Step One: Get job. Step Two: Take a vacation!!!!!!!!!!11

Working full-time for almost a month has worn me out, folks. I mean, do people really do this? Sit at a desk for 40 hours a week? I mean, I just finished grad school so I'm used to working full-time, but I'm not used to working working full-time. Ugh.

It's time to go away, and having never been to Hawaii, I figure that's about as good a place as any. So Jeff and I are off to Kauai on Saturday. It's his birthday and our anniversary, so we've got some celebratin' to do. Woot!

What I really want to talk about, though, is how a patron just shushed me in the library. Me, the librarian. I was talking to this kid about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (the kid thought there were chapters missing from the book and I explained that the chapters were numbered using only primes) and we're laughing and a woman in mom-jeans comes up to me all sour-faced and is like "[Ahem] Can you quiet down?"

Apparently, this lady missed the Library 2.0 Revolution. Nowadays, the public library is not just about quiet studying, it's about community-building and social interaction. Okay?

I totally lowered my voice, though. I felt a little embarrassed, and an old worry that used to haunt me in graduate school returned: Am I too loud to be a librarian?

Bangs!

I'm thinking about getting a tattoo. I don't want to be a 45-year-old librarian who never did anything crazy. So: what about getting SHHH! tattooed down the inside of my first finger? So when I shush people I won't have to make that shush sound, people will be able to read it down my finger. Cool? Probably not. I still want to do it.

In the meantime, what about bangs? The bangs in the picture are fake, but I might get real ones. You know, just to be adventurous.

I've had this blog for like three days and so far I've changed the name five times

My original blog name was "Diary of a Neurotic White Woman". I spent a lot of time on this whole mock Diary of a Mad Black Woman thing and then decided it was tacky and nobody who saw that movie would think it was worth a parody anyway. I mean, it was a really bad movie. I just think I'm neurotic, so I thought I'd go with it. But then I thought, is calling yourself neurotic like calling yourself crazy? You know, like in that way when people are like, "Oh my gosh, I'm soooo crazy!" Because that kind of annoys me.

So I thought I'd go with something more obvious, which is that I'm doing this whole librarian thing right now. The director of the Copenhagen Public Library guest lectured in one of my classes a few days ago and told us how they have this program now where patrons can "check out" a librarian for a few hours to help them do research or teach them how to use some database. I thought that was pretty cool. So I thought I'd call the blog "I'm a Librarian: Check Me Out", but after a few days I decided that's sort of a lame pun. (Grin actually was the one who informed me it's a sort of lame pun.) (She also reminded me that I'd thought of it before a long time ago, only I think I said "Forget the books! Check out the librarian!" or something like that.) (Also there's a shirt at cafepress.com with a big barcode on it that says CHECK ME OUT.)

So I'm back at square one and I'm thinking, "What makes me special?" I just read this book Stumbling on Happiness and one of the things the author says is that everyone thinks they're more special than they actually are. By "special" I mean "distinct from most other human beings." Yes, everyone is unique. But it's also true that we're pretty similar in most ways. We just focus on our differences. I'm off topic now.

Oh yeah. The thing is, I don't know why we all have to believe we're special. Most of us are going to have pretty ordinary lives. When I have children, I don't know if I'll tell them that they are the most special children in the world. I think I'll probably say, "You're special to me because you're my kids, and if you want to, you can do extraordinary things, but I want you to know that it's ok to be ordinary, too."

I think I'm thinking about this because of what happened with Sylar and his mom on Heroes. I'll probably change the title of my blog again next week.