents, because every effing second must count, every second that I can spend with them should be the best moment I ever have. And I want as many as them as possible.

Work Hard, Play Hard

I've always loved that phrase..."Work hard, play hard." It makes me think that if you do that, you are living hard, taking on life whole-heartedly, going full-steam ahead. Not sure that's what I am doing, but I certainly had a week like that. Seven straight days of work, and then today was my first day off. One of my partners in crime, Kristin (code name: Kissy-fur) willingly aided and abetted in the play aspect of my week, and so today we ventured down to Orange County.

Highlights of our (mis)adventures included:

• Shopping at a discount mattress store, where we discussed the merits and drawbacks of sleigh beds. (Advantage? Very dignified. Disadvantage: very difficult to perform acts of sexual bondage without bedposts. Major disadvantage, but as I pointed out, one can circumvent this by using the specially-made restraints that run under the mattress. I'm not speaking from experience, people! I had friends in Bloomington that used 'em. REALLY. I actually am telling the truth here.)
• Eating lobster taquitos as we watched sailboats fly past on Newport Harbor
• Watching the sun set over the Pacific (well, actually, over Long Beach), and then watching several pods of porpoises gamboling through the waters)
• Visiting Madame Cleo a palm reader and listening to her inform me that I would change careers, be stuck in California a long time, have twins and a Cesarian, and be fulfilled by a very strong marriage to a tall, light-haired man
• Eating funnel cakes, and contemplating our future heart attacks

Now Kissy-fur and I are back in Corona; she's finishing some work, I'm tapping away on her laptop, we're both nursing a bottle of pinot grigio and listening to Dido in the background. It's not a bad end to the day. I worked hard all week, I played hard all day, and I am going to sleep hard tonight. Not in a sleigh bed, alas. :)

LSSI: Library Services That Suck Immensely

Just in case it isn't clear: yeah, LSSI, I'm talking 'bout you. These are fightin' words.

I don't do a lot of blogging about my profession. Possibly this stems from a desire to not sound too boring, or maybe it's just because I want to leave work at work. But this is something I feel very passionately about, and I want to do my bit to fight it, so there.

Outsourcing is a library issue, too. No, we don't send our libraries to India, but a lot of libraries are starting to outsource their services and management to outside agencies. One of the big ones is LSSI, Library Systems and Services, Inc., but that is really misleading, and I think LSSI is more accurately represented as Library Services that Suck Immensely.

See, here's the thing: a lot of libraries (or counties, or cities) end up contracting with LSSI because it saves them money. And in these days when tax dollars are as grudgingly given as an honest statement from a politician, money talks. But here's the really obvious thing: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. And when you're paying less, you are going to get shitty services. I will concede that maybe there's some good to them, but I haven't heard a lot of it. I will also concede that maybe I'm only hearing the evil side, and that it is not entirely accurate, but what I can tell is that collection development is taken away from the local libraries, that they pay their employees disgraceful wages, and that many of the employees they hire to fill the librarian duties are not degreed librarians. This is dangerous to the new generation of librarians coming out of grad school--those of us who have invested thousands of dollars in our educations might find 10 years down the road that our degrees are rendered irrelevant, make us too expensive, and that there might no longer be a place for us. This is dangerous to our profession, because the people that are filling the roles of librarians are not, will not be degreed librarians, and the library services that these staff provide will not be equal to those that librarians offer. Remember, taxpayers and government officials, you get what you pay for. If you want to do something smart with the tax money you have, invest it wisely--don't throw it away on an outsourcing agency that will provide library sources that suck immensely, and that will undermine the vital and important role that libraries continue to play in society.
According to LSSI's website, they claim that the ALA conducted research and concluded that "….the evidence supports the conclusion that outsourcing has been an effective managerial tool, and when used carefully and judiciously it has resulted in enhanced library services and improved library management."

This disturbs me for mainly one reason: it's the ALA who has been crying for librarians for the past ten years, begging young college graduates to get a Master's in Library Science and join a thriving profession. And yet if LSSI's portrayal is accurate, the ALA is signing its name to something that will be the death warrant of degreed librarians, and that means tells me that either the ALA is trying to play every side to serve itself, or that they are duping us. Which do you think?

Any librarians out there who might be reading this blog (there might be what? 2 of you?) please respond here. Give me feedback. Educate me, inform me, say what you think about LSSI and outsourcing. Start talking!

It Is What It Is...

Another year has passed.

Today was the 2-year mark. Today, 2 years ago, the man I thought would one day be my husband broke my heart in a very public place. In the middle of the Student Union, I fell apart and watched, helplessly, as my boyfriend took a sledgehammer to all that I had worked for, hoped for. Of course, in hindsight I can see that both he and I had been sledge-hammering the relationship for a good long while, but I was blind to it at the time.

So, it was 2 ygpears ago today. 2 years ago, I watched Michael get up and start to leave the student union. I got up, too.

"Where are you going?" he asked me.

"I'm going to follow you," I answered.

"Why?"

"Because that's what I've always done."

And indeed, I followed him out of the student union, down the street, stumbling along, not really seeing. He was on his way to the apartment complex where all his friends lived. Outside the apartment, he turned to me. "You can't come in."

"Why not?"

"You're not welcome there."

Cruel words, but perhaps I needed to hear them. Perhaps it took cruelty to penetrate my shocked brain and make me realize that it was over.

That was 2 years ago today. And then I stumbled home and spent the next 12 hours on the futon, waiting for Michael to come home. He never did. Instead, everyone who loved me called me, tried to help me. Finally, my friend Eric simply came over and took me to his home.

It would be nice if, during moments of awfulness and angst and over-blown despair, when we are suicidal and numb with misery, we could look forward and see a future day in our lives, in which the present pain has simply become a bad memory, and not the crippling entity that it is at that moment. It would have been nice to have a vision of the future, to see me two years down the road (now), house-sitting for friends, living in Southern California, working at a job that I love, planning to move to Palm Springs, having the courage to love again. It would be so nice if I could have had that vision to comfort me as I sat there in Indiana and truly believed that my life was over.

Every heartbreak seems to be the worst, the most wretched. And when we recover, we remember the pain, but in a muted way, much like childbirth, and think we can handle it again in the future. And then when the next heartache comes, you forget for a while how resiliant and brave you can be.

Well, now I am in between heartbreaks. But I remember the last one, I remember Indiana and the life I had there, and I look around at the life I have built here, and I remind myself:

It is possible to rejoice in where you are in your life, but mourn how you got there.