Carleen and Mike

I was shushed by a patron today while Laura and I were talking. “I can understand customers being loud but not the staff”. I would have responded better if he had just told us to keep our voices down rather than be so hateful. I really don’t think we were being that loud. Jennifer was here too and said that he had shushed her once before aswell.
Today I wish I wasn’t here. I’m tired of being at the desk alone. Beth has been here a lot too but she has plenty to do herself and often has to leave the desk. I feel rather overloaded with doing the mail and ILL while trying to help people with questions. It’s always hard to remember what it was I was doing when I do ILL, where I was at before I was interupted, I really don’t know how Katherine does it. I guess the hardest thing is making sure I do everything correctly according to her system. Everybody has a system and Katherine has had one for years and years. I’m so worried that I’ll mess something up and she’ll come back all upset. I’m already worried about the fact that we have moved the magazines and added the donations to the collection which I don’t think she’s going to be happy about. She’s very reluctant to change and understandably so since she’s been doing things a certain way for so long. Beth isn’t going to be here the day she gets back so she’ll probably get a shock when she walks into the periodical room. I hope I don’t get an earful.

I’ve been whining a lot this past month. I think it might be the heat. I hate hot humid weather and the summer has arrived a lot faster this year it seems. Patrons are getting on my nerves a lot more than usual and I seem to have a lot less patience then normal. I’m planning to use this weekend to finally re-organize my house from top to bottom. My bedroom is pretty good but every place else is a mess. There are so many items stashed in temporary places. I need to fine them a home :). I’m hoping to get most of this done by the time Mike gets back but something tells me I’ll have to work on it on memorial day too.

Well I’ve been home (NY) for several days now, and I’m just having a blast. I’m back in NY for for my best friend Jamie’s wedding. We had the bachelor party this past Saturday, which was far more fun even than I imagined it. I was the DD unfortunatly, but I still had fun and probably saved a ton of money. I got to fire off Jamie’s potato cannon, something I’ve never done, and now that I’ve done it, I have to say, has definetly been one of many highlights of the trip so far. Another first, my first paintball experience, was a trip. I can’t wait to move back to NY so I can join Jamie & Brian for the tournaments. Then later in the evening, we went bar-hopping, which being the DD, was pretty boring for me. But after that we went to the strip club, which made up for being the DD tenfold. And uh–that’s all I have to say about that. No really, I was a good boy.

The weather has been really cruddy here, which is good for me, seeing as how all we’ve been getting in Oklahoma is sunshine sunshine sunshine, that’s nice but a break is nice too. However, the rain is not so good for Jamie, who’s having an outside wedding (d’oh!). Hopefully the rain will hold off.

I’m always astounded at how strange my taste in music can be. It’s so inconsistant sometimes. My collection of cd’s began with a Phil Collins live album that my mom bought me on a trip to Aberdeen when I was ten. I love his music to this day, including several other childhood favorites like Belinda Carlisle and Bruce Springsteen. As a pre-teen I was devoted to the New Kids on the Block, however, I never really owned any of there albums. Makes me wonder what I was really devoted too. Anyway, by the time I was fourteen I found myself searching for music with more substance, more quality. I discovered Tori Amos shortly before I moved to the states and listened to her constantly, before I went to bed, during car drives, on walks, prefering my walkman to the stereo so I had a better chance of drowning out the world around me (the whole, depressed rebel teen thing-luckily my phase didn’t last too long). I also went through a Metallica phase. I had all the required “black” in my life, bedroom furniture, posters, t-shirts. This made me particularly attractive to a rather shy long haired kid in my algebra class who apparently had a crush on me for my entire ninth grade year, not making his feelings known until Valentines day when he suprised me with a dozen roses at school and a package with all the Metallica albums wrapped inside (very sweet but I wasn’t interested).
I grew out of the heavy metal by my senior year, a time when Alternative Rock was actually alternative and “New Age” music was the “new” thing. I started to listen to a lot of instrumental stuff, folk, celtic, Enya, Loreena McKennitt and of course, the angst of Alanis Morrissette. But I was also still fond of a lot of the new dance/techno music popular at the time. After taking a music apprecation course in college, I started to pay more attention to what I was listening to and found myself responding differently to music then the way I had before. I focused much more on the instruments being used, how they were used, and not just on the lyrics and how “catchy” the rythym was. Through Mike I found a new appreciation for music that I had always disliked for it’s awkwardness. Dave Matthew’s and Blue’s Traveler’s were both bands that were confusing to me because I just couldn’t digest it all. There was too much to focus on, too many different kinds of instruments, styles, etc. It was too hard to figure out what I like about them and a lot easier to say that I didn’t like them at all.
So, this past year I started liking jazz and now apparently punk (?) The Yeah Yeah Yeahs Maps is the new tune in my head.

When it comes to my thoughts on the war in Iraq I usually stay pretty quiet. The majority of my family and friends are in agreement and we have our little discussions every now and then, but for the most part, I live in a very republican state and my views can cause a lot of confrontation. We had a patron come in yesterday who wanted to speak to our director concerning an issue that arose during a dinner party she attended. Apparently the dinner conversation was very focused on political issues and current events and through various discussions this lady discovered that she was the only Democrat among them. I guess another lady in the group was such a strong Republican that she swore she would have no problem checking out every book in the library that was left wing, democrat or liberal, and not return it. Our patron was concerned and wondered if there was anyway we could prevent this from happening. Obviously, there isn’t. She can check them out, keep them. We can charge her for the books and if she doesn’t pay then we can send it to a collection agency. If she pays, that’s good because then we have money to buy the books again. If not, well, we’ll have to dig into our budget and re-order.
Up until now I’ve been able to stomach most of the war. We don’t have cable so we don’t get CNN but I manage to keep up most of the time through the internet and the newpapers that come into our library. I also have to thank my brother who is much better and keeping up and sends me anything he feels is important to know. He sent me the slide show from the New York Times showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners about a week ago and I’m afraid that was a bit too much for me to take. One of the reasons I don’t want t.v. is so I’m not constantly exposed to these images because they affect me so much (that’s why I don’t like horror movies). Besides, my imagination does a well enough job most of the time anyway. But, I haven’t been able to escape those visuals these past view days. With Katherine gone, I’m in charge of checking in mail and almost every newspaper has got those pictures spread over the front page. The execution of Nick Berg hits a little close to home since he apparently attended the same university I am now before he transferred to Cornell. Not that it should make a difference but it just feels closer for some reason. Maybe it’s because his interests and personality remind me a little of Mitch. The fact that he attended several different universities so he could get four different degrees and traveled around the world wanting to make a difference and to help people. So, needless to say, all of this and the recent events at work have left me feeling rather hopeless. My mortality has once again been thrown in my face and the cruelity of our kind has left me questioning my own existance.
For the most part, I don’t really understand why Americans are so shocked by the abuse. I find the response to be rather naive. Besides the glory and the patriotism, I’m not sure what kind of perception our nation has of war but it’s obviously not a realistic one. I’m not sure what made them think our soldiers would be immune to the savage affects of war. These people are surrounded by death and brutality everyday, they watch they’re friends ripped apart by bullets, burned alive and who knows what else. Not to mention they are in a foreign country, immersing themselves in a foreign culture that most of them know nothing about and conversing with people who speak a completely different language. Maybe everyone thinks we’ve “come a long way since Vietnam”, that things are different now because we’ve supposedly developed ways to have a “peaceful” war. War is war. Liberator’s, enemies, emancipators, antagonists, friend, foe. It makes no difference. We’re all the same. Don’t they get it?
I read a USA Today article that had an interview with a well known Stanford psychology professor by the name of Zimbardo. He apparently conducted a semi-secret experiment back in the 70’s. He set up a “mock prison” situation in his basement, hiring people to play prisoners and soldiers. His instructions to the soldiers were very vague and he left them there for about 6 days, observing them, before they started to exhibit some very disturbing behavior. This kind of experiment would be unheard of nowadays. Anyway, the results are rather interesting and were remarkably similar to the situation with the Iraqi prisoners. I’ve never really given experiments like this much merit just because no matter what you do they are still “controlled” in some way and there are always other external factors affecting the situation. But it was still interesting. You can read about it on Zimbardo’s website.

It’s been a really sad day. Katherine, our reference librarian, is very ill and was admitted to the hospital last night. She has worked at our library for over forty years and has hardly ever called in sick except for a few days after a surgery she had in the 80’s. She has always been a very private person so unfortunately we don’t really know what exactly is wrong with her. She called in sick Monday saying she had some kind of stomach virus. She was sick again yesterday then, apparently, her husband brought her to the hospital last night. One of the ladies that works here went to go see her husband today but all he said was that she would probably be there awhile and then he broke down and started crying. I would guess Katherine is probably in her 60’s but she’s always been such a fiesty lady. Very trim and energetic, always riding her bike to work when the weather would allow. It’s just hard to imagine her ill. I would like to hope that this is nothing series and that she will recover quickly but something tells me that’s not the case just because of the way her husband reacted. If a husband is crying then it must be something serious.
On top of that our children’s librarian has just found out that her mother has lymphoma. I guess they’re still going to do some more tests with another doctor tomorrow to make sure. There’s just so much sadness everywhere today.

It’s been awhile. Since my last posting I have completed my first semester of grad school, gone to a wedding, completed my last class for Librarian Level I certification, lost my dogs tag and collar, pulled off an estimated 20 tics from me, my husband and my dogs body after a trip to Osage Hills and rented a total of 5 movies that were not worth two seconds of my time (The Order, Gothika, Timeline, Cold Creek Manor and Eyes Wide Shut).

With more time on my hands I have gotten back into altered books. I did a cover and a couple of pages the other day that actually turned out pretty good. I think I may be getting the hang of it. If I can figure out how to upload pictures on this thing then I’ll scan and post some of my stuff.

Our garden is finally blooming. Mike and I are terribly excited since we’re finally getting to see what plants and flowers we actually have in our yard. Last year, I think things were far to overgrown for anything to really blossom properly. We also finally have some basil. Trick now is to figure out when to pick and dry them. I’d like to plant some more herbs too. We also discovered that we have some wild strawberries. They’re really tiny. So cute!