Thoughts at Lunch Break

Thunder and lightning. Mike drove home on the motorcycle through the rain. In the morning I put my head on his arm and said, "I was worried about you with the lightning." "Oh, I wouldn't get hit," he said, pulling me into a hug, "I was driving way faster than the lighting."

Men.

But today I am starting my first week of real library classes, with story time and book talks and library skills lessons. I just finished my first class, and I had closed the book we were reading, feeling satisfied. I did it! I read them a great story that would inspire their young minds, and they would run home to tell their parents all about what a wonderful librarian I am. Hands shot up to comment on the story. I pointed to one. The little girl smiled broadly and said, "I don't get it!"

Damn it.

In his own words

My baby is all grown up and talking like a little kid. He might mush some of the words, but I'm amazed at his sentences.

Last night:
I asked, "Did you help grannie make the meatballs?" (expecting him to say "nuh uh" or "uh huh")
He replied, "I sure did not, she told me not to." (mildly reproachful glance at grannie)

also last night (Gavin has taken to examining me after work):
"Oh, mom, I real real like your purple eyes" *peeling my eyelids back* "Oh, mom! Your eyes are so so red! You're tired!"

and a couple days ago:
"I real real like your breasts, mom. Your breasts look nice in that shirt." *pat pat*

I love my kid.

My own private rainbow

Apparently, some popular tv show last week featured a guy who decided that he didn't want to have a vasectomy because, should something happen to his family, he would want to have a backup wife and children at some point. The radio DJs were angry, yapping for twenty minutes about the horrors of spouses imagining life after their mates. Well, I also have a back-up plan. It is not uncommon. If Mike meets a gruesome fate, I will become a nun and plant tomatoes all day in Eastern Europe while Gavin moons around in the abbey windows with a french novel and dreams of running off with the scullery maid.

I flipped stations. Things got worse. Coldplay crooned miserably about wanting to fix me. I drove by a dead kitten in the road. Normally, I avert my eyes, but it was dark and I looked in its face as my headlights swept by, and I nearly cried. The radio DJs had stopped yammering and ironically played American Idiot as I pulled up to the school. The sky was icy blue and my legs were chilly as limped across the gravel because I stepped on a bee last night. 

After only 6 hours of sleep, I was looking forward to opening my new box of Yogi tea when I got to the staff snack area. Peach redbush chai. As I took a nice deep sniff of the hot tea, a fat brown cockroach twirled gracefully to the surface. I dumped it down the drain and went back to the library.

Unflagging optimism. Each day as I drive home from work through the Misty Mountains, a small rainbow forms over me. It curves from one side of the highway to the other, coloring the guard rails. As I drive out of the tunnel, the sun cuts over the mountains and lights up the mist in the valley. That's worth a few cockroaches in my tea.

"Miss, you're married?"

me: Yes, here's a picture of my husband.
student: *snicker* And you have a kid?
me: Yes, see his picture here?
student: ... um, you know something? *points to pictures* He's supposed to look like him.

Hmm.

5 minutes later...

same student, with copy of "Sister Wendy's Story of Art": eeeeeew. There's naked people in here!
me: New library rule. No one is allowed to say "eeew" when they're looking at art. Except if it's Post Modernism.

Kids these days.

Blah

I felt numb all the way home yesterday, I couldn't feel any emotions at all, good or bad. I'm usually a calm person, but this was weird. My roommate in college had violent temper tantrums. She said it was epilepsy and that she was helplessly having seizures every time she screamed and cried and ripped up her art projects. I just stood and frowned at her.
 

I felt something today as I was driving to work. It started in my stomach and worked its way up into my head. My eyeball started throbbing with pressure and for a moment I thought I would have an aneurysm and crash the car. Maybe I could sail off the H-1 overpass and take out a few minivans while I was at it. Maybe even a Hummer. I imagined the driver getting out at work to discover a VW lodged in his luggage racks. I glanced in the rear view mirror and for a second I had vertigo - the back was front and front was back and I was sailing down the highway at 65 miles an hour in reverse. And it was raining. I hate driving.

One of my students loves the library but hates to read, and leans over my desk before school to flip through picture books and talk about life. She laughs when I tell her that people read for fun, and shakes her obnoxiously adorable little pigtails when I insist that in time she will, too. I'll make it my mission in life, damn it.


Dear you-know-who-you-ares,
I am sick of having an empty inbox. Things like "how do you do" and "my flight arrives at such-and-such time" would be appreciated.

If Brooke calls from the airport and makes me drive all the way back over to this side after I get home I'm going to make him ride home in the trunk.
 

I had a dream last night (oh, we love hearing about other people's dreams, I know, but this is my blog) that I had another baby. It was another boy. I was slightly disappointed to fail again at meeting my daughter, but the tiny boy looked just like Gavin, only with a slight curl to his hair, and I suddenly felt a powerful possessive love for my second son. Maybe we will have another one.


and now, last of all -

I got my first grown-up real-life paycheck! Yes! Dixie Grill, folks, this weekend! And with one of my best high school buddies on my arm! I am feel something again!

Night on the town

Our hotel stay was complicated by our car winding up at the mechanic's overnight. Mike picked me up from work in my mother's car, looking like he was in a good mood. He took every wrong turn possible down to the hotel, and I was so hungry that I started laughing a bit hysterically at every intersection. 

Although the Pagoda restaurant is elegantly built over a fish pond filled with koi fish and little waterfall, they were asking $20 a plate just to sit on ancient tropical-themed furniture and chew salad. We headed out on foot to explore the food scene around Ala Moana. It was humanity soup: shabby and hollow-eyed people sat around outside Walmart and the row of karaoke bars; manicured and wide-eyed people waited in line at Starbucks and overpriced Japanese restaurants. After walking too far into the pleasure district, we decided that we looked like plump white tourists with pockets full of cash (oh, to have cash), so we hurried back into the relative safety of the crowds at the chain restaurants at the mall. Ruby Tuesdays was very disappointing, but only $10 a plate. Walking back to the Pagoda, Gavin bounced limply on Mike's shoulder, his eyes red and bleary, and fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow of our stiff queen-sized bed. I'm sure Mike thought this would be a romantic night in a luxury hotel, but the Pagoda is the Motel 8 of the pacific, and I was exhausted from a day at work. I pulled on my jammies and we all watched American Chopper until I started nodding off, then went to our bedrooms and crawled under the flimsy blankets with every spare pillow in the room piled on our heads and the fan on full blast while the traffic roared and beeped and flashed outside the window.

At 5am my mother and I ate cereal before the sun came up. We left the boys sleeping in their room and drove through the industrial district so she could drop me off at work. Wakeful tourists with backpacks headed for the beach, dock loaders on bicycles waited at the corner, mechanics drank coffee outside their shops. I was the one in the fishbowl as we drove by, but I liked seeing the city's early risers.

So I am at work early, drinking tea and writing about my night while the sky lightens up outside my library windows. The kids will hit the beanbags in 3 minutes for their half hour of reading before homeroom. I am amazed to see the same kids checking out new books in a series every day. Where do they find the time to read a whole book in a day? I should try to keep up.
 

I don't know, I feel kind of sad and lonely this morning. Maybe it's just the early hour, but I have a bad feeling.

The First Week of Work

If this was the first of thousands of weeks of work before I am allowed to retire and die, then I guess I'm going to be just fine.

In the mornings a handful of kids hang out before the bell, reading magazines and Far Side comics in the beanbag chairs. I am then left alone for hours to work through the considerable backlog of books. Some are brand new, some are donated. I catalog them, barcode and label them, tape their spines, jacket the covers in plastic, then put them up on the new book display, and by the time my afternoon classes are through, most are checked out. I average about 15 books a day, with hundreds still to go. Teachers browse throughout the day, offering suggestions for books and videos they would like. In the afternoons, between classes (20 minutes of frantic book checking with 15 kids), I make up lists of potential books to purchase. On Monday I will be placing my first order for supplies; book tape and book covers. I'm working on decorating my door with construction paper frogs and butterflies. There is no monotony, no boredom. It's great. Next week I'm putting out a sign-up sheet so teachers can bring in their classes steadily every week, as they have been on a starvation schedule due to having no librarian for a year. I'll have to do storytime and book talks, as well as teaching information literacy. This was intimidating until I learned that I would have a short 10 minutes to do this before the kids are set loose to browse and check out books. No problem. My biggest task will be figuring out which books to read every week, and that is no chore at all. I want to make up pathfinders to internet resources, and create a fun poster to help visually identify the Dewey Decimal System, and make up flyers of cool books for the high school kids (who appear to be allergic to the library). As I drive home, I get to see the Koolau mountains in afternoon light. Not a bad way to earn a living.

I rarely see Mike. I leave at 6:15am, before he is awake, and he heads to work just as I arrive home. Yesterday I came home a bit late; he turned his motorcycle around and came home just to hug me before heading back out to work. Today will be the first day I've had time with him since Monday, but even tonight he has to work, so no movie date for us. This will change once he quits his theater job (although we will also have no more free movies). But we're good, I think.

Giant beers from Dixie Grill are on me once I get my first paycheck, Yuri and Marie.

So I am busy and happy at work. I got very excited about the season premier of Battlestar Galactica last night.  Gavin has been doing just fine with his 8 hours of independence from me every day, we spend the evening laying around demolishing leftover Christmas candy and pushing his trains around in circles.

Not bad.