I been havin a snake

And we're closed

2006-03-14T19:37:00.000-06:00

I've moved to a new URL. Email me for it, if you like: daisers at gmail dot com

Another Mardi Gras picture

2006-03-10T15:44:00.000-06:00

This would be Daisers and Menckles wearing goofy hats. Notice also that my tits are all akimbo.

What I been readin

2006-03-10T14:03:00.000-06:00

My favorite book of 2006 is unquestionably Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (2005). I have a hard-on for boarding school stories to begin with, which is probably why the review for Prep caught my eye, but this one was particularly awesome. It's low on actual plot, although there are some twists I didn't see coming (Sin Jun!); it follows the life of Lee, a girl from Indiana that get into a prestigious East Coast prep school, for the four years she's there.

Lee's biggest problem is that she wants to be cool but isn't. How pedestrian, right? And yet, the way she works that out, and the way it's expressed via her narration, is totally right on. I crawled right up inside her head and stayed there for hundreds of pages, relating to everything that happened to her. I cringed during Parents' Weekend, and I laughed out loud with glee on page 287. I didn't want to put the book down when it was over; I held it in my hands for a couple of minutes, and then wished I could read about how Lee did in college.

Several hundred pages in, I glanced at the author's name so I could investigate her other books, and was stunned to see that the first name was Curtis. I couldn't imagine a man having written this, but when I checked online, Curtis is a woman. I guess that makes sense since her protagonist's name is Lee.

I may merely be old.

2006-03-10T13:42:00.000-06:00

But I totally don't get this: I saw a teenage girl having lunch at Ruby Tuesday's yesterday, and she was wearing a t-shirt that read I LOVE MY BOYFRIEND. I have several ideas why this might be, but none of them is satisfying.

1. She's wearing it to advertise her "taken" status so no one hits on her. Maybe, and I'm certainly not above claiming I'm married in order to get rid of some lecherous fuck, but it was noon at a chain restaurant on a weekday, and she was eating lunch with a boy.

2. Her boyfriend gave it to her and she's wearing it to lunch with him to show him she likes it. Again, maybe, and we all pretend to like gifts we don't like, but how moronic do you have to be to buy your girlfriend a shirt like that that doesn't even have your name on it? I'd break up with someone that gave me that shirt. Probably.

3. She wants the world to know, or believe, that she has a boyfriend, but she doesn't. If this one is true, I'm never leaving the house again, and I'm only ever eating toothpaste and I hate all of you.

Where I been

2006-03-09T01:34:00.000-06:00

Moving

2006-03-09T01:33:00.000-06:00

I'm going to be moving out of this space shortly and into new digs. I won't be publishing the new URL here. If you want to know what it is, send me an email at daisers at gmail dot com and I'll add you to the list.

Find of the day

2006-02-14T16:49:00.000-06:00

I discovered this note while pulling easy books (picture books) off the shelves for a project. It was stuck between the pages of Goodnight Moon.

There's this girl who works here. I can't remember her name. I want to have sex with her. Or I want to see her naked. Or I want to watch her have sex. Her body is beautiful, perfect. I want to strip her down & look at her beautiful tanned flesh. She shelved Juv. Easy's today and I watched her the whole time. I love the way the crack in her denim shorts crept up her ass. She had on tight, short shorts. I'm in lust with her body. I'd pay her to have sex or even just to let me look at her body. I want her! I want her!

The two best library blog posts of the week

2006-02-13T09:45:00.000-06:00

I miss being a public librarian for a lot of reasons, but one is that I don't have tales of stupidity to post. I must get my fix elsewhere, like via this post by the Foxy Librarian about stoners in the library.

Even funnier is Chuck's applause of a cataloger's response to Richard Cravatts, a journalist that wrote a whiny, misinformed piece about how librarians are protecting terrorists by not censoring Internet use and giving up patron records.

Another letter from Tal

2006-02-12T16:45:00.000-06:00

Dear Sirs and Ma'ams,

Frankly, I am almost at a loss for words, but I think I can choke a few out.

As with some other "libraries" that have not accepted my application, you have seriously fucked yourselves. Whoever does your hiring needs to pull his head out of his ass and get to fucking work. I thought that only a fucking retard would have the decision-making skills that someone at your "library" apparently uses to hire people.

I guess you'll find out the hard way that I was your ONLY clear choice. In the next couple of days, I will be sending my pitbull, Susie, to personally perform plastic surgery procedures upon all of your employees. I hope you realize that this could have been easily avoided.

Yeah, I got two more rejection letters. But I also have two more interviews -- NYPL by phone on Monday, and director of a small-town library on Saturday -- so it all evens out.

Taxing

2006-02-09T10:40:00.000-06:00

2005 was the first year that I worked as a freelancer, which to the IRS means that I ran my own business, so I had to fill out a 1040 instead of a 1040A or EZ for the first time. I had no idea what a mess that would be. It took me hours instead of ten minutes. I had to fill out all kinds of schedules for self-employment taxes, etc., but I also got to deduct part of my utilities since I run my business out of my home, and I got to deduct moving expenses from New Orleans since I was laid off. Overall, I owe less than I'd budgeted.

I also was a part-year resident in both Louisiana and Illinois, so state taxes were a mess as well. The most amusing part, though, was the differences between the LA and IL forms. As you'd expect (well, I would), the Illinois form was a simple, straightforward document. It was even attractive, and it was easy to fill out. In fact, I could fill it out online and then print it to sign and mail. (I didn't qualify for e-filing.)

The Louisiana form was, also predictably, a nightmare. It was ugly, for one thing -- why orange? And I had to fill out like 900 schedules that ended up being totally useless. And while it was possible to type my data in online, I couldn't save it to print at work; I had to print it using the nearly-dead ink cartridges in my home inkjet. The most astonishing part is that Louisiana does not provide you with one critical form. You're told to do your own math and create a schedule on a separate sheet of paper. It's a pretty straightforward bit of math, so why not make a form, State of Louisiana? I know you're busy right now, but why didn't you do this in, say, 2004? Or 1904?

Probably the stupidest part of the LA form was the blanks to enter numbers. On the federal and Illinois forms, you simply type, say, the standard deduction into the boxes. On the IL form, you'd type 5000 and then hit Tab and the form would magically change this into $5,000.00. On the federal form, it was slightly more complicated -- you had to type in 5000 and then hit Tab and then type 00 in the cents field. In the Louisiana form, however, life got stupider. Each digit was set as a separate field, so to type 5000.00, you had to type 5, then Tab, then 0, then Tab, then 0, then Tab, then 0, then Tab, then 0, then Tab, then 0, then Tab. I shit you not.

The funniest distinction, though, was a question included on the Illinois form but omitted from Louisiana's. I'd like to know what percentage of state tax forms ask this. It's right near the top, in high priority, right after you fill out your name, address, and filing status. It instructs you to check a box "if you were a member of a professional athletic team during 2005."

Doorbell idiocy

2006-02-07T16:05:00.000-06:00

How many times in your life have you ever rung the wrong doorbell at an apartment building? I can't think of a single time I have done this, even though I used to be a pizza delivery driver. Oh, I've probably done it....once in my life. Maybe. Maybe zero times.

How is it, then, that so many people ring my doorbell when they mean to ring that of another resident of my building? I'm not talking about people looking for Dee. I'm talking about people that come to visit someone in apartment 4, let's say, that end up pressing my button, clearly labeled 6. After the third time this happened in a single month, I went outside to check whether the 6 label was, say, between two bells in a confusing fashion. Nope. Could not be any clearer. I just.don't.get.it.

The last time this happened, it was after midnight and I was in bed. The doorbell rang, and it isn't merely a chime; it's a little song composed of eight notes and played at an incredibly loud volume. I sighed, got up, put on a robe, knelt on the couch, pulled up the blinds, and opened the window so I could speak to the person below. "Who is it?" I asked.

Silence.

"WHO IS IT?"

Silence.

"HELLO?"

Finally a woman muttered, "I rang the wrong bell."

"Oh, okay," I said, withdrawing. As I closed the window, I heard her say to her friend, "Bitch." Oh, right. You awaken me in the middle of the night because of your own inability to read numbers; I deign to politely ask who you are; and I'M the bitch.

Memed yet again

2006-02-02T15:19:00.000-06:00

Juice has tagged me for this meme, so, here you go.

Four jobs I’ve had:
1. Visiting Fellow. This is actually my current job. Internally we call it "Visiting Katrina Fellow." No shit.
2. Money counter for an off-track betting facility.
3. Customer service rep for a textbook publisher.
4. Bouncer.

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Office Space
2. South Park: The Movie
3. Half Baked
4. Party Girl

Four movies I can't stand the sight of:
1. Batman & Robin. It combines one of the worst actors in movie history (George Clooney) with baby-faced sidekick Chris O'Donnell, plus adds a horrifyingly lame script and an appearance by Governor Schwarzenegger.
2, 3, 4. I don't know. I tend to not really watch movies I hate, or movies longer than ninety minutes, or movies at all.

Four places I’ve lived:
1. Chicago, Illinois
2. New Orleans, Lousiana
3. San Diego, California
4. Champaign, Illinois

Four places I'm avoiding:
1. Downers Grove, Illinois (suburban hell)
2. Fayetteville, Arkansas (they want me to pay my own expenses to interview there)
3. Hampshire, Illinois (they didn't give me a job, and I'm glad (a little) because it's a tiny little all-white town
4. Baton Rouge, Louisiana (jobs available, but kind of a gross place)

Four TV shows I love (CURRENT):
1, 2, 3, 4. Truly no idea what's even on TV. Um, the news? Oh, last year I liked The Apprentice when I was living at my sister's.

Four TV shows I love (CLASSIC):
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2. Facts of Life
3. Friends
4. Roseanne

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Kauai, Hawaii
2. San Francisco, California
3. Eight European cities: London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Milan, Rome and Paris
4. Los Angeles, California

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Sushi. Right now I'm craving it constantly, probably because there isn't a Japanese restaurant in this fucking town.
2. Home Run Inn pizza
3. Grilled cheese sandwich with mushrooms, made with love by Sassy at the Embassy in Champaign
4. Pad thai from Thai at the Y, also in Champaign

Four sites I visit daily:
1. Web site of the library at which I'm employed, to check on my holds list
2. Public library's Web site, to check on my holds list
3. Tomato Nation
4. Go Fug Yourself

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. At my sister Peachy's house, hanging out with her and Tal and Johnson and our dogs
2. In my armchair drinking tea and reading my awesome lesbian true crime book
3. In New Orleans at the Muses parade wearing a Miller Lite around my neck
4. At an Old 97s show, preferably with Becky

Four bloggers I am tagging:
Becky; Bartsy; Jeffrey; and TIL.

Eh?

2006-01-31T14:38:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I received a phone message from the Wall Street Journal. Dude stated his name and affiliation, said that he'd heard I was a fact-checker, and left his number.

I was confused by this -- the Wall Street Journal wanted me to fact-check for them? Okay, that's pretty cool, but how did they get my name?

While I was pondering this, the guy sent me an email. His signature included his job title, which involved the "publishing beat." So perhaps he wanted to profile me, although a profile of someone working in a low-status job that most people have never heard of...why...

OH, I totally just got it while writing this post. Fact-checkers of nonfiction are suddenly in the limelight, for once. Thanks, James Frey!

Anyway, the WSJ dude and I left each other several messages but never connected, so, oh well. I'm not famous yet.

Update, ten minutes later:

Yep. Here's the story. Primm owns one of the companies I fact-check for, and Garnham is another fact-checker for them. Totally missed my opportunity to be in the Wall Street Journal.

For Textbooks and Some Children's
Fare, Fact-Checking Isn't Fiction

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 31, 2006; Page B5

Amid the controversy over the contested memoir "A Million Little Pieces," many book publishers insist it would be too expensive for them to hire fact-checkers to ensure the veracity and accuracy of their offerings.

But in some areas of the industry, fact-checking is routine: textbooks, for example, and nonfiction books for children, especially those books found in school and public libraries. (See related article.)

After a now-famous televised tongue-lashing from Oprah Winfrey last week, James Frey, the author of "A Million Little Pieces," has acknowledged that some parts of his book are embellished or fabricated, and has apologized, along with his publishers, Bertelsmann AG's Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint and, in paperback, Anchor Books. The book continues to be a best-seller.

Even though the scandal has rocked the book business, publishers and literary agents say that employing fact-checkers is impracticable. But all of the textbooks published by Pearson PLC's Pearson Education unit are fact-checked, said spokeswoman Wendy Spiegel. The Pearson unit issues several thousand new textbooks each year, she said. Textbooks are a particularly profitable segment of the book business.

"We fact-check them because we stand behind the integrity of our content," Ms. Spiegel said. "We couldn't afford not to have fact-checkers."

April Hattori, a spokeswoman for McGraw-Hill Education, the textbook arm of McGraw-Hill Cos., said all of its textbooks are fact-checked. "Our goal is to ensure accuracy, she said.

The same goes for many other nonfiction books for kids. "Every book we publish is fact-checked," said E. Russell Primm III, president of Editorial Directions Inc., in Chicago, which produces an estimated 300 titles a year for educational publishers.

Mr. Primm said his eight-year-old company creates series for publishers, hiring the writers, copy editing the books and providing the art. He employs a small army of free-lance fact-checkers. The books involved are relatively short, ranging from 120 words for a preschooler to 60,000 words for a high-school text. "The argument about not having enough time or money to fact-check is ridiculous," Mr. Primm said.

At The Child's World Inc., a Chanhassen, Minn., publisher specializing in preschool through grade three, Mary Berendes, director of production, said that all 200 titles published annually are fact-checked. "We started using fact-checkers three or four years ago because librarians would call and say this or that date is wrong," Ms. Berendes said.

One veteran full-time fact-checker, Peter Garnham, said that some publishers pay by the hour; others pay a flat fee per title. He rarely gets more than $500 to $600 per title. Mr. Garnham said he works for eight publishing houses, mostly vetting children's nonfiction. Though he has offered his services to major New York publishers of books targeting adults, he has so far been rebuffed. "In terms of the cost of publishing, it's not that expensive," Mr. Garnham said.

It is unlikely that many major publishers will change their minds soon. John Sterling, president and publisher of Henry Holt & Co., a unit of Germany's Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, said he has no intention of hiring fact checkers, nor does he know any publishers who will soon be doing so. "It's not financially feasible," he says. "A book that sells 4,000 copies as a hardcover has a negative number at the bottom line. Do you want to add to that with fact-checking?"

Discovery of the day

2006-01-28T15:47:00.000-06:00

Morningstar corn dogs. They're just the right amount of sweet and savory; they're the perfect size for a snack; and they microwave in fifty seconds.

How librarian-y are you?

2006-01-27T15:24:00.000-06:00

I took this quiz and scored only 58 percent, receiving the suggestion that I'm "more of an aspiring librarian" than an actual one. That's pretty shitty, except when you consider that I scored better than 94% of my fellow test-takers, or at least those whose age and gender are similar to mine.

Ha ha

2006-01-27T10:54:00.000-06:00

I was turned down for a job I really wanted and thought I had a shot at. I was a little sad, but not after I got this email from my sister Tal. I had forwarded her the rejection email, and here's what she sent back:

Hi ass suckers,

I was glad to receive your email about how you stupid fucks just made the biggest mistake of your lives. If you think you and your fucking "library" are going anywhere without my guidance, you've got a fucking other think coming.

I am going to send my pit bull Susie over there to rip off each of your balls and/or faces. I hope you know that this could have been easily avoided.

Thank you,
Daisy Lastname

The bathroom: a snapshot

2006-01-27T09:28:00.000-06:00

The bathroom nearest to my desk at work is a mixed bag. It's usually clean, which is my primary criterion for a Good Bathroom, except on the days when people use the toilet and then, apparently, say to themselves, "Should I flush away my waste? Nah." The sinks are clean but unpleasant; they feature the two-faucet system, with hot on the left and cold on the right, so that it's impossible to wash your hands without either freezing or burning them. Also, the faucets are the kind you have to hold in place to keep them running; you can't just turn them on and wash. As a result, I've developed a maneuver where I turn on the hot water in one sink for just a nanosecond to wet each hand in turn; then I lather up, then I rinse as much as possible under that hot faucet until it's too hot to handle, and then I move to the adjacent sink to continue my rinse, still one hand at a time. This only works if there's no one else in the bathroom to witness my madness. Oh! One good thing is that we just got foam soap. Score.

The other interesting fact about the bathroom is that it features a separate nap room. No shit. I guess they put it in the bathroom to prevent heterosexual sex, not that the bathroom is a particularly erotic locale to begin with. It features two bed-type pieces of furniture, each narrower and a little lower than your standard twin bed, made of vinyl, with an elevated portion at one end to serve as a pillow.

Yesterday afternoon I was feeling ill from my lunch of french fries with ranch dressing, but I couldn't go home because I had to work the reference desk in the late afternoon, so I decided to test the nap room. I chose the bed nearest the door, because no one using the bathroom would be able to see me without stepping into the room. I imagine that a user of the nap room would draw a lot of attention, as I've never seen anyone in that room before, and no one at this university has even mentioned its existence.

I was there about half an hour, coat wadded under my head, my glasses and cell phone cradled between my body and the wall. Not a soul entered the bathroom while I was doing this, thankfully. I can't say I actually lost consciousness, but it was a much-needed break. Good idea, university!

Oh and...

2006-01-20T12:42:00.000-06:00

Be sure to visit Jeff's site today for his Daisy museum.

Happy birthday to me

2006-01-19T22:37:00.000-06:00

I turn thirty in just about an hour now. I'm delighted about it, because my twenties were a pretty tumultuous time. Some highlights/lowlights:

I moved from Evanston, Illinois, to La Mesa, California, to San Diego, California, to Champaign, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, to Palatine, Illinois, to DeKalb, Illinois.

Graduated from college, tried grad school in women's studies briefly, struggled through library school and finally made it.

Became vegetarian, then vegan, then vegetarian again. Became gay and then bisexual. Dabbled briefly with witchcraft. Fell in love with Buffy, Elastica, and Mardi Gras. Lived in a co-op and got all into natural foods and microbrews. Attended the weddings of my three best childhood friends.

Worked as a customer service rep, marketing assistant, research assistant (times three), e-newsletter reviewer, tech center support ho, appraiser liaison, receptionist, Webmistress (times two), money room ho, pizza delivery driver, bouncer, bartender (for one week), babysitter, telephone interviewer, librarian, public relations rep, and freelance fact-checker.

Lost both my maternal grandparents. Got busted blogging about work. Survived a hurricane.

Quit smoking cigarettes. Learned to shoot pool passably well for a girl. Drank my way through eight European cities. Fell in love, but only once, which is probably unusual. Adopted two cats and Susie.

Interesting happenings of late

2006-01-17T23:07:00.000-06:00

1. I had my ninth job interview since the hurricane today, with my tenth scheduled for Thursday. I'm so sick of it you can't even fucking imagine. Most of the interviewers are totally nice, and they're all for jobs I want and am qualified for, so that helps. Still, I hate it when I get to an interview and I'm third on a list of ten people that are coming in. Employers, why do you have to interview ten people? It's just mean. Pick your best three, and if none of them work out, pick the next three. Interviewing is stressful and often costly for the applicant. Each time I go for an interview, I have to research the library in question via their Web site; print my résumé and relevant supporting documents, like pics from the NOPL Web site or printouts of my recent media exposure; get a good night's sleep and all of that; wash, iron and dry-clean professional clothing; take time off work; drive anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours when gas is $2.30 a gallon, often getting up early or going after work when I'm tired and cranky; put on my best face and try to sell myself for between one and six hours; etc. So don't interview me if you've got five résumés you like better. Please.

Or maybe I should feel lucky that I've had so many interviews. And I am proud that out of 25 résumés I've sent out, nine libraries have asked for interviews. I think that's a remarkable percentage and a sign that I'm applying for all the right jobs. Still, the process sucks ass and I can't wait until it's over. When I finally get a job, I'm going to dance in the streets, perhaps literally.

2. Susie almost got hit by a car. I always say that she never, ever goes in the street, but this time when I opened the car door to get out myself, she leapt out after me on the street side of the car. It was a busy thoroughfare, too; cars slammed on their brakes and honked at me. I really thought she was going to die. She's totally fine. I mean, I beat her ass, but it didn't hurt her; she's part pit bull, after all. The longest-term effect was on me. I went into what I guess was shock. Emotionally I was okay, I thought, but all of a sudden I was freezing cold and aching and really tired, like totally wiped out. Only a nap and massage helped.

3. I have discovered that if I can't have Turbodog, then Leinie's Creamy Dark is a good substitute. But nothing can compare to Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale, even if it's $10 for a sixpack. It's hands-down the best beer I've ever had, and you know I've drunk a lot of beer in my time.

Best.toy.ever

2006-01-10T11:59:00.000-06:00

Salary Calculator

If you are, let's say, planning on moving from your present small Midwestern college town to somewhere else -- somewhere undetermined -- and you have to compare your present salary to the proffered* salaries by libraries in other locales -- you can type in your current earnings and pick your new and old towns and see how much you'd have to make in the new place to maintain your present lifestyle.

In New Orleans and San Jose, I could make pretty much just what I make now (which is more than I made in New Orleans by twenty percent). In such local hamlets as Woodstock and Belvidere, IL, I'd need another thousand or two. In the far north suburbs of Chicago, ditto. In Chicago, I'd need to make more than ten grand more than I do now. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, I could take a pay cut of five thousand. The small town where I applied to be the director isn't even big enough to be listed in the salary calculator.

*Not that I have any offers yet. Totally don't. Cross your fingers.

Flashback

2006-01-09T00:04:00.000-06:00

I miss New Orleans a lot, in sort of a general sense. Sometimes, though, I get a flash of something and it sort of stabs me in the chest. Tonight, that something is a vision of me in the passenger seat of Jeff's little white Tercel, on our way to work in the morning, driving past Charity Hospital and drinking iced coffee while I read aloud the highlights of the Times-Pic.

2006 (so far) in books

2006-01-08T19:43:00.000-06:00

Between semesters, no one wants to work the reference desk because it's dead boring. In a three-hour shift, we might get two requests for pencils, and one (maybe) ref question.

I can't imagine why this bothers anyone. I relish it, because I can spend three nearly-interrupted hours reading in peace. I volunteered to work a ref desk shift every day for the month between fall finals and the beginning of spring classes, and thus I have already finished seven books and am in the middle of three more.

The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester, 1996. This was recently recommended to Becky by Clairabelle on the grounds that it features a highly unreliable narrator. Since this is one of my favorite literary devices, I snapped it up. It's a little difficult to get into because said narrator is so pompous; he's writing about French cuisine, and he's so full of himself and writes so pretentiously that I wanted to just put the book down. But I persevered for a little while, and on page 33 (I believe), he revealed a detail that made me want to keep reading. And then I couldn't put the book down but I couldn't breeze through it either because I needed to read closely to see what other clues he'd drop.

David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall, David Sedaris, 2003. I wasn't sure whether this counted as an audiobook since it was a recording of a live show, but I decided to put it in that category because (1) the public library has it in their audiobook section; (2) dude exclusively read from his books during the performance; (3) Amazon classifies it thusly. The content was what I've come to expect from Sedaris: he's overrated. I don't dislike him, but he's just not that funny, especially in prose or 70-minute-show form. His radio segments are just long enough, and they're free.

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Barbara Ehrenreich, 2005. I'm sure I'm not the first reviewer to say that I adored Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich's book about her stint as an undercover blue-collar worker, and that this one was a disappointment. In the newer book, she tries to get an office job as a public relations ho, and it would have been awesome if she'd flitted from job to job like in Nickel and Dimed, or even if she'd been to several interviews and corporate trainings. Instead, she had only two interviews, both for non-jobs in which she'd make only commission and would work from home. Most of the book covers her trips to career coaches and subsequent attempts to network. Boring.

Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America, Bakari Kitwana, 2005. I had high hopes for this one as well, but they also did not pan out. Kitwana used to write for The Source, not only the premier hip-hop magazine but also the publication with an anti-Eminem slant that uncovered a tape of him being pretty grossly racist back when he was sixteen. I wanted to know more about that story, being a big Eminem fan, but the book didn't get there until the fifth chapter. Chapters one through four and six were pretty dull and didn't really answer the question posed in the title.

Acceleration, Graham McNamee, 2003. Of course I had to read a YA novel about a kid with a summer job in the lost & found at the Toronto subway and finds the diary of a serial killer. I liked it quite a bit; the main character and his friends weren't perfect suburban children, and the lead's motivations for wanting to track down the murderer rang true. Being a short teen book with a necessarily happy ending, it was hard for the author to get into detail about why serial killers do what they do and how to identify them, but the author pulled it off nicely by putting the protagonist's brainy friend to work on library research so they would know what they were getting into.

Design for Dignity: Studies in Accessibility, William L. Lebovich, 1993. Thirty-one case studies of how modern buildings have handled the need for remodeling after the Americans with Disabilities Act. Mostly pictures with short text explaining how it's cool that this particular bathroom has levered sink handles, but how the stall is too small for a wheelchair to move in next to the toilet. I enjoyed it, but color pictures would have helped, as would have some definitions of architectural terms, but I don't think the layperson was the intended audience.

Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray, Alison Owings, 2002. Owings interviewed dozens of waitresses to find out their perspectives on their undervalued, underpaid job. I liked reading everyone's personal story, and the book was compelling, even though it didn't really teach me anything new. There were lots of stories about sexual harassment, bad tippers, and snorting coke in the kitchen. The best part is probably the first section, which covers waitressing from a historical perspective, featuring interviews from elderly women that began waiting tables in the 1930s or earlier, including one that was forced to decline service to the four Black students in the Woolworths incident that helped kick off the civil rights movement.

The three I'm currently reading are Pride and Prejudice on CD, The House of Leaves for a book club, and The Female of the Species. The first two are rereads. I'll review each of them upon completion. One of my New Year's resolutions is to review every book I read this year.

Disappointment

2006-01-03T14:00:00.000-06:00

I really, really wanted to love The House Café. It's a cute little restaurant with living-room furniture and a vegetarian-friendly menu. At night it becomes a music venue, and it's owned by a professor. It has fondue and tofu dishes and pierogis and a $1.50 peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

The only problem is that the food totally sucks. I've been there twice now. The first time, I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and sweet-potato fries. I received a disgusting Velveeta concoction whose "grill" marks led me to believe it had been cooked in one of those electric sandwich-makers. No fries were served with it. After ten minutes, I asked my obviously stoned waiter whether they were coming up soon; she said they were in the oven.

Fries? In the oven? I was afraid, and when I finally got them (after I had finished my sandwich), I saw that they were indeed store-bought, frozen fries that the restaurant had merely put in the oven. This was so uncool that I didn't go back for almost two months, but today I decided maybe I'd just ordered the wrong items and it was worth another try.

This time I chose the pierogis with sour cream, and decided to get one of the day's three soups: mushroom bisque. Both dishes were served to me at the same time. I am not entirely convinced that the pierogis weren't frozen like the sweet potato fries of yore, but they were reasonably good; a little bland, to be sure, but they're pierogis after all.

The mushroom bisque was another story. First off, I looked at the cup of soup and beckoned to the waiter (the same space case as last time). "I ordered mushroom bisque, but I think this is chili," I told her. "Oh, no, that's the right one," she said. Okay. I tasted a little bit on the end of my spoon. Thick dark red substance, more solid than liquid, tasting of cumin and chili powder....but those were mushrooms in there, not beans. Still...doesn't "bisque" mean a thick creamy soup? This was thick, but there was no sign of cream, and why the Tex-Mex spices? And seriously, I stuck my slice of grilled bread in there and it stood on end in the middle of the bowl. I think that qualifies as too thick. And totally inedible.

Quote of the day

2006-01-02T17:55:00.000-06:00

"Pierre...never looks directly at one but his avoidance of one's eye somehow manages not to seem either shifty or apologetic; it is as if he were a polite basilisk, courteously failing to avail himself of his ability to turn us all to stone. The three or four partially feral cats who frequent my house during the months I spend at St-Eustache...are always mysteriously absent during Pierre's visits, perhaps fearing that this Gorgonian power might vent itself on them as they scuttle about on the floor and, in the etymologically radical sense of the term, leave them astonished."

--from The Debt to Pleasure, John Lancaster, 1996, a recommendation by the lovely Clairabelle.

2005 in books

2006-01-01T20:41:00.000-06:00

I read 217 books this year; that's one every 1.7 days. Twenty-three were audiobooks. Of the remaining 194, one was a book of comic strips (Calvin & Hobbes); six were essay collections; one was a volume of four novellas (Stephen King); one was a graphic novel (Lyrical Life); one was a play; one was a book of short stories (a David Sedaris-edited volume); one was a coffee-table book of photographs (Girl Culture); sixty-six were nonfiction; and the remaining hundred and sixteen were novels.

Twenty-eight of the books I read in 2005 were actually published in that year. Eighty-eight more were published between 2000 and 2004. Only three (Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Sense and Sensibility) were from before 1900.

Here are the best books I read this year, in order of publication date:

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee, 1962. This was the only play I read this year. I started and finished it the same night, the night of the hurricane, when I was drunk and alone in a hotel room and trying not to pay any attention to the news and wishing Susie wouldn't bark every time someone walked past our window. It's the story of two married couples, both with problems, and how the older pair fucks with the minds of the younger ones. Brilliant.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman, 1997. Tells what happens when a Hmong family living in Merced, California, gets caught up in the American medical system. The title refers to the Hmong explanation for epilepsy, with which the family's youngest daughter was diagnosed shortly after they arrived in America. Nonfiction and totally riveting.

The Devil of Nanking, Mo Hayder, 2004. A novel set partly in 1930s China and partly in modern-day Tokyo. It flashes back and forth between a girl researching the Nanking massacre and the participants in the massacre, but unlike other contrived and way-too-long novels that switch between a researcher and her/his material (The Darwin Conspiracy, The Historian), it totally works. Plus the girl's living situation in Tokyo is bizarre; she lives in a crazy, dilapidated old house with hidden dusty rooms and lots of secrets, and her job is a novel in itself.

Towelhead: A Novel, Alicia Erian, 2005. This YA novel is a little difficult sometimes because it stares so hard at the relationship between a thirteen-year-old girl; her lascivious, married neighbor; and her old-school father. But it looks into a teenager's head better than almost anything else I've ever read, and the story is intriguing if disturbing.

The Ha-Ha, Dave King, 2005. I just finished this one today, so I don't have any emotional distance from it yet, but it was truly awesome. I didn't know if I'd be able to get into it from the start because of its bizarre subject matter: it's a novel narrated by Howard, a Vietnam vet that suffered an injury after sixteen days of war and now can't speak or read, although he understands everything said to him and has a 126 IQ. His ex-girlfriend goes away to rehab and leaves her nine-year-old son in Howard's custody, although he's never raised a kid before. It's hard enough to raise your own kid, let alone one suddenly dropped in your lap, let alone when you can't even fucking talk. Or read notes sent home from school.

Exemplifying camp

2005-12-27T11:38:00.000-06:00

Actual titles of hundred-year-old children's books owned by this library:

Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays

The Pansy Books

Playmates in Print

Wide Awake Pleasure Book

Diddie, Dumps and Tot

The Boy Cruisers

Linguistic deja vu

2005-12-18T18:36:00.000-06:00

First of all, Jeffrey called me from the middle of a second line, a phrase I hadn't heard for several months, if not more.

Then I went to the gas station on Route 23 this evening, and when I entered the station to pay for my gas, the handsome young man behind the counter gave me a sunbeam of a smile. I figured he was just very customer service-oriented, so I gave a half-smile back as I approached the counter. I said,

Me: Hi there. I need to pay for gas on pump six.

Him, taking my money: Where do I know you from?

Me: Um...I don't know. Do you know me? (He didn't look familiar at all, but that could easily have been due to my mild face blindness.)

Him: I think I do. Yeah, you look really familiar.

Me: Well, I work at the library on campus, so maybe...

Him: Oh! You were in the paper!

Me, now trying not to laugh: Yeah, I was.

Him: I wanted to meet you, because I'm from Louisiana too!

Me: No way. Where?

Him: Well, I'm from Baton Rouge, so I wasn't really affected, but my auntie* is from New Orleans and she came up here because she's lived here before, so I came with her.

Me: Oh, awesome. Well, you take care now.

*In further linguistic deja vu, I have also not heard the word "auntie" pronounced in the New Orleans fashion (ahn-TEE) since August.

Nadia has moved

2005-12-13T22:15:00.000-06:00

The Kinky Librarian is no more; if you miss Nadia, you can read her now at Nadia West: The Wickedest West in the East.

AARRRRRGGGGHHHH

2005-12-13T18:13:00.001-06:00

For the third fucking time this week, some retarded motherfucker has parked in my assigned, numbered parking space, in the private lot behind my building which is clearly labeled with giant signs informing all would-be parkers that they will be towed if in violation of the rules. For the third time, I asked the landlord to call a tow truck; mind you, I have no evidence that a tow truck has ever come. They consistently have such a huge backlog (or so they say) that it regularly takes them hours to get here, so the illegal parkers just get into their cars and get away with fucking up my night. Three times this week. Fuck that.

I wrote a note and stuck it under the windshield of the car. It said something like, "This is not your parking space. Are you retarded? Do you see the signs that say Tow Risk, dumbfuck?" Then I began knocking on the doors of the other apartments in the building. Number 5 answered, and I said, "Does anyone here drive a Monte Carlo?" Number 7 was just unlocking her door and overheard this, and she said, "I do." I said, "You're in my spot." She claimed to have believed it to be her own spot, and went to move her car.

Five minutes later, of course, she came knocking on my door waving the note. "Look," she said, obviously furious, "I made a mistake. I thought that was spot number 7. Don't you be writing no notes to me."

I shrugged. "Don't park in my spot, then," I said.

"Don't write no note!" she shrilled.

I could see this was getting nowhere, so I stepped back into my apartment and closed the door. My car is totally going to be keyed tomorrow.

Yay!

2005-12-13T13:32:00.000-06:00

I have an interview Friday morning to be an L3 at Chicago P.L. I would be a children's librarian at one of three branches -- one on the west side and two on the south side, one of which is a brand-new building that is, in fact, still under construction. All three are accessible by el or Metra.

Rejection letter

2005-12-13T10:13:00.000-06:00

I was turned down for my dream job -- teen librarian at B e r k e l e y Public Library. But the rejection letter said, in part, "It was a real joy to interview you and all of us on the panel were impressed at the poise and personality you were able to present in a telephone situation--not an easy thing!" So, that's cool, I guess, and they'll keep my resume on file and blah blah blah.

What I hate about Curves

2005-12-07T17:01:00.000-06:00

Pretty much everything. Oh, I like the basic concepts, of course; that's why I'm a member. I like the idea of the 40-minute workout that integrates cardio, strength machines, and stretching; I like that it's only $29/month; I like that the workout is at a level I can handle; I even like that you're rewarded for working out at least three times a week with Curves Cash, which you can save up and use to buy a gym bag or a Curves t-shirt.

I hate everything else. I hate that it's supposed to be a "community," and that the machines all face forward in a circle so you can talk to your fellow workers-out. I hate every single worker-out, too. They're all fifty-year-old bottle blondes that talk about the most asinine things you can imagine: one came in all excited because she'd bought a Mickey Mouse clock for her adult daughter for Christmas. "And Mickey's hands are the hour and the minute hand!" This resulted in shrieks of "Oh, adorable!" "How cute!" from the Curve-ing masses. One woman discussed her gastric bypass surgery in more detail than I wanted. Everyone, the very second they come in, makes a comment about how cold it is and how they didn't want to work out today but they had a doughnut for breakfast so they thought they'd better. Everyone also constantly exchanges really stupid dieting advice and complains about dieting; "How can I keep away from all those holiday goodies?" is a frequent lament. And no one is safe from this. I try as hard as I can to not make any eye contact, to make myself as invisible as possible, to just work out and leave, but people just don't care. I'm continually asked whether I've ever been through a divorce, whether I saw The Biggest Loser last night (no, and the joke here is too obvious to make), whether I am of the belief that it's colder this year than last year, etc.

I think the thing I hate the most, though, is the wall calendar. Two or three days a week have a handwritten command on them; if you fulfill its terms, you get extra Curves Cash. Now, as I said, I sort of like the idea of Curves Cash as motivation to work out. If I go three times a week, I get three bucks in Curves Cash, and if I ask to be weighed and measured once a month, I get five dollars each time. I have my eye on a purple gym bag. Anyway, the calendar is bullshit. The week before Thanksgiving, extra Curves Cash was given if you wore something with a turkey on it.

Just let that sink in. Who owns a garment with a turkey on it? Exclusively middle-aged women that wear sweatshirts festooned with red and pink hearts in February and little plastic Santa Claus pins near the end of the year. These incentives are clearly not designed for girls my age, and that sucks ass. Plus, what does it have to do with fitness?

It gets stupider, even. You get extra curves cash for "loudly singing 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'" while working out. Who the fuck wants to hear that -- if you even can, with all the morons running their mouths about Mickey Mouse? And one calendar square actually says, "Bring in your favorite cookie recipe." To a weight-loss facility? Yeah, great idea, geniuses.

I can't relate to anyone there, at all, ever. Not that I want to, but their loud stupid conversations are inescapable when I'm working out in the same room. And one more thing: They're all constantly complaining about all the "goodies" (stupidest.word.ever) that they'll have to avoid at all the holiday parties they're forced to attend. No one's got a gun to your head, bitch; don't go if you don't want to. Plus, who has rounds of holiday parties to attend? Do you? I don't.

Oh, and there's a Christmas tree decorated with Beanie Babies. Kill me now.

The return of the ghost of Dee

2005-12-01T09:27:00.000-06:00

Ever since I posted about people in search of the former inhabitant of my apartment, I haven't been molested by any such callers. That was well over a month ago. And yet, last night I was awakened out of a blissful sleep (really, it was blissful; I was toasty warm in an envelope of blankets, cats and dogs, and having a dream about a really mean boy I had a date with and then dumped without a care) by the sound of the really obnoxious doorbell, which plays a tune I can't quite place.

Confused, I stumbled out of bed, groping for my glasses, tripping on the sheets dragging behind me, and looked at the alarm clock. No, it wasn't going off, and indeed, it read 1:56 a.m. The phone was also not the culprit. As I gradually regained consciousness, I realized that it had been the doorbell. I went to the window and opened it. A middle-aged man was standing in front of the building door.

Me: Yes?

Him: Hi.

Me: What do you want?

Him: (unintelligible)

Me: What?

Him: (unintelligible; sounds like "in")

Me: WHAT?

Him: (unintelligible; sounds like "in")

Me: I can't hear what you're saying.

Him: ANN.

Me: Ann?

Him: Yeah. You know, that white girl's dating a black guy?

Me: ...I don't know who you mean. It's two o'clock in the MORNING. I'm SLEEPING.

Him: Uh, I apologize. He turns and moves away.

I am a bit confused about this but see a few possibilities. One is that he is looking for the white girlfriend of Dee, the former resident. (This would partially explain why everyone looking for Dee was unsurprised to see me living in his apartment, seeing as how I am also a white woman. Perhaps we all look alike.) Another is that he was looking for a woman that lives in another apartment in the building; there is indeed a white girl about my age that has a Black boyfriend, so maybe he just rang the wrong bell. A third, more remote, possibility is that he, a Black man himself, was looking for his own woman, although in that case I would hope he'd know more about her than her interracial dating status. Like her last name. Or her apartment number.

Susie's first snow

2005-12-01T09:25:00.000-06:00

Overnight, we had our first real snow of the season. It's sprinkled a few times before, leaving a light cover of white dust on the still-green grass, but this morning we woke up to actual depth and total ground cover. I stood near the back door of the building and let Susie out to pee, and she was as enthralled as I knew shd would be. She leapt and played and ran as fast as she could and licked the snow and wouldn't come back in until the third time I hollered.

Quote of the day

2005-11-30T16:07:00.000-06:00

This is the dedication to a complete set of the works of William Makepeace Thackeray, published 1884. Titmarsh is one of several pseudonyms Thackeray used. Original punctuation retained even when dead wrong.

Dedicatory Letter to M. Aretz, Tailor, Etc.
27 Rue Richelieu, Paris.

Sir,

It becomes every man in his station to acknowledge and praise virtue wheresoever he may find it, and to point it out for the admiration and example of his fellow-men.

Some months since, when you presented to the writer of these pages a small account for coats and pantaloons manufactured by you, and when you were met by a statement from your creditor, that an immediate settlement of your bill would be extremely inconvenient to him ; your reply was, "Mon Dieu, Sir, let not that annoy you ; if you want money, as a gentleman often does in a strange country, I have a thousand-franc note at my house which is quite at your service."

History or experience, Sir, makes us acquainted with so few actions that can be compared to yours,--an offer like this from a stranger and a tailor seems to me so astonishing, that you must pardon me for thus making your virtue public, and acquainting the English nation with your merit and your name. Let me add, Sir, that you live on the first floor ; that your clothes and fit are excellent, and your charges moderate and just ; and, as a humble tribute of my admiration, permit me to lay these volumes at your feet.

Your obliged, faithful servant,
M. A. TITMARSH

Quote of the day

2005-11-29T14:07:00.000-06:00

Jane Smiley on children who are constant readers:

"Undoubtedly, we were reading for all the wrong reasons -- escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and because we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. We did not have very good manners, because in numerous ways to be cited later, reading books is deleterious to good manners. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid." ---Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, 2005

How could this be?

2005-11-28T14:39:00.000-06:00

It's winter in northern Illinois. In the last couple of days, the outdoor temperature has varied from 40 to 50 degrees - warm for this time of year. But: it's consistently 75 or 76 degrees in my apartment without any artificial heating (the thermostat is set at 69, so the heat's not coming on). Why is my apartment thirty degrees warmer than the outside temperature? Why? It's actually too hot to sleep; last night I had to kick Susie and the cats out of bed and sleep in the nude with just a sheet. What the fuck? And I refuse to turn on the air conditioner so don't EVEN.

Local culture

2005-11-22T13:47:00.000-06:00

A bar & grill near campus advertises the following event in today's student newspaper:

The Ultimate Pre-Thanksgiving Event! Turkey Testicle Festival. "Real" Deep Fried Turkey Testicles. Try 'em if you have the "stones." These aren't fake! This is the real deal! Don't be fooled!

Ignoring the quotation marks that seem to belie the authenticity of the testicles, and further ignoring the last sentence (fooled into what?), I want to say only that it seems remarkably strange that eating a bird's balls is a sign of masculinity, while performing a similar, if less destructive, act on a human male is surely, to people of this mindset, real girly.

Here we go again

2005-11-21T13:21:00.000-06:00

November 21, 2005

American Airlines Customer Relations
P.O. Box 619612
MD 2400
DFW Airport, TX 75261-9612

Dear Madam or Sir:

For the last six weeks, I have been working with your department to resolve a problem I had with regard to a flight from New Orleans to Chicago (ticket number 0011274309329). I sent you a letter dated October 3 describing the rudeness with which I was treated by your reservation agent. Upon receipt of this letter, your department promised to refund the price I paid for this ticket (see enclosed correspondence). However, I have not received my refund. In the last two weeks, I have emailed your department twice to ask for information regarding when and how I would receive my refund. I have received no response to my emails.

I have no idea why a department entitled “Customer Relations” would ignore repeated emails from a customer, nor why you would promise a refund and then not deliver it, but at this point no degree of poor customer service on the part of American Airlines can surprise me.

Please contact me immediately to tell me when and how my refund will arrive.

Sincerely,

(my full name)

I'm on a roll

2005-11-18T12:53:00.000-06:00

I just applied to New York Public and Boston Public, because why not?

Rare book of the day

2005-11-18T10:08:00.000-06:00

An 1885 speller encourages students to practice penmanship by writing the following text:

A good stew would suit us. Chew the tough meat. Does puss mew? Let her lap some juice with her rough tongue. We should love the young. He was wont to come with the news once a month. Could the feud end in blood? Sponge the front of the glove.

from Sadlier's Excelsior Complete Speller: Oral and Written, By a Catholic Teacher, William H. Sadlier, 11 Barclay Street, New York, 1885.

Some books I have read recently

2005-11-16T20:07:00.000-06:00

Am in the middle of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I can't put down. It's a lot like Carter Beats the Devil except even better, at least so far. It tells the story of two cousins aspiring to be comic book artists. It is, of course, a Becky recommendation.

I'm also in the middle of the Wickett's Remedy audiobook. It's hard to say what I'd think of the written work, since the CD includes lots of sound effects and at least three narrators; it's almost more of a dramatization than a straight story. The author, Myla Goldberg, reads the main narrative herself, and I like her voice. It's hard to get into the story, though. Then again, I felt that way about Goldberg's Bee Season too, but there was a big payoff at the end of that one, at least for the story arc involving the mother.

Yesterday I finished Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities. It's nonfiction by a woman that went undercover as a nineteen-year-old and hung out with sorority girls to find out if all the rumors were true. She says several times that she went into the project wanting to tell the truth, whether it was positive or negative, but the book makes the sisters sound petty and superficial at best, and violent and racist at worst. It's a pretty compelling read, following four girls in particular, and I couldn't put it down. One interesting part was that the author revealed the secret password of the sorority to which I belonged, and spells it "Chi-Air Offilimus." It's totally "caer ophalamus," for "helping hand" or some shit. Or wait, something about a heart, I think. Maybe someone that knows Greek can help me out here. Pinky, perhaps you would ask your lovah. Anyway, I thought that the author had done pretty shoddy research and that the correct spelling could've been Googled pretty easily, but when I tried a search on the phrase, I got zero hits. Still, she defines the Greek words in the text, so it's a little weird she can't spell them.

Sayonara

2005-11-01T20:32:00.000-06:00

I won't be posting for a week; I'm leaving for New Orleans tomorrow to get as much of my shit as I can fit in my car, putting the rest on the curb.

Books and food, in which I describe the best of both I've had since The Hurricane

2005-10-29T20:50:00.000-05:00

Probably the best two books I've read in the last two months are Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Born Confused. These are two pretty fucking different books. I read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a Motel 6 in East Memphis the night Katrina was approaching New Orleans, with the TV on in the background, drowsing in and out of sleep. I'm not sure how much the impending-apocalypse newscast and flickering lights contributed to the degree I loved the book.

If you haven't read it nor seen the movie, it's a pretty simple story with four characters: two couples, one middle-aged and one younger. Both husbands are university professors; both wives are homemakers, as far as we know. The story is about the older pair, a bitterly unhappy couple, taking out their resentment of the younger couple on them and each other, all in one evening at the older pair's home. I was so entranced with the book I even wanted to see the movie, and did, and loved it.

The other book I loved this fall was Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier. Unsurprisingly, I share the opinion of Beckers: it's also the longest YA book I've ever read, and I also adored it. It was written in a way that was sort of poetic and sensory without being pretentious, and I don't have a lot of tolerance for that shit; it reminded me of Audre Lorde's prose. Sure, I saw a lot of the twists coming -- the lesbians were easy to spot, and so was Karsh's crush -- but it didn't matter. The plot somewhat reminded me of The Basic Eight, but I can't say why without giving away the whole point of The Basic Eight, and you should really read that, so I won't. I can't wait to see what Hidier comes up with next.

I've had a cold for the last few days and have read quite a bit, most notably Jonathan Tropper's Everything Changes and Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. I love both authors, although in Tropper's other two books, I have felt that he relied too much on the easy romantic ending. He didn't do that so much here, and the plot was appealing if a little trite: dude thinks he has bladder cancer, so begins to change his life. He fucks up his job a lá Office Space, reunites with his crazy deadbeat dad, etc.

I read the Hornby right afterward, and while I can't say this is his best, that's only because his other novels are so spectacular. I'm thinking About a Boy was my favorite (I loved Marcus and Ellie as much as I was indifferent to Will), but also thought High Fidelity and How to be Good were excellent. This one is different because it doesn't focus on a single thirtysomething male Londoner; instead, it starts when four very different people meet at the top of a tower on New Year's Eve, each planning to throw themselves off. Yeah, it's a little Breakfast Club, but Breakfast Club was great, right?

My favorite character is Maureen, the 51-year-old housewife who's somewhat the moral center of the book, which is a weird thing to say about a Catholic that's planning to commit the ultimate mortal sin. But I loved her for her clueless observations about the rest of them, and her interpretations of what she sees, e.g. when she sees some kids kneeling in front of a toilet at a party and believes them to be sniffing the seat for kicks. Then there's Jess, a spoiled, obnoxious 18-year-old that was dumped by a boyfriend; JJ, who's finally realized his music career is going nowhere; and Martin, a broadcaster who lost his wife and kids when the tabloids reported he's slept with a fifteen-year-old. So yeah, it's a tale of how these four people work it all out together, but it's done nicely and it made me laugh out loud at least twice.

Food, then. The best thing about my current small Illinois city, vs. New Orleans, is the food. I know that's counterintuitive, but remember I'm vegetarian and this is a college town. The Thai restaurant has a vegetarian lunch special every day, even if they did try to serve me crab rangoon last week on the premise that it was artificial crab (yep, still fish). And Mexican restaurants abound! I even found one that has the best.premise.ever: instead of salsa on your table, there's a señorita with a cart that comes around and makes it to order for you. You can get red or green (tomatillo), and hot, medium or mild, and onions and cilantro or not, as you prefer. And wait, it gets even better: she also makes guacamole for you, like right there. Now hang on: it's FREE. Free guacamole made fresh in front of you. Yeah.

Human beings suck.

2005-10-26T20:44:00.000-05:00

Really. Okay, I'm doing laundry. It's time for me to take my shit out of the dryer, so I go downstairs, and the dryer I was using is open. The laundry inside is cold and wet, and when I close the door and press Start, no love -- my time is up. I trudge back upstairs, get another dollar in quarters, and start the dryer again.

Someone decided to be a pain in the ass on purpose. I can only imagine it's in retribution for the fact that, when I went downstairs earlier to move my clothes from washer to dryer, someone's dry clothes were already in there. I took them out and put them in a neat heap on top of the dryer. Isn't that what you do? I mean, what the fuck else should I do? Should I have left them in there and delayed my own clothes-drying so that this person can come and remove her or his own clothes? What if they didn't come until the next morning? Should I have folded the clothes for them? Seriously, what is the etiquette? And was my breach of it so severe that someone decided the right thing to do was open the dryer so my clothes wouldn't dry?

I suppose it's possible that the person in question is just rock-bottom stupid and opened the dryer to see whether his or her own clothing lay within, and then forgot to close it. I fucking doubt it, though. God.

I'm eating a banana.

2005-10-26T09:46:00.000-05:00

And you know what would be really great? If I had a little dish of sesame seeds and I could dip the banana in it before each bite so that it would be encrusted.

The Clue in the Identical Prose

2005-10-20T22:52:00.000-05:00

So does anyone else think the Clublife guy also writes Opinionistas?

The Mystery of the Former Resident

2005-10-20T21:08:00.000-05:00

I have no idea who the dude is that used to live in my apartment -- I hear his name is Dee -- but he was up to shit of one type or another. And then he booked and didn't tell anyone.

In the thirteen days of my tenancy at this apartment, I have received three callers for Dee. The first one came late the night after I moved in. It was about eleven p.m. and the doorbell hadn't rung, so when there came a rap on my door, I assumed it was the landlady. I tiptoed to the door in my short green nightgown and peeked through the spyhole. "It's me!" a fortyish man was saying. "It's Pete."

Pete is also the name of the building's owner, a gentleman I had not yet met at this time, so I decided to open the door just a crack. "Yes?" I said.

"Hey, Therese sent me over. Can I come in?"

"What?"

"I'm Therese's buddy! She sent me over here."

"...What?"

"Wait, did you just move in here?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, sorry." Dude turned and left.

Okay, that's not that big a deal. Whatever. But then, a few nights later, at about the same time, the doorbell rang. I wasn't expecting anyone and didn't want a repeat of the Pete/Therese incident, so I let it ring twice more. I remained planted in my chair. Anyone that I would want to see had my cell number and would surely call if they needed something that urgently.

Then I heard a ruckus from outside. "Yeah, tell him!" a woman shouted. "You go up there and tell him I want my PlayStation right now or I'm going to the fucking cops and they're going to go in there and get it for me!"

So what I learned from the first incident is that Dee most likely sells drugs. From the second, I learned he's got ex-girlfriend issues. The third encounter leaves me mystified, however.

A couple of nights ago, the doorbell rang. Again, I was expecting nobody. This time, though, I had the foresight to lean out the window; I wanted to get a glimpse of the PlayStation chick if it were she. Instead, it was two boys between ten and twelve years old.

"Can I help you?"

"Dee home?"

"There's no Dee here."

"Dee home?"

"No one lives here by that name."

"DEE."

"THERE'S NO DEE HERE."

"Aw, shit," one boy remarked to the other. "He move and don't tell us."

Indeed, it seems as though Dee left without a trace. But what did these children want with him?

Library notes

2005-10-20T20:46:00.000-05:00

I now have five valid library cards: New Orleans Public, Chicago Public, Palatine (IL) Public (from when I was staying with my sister), the local public library, and the university at which I'm temporarily employed. I have books checked out at all five libraries.

New Orleans Public is the only library to employ the common-sense system of printing a receipt upon checkout. You hand your books to the person at the desk; she checks them out and hands them back with a receipt stating the name and due date of each book. You take it home and put it on your refrigerator. If you forget what you have out or when it's due, and you don't have computer access to check your account online, you have the receipt right there.

The other four libraries all employ the antiquated system of stamping your book with a due date. This is inferior for two main reasons. One, there are probably like fifty million other stamped due dates on your book. Which one is yours? Obviously it's the latest one, but you might have to stare at the book for a couple of minute before you figure it out. Two, what if you forget what you've checked out? What if you know your kid got three books, but you have no idea which they are? Now you have to go through every book in the house to see if it's a public library book. If only you had a printed list like the ones NOPL provides.

In other ways, Palatine PL is the best of the publics at which I have borrowing privileges. They have no checkout limit, which is great for me because I'm often fact-checking two or three manuscripts at a time, so I need like fifty books. They also provide tote bags that are free to borrow; they have barcodes just like books, and check out to your account like any other item. And they have shopping baskets like at the grocery store for you to carry your books around the library. They also have a giant room full of new CDs and movies; it really does rival Blockbuster, except it's free. Movies are three-day rentals; CDs are one week for new ones, three weeks for others.

Chicago Public is the worst. You wouldn't think so, what with its 78 locations and its collections in thirty languages and shit, but it so is. On the one hand, you can make advance reservations for a computer from home or by phone. That's cool because you don't have to wait when you come in. On the other hand, and this is really appalling: you can't renew by phone or online. You can only renew by physically bringing in your books. I remember this from when I was a tot at the Edgewater branch, but I assumed it had changed now, just like when I got to NOPL and they had the printed receipt thingie, I figured all these libraries had jumped on the bandwagon. Nope. So now I have three books overdue at CPL and I'm not going to the city until Saturday. Bastard people.

The university library rocks, incidentally. Yeah, they don't have everything I need, but they're a member of a 65-library consortium that can get me anything I want within a few days without filling out any interlibrary loan forms or anything stupid like that. I got really used to that when I was in library school, and now I have it back again -- the same consortium, even. And I have a four-month loan period, which is awesome because I have a full to-be-read shelf.

This is my freezer.

2005-10-18T11:25:00.000-05:00

Photo taken by Jeffrey, who assures me I got off lucky and most people's freezers look way worse.

The bad part

2005-10-12T20:01:00.000-05:00

I guess I didn't get to the "distressed" part of this job. It's not the job or even the small town, and it's certainly not my totally awesome, two-bedroom, IKEA-bedecked apartment. It's that I'm not in New Orleans, helping to rebuild the library and the city. Jeff is there and I get daily reports but it makes me pretty sad and jealous. I think I'm doing the right thing being here, but I'm still torn.

Actual letter I'm mailing tomorrow

2005-10-03T20:08:00.000-05:00

October 3, 2005

American Airlines Customer Relations
P.O. Box 619612
MD 2400
DFW Airport, TX 75261-9612

Dear Madam or Sir:

In late August, when I was living in New Orleans, I made a reservation to visit my family in Chicago over the Thanksgiving holiday (flight 2174 on November 22). I lost my job and home to Hurricane Katrina, and now I have relocated to Chicago permanently. I will not need to use my nonrefundable airline ticket.

I called your reservations line this evening and spoke with Marty Barun in the Dallas office about this problem. I couldn’t believe how rude he was as I described my problem. He cut me off in the middle of my explanation to tell me that the hurricane was not the fault of American Airlines. When I explained that I have no money or income and wanted a refund so I can begin to rebuild my life, he again cut me off in the middle of a sentence and said impatiently, “No, that’s not an option.” I asked to be transferred to another agent, not because I thought they would describe a different policy, but because I couldn’t believe how rude the man was. Mr. Barun put me on hold for five minutes, and then came back on the line to tell me again that a refund was impossible. I said I thought he was going to transfer me to another agent. He disregarded this request and said again that I would not be able to receive a refund because I had “chosen” to move to a different city. Chosen?! My home was destroyed by a natural disaster, as Mr. Barun knew. I hung up.

I understand from your Web site that your policy is to provide a travel voucher in a case like mine. However, in light of (a) the fact that I have lost my job and home and have no need or money to travel by air any time soon, and (b) the rudeness with which I was treated by your representative, please refund my ticket price in full.

Sincerely,

(my full name)

People whose whereabouts I'd like to know

2005-10-02T23:32:00.000-05:00

---The little butch girl with the pit bull named Auspice
---Lillie Porter, my cashier at Robert Fresh Market
---The Vietnamese lady that makes me special vegetarian fried rice at the mall across the street from the library
---My favorite patron, Miss Nicole, and her daughter
---The crazy Tourette's guy that liked to use the tech lab to find pictures of musclewomen
---The little kid around the block that loved Susie more than anything
---The blonde lady with two dogs that lived two doors down
---My landlord and landlady and their dog and cat
---The waitress at Italian Pie that always put too many lemons in my water
---The girl at the coffee shop that liked my hair
---The two lesbians I met at the Le Tigre show this summer
---The library housekeeper

I've just been laid off, you see, and somehow it's made this whole thing hit home more than usual. I don't have a job to go back to, and I hate the city administration for it, and it makes me want to leave town forever, but I want to know that my favorite waiter at Slim Goodies is okay.

It's not time yet.

2005-10-02T10:19:00.000-05:00

I have been invited to return to New Orleans and work for the city. In order to accept this, I have to commit by today to return to New Orleans this week. It's killing me, but I think I have to say no.

In my zip code, according to the city's Web site, tap water has not been approved for drinking and showering unless it's been boiled. I might not be able to use my stove, though, because twenty percent of homes have no gas yet. There are no traffic signals. Gasoline cannot be purchased. Stores aren't open. I probably have power, but I can't be sure. There's no mail service.

Without driving a thousand miles to find out, I have no idea which of these problems apply to my home. Plus, what if I'm the only person on my block that's back? I'm a lifelong city dweller and reasonably tough, but I don't think I'd feel safe as a woman living alone in that situation. I've been offered temporary housing on a cruise ship on which other members of the library administration are residing, but pets aren't allowed, and I can't leave Suze alone overnight every night.

So I can't do it, as much as I want to go down there and find out what's going on. Shit.

The weirdest thing

2005-09-22T20:41:00.000-05:00

I've been living in the Chicago area for just over three weeks now, and my lifestyle and personality have totally changed. I don't feel stressed or tense -- on the contrary, I feel like I'm adapting well to this gigantic change in my life -- but I'm constantly on the go. I can't relax for a minute.

Those of you that know me know that this is unusual behavior: I have a notebook with a page for every day on which I list jillions of things to do...dry cleaner, library, apply for temp jobs, go to the gym, buy tamales, buy Windex, clean the bathroom, email so-and-so, finish fact-checking a manuscript, write a letter, write a thank-you note, write a press release, go to the bank, etc. Even between these activities, I can't stop thinking about the next one. This is a far cry from my usual lying-on-my-ass behavior. I've only taken one fucking nap since I got here, and that was on Labor Day. Who am I?

You'd think I would be reading tons since I'm unemployed and all I have to fill my day are errands, but 'tisn't so. I can't sit still long enough to do it. You might think I'd be taking baths a lot....ditto. Well, maybe all my time is taken up watching and reading news about New Orleans? No. Nothing.

Again with the actual conversations

2005-09-08T23:16:00.000-05:00

I'm at the Palatine Curves this afternoon, prancing away on a cardio mat. When the recorded lady says "Change stations now," I move to a machine we don't have at the East New Orleans franchise. Some chick showed me how to use it a week ago, but I've forgotten; I hail the floorwalker, whom I haven't met.

Me: Hi there. We don't have this machine at my usual Curves. Could you show me how to use it?

Her: Oh, sure. Is this your first time here?

Me: It's my second time at this Curves. I've been in Chicago for the past week using the one in Edgewater.

Her: Okay. (She shows me how to use the machine and then walks away. Score, I think.)

Five minutes later, she approaches my current station.

Her: So, you're just visiting Chicago?

Me, with an internal sigh, knowing what's coming: Yeah.

Her: So where's your usual Curves?

Me, really dreading this: New Orleans.

Her, with a short pause: Oh! Well!

Me: Yep.

Her: So are you a displaced person?

Me: ...Like, do I have a home? Well, I'm staying with my sister up the street.

Her: And how is your family?

Me: They're from Chicago. They're fine. I'm trying to discourage conversation by being polite but not really looking at her. I'm fucking working out, for one thing.

Her: Oh, that's good. And how's your house?

Me: I don't know.

Her: What about your job?

Me: Don't know.

Her: You know, if you don't want to talk about this, I understand. Just tell me.

Me, looking her in the eye for the first time and smiling: Well, you know, it's just that I spend so much time talking about it, and answering these questions.

Her: Oh, I bet. It's just that those of us that haven't been there want to find out as much as we can. You know, we're watching it on TV...

Me: Totally. Everyone means well, I know.

Her: So, when did you get out?

Me: The day before.

Her: Aren't you glad you did?

Me: Yes.

Her: So have you been watching the whole thing on TV?

Etc., etc. Unbelievable.

Hey, y'all

2005-09-01T22:27:00.000-05:00

Thanks for all the well-wishes.

Here is what I know right now, and what I don't know:

I'm safely in Chicago, and so are Susie and the cats. The cats are living at my mom's; Susie's living at my sister Peachy's in Palatine. I'm in Palatine right now, but I'll be traveling back and forth, staying with Peachy, my other sister Tal, my friend Belly, and my mom. Susie will stay here with her cousin Kalani, a chocolate Lab.

Jeffrey's in Nashville; P and her family are in Baton Rouge; Asian Boyfriend is in Mississippi.

I don't know anyone personally that did not get out of New Orleans, except for Jeff's friend that's a cop. I'm sure I do know people that are stranded or have died, but I don't know about them yet.

I don't know what has become of my house. My guess is that I'm pretty lucky; it's on high ground and is hidden behind a big house, so I probably am not either flooded (much) or looted.

I don't know how my library is, although we do have reports on three of our thirteen locations: one is flooded to the roof, one is not damaged so far, and one, the one downtown where I have a basement office, is flooded on the first floor.

I don't know when I will have access to my house and my belongings (I brought only my pets and a couple changes of clothes, and Jeff has my computer in Nashville) or what condition they'll be in.

I don't know whether I have a job to go back to or when I will receive the (badly needed) pay I'm owed. It's supposed to be direct-deposited tomorrow, but I seriously doubt that will happen. There would have to be a miracle.

I don't know what I will do...get a job here, go back to New Orleans, move to Berkeley where they want to pay a teen librarian $62K.

Hello, Katrina

2005-08-27T18:47:00.000-05:00

Apparently, we're having a hurricane. That's fine, I guess. I have flashlights, candles, a stack of books to read, and a battery-powered radio, and I just returned from a trip to Whole Foods, during which I bought foods that can be eaten at room temperature like fruit, cheese and crackers, avocados for guacamole, energy bars, chips and hummus, cereal and soy milk, etc. There's plenty of water, Diet Dr. Pepper, beer and Captain Morgan. I can handle the power being out for a while...I think. I'm a notorious pussy, though.

A big blanket of love

2005-08-25T23:11:00.000-05:00

I'm in the middle of two oddly similar books that I love, love, love. In the car, I'm listening to the audiobook version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the story of Oscar, an eight-year-old Manhattan boy whose father died on September 11. Oscar and his dad played a sort of treasure hunt game every weekend in which Dad would leave Oscar various clues and he'd go off in search of whatever the prize was. They were in the middle of a particularly complicated game when the dad died, and Oscar is eager to find the treasure but unsure how to proceed without further clues. Poking around in his dad's closet, he finds a blue vase containing an envelope, which in turn contains a key.

The word "Black" is written on the envelope, and Oscar gets it into his head that he's going to visit every person whose surname is Black in all of New York City. And that's as far as I've gotten so far. I love the narration; the author and the reader make precocious, neurotic Oscar endearing, kind of like the protagonist in another of my favorite books, The Curious Adventure of the Dog in the Night-Time.

And in print, I can't put down As Simple as Snow. This one is even more filled with cryptic maps and puzzles and clues than Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's about a high school boy who meets a cute goth girl obsessed with poetry, wordplay, indie music (she gives the unnamed narrator several CD mixes, and the tracklists are included), shortwave radio spy-number stations, and stage magic. And then one day she disappears. Her dress is found spread out next to a hole in the ice over a frozen river, and everyone assumes she's dead, but then the boyfriend starts getting mysterious packages in the mail. It's ooh spooky good and I think I can't go to sleep tonight until I finish.

Should I just rename the blog "Actual Conversations"?

2005-08-25T19:33:00.000-05:00

I had a patron in the computer lab that I knew was going to be trouble. She was incredibly sweet and kept calling me "baby," as native New Orleanians are wont to do to perfect strangers, but she kept saying, "I don't know nothin about computers." And, of course, she wanted to complete a task requiring an intermediate skill level, namely shopping online for textbooks. I knew I was in trouble when she said, "My friend told me to go to half dot con and cheap books dot con." C'mon, people; even if you've never used a computer before, .com is written all over everything and uttered on TV and the radio millions of times a day.

So I showed her how to use the mouse ("No, the left button. No, your other left. Yeah, when you click, you have to make sure the cursor doesn't move off what you're clicking on"), sat her at a computer, and left her to log in by herself. That didn't go well; she needed help clicking in the text box where she was supposed to type her library card number.

Then we learned how to double-click and got a browser window open. That's when the real fun began.

Me: Okay, click in the address bar up here. (I touch the correct area of the screen.)

Her: I got to put the clicker there?

Me: The cursor? Yeah. Just click in there so you can start typing the address.

Her: I don't know no address. All I got is the name of the Web site.

Me: Half.com, right?

Her: I want to go to the cheap book one first.

Me: Okay. So just type cheapbooks.com. (She painstakingly types c-h-e-a-t. I stop her.) Oh, you typed a T but you need a P.

Her: That has a P?

Me: Cheapbooks.com, right?

Her: Yeah.

Me: So, yeah, cheap. With a P.

Her: Oh, okay. How I could go back?

Me: Use that button right there that says "backspace."

Her: Okay. (She backspaces through four characters, so she's left with a C. She types p-e-a before I stop her again.)

Me: Wait, aren't you going to cheapbooks.com?

Her: What I did now?

Me: Well, I thought you were going to type the word "cheap."

Her: You say it gots a P.

Me: ....Right. Okay, type c-h-e-a-p...no, wait, you have to erase what you had first...

I won't even try to explain what we went through when she got to the actual online bookstore in question.

More books

2005-08-21T10:33:00.000-05:00

I usually don't post about how I need to post more often, as I think that kind of self-analysis tends to make blogs dull. But I'll break this rule today, to explain that the past week and the next week are insanely busy. Here's what I've got going on:

1. I'm doing two full-time library jobs at once -- my regular job as well as PR for the library system -- but cramming all the duties into 35 hours per week. Stress.

2. I just joined Curves, and I'm allegedly going three times a week.

3. I accidentally agreed to fact-check three manuscripts all at the same time, one of which is a 90-page book about China. The upside to this is that the three books together pay $700. I could use that.

4. I have a houseguest coming in from Chicago tonight, so I spent most of yesterday cleaning.

5. So the only leisure activity in which I've had the energy to take part is reading. Books I totally adored this week: the aforementioned Galveston by Sean Stewart, and The 25th Hour by David Benioff, about a man with 24 hours to go before he starts a seven-year prison term, both Becky recommendations. I also enjoyed The Girls, about a bitchy popular junior high girl, and Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, a series of connected long stories about a working-class Detroit suburb where all the fathers disappear one year. The book follows their sons, and one in particular, through the rest of their lives.

You got me, Beckers

2005-08-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

One of Becky's very favorite authors is Sean Stewart, and she has been trying for years to interest me in his work. First, she gave me a copy of Resurrection Man, and I immediately disliked it; it opens with a bunch of people conducting an autopsy, only the corpse also has a living body, and I was just confused and bored.

Then, she gave me Night Watch, and I couldn't get into that one either. It seemed like formulaic fantasy, with a tough young heroine rebelling against authority, and there's all this shit about magic.

The best book Becky read in 2004 was Stewart's Perfect Circle, and I gave in and read that one too, even though I'd decided I was done with the author. It was pretty good. I didn't love it, exactly, but I liked it a lot. There's this ex-punk rocker named Dead Kennedy that can see ghosts, and he therefore earns some extra money trying to rid people's houses of what haunts them, and, well, the plot is really good so I won't ruin it for you.

But now I'm totally sold. I'm in the middle of Galveston, Stewart's 2000 novel about what happens when a flood of magic takes over and Mardi Gras 2004 never ends. Can't put it down. Good work, B.

Two things I have learned tonight

2005-08-13T22:33:00.000-05:00

1. In Tibet, people make sculptures out of yak butter.

2. I'm sorry, but the domain name www.insecta-inspecta.com is already taken.

And on that note

2005-08-11T20:47:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Simon, it's bacon time.

Worst.restaurant.ever

2005-08-09T19:59:00.000-05:00

I believe I have elucidated in the past upon the dearth of decent restaurants in the almost-suburban corner of New Orleans in which the library lies. It's pretty much only chains and a couple of po'boy and Chinese restaurants, and of course, being a vegetarian doesn't help. Jeffrey and I generally get fried rice from the mall (the lady that works there sees me coming and says "Same thing?" in a cute lilting accent and then tells the cook to make me some special vegetarian rice, because it's sure as hell not on the menu), or else we visit the Shoney's lunch buffet, which generally includes macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and okra, or there's always Burger King for veggie burgers, or Subway for their veggie sandwich, or Italian Pie for Caesar salads and spinach/artichoke sandwiches. But these things get old after a while, so today we decided to try Texas Barbecue.

It's not like I expected to find tofu satay and seitan chili at a barbecue joint. Really, I'm not that deluded. However...well. We walked in and saw that the soup of the day was broccoli potato. That sounded delicious, but I imagined that it probably had chicken broth in it, as such soups are wont to have. So I asked our very sweet waitress. "No, it don't got no meat," she answered. What about broth? She went to check and returned to report happily that it had no stock or meat broth of any sort. Score.

We weren't quite ready to order (Jeff has a sort of illness that manifests itself when he's presented with a menu with more than two items on it; it takes him forever to make a choice), and of course I wanted more than soup anyway, so I perused the menu. Jeff pointed out a slogan on the back for their catering business: "Meat By the Bulk." By the...bulk? Then he visited the salad portion of the menu. "The garden salad has bacon bits," he reported. "Wait, so do all the other salads." Truly, who needs to put meat on lettuce?

I scanned the menu for something I could eat. The cheese fries also came with bacon bits. Oh...fried mushrooms. Okay, I like those. I really like those, actually. Done. The boy decided he wanted a pork and chicken lunch special, and we ordered.

The food took forever to come. I got my soup first. It smelled...savory. A little too savory, kind of like salt and nitrates and animal muscle. I took a bite and chewed. Yep, bacon.

I pushed the bowl to the side of the table, and when the waitress came back, she asked what was wrong. "It's got bacon in it," I explained.

"Oh, no! I'm sorry," she said, and took the bowl away. She brought another one back in five minutes. "We took this from the bottom of the pot," she explained. "It shouldn't have no bacon."

What, because bacon floats? I said, "Oh, well, um, no thank you. Please just take it off my bill. Thanks."

Finally, after seriously like twenty minutes of snickering about what exactly in the place didn't have bacon in it (garden salad? Bacon. Cheese fries? Bacon. Broccoli soup? Bacon), Jeff's barbecue and my mushrooms emerged from the kitchen. The mushrooms were...chicken-fried. I guess that's what you'd call it. There were a lot of them, and they were indeed free of bacon and all other meats, but they were definitely fried in chicken batter. They were so crispy with chicken batter you couldn't even tell they were mushrooms. I have never, ever heard of chicken-fried mushrooms. Never. Which is also when I'll be returning to Texas Barbecue.

Quote of the day

2005-08-06T23:30:00.000-05:00

"'You told me yourself you were feeling badly this morning,' she said in a mild little voice, and I took a deep breath that came out again in the form of a sigh, because it's hopeless to try to explain to Mrs. Rowena Abbott that feeling badly comes from having something wrong with one's sense of touch. I've tried and she just won't accept it. It's like who and whom. Whom sounds nicelier."

It's from the Becky-recommended Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker, 1962). It reminds me a whole hell of a lot of The Velvet Bubble, which I read and loved a couple of years ago, except this one is about a girl obsessed with her twin sister instead of her father. I'm not very far yet, but I can't put it down.

Yeah, I know

2005-08-05T23:12:00.000-05:00

I haven't had that many Hilarious Patron Stories to post because I never work the desk any more. Two days a week, I'm downtown doing public relations, so the other two days when I'm at my branch, I have so much other work to do between scheduling and collection development and planning the summer reading party and meeting with my boss and training new employees that I only work the desk if we're really short-staffed. But tomorrow is the summer reading party and perhaps hilarity will ensue.

Here's a meme I found over at Juice's site:

10 years ago today, August 5, 1995: I was living at my mom's house between my freshman and sophomore years of college. Actually I think I spent most of my time at Belly's apartment smoking pot and eating Rice a Roni. I worked at a textbook publishing company with La Trix, and I was sleeping with my alleged best friend's boyfriend. Man, I'm glad it's not 1995 any more.

5 years ago today, August 5, 2000: I had just moved from San Diego to Illinois, and I was living with my mom in Chicago while I waited for my apartment in Champaign to become available. I'd enrolled in library school there. In the meantime, I lived in my mom's back room with my cats, and I hung out with Pinky a lot. We had coffee and pastry at Kopi Café and read the Reader and hung around Reckless Records and drove as fast as we could blaring Elastica in my brand-new car.

1 year ago today, August 5, 2004: I was in Phase One of the South Beach Diet, meaning I was constantly tired and miserable. I was also angsty because my promotion hadn't yet gone through, and it was hot as fuck and I had a one-year-old pupper that kept chewing up my shit. I read Little Children by Tom Perrotta in its entirety.

Yesterday: Jeff and I did storytime for one single child and then spent the rest of the day shopping for prizes and food for the summer reading party. In the evening, I reread Elizabeth Wurtzel's More, Now, Again and drank Red Stripe.

Tomorrow: Summer reading party. We're having cake, cookies, goldfish crackers and freeze pops, as well as a clown and lots of prizes.

5 snacks I enjoy: French fries with ranch dressing; Symphony bars with toffee chips and almonds; salted kettle chips; pretzels dipped in peanut butter; ripe little grape tomatoes.

5 bands that I know the lyrics to most of their songs: That's some bad grammar there. Le Tigre, Elastica, Old 97s, Eminem, Kasey Chambers.

5 things I would do with $100,000,000: A HUNDRED million? Wow, that's a lot. I'd pay off my own debts and any that pretty much anyone I know has; buy my mom a house in San Francisco and one in Hawaii and one in Chicago; buy little houses for Belly, La Trix, Bartsy, Sassy, Ivo, Pinky, MF, Becky, Rae, Jeffrey, and each of my siblings; spend six months traveling the world, ending up in Holland; get a whole bunch more dogs.

5 locations I'd like to run away to: New York, San Francisco, Boston, Amsterdam, the Mediterranean coast.

5 bad habits I have: Losing my temper, crying when I get mad, drinking too much beer, spending way too much money on restaurant meals, leaving the dishes too long.

5 things I like doing: Shooting pool, cooking when it's not summer, reading in bed with Susie, reading Go Fug Yourself, shopping at Whole Foods when I'm hungry.

5 things I would never wear: A tie of any sort; puffy white gym shoes; a blazer; socks with sandals; capris.

5 TV shows I like: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; South Park; Three's Company; Facts of Life; Friends.

5 movies I like: Pulp Fiction; Office Space; Outrageous Fortune; South Park; Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead.

5 biggest joys of the moment: Frozen samosas; Susie's sudden desire to be obedient; Cibo Matto; Overheard in New York; my white lace nightgown.

5 favorite toys: My computer; Susie; our Chuck-It; the hula doll Morag gave me; Jeff (for beating upon).

Memory fragment

2005-07-31T19:04:00.000-05:00

For some reason, this just popped into my head. It was the Christmas that I was eight and my sister Peachy had just turned seven. This was 1984, and a line of children's fitness products called Get In Shape, Girl! was all the rage. It was also an Olympic year, and the ribbon-twirlers had captured my attention. I believe their event was called "rhythmic gymnastics." Anyway, Peachy and I each got a Get In Shape, Girl! ribbon...thing. I don't even know what you call it. It was a plastic wand with a six-foot satin pastel-pink ribbon attached that you were supposed to wave and swirl to create pleasing effects.

I considered Peachy to be grubby and irresponsible, and I didn't want her playing with my ribbon, but the two were identical and I foresaw confusion. So I approached her with a fat black permanent marker.

Me: Peachy, we have to write our names on our ribbons so we don't get them mixed up. You go first.

Peachy: Okay. (She eked out her initials, marring the pink satin with her messy penmanship.)

Me: Ha ha! I made you do it first so I wouldn't have to do mine. Now we know mine is the one without writing. You ruined yours! Ha ha!

Food that changes color

2005-07-26T19:28:00.000-05:00

I used to practically live on Kraft mac & cheese...my mom served it to us with fish sticks, calling it "Horses in the Hay," when I was little, and then when I was in high school and college, I'd make it myself, sometimes several days a week. I still crave it every now and then, but of course it's filled with awful things no one in their right mind would want to eat. There are all-natural substitutes, but they're, like, white cheddar and shells and not nearly as good.

But the other day at Whole Foods, I saw their Whole Kids Organic Macaroni and Cheese, and the box proclaims, "Orange Cheddar Cheese!" The box is even the same color as baking soda so you know the completed dish will be orange. Just what I was looking for.

I made it tonight...cooked and drained the pasta, stirred in butter and soy milk, and then dumped in the powdered cheese packet. Except...the cheese was pale yellow, almost white. I wondered whether the factory had put the wrong sauce packet in the box. I mean, it clearly was supposed to be orange. I stirred and stirred, though, and the pot's contents got more and more golden until...yes! The bright orange noodles of my youth. They taste just as good, too. Better, because you know you're not eating whey protein concentrate or yellow dye #6.

Much stranger than that, though, is the insanity that is....goldfish crackers that change color in your mouth. Yes. The summer reading theme this year is ocean-related, so we thought we'd get some goldfish crackers for the party, and the only kind they had at Big Lots claimed on the package that they change color in your mouth. We grabbed a bag and, when we returned to the library, Jeff ate them. All of them. And showed us the inside of his mouth. Which was blue.

Semiannual book rundown

2005-07-24T22:51:00.000-05:00

This is for January 1 - June 30, 2005.

I read/listened to 115 books in their entireties. That's compared to 134 in 2004, 68 in 2003, and 55 in 2002. Eleven of this year's were audiobooks, so 104 were print. Two of those were graphic format.

The genres broke down as follows:

Nonfiction: 12 sociology, 8 true crime, 6 autobiography/memoir, 4 essays, 3 how-to, 2 short stories/novellas, 2 politics, 2 history, 1 physics

Fiction: 25 juvenile realistic, 24 literary fiction, 8 science fiction, 5 fantasy, 4 horror/ghost, 3 mystery/thriller

The ones I loved the most, in chronological order:

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 1847. This was my first time reading this book, for some reason, and I loved the luridness, the plot twists, the creepiness, the high drama.

2. Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, Linda Perlstein, 2003. Teenagers may be crazy, but twelve-year-olds are fucking nuts. This is what they actually do and say, recorded by journalist Perlstein.

3. The Effects of Light, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, 2005. It's the story of little girls whose pictures are taken nude by a family friend/artist, and how the world's reactions affect their well-being more than the pictures themselves.

4. Idoru, William Gibson, 1996. There's this celebrity that's actually virtual, and the rock star that's in love with her anyway, and the teenage fanclub that sends an emissary to Japan to find out why. I like the teenage scenes the best, of course.

5. Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania, Warren St. John, 2004. Dude follows a bunch of insane Alabama football fans around to the various RV parks in which they set up camp before games. These people are fucking nuts.

6. I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe, 2004. The much-maligned college novel about four stereotypical college students all out to pursue their own ideas of what's right. Very readable; I wasn't able to put it down despite its shortcomings.

7. Towelhead: A Novel, Alicia Erian, 2005. Probably my favorite book of the year so far. Disturbing -- the protagonist is sexually abused and likes it -- but such an honest teenage girl's voice that it made me cry. No wonder kids are so fucked up.

8. The Devil of Nanking, Mo Hayder, 2004. My second-favorite. It's a novel set partly today, narrated by an English girl named Grey that has vague memories of reading about atrocities committed in the 1930s, and partly seventy years ago by the man who has the answers to Grey's questions.

9. The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin, 1972. I couldn't put down this short novel about suburban housewives that live to cook and clean, and the fate of the woman that discovers how they got that way.

Also excellent: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger; Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby; Twilight's Child by Torey Hayden; Speak Softly, She Can Hear by Pam Lewis; True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman; The Burn Journals by Brent Runyan

Avoid: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis; The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson; The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe; Good-bye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton; If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now by Sandra Tsing Loh

Idiot of the week

2005-07-24T19:43:00.000-05:00

There's this irritable old woman that comes in once a week and demands a printed list of all of our videos. We don't have one, so we show her how to look up videos in the IPAC, and she can never remember how to do it. Plus, there are several different ways to do it, and she always wants to know the way "that lady" showed her last week, and of course we don't know which way that is, let alone which "lady" helped her at that time. She's not a bitch or anything, just grumpy and old. I have little patience with old people, which is, I know, my own prejudice and cross to bear and whatever.

So she came in yesterday and thrust a small square of paper at me.

Old lady: I want to order these videos. (I sigh, because if she's going to bother to look up the video in the catalog, it's really, really easy to request them from another branch while you're in there. I take the piece of paper, which says this:

772
3
4

In other words, they are not call numbers nor barcode numbers nor ISBNs. I have no idea what they are. We don't use three-digit numbers for anything.)

Me: Uh, well, I'm not sure what numbers these are.

Old lady: They're for the VIDEOS I WANT.

Me: Well, uh, videos are sorted either alphabetically or by call number, just like books. These aren't...

Old lady: Well, I got them from the computer.

Me: Let me look them up by name and I can request them for you. What's the first one called?

Old lady: I don't know! That's all I know, is what's on that paper.

Me: Well, um, how did you find them?

Old lady: They're about the presidents. Three presidents.

Me: Okay, so each video was about a different president?

Old lady: Yes.

Me: Which presidents?

Old lady, with a huge sigh: I don't know! I told you, I don't know anything about them. If you can't help me, I'll just come back later.

Me, gritting my teeth and smiling tightly: You don't recall any of the names of the presidents about whom you'd like videos?

Old lady: One of them was Nixon.

Me, typing busily away: Okay, there are a few different videos about Nixon. Was it a two-tape video or just one?

Old lady: Listen, I don't know anything about them.

Me: Look, I'm just going to order you this one, and if you don't want it when it gets here, you can just send it back, okay?

Old lady: Fine.

Me: Who's the next president that you're interested in?

Old lady: That one, you know, that came after Nixon.

Me: Okay, that was Ford. (I begin typing.)

Old lady: No, no. Ford didn't come after Nixon.

Me: Sure he did.

Old lady: No, he didn't.

Me: I think you'll find that he did indeed.

Old lady, sighing at me again: I'm going to go back to the computer and see if my video is still up there and I'll come back and tell you who it was.

Me: Okay, ma'am. (I begin muttering and cursing as soon as her back is turned, then say to Jeff, "Dude, didn't Ford succeed Nixon?" He confirmed that this was true. The old woman approached the desk again.)

Me: Did you figure it out?

Old lady: Yes, it wasn't who you said it was. It was Ronald Reagan.

Me: ...Okay. Let's see, here's a video about Reagan. Who was the third president you wanted a video about?

Old lady: Ford. Gerald Ford.

I, with supreme patience, said nothing.

Search terms

2005-07-20T21:36:00.000-05:00

People have recently found this site via the following searches:

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I have been entertaining myself

2005-07-20T20:35:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting about it much, but I have indeed been reading, listening to music, and even going out; this last weekend was Jeff's birthday as well as Susie's. For Jeff's, we went to eat at Port of Call, then went home and had birthday cake and champagne, and then went out drinking. I spent the next day in bed reading Harry Potter, and then for Susie's birthday we took her to the lakefront and flung tennis balls at her using our newly acquired Chuck-It. I gave it to Susie and Jeff as a mutual birthday gift. Next year, I think I'm getting them a HyperDog.

What I've been listening to

Cibo Matto
the Knitters
the Soviettes (thanks, La Trix)
the Go-Gos

What I've been reading

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince You already know what it's about, so I'll just say: thank god they decided to hyphenate that title. I was getting worried.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx I guess you'd call it an ethnography, but it's written like journalism. This chick spent eleven years in the Bronx, almost living with the Martinez family, absorbing all the details of their lives: fourteen-year-old pregnant girls, lots of cocaine, heroin manufacturing, arrests, cokehead moms, and way more. I, of course, loved it, even though at the end the author uses the phrase "true-crime novels."

A Little Princess Believe it or not, I've never read it before. Belly and La Trix convinced me it was worth a read, and they were right: it's not as complex as The Secret Garden, but it killed some time in a pleasurable fashion.

Further car woes

2005-07-20T19:55:00.000-05:00

So I left the main library today (I'm there on Mondays and Wednesdays now, temporarily doing public relations) for what should have been a ten-minute drive home. On Loyola Avenue, however, I hit a pothole -- or so I thought. It was actually the sensation of my tire blowing and the car, therefore, dropping five inches on that side. I stopped right there in the left-turn lane and used my just-acquired work cell phone to call Jeffrey. He was just leaving work, so I expected to see him in about half an hour.

I carefully pulled over to the side of the road and decided to see what I could do to get started while I waited for Jeff. I knew I had a tire in my trunk, but I didn't know whether it was a useful spare or the last tire I'd removed, all holey, from the car. I dragged it out and rapped on it. Seemed pretty air-filled to me. I inspected it for holes and couldn't find any, but I did find two tiny nail heads, or what looked like them. Given my level of expertise, however, they could well be just part of the tire. No fucking clue.

So I rolled the trunk tire up and leaned it against the flat one on the car, and climbed back into the driver's seat to finish reading Random Family and wait for the boy. However, I was in front of the main city post office on a busy downtown street at rush hour on a sunny day. There was plenty of foot traffic, and I was on the side of a six-lane road. I should have anticipated the five (5) offers of help I got.

I appreciated all of them....really, it's very nice of total strangers to offer to help a girl with a flat tire. And three of the offers were just the way I'd do it: a man approached the rolled-up window, gestured at the flat tire, called that he'd like to help; I smiled, shook my head, and yelled back, "Thanks, but my husband's on his way!" (Note: I am not married to anyone, let alone Jeff, but when I'm alone and approached by a man for any reason, it's become my new "I'm gay" (see: the cab incident). In each of these three cases, the man nodded and walked off.

But I didn't want anyone's help. Jeff was already coming, and I wanted to ask his opinion on the nail-studded tire before putting it on the car. If he felt that tire wasn't any good, I would need him to drive me to the tire store; if he did think it was probably okay, I still wanted him to follow me home to make sure I didn't have any other problems. In other words, I wanted a friend to help me, not a stranger, however well-intentioned that stranger might be.

The other two offers of help, though:

This one came when I was still standing outside the car, examining my trunk tire to see whether or not it was a valid spare.

Dude: Hey, I could help you.

Me, smiling pleasantly: No, thank you. My husband is on his way.

Dude: But I want to help you. I work for God.

Me: Pardon?

Dude: I am a Christian. I work for God. I want to help you for no money or nothin.

Me: ...No, thank you. My husband's going to be here any minute.

Dude: Why you don't believe me? I don't want nothin from you. I am a Christian.

Me: No thanks. I've got it under control.

Dude: YOU LISTEN! I do it for FREE! I work for GOD! NO MONEY!

Me: NO! (vehement slam of my trunk) Have a nice day.

So when I was in the car, another man approached me, this time through the rolled-up driver's side window on the street side of my car. He gestured toward the tire. I smiled and waved him away, mouthing "Thanks," and then tried to return to my book. He approached the car anyway. I looked up again, smiled, and waved him away again. He knocked on the window. With a sigh, I rolled it down.

Him: You got a flat?

Me: Yes, but my husband's on his way to help me.

Him: No, I'll fix it. I'll do it for free.

Me: No, thank you. My husband's coming.

Him: NO, I'll fix it. Come on. Where's your jack?

Me: No thanks.

Him: Am I scaring you? Do I look scary? (Again, I was in the central business district during rush hour in broad daylight. Even if I were easily scared, which I'm not...)

Me: No. I don't need any help.

Him: Just let me fix it.

Me: NO!

Him: Okay. Okay, can I be straight with you? Are you ready for me to be honest with you?

Me: Okay, what?

Him: I really need some money. I need to get into a shelter tonight and I'm trying to earn some money. If you could give me six dollars, I...

Me: I don't have any money on me, not even a dollar. (This was, incidentally, true.)

Him: Okay, okay, okay! I'll do it for free because I'm a good person. You have a jack?

Me: No thank you.

He looked as though he were going to continue attempting to persuade me, but I rolled up the window and turned away. God.

(It all ended happily, by the way: Jeff arrived, deemed the trunk tire okay, put it on the car, threw the old one in the trunk, followed me to a gas station, put air in my tires, and all was well.)

Thoughts while reading Harry Potter 6

2005-07-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

Interesting...Lord, what an obvious red herring...Well, that answers that, but I think I see what's coming...Stupid Bill, I hope that won't happen...Oh, good for them...Right, right, how I enjoy being right...That certainly explains that situation, and does so nicely...Hee hee, how cute...Wow, he's really going to let him do that? It's about fucking time for that too...Oh, this is fun, and reminds me both of The Hobbit and the King's Quest series...Oh fuck, Harry was right all along....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NO! Okay, I predicted this after the last book but I didn't want it to happen oh FUCK!....Oh, wow, now this, this I didn't expect. I hope he changes his mind.

Interesting things that happened yesterday on Jeff's birthday

2005-07-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

1. Some dumb bitch ran a red light and hit my car, one month before my last accident was cleared from my record. This means that my insurance premium might not go down $200 like it was supposed to.

2. Mushrooms in wine sauce on Tuscany bread, and chocolate cake baked with chocolate-peanut butter morsels and topped with sour cream fudge frosting.

3. My cab driver inquired whether my husband and I participate in kinky sex, and whether we have any particular fetishes I'd like to share with him.

Story of the day

2005-07-15T12:27:00.000-05:00

"Dixie," courtesy of Juice.

Fine dining in New Orleans

2005-07-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

My mom's in town this weekend, along with Boobsie and Bartsy, and we have been eating like kings and, in some cases, queens.

On Friday evening, we had dinner at Commander's Palace, the best restaurant in town and beyond. I'd been there last year with Mom, Boobsie and Jeff, and I couldn't wait to go again. It's not like I can afford to go very often. It's certainly the most expensive restaurant to which I've ever been.

Last year, there was no vegetarian entreé on the menu, but the chef prepared a dish of leeks and mushrooms in balsamic reduction, which I loved. This year was different. Here's what I had:

COMMANDER’S LAS VEGAS SALAD Tender baby spinach, shaved red onions, candied pecans, crumbled Point Reyes blue cheese and sugarcane vinaigrette

TARTLET OF FORAGED MUSHROOMS AND WHITE TRUFFLES Confit of winter leeks, creamy garlic cloves, roasted tomatoes, shaved Parmesan and red wine sauce

PEARL RIVER BLUEBERRY COBBLER Toasted cinnamon-pecan streusel, bourbon syrup and buttermilk ice cream

Yeah. Foraged Mushroom Tartlet. It doesn't get a lot better than that. I also tasted Bartsy's bread pudding and Mom's Chocolate Molten, and we shared a bottle of "Sin Zin" red zinfandel, my new favorite wine. Plus, we were given complimentary drinks called Adelaides; garlic bread that melted in our mouths; exquisite Italian bread; and coffee with dessert, the only time I ever drink hot coffee. If I were rich, I'd go to Commander's once a week and never get bored.

The other old New Orleans standby we tried was breakfast at Brennan's. All five of us (Jeff included) got the three-course prix fixe breakfast for $36. I started with the Southern Baked Apple with Double Cream because it was recommended as a traditional beginning to a Brennan's breakfast, but I didn't really care for it. I'm not much of an apple fan to begin with, so I probably should have gotten the strawberries, but I'd really wanted the Creole onion soup. It had beef stock, though. I think my four dining companions all had soup to start -- onion, turtle or oyster. They all liked them a lot, but I decided to skip most of my apple and save room for the main course.

I chose Eggs Portuguese, billed as "Flaky pastry shells filled with freshly chopped tomatoes sautéed in butter with parsley and shallots. Topped with poached eggs and covered with Hollandaise sauce." I didn't really think I would like Hollandaise sauce much (somehow I've never had it before), but if you look at the menu, it's a part of nearly every dish, including both of the vegetarian options on the prix-fixe menu. And I did want to go with the prix-fixe, since an omelet would have run me $25 even if any of them were vegetarian, which, no.

So when I got my Eggs Portuguese, it consisted of three little pastry puffs topped with eggs and Hollandaise sauce, but there were no sautéed tomatoes with parsley and shallots within. It was just plain bread, no shit. There was a half-tomato on the plate with some breadcrumbs on top, but this was not the dish I'd ordered. A spicy tomato sauce came on the side, but after tasting it I decided it wouldn't add anything. I only ate about half my Eggs Portuguese.

Dessert was excellent -- I got chocolate pecan pie -- but I was too full to eat most of it. I took it home and had it for dinner tonight along with last night's leftovers -- spinach fettucine with exotic mushrooms and tomatoes at Mr. B's. Now that's a meal. And I'll never go to Brennan's again.

Vacation Day 3: Thursday, June 30

2005-07-10T23:03:00.000-05:00

And this is where it all went awry. I was supposed to be on a 10:53 a.m. flight to Buffalo, where I would meet Becky and we'd pick up our rental car and drive to our Toronto hotel, about 100 miles away.

I had to take public transit to the airport, but I've done that a million times, and somehow I just didn't think too hard about when I'd have to leave. I didn't want to get up at the buttcrack of dawn because of the party the night before, and I didn't really feel like I needed to get to the airport before 10am. I wanted to check my suitcase, but it was small enough that I could carry it onboard if I had to. It would be an asspain to lift it into the overhead bin, but I was sure I could find a flight attendant or burly young passenger to assist if necessary.

So I planned to leave Belly's house at 9am. It was a short walk to the Red Line, and then I would ride downtown and transfer to the Blue Line, which would take me out to O'Hare.

But by the time I got my ass out of bed, brushed my teeth, finished last-minute packing, and said a dozen goodbyes to Baby O, it was 9:15. When I arrived at the Granville Red Line station, it was 9:25. I didn't have a watch, so I wouldn't be able to keep track of time on my trip, but it wasn't like I could speed the journey along any by knowing what time it was.

I took the el almost every weekday in high school and college, and its patterns are somewhat ingrained in my mind, even though I haven't lived in the Chicago area for seven years. So when I passed the Chicago Avenue station and then Grand Avenue, I stood up and dragged my suitcase toward the door, because I knew the next stop would be Washington, where I would transfer to the Blue Line.

Nope. Apparently they've added a new station, Lake Street, in-between Grand and Washington. I didn't notice this until I'd exited the train and it had pulled away, so I had to sit and wait for the next train. One came along five or ten minutes later, and I rode it one additional stop to Washington. Then I descended into the tunnel that connects State Street with Dearborn via an underground walkway, lugging my suitcase up the stairs on the Blue Line side, and just missed an airport-bound train. Damn.

There were no clocks in the station, so I had no idea how late it was, but I knew I was behind schedule. I figured I might reach the airport as late as 10:35, 18 minutes before my flight was supposed to depart. I thought that if I ran like hell to ticketing, kept my bag as a carryon, and made it to the front of security quickly because of my impending departure, I'd be fine.

So I got off the train, took the escalator up to the airport entrance...and the clock said 10:55. I stared at it in horror. I had actually MISSED my PLANE? Well, I hadn't called to check its status that morning; maybe it was delayed an hour. I tend to be a pretty lucky person, so it was worth a shot. I galloped to ticketing and checked out the monitor. My plane was delayed, but only until 11:07, and by now it was 11:02. My eyes scanned the long lines at ticketing and security, and I knew I had no prayer. My only hope was to get on the next flight out.

I waited in line forever and then got a ticket agent that happened to be from New Orleans and was now (obviously) living in Chicago, so we had a lot to talk about. I kissed as much ass as I knew how, but there was nothing she could do for me. It was Thursday, June 30, the day before the July 4 weekend, and all flights for the next 36 hours were completely sold out. She added me to the standby list, but advised me I probably would not be able to travel via plane that weekend.

I decided to remain optimistic. I called Becky to let her know she would have to stick around for a couple more hours until the next flight took off; I knew this must suck for her because she'd already been waiting for me for hours in Buffalo since her red-eye from San José arrived well before I planned to. My calling card only had four minutes left on it, so I shouted incoherently into the phone at B, hoping she'd get the picture. Then I went to the gate of my standby flight.

I knew as soon as boarding began that it was bad news. After all rows had boarded, there were still twenty people waiting with me, staring expectantly at the desk agent. Two people were called up to get on the flight. When it took off, I stood in line to ask the agent where I was on the standby list. Thirty-six. Yeah. And there were only two more flights out that day...and the next day was the Friday of Fourth of July weekend. I was totally fucked.

I called Becky and told her to carry on with her plans -- pick up the rental car and drive to Toronto. I called Belly and told her I was coming back to her house and that I'd need to use her computer to search for planes, trains and rental cars that might possibly get me to Buffalo or Toronto before the Saturday wedding. Then, once again, I got on the 90-minute two-train trip back to Belly's house in Edgewater. At least this time I didn't have a suitcase to drag, as it had gone on the first flight out to Buffalo. I figured when I made it to Buffalo, I'd pick it up there, or if I went directly to Toronto, I'd ask the airline to send it on.

When I got to Belly's house, the first thing I said was, "Do you still have my burrito?" She did. I ate it. It was delicious.

Vacation Day 2: Wednesday, June 29

2005-07-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

I woke up fairly early on Wednesday morning and Tal drove me to Belly's so I could spend the day with Baby O. Now I know everyone thinks this about their own daughter or son or quasi-niece or whatever, but O really is beautiful, brilliant, happy and fun to the extremes of those words. I just love spending time with her. All you have to do to make her squeal with laughter is stick out your tongue. And she loves to tickle people, and she's always bringing you a book and climbing into your lap. She insists that book-reading is a thing that happens with you sitting on the couch, her in your lap with your arms around her, and the book in her lap.

After O ate lunch, we all went to the grocery store to buy supplies for that night's pot luck, and then we stopped at El Famous Burrito so I could get some lunch. I'd never eaten there, but I was dying for real Mexican food, and I got my wish: a fat burrito full of beans, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and hot sauce. It was big enough that I could only eat half of it, so I left it in the refrigerator. That, my friends, is foreshadowing, by the way.

I don't remember what we did in the afternoon, but in the early evening, guests started arriving for the pot luck. Kath and Jay came first, bearing marinated chicken, and then Tal and Biscuit brought corn casserole, and I think Bartsy and Pan forgot to bring anything. We watched O turn somersaults and blow bubbles, and the rest of us drank beer and sangria and talked shit. I think maybe I went to bed pretty early, but I can't exactly recall.

Vacation Day 1: Tuesday

2005-07-06T17:18:00.000-05:00

So last Tuesday morning, I flew out of New Orleans to Chicago for the first leg of my vacation. My plane didn't leave until 10:18, but Jeff had to be at work before 9am to prep for arts and crafts, so I got dropped off at 8:30. This gave me plenty of time to check in, eat a somewhat crappy egg breakfast at a place billing itself as a Creole carvery. Whatever. Then I had so much extra time that I finished my entire book (The Stepford Wives; highly recommended) before I even got on the plane. Since I had stupidly packed all my other books in my checked luggage, I had to buy an issue of Jane. Now I remember why I canceled all my beauty-mag subscriptions. Not that I didn't read the thing cover-to-cover.

I got on the plane and was seated next to some white guy who immediately introduced himself and asked my name. I mumbled it and buried my face in my Jane, hoping to give him a hint, but instead he continued asking questions: "So where are you headed?" (Uh, aren't we on the same plane? To...Chicago?) I told him without a smile, and, again, immediately cast my eyes back down to my magazine. His next statement was, "I don't want to be one of those really annoying people on airplanes." Oh no? I figured this disclaimer was a preface to him shutting up, but no. He didn't talk through the whole flight or anything, but literally any time I raised my head, he began interrogating me on my vacation plans. If I wanted to rest my eyes, I had to close them while pretending to be engrossed in the magazine. When I finished it, I picked up the duty-free catalog just to get away from this dude. God.

MF and Starla met me at the plane, after a brief debacle (my itinerary said US Airways, but apparently it was really on affiliated United, but MF was meeting me at the US Airways arrivals and I was at United, blah blah blah), and then we went to visit the very ill Rufus. Uh, that's Rufus the dog, not Rufus whose wedding was Saturday. Rufus the Dog was happier to see me than I expected of such a sick boy.

MF and Starla drove me to Belly's house, where I joyfully reunited with Baby O. I'm not sure whether she remembered me or not, but she was delighted to see me in any case. She's got to be the friendliest little creature I've ever seen, and certainly more outgoing than I was at her age. And than I am now; see above airplane anecdote.

Almost immediately upon my arrival, my sister Tal came to pick me up. It was my dad's sixtieth birthday and we had a big surprise planned. He knew that the rest of the family (Tal and Biscuit, Mog and Johnson, Dad, Dad's Wife, and Dad's MIL) had arranged for a limousine to carry them all downtown to Water Tower, where they had plans to have dinner and see The Full Monty. Dad, however, did not know that I would be coming in from New Orleans for the occasion. He was perfectly stunned to see me standing outside Tal and Biscuit's apartment, waiting next to them for the limo to arrive.

We had dinner at the Mity Nice Grill because it was part of the theater package. However, I was disappointed not only in the blatant misspelling of "mighty" in their name, but in the vegetarian entree. Spaghetti with marinara sauce is not cool, people.

The play was unexpectedly delightful. It was raunchier than I'd expected, and I was concerned Dad might find it overly so, but he did not. I would have cut a couple of songs, sure, but I generally want to cut every linear entertainment in half chronologically, so that was no surprise. After the show, we had dessert and wine in the limo, and I went back to Tal's house to watch Napoleon Dynamite and play with her puppy Jake. I missed Susie, who was staying at Pooch's Palace, but Jake is adorable and fun. Tal and I had some drinks and went to bed fairly early.

Vacation

2005-06-26T11:09:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, I leave for two days in Chicago and five in Toronto. In Toronto, I'm going to Rufus's wedding and hanging out with Beckers. In Chicago, I'll have dinner with my dad on his birthday and attend a potluck dinner with my high school friends, but I'll spend most of my time with this little person:

Books in brief

2005-06-25T01:32:00.000-05:00

Current:

Vanity Fair. Becky inspired me to read this classic. I've decided it's going to be my at-work book, so it's sitting on my desk, but now that I've been temporarily reassigned to do public relations at the main library, I'm going to have a fuck of a lot less reading time on the job. So we'll see how long it takes me to get through this 800-page tome.

French Women Don't Get Fat. I'm not generally a fan of weight-loss books, but I was intrigued by this one. So far, it seems to favor what I've already decided are good techniques -- buying seasonal, locally produced fruits and vegetables, eating high-quality cheese, drinking lots of water, remembering that a few bites generally satisfy you, etc. The only weird thing is the two-day leeks-only diet, but I'll probably try that anyway, just for a kick in the ass.

Last Days of Summer. This YA novel consists largely of letters exchanged between a twelve-year-old Brooklyn boy and his third-baseman hero in 1940. I really like it so far.

Finished recently:

One Child. I think this is the fourth or fifth time I've read this. A teacher of emotionally disturbed children develops a special relationship with a violent, abused, smelly, genius child -- a six-year-old named Sheila. The sequel is called Tiger's Child and takes place seven years later when the author hires a teenaged Sheila to be her teaching assistant. Becky's going to bring me that one on our upcoming trip to Toronto for Rufus and Claire's wedding. I've only read it once, I believe.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now. This novel about ex-granola Gen Xers in California bills itself as different from all the disillusioned-youth Douglas Coupland novels of the 1990s, but to me it read just the same: Bronwyn and her live-in boyfriend live the bohemian life, but then the BF gets a screenwriting job and Bronwyn falls in love with the L.A. glitz. Whatever.

Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs. Cute, but if Dave were my age instead of my mom's, I might relate more. It's not like I'm intimately familiar with the Beach Boys' catalog.

To Sir, With Love. I have a thing for "teacher books," fictional and non-, in which a Very Special Teacher meets a class of problem kids and works miracles, or tries to. Fiction entries in this genre include The Blackboard Jungle, Push, and Up the Down Staircase. Nonfiction works, which I much prefer, include The Water is Wide, Educating Esme, P.S. Your Not Listening, 36 Children, and now this one.

I've never actually been to a Supercuts before.

2005-06-24T19:00:00.000-05:00

And I will never, ever go again. I only went today because it was $11.95, including tax, and they don't require appointments.

So I went in and they said it would be a fifteen-minute wait, but it was only about ten minutes before a chick called my name. I greeted her and smiled. She pointed at a chair; I glanced at it and then looked back at her to make sure she was serious, because the footrest and the floor all around the chair were still covered in other people's hair. But yeah, she was serious.

I sat down and she said, "How do you want it?" I wanted to say, "This isn't a hamburger, yo. It's a haircut." I said, "Well, uh, I've been kind of trimming it myself, so I mostly just wanted it evened out, and I'd like a few layers; what do you think?"

Apparently unused to consulting with customers, she didn't reply or smile. All she said was, "Give me your glasses." I removed them and held them out to her. She jerked her chin at the counter. I placed them there.

She flung a plastic cape about my neck and began misting my head with water, not shielding it from my eyes or even warning me first. She also had not yet smiled or spoken to me. She pushed my head forward, snipped, pushed my head to the side, snipped...and then her cell phone rang. I watched as she actually leaned over to the counter to get it. This is how her five-minute conversation went:

Hi, Amy....I'm cutting hair. Do you need something? (At this point, I decided that she was getting rid of the caller and that she would return to my head shortly. Wrong; she simply cradled the phone between her ear and her shoulder and kept chatting WHILE SHE CUT MY HAIR.) Yeah, are you okay about yesterday? I'm sorry about that...Yeah, I was real shook up. I ain't never been put away before...Yeah, I hate her. Do you think it's a good idea to meet with the police and show them all the stuff I got on document?...No, she's crazy. I ain't messin with her....She made a false call but she could do it again and again. Twelve hours is the longest I ever want to spend in that place....She made a false call, you know? They should put HER in jail...Yeah, she made a false call and she could make more false calls....I want to meet with the one in charge at the police station. I told the desk girl, 'I don't have nothin to say to you. I want to talk to the man in charge.' I told her....Because she says I been harassin her by phone and doin things with guys to get them to pay my car note. I WISH somebody was payin my car note, you know what I'm sayin?...Yeah, she keeps makin these false calls. I can't stand it....Okay, take care. Bye.

My interest was now piqued, of course, and plus I wanted to make some type of personal contact with this chick since she had my hair literally in her hands, so when she hung up, I smiled and said, "That sounds like a good story." Bad idea. She went on for twenty (20) minutes about her brother's ex-wife and how scary she was, which would have been an okay distraction while my hair was being cut except that she would stop frequently at especially dramatic points, walk around to the front of my chair, put her hand on my shoulder, and peer into my myopic eyes, waiting for me to make appropriate expressions of horror at the various things her sister-in-law had done. These things included identity theft and telephone harassment, as well as slander (telling people that Hairdresser had slept with men to induce them to make her car payments) and false police reports. I was extremely skeptical about this last one. I've never heard of someone being dragged out of their home and arrested because another person called the cops and said they had been harassed by phone.

Also, while Hairdresser was insistent that her sister-in-law was a horrible person that had stalked her brother over the Internet and then married him purely so she could destroy Hairdresser's family from within by stealing the identities of Hairdresser and all of her siblings, she was unclear on how all of this had been accomplished. She said, for example, that while Sister-in-law had been married to Brother, SIL had obtained Brother's computer passwords, and that now that they were divorced, SIL emailed Brother a list of all the people with whom he had been in contact via email and IM. I said, "Well, why doesn't he just change his password?" "Because she's good with computers and he's not," was the irrelevant answer. I said, "But no, he can just change his password now," and Hairdresser said, "No, no, she's real good with computers."

This last characteristic, it seems, is one Hairdresser associates with being generally evil. During a list of SIL's bad traits -- being an identity thief, having been in federal prison, the "false calls" to the police -- she said, in hushed tones, "And she's on the Internet ALL THE TIME." This was one of the points so important that she had to stop cutting my hair to come around and gauge my reaction. I merely raised my brows.

"And another thing," said Hairdresser. "She just got a perm. No one gets perms any more...NO ONE." I smiled, thinking that it was pretty funny that she had switched from SIL's criminal history to her poor personal aesthetics. But no. "You know who does get perms?" Hairdresser asked me rhetorically. "People in prison," she went on. "Because they don't let you have no blow-dryer and you can just wash it and comb it out. It's real easy to take care of a perm in prison."

Summer at the library

2005-06-20T19:32:00.000-05:00

In some ways, summer at the library is better than the school year. We're still really busy, but it's spread out over the whole day instead of being dead during the morning and then slammed at 3pm when school lets out. And we don't have to help 150 kids all find books on the same animal, or Google-image-search fifty million pictures of Black inventors, or convince parents that yes, the encyclopedia really is the best place to find the state bird of Montana.

In most ways, though, it totally sucks. Everyone has summer reading lists, and we have holds lists on all of these books, so the hold shelves are sagging in the middle and we're jamming books on top of them and into all sorts of nooks and crannies, and when we pry a book out, the other ninety books on the shelf all fall at our feet and have to be re-alphabetized. And I'm always guaranteed an audience at storytime, which makes it fun, but on the other hand, we have to do arts and crafts, which I loathe. (This year, I've palmed it off on Jeffrey, and I am merely his assistant.)

But the worst thing about summer is the fucking day camps. They all want to book their entire 150-kid camp, ages 4 to 13, into all of our activities. They don't care that the arts and crafts limit is 25 kids, or that 11-year-olds are way too old for storytime, or that the calendar says that they need reservations for groups of six or more. They just want to take advantage of the free programming we have available. Now, that's what it's there for, but we can't just book one group into all thirty programs and not leave room for anyone else. I actually received a phone call like that in May, right after I'd made sign-up sheets for the whole summer's worth of storytime and arts and crafts. The camp teacher asked which dates were available for her camp to attend, and I said, "You're the first one to register, so you have your pick of the dates." She actually said, "Oh, good! We want to come to all of them, then." I had already explained to her that there was a 25-kid limit, so I was flabbergasted at her selfishness. I just said, "Uh, well, we need to leave spaces for some other camps." She was all like, "Well, fine, then, how often can I come?" I let her sign up for one session in June and one in July. Read to your own freakin campers.

So today I got to work at 9:15 or so, and right away, Jeff spotted two buses full of campers pulling up in the parking lot. This was a bit of a surprise since (1) we had no events planned today, and (2) we don't open until 10:00. Still, I figured that they were here to pick out books or sign up for summer reading or for a teacher-conducted tour of the library. As for the early hour, we often get classes here too early because they order the bus for an hour ahead of time, just in case it's late. So I didn't think too much of it.

At 10am, the doors opened and a flood of blue-shirted campers entered. There were probably eighty of them, and five teachers. The adults stashed the kids in the children's room and then converged upon the desk to yell at me. The conversation went something like this:

Teacher: We signed up for a workshop today. I want to know what the problem is.

Me: I'm sorry, but we don't have any events today.

Teacher: When I called on the phone, I was told today and tomorrow was Kids' Day and they had workshops and readin' hour and stuff. Monday and Tuesday, she said.

Me: We have storytime on Thursdays at 10:30, never on Monday or Tuesday, and I'm sorry, but I don't have you registered. I'm the children's librarian and storyteller, and all reservations are made with me, and I didn't...

Teacher: Well, it's not our fault someone on the phone told us wrong. And she say you open at 9:00. We been waiting outside for an hour and the kids gettin all riled up.

Me: None of the libraries open at 9:00. We all open at 10. I'm really sorry about the confusion, but I don't really see how this happened. I don't suppose you know the name of the person you spoke with...

Teacher: No. It a girl that answered the phone.

Me, studying the system-wide Summer Reading Program schedule: Wait a minute. Ghetto Branch has storytime on Monday mornings, and even though the library doesn't open until 10, they let the kids in early for storytime at 9:00. So I'm thinking maybe you accidentally dialed...

Teacher: No. No. This the library we always go to. This out by us.

Me: I understand, but maybe you just misdialed. All the branches have similar phone numbers.

Teacher: I have two other reservations for two other storytimes in a few weeks. You have us coming to those?

Me, consulting my sign-up sheets: No, I'm sorry. I haven't had any contact with your camp at all.

Teacher: I hate this library. I don't know why I ever come up in here.

Etc., etc., etc. I went as far as to call Ghetto Branch and ask whether they had a no-show camp for storytime, but they said they didn't. I officially have no idea what happened. Everyone at my branch knows kids have to register with me for all programs, and they certainly know we don't open at 9am.

To make things worse, half an hour later, another large group came in, all wearing purple camp T-shirts. They were here to see the magic show we had scheduled for 11am...tomorrow. They were, of course, angry with me when I explained that they'd gotten confused. They insisted that I had given them the wrong information on the phone. I pulled out the system-wide calendar, my sign-up sheets, and my personal desk calendar, pointed to the words "Tuesday, June 21" on all three, confirmed that I had them booked for TOMORROW'S magic show, and tried to send them on their way, but of course, since they were already in the library, they wanted to join the blue-shirted throngs in the kids' room. The blue and purple teachers began to commiserate with one another about how bad I suck as a human being. I wanted to bang their retarded heads together.

Funniest.typo.ever.

2005-06-19T07:18:00.000-05:00

Read the whole story; it's short.

Westbank church reaches out to 'lost generation' (from wwltv.com)

And today...

2005-06-19T00:29:00.000-05:00

...was mellower than yesterday, but we still fit in a lot of shit. I slept until 12:30, and then we tried to go to the Camellia for potato/cheese/onion omelets, but the line was out the door, so we hit Slim Goodies instead. I had something called the Popeye's Slammer. It had hash browns covered with spinach, mushroom and tomatoes; two fried eggs on top of that; and a layer of mozzarella on top of that. Beckers had an egg/pancake/bacon combo, and Jeff had something called the Bhansali, which was an omelet filled with tomato risotto. It was sort of bland. My shit was good, though.

We visited two different Walgreenses trying to find just the right toy baseballs for Susie, then went to pick her up and crossed the bridge to Algiers Point. She and Jeff ran around chasing each other and the ball for an hour before we adjourned to get Sno-Balls (what the rest of the world calls Sno-Cones). Susie and Jeff had wedding-cake flavor (vanilla and sugar), and B and I had blackberry. Susie and I did not like ours very much. I thought Suze would love it, because she loves ice cubes and sugar, but no.

We drove around Algiers Point to look at its two interesting buildings: the Carnegie library, built in 1905, and a little grocery store with a funny sign on the wall. Then we went home for naps. Susie and Becky lay next to each other on the bed, their heads on two adjacent pillows, and breathed deeply in unison.

After that, we went to Mr. B's. We spent $150, not including tip, but it was so worth it. I loved it. Jeff and I got a bottle of red Zinfandel, which I didn't even think was a thing, but it's my new favorite wine, and the bottle lasted through dinner and dessert with none left over. Perfect.

Becky and I each had a tomato-mozzarella salad, which we enjoyed. It also featured olive oil and pesto, and we used crusty bread to mop up the sauces when we were done. The only other vegetarian item on the menu (besides a garden salad) was truffle oil pommes frites, so that's what I had. Turned out to be a giant pile of French fries, perfectly done, topped with Parmesan and the truffle oil. I made the table at large help me eat them, because I wanted to have room for dessert.

In addition to her salad, Becky had sauteéd shrimp, which came with a "pepper biscuit," a tiny little thing sitting right there in her mini-skillet. She also got three wee cups of soup: two different kinds of gumbo and a cream of cauliflower which, I was chagrined to learn, contained chicken broth. Jeff had duck and goat cheese spring rolls as an hors d'oeuvre, and his entree was onion-encrusted redfish on a bed of tomatoes and cucumbers.

B and I had already selected our desserts before even ordering our dinners. This was a good idea because we were sure to order in such a way that we would save room for my Hot Buttered Pecan Pie (with cinnamon crust and homemade ice cream) and her traditional bread pudding with whiskey sauce. Jeff hemmed and hawed but finally ordered the Orange-Ginger Creme Brulee, and when the desserts came, we passed each of them around the table. I demanded my pie back to finish myself, though. It's the best pecan pie I've ever had, by a LOT.

And that's it. My long weekend of vicarious tourism is over. Beckers and I are home for the night, reading and Internetting, and going to bed fairly early because we have to get up in....shit. Five hours....to get her to the airport.

I'm sunburned and have blisters

2005-06-17T20:35:00.000-05:00

But here are some things Becky and Jeff and I have done this week:

1. We went to see the Old 97s at Tipitina's on Wednesday night. This is nominally what B came to visit for in the first place. She's seen them eighteen times that she can count, including shows in San Francisco, San Jose, L.A., and New York, but this was her first time in New Orleans.

Best show I've ever been to. Those of you that know me well will be shocked to hear I danced the night away, but not surprised to learn that apparently I resembled a Peanuts character while doing so. My neck still hurts.

Rhett Miller is a beautiful boy. He's pretty much the most attractive male I can think of right now. Honestly, I've seen lots of pictures but they don't do him justice. The man is gorgeous.

And the show rocked, of course. They played everything I could possibly want them to play: "Designs on You" was the main one I was worried about missing, but it was there, and so was everything else. "504" was great, of course, and they played it right off (second, I think). Yeah, that's the New Orleans area code, if you don't already know it.

2. So that was Wednesday night. Thursday I had to work, but B came to visit my library and hang out in the reading room with Torey Hayden's Somebody Else's Kids. Then we went to lunch at Liuzza's in Mid-City. It wasn't especially vegetarian-friendly, so I had onion rings, fried dill pickles, and fried sweet potatoes. Yeah.

3. On Thursday night, we began at Napoleon House. I had a Pimm's Cup, Beckers had a ginger ale, and Jeffrey had a Miller Lite.

4. We moved on to The Dungeon's outer bar, where Consuela works. Jeff and I had a pitcher of beer (the Thursday special), and then B and I started watching some appalling movie (perhaps Creepshow) in which Stephen King clumsily portrayed a farm boy who broke open a meteor and therefore started growing foliage out of his skin.

5. Then we took a walk down Bourbon Street to give Beckers a taste of the action (strip club, strip club, daquiri bar, strip club, T-shirt shop, daquiri bar).

6. We headed next to the Alibi, where I had fried mushrooms (Becky reports that they were precisely what we wanted at that moment), B had spinach-artichoke dip and a salad, and Jeff had jalapeño poppers.

7. Then we had to pee, but didn't think of it until we left the Alibi, so we stopped at Johnny White's for that purpose. So as not to appear rude, we had a beer here as well.

8. For dessert, we headed to Café du Monde for beignets and café au lait.

9. At that point, we went home to walk Susie and pass out, making plans to meet up for breakfast. We actually hauled ass out of bed early and went to the Bluebird Café. I had migas, nibbling at Jeff's cheese grits and huevos rancheros from time to time. I believe B had something called the Big Breakfast, which, if I recall correctly, included pancakes, potatoes, and eggs.

10. We stopped at the ATM and then visited Lafayette No. 1. We wandered among the above-ground graves and posed for pictures.

11. Next, I wanted to show Becky the Marigny, the little neighborhood east of the French Quarter where I wanted to move when I first came to New Orleans. It features small, old, gaudily painted shotgun homes and bungalows, lots of flowers, a dog park, lots of bartenders and waiters, a gay and lesbian bookstore, hipster music venues, and (says Becky) a sort of island feel.

12. We stopped for iced coffee, iced tea, and an iced mocha, and then visited the Beauregard-Keyes home. We'd planned to do a house tour, since New Orleans is famous for its architecture, and I'd picked this one because I loved Keyes's Dinner at Antoine's. That's the only book by her I've ever read, but I loved it and now I plan to read more. The house was charming; it had an old square piano, lots of teapots and dolls and fans, antique beds and dressers, slave quarters that were later turned into knickknack rooms, a sun porch with hand-painted tiles, and more. B and J and I were the only ones taking the 1:00 tour, so we asked the docent all kinds of questions about books and history and shit. The garden was cool too. I recommend this if you ever want to do an N.O. house tour.

13. After more iced tea, we proceeded to the Presbytere's Mardi Gras exhibit. I can't believe I've never visited this before. We must have spent nearly two hours in there; it's two floors and dozens and dozens of artifacts, paintings, displays, etc. The attention to detail is astonishing; the bathrooms have Port-a-Potty doors, and at the end there's a cop car and a picture of horses' butts to represent what Jeff calls the Krewe of Municipal Vehicles that ride behind each parade to signal its end. You can view throws, party favors, costumes, ball gowns, Indian dresses, and pieces of floats, and you can listen to a variety of Carnival music, and there are videos to watch and informational boards to read, and all in all, I'd say it was a hell of a bargain at $6.00.

It also sold Becky on the Mardi Gras concept. Most out-of-towners think it's all Girls Gone Wild, but I think B gets it now, at least as much as anyone that hasn't actually experienced it. She plans to come visit next February, so she'll get the initiation.

14. Our feet were sore and it looked like rain, so we advanced to La Madeleine, where we shared a lemon tart and a chocolate cream tart. Both were perfection. Uh, if you have any questions about the way certain pastries are pronounced, click the link above and you will find spoken guides to assist you.

15. Having not been sated by our desserts, we discussed dinner. Becky had already been exposed to the po'boy and to mountains of fried seafood, the staples of the local diet, so we agreed to go Asian and opted for Siam Café, a Thai place Jeff and I had tried to visit previously when it was closed. Upon getting our asses in the car today, we learned that they don't open for dinner until 6pm, and we didn't feel like killing an hour sitting on the curb, so we headed for Lemongrass (look at the dessert menu). They too don't open until 6. What the fuck? I thought 5 was the normal restaurant-opening hour. I mean, I know it's early, but I thought most places open then as a general rule. Apparently I am retarded.

16. Finally, we settled on Sake. I had the eggplant, of course, and the goat cheese gyoza and the vegetable roll. Jeff and Becky shared the Mariposa shrimp, which was large shrimp tempura with rods of asparagus stuck through the middle. (Becky: "The coconut sauce was delicious, but the asparagus was overdone.") B also got a sushi package deal with seven different kinds plus soup and salad for $15, and Jeff got something called the Spicy Yellow Dragon roll, which had like twelve pieces, which was good because they never brought his calamari. We didn't realize it until making this very post. Bastards; I hope they didn't charge us for it.

So then B and I dropped Jeff off and now we're hanging out drinking beer (well, that's just me); reading David Foster Wallace (well, she is), and listening to Eminem, M. Ward and the Old 97s on random. And making fun of singer/songwriter David Wilcox. Sample lyrics:

"I can hear the echo reflecting in your eyes."

"When my grandfather spoke about the eagle
He would raise his face up to the sky
The sunlight reflecting on the water
And she flew so close as she passed by."

"The only kind of love that ever fills you/Is the love you give."

We considered re-listening to those songs so we could do a better job of snarking at the lyrics, but once my .mp3 player struck up the opening chords, we thought better of it, turned the volume down to 0, and un-paused The Eminem Show.

Dude, considering B has only been here for 48 hours, that's a fucking lot of shit we've done.

Tomorrow: Algiers Point, purse shopping, and potato-onion-cheese omelets.

Belatedly

2005-06-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

A very happy birthday to Pinkers. He's not posting much lately because he's in L.A. temping and eating delicious Mexican cuisine.

Quote of the day

2005-06-17T20:33:00.000-05:00

Thursday, June 16. Jeff said:

"I have this new hobby, which is, like, completely using incorrect English."

Only in New Orleans

2005-06-14T21:37:00.000-05:00

Today when I got home from work, I checked my mailbox, as usual. Within were two envelopes from the public housing authority. Neither was addressed to me. One was to a man in the Ninth Ward, and the other was to a woman living in Mid-City. Neither zip code matched mine; neither name was anything like mine; neither street name nor street number had anything in common with mine.

When people say, "Only in New York," they're usually talking about unusual clothing, or clever rudeness, or weird street theater. When people say "Only in New Orleans," they mean a manifestation of supreme incompetence. Either that or incredible humidity.

I wonder who got MY mail today.

Food

2005-06-14T01:20:00.000-05:00

Things I cooked tonight:

Asian Slaw (first time I made it; shockingly good)
Scalloped Broccoli and Cauliflower (an old favorite)
Blueberry Crisp (I had to use up the three boxes of blueberries I had)

Things I'll cook tomorrow:

Szechuan Tofu with Cabbage (in an effort to use up my extra cabbage and to experiment with a variation on Szechuan Green Beans, which don't keep well)
Tofu Salad (like chicken salad, but with tofu)
Cucumber Salad (haven't researched this yet, but I have a spare cucumber)
Burritos (to freeze and bring to work)

Jesus H. Christ

2005-06-12T17:40:00.000-05:00

Liberry events this weekend:

1. Some bitch came in and walked right past me to the other side of the circulation desk, stopping in front of Jeffrey, who was busy helping another patron. I wasn't doing anything, and I didn't want her to have to wait, so of course, I looked her way, smiled and said, "Can I help you, ma'am?" She glared at me and retorted, "I just walked past you over there. Why you didn't stop me then?" Uh...maybe because I didn't know you needed help until you approached the circ desk?

2. A woman entered the building and asked whether we had a phone. I said we did indeed. "It's right around the corner by the bathrooms, ma'am," I said, pointing. She went over there and then came stomping back. "I meant a REAL phone," she said. Pardon? "That's a PAY phone." Oh, and thus illusory in nature. I...see.

3. This chick came in again. This time, she was furious because I wouldn't let her use her daughter's card to check out books. This was because her name wasn't listed as the parent name on the account (it was her husband's). She kept raving about how she was an attorney and she was going to change the rules and she was not going to stand around and be inconvenienced because she's an attorney and we made her call her husband and daughter to come up in here and on and on and on, and she wants the manager's name and the city librarian's name and she has a meeting with the mayor tomorrow because she's an attorney and she can sue us and how dare we and etc. She ranted for ages, even using the phrase "post-industrial society" at one point. I did not dare to ask a question about what exactly that meant. And yes, she wanted French books again.

The punch line? She had her own library card with her the whole time. She could have checked out those books on her own card, and she knew it. She was the one causing the inconvenience. She just wanted to throw a tantrum.

I don't usually think bumper stickers are especially witty...

2005-06-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

...but here's one I saw today:

I'll try to be nicer if you try to be smarter

Telephone calls of the damned

2005-06-07T19:58:00.000-05:00

A co-worker buzzed the staff room today. "Daisy, you have a call on line 1."

Me: This is Daisy. May I help you?

Caller: (silence)

Me: Can I help you?

Caller: (breathing)

Me: Hello?

Caller: Oh, I, um...who you said this is?

Me: ...My name is Daisy.

Caller: I think I have the wrong number. I was calling for Miss Lastname.

Me: That's me. I'm Daisy Lastname.

Caller: Oh. (long pause)

Me: How can I help you?

Caller: This the liberry?

Me: Yep. How can I help you?

Caller: I think I have the wrong number.

Me, trying not to sigh: This is Daisy Lastname at the library. Isn't that whom you asked for?

Caller: Yeah, okay. I wanted to know if I could come back up in there.

Me: ...To the library?

Caller: Yeah, or if I was dropped.

Me: Dropped from the library?

Caller: Dropped from the class.

Me: What class?

Caller: Yeah, I have the wrong number. (hangs up)

I have no explanation for this. I do know, though, that no one is banned from the library at present, and that I don't teach any classes and, indeed, never have. I also know that there's no one working at the library whose name sounds anything like Daisy or Lastname. We do have three volunteer teachers whose classes meet at the library, but none of their names sounds a single thing like mine. I further know that in last Sunday's paper there was a story about the teen art contest we had a few weeks ago, and I was quoted, and at the end of the story appeared the line, "For information about this or any other library programs, contact Daisy Lastname at (phone number)." I was amused and horrified when I saw this, recognizing that it might attract freaks, and...hello.

Also, last week Jeff made a flyer to post on the front desk that announces my weekly storytime. It's every Thursday at 10:30, and it's geared toward three- to five-year-olds, but sometimes during the summer, parents try to fob their tweens off on us, and I don't want that, so I asked Jeff to put "Preschool Storytime" at the top of the flyer. He did, and today I saw a mom looking at the flyer. She said to her friend, "Oh, look! The library has preschool now."

I have a slug

2005-06-05T22:24:00.000-05:00

Here are some tales, so that I don't kill myself in frustration over the fact that I just spent seven hours scrubbing the house from top to bottom -- cleaning the stove and the baseboards; scrubbing the sink, toilet and shower; picking up clutter; dusting and Windexing; wiping down the walls; moving the dresser and bed to clean behind them; lifting up my mattress to put my new bed skirt between it and my box spring; doing all the dishes, including the spinning microwave tray; replacing all my recently-played CDs in their cases and filing them; and, finally, sweeping and mopping the entire house. This, however, is not wherein the frustration lay. Here, my bloggy friends, is where it lay.

1. I was really, really hoping I'd find my copy of Cassandra at the Wedding, a book that Becky recommended a few weeks ago. The only copy we had in the library catalog was labeled "to be withdrawn" from the main library, so I emailed the appropriate chick over there and she said it had already been boxed and sent to the book sale. I resigned myself to not being able to read this book. Then the chick emailed me back and said she'd found it in a different batch of books. I rejoiced, and when the book came to me in the branch run, I brought it home and arranged it on the dresser next to the other books I'm planning to read soon. And then...it disappeared. I remember seeing it about a week ago. It has a distinctive red library-binding cover. I initially assumed it fell behind the dresser, but I've moved it no less than three times trying to clean and look for this book, and it just isn't there. I have no idea where it could be, since I just turned the entire house upside-down cleaning. My best guess is that it fell into the wastebasket I keep next to the dresser, which has since been emptied numerous times.

2. It was hot and humid as bloody hell today -- not the best weather for housekeeping. I wanted to lie on my bed with a glass of ice water and read The Dive from Claussen's Pier, but I didn't. I lay on the kitchen floor, and numerous other places, cleaning and sneezing (cat hair in addition to the dust), and sweating so profusely that my hair and clothing were completely soaked. I couldn't keep my glasses on my nose. Nonetheless, I'm telling you, I persevered.

3. So I was almost done. The last thing I do when I do a major housecleaning is sweep and mop the floors. I moved all the random floor-stored shit like wastebaskets and shoes to the front porch, and swept up an assload of dust and cat hair (Annie's fur is long and grey, so it's hard to tell apart from dust), and then filled up my bucket with hot water and Pine-Sol and began mopping the house. I started in the kitchen, then did the hallway and bathroom, and then worked my way up the stairs to the bedroom (I live in what I call a two-story studio, and the second floor is all bedroom). When I was done, I felt awesome. This was the culmination of hours and hours of hard work, and now my house was not only spotless but smelled like a piney woods. I celebrated by lying on my bed reading for ten minutes until the floor dried.

I'd left Susie on the front porch, so I made my way carefully down the slippery stairs carrying a bucket and mop. On the second stair from the bottom, disaster struck: I fell on my ass, banging up my butt, leg and arm. More critically, the bucket of dirty water spilled all over my pants, the stairs, and the front hall. I cursed and began paddling the water out the door with the mop. Then I went into the bathroom to clean up.

4. I removed my filthy sweatpants and then sat down to pee. When finished, I flushed (uh duh) and then gasped as water rose in the bowl...to the very top of the bowl....out onto the floor. Horrified, I saw the dirty water spill onto my brand-new clean floor and then onto my feet. I knew why the toilet had clogged -- I'd flushed two paper towels earlier after Windexing the bathroom mirror, and New Orleans's sewer system is notoriously third-world -- but I couldn't go back in time to stop the madness. Instead, I had to re-mop the floor. And plunge the toilet. Tomorrow. Because remember how filthy I was from cleaning all day in the humidity? And remember how I'd spilled a bucket of dirty mop-water on myself and then stood in pee? And shower access was blocked by a floor two inches deep in toilet water. I wasn't leaving my house to buy a plunger without bathing.

5. I called Jeffrey to complain about the outcome of my day. He commiserated properly and then we hung up. Ten minutes later I called him again.

Me: AAAAAAHHHH! There's a THING on my wall!

Him: Uh, what kind of thing?

Me: Ewwwwwwww! It's the size of one of those little lizards that run around outside (about 3 inches long) but it doesn't have any legs and it's OOZING up my WALL like I imagine a slug does except I don't know what a slug is! AAAAAAH!

Him: A slug is like a snail without a shell.

Me: Ew! This is much bigger!

Him: Okay, scoop it onto some paper and put it outside.

Me: OKAY BYE!

I eventually pushed the THING onto some cardboard with a ruler, threw the whole thing in the trash, and took the trash out. I still have no idea how a slug entered my home. I guess it could have been living in my mop, which I store on the front porch. Still: EW.

Those book reviews:

The Devil of Nanking, Mo Hayden, 2004. Excellent -- my favorite book this year. There's this English girl named Grey that read about the horrors of the Nanking massacre when she was little, and there were some appalling details that everyone thought she made up, so she was hospitalized but she knew she wasn't crazy and that these things really did happen. She finds herself in Tokyo in 1990, looking for a Chinese professor that wrote about an alleged film of the atrocities, but he doesn't want to talk to her. Then she finds a room in a huge old mansion that's now being rented out room by room as a boardinghouse, but every scene set in the house is eerie and you know the house has multiple secrets like in The Ghost Writer. Creepy, creepy. And about one-third of the book is devoted to the professor's life in 1937 when he actually lived through the massacre. Chilling stuff. Sure, the book is flawed -- the end isn't as shocking as the author wants you to believe, and I sort of expected that, and the plot twists aren't, you know, that twisty -- but I was fascinated by Grey and Jason and the mansion and the pregnant wife and yeah, read this one.

Down Girl and Sit: Smarter than Squirrels, Lucy Nolan, 2004. Cute little juvenile chapter book narrated by a dog about as crazy as Suze. Good for a beginning reader that loves dogs.

Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater, Alan Richman, 2004. A series of restaurant and wine reviews he's published in GQ in the last twenty years. Mostly excellent. He's at his funniest when he talks about his family and friends, and at his most unreachable (to me) when he discusses wine. But even though he spent hundreds of dollars on some meals, I liked that he gave the same attention to his quest to find the perfect barbecued-pork sandwich in North Carolina, and I liked even more that he never mentioned his ability to switch between these arenas.

About a Boy, Nick Hornby, 1998. I've read this several times before, of course, but I picked it up again because I was out of library books and I couldn't find Cassandra at the Wedding. Hornby is as hilarious as I recall him; he's both real and funny at the same time, and his characters are never too over-the-top to be believed. This movie (which I haven't seen yet), and therefore the book, are billed as the story of Will/Hugh Grant, a man that pretends to be a single dad so he can sleep with single moms, but that premise evaporates shortly into the novel and the book becomes the story of twelve-year-old geek Marcus, the most sympathetic character I can think of. If you haven't read this, do so at once.

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card, 1977. This was another reread, and a delightful one. I think I first learned of this book from Becky. It's not the sort of thing I'd ever read on my own, and that's a damn shame. Ender's Game tells the story of a six-year-old boy genius selected by the government to go to battle school and learn how to fight so he can kick some alien ass in the upcoming war. The book tells how little Ender learns to deal with his peers, how he's taught to fight and to strategize, how he rises up through the ranks, and finally....maybe I should have seen it coming, but I didn't, and it's the finest twist-at-the-end I can think of.

Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, Laura Shapiro, 2004. I wasn't sure I'd be able to get into this, but I loved it. It's a slice of history-of-food that has to do with American housewives discovering, and largely rejecting, the wave of processed foods thrown at them by corporate advertisers after World War II.

Sushi after sushi

2005-06-05T11:32:00.000-05:00

So last week, Jeff and I had to go to Metairie (a border suburb of New Orleans) on a work-related errand, and I was craving sushi, so we decided to stop at Sake Café for lunch. We'd both driven by the main Sake on Magazine Street dozens of times, but neither of us had ever been inside, so the Metairie branch was our first experience therein.

The decor was like Red Lobster and our waiter was freakish (at one point, I needed a fork and got up to ask for one at the sushi bar, and the waiter ran up to me and said in surly tones, "You stay in your seat. If you need something, I'll bring it to you"). Okay, whatever. But the food was awesome. I had three dishes:

1. The best vegetable roll I've ever had. It was an "inside-out" hand roll, with sticky rice on the outside, and within was a smorgasbord of vegetables: black mushrooms, crisp lettuce, oshinko, avocado, carrot and cucumber. Too often, I've ordered a vegetable roll and it's just cucumber and pickle. This was a delicious blend of flavors.

2. Agedashi tofu. I'd never heard of this, but it was cubes of pan-fried tofu that were creamy on the inside, crispy on the outside, and served in a tray of some delicious sauce.

3. Veggies tempura. These were fairly standard, but they included only the good vegetables: eggplant, broccoli, sweet potato, etc. and no onion or green pepper.

Jeff had a tuna roll, which he said was very good; shumai, at my recommendation, because I miss my seafood-eating days when I was a big shumai fan; and edamame, which I helped him eat, and of course this quickly degenerated into both of us shooting the beans out of their pods at one another. He was better at this than I was.

This stellar experience led me to quickly become interested in the Magazine Street branch of Sake. I had a vague impression of it formed from reading reviews and talking to others about it: truly awesome food, but overpriced and favored by hipsters and yuppies. When I unexpectedly received a check in the mail yesterday, I decided to give it a try.

The decor was very different: it was all wood floors and set up in a variety of levels, with angled bars (sushi and alcohol) and hidden nooks. I was given a table next to the sushi bar and greeted by the cutest waiter I've ever seen. She was about twenty and had red-gold hair and was just precious.

The menu, to my surprise, was very different than at the Metairie location. The first thing my eyes fell upon was the goat cheese gyoza. Yes. Why has no one thought of this before? I consulted with the beautiful waiter and was assured that these were vegetarian. I then asked for the agedashi tofu, and she said it came with fish flakes, "but that's really disgusting so I'll tell them to make it without those." Okay, yay. And then I ordered another vegetable roll, just to see if it was as excellent as last week's.

I was very impressed with my meal, but not completely blown away. The goat cheese gyoza were delicious, of course; how could they not be? And they were served with mango dipping sauce and a small salad of mixed greens and cherry tomatoes with soy-ginger dressing. I'd considered ordering a side salad, but was glad I didn't because this was perfect. But I thought the gyoza could have been done a little better. They were just pastry filled with goat cheese. Sure, they were wonderful, but I thought they'd be more creatively done.

The tofu agedashi was pretty much the same as what I had in Metairie, although presumably my first order had contained "fish flakes," whatever that means. It was very good. My vegetable roll was not quite as delectable as the last one, though. It contained five pieces instead of four, and it seemed to have all the same vegetables, but there was no rice on the outside, and it just didn't have the same bright blend of flavors that my first one had. However, I did take this one apart to identify all the vegetables. Lettuce, black mushroom, oshinko, cucumber, and -- and this is an inspired idea -- carmelized onion in teriyaki sauce.

As for the allegedly exorbitant prices, I can see how it could get really expensive to eat at Sake if you don't stick to vegetarian items. The fish and seafood sushi and sashimi get really expensive at the upper end, and meat entrees go for twenty dollars. Nonetheless, my three-dish meal and a Diet Coke came to only $16. I think I want to go again right now. Let me see if the boy is available for lunch.

Oops, I've just been memed

2005-06-01T19:56:00.000-05:00

Via Jeffrey:

Total Size of Music Files on My Computer: This took me a minute, because I had to add up the volumes of a variety of folders named after now-unused filesharing programs (remember Audiogalaxy?) Um....2.74 gigs? Is that even possible?

The Last CD I Bought Was: I eBayed Drag It Up by the Old 97s last week in preparation for their June 15 show. Haven't gotten it yet. That shit better come tomorrow.

Song Playing Right Now on my iFruit: As if. On my stereo, though, it's Elastica's "Line Up."

Five Songs That Mean a Lot to Me (1 per artist):

One per artist. Okay.

Ani Difranco, "In or Out" -- describes the joy and anger involved in coming out as bisexual.

Elastica, "Your Arse, My Place" -- It's an absurd bluesy punk song, and it reminds me of the period in my life when Pinky used to call me to wake me up every morning and play this in my ear.

Old 97s, "Designs On You" -- Out of their dozens of songs, I keep coming back to this one. Rhett sounds like he really, really means it. I'd love to meet the girl. Unless she's his wife.

Le Tigre, "Hot Topic" -- it's not my favorite song by them, but that wasn't the question. This one takes me back to the days when I befriended an English writer that wanted to make a zine with a page about every girl mentioned in the song.

Moldy Peaches, "Steak for Chicken" -- because I'm kind of stretching here at the end, and also because it reminds me of driving around stoned in a car with MF and two dogs and also of my first trip to New Orleans, when some dude in a truck leaned out the window and yelled to us, "Do y'all want to buy any steak or chicken?" and I almost peed on the sidewalk.

Who's next?

Ha ha, my pretties...

Rae
Becky
Pinky
Juice
TIL

Go!

I been havin a snake

And we're closed

Another Mardi Gras picture

What I been readin

I may merely be old.

Where I been

Moving

Find of the day

The two best library blog posts of the week

Another letter from Tal

Taxing

Doorbell idiocy

Memed yet again

Eh?

Discovery of the day

How librarian-y are you?

Ha ha

The bathroom: a snapshot

Oh and...

Happy birthday to me

Interesting happenings of late

Best.toy.ever

Flashback

2006 (so far) in books

Disappointment

Quote of the day

2005 in books

Exemplifying camp

Linguistic deja vu

Nadia has moved

AARRRRRGGGGHHHH

Yay!

Rejection letter

What I hate about Curves

The return of the ghost of Dee

Susie's first snow

Quote of the day

Quote of the day

How could this be?

Local culture

Here we go again

I'm on a roll

Rare book of the day

Some books I have read recently

Sayonara

Books and food, in which I describe the best of both I've had since The Hurricane

Human beings suck.

I'm eating a banana.

The Clue in the Identical Prose

The Mystery of the Former Resident

Library notes

This is my freezer.

The bad part

Actual letter I'm mailing tomorrow

People whose whereabouts I'd like to know

It's not time yet.

The weirdest thing

Again with the actual conversations

Hey, y'all

Hello, Katrina

A big blanket of love

Should I just rename the blog "Actual Conversations"?

More books

Other stuff I been readin

You got me, Beckers

Two things I have learned tonight

And on that note

Worst.restaurant.ever

Quote of the day

Yeah, I know

Memory fragment

Food that changes color

Semiannual book rundown

Idiot of the week

Search terms

I have been entertaining myself

Further car woes

Thoughts while reading Harry Potter 6

Interesting things that happened yesterday on Jeff's birthday

Story of the day