Posts Tagged ‘library’

Confession Time

As well as telling the Internet my greatest triumphs like appearing on NASCAR News or being Hannah Montana, it seems only fair that I also write my greatest embarrassments so that no one gets jealous of how awesome I am.

Confession: I recently bought Twilight.
I know, I know, I feel awful about it. Especially since I’ve already managed to read the first three books through extreme patience and library-fu. Buying a Twilight book is shameful. Buying a Twilight book you’ve already read is definitely more shameful. To be fair, it is on my reading list for my Young Adult Literature Class next semester, and I did buy it at a used book store for $3. I don’t think any of that went to Stephanie Meyer, so I still feel pretty okay about the practical facts, but my reputation may never recover. I knew this would be necessary since the tens or hundreds of people on the waiting list for it back at my library at home would make it impossible to guarantee my having it a specific week for class, but, oddly, this morning when I went online to request the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, to write a wildly popular review of it, I found that I was number FOUR on the list. And there are EIGHT copies. I’ll probably have it tomorrow. I’m shocked by Twilight’s apparent lack of popularity here, until I realized that a typo in the description of the book calls the vapid main character “Ellen Swan” instead of “Bella Swan”, thus confusing legions of preteen girls. Suckers.

In Penance for this: I vow to be as sarcastic and withering as possible to the inevitable one or two people in our class discussion who will gush endlessly about how much they love Twilight.

Confession: I am incurring library fines AS WE SPEAK
As a librarian, this is incredibly shameful. It gets worse: the source of these fines is none other than the book-on-CD version of I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have to Kill You. To be fair, I didn’t steal it so that it could be mine forever, but simply forgot to give it to Mom Ladd before her return to Florida and have since been unable to find it to mail it back myself. Trixie probably hid it. Which means that, years from now, someone will pull it from some secret compartment in the back seat, stare at it with raised eyebrows, and then say “Patricia R. Ladd, why do you own this?” in a disgusted tone.

In penance for this: I vow to NOT punch them in the face.

Confession: I stole a full set of cutlery from the Servery
Which I am using EVEN NOW, hundreds of miles away. Just like my embarrassing library fines, I didn’t do this on purpose either. I just sort of found various spoons and forks and knives in various purses and book bags while attempting to pack. On the plus side, it can be very useful to have a fork in your purse, in case someone offers you free but messy food while out and about. On the minus side, they tend to look at you a little funny, and I may be the sole reason why the Servery is losing money.

In Penance for this: I vow to only eat with said cutlery things worthy of the Servery. Meaning anything I cook while really tired or am having one of those haphazard “well, I’m sure applesauce is a fine substitution for flour” kind of days.

There. Now my conscience is clear.

Dewey Decimalogy: A Guide to Predicting Your Future

Little known fact: Patricia’s Dream Job #37= Fortune Teller. It’s entirely made up of aspects I enjoy: ridiculous costumes/accents, lying to people, and saying absolutely everything as dramatically as possible. I’ve often considered giving up my dreams of librarian glory to lead a fulfilling and nomadic existence following America’s carnivals and RenFests to touch sweaty people’s hands and pretend to see the future in them. Today, however, I had an epiphany. Why choose when I could just combine the two? This plan has the added benefit of basing my new branch of fortune telling off of something I’m already familiar with, which is great because I wasn’t about to memorize anything. And, once again, I prove that a simple knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System will get you anything you want in life. Or, at least, anything you want in the library. Except Twilight, natch.
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Misguided Travel Guides: Seminole, Florida

As previously stated, Seminole, Florida is a suburb which, oddly seems to have no real “urb” to be a “sub of, since the entirety of Pinellas County is really just a conglomerate of similar houses and strip malls, searching for a metropolis. You know, and the beach. But it’s still home and here are the four best things about it, should you ever be trapped here on some kind of low-budget Floridacation.

1. The Water Tower

800px-Seminole_FL_Water_Tower2
So this water tower was originally a really drab blue, but they decided to jazz it up when I was in middle school and hired an artist to paint gigantic native Florida birds on it with some clouds in the background. This made total sense, until someone decided that the water tower’s natural shape would lend itself really well to painting a big orange cage over them all. Obviously this image creates a few troubling philosophical questions: if those are clouds WITHIN the cage, did some even larger person put a cage over THE SKY? How could these birds, even at normal size, even fit in a bird cage? Is this a metaphor for human interference being akin to a harmful cage put over THE ENTIRE NATURAL WORLD? Or, we could go with my immediate reaction the first time I saw it: “OMGOD THAT OCTOPUS IS ATTACKING THOSE BIRDS!”
Apparently the city agrees with my complaints because they wanted to paint over it awhile ago, but people complained, saying it was “good for giving directions”.
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