......

I just signed up for a meal plan, and the guy at the office kept assuring me that after following the steps he advised I would be all set to use those bad boys (meaning my meals): "Just sign right there and we can get you using those bad boys today!" My chagrin, as you may imagine, was inexpressible.

So there, naysayers!

My agreed-by-all-to-be-completely-lovely flatmate thinks Indigo is a very cool name for my son.

HA.

Heaven, I'm in heaven

I'm getting tears of frantic desire just thinking about this. There is a Catholic (I'm Catholic!) university in New York City (actually in the city! they have campuses in Manhattan and Queens and Staten Island, ALL THREE of these places!) where, oh my God, where they pay your entire tuition to get a master's degree in library science as long as you agree to work for three years thereafter in some libraryish capacity with underserved populations, and while you are getting your degree you do volunteer things with programs that, like, help young mothers get better about reading to their children. I'm not even kidding! You help them. To read to their children. Perchance by finding really good books for them to read!

Seriously, every time I think about this, I start crying. As I am typing this there are tears falling out of my eyes. This is so exactly everything I want in the entire world. I want a degree in library science, and I want so, so, so much to live in the city for a while, and I want to Do Good, and especially I love more than anything to tell people what to read and have it be my specific responsibility to pick out things for people to read, and there is virtually nothing that I believe more strongly than that teaching a kid to love reading is one of the most valuable gifts you can give to him/her.

(Sidebar insight into my psyche: Officially I have no problem with using "they" as a gender-nonspecific singular pronoun, and I find it less lame than s/he or him/her, but I can never actually bring myself to do it, in practice.)

But to return to the point: It seems absurd and impossible that I should be able to do all of these things that I love simultaneously and only have to pay housing (which is a lot obviously if I am living in the city, but OH MY GOD). And the place is Catholic, and I am Catholic, so they obviously love me, and I could actually write a really good essay on What Catholicism Means To Me, if they wanted one, and I worked at Catholic Charities this past summer, with underserved populations! I could get my grad school paid for by promising to tell people what to read for three years after I was done! Three years! Of telling people what to read!

I just looked into it a little bit more, and apparently they also take you all around to all the New York libraries and museums. OH MY GOD. A two-year paid-for guided tour of the New York libraries and museums, in addition to everything else that is wonderful. Oh, I want this so much. God invented this program for me. They have to let me into this program.

If this is financially viable, I'm on it like white on rice.

P.S. I've always wanted to use that phrase but never had the opportunity. See what a good program this plainly is?

Almost trapped in the library

So I was at the library today with my sister, and there was some book I knew I wanted, because I could remember wanting it desperately, and in my mind there was a nice and friendly feeling about this book, but I had no idea what it was. Instead of trying to track it down, we decided to go into the children's section, which is full of friendly books, and find a replacement book for me to get instead of the one I forgot.

OH MY GOD.

The children's section of the library is crack cocaine to me. It sucked me in and it wouldn't let me leave. I kept trying to escape, but there were so many books, and I couldn't get out! I couldn't get out! There was no way to escape! All these books about exciting and interesting things, with plots that happen quickly and if you aren't enjoying it, oh well, it's a kid's book, it reads fast and it'll end soon. And I couldn't get out. Every time I started heading for the exit, I would remember some other author I wanted to check on, and then I would get distracted by other books on the way to find that author.

This is what I miss about going to the library now that I am a grown-up. There is not nearly so high a proportion of decently-written and entertaining grown-ups' books in the grown-ups' section. Why should that be? I never have this experience in the adult fiction section, where I simply cannot stop taking books off the shelves because they all just look so good. I have to hunt for books that don't look a) boring or b) trashy and stupid or c) pretentious. There is no snatching of books with reckless abandon and a vague certainty that at least half of the things you grab will be enjoyable. There is none of that! There can be none of that! Not in the adults' section!

I was telling Robyn that we're going to be old ladies in walkers still charging up and down the aisles of the children's section, knocking over toddlers and snatching Weeny Witch from their little hands. They're little, they'll cave instantly! We'll croak, "Sue Barton! Where are my Sue Barton books, eh? Hey, kid, did you ever read these Sue Barton books? Classic", and the little children will cry and run from us, and we'll be like the old crazy kids' section library ladies.

It's actually sad. I love to read more than almost anything in the world, but now that I am old it is not as exciting as it used to be. Because of the dearth of good writers for grown-ups. It is much more rare that I get a book from the shelves and I can't put it down because the plot is interesting. JESUS, what HAPPENS to grown-up writers? Why can't they write plots? What is so hard about writing plots? With action that happens? Interesting things that make you go, Huh, I wonder what's going to happen next? instead of always going, Huh, I wonder what clever metaphor or play on words is going to happen next? (And that is in a good case scenario, not even talking about the writers who are just not very good writers. I am looking at you, Salman Rushdie. You are a very brilliant writer, but plots? Maybe not totally your thing?)

Which is why I would like someone who knows what books are good to divide the library into Good Books and Crap. Is that so much to ask? Just take all the bad historical fiction and romance and pretentious crap and Tolkien knock-offs and throw them in one section, and leave the good books in another section, and then I can have this very same experience, but with grown-up books. The way God intended.

Something BIT me. On my FACE. While I was SLEEPING.

And now I have a massive welt on my face, even though I have run it under hot water twice to get rid of the histamines.

Dammit.

Some people called him shayachern-a-muffin

(Little trashy fantasy humor there for my two favorite sisters and Nezabeth if she ever heard that song we invented that time and sang it a lot really loudly at gas stations.)

Seriously, though, this whole Dumbledore being gay thing couldn't possibly make me happier, which I think is for several reasons, one being that oh my God, it's so true and thinking back on it, I can't believe I didn't think of that in the first place. I suppose because he was never awfully forthcoming about his personal life.

And another one is that now the Grindelwald story is a better story, because it's more poignant now, and I am all about poignancy. How sad. Poor Dumbledore, and then he had to go off and fight him and defeat him and send him to prison for the rest of his life. (I realize this was always the case, but now it's sadder.)

And another one is that she waited until now to tell everyone, so a bunch of Christian people are on record as saying that Dumbledore is a good role model, and HA HA HA, Christians, YOU CAN'T TAKE IT BACK. YOU LEFT A PAPER TRAIL. Silly fundamentalists; I would have told you to hold your praise until the series was over, if you'd asked me about it. Well, actually, because I think that people who hate Harry Potter for religious reasons are silly, I would probably have told you that you should go with your opinions, and parents couldn't wait until the books were all out to decide whether their children should read them, and really, the values that you saw were there no matter what happened in later books. But, y'know, if you'd gotten me drunk or something, or like made me vow to give my absolute honest opinion, then I would have told you to hold your praise until it was all, all, all over.

I wish she'd mentioned it in the books themselves, though I can see why she wouldn't. It wasn't germane until the seventh book, and if she'd mentioned it then, all anyone would have said about the seventh book would have been OH MY GOD DUMBLEDORE IS GAY and really, after working for seventeen years on the damn things, you can see how she would be disinclined to turn the finale into the Dumbledore Is Gay Show and would instead want people to focus on the actual plot about defeating Voldemort and Jenny being totally right about Snape. I can totally dig it.

In other news, nyah nyah to Plugged In Magazine, you cannot take it back now. I saw all that nice stuff you said about Dumbledore, and never once did you say one single word about Dumbledore-related hanky-panky, and now there is no way that you can go back and say that what you meant all along was that it was very alarming to have a gay man in charge of all these students teaching them Bad Values.

I especially love how people are saying she's doing it to sell more books. Right, yes. Because that's what the woman needs. More money. It's a very cunning publicity stunt to save her from financial ruin.

And finally, this pleases me because now everyone is saying (albeit for the wrong reasons) that they should've got Ian McKellan to play Dumbledore. Which I was always saying. Michael Gambon does not do Dumbledore justice in the slightest, because he fails to attain that combination of charming and kind and clever and witty and classy, and Ian McKellan would be perfect at it, and I know he would be perfect at it because he is so extremely excellent, and yes, okay, he was Gandalf already and maybe he doesn't want to be typecast, but TOO BAD, he would be the perfect Dumbledore. Which I have always said. From the very moment that I first saw Ian McKellan. And now lots and lots of people are telling the internet how much they agree with me.

(If only Michael Gambon were a hard-core religious nut who refused to play a gay character and then Ian McKellan could so step up for it. I will pray to God to make that happen.)

*cackles* How happy am I?

I have just gotten some news (from Laura, my favorite person ever) that just, wow, makes me happy on so very many levels.

I am not telling what it is here, because that would eliminate any chance I have of telling you in person, but let me just say that I expect to be having very serious discussions about the ramifications of this whole thing in my WGS class on Wednesday next. And I will probably be the only one as filled with glee as this.

It is such good news that I am getting up mad early tomorrow, depriving myself of sleep, in order that I may drive over to my house in the early morning, intercept the newspaper, and tell this news to my family first before they have the opportunity to read it in the newspaper. And I will also call my little sister in the morning and tell her not to go online or read a newspaper or talk to anyone until we can meet and I can inform her.

Wow. YAY.

The weather is schizophrenic today, and I don't appreciate it; also, a joke that probably only Robyn and Kate would think is funny

I am sitting in the library (again, avoiding studying for art), and outside the window it is raining. But wait. It is not just raining. It is also sunny.

Now, sitting inside the library watching this, it's sort of charming, because the sun is shining and the rain is falling, and that's kind of cool, like the weather is attempting syncretism, which I'm definitely coming out in favor of. However, in real life I do not approve of sun-showers, because despite their rather friendly-sounding name, they are quite unpleasant to be outside during. If it is cloudy and wet enough to rain, then it is also quite humid, so it's really humid and unpleasant, and then in addition to that, the sun is shining at you. Rain is good because it is different to sun and you cool off a bit after all the hot hot sun, but during a sun-shower, you can't cool off! The sun is making the rain hot! Very, very uncool.

Additionally, I am wearing work clothes today, because I have to walk to work after art class (I hate Thursdays), which means that I am going to get thoroughly wet, including my feet, when I particularly don't want my feet to get wet due to the toe thing, which is still problematic though it's been many weeks since the initial injury. It has gotten very weird, and I think another toenail is growing underneath the damaged one, which is kinda gross (the sun just went away; now it's just raining really hard), but I have improved the shining hour by naming the damaged one James Marsden. It thinks it is the best, but pretty soon it is going to be supplanted, and really, guy, I can't believe you didn't see that coming because it has been obvious to everyone from the beginning that you were going to be discarded.

Sign #158 that I have been indexing for way too long

I have developed a little game, which goes like this:

The people in the flat upstairs from me are thumpy, thumpy people. Thump, thump, thump, all the damn time -- quit watching Bambi so much, you thumping thumping fiends, and listen to a little Paul Simon for a change!

(Heehee, thump is a funny word. Thump. Thump. Thump.)

Anyway, they do lots of thumping activities, and I've noticed since I've been trapped in my room with nothing but an indexing procedure and The Gilmore Girls to entertain me that two of their loud thumpy upstairs activities include laundry and sex. Loud thumpy laundry and loud thumpy sex. From downstairs, these things are actually barely distinguishable, so the game is to figure out whether they're having sex or doing laundry. Now, this should be an easy one to guess, because laundry is not usually accompanied by giggling, but actually these people upstairs, they are a giggly bunch, and sometimes the rhythmic thumping and the giggling, they go on for an hour. It could be insane stamina, but since the thumping never varies in its rhythm, I'm kind of guessing it's laundry and also some other fun activity like Gigglethumpopoly or Gigglethump Jenga or Gigglethump Clue. Every time I get it right (that is, if the laundry goes on for an hour or the sex goes on for, um, less), I get a cookie and a carrot. That way it all balances out.

Thump, thump, thump. I'm going to my nonthumpy home now to eat spaghetti and maybe Sister Schubert rolls, if the gods are kind, and I have every reason to suppose that they are.

Sign #157 that I have been indexing for way too long

I just came across the words "commodity form" in the manuscript for which I am making an index, and I shrieked, "Commodity form! Yaaaaaay!" and I felt happy about it for three whole seconds before realizing how tragic my life has become.

Take me, sweet death.