There was a documentary on Newsworld tonight called Up the Yangtze. It was about a couple of kids working the tourist river cruises that swung by my old home (though the never showed Wanzhou specifically). I watched and recognized people. Not actual individuals but people who showed the exact same personalities King or Vivien or other students I’d taught. And the woman who worked in the kitchen who reminded me of the woman who ran the restaurant with the AC and grimy plastic curtain. Made me miss China. It was so grey and green and brown, just like I remember it.

No real reason I’ve not been blogging. I’ve been reading instead. I read an Ursula K LeGuin novel last week, The Dispossessed, and I loved it. It felt like she’d just read Atlas Shrugged and said, “I could write a way better book about individualism as a political choice than that” and then did. Now I’m reading Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana. In my head it alternates between looking like a 21st century and the ’80s, but both of those are wrong, cause it was only written in ‘71. But there aren’t that many signposts to the date inside. I mean there are, but they aren’t obviously anachronistic if you’re setting it in the ’00s.

There are a bunch of LSA 1/2 jobs coming up at Millennium this month, and careful analysis has shown that I’m not likely to get any of them. There are three packages and at least three pages with more seniority than me applying. The only reason I got so close last time was because the girl with the most seniority had been on vacation and missed the posting. The last couple of days my shifts at work have just dragged. Nothing’s different. Just one of my periodic dissatisfaction arcs I guess.

I tried to see that Stellet Licht movie at Cinematheque tonight, but I was about a dozen people away from purchasing a ticket when the place sold out. You could so tell that everyone in that line had a relationship with the language of Low German. Most people probably in the “I can understand more than I could possibly speak but oh please let there be subtitles” camp.

Also, I learned that I’m second in line for the LSA 1/2 position at Millennium I applied for a while ago. That’s not something that requires me to have passed the tests I’ve been doing. LSA 1/2s check in and out your books and collect your fines and sign you up for a library card. They’re interviewing someone else on Tuesday and if he doesn’t take it they’ll interview me. Jeff said the person’ll probably take it, but that I should keep applying because there’ll be three more of these positions coming up in the next little while. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these jobs, but it wouldn’t stop me from applying for LSA 3 positions, which I’d like a bunch more.

This morning I finished reading a Samuel R Delany book, Empire Star. Holy shit, I cannot get enough of his work. And what’s great is that he’s been writing since 1960 something and for decades was published in cheapo paperback editions, which are very findable in used bookstores. I’ve deliberately stayed away from finding some master list of his books so I’ll never quite know when I’ve exhausted this vein of material.

I got a bit sunburnt at the Goldeyes game yesterday but nothing too bad thanks to the expired sunblock Sean picked up and left behind. The fish lost by a bunch but the game was filled with home runs and errors, and some nice work in left field.

Our page quotient at the library has skyrocketed. The downside is that means there are fewer unfilled shifts so I don’t get to be choosy about the hours I pick up to keep me in rent and food. And that means I had to take a shift for the Thursday night of Folk Fest. So I won’t be coming out till Friday after work, and will be missing the Weakerthans on mainstage. Le sigh.

I was just going to note this for my links feed over in the sidebar there, but it’s an interesting enough article to respond to a bit here. The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - By William Deresiewicz

An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.

Now, I don’t have an elite education by any stretch, but a lot of this article resonated me all up. I sometimes look at my time here at the library as underachieving. This is no surprise to you. I feel like I could have gone on to do more; I could have been a doctor of something or other. I feel like I chickened out of the hard work it would take to do all that stuff. And then I read about how important it is not to get sucked into that world, how being outside it signifies an independent spirit instead of lack of ability. And those are really gratifying things to read. It lets me go, “People want (this romanticized version of) my life” rightly or wrongly.

I’ve been told not to change, to be happy I’m in the position I’m in. To be able to go enjoy a baseball game on a Thursday afternoon. I’ve been reading Walden and it’s all about living in the woods by yourself and how that is the only measure of success we should be looking for. That’s what Thomas Merton did too (with the addition of being an actual monk). Those things don’t feel like huge stretches for me. I could do that. But I can’t help feeling that I’m missing something by skipping all the intermediate steps. I feel like I haven’t given up anything to arrive where I am.

You can read all this stuff out there about simplifying your life to find happiness and blah blah blah. I shelve at least a dozen of those books every week. When you’re already pared down pretty far though you hit some sort of diminishing return. Sometimes I feel like I should be ambitious in a professional sense, so that I could come back to this life and really appreciate it. Part of my qualms about going to Japan and teaching (which I’m not planning on doing in the immediate future) had to do with how I’d look back on this time at the library as such a wonderful relaxing peaceful time for me. What is that, some sort of latent conservatism? I don’t want to give up the good life I’ve got going for one which I’d like much less?

Last night on the Daily Show there was the top foreign correspondent for CBS talking about her work in Iraq and Afghanistan and how important it was. Sometimes I want to be her, to actually have a fight on my hands every day to do something important. And I feel bad for sitting here writing my little stories while the world goes to hell.

And sometimes I just really want an iPhone.

At the library yesterday a young woman came up to me while I was shelving and asked if I’d be able to go get some Asians to be quiet. I think she only specified their race so I’d easily be able to see who to shush, but still. Happily, shushing people isn’t my job so I could send her to the reference desk.

Tomorrow I’ve got another Reference/Reader’s Advisory test in the morning. This one is for Children’s and Young Adult positions. Good thing I spent the whole day searching Amazon’s “Customers who liked this also bought…” listings for Rowling, Blyton and Westerfield books. I would love so much for Scott Westerfield to show up on this test. He’s pretty new though, only the last few years, but his YA scifi stuff is supposed to be great.

Actually I didn’t spend any time at all studying today. Good thing it’s not an LSAT. Instead I finally rewrote a short story that’s been bouncing around my computer in various formats for the last year and a bit. I got it down below 5000 words, resequenced the whole thing and actually made the point of it somewhat apparent with a non-anti-climactic ending. It’s a hell of a lot better than any of the versions I’ve let people read before now. I have my eye on who I want to sell it to as well. I wanted to do this to get me back in the swing of rewriting before I start in on the novel again. I should be able to start that work on Thursday.

I’ve written a goddamned novel.

I wonder how long the rewriting will take.

A stretch SUV limo with brand new high school grads leaning out the windows “Woo!”ing. This was followed directly by a pickup truck with an ATV in it. I hoped they were going to the same place.

A guy with black inflatable demon horns curling out the back of his bike helmet.

A dumbass kid who may or may not have been hit by a car. This was just by John M King school when it was letting out. The boy who was probably around 10ish ran across Ellice not at the lights. The east-bound car sort of swerved towards the sidewalk and stopped. I looked up to see the kid getting up from the street looking pretty sheepish. It didn’t look like the kid got hit at all, just freaked out but I didn’t have a very good view. The middle aged woman with two much smaller kids who was on the sidewalk grabbed her mouth and lunged for him, but he walked to the sidewalk fine. Then when the car opened up and the moustachioed driver got out the kid was sitting on the ground and started screaming holding his leg. There wasn’t any blood. People came out of the Youth Outreach office and the Vietnamese restaurant across the street because of his howling. By the time I was across Maryland a cop car was on the scene.

A heavily bearded man walking with his hand on his friend’s shoulder. The friend was walking about a full step ahead of beardy.

I took a test this morning. For the first time in years. I was out of practice. And hadn’t studied. But it’s not like it matters when the questions are “Name a John Grisham novel.”

The test was to see if I’d be qualified as an Adult Reader’s Advisory/Reference Library Service Assistant, Level 3. (You know why I don’t use the word librarian? Because you don’t need a degree to be an LSA. There are like a dozen librarians in the whole Winnipeg Public Library system. This would not make me one of them.) It had three parts.

First part: Reader Advisory. This was filled with easy Multiple Choice questions like “Who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being?” and difficult questions like “If a reader likes Supermarket Romance Novelist X, what would you recommend?” For that one there was no “shank the patron” option, so I picked the name that sounded least like a writer I’d possibly respect. My weakest section, but mostly because my only exposure to a lot of the crap people come looking to read is putting it back on the shelves, and when I work my brain is shut down.

Second: Using the Public Online Catalogue. Much easier, though there were some tricks to it. Questions like “What is the first chronological listing for Ernest Hemingway?” and “How many pages in the standard edition of Angela’s Ashes?” were a snap, but I almost mucked up “How many video listings (DVD/VHS) are there starring Jerry Lewis?” The problem? I didn’t put it in quotes the first time, so it included Jerry Lee Lewis movies. I caught it when Great Balls of Fire showed up on the list.

Final: Using Reference Books. There’s a cart full of big ol’ indexes and encyclopedias and almanacs and a list of 21 facts we had to find. No problem at all. Bing bang boom. You want to know what Wednesday’s children are full of? I got you covered. (It’s woe.) The director of Hungary’s National News Agency? Well, I forget now, but it’s written on my test paper. What day of the week was August 15, 1944? Wednesday. (I may have the date wrong, but I know the answer was Wednesday.) I’m dusting off my hands after a job well done when I look back at the instructions. They wanted page references for each of those facts. And I swore and took out all the books again to make sure they didn’t think I just pulled all that info from my brain.

In all, it was pretty fun. And I get to do it again next week, but for Children/Young Adults.

I’ve been away from the bloggery since realizing you don’t really need to read about my writing insecurities. But since that’s the only thing I do apart from read, watch baseball and go to work anymore, there hasn’t been a lot of good fodder for typing about going on. I’ve got about 10 days worth of work left and then I relax a bit before making it good. Maybe then the blog’ll get more interesting.

Though I guess I’ve been reading and could talk a bit about that. V remains good and I’m not done yet. I got a bit bogged down again in Mondaugen’s story. There’s only so much decadent sjambokking I can read about in a sitting. But today I read Fausto’s Confession while the Jays finally beat the Orioles and it was fine.

When I got bogged down I turned to a couple of other books. I read The Picture of Dorian Grey and got sick real quick of the “wit” of saying that things are their opposite. In much the way that future generations will look on our sarcasm, I imagine. And I’ve been reading Walden which I think I should leave to its own post.

But yeah. I’m just rolling along, manufacturing things to be looking forward to.