In Which My Computer Exploded With Beauty Last Night and Inspired Me to Explode With Beauty, Too [11 May 2013|10:08pm] rockinlibrarian Funny, I was way more enthusiastic to write this post this morning. Naturally, LIFE got in the way and I didn't get around to writing it (unless you count me gushing the basic details into my journal this morning) until now, when, LIFE having gotten in the way, I'm no longer floating on the bubbles of joy that I was. No, I don't have any sort of huge good news. It was just the building up of little beautiful things. And THAT, in itself, is why I wanted to post about it! Yesterday evening I wasn't in any particularly good mood. It was evening, which meant I was tired, and my husband was at work, so I had two whiny overstimulated kids I was trying to get settled down for bed by myself, which isn't exactly a party; but I wasn't feeling particularly bad, either. In fact, my son was doing all right. He'd earned, through chores and good behavior, some time to spend on something he wouldn't normally be allowed on-- in this case, my computer. He was drawing several variations of his usual "beach" picture in Paint (he draws a line down the middle, then paintbucket-fills one side with yellow, the other with blue, and that's his beach picture. He has at least five of these saved on my computer) while I struggled his sister into bed. But when I came back, he was saving a new picture to my computer. This was it: I mean, let's stop right there. That alone could make anybody's day. So I put him to bed (after thanking him thoroughly), grabbed my Nook and a bowl of corn chips, and flopped on the couch. (Okay, the title isn't accurate. Most of this was actually my NOOK exploding with beauty. But it was still the Internet, so it still fits). I set out to catch up with almost a week's worth of blog reading. There was one post I was most anxious to see. Those of you who are already familiar with Hyperbole and a Half know what I mean. It was such a joy to see brilliant webcartoonist Allie Brosh back online after months of hiatus, particularly when we all knew she'd been very depressed last we heard from her (and by "we" I mean "a shocking variety of people. Like, everyone from all walks of life"). And she came back with the most perfect summary of her dark experience of the past couple years: seriously, if you HAVEN'T seen this yet, GO DO IT NOW. CLICK. Actually, do it again if you already have seen it because it's that wonderful. What she has done is given us the most dead-on heartbreakingly accurate description of depression that somehow also happens to be laugh out loud hilarious. It's part of the "Clowns of God" concept again. When you mix happy and sad together, heartbreaking and hilarious together, it makes each of those emotions THAT MUCH STRONGER. And it's especially refreshing, to know so completely what she's talking about, but to be able to LAUGH at it... in the face of it... there is possibly no stronger force for battling the Darkness. I drew the connection between Allie Brosh and The Bloggess, how two of the absolute funniest people I've found on the internet are also two of the most broken. I don't think funny makes you depressed. I think being depressed forces you to find the funny. Humor is a gift given to those who need it most! So now I'm buoyed up on that (that last picture and final sentence still do me in, even just now scrolling past to link to it), I continue reading through blogs-- or, to be honest, scanning them for the most interesting ones-- and I nearly skimmed right by this next one at Fuse #8 because, at first glance, it seemed to be a review of a picture book (which I don't get much say in ordering at our library) and I had a lot of other stuff to read, but then I noticed it was really an anecdote written by the author, about how, as a frustrated young immigrant, she found a library and a librarian who changed her life. OH LORD. A BEAUTIFUL IMPORTANCE-OF-LIBRARIES STORY. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time AGAIN. So then I finished the blog-scanning and opened my Twitter app, where I immediately ended up retweeting the ever-so-wise Shannon Hale: "How can we build up instead of tear down? How can we make each day better for our presence? Our words are powerful. We can be superheroes." And even though, in context, she'd just been lamenting some cyberbullying her friend was going through, I was too high from the other things I'd read and seen this evening to get pulled down by those bullies. Instead, I saw we can be superheroes. YES! With wonderful, positive, sensible and sensitive people like Shannon Hale leading the way! All I saw was the light piercing THROUGH the darkness. And close below that was another picture from Commander Hadfield aboard the International Space Station. If you haven't seen Commander Hadfield's pictures, please go, do it. Each picture of our troubled planet from far above is a quiet moment of Zen. It's like something I've always remembered from reading Joseph Campbell: that if you look at Creation stories from across cultures, they are almost always violent and traumatizing when told from the POV of the people of Earth, but when told from the POV of the gods, they suddenly become beautiful dances. That's what the pictures from the ISS are like, and last night's picture of the Alps in the clouds was no exception. Except I was already feeling lovely and positive, so it was that much more awesome. Then I did something that might have dragged me back down into my own brain, my own self-conscious self-pity-- I went to YouTube to see if my particularly awesome if-I-do-say-so-myself but-that's-because-it's-about-one-of-my-favorite-topics vlog post of the week had got any more likes or comments. Eh, it had only been VIEWED four times, and I was pretty sure two of those views were me. So I was all set to start whining to myself how "NOBODY CARES WHAT I HAVE TO SAY!" (which we all know is a stupid thing to think and ones self-worth should absolutely not depend on how many people respond to your Internet postings, BUT YOU ARE STILL WELCOME TO COMMENT ON THIS POST! GO AHEAD! I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU! IF YOU ARE EVER WAVERING BETWEEN RESPONDING OR NOT RESPONDING TO ANYTHING I POST, GO WITH THE RESPONDING! IT'S NOT ENABLING, I SWEAR!), but then I caught sight of YouTube's little "Recommended for You" column. You're going to laugh at me, after all these heartwarming philosophical transcendent things I've been talking about, but face it, this is me. And YouTube had found me an old interview with Martin Freeman I'd never seen before. SHUT UP. It totally does fit with the rest of these beautiful things. Look, I've never been able to truly explain (no matter how I've tried) exactly why I adore him so much, but I can't watch him without smiling. I am unable to even look at a friggin' Hobbit DVD cover without smiling. And he was SO utterly lovely here that I very soon found myself just bubbling away in a hot spring of joy. And then I caught sight of my list of YouTube subscriptions on the side, saw a little "1" beside Collective Cadenza. I think I'm late to the game on the CDZA thing, and everyone else discovered them a long long time ago, but I only discovered them a week ago, and the fun they have with music is possibly the greatest thing ever. Even the videos that aren't so good are still the Greatest Thing Ever, just because Fun With Music is THAT AWESOME. So I watched their new video, where they took their "History of Wooing Women" routine (which I hadn't thought was a particularly great one) on the road. It was basically them serenading random people on the street. And the longer the video went on, the more wonderful it felt. The more I was LAUGHING AND CRYING AT THE SAME TIME again. And that was it. I didn't read or watch or look at anything else. I just sat there with my Nook on my lap, FEELING JOY. I popped onto Twitter just because, somehow, I had to share this feeling: "I've been reading and watching one lovely, beautiful thing or person after another here this past hour. I'll go to bed now filled with joy." It was all I could fit into 140 characters. But the feeling was, basically, the exact opposite of Depression-as-Described-by-Allie-Brosh. I've been there. I'm all too familiar with the hopelessness, the wishing-I'd-just-die-so-it-would-all-go-away. But THIS feeling was... well, this is basically the thought that came with it: I am so glad to be alive in a world where such beautiful people doing so many beautiful small things exist. And I woke up this morning determined to LIVE, to BE one of those people who make the world a better place just by our being here. I don't think the day went quite like I hoped. But there are more days. And every little bit of beauty helps. 4 comments|post comment

Trying to Find the Awesome In Me... #30awesome [05 May 2013|11:18am] rockinlibrarian Liz Burns over at A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Teacozy and a couple of her librarian friends I don't know as well put together this CELEBRATION OF THE AWESOME THINGS LIBRARIANS DO for the month of May, called, fittingly, "Show Me The Awesome: 30 Days of Self Promotion." I'm not as awesome as those librarians, though. I don't get huge turnouts at my programs. I don't win grants and invite speakers and create brilliant innovative things that I can teach other people to do. I'm not that special as far as librarians go. But then, I feel that way about every part of my life. Unremarkable. Not bad, but nothing special. Pretty good, but not amazing. I'm terrible at selling myself. Frankly, I don't really believe in myself. It's something I've struggled with for years. And today*-- maybe it's because I've been feeling still knocked out from the mono, and the house was getting messy, and the kids were whining and the husband was yelling at them and complaining that the house was a mess-- I felt particularly useless. But maybe that's why I NEED to find the Awesome in myself today, to make an effort to self-promote, whether as a librarian or as a person. It's actually in my role as a librarian that I feel MOST confident. Even in the worst of my depression, someone would come to me with a reference or readers' advisory question and I'd find them even more than they thought they were looking for, and I'd, for a moment, FEEL AWESOME. I KNOW I'm good at that! I'm good at asking the questions to find out what someone is TRYING to say that they want. I'm good at thinking up many possible ways to find the answers, and many possible answers, too. It's not particularly fancy. It doesn't get attention. A lot of people don't even realize it's a skill, and think anyone off the street can work a library desk. But, one person at a time, I build the patrons' trust and satisfaction. And I have coworkers who, when they get a tough reference question, will immediately send the patron to me-- even if they're not looking for information in the children's or YA sections. Once at the grocery store a family I, admittedly, didn't even recognize ran up to me waving cheerfully and proclaiming that they were ALL reading their library books in the car RIGHT THEN and thanked me for recommending them, they were so awesome. And that wasn't bad at all. Nor was the line of schoolkids in my kids' preschool building who all started yelling "HI MISS AMY!" when I took my son to his first day of school. And these weekly programs I've been running-- sure, they don't get a huge turnout, but everyone who DOES come raves, "Why aren't there more people here? Don't they know WHAT THEY'RE MISSING?" I've gone all out, making hobby horses from scratch because I felt the program NEEDED hobby horses. We had a moviemaking program where kids wrote, performed, and directed (I wouldn't let them handle the camera themselves. Not THESE kids) their own movies. And there were wild programs I've done in the past, like my birthday party for A Wrinkle in Time, or my Read Across America Program with Three Cheese Trees. I like to dress to the theme, sometimes in costume even-- "I have a feeling I may be turning into Ms. Frizzle," I said to a coworker the night I wore my pajamas to the bedtime-themed Family Night. Ooo, and anybody remember the Teen Cooking Program I did a few years back? And I know where to go for great ideas-- I do my research! A post at the ALSC blog inspired me to check out Squishy Circuits, which gave us quite an interesting program one week. And this week'sPenguin Day was an opportunity for me to go back to my One Book Every Young Child Activity Guide from 2009. Of course that WAS actually me who wrote those activities. ...hey. THAT WAS ME who WROTE THOSE ACTIVITIES. You know the thing that I'm most proud about my programs? I've gotten people excited about BOOKS. A lot of my other coworkers who do programming don't even bother to booktalk related books during their programs, because no one's interested. BUT I'VE MADE THEM INTERESTED. And I still love thinking about the time I read A Tale Dark and Grimm to the Summer "Reading" Club. And non-programming related-- once, ON MY DAY OFF, on a whim, I posted this to the library's Facebook page and it went viral! It was shared by the official @your library page! DANG! ...Okay. So. Maybe I do have something to brag about. But it seems to me that that's just what I'm SUPPOSED to do. That's what a youth services librarian is FOR. Nothing so out of the ordinary. But then, for someone who struggles daily to not feel like a failure as a mother or wife or writer or housekeeper, to actually feel like I'm doing all RIGHT at something? That's pretty Awesome indeed. ---- *Not really "today" anymore. I wrote the bulk of this yesterday. But then I had to go to sleep. Because, you know, mono. 4 comments|post comment

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