The Mental Meanderings of a Sleep-Deprived Sicky

Do you know what I love? I love movies where actors with no previous singing careers sing. I love them! I fully plan to see Sweeney Todd, not just because it is a Tim Burton movie, but because I want to swoon when Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman sing. And Sasha Baron Cohen, too, I guess, although not so much for swooning really, but the other half of the fascination is the whole "Wow, look at that famous person sing in public. Neat!" thing, so yes, Sacha Baron Cohen too. And Helena Bonham Carter, for that matter.

The main point, though, is Johnny Depp! And Alan Rickman! The Husband pointed out to me once that in Love Actually - which is a bloody brilliant movie and I don't want to hear opinions to the contrary - Mr. Rickman wears glasses that cause him to bear an unfortunate resemblance to Sally Jessy Raphael. This is sadly, but hilariously, true, and has been a sticking point in my appreciation. But the singing! It will cure me! (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was already cured, and if you want to know how, follow the chain of links to Alan Rickman reading my favorite Shakespearean sonnet. Although, in all honesty, it's my favorite sonnet because it's kind of funny, and he's probably reading it a bit too seriously, but oh my god, just listen. Seriously. I'll wait here.) So anyway, all that is to say that I'm looking forward to Sweeney Todd.


Do I seem weird today? I feel like I seem weird. I'm using a lot of exclamation points, and I normally try to keep my fangirliness hidden away where it can't embarrass anyone. I have been home sick for the past two days, though, and I am getting a bit stir crazy, I think. I am genuinely sick, but not the type of sick where you can't get up from the couch. It's the kind of sick that is nice for a day or two, because I feel sick enough that I don't feel guilty about skipping out on work, but not so sick that I am praying for death. But it's getting old. As much as I love the husband (and I do, even more than Johnny Depp), I think I need outside human contact. One of the things I like about my job is getting to talk to a wide range of people. So while it has been lovely sitting on the couch knitting and listening to the This American Life cds that a co-worker lent me, I am ready to get out of the house. I am also ready to get a decent night's sleep after two nights in a row of practically no sleep, thanks to a horrible, dry, hacking cough. Nyquil wasn't working, so I tried a homeopathic cough syrup called Chestal today. I don't trust homeopathy, really, but then I don't trust the drug companies either. Still, though, I am half-afraid that this syrup will kill me, or at least make me throw up, which I hate.

By the way, why do all the cough syrups promise to thin out your phlegm to ease congestion while also suppressing coughs? Personally, I just want my cough suppressed for the night, and I promise I will fight phlegm tomorrow. But assuming that my phlegm is thinned, shouldn't it be removed somehow, before it thickens again? And wouldn't my body's instinct be to cough it out? Isn't this counter-productive? Won't someone please think of the phlegm?

Storytime Improprieties

On the way out of toddler storytime, most of the grown-ups (who are mostly moms, but there are exceptions, including some nannies, so grown-ups is what I go with) will have their child attempt to say good-bye and thank you. This is fine. It garners me hugs, gives me a chance to have one-on-one time with some of the less forward kids, and shows that I know their names (or helps me learn them). And generally, we all understand each other's boundaries.

This week, though, a mom asked her child to tell me he loves me. Parents who read my blog (or if we're being frank here, parent who reads my blog): please, please don't ever try to force your child to tell the librarian, or any other provider of childcare/entertainment, 'I love you'. It's one thing when your child says it on his/her own. Kids don't know what it means, and in their innocent ways, they probably do love me, much as they love the ice cream man, Dora the Explorer, and anyone else who never tells them no. Grown-ups do know what love is. I think I can speak for the profession here when I say we do not want to sit with your child and say that while we really, really like him, and we think things are going great between us, we just don't think we're ready for love. It's not him, it's us. No, actually, it's you, weirdo mommy.

While I don't love that child in particular, I do love storytime. I love the children as a collective whole. So I'm sad that next week is our last week before storytime break. When storytime goes away, so does my job satisfaction. And it doesn't pick back up again until late January. Blech.

On a different note, you know those inflatable lawn ornaments that are lightweight fabric with a fan blowing them into the shape of a holiday symbol such as Santa or the Easter Bunny, or a Hanukkah bear? The husband and I have a theory about them. (In all honesty, it was his theory but one of the benefits of marriage is that what's his is mine, intellectual property laws be damned.) The theory is that these were cooked up by the energy companies, who realized that leaving extra lights on all night wasn't driving electricity bills up anywhere near high enough. So they found a way for people to run a small motor day in, day out, thus showing their holiday spirit while making the earth die just a little more quickly. Is that grinchy? Maybe so, but a co-worker told me that she's heard of children being traumatized when their parents turned the thing off because they think that Mommy and Daddy killed Santa (or the Easter Bunny or the Hanukkah bear). And you can't tell me that even if the energy companies didn't come up with that, their CEOs aren't at least a little bit happy that that happened. So grinch that, bitches. Also, a Hanukkah bear? What the hell, people? The husband said it's a gray area of Talmudic law, but I think it's probably pretty sacrilegious to put a yarmulke on a bear.

Dispatch from the homefront

Yesterday, an older, male member of the husband's extended family poked me in my back and asked me if I'm ticklish. What does one say when one is asked that question by a 50-something male that one is sort of related to?

The horror! The horror!

So I was planning to write a nice post about how thankful I am for different wonderful things in my life: the husband, the dog, my family, my in-laws, my health, the fact that I have a job that let me afford my rock and roll lifestyle, etc. It was going to be happy and gooey, and I was going to get all teary-eyed while I wrote it. But then tragedy, in the form of job-related mental torture, struck.

Do you know what DDR is? Officially known as Dance Dance Revolution, it's a video game in which players dance along to horrible music (good music is available - but the kids today don't like good music) in order to earn points. For your edification, here is a link to a person in a lion suit playing DDR. Libraries use DDR and similar video games as an attempt to remain relevant in the lives of today's youth.

Apparently it works, because I spent an hour and a half yesterday with one of my fellow employees trapped in a room with 15 tweens and a few younger kids playing DDR. Our programming room does not have windows that can be opened and the kids were dressed for blustery winter weather, so within 20 minutes, the place smelled like a gym. And to be fair, they did play many songs that really aren't too bad. It's just that there are four songs that they really really like. These songs get played over and over and over and over. One of them is "Hey Mama" by the Black Eyed Peas, which I used to like, until I heard a 2-minute portion of it 20 times. There's one called "Butterfly" in which the woman sings in a very high-pitched voice, and the majority of the song is "aaahh-eee-aaahh-eee-iiiii" repeated over and over again to a techno beat.

For some reason, I am always the one to sit in on DDR. Always. Two adults have to be in the room due to village ordinance, and usually my partner in pain is a very nice woman who is in her 70s, and thus should really be exempt from this particular form of library fun. Today, it was someone close to my age, with twin toddlers at home. At one point, she turned to me and said, "I will never complain about the Wiggles again." So maybe that's how I'll tie this back into Thanksgiving: I am grateful for my lot in life. Because no matter what else happens, nothing in my home life is set to a pulsing techno beat.

Alpaca-riffic!

The husband and I travelled home this weekend to drop off the turkey for the Thanksgiving celebration with his family. While there, we also visited an alpaca farm in the general vicinity of his parents' house. We've been looking at a lot of alpaca farms online.


Do you even know what an alpaca is? I wouldn't, if I didn't knit. This is an alpaca:



Our long-term life plans at the moment revolve largely around this creature. We want to eventually move out to the country and buy alpaca (and maybe chickens and various seedlings to grow food from, but mostly alpaca). I am going to take a handspinning class, so that I can shear the alpaca and then turn their fleece into yarn. Then maybe I'll knit products out of the yarn, and then sell them for profit. Look at that sentence structure. An alpaca future turns me into a 3-year-old, syntax-wise.

I do fully realize that the husband and I are turning weird. Seriously, we don't plan to have kids anyway, but if we did, they would totally be the awkward kids who wear handmade clothes and bring their own weird lunches. ("It's a tofu sandwich. My mom made the bread and my dad made the tofu. The little chunks are spelt!") But knowing that you're weird offsets some of the weirdness, right? If the library has taught me anything, it's that people who are weird to the point of making you uncomfortable never have an inkling that they're uncomfortably weird. At least that's what I'm telling myself. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to harvest the dog's hair to make my first yarn. (Not really, but I totally could.)

Regarding Book Donations

Dear potential library donor:



We at the Suburban Chicagoland Public Library would like to thank you for thinking of us as a possible recipient of your generosity. While we would highly value a financial donation that could be used to purchase items that the library may actually need, we are also very excited by the possibility of receiving our fourth donated copy of the book version of The Prince of Egypt. But before you present us with the nearly forgotten contents of your basement, we would like you to consider the following list of questions whose answers may have an impact on our ability to use (and perhaps even to touch) your donation.



Are there pages or other parts missing that will affect other people's ability to enjoy the item? Even if you can figure out the plot of a book without those missing 20 pages, most people would prefer to read rather than infer their books. Also, if your child has torn off all the flaps in their lift-the-flap book, this will impede the other children's ability to enjoy the book.



Are there questionable stains anywhere on or in the item? While you can look at the brown smear on the cover of that well-loved copy of Hop on Pop, and remember the hilarious time that little Johnny's ice cream bar melted all over his hands and clothing, we at the library are not privy to that fond memory. In fact, we at the library are concerned that said smear is feces.



Are there bodily fluids anywhere on or in the item? Though technically speaking feces is usually not a fluid, it does count when answering this question.



Are there unusual smells emanating from the item? Actually, considering the fact that the smell of human urine is not really 'unusual', per se, we would like to restate the question to read Are there any smells emanating from the item?



Did you write the book yourself? While we are sure that your 600-page science fiction novel is a heart-breaking work of staggering genius, perhaps you should submit it to agents and publishers before attempting to take the library world by storm.



Did you pay someone else to write the book? Truly, it is wonderful that someone loves your child enough to have had a story about a woodland fairy altered to include her name on every page. But perhaps that is a treasure that will be most valued by you and yours in the years to come.



Look inside the bag or box in which you will be putting the items. Are there droppings from rodents or other animals (including humans) in said bag or box? We at the library really, really do not want to deal with feces.



Again, we are very grateful that our library is the first institution you think of as you clean your basement. We are also very grateful that we are not Goodwill, as we can only imagine the types of things that you stuff into garbage bags and leave on their doorsteps. However, it is a much more efficient use of your tax dollars for you to place these items in your own garbage rather than having a library professional do so.



Thank you for your time,



A Disgruntled Librarian

The sound of my indie cred dying

It's Saturday night, and in Rachelville (Rachelstan? Racheltopia?), that means it's time to try to go through my RSS feeds. (Does anybody else feel a tiny sense of quiet desperation at having over 600 items? Or a bizarre sense of guilt at not at least skimming the titles of said items? Just me? Okay.)


Anyway, the highlight so far (aside from a picture of a chipmunk holding a flower on Cute Overload) has been Chicagoist's link to a great 80s video. Is it wrong that I know all the lyrics to a Huey Lewis song? Or that I was genuinely delighted to follow the link and find that it was this? Did you know that you could see Huey Lewis's schlong in the Robert Altman movie Short Cuts? It's true. Everyone talks about Julianne Moore's below-the-belt frontal, but the real news is Huey Lewis. (Ha! That was unintentionally a pun. Sort of. Hey-o!)

On to other things. While watching my new favorite show, Pushing Daisies, I saw an ad for Tonka. In the ad, the voiceover tells us how boys are just built different. They then describe the toy, which contains a shape-sorter (obviously girls won't like this - shapes are closely related to math, and math is hard), a push toy (girls don't like to push things around - except the men in their lives!) and a free-wheeling riding toy (even at 2 years old, a woman driver is a woman driver - and you don't want that in your home). The ad then reminds us that boys are built different. It would be bad enough if there were two versions one yellow and construction-y, and one pink and thus girly, or if they just only showed boys playing with it, but to suggest that the toy is not made for girls is stupid. Not to mention that about half of the babies in the country are girls. Why would they cut out that market share? It made me angry, and I don't want to be angry during Pushing Daisies. (Really, it's awesome, if you're into quirk. Also, there's a male knitter in it, which makes it even more frustrating that the Tonka ad was so egregious.)

That's all for now. By the way, if anyone has found my blog from a search for Huey Lewis's schlong, I'm sorry to disappoint. But keep searching, tiger!

The gift that keeps on giving

The little storytime darlings have given me a cold. At least I think so - my allergies have been weirdly intense since September. But I went home early today with that groggy-headed cold feeling. There is a certain degree of tragedy in coming down with something on the first week of my two-week storytime break. But when you work with kids, particularly babies and toddlers, you have to accept the gift of their viruses, right along with the scribbled drawings and and the unabashed adoration. Some of them are more egregious in their germ-sharing then others, though. One of the toddlers used to come to my baby storytime, and during the quieter moments he would toddle up to me and put his head on my lap (which, in all honesty, was a little weird in and of itself). Since he was teething, when he got up he would leave a puddle of drool big enough to soak through my pant leg. It's a little like a college party, dealing with wee ones.


Actually, until around the time that they turn 3, kids really are like little drunk people. Lurching around, grabbing things for balance that aren't stable enough to withstand their weight, falling on their heads without getting hurt, spitting up without warning, babbling incoherently, crying for no reason, lifting their shirts to show you what they've got, coming out of nowhere to hug you without asking - my storytime mornings are one big frat party. But with more puppets. Unless you went to kinkier parties than I did.

76 trombones? Very nearly.

This weekend, the husband and I travelled home to watch my sister compete in a marching band competition. It was actually pretty fun, and her school was one of the five to move on to the state competition, which is a Big Deal.

I have never seen a marching band competition before, let alone an intense and important one. I went to a small high school, whose marching band performed at football games and that's it. Apparently Indiana is known for its intense marching band competitions, but I had never even heard of the concept until my sister joined up at her school. (My parents moved after I graduated, and my siblings go to a giant high school.) Here are some things that I found surprising about competitive marching band:

1. There is interpretive dance. Okay, as I said, I went to a small high school. Our "color guard" carried a flag or two and sometimes threw batons. Apparently, they were supposed to be symbolizing the movement of a butterfly while wearing an outfit that looks like Madonna's Like a Virgin outfit if she had decided to incorporate a playing card color scheme. But a joker tutu will look silly without accessories, which brings me to...
   
2. There are props. Each of the bands divides their performances into four (or so) movements, during which the color guard uses different banners or other props. One school had big umbrella-ish things with dangly parts - they looked like cat toys. Another had things that looked like hamster balls which they danced within. Another band had big wrenches to go with their car racing theme. They also had banners with the faces of famous racers, including, of course, Dale Earnhardt. This is Indiana, after all.
   
3. The fans get into it. Obviously the parents get into it. (One mom, whose daughter was in color guard, not band, would ring a cow bell every time the girl did something impressive. A cow bell. During a band competition.) But there were also peers of the band members who were very into it. There were shirtless teenage boys with their chests painted representing a school that is 120 miles away. Of course, during my own geeky high school years, there were shirtless teenage boys with painted chests at the state Academic Decathlon competition (for reals, people), so maybe teenage boys just like to take off their shirts and paint their chests.


4. It is hard, and my little sister is very good at it. All sarcasm aside, I am pretty proud of my sister. She has spent hours and hours practicing throughout the summer. The weekend before last, when it was in the high 80s outside, she was marching with her clarinet. She has worked her ass off. (Literally - the girl's a healthy eater and a size 2. We are not a family of size 2s.) And while I can not walk in a straight line while well-rested and concentrating, she walks in intricate patterns, often sideways, while playing a musical instrument. And she is a high school girl who regularly appears in public wearing a hat with a giant plume. If that doesn't show guts and determination, I don't know what does.

Just a Region Rat without a home

Look, everybody! I did a blog!

I've been feeling the need for a blog for quite some time now, but haven't been able to come up with a name for it. It's an interesting soul search, finding a blog name. It's also a challenge of one's cleverness and wit. Oh, how I wish I could have a cleverly named blog. But unfortunately, the ability to come up with a clever, not too punny name that would stand the test of time was excluded from my gene pool, along with normal height and thick chestnut-colored hair. (To be honest, I don't know what color a chestnut is. But doesn't chestnut color hair sound wonderful? Better than dishwater blonde, at least?)

So clever wit was out. Instead, I turned to descriptiveness. I am a Hoosier. Growing up, that didn't mean much to me. I was born and bred in Hammond, which is in a part of Indiana known within the state as The Region. It's in Indiana physically, but not ideologically. It's highly industrialized, highly polluted and filled with steel mills, factories, and blue-collar liberals. No one I knew enjoyed watching racing, and everybody cheered for Chicago sports teams, even though we claimed to hate FIPs (fucking Illinois people - see also FIBs (f'ing IL bastards) and FIDs (f'ing IL drivers)). But now that I am a FIP, and it's been three years since the husband and I lived in Indiana, and now that we're gearing up for a move next year, most likely out of the area, I'm finding myself identifying more strongly with my Hoosier heritage. And I'm a little sad that I will most likely never live in Indiana again.