(no subject)

Some things about family:

1) I am puzzled by this habit of leaving MTV on when there is no one in the room, or even at home. At times I have gone from room to room, turning off TVs in succession. (It's one of the peculiarities of the American middle class that our house has three individuals living in it (up from two last year) and three television sets...)

2) I am disconcerted by not being able to sleep at night on account of my seven-years-younger sister hanging out with her boyfriend in the next room over, and equally disconcerted that both my younger sisters have much more expensive underwear than I do.

3) I will not copy-edit my sister's homework.
I will not copy-edit my sister's homework.
I will not copy-edit my sister's homework.
I will not copy-edit my sister's homework.

I really don't want to be That Girl who lives at home rent-free and then whines about how awful it is, and it's not, it's really really not, it's just... an adjustment.

Some things about the library

1) It is the smallest library in the county, half the size of the next smallest, with the shortest opening hours and the smallest staff. It may well be the smallest library I have ever visited.

2) Despite that, there is no visibility at all from the front desk to the children's section. This provides a nice secluded atmosphere for homework tutoring and such, but it's also potentially dangerous.

3) I know individuals who own more YA books than this library.

4) I am the "computer whiz" on staff. In itself, this is not so alarming, because I did do tech support for ten months. But thus far I have not been asked to demonstrate any more competence than figuring out how to download a file from a shared server to an individual computer.

5) While I know that I'll do more librarianly things as I get more experience, so far, all that's been asked of me is neat handwriting, fast typing, and competence with computers. It's slightly discouraging to realize that I could've done all that a decade ago. (What I couldn't have done a decade ago is deal with the public, so that's something).

6) We are in a shopping center with a taqueria and a Food Lion.
6a) For those who don't live in the south, a Food Lion is a pretty ghetto grocery store. It's a step above a Piggly Wiggly.

7) I really do like my job. It'd be nice to have books, and space, and computers that were less than eight years old, but that hardly affects me directly. Our complete lack of resources in comparison to the richer libraries of the county (like the one I used to go to, which is moving into a building 3 times larger, which will make it, ah... 12 times larger than the one where I work) bothers me not so much for my own sake as for the sake of the people who use the library. It's been one week, and already I've had to tell two people, "We lost that book." These are people who don't have any computers at home, and they're having to do their school projects and job searching on computers that crash if you breathe on them wrong. And how are you supposed to get any homework done when we're only open four hours during the whole weekend?

8) There is a certain amount of culture shock coming from my hippie town to a much more conservative area where I have conversations like this one:

"Do you have any kids?"
"No."
"That's good. You should wait. But don't wait too long."
"...."

(I do look older than I am, and I come off as older than I am, but even so, I was kind of tongue-tied. I don't think I've ever been asked that before).

Or see the following taped to the cash register:

'How much do you love me' I asked Jesus, and Jesus said, 'This much...' Then he stretched out his arms and died.' "

One of these days I may snap and run away to Massachusetts.