Cesar would be so proud! I am staying at a house with 4 cats, 3 dogs and 1 beta fish. If you add in Big'un from the Mouse House, that's nine animals in my tender care for another week. These new pups and kitties are very low maintenance considering how badly they outnumber me :) I stayed at the new place last night and finally got a decent night's sleep AND the use of a microwave!
All my coworkers gave me a hard time about my oven-use complaint but I don't care. That's just one of the multitudinous harmless neuroses that I live with on a daily basis. There's worse in the world, let me assure you. We see most of them here on a daily basis.
Let me reveal the extent of nerdiness and tell you about the HE-larious book I read yesterday (and I read 3 books yesterday!). Don Borchert's Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in the Public Library is going to have to be one of my favorite books of the year! This man has put some serious time in on the floor and lived to tell about it. Go find this book ASAP because what they found in the book drop one day alone makes the book worth reading! Mr. Borchert does have a potty mouth on him so if your grandmother, elderly aunt or other similarly fragile sensibilitied person was once a librarian or worked in one and you think this would make the perfect gift...think again! Think wicked funny, not warm funny.
2 comments:
Borchert can take his book and put it some place where the sun doesn't shine if you ask me! No offense. I actually planned to get this book. It's about libraries, and I wanted to support that. I didn't mind that Borchert isn't technically a librarian (though I have seen some of the reviews on Amazon from people who do). What really changed my mind was when Borchert said in USA Today that librarians were "not to be overly ambitious people. Not extroverts. It's a way for some people to hide. But that doesn't mean they're not good people." Who does this guy thing he is! I'm not a librarian, but I know plenty who are and that comment is so cliche. If that's the kind of observations he makes, then I'd rather not support him or his "potty" mouth!
ANON--I agree with you that Borchert's USA Today statement was a bit overgeneralized, but the sad truth is that it is that I've seen plenty of the librarians he's talking about. The last conference I attended, ALA in D.C. last June, was enough to let me know that stereotypes, as awful as they are, many times have a firm foundation in truth. I saw many of my peers who made me shake my head and think that person or another is what gives librarians a bad, or at least boring, name. I'm sure some looked at my fat, rather frumpy @$$ and thought the same thing of me. The little punks in the tattoo parlor I visited in Georgetown were certainly thinking along those lines.
I'm glad I'm not one of them and I see more and more who are not so socially-challenged. His observations are razor-edged and subsequently cutting, painfully and, all too often, dead-on accurate. I'll admit to some private guffawing at the same types that he so publicly ridicules and I cringed at the comments that hit a little too close to home but I'm not going to get up in arms over it. He pokes just as much fun at himself as he does at others and I thought he threw a little honor towards some people who get very little in the library world.
This has been a really long comment just for me to disagree with you, but I appreciate your visit AND your comment and hope that you find enough to interest you in returning some day.
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