Ring – getting hit on at the library.

Posted on January 7, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I wear a wedding ring for a reason, but it doesn’t seem to mean much to some people.

I was at work yesterday and a patron came in who has been a regular for the past few months. He is in his mid 60s, weighs around 250 pounds, and gets only movies. He also reeks of alcohol. He smells so much of it that it is obvious that even if he isn’t drunk at that moment, he is drunk often enough that it is just part of his body chemistry now.

It was single digit weather, and he was wearing just a long sleeve shirt and overalls. He didn’t feel the cold, because the alcohol had numbed him.

He worked up the courage to ask me if he could see my hands. He said that he is a palm reader. Sure. Why not? So I gave him my hands and he decided that they said I had two children.

Nope, unless you count jewelry and writing. They are certainly creative outlets I have, and I put a lot of energy into them. But I don’t think that is what he meant. I already know that this is going to be weird from that start, but I let him continue. I’m curious by this point.

He goes on, with some vague things and nothing specific. I think if you want to know about somebody you’d be better off asking them than looking at lines in their palms, but it was making him happy. Meanwhile I’m breathing very shallowly because he smells so strongly of alcohol.

I let him do this because it afforded me a chance to see a different side of him. Sadly, I got to see more than I wanted. One day I’ll remember that being friendly is often seen as being a friend.

At the end he said that he’d wanted to read my palms ever since he met me, but just wasn’t brave enough. He mentioned that he was glad he finally did.

He left and then came back. His car wouldn’t start and he’d called a friend. He was going to wait in the library. I could tell that he wanted to talk more to me, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I have work to do, and I really wasn’t getting anything out of this interaction. Plus, again, the smell. I started getting books to check in and putting them up. This kept me from constantly being at the desk. He didn’t quite catch the clue so I suggested he go look for more things to check out while he waited for his friend.

He left again, and again came back. This time he said “I wonder if it would be too forward to ask you out to dinner sometime?”

Really?

I said my usual line for this “I think my husband would have a problem with that.”

Not to mention me. What would I get out of spending an hour or so with this man? He’s old enough to be my father. He’s an addict. He doesn’t even read. Totally not my type.

I can see why he’d want to be with me, but why would I want to be with him?

I study human nature, sure. There’s that. But I like going to the zoo, where the animals are in their cages and safely away from me. I don’t invite them in my home. I don’t go out on safari to find them either. So no, I’m not going out to dinner with him.

How could he not notice the ring? I wear only one ring. It is gold. It is plain. It is on the proper finger. There is no ambiguity about it.

He had my hands right in front of him and he still didn’t get it.

Or maybe he did and he just doesn’t care.

Things will be awkward between us for a while. He was embarrassed. That is obvious. But will he even remember? Who knows how much he can retain these days. He’s pretty pickled.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been hit on at the library. It is always by older men. Sometimes when I remind them that I’m married they say things like “That doesn’t matter in my crowd.” Uh, it matters to me. If I was into that, I wouldn’t have gotten married.

Some ask me out and they have just met me. They don’t even know my name. They don’t know anything about me other than I am female.

Do they go hunting with birdshot? The wide dispersal pattern has to hit something, right? If they ask everybody out, they’ll eventually get lucky.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking that I’m really glad to be out of that rat race.

It isn’t about finding just anybody. Most of it is being OK with yourself first. I want to ask these guys, would you date you? Really? If not, then work on that first. Get sober. Get healthy. Develop a hobby. Be interesting. Don’t be desperate.

Because women can smell desperate the same way they can smell the fact that you’ve been drinking yourself to sleep every night since your wife left.

And any woman who says “yes” to that isn’t worth having.

Crazy hair – on poverty.

Posted on January 7, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

You know those people that you can look at and tell they are poor? We have several of those in the library. Some seem one month away from homelessness.

There’s a new lady who has started coming in who this describes. I’m going to call her Tommie. She only gets videos, and they are for herself and her husband. She is short and wears leftover clothes and has hair that is wild and stringy. Recently she held out her hands and showed me her French manicure. This was her Christmas present. She was really excited about it.

I was a bit conflicted. It was beautiful work. It was the one beautiful thing she had done for herself. She would have done better if she had gotten her hair treated so it didn’t look so wild. Her hair is a white person’s equivalent of an afro. It isn’t as thick or as tall, but it is very wavy. It looks like she hasn’t put conditioner in it in ever.

Of course, she doesn’t have to. There is nothing saying that people have to manage their hair, exactly the same as people don’t have to wear makeup or shave. But if they don’t do these things, they will get judged as different or as dirty. I understand this all too well. I don’t wear makeup or shave my legs, and I understand the social lines I’m crossing when I do it.

One of my coworkers thinks she and the friend who drives her to the library are both dirty. I don’t think they are. I’ve never noticed a smell coming from them. We have plenty of patrons who smell very badly. Sometimes the smell is best described as a blend of cheap cigarettes, the sweat that comes from lack of showering and a diet of convenience store foods, and ferrets. They too get only DVDs, and the cases come back reeking of this poisonous cocktail.

Then again there are people who are aware of how they smell and they try to cover it up with perfume that is very strong. As much as I dislike strong body odor, I prefer it to the perfume because it doesn’t set off my asthma.

Back to Tommie. I can only imagine what it was like for the tech who did her nails. That is literally hands-on work. Our counters are pretty deep, so we don’t have to touch anybody. We also generally don’t have to deal with them for long. Doing someone’s nails is another thing entirely. Maybe the tech doesn’t even think about this. She does this all day long. This is her normal. But for me to have to hold someone’s hands while working with them would be really strange.

Don’t get me wrong – Tommie is a nice person. Simple, but nice. I just can’t imagine spending a lot of time in close proximity with her.

It was also weird because getting your nails done is a very girly act, and there is nothing girly about Tommie. Sure, she is female. But she doesn’t seem to care about it at all. Maybe I’ll see her in a different light once winter is over and she stops wearing that immense grey puffy jacket. Maybe she will wear something pretty and colorful. I doubt it.

She reminds me a lot of a friend I had in high school. I’ve talked about her before. That friend who I was assigned to for her good, not mine. That friend who had no friends. Perhaps that is why I notice her, and why I’m curious/concerned about her.

I had suggested that she ease up on the constant diet of movies and she assured me that she soon was going to get books because she needed to study for her GED. I wasn’t surprised. This just seems to be such a cliché all around. If you want to stay poor, drop out of school and watch a lot of movies.

New Year’s reflections for the library.

Posted on January 1, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

It is a new year. What will this mean for the library?

It is looking good for the employees. Everything looks stable. Our jobs are affected by the economy, but it is all balancing out. We are slated to get a raise soon, after five years of hiring and wage freezes.

There is a new branch manager. She in one day has already impressed me. She wrote us all a thank you note after her first day saying that she is grateful to be working with us. She has shown appreciation for the innovations we have taken. She has worked in many departments of the system and actually knows how to do everything that everyone does.

This is already more impressive than the last branch manager who only managed to stay hired because the administration was afraid of her hitting them with a racial discrimination lawsuit if she got fired. We all still have a lot of resentment over that. We were abused by an incompetent bully for 12 years and they knew it all along. And when I say incompetent bully, please understand that she was both incompetent and a bully. As for being a bully she was a master.

Our circulation manager is leaving. She is moving to the Main library. This is a promotion for her, and a relief for us. Five years ago I would not have thought this. Five years ago I would have been terrified at the idea of her leaving.

Not now. Now we are all celebrating it.

She has changed. Or I have changed, and I can now see her for who she is. She was never empathetic. She is more interested in getting the job done than getting people to go along with her. People get in the way. She doesn’t understand that if she is going to get something to happen, she has to get all of the staff behind it. She doesn’t get that part of being a manager is actually dealing with people. She has said many times that she doesn’t like dealing with people, so it amazes me that she got a customer service job.

I’m sure a lot of how she thinks has to do with her upbringing. She didn’t really have a childhood. Her parents weren’t really parent material and she had to do a lot of the work. But she is in her mid 40s now, and it is time to unlearn a lot of bad habits. Not listening to your staff when they work up the courage to tell you that something is wrong is a good thing to unlearn, especially when you’ve asked them to give them feedback.

We are all glad she is going. We have noticed in the time she has been working at another branch to fill in that we are all more relaxed. I’m a little concerned now that she is going to spread her negativity not only there but also to the rest of the system. But then, that was their choice. She was hired for that job, so that is what they wanted. Perhaps they can’t see her the way we can. Yet.

As for the patrons, who knows? I suspect there won’t be a lot of change. I suspect we will still have the patrons who come in all day, every day, and play games on Facebook rather than deal with their problems. I suspect we will still have patrons who come in reeking of alcohol who check out the limit on DVDs for the same reason.

Plenty of people use the library to escape. The funny part is that escape works different ways. You can escape your problems by playing games or watching movies or reading the same fluffy fiction over and over. You can also escape them by self educating. With the first, you aren’t fixing the problem. You are just putting it on hold. With the second you are doing something about it.

Both are running away from your problems. It is just that the second one is running toward something.

So it will be a new year at the library. There will be some welcome changes. There will be some predictable consistency. But most of all there will be stories. And thus there will be things to write about. Sometimes I think that is why I stay here.

That, and the fact that I’m not sure what other marketable skills I have.

Book sniffer

Posted on December 10, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I am a book sniffer. The older, the better. Perhaps that is part of why I chose to work in a library. I love the smell of books.

Now, I didn’t get hired at an old library. It was new when I started. You could say it and I started at the same time. It is now 13 years old and the books are just starting to smell pleasant. Fortunately we are part of a system and we get old books in on hold all the time. Every now and then there will be a special one.

A good book smells like fall leaves raked into a pile. It smells like the pile of leaves after you have jumped into it.

A good book smells a bit like vanilla pound cake, fresh out of the oven and cooling on the windowsill.

A good book smells faintly of pipe smoke from your grandfather, while he is warming up by the fire after coming in from the rain. He is sitting in a soft worn leather armchair, wearing his tweed jacket. It is a little bit of all these smells.

A good book smells comfortable and friendly. These smells are the smells of safety and home.

There was a coworker once who shared my love of smelling books. When we’d find one, we’d share it. We’d take the book in our hands, admire the cover and the patina of age on the pages, open it up and have a good sniff.

The branch manager saw us doing this once and openly wondered about our mental health. But, then again, she never read a book to our knowledge.

Now, not all books smell good. Some smell of feet, and cat spray, and the sad sickly smell of too many medicines and ointments and not enough fresh air. Way too many books smell like cheap cigarettes.

But it is the good smelling books that I cherish.

How can you spot a potentially good-smelling book? Covers like this are a sure thing. The original covers have been taken off and the book has been rebound in this amazing stuff. It is beyond the hardness of a hardback. This kind of stuff is going to last forever.

The spines are embossed, either in gold or silver.

The edge of the book looks like this. Note the worn nature and the color.

The corner edge is rounded. That is always a nice touch.

All these different bits point to really old books. That is what you are looking for. Smell the edge, and if that is OK, then open it up and smell the gutter (the inside, opposite the spine) of the book.

Modern books with their fancy ink and high quality paper just won’t do. You are looking for old books with old-fashioned paper.

Happy sniffing!

Invisible walls.

Posted on December 8, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Have you ever come across a wall that you didn’t even know was a wall?

There is a wall at the library. We have an open part of the counter. The counter is very long, and one of the ways behind it is to the left. People see it as a wall. If their children run behind the counter, they stand, helplessly, calling to their children. Come back, they say. The children ignore them. They will never cross that line to come behind the counter to get their children unless we tell them to. It is programmed into them.

Now it is more interesting. Now we have the DVDs that are on hold behind the counter. They started getting taken by people who didn’t have them on hold, so we had to move them here. The shelf for these holds is right next to the end of the counter. We’ve told the regulars to just go ahead and get their DVDs if we are busy. They still see the wall. They still don’t want to. Sometimes they will stop, just at the color change on the carpet, and lean in as far as they can to get their movies.

And it got me to thinking. What other walls are there? What else is there in my head that I’ve been programmed into thinking is something that can’t be done, some rule that I’m breaking?

The view from the patron’s side.

The “wall”.

The view from our side. Notice that the carpet is different on our side versus their side.

That dark blue line is used throughout the building, wherever there is a post or a counter. It probably makes it easier to blend carpets when they come together around a difficult corner. I don’t know if the blue part is the bit that stops people, or that it is the end of the counter.

What “walls” do you have? What prevents you from doing something? What has been programmed into you, that you needed to know then but don’t need to know now? What have you generalized as a “rule” that really is a “suggestion”?

Beach reading

Posted on December 6, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Many people like to take a book to read when they go to the beach. Some people take library books. Some people take library books onto the beach itself. If the books have plastic laminate covers, they often get sand inside them. It feels a little weird when you pick up the book afterwards. I’m not really sure how sand gets inside the cover since the whole point of the cover is that it keeps the cover clean.

This is what it looks like.

Another view. If the sand is in there long enough it dents the plastic cover so it feels like braille. This hasn’t gotten to that point yet.

Now, most of the books that are taken to the beach are fluffy romance novels.

Not this one. This is a real surprise for a beach read.

Generally people who read Lovecraft aren’t into going to the beach. Too much sunlight. Too many people.

Here’s a final shot, of the sand collected in the bottom.

10 o’clock on a Tuesday

Posted on December 3, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

We get a lot of people who are drunk at the library. Back when we opened at 9:30, it was very common that we’d see them at 10 on a Tuesday morning. Now that we open at ten there isn’t a set time. They come whenever. Early morning, late afternoon, evening. Any day. Why it was 10 on a Tuesday before is anybody’s guess.

They are so far into their cups that they smell of alcohol all the time. Even if they aren’t currently inebriated, they have been enough so over the course of the last month (or year) that the poison is coming out of their pores. You can smell it in their sweat. You can smell it when they exhale.

It is one reason why I dislike summer at the library. You can smell it more. In the summer, people sweat more. In the winter, even if they sweat they will often wear a coat and that provides a shield of sorts.

It is a reason I like the fact that the counter is as deep as it is. I’ve got a good 2 feet of Corian between me and them. But then I’d rather smell body odor than smell most perfumes. Body odor doesn’t trigger my asthma.

People who smell of alcohol almost always get videos. They will get the maximum number of videos as often as possible. Some come in every few days, turn in ten videos, and then get ten more. Just movies and TV shows – no documentaries. Nothing educational. I’ve only noticed one person get books who is inebriated.

I don’t know what any of this means. I just know that it is so common that it is cliché now.

I suspect there are many other people who have substance abuse issues who come into the library. I suspect they are better at hiding it. There is something about alcohol that it really smells when it comes out of the body. Sure, I can smell the people who smoke really cheap cigarettes, and those who reek of pot.

Alcohol and DVDS seem to go hand in hand. It is so cliché that if I see someone who only gets movies, and gets the maximum allowed several times a week, I wait to see if they come in with any signs of drinking.

What causes what? Is the drinking first, or the excessive movie watching? Are both symptoms of the same thing?

Lunchtime walks, 2012

Posted on December 1, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Last year I started going on short walks at lunchtime. I took my phone with me to keep track of the time. I started to notice some pretty special things along the way and started taking pictures. These are all taken in the same area.

It just goes to show you don’t have to go anywhere special to see something special. You just have to open your eyes. Everything is new and unique to somebody. Pretend you are a visitor from another country and look at your own surroundings in a new way.

There is a large sinkhole on the property, and there is a walking path around it. It is kind of like a treehouse. It is very nice to walk here when it is very hot outside because it is 10 degrees cooler. This was taken 1-24-12

2-7-12 Foggy morning.

3-15-12 Cherry trees budding.

3-15-12 The stream leading to the sinkhole. It has water in it most of the time.

3-15-12 A herd of clover. Sometimes things are more interesting if you look at them in a different way.

3-21-12 The cherry trees are blooming now.

3-22-12 A beetle on the building.

4-4-12 A redbud.

4-21-12 If the weather is bad I walk in the stacks. This way I have no excuse to not walk.

4-30-12 A bug cocooned in a leaf. It fell off – I didn’t pull it off to take this picture.

5-1-12 Another bug in a leaf.

5-1-12 A different view.

5-15-12 A black walnut.

5-17-12 Cone on some type of evergreen. They look like caltrops.

6-28-12 I’ve come to realise there are a lot of dragonflies at the library. I’ve seen three different kinds.

8-9-12 There was a very hard storm just hours before, and the force of the water flattened the grass in the stream.

8-28-12 Perhaps a dried black walnut? It looks like a brain.

10-2-12 Monarch butterfly

10-1-12 Redbud

10-20-12 American sycamore, I think.

11-8-12 A bench for admiring the view.

11-15-12 Sometimes you have to look up.

Library card

Posted on November 20, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Having a library card is like having a gym membership. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t use it.

There are plenty of people who come in every four years to vote in the Presidential election and they feel that they have to get a library card. Our library is an early voting site, and we have people come in that normally never go to a library. They feel that it is part of being an American to have a library card, so they sign up. Four years later, when they come in to vote again, they ask if their card is still valid. It isn’t. If you don’t use it in a couple of years it expires. So then they sign up again. Every now and then I’ll ask them if they want to go and find a book first, to see if they NEED to sign up for a card. Nope. They want to get a card. They just don’t want to use it.

Libraries are the most amazing thing ever about America. They present a free exchange of information. With a library card you can unlock any door. You can learn how to do anything. Going to the library is the best way to improve your mind and your life. It is the way out of a bad situation. It levels the playing field.

There are books at the library for everybody. Every now and then they get challenged but they usually get to stay. A book is “challenged” when someone tries to get it removed from the library. It is very hard to remove a book from the library. People don’t understand that just because they don’t like a book doesn’t mean they have the right to prevent another person from reading it. Thus, libraries have a huge variety of books to accommodate the varying needs of the community.

Yet this means nothing if they don’t use their card. What is the point of getting a library card if you don’t use it? There are plenty of countries around the world that don’t have libraries. Just being able to read is something you shouldn’t take for granted.

Plenty of people take the amazing resource that is the library for granted. If they use it at all, they will fill up on movies and fiction. That is just the icing on the cake. There is so much more to the library than this. The most amazing thing about the library is that if you want to improve your life or your community or the world, you can learn how to do it at the library. It is free to everyone.

Well, I take that back. Everybody can come in and use the library. Not everybody can check out. You have to get a library card to check out books and apparantly for some people that is very hard. The rules are slightly different for certain libraries, but in ours you have to provide proof of who you are and proof of where you live. If you live out of county, there is a fee because this library system gets its money from property taxes.

For some people, just being able to prove where they live is like pulling teeth. They will want to show their driver’s license that is from three years ago. They have moved three times since then, and not gotten the ID changed. They will point out that the address on the ID is in this county. That isn’t the point. It isn’t their current address, so it doesn’t count. Every now and then they will get huffy and say they should just have lied and said it was correct. It is very frustrating dealing with an adult who just doesn’t get the value of being honest – and the importance of having the current address on their ID.

I feel that Americans take the library and free public education for granted.

I know a lady from India who was a patron here and then went back home to India. She told me about how there were no free public libraries in India, or at least where she was. There were libraries, but you had to pay to be a member, and there weren’t that many books. Thus, people don’t really read very much.

A community that doesn’t read is a dead community.

Having a card isn’t enough. You have to use it.

If you are poor, education is the way out. Plenty of people will say that the schools are bad in their area, but this means nothing. You can have your education spoon-fed to you, or you can go hunt it down yourself. It also doesn’t matter what your local library is like. No matter what library you use, you have access to the inter-library loan system. Whatever you want, if it isn’t at your library, they can get it for you from another one. So if you don’t get a good education, the only person you have to blame is yourself.

Go get a library card. And use it. The mind you save will be your own.

Library buffet.

Posted on November 8, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Libraries are like all you can eat buffets. You can fill up on all sorts of stuff that is good for you, or you can fill up on junk. It is your choice, but also you have to bear the responsibility of your choice. If you are what you eat, you certainly are what you read.

There is something for everyone at the library. No matter what your taste or inclination, there is something for you. Even in fiction, I am constantly amazed at the variety. There are not just multiple genres, but crossovers. Large print Christian Amish suspense. Urban historical Western romance. Zombie romantic comedy. We have it all.

There is a lot of fiction, but also a lot of non fiction. If you want to learn anything about how to improve your health, your business, your marriage, your community, or the world, the library has it.

The library was my salvation when I was a child. It still is. I learned about the secret of Santa Claus from the library. I learned about the secret of sex too. I have no idea if my parents were ever going to clue me in to either one of these things. I learned early on that if I wanted the truth, I was going to find it in a book rather than from them. Even now, if there is anything that I need to know more about, I find a book from the library and learn.

Libraries are also my escape. If life is a little bit heavy, then some Terry Pratchett will lighten it. If life is too predictable, then Neil Gaiman will make things more interesting. Libraries are a place to find new friends for my journey.

Libraries are the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter how poor you are or how uneducated your parents are. With a library you can escape the horrible pull of poverty and ignorance. Yet, just like with a buffet, you can make bad choices too. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say they are bad, but they certainly aren’t nutritious or uplifting.

I’m sad when people use their library to exclusively waste their time and thus their lives. I’m sad when poor parents don’t use the resource of the library to help their children escape the cycle of poverty. Nothing is more empowering than knowledge.

We have a limit of 10 movies that patrons can check out at a time, and there are a stunning amount of people who get that limit and watch them and get then more, every few days. Some people have their wives’ and child’s card and get 30 movies at a time.

What an amazing waste.

Then there is “urban erotic fiction”, with broken English and stereotyped scripts. I’ve already written about how damaging I find that genre. I’m upset that it teaches African-American women that they are things and not people. I’m upset that it teaches them that they aren’t anything unless they have a man, and they aren’t much then either. I’m upset that they are reading the literary equivalent of deep-fried Twinkies. I want them to be empowered, not enslaved.

There are also other choices that aren’t the best. Sure, you don’t have to get educational materials all the time. But I worry about parents who let their children only get comic books. Children are like plants. You have to support them and raise them. They can’t be allowed to just grow up like weeds. They have to have good information put in them.

It is stunning to see the difference between foreign born parents and American born parents. The foreign born ones get educational books for their children. The children learn early on that their job is to learn. They develop healthy habits about learning. The parents choose for their kids the majority of their books.

The American born parents let their children pick out whatever they want. While I’m all for kids having some say in what they read, I know that they aren’t going to push themselves at all. Some, generally lower income ones, let their kids get just movies. This will just continue the cycle of poverty. If they can’t read, they can’t get good jobs.

Library materials and food are the same. If you let a child choose what to eat, he is going to pick junk food and candy. No child picks broccoli and squash if he has had hot dogs and chocolate. I’m not for censorship at the library, the same way I’m not for eliminating fried food at Golden Corral. I am for people being mindful about the repercussions of their choices. Life is short. Choose wisely.