I May Be An Idiot In My Personal Life But At The Library I Am A Rock Star!

I am excited to tell you all that my handsome grandson, Xander Matthew-Bryan Davis, came home from the hospital today. He will be on medicine for awhile and making frequent trips to the doctor but he is home and happy. Thank you all for your prayers and support!

- D

Now on with the show......

I spend quite a bit of time making fun of myself and a lot of people have voiced concern over what they perceive to be my very "low self-esteem" and I would like to assure all of you that my self-esteem is in very good shape! I guess I like to poke fun at my little misfortunes because, well, I like to keep my ego in check. When you work with the public on a daily basis it is easy to feel mentally, socially, and, quite frankly, genetically superior to a vast percentage of the population. If I didn't remind myself of my varied imperfections on a daily basis, I would have a Donald Trump sized ego. I cannot speak for other venues, but at the public library, any public library, you will find a huge cross-section of society.

There are the Brainiacs and the Bookaholics, who truly read so many, so quickly and so voraciously, that they couldn't possibly afford to buy enough books to feed their habit. These people are surprisingly well intentioned and truly love the library but tend to spend at least an extra 15 minutes at the check out counter so that they may give everyone within earshot a synopsis of each book that they have returned.

There are also the home-schoolers who try their damnedest to try to clean out entire sections on one subject each week in order to prove that their child will be academically ahead of the game since odds are that they will end up emotionally stunted.

There are the hordes of teen aged girls who flock, in their dirty tank tops and pajama pants, to use the library's free Internet services in order to make their MySpace pages a little more pedophile friendly. And then there are the teen aged boys who come to see those girls and attempt to climb the library steps with their pants sagging to mid-thigh.

There are the homeless (or the residential challenged, as my sister refers to them) who for lack of any better place to go spend their days in the library, periodically washing their clothes and asses in the bathroom sinks and looking up big words to use when telling the local media their personal story of triumph to tragedy (these stories got super popular with reporters after the release of the Pursuit of Happyness) Side note: Only Will Smith could look HOT while playing a hobo!

And then of course there are the well-meaning albeit misguided and condescending couples who bring their half-eaten sandwiches and restaurant doggie-bags in to "feed to the homeless" and leave angry when they are a.) not accepted or b.) not devoured in front of them. (Seriously, even the homeless have their standards.)

On top of all of this, the library hosts the sexual deviants trying to quickly view porn on the computer before Security walks by, the unwashed, the morbidly obese who inevitably fall and need help into a chair to catch their breath, precocious children who question every answer given to them, old men who routinely ask for 30 archived issues of a magazine only to hand them directly back and say they have changed their minds, parents who want "the nice librarian" to do their child's homework, spoiled adults who constantly remind us that their tax dollars pay our salaries, and just royally bitchy rich ladies.

Surrounded by all of this 37.5 hours a week could make anyone get a little full of themselves and THAT, in a nutshell, is why I try to remind myself that I regularly have toilet paper stuck to my shoe and I once quietly farted in public and blamed the subsequent smell on my granddaughter's diaper. So, for those of you who are worried that I might be a little hard on myself. Please relax, I am fine! It is the rest of those freaks you need to worry about!