Where have all the crazies gone?

I have been having trouble coming up with interesting posts lately. My life is kind of boring. The job is all right, our house is all right, we still have a condo, and we’re pretty poor. Not much to talk about there. You know what the big difference is, though? I don’t have any time on the reference desk at my job. This is largely because there is no reference desk. It’s just the circulation desk, and they pay me too much to let me do that. If you had told me last year that I would be at all sad about that, I’d have told you that you’re nuts. But I kind of am. A reference desk shift breaks up the day. It’s a good time to do busy work. It lets you talk to people, which, surprisingly, I usually enjoy. And best of all, it gives you good stories.

There are far fewer good stories at my small little library. This is a library where people eat the food that patrons bring in without any worry. At my old libraries, patron food was met with suspicion. “Mary brought this? Is that Friendly Grandma Mary or Crazy Talks-to-Herself Mary? Did we make her pay fines recently? Let’s have one of the pages try some first.” Here, they know the names of just about everyone, and certainly everyone who cares enough about us to bring food. And they know them because they like them, not because they felt obligated to learn them in order to file a better police report.

It makes life simpler and probably safer, but also a bit more boring. Nobody tells me not to worry if there are any disturbances because “I used to be a cop, and I always carry.” (We soon found out that in crazy-speak, “used to be a cop” means “used to be a parking attendant”, and “I always carry” means “this is why your desk has a panic button that calls the police for you”.) Nobody wearing a large dragon pendant asks me to help them set up an email account in the name of “KungFuPinkFloydLennon742” (not the real name, but close). Nobody even asks me for the book that they read once that was blue, or maybe red, and had a cat on the cover, but not in the story.

The hardest part of no desk time, blog-wise, is that I would do some of my best thinking on the reference desk. There were times, such as science fair season, when the desk was crazy busy and I wouldn’t have a second to pause. In general, though, the desk is just intermittently busy. And I find it nearly impossible to get any work done while sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, trying to look approachable. Sure, sometimes I’d be on the desk with someone and we’d talk the whole time, or sometimes I would actually get work done. But a lot of the time, I’d stare into space counting down the 20 minutes until my shift was over and I could go to lunch, and then I would have an idea, and by the time I got home, a post was sitting in my brain, waiting to be put to screen. Not so much now. I’ll have to find a new source of inspiration.

Ho Ho Ho

At this point, I am two weeks past it, but I’ve got to share the details of the library’s second biggest program (after Summer Reading Program), if only so that I remember. The program is an ornament workshop. It was mentioned on my first day of work as an upcoming thing that is a Big Deal. At the end of September, it was mentioned again as something I should get started on, a suggestion which I pretended to seriously consider and then promptly dismissed. Christmas? In the fall? Ten weeks before the program in question? I’m so sure.

I started to do a little planning in October, but it was November before I really started to get cracking on it. Which probably would have been fine except that what with my other job responsibilities, I wasn’t spending the amount of time I should have. It wasn’t until about two weeks before the big day that the enormity of the thing really hit me. The program is set up so that the kids have 5 or 6 ornaments to pick from. There should be a variety of skill levels, a variety of types of things (i.e., one Santa, one reindeer, etc.) and I felt there should be a variety of materials that the ornaments would be made of. I couldn’t repeat anything done in the last 4 or 5 years. And there needed to be about 75 of each type of ornament. People, that is 375 to 450 ornaments, each with at least one thing that needs to be cut, even if it’s just the ties to hang the ornament

What this ended up meaning was that the last two weeks of November were spent furiously cutting out felt triangles and counting beads and tracing gingerbread men onto cork, and on and on. I developed a callus on my finger where the scissor handle rested. I developed a constant burning sensation in my stomach. And I developed a sense that this was karmic payback for my deep-seated reluctance to help with ornaments as a child. I’ve never particularly liked Christmas decorations, and I was known to get sulky when forced to help out with that aspect of the Christmas production that my family goes through each year. Every time I remembered something I had left to cut, or realized that something I thought was going to be quick was going to take an hour, I pictured my mom rubbing her hands together and cackling.

In the end, it turned out fine. I had been planning six ornaments, but one got cut at the last minute, not that anyone knew, or would have cared if they did. I genuinely feel a bit ambivalent about this much of the library’s resources being spent on a program celebrating a religious holiday, even if we do just focus on the secular. (My predecessor would occasionally do angel ornaments, and while I respect most of her choices, I kind of think if you’re going to do that, you may as well do a baby Jesus.) But the program brings in tons of people who would never come to the library otherwise, and it’s clearly labeled as a Christmas event, so for this year, at least, I turned off my inner alarm bells and rolled with the Christmas cheer. Next year, maybe I’ll be organized enough to plan a winter celebration storytime that features all of the many winter celebrations. Above all else, next year, when my boss brings up the program in September, I promise not to laugh.