(no subject)

(Resuming my progress to Lothlorien, abandoned after getting sick and having to unpack library boxes and just plain not getting a round tuit).

Miles: 71.6
Reached small stream; nothing else of interest

Posting this in lieu of actually making progress, since they changed the gym security codes and I can't get in.
I do have a bike. I am disinclined to haul my bike up a flight of stairs this morning.

In which I continue to be gloomy about the MySpace ban

I hate the invasion of privacy that inevitably results from walking around to check people's computer screens (when I think of it, or when I hear a lot of giggling. When there's a lot of giggling, I find, it's usually people beating each other up on YouTube.) I hate that the regulars are on to me, and are very successful at switching off to Facebook or Tagged or whatnot when I leave the desk...which leaves me disproportionately punishing the clueless. I hate that I have to be the bad guy with the kids I used to get along decently with. And do I seriously think anybody's going to come to any teen programming I do?

I'd just as soon turn a blind eye to MySpace, but I can't, because pretty soon word would get around... and then we'd get all the troublemakers in the county.

I wish we had a security guard so that I would not have to deal with this, but in the absence of the pot-smoking tire-slashing vandals that caused so much trouble at the other branches, it's silly and petty to spend that kind of money chasing teenagers off a dumb website.

I was not at all a troublemaker as a teenager, but I'll say this: If I were fifteen or sixteen, and the library had just cut off my access to my social network, I'd be searching around for proxy servers in ten seconds. It's real easy to self-justify: the rule doesn't apply to me if I'm not doing anything wrong.

If I can stick it out until the middle of August, that's when the summer programming ends, and maybe by then something will change, things will settle one way or the other.

And until I figure things out, I will have to discard the illusion that there's a right answer, that I could figure out some way to do things that won't get anybody mad at me. I think that's probably part of being a grownup: accepting that people are going to be mad at you, and it's going to be your fault, and it's going to be the least-bad of a lot of bad options.