I Guess I Only Claim to be Nice

Indulging in basic sensory pleasures has the complete opposite effect on me once the feelings are gone. Like my body is seeking balance. In my life there is no balance though. We just end up on a topsy-turvy perpetually wobbling carousel. It's like the Tilt-A-Whirl. Maybe that's why I always liked that ride so much. It felt like home.

I just watched "Southland Tales" and Richard Kelly totally fucked with my head once again. Except this time, I didn't understand a word of it. I think he seriously lost his mind this time. It was kind of frightening how he got so many celebrities to come along with him on it, too.

I think by now I've turned into one of those wind-flag-balloon-people that stand in front of gas stations and car dealerships, waving bonelessly in fake wind. You see me here, in some sort of motion. Perpetually standing and giving my all to celebrate the puny life I have. But the air that moves me is manufactured and auto-piloted. You don't get to see me when I'm actually happy, because you don't see me anymore except in passing. And even then, you're only watching me undulate in the breeze through a little window, little box.

Someday I'll be a real girl, someday.

The Lone Librarian

If the title "Lone Librarian" wasn't already taken, I think it would be a good alias for me. I often feel removed from others, in a category all my own. I spend a lot of time by myself. I seem to fit in with few people, and they usually end up living far away from me. Lone... it describes me very well.

I have my moments where I get really lonely and depressed that people don't take more of an interest in me. That I don't seem to fit in with their group of friends. But mostly I just find ways to entertain myself because that's what I'm used to. I've never been able to figure out why kids my age didn't seem to like me very much when I was younger, but they sort of pushed me to the outside and I've been there ever since. I guess as you get older, you just don't want to waste time caring so much.

My outsider feeling carries over into my career, as well. While the librarian community is certainly alive and kicking, I often can't put up with these communities (and some of these people) for very long. Not to give the wrong impression, I enjoy what I do and put in a lot of time, hard work and money in order to be able to do it. It was the career that was standing right under my nose while I was looking around at other options. "You mean people will pay me to do things I do naturally? Sweet!"

But I have an issue with other librarians. I have ones that I like of course, friends from past jobs and such. But there are many more that I have trouble standing. The ones who can't talk about anything but libraries. The ones who hate their jobs and are taking it out on the rest of us. The librarians who will jump on any new trend just because they can. Or the ones who will jump down your throat if you say something they don't like. And the ones who keep hoping against hope that their flux capacitor will finally work just this once so they can fly back to the libraries of the past and pretend they've never heard of computers or DVDs or Guitar Hero.

They all fight, they all make ridiculous arguments and they all drive me crazy. Yet I keep reading their web-vomit because I believe in professional development. That means reading news, reading blogs, keeping up to date and in the know. I just wish I didn't have to do so through these people.

I mean really. With all the naysayers out there predicting doom for libraries and hollering on about how irrelevant we are and that nobody uses us... with the perverts and the molesters and the crazies and the insults... do we really need to be such bitches to eachother? Yes, I said bitches. Like it or not, you're being bitches. So sayeth me who observeth from both in and out.

I wish it was just constructive debate. The hard truth is, much of it is all a bunch of bitchcraft. The trendy people hate the stubborn relics because they aren't keeping libraries fresh and changing for the 21st century and are creating a risk that libraries will cease to exist. The relics.... well they'd rather see libraries stop existing than watch them turn into the equivalent of a bookstore.

You're all a bunch of deeps, and it puts me off the entire profession just to hear it. I don't even want to call myself a librarian, what with the new and improved reputation you're building for us. Way to go!

We have some hard tasks ahead of us, and nobody is going to be ready to face them because everyone is bickering about how to do it. It's not going to be easy, but it is possible. I remember loving the library when I was a kid. I loved reading, I loved picking out new books for the week and did summer reading every year. Sure I was a dork, but it didn't just come from inside of me. It came from my parents, it came from a good library and it came from the world around me.

If you want to make libraries more relevant, if you want people to want books and literacy and education, you're going to have to *change the world*. There are people working at that everyday... are you so much better than them that you can't give it your best shot too? Because you have a Master's degree, the world should change itself to fit your expectations? Or are you not satisfied with what a library is, you feel you need to make it something else to fit into the world?

Well, even if I'm alone in this: I think the world is in serious need of a makeover and in my vision, it's wearing its reading glasses. All about the learnin', over here.

*Sigh* I swear, someday I'm going to become the Hermit Librarian. I'll answer reference questions through a tin can phone in a cabin out in the mountains. I'm liking this plan already...

The Unity in Community

Unlike those who have jumped on the latest social networking sites only in the last few years, I've been communicating socially with others on the internet for about 10 years. There are many out there who have been doing it even longer than that, hearkening back to the days of listserv's and very low-tech message boards. As a young teen I played around with AOL's chat rooms, but it was a couple years later that I started getting on email discussion lists.

My first and primary list was RBFMOJO, a list to discuss the band Reel Big Fish among many other things. I made a lot of friends on that list, I even talk to a couple of them to this day. But there was also a mean streak that ran through our little community. Blame it on teenage hormones, on clashing personalities or on the anonymity of the internet. But we had fights, and some of them got pretty ugly. I was one of the group that posted most often, a sort of clique within the community. I was also one of that clique who was a troublemaker.

When I say I was a troublemaker, I don't mean that I started arguments. Quite often I was reacting to something stupid somebody else said and trying to cut them down to size for being a moron, or defending one of my friends or an innocent bystander. I was trying to be the voice of reason at times. It was the first time in my life that I really felt armed to effectively defend myself against the words of others, and I ran with it. They couldn't see me get upset or cry, I had time to choose my words carefully and best of all I had people, friends who would back me up. Not so in real life, unfortunately; which is why I loved that group during that time.

But over the years as I've been involved in various communities-- other discussion lists, Yahoo groups, online journals, journal communities, message boards, social networking sites, etc.-- I've been able to take a broader view and understand what many of us truly need out of these communities, and what is often sorely lacking.

There's so little support and respect in a lot of them. Internal bickering among members, fighting over stupid details. People trying to force their opinions on others, people who just type to hear themselves talk and feel important without regard for the feelings of others. Members get defensive, get angry, and then everyone else watching the fight happening are made uncomfortable and decide to leave the group. Cliques form, but they are mostly to fend off other members and give the illusion of security to those within the clique.

Not every community is like this. For example, I'm in a community bonded by a common illness that's been absolutely amazing. It's not perfect obviously, but most members try to at least be respectful, even if they disagree at times. I think it's because we all know how horrible the disease we have can be and feel sympathy for one another, but I've seen other communities for this illness that are not as positive. I'm inclined to believe it's the way this particular community was set up in the first place, in addition to the specific people involved that makes it such a welcoming, enjoyable place to be.

Some of the other communities I'm not proud to be a part of have constant bickering. One in particular is related to my career, and is a place where we can all go to vent or rant about the aspects of our job that frustrate us, or people we have to work with that do crazy things. It's about letting the stress out, sharing our shock, anger and amusement (whatever the case may be) and can be very helpful and therapeutic. That is, until the PC-police show up. I don't know why certain members find it necessary to do this, but they are always watching for any little discriminatory remark, or un-PC opinion. And as soon as they find it, they pounce like a predator.

It's sickening and sad to watch them attack their fellow members and fellow professionals in this field just because they decided to describe an individual's ethnicity. Or because they expressed an opinion that by any stretch of the imagination, could possibly restrict a group of people from doing something they want. Endless debates about whether the descriptive details were necessary to the story, endless arguments over who gets to do what in a public place. Insults, accusations, assumptions, you name it.

Where is the solidarity? By the very nature of this community, our field deals with a lot of crazy members of the general public who find it their life's goal to drive us insane or else otherwise into the ground by demeaning us. So we're going to do it to eachother, too? Way to make a stand with your sisters and brothers.

That isn't to say that I'm immune. I jump in too when I've had a bad day and just need somebody faceless to ream into. But usually I'm still on the side of reason, asking why we have to attack eachother. I just do it with clever insults and witty sarcasm that enrages my targets even more. I hope some day that they'll learn not to take everything so seriously or personally, the way I did all those years ago. But chances are I just spur them on. Luckily I know when to stop-- usually when I just plain lose interest. It doesn't take long, because like I said... I don't take the individual comments that seriously.

What I do take seriously is the larger problem. People would rather be in conflict than in union. They'd rather be at war than be forced to deal with themselves in a time of peace. Fighting is a great distraction from the world inside, the ugliness that can and does exist inside each of us. But ignoring that will only make the world uglier and darker, and lead to the destruction of life as we know it. I know that sounds a bit overdramatic, I'm not suggesting that one argument in a Facebook group is going to end the world. But the patterns we're perpetuating by allowing it to not just happen once, but over and over again all over the internet (and the real world as well) most likely will be the end of us. Maybe not soon, but eventually.

And where I started this I will also end it, since Reel Big Fish once covered a song called "Unity" by Operation Ivy that spoke right to the heart of what I'm saying:

Civilization- Ha, I call it as I see it
I call it bullshit you know, I still cannot believe it
Our evolution now has gone the way of hate
A world evolved, resolved into this stupid fate.

All so different, yeah, I say we're all the same
All caught you know in the division game.
Self destruction fast, impending like a bullet
No one can stop it once its fired no one can control it.

A final word, wait it's not a call to action
We ain't no sect, no this ain't no fucking faction
Unity, unity, unity you've heard it all before.
This time it's not exclusive: We want to stop a war.

Love & Marriage

In the morning on my way to work, I usually listen to a particular radio station. I do have a CD player, but it will not work when the car is below a certain temperature. Even when it is warm enough to work, sometimes I just feel like mindlessly listening to chatter. I've grown to like the morning show on this particular station because the deejays are so ridiculously funny and upbeat. There's also a certain level of trash factor, like a talk show, and I have an affinity for some trash.

Like a lot of morning shows, they have topics every morning that people call in and discuss. Recently the topic of marriage has come up in at least a couple of their more specific topics-- today's was "Surprise! I'm calling off the wedding!" I've been hearing a lot of people express their aversion to marriage, and it really kind of puts me off. I guess I'm a little surprised at how many people out there want nothing to do with it.

Now I'm not the type of person who wants to force everyone to agree with me. Don't listen to my boyfriend if he tells you I am, and he probably would. What I have is a competitive streak which when informally challenged to debate comes screaming out into the open. I don't like being told that I'm wrong for my opinions, and sometimes the way others express themselves can sound very challenging.

No, if someone just isn't interested in marriage that's fine. What do I care? As long as they're not somebody I was hoping to marry, it's ultimately their business.

But me, I want to get married. I want the proposal, the wedding, the reception, the honeymoon. And I want a marriage that lasts long after those things are over and done with. I don't want it for religious reasons. I don't really care about a gigantic expensive wedding. I'm a very practical woman, and I definitely don't have illusions about some big diamond engagement ring. For me it's about family and friends, getting to celebrate a major event in life with everyone you care about around you. I know that our society has created other ways of accomplishing this without actually achieving the dreaded m-word. But this is a tradition that goes way way back, and I don't see it hurting anybody. I actually like it.

Part of this is I'm sure because of the marriage I witnessed between my parents. They've been married for over 30 years, and they're happy. It doesn't mean everything has been absolutely perfect, I have a couple specific memories that were not my favorite. And they fight, like anyone. Nevermind what fights they might have had when I wasn't around. But they're fine and they love eachother. And I've marveled at how my dad has put up with my mom, at times. I couldn't do it, our personalities clash in the wrong places. But they did, and that makes me optimistic about being able to do it myself-- with the right person.

I guess I just feel bad for people out there who might be missing out on something that a part of them wants, but that they're denying themselves because of fears and issues that they have. I'm sure that there are people out there who are perfectly happy being alone, or happy being with somebody without ever getting married. I just worry for the ones who could be happiest with marriage, if they could only get past their self-restrictions.

Of Being Unheard

Youth has become a commodity that is at the same time both highly desired and drastically devalued. On one hand, pop culture and the media fawns over young beautiful celebrities. They're attractive, they're sexy, they're better than the average person. But we also make out the young to be unenlightened, uninformed and foolish. They lie and make up stories for attention, and are painted as ignorant simply because of a lack of "life experience."

Young people lack credibility in the eyes of older adults-- young women even moreso. Men are still thought of as more worldly, even as teenagers. Femininity and youth both share a perceived lack of credibility and objectivity, the former mostly due to their biology and the latter because of inexperience.

Society warns us not to make up stories, not to overreact and cause panic among our communities. Cry wolf, and you will pay dearly for it later. But the cynicism that story encourages creates people who will assume a lie quickly and unapologetically. Combine an unlikely story with a young face or a female build and you'll have "liar" written all over you. You're exaggerating, you're lying, you're imagining things.

In horror no one believes you until it's too late. Demons, homicidal maniacs, ghosts, vampires, zombies; impossible, they couldn't be true. The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series is a perfect example of teenagers facing both evil and the terror of not being truly heard and believed. In every installment it's the children of Elm Street who are targets of Freddy's cruelty. Everytime they try to tell others what's happening to them, no one believes them-- particularly adults. The irony is that adults unintentionally created the monster, yet they don't believe it when he comes back for their children. And of course their unwillingness to believe that such a thing could exist eventually kills them and others.

Even adult women are not necessarily immune to this disease despite their years of experience. If you look at movies like THE EXORCIST, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE HAUNTING and LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH you see adult women facing a supernatural foe as well as a struggle to find one soul who will believe them and help them. Instead the men they look to for help brand them as mentally ill, hysterical or otherwise not of clear mind.

THE EXORCIST points out a specific area where credibility is often questioned: in the doctor's office. In the movie Reagan's doctors keep finding no evidence to support their theories about her mysterious illness, yet they will not give up on them and refuse to listen to Reagan or her mother. In WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE, a similar situation is seen in Heather and her son. The doctors, stuck in their rigid paradigm with no will to leave it, cannot accept the possibility that the boy's problem is not physiological. They even go so far as to believe his mother is abusing them before they'll believe that something supernatural is happening. And this film is unique in that it mirrors the real world where the characters are aware of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies and that nobody ever believes it's Freddy until it's too late. But still, when faced with a fantastical circumstance that could very well be out of one of those movies, they cling to a mindset where those things are not real, where it is just a movie and there is no explanation that is not scientific and tangible.

As you can see, this is a fairly common plot device in horror. There are many others which feature characters facing similar challenges in credibility and quite often it's young people or adult women who are disbelieved. I believe this reveals something about ourselves, that we and society are less likely to believe the claims of certain types of people simply because of a perceived lack of knowledge or experience. An incredible claim doesn't not necessarily mean it isn't true, but I suppose we would rather it not be true than face what it would mean for monsters, ghosts and ghouls to be such a real threat.

High Tension, Low Tolerance

The past few years I have been experiencing a decreasing physical tolerance to many things. I suppose it's a consequence of age in some ways, but I've also got this digestive-disease monkey on my back which makes things worse.

My tolerance for alcohol greatly decreased at some point during 2005. I estimate this, as it is between the binges that characterized my senior year of college and the times I started getting uncharacteristically sick in 2006 after drinking only a fraction of what I had drank in times past. I had only vomited once before, but began doing so a bit more often until I finally gave in and changed my drinking habits. Even then, I still had some digestive troubles.

My tolerance for medicine seems to have always been low, as I can't remember a time that taking allergy medicine didn't make me loopy. These days, the effects are less fun and more nauseating. New medications often give me nausea, and I can't take Vicodin for more than a couple days before the nausea just becomes too much. No risk of addiction there, I suppose.

Sadly, my tolerance for gore has dramatically decreased over the past several months as well. Not that I ever won "Poker Face of the Year" while watching a gory movie, but at least I could handle watching it. While I can still tolerate it, I feel that my body is less delighted to withstand not only the violence, but the suspense in horror films.

I was watching HIGH TENSION the other night, which I've seen before. To say I was watching it is a little misleading, as much of the time I was often doing something else or on my computer as I listened to what was going on. This is not behavior I reserve for horror movies, I often do it just because I like to multi-task, and a good movie is nice background while doing other chores. It makes it feel less like work. However this time, I think I did purposely do it.

That stress which feels so much like riding a roller coaster, and the revulsion at the sight of blood is no longer tolerated very well by my body. I find it really unnerving, because I am still very much a fan of horror. If this keeps getting worse, how am I to continue enjoying my favorite genre?

Then again, maybe like any medicine if I keep exposing myself to those feelings my sensitivity will settle back down again.

I talk about my health and body way more than anybody else I know. You have to understand that it's on my mind every single day. Maybe as time goes on and I adjust to it I will be more accepting and be able to resist letting it take over my life. But it's still very fresh and young, and like the physical healing that has to occur, the emotional healing takes a lot of work, time and patience.

I promise that the next blog I write will not be about my health... will not touch upon it at all. I'm even sick of hearing myself write about this. Let's move on!

The High Price of Weight Loss

I don't really talk about weight that often, although perhaps more often in recent years than any other time. It's kind of an embarrassing topic because I've been overweight ever since grade school. There were a few years when I was really young when I was pretty normal. But combine a lack of knowledge about healthy eating habits with an addictive personality (and possibility an oral fixation) and well... I ate quite a bit, without doing much physical activity.

I tried and tried during my teenage years to lose some weight, but I was often not a happy child which made it difficult to change my habits. It was a cycle really, my social life sucked because I was fat/miserable, and I was miserable because my social life sucked, and I stayed fat because I was too miserable to change my eating and exercise habits.

I met my share of ridicule because of how I looked, although it mostly died off in high school. It was replaced with an invisibility syndrome that has stuck with me even now. It was like I didn't exist to most of the people I went to school with, which is funny because I was hard to miss.

Over the years I tried various exercise tapes, machines, made small changes to my diet. It wasn't really enough, and by the time I got to college it stopped mattering because I met my first boyfriend. He didn't seem to care how I looked, and loved me all the same. We ate junk food all the time because, well, we were college students. And I didn't feel a pressing need to watch my weight, although I did casually at times.

When we broke up, all bets were off. There was a time when I wasn't eating much, but I drank in place of food. That gave way to being too miserable to care, and perpetuated my habit of eating whatever without thinking about its consequences. One day during the summer after I graduated from college, I saw that I had reached 220 lbs and freaked out. I joined Weight Watchers, and overall lost about 30 lbs on that. It was the first time in my entire life that I had actually lost weight.

It wasn't long after this weight loss that I started to notice that I might have a lactose intolerance. In fact, it may have coincided. Now it's worth mentioning at this point that I had had digestive issues for most of my life. It was constipation when I was younger, which eventually turned to a tendency towards looseness during college and eventually occasions of diarrhea in the years after. I've had all sorts of abdominal pains, cramps, gas, weird sensations, nausea. I suspect that I've had irritable bowel syndrome for a long time.

Was this what led to the lactose intolerance? Maybe. But knowing what I do now, I actually suspect that the lactose intolerance was a sign of the beginning of the end, so to speak. I think it was the first sign that my body might be set up for Inflammatory Bowel Disease. If I really want to stretch it, I could say that there might have even been signs back in college when my boyfriend and I broke up. I do remember feeling as though something inside my body was changing simply from all the heartbreak and stress.

In any case, I believe-- but have no hard evidence to back it up-- that up until October of 2006 I was protected from the possibility of my IBD being triggered, and that I was protected by cigarettes of all things. My parents smoke, and I did from the ages of about 17 through 24. Five months after I quit, I got a stomach flu and have been experiencing IBD symptoms ever since.

There are many other people with Ulcerative Colitis-- one form of IBD-- who have similar stories where their disease was not triggered until after they quit smoking. My doctor is not totally sure that I have that form yet, but I suspect that I do.

Talk about paying a high price for something positive-- there's research out there that suggests it's the carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke that prevents inflammation. Let's see, I can either get lung cancer/emphysema/chronic bronchitis OR a chronic auto-immune disease that produces random flares of bloody diarrhea that will increase my chances of acquiring colon cancer, among other things. Hm! What a choice.

For now, my disease is under control. But I believe my IBS has been exacerbated by the inflammation, and that whatever damage that was done to my colon is keeping a few stray symptoms hanging around. I definitely can not eat whatever I want to anymore without paying for it, whether I pay sooner or later. My doctor officially says that even if a food makes me feel sick, it's not doing any damage-- but he has to say that because scientific research has not proved that certain diets help or hurt this disease. Me, I'd rather not eat something that makes me feel like I have a flu or sends me running to the bathroom first thing in the morning. Craziness, I know.

This means that I've been avoiding a lot of foods. Anything difficult to digest, anything too high in fat or fiber, almost all dairy, caffeine, alcohol, sugary, even limiting my amounts of carbonated soft drinks. It doesn't mean I don't ever eat those things, but I certainly don't have them very often. Furthermore, the things I do eat I eat less of. I'm hoping that one day I will be able to eat more normally again, but I know that I'm going to have to be patient and give my body the time (and resources) it needs to heal.

During the 6 or 7 months that I was first sick I lost quite a bit of weight. Not as much as others, since I suppose my disease was not as bad-- but a good 15 pounds. Since I've been on medication to control it, I've lost another 10 pounds. I don't know if that indicates that my disease is not entirely under control, or that I'm not absorbing nutrients properly, or if it's just a consequence of eating much healthier than I have in a long time. But as long as I'm not feeling too bad and am not getting sick like I was last year, I'll assume it's healthy weight loss.

I haven't weighed in at 165 (where I am now) since high school. Hell, I'm pretty sure I weighed more than that for at least part of high school. Is it worth it? Not really. It's too high a price, and I'd take the weight back if it meant I could give away the disease and all its physical damage. I think anyone who has IBD would agree with me.

It's a serious disease, and chances are it will get worse whether sooner or later. People who know me have had to hear me talk about it much more than I'm sure they've wanted to. But it's the sort of thing that really does affect your entire life, and it takes strength to resist letting it take over and limit your existence. In fact, it can ruin some people's lives just from the obscene cost of treatment, hospital bills, etc. I talk about it because it's not talked about enough, and the rates of people diagnosed with this disease keep rising. Nobody ever got better research, medications, treatments and-- most of all-- a cure by staying silent.