I started my day by making someone my bitch.
Okay, perhaps I exaggerate a little. In any case, my
library school has an unmoderated
listserv for the entire school, students, faculty, and some alumni. Occasionally, a discussion breaks out, but generally the list serves merely for announcements and forwarded articles. So yesterday my friend Laurie posted a commentary-free announcement for a
peace vigil down at
MacDill AFB this weekend. (MacDill is the home of
US Central Command, where all military operations in the
Middle East are planned and overseen.) Such announcements are not uncommon, especially in this program where some members of the faculty encourage librarians to be politically active.
So I log on for my post-
breakfast email check and
spam deletion, and find this intemperate message:
If, you and your friends really want to show your distain (sic) for war, then why don't you hold your protest in NYC at ground zero!
Now I don’t care what you think about the idea of war, and you won’t find my opinions about the idea in this write-up. You have your right to voice your opinion, whatever it is, but there’s no need to be an
asshole in a forum which isn’t generally used for debate when someone is merely posting an announcement. And we won’t even get into this guy’s poor grammar or his logical fallacies.
A man who utters rude
slogans is generally impervious to logical debate, so the best way to puncture his
ego is humor directed at said ego. So I dashed off this reply:
Here are some other clichés you might want to add to your repertoire:
1) Go back to Russia, you commie.
2) America, love it or leave it.
3) You'll pry my gun from my cold dead fingers.
And then I was off to my cataloging class. When I got there, it had been only a few hours since I sent the email, but people were already congratulating me on insulting that pompous ass. And when I checked my email that evening, my inbox was full of similar praise, including a message
from the department chair. It wasn’t the wittiest thing I’ve done by any means, but it still makes me giggle when I think about it. And he has hardly been the biggest fish I’ve fried (ask me sometime about what I said to
Pat Buchanan to his face a few years back), but it was a fun way to start my day.
Especially since I spent all night trying to figure out how to catalog a (probably fictional) book called
Very First Things To Know About Monkeys. The class has been a little chaotic, so we haven’t learned as much as we should up to this point. Our professor has some problems with the
INS and didn’t get her
work permit in time for the beginning of the semester, so for the first month we had a substitute. She talked over our heads for several weeks and then our new teacher got her permit and picked up the baton. But the transition has not been smooth, both the transition of accents (
Welsh to
Korean) and of course material, as they apparently were not working from the same syllabus. Cataloging is fairly easy, but the rules are many and specific. So you have to consult one thick book ($60 new) for the
AACR2 rules on what information to include in a record and how to punctuate it, then consult another ($54 used) for which
MARC field to include it in and how to record it there. Difficult stuff if you’ve all of a sudden been given an assignment to catalog things from scratch after weeks of scattershot lectures, but I got the hang of it sometime before dawn. I’m hardly alone, as the class whined so much that the teacher gave us an extra two weeks to complete the assignment. I wasn’t about to voice an objection, but I had mixed feelings about it. I’m done, and I’m not about to pore over my assignment for mistakes when I have a pile of other projects to do, and I’m worried that we’re going to push too many of these assignments to the end of the course.
After class I went a
candle party hosted by my friend Sean, who is the only person on
Earth who would host a candle party in an
Eminem t-shirt. Candles don’t exactly fit in the lifestyle of a disorganized
bibliophile (think
Fahrenheit 451) with a sensitivity to strong artificial scents. But I went because he was my friend and he asked me to go, even if I wanted to poke my eyes out with a candle snuffer by the end of it. And I did learn that, according to a study in
Cosmo,
pumpkin spice is the scent works best when trying to get men in the mood. You learn something new every day, and maybe it will come up one day when I'm manning a
reference desk. When everyone else had spent their money and left, we did lots of
slacker things and I downloaded some crap for his new computer. He’s a bit new to this whole newfangled "
internet" thing people keep talking about, but we’ll make a
noder out of him yet. And that’s what worries me, as so many people I know and so much of my life has been assimilated by this fucking website that it gives me serious pause. Not that I don’t love each and every one of you. Except for
Jet-Poop.