Tired Librarian

There’s no guillotine emoji. Weird.

I hope she’ll be ok.

I picked an awful time for a tolerance break.

They showed up quick. The deputy talked to her for a while, the. He went back to his car and talked to some other people. Ultimately he drove her home. Whole thing took an hour and a half.

I knew it would happen sooner or later: tonight I and some colleagues stayed an hour and a half late at work because a teen girl reported physical abuse at home to us. We are not mandated reporters. But she was too distraught to leave after we closed. So we stayed & called non-emergency.

Ordering off the secret menu at Panda Express.
Did you know the cream cheese rangoons come in a large? It’s 4x the number of rangoons in a regular order.

Why don’t Caucasian witches just light a long wooden match to do a smoke cleanse? Why do some insist on using white sage?

I just found out what poverty nachos are.
I had previously been calling them ‘nachos.’

A poet once wrote,
30 days hath September, April, June, and November
February is an unending march of interminable sadness
All the rest have 31

✨🌈 The more you know 🌈✨

Seems like a good time to read (or reread) Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, as well as Pacifism As Pathology by Ward Churchill.
Get them from your library! If your library doesn’t own them, they may be able to get them for you through ILL. It’s worth asking about!

I remember Twitter did that too, first time around.

It’s got me wondering if either he’s really just a conglomeration of writers like Erin Hunter was, or if his identity is actually known in that writing community.
Or they’re just all big fans. Like, Stephen Graham Jones is one of the readers and it’s messing with me 🤯

Ok, so Chuck Tingle came out with another horror novel which I am listening to now, and not only is it GOOD, it’s narrated by several sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers (in addition to profesh audiobooks narrators)

Hi! What reoccurring life lesson do you hope doesn’t follow you into 2025? Mine is “the people you have 1-sided issues with will always be hanging out in the spaces/communities that are most aspirational to you.”
Fucking hope I’ve learned that one.

Me: I’d like to learn more about German folklore, maybe do a witchcraft about it.

German folklore: If your house isn’t tidy by January 6, Frau Perchta will come disembowel you with her knife.

Don’t forget underpaid! 😀

Decided my New Year’s resolution is to be more disrespectful to my enemies.

Holding it in only hurts me, much healthier to let it out.

In high school a good friend became the butt of many jokes in our friend group by giving me a library book for Christmas. I didn’t mind at all; she’d taken the time to track down an uncommon book I wanted to read, when Amazon wasn’t really a thing yet.

In a better world the insurance CEOs would never have been targets for everyone’s hatred, because they wouldn’t exist. They simply wouldn’t have been allowed to cause so much real, widespread harm in the name of profit. But we don’t live in that world.
May the next Luigi get away with it.

We used to know this. But an uneducated workforce that would rather blame one another than work for the common good is more profitable to the few at the top.

I just wish the complainers would get some perspective.

I’m tired.

And that, I guess, is the banality of evil. That on a bright, quiet afternoon, a well-dressed, well-fed, well-sheltered person felt entitled to casually ask that other people be denied a resource that is meant to be for everyone.

Let me be clear: if merely seeing unhoused folks minding their own business is enough to make you threaten to ‘withdraw’ your support of the library, then you didn’t really support the library to begin with.

This was a guy who just felt that he shouldn’t have to share space with the unhoused, at all. He didn’t want to have to see them in public. He felt they should be denied a civil right (because courts have ruled that’s what access to the library is: a civil right) because he was uncomfortable.

Now, there are nuanced conversations that can be had about some of the behaviors displayed by the least fortunate and the most vulnerable in the library. Libraries see the effects everyday of the housing crisis and addiction epidemic.
But this wasn’t that.

Then came the kicker; he told me the libraries should do something about this. That he would hate to have to “withdraw” his support for the library, or vote against us in future funding initiatives.
This is a tactic that has been used time and again against marginalized groups.

I clarified; they hadn’t done anything against our code of conduct. Just a few men sitting quietly in the reading area, enjoying newspapers & magazines.
He agreed they hadn’t done anything wrong, but why were they here and why were they here all day? He said it was a problem at every library.

Someone stopped me in the middle of the library to complain about the presence of unhoused people.
He started by saying how much he supports the library, always has.
To be clear, he wasn’t complaining that anything bad had happened, no one had done anything, he hadn’t been threatened or harmed.